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Comment by throwawayHN378 | Hacker News Reader

Product Management. I hate it, but I was too stupid to get into FAANG as an SDE and my personality type better matches the role. I love coding and have done it my whole life and for 10 years professionally but at the highest level I’m simply not as smart as other people

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Au contraire. “faang” ( with the exception of the “n” ) engineers aren’t on average smarter than gen pop devs. They are simply willing to grind leetcode and put up with a lot more behavioral stressors ( large companies are incredibly difficult to prove impact and all the low hanging fruit is done, so the fights are more bitter because the stakes are lower )

Being willing to do the interview process is part of it, yes, but this idea that they’re all just average is completely wrong.

Highly paid big company engineers are some of the most talented developers out there. The companies invest great resources into making it that way.

The idea that they’re all just average devs who did LeetCode for a month and now they’re paid twice as much is a comforting fiction for non-FAANG engineers, but it’s not true.

If it was true, we’d be seeing scores of average developers taking a month to do LeetCode and then get huge pay increases. Who wouldn’t invest a month of work on a free website if the payoff was millions of dollars over the next decade?

Since supply of these jobs is so limited, how do you know whether that’s true or not?

It may be a lottery ticket where a 30-day investment increases your chances of winning to 1:100 from the default of 1:10,000. It’s still unlikely that you’ll get in.

This is just a hot take, and personal observation of mine, but the smarter / more intelligent your applicant pool becomes, the less financially motivated they seem to be - i.e., their main motivation is to work on interesting and challenging things. Of course, those things are not mutually exclusive - but fact stands that almost no-one that joins some megacorp, gets to work on the most challenging things from the start (well, other than certain R&D groups).

The "golden" pool of applicants would be those that are above average intelligent. They're more financially motivated, willing to jump through the hoops, and confirm to the system, if it guarantees some huge payoff in the end (financial gain, power and prestige, etc.). These applicants are the bread and butter to sectors like high-finance and management consulting. And in recent years, they've jumped ship to join tech.

Agree and personally I think the Leetcode part is the easiest part in their process. The whiteboard algorithms is where the real fun begins.

You're being downvoted but your point about FAANG engineers not being "special" resonates to a degree with me. I think every team need engineers, that are learning, to do the drudgery — even (especially?) FAANG companies. (I did mostly that in my own career.)

To be sure, FAANG companies have their luminaries that are some of the brightest people I have ever known. Among engineering they are recognized as the really smart ones — the ones you go to when a bug is kicking your ass (for example — or when you need to re-architect the entire graphics pipeline of your product in order to stream 60 FPS 1080K video).

But they are not representative of the rank and file at big companies.

I'm sure the average Google dev is of higher intelligence than the average dev at Coca Cola. No disrespect to anyone but how wouldn't it be the case? I can't make it into FAANG btw, I get too stressed during interviews or I'm not a quick study enough (I don't really have the energy to self study for months preparing for an interview) or a combination of the two.

I’ll concede this point in specialized areas: these companies are able to pay top of band for ML researchers and data scientists. 10 years ago I’d have agreed that G and F had the best. But now, knowing many many engineers who work there, my anecdotal and very subjective assessment is that they don’t exactly demonstrate an advantage. Especially if the task is pure ( non leetcode ) development of a software product, I would even go so far as to say they’re at a distinct disadvantage.

You don't have to LOVE your job/profession per se, but hating is certainly not healthy for you, it sounds to me you at least have the choice to pursue a different career.

I'm good at project management though, but highly unconventionnal compare to PMI type. So this create a lot of issues that make me hate my job... but I do deliver, so there's that. Still, after 4 years, I realise I truly despise my job.

I'm searching for my next career switch. I don't know what it'll be.

IIUC, you live sw development but you took the job you hate just because it is at FAANG? If I may ask, why would you want to be there and nowhere else? Asking because there are quite a few great jobs around for devs, so the decision seems pretty weird to me, which probably means I am missing something... :)

Jeez it's either FAANG or you're out? There's quite a lot of other companies out there...

why do you hate it? (ur personality matches dev better than pm? not sure how to read your comment)

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