I can't find another job even with a FAANG background. The market is brutal. Maybe my only choice is to start a startup.
Which is logging into Glassdoor or levels.fyi and checking. Shit you can do that right now and get some rough ballparks.
People leave, sometimes suddenly and without warning. The high self-esteem way to deal with it is to do your best to provide an attractive working environment, accept that some people will leave, and try to learn from each departure. That way you have the option of profiting from the talented employee who totally could make more at a FAANG but happens to like your company because you provide good management, a worthwhile purpose, or the actual ability to write code rather than deal with company politics.
Heck, having someone sharp with a new perspective even for a year could significantly improve things for the better. If you get out of their way of course.
I phone-screened someone from a FAANG, and they knew very little about non-proprietary technologies that we used on a day-to-day. Any of the big-branded commercial apps, they weren't familiar with, and I can hire someone for a lot less with the required working knowledge AND know that they won't be resentful about it.
I think it's going to take a year for some of the young engineers to level-set their careers in some places.
I'm trying to remember how long it took after dot-com bubble busting, and back then I know a lot who went back for their MBAs, Law degrees, etc. during a softening market. And I know personally how long it took for me to recover to the same economic level.
Also, I get emails a few times a week from recruiters saying something like "Ex-Meta Employee/ex-Faang available for employment", leads....
I had an eye opening experience several years ago. My group was partnering with a group at Google. Their developers were sharp, as one would expect. But were very lacking in what would otherwise be considered table stakes, the reason always wound back to they had a proprietary Google equivalent of X, so thus they weren't familiar with X. The one that really hit it home was that we had to teach them how to use Google Cloud, because at least at the time, internally Google folks didn't use GCP but instead used their own internal versions of things.
Kafka for 99% of developers in the company should be "Can I use our internal library to read/write some topic".
Most of what people are talking about can be learned in days because they’re 90% the same as other products. Sometimes it's hours as someone else said because they're just generic databases or a pubsub system.
Or the design is wonky because the new platform isn't a 1:1 match to the proprietary solution.
Occasionally X is an open source implementation of a Google paper, published after Google decided its proprietary tech no longer provides a competitive advantage and/or has moved onto a better architecture internally.
There's an astounding number of Google publications that spawned Billion-dollar industries.
Day-to-day tools are things that really takes no time to learn on the job imo. They take more time to get up to speed from scratch but when dropped into an environment using them I expect experienced folks to get up to speed very quickly.
If they resent not having the awesome dev tools though, like you mention, that's another thing entirely.
> Or very early stage startups, like seed or series A, which I'm not comfortable joining.
Pick one of these two statements please.
Technically speaking, it's not a "paycut" if you're not currently getting paid.
I find your tone concerning, considering there's something driving wages down (which if you're a wage worker should make you squirm regardless of how much you make). I feel some resentment against fellow workers (because it doesn't matter how much you make, if you MUST work to live, you're a worker), but it doesn't matter. Wages aren't tied to worth, or the value added to the business. If this was true, extrapolating from the sheer amount of money FAANG companies make, these compensation ranges should actually be higher.
Wages are tied to the 'market', basically what companies are willing to pay. If they cartelize (like they did with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...) they can drive wages down. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out in the future that something similar is happening today, but I'm not wearing my tin foil hat yet..
Edit: Just to be clear, I don't work in a FAANG company.
On the smaller side, I've noticed that I can build the same 'thing' for two organizations, A & B. Org A will struggle to get any value from it, and Org B will make a killing from it. From my standpoint, it was approximately the same tech, same effort, often even similar problem space. But some companies are better at extracting value. You able to take software X and get $3M in sales from it? You'll have no problem paying me $150k. Someone else with same software X struggling to operate their company to make a profit... they won't be able to pay anything.
This idea that someone is 'worth', say, $300k/year because of their skills or experience just doesn't seem all that productive. Or... perhaps what I've been hearing is people conflating what they 'should' get in the marketplace because of past experiences. Finding the companies and industries that can extract value from what you provide isn't always easy.
It’s totally fine to demand more for yourself because the companies will always try to pay you less. Are all engineers at banks less skilled than all engineers at say Facebook? Definitely not. But does that mean engineers at Facebook are worth less? Again, definitely not. It’s the engineers at banks who need to demand more.
Personally as a non FAANG engineer I have my minimum for what I will work for. And I would rather be unemployed and do something of your own than work for less.
> Wages aren't tied to worth
Of course they are. Nothing in the history of humanity has ever been more clearly tied to "this number means how much worth you have as a human being" as income in the United States does today; a close 2nd being the number of serfs you had in medieval France. There's literally an income below which people will cheer for you dying in the streets if you get sick. Yes, they cheer. They cheered when Ron Paul suggested letting poor people die in the streets when they get sick. Being poor is becoming illegal. They'll throw you in jail for it. They add spikes to the sides of highways to make life even more miserable for the homeless. Of course your income is tied to your worth as a human being. What world are you living in?
We're talking about different things here. Worth as in 'how much value you add to the company/industry ie are you worth paying this much' (which is what we're talking about here) != worth as in 'how American society sees you based on your income and what privileges you have because you're making money'. I agree with your assessment of worth wrt to American society. That is my perception as well.
> I'm not sad to see arrogant FAANG developers get cut down to size a little and learn they're not actually God's gifts to the discipline. For over a decade, it's been automatically assumed that everyone else was a failure who just "couldn't cut it" at a FAANG.
Everyone is responsible for their own assumptions; I don't share the same thoughts as you. Not everyone who got laid off is an arrogant FAANG developer and not everyone working at FAANG thinks they're God's gift to the craft (honestly, anecdotally, I have never seen more instances of imposter syndrome than in FAANG). Do you by any chance frequent the Blind forums?
In the end, I would remind everyone that wage workers hating each other because of how much they make is a God send for the people who actually own the economy. It's non-productive and mistargeted. You need to hate your boss/company if you're not happy with how much you make.
Where do you come to the conclusion that FAANG developers are like this?
> For over a decade, it's been automatically assumed that everyone else was a failure who just "couldn't cut it" at a FAANG.
Assumed by who?
The amount of judgment coming from your comment is rather shocking. I'll just say that it definitely doesn't reflect the perspectives of tech workers I know.
I'm sorry that you seem to find yourself in a circle that you have come to those conclusions.
All of this is fine. But let’s be real, part of the community resents another part and has for a while. It is part of some people’s identity to hate on FAANG engineers. And they let you know.
Don't understand the hate on FAANG salaries as it sets a precedent for higher tech salaries.
For example the right decisions in a small company vs. FANG is often quite different, potentially outright the opposite. Not just because of differences in people, time and money resources but also due to scale.
Like you spending a day or even week to optimize something to be a bit faster can save millions in just a year if used on the scale of google. But in a startup the pure salary cost of spending a day on it can easily be more then it saves in 5 years. And due to the small number of time and human resources the actual cost can easily be much higher.
You can see this in some of the design decisions around open source tooling from FANG companies. They are often designed for a context of: "Many highly qualified people working at the same time at the same project. And micro optimizations being important."
But what smaller companies have is: "A small group of very mixed qualified people working one it. Rarely more then very small number at the same time on the same component. Most micro optimizations being clearly out of scope. Constantly chasing a schedule where a single larger delay can be a catastrophe for the company."
For example for a FANK company breaking changes on internal APIs are often a no go, but for small companies they can often be a no brainier especially if it doesn't involve any migration complications.
Or for example for Google a single service stopping is often worse then it running amok and creating a mess, for a small company which might only provide one or two services such a mess can mean insolvency, but an outage might not.
Or for example in a small company having a repo where you define all the (internal & external) APIs and use it to generate glue code to bind all your services together in a "type safe" manner can be a grate thing to have (if you have the right tooling). For a FANG company where not just many people but many teams might work on code interacting with the same overlapping APIs this isn't a viable approach at all.
Not what CS is. (Although I did take a chip-level architecture and asm class, that's the closest it gets to hardware.) If you want a Network/Storage Engineer, hire one.
It's ironic, because the System Design interview is a major delineator between lower and higher level Engineers when they interview at these companies, yet many of the tenured people would do very poorly because many of the questions and considerations of the problems presented in such interviews are effectively solved problems in their daily work that they've never had to think about.
Full support if that's the case, I just think your current job hunt might be a little different from those of the recently laid off FAANG engineers, which is why some other commenters are wondering what's up.
Most of IT is there to support business ops, and is basically there to do what a secretary pool did 60 years ago.
Then for lower paying jobs a lot of people are hesitant to hire "overqualified" people as they expect them to jump ship the moment they find something better, i.e. no FANG people.
Then team leads no matter which job/industry often avoid hiring someone perceived more qualified then them, like e.g. from FANG.
Or in other words in an economy where you might need to be happy with a less well paying job which you also might be perceived to be overqualified for having a long term FANG employment without an employment afterwards isn't necessary a good thing...
As a hiring manager, this is a factor that weighs heavily in my mental math. My experience with ex-BigTech engineers has been that they tend towards wanting to make everything to match their BigTech experience. But they often don't have the pragmatism to understand that X is a good pattern at BigTech because *of the size of BigTech*. Have had way too many conversations of the form, "Yes, that is objectively better. But at our scale, the value add does not warrant the effort involved". Or "there's no need for these 15 layers of indirection because there's 5 of us, not 5000".
Obviously this is a stereotype and doesn't apply to everyone. But that's no different than how people have a positive stereotype of ex-BigTech employees being sharp.
he literally could not understand that a small company can't afford to do this.
not only that, he also could not understand that small companies doesn't even make junior hires. there's nobody to mentor!
and i would guess this guy has like a top 1% iq, whatever that is.
Boils down to not realizing most companies don't have buckets of money raining from the heavens. Inconceivable!
It is a sin of the industry to not train new folks, and I would argue that many “senior engineers” do not know how to mentor juniors because they don’t see it as a priority.
I was heavily mentored during my time in small businesses with limited resources and profit. I hope others get that experience too.
Clearly not the case anymore
I'm sure there are plenty of jobs in your field you can get with your resume, assuming you're willing to face reality.