Ask HN: What surprised you after you started working at FAANG? - ent101
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PragmaticPulp
I was surprised at how political people were at the bottom of the org chart.

I expected the front-line ICs to be united against middle-manager politics,
but I found the opposite. Middle management was generally professional and
transparent, while the toxic politics came from younger ICs looking to claw
their way up the ladder.

I think it's a side effect of selectively hiring people who have been high
achievers all of their lives. Drop them into a company where their
intelligence is just average and many people resort to politics to get a leg
up. Not everyone was like this, of course, but I've never worked with so many
people rushing to throw their coworkers under the bus if they thought it might
help get them closer to their next promotion.

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ent101
Never worked at a FAANG, but this is pretty surprising to me. I was expecting
the exact opposite!

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spyspy
It's also the consequence of hiring tons of very young engineers.

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duxup
I'm far from FAANG land, but they used to sit the new young employees sat next
to me for about 6 months.

We often would have conversations about "picking your battles" and how just
pointing out about how something is "wrong" is not the way to go about
changing it.

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downerending
Some Google speaker at a conference rendered this as "Don't jump in front of
_every_ train.".

(I learned this way too late, myself.)

~~~
duxup
And even just learning that stupid things come about for reasons, sometimes
equally stupid, sometimes for good reasons that aren't what you might assume.

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WnZ39p0Dgydaz1
Politics. I found that getting promoted within FAANG depends largely on your
ability to navigate politics, not on how good you are at your job. You will
move up much faster if you optimize for "Find the right people and get them,
through whatever means, to say great things about you at performance reviews"
\- I've seen many brilliant people at the company who never moved up because
they were bad at navigating or manipulating human relationships. And I've also
seen people who were, let's say, not the brightest, but extremely good at
manipulating people and make themselves look good - they moved up very
quickly.

It has also given me a new appreciation of why startups can be so efficient.
The joke that every gmail redesign made the product worse but had to be done
because someone needed to get promoted is no joke. When politics falls away
and everyone's incentive is to become profitable or to build a good product
the result can be magical.

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blankton
Reminds me of the old movie "The Pentagon Wars" which I would highly
recommend. Its about the absurdity of said politics, but in the army, where
lives of people are on the line. The sad part is: The Story is true.

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downerending
Not a FAANG, but a couple of "world-class" employers that pay similarly.

Probably most surprising was that there were a substantial number of people
that (though very sharp) had pretty severe personality problems. The
challenges and politics of dealing with these people seemed to dominate the
merely technical challenges.

As a corollary, though their hiring filters were quite tight, these shops
seemed to be only somewhat more productive than what you might see in a random
US corporation. I would have thought it would be a day and night difference,
but it wasn't.

A third minor surprise: Sometimes these companies spend huge on salaries but
don't provide very good working conditions (office, desk size, quiet, decent
bathrooms, etc.).

~~~
spyspy
> a substantial number of people that (though very sharp) had pretty severe
> personality problems

This has been my experience with engineers from Ivy League or similar schools.
Really smart in a bubble, but with tons of weird neuroses that keep them from
being fully-productive members of any team. That, and they never tend to stick
around very long. It only takes a few bumps before I-could-do-better syndrome
kicks in and they bounce.

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aabeshou
I was surprised by how much I hated it. It caused an existential crisis for me
to have reached the "pinnacle" job and to feel so alienated and pointless.

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throw_this_one
What was so alienating and pointless about it?

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throwawaymsft
Not OP, but I saw people wasting their lives on "big projects" that actually
had little impact. (And that's if you're lucky enough to have it ship and not
be cancelled.)

Imagine you are designing the McDonald's hamburger wrapper. "Oh, your work
will be shown to millions of people!" And nobody really cares. I'd rather
design something smaller that is truly appreciated.

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aabeshou
it's absolutely this, and also, to go along with the analogy, feeling like "is
McDonalds really a positive thing for the world? and why does it seem so
verboten to express doubt about the absolute positivity of our mission?"

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throwaway15392
Haven’t worked at a FAANG but a similarly large well known trendy company. The
access I had to their users’ data simply as an employee

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reddstar
One thing that really surprised me was the massive scale of it all. These
companies are sooo huge and have so many resources to play with. They can
afford to expirement and have huge teams work on things that may not pay off
in the end.

