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Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

My advice would be to put your head down, live like a monk, and save/invest money. Get promoted as far as you can, but don't burn yourself out. If you see yourself having a family someday, spend your free time on finding a spouse.

Five years in, you'll have a huge pile of cash and an insane chunk on your resume that will almost certainly guarantee you an interview wherever you want. Once you hit that point, take some time off and do literally anything. Start a startup, be a contractor, get a new degree.

You have stumbled onto the sort of prosperity (easy low-stress job) that 99.95% of the world literally dreams about. To throw it away because you're not "creatively expressing yourself" would be foolish.

This advice doesn't apply if you're a relentlessly competitive founder type like Gates or Bezons, but if you were of that mentality, I doubt you'd be having the same troubles you are.

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The downside of this advice is while you make money and your experience will look good on the resume, you might not have learned that much in the end and in some ways wasted your time and life.

Also if you want to go back to earlier stage companies or different places than FAANG, the FAANG experience is not some golden ticket, but can be also a potential flag to those who know how things work. Basically a flag to verify can this person still build things outside of bigco or are they just a professional coaster at this point. It can be surprising to people that even though you did work at Facebook or Google, you are not automatically a good fit for some other company.

My personal way of thinking has been always to join companies or pick jobs where I learn and that pushes me in some way, especially while I'm still young. I also did work at FAANG but the main thing I learned was how manage politics. Also within FAANG there is always teams or roles where you are actually challenged but majority of the roles are fairly easy.

Ideally at each role you learn something that improves and expands your skills. Each role prepares you for your next role or the step you want to take in your career. Taking home a paycheck and being a professional coaster doesn't help you make progress or make your life interesting (not to say that work is all your life but it is part of it).

The synthesis is to professionally coast at work, but have another type of work like your hobbies or learnings outside. Sometimes they are the same too.

We’ve all wasted our time and our lives in some way. May as well have an ungodly amount of money after a few years.

>"an insane chunk on your resume that will almost certainly guarantee you an interview wherever you want"

So true, I worked with a guy that was mostly hired because he had worked at Microsoft. It wasn't even long. He was lazy and mostly at the bottom of our team's ability. Working at the right place will open doors for you.

BTW, OP, the best ideas aren't always the ones that get implemented. The ideas that get implemented are those that the leaders feel comfortable with and come from the people they feel comfortable listening to. There's a whole world of work related politics that you should learn to get your ideas heard. If you don't learn to play the game you'll have the same problem every where you go.

This is a seen in The Godfather II that always comes to mind when people say they aren't being heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgHXHtHSsNo

I did this but didn’t get promoted at all. Never tried to. Did the bare minimum. Bounced between 5 managers before bouncing myself out of the company (Google). Lived dirt cheep and stockpiled cash. Used all of my energy during that time to dream of cool ideas. Implementing them now and have zero pressure to go back. Would not trade my current state of existence for anything.

Life is too short for advice like this, it really is.

Then again I’ve rarely had the discipline to stay put and make a short term sacrifice for long term gain when it comes to my daily work.

It is critically important to me to be fulfilled daily in my work and explore my ideas and passions.

To me, even if I was never financially well off, but I got to pursue my passions and creativity, that would be a life well spent.

Remember, the journey is the reward, not the end.

Disclaimer: I am a college drop out, couldn’t even be patient long enough for that.

> To me, even if I was never financially well off, but I got to pursue my passions and creativity, that would be a life well spent.

That's pretty difficult to obtain. For typical creative passions, you need to be in the top 1% for them to sustain you.

I don’t know what a typical creative passion is.

I am into product development, particularly products that are what I would call “full stack.”

Electronics, firmware, software, and web stack all developed for the product.

Are you passionate about product development within a confines of somebody else' company? Then it's definitely not a common passion.

If, on the other hand, you're passionate about software development and electronics, then it's a very common passion and you have to be in the top 1% to make a living out of your creations. Of course, there are subniches with various degrees of difficulty - it's easier to make money on some technically simple B2B SaaS than on consumer robots for example.

I would be less passionate in someone else's company than my own. However, I could do it passionately for a company that I believe in.

I don't understand your point. Isn't there a massive chunk of people who are passionate about "software development and electronics" that make a living off of it?

> To throw it away because you're not "creatively expressing yourself" would be foolish.

These golden shackles chained me to my faang job for a over a decade. Now I look back and my youth is gone. I have less energy , less creative drive, less inclination to shift my brain into a different groove to spin on. Makes me sick when i think about the fact that i gave my youth away to a corporation. I was just a 'young blood' willing to bang out code on demand.

I look back my past decade and I have no idea what I was doing. Its all just a blur.

Yet at the end you have the gold, so to speak. At smaller creative places you may end up feeling fulfilled and entirely unable to support yourself or family financially. It's not binary either. There is a spectrum.

I spent years on creative pursuits at college in gaming, got no money for it, then took a corp job. Ultimately I regret pouring out so much creative energy, especially since it was modding based on IP I didn't own. Anyway, my creative pursuits today are so modest and routine it would make the younger me scoff. And yet now I'm satisfied with a corporate job and hobbies like home improvement and occasional game playing and podcast recording.

This is great hindsight advice. It may be hard to see from the perspective of the OP though.

The way you describe is how it is in FAANG (I work at one, haven’t at others). Until you get to a certain level, you implement what others (PMs, higher level eng) put together. If you keep advancing in your career you may have creative freedom in FAANG. But it will never be like that of a startup - which is how I read your post.

Doing creative work for big co, someone else’s idea or a startup is overrated when you look back 10 years later. This is just my opinion but I believe it is very common and comes with age.

Good luck. Sounds like you have a few good options.

So you are recommending they let their soul potentially die with advice like, "'creatively expressing yourself' would be foolish" in exchange for "a huge pile of cash"? Do you consider that when they're done climbing the corporate ladder--whenever that might be, if ever--the version of them that "loves learning new things and taking on hard problems" might not be a fraction of what it once was, or might altogether be gone?

Also, I highly disagree that FAANG jobs are "easy, low-stress" jobs, but maybe your experience is significantly different.

Your soul doesn't die, but there is moral injury and it can heal. I spent a decade in big tech letting my soul languish with a few spurts of expression, and it took a solid six months and ketamine for my soul to flourish.

At this point, I can't even express how grateful I am and full of joy since my life is just so great. Yes, I suffered, but it is was so worth it.

Here is the core problem in my life: I hired a private chef which tilts the retirement math out of whack, but I have three decades to solve this problem. It's a fantastic problem to have, and if I had taken opportunities to be happy then I couldn't be here maximizing my own personal creativity.

Right now, I'm building my own platform to mess around and have fun: https://www.adama-platform.com/ and I'm exploring the nature of what I like to make and embracing myself for random detours.

> This advice doesn't apply if you're a relentlessly competitive founder type like Gates or Bezons

Eh Bezos worked a couple different jobs. I’m sure he had these thoughts and doubts at that age.

Not to mention.. having a golden spoon in your mouth puts you into that 'entrepreneurial' mindset from birth, because being an entrepreneur validates all your privilege.

True, but the golden spoon alone is not enough.

I think developing an artistic hobby is incredibly beneficial right now. The ability to compound rote memorization with natural curiosity leads to original merit in creating beautiful experiences in the minds of others.

This person has the ability to make that possibly serious with enough prepared latitude in making the jump if/when the soul desires. Worst case outcome: a fun social life.

Where does rote memorization come into this story...?

Great advice. Just stick with it for now, for sometime. It's always disorienting in a new environment and takes some time to get used to it. Even if it doesn't meet your expectations or goals, sometime it is better to revaluate your expectations to ensure it is realistic with your abilities, goals and how the world actually is. Especially if the working environment is otherwise nice - decent pay, good boss, good co-workers. In your specific case, if your work is not providing you enough intellectual challenge, I'd suggest you start working on some personal projects. Especially if you fear you are losing touch with newer tech. Better yet, find people in the field you are interested and try to work together on some opensource / personal projects.

This is good advice only because FAANG or should I say MAMAA companies have an enormous amount of cash compared to everyone else on earth. A historical aberration and a near monopoly. Utilize that advantage while you can. The last time a Company had similar cash levels was East India Company 300 years ago.

> FAANG or should I say MAMAA companies have an enormous amount of cash compared to everyone else on earth

I wouldn't be so sure. There's plenty of conglomerates around the world with huge piles of cash.

This is a nice advice. Please dont box yourself to your work only. You can express creatively outside work. You can have outside-work projects, enjoy life without to much stress. You can take on advance you education, develop a hobby.

I second this op. Also relatively early in my career and in fang and have been circling on this line of thought as the "optimal" way to spend the next few years. We genuinely have it too good and should take advantage of it.

You might be greatly exaggerating with the 99.95% number. It's a common narrative to "have the bravery to leave the corporate job/comfort zone and achieve your dreams"

i think it is under-exaggerated. maybe 99.995%.

Why not work on a side project or contribute to open source? You can still learn a lot while still maintaining your day job.

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