
Ask HN: People who rejected a FAANG offer. Why? - imheretolearn
Or put another way, what was more appealing about a non-FAANG offer that made you reject a FAANG offer?
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DXA9zE
I've rejected multiple interview requests for FAANG jobs because I do not wish
to study strange-toy-programming-quiz-tricks for three months just to be able
to say I work at Hooley-Soft.

~~~
zulln
Have you tried giving it a shot without studying beforehand to see how it is
yourself?

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zenexer
I tried that for an SRE position at Google. You can get through the first
couple interviews, but if you don't study the _exact_ material they give you--
and they'll give you a lot--and aren't able to recite it exactly as described,
you get turned away pretty quickly.

They feed you all this nonsense about wanting to see creative solutions in the
interviews, but if you study the material they give you, all the answers are
there. It might as well be a certification.

"You did well initially but didn't study the material we gave you. Re-apply in
1.5 years." No thanks; I was just keeping my options open and don't have time
for all that nonsense. If you have a decent offer, tell me; otherwise, stop
wasting my time. And, of course, what happens 1.5 years later? They call and
email you incessantly asking you to re-apply.

~~~
wikibob
Can you post the list of study material?

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cbanek
I rejected a Google offer in 2012, and they've been bothering me ever since.
They seemed really surprised that I didn't feel all warm and fuzzy about their
lowball offer. I ended up going to Blizzard and then SpaceX, and I don't
regret anything. My big thing is that while the money might have been better
at a FAANG, I've done a lot more interesting work I can talk about (and some I
can't). But at Google, and Microsoft where I worked for about 10 years, there
are frankly so many people (many quite talented) that it's hard to get
something interesting or useful to work on. It's just a lot of politics and
empire building. Also, the mobility especially for women is pretty bad. We
always joked the best way to get a raise was to leave and come back. It was
funny because it was so true.

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tdeck
> there are frankly so many people (many quite talented) that it's hard to get
> something interesting or useful to work on.

I always say it's like picking stocks. The chances that you've found a truly
great opportunity on a project at Google that hasn't been found by 5 more
qualified people aren't nothing, but they're pretty small.

~~~
cbanek
While that's true, and I get the feeling this is coming from the perspective
of someone already working at google and shopping around for new projects,
this actually brings up another point I hate in particular about Google's
process.

When you're interviewing you are interviewing for a role but not with a team.
So you don't know what you will be working on, and it seemed like when coming
in, new hires always seem to get to be put on whatever. I talked to a couple
of the managers who wanted to work with me, and it felt like these projects
were kind of silly. Talking with people on the inside, it seems like the way
to find something useful is to get in, then transfer to a team you want. But
why would a qualified person want to go through all this craziness when they
can just interview at a different company and meet the people they will work
with, and talk about what they are working on? Like a normal job? It seems
like Google's process is highly skewed toward "great for Google, shaft the
candidate." Which they can do, because everyone wants to work for Google, so
why not only hire kool-aid drinkers?

And just to bring up the empire building again, if every great opportunity has
so many people wanting it, it tends to lead to toxic behavior and culture due
to unhealthy competition.

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woofie11
Fulfilling life. Half the salary of FAANG is more than enough to live on, and
I love my job, and I love my family, and I get plenty of time for both.

Alternative would be twice the salary, retire early, I guess. And I think if I
did that, I'd be spending my time the exact same way I am right now. Only
after a few hellish years having my soul drained by making people click on
more ads.

~~~
gfaure
Wow, it seems people who don't work at FAANGs have a weird impression of what
goes on at them... Autonomy is not guaranteed at a startup, just as lack of
autonomy is not guaranteed at a FAANG.

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woofie11
I have plenty of friends at FAANGs, and I've visited plenty of times. I am not
sure why you'd presume I have a weird impression.

I'm also not sure why you're presume autonomy brings fulfillment. All job
offers I had gave plenty of autonomy. I'd take genuine community over autonomy
in most cases. People are social creatures.

I'm also not sure why you'd presume I work at a startup. I work at a large and
ancient not-for-profit many times older than FAANG. I work on an internal
startup-like project. What they historically did was super-labor-intensive,
and you can do it better integrate digital technology and big data. People can
do more, better. I'm trying to do that.

To be clear: (1) I don't have an NDA, and I can openly talk about what I do. I
don't need to keep secrets. (2) My work will help people in significant and
visible ways. (3) It's technically fascinating (and I can publish research
papers on anything I do).

That's not an abstract Google/startup/tech transform the world: ("At BILLINGLY
DOT COM, we are changing lives by TRANSFORMING HOW PEOPLE DO BILLING"), but
having direct, positive impact, potentially on millions of lives. Right now,
I'm doing pilots, so it's impacting a few individuals, but if those are
successful, the organization can take this to scale.

There are surely such projects at FAANG too, occasionally, but they're rare,
often highly political, often incompetently done, and it's not the offer I
had.

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reacharavindh
I’m in my mid 30s, and have had a healthy, fun career as a comp. engineer. I
thought of applying to one of the FAANG companies recently, but the idea of
whiteboard/hackerrank Code tests was a severe turn off, and put that idea
away. I don’t have the energy to put into preparing for weeks like a code
monkey to give a shot at a test and mostly never using them at the job. I’d
rather spend more time playing with my baby boy.

I’m not saying learning data structures and algorithms are useless. Only that
testing for them using timed tests with toy puzzles is silly and not for
everyone.

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derivativethrow
I was offered significantly more money from a non-FAANG than any of my (three)
FAANG offers were willing to give me, with better liquidity. At the end of the
day, that's all I cared about. I'm very happy with where I landed, and have no
plans to leave in the near future. My present company has an academic
engineering culture that prioritizes outcomes over process, while encouraging
curiosity and autonomy.

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randtrain34
Was it from a unicorn?

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djannzjkzxn
Hard to get good liquidity from a unicorn. The description sounds like trading
to me.

~~~
deepaksurti
Yes, the GP username is also a hint!

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derivativethrow
No it isn't, I just like calculus/analysis. I don't work in trading, my job is
developing simulations in operations research.

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aprdm
I never got an offer but I've rejected interviews (won't take part of the code
challenges culture).

At one of them I had a strong recommendation for a specific project which
allowed me to skip the initial screening but I declined in an interview as I
didn't want to move to the USA and they weren't remote friendly.

I am quite happy where I am in my career and industry ! Feel that I have a
huge impact in the business at a global scale. Starting over as just-another-
sw-engineer-in-a-large-company doesn't seem attractive.

~~~
stevekemp
Similar story here, I would receive emails/phone calls every half-year
inviting me to interview with Google.

My initial question was always "Can I stay here in Scotland?" to which the
reply was "You will move to either Ireland, or Switzerland." At that point I
said "Please stop calling/emailing me"

At some point they stopped calling/mailing, looking over my email archive it
has been ten years+ since I've heard from anybody at Google.

~~~
zapperdapper
I had a similar thing about a decade or so ago. Thought I might be able to
wrangle a (part) remote gig with them. No dice.

There's no way I was going to commute to London every day. Nightmare. They
kept coming back to me though.

In my case I think it was more likely a combination of poor process, and a
clueless recruiter, rather than a deliberate retargeting of me that resulted
in the ongoing calls/emails.

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synaesthesisx
I realized FAANGs are not the holy grail of tech, and that it’s possible to
get excellent TC while working on interesting projects with more autonomy and
possibly better WLB as well at smaller, faster organizations. Granted, a
downside is that most equity is unlikely to be meaningful (except for the
lucky), but I found a far more exciting path. Though I could certainly see the
appeal in the more innovative arms of some companies (like Alphabet’s X) to do
bleeding edge work...

I also have ethical issues with spending my existence working for some of them
(Facebook is the grimiest offender by far), and the line blurs quite a bit
into questionable territory for some of these companies.

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tw1912112
\- I don't like to work at a public company, it's very stressful to work in an
environment where every day you are waking up and reading stock market news.

\- I had already worked at Microsoft for 2 years in 2009-2011, there isn't
much value addition to your resume after you have worked at one such big tech
company.

\- I was hired by the Android TV team, which is not a product I use and not my
area of interest. It was mildly disappointing that they only gave one option
in the team matching process.

\- I am not a very suburban person, and commuting from SF to MV every day
seems appealing at the outset but gets very cumbersome after a few weeks.
Google doesn't tell you whether the team will be located in SF / MV when you
interview, you are allowed to choose when you go through team matching.

In summary, I had made enough money already and my resume had Microsoft brand
(though it was not a FANG in 2009). Touchwood, I have been able to get through
all the recruiter filters whenever I have applied and I think that's the only
advantage of working at FANG.

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MBCook
I’ve turned down feelers (politely) because I like where I live and don’t want
to be forced to move to $expensiveBigCity.

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antifaang
(I'd rather share this anonymously, so this is a throwaway account.)

I'm a software engineer and technical manager with just shy of 20 years of
experience. I've never received a job offer from a FAANG company, but I've
said "no thanks" to Google recruiters a number of times over the last ~10
years, and several years ago I did an initial remote interview with Netflix
before declining their offer of an onsite interview. Here are my own personal
reasons against working for a FAANG company:

Facebook/Google: Surveillance capitalism at its finest; working for one of
these would be using my talents to further the greatest privacy-violating data
collection regime (with virtually zero government oversight) the world has
ever seen. I'd rather give up programming entirely and work retail.

Amazon: less objectionable than FB/Goog, but only slightly. They treat their
non-engineer employees like complete crap, and I've heard that the quality of
life even on the engineering side is very much dependent on the org you end up
in and your manager.

Apple: Their privacy game is much stronger than any of the above, and I use
their devices daily. Their walled gardens and locked-down devices mean they
are a far cry from the hacker-friendly Apple I remember as a kid in the 80s.
Their culture also seems very secretive and rather cult-like which leaves a
bad taste in my mouth (though maybe this is improving since Steve's death?)

Netflix: by far the least objectionable FAANG, many fewer privacy concerns and
the product is good IMHO. However, they have a hard policy against remote
work, at least for the team(s) I was looking at, and I don't want to live
anywhere near SF Bay. This is the only reason I ended the interview process
with them.

Aside from all of the above and even if you disagree with everything I said,
FAANGs are just so huge that the incremental value you add by joining is
likely to be tiny. I've spent the last ~10 years working at startups to mid-
size companies (from 5 up to 200 people) and I feel that my work is much more
impactful than it could ever be at a FAANG.

~~~
tomlockwood
I'm not sure why this is getting downvoted since it seems to be a pretty
genuine and relevant post.

~~~
derivativethrow
It's probably getting downvoted because it's not actually relevant. I'm not
sure why there are so many comments here talking about refusing to interview
or "rejecting" recruiter advances. The OP was very specific in wanting to hear
from people who rejected an _offer_ for another offer.

Instead a lot of these comments are from people who seem to have an axe to
grind against the companies themselves. It's fine to have ethical or practical
disagreements with FAANG companies, but it's not relevant to the OP's question
about why someone would go as far as receiving an offer and then decline to
accept it.

~~~
Goladus
To be fair, the narrow question would have been far more compelling 10-15
years ago, when these companies were both less-huge and had largely
unvarnished reputations as being the best large companies for software
developers to work. 10 years ago, sour grapes would have been a lot more
obvious and valid answers would have been quite interesting. Today, not
wanting to work for Google or Facebook is rather mundane.

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anonymoushn
On one occasion, Google offered a reasonable amount of money to do something I
had basically no interest in. On another occasion, Google gave me a 4-day
exploding offer for way below market. So I didn't work for Google so far

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telaelit
Didn’t want to sell my soul to a heartless company that exploits workers. I’d
rather be part of the solution and build products and services for unions,
non-profits, and movement organizing.

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soumyadeb
Rejected a Google offer in 2008 to join a company called DataDomain. I had
just finished my PhD and my co-advisor was in Data Domain so it wasn't a very
hard choice. At that point, Google also didn't assign you a team before
joining so the choice was between join an unknown team at Google VS go and
work for someone I knew and respected. Also, Google paid well but wasn't as
crazy as things today.

Learned a lot at DataDomain as it scaled from a reasonably small team to a
large enterprise and eventually got acquired. Financially though, would have
fared much better in Google (assuming I had stuck around).

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giantg2
I didn't even apply. I sort of wish I did. I don't know that I would have even
gotten an interview, but my god... my current job just seems so boring.

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jordiburgos
I turned down interviewing with one of this companies because they didn't want
to disclose the salary, not even a salary range.

Also, the interviewer explained that I had 3 weeks for studying a list of
computer science concepts for the interview.

I already have a Master's degree and I am working, I don't need to study to
proof my profesionality.

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oysteroyster
Honestly, slightly more appealing kool-aid.

I interned at one and turned down a grad-job offer. I never was proud of
myself for working at a big-tech company that is infamously awful to its more
replaceable staff. The pay cut (at least at this point in my life) is worth
not feeling like I'm actively contributing to a global evil.

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mraza007
I’m loving the comments of this thread. Gives me more courage that cool tech
and software does exists out of FAANG World.

I’m just a new grad soon to be graduating whereas my peers are always talking
about landing positions at FAANG while missing out on other opportunities. I
think its important to look at things from different perspective.

~~~
bsd44
I never worked for FAANG, but I have been bothered by their recruiters for
years and I politely reject them every time. To be fair, not just FAANG, other
household name BigCorp too.

Reason being is I used to work for a small company and had to do everything
myself, then I moved to a bigger company and I did a fraction of stuff
compared to my previous company, but for a lot more money. It was a bit of a
shock and it got me thinking. So I figured the larger the company, the more
corporate the environment is; you are more restricted as to what and how you
are allowed to do. I don't like that, so I moved back to a smaller company for
less money and never even considered working at a BigCorp again.

You can make a case for both, depending on what you prefer. If you like
prestige/cult/money and want that stamp on your CV then work your way up to
FAANG. If you're curious, easily bored and like implementing solutions your
way then work at a small company. Cool tech does exist outside FAANG. I can
look back at each company I worked for and proudly talk about solutions I
developed and implemented, most of which are still in use today and can be
seen or used by customers/users. I'm not sure if I could have such an impact
on a business working at BigCorp.

Sure you don't get paid as much and you can't brag to your friends and family
you work for FAANG, but it feels really good when you suggest a solution to
your manager/boss, then research it, build it and implement in and they TRUST
you fully to do all that. You're part of the entire process and there's a
certain satisfaction with having such freedom.

~~~
mraza007
I totally agree with you. Plus the satisfaction you get when owning the entire
process. I totally agree working at a large corp you are like the tiny part of
process

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ameliaquining
It was straight out of college. I'd have had to move across the country, and
wanted to stay closer to home. The startup that I joined instead also appeared
to be offering work more aligned with my technical interests, though in
practice it didn't work out that way and I left after less than a year.

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ram_rar
Everytime I was interviewing, some other company out bet FAANG offer. There
are many companies in the bay area, which can match/give you more than FAANG.
Fb being the only exception. But then, you are working 2X more for 1.5X the
salary. So its not really worth it.

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jamesponddotco
I did not get an offer, but I did reject interviews to work in the support
team at Google Cloud. Moral implications aside, the job required me to move
from Brazil to the US, and I had no interest in living in the US.

No regrets about my decision.

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aianus
I wanted to be a digital nomad instead.

Edit: it was Twitter though, so not FAANG, although I'd also interned at
Amazon previously.

~~~
imheretolearn
Being a digital nomad is something that I've considered as well. How does your
experience as a digital nomad compare to a FAANG offer financially and in
terms of growth?

~~~
aianus
It is not good financially or for career growth (although it doesn't have to
be terrible if you keep it short and keep your skills up)

If you enjoy working full-time at a FAANG, or if you've never tried it, you
shouldn't pass up the opportunity.

I already knew I didn't enjoy it, and I didn't want to waste any more of my
youth which I felt I had already wasted studying hard at a nerdy male-
dominated college with non-stop internships. So that's why I did what I did.

