You will have little agency and impact, and your only opportunity for a decent compensation will be based on internal politics rather than technical merit.
Meanwhile, you can join a human-sized company, and be a real enabler and transformer of that business.
You see, as a business ( of one), I'm here to ensure my company (again me) is generating cash flow and profit for my stakeholders ( me + family + dog).
Unless I own the company or have equity >10%, it never made sense why anyone would.
That said, I enjoyed my time at the good large corps. Big and small, they all have their issues internally, but I'll take the boring and well compensated job over the interesting (almost never that interesting) and low pay one.
This is key. I worked for a small company for 8 years, and in the end I realized that the owners still wanted me to be just a cog, and I would never be anything except a cog in their (small) machine. That's when I quit and started my own company.
The gap between employees and owners is massive and almost always insuperable.
Either you were not a key person or you badly picked the company you worked for.
This is a really uninformed and insulting reply. You speculate without having any knowledge or details about the situation.
First of all, I didn't join the company with the intention of staying 8 years or rising to management; I joined because they offered a big pay raise from my previous job. So no, I didn't badly pick the company I worked for.
Second, I personally wasn't looking for equity, I was looking for power, the ability to make independent decisions.
Third, a more general point: BigCo engineers get equity in the company, but they're still just cogs in the machine.
Feeling insulted by logic really takes the cake for a computer scientist.
Settling for a cushy job where you don't have to care and can focus on your family, yes, that's what FAANG is for. That's what I meant by retirement.
I joined a FAANGM straight out of Uni, wrote code that currently runs even today on billions of devices worldwide, and services that processes requests also in billions. Then ended up at another FAANG with similar outcomes.
Being at large corps in my early 20s was one of the best things that happened to me financially, setting me up for life by 30 to pursue anything I wanted - a lot of it was timing and luck, but some credit for my dedication wouldn't be asking too much.
The startup, on the other hand, was bought out and the service eventually scrapped. I'm pretty sure that code doesn't even exist anymore or an archive somewhere never to be touched. Ironically, this is the place I've had to work the hardest.
Today, I can at least get my foot in the door at most places purely based on past experiences. Whenever some company wants me to do a song and dance take-home interviews, I respectfully tell them to knock it off and they usually do.
I'm definitely focused on family now, and I'd argue it is the greatest thing I'll ever achieve.
I hope young, newly-minted engineers don't take your advice too seriously. You can definitely forge your path in multiple ways in your life. Not drinking the kool-aid is paramount to maintaining perspective of what really matters in life. Every decade or 5-year chunks of your life, has unique phases, choices/oppurtunities and experiences that are strictly for that part of your life. Your real job is to figure out which to pick and choose to minimize regrets.
Paraphrasing another HN comment -- In a decade, the only people who will remember you worked late to go above and beyond to deliver, is your kids. And if you choose not to have kids, well there's your answer.
3 years of experience at a startup are worth a lot more than at a big corporation.
Personally I'd rather my kids are proud of having a father who believes in what he does, rather than one that just clocks in-and-out. I have a similar sentiment when looking for a partner too; I simply cannot date someone who's not driven by their job.
That being said, to each their own. I know a lot of people who prefer focusing on hobbies and family than on their career. I suppose that for those, FAANG isn't such a bad compromise.
1. First, there are plenty of roles in these companies. You could be working in a very small specialized team on open source software that is used beyond the company. It doesn't matter if the company is past its prime or not, and you're not more or less a cog that if you work for a startup.
2. I can only speak for my experience, but my compensation isn't based on politics at all. It's purely based on my contributions. Compensation is just like the interview process, highly standardized, no room for politics.
3. A lot of human-sized companies don't produce anything meaningful, with more politics, and you won't have any room for impact because you're blocked by a few stubborn people in power.
Again, just my experience but I found that in my FAANG, there's a critical mass of people with good common sense and less bullshit in general. In the couple of smaller companies where I worked, it wasn't the case. There were good engineers, but also enough annoying people with too much influence that make my day-to-day job less enjoyable.
2. Highly standardized is exactly what leads to politics. Everyone's circumstances are different but somehow you need to fit everything to the same ill-fitted mold, so everyone is trying to exploit the game. The standardized interview is also the worse thing about Google/Facebook leading to dumbing things down, lack of purpose, and bad targeting of specialized skills. At least Google is backtracking from it.
3. A small company has vision and enables a few people to have genuine impact, this is what leads to doing something different and innovating. Those few people in power are stubborn, they need to. You don't innovate through design by committee. If you don't like the vision you shouldn't have joined that company.
> At least Google is backtracking from it.
Interesting, I didn't know that. How do they hire people nowadays?
Now, if you are entrepreneurial and aiming to start something of your own, a smaller company will force you to wear many hats and become the jack of all trades, learning tons.
I say, do it when you are younger - you will have more time, more energy, and you will need to be learning a lot. And later on - be a mercenary for money.
yada yada
>You will have little agency and impact, and your only opportunity for a decent compensation will be based on internal politics rather than technical merit.
Yes, you have little impact (unless you go up on the ladder), but you're working on products that serve the whole world.
That's quite a few order of magnitude more than working in yet another startup creating web-shop or niche app.
I'm not even at FAANG level of corpos and I really can say that I'm putting tiny bricks into really interesting products.
The work itself is pretty boring, but products as a whole are impressive as hell.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that corpos are great and startups sucks,
but when you're talking about companies that hire 50k, 100k, 200k or more people and just call them places where you're just "cog" and there's nothing exciting about the job then I think you're just naive