Laid-off tech workers choose stability over status

Highly doubt the bottom performers at FAANG during a period of mass overhiring are that much better than any average programmer at a boring tech co.

I'm sceptical an F500 company would be willing to replace existing systems that are working ok and that integrate with their ERP system and the other cobbled-together offerings from their enterprise software/services vendor (eg Broadcom/AVGO). There's likely not much new there ... but maybe ChatGPT is an exception.

As someone who's been both at top startups as well as boring tech companies, my experience suggests that it's not as much a difference of tech stacks or skills as opposed to priorities.

For better or worse, in a lot of tech companies, tech wins hands-down. It has to be the "right" kind of tech (suggesting pragmatic but old-school solutions not fitting the current groupthink might not pan out), but generally, tech nevertheless works (maybe because there are enough resume-driven-developers that regardless of management/politics concerns, pushing for the right tech will always get enough people on your side to win).

In legacy companies, tech alone won't get you very far regardless of its merits - if anything it's the opposite. "Too much" tech will actually be seen as a threat and you may encounter roadblocks, because the tech you're proposing is too good and will threaten some entrenched positions or entire departments within the company.

If you want to succeed as a tech guy in a big legacy company as an employee, you need to stay within your lane and not push the boundaries - the boundaries you are being given (explicitly - or implicitly as in "why hasn't this been done before? this seems so easy") are there for a reason and are there to protect some position(s), and unless you have a direct relationship with the CEO and/or investors, you are unlikely to win this battle (it took me a firing to actually understand that). Remember that you may be hired to provide business value as much as you could be hired to be a number on some manager's direct report's list where your only true job is to pad that list and otherwise not rock the boat too much.

On the other hand if you determine the limits and manage to automate day-to-day tasks well or at the very least automate the BS and make your workday enjoyable, it can be a nice cushy job that only require a couple hours a day - not to mention that doing the right favours to the right people will give you good career progression (if the company itself appears to be on solid foundations). Of course, please do any of the juniors a favour and try to explain them these dynamics in private, so they don't shoot themselves in the foot early and get fired by threatening some high-up position/department.

TLDR: don't join a legacy company because of passion, but join it if you're ready to put morals/perfectionism aside and make a decent bit of dough. The reason their tech is so shit is not because of lack of skills or money but because a lot of existing money depends on nobody having those skills. If you can operate within that environment you will have a good time.

> An ex-FAANG worker in the right job might be able to be a 10-100x force multiplier, just by building the right tech to make other developer's job simpler

I don't think your random FAANG worker could show up somewhere and just "build the right tech" on their own, especially in a not so good team. There are some very strong SWEs, but the average one isn't a super star. My experience working at a FAANG is that everyone in my team is good (able to solve problems, hard working, good foundational CS knowledge), and there may be 1-2 very strong ones who really make things happen. Also, a lot of the skills we develop are with our own internal systems, I don't know how easily it would transfer to open source world.

In my previous company, there were some good engineers, but also some mediocre ones. This led to a lot of bikeshedding, wasted time trying to convince people, to review bad codes and so on. What I'm trying to say is that a very good engineer may not be able to unlock their potential in bad team, unless they also have good leadership skills.

If your goal is to implement open source systems are ex-FAANG workers the right choice? I would assume they'd be more likely to have experience with in house systems rather than implementing open source ones.

“ An ex-FAANG worker in the right job might be able to be a 10-100x force multiplier,”

From my experience they often have no idea how to deal with the typical corporate IT and the lack of ready to go infrastructure.

Ha ha oh did that make me laugh. Companies like that are not suffering from a tech problem, that is only the symptom. They’re suffering from a people problem, often a big entrenched structural one. You can throw all the smart engineers you want at them but they won’t be allowed to plan the work, do the work, given the necessary tools or have their work adopted. Plus you’ll first need to convince them to drop vendor x that someone influential and important decided to spend $y00,000 on.

You don't just land in a place like that with SWE skills and suddenly affect change. Ordinary SWEs don't have enough leadership or management skills to understand the problems and coordinate the process of building a solution.

A single person has only 8h a day (usually) to do anything, a great leader has many more hours than that. I'd say even FAANG employees who are top at their field aren't necessarily good with this skillset.

Did you get your cats back?

> I just want to pay bills and have a life.

You value the right things. Congrats.

You can live a pretty chill life at most FAANGs too if you avoid the burnout high pressure projects and choose not to have the crazy commute by moving close to work? They pay you plenty enough if you are a single person to not have a bad commute. There is a reason why there is jokes about google employees working from 11-4.

IMO it's the small startups and certain industries that have crunch.

I did the same about 8 years into my career. I've been here for about 4 years now and I don't ever see myself leaving. I get to work on neat stuff, the leadership is genuinely nice and open to anything. I feel like a human here and I can see myself being friends with most everyone at the company. We have about 45 people.

> What happens to all that accumulated $? Does it just go away?

It may not have been there in the first place. Lifestyle inflation is a thing.

Imagine you recently bought a Bay Area house, a few kids, have day care and/or pre-school costs, various other debts, etc. Sure you were making a huge salary and hopefully have some savings. But it’s all relative and you’re just a middle class dude that can have family vacations that involve an airplane, all things considered. But you have a $8k mortgage payment due every 30 days. You can burn through savings real fast.

A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck, even middle income earners.

RPG?

I can vouch for commercial banking settlement systems. Far and away, they are running on IBM AS/400 mainframes. Most of the code is C or something before it. I have seen the source for more than a few in my career. The code is rock solid, if poorly tested, but it has been running so long that it is essentially bug free. If any changes need to be made, first, unit tests are written to find all the edge cases in old code. Then, refactor + add new business logic. It's not perfect, but it works much better than anyone from the outside could imagine. And, I agree with your "normie" comment. The code is _so_ bland. Zero tricks, ever. The goal is to write code that will last 15-30 years. No joke.

Right, cuz 300 people tech companies are known for their job stability….

/s

Job stability at that company is not guaranteed. Often times it is poorly run and their lack of formal processes and adherence to discipline is a result of the managements' incompetence.

Note to OP - when that developer leaves the company they will host a session called a "handover". At the handover meeting they rapidly run through how they think the pipeline works, lay out some caveats and then they're gone. That's the documentation. You own the pipeline now.

It's probably a good idea to take vacation whenever the person who owns the Jenkins pipeline announces that they've handed in their notice. Otherwise you might be invited to the handover meeting.

> Most companies cant afford to throw large amounts of money at a team who’s entire job is managing a Jenkins pipeline.

I don't agree with this at the 300 engineer level; Specifically that they can't afford it. At that point, one or two more engineers is 1-2% increase in spend on compensation, and if you can get someone to handle architecture and developer support (ideally two different people) and empower them to make useful changes, you can probably get the ball rolling.

Now, if you're talking about a 20-50 engineer shop, the math can be a fair bit different and there I do agree with you.

It seems more down to the evergreen issue of tech debt and fragile tech stacks being a hard-to-quantify cost and mostly hidden from those making the budget decisions. No budget for maintenance or architecture -- things are done in the cheapest most expedient way possible. Then it becomes harder to make future changes, so doing it the right way starts costing even more, and the cycle repeats.

> Welcome, Neo, to the real world.

Indeed. Gamedev was frustrating for this quite often.

When Elon went and laid off everyone at Twitter and everyone kept saying, why do they need to many people. Like this is why. It was a shit show at time but it wasn't that much of a night mare because there were teams like that.

IME there is a code quality/sanity valley of death between about 50-1000 people, with the lower bound shifting upwards a bit depending on the maturity of the company's founding/early stage technical contributors. You get more bang for your buck with five of the right people than 50 of the wrong ones in the early stages, and sometimes that determines five years later whether you are drowning in tech debt (bad) or 1000 years ahead of the competition (inefficient, probably) or maybe just barely staying one step ahead of the reaper (optimal, probably). But a lot of companies limp into the valley, get enough revenue to stay alive for a while, and then slowly fade into obscurity the second a nimbler competitor shows up on the scene and eats their lunch. That's why small companies are fun. All that visible impact and you know you won't be mired in the bureaucratic death spiral of a medium-sized company lurching into obscurity!

I've worked at the G and hated it. It was too big and agree 100% with your analysis. Money and benefits are great, especially considering how little work is actually expected of you (compared to smaller orgs). I enjoyed always being able to find someone who knew more than me, which opened up really good learning opportunities. But as you said, good luck getting any of your accomplishments noticed. Your direct manager would notice and you hope they write the right kinds of letters and accolades to other people to notify them, but that's about all you can ask for.

I've also been at small startups. I worked somewhere early in my career where I was employee #5 and stayed there until we were about 70 employees. It was exciting and I can say humbly that I touched essentially every feature and decision that happened during those ~3 years, which can be rewarding. I'm not saying I personally built the whole company, i had other good engineers around me, but you were involved in everything, so you touched everything and played at least a partial role in everything that was built. That's a great learning experience in its own right. But I found it very stressful to have so much expected of you. At these small companies you will always have more on your plate than even the most efficient engineer can accomplish. The backlog is endless, and solving even basic problems often required new systems or decisions because everything is new and no precedent exists for anything.

I've found my happy place at what i call a "mid-size" company. By my defintiion that is ~250 employees (+/- 100). I admit that the industry definition of mid-size is generally 500-1000 though. I really like this 200-300 range size. It is big enough that at least basic systems exist for everything already. There are teams for each product meaning that you aren't building everything and can focus on a certain area. But you also aren't pigeonholed in a narrow job description either. While you might have a sector of the app you manage, it can still be moderately broad giving you good variety. The team isn't so small that you are doing everything, but its also still small enough that if you accomplish impressive achievements that it still gets noticed. It is small enough that you know most people in the company by name but the team is still large enough you can always find someone with expertise in a weird thing you might want help with. By the time the company is this size, they aren't going to dissapear overnight like a 20 person startup might (although in tech anything is still possible). I'm happy where I am now, so no plans on leaving. But when I search again, I am going to be targeting companies of 100-400 employees again. I really think its the perfect size.

I worked on a team that managed the build systems at a FAANG. It was seriously the worst. Teams would come to you and say

> "we made this service, we need a pipeline that does this, exactly this way, and we need it.... by Friday, let me know if I need to escalate it."

Whenever people threatened to escalate stuff, I would always laugh and say "go for it", to be honest I can't remember the last time I worked on something that wasn't "escalated". Basically the escalated pipeline was e size and our bandwidth was 0.9e - so we never would catch up and if it wasn't escalated it basically didn't exist.

Widespread PHP at a FAANG has to be Facebook, right?

I've yet to see these mythical industry tools that do these tasks well. :(

Those tools are affordable until the company making the tool needs to start actually making a profit and they raise their prices or they decrease their LOS. Then the tools become an expensive risk and the price increases end up percolating into your own startup. If you raise prices to compensate, you'll affect your growth. That's how startups go under.

In a ZIRP world using the tools of other startups makes sense but the stability of the FAANGs and their in-house tooling means they can weather much choppier economic conditions than the equivalent startup.

Link some of these mythical industry standard tools for the rest of us, please. And share how you’re operating them with a small startup that they’re working so well.

The company is over 10 years old

I’m starting a Residential trash/recycling hauling cooperative

No investors, democratic organization, our vision is to give economic power to the working class

Similar situation (albeit 18 months for me) and similar feelings. I wish I didn’t have to work ever again (ie it would be a choice and an option, not an obligation) but I’m not there yet.

It is hard to find a job that isn’t soul sucking and/or that doesnt feel pointless though. Even more so after such a long break and realizing how much of the things people spend money on are a direct result of working too much and being advertised at too much so they don’t have any time to do basic things for themselves or want things they don’t need at all.

I need a cofounder so send me an email

> We’re you at Walmart labs? Pretty impressive jump from Walmart to google. Any tips as to how you did it? Did you leetcode grind?

The engineering practices at Walmart are quite similar to those at Google.

As someone who also made the transition from a smaller company to Big Tech, I can say that while the user base is much larger, the engineering practices and quality remain relatively consistent.

If you’re looking to land a job at a Big Tech company and want to practice by solving LeetCode problems, go for it. However, keep in mind that solving these problems alone won't guarantee you a job.

I haven't worked at either... but I did work at a regional retail company.

Walmart is a massive logistics company that dwarfs any other - save maybe Amazon (and it would be interesting to see the break down side by side).

I believe it is dangerous to put the FAANG companies on such a pedestal.

Consider even McDonalds Tech Labs - which sold to IBM which was doing some rather interesting things with machine learning, and bilingual natural language processing (drive throughs).

My point is one of "Walmart to Google is likely much less of a jump than people imagine... other than the name attached."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart_Labs

Might be a non-SWE role at Google. Account managers, solutions engineers and roles like that often have interviews that focus less on the perfect engineering skill and more on good engineering skills + human skills which Walmart might actually teach better than tech.

Getting deported OR settling for first acceptance jobs within 60 days. OR going to Canada that has opportunistically opened their doors. OR going back home.

No, middle managers earning $500k total comp for 30 hours of work and flirting with unionizing are never coming back. It’s over

They weren't uniquely talented.

In 2023 Meta will fire about 20,000 people, and Zukerberg will pull about $30,000,000 from the company.

If Zukerberg took 0 it would save about 1500 per laid off person. Tech is generally cutting costs at a large enough number that C-suite compensation packages couldn't cover it.

This is a common mistake made on HN, often used as an explanatory factor for something else. "Because the WSJ is owned by Jeff Bezos, "

It's what really is amusing about a lot of the rhetoric around LLMs when they say this: it's the most human thing they're doing.