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Comment by solarmist | Hacker News Reader

I hear this all the time, but I have yet to experience it. It may be because the small companies that I interview with are all startups, but I have yet to be able to get a call back from any other kind of small company. And the startups I do interview with have a full FAANG interview loops.

There seems to be a weird selection bias that if you're FAANG or FAANG adjacent these small companies aren't interested.

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>”There seems to be a weird selection bias that if you're FAANG or FAANG adjacent these small companies aren't interested.”

Many smaller companies have noticed that former and wannabe FAANGers are looking for FAANG-type jobs, and are not good fits in their niche. Small companies often have more uncertainty, fewer clear objectives, less structure, and often lower pay. They’re not a good substitute for megacorps.

And then there's people like me who have been at startups, midsize companies, tiny small businesses and FAANGs.

Not everyone at a FAANG is purely motivated by the amount of money that they can get.

I’m looking for a smaller company because I’m tired of the FAANG mentality personally.

The problem is that many smaller companies have hired people from FAANG, and had them quite after a short tenure, so they're unwilling to try their luck again, as it's just not worth it. You may be different, but they've heard that story before, and had it not work out.

Sure, but in this context, your FAANG experience is a negative signal for people who don't know you well yet. It's unfortunate for you, but a genuine factor you now need to account for.

Your path through will probably look like having the luck of breaking in at one of these kinds of companies, and then staying for several years to demonstrate earnest commitment/fit while building a new network of connections, and then leveraging those connections to get more opportunities if it becomes necessary to do so. If you have connection from your previous non-FAANG work, that's probably your best route.

It won't happen overnight and you'll always be at a disadvantage when you find yourself applying through resume portals. Good luck!

I find this attitude baffling.

In my time at tier one companies I have worked with the best engineers I have come across in my entire career (even the worst engineers were more than competent) who were working on deep issues that could affect the revenue of the entire company because they’re laser focused on providing value to the business, instead of doing engineering for engineering’s sake. I have grown by far more in these kinds of roles than I have anywhere else because the kind of problems you encounter at such a high scale just don’t exist elsewhere. And most of them have been there for at least five years if not longer you don’t make those kind of contributions to accompany without a long tenure.

I mean, I'm just sharing the practical ground truth of how a resume like yours effects recruiting in certain contexts.

Just like there are innumerable brilliant, effective engineers who would contribute tremendously to a FAANG but don't suit the modern interview funnel (leetcode, etc), smaller companies surely do miss out on strong, suitable FAANG engineers in anticipation of negative experiences they've had with others.

There are a lot of people who accumulate FAANG entries on their resume and many of them really don't suit smaller companies for a number of reasons.

Honestly, though while I'm only seeing a very narrow picture of you here, it sure sounds like you see these "tier one" companies as a desirable place to work, with prestigious colleagues and profound learning opportunities on high scale problems that just don't exist elsewhere, and surely for much more money. Are you sure you're really going to be happy somewhere else? Or might you get restless? That's precisely the kind of concern these smaller companies carry when seeing FAANG stuff on a resume, and it doesn't seem like it should be baffling that they would do.

I definitely used to. The work culture and attitudes, particularly of management, passed the breaking point for me a few years ago. I realized work was not my whole life nor did I aspire to that.

As I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121594)

> In my time at tier one companies I have worked with the best engineers I have come across in my entire career

You’re throwing a giant red flag right here. First of all, FAANG isn’t “tier one” except to people who idolize these companies. More agile startups are trying to disrupt these dinosaurs and do not thing very highly of them. Many of us who have worked with FAANG and ex-FAANG engineers were not impressed.

> I’m tired of the FAANG mentality personally.

As someone that never had a desire nor ever made an attempt to work at any of those companies, do you mind elaborating on the mentality of such places?

I'm just your boring below-average to average dev, so I know I'm not cut for those types of places, but it never truly bothered me anyway. Any reason that I can personally think as to why I would work for such a company would either be due to my own egotistical desires or for monetary reasons, but those were never strong enough to actually compel me.

I am just mainly curious about two things:

1. Is working at those places all it's cracked up to be?

2. Assuming one had to work hard to get into such companies, was the juice worth the squeeze?

I've often wondered if one's experiences for these companies is often something akin to the old advice of, "Don't meet your heroes." In other words, was the conflicting dyad of expectations vs. reality present?

It has turned into something similar to what people in trading companies on Wall Street deal with. Constant grind, unrealistic expectations, and projects done in order to get a promotion instead of because it provides value to the customers or the business.

That said the amount that you make is insane some of the smartest engineers I’ve ever worked with have been at these companies and a lot of them have really strong engineering cultures, and standards.

The current work environment seems designed to use up bright young engineers, and burn them out within a few years. This is a significant shift from 15 years ago, where it was a much more sustainable place to be.

Yeah, that sounds hypercapitalist. At least I hope those engineers make enough money to retire when they burn out.

Unfortunately hedonic adaption often prevents that.

I could see that happening, especially given that they're young and feel powerful, nearly invincible. I experienced a similar attitude form younger folks outside of FANG, some kind of derision of experience and advice from people who have been around and choosing instead to obsolete it. After the first burnout may of them become a lot more thoughtful and humble. I may have been like that too when I was young, I don't remember being exactly like that but maybe I was just not aware. I still did respect experience and I still do to this day.

At a former gig we had a newly hired ex-facebook employee give notice within a month because she didn't like that dev setup had bugs that devs themselves had to fix. At fb they obviously can spend millions of dollars for a whole team that ensures that working dev env is always a button click away, a startup (even a scaleup) usually can't afford to. This is just one example out of many I can tell...

And I’ve heard just as many horror stories about companies hiring from small companies that the engineers haven’t kept up with engineering, culture and practices and are coding like it’s 2004.

Also, those types of stories tend to pop up with any engineer who’s only worked at a single place.

My point isn’t that there’s not bad engineers at Facebook it’s that there’s bad engineers everywhere and filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.

The sad truth of hiring is that you can't afford to interview everyone, and have to keep in mind that prospective employees are showing you a different version of themselves than they'll actually bring to work.

Especially in a small company where your hiring manager may also be busy with development and sales, and not have an HR department to run the process for them, you're much better off interviewing candidates you are 50% sure of being a good fit vs 5%. Personally I prefer interviewing candidates coming from FAANG-ish companies and often make exceptions for candidates that demonstrate exceptional skill/interest, but when you can only interview 1-10% of your applicants you have to prioritize those who are likely to succeed at your company (keeping in mind implicit bias and such).

> filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.

In aggregate it most likely is useful for those companies.

> And I’ve heard just as many horror stories about companies hiring from small companies that the engineers haven’t kept up with engineering, culture and practices and are coding like it’s 2004.

Big cos can afford to onboard their engineers for months, sometimes years. Startups usually can not

Yup. You can check out of FAANG anytime you like, but you can never leave.

Was path dependency for careers always this bad?

I don’t feel like it was. Every role is hyper specific nowadays.

And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience.

>"And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience."

This is often because the culture of job-hopping for better pay every 18 months has eroded the willingness to pay for training or adaptation. Why pay for someone to learn if they're just gonna leave soon; the pre-trained person is a better deal if you'll have to pay to retain anyway.

Which was caused by cost cutting measures, MBA disease, in companies to begin with.

We’re just seeing the end of the cat and mouse struggle that’s been going on since the 60s. And massively accelerated in the 80s.

It’s unfortunate for companies though because they’re the ones that will lose out in the end when all the experienced people start retiring and they have no one to hire.

It’s an untenable position to not train people, period. There is no schooling you could go through that would educated junior dev to the level of a senior dev. And it’s the same for any other role. Experience is not optional.

I think the primary stimulus which creating the “job hopping culture” was actually the hot labor market for software developers. Other fields experienced real ‘cost-cutting’, without resulting in a lot of ‘job-hopping’.

I agree that this situation is undesirable, but it seems to be stable, somewhat like the result of repeated play of the prisoner’s dilemma.

That definitely massively accelerated it but you’re looking way too short term that’s only been in the last 10 to 15 years.

I agree that other industries are not YET at the point where software is , but you’re not looking hard enough if you don’t see the short tenures compared to the 25-30 years they used to have.

And yeah, it might be in an equilibrium now, but how long can it stay in an equilibrium? I’d guess at max 10 to 15 years.

It's a more mature industry.

I'm guessing the majority of people now in their 50s and 60s in computer-related careers had very eclectic jobs before settling down in computer-related stuff. After all, many never used computers at all until college or beyond.

My understanding is even in the early 2000s it was pretty much just firmware versus desktop software with a small niche for Mac developers.

Edit: my point was not that specialized software applications didn’t exist. It was that people were expected to be able to jump from stack to stack when they change roles in a way that has disappeared from modern job applications.

Plenty of server software being developed in the early 2000s. (Though minicomputers were mostly off the scene by then.)

Pretty much.

Well, and mainframes. And trading and financial systems. And numerical/scientific computing. And network services. And web sites and e-commerce. And flash, java applets, and browser plugins. And control systems. And operating systems and tooling. And cell phone applications. And games. And video/image/audio/music processing. etc etc

Oh, wait... maybe not!

So you’re saying that none of those roles could be cross hired in the early 2000s between any of the other roles?

That’s the point I was trying to make. Not that the software didn’t exist or people weren’t doing specialized applications.

I basically agree with your edit. There was a lot more fluidity among roles and even just moving into computer roles from other engineering (and even non-engineering) fields. But that's not really what you wrote initially.

Fair

It was probably about as hard to move between those domains now as it is today. Which is to say that it's pretty hard and needs some concerted, non-trivial effort in shaping your experience and how you present it before trying to make a transition, and often either some kind of inside reference to vouch for you or an employer that was especially hard up for candidates. Or else an employer that straddle multiple domains and actively supported internal transitions.

Depending on what you could bring attention to in your prior experience and the size/needs of the new orgs you seeking to move to, certain transitions were more feasible than others, but you could easily spend decades working in mind-numbing enterprise applications while wishing for opportunities in game development or trading or whatever and never get your resume so much as looked at. (And vice versa, even, for those who dreamed to "retire" into the supposed quiet of enterprise apps or government IT or whatever)

I've had a few good experiences with interviews at small companies and startups, so they do exist.

But I have also had really terrible experiences, similar to what you've mentioned. Sounds like you've just gotten unlucky and gotten the terrible ones.

Yeah, been there, done that; wannabe FAANGs are the worst.

At least those are typically honest about what they try to be and give a very clear signal, right at the interview time.

It's much worse when the interview gives you different vibes (and expectations) than the actual day-to-day work.

I've had both I've had ones that only tell you what the next interview looks like. Unless you specifically prior it out of the recruiter's hands.

The only way to test actual work is to do actual work, should be obvious but here we are.

It is obvious, but it’s also very time-consuming. You can’t solve ambiguous open ended problems in a set amount of time while being watched closely.

I'm not talking about being watched closely, I'm talking about regular work and then making a decision. You have to leave people space to do their thing if you want to see what they're capable of.

Sure, that would be even better. But how would that even look?

In the best case applicants needs to apply multiple companies. Companies need to interview multiple applicants and have a way to compare those applicants.

Those are the most basic constraints I can think of. How do you make that cost tens of hours for each round?

You would have to stop optimizing people to hell and back and start committing to a few at a time. Sounds like a really good idea to me.

That doesn’t answer the question.

For me as a job applicant even in the best case I would need to do 3 to 5 interview interviews. The same is true for companies in the best case it will take at least 3 to 5 interviews to find somebody. Are they supposed to have 3 to 5 temporary staff for weeks at a time?

How much time should that take per interview? How would somebody that currently has a job manage that kind of time commitment?

Yeah, you would need to change your expectations, I figured that much was obvious.

I felt like I was doing that with what I described.

What changes to expectations are you talking about?

You seem stuck on the idea that you need to verify an employee to hell and back before investing anything, that's not what I mean by committing. If they look like they might be a reasonable fit, give them a month to prove it, then you'll know for sure. One interview per person should be enough to make that decision.

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