Comment by zarathustreal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zarathustreal | Hacker News Reader

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(opinions my own) - I actually do work for $FAANG and can confirm this statement. Mountains of tech debt, 20+ year old tech running most of the stack, most tooling written in dynamic interpreted languages, and above all else every single engineer is expected to be part of on-call rotations, even if your role is not related to infrastructure or operations whatsoever. Even if you don't touch the service(s) your team maintains because you're in a FEE role.

The SDE role at $FAANG I work at is essentially glorified tech support, which makes the leetcode interviewing process so much more ridiculous than it would be by default if you were actually writing code and solving meaningful problems most of the time.

> The SDE role at (FAANG)

I don't think you're generalising to all FAANG, just whichever one you work at.

That said, this has not been my experience at all at another FAANG which doesn't use the TLA "SDE".

Using (FAANG) for anonymity, but you're absolutely correct

I’ve worked at Twitter, Uber, Amazon, and Facebook. They all had mountains of tech debt and oncall burden.

Which one do you work at so I can go there?

I think you're going to find this at nearly all software companies, FAANG or smaller. The sad state of our industry is that everything is so poorly written that it's falling apart daily, and each company has an army of people trying to toss water on the last fire that popped up. This is the natural steady state of an industry that prioritizes schedule and feature cram over quality and craftsmanship, and prioritizes human heroics/toil over process and automation. Move fast and break things.

The key I have found is to have hobbies that take you out of cell reception.

Or at least appear to have those hobbies if you do not.....

The thing about FAANG is that very few experiences can be generalized, even within a single FAANG company. These companies are so massive that culture, tech, etc. can have huge amounts of variance between orgs let alone companies.

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