My dream job wasn't worth it: Former employees (Meta, McKinsey, JP Morgan) share | Hacker News Reader

My dream job wasn't worth it: Former employees (Meta, McKinsey, JP Morgan) share

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28 pointspg_123455 comments

I've been both an IC and a manager at FANG.

In some cases the work is terrible, an example is CloudFront at Amazon. It is a weirdly badly run organization which causes heavy operational stress on the teams that support the service and which is not sufficiently staffed to deal with the load. I don't know how it got into such a large hole.

More commonly, at least in big tech, is that the person has reached their Peter Principle in software (they may have other traits, like being a creator or whatever was in the article that allow them to succeed in other fields) and that is causing them tremendous stress, usually without them knowing the root cause.

I spent some time on core services within amazon. I think theres just no upside in major rewrites when the system is working. Any major outage with cloudfront is a huge liability for the company, and so AWS decides to just pay their engineers a ton of money to sit there and hammer out operational issues day by day. This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility.

On some teams, the work is actually not SWE work, even though people think it is. Its really an on call rotation, with some product related work to keep people busy while they recover from on-call. Managers will never admit it though.

There will be good SWE work, but some guy who has been in that same org for 6+ years will quickly snatch the best parts. Less tenured engineers will slog

Some truth to what you are saying.

AWS is amazing at operations, it came from the top down and was a marvel to observe. It could be company culture based, as Amazon retail is simply an operations company (and perhaps the best one in the world), or it could be personality based and will fade in time due to Charlie and Andy taking new roles.

However, from what little I could see of CloudFront it was a cluster **. I didn't see how they could justify that amount of operational load without investing in addressing the root causes. VGery strange.

> This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility.

After working there for >5 years (premium support at AWS, then EC2), I've found myself missing Amazon's operations culture and observability stack (as well as CI/CD toolchain) at every other job. Carnaval in particular is hugely missed.

I find what happens is that people are promoted and expected to do the new job at the same level as the old one without additional training.

All my life I wanted to work at Microsoft. I read a book in 91 about Bill Gates and how he hacked DOS together and the introduction of Windows. I was just a kid but I was dead set on following his footsteps. Well after several rejections throughout my career, I finally got into Microsoft via acquisition. Started working my way into the Microsoft org and met some horribly, horribly biased individuals and managers. One team I encountered expected 60 hour weeks to be the norm, prioritized metrics over delivering features, and treated me as an outsider. Completely opened my eyes to how Microsoft was so ruthless over the past 3 decades and immediately made me nope out of there.

Someone on HN said it best: don’t meet your idols. (FWIW another person told me their team wasn’t so toxic, but the damage has been done)

Perhaps a better lesson we all can learn from should be “don’t idolize” rather than “don’t meet your idols”. Learn from the good and the bad and grow from the experience.

Reminds me of the famous quote from The Dark Knight, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain”. No one, companies included, is perfect. You stick around long enough, you’ll find the bad.

There are other ways to reach one's goals or dreams, but at least for GP's case it seems the "idolization" of Bill Gates and Microsoft has motivated them to work hard and improvement themselves to the point that they could eventually get hired by Microsoft.

One counter saying that it's not a worthwhile goal... but I'd say that every goal , worthwhile or not, requires a certain level of rose-tinted glasses anyway.

I've learned to take anecdotes as data points but also recognize that in a large enough company, there is a huge variance.

A large company is like a country. Different people will have different experiences. Take America for instance. Some people say America sucks, the healthcare is broken, there's too many guns, Europe is better. Others say there's more jobs that pay better in America, America gives people a chance to be on the leading edge (through various tech/cultural hubs) and to do something that would never be possible in their own country.

A company -- like America -- is a bunch of people united by a set of constraints. If you don't like those constraints, then it's worst place in the world. But if you like those constraints, it's not bad.

The former group though tends to be more vocal about it. This is why I discount HN opinions that are super emotional and embellished and one-sided. Chances are OP had a really bad experience and the sample is really biased.

Not sure when you got there but all these companies are so big now that the local management is basically the separator between good and bad and toxic and fulfilling. Sounds like you got a terrible team, and as an acquihire were othered from the beginning.

> I read a book in 91 about Bill Gates and how he hacked DOS together

Book of fiction then. They bought DOS, and actually had to get a contractor(Tim Paterson from SCP) to come in to port it to the IBM PC.

> I was dead set on following his footsteps

Decades later you haven't realized that what Bill Gates did was found a startup instead of working for IBM at the time, the current day Microsoft equivalent?

This article seemed... weak. Of the five people profiled, two went on to become content creators selling advice or whatever the term for that is now, one went into real estate, and one went to work for a startup. I get it, it's hard to get off the treadmill, especially when you have the opportunity to make money in a not miserable way.

But these changes don't seem all that radical. Those four are all playing different games now, but they're still grinding.

Grind isn't always bad, infact if you're the type that gets into fancy companies you probably did a lot of grinding beforehand. It's the psychological environment of these prestigious companies that make them torture for some people.

>two went on to become content creators selling advice or whatever the term for that is now

Influencers, aka Snake Oil Salesmen.

There definitely are worthwhile content creators out there, to be clear, but the signal-to-noise ratio is so astronomically terrible that it's probably better to throw out the entire bathtub including the stillborn baby.

I hate the terms "content creators" and "influencers" both. Scorsese isn't a content creator, he is a film maker. The idea of a content creator is just so... dystopian. What they make doesn't matter, its not art, its just content.

Most movies aren't shot on reels of film ("What's a 'film'?") anymore, nor do most people know what the "tube" in Youtube means.

I wager terms like "content creator" came about as an attempt by younger generations to detach concepts they know from concepts they don't or can't understand.

Note how a similar thing has happened to Saving something (it's "in the cloud" now, nobody knows what a floppy disk is), Private Messages are now Direct Messages (there is no privacy), and files and folders have straight up ceased to exist because paperless is the modern trend.

"Influencer" is probably mostly just snake oil peddlers trying to figure out a more palatable name for themselves, though; not that it's any more palatable.

Sounds like grinding with more ownership

> Of the five people profiled, two went on to become content creators selling advice or whatever the term for that is now.

So using their influence because 'FAANG' in order to grift for selling courses into how to get into FAANG.

Repeating the same tech-lead scam that has been done to death.

> In November 2019, I experienced my first panic attack while I was working from home. It was around 4 p.m., and my left pinky went completely numb. At first, I ignored it, but it got worse: An hour in, my ears were ringing, and my heart was beating really fast.

> One day, she experienced intense stress at work, which brought on a severe migraine that sent her to the emergency room. She knew she had to make changes and ultimately quit her agency job.

These people made the right move. It's not worth sacrificing your health if you're able to get a decent job in a more relaxed environment elsewhere.

With that said though, some people handle stressful situations really well, and others handle stressful situations poorly. One of the reasons these jobs pay so well is that they're stressful, and they need people who can handle that.

So, I completely disagree. I work in tech, and I personally empathize how stress can get to you, but I came from a blue-collar family- as a kid I watched my dad risk his life to drive though an ice storm for some shitty job, eventually it almost cost him his life after a bad wreck. I saw him pick up construction gigs after his divorce, and he would tell me on a regular basis how he had to cover for a friend that shot a nail through his hand or fell off a roof.

My point is, the 99%, or whatever we want to call them see people like us complaining about how our lives are so stressful as weak and embarrassing. Honestly, I have to agree. There are statistics to prove my point. Poor, working class countries have an almost non-existent rate of suicide and psychological issues.

Clearly all the people saying we should be have a higher EQ and be accepting of mental health issues were full of it, and frankly, I’m waiting for them to admit it and society to take a new approach.

> Poor, working class countries have an almost non-existent rate of suicide and psychological issues.

Instead they have sky high alcoholism, substance abuse, and domestic violence.

Also lol about non-existent “psychological issues” - I am sure they also “don’t have gays”. If that’s too indirect - associating societal stigma makes all kinds of issues “almost non-existent”.

This is a pretty rude generalization, though I get it.

As you grow in this career I promise you'll see people with real, serious problems caused/exacerbated by their white-collar jobs.

I don't think the difficulty of other careers means we shouldn't demand fair treatment for ourselves. Is letting ourselves get treated poorly supposed to help them?

> people like us complaining about how our lives are so stressful as weak and embarrassing

The biologically correct way to deal with stress is to punch your boss in the face. Back in the day, a family member has done it, broke the guy's0 nose, says it was one his best days.

These days we cant do that, corporate culture has us by the balls

> Poor, working class countries have an almost non-existent rate of suicide

That's fantasy - it's like saying that in year 1000 noone dies of cancer. They did, there jusy werent any doctors around to diagnose the problem and no statisticians to record it.

I lived in a poor country, noone ever goes to a psycologist, they hide issues, and, if someone kills themselves, they will record it as something else to avoid the shame

I agree with your logic, but I'm not sure on the conclusion

In my limited anecdotal data*, you learn to handle as much stress as your formative enviroment exposes, and the problems start when the stress ramps up too fast for a person to adapt

Which is why, for someone from a "worse" backgrounds other people "feel soft", is like comparing a strongman to an average person and expecting them to handle similar weights, but then they also tend to have other coping mechanisms, which may or may not be a net positive

*Venezuelan migrant here, I recently saw on reddit list of suicide rates by countries in LATAM, Venezuela was I believe second to lowest and it was a significant difference, even after a crisis large enough to move a population the size of Laos out of the country

Not to minimize the risk to health in blue collar jobs, but I’ve done some, and if you reduced that risk to be similar to office jobs and equalized the pay, I’d pick them over office work, no question.

Now, that’s some big “if”s, but all I mean is that some aspects of office work are in fact pretty bad.

A couple weeks into my wife starting a “cushy” standard knowledge work office job with a fairly typical level of demand for actual work (i.e. not all that much, really), coming from one that kept her on her feet and constantly busy and thinking, she said something like: “oh wow, now I get why you’re always so drained at the end of every day”.

Staring at a computer all day sucks. That doesn’t mean I’d rather be doing roofing, all factors considered, but it does suck.

You have a point. But what is the cause then? That the fight for survival and chasing a bit of comfort and relaxation is actually mentally beneficial? Certainly seems so

What an odd take. You start from a significant oversimplification and then point to 'statistics' in an entirely different context/culture/society as 'proof' that, basically, white collar stress isn't real stress.

I think real world stress is something that academic institutions don't prepare you for. Unless you're doing unique research, there is always a solution, always a reasonable way forward. In the real world you'll be tasked with solving some bullshit problem where there is no good solution. What I notice with successful people, especially management, is that they are able to take control of the situation and reframe the problem into something tractable. In school you would be punished for doing something like that. In real life it's often necessary. I think it's a learnable skill, but some people just burn themselves out instead of adapting. Usually a mentor is someone that can help you with that.

> I think real world stress is something that academic institutions don't prepare you for.

Should it, though? Stress results from abuse and abusive working conditions, and a workforce should not be conditioned to take abusive relationships as normal or acceptable.

I argue the opposite and go as far as to claim that software developers are in a dire need of a union. Having to work nights and weekends should not be tolerated in any industry, which includes also FANG jobs.

>Should it, though? Stress results from abuse and abusive working conditions

It doesn't have to be school, but you should learn how to manage stress. You can have a perfectly fine job and still get stressed out, or have a horrible job and manage fine. Personally I can handle a lot of stress well, and I enjoy the rewards that it brings. Infact, it's fun for me.

> It doesn't have to be school, but you should learn how to manage stress. You can have a perfectly fine job and still get stressed out, or have a horrible job and manage fine.

There's something awfully broken in a society that would argue that the entire youth of a nation should be conditioned to accept stress as normal or acceptable, and that stress should be considered normal in any working environment.

I would say what's broken is a generation of youth that go out into the world thinking that they won't encounter stressful situations .

There's a colossal difference between encountering stressful situations and thinking it's normal that jobs should be so stressful so often that the national school curriculum should prepare people to endure mental and emotional abuse. There is no way around it: it's screwed up.

Guess we'll just have to disagree on the framing. But if you really want a less stressful job there are plenty outside of silicon valley and wall street, you'll just have to live with being paid significantly less. Don't see why you have to ruin the jobs that work well for so many others.

I agree. Real world job performance often rewards you for bending the rules or reframing the problems you face, whereas academia rewards you for following a path set for you.

> successful people, especially management, is that they are able to take control of the situation and reframe the problem into something tractable. In school you would be punished for doing something like that

Academia treats collaboration like it's cospiracy, treats leadership like it's mutiny, treats optimisation as lazyness and original thought as rebellion.

And then we wonder why kids with good grades steuggle outside of school

I work in consulting the people I know a ring or two up the ladder all have weird ticks or unexplainable random medical issues. I have no desire to do that to myself, even their rewards are not that great. Certainly not worth becoming a messed up freak of a person, incredibly productive and knowledgeable but also an emotional and physical basket case.

Not in consulting but have the experienced the same. Some people get completely broken.

Friend's friend made ten million plus a year. Banking. Got a stroke at 48. Quit.

Still, for those years set up family for success.

I’m surprised that places with terrible reputations (e.g. Amazon) still manage to recruit at all.

Then again, companies like that also have long-timers who like it there so perhaps the reputations are overwrought?

1. Big company, bound to be some good teams and some bad.

2. Money will make people do all kinds of things.

When I worked at Groupon a decade ago, there were a lot of ex-Amazon people and I heard comments a few times about Microsoft being “a place to go retire”. The implication was that they liked the intensity of Amazon (or in Groupon’s case, a fast growing startup).

I'm somewhat in that camp myself, though I’ve never been at Amazon. I like to work very intensely for a few years and then unplug and go into a learning phase.

How was working at Groupon? It's a discount website that is heavy on sales. What's the tech there?

It was definitely a very sales-driven company. There were maybe 250 devs in Palo Alto, maybe a similar number in Chicago and Seattle and over 10,000 sales reps just in Chicago.

When I was there, they had recently finished acquiring several Groupon clones from other regions and were in a painful process of trying to integrate all the various infrastructure. The main company had started on WP, I believe, and then migrated to Rails. Most of the clones were written in Java AFIK.

I was hired as a front-end dev, so for me the tech stack was CoffeeScript, Node.js and Backbone.js. It was frustrating feeling siloed into a pure front-end role, since I was eager to learn other things, but I really liked the colleagues I was working with. All in all, it was a positive experience.

You hear from the people who like to complain. You never hear from the many others who would say it's a good or OK job, or even those who think it's not great but just aren't the type to get on twitter or write blogs about it.

Most people aren't ecstatic about their jobs. It's a means to pay the bills, and they suck it up because they have responsibilities.

> You never hear from the many others who would say it's a good or OK job, or even those who think it's not great but just aren't the type to get on twitter or write blogs about it.

Places like Amazon have a high regretted attrition rate. I think the average tenure is 3 years. Some teams see their team members rotated out in a span of a year.

The number of people that stayed is eclipsed by the number of people who got up and left.

Across all jobs the average tenure is about 4 years. So on that basis they sound like not a great employer but probably not among the worst. But in tech, where some advise changing jobs every year or two to "advance," a three-year tenure might be more typical if not pretty good.

I've left "good" jobs in less time than that, just because a better opportunity came along or outside factors changed.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf

This may be true, but there tends to be more complaining about Amazon in the FAANGs than the others.

Teams that have very poor work-life balance lose more people than are actually high performance. This means they get more openings, and more people bounce out, continuing the pattern.

Unless there is money and glory in landing in a badly performing team and turning it around, or the cost of managing a team with high attrition that doesn't get better is a pink slip, anyone that is career minded will not do anything to fix the problem areas that give a company a bad reputation. Even more so when said company uses stack ranking.

Thus, almost every bad experience is worse than average, but if you are joining a company, it's much easier to land in those bad teams than in those where nobody ever wants to quit.

Yeah anytime you apply for a job make sure you find out why there’s an opening to begin with. Is a good team expanding or did the last 5 people quit in the first 90 days?

It's been my guess that parts of Amazon can be good if you have a great manager who somehow shields you sufficiently from corporate.

That aside, I speculate that job-hopping culture means many people don't have to care much about corporate culture. In 12 months, they've gotten a lot of Amazon TC, added Amazon to their resume, and are ready to hop to the next place, before they're likely to get stack-ranking culled, or metricsed in a way they actually have to care about, etc.

(Well, there is being on-call, which is one unpleasantness you can't just disregard because you don't care.)

JSON (text-only), no Javascript

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1j2kLG

   #!/bin/sh
   exec sed 's,.*\/ar-,url=https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/,'|curl -K-

usage:

   echo https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/topstories/my-dream-job-wasn-t-worth-it-former-employees-at-meta-mckinsey-and-jp-morgan-share-how-they-burned-out-and-left/ar-AA1j2kLG \
   |1.sh > 1.json

   yy059 < 1.json (or use jq or whatever favourite software)

The "sourceHref" key reveals the article is actually taken from

https://www.businessinsider.in/careers/news/my-dream-job-was...

> But in his role, he saw that every new person was trying to outwork the other person at his company. "Once one person started building that kind of workplace culture, another person would follow suit because they didn't want to be left behind. Everyone was trying to impress their respective bosses to try to get a raise or get that promotion."

This really messed with me. Idk how you are suppsed to deal with it. I had a pretty chill job, then we started to grow and this behavior started after hiring.

It's funny to see this article, when there is a front page hiring post atm talking about working weekends and extended hours as an expectation lol

Y'all dreams weak af breh

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