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Comment by hnfong | Hacker News Reader

Maybe this will be true in the years going forward, but AFAIK even in 2022 they were still considered top tier FAANG to work for among new grads, if only for the fact that compensation is generally somewhat higher than their peers.

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It's only higher than other big tech companies because they have so much difficulty hiring new grad. it's what's holding the funnel together, the moment comp drops compared to the others they will lose a ton of candidates.

Since ~2016 Meta employment has signaled to me that someone values high compensation above anything else. This view has become so popular that choosing to work at Meta indicates you are fine broadcasting this signal.

There might be some exceptions for those working on Oculus, but it's not a blanket exception.

I'm not sure that's entirely fair. Whatever you think of the company that's no denying they have interesting problems to work on, such as AI, plus ordinary big tech scaling. Plus you don't know whether a person even had other offers.

Yes. That’s how signals work.

This is the case across most Big Tech. If not for compensation, why would you choose to work in a large organization? Tech productivity peaks somewhere around 500-2k engineers in an org, by the time you hit 10-50k different groups look like different companies in terms of coordination tax.

It is not so easy to get a (first) job in FAANG. They sieve out a lot of bad programmers during their recruitment process. Probably some recruiters beleive that if you managed to get to a FAANG and stay for 2-3 years, then you are competent enough for many other jobs. So in theory working there opens doors.

It used to be similar in finance, where getting that internship at Mckinsey/Bain/BCG or in BIG4 (deloitte, ey, kpmg, pwc) meant something - in some countries it was like 1000 candidates per 1 place. But I feel it is much fewer nowadays.

aye - it definitely signals rigor. However it is worth questioning whether Google at 30k employees has the same signaling effect as Google at 186k employees. Either the number of highly qualified engineers has increased by 4x - or the bar has lowered over time.

I'd imagine that 4 years from now having OpenAI on your resume will be a much better signal than Google, if only for the reason that there are only 400 people who can claim OpenAI as their background.

> whether Google at 30k employees has the same signaling effect as Google at 186k employees

This is why prestigious universities don't invest in increasing class sizes. The student demand is there. There is no lack of world class professors to hire, and larger facilities could be built. An Ivy league is capable of reaching 10x enrollment in 20 years while raising tuition and providing the same quality of education. However, within 50 years the brand will carry less prestige.

For me, it’s because I liked systems stuff at university. Scaling to and beyond the level of FAANG is pretty interesting and I’m not sure where else I would have been able to work at that level. It’s also quite nice to be able to really dive deep into a specific area, although more diversity wouldn’t have been bad (for building longer term skills)

Engineer productivity mattered a lot less, because straight out of university it’s not like I knew enough to be productive from the start anyway.

Compensation-wise, finance tech pays a lot better, although is most cases it is a WLB tradeoff.

It's higher per year, but lower per hour of work.

IYKYK

New grads have lost their minds. It is really sad to see the state of affairs. When we were coming out we used to shun large companies. Now they are joining large companies. Sad!

New grads joining large companies isn't anything new, nor is it "Sad!".

They are also using Electron apps. No wonder we are in a recession.

The money is just too good to put aside. Plus, the cost of housing has gotten through the roof, so you'd have to be a real and committed idealist (or to have family money) in order to shun that type of compensation coming your way.

If it matters I'm in my early 40s and I have left money on the table in the past because of said idealism, but if I were to be a 20-something again and especially in today's market I'm not sure I would do the same thing.

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