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Comment by WizardClickBoy | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like an absolute nightmare and I see stories like this very frequently. Is this the "normal" experience of working at FAANG in 2023, and how long has it been like that? I have never worked for (or been tempted to apply to) any business remotely approaching that scale (currently in largest ever company, 3-400 employees total, only because my previous much smaller company was acquired) and I can't really understand why anybody would ever want to.

Surely the delta in terms of earnings at FAANG vs literally anywhere else is not worth this kind of horror – can anybody explain? Or do people just not find out until it's too late?

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There seems to be 1-2 posts per week about how terrible $FAANG is to work for (google is in the hot seat this month)

If google has ~200k (I don’t have exact data) employees, there are surely a significant number of people who either don’t hate it enough to blog, or actually enjoy it.

It’s just that nobody writes a blog post saying “I went to work and things were good”, and nobody (especially HN) would upvote it.

But remember, if you see a new update about React, Android, ChaosMonkey, or every time a new apple product lands… that’s someone’s work being released, and at least a subset (possibly small, possibly large) are happy with the work and the outcome

It has its ups and downs. Yes bureaucracy can be annoying, but. Thing is, that with such a huge company the teams and cultures are so different that it doesn't really make sense to talk about Google culture as a whole.

Yeah exactly. Being a tech lead for the next iPhone and being tech lead for some HR system that organizes people’s 401k contributions are both experiences of “being a SWE at apple” but probably overlap in infinitesimally small ways.

A lot of folks don’t seem to get this. There are plenty of horrible 100 person startups, where you quit and move to a different 100 person company where life is amazing. There are hundreds of 100 person units in a FAANG.

It’s similar to the shortsighted conclusion “Americans are X”, ignoring the diversity of different states.

Honestly I think that would be great content. "Went to work, it was okay. Meeting was boring, had a chat in the coffee corner." Basically the HN equivalent of the local news "local man paints fence".

"Roman is having an okay day and got a coke zero at the gas station. Raise the roof"

https://youtu.be/58VhB4R-4XY?t=100

Yes, it's normal. I've rarely had a time when at least one direct coworker wasn't doing work but still employed, sometimes multiple.

Why still here? I'm sick and have two young kids, and I just find projects that interest me but aren't too challenging.

I'm applying for a job at 100k+ people company. I was sent test for a different position. After I complained, they send me another test. And next hour they've sent another different test again without me requesting it. I guess they don't care about their job very much.

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