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Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

> After leaving Meta recently

That's all I needed to hear. Back in the day, the college you went to opened (or shut) doors to get interviews. And most people, who did not attend an Ivy League school or similar, rejected the concept as being anti-meritocratic.

However, today, it's the same thing -- just replace college with the company(ies) you list on your resume. A shitty programmer with a bad attitude from Meta, Google, etc. is far more likely to get opportunities than the best programmer in the entire insurance industry, or the person who wrote the greatest dry-cleaner management software. It's quite unfortunate.

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This is true, but I think you have the reason misconstrued: it isn't that working at a FAANG on your resume provides a signal of greatness, it's that it guarantees a reliable floor competency. The recruiter is concerned with making her quota just as much as finding rock stars, if not more, and ex FAANG candidates probably stand a higher chance of making it through the interview funnel on average.

> you have the reason misconstrued

I don't believe my post suggested any reasons.

> it guarantees a reliable floor competency

I disagree. FAANG experience only demonstrates that, at one point, somebody believed you could do the job. There are dead-weight employees at FAANGs (and everywhere of course) who don't really have much competency (or perhaps one very specific competency that's only valuable in that specific role at that specific company, and virtually nothing else). There are also people who were once terrific, but have burned out, turned focus towards their family, were amazing at some obsolete tool/language, etc, started (or stopped) using drugs regularly, etc

I do agree that recruiters are not looking for rockstars but just anyone to fill a spot.

Why do you view focusing on one's family as a negative? You can still do excellent work and focus on your family.

If by that you mean "won't be willing to be exploited by working 70hr weeks and weekends" then that's a whole different conversation.

People that have a family but don’t focus on it will never be exceptional employees.

They will tell themselves sweet little lies all day about how their need for external validation and appearance of being busy / important is actually in service of their family.

They lack the ability to reflect, put something more important above them when there is no validation, and won’t take honest ownership either.

Counteranecdote: Euler

> There are dead-weight employees at FAANGs (and everywhere of course) who don't really have much competency (or perhaps one very specific competency that's only valuable in that specific role at that specific company, and virtually nothing else).

Sure, but if they were able to fool everyone enough to remain employed for a while (and didn’t depart on bad terms), then they’re likely to be able to do the same again, which means everyone (who is relevant to the hiring decision) wins.

Not really. I, as the hiring manager, have a lot of interest in someone who is productive and can help out (among other qualities obviously).

And in fact I have become very critical about people coming from FAANG when hiring into a smaller company. The problem is that they are often overestimate their abilities, aren't easily able to adjust from a big corp into a more dynamic, fast environment being hands-on and - which is the worst - don't see the problem with themselves but with their employer.

That being said, there are certainly brilliant people at FAANG. But most of those don't apply at smaller companies anyways. Leaving me with candidates that aren't a good fit, despite having a great resumee.

you can be terrific and have a focused family life.

The recruiters just spray and pray wildly. Since 2020, I’ve had:

- A recruiter from Google reach out to me about an Engineering Manager position - I’ve never managed anyone in my life.

- A recruiter from Facebook reach out to me about a senior software engineering position even though the last job I had at the time that had an official title of “software engineer” was two years prior and I had no details about what I did and the company I worked for was unknown

- two recruiters reaching out to me from Amazon about “exciting software development opportunities” - while it clearly showed on my LinkedIn profile that I was working at AWS.

To echo others, none of that seems unreasonable:

- There's a first time for everything, including management

- The facebook thing is a little weird, but if you had some software experience, and two years isn't THAT long ago, it may be worth a try. As much as everyone says you need perfectly crafted resumes, sometimes there's detailed information missing. People know your only human and capable of being a bit vague on a resume, or entertaining opportunities you didn't initially envision.

- As far as I understand, this isn't weird at all. It seems the culture at Amazon is to hop around teams, if desired... I think you only have to put in 18 months to be an "unrestricted free agent". I've been told that a big part of success at amazon is predicting the right time to leave doomed teams.

> A recruiter from Google reach out to me about an Engineering Manager position - I’ve never managed anyone in my life

There has to be a first time managing a team, no? Some people view changing roles from IC to leader as career progression.

Maybe the recruiter saw something positive on your resume and thought: hey, this person might make a great leader and maybe they’d be interested in a next step in their career.

However, judging by your reaction, you probably aren’t / weren’t ready so win/win.

I would hope that Google has more sense than to hire someone as an EM with absolutely no management experience and no experience working at any large company. They would have never hired me. It’s more speaking to recruiters than the hiring practices.

Besides my LinkedIn profile where I was reached out at is purposefully sparse.

> it's that it guarantees a reliable floor competency.

Meh. Most of the ex-FAANG people I worked with at non-FAANG places continue to apply super duper mega scale practices to human scale products and completely fail at what matters.

How many jobs have you had in the last 5 years?

I once asked recruiters how many candidates they review before they hire a senior engineer. Some answered 200! So the fact you worked in FAANG is not a reason to reject, at least not on recruiter’s level.

as someone who started their software career working at 3M of all places (shitty software practices) and slowly worked my way up to a tier-2 software company (just below faang) with a total comp of $200k+, don’t sell yourself short. Oh and i went to a state school, and also applied for these jobs directly online, no referrals. Where you start doesn’t matter if you are motivated and have some luck along the way.

Yes the rich and smart have a head start, they are dealt better “cards” at birth. That’s true for EVERYTHING in life. That has nothing to do with software.

With an attitude like that, you are richer than you realize.

100%! I’m blessed to be in the position that I am. But everything is relative. Some of my colleagues have it so much easier than me, because they went to school at Berkeley, etc. Started off their careers directly at a tier 2 company as interns! Got those sweet RSU’s at 22 years old.

The goal of my reply was to encourage others and make them believe they can do it too. I endured some hardships on my journey (no connections to the tech industry, went to an average state school, etc). Others will be enduring much more, and i acknowledge that.

You're right, some of us couldn't afford college and so went into tech because back then it didn't require a degree. Worked their way up from a call center to web and software development. Learn some stuff along the way and release a game for the xbox 360 all while maintaining that career they worked so hard to build, only now they are a Director within the industry teaching others and directing others on how to build planet-scale data lakes and distributed systems. :D It's not about money (though we think it is when we start), it's about fulfillment and doing what you love.

Yeah its best not to compare hardships and when the people more privileged than you got their RSU's. What you have is someone else's envy so keep the first statement and drop the rest.

I also did not find that my time at BUSINESS hurt my interviews. If anything, I suspect developers at non software businesses would have more room to explore and grow, or stagnate, than at a more tightly controlled tech company.

Perform miracles at BUSINESS and you may not even be recognized for it. You might also not get recognized for doing absolutely nothing.

Would the person who wrote the best dry-cleaner management software do well at a company like Google? That is, I think a lot of the required skills there are ‘getting things done in a company the size of Google’ and having worked at Meta for a few years is perhaps a better signal for that than having made some great software. Likewise someone from Google may have a harder time in some startup where the structure is different and they don’t have all the fancy google tools or services. To be clear, I don’t want to imply that someone who makes great dry cleaner management software is a bad programmer or that they couldn’t be successful at Google or that Google look at the right signals and have good processes or that the startups who should have a different hiring strategy don’t copy google too much.

> Would the person who wrote the best dry-cleaner management software do well at a company like Google?

Offer them a job and find out.

> the required skills there are ‘getting things done in a company the size of Google’

this sounds like a fake excuse to exclude someone who has demonstrated a high degree of ability and skill, but doesn't fit your mental image of what a Google employee should be -- otherwise known as gatekeeping

I went from demonstrating a “high degree of ability and skill” that brought in an extra 1 million in revenue at a 60 person company over a year. It was lauded by CxOs.

Doing the same type of work at AWS gets a congratulatory email and is just a drop in the bucket.

I’ve also gone through interview training. We are specifically told not to consider where you got your experience or education from as long as you meet the standards. While they don’t bring me in for coding interviews, I’ve been on interview panels as part of the system design section. I know this to be true.

That is something Amazon does got right, they look for the experience during interviews, for the skillset. And yes, they tend not to care that much about where that experience comes from.

> but doesn't fit your mental image of what a Google employee should be -- otherwise known as gatekeeping

Otherwise known as “culture fit”?

I say that sarcastically. Anywhere I see “culture interviews”, “our culture”, or “culture fit” I think it’s one of those bull shit jobs type things, and used as a get out clause in the hr tool box.

For the big companies, culture fit often feels a bit cult like. It’s no longer a job to pay the bills even if you enjoy the work, instead you have to believe the company is changing the world, eat, sleep and live the company values etc etc.

Dry cleaner app guy maybe but insurance guy for sure.

It personally took me over a year to learn how to navigate BigTech after spending an entire 25 year career at small unknown companies.

I came straight from a 60 person company to AWS. It wasn’t pretty and I was hired for a remote position during Covid

>> don’t have all the fancy google tools or services

Hard to believe that all of the fancy google tools haven't been replicated in open source yet. Software people love writing tools to make writing software easier - what's up?

I haven't worked at Google. But I think that the level of infrastructure at a larger Tech company really shouldn't be disregarded. I've worked in a small <10 person shop, a large non-tech finance co, and a tech co. One really big difference is that the internal tooling, infrastructure, etc. are really well polished at a larger tech focused company compared to non-tech and small places. Even if there are a lot of open source tools, which may even be used at tech companies, when you do not have a team(s) who work full time integrating all of these tools, the developer infrastructure, CICD, etc. it is a big pain. And at smaller non-tech companies, debugging all of this stuff that Just Works^tm is a really big part of the job.

Not to mention when there's a problem, especially a SEV, you have oncalls and entire teams of people rushing to fix it, giving trackable status updates, responding directly to you, etc.

Compare that to posting on Stack Overflow and praying for a high quality response.

I can’t speak for how it is in 2023. But in 2020, I had nothing but a long history as an “enterprise developer” at unknown companies writing C# CRUD apps and I had every tech company reaching out to me.

It really didn’t matter where you work if you could pass the DS&A monkey dance interview, you could get a job at most of the tech companies.

I did a slight pivot to fall into BigTech. So I didn’t have to.

One could argue that being at FAANG provides far more income than 95% of other tech jobs, so OP might have a significantly larger financial cushion before they need to worry about the next paycheque.

This alone excludes most people from quitting first with nothing lined up.

> A shitty programmer with a bad attitude from Meta, Google, etc. is far more likely to get opportunities than the best programmer in the entire insurance industry...

First, even if this is true, are you seriously arguing that people with relevant work experience from biggest tech companies getting opportunities is anti-meritocratic? (And no one is just handing out jobs, they still have to do well at thr interview)

Besides this even true? I personally know lots of people who in big tech that haven't previously worked at big tech. These companies hire tons of fresh grads out of college too, and not everyone is from ivy leagues, in fact from my experience, most are not.

I single-handedly wrote a custom inventory management system for a Japanese mobility-industry service provider that's in operation for 15+ years. ...crickets.

the skills you learn in Big Tech are somewhat distinct from what you are taught in CS 102: modern distributed systems engineering and cooperating within a giant org.

The Ivy League filter feels and kind of is unfair, but for new grads it's really really difficult to find good signals and big tech gets two or three orders of magnitude more applicants than open positions.

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