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Comment by avgDev | Hacker News Reader

Idk why but stuff like this completely turns me off when it comes to working for them.

Recently I was talking with a FB recruiter and the amount of kool-aid that came out of his mouth made me feel uneasy. Stuff like we will get you to use whatsApp it's amazing you will never use anything else again. Then, the metaverse pitch of how FB/Meta is changing the world. Then just defending meta for no reason saying some people say negative things about meta but its a really great company that has done a lot of AMAZING things. His enthusiasm was so toxic I would not want to spend 5 minutes with this individual. Is everyone like this at FAANG?

Maybe I'm just too old for this shit. I get my work done and don't drink the corporate kool-aid.

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This is intentional, they are filtering out employees they don't want out of the gate. FAANGs want young, single engineers who will eat, sleep, and breathe the corporate brand and do way over their 40 hrs a week.

A brilliant way to do that while skirting the law would be to arrange for interviewees to have a short walk from the front desk or whatever, with a chaperone and a person who appears to be another candidate but is actually a shill, who shares personal information (the sort that is illegal to ask about) in the manner of small talk.

I wonder if/how many companies do this.

Google employee here. I work in engineering but collaborate very closely with recruiters and executives. While I don't speak for the company nor for all of its countless employees, I can say that in four years of employment, nobody ever, EVER said, implied, or appeared to act in a way that made me think that they want what you describe.

Case in point, I'm in my forties and have a family with young kids and have arguably been successful as well.

FAANG recruiters are very different than FAANG engineers.

The problem is that the recruiters are the face of the organization to those looking to become engineers.

This. Judging what engineers are like somewhere based on enthusiasm of one of their recruiters feels like doing the same based on enthusiasm of their HR people.

Just think about your current company and how representative recruiters are of the engineers you work with. It is worlds of difference. Their jobs are to sell/advertise/source roles, engineering jobs are to produce/organize. If two roles don't overlap in function/interaction and goals much, I wouldn't compare them.

However, if you hear the same koolaid drivel from engineers interviewing you, that would definitely be somewhat of a red flag. Especially if every single engineer interviewing you separately tries to make you chug that koolaid. Awkward one-offs could happen accidentally, and they do fairly commonly, but a chain of them is worrysome and serves as a warning sign to me. Not a "instantly run away" sign, mostly because it could be that they are just going by the script provided to them. But once you dig deeper and start paying attention to that explicitly, it usually gets more obvious which one it is.

The good news is that it is only this weird stuff that makes the news. My experience at Google has been that the vast majority of it is just a workplace. Same stuff from middle management. Same cycles of performance review. Same desks. There isn't any large amount of wackiness on a day to day basis. People are grumpy and complain about Google products internally all the time. I don't observe a forced smile or kool-aid.

The pay is good. You can take advantage of facilities and benefits if you want, but many people don't.

I worked there from 2008 to 2015. The trajectory of the word "Googley" was telling; it went from an occasional tongue-in-cheek reference, to an everyday word used literally and unironically to describe anything that was good or desirable (in the subjective opinion of the speaker, of course).

Toward the end of my time at Google, most uses of the word turned me off, and in particular the lack of self-awareness around how it was used was a pretty appalling kool-aid indicator.

There are all sorts of weird words. I'm currently fuming about the fact that "double-click" has apparently entered PM-speak. My experience has been that although "Googley" does get used frequently and it is indeed a stupid word it basically just means "kind" or "helpful" and I don't read it as some sort of kool-aid that implies that people working at Google are meaningfully different than people working elsewhere. This is, of course, just my personal experience.

Just make sure they don't write it on a whiteboard where the cl can look like a d, which changes the meaning.

Not everyone is like this, but there are a lot of candidates who want to feel like they’re doing something important so it’s something recruiters need to compete on. There’s definitely room for careerists in big tech, although if you genuinely don’t care about “making a difference” you could probably get a better offer from Citadel or something.

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