
Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this? - faang0722
This last year I finally landed a SDE job at a FAANG company! However, I&#x27;m considering quitting because I am not happy.<p>The good: I get paid better than my last jobs. I can browse internal resources to satisfy my curiosity about how things work.<p>The bad: Basically no work gets done and there&#x27;s no motivation to do any.<p>The dev tools, docs and tech debt impart such a slow iteration speed that even when I am working a full 8 hours, only a few very small changes get done, yet somehow this is even more than most of the rest of my team can muster during an entire week.<p>Because of this, I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during the the week. The other days I only open my computer for standup and if I get an IM. As far as I can tell, if I can be just barely the best on the team by doing there&#x27;s nothing the company will offer me to work harder. If I get asked about why it takes long to make a simple change I can point to the environment and shrug my shoulders. Of course, it&#x27;s possible the rest of the team is doing that too, but I have no way of knowing.<p>This amounts to a glacial development pace and when I look back at the progress made since I joined and estimate the cost to the company (salary, servers, etc) it&#x27;s frankly disgusting. I don&#x27;t feel what I&#x27;m doing is ethnically wrong, because the company is evidently pleased with my current productivity, but I find it unsatisfying and like a waste of my time on earth.<p>So my question is: Is all of FAANG like this? If the market value of such incompetence if FAANG salary, how can I do good work and get paid preportionally?
======
SubuSS
I worked for Amazon (like you:) but that was 5 years ago. Things were a lot
more breakneck then - but I can see how things could’ve slowed down with the
3x dev count now.

As many have pointed out, it depends on teams. I have seen engineers in retail
whose sole job was ensuring data entered the catalog correctly through the
input system and fix any errant data. I also saw teams like mine (early kindle
/ early dynamodb) literally perform magic. We launched dynamo across the world
with a <15 person team. But it had 3 principals and 5 sde3s in a time when the
whole company had <100 principals. That team remained highly motivated through
my tenure but the members went on to different parts overtime because it was
too much talent concentrated in one spot.

In short I look at FAANG as flexibility. you have a major life event, you will
probably have enough good will to work it out with lighter contributions. You
want to build bleeding edge software, you can do that too.

I’d suggest finding the local legends now, see what they are working on,
building deep knowledge about it, ask for an interview and join them. In a big
place like that, there are always movers and shakers - they are also looking
for motivated and talented devs for their team, so it is mutually beneficial.
It will only work with your initiative and a bit of luck though.

FWIW - I still have some of my old contacts there. Message me if you want a
referral. Good luck!

~~~
MuffinFlavored
> But it had 3 principals and 5 sde3s in a time when the whole company had
> <100 principals.

I can only imagine what principal / SDE3s that deliver products as big as
DynamoDB got paid in bonuses/salary. Total comp had to be $500k-$1m+, no?

~~~
jasonpeacock
Nope. There's no bonuses at Amazon (at PE/SDE levels at least), and there are
compensation bands for each level. A top-ranked SDE3 that delivered DynamoDB
should have similar compensation as a top-ranked SDE3 working on internal
tools.

~~~
SubuSS
I prefer not to discuss compensation - so will answer this indirectly. Few
SDE3s definitely make principal salaries, Principals make millions and so on.
I remember there was an ex amazon guy putting up the top end numbers on
twitter which seemed more along these lines. It sadly comes down to your
managers and VP decisions.

FWIW it is kind of a future investment IMO. You come out with a ton of
knowledge and contacts that your future jobs can definitely be highly rewardd
if that's what you're going for. Some find joy in the company of like minded
peers instead of chasing the gold, everyone unto their own!

~~~
ben0x539
> I prefer not to discuss compensation

Why not?

~~~
SubuSS
I guess I have old school compunctions against discussing it, probably comes
from generations of folks not talking about it and considering it impolite.

I also have seen how people react when they realize there might be a huge pay
variation for same titles - it's not good for anyone. I avoid conflict as much
as possible nowadays, so it makes me more reticent. I pretty much redirect
direct questions even from family because of that. None other than me and my
wife knows how much I make - that's the max comfort level I'd ever get to I
suppose.

~~~
noknownsender
I'm generally of the opinion that the tradition of never discussing salary is
entirely pushed by management to prevent underpaid workers from asking for
more.

If nobody knows how much they could be making, they can never really be sure
of what they are worth.

At a company that size, it probably saves Corporate billions, while serving
the average employee not at all.

~~~
pc86
If it was "entirely pushed by management" then most employees would ignore it,
_especially_ those making several hundred thousand or millions a year. On the
contrary, a _lot_ of employees at all salary levels discuss their salary.

Management absolutely has an incentive to hide salary writ large so that is
definitely part of it. But employees who earn more than their comparably-
titled peers also have an incentive not to disclose their salary. If position
X gets paid, at the median, $200k a year with a $20k SD, and you get paid
$275k a year in position X, the only things that will happen by you publicly
discussing your salary are: 1) you'll be called a liar; 2) your peers will get
jealous; 3) the best peers who may have been content prior, will either
negotiate a higher salary and leave less in next year's budget for you, or
leave for other positions making more money, resulting in a brain drain from
your team.

Salary discussion overall only benefits low and mediocre performers. High
performing ICs have very little incentive to discuss it.

~~~
thw0rted
#3 is called "fairness." It's the part where the rest of your team --
especially the women, who, statistically, are almost certainly making less
than the median -- realize what the median is and have the opportunity to
demand that they are paid for their contributions. Yes, that might come at a
cost to you personally, if you were making more than others on your team who
were adding similar value. Would you rather scam more money from the system
for doing the same work as your peers?

------
CGamesPlay
It's possible that your or your team's productivity is actually bad, and in
general at the company you are expected to do more, but the team you are on is
a puddle of low productivity within the overall org. How would you know if
this is the case? There are a few signs.

What degree of tenure do other people on the team have? If old-timers aren't
on the team, or worse, if they leave the team for others within the company,
they might be seeing writing on the wall that you can't. If this is the case,
your future on this team, and likely with this company, might be in jeopardy
when the reorganization comes.

Is the team just not important? Are you responsible for maintenance of some
cost center that isn't worth high-level executives paying any attention to? If
this is the case, your future might also be in jeopardy, but the
reorganization might be multiple years away.

Are you just not listening to your manager? It's possible that you are going
to be "blindsided" by a PIP due to the lack of output. This might happen if
the actual output of your team isn't what you are thinking it is. Maybe the
engineers who aren't outputting anything visible to you are actually
outputting considerably to other parts of the organization. If this is the
case, your future is in jeopardy and you'll find yourself out of the company
within a year or so (yes, it actually does take a long time to fire people at
FAANG companies).

It could be one of these or something else. Since you have so much extra time,
it might behoove you to figure out exactly what the situation is on your team,
so you can make the necessary preparations (to change teams, to get a new job
before you're laid off or fired, to do whatever you think is best).

~~~
throwawaybbqed
These are very good points. I'm curious what the process is from the
perspective of the manager. I'm new at the management side of things and was
always a top performer as an IC (so didn't get a chance to learn how its down
on the flip side). My biggest challenge is figuring out how to give negative
feedback (and not destroy a weak player's morale). If someone is having not
performing well, I act as a cheerleader and suggest ways of improving. I'm not
sure how strong I could/should go (I'm not going to berate anyone since I am
not a psycopath). By not providing stronger feedback, I think I am failing the
struggling teammember since they may eventually get put on a pip. Any blogs,
books or suggestions on how to develop this skill?

~~~
workingname
I thinking being transparent about it and highlighting how it could be a good
thing for them down the line (Interview Question: "How do you handle
challenges at work?") if they do improve the things you're noticing. Provide
evidence of why you think that and say they aren't in trouble, but we want to
improve the quality of your work in this one area.

\- Hey X, I brought you into today to talk to you about something I noticed.
There is an issue/errors with your work, when doing Y[provide evidence of
common errors/average errors of others], I just want to say you're not in
trouble, but we want you to improve this area and wanted to make sure you were
aware of it.

\- I want to extend any resources I have available for you to improve in this
area, and of course I have some ideas, I wrote everything down on this
paper/email.

\- You can come with a plan of your own. Or we can collaborate on it--if
you're not sure why issues are happening. Take some time and think about it,
and when you're ready to talk about how we might ago about improving in this
area, please schedule some time with me and we can work on this together.

------
jupiter90000
This doesn't directly answer your question and you didn't ask it, but I feel
it relates directly to the source of your frustration potentially: you may
never find a job that is fully satisfactory in terms of what you hope to find.
I used to be in a similar boat striving to work towards and find some magical
job that would make me feel fulfilled and purposeful. They all ended up having
things I didn't like and would quickly lose interest.

So at least what I did is stop trying to put so much of an expectation on my
job to fulfill me. I took responsibility to find and do things at and
especially outside of my day job that did fulfill me. Now I feel no large
angst or annoyance at glacial paces at work that occur, political games, etc..
because I have other things that are more important to me that are
interesting, provide meaning to me, challenging, etc.

Having a nice paying job with relatively little work to do is something of a
luxury, especially in this pandemic time where the economic toll is hitting
many. So my unwarranted suggestion is to find something meaningful for
yourself to do/experience even if your work isn't where it's at.. you probably
will even have extra time to discover and pursue that since sounds like you're
not so busy at work.

~~~
jasode
_> So at least what I did is stop trying to put so much of an expectation on
my job to fulfill me. I took responsibility to find and do things at and
especially outside of my day job that did fulfill me._

I'm not debating you but I just want to point out that your advice depends on
the personality. It may even work for _most_ workers but for some us, we
cannot mentally "compartmentalize" the day job as the isolated 9-to-5 soul-
sucking slog and then use the weekend activities to make up for it.

I used to have a boring high-paying job and used the money to go on exotic
travel and buy expensive hobby toys like hi-fi audio equipment and camera
lenses.

I should have done the opposite. Find a day job that I was passionate about
instead of looking for fulfillment in after-hours hobbies. For me, I need my
_hobby to be my day job_. I know an entrepreneur who sold his business for
millions and I always envied him because he worked 80+ hours every week and
_he had more energy than I did_ even though I only worked 40. Why? Because his
intense overtime _aligned_ with what he wanted to do. Mine didn't. He didn't
golf or go on vacations. He always worked because that's what the most
interesting activity was to him. His only break was weekly meditations.

That's what I'm trying to do now. I want to find something I can really sink
my teeth into and work overtime on. I don't believe in "work/life balance". I
tried that. I need work to be my jam. I'm probably the minority and others may
even see that as a psychological defect but I can't help it. For me, the
dissatisfaction of a boring day job always bleeds into the weekend as an
underlying unhappiness I can't shake.

~~~
henrikschroder
> It may even work for most workers but for some us, we cannot mentally
> "compartmentalize" the day job as the isolated 9-to-5 soul-sucking slog and
> then use the weekend activities to make up for it.

Remember that the absolute majority of humanity are working soul-sucking slog
jobs to get a salary to be able to afford a home and food and some nice
things.

We who work in tech are _extremely_ fortunate to be able to find jobs that are
both very well-paying as well as fulfilling. Thank your lucky stars that this
is a possibility for you.

~~~
hardlianotion
This is meant to be helpful, but it does not help.

And you cannot say to someone that is depressed - most out there are worse off
than you. It will not help with the depression.

~~~
icebraining
Not all feelings of "this sucks" are necessarily depression, though.

~~~
santoshalper
And also, we are not his therapist. I am not concerned with helping his
depression.

~~~
hardlianotion
I did not imply that the poster has depression.

------
Kapura
>If the market value of such incompetence if FAANG salary, how can I do good
work and get paid preportionally?

You're going to have to learn that, as a laborer at a firm, the quality of
work you do is, at best, loosely correlated to your monetary compensation.
Sometimes you can do good work, sometimes you can do bad work, but how much
you're paid is going to depend greatly on a number of surrounding factors.

So, accepting that there is perhaps not a strong link between doing work that
you're proud of at work and being paid well, which would you rather have
first?

If you finish work at the well-paid FAANG job feeling like you still have
energy to do good work, you can contribute to open source, build some side
project, or, even better, none of those things. You can use your extra time an
energy learning new things or engaging in a hobby. You don't need to define
yourself by your profession.

If, on the other hand, you'd rather not feel like you're just collecting a
check from your job, there are certainly positions and fields that will
actually ask employees to move mountains. I'd imagine that firms like SpaceX
don't have room for desk fillers. There are lots of scrappy upstarts trying to
solve big problems, but you will almost certainly make more if you stay parked
in FAANG.

I personally am a game developer; the challenges are unique and satisfying and
i don't have to worry about whether I'm contributing to something worthwhile.
I also make probably less than 50% of what my friends at Amazon and Microsoft
are making. C'est la vie.

~~~
whoisjuan
This is the fallacy of modern tech-based capitalism and I hate it. The job
that I enjoyed the least and where I also did the least amount of work was the
best salary I ever had. The value that I added through that job was nominal at
best.

Other jobs that paid less felt more challenging and exponentially more
interesting. Needless to say that happiness was proportional as well.

I came to terms with the idea of lowering my salary just to have more impact
and work in interesting things in cultures that I enjoy. But there's something
that feels so wrong about it. Imagine a Corolla being more expensive than a
Mercedes C Class. This is the equivalent to that but in the opposite side on
the equation.

It doesn't make sense but there's probably little you can do about it. Big
tech companies ruined the job market. Not because they pay well, but because
they pay too well for mediocre IC and Manager positions that barely move the
needle.

~~~
dnautics
> This is the fallacy of modern tech-based capitalism and I hate it

I hate to break it to you but no capitalism (and for that matter no non-
capitalism) has ever been structured in a way that would satisfy you. For
labor to be compensated for its "true worth" there needs to be a way to
accurately judge what the "true worth" of the labor is, and honestly, the
person to whom it matters the most is the laborer. This suffers from several
problems: 1) most people don't know what they are worth, ofetn aiming too high
(dunning-kruger) or aiming too low (impostor syndrome) and 2) even if they
did, it's quite impossible to read the laborer's mind, because worth is tied
up in different values, that are not necessarily in alignment with the values
of the employer (or the state, in the case of non-capitalisms).

I think these days things might even be a bit worse because we have a strong
narrative of "do what you love"/"do what makes you happy" in most western
societies (not necessarily a bad thing). But there is no corresponding "though
may not correlate to what other people want of you, be prepared to pay the
difference in price" narrative.

~~~
neutronicus
I do think "do what you love" and its cousin "shoot for the stars" get a lot
of people in trouble.

Personally, "doing" in all its myriad forms isn't something I'm really capable
of "loving." Similarly, "dreams" are more of a crushing anxiety-burden than a
source of joy.

I think about this a lot because my younger sister, whose personality was
similar to mine, but with more conscientiousness thrown in, took her own life
in 2014, while enrolled in a top-14 law school and after graduating from
Stanford. I get a lot of the mental-illness platitudes re: that, amounting to
the idea that if only society had done a better job of ensuring that she got
herself to the brain-mechanic and providing better brain-mechanics she'd be a
high-achieving lawyer, passionate about the causes she's representing, today.

I wonder, though. She was not ambitious as a kid, and maybe if people had
treated this as her personality and not a pathology, she'd have gone to a
worse school, taken an easier path, and been happy and alive today.

Me, I have like, some ambitions, and I enjoy my job at times, but it's all in
service of the comfort and security of my family and self. And honestly I
think this "slacker" personality is on balance an asset for fatherhood.

~~~
bumby
I'm sorry to hear about your loss. I'm trying to make the connection to what
happened and your comment:

> _I do think "do what you love" and its cousin "shoot for the stars" get a
> lot of people in trouble._

Are you implying your sister was doing what she loved and it got her in
trouble? Because the opposite comes to mind when I read stories like this,
that perhaps people feel driven to follow the path they feel they are
"supposed" to and are worse off for it.

I'm genuinely curious about your perspective but I hope it goes without saying
that you don't need to respond if it's too painful.

~~~
neutronicus
In her suicide note, which I read six years ago and not since, she branded
herself destined for failure and declared her intention to spare her family
from the burden she was destined to be. She tried her hand at several careers
and I think she didn't come close to loving any of them, and was conscientious
enough for this to wrack her with guilt.

If you're told "do what you love" doing something you _don 't_ love is
_failure_. But most people don't love work. That's why it's called fucking
"work". If you're very ambitious, you do love work, because fulfilling your
ambition makes up for, you know, working. If you are neither ambitious nor
conscientious, you dismiss "love what you do" for bullshit and get on with
your life.

If you are conscientious, but not ambitious - that's the dangerous
combination. You can't bring yourself to dismiss people's expectations, so you
blame yourself.

So, yeah. Maybe I'm full of shit. Maybe I'm just making up a narcissistic
story where she wouldn't have killed herself if she were more of an amoral
slacker, like me.

But I just wish there were more of a sense of _permission_ to just shrug, say
"it's a living" and live your life.

~~~
bumby
Thank you for sharing. As someone who scores much, much higher on the
“conscientious” scale than the other big five personality traits, what you
said rings very true, but you framed it in a way I had not previously thought
of.

I wonder if this is worse in the US where Americans find so much identity in
their jobs. Regardless, as you said, people need room to just “make a living”
and find purpose (and hopefully contentment) outside of one's work if we can’t
all be following our passion (if we’re lucky enough to have even found our
passion)

------
neixidbeksoxyd
I think being part of a big company will always be like that. The 10x
performers will get paid 1.3x and the .5 performers will get paid .8x, so if
you're smart and not particularly passionate about your work it makes much
more sense to be a .5x performer. Also, usually the codebases tend to be quite
complex with little to no documentation since that kind of work is not
rewarded. This means the hundreds of engineers who later work on that will
take 10x as long to complete anything but it doesn't matter because the person
who wrote it already got promoted and left the company. Then these engineers
lose motivation as a task that should have taken 1 month takes 10 months, and
that also brings productivity down. This is why I look for teams that use open
source technology because there is competition there and if your documentation
sucks no one will use your code or another competitor will take over. This is
why I'm convinced places that use proprietary tech are going to fail in the
future since the natural forces of competition will cause the internal
technology to stagnate.

~~~
plafl
> This is why I'm convinced places that use proprietary tech are going to fail
> in the future since the natural forces of competition will cause the
> internal technology to stagnate.

I doubt proprietary tech is going to fade completely, but it's true that maybe
there are forces that are pushing for big companies to make more and more
projects open source. If you think about it it makes sense: the employees are
happier because their work has more impact, they also benefit because they can
showcase it in their CV. For the company they externalize testing, quality
improves because employees are going to be more careful when their code is in
the open and they are more motivated. It can also make hiring easier.

~~~
cliff_badger
I think you're incorrect, although I hope you're not.

This idea will never become a reality for the vast majority of companies, for
the exact same reason that companies fear piracy. If I open source my product
then anyone who uses that open source code is a lost sale. A lost sale means I
make less money, less money means the board is mad, on and on and on...

The bottom line is money, and open sourcing their code means (to them) a loss
in potential revenue.

~~~
doctor_eval
Well, that’s only true if you plan to sell the code. Much code exists not for
its own sake, but to support the business. Maybe you need to build an in house
inventory system for some kind of complex product you’re building. You were
never gonna sell that software, but you still won’t open source it because
that would help your competitors...

~~~
ghaff
Well, and if it's so tied into an in-house inventory system just tossing a
bunch of code into a Github repo is about 99% useless. There is almost zero
value to just tossing some open source code over the wall.

------
nine_k
During my nearly five years at Google, I have switched a number of teams and
projects, as a contracting SDE.

There were _vast_ differences in the pace, communication style, and project
success rate among them. There were very fast-paced projects with extremely
sharp colleagues. There were small projects in contact with the prospective
(non-engineering) users of the tool being built. There were slowish projects
with some red tape thrown in. One project was outright canceled because of
architecture not matching the changed requirements.

No, not al FAANG is "like this". No, every single company inside FAANG is
_huge_ , and very much varied within.

Walk around. Talk to people. Get interested in what other teams are doing. Do
some research, because I bet the tools to look into other teams' work are
there, as are informal internal forums. Find a better team, and migrate to it.

~~~
faizshah
Seconding this, I had some similar questions as OP at my Amazon internship
(moreso stemming from going from Data Science work to web dev). The thing is
every team at Amazon is so different u can find teams moving at breakneck
speed in JS monorepos and u can find teams barely moving just fixing random
build configs for months without even many unit tests in their repo (some
people enjoy maintaining mature software in a customer focused team).

I suggest OP browse through the internal code search tool, find a team that
fits their needs/values, and then try to find a job under that manager. OP has
the unique ability to see the actual day to day work a team is doing before
applying, they should take advantage of that. You can find a team like OP
describes at any company but how many times can you see the day to day work
before applying, take advantage.

------
ransom1538
I remember talking to a senior person at FB (wears a suit on friday). I asked
"how is hiring?". Their response: terrible. People like this OP game systems,
know how to test, understands what the boss wants, know ahead of time the
questions they will be asked, etc. They have gamed the entire system. So! They
tend to get through the interview with ease. The problem is... now what. What
is the next thing they need to game? Turns out, they are in it for the 'game'
itself. Eventually they wake up, realize their life now is to ensure people
click on FB ads. Basically, they finished the last level on Mario Bros. and
now begin a bizarre existential crisis.

~~~
austhrow743
I don't understand what you mean by "people like this OP". They don't say that
they struggled with the hiring process or feel like a fraud. Rather they seem
to be easily capable of the work.

Actually I'm not sure what any of your post is about. Your friend doesn't like
their job because they're hiring people to make facebook ads more effective?

~~~
jasonmp85
Hiring doesn’t show whether you’re capable of the work, it just answers
whether you might be hired.

The reply here is entirely in line with the poster; they didn’t say anything
about feeling like a fraud, they said candidates in tech minmax career choices
with no thought as to their actual purpose.

And yeah anyone remotely self-aware would feel disgusting working on adtech.
It’s just that most tech workers do not think about such things.

~~~
ghettoCoder
Some of us end up working at jobs infinitely worse than adtech, the public
service.

~~~
feteru
What? What do you mean by worse...

~~~
ghettoCoder
Worse as in you try to get things done in a cost effective way in order to
deliver value to taxpayers but have to deal with lifers, deadwood, and
clueless managers who are completely risk-averse. I know. I work in the public
service.

~~~
jiscariot
Right there with you. Not saying I'm a bright shining star, but it is amazing
the level of incompetence you sometimes run across. It is legitimately the
first place where I've found people who actually cost time/resources for
anything they touch or interact with.

The other thing is the supreme deference to rank at the cost of initiative.

It was mind blowing coming from a more competitive corporate world.

------
CoolGuySteve
At Apple, the amount of debate, code review delays, and interdepartmental
meetings made everything take forever. I once waited 2 months for a code
review there. A feature I wrote and pushed for Leopard didn’t actually ship
until Lion.

Back then there was severe priority inversion, anything the desktop needed got
delayed by iOS priorities but also the senior engineers with magic rubber
stamp powers were working on iOS. So changes for the desktop stack never got
approved without significant and needless delays.

~~~
realtalk_sp
This really goes a long way towards explaining the current state of macOS.

~~~
mavhc
MacOS is less than 10% of their sales, so makes sense.

~~~
robenkleene
Counterpoint: All iOS apps, and the OS itself, are built macOS. Measuring
importance in terms of sales seems shortsighted to me.

~~~
scarface74
And that means if you care about writing iOS apps, you have to buy a Mac
whether you like it or not.

~~~
mywittyname
It also means, if a critical mass hate developing on Macs, then iOS software
will suffer. App store fees are already a business pain point for app
developers. And web browsers are getting capable enough now that it's probably
feasible for a lot of apps to go back to being browser only.

It's going to be hard to reverse a trend away from Apple if it starts. Imagine
what would happen if Microsoft Visual Studio becomes the IDE of choice for iOS
development after devs ditch macOS in droves. Microsoft won't play nice.

Apple isn't watching their flanks by letting macOS atrophy and a competitor
will step in if they don't cover it.

~~~
scarface74
You act like developers have a choice. Companies go where the money is and
developers do what companies tell them. The supremacy of the indie developer
died a decade ago.

There are very few apps that could be web only apps that are making money via
in app purchases. Most of the money being made in the App Store are pay to win
games. Most of the subscriptions apps that use to allow in app purchases are
already forcing users to pay outside of the App Store - including Netflix and
Spotify.

------
abhv
At apple, you cannot browse internal resources. At fb and google, it is called
SWE instead of SDE. Amazon has SDEs. (perhaps netflix too?)

Although you might be smart enough to know that and misdirect.

Even at the best universities, best tech companies, best startups, you will
find pools of miserable and unmotivated people.

Don't get stuck.

There are brilliant people everywhere and certainly at faang. Find them,
learn, and seize your opportunity to have an interesting life.

~~~
EForEndeavour
> At apple, you cannot browse internal resources.

What does this mean? Aren't there resources for onboarding, training, project
wikis, repos, etc. which are accessible to employees but not the general
public?

~~~
Sodman
I believe he means you can't just arbitrarily browse the source code for any
Apple software you're curious about.

------
gfxgirl
Switch teams?

My experience were the first 2 years I was writing wholly new code and was
able to write a ton. The next 3 years was all maintenance for new issues,
requirements and I felt unproductive.

Also, just in general it felt like my output went down 50% or more because of
code review and tests. Those were all essential but up until my FAANG job no
team I was on did that stuff (games). We'd just make the game and file bugs
while playing. We didn't write tests. We shipped too. I see the value and
essential requirement for code review and tests, specially outside of games,
but it was a rude awakening just how much slower things went.

There was also just process. Because of code-review you were required to write
small changes which I totally understand the need for but it also felt shitty
to have to babysit several changes through the CI. Can't submit #3 until #2
passes, etc... so a it felt like wasting so much time on something that used
to be instant on a smaller game team. Another example is review of #2
requiring refactoring #3 and #4. And of course the re-write is correct but
having to propagate it through changes was more work than if I could have just
submitted one change. Similarly while babysitting this stuff someone would
check in something with conflicts and again, fixing those conflicts would have
been easier with one large change than 4 small changes so again, just adding
what feels like busy work.

I get why it's important, it just feels poopy.

~~~
cyberdrunk
> I get why it's important, it just feels poopy.

I think it summarizes a lot of office work. We're organized in processes which
are efficient and/or necessary at the scale of the company, but which severely
restrict and constrain us, making a lot of us unhappy.

For people for whom it's unbearable, there are two options: either join a
small company or just check out completely, treat your job as some bullshit
that brings you good money, be glad you're not cleaning toilets for 20% of
your pay, and try to find fullfilment outside of work hours.

~~~
sneak
> _be glad you 're not cleaning toilets for 20% of your pay_

Be advised: If you are programming computers in 2020 and making only 5x what a
toilet cleaner makes, you are approximately 100% underpaid.

~~~
baq
or maybe programmers are overpaid...

~~~
bdavisx
In the U.S., it's much more likely that the custodians/janitors are getting
underpaid.

~~~
sneak
If they were underpaid, they’d go work somewhere else they are not.

There is a near unlimited supply of mop-pushers in the world.

~~~
stnmtn
What if every place where they live is paying them around the same rate?
Should every person be expected to move and uproot their life to find a job
that pays them enough to live on?

~~~
stainforth
Some ideologies construct an imaginary world with its own rules and and
perfect ethical actors and then ignore that it does not map to reality.

------
shp0ngle
I worked in a corporation that pretended to be a startup; or a startup that
pretended to be a corporation; basically what's called "unicorn" nowadays.

And yes, unless you got lucky and get to work on some interesting,
infrastructural problems, it was like this.

Also tons of useless meetings where things get rehashed over and over, and
people shouting "agile" and "AI" and latest buzzwords over and over without
actually understanding them, and having 1 hour calls over 1px design changes.

On the other hand - comparing with start-ups, you have clearly defined role
what to do, nobody can really screw you over like start-ups tend to do, the
pay and perks are good, the teams are more clearly delineated than in start-
ups.

Pick your poison.

------
hef19898
I cannot speak about about dev jobs, but as ex-FAANG myself (only one of them,
so experience may not be applicable at all), maybe I can offer some insights.

Things at these companies are moving slow, because they are behemoth. Upside,
_when_ things move, they move faster than at any other big corp I now. they
also tend to move if not the right than at least not the wrong direction. Also
a big difference compared to other big corps I know. FAANG also turned into a
political nightmare at times, office powerplays are a daily occurence.

One thing you definetly can learn, is how thngs should be run, FAANG are good
at what they do. Learn whatever you can, try to understand why things are done
the way they are before judging.

After all that, FAANG is not for everyone, I left after three years. The
sooner you realize that, the better for you. Being one year in is not that
uncommon to quite, there is alos no shame in doing so. If you can stick with
it, regardless of the current economic situation, I would stick around for
another one or two years. You are at the beginning of your learning curve.

If you want speed, pick a job at a start-up. From my experience you will get
the other side of the coin: speed replaces planning, politics are still the
same and SOPs are replaced with chaos. I know what I prefer.

------
nmpennypacker
I don't understand how that's 'ethnically' wrong. Yes, all of FAANG companies
are like this. In order to work for these companies you have to become
comfortable with the idea of being paid more to do less.

My advice to you would be to pick up a more rewarding side-project, or to use
the in-between hours to do something that you enjoy. Ride a bike or something.
Think of your main gig as a function to make money. If it's working, and
working efficiently, then you have a good function. If you have extra time as
a result, use it wisely. Time is your most precious resource, and it is
finite.

I spent the first few years of my career as a developer working for startups,
and the break-neck pace is thrilling, but the stakes are low - you might break
things for a few thousand people, none of whom expect perfection from your
application. Think about how many people are potentially affected by a change
to (for example) the F codebase. That's why it takes so long to release a one-
liner, and justifiably so. For a FAANG company, prudence > professional
development. Take the money and run; enjoy your free time and use it wisely.

~~~
guscost
“Move slowly and don’t break anything.”

------
throwaway3354
Googler here. I used to feel very guilty during my first year here, because my
productivity was so ridiculously low. Yet I was being praised for being fast
and productive (both by my team, and by my manager). Then over time this
feeling started fading away (since I could clearly see that everyone was
unproductive, not just me), and I started seeing this as the new normal.
Everyone works way below their potential, and a lot of time is wasted through
internal processes, subpar development tools, and massive overengineering.
Part of me believes that many people are hired so that they don't go build
competing products.

~~~
ipnon
Sounds like a pretty sweet gig if making money is the primary goal of
employment.

------
eel
If your FAANG is Amazon, it gets better. When you first join, no one knows
what you can do, so you get crap tasks. You show what you can do and you get
better tasks. As you stay on a team for a little while, you start to notice
small improvements that can be made, so you make a well thought out suggestion
(or you just go and make it better). Over time your tasks become projects. You
understand the goals for your team so you make your own tasks. Eventually the
projects you are assigned are so large that you have to delegate tasks to your
colleagues who don't have the experience yet.

If you have the patience and willingness to build that trust and go down that
path, FAANG will be rewarding. If it feels slow and frustrating, then it might
not be a good fit. You could bounce around to different orgs hoping to find a
domain that excites you, or you can coast for 4 years until your RSUs run out.
I'd say it's better to find an organization or company that gets you excited.
Just my two cents.

~~~
unreal37
He's not showing what he can do though. Making changes take a week when he
finished them in a day is self-sabotage.

~~~
dbish
Yep. This is the issue. They may be kept with small tasks and eventually noted
as a performance issue when it’s too late for then to show what they can do

------
jameshush
This is a common mind set to fall into. I fell into it at a previous company
for a few months, and a top performer at my current company admitted to
falling in the same trap. Here’s what I realized:

You can do excellent work AND work 40 hours.

You don’t need to work 5 hours or 100 hours. It’s not binary. In the short
term do you see any benefit? Nope. Will you get promoted? Probably not. And if
you do you won’t make that much extra money.

BUT! In the LONG TERM it’s TOTALLY worth it to be known as the proactive,
friendly do-er who moves the project forward. That’s how you build those
relationships to be the kind of person who gets brought along to a new
opportunity when your coworker/boss quits. I’ve found myself at a startup FULL
of ex-FAANGs who have this attitude and all worked with each other for 10+
years. It’s a great place to be.

People think ”networking” is going out drinking with new people. It’s not.
It’s consistently showing up and finding opportunities to move your team and
the project forward in a friendly, collaborative way.

------
hiisukun
I'd just like to make a comment about human endeavour generally. It is a messy
business, full of inefficiencies and strange quirks. Yet somehow, we still
manage to invent amazing things across the planet.

What you are describing is certainly not unique to FAANG, and certainly not
true for all FAANG (or anywhere). There will always be places where the pace
is glacial, or getting work done is hard. There will be others where it is
easier.

There will be times when you are struggling to get things done, even in a good
environment. Life will not always be as simple as it was (children, life
traumas, financial change, political instability, medical events, who knows).
Other times, life will be easier and you will have time to wonder and plan on
top of regular life.

The one constant is that you are often in charge of a certain amount of agency
with regards to yourself and your own output. Why shrug your shoulders and do
less in your current team? If the company will not offer things to you to
'work harder', why not just do it anyway if you are capable? Some people don't
even have two hands! This is flippant but the point is: do not rely on solely
external motivations to do brilliant things.

Counterpoint: Don't work yourself to death in a team or organisation that will
not value your output. Do good things, and use them to move laterally (or
elsewhere entirely) until you find a good fit. It probably won't be perfect -
but flaws can bring benefit too, even if only as a balanced perspective.

Anyway, carry on and do well despite those around you acting as anchors or wet
blankets. Find some colleagues in the lunch area that will act as sails, and
be their sea breeze. Invest something great, or make small invisible
improvements to many peoples lives (quite possible in a FAANG) and take heart
that you did well for yourself, and not for some performance metric.

~~~
noir_lord
It sounds a lot like where I work and that's not a faang - it just seems to be
the default setting for large software organisations.

Sucks to be on the inside though and stressful if you care about doing good
productive work.

------
nullc
This sounds like a general description of life at a big company.

At least your company isn't as dysfunctional as this:
[https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/](https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/)

:)

~~~
Jaruzel
This. As someone who has spent the last 25 years working for large blue chip
companies, they all suffer a lack of inertia. It commonly can take weeks in a
large co. to implement something that would only take a couple of days in a
smaller firm or startup. If you prefer a faster paced work life, then the
large company structure is not for you, FAANG or otherwise.

------
pwdisswordfish2
We are heading toward a future where work is less "work" and presumably people
will have to be compensated on some other basis besides "working hard".

That is one premise in the film version of Piketty's Capital in the 21st
Century.

The inequality in the distribution of capital that has been increasing since
the 1970's, while wages stagnate, is at worst a trajectory that takes us to
neo-feudalism, or something that resembles slavery, colonialism or caste
systems. At best, it's a long-term recipe for social unrest.

FAANG is sitting on vast amounts of capital. Though FAANG employees may loathe
the thought, it is arguable that, in the end, the market value is not based on
the workers, it is based on the capital. Time will tell.

The relatively high salaries can be viewed as a protective measure to keep
these workers from joining competing companies. We already know the FAANG
CEOs, e.g., Steve Jobs, made pacts with each other on how much they would pay
out for these workers.

The film suggests workers have become liabilities not assets. Workers are
costs that can be cut when needed. You can decide for yourself, but when pacts
are made to limit salaries, this to me sounds like limiting a cost, not
limiting how much they will pay for an asset.

Taking a long view, thinking beyond simply my own welfare, I would have
problems ethically working for FAANG. I do not see these companies as
contributing anything towards solving the problems we are going to have as a
result of the trend to which Piketty has drawn attention. If anything, these
companies will be on side of capital not labour, and the "work" they do can be
used to keep labour under surveillance and control.

~~~
ZephyrBlu
> The film suggests workers have become liabilities not assets. Workers are
> costs that can be cut when needed

Makes sense to me. Most of the value creation in big companies has already
happened, so majority of current employees are cost centers.

It also seems like most companies are one-trick ponies, despite what they
would have you believe (I.e. Google still heavily relies on ad revenue despite
having a billion other products), so they could probably cut a lot of workers
and retain most of the value of their company.

------
throwawayfaang2
Given the description I assume you worked at Amazon. I worked there too, and I
quit for Google.

They are VERY different companies. Google's tooling is unparalleled and
maintained by staffed teams, its work force is motivated. It's hard to move
the needle - in a large company full of smart people all the easy stuff was
done ten years ago, and compliance concerns are everywhere. But none of that
is due to lack of tools or motivation.

Google is an engineering company. Amazon is a store that hires engineers
because it has no other option.

You seem to be at exactly the point where I was when I left. Yes, the grass is
greener on the other side. Do it.

~~~
malechimp
Not in Amazon myself but rumor has it that Amazon is actually the inverse of
what OP describes - more at the verge of sweatshop rather than an easy-boring-
sail downwind.

~~~
amznthrowaway5
Eventually the accumulated sweatshop tech debt and incompetent management with
no technical understanding result in teams not being able to accomplish
anything, and situations like the one OP and his team are stuck in.

------
bob33212
Yes and No. I worked at a big company where on my own initiative I automated
40% of the QA processes. It was great because I was productive and received
recognition. It was also frustrating because I delivered 5x value more than my
coworkers but was paid similarly. The company limited raises to 10%. I did get
rewarded with non monetary things. I took 8 weeks of vacation, tagged along on
any international trip the directors were going on. Worked from home as I saw
fit.

Large companies do not want people like you and I making 800k/year and being
at our peak productivity. It is putting to many eggs in one basket. They would
rather pay 6 people 200k to do the same work because it is more stable

~~~
defnotashton2
Yea I walk anytime I sit across from a manager and they say our corporate
raise limit is x. Its terribly discouraging and makes me want to burn the
building down. I should be paid for a portion of the value I'm adding to the
company. If I wrote software in 3 months that billed out over 500k every 12
months, I expect a substantial raise or bonus not 3,5, 10%..

~~~
csunbird
I actually disagree with this.

In big companies, everybody completes a piece of the puzzle and if you are the
one who collects all the pieces, you might think that you are doing the most
of the work. But actually, everybody is a part of that.

Let me give you an example: My $JOB at $COMPANY is related to preventing
fraud. My department and team saves around 4 to 10 percent of the ALL revenue,
potentially more if we did not do our jobs well (fraud rate grows
exponentially when a known pattern is known to fraudsters). Our department is
not even 1% of all of our engineers but our value is triple of other teams.
Should we ask triple of their salaries? No, because all the data points that
we gather are generated by other teams, which do their jobs, just like us.

It is called a co-operation (corporation) for a reason.

~~~
tk75x
It's called a corporation to describe a collection of resources into one body
(corp). Latin(?) roots.

------
rvn1045
Yes. I worked at amazon from 2015-2018. I worked pretty hard the first 6
months. It was my first job out of college. There was a lot to learn in the
beginning. 8-12 months in I was barely doing any work and I knew several
people who hadn’t done any work in months and sometime even a year or longer.

The thing is a lot of projects get over staffed and work gets split up with
too many people. It’s also not an environment where you are allowed to take
initiative and take on work yourself because a manager pretty much has to
assign you work (every piece of work or project is someone’s promotion
project) and how they assign work and to whom has a lot of strategy behind it.

The only good thing is the pay. The pay is so high you can FIRE pretty
quickly.

It got boring pretty fast. Since your there already I would suggest saving
money as aggressively as possible while you figure out what to do next.

~~~
Balgair
FWIW, big DOD and BioPharma companies can be like this too. It's more like
this is just how large companies _are_.

------
adverbly
> If the market value of such incompetence if FAANG salary, how can I do good
> work and get paid preportionally?

Asking this question shows that you do not yet understand how compensation and
pay works in the world.

Roughly speaking there are two different kinds of jobs. The first kind of job
is offensive. This job involves creating systems or value where it does not
already exist. It is probably what you thought all engineering and development
was. Surprisingly though these jobs do not always pay very well because they
are high risk. Especially for unestablished workers who do not have a track
record of successful value creation.

The second kind of job is a defensive job. Roughly speaking this job exists
when a company already has a big Cash Cow Monopoly and can print money. These
jobs pay very well because there is already a ton of money flowing in the
value chain. For these jobs you don't actually have to create anything. You
just kind of have to be around to make sure that nothing goes wrong.

Faang jobs have over time become more defensive than offensive.

Don't expect your current view of proportional pay for work to apply to other
positions.

------
dr3ad
This is an opportunity and a test of character.

Will you put in your best effort and do your best work only when conditions
are ideal, or will you cultivate the habit of always doing good work?

By doing one day's work and spreading it out over a week, you are selling
yourself short by developing poor habits.

Whatever you do, do not consciously develop bad habits. Analyse why it takes a
long time to get anything done. Try to identify the reasons, do small tests to
validate your theories on what would improve the process. Rinse and repeat. If
nothing else, you would learn a lot from the process.

------
miguelmota
When I was working at a large corporate company I sometimes dreaded going to
work for the same reasons you mentioned. The code was a mess from having a ton
of developers touching it and them taking shortcuts to implement updates
because learning the entire context and codebase to do it the right way would
be take a very long time or they didn't have the motivation to bother. Working
on a single Jira ticket would take days. The culture at the office was way too
relaxed and seemed like people would kill time by playing ping pong or other
activities until it was 5pm for them to check out for the day. Doing the bare
minimum to get by was the norm culture there and the many layers of management
there made it hard for people to get fired. I didn't find the job fulfilling
since I wasn't learning anything new and felt like I wasn't contributing
anything impactful. I quit and joined small smartups where the environment is
more fast paced and you have to wear many different hats so you are always
learning new things. In short, if you're not happy then start looking for new
opportunities.

------
TACIXAT
At Google things got done but it was slowed down from messing with testing
frameworks, code reviews, and build systems (not that this is a bad thing,
just not what you expect when you want to write code). Coworkers were all very
good at what they did. Work was a bit boring and it was sometimes shocking how
much work went into adding a button to a page. It doesn't really sound like
what you are describing.

~~~
jeffbee
From an objective standpoint, testing, code review and distributed build speed
up the pace of the whole project, even if individuals may perceive themselves
as "slowed down".

------
jlj
> I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during the the week.
> The other days I only open my computer for standup and if I get an IM.

There is a term for this called "sandbagging."

> I don't feel what I'm doing is ethnically wrong, because the company is
> evidently pleased with my current productivity, but I find it unsatisfying
> and like a waste of my time on earth.

Sounds like you have a motivation and procrastination problem. Pleasing
someone or some organization != ethics.

> The dev tools, docs and tech debt impart such a slow iteration speed

Help streamline how the dev tools are used. Tools alone don't solve for much,
they need a solid and frictionless process to follow. Document that process to
help yourself and your team. Find some common threads or repetitive issues in
the tech debt and fix it without waiting for someone to ask you to fix it.
Those kids of work may even help get you promoted and open up more interesting
projects.

~~~
gajjanag
> Those kids of work may even help get you promoted and open up more
> interesting projects.

Do you have any anecdotes in support of this view? My general understanding is
that working on such things (if it isn't part of your explicit job
description) is usually met by at best gratitude from other people, but
certainly not promotions. And there are definite risks: since it is time spent
not on your "actual" job, it can show up in performance cycles especially with
a mediocre manager.

~~~
wtracy
This seems to be a common and expected way of getting promoted within Google:
Their performance review system allows engineers to provide feedback on people
from unrelated teams.

I don't know if any other company where this strategy is likely to get you
ahead.

------
gravypod
I've never worked at a FAANG company but, for when you do reach you do choose
to stay are go, can you put a burner email in your profile?

A lot of engineers at startups, like myself, want to work with talent that is
skilled enough to get into FAANG bit too bored of the extremely glacial pace
these companies work at.

On a more on topic note: I've heard about, and observed, similar behavior from
friends of similar companies: doing very minimal work and being surprised at
the massive rewards they get.

~~~
scarface74
Does it really take skill to get into a FAANG or just the ability to do
algorithms well enough to get past the interview?

~~~
gravypod
I think that if you selected:

1\. a random person from the tech industry, and

2\. a random person who has worked at a FAANG company for 1 year.

I'd assume that on average person 2 is no worse an engineer than, and
potentially a better engineer better than, person 1.

~~~
scarface74
If you go by Joel Spolsky’s simple interview criteria - smart and get things
done and think about the two characteristics in a quadrant. “Whether you can
reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard” as the filter, completely optimizes
for the “smart” and doesn’t test at all whether you can “get things done”.

I’ve interviewed and hired software engineers at small companies where we
needed each software developer to be impactful. We needed someone with history
of “getting things done”. We can’t tell that by your ability to do leetCode.

On a side note, an Amazon recruiter reached out to me about a software
developer position on LinkedIn a few months ago. I knew I had no interest in
going through an algorithm interview to prove I was “smart”.

I asked her could she put me in touch with someone from the AWS consulting
side since I did have experience with “getting things done” from working for
small companies in general and using many of the AWS fiddly bits specifically.

As I suspected, the entire loop was concerned with past projects and “tell me
about a time when...”. I breezed through the interview without a single
algorithm question even though I am actually doing some hands on the keyboard
coding - implementations not sales.

------
romanhn
Very curious about which FAANG this is. As an EM at "F", my experience is
pretty much the opposite - everything moves at breakneck speed, driven by an
impact-oriented culture and related incentives. A team like you're describing
would get disbanded very quickly due to low productivity (unless of course
you're all somehow saving/making the company millions of dollars with few
lines of code).

------
CyanLite2
Yes, they're all like that. They call it resting-and-vesting for a reason. I'm
happier at a non-FAANG company where I can do more meaningful work as a
principal engineer, and won't have to do silly leetcode interviews to the
candidates I interview. I realized either I can be a superstar at a mid-level
company or a be a benchwarmer at FAANG. Pay is probably 20% less than at a
FAANG but it's more than multiples higher than the U.S. median salary, so I'm
doing okay and living well.

------
samplatt
>Because of this, I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during
the the week.

Sounds like the Change tool chain is way, WAY more efficient than my "20k+
employees corp but not FAANG" general career experience... Most places I've
worked for (mostly mining/engineering) have a change process that takes 2-3
weeks to get something HURRIED through a change process.

Maybe a non-technical role would suit you more. Try asking for "team admin"
responsibilities as a route towards team management.

~~~
iforgotpassword
At a 10k company that didn't originate in tech but obviously had to get
software devs eventually, it was similar. Most of my day was spent wondering
whether I messed up something about docker again or the super restrictive
proxy server just messed things up again. Just run the script a couple times
to be sure it's not just the proxy. Then open ticket with network team. Maybe
have it resolved two weeks later. In general it was mostly just asking for
stuff to be allowed to be accessed. Even when you had three things to work on
that were somewhat not dependent on each other there were times where you just
had nothing to do. And then when you finally can access whatever it was it
takes you two days to get back into what you were actually doing there.

On the positive side, it was mostly relaxed, I could think about side projects
and actually work on them after work, even though I "worked" more hours than
the job after that. I think that's what kept me sane, but it was very
refreshing to switch to a small company after that where you could get things
done and generally mostly dealt with motivated folks you can get along with.

Worst story so far was from a high school friend who joined a 600k employees
monstrosity. Getting almost nothing done because every fart needs to be
approved but in addition a very toxic environment with lots of unnecessary
conflict and dickery between different teams whenever they had to cooperate on
something. Now it's a huge company and probably not all of it is like that,
but boy I don't understand how he's still there and not completely dead inside
or became an actual psychopath.

------
didibus
If you feel like you're not doing enough, bring it up to your manager and ask
for more. Don't get complacent, you might be told you're doing great, but
secretly people think bad of you and it might come back to hunt you later.

Take a good look at your team within the org. Is it a sinking ship? Do people
sing its praises or lament it? Would it be considered a success or a mess? You
don't want to be on a sinking ship, it's only a matter of time before it
attracts higher ups attention and people start to investigate what's wrong, if
you're caught in that fire you will be blamed as part of the problem. So
either become the ship's captain, or switch team.

Finally, it might be because you are too low down the chain and not seeing the
bigger picture. A lot of the hard work at FAANGS isn't coding related. It's
about decision making. Choosing what task to do next, what component to
rewrite or replace, what business goal to meet, which project to invest in
next, etc. Sometimes this takes a while and in the meantime, there's little
change to do on existing live systems. What you should do is get engaged with
that decision making. Learn who your stakeholders are, get involved in the
planning process for your team, understand what business you serve and what
their problems are, figure out the goals leadership has set out for your org
and your team, etc.

In other words, at FAANGS you don't get work handed to you, you're expected to
come up with the work yourself, be your own leader and advance the team and
company forward independently with minimum hand holding. Don't wait for people
to tell you what to do, figure out what needs to be done, what should be done,
influence others to agree and support you, and get it done.

------
ctheb
Take advantage of the resources available to you and learn as much as you can.

You can do good work at any company, but FAANGs especially will reward you
with compensation and opportunities if you stand out.

------
bishnu
FAANG companies will have smaller teams working on various new/experimental
products. Without a large userbase you'll be able to iterate faster. You can
try to get transfered to one of those teams; I found it quite rewarding.

------
ex_amazon_sde
Ex Amazon here - and I know a lot of people in other FAANGs.

On this kind of topic I try not to generalize across a whole (large) company.

Things can be different across teams, offices, cities and countries within the
same company.

In my experience "no work gets done and there's no motivation to do any" is
the very opposite of what I've seen.

My suggestion: get out of the team bubble and talk to people in different
teams and geographical locations.

EDIT: on second thought, I don't want to speculate, but if the team has
serious productivity issues the hammer can come and hit the whole team in
future. Amazon, generally speaking, tends to push people to either grow or
leave.

------
ISL
Sounds like there might be opportunities to help your colleagues make the
environment better, so that together you can work to leverage the awesome
opportunities/resources present at those companies to both make the world a
better place and make the company more money.

I've been reading/contemplating Willinck/Babin's book Extreme Ownership of
late -- I think you might find some resonance there.

------
viburnum
I’ve been there. My evaluations actually improved when I stopped fighting the
system and simply stopped doing any work. But actually accomplishing something
useful for the world is the most satisfying thing you can do, so find a way to
do that and also make a living.

------
twic
> Is all of FAANG like this?

No. All big companies are like this, not just FAANG!

------
nathanvanfleet
It is not clear but you say you only work one day a week and get away with it,
but also blame the tools for the inability to get work done?

The process is supposed to be there to protect things from breaking and for
allowing so many people to iterate on the same codebases. If it's just that
costly and everyone knows it what is the issue?

You're saying that somehow the cost of you or other teammates is disgusting,
which is very funny! Tech companies have some of the highest profit per-
employee than any other company. Why are you feeling shame towards this? As
long as you are putting in the expected time and effort I really wonder why
you would feel shame.

If you think the tools can be improved maybe you can work to improve that for
everyone?

------
minimuffins
It sounds to me like you found yourself a nice sinecure, a rare find in
contemporary life! Take heart!

There's no reason you need to identify yourself or your work output with the
company that employs you. A lot of people try, but it's not the only way, or
the best way.

Meaningful work is a basic human need, but the market doesn't always provide
it. If you can meet your basic material needs and then some by working one day
a week, you are way ahead of most people.

Spend the rest of the time working on something that pleases you to work on
that wouldn't please FAANGCorp. Work on something they would never let you do.
You're free!

------
rehman
Good growing startups is the best place on every aspects. 1\. Not too much
load since it's growing and has resource scarcity so won't push harder on
employees. 2\. Not less work since it's growing and there's ample work to do
for next year atleast next few months. 3\. You own stuff. 4\. You get paid
good. Equivalent to how much you work and that keeps you going. Even you can
negotiate freely on this in case you have any concerns.

Not all startups are like this, but yeah few good growing startups.

~~~
skohan
This has been my experience as well. The best places to work are where they
actually have a lot of interesting problems to solve and work to be done in
order to grow and be profitable.

A lot of companies are not doing that, and in many cases developer hiring and
team management is more driven by things like internal company politics, or
the desire to use a hiring budget by the end of the year for example.

Also it is sometimes the case that an organization's software development
needs are not persistent. Sometimes there are weeks or even months where the
bottleneck of the company is far from software development, and until those
problems are figured out there's little for the developers to do, but they're
on a salary so they have to come in and do their hours anyway. That can be
awkward to talk about when those developers are being paid up to a half a
million dollars per year.

------
wbsun
I guess you probably never broke a system and caused an external visible
outage?

I am working in a FAANG company, almost all the things slow the dev velocity
down are originated from postmortem action items, new hire super stars stop
complaining immediately after writing their first postmortems.

------
faang721
It can be widely different depending on the team. Some projects that are high
visibility will really have crazy hours for the team. Some teams are just
keeping the lights on.

If I were you I’d consider an internal transfer. Try to find out which teams
are doing the really interesting work.

------
USNetizen
Any organization that reaches a certain size will encounter things like this.
The larger an organization gets, the more the productivity level tends to
regress towards the mean. So, people with higher productivity will likely feel
unfulfilled and people at the lower end will still feel inundated. It is both
a mechanism of success and a detriment to such organizations. Successful
because it standardizes things, ensuring more consistent quality and
productivity overall - the end goal, after all, is to eliminate uncertainty as
much as possible in daily operations. Detriment because, pertaining to the the
consistency of quality and productivity, it tends to regress at a lower level.

The salaries tend to be higher simply because these large organizations are
typically much better capitalized, not necessarily because the people that
work there are that much better than everyone else. This is why a lot of high
performers tend to strike off on their own at some point in their careers -
dissatisfaction with mediocrity. But then their own companies, if successful,
grow to a level where, once more, productivity and quality regresses towards
the mean and they find themselves in a self-created bureaucracy as the
organization matures.

------
smattiso
Source: Worked at 3 different FAANGs for nearly 10 years.

What you are describing exists in almost every big company. I assume that you
are working on a mature product with a big code base. In these projects the
pace of development is slow and the changes are typically small and
incremental. Engineers tend to get burnt out as building anything requires an
egregious amount of back and forth with PMs, TPMs, QE, etc. As a result
probably 90% of the engineers are not motivated to build anything instead
optimize for reaching the next level (L5 L6 etc) and payday.

I came to the same conclusion as you and ended up quitting. However if you
want to stay there is another path.

Like I said 90% of the people you are working with are burnt out and their
work is boring, but 10% are legit engineers building the future. They might
not be working on your team, or your product, or even your org, but they are
there. If you can collaborate with these people you will find your work 1000x
more enjoyable and these are the type of people who will go on to do great
things. You can be one of them and this will carry you on to bigger and better
things as your career goes on.

First you need to prove yourself to your own team as someone who can get
things done and isn't a wimp. This can take as little as a few months. After
that look around your own product and org for something that you would be
totally stoked to work on. Maybe this is an inventive product idea you came up
with, maybe its something a secret team is building, who knows? Start reaching
out to your manager and people on that project and offer your services. Start
small build an integration with some other product, fix a few bugs, etc. Be
nosy into what is happening within your company, stay upbeat, and be willing
to step in and be the man. If you have that attitude and can keep your passion
going you can get to those rare higher levels of the engineering profession.
If you check out of your job and stay depressed you can make a living for a
while but you will stay where you are. It is what you make of it, and if your
company or your manager won't let you progress in the way you want, you can
always quit. Don't stick around for years doing the same old BS, and don't let
your career be controlled by your manager, but there is another way. That
being said if you are young and a new grad it will be much more difficult
until you have proven yourself over a few years.

------
saalweachter
So the only answer I can give you is "maybe?" because I don't really know how
all FAAMGs operate and I don't know exactly how much productivity you are
actually seeing.

I will say a megacorp feels much less productive than a startup, because of
the amount of overhead involved. Meetings on product design, meetings to
coordinate development, meetings to talk about how many meetings we have, a
month spent writing perf reviews, launch processes that require buy in from
three different PAs to change the color of a widget.

If you've also worked at a smaller company or a startup where you are one of
five or ten developers given vast authority and responsibility for broad
swaths of a codebase and you spend all day pounding out code, it can feel very
unproductive.

The problem is that you can only have something like 20 or 50 developers
working on tangentially related projects like that before they stop being able
to work effectively.

If you have a software project that needs, say, 10,000 developers to pull off,
what you end up doing is hiring 20,000-40,000 developers and having them spend
half their time or so coordinating the development. This feels unproductive to
the individual developer, because you could be writing so much more code, but
it really isn't -- if you had all these programmers programming
indiscriminately, you'd be writing a lot of code twice, not writing some code
that's needed, and writing a lot of the wrong code. It'd be a mess.

Of course, sometimes things are broken, globally or locally in a megacorp.
Sometimes the planning goes out of control and too little actual work gets
done even by megacorp standards. Sometimes a project is actually a small
project and you have a team of 40 developing something that could actually be
developed by a startup of ten. Sometimes things go wrong.

The point being: if you feel like a cog in a machine, well, you're always
going to feel like that in a megacorp. But do you feel like a effective cog in
a machine that's doing something important? If you don't like being such a
relatively small fish, you might want to go back to a smaller company. If you
don't feel like you're making a meaningful contribution, even accounting for
the necessary overhead, or you don't like what you're contributing to,
consider another job in a different or different part of a megacorp.

~~~
danjac
> Meetings on product design, meetings to coordinate development, meetings to
> talk about how many meetings we have, a month spent writing perf reviews,
> launch processes that require buy in from three different PAs to change the
> color of a widget.

This starts to happen to small and medium sized companies once they start
hiring from the megacorps.

~~~
saalweachter
Yeah, the worst thing of all is when you have a _small_ company that doesn't
actually need that much coordination overhead aping it from the larger
companies. Spending 2 hours a day in meetings and complicated performance
calibration processes is an unfortunate necessity of working with a few
thousand other people; you eat the cost because it's the only way to actually
get thousands of person-years of useful work done each year.

But if you're a 10-100 person company and most people are spending 25-50% of
their workday on coordination and process, you're probably paying the same
cost for no actual gain.

~~~
danjac
Tinfoil hat opinion: maybe FAANGs and other megacorps are happy to lose a few
managers to these small companies, so they bring their big corp culture to
these companies and bury them with process, risk aversion and meetings before
they become a serious competitor?

------
yumraj
You have two options based on what you're describing:

1) if you're in CA, with liberal moonlighting laws, start working on something
of your own, save money, and launch what you're working on for side income or
full-time entrepreneurship. Of course, if that excites you.

2) Change job

There is a 3rd option, you can move within the company to a different team,
but that may or may not be better than your current situation - but it's worth
trying..

~~~
ryandrake
> 1) if you're in CA, with liberal moonlighting laws, start working on
> something of your own, save money, and launch what you're working on for
> side income or full-time entrepreneurship. Of course, if that excites you.

Be careful with this. All FAANG companies and many more include broad IP-
assignment clauses in their employment agreements that allow them to claim any
IP you make with or without company equipment, at home or at work. While CA
law is generally favorable to moonlighting, there is an exception for any work
that is similar to work your employer does or may do. For FAANG companies,
that could be everything, so they have wide latitude to claim your IP. Just my
personal experience: All employers I've ever worked for in CA have been very
clear right up front: They will own any of my side projects so just don't do
it. This is the opinion of a non-lawyer so take it for what it's worth.

~~~
yumraj
I'm glad you said that, since my comment above was not meant to be a legal
advice either and everyone needs to do their own due dilligence.

Having said that, in the past a CA company had asked me to sign a non-compete.
Interestingly I was joining with a bunch of people and one person knew about
how non-compete's are illegal in CA and forced them to change it. If it had
not been for him I would have signed it with the non-compete in place. But, it
still would not have been enforceable. However, whether or not they would have
gone to court and whether I would have been able to fight them is a whole
different thing.

IMNAL, but I think the same is true for moonlighting. Companies can have you
sign all kinds of shit, but whether or not it is legally enforceable is a
whole different thing, and whether or not you can fight it is yet another..

But, without a liberal moonlighting clause, and people working on side
projects before taking them mainstream, I doubt that CA's startup scene would
have been what it is today.

------
gfodor
I have limited experience in bigcos but in terms of raw development/shipping
speed by an individual dev my experience being in a small/startup like group
in a bigco:

\- average bigco team dev has speed X

\- startup like team in bigco dev is ~5X, given lack of bullshit (but still
some)

\- actual startup dev is ~10X, given marginal bullshit difference between them
and a fast bigco team

\- small founding team dev at ~20-30X, given lack of bullshit from non-trivial
company size

\- individual solo bootstrapper moves at ~50X, given lack of any inter-
personal communication/coordination needed (This is my current status, having
jumped from the second point to here in a single step, and it's insane.)

Now, this doesn't mean these velocity speeds translate linearly to net impact
on users. But there's some dynamic there worth understanding. It's also
interesting how leverage changes here. In the last bullet point, if I stop
working (and say, type an HN comment :)) dev velocity goes to zero. In the
first bullet, half the company could take a day off and dev velocity probably
would remain relatively unchanged.

------
tehlike
I can only compare g and fb. I can say fb moves a lot faster for a bunch of
reasons. Google infra is better, but most stuff is fairly slow because of
analysis paralysis, fear of doing mistakes and so on. Fb is more like let's
make mistakes and figure out how to fix them as we go.

The age also plays a factor, fb teams are much younger, people have much more
energy.

------
cc23
I worked at a large tech company, not a FAANG though, and experienced much of
the same as you. It took forever to get things done, and a large part of that
was due to the dev environment. There were numerous internal tools that were
not well documented. Etc.

I moved to working at start ups where the code is open source. Start ups move
faster, and it's easier to use open source tools than internal/proprietary
tools. At the large tech company, we couldn't use anything past C++03 (this
was in 2016), due to technical constraints. At my start up, we use the newest
C++ as soon as it comes out.

For what it's worth, the start up I work at now is fairly large and has a lot
of code running in production. So I get the reward of pushing to prod, but the
dev speed of a smaller company. Sure I take a pay hit, but I still make more
than enough money, and I get to work on cool stuff.

------
curiousDog
And FWIW, Amazon isn’t a typical prestigious company. FNG are different
compared to it.

~~~
scarface74
Who cares about “prestige” when working? Since when did HN become
r/cscareerquestions?

------
MR4D
@faang0722 - So, I've never worked for a FAANG, but I have some comments:

First, step up your game. If you are the best on the team without even trying,
and doing so little work, then _you don 't understand why they hired you_.

Specifically, you are acting like an individual, when you should be leading
the team (leading, not managing).

What you should be doing is taking your team to the next level.

Working to make them better developers.

Working to make the team more efficient.

Working to make the _codebase_ better (as opposed to just improving the app).

Working to improve the toolchain.

Working to make the development pace faster without ruining quality.

Etc.

Many more things, but I'll keep it to that list - I think you get the gist of
my comment.

Small changes at huge scale have huge impacts. Think of car designers who work
hard to eek out 1 more MPG from a car (and them multiply that by a million
cars).

Discipline and many small deliberate actions got us to the moon - it can get
you where you should be.

------
malechimp
If what gets assigned to you seems so easy and quick to do, what exactly is
holding you back from doing extra in your extra time? I'm sure that if you
look around you'll find a dozen ways to add value to your company. E.g. the
review process takes too long? Why is that? How can you optimize the
bottleneck if any? Maybe write a new tool or propose a new process.

Maybe I'm naive but I would think that quitting a fine job in this economy
just because you are asked too little off it...well it just seems plain wrong
on every level I can think of.

Then again if you are so unhappy then there is really one constitutional
obligation (I guess you're in US) and you have to try to honor it. Move away
and try to be happy elsewhere.

------
KaiserPro
Not all of FAANG is like that. I suspect not all of your company is like that.

However, what is always slower is the pace of development.

For example: I was at a small startup as the lead Devop. I was working about
85% capacity on average. Since takeover, that has dropped to about 15%. If I
was a dev, I suspect the dip wouldn't be so pronounced, as there is still lots
of work to do porting code.

But: the documentation is shit. So very shit. Some of the tools are good. SOme
of them are pretty shit. Everything is re-invented from the outside, even when
it doesn't need to be.

There are way more fun jobs out there, but at the moment I'm not walking away
from the mountain of cash and security that comes with being in a boring role.

------
es7
Try transferring to a new team?

If you were on my team then low productivity would not fly. I see many teams
at my FAANG company and all of them have very high expectations. The companies
are big enough though that there are occasionally teams that don't hold up.

------
angarg12
> If I get asked about why it takes long to make a simple change I can point
> to the environment and shrug my shoulders.

I challenge you to stop thinking about FANG and focus on yourself instead.

Have you brought this up to your manager? Have you tried to make things
better? If things are as bad and you are as good as you think, it seems you
got a great opportunity to have impact. You could improve things and slowly
turn your team into a high performing one.

If you haven't, try this: gather data points on why everything is terrible,
come up with proposals for improvements, write a 1 or 2 pager and run it
through your manager/other stakeholders. Get buy in and then start working on
it.

~~~
strgcmc
The OP's fundamental frustration (I think, oversimplifying) is that they feel
no incentive or no motivation to "do better" or take on the kind of things you
suggest. They do not believe it will be rewarding to them, and so what's the
point? So, I don't think it's a problem of, they never considered these
options before... it's more just, why bother?

Few observations for the OP:

\- These are potentially signs of depression in general, that nothing seems
worthwhile and you don't want to engage with any activities. Are things
outside of work still engaging? Do you put your energy into other hobbies? Or
does everything feel tinged with this same flavor of generalized discontent
and oh-whats-the-point?

\- Setting aside depression as a factor (which OP should seek diagnosis +
treatment for, if relevant), in general this is also a self-fulfilling
prophecy. By believing that your work has no meaning, that just being barely-
better than the rest of the slow/lazy team is good enough, OP will make this
into their reality. So in a sense, it's not an objective observation about
FANG work-life, and more of a subjective decision to shape OP's reality into
this mode.

\- OP could be doing better work as you suggest (notice I said better, not
more), improving their tech skills, adding impactful examples to their
portfolio/resume, empowering their future career, but they're choosing not to.
It's not as if the manager has actually blocked OP from learning or working on
interesting things. And even if the team is a strategically unimportant team
with no long-term career prospects, OP would still be hurting their career by
not actually using this time more effectively, to add to their own portfolio
of work or body of knowledge... So what if they won't get recognized or
promoted for it on their current team, OP will still need to have something to
talk about in future interviews or future promotion cycles on other teams. If
someone asks OP, "what did you work on from 2019-2020, what significant value
did you deliver, what did you learn, what skills did you gain?", what's OP's
answer going to be?

\- Speaking of promotions... it may feel to the OP that "coasting" along is
going okay for now (i.e. no complaints from the manager), but I doubt they are
at a career stage that they can really "coast" infinitely/indefinitely. In 2-3
years (or maybe sooner), someone will ask, "hey what has this person really
done, that's meaningful or impactful? how critical are they to the team? feels
like they're just coasting, right?". Even if OP isn't PIP'ed, they would still
be extremely unlikely to earn any promotions, simply because, what is there to
justify it? What next-level work have they done, if all they are doing is
coasting? So, this is a fleeting/temporary situation, that OP is fooling
themselves into thinking coasting like this is sustainable (because short-
term, it is).

------
pbhowmic
I contract for banks. I can’t speak to what your experience has been in at
this FAANG but things at banks can be really slow because the environment is
very controlled. Lots of documentation. Every deployment change assumes the
change will break the application so things need to be rolled back at a
moment’s notice. Hence the extensive docs and I consider that a good thing. It
requires discipline that helps in the long run. Bad part is the number of L4
tickets generated not because we necessarily encounter L4 problems but there
is dire need for L1-L3 staffing and tickets just automatically become L4 after
being unattended for a while.

------
sumanthvepa
Nor surprising at all. It took me 9 months to get a 3 line code change into
production once at Amazon. This was more than 20 years ago. It was not the
only thing I was doing those 9 months though. But these periods were
interspersed with nightmarish forced marches lasting six months or more. There
was one instance when I spent 7 straight days in the office, 28 hours of which
were in a continuous coding session. (VERY BAD IDEA btw) So, both things
happen. It's corporate life. Just make sure you get enough of both kinds of
experiences or you will either burn out or get bored and leave.

------
psim1
This makes me sad because I'm sure I am doing about ten times as much work as
you of a similar nature and getting paid one half of what you are. And there
is not much either of us can do about it.

------
cbanek
> how can I do good work and get paid preportionally?

Step 1: Decouple these two ideas. Getting paid a lot of money has nothing to
do with good work, and visa versa. There are plenty of people who get paid a
lot to do nothing, or sometimes even less than nothing, as you have
discovered.

Step 2: Please let me know when you figure this one out. I, too, am flummoxed.
I have given up and gone into non-profits where I just focus on the "doing
good work."

~~~
temikus
You could try working for yourself - it doesn’t necessarily needs to be a new
product/business, it can be consulting or algorithmic day trading.

------
codegladiator
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455415)

~~~
rckoepke
Additionally:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961560)

"Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?"

------
baccheion
Sounds like Google 2010. You'll never receive a promotion. Have you been
through a performance cycle to see what you're rated?

I was in the same position many years ago, but they used the lack of output to
try sabotaging.

Money is all that measures these jobs. Even if able to do something at a
startup, the company/product will likely be shuttered within a short period of
time. That is, there'll never really be an opportunity for it to shine or be
used. You could've just done that at home. Further, the shuttered company
lives on as a technicality to still own everything you did with them.

If able to also work stable/normal hours and only 5 days/week, that is another
positive step. I spent hours day on night working on that nothing. Set hours
leaves time outside of work. Waste not, eh?

Definitely save. At least 50% of take-home salary. To a high-yield investment
account, even if just buying into the S&P 500. Avoid debt. Always pay cash,
even for a house.

You may have problems finding another job with nothing to represent your time.
On the other hand, supply and demand. Beggars and choosers. More importantly,
most just lie on their resume anyway.

------
imvetri
Get their money, fill your pockets.

Use their time, start your hobby projects.

Don't forget to have fun.

Fun is skipping the classes.

------
dbish
My personal advice as an engineering manager at Amazon FWIW, is that sometimes
teams do have issues with productivity for various reasons. If it is the team
(and not specifically you), I would work to find a new team. I'd also caution
against coasting/slacking like this. You may think everyone is ok with your
pace of output, and you might just have a manager who is either bad at telling
you quickly when they see an issue, or giving you some slack as you ramp up.
When it comes time for promo and performance reviews, you may not be in the
position you thought you were. A good manager would be providing this feedback
proactively, but that is not always the case. You can also be proactive about
this and discuss with your manager and team that the development cycle is too
long (maybe gather data across your team) and find ways to improve it. Being
part of a team is helping to give feedback on issues you see as well and
working together to make progress against them. If your manager and team
aren't open to that, then move on of course.

------
user5994461
What is slow? Days, weeks, months?

It's perfectly normal to take day to makes changes in a company. Going through
tests, build, code reviews and staging over multiple environments.

This can easily scale into weeks if there are challenges like opening
firewalls or access permissions.

It's the normal pace of development in large companies. Unlike in startups
where developers could push the application straight to prod over ssh any
minute.

------
ulfw
A lot of jobs at FAANG companies are there pursely so you're not working on
competing with said FAANG company at a startup/other company.

------
codingdave
> how can I do good work and get paid preportionally?

That is really the crux of the matter - "good work" can have many definitions,
so I'd first make sure that any FAANG you work for matches your personal
values. Do the coders at <SomeFAANG> truly believe in its mission? Do you? If
so, putting up with the corporate world is easier. But if your values don't
match the company's direction, then you are just in it for the money. And with
enough money, that can be OK.

Finding a job that pays amazingly well while also working smoothly and
matching your values.... that is tricky to find. So you need to start thinking
of which of those levers you are OK with changing. Does more money make it OK
to be less efficient? Or would you prefer less money for a smaller company
that doesn't have the same scaling problems internally?

So to answer whether all of FAANG is like this, both yes and no will be true
answers. Every company has its own unique dysfunctions - but they do all have
them. It is up to you to figure out which corporate dysfunctions are
acceptable.

------
davewritescode
The best places to work aren't necessarily FAANG companies. A good smaller
company working at a breakneck pace is often times a lot more engaging. The
pay is never going to be as good but work satisfaction can be a lot higher.

What you're describing can be fairly typical at larger companies FAANG or non
FAANG.

However, sometimes a big enough project with enough priority comes along where
an exec gives you the ability to bypass a lot of red tape. These types of
projects are exactly the kind of thing you want to find yourself on and
they've given me immense satisfaction.

You may also look to expand your role by fixing/improving things without being
asked. I find it hard to believe that you can complete everything that needs
to be done on your project by only working one day a week.

I will tell you as someone who oversees a team of engineers, the ones who see
the vision and understand why we do things and can get ahead of future issues
are way more valuable than people who pick off stories off a board.

------
koala_man
I've been on three projects at two such companies over the past eight years. I
don't recognize this at all.

I've heard rumors but wow

------
burlesona
That sounds comically bad, and doesn’t match my experience in big tech.

------
jhatemyjob
> a waste of my time on earth

Uhh.... what? As you say you're only on the computer 1 day a week. So go do
something else. Go fishing, spend time with your family/friends, take up a
hobby. Life isn't just work. Sheesh.

If you want to "do good work and get paid preportionally" then start your own
company. Tech jobs aren't a meritocracy.

------
cbg0
I don't think this is necessarily related to working at a FAANG company, but
most likely related to working in a large corporation, which has multiple
layers of management to slow things down. If you like moving fast and having
project ownership, working at a small company/startup is a better idea.

------
Maro
I worked at FB London in 2016-2017, on the Workplace team. It was not like the
OP describes. It was great, everybody was super smart and hard working,
velocity was significantly higher than any other job I had (incl. my own
startup). I easily learned the most at FB in my career (I was ~35 then). I
always recommend everybody to apply/interview at FB/G because it's such a
great oppty to see a "spaceship" from inside, set your own expectations wrt
velocity and impact going forward, and just learn a lot. I'm still playing by
the "FB playbook" today.

I left bc I didn't like London, I didn't like the DE role, and I can make a
lot more money in Dubai (higher comp, no taxes, low cost of living, high
conveniance and luxury).

------
catsarebetter
This is difficult to answer not only b/c of all the other variables listed
below: context of team, the department, your team, manager, the company you're
at, maybe the time we're going thru right now is changing your experience,
etc. -- but also consider that this might be more frustrating to you than
other people. You could just be the type of person that hates working in a big
company FAANG environment and prefer something else and you're just now
discovering it. Talk to everyone you know and be honest about how you feel and
see how they respond. The ones that really enjoy working at a big company, the
careerists will brush you off b/c they don't understand, if they relate then
you know that's just how it is.

------
dehrmann
> I am working a full 8 hours, only a few very small changes get done

General observation: the large the company, the slower it is to make changes
because of a larger codebase, legacy concerns, more complex interactions with
the rest of the system, handling scale, and more stakeholders.

------
holiveros
Hard to tell, I would guess most large well-established companies have
situations / teams like this.

I work for a large videogame company, things are more or less the same, except
we have two clear modes of operation among teams: * "production" (gameteams
themselves), work in frantic mode all the time (crunch time being very common)
* all other teams, work in glacial mode, technical debt is pretty high, same
as your situation

When I started, it was my dream job. Years later...

Quite difficult to find a dream job and maintain that state of mind for long.

I would suggest you speak to your manager(s) and find / create some new
projects, be creative and proactive.

Or, your current job may not really make you happy and you'll need to find
something else to do.

------
jb3689
Are you on a product team? What level of experience do you have?

I joined a unicorn recently and have felt similar feelings, however I am on an
infrastructure team and there is tons of work to do so it's relatively easy to
not stay blocked (if we are blocked it's usually our fault). That said, we end
up blocking a lot of teams (lack of resources, lack of tooling, things just
take a long time). I find the architecture pretty standard so it's easy to
navigate around though

> only a few very small changes get done

I can echo that. I've tried to make bigger/more changes but the team can't
keep up with them and they introduce too much risk. A lot of my day-to-day
winds up being balancing risk, change, and upside. The work is a lot more
deliberate which is good for big changes and bad for small ones

> I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during the the week

To be clear, I would not recommend doing this. I strongly prefer to work hard
and then find a place where people work as hard as you. Complacency is the
worst (for me)

> it's possible the rest of the team is doing that too, but I have no way of
> knowing

It's a bit unsettling that the team doesn't talk about things like this

> when I look back at the progress made since I joined and estimate the cost
> to the company (salary, servers, etc) it's frankly disgusting

How much value have you added though? At my company we have multiple simple
fixes that save multiple millions of dollars annually. It's pretty easy to
justify cost at scale. Maybe you need to examine the value you're providing
further?

> I find it unsatisfying and like a waste of my time on earth

This says "it's time to move on" to me. I would go to a smaller company
personally or move to a different function (e.g. infrastructure). I sympathize
with your comments about dev speed - that's a huge one for me. It sucks to be
bottlenecked by development process rather than bottlenecked by something more
in your control

------
peterwwillis
Don't think about whether this is normal. Just ask yourself what you would
like to be doing instead. Can you do that while barely doing any work at FAANG
and collecting a paycheck? Or would you need to change jobs? I would
personally wait until the recession has hit bottom before changing jobs. But
then again you could get hit by a truck tomorrow.

I can tell you that lots of huge companies have this, but not consistently.
Some teams move fast while some move glacially. Greenfield work can move the
fastest, unless you get stuck waiting on someone to build environments.

Definitely don't stay there too long if you're unhappy. Worst case you try
something new and it stinks, in which case you try again.

------
sails
I wonder if you are at risk of doxxing yourself with some peculiar typos and
grammar mistakes.

------
dekhn
if you have a job that you can do in 1 day a week, and your employer is happy,
why complain (other than the fact many people derive satisfaction from
achieving things)?

It sounds like a great deal to me- in the past, I certainly would have felt
personally guilty, but at this point, I understand the value I provide to my
employer and how much work is required to achieve it.

A lot of my time is spent paying down technical debt that other eng have
introduced, so we can get back to reasonable velocity. In the past, my company
didn't really see that as valuable, but I articulated it in terms of potential
revenue gained and they immediately let me get back to what I knew was the
right thing to work on.

------
schreiaj
I’ve worked at a non profit, an early stage startup, a more established
startup, and now a FAANG. My experience at the FAANG is opposite yours - I
feel I should be working more and faster.

At the non profit I had times when I’d get that feeling for a few weeks as I
was ramping up on something but largely ended up feeling like each day was the
same.

The startups were a little different but at least at the last one the hard
part about my job wasn’t writing code it was doing my best to make sure what
we built was maintainable.

Now at the FAANG I feel like I’m learning a lot of new things and working with
people who care about building good software.

So no. It’s not like that everywhere.

------
jorblumesea
Getting into a FAANG has a high bar, but it is often artificially created and
not based on the actual work done. It depends on team/scope/specialization but
there are many people at FAANG just digital janitors.

------
cwoolfe
You'd probably be happier on another team or a smaller company. If you want to
do good work and get paid proportionally, start a company, or join a startup
offering equity. Equity somewhat measures the market value of what you
actually produce. Whatever you do, don't start coasting. Keep learning and
improving and don't settle for less. "In all toil there is profit; but mere
talk only leads to poverty." Eventually your contributions will be shown for
what they are, whether valuable or not. But that will take time. Do good work.
Even when nobody is watching.

------
gregkerzhner
I think in general there is a negative relationship between money and
interesting work. There are definitely outliers, but you have to get lucky (or
unlucky).

At one end of the spectrum, you can come up with a great idea and spend day
and night working on it as a solo founder. Your wage might be 0, but the work
will be as interesting as can possibly be since you are the only one deciding
what you are working on.

At the other end of this, you can imagine a hypothetical position where for
$5,000,0000/year, you would do anything you are asked no matter how boring.

Where you exist on this scale is up to you.

------
maerF0x0
> The dev tools, docs and tech debt impart such a slow iteration speed that
> even when I am working a full 8 hours, only a few very small changes get
> done, yet somehow this is even more than most of the rest of my team can
> muster during an entire week.

It took some discipline but I've started to spend any painful wait times to
either do additional work (other repo, next commit, other branch, etc). Or to
work on performance of the system that is slow (parallelizing tasks, bulk
insertion of test fixtures, cached results so we only rerun invalidated
portions etc)_

------
mnm1
Why not work on your own project three days of the week and take the 5th one
off (or work on it 4 days)? You're making serious money for a super easy job.
You'd have to be insane to quit, especially if you're working from home.
There's no reason why you can't work another job and do whatever you want
there, use whatever technology, and develop whatever pleases you. Or pick up a
hobby during the day. Or learn some new tech just for fun. Or any number of
things. Why should your job be the primary source of satisfaction?

------
unexaminedlife
I see the productivity decrease in large corps as a part of the organization's
risk management. If you've ever been brought into a project in an emergency
capacity because the "lead" developer bailed (typically due to burn out)
you'll know what I'm talking about.

ALSO, in case this is in fact a thread about Amazon (which some appear to
believe) maybe part of it has to do with the news we sometimes see posted
about how "work conditions" are terrible at Amazon? I couldn't blame them for
a response, if this is it?

------
raldi
Have you taken a Myers-Briggs test? I'm guessing you're a strong P and you
feel alienated because you're surrounded by J's.

The cure is to join a startup, or find one of the P teams at the big company.

------
kanobo
"I am not happy" \- Yes you should quit. Keep in mind this year has been
incredibly unusual in terms of productivity.

All the issues you describe are opportunities to have huge impact on a global
scale if you decide to solve any of them. But if you truly are disgusted by
the state your company then that's not your path. I think you would likely
thrive if you set your own path and work in an environment you built. You
might need to quit once your creation becomes too successful though to avoid
this problem again.

~~~
xiphias2
There are literally thousands of teams in more than 50 cities in the world he
can easily move to. Quitting so fast without evaluating his options would be a
stupid decision.

~~~
kanobo
The costs of doing business at that scale disgusts the engineer, that's not
going to be different in another city. This engineer is likely intelligent and
has been at the company for a year so I have no doubt he has considered other
opportunities within this company so yes I do think he should quit as soon as
he has a plan. Many people in this thread think the asker is somehow
unintelligent and a slacker. I'm answering assuming this eng is smart and
eager to work but has internal turmoil.

~~~
xiphias2
I was at a FAANG company as well (Google, with extremely slow dev tool
velocity), and I don't think he isn't intelligent. But there are workarounds
of the official dev process.

I liked working on parts of search quality for example (or any data mining
project), where most of the time (and the way to promotion) is spent on
research, not software development. It means that 90% of the code we write
don't have to be committed (code reviewed, tested, documented, going through
the approval process), just the code that goes to production. The smartest
colleague of mine spent a lot of time figuring out the root cause of
data/search quality issues, and made the smallest possible change in the
system to get his change through. It's an art in itself, and can make a lot of
impact and lots of money to the company as well.

------
fapi1974
I find that big companies are like the world - good and bad. I can guarantee
that somewhere in your FAANG is a fascinating, demanding project led by a
charismatic boss with a high bar for achievement. People are likely to know
what the project is and who is leading it. Go there! Believe me, if you are
deliberate about it you can be on that project within 3-6 months, hitching
your career to that leader, who, I also guarantee, is going places you also
want to go.

------
joubert
"Is all of FAANG like this?" No.

And even within a particular company, especially very large ones, there's
probably variability across orgs.

From your description, it sounds like a couple of things missing, such as:

\- candor (does nobody speak up about this?)

\- open communication ("of course, it's possible the rest of the team is doing
that too, but I have no way of knowing").

May I recommend that you bring up this topic with your team? If you are
thinking this, chances are others on the team experience the same.

------
sjg007
Enjoy the job while it lasts. Keep learning. Do good work, document it.
Network, network, network. Ask for more work. Help others.

That can be harder than you think at first but remember that nothing stays the
same forever. Change is inevitable.

In the end, this is why some people leave and start or join startups. Maybe a
new opportunity will present itself because of the people you met and worked
with while at your FAANG and they will invite you to join them (or vice
versa).

------
tecnogram888
1\. There's more to the job than coding. If you think that's all there is, you
have much to learn.

2\. "only a few very small changes get done,"

To me, you can learn to make large changes. Your skill level determines how
many changes you get done. You can work harder to get more done.

3\. When you work harder, your skills grow, your compensation will grow. FAANG
is usually good at this. If they aren't, you can quit, but this takes at least
a year because promotions are lagging.

------
honkycat
Is every job like this? No. Are a TON of jobs like this? Absolutely.

I was in a job exactly like this last year, and I quit. I regret it. I miss
the money and it was good for my resume.

------
eternalban
Gradually improving a long standing codebase subject to stringent production
SLAs is actually quite an accomplishment.

You are not looking at the bigger picture and your dismissing the development
regime as incompetent reflects your lack of experience.

Would you accept a LOC standard as a measure of 'competence'? How about this:
_significant continual development of running distributed system with xxx bugs
per xxx commits with minimal surprises, as base expectation_.

------
api
I've long speculated that FAANG companies over-hire, over-recruit, and over-
pay as a way of sucking all the talent off the market to reduce the talent
pool for rivals. They certainly have the cash to do this, and top engineering
talent is rare enough that it could work.

The shift to 100% virtual tele-work could be a countermeasure, since under-
recognized and under-utilized talent exists all over the world.

------
doonesbury
Welcome to corporate work! There are many factors that heavily if not swamp
the technical aspects of the work. If you're not happy you have to make some
noise with your boss, transfer, or quit. You're gonna have to take action.
Human organizations are too complex to succumb to easy generalizations like
all faang companies are like this ... That's no help to you or anyone else.

------
jameslk
If you're bored, why not just climb the ladder? Isn't that the logical
conclusion of working for any large company? Not that working harder will
correspond to promotions, but rather the higher you climb the harder you'll
have to work. So if you want more things to do, make more "impact" (i.e. play
the political game). Otherwise rest and vest like your colleagues.

------
lifeformed
Side question: Why is Netflix in FAANG? When people talk about the "Big 5"
companies they have Microsoft, not Netflix, in there.

~~~
aspenmayer
Jim Cramer of Mad Money fame coined it in 2013 to refer to tech companies that
were dominant in the markets. I can’t speak to the veracity of his market
claims, but he is considered the first to use this exact acronym; its worth
noting that his original usage of the acronym FANG did not include Apple at
that time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech)

------
perlgeek
I cannot answer your question, but I have an idea for you: Before quitting,
maybe try to get transferred to a different team and project?

Maybe you just had bad luck with your team allocation.

That said, if it's the same in all other teams, I'd totally quit as well; not
having a sense of progress is devastating in the long term. (And made me quit
science, btw).

------
ksaj
I thought this was similar for all large enterprises. A bank I used to work
for referred to it as silos, because anything you wanted to do required
climbing your silo, crossing through a bunch of intermediate silo heads, down
the targeted silo, then back again. Repeatedly, until you either finish or
give up.

------
Aeolun
This sounds more or less familiar to me. Except that everyone is working their
ass off and still nothing gets done.

------
Vadoff
If the dev tools, docs and tech debt are bad and slow the entire team down,
then why not take it as an opportunity to improve them?

At FAANG doing things that have a multiplicative effect across the
team/several teams/entire org/entire company are rewarded extremely well and a
rapid way to advance your career.

~~~
throwawayfaang2
Not at Amazon because you can't write some silly "customer-centric" pseudo-
press-release to justify your effort, so nobody wants to be stuck paying the
salaries of teams working on tools. That is why their tooling is always
bankrupt.

They would all rather spend money hiring another useless Principal Engineer
instead, who will walk around doing nothing but networking with the cabal of
useless Principal Engineers.

For a real FANG, yes, that is the case. Working on tooling is insta-impact.

------
hartator
> I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during the the week
> [...] don't feel what I'm doing is ethnically wrong, because the company is
> evidently pleased

Well, it is ethically wrong. If it was not, you weren't trying to mislead the
rest of the team by artificially spreading out your work.

~~~
ghaff
I guess you're arguing that you have an ethical obligation to always be
working at full speed for your employer, i.e. sandbagging is an ethical
failure. I can't agree with that and I'd argue that in at least some
situations padding deadlines is the only sensible thing to do. But I suspect
we won't convince each other.

------
j45
I'm not sure if it's the world's responsibility to entertain or engage you.

By cultivate becoming a naturally a curious, resourceful person on your own,
you demonstrate the self-directed effort to learn to solve problems that are
small will lead to bigger ones that are interesting and engaging.

------
qqj
Yea, big corp sucks. Few more points:

\- Your performance does not correlate with your compensation, not to mention
that there are huge disparities between competency levels. You have people who
don’t know how to use git getting the same paycheck as 10 yr vets that could
reimplement git in a single day. You have executives getting outrageous equity
plans and salaries for running entire product lines into the ground before
going on to the next company for even bigger paychecks. Welcome to capitalism,
lol.

\- There is tremendous waste in these organizations because humans haven’t yet
figured out how to scale them properly while retaining individuality (i.e.
it’s easy to create an organization comprised of 1,000 robots that do exactly
what they are told). There is simply too much politics going around, too many
conflicting interests and “market forces”. And so processes are invented and
have to be followed, entire departments need to get involved in code reviews,
design meetings and so on and on. It’s pretty depressing tbh.

\- Don’t listen to people telling you your job should be your job. Work drains
you mentally and precludes you from doing stuff you’d otherwise do. Don’t
accept the moronic (sorry, stoic?) concept of “well, you have to pay the
bills!”. These people trade more than half of their lives “just to pay the
bills” and have an occasional vacation. It’s beyond depressing. Your job
_should_ be your passion, and the major provider of meaning in your life.
Getting a hobby will not compensate for selling your soul.

------
anonu
It's not just all FAANG. It's any big corporation. The corporations that do
well are able to navigate this big management stuff and move slightly faster.
I'm reminded of this saying which I believe to be true especially in the big
corporation: faster alone, further together

------
todd3834
> I don't feel what I'm doing is ethnically wrong, because the company is
> evidently pleased with my current productivity

I would challenge that perspective. It sounds very much like an ethical
conflict to me. Does your contract say anything about the hours you are
expected to be working?

------
TomVDB
I don’t work for a FAANG, but a SV tech company that’s still pretty big: I
find myself surrounded by productive, driven, competent engineers who are all
working a breakneck speed when it’s necessary, and taking it a bit easier when
it’s not. It’s very satisfying too.

So, no, it’s not all like that.

------
khazhoux
This thread is seriously in need of some tough love.

@faang0722, you're being a slacker, and not doing right by either your company
or yourself.

You're at one of the top companies in the world, and are safe from the jobs
disaster that's gripping the entire country. Millions of people are desperate
to receive $600-1600 from the government this month because they are unable to
work. Millions are putting on shitty facemasks and still showing up to work at
grocery stores and warehouses and wherever, risking disease because they have
no other choice. Meanwhile you can't be bothered to work at home on your
laptop more than one day a week, because the build system and tech debt makes
you sad?

You say the company is evidently pleased with your work and that may be true,
but now you're part of the problem. You think the company tolerates shitty
work, so you've decided to tolerate shitty work. Don't.

Since you don't think what you're doing is ethically wrong, have you told your
manager that the work assigned to you is so simple that you only actually work
one day a week? Of course not.

So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see
if it suits you better... or else accept that you're being a freeloader and
pretending to do more work than you really are.

~~~
smattiso
Don't listen to this guy. You don't have to change your own identity and your
own personal compass to fit your company. You also don't have to succumb to
the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given. This
life has a billion paths you can take. Understand the tradeoffs and make a
calculated decision but follow your own path. Granted you may end up homeless.
But from experience there are way more people slogging it out at work doing
the 9-5 putting in the bare minimum than people who find a passion and go for
it. If your passion is basket weaving you are probably screwed but given that
you are an engineer there are a million problems that need to be solved. Find
one, might even be within your own company.

~~~
SaltyBackendGuy
> You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take
> whatever crap job is given

Just opinion so feel free to downvote to oblivion.

It's hard for me personally to rationalize their position as a 'crap job' (as
I have had really crappy jobs in my life - see US Army). Maybe op's take is a
little brash, however, there's some perspective to be drawn from the comment.
Agree with your sentiment though.. If you don't like it do something about it.

~~~
smattiso
I think 'crap job' can be multifaceted. For instance take someone making a
million a year at a hedge fund with a strategy of frontrunning public pension
fund trades. To some that is a dream job, to others that is a waste of life.
It depends on the individual. Some hate the Army, and some sign up to do 4
tours. You have to find your own purpose and your own way of staying
motivated.

~~~
Loughla
>To some that is a dream job, to others that is a waste of life.

This is what a lot of people forget - your experience isn't everyone's
experience, and your perspective is just that - your perspective.

Just because OP has a job that you would consider a dream, his opinion isn't
invalid.

For an example: I went to college to escape a farming life. Now all of my
young, relatively wealthy friends tell me how lucky I was to grow up on a farm
and live a simple life. They talk about how they want that simple life. And
they're confused when I respond with something to the effect of: bitches,
farming isn't simple. It's hard work for really, really, really low margins.
There's a reason I went to college, and that was to get away from that mess.

------
nogbit
Smaller firms will have more greenfield opportunities that allow you to move
at a much faster pace. Larger enterprises (FAANG or not) will have software
that "works", and to make changes to it requires more consideration across the
board.

------
deanclatworthy
I have no experience working for a FAANG company but I can tell you technical
debt is everywhere. As soon as you write a line of code, doesn't matter how
good it is at the time - it will eventually turn into debt and need
maintaining.

------
sharadov
Work the other 5 days on a side project - open source, personal project,
satisfy your passion there. Or, leave and work for a startup. You will have
plenty of problems to solve, but no stability.

------
cmrdporcupine
Almost 9 years in one and been on several teams, and yes, this is kind of how
they are. But you might be interpreting things wrongly. Here's how I look at
it.

Firstly, you're measuring pace compared to companies that are struggling to
survive, while these companies are not.

Secondly, the benefit to these companies of hiring boatloads of staff (89.9%
of staff are newer than me and there are about 5 times the number of people
now than when I started) is not really to get a lot of stuff done and done
quickly; but instead the following:

1) More eyes on a problem means potentially less defects, even if it slows
things down. Especially with giant systems like search or ads or huge social
media sites a small change not well considered and done quickly could cause
serious problems. Your job at this company is truly more like an engineer than
a developer. You're not there to "develop", but to slowly and carefully
engineer.

2) It's like firing a shotgun, something is bound to hit the target. You hire
80,000, 100,000 etc. engineers and one of them is bound to produce something
genius. At least that's the theory.

3) The more brilliant well-paid developers you have internally the fewer are
out in the market doing work for competitors. (Or worse, creating new
competitors)

Having been through an acquisition and then seen others, I feel like #3 is
most important to understand management behaviour. They simply cannot afford
to have the market disrupted. Luckily for them most of our industry churns on
this process: a) Get VC, b) Make something 'disruptive' c) Get acquired by the
people you're disrupting d) Rest & vest.

While here I've seen some of the most brilliant engineersing and cleanest
nicest code. But all done for rather banal and slowly implemented tasks.

... Also the process has surprised me, I've been on projects that felt like
ridiculously slow and mismanaged progress was what was going on and then 6
months later and not really delayed there was this shiny beautiful product
sitting on a store shelf with code in it that I worked on (a very small
amount), and I honestly couldn't figure out how it got there because the whole
process seemed so broken to me. And yet there it was, and it was good.

So for advice, what I'd say is this: if you're young and in the early stages
of your career still then spend 4-5 years, dig yourself into it, learn what
you can, and then _move on_. If you're older, like me, well, you could find
your niche and milk it until you can retire. [Not sure I'll last that long
myself, tho, I'm looking for something new now]

Honestly, you are surrounded by really smart people, there is a bottomless
amount of knowledge you could absorb in companies like this, even if the work
can seem unsatisfying.

EDIT: I should also mention that you should be careful about measuring
productivty right now -- during this COVID-19 situation -- compared to normal
times. Things are moving very slowly right now.

------
noisy_boy
Having had to deal with working at break-neck speed while balancing family
commitments, for what feels like forever, I'll take a nice big raise with low-
pressure environment in a heartbeat.

------
OliverJones
You have only one irreplaceable resource: your time. You care more about that
resource than any employer ever will. They pay for your time and figure that's
enough. (It's like that everywhere, not just at sili valley's wealthy
behemoths.)

So, use your time wisely.

If you finish your week's work by Tuesday midmorning, spend the rest of your
week doing something worth YOUR time. Treat this situation as an opportunity,
not a curse.

You could be learning something. You could be prototyping an improvement to
some aspect of your employer's software suite. You could be writing tutorials,
or even books, on how to do something interesting to you. (How do you think
all those O'Reilly books get written?) You might do a side hustle of some
kind. It's probably not doom-scrolling.

Before you start doing that, of course, double check that you're meeting your
job expectations, and that you're not stumbling into the Dunning-Kruger effect
in your job.

------
jacknews
Don't be the shrug-shoulders guy, try to do something about it.

------
unixhero
Don't leave, stay. Your current future opportunities might never come back to
you again. To have 3-5 years of experience from a faang will be extremely good
for your career.

~~~
temikus
Care to elaborate? Genuinely interested.

~~~
unixhero
Just any recruiter if they will echo my sentiment.

~~~
temikus
Thanks for editing and clarifying on the original comment, appreciate it!

------
icedchai
Have you considered just getting a second job? You can probably work your
FAANG job, then add another one on top. This will be pretty easy to pull off
since you're remote.

------
jasonpeacock
So, what have you done to fix these issues?

Why are you leaving instead of improving the team's throughput and work
environment?

What makes you think you won't encounter the same issues elsewhere?

------
maps7
It annoys me that I probably couldn't pass the FAANG interview but I would
definitely be better than most people on your team (and probably improve the
team)

------
ChadTheNomad
If you only work 1 day a week without them knowing it, you're basically
walking into the office and stealing 80% of your salary off of the CEO's desk.

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mesozoic
Yeah if you want speed go to a startup that is strugling to stay alive there
you move fast or die. At large ossified companies you move fast and you die.

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mring33621
Welcome to life at a BigCo! To a BigCo, change = risk; risk = bad. So, BigCos
develop 'internal immune systems' that slow the rate of change.

------
ksec
FAANG; Facebook , Amazon, Apple, Netflix, And Google.

We can pretty much rule out Apple and Netflix, which leaves you only with
Facebook, Amazon and Google.

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albatross
If you find yourself with significant free time but don't want to abandon the
comfort of your current role, start a side project.

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myst
It's all like this. Mostly because nobody feels excited about making rich
richer by improving the conversion rate on ads.

------
macca321
Are they happy with 8hr a day? I keep worrying that I'd have to put in 12 hr
shifts to keep up with the graduate hires.

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chasd00
this happens in large companies, not just FAANG. things slow way down since
there's a lot more gears turning. also, screw up bad enough and stockholders
notice. "well we're suppose to move fast and break things right? " isn't going
to get a pass like it would in a small company.

------
robot
I work at VMWare and I am pleasantly surprised it is not at all like that.
Join VMWare's core team ;)

------
the-dude
> I don't feel what I'm doing is ethnically wrong

Interesting typo considering the current climate.

------
peroporque
Why not move to another team for a while to learn what and how they are doing?

------
Gigablah
Answer: no.

Take a look at the work life of FAANG employees in their APAC and India
offices.

~~~
ramraj07
Any discussion on FAANG culture in India?

------
vernie
Milk it as long as you can.

------
notacoward
Betteridge's Law says no, and so do I. I work at one of these companies. The
raw productivity level of the people I work with is as high as at any of the
dozen other companies (mostly startups) I've worked at over 30 years. I've
been the guy who could get away with really working one day a week (but didn't
succumb to the temptation) and I honestly have trouble keeping up with some of
my peers now. To be sure, a lot of that "productivity" is bandaging self-
inflicted wounds, implementing features that everyone knows will be thrown
away within a year, and generally going around in circles. Despite that,
there's continual forward progress on par with anywhere else I've been. I've
worked with some real superstars in my time, and I've never worked with
_anyone_ who could put in 20% effort here without getting managed out the
door.

------
wayanon
What would happen if you discussed your concerns with your manager ?

------
vcool07
What's the second A in FAANG for ? Apple / Alphabet ?

~~~
Cactus2018
Apple

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAANG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAANG)

------
Balgair
Aside: A reminder to HN to re-read The Gervias Principle by Venkatesh Rao. It
is a deeply _cynical_ look at corporate structures, everyone is flayed and
ridiculed. But, there are many good lessons to be learned in it. Think of it
more as another pair of lenses with which to view the world.

> The Gervias Principle: Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly
> promote over-performing Losers into middle-management, groom under-
> performing Losers into Sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort
> Losers to fend for themselves. >

[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-
principle/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/)

------
gdsdfe
hmmm but one team is not representative of one company, I'm not sure why all
this debate on such obvious thing

------
shadowgovt
I only have experience at one FAANG (and the culture varies from one to the
next, so not knowing which one you're at, it's hard to say).

Couple of things about them that can differ from other firms:

1) The one I was at heavily rewarded self-motivation. If no work is getting
done, the work for the engineer to do is identify why that is and either
overcome the obstacle or build support and service tooling so that when the
obstacle is removed, the team is ready to hit the ground at full speed. Think
like water; if you hit a wall, don't freeze... flow around or over it, and
fill the space you occupy.

2) Software engineering at the FAANGs differs from other places (especially
startups) because, to be blunt, there are stakes. The only thing startups are
out if they fail is money. FAANGs make software relied upon by billions of
people, trade hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, and have sweeping
cultural (and in some cases physical) impact. I don't know what project you're
on, but some projects _cannot_ allow for error in software development; it
translates to lost dollars, lost goodwill, or possibly lost lives. I've never
seen practice at a FAANG that rises quite to the level of industrial /
physical infrastructure or aerospace engineering for quality control, but it
gets up there. To that end, the processes are wildly different from ones a
person may be accustom to at a smaller company, because there are systems in
place designed to minimize the risk of engineer error. Sometimes, that means
the engineer can't make progress until they learn enough to know why the
system is stopping them, and that is by design; it's how the company encodes
decades of hard-learned failure lessons into the process itself. It's more
taxing than a startup's process, but that's because startups tend to create,
in contrast, teetering edifices of fragility (consider Twitter's early years
when they unexpectedly got popular; Facebook, Google, and Amazon can't afford
to just have a service not work because of the failure mode "people actually
want to use it"). And sometimes, progress at FAANGs gets slowed because unlike
smaller companies, they have to consider whether what they're doing is _good
for society_ in some sense (either from a moral stance or, far more often, the
practical stance of "We need an internationally-scoped legal review on this
feature so we don't get sued out of a tenth of a quarter's worth of profits").

3) Some FAANGs are much better at software than management. They assume
individual engineers will know when things aren't going well for them and will
self-correct. To my mind, that's an error (not a lot of engineers I've met are
comfortable with emotional self-direction, and it's certainly not taught in
software engineering curricula), but it's what I've observed. It may be
helpful to talk over your concerns with a trusted coworker (ideally on another
team, to minimize the odds of any promotion jealousies creeping in) and see if
they experienced something similar and what they did about it. In my
experience, most engineers at the FAANGs went through a period of feeling like
this wasn't for them at some point.

4) There is _absolutely_ such a thing as a sucky dead-end project in FAANGs.
My first project was one. I didn't do anything like find my footing until I
got off of it. It eventually disintegrated under the weight of its own bad
engineering decisions, but I lacked the perspective at the time to realize I
was standing on a sinking ship. It was a ship that made an awful lot of money
though, so the company was extremely willing to throw careers at it to keep it
afloat, if the engineers doing the bailing were willing to hold the buckets.

All of that having been said... Even after I found projects that resonated
with me and I could make real contributions to, I left because I felt like my
career was stalling out working on projects at a glacial pace with mixed
chance of success, even knowing why we did it that way. If the work isn't
fulfilling, and if you can't see a clear path from the value of the product to
benefits for real people... Maybe it's not worth you're time.

------
grandmczeb
Let me explain. I was browsing Facebook on my phone at Philz one day and saw
Mark Zuckerberg come in wearing a suit (it was a Friday). I asked him "are
coding interviews good?". "No", he said, "they're very bad". I would have
asked him to explain, but he seemed to be engrossed in the last level of some
sort of Mario Bros game. I went back to my phone and clicked on an ad. Only I
never click on ads: it was all a dream. I woke up. "Is this still dream?" I
wondered. I spun my phone on my desk like the top from Inception. It fell off
and the screen shattered instantly.

~~~
maest
Is this GPT-3 output?

~~~
loh
I love (well, kinda...) that we're going to have to start asking this question
on a much more regular basis.

What will be really interesting is when it is actually a GPT-3 bot but no one
has any clue, conversing with it like it were anyone else.

~~~
diarrhea
I really enjoy /r/SubredditSimulator, but also _because_ it is bad. Hopefully
it doesn't get too realistic.

------
schoolornot
Non-stop VC funding and explosive growth usually lead to this. Eventually your
managers aspirations get the best of them and they hire middle managers and
those people hire program managers and the feedback loop continues. This
excludes the "friends" I mean _cough_ cough "colleagues" that get hired into
newly created positions of power. Then you have reorgs which is a whole
separate issue.

I don't think there is anyway way to stop this cycle, I've seen it play out
too many times. The only way to sort of delay it is to ensure the C-levels are
lined with at least one technical ex-SE type that'll call out BS when they see
it.

