Ask HN: 3rd Week at FAANG and feeling imposter syndrome

Personally it feels like every issue gets shoved under the "imposter syndrome" umbrella, but I'd say you are just feeling a bit of cultural shock or cultural mismatch.

The other thing is software developed by large teams tend to be complex, and a new-comer needs more time to understand what's happening. Onboarding can be a very chaotic process especially for teams who don't specifically put a lot of effort into making it smooth for new-comers. This isn't imposter syndrome but rather something that your team probably needs to do better.

The complexity you are probably going to have to get used to. Maybe some of it is unnecessary, but just like the naïve developer trying to refactor/rewrite a complex piece of code realizes, the extra exceptions and special cases were added for some reason and without them the code breaks in various niche situations. (Or maybe they're really unnecessary! The thing is until you get a full grasp of the code, you won't know)

Otherwise just give it a couple months and see how well you adjust. I think just keep an open mind and don't assume things only because other people have different backgrounds from yours. (I mean, what does age have to do with this? You're only a couple years older than those "fresh 20 year old kids", not even "old"...)

Hey there. I spent a couple of years at a FAANG as an engineering manager. Impostor syndrome is extremely, EXTREMELY common. I had it, my peers had it, my direct reports had it. It's normal. Senior-level folks from non-big-tech companies tended to get hit especially hard, as their prior experiences and successes did not necessarily translate to FAANG processes and expectations. It's definitely a bit of a sink-or-swim situation, especially if you came in at a senior level, but take a few breaths, realize that everyone goes through this, it does get better, and be kind to yourself. Good luck!

At twelve years in, you are expected to be a senior engineer and to be able to bootstrap yourself into a new dev environment without someone leading you to do so. How you go about doing that, especially in a chaotic environment with aggressive schedules, will become your image with your peers.

One technique I would advise is to use 'git blame' (and/or conversations with your engineering and product managers) to identify authors of components (or even just chunks of code) that you are struggling to understand, and then set up short 1-on-1 meetings with those authors to discuss the system architecture from the perspective of the component(s) that they have written. Rinse. Repeat.

Remember, as you go about this, that what you are really doing here is building a living network of the tribal knowledge graph within your company, so be kind and respectful. Further, consider starting making a guide book of sorts, both for yourself as well as for subsequent new hires, especially more junior engineers (who you may need or want to mentor).

Don't worry. You've got this. Best of luck!

Good advice. Another “pro tip” i learned from an AMZN coworker; while learning a system start writing integration tests. Youll learn the existing vs expected behavior, youll improve the existing system, and you’ll see how your components interact with the rest of the poorly documented ecosystem.

I disagree. All team members should be onboarded by the team - not HR - regardless of how much experience they have. It's so crazy to hire someone and expect them to just figure it when their teammates have the information. Be a team, have a common sense goal, help each other.

Yes, I was at Amazon for a total of 8 months. I found the environment, tooling, and systems way too bloody complicated. Brought down some systems when doing a task because I put insufficient data in a config file. But I think what bothered me the most was that I wasn’t really assigned any tasks for the first 6 months and didn’t really understand what the team was working on. Definitely one of the lowest points in my life. I don’t think it was imposter syndrome though, I just think I wasn’t a good fit - hence why I left.

Were you Senior? I look at those situations as eat what you kill. Like I would ask my manager to put me in touch with arch or up level engineers to tell me where the focus is and find tickets to work on myself.

Yeah. I kept telling my manager and other team members I wanted to do some work. I also was clear that I didn't understand a lot of the tooling and systems primarily because I wasn't interacting with them, because I wasn't assigned any work (full circle). Over months nothing really came of this until at about 6 months later. However I participated in all the team meetings like scrum poker estimating tickets I had no idea about because I hadn't interacted with systems or software. Whether I was responsible for my own situation is debatable, but you bet if I've been idle for 6 months and not really getting adequate training that I'm definitely going to start looking for a new job. I've worked at companies of all sizes and never had this situation before and after, and at the time I was in Amazon I had been in the industry for more than a decade.

I spent a few years at Apple, a decade+ in AWS, and now at another mega cloud co. IME expect 3 months to understand whats going on and become useful. Ask questions or “raise your hand” when stuck for a day, you should have an “onboarding buddy” coworker and manager who are invested in your success. Keep track of what youre doing, when youve asked for help, and what youve accomplished on a daily or weekly basis. Use this as a (bi)weekly 1:1 topic to set expectations with your manager.

Re: complications, increase your sense of scale beyond anything you imagined. Youre now inside of an industrial process. Depending on your company youve gone from ~100 coworkers to literally 10-40,000 other SDEs working in the same environment. There are probably more dev teams than previous coworkers. All sorts of things get complicated at that scope.

Check my profile if my experience is relevant and youd like a virtual coffee chat.

> Right now at work I've taken on a ticket that should be simple, but I just cannot understand why it's not working in the massive ecosystem and integrations that exists for this app.

Ask for help

> Also on a sidenote, I'm a bit disappointed in the sense that I expected more from FAANG. The quality of the apps I'm seeing seems vastly technically overengineered

You have not been capable of fixing bugs in simple React projects yet, I don't think you are in a good position to make this judgement.

>Ask for help

Ask for help and asking questions is like a superpower at a megacorp. Trust in your intelligence and experience to know your questions are valid.

So many people nod along and operate on vibes because they all have imposter syndrome and are too scared to ask. Entire meetings where people are discussing acronyms they dont even understand. Functionaries that dont ask or understand why they are doing something, and how it fits into the big picture.

There other thing to remember is not to avoid politics. You dont have to kiss ass, but knowing who has power and building reputation with them is critical.

FAANG was only good for the name and the money. Now I would say neither. I think we are now in a post-FAANG world. Maybe at the highest levels sure you’ll clean up but not as FEE. Honestly there are a ton of private companies now (stripe, Databricks, the GenAI companies, etc where the name carries a lot of weight and you can clean up well if you have a few years).

why does databricks carry any name brand value. isn't it just hosted spark ? whats the big innovation?

That they make a lot of money doing it

so does walmart but working at walmart isn't prestigious. why is databricks?

I worked a bit in a FAANG level company.

TBH I think it's just they don't have the capacity to properly train and doc. That's why you got all those weird commands and out of date docs. The company is forever growing or heading for new directions, team gets requests left and right, so they try to hire good developers and hopefully they don't make a big mess.

I "guess" more critical teams like security and ops might be different, because even very good developers can still mess up royally if the doc is wrong. And system programming teams might also be better, like teams that build tools.

Ask a senior person on your team to give you a walkthrough of how the system works

That should be normal process when starting a new job, its not a crazy thing to ask

The worst thing you can do is ask no questions and just spin wheels

I’m not at a FAANG, but a F250 company, and it’s the same way. It used to be pretty stable and things made sense. However, one they started bringing in a bunch of people fresh out of school, and gave them the keys to the kingdom to “modernize”, everything became a convoluted mess. They don’t understand what it means to support something in production through its lifecycle, and don’t care, because they always have one foot out the door.

It’s probably worth sticking it out, as having 1-2 years there will look good on a resume, while a month will not.

I’ve dealt with imposter syndrome most of my career. You never really know how you’re being perceived by others until they tell you. I went into a review a couple years ago 100% certain that I was going to be shredded, because I felt like I had really been phoning it in and the boss had made some comments very early on when he took over the team. When I showed up to the review I was met with 45 minutes of praise. After it was over I just sat there for 15 minutes in shock. I couldn’t seem to integrate the false reality my imposter syndrome created in my head with the reality of what just happened.

Your expectations for yourself and the company might need time to align with the reality of how the business actually runs. Most companies are way more dysfunctional than anyone would want to believe. This is why Dilbert was such a popular and relatable comic for so many workers.

> I couldn’t seem to integrate the false reality my imposter syndrome created in my head

This is my observation with life in general, the model of world I keep in my head is usually far from reality, sometimes too positive and sometimes too negative.

Stick at it for at least 2 years, keep improving, it will get better. I got a BigCo on my resume early on and I'm glad I got it, but I don't particularly care for BigCos; all the friction makes it too hard to get anything done and it drives me nuts.

>The quality of the apps I'm seeing seems vastly technically overengineered, almost like 100 different hero engineers added their own "tricks" just to seem clever, make a name for themself, make everyone else's life harder, and then pat themselves on the back while writing extensive documentation about why their little chrome extension or alternative way of doing things solves X,Y,Z (while completely ignoring how convoluted and burdensome they've now made something that, while technically inconvenient, was utterly simple to understand prior).

This is what endless interviews full of leet code questions buys them. At least all their engineers can estimate how many ping pong balls will fit in a school bus.

About the imposter syndrome, I'd like to say that you're in the room. That means you're qualified. Full stop. Most of those fresh grads haven’t seen half the edge cases you’ve handled in agency life. Don’t downplay that. You’ve got real-world scars, not just textbook answers.

I think just try focusing on your little corner of the world, especially since it's so early! Soon more and more will make sense.

As you start just try to make sure you are working on exactly what your manager says is a priority. Everything else is noise. And try to have 1-1 discussions with your teammates, I think you'll be surprised how pretty much everyone has the same opinion as you in regards to over engineering!

FAANG means tens of thousands of employees, hundreds of PAs and thousands of teams. "Culture" is not homogenous, and what worked for me is pushing myself out of my immediate circle of co-workers, also changed teams/departments already and it feels like being in a different company.

Chill, that’s just typical when moving from fast and small organisation to a big one.

I still remember when I moved to my own startup from a very regulated finance and realised I can just install a new python library on a server without a month long approval process :D

Surprised someone actually got hired!

Stack ranking demands fresh blood regularly

Stay. If you want to talk, reach out to me.

(Email in my profile is anonymous for HN, but will respond from my gmail)

I have never worked in FAANG but I have felt this way many times. I had 15 years in corporate JavaScript, self taught, before I moved on to something else.

What you are describing is actually the other side of imposter syndrome. It’s the I know exactly what I am doing and can force this to work if I just cut out all the boilerplate bullshit but will never figure this out without some internal documentation.

This is why Bank of America teams in India were running circles around their American counterparts. They (the India teams) recognized this stupidity early, documented the shit out of it, and then wrote scripts for most of it. The imposters were the people refusing to recognize and confront the internal stupidity openly and transparently.

My suggestion to you, having gone through this many times, is dominate other peoples time. It does not matter how busy they are. This shit is not working and someone needs to show you why. Be very clear about this with your team. Then write your own personal documentation.

I feel you are spot on with your second last paragraph. I have similar experiences (although not at FAANG). That appears to be the invisible/"in the background" culture in star-studded teams/companies lately.

But ultimately, only you can know who you are, what you are capable of, what you want to be capable of and what you need to get to that next level.

There was a reason you considered/interviewed FAANG. If that reason is more important to you over $, real-world learning, skills, and abilities, you know what the answer is.

TL;DR you will figure it out one way or another.

You are in a new environment and the problems that need solving are unique to the business.

There is a lot to learn. Probably more than anyplace else you have worked.

The work is hard. Probably harder than anything you have ever done.

You were hired by people who know these things and they hired you because they believe you will be able to handle learning a lot and working on hard things.

In addition, they know everything takes longer than it would if the problems were ordinary.

The documentation and tools are only engineered to meet the business criteria and get the hard things done. Not based luxurious theories.

In the end, FAANG is enterprise…the problems are not going to be obvious and the optimizations are for longer term time frames.

There is a lot to learn and everyone who has stayed via competence knows that. Good luck.

You got into FAANG, how bad could you be?

Honestly, they could be really bad. It happens regularly enough. Some people interview well (and so many FAANG interview loops are completely unrelated to the actual job), but turns out that they are actually terrible. I've got lots of anecdotes from my time there.

Just wait till you go through your first performance review, if you think everyone’s too busy for you now, you’re in for a treat!

Tell me more. Been doing this for over 10 years and have had one performance review my whole career, so not sure what those are about.

I also saved a decent chunk of change from my last gig (paid more than FAANG by 20%, pure cash) so I've been coasting without much emotional attachment to this job.

You'll have a bunch of peers request feedback from you. Your feedback will need to be specific and focused around the leadership principles. It'll need to include some kind of constructive criticism. The feedback you provide plays an important part of any promotion opportunities. Oh, and naturally they stack rank, no matter how much they say they don't and try to pretend what they're doing isn't actually stack ranking, when really it is.

The more time you spend there, the more requests you'll get, so after a couple of years it's not unusual to get 30+ feedback requests.

If you are at Faang and feeling imposter syndrome, maybe you just need to get better at things. I actually rejected multiple offers from Faang back in the day because they were so mediocre.

A lot of people are on stimulants there. You are going to have to load up on your stimulant scripts and get crackin'.

No they are not. Don’t do this OP.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35891362

People that grind leetcode all the way to faang are loaded. You have any idea how many people I've seen with dilated pupils in the office? Unfortunately for OP, he/she will have to roll with this crowd because that's just the truth, there's nothing they will be able to change about that reality.

With that username it's really easy to assume you have a biased view of the situation...

I've gone through the whole marijuana addiction cycle and am pretty much over any future addictions to substances.

Either way though, it’s not good advice

Running slowly in the correct direction is better than running really really fast in the wrong direction.