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Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

There is something to be said about being a former FAANG worker getting paid above average salary at (insert boring tech company here).

Partially because maybe if they weren't seen as a 10x developer at FAANG with the competition all trying to make the next promotion, they surely might be close to one in any other company depending upon how good/bad that company's hiring has been (often terrible).

Many F500 companies have crummy tech stacks and lousy in house developed systems that would be better replaced with counterpart open source systems. 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.

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> 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.

The top 1% of SWEs in any FAANG are world-class engineers and are unique. I'm talking about the John Carmack's of the world who are top of their field.

The top 10% at FAANGs are game changers, and having them in any company would probably accelerate them. I've worked with some really extra ordinary, high-output engineers that were brilliant.

The rest of the 89% are very, very ordinary. I'm at a FAANG and the vast majority are exactly like every other SWE I've worked with in my career. There's nothing special about them. I'm currently working with some of the laziest, dumbest SWEs in my career despite their employment at a FAANG.

So to those that think FAANG is some badge of honor, don't believe the hype, I don't think FAANG employment is a meaningful signal at all.

> So to those that think FAANG is some badge of honor, don't believe the hype, I don't think FAANG employment is a meaningful signal at all.

I honestly think FAANG employees sank their own boat. The constant bragging of how little work the do in a week on anonymous forums, and the "day in the life" videos that show everything but work. Despite their bragging about being 10x, I don't see any proof of it.

The 1% of SWE though are very good (especially older employees with years of experience e.g. Rob Pike). The rest of the 89%, as you say, are mediocre at best. A Google employee in 2010 is not the same as a Google employee in 2020.

The 1% who brag are rarely SWEs IME - usually PMs and admins and the SWEs who do rarely do it for long generaly just a lull between projects or during research phase or just recovering from burnout. There's a lot of very bursty types here though - people who don't do much for a few weeks at a time then drop something massive in a marathon or something.

Isn't an 11% chance to be hiring a really good to incredible employee good signal? I don't think you can have the same chance when hiring from most small companies, not based on company reputation alone.

That assumes that the 11% are on the job market at all.

You're unlikely to see a resume of a distinguished engineer from Google cross your stack of resumes.

For a bit of a blast from the past: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...

> The top 1% of SWEs in any FAANG are world-class engineers and are unique. I'm talking about the John Carmack's of the world who are top of their field.

How are Carmack's SRE/Devops skills?

How are SRE/DevOps skill the measure of a world class software engineer? How good is Vint Serf at SRE/DevOps?

My point is that employers (esp Google/Facebook/Amazon) try to consolidate roles. The term "Full stack developer" encompasses a lot. That's a "10x"/rockstar dev.

Carmack or Cerf probably would not make it through the levelling at Google. They are at a Distingushed engineer level.

Vint Cerf, but point well taken.

Hiring John Carmack to run your SRE team is like buying a Ferrari to only go shopping at Safeway with.

There’s no need to build the right tech on their own. They can simply miss some tech and find a close enough FOSS or build a close enough version.

Where “close enough” means build 80% with 20% effort. Or even 20% solution with a day of effort. Whatever makes sense in the new environment (which doesn’t need to scale to billion active users, for example)

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.

As someone that joined a legacy company 6 months ago to weather the recession, I agree with the majority of what you said. You are talking entrenched interests in keeping the way things are. Especially those that have worked in the company for years. They don't want change, because change would threaten their position.

It has been very difficult to adjust to the culture personally. On the one hand, I hardly have any work. On the other, I am struggling with the meaningless work assigned to me. The tech is abysmal, but given the culture, it's not worth dying on this hill. Countless people have tried before. You can accept it or move on.

I am staying around because of the economic environment. The upside is that I am free to work on my side projects because my IP clause is strictly related to work only. I don't expect much else because it can't offer any other than words.

I wish I would have read some of this commentary 15 years sooner.

> 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.

Are you summarizing what you wrote earlier in your comment? Or generalizing? I’m not following and/or skeptical of this characterization.

In my experience with large organizations, the lacking quality of technology tends to result from:

- hiring outsiders (often contractors but sometimes corporate IT teams) to build things

- the outsiders have little incentive to build it well to solve long term problems

- the managers hiring the outsiders don’t really understand the technology domain well enough

Put another way:

A. the people who build software “solutions” for internal business processes may be the only ones who appreciate how complex and messed up these processes are.

B. If they are not compensated nor respected properly, and don’t stick around for future iterations, how is the next version going to be significantly better?

I'd summarize it by saying that the reason behind technology generally lacking in large companies is a result of mismatched incentives.

In large, established companies, a lot of processes that could nowadays be replaced by software and automation are done by people. Some of those people are senior employees and/or have a manager whose standing within the company depends on the number of people they manage. Some of those people may even have "money under the table" relationships with vendors of subpar solutions that will be jeopardized by a new in-house solution being developed.

The feedback loop in large companies is long enough that individual employees can make decisions that are beneficial to their individual situation at the expense of the firm's profitability, but that fact will only come to light in so long that by that time they will have moved on or retired.

Therefore the reasons behind tech being shit at large companies is typically a blend of:

* nobody within the company having enough expertise to truly vet the people/consultancies they're hiring, resulting in lackluster results

* people within the company know (or eventually realize) that the people they've hired are competent enough to put them out of a job, so they give them intentionally-sabotaged instructions to deliver something subpar as to protect their job

* the working conditions, pay and/or working conditions within the company are so bad that nobody competent enough to make a change walks through the door, so the only people that do walk through that door wouldn't be able to make an improvement even if there were no other roadblocks in the way.

In general, in my opinion, it is a combination of all these factors. Incompetence of the incoming talent is a big one (that benefits the people relying on the status-quo), but should there be a breakthrough employee that can actually make a difference, he will be stopped because of the other reasons (otherwise he'd put many people in a tricky situation and they don't want that).

This has been my experience as well and it took a (very long) burnout + a resignation to understand.

"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)"

Do you mean "positions" as in roles or jobs? If so, why would it be a goal for the company to keep people around that can be automated away? That seems opposite to their duty to their shareholders. Am I misunderstanding or missing something?

> why would it be a goal for the company to keep people around that can be automated away

The explanation that I always use is that in a small company, the feedback loop all the way up to the CEO and/or investors is short enough that any misbehaviour from employees for their own interests will be easily detected, so it doesn't happen.

In a big enough hierarchy however, the feedback loop can span decades of real-world results, so middle-managers can make decisions that are detrimental to the long-term performance of the firm but gain them short-term results (from which bonuses and promotions are derived), not to mention plausible-deniable "money under the table" that is still technically a "bonus" though off-the-company-books. By the time the long-term impact of the decision comes to light (if it ever does), they would've long since moved on or even retired.

Therefore, in a big company, you need to keep in mind that people may not act within the firm's best interests if they know they can get away with it, and you may merely be a pawn within their chessboard - in which case they're happy to pay you to keep you around but you need to move exactly as they say and not rock the boat too much.

And I'm not even talking of outright blackmail where multiple high-standing people within the company could have dirt on each other (or at least pretend to?) and thus cooperate with each other because any defection means mutually-assured destruction.

Aside from the existing system having inertia, there may be regulatory or legal requirements protecting certain teams and processes that make automation trickier. Even if this isn't the case, the current system works, and so improvements need to be weighed against that; most likely, it's a long-term, strategic shift to a new process, because large organizations rely on processes to shield themselves from the legal system. Finally, any individual coming in and waging civil war on other departments within the organization is always bad, even if they're right in the long run.

> Finally, any individual coming in and waging civil war on other departments within the organization is always bad, even if they're right in the long run.

Yes, an individual going alone against entrenched powers will feel an unpleasant burning sensation.

Still, at times an entire department is already looked at as a black sheep. A key hire can just provide “cover” for what most people in the organization already know. The new blood might not tread lightly. It can work, if the attack dog has cover and support. This has the added benefit of providing a ready to burn scapegoat if the “excision” / reorg doesn’t go well.

P.S. Need more mixed metaphors?

Out of curiosity, given that you appear to have more experience in this domain:

1) if there is a regulatory reason behind "protectionism" of some employees/departments, why not outright announce it to the rest of the company?

2) if you're saying that someone that wages "civil war" against other employees is bad regardless of their motivations, what would be your alternative for someone genuinely knowing the best long-term outcome for the company but otherwise lacking the necessary connections to play "puppet master" behind the scenes or pass money under the table to influence the right people?

You are missing that shareholder value drives very little corporate decision-making below the C-suite. A director benefits the more people report to them. They don’t necessarily care whether any of them are doing anything as long as they can slingshot to their next job before it all implodes. But nothing ever implodes, it just reorgs.

Having been in a director position myself, financials always mattered. Sure having more folks to execute on plans is great, but ultimately there'd be pressure to grow revenue and revenue/employee.

> "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.

In consulting work I find myself asking the question, “is this limitation technical or is it a business decision?” If it’s technical I can offer solutions or workarounds, but if it’s to avoid an entry level product eating the high end version’s lunch, I won’t waste my time.

I’m curious about your firing experience. What boundary did you push and was it explicitly stated or was it implicit?

In my case it was very implicit and it's only in retrospect after many years in other companies that I can realize it. To be clear, this was a textbook "growth & engagement" startup, but my experience nowadays suggests the same would apply in legacy, conventional companies too.

The firing itself was over a stupid misstep outside of my domain of expertise and also wasn't of any consequence to the business, which IMO means that it should outright be forgiven or at the very least downgraded to a formal warning considering I was otherwise on good standing (or at least I thought so).

The problem was that I was questioning and pushing back against a supposedly "technical" decision that even after 5 more years of expertise still feels correct - however by now I realized that the whole reason behind the decision wasn't a technical one but to farm out business to some high-up person's friends' company back in their home country. Tech-wise, this decision wouldn't have improved the supposedly-claimed problem (according to tickets and meetings) one bit.

The mistake I did was just a convenient excuse for a firing, but overall it worked out both ways - they eventually got a lucky exit (and I'm sure whoever was involved in that scheme also benefited even earlier regardless of the exit), and I got to learn a decent lesson about office politics to carry with me in my freelancing career (I didn't have any stock options or any good money on the line anyway, so no hard feelings and I still got a good reference).

Great comment.

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.

“ 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.

> lack of ready to go infrastructure

That's just an excuse and concealment of the real reason(s). If there's a will there's a way. It takes 5 minutes to open any could provider (or dedicated server host) account and all it needs is a credit card and billing address.

Ha, I know people who would be fired for doing that.

In this day and age just putting company business/data on a third-party provider with a personal credit card is probably at least grounds for a stern talking to at many companies.

Depends how high-up you are. I can see this happening for an individual contributor, but much less for a head of department or CTO.

Fair enough. And size of company matters too I’m sure.

That’s not how it works in many corporations especially when you are dealing with sensitive data. You have to go through some kind of approval process.

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.

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.

The best startup ideas often come from people who worked inside F500 companies and saw the inefficiencies with current vendored/home grown solutions.

Good point. They also learn about the complexity of "purchasing". Also, I heard that the easiest startups target B2B, and avoid the dreaded B2C.

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.

> I would assume they'd be more likely to have experience with in house systems rather than implementing open source ones.

Every hiring process I’ve been apart of (FAANG to startups) is an exercise in mostly measuring intelligence and empathy. That’s a long way of saying smart people aren’t limited by in house systems or open source ones. They’ll figure it out in a few days.

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 don't doubt there are low performers at FAANG. I just believe when you're doing a 10% layoff, there's no way you're not going to cut high performers as well. Some layoffs are just purely based upon the department level.

Sure, there will be some high performers that get caught in that 10% net. The F500 shops wants their recruiting teams looking for those candidates, but they need protect themselves from adverse selection. An ex-FAANG developer who thinks they're 10x and is given unconstrained runway to prove (or disprove) it can cause a lot of damage to an unprepared but otherwise functional team of 1xers.

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