How to succeed at Meta
teamblind.com
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Interesting how there's comments on this person being concerned solely with "TC" as if the company itself is not solely concerned with profit. To top it off, most of these companies are on some shitlist for abusing their work-force or slave labor in developing countries. There's nothing wrong in working at a FAANG for the money and I'm surprised to see the current attitude in this thread around that. I thought we were past the employer loyalty era and more accepting of the harsh reality that everything is profit-driven these days.
BTW the person is not literally saying to do these things. They are using humor as a means to illustrate how ridiculous it is working under those conditions.
So true. Family members have seen it in pharma. It's endemic in retail banking. Large parts of media/entertainment have gone this way, too. The core ideas of being your own PR department -- and hopping from one short-horizon metric to another are just how these places hand out recognition, promotions, etc. At the better ones, innovative work will be tolerated, too. But the easiest path is pretty much what OP describes.
I think this is my biggest disappointment working for a big tech company. I don't feel I'm "part of the family" at all. Very high turnover, people come and go, some are fired, burn out, or move to another job. I'd love to feel I'm part of something, but it's not the case. Plus most products are very questionable. Very few people do work on something meaningful anyway.
It's all about optimising some metrics. The same way you need to leetcode to get recruited, you're expected to check some boxes once you're in if you want to stay.
I think it's not so much company size as it is operating in a hot industry during a boom time.
On the other hand, telling employees they should own part of the business is bad investing advice; if you get shares of a company and you're not already a millionaire you should sell them and buy an index fund. Even if you work there.
Obviously if you own a business, you are much more vested in its success
i.e. shares or not, I'd prefer to work for a company where I felt I was part of it as opposed to one that's just time served.
I heard someone smart (maybe Naval Ravikant) say on a podcast that this becomes prevalent in orgs which have two or more layers of management between real customer-facing work and business ownership (CEO, co-founder, CTO, etc). Having worked in several startups as well as F500 FAANG-ish valley tech companies, I agree. When a manager reports to a manager who's reporting to someone else degradation begins to occur. Another tip is to look at the org chart. If your manager's manager has more than six (maybe up to 8) direct reports, that's a bad sign.
However, there are exceptions to be found in specific sub-groups in some orgs. I've been witness to it more than once.
A bad sign of what? A bad sign that the company is too large to be innovating?
IMHO, it's correct but that doesn't mean it's good or desirable that things tend to bog down in wider / deeper org structures. Maintaining high efficiency and effectiveness in large org structures is hard to do and that's why the exceptions are notable and worth studying.
To study single-mission mega projects, the classics are the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions and the first ICBM systems. The management of these projects were awe inspiring.
Overall, managing people at scale is always going to be a hard problem and it seems unlikely that technology will ever offer a satisfactory solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
All else equal, easy to capture proxies make good metrics; however, the point is that all else will not be equal.
Also, the CYAed version of web of trust is a “360 review”. Going all in on 360s is a good way to unleashing reality tv dynamics in a previously banal workplace.
I just call that the "monopoly phase." There is no natural post-innovation phase, you either have to compete for business, or you don't.
A bakery that's been happily serving its community for 25 years isn't a monopoly just because it doesn't feel pressure to grow.
A company decides whether it's publicly traded or not. It also decides whether it makes an offer to buy the competition or not. I think people forget just how many entities Google has purchased over the years, and how often the FTC has just let them get away with it.
> A bakery that's been happily serving its community for 25 years isn't a monopoly just because it doesn't feel pressure to grow.
Are we really going to compare a single locally owned bakery with a naturally limited consumer market to a corporation like Google?
Wouldn't you agree that bakery would be a monopoly if it let it's standards slip for a few years, and an ex-employee of that bakery opened a new shop, and the existing bakery just decided to buy them out and then close their business instead of starting to compete with them for customers?
Now multiply that by like 250 times. I hardly think it's uncharitable to call this "strategy" out for what it is.
That's assuming you have no problem working for FAANG period. I have serious ethical concerns with 4 of the 5 and probably would never work for them for that reason alone.
What is the dirt on Meta? I'm guessing abuse content moderators in the Philippines or something?
ok, but... it is true that not everyone is in it for the money, or at least, not for the money primarily.
Sure, if you believe that making more money is the only thing that matters in this world. If you take this logic to its extreme you can justify anything if it makes you rich. You're simultaneously criticizing a system while defending your participation in it.
There are lots of things wrong with working at a FAANG for the money. If you don't like how Amazon treats their warehouse workers, don't work at Amazon. If you don't like how Facebook perpetuates fake news, don't work at Facebook. If you don't like Google's search monopoly, don't work at Google. Just because the world is a shitty place doesn't mean you can excuse yourself for being a shitty person.
I don't want to work for FAANG for various reasons, but their negative externalities are either things I'd have no connection with or be in a position to push back against.
Sure, the bosses may say "do it anyway" and my only counter would then be to leave, but I expect most people in FAANG aren't actually connected to $relevant_controversy.
At least, that's my impression from (mostly) the outside.
There are too many variables and that line between right and wrong is not well-defined in this matter. Using an extreme version of your logic, you should strip yourself of all currency and material possessions. Yet you're on here, possibly even while you're supposed to be working. Do you think the companies hosting ycombinator.com are clean? Maybe they're using AWS resources. You're using devices from those very companies you despise right? You're probably using electricity from a power company that is exploiting people in some way or maybe you bought solar panels from a company that exploited people to fabricate those panels. You see, that moral line can be shifted all over the place.
I grew up on food-stamps and I was in debt for a very very long time in my adult life. Poverty can be very traumatic (and very motivating to never go into it again). Money is certainly not the only thing that matters in this world and that's not what I said in my post. It is very important in living a sustainable life in America (and elsewhere). A single ER visit can ruin your life-savings for example. I work for a FAANG because I'm uncertain about the future and that scares the hell out of me. I have a family. I have several chronic medical problems. There's a realistic possibility I might be too disabled to work next year or the following year. Layoffs are starting to ramp up. I don't want that money, I need it to ensure my family can survive the problems that are surely to come in the not too distant future. I don't want them to endure the hell that I went through. I don't think I can bare it mentally. So yeah, I'm working at a FAANG for the "TC". I don't give a shit about innovating some new UI library or whatever else people think is cool in tech. I'm not even sure I have that ability if we're being honest. Even if I did, this whole thread is about a post that highlights exactly why it's hard to do that now. I work here so I can survive and that's it.
At the end of the day my family loves me and they have a comfortable, happy life, so I’m fine with internet commenters calling me a shitty person because of my employer.
I will not work for a company like Facebook.
And I don't throw Facebook in the same bucket as companies like Google, Microsoft.
And sure Amazon and apple are more evil than the others but they are also so far away from Facebook.
For me, TikTok even though they probably don't hire SDEs like FB and there's prob enough people to fill those roles anyways.
I truly think its an awful invention. It's bad for the same reason I feel most social media is bad... just turned all up to 10. You thought people doom scrolling mindless posts in 2014 was bad? Here, have 10 second bits of unscrubbable nonsense for 5 hours a day.
Anyway fb purposefully pushed people to addiction.
Did not take any actions against spreading missinformation
And for the people needing to check illegal stuff like snuff or pedo stuff, they are not good to them either.
Everything fb does is for making more money out of screentime and addiction.
Always remember to state TC as the offer/granted value (amortized per year, often divide by 4) not the present value of equity, that's how it stays relatively comparable across time.
1. aggressively fend off low impact commitments or projects (there are always a million ideas and requests for help floating around)
2. make sure you have a good relationship with your manager, your team, and other teams that you need to work closely with
3. work in an area that either clearly makes the company money, or is critical to the business in some other way
4. make sure your work is publicly shared, but you don't have to go overboard. if your team does something valuable or interesting, write about it
My last company tried to pretend it was larger than it was and introduced KPIs. I pushed back hard but had little control over it. I argued that if we were going to be judged on KPIs then that's all we would spend our time on. Commits matter? Guess I'm committing every few lines. Bugs found matter? Guess I better backchannel with QA to prevent a real bug getting logged since I'll get dinged. Story points uncompleted matter? Guess I'll drop the points I take so I never worry about not finishing everything.
It gamifies everything and not in a good way. Just like this post says, it doesn't matter what is best long-term or what is good for company/customer, all that matters is what you are graded on.
I wonder how one can find companies with no office politics, and one that rewards real engineering work. Do any of the FAANGs actually qualify for this?
But I do think Google rewards good engineering. There are a bunch of other caveats though; if you do great work on something for a year and then it gets canceled before launching, you won't get rewarded for that.
Google is obsessive about engineering quality - and IMO is a good example of why that shouldn't be the core principle of a tech company, even though as engineers we're biased towards it. Google excels at producing a lot of well-designed, scale-hardened, well-tested code... that doesn't do anything useful for the business and is a net drag on the company.
re: customer impact, and if you want to define "real engineering work" as "real engineering work that your users actually use/love", IMO Apple is the way to go in the realm of BigTech. It's the only one of the FAANGs where simply juking metrics isn't enough to get ahead, and you have to deliver customer impact in a reasonably robust way to succeed.
I've been at 3 FAANGs now, and Apple is the only one where a conversation has gone something like "wait, the metrics you're proposing are bad at measuring the actual quality of the user experience and does not account for hard-to-measure factors like (a), (b), or (c)", and that conversation is coming from an executive.
I'm not sure what the path to fixing this is, or if it even needs to be fixed, but I do think that Steve Jobs created a cult of innovation and a beacon to aspire towards creativity-wise, even if he wasn't the most pleasant person to interact with. This aspirational figure forced individuals and companies to be better.
Try tapping the play button and guess what's going to happen. Try getting the passcode screen to actually appear when you want to get into your phone and your face/finger aren't working. You can feel the competing teams shoehorning their thing into a platform that's already overstuffed, with no top-down editor removing the bloat.
Yes I’m also worried of them getting cocky and lazy. But so far they have done good
The point is that there's a thing you're trying to accomplish with a project and the engineering techniques should be a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.
“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ’the reality of the ethical idea’, ’the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ’order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state."
Replace state with "management". The answer for "reduced politics" and "real engineering" is smaller organizations. These are often early stage startups.
There are two types of startups:
- Those that will find product market fit and sell things
- Those that are pushing the vanguard of tech
Sometimes, a startup may do both, but it's rare. If you are financially stable and skilled, you can jump to a startup doing "tech advancement" but you won't have job stability. If you want reduced politics but are down to make your 5th a crud app, then a startup that is finding product market fit and selling things should give you less politics.
A "startup within a corporation" can never work because it's not legally a startup. You're still an employee of BigCo, so they can't grant you tons of shares for a penny so the culture will never be the same. And even if they manage to keep the group outside of most corporate politics, you're still ultimately employees so you'll be bound by HR and security policies because they have to.
The way to make it work which is fairly common is for the BigCo to fund a new startup which is a completely separate corporation and let it go its own way. If it fails let it fail or if it succeeds then they can acquihire it back in some future.
I did so without any job lined up. I wanted a break.
My former colleagues are reaching out to see if I'd be interested in their gigs.
But they're all large companies, and all large companies have the same big company bullshit.
I do think smaller paycheck and smaller company helps, but I'm sure the grass isn't always greener.
Good for you. Here in Eastern Europe, the difference between working for big tech versus working for a local small business appears to be a factor of 5 to 20. I'm not saying money is the most important, but gee an 80% to 95% paycut does seem like a lot...
No need to be sorry. The flip side is that Eastern Europe is actually cheaper than the West (though perhaps less cheap than the West might think). So while a local salary here is not great, getting a Big Tech salary in Eastern Europe is even more of a win than it is in Silicon Valley.
I took it to mean that they realize that most of this advice is not universally good/not applicable everywhere, but that single point is.
There's so much more to work than compensation and this post proves it. Being on a good team is 100x more important than what you're paid. Good teams elevate engineers and give you a better career path in your future. I make SL level compensation and non-SL level companies because my value is high, not because my employer can overpay for mediocrity.
There's too many engineers who think the secret to success is to get hired at the right company and then they just sail on to a dream career. I've worked with enough people from those big companies who left, some after long careers, to know that it's simply not true.
A lot of people see the impactful work that happens at these big companies and assume that's the impact they'll make as well. What they don't get is those big companies literally poach PhDs or buy smaller companies to get that kind of talent.
Needless to say, if I was offered these compensations (or higher), I'll gladly take even 10 years of incompetence around me to then be able to do fuck all for the rest of my life (or, well, things I actually enjoy doing, not for a megacorporation). Being an elevated engineer doesn't pay the bills.
It doesn't get you that far.
Consider tax and cost of life in NYC/SF/London where you won't be able to buy a house anyway, and you're left with 50k to save a year. In other places, you're less likely to get such a TC.
Sure, it's a lot of money, but not enough to change your social status. It adds up if you manage to stay long enough there, but considering ageism and burning out, you're not in the same leagues as let say doctors, or people who inherited 1 million after selling their parents house.
For comparaison, there are extremely few SWEs in FAANG over 50 years old.
You're mistaking the exponential growth of the SWE "profession" with Ageism.
The time to acquire a fellowship seems to be a couple years.
During that the time it takes for a doctor to go through med school, residency and specialist training (after which they would have the income numbers you cited), the FAANG careerist would probably have risen through the ranks and have comparable income numbers anyway.
If you want to make an argument that the overall career arc of a software engineer is better off than that of a physician, then that's a very different statement than GP made. (My personal view - strictly from a monetary standpoint, medicine in the US is more lucrative than big tech over the course of a ~40 year career, when you take into account lifestyle and personal flexibility, tech comes out looking better).
To me this is an important difference between these two careers. Ageism is a thing in tech and in corporations in general. Of course, a few winners can climb the ladder and have a lucrative corporate career or earn enough money to retire early. But lots of SWEs get pushed out in their 50s or don't manage to work in fast pace / high pay environments for decades.
I don't see which row. Levels.fyi says L5 Google SWE is 350k. The left column in your link has a header saying specialty. "Family medicine" is 270k in your data set. Nothing in the 350k range vaguely resembles general practice.
> If you want to make an argument that
I'm not trying to make any argument, except to counter yours.
> not sure if this is a tech industry coping mechanism
Heh. I can't speak of the industry as a whole, but I don't think I'm coping in any way. I'd say in medicine you know the demand for your skills is going to be stable, worldwide. In tech, there's no way to project 20 years into the future.
Alright, let's consider this: my current gross salary is at 47k €. With what my boss pays, let's say it would be the equivalent of 100k in the US (unemployment, social security, etc). And I'm from France, which is a pretty wealthy first world country. My salary puts me in about the top 20% in terms of salary.
If you think I wouldn't be able to commute for 2 hours every day for 2.5x salary so i could save up MY ENTIRE CURRENT SALARY IN A YEAR, you have massive blinders preventing you from realising how privileged of a status it'll be. The amount of people that can put 50k aside in a year is ridiculously small. And 50k is actually being awful at saving, you can easily reach 100k if you're not a dumbass.
Now consider this for an indian H1B, who can pretty much make an entire family live like kings off of that.
No, you don't realise just how much of a life changing amount 250k is.
My lifestyle hasn't changed to the slightest, except I work more. I won't be able to sustain that lifestyle for many years, because ageism + stressful job. For comparison, in France, 10% of people inherit more than 500K without doing nothing. I'll probably never reach that level of savings, won't ever be able to live in a house and so on...
I'm not complaining as I'm in a privileged situation. But in countries like France, inequalities come primarily from inheritance. It's hard to lift yourself from middle class with salary alone.
So you're at least E6 and less than 30 or/and you join the companies when stocks were low. Don't think your particular case is the same as everyone else. Some people go to FAANG at E5 in their late 30s in Europe/Asia. 200K is more the norm for them, and it's not sure they'll be cruising until 50 in an IC position.
Spot on! It's a race for them to keep moving up the TC ladder and then show off within their social circles. Their all now on to the new fad i.e working at HFT firms. I work at one and the questions I see on Blind, regarding HFT's, is a source of constant laughter for those of us in the industry.
Some great examples: "I have never written a line of production C++. If I do leetcode in C++ will that get me a job working on ultra low-latency systems?".
"TC" gives me and my family options to do other big things in the world.
Yes, I want to take two big family vacations a year, live in a great neighborhood/ school district, and give my kids extra opportunities.
Optimizing for "TC" makes sense.
Being highly visible inside and outside my company has opened up more opportunity long term in terms of being offered consulting roles and opportunities in early stage startups then being a worker bee at Amazon for 2 years until you burnout. I know many people who have taken that route and it's one of many paths.
If you're a good engineer and can sell your work, contribute visibly to open source projects in your area of expertise and can present at conferences you'll have more opportunities than a worker bee at FAANG.
Someone out there is building the next big thing and if you're focusing just on getting the biggest paycheck you'll be watching from the outside.
The reality is that even if someone is a good engineer, they may not always have the right opportunities, they may struggle to sell their work, or they may have other challenges that we cannot foresee.
With such unpredictability in mind, all advice here on HN is anecdotal, and everyone has to optimize for their specific situation. Optimizing for TC isn't necessarily bad, it may be the only option at a better life for some people.
It is deleterious to community per se. Islands of nuclear families does not a community make.
It's true there are people who straddle both worlds -- those who use TC to improve and embolden their community. But I would bet a lot of money that it's mostly people who spend frivolously and selfishly so that their kids go to good schools and have good opportunities, but that others' kids don't get access to the same kinds of on-ramps to success.
Getting a higher TC does not take opportunities away from other people. What kind of communist thought is this? Line employees at these companies aren’t the ones appealed to in “The Gospel of Wealth”.
It really is remarkable how, every time this subject comes up, reactionaries can swing only at straw men. It demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the arguments of their supposed opponents, which makes them seem naive at best.
In fact, seeing opposition where there is room for discussion is part and parcel of the same phenomenon of self-centeredness that I discuss above.
Communism as a political organizational principle requires by definition the use of force (via government) to enforce its dicta. Where did I advocate using force? Where did I mention or even imply the involvement of a government at all?
The word you may be thinking of is collectivism, as a counterpart to individualism, the axis of which obviously aligns much closer with the discussion we've been having above than anything on the capitalism/communism axis. But "collectivism" isn't a 20th century dog-whistle boogeyman so I can see why it dodged your reactionary tendencies.
> If you're a good engineer and can sell your work, contribute visibly to open source projects in your area of expertise and can present at conferences
You are describing the top 1-5% of engineers here. Yes if you are in the top, you can literally do anything you want. For the rest of us who are writing software to make a living, we might as well maximize the money we earn as easily as we can
A while back, I estimated myself around 7-15%, based on an average of "average ___" searches (not remotely rigorous). I was shocked, given that I'm an essentially-average software developer in an essentially-average developer role. I would have been impressed with a "top 30%", given all the talented people in the industry who are paid much more than I. I tried a few more things, and eventually felt pretty confident in a "top 10%", but it still didn't feel right.
To me (and I'm not disagreeing with you here), a "top 1-5%" engineer is one of those mysterious dragons that codes with toggle switches in octal deep inside of a lair of some kind, has invented or described an entire domain of knowledge, language, and/or operating system, etc. - and I certainly don't feel 2-5% away from that, lemme tell ya.
It was kind of like waking up to find out that my name and email address had been entered into an archive of humanity's most important code - all the critical stuff we would need to start over if a meteor struck and brought the dinosaurs back or whatever. It was burned, IIRC, into a golden USB drive, a platinum LaserDisc, and that special paper librarians like, stored forever in a super-sekret vault deep in the Arctic, next to the seeds, I assume.
Certainly, the handful of miscellaneous patches, like un-hard-coding a variable here-and-there, in relatively minor projects, and on features nobody was really using anyway, doesn't make me or my code that important (or even necessary, in most cases). And yet, when the future archeologists knock over a seed pot and discover the Ancient Golden USB Drive of GitHub Commits, I'll be on that list.
I especially like the thought of it being displayed, context-free, in some alien museum, a la Linear B, with a note that says "We have no idea what this means", or maybe "developer complains about security vs. business priorities in comment about encryption". Anyone else get the Arctic Code Vault Contributor badge?
Anyway, as I rationalize it, the Top 20% are the ones already here, doing it, making my Top 7% more in line with my gut feeling of "a little above average sometimes, but by no means exceptional". The 80% are those people merely thinking about learning to code, only considering contributing to open source, abandoning starter kits and tutorials 3/4s of the way through, etc. Maybe they'll join us one day soon.
This also demystifies the dragon: we're making that same error that saw Bernie Sanders' "Top 1% of The 1%" (The 0.01%, or 0.0001) diluted into Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson's "Top 1%" and, eventually, "Top 10%" (a thing I especially resent as a self-described 7%-er).
These errors are so common - hopefully I didn't do it in that parenthetical - that Google's on-site prep material included a handout specifically on this topic.
Google, I said! Have you heard it's 10x harder to get into Google than Harvard? They only accept something like 0.2 (or was it 0.2%?) of candidates.
Harvard! That most selective of institutions, whose discrimination is only surpassed by the most exclusive of exclusive organizations, like Google and Wal-Mart.
Only some exceedingly-small percentage of candidates, with the denominator being every half-assed application of every entirely-unqualified candidate ever submitted, even get invited to an on-site interview. What an exclusive club!
I haven't been admitted to any of them, of course - I blame it on answering the steal-the-pen question wrong on the WalMart kiosk when I was 17 and it ending up on my Permanent Record - but it might also be because I never even applied to Harvard. Carlin was right: it's a big club, and [we] ain't in it.
So, by some metrics, I guess I am in the top 1-5% of developers, but those metrics are sketch.
So, as one of humanity's most important top 1-5% developers, I can say with great authority that, if you're already out here reading this and have typed "git push" at any point in the past week, you're much closer to that "top 1-5%" than you think. You CAN do anything* you want! (Including enjoying your weekends!) The Magic, I'm told, is in the work one has been avoiding.
P.S. If you do it this weekend on just about any open source project, you'll officially, definitionally, be an open source contributor! (And I promise the recruiter bots will find your email and you'll have more (interview) offers than gift card scams in your inbox in no time)
They key is, showing up consistently over time for years and years. That's the key, and that's the hard part
> If you do it this weekend on just about any open source project, you'll officially, definitionally, be an open source contributor!
Nobody cares if you made some 1 line change to some OSS project. Any meaningful change requires more work and effort
On the spectrum of unemployed fry cook to 6-figure tech job, "attracting recruiter spam bots" and "attracting overly-clever recruiters" isn't far from actually Getting There and/or Making It - so long as you keep showing up and making an effort. Definitely not a quick life hack.
Long-ish term career moves are really the only reason I check on that stuff anyway, and get more value from the relative rankings of, say, language popularity and jobs, than any number I come to. I work in a job I like, in an industry I like, in a language I like at a very fair rate, so I'm not too concerned about it, but part of that is from figuring out what were dead-ends/non-starters for me, identifying niches, etc. (+1 for the ikigai thing, too).
> Nobody cares if you made some 1 line change to some OSS project. Any meaningful change requires more work and effort
For sure, if you're presenting yourself as "a [project name here] developer", but the conversation in interviews I've had has tended to center around, say, how we used to use [that horrible old thing] until we found [shiny new thing].
I'm pretty sure I've never impressed anyone with my OSS contributions, save maybe one person who somehow remembered an exact bug and considered fixing it, but I think we were more impressed we both remembered the bug than the handful of lines of code it took to replace `insecureConnections: true` with `insecureConnections: $insecureConnections` and add a `caCerts` property to be passed in to a constructor somewhere.
So I guess again, it was the pattern of making minor fixes ("just showing up") rather than being some super l33t hax04 genius or major project maintainer or whatever that got me the credit that mattered.
That's way more work, though. It's really TC over time investment that they talk about on Blind. Nothing will beat FAANG or the hedge funds in that respect.
Are you aware of other options, such as non-shit jobs?
So then I say a better strategy is to do work that pays above market but you still enjoy instead of something significantly higher paying job that you dont enjoy. Just 2c from a middle aged techie.
The one thing you probably can't 100% count on having the ability to do when you get old is work, which is why it's so important to "make hay while the sun shines" as they say--max that salary while you can. Especially in the tech industry where there's already so much ageism. I am not counting on my ability to pass an interview or actual physical do work, beyond like 60 or so, but still need to financially prepare to live to 90. I think some people on HN just assume they'll be capable of working up until their final day, so why save?
TC is tangential to all of that. If getting a higher TC decreases work life balance, then it actually doesn't give you and your family options to do other things in the world, it literally detracts from it. If a higher TC means a longer commute, you are losing out on time that you could be doing things with your family. Having more stress for more TC lowers your health (mental and physical) and can significantly strain family life.
TC is literally only one dimension that should be optimized for. There are many other factors that should be taken into consideration with a job, because burning yourself out before you are 50 just so you can maybe hope to retire early isn't always worth it, and isn't guaranteed to even actually work out.
Person 1. "I'm a junior engineer and two senior engineers just left my team, now I'm being asked to do do a bunch of work that they used to handle."
Person 2. "If they aren't bumping your pay immediately you should leave. Never do senior work for junior pay."
Now this person is missing out on a huge opportunity to get a ton of experience and prove themselves to be invaluable.
I pay my mortage with opportunities, exposure and experience too.
Big tech companies move slow technically, but move fast in organization structure. A "long term" project often means nothing ever gets done, a management chain change happens, and it all goes to nothing.
Metrics are never perfect, but it beats hand wavy claims of success, normally if a change is useful there is some metric that will show it. Honestly, the default "success" in big tech is the scope being reduced so many times that literally nothing happens and the PM's and management treat it like a win.
Finally testing... It's already easy enough to get nothing done in a big tech company but test code can take this to another level. You can join a team, write a big design document about some testing framework, spend 6 months implementing it, then leave the team just in time for the next reinvention of the test framework. And the whole time you were never at risk of deploying anything to production.
The smart people which solved problems and made Meta/Amazon/MS/Apple such giants, that kind of generation might never reach these companies due to these things.
I maybe wrong, but who knows.
Blind = TC or GTFO :D Kids these days.
That person would make L5 at AWS easily, but L6 will be harder without a somewhat lenient manager/reviewer.
If you want to work on long term stuff, and have no metrics or data to show for it - then you need to get your manager (and team, and others) on board with it.
If you can’t convince people around you this is important, then the company can’t figure out how to differentiate you from someone doing useless long term work.
This is what a lot of people call politics (especially if they’re not succeeding in it), but for me it’s just part of the system barring any better alternatives that will allow organizing a big company.
The ladders contain massive amount of criteria, most of which is not de-facto crucial, is weighed against other goals, and – most importantly – is vague enough to be open to interpretation.
For instance, the "fix something that you broke yourself" can be packaged as "quality assurance work that is part of a long term initiative to leverage force multipliers to increase developer velocity". The promo committee and even your manager won't see through it, unless you make it stupidly obvious. Peers won't complain openly to avoid bad vibes (why should they care), so even if there was time for scrutiny (there isn't), there's virtually no paper trail.
In reality, you are seen as proactive, a fixer, someone who takes care of problems when they come up. A good citizen. Some even do this unconsciously, because they overestimate their abilities and over-engineer things that break because it's infeasible to reason about complexity monsters in the first place.
Eventually there will be someone who makes a spreadsheet, sorts by a column, and makes a decision based on what they see. Or, perhaps they will send it to a management consultant who has been in the workforce for all of 6 months to make a powerpoint about the columns.
Make sure you have a good rank on as many columns as possible.
if you're working on infra stuff, enterprise stuff, or longer term complex projects, not as important
For a large enough company, it's a given that there will be metrics, and a lot of people don't care much what they are, so it's not always something to spend time on in the interview.
I work at Meta, my opinions are my own, and I'm speaking to this point in general, not specific to my time at Meta.
Small, incremental changes are great because they're easier to review, easier to verify, and safer to roll out. What's important during the review is seeing the whole picture. It's possible for changes that are locally sane to produce something globally goofy. I've also seen changes for larger projects with multiple reviewers miss an important piece because each reviewer assumed it was a change the other person looked at.
I would really prefer a culture that allowed (at least) 2-8 hours for a larger code review of features. That way you can block time out for it and digest things. A company culture has to allow that. People get reluctant to review the large PRs because they know they have to other work to do.
A bunch of small model/service/repository PRs seems tedious to me. If I want the consider the whole picture, I also have to go back to each PR.
This is prioritizing appearance over substance, something that is common for business minded people like sales or managers, and is no surprise large companies are taken over by this mentality. In my opinion roles have to reflect their area of expertise when it comes to career success. Engineers should be rewarded for the solutioning and technical knowledge (for the most part). That list should look very different for each role.
2 ways to succeed at huge companies - do work they can't ignore (at one of the companies I was, I was doing Business Dev work and I outperformed my peers by 200x - I was able to chill a lot visibly after a couple of big deals, but I still succeeded due to performance) - do average or below average work, but communicate it great and get in 'face time' without actually doing something.
For infrastructure engineers, this is a recipe for disaster which is fantastic because it always explodes in your face which attracts long term thinkers who work well with stake holders to build a long term strategy.
I say this as I led two multi-year complete re-architectures and took from E6 to E8. My final architecture before trying out Oculus was published at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483572
I'm retired now and building my own lifestyle company.
Goodhart's law states the target shouldn't be a metric ideally but this is sort of a meta-metric to succeed at Meta. (Pun was unintentional)
Let's see how long the author will last with this strategy.
I would not put any faith in this. Companies typically operate at a year cycle and are different depending upon level. The author sounds overly arrogant and just gonna lead people down the wrong path.
> This is the only way to succeed here.
Complete bullshit. This is the red flag that says "ignore everything this guy is saying, you're wasting your time."
Per Rao's analysis, the poster isn't the sociopath (Rao's term) that they make themselves out to be. I'd say they would fit better as one of the clueless (Rao's term, again); thinking that they are making an impact and gaming the system. They seem, per my reading of Rao, to just be mercilessly hitting metrics that their sociopath bosses have set out; being the nice little carbon control rods in the nuclear reactor of capitalism. To Zuck, this is great news (again, using Rao's lens)
Personally, it reads as tongue in cheek. But trying to use the lenses of the Gervais Principle is always a dark and fun little exercise.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...