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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

At this point I’m more hesitant to hire FAANG employees who are used to really strict guardrails both culturally and technically to keep them “on track”. Most startups don’t have the guardrails and need people who make good choices without the bumpers. Hiring a bunch of FB and Google people did not improve Airbnb’s average engineering skill, rather it sank because a substantial part of our population only cared about promo and promo projects.

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Interesting from a couple perspectives (taking the above as honest about AirBNB). Confirms a bit about what's been weird with the economy and hiring.

From the man on the street's perspective (and apparently teirc's view above), FAANG work is where you want to go, and what you want to have on your resume. Per the quote, "a golden ticket". Pretty much all the news talks about.

However, if you talk to the rest of the tech community, they're like: "We tried poaching a few of them. We didn't really like the results. You work at one of those places and you get infected with something that's 'not startup'".

This seems a lot like Stanley and Neck's recent work [1]. The people you've historically been most likely to get as hires are the people most likely to ditch FAANG's for anything shinier. The people who don't "only care about promo", don't actually leave.

Other note, also similar to other recent posts [2] and comments about the change in Google. Like people finally realized: "wait...they're just like MS. All that 'Don't be evil' stuff was just corp-speak. Two decades later, and its strategy deja-vu with Android / Search / Ads. With MS now being the caring innovator who values your freedom of choice."

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37111317

> With MS now being the caring innovator who values your freedom of choice

they most certainly do not, but might be a slightly lesser evil in some ways

Most certainly agree.

Yet, its not whether they 'actually' care. Just the noises they're making.

Google looks inept and malicious. MS wants health care money, cause its the next big market as everybody dies. "We care, cloud health innovation. All MS innovation is powered with empathy.[1] Nano, cyber, quantum, big data ... technobabble Tourette's, How the F** do we get defense contracts?"

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/empath...

I've heard of people who had terrible experiences with ex Amazon engineers. I've met a few of them, and not the greatest group of people to work with. Of course I'm stereotyping a very large company so take it with a grain of salt.

Any commonality?

I agree with that assessment, but with the caveat that I think this mostly applies to new-grad hires. In my experience, people who brought outside experience into FAANG weren't nearly as affected by these guard-rails outside of things I think most firms would approve of (mandatory code reviews, unit/integration tests, don't write inscrutable wizard code golf changes, don't be an ass).

I've spoken with recruiting firms before that literally told me companies asked them to stop sending people who were hired as a newgrad to FAANG.

That's a great explanation for why Airbnb was pushing out open source torture software like their eslint preset (I still have nightmares about it) while having the slowest and clunkiest frontend ever.

I started using booking.com first because of how bad that website was working and I had the latest MacBook.

Are you filtering before the interview?

How did you structure your hiring, your teams and project lifecycle ?

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