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Comment by kodah | Hacker News Reader

It's honestly not that hard to work at these firms as long as you let go of any sense of self and adhere to the dog and pony show of algorithm interviews. After that, your chances of employment are mostly a lottery, which you will eventually win if you're good at the show.

If money is important to you, do it. The sacrifices you'll generally make:

- you'll need to work on POCs (new products) in your off-time. Most of these companies don't schedule innovation.

- promotions are based on project delivery and impact within huge orgs, which makes it more hard.

- you'll probably run through a number of teams before you find one you like. Colleagues are generally good, management is lackluster, and execs are mostly poor. There are exceptions. I found a place where management and execs are great, but I'm not sold that this paradigm will endure.

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> you'll need to work on POCs (new products) in your off-time. Most of these companies don't schedule innovation.

Like, your personal time? For company products?

I’ve never worked at a huge org. I assume though that there is a hypocrisy between what you are asked to do (trivial small things) and what is rewarded (big bold changes).

I can second this one. Not necessarily your personal time but at least once your assigned work is on track or completed. Not rare to hear people say "this past weekend I was playing around..." though.

If you have a good idea for a feature, product, or a new system to improve your team, it's unlikely there will be time in the schedule for it. In my experience you spend your extra time playing around, show it off, and wait for a decision maker to take interest.

Like the original comment said, I've personally never seen someone be assigned time to innovate from scratch. Once a POC already exists folks jump on the bandwagon though.

That's nonsense. They're hard work but they're not, like, that hard. Depends on the team of course. But people get weird ideas like this from forums/external discussion. nobody things that at the actual jobs.

I spent a decade working in Bay Area tech. I guarantee you the culture absolutely demanded that “personal time” simply didn’t exist. You worked at work, you worked some more at home, you came into the office on weekends, and when you weren’t working you were expected to be studying to keep on the bleeding edge of incoming tech.

I have been verbally shamed for wanting to spend time with my wife and kids rather than work. This is why I refuse to work in any Bay Area tech today.

How do we square this circle with the amount of grifting and doing nothing that seemed to dominate some companies?

Google and Microsoft were known as tech retirement homes to rest and vest at. We have the stupid TikTok videos to prove it too. How is it that some get so overworked and others do none?

I've also spent a decade in Bay Area tech, and have never been asked or seen any of my coworkers feel this pressure, both at big tech (Google/Stripe) and at tiny startups.

Of course there are crunch times, but the majority of the time WLB was great. In fact, there are definitely a group of folks who seem to be permanently coasting.

There are bad companies and bad teams, but saying all of tech in the bay area operates this way is just wrong.

I would say it's a aspect of Bay Area tech that is uniquely common in Bay Area tech, but exists abroad at lesser frequencies.

Downplaying it given the amount of people who come out to talk about this very thing, as you are doing, also is just wrong.

People feel the need to defend Bay Area tech for whatever reason.

I’ve been trying to tell people for years that my experiences at multiple companies, and talking to many, many other devs I met in the area and at conferences, indicate a serious problem in tech that we need take address.

There are always people who will come out and say “well I didn’t have that experience so it doesn’t exist”.

It's not really defending Bay Area tech. It's kinda the opposite. I have lot of problems with Bay Area tech, but I'll jump to shoot down hyperbolic criticisms that don't reflect most people's experiences because they' make it harder to _actually_ criticize them, in a 'crying wolf' sense.

The top-level post in this thread is just _wrong_ as a general statement (well, at least the bit "you'll need to work on POCs (new products) in your off-time. Most of these companies don't schedule innovation' for instance"), although there may be specific instances where those are true, and pretending like it isn't means that people's criticisms of these companies are criticizing them for fictional grievances instead of real ones, which makes those criticisms far weaker and easier to fend off.

This isn’t standard, even here in the Bay Area.

Sounds like you just spent too long in the company.

I worked for multiple companies in the Bay Area, and this was standard fare at all of them.

Hire young people with no personal obligations and gaslight them into believing if they don’t live and breathe work they’re “not a team player”.

> I guarantee you the culture absolutely demanded that “personal time” simply didn’t exist.

I have spent two decades in SV and this is simply not true. My partner has spent a similar time and barring one bad experience for 2 years, the rest of it aligns with mine. Maybe, you got stuck in some shithole?

If you build something great in your free time and decide to give it to the company you work for you are a fool...

It's not that one-dimensional. Two things come to my mind:

- innovations may require significant resources (think data or compute)

- making a dent in the profitability of a multi-bn $ org should enable a very comfortable life unless you're wasting your hand (in which case you probably wouldn't make it on your own either)

> making a dent in the profitability of a multi-bn $ org should enable a very comfortable life

Life does not work like this, the world isn't about "should" it's about "is" and "can".

So if you create something that makes the company 10% more money, at best you can expect a promotion and a small one time bonus that is a fraction of a percent of that 10% recurring revenue growth you just generated for the company you work for.

That is the best scenario. The alternate scenario is verbal recognition with 0 reward and if you work in a truly dysfunctional organization you can expect outright retaliation at some small frequency.

My position is rooted in a blog-post I've read a couple years ago, 'don't call yourself a programmer' (well worth the read).

Core assumption: be visible and associated with profit -> good things will come your way.

How much this works will depend on your hand and the table. Personally, I don't feel drawn to dysfunctional/bloated [...] environments at all and have no FAANG experience, so I can't claim to estimate the agency in those environments, but I would assume it to be >0.

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

In Fintech it is not uncommon to work on the weekend a few times a year to hit deadlines.

Can you elaborate on "not sold that this paradigm will endure" ?

I've worked at two larger West coast firms and my experience is that executives get worse with pressure. It's not they're born evil or that their compensation gets to their heads. To say it's inevitable is me acknowledging that the outcome is largely driven by incentives.

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