Ask HN: Does FAANG innovate anymore? If not, where to go? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does FAANG innovate anymore? If not, where to go?

12 pointshahnchen20 comments

I’m about to graduate and it seemed obvious to aim for google or one of the other faangs until my classmate asked me, do any of them really innovate anymore?

I want to work somewhere where they are doing something new and exciting. Which companies do you think still embody this?

Some that come to mind are SpaceX, Tesla, Waymo, Meta and Microsoft are trying hard, maybe Intel

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Honestly as someone who went to FAANG after graduation and worked on a bunch of different teams: my number one advice if you want interesting problems is to avoid working on web apps/web services and avoid any roles doing frontend/backend development

That area of software is very advanced at this point and even at FAANG you're mostly just wiring together services/libraries.

You might think "Well what about huge scale services?, that must be interesting?" Eh, not really. It just means more partitioning of data/traffic, more hosts, and more time writing pipeline/automation code.

I would recommend finding a more niche area you are interested in, for example: game development, game engines, image processing, machine learning, operating systems, graphics, VFX, audio/DSP, high performance computing, GPU related stuff, embedded systems, robotics, etc...

What is innovation really? Solving problems in a novel way for users?

You are definitely right regarding niching down!

However innovation is useless without adoption (at least early users) and the most popular app of 2022 is Wordle. So its all relative

I reckon the next innovation might not even be software related so you can probably niche down to verticals like climate - carbon capture or sustainable protein.

I don't know anyone who works at those companies because they want to innovate. Everybody I know used to work at more innovative (e.g. smaller, younger companies and startups) and went to those companies because the money and benefits were good. Sometimes there is some vague optimism about "working at scale", but nothing about innovation. And they end up working on some product that is a knock-off of something that already exists, because the larger org needs a presence in that space. So, that's not innovation. I see FAANG as becoming the modern equivalent of working for IBM or Microsoft in the 90s: a comfortable, good job you can expect to still have in 10 years if you want it.

In fact the desperation which which job-seekers chant "FAANG!", "FAANG!", "FAANG!" makes it sound like they're trying to impress other people like their parents.

There’s a strange arrogance I’ve seen among developers and other highly compensated fields.

At a cnc shop in the Midwest I worked as a full stack we dev / software developer and got exposed to all kinds of technical and social engineering problems. From working on CAM programming algos (comp geo was a trick to learn tho) to distributed systems to ux of internal software.

Basically what I'm saying is go work for a non software company doing B2B work and make "magic" happen. Infinitely rewarding and can pay remarkably well if you provide value.

Some of the most successful new product lines at companies of that size tend to come from acquisitions (e.g. Android, Google Maps). FAANGs are the exit strategy for the real innovators.

Don't expect your employer to provide the stimulation for you to innovate; look for companies with solid software engineering practice (e.g., Hashicorp, Grafana, Airbnb, Google), and absorb as much as you can.

Sure, you can go to SpaceX and Tesla and work on cool ideas and projects. The downside is that your pay is going to be lower and you will probably work more hours. You can go to a traditional FANG company and earn more money and you may work on cool/boring(depending on the team) ideas but you work life balance may be better. It's all about tradeoffs.

You could extend Spacex/Tesla to any other "Billionaire" passion projects, where there is a strong drive to achieve key milestones while being nimble/frugal by working incredible hours for paltry pay. The bigger the bet, the longer the hours and meager the wages. Its kinda the name of the game.

Meta = Facebook. Facebook bought an innovative team that sold the first mainstream VR headset, they are certainly doing the work to sell a quality hardware product at a competitive price. If only Mark Zuckerberg watched Ready Player One and Sword Art Online he might be able to communicate what it means, but he hasn't and he won't.

Netflix doesn't seem like a great innovator if you compare it to Disney. (e.g. animated films, that Lincoln, Space Mountain, building a machine that turns Star Wars and Marvel into $$$ better than anyone else...)

Apple has the talent and resources to create something new but there are a limited number of products that most people buy that cost as much or more than a smartphone: there's room for an Apple Car and an Apple House, but will an Apple AR headset move the needle financially?

they think they do but are just sniffing their own farts. not all FAANG are the same of course. innovation happens at startups or under the radar bootstrapped companies. FAANG buys them and integrates their work. i would argue real innovation does not happen at VC funded startups because they don’t have years to work on their own schedule. they need to raise all the time and focus on growth. blue sky tech development does not fit in those plans.

How do you find these startups?

you won't hear about them. because the ones you hear about are good at raising money, primarily.

They do, but you likely won't be able to work on most of it. I think it's useful to distinguish between two types areas that innovation can happen from an engineer's perspective:

1. Product + technical work (e.g. Siri at Apple)

2. Pure technical work (e.g. chaos monkey at Netflix)

Most of the product work at big companies is some combination of maintenance and keeping up the competition (our competitor implemented feature X and now we need it too!). Even for those features which are innovative the sprawling complexity of existing products means that even engineers nominally working on the innovative feature are not doing any innovative work themselves but are instead doing bog-standard data piping or UI work.

For pure technical work, most of the low hanging fruit has already been grabbed. You genuinely need to be quite clever to not only identify big cross-cutting problems but also come up with a solution that meets all backwards compatibility requirements without putting too much of a burden on your fellow engineers.

The key thing here is that this is true at more or less any medium to large company, it just falls out of the business dynamics. The lesson is that if you want your work to be interesting and innovative, target teams, not companies.

Seems difficult to get onto these teams, especially as a new comer

You can reduce the difficulty by not trying to join them directly. A technique I've seen many people pull off is the following:

1. Join a team somewhat adjacent to the team you want to join, preferably supporting them.

2. Identify the most senior people on that team and figure out what their pain points are.

3. Solve these pain points in your free time.

4. After doing this for a few months, ask to join the team.

(3) can be difficult, but if you can do it this often works well.

I work at a FAANG-adjacent company. It's absolutely incredible how much more money there is to be made with what we already have. You could lay off the entire product and engineering teams and still grow the shit out of this company for a decade with nothing but a sales and client support team. A slight exaggeration but you get the idea.

It's hard to innovate in such an environment. You make something super innovative and grow it to making $40m but those same people could be growing existing revenue by $400m. It's hard for a company to prioritize innovation in such an environment. We're gonna become an IBM.

SpaceX is a good bet. OpenAI is doing some pretty crazy stuff. Google and a few others have quantum computing laboratories. That's always appealed to me as well.

FAANG's body-mass index has reached such levels that they aren't mobile anymore. I'd expect some real innovation in robotics & ML: it'll start in the war industry, as there's a strong demand for semi-intelligent autonomous drones immune to traditional weaponry, and then will slowly progress to the civilian markets in 50 years or so.

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