Comment by bin_bash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bin_bash | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If it's early in your career (<10 years) I think the best possible thing you could be doing for your career is SWE at a FAANG. You're too young to move into management (IMO) and nothing will give you that level of resume credential. The real life experience of working on big projects is important too.

After that I think you have a point. I work at a FAANG as a SWE (15 YOE) and want to move into management, but it requires a SWE promotion first to staff engineer I don't think I'm capable of getting at this company. (I've been a staff engineer at a previous firm though).

I could switch to a lower tier company and definitely find a way to move into management and develop my career on that ladder but I would likely have to take a big pay cut. I think the trouble is people with 10+ years of experience are like me and have families and a mortgage. It's just not an option to make less for me even if the future was bright.

EDIT: As someone pointed out, 10 years entirely in FAANG is probably not as good as a varied career that includes FAANG.

10 years is also (very roughly) the historical average doubling time for an investment in the s&p 500. one way to look at that is for every $1 you didn't save at age 25 while building experience at a "scrappy" startup, you need to save $2 at age 35 just to break even on retirement. that's probably not infeasible; you don't have to double your salary to double your savings. but it's a significant amount of drag you need to overcome for the "trade comp for career growth" advice to work out.

You are absolutely right in terms of resume credential, but in terms of engineering experience I don't think it's so cut and dried. The ability to work on large systems, and access to mentorship is unparalleled, but you also miss out on end-to-end perspective and how to focus on solving the most critical problem in the simplest way. FAANG has some of the best talent in the world (if you're lucky enough to be able to work with them), but it is also has many smart but unmotivated clock punchers who would struggle to execute without the world-class tooling and resources that they take for granted.

Working for a smaller, fast-growing company will give you faster feedback loops, and a closer connection to the business that will give you a broader perspective on what is truly necessary vs FAANG best practices for scale. Ironically this makes you more fit for leadership because you can then see patterns which repeat themselves in all companies, but are obfuscated by specialization and huge org sizes. By contrast, if you join a big company you'll get better at the corporate jargon and cultural games, but you won't have the same visceral understanding of what really matters and why.

For much of the past century, the best career advice in the world was: go to IBM, General Motors, General Electric. Climb the ladder for a few decades, get a pension, retire at the top 1% of the income pyramid. That worked great until it didn't, and millions of people got left with no savings or useful job skills.

Today's world offers so many more paths for talented builders, beyond joining the currently hot company as a cog in the giant ad-tech machine and hoping for the best. As a data point, go read last week's article on how Sidekiq has made $13 million for a solo developer.

I’ve published 2 books, created a significant open source project, and was staff engineer at a Fortune 50 company. Was reasonably well known as a blogger and speaker in the JS community too. (I’ve given up on OSS since FAANG)

But you know how I’ll be introduced? They’ll say I was “ex-FAANG”. None of that other stuff matters in comparison.

I’m not at all saying it’s the only path, I’m saying it’s the best and certainly most reliable one.

I'm not sure. I suspect the gloss of working at a FAANG is starting to look a bit tarnished. Just because they employee so many people now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com