Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

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FAANG isn't looking for experience at all. They want smart fresh college grads - better schools first. They have a large army of middle management ready to grind them until they either quit or promote up to middle management. They put a lot of time and money into this well oiled machine. Taking on senior devs is a waste of their time, they don't have the processes or culture to integrate them - and seniors have an ability to say "no". This could be toxic. Fresh grads just take orders and start doing what the culture wants. Sure, there is a few spots for extremely specific niches - eg. you wrote podman, and they need to convert to podman yesterday. The only real hope, if you aren't a fresh faced grad is to get acquired - for some reason you get a pass from all interview hazing and drama [tons of friends in this group]. FAANGSs will also take in anyone from another FAANG at any stage in the career (nothing gives them sweeter pleasure than harming another FAANG).

Stats? The average age at google is 29 years old. Which means half of their company is YOUNGER than that - and by 29 you better be a middle manager bobble head.

I think it's useful to distinguish the behavior of FAANG [0] as a collective vs. any individual FAANG company. FAANG as a collective almost exclusively hires recent college grads, who work there until retirement [1]. Any individual FAANG company is constantly hiring senior devs, who work there for ~2 years before going to a different individual FAANG company for a pay raise (or for various other reasons). Some FAANGs (or at least some teams) are meat grinders, but my impression is that that's pretty far from the norm.

[0] Meaning those 5 specific companies + other large tech companies that compete with them for talent + startups comprised of people from those companies.

[1] Leaving in your thirties to become a carpenter or open a restaurant or whatever still counts as retirement if you have enough in the bank to never have to work again.

> Stats? The average age at google is 29 years old. Which means half of their company is YOUNGER than that

No, that’s not what that means.

True! It doesn't "mean" that. But you get the picture.

I think it does though, ages are right skewed. The median is likely under 29 in this example

The median probably is 29, that seems a lot more reasonable than the average being so.

Both median and mean are averages. An age discrimination suit in 2013 said the median was 29. Forbes in 2017 said the median was 30.

FANGS hire plenty of senior talent especially on the infrastructure side, but there is a core challenge of what ever senior means.

I've seen many senior people get managed out due to performance as the game is much harder. Perhaps, it is needlessly hard. However Price's Law applies and is soul crushing.

"FANGS hire plenty of senior talent" Following this logic the median/mean age would not be 29. But we know it is - since that number is from lawsuits which did their due diligence with court ordered discovery. The other way to follow this logic is that age and experience is not correlated. EG. A 23 year old developer could be senior. Maybe this is the case?

No, median/mean are bad metrics due to Price's Law.

For reference, look at https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook,Amazon&track=Softwa... for leveling reference.

There's a fat pipe of people in the E3-E5 range, but it starts to drop at E6 and even more so at E7, and E8/E9 are unicorns. The median is going to be in the E3-E4 range as there is a tremendous amount of churn there for performance reasons.

This is why the question of "what is a senior engineer?" is so important. FANGs are thirsty for E6+ and they hire plenty of them, but there are not enough of them in the world as it's hard to become one without credentials from another FANG.

Part of the reason for this is that there are not many big tech companies that marshal similar forces. For instance, a E6 may be responsible for designing a $50,000,000 system which is definitely a rare skill.

Unfortunately, the senior title is basically useless across the industry. Does it mean time spent doing stuff? Well, time spent doing what? With what kind of budget? What kind of responsibility? What kind of operational burden?

The cruelty of reality is Price's Law comes in for a double whammy. First, for humanity, there are only so many big tech endeavors that investors/customers support so the scope is limited in the number of companies that have big challenges. Second, within a company, there are only so many big-tech problems.

The hardest part of my job was creating scope that was relevant for the business, and I left as an E8 where my great pride was helping two people achieve E7 and a swath of people achieve E6. I was not creative enough to create the scope for another E8.

I tried, failed, and bounced to create room for someone else.

This was an uncannily accurate characterization of my time at one of these companies.

Yes. This is from all my friends that work there with 4+ drinks in them.

Doesn’t Netflix only hire people senior engineers though? Perhaps you’d disagree about the definition of senior.

It probably is true that new grads are preferred and are more malleable into the company culture.

It feels to me that hiring from competitors is less about harming other companies and more about the signal that people know how to deal with the various ways big companies may work.

If the median(?) age at Google is 29, isn’t that a combination of (a) growing a lot and (b) hiring a lot of new grads? Then it’s mostly a function of the average % of the size of the company you hire each year at 22 years old.

I think they recently started hiring juniors too.

My experience with meeting Netflix people from conferences and also interviewing is that they definitely seemed older.

This isn't my experience. Multiple people that I used to work with at a no name company now work at Amazon Google and meta.

I've gotten offers to onsite at Google and other big tech cos but didn't follow through due to not wanting to grind LC

These places seem to be hiring like crazy.

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