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Comment by blitzar | Hacker News Reader

I would be more comfortable with gambling/betting than someone that worked at Facebook.

it's kind of interesting how i have started to look differently at ex-FAANG employees compared to how I used to view them only like 3 years ago. For me, it's less about someone's morals because look, if you're going to get paid 500k--there are very few people in the world that wouldn't take that. It's more about the fact that after reading Blind, the culture behind FAANG just turns me off so much. The optimizing your entire existence around TC, the musical chair company jumping just to increase said TC, working just barely enough to avoid PIP while delivering near zero. It's become so soulless and cringe that I can't view FAANG as the upper echelon of engineering anymore. I understand you killed it at leetcode and system design and you're probably very smart, truly I do. But I really just don't want to work with those types of folks. I'd rather work with slightly "worse" engineers that maybe couldn't hack the leetcode grind or chose not to and instead shipped a bajillion features at startups/mid tier companies that are actually normal, fun humans.

Basing a company's culture on Blind comments is like basing it on the movie Office Space. Sure there's a subset of scenarios that mimic them, but they're both ultimately characitures of the actual job.

i do understand its a generalization, but it's not just Blind. Culmination of personal experiences, too. I've worked with a lot of these types of folks. I also highly disagree with this analogy. One is a fictional, creative work of art set to make fun of the corporate world, and the other is an active forum with actual people that work at these places. It's completely fair to judge based on an anon forum (where people can transparently spill their biases/views without any repercussion). Also, a lot of them are in leadership positions and it takes only 1 or 2 to set a culture for a team and eventually a department. Blind also leaks into many many other areas because it has become so famous. At what point can you say that maybe there's a problem endemic to FAANG?

prime example: my last company decided they wanted to become more of a "mature company" and start hiring these geniuses and got someone to lead product from FAANG. He came, did some very fancy pontification (i.e would never let anyone else speak and fill the room with his opinions). Stayed for a year (guessing he got his 25% cliff), delivered literally nothing, and moved back to FAANG to a higher position (VP) and is now probably making a solid 2MM in TC. What a sweet life. I would pay a lot of money to be a fly on the wall of those interviews and how much bs was said with what he did at my last company to get that VP job.

I’ve interviewed once with Google, didn’t make it so take that grain of salt in my comment:

Every time I’ve met with ex-FAANG types in the last decade (and I’ve got dozens of anecdotes) I felt like I was talking with a Wolf of Wallstreet bro stereotype. Complete lack of humility / big ego.

The big name and big money attracts a certain personality type.

I realize full well this is broad strokes and not all are bad, but there’s a bias in the population pool.

Someone recently joined my team (mid size SaaS) from a FAANG, and the couple times I asked about their time at said FAANG they quickly steered the conversation elsewhere. I took the hint.

I get the sense that they would mostly rather forget the experience.

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