Hacker News Reader

Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

You probably don't want to go to a FANG. Start your career somewhere else. It's easier to 'level up' and if you want to go FANG later on you can leverage that.

I am the highest level of Sr. SWE at my FANG w/ very little work to get there vs the folks I work with who are grinding themselves to death trying to get promoted from within.

Edit: I'll add that your first job or two is pretty important for setting the tone of your career. Going to a FANG and learning toxic habits, like putting yourself above your team and thinking only of compensation/promotions, can make you an asshole for life.

View on HN

Strong disagree, going to FAANG or alternatively a larger company respected for engineering chops will open a lot of doors. It definitely did for me. Also the sore reality is assholes are everywhere, and smaller companies have less rail guards to prevent them from gaining authority in an org.

Whereas at larger companies you have more leeway in moving teams and finding an org with wonderful people.

That doesn’t mean a startup is a bad choice for a new grad, it can be the best choice for many. But I would not count out larger companies so quickly.

I think the bigger message in the post you're responding to is that for the first few years of your career, you should switch jobs often. In the first few years of my career I was put in the situation a few times where:

1. Raises at my current company weren't offered unless requested, or unless a promotion (change in title) occurred. Sometimes both. 2. Raises associated with normal growth in your role at my current company were pretty consistently 3-4%, raises associated with a promotion were 5-8%. 3. Switching companies would get me a 10-20% raise.

Early in your career, the value you're providing is improving fast, and your compensation should keep up, but for most, it doesn't, because management has an idea that some percentage is "standard".

Having talked to lots of people about their salaries (which all workers should do), it doesn't seem to matter much whether you're switching between startups, between FAANG (or similar) companies, or between the two. But if the person you're responding to took a trajectory that led through a few companies to FAANG, it might create the impression that it's good to go to other companies before FAANG.

I definitely agree that a new engineer should, generally, avoid the trap of working at the same company for more than the first 5 years of their career. If nothing else, you will learn different mindsets, cultures, skills, etc that you just can't get staying at the same place. It will give you perspective that will prove valuable as the industry and your career evolves.

Also, yes, easier to get raises that way.

I've seen the salaries people get by "switching companies often" and they don't seem to be a lot better than what you can get from good perf reviews at a FAANG.

I'm sure it depends on the company, but you can also switch teams and products inside a large company if you feel there's more opportunity elsewhere. (One thing people think is that boring-but-important work might pay better - this actually isn't true, the exciting meme work also pays the most but is less stable.)

> I've seen the salaries people get by "switching companies often" and they don't seem to be a lot better than what you can get from good perf reviews at a FAANG.

I suppose it's possible none of the FAANG folks I have spoken to about this were getting good performance reviews, but I have never heard of someone getting a 20% raise in one year at a FAANG company unless there were some obvious extenuating circumstances. I'm sure HNers will rush in now to tell me they got X>20% raise at Y FAANG, but that definitely seems like outliers to me.

And the thing is, you don't even have to be great to get a 20% raise by switching jobs early in your career. Normal, even mediocre growth as an engineer puts you at that valuation easily.

That happened to me, but I started as an intern so there was a lot of room to grow. If you come in as a mid-level engineer it'll take a while to get a "permanent" raise that high.

But I'd say in a FAANG the target isn't salary growth, it's getting enough stock refreshers to avoid TC falloffs, which you should be able to do through good perf reviews and promos.

> But I'd say in a FAANG the target isn't salary growth, it's getting enough stock refreshers to avoid TC falloffs, which you should be able to do through good perf reviews and promos.

Could you explain this further? I'm not sure I understand.

Or, go to work at a large company (my company has nearly 100,000 employees) that is not a FAANG company. No bs leetcode interviews, much better work-life balance (I maybe put in 30 hours a week and have enough vacation stored up that I could potentially take off 5 months right now), I've never met an asshole engineer or manager, etc.

TC?

I see. I make 160k base salary (typically get a 3-4% inflation increase each year). About 25k in stock per year. 15% of base salary as a bonus each year. 5% 401k match. 16 vacation days + Fridays off in the summer. 1 day of PTO each pay period that can rollover year to year (I currently have enough saved up for about 4.5 straight months of PTO). 6 week sabbatical every 5 years. Really really good medical/dental/vision insurance.

I’m not sure what else would be included in total compensation.

The main benefits are a super relaxed work atmosphere. Absolutely no stress. I typically work from 10:30-3pm each day with time off for lunch. My work is mostly remote, though I only live a few miles from campus, so I could go in whenever I want. The projects are fun, I like all of my coworkers and have very laid back managers.

Sounds good. Thanks to share details. What company?

I don’t know what TC is.

Then GTFO, as Blind would say.

(TC is total compensation, it's a meme on Blind to mention what one's TC is when talking about working at a company. Those that don't are told to GTFO. Interestingly enough, the salary sharing is quite beneficial to employees on Blind, since it incentivizes salaries to go up.)

Indeed. People always give reasons why working at their company is better than working at FAANG but very rarely say what their TC is, which is telling.

Before I came to the valley my TC was less than half what it became, but my LE(life enjoyment) dropped commensurate with my salary increase.

If you solely value TC then you may be a great fit for the valley. If you value other things, you probably won't like working and socializing with people who put TC above all else and you should avoid the valley. Leave it for the people who need it.

"Total compensation" which is valley-speak for what you get paid plus what you make from stock and other forms of compensation.

This is one of the big things you'll run into in the valley: folks who value that extra $150-250k of compensation every year vs proximity to friends+family, work/life balance, etc.

If the folks I work with are any indication, the extra money is what you'll tell yourself you'll spend one day while you blow the best years of your life grinding away at work. This is how you end up one of those weird, 60+, friendless engineers living in, I don't know, Las Vegas, driving a supercar and married to a foreign woman who only loves you for your money. But there are folks who will argue that that is a great life and if you want to work with them, the valley is there for you!

I don't even live in the US let alone SV and I don't work at FAANG. Comparing companies without taking compensation into account is just silly.

> If the folks I work with are any indication, the extra money is what you'll tell yourself you'll spend one day while you blow the best years of your life grinding away at work

I'm curious how old you are and how many YOE you had before you joined FAANG as a senior.

What did you spend "the best years of your life" doing instead of "grinding away at work"?

Joined a FAANG around 42 w/ 25 years of experience. Spent most of my time at smaller tech companies in a smaller market where I owned a house and enjoyed life outside of work. I was married and ended up getting divorced and stuck w/ hellacious alimony(no kids, just lazy wife) so I had to work in the valley gold mines to make up for it.

I want to add here that I'm not totally bagging on FAANG work. I'm glad I did it(and still am). I have an immensely impactful role that pays well even if I don't enjoy the team I'm on. But I work with people who have spent most of their careers in the valley and it shows. They're middle aged and frustrated that, despite their single, high paying FAANG job they can't buy a house or find a spouse("Man Jose" and all that). They're folks without hobbies who only seem to find worth in their work accomplishments. Maybe I'm just old and these are the kinds of people society cranks out now. I don't know.

I mean, you got married and divorced and now you're forced to work hard to pay alimony, yet you are judging people who are single? Maybe they just don't want to get married? You're not exactly making it seem appealing.

I'd rather have loved and lost than have missed out and died single. Marriage is great, which is why I remarried. Just understand what you're getting into and make some money before you get married. Then you have something that can't easily be taken away in a divorce. My mistake was marrying at 20 and not realizing the ex was a slouch.

"42 w/ 25 years of experience". Umm... Tell us about your full time professional work at 17 years old. We are curious to learn more. It's probably more like 20-21 years.

Haha sorry, math fail. I don't social media much and let myself get sucked into too many convos at once. 42 with 20 years of experience. Started in '97.

What crappy state or country you live that forces you to support lazy ex-wife?

California. Long-term marriage. Wife resisted getting a real job for years while promising her various artistic endeavors would turn into a career. Now she has no skills(on paper anyway) and gets to sit around watching netflix all day in oregon while I pay for it.

For how long? Until she dies?

I’ve worked at lots of small companies, some super large companies, and FAANG, and by far the most overworked people were often at the small companies.

FAANG folks I work with mostly worked hard but at a reasonable pace, not running themselves ragged like the startup folks I know.

Are startups your only experience with small companies? There is a world of successful, profitable, smaller companies that probably outnumber startups 10:1.

Yes i’ve worked for those too. Definitely comparable wlb to FAAANG on average. I have no doubt there are more chill companies but in my experience smaller companies tend to push as much or more because owners see the employees coming out of their bottom line and profits are tighter.

I for one enjoy supercars and foreign women

Yes, midlife crisis purchases and mail-order-style gold-diggers (supercars and foreign women in the context of what the parent is talking about) sure are fun, if you haven't got an actual life!

The foreign women are stealing our men!

I have worked for large and small companies in my career (not faang but similar size) but honestly all the great people I admire have been in smaller companies. Large companies seem to full of people that chase promotions, TC and are not interested in learning new things.

Not sure if I am reading you right but are you saying the options are either to go to a FANG or a startup? If so, I'd add startups to the set of places new grads should avoid.

Assholes are everywhere, so learning to deal with them is essential, but, in my experience(which, arguably, mostly comes from another era), the valley has a lot more assholes per engineer than, say, a small to medium sized company. Not only that, but the valley has an overall social environment which is... unsupportive to many. It is, based on my experience and the general feeling I've encountered talking to coworkers and online folks, a very difficult place to find friends and support.

Depending on your role, there are a lot of places that look down on FANG experience. That is going to vary a lot with which part of the SW elephant you work on. My experiences as an embedded SWE who deals a lot with HW folks won't necessarily map to someone doing games or front end web work.

Nobody is going to look down on FAANG experience. Come on now.

It comes up regularly on HN(i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846408).

FAANG folks have high salary expectations, often do not know how to work in a less supportive environment, often possess big egos, and will leave as soon as they're offered another FAANG gig.

When I've hired for non-FAANG roles, I hire folks who are going to be a good fit for the team and the company, who demonstrate a good understanding of the work they've done, and whose experience aligns with what the role requires. Coming from a FAANG was neither a benefit nor an asset to me. Now that I've done time in the valley, I think I'd be extra careful to screen toxic folks.

"extra careful to screen toxic folks". I like your sentiment, except the scariest toxic people I ever met are very good at hiding it and only show when 100% safe. Only the unsophisticated ones are easy to screen.

the FAANG companies are so different from each other, I don't know that stereotyping everyone who is from "one of those companies" is accurate or effective.

FAANG companies are so different from each other

...yet they look so similar when compared as a group to everywhere else.

I've only heard those negative stereotypes about Google and maybe Meta. Doesn't describe Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft which are all pretty different from each other.

> ...yet they look so similar when compared as a group to everywhere else.

What point of view?

- business model

- culture

- growth rate

- engineering problems

- ?

Netflix is totally different from Amazon is totally different from Apple, for instance, on almost each of these dimensions.

I would not even bother interviewing someone with FAANG on their resume at my current company. They’d definitely expect more than I can pay. I’d also assume they would be bored or complain about doing grunt work that can be common in a small company. Many places know they are not top tier, or rather, they’re satisfied with what they get from programmers who work for less.

Of course some people do. I know plenty of people view ex-FAANG candidates at least cautiously. Several of those people are now founders/CxOs at reasonably successful tech firms. Career FAANG people tend to have a polarising effect where they can be very good in some areas but have huge blind spots in others.

If you don't think this is true then I encourage you to look at the comments any time someone relatively senior coming from outside FAANG asks about being down-levelled when they start. There are always a few slightly too haughty people talking about how that outside experience doesn't translate and a different skill set is needed at high levels in a FAANG-style organisation. That's true - up to a point at least - but it goes both ways.

I absolutely do. Many of these companies are already have a disproportional amount of influence in the world and can even exert their influence in the world of politics through lobbyists.

As a software developer, I'm 100% ideologically against working for a faang because it gives them even more power.

There are people who respect F (M) for engineering chops? Interesting. To me they more look like "that's how not to do things" than the opposite.

How did you come to believe that Meta doesn't have engineering chops? They have done so much cutting edge engineering work I don't even know where to start.

Think what you want about the company itself, but they've done a shit ton of amazing engineering work.

I worked at a startup where everyone was ex meta! They made such a shitty architecture with GraphQL and Hasura and other meta technologies they learnt that it was laughable they were using that for a small startup.

GraphQL and Hasura is... totally reasonable for a startup? We used same at a 12 person startup, way faster and cheaper than the shitty MVP API service we were limping along with.

Also Hasura is not Meta tech afaik.

It's not that there aren't great engineers at the FAANGs. It's that there are a lot of low quality ones. So it's a poor lake to fish in.

Isn't that true for engineers in general and not just engineers at FAANGs?

Right. In some sense, it's just a population reversion to the mean. But I've had better luck with my hiring once I've excluded FAANG-only engineers from the resumes I screen.

Considering we pay about $350k for a fresh grad, I think I know why this is.

The amount of recruiter spam increases by an order of magnitude once a FAANG-level technology company appears on one's resume. It has a dramatic change in the amount of technical interviews that are granted to an applicant.

At what kind of company? Looking from outside and in particular from outside the US the whole FAANG culture seems very strange. There is - or was - a huge amount of money available in compensation that seems almost completely disconnected from the value of an individual developer's contribution to the business or the level of useful skills and experience the developer has. And it seems there's this kind of clique effect where those who have worked in a FAANG or a high-profile startup are assumed by others who have worked at FAANGs or high-profile startups to be somehow better than everyone else. But IME once you're outside that bubble a more likely assumption is that ex-FAANG people will demand more than they're worth and won't necessarily be any more competent or productive than anyone else. And ex-multiple-FAANGs with rapid job hopping at the start of a career is a huge red flag.

FAANG has a fairly high floor for engineers. You certainly find brilliant people on par with the best of FAANG at all types and kinds of companies. However many companies also have absolutely morons slip through the cracks, people who can barely code. FAANG does a pretty good job filtering those people out.

So I agree that FAANG isn’t a great signal of brilliance but it is a good sign of “decently competent”.

It sounds impossible to characterize a bigco, which is like a trillion competing and independent duchies and fiefdoms, with any sort of sweeping statement about how good their engineers are.

Not to mention the entire disciplines of engineering that really only exist at the megacorps - Meta is still on the relatively bleeding edge of datacenter design, both physical plant and networking.

Disagree. Imo, you should be at a FAANG company at least once. I liked all the jobs and internships I took and a few of them are arguably better than FAANG (hft/unicorns), but when it came time to interview for other places, I had a much harder time getting past resume screens vs my friends who were from a FAANG company.

Imo having a FAANG company on your resume provides flexibility. Also, FAANG jobs are just nice. You have a lot of creature comforts that will make your first few years out of college much easier (Good 401k matching, liquid stock, good benefits, plenty of locations to chose from, wide selection of teams, free food, etc). Ive been at "good" companies without many of these benefits, and while the work is interesting, your quality of life suffers greatly.

Also eng talent is generally pretty good at FAANG from what I can tell. You have a lot of really senior people showing you the ropes, vs a startup which may be led by younger people who may be smart, but lack experience.

If you are dead set on some career path that doesn't require you to be at a FAANG company (i.e you got a job somewhere and you are satisfied with being there for a while), then sure it may not matter, but for a general SWE, the flexibility, resume value, and scope going to a FAANG company gives you is very valuable.

Note: I am using "FAANG" here to mean FAANG + Similar adjacent companies. Think Uber, Microsoft, Airbnb, Datadog, etc.

To the GP: I'm FANG now, started my career at non-FANG. Largely I agree with this advice, but for a completely set of different reasons.

In particular -> "Going to a FANG and learning toxic habits, like putting yourself above your team and thinking only of compensation/promotions, can make you an asshole for life."

I think you'd be unwise to think that FANG will teach you toxic habits and putting yourself your team. Or if it happens, that other companies on average are better and FANG is the bottom of the barrel.

Being on the inside, these companies are really not innovating. Just optimizing existing platforms

I'm not getting into that debate, but I'll say that the most important thing for a new engineer isn't being at an innovative company. It's just learning the ropes, making your first mistakes, fixing them, learning team skills, etc. Sure, you want to avoid the bureaucratic nightmares like the defense industry, but I think many SW shops will teach you a lot vs school.

I bet you alot of the engineers at openAI doing impactful work are just a few years out of school, if that. Big tech is filled with bureaucrats

Aren't a lot of those projects built on top of FANG outputs? I.e. pytorch, tensorflow, CUDA, AWS, etc?

Sure, but as a junior engineer on one of those teams, some senior engineer thats been there a decade will shoulder you out of the best learning opportunities.

Also, that stuff was invented more than a decade ago in most cases. Very different companies back then

I agree. But in my opinion, that's the perfect kind of company to start your software engineer career in.

Wrong advice.

If you want to be leveled up fast in a FAANG, you should start in one. I know of 4+ YOE people jumping one level per year, they are an exception but the argument is, it is faster if you are born into the culture, rather than if you adopt it.

This is impossible at Google. Can probably be done at Meta, or at least could several years ago. I wouldn't paint with too broad a brush here.

I got promoted twice in two years at Facebook, back in the day. Definitely possible. Mind you, my manager lated admitted that I was under leveled but the comp worked for me at the time.

I'm not in a FAANG, but another quite large tech company. This has been a really good place for me to 'level up' so I don't quite understand why you would recommend non-FAANG companies, which presumably means a non-tech company?

The timeline for reaching senior+ in FAANG is also likely to be a lot longer if you start from outside vs working up from inside.

I'm not sure why you assume non-FAANG means non-tech when you work at a non-FAANG tech company.

It sounds like you're agreeing with me as you're having a good experience at a non-FAANG company :D

Depending on the context, I often read FAANG to mean "a large tech company" rather than literally Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google.

E.g. Stripe, Uber, Square, Microsoft etc would count towards "FAANG".

Do you think the environment at FAANG specifically is that different from other large tech companies?

My guess is that the large tech companies in the bay area share certain characteristics, for better and for worse. Many factors are at play though. Do I think working for Intuitive Surgical is just like working for Apple? No, but in many cases I think you'd encounter similar issues.

That said, there are certain companies that are held in higher esteem by many of the folks who care about such things, and those companies tend to attract people who value working for an esteemed company. I talked with another FAANG engineer one day who said they'd feel like a failure if they didn't move on to another FAANG, despite grinding away for years, being middle aged and unhappy, and burned out by the politics at work. Anyway, I think those 'esteemed' companies attract more aggressive and driven folks which changes the culture vs any other large tech co.

I always thought the faang horror stories come from new grads, since there is so much operational stuff you have to navigate. Not sure I'd want to start my career there. Going in as a senior wasn't bad though.

If you are at the highest level of SWE in a FAANG with very little work to get there, you are probably exceptionally talented, which makes your advice less actionable for most people.

I feel like it's a lot easier to avoid assholes at a bigger company. One bad coworker can ruin the entire experience at a startup because there's no avoiding them!!

You earlier described working at a "FANG:ish" company, do you actually work in M-FAANG? Where I work you get nowhere without convincing XF partners to do work for your area of responsibility, and if you come across as an asshole, they will find a reason to not do it. Assholes get held back in promos and this is clearly communicated in reviews.

You can learn asshole skills anywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com