Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why? - macca321
======
mtlynch
Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with
the promotion process ([https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-
google/](https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/)).

Since then, I:

* Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue things for fun without worrying about how much it's costing me in terms of time.

* Attempted to build a startup on top of a distributed storage cryptocurrency ([https://blog.spaceduck.io/](https://blog.spaceduck.io/)). Didn't work because the underlying platform wasn't mature enough yet, so it was more expensive and less reliable than centralized solutions.

* Attempted to build a business with a ML-powered recipe ingredient parsing service. Found out recipe apps aren't really willing to pay for it. ([https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/](https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/))

* Currently working on toy projects to sharpen my web development skills because I've found that part of my skillset to be a bottleneck with my previous projects.

~~~
lemming
Great article about the promotion process and the employee dynamic at Google.
It very accurately summarises much of why I quit there so quickly after coming
in via an acquisition.

 _That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service
to Google in exchange for money._

I was very lucky to have a friend who taught me that very early (not about
Google specifically, the same applies to _any_ company). Working as a
contractor just cemented it - I was sitting next to people earning half as
much as I was or less, just because I was a contractor and they were an
employee. Once you can see this, it's amazing when employees get sucked into
killing themselves working crazy hours because they identify so strongly with
the company they work for. Companies go to great lengths to promote the idea
that we're all one big family, of course, precisely because it allows them to
exploit their workers more easily.

Since leaving Google, I now make a software product I sell online. I have no
boss, no employees and no investors. Occasionally I miss having coworkers, but
mostly it's great. Freedom is really worth a lot of money, at least for me.

~~~
LeifCarrotson
> I was sitting next to people earning half as much as I was or less, just
> because I was a contractor and they were an employee.

Was this still true after all the taxes, insurance, and stability factors are
considered, or was this just your hourly rate?

~~~
lemming
As a contractor in the UK, I paid less tax than an employee would. HMRC
brought in IR35 to try to combat that, but at the time I was contracting
(early 2000's) most contractors were still paying less tax - I'm not sure if
that's stricter these days.

I was in London working in web & finance at the time, so it was a fairly
distorted market. I did get bitten by the dot com crash, but even so I was
only out of work for about 6 months or so and that was a pretty extreme event.
Realistically in the current environment job stability in a major IT centre
like London is so good that contracting is pretty safe. In a more unstable
market there would be a higher element of risk, for sure.

~~~
daveoflynn
Contractors still do a bit better than employees, though HMRC keep talking
about seriously cracking down on the practice.

~~~
sjg007
Cracking down seems like a bad idea.. you lose dynamic flexibility on both
sides. What would the upside be?

~~~
baq
Taxes mostly and fairness towards people who are actually employed.

~~~
sjg007
In the US you pay more to freelance in taxes than you do as an employee
(because the employer pays some on your behalf) but you can have other
deductions as a contractor. So I think fairness is not specifically a
sufficient motivator. The UK can have a tax advantage for freelancing but
these freelancers lose out on employment protections. Dunno..

~~~
walshemj
US contractors don't seem to get anything - they seem to think getting a 20%
premium over FTE is good.

In the UK you would normally expect 3x for a short 6 month contract.

~~~
sjg007
Right but UK salaries are about 2-3x lower than US (at least for software
engineers).. or at least they use to be.

------
jakevoytko
I worked on the same team at Google for 4.5 years, and left 3 years ago. I was
bored; I was getting better at doing the same thing, but I wasn't expanding as
an engineer. I worked on a free product. We had no market incentives to make
time-boxed decisions and could declare anything we did a success whether it
was or not, which drove me nuts. I was at the New York office, so when the
company got bad press you could usually rationalize it as "oh, it's this Other
Google in Mountain View making these really bad decisions and having this
weird cultural obsession with needing everything you do to be as hard as
putting a man on the moon," but it dampened my enthusiasm for looking for an
internal transfer. Staring down the end of my 20s, I ended up taking almost a
year off to relax, reconnect with old friends, do a little traveling, fail to
start a small business, and eventually interview.

I ended up at Etsy. A major criteria of mine was "find a business model I want
to work for." Etsy checked all the boxes -- I was impressed by the caliber of
people that I talked to when I was interviewing, I got a fair offer, I think
the business model of selling local goods internationally is a good thing for
the world, and I would be working directly on things that affected the bottom
line. It hasn't been all sunshine and roses. There were 2 rounds of layoffs
and almost everything has changed since I joined. But something that doesn't
change very fast at a small established company is its business model, so I've
managed to still be motivated to work there despite all the churn around me.
It also helped me realize that some of the ennui I felt at Google was really a
shifting of interests -- I'm not interested in technology for technology's
sake anymore, but instead am motivated to solve problems that I think can be
solved via technology.

~~~
paulcole
Sadly a lot of what's featured on Etsy now is mass produced crap masquerading
as handmade.

I get why it was essential to the business. You can only grow so much as a
small truly handmade market. Then it's OK to sell "vintage" clothing and on
and on...

~~~
jakevoytko
Yeah, I hear that. Growth is absolutely a factor, and fairness is another
factor. Like, how do you define "handmade" without punishing people who get
too successful ("oh no, I have more orders than ever and can't make them all
myself anymore. Do I have to stop selling if I get help?"), and while still
being simple enough that content moderators can fairly and reproducibly apply
rules for listings that are challenged. You basically end up at one end of the
spectrum or the other, "everything has to be truly handmade, and we're okay
being really restrictive" or some variant of "authorship is really the thing
we care about".

------
earhart
I did ten years at Microsoft; loved it, but wanted a change, and Google
desperately wanted people with VM experience to build GCE.

I was at Google for six years; I had a lot of fun building various parts of
cloud, but then at some point realized I didn’t really care a lot about the
component I was working on, and looking around, I didn’t see a lot of other
projects going on that I really felt passionately about.

I had some savings, and wasn’t really worried about finding •some• other
software engineering job in Seattle if that ran low, so I decided to take off
to think about what I really wanted to be doing in life. And then a friend
reached out to me - he was founding a startup, and was I interested in
joining?

So I did an ML startup for a couple of years. It was tremendous fun; lots of
work, but I felt very connected to what I was building, why I was building it,
&c; it felt good to be really thinking about the product from an end-to-end,
“How is this going to delight the customer?” point of view. I think I’d have
had to be a director at Google to have the same level of involvement with the
entirety of what I was building...

And then, we were bought by Intel. It’s not too different, though - it’s a
much bigger company, of course, but I feel pretty connected to the stuff I’m
working on; I see and understand the business case, and my role in it. I don’t
know that I’ll work at Intel forever, but certainly for the foreseeable
future; I’m having fun, and feel pretty fortunate to be working here.

~~~
krashidov
It sounds like you're very happy with your career decisions. How long did you
work on the startup before it was acquired?

~~~
earhart
The startup was vertex.ai; I worked there for a little over two years.

It was very educational (in a good way), despite the uncertainty around
paychecks (just from the higher odds of going under at some point down the
road). For people who’re in a financial position to handle some paycheck risk,
I’d definitely recommend trying a startup.

------
rsweeney21
Ex-Netflix here. I was a senior dev at Microsoft and Netflix (8 years of
professional experience) and decided to switch to freelance for a variety of
reasons. Eventually that turned into starting a company that provides a home
for ex-FAANG (etc) devs that want to switch to freelancing.

Facet Development is a freelancer network made up exclusively of ex-FAANG
engineers. Facet does the work of finding freelancing jobs/projects and then
we send them out to devs in the network. We also provide project management
and billing/collections, help with taxes, etc, so freelancers get to spend a
lot more of their time doing the enjoyable parts of freelancing and not trying
to run a small business.

We target FAANG companies and companies that wish they could hire FAANG devs
when finding work for our freelancer network. When I was a dev lead at
Microsoft, bringing on vendors or outsourcing was a terrible experience,
because they always seemed to be below our hiring bar. So I started Facet to
solve the problem I had when I was an engineering manager at a FAANG company.

We have more work than we can handle, so if you are a FAANG or ex-FAANG dev
that wants to switch to freelancing or already is, you should sign up!

You can read more about the Facet Developer Network here:
[https://www.facetdev.com/blog/the-facet-developer-network-
th...](https://www.facetdev.com/blog/the-facet-developer-network-the-
freelancer-network-for-former-faangetc-engineers)

~~~
robszumski
Wow, this is a great idea. I can see both sides of it:

"Look, you've always wanted to jump ship to freelance, but it's hard and
you're used to being heavily supported by your org. We have that for you."

"Look, you want to hire these people but you can't. I can, and they can
complete your project in a super high quality way, you just need to pay for
it. We can be there next week."

~~~
rsweeney21
Exactly! :)

I always wanted to jump ship so I could work on my own startup, but was afraid
cause I had no idea how to find work as a freelancer, and was totally not the
sales type. I figured there had to be more people out there like me.

------
johan_larson
I left Google after three years as an SDE because I had really _really_ had
enough of my bosses, I wasn't promoted when I figured I deserved it, and a
project that meant a lot to me wasn't getting the staffing it needed to
succeed.

I left for a more senior position at a smaller, less prestigious software
company, though I've moved again since. Right now I'm working remotely from
Toronto for a Silicon Valley start-up.

Ultimately, I wish I had approached working for Google a bit differently. I
thought it was sort of an overgrown startup, and you were supposed to look for
something that needed doing and do it. No. Google is a large highly structured
company with a distinctly process-oriented culture. It's a place where you do
what you are told. That famous proverb about Japanese nails absolutely
applies. I eventually figured that out, but by then it was too late.

~~~
jacquesm
> That famous proverb about Japanese nails absolutely applies.

"The nail that sticks out gets hammered down."

~~~
tw1010
I'm guessing there are some "nail dimensions" that get hammered down, and some
that are encouraged. (There are some anomalous characteristics that are
accepted or incentivized, and some that are penalized.) I'm curious, could you
(or someone in this thread working at google) help me understand which these
are? Which weird character traits are ok, and which are not?

~~~
riazrizvi
I’m going to make a guess here, but based on my experience of this type of
culture at other organizations, weird character traits that are okay =
anything unusual done by the very senior, generally-accepted-company-success-
story people. So if you started a successful spin-off that Google funds and
makes a ton of money from, then your penchant for rollerblading around the
building is cute and HR smile when describing it to interviewees. However if
you are one of the other 99.9% then get those damn things off your feet, your
going to hurt someone.

------
amirathi
Ex-Amazon engineer here. Worked for ~4 years in the Prime Music team. Contrary
to popular belief, I had incredible time at Amazon. Learned a lot, good work
life balance, progressed to L5 etc. Primary reason I quit is to start
something of my own and not live under a draconian H1-B visa that treats
people like second class citizens (will save H1-B rant for some other time).

What am I doing now?

I enjoy building dev tools. I am currently building ReviewNB
([https://reviewnb.com](https://reviewnb.com)) that helps with Jupyter
Notebook diffs and commenting. I built
[https://nurtch.com](https://nurtch.com) earlier this year to help Dev/Ops
teams write executable incident runbooks.

How?

I moved back from Seattle to New Delhi, India. Cost of living is less than
$2000 per month which gives me enough time to work on my projects without
being stressed financially.

~~~
dhnsmakala
$2k/mo seemw very high for India (I'm not too familiar), are you supporting a
family/spouse as well or is New Delhi just expensive?

~~~
amirathi
South Delhi is expensive. I pay $1000/month on rent. That's also because I
have a larg'ish space (home office, guest room etc.)

Living in tier 2 Indian cities or suburban areas can cut down the expense in
half. ~$1000/month for a comfortable lifestyle.

~~~
dhnsmakala
Ah I see. Yeah, to do <2k in the bay area either roommates or studio + ramen
:P

------
Nihilartikel
Ex-Google SWE L5 (Senior) - Left in 2014 after almost 9 years spanning from my
late 20's to mid 30's. I really can't complain, and would easily rank it as my
most fulfilling and lucrative full-time employment experience so far, though
the previous and post employment were in defense and startups.

In short, I left due to burnout, though I think it wasn't so much the
team/work as it was my character lends itself to burnout if I'm not very
careful to erect work/life barriers and not trample them in spite of myself. I
also tried hard but failed to get promotion to L6 SWE, and that left me with a
bad taste in my mouth. This was mostly a matter of personal immaturity at the
time though. In retrospect my technical skills may have passed muster, but my
ability to make things happen in the organizational and interpersonal sphere
weren't really at an L6 level. My foot was already half out of the door by
then, anyway.

In the intervening time, I've worked on an (unsuccessful) Android game, worked
at a startup (again, burnout is easy when you internalize the existential
precariousness of this sort of venture), and have since moved back to my
hometown, bought a nice house, started a family, and done remote contract
work. I have a few projects incubating and am planning on pursuing some
entrepreneurial bootstrapping once my current contracts peter out shortly.

I miss the proximity to amazing engineers and casual availability of
supercomputing resources, but in the end, I'm grateful to have saved enough to
have a great deal of freedom in how I spend my days and to have been fully
present for the first few months of my son's life.

Another benefit of time outside of Google is getting acquainted with the
equivalent software ecosystem outside of their walled garden. Borg ->
Docker/Kubernetes, MapReduce/Millwheel -> Spark, Dremel/bigquery-> Presto, etc
etc.

~~~
the_clarence
What is L5?

~~~
mdasen
L5 is one of Google's internal levels. They're putting it there to let people
know where they were in Google's hierarchy and they note that it denotes
Senior. From what I know, people generally start at 3 right out of school.

~~~
antognini
To expand a little bit, you usually start at L3 as a fresh graduate, and then
are expected to be promoted to L4 within ~2-3 years, and then L5 after another
2-3 years (although it could be shorter). L5 is considered a "terminal"
position, in the sense that once you get to that level you're no longer
expected to get promoted. (L3 and L4 are, by contrast, more "up or out", where
if you don't get promoted after long enough you can get fired.) I actually met
an L5 engineer at Google who had been there since 2002. Promotions to L6, L7,
etc. start to get exponentially more difficult.

~~~
twiceaday
This is no longer the case. L4 is the new coasting position.

------
simonebrunozzi
Ex-Amazon (and ex-Vmware) here.

Worked at AWS from 2008 to 2014 (Europe, then Asia, then USA), then Vmware
(also USA) from 2014 to 2016.

I then spent ~1 year at a startup, as CTO - the experience sucked, and I
consider it to simply be a big mistake.

1.5 years ago, I left that job, worked on a new idea, and in August 2017 I
founded a startup, Fabrica, with two other friends.

I am still there. No salary. Bootstrapped until March, then raised some angel
money. Doing ok.

I will never go back to the corporate world. I'm done with it. I have some
money on the side, and I firmly believe that money is to buy things that
matter to you. To me, not working at a corporation matters.

~~~
devilmoon
>I firmly believe that money is to buy things that matter to you. To me, not
working at a corporation matters.

Damn dude that is a very good way of putting it

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Not sure I interpret your comment properly, but did you mean that you
particularly liked the sentence? Or was there irony instead?

~~~
devilmoon
Yeah I meant that I loved the sentence! I worked in corporate before deciding
to go back to Uni and it really resonated with me, even though unfortunately I
wasn't able to already buy my own freedom to not be in corporate but need to
be supported by family still. Hope I can make it one day :)

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Thanks for clarifying!

------
a13n
Running my own bootstrapped SaaS startup, Canny
([https://canny.io](https://canny.io)). I've always wanted to do a startup.

Last year I wrote a blog post about the biggest lessons learned during the
transition. Seems pretty relevant. [https://hackernoon.com/software-engineer-
to-saas-founder-c16...](https://hackernoon.com/software-engineer-to-saas-
founder-c16154013e12)

Also left SF to be a digital nomad. SF is so expensive and if you aren't
fundraising you don't need to be there. There's so much of the world to see,
and it's easy to be productive anywhere there's internet.

~~~
MoBattah
Digital nomad - are you AirBnBing around various countries or are you staying
in coliving/coworking communities?

I ask because I'm interested in doing that soon.

~~~
a13n
Have lived in Airbnbs for the past year and a half :)

------
SubuSS
I spent about 7 years at MS and 7 in amazon - mostly around databases. Now I
have been with Snap for about 3 years and it has been going great. My reasons
were:

\- Agility. Snap moves 10x faster than amazon/ms.

\- Small size. Our dev community is so much smaller than Fb etc. Last quarter
our reported user count was around 188MM? So the amortized # of customers
influenced per dev is very high.

\- Ownership. I am the tech lead for all of analytics in snap (an uber lead as
we call it). In Dynamo I was the TL for the storage part alone, my other
offers from fb/twitter/oracle et al were around running parts of their
machinery. Nothing came close to the extent of ownership provided by snap. An
L1 in snap owns 5x of what an L1 would own in FAANG.

\- Rest of the benefits remain equal / better: You are surrounded by smart
people, you have hard problems to solve, perks, benefits and comp are very
equivalent to / better than fang.

That's pretty much what I tell people during my job sells / interviews as
well! If you are looking for the above, you can't beat small companies. On the
flip side - FANG do have the scale very few others can only dream of reaching
(dynamo did millions of qps per region and ran in 10s of regions). I am
obviously hopeful we will make snap that big :)

~~~
fizwhiz
That stock tho.

~~~
parthdesai
Not much to complain if you are shorting it :P

~~~
synaesthesisx
Shorting SNAP via puts was one of the best decisions I've made this year.

------
anonymousFAANG
Several years at Google, but got bored/frustrated like every Googler, and left
to do a startup. That started off great but eventually fizzled, we got
acquihired into a lame-ass company that I rode out for a couple of years, and
then tried to do another startup never got off the ground. Now several years
later, I'm at another FAANG. Fairly certain that my savings, salary and stock,
career development, and overall confidence would be an order of magnitude
higher had I stayed put and used the leverage I had at Google, to find a
better project instead of leaving.

I don't actively regret all this -- I took the risk and did not come out on
top. But the warning I'd give to others is that since 10 year ago, FAANGs
probably give you the best possible deal, despite what VCs and entrepreneur
bloggers want to tell you.

------
Throwaway2Trax
Ex-Amazonian, not in a software related position. I left for the same reason a
lot of the fellow commenter did, internal politics, promotion / development
and shitty bosses (two levels up, but that's where it counts).

For one, as great as Amazons Leadership Principles are in theory, in practice
they are used more than a weapon than anything else. Once the higher ups have
made up their mind about a person, no amount of feed-back will change that. In
the end perf reviews resemble court-martial, except in a decent court-martial
you are present to defend your self.

I realized that too late. Internal "voting rings" self-promoting members at
the expense of other are aggravating this even further. I would still do it
again though, only with a clear exit strategy from day one. Rough guideline,
if you failed to get promoted or transfer internally by year 2 - 3 you are by
default dead. A transfer buys you another 2 odd years of runway.

What did definitely not help was stock development. I joined in early 2014,
initial RSUs have beem granted nased on 2013 expectations, the value increased
by a factor of 10 by now. So AMZN had yet another incentive to reduce the
number of employees in my generation of hires. And they did.

Funny side note, around two years after I left they implemented tje two high
level solutions I proposed back the day and got axed for.

Since then I had two employers which didn't work out. Mental note: take the
sabbatical immediately after leaving, failed to get start-up ofbthe ground and
finished my studies.

~~~
geekbird
I worked for an Amazon subsidiary for about 4.5 years. By the time that last
review & reorg came around, I was mentally already out the door, being burned
out. Having my job change to doing mostly Windows help desk (I'm a linux
sysadmin) was what made me crazy. Unfortunately, that layoff came right after
the "Great Recession" got going, and I was out of work for a year and a half.
My nice $125/share stock RSUs had to be sold for living expenses. If the
timing hadn't sucked like that I could have paid off my house by now. I still
have 5 shares...

I kind of had a forced sabbatical after that. At least I was not in debt going
into it.

Then I went to work for some big names, this time in Linux operations, some
contract, some regular. Since I have the wrong age and plumbing, I constantly
have title deflation and other BS to deal with. I'm currently at a university,
at a pay drop and title drop, but it's more stable with more time off.

------
pr0zac
I was a E5 security engineer at Facebook. Left after 4 years because I married
a Canadian, was sick of living in the bay area and FB had no way for me to
continue working where I wanted to live. I enjoyed the job a lot but non-
career stuff (including allowing my wife to start her career after finishing
her PhD) was a higher priority.

I moved to Canada and spent two years working remotely as a security manager
for Uber which I also enjoyed. I eventually left because of burn out and took
a few months off completely. I now live in Montreal and am working on a
startup with a few friends in NYC.

~~~
rasikjain
Hi, interested in learning more about your security career. Your contact info
is not on the profile. Would like to catch up. My email is in the profile :-)

------
cbzehner
Ex-Facebook. After five years I found my pace of learning had basically
plateaued. Combine with organizational politics at any large company and I
started looking for something smaller.

Ended up at Atrium, a legal startup in SF. Similar to mtlynch, I didn't expect
how much I'd have to hone my front-end chops on leaving a FAANG.

Getting the opportunity to learn what I hadn't been learning and shore up
those weaknesses reenforce my decision to switch.

Best parts so far:

* It's 30x smaller than FB was when I joined and 300x smaller than FB was when I left.

* Great people abound. I was worried that this wouldn't be the case at a smaller company but I joined partly on the basis of how intellectually curious the engineers I met were during my interview.

* It's a non-traditional tech company. We work with attorneys and build domain expertise in the problems CEOs and VCs face every day. The hard legal problems of starting a business.

If any of that sounds interesting, we're hiring! Reach out to username at
gmail or [https://www.atrium.co/careers#current-
openings](https://www.atrium.co/careers#current-openings)

------
throwaway6119
You won’t see a lot of ex-Apple people posting here because of the deeply-
ingrained conditioning to never talk publicly about anything that goes on
there, even after you leave.

I’ll say I liked the company in general. The rank and file engineers were
smart and nice to work with, a real pleasure. But people were meaner and egos
were huger the higher up the org chart they were, and I had to interact
regularly (daily) with people 2-3 away from Tim.

Ultimately I made it 4 years, pretty much to the day my last stock vested.
Manager said they don’t give refreshes, so I’m not going to take that big a
pay drop to keep going there so reluctantly quit. I’d go back in a heartbeat
if they weren’t so stingy with pay/RSUs.

~~~
pdimitar
I am reading the end of your comment like "Apple does not pay good salaries".
Is that true? I have no interest in shares / stock, just the net sum at the
end of the month.

------
drewg123
Does it count if you move from one to the other?

I spent 2 years as a L5 (Senior SWE) at Google in MTV. I could not negotiate a
deal to work remotely under my VP or find a team under a different VP allowing
remote work that I was interested in (and which was interested in me).. I left
after promotion to staff (L6) and went to Netflix where I work on the
Openconnect CDN. Netflix is so much smaller that I feel like I have an impact,
and I'm not just a cog in the machine.

~~~
romed
Congratulations on making Staff after only 2 years. You’d think it would be
alarming to Google how often engineers leave immediately after being promoted.

~~~
johannes1234321
What's the benefit of waiting for promotion and then leaving? Any benefits you
gain from that? Naïvely I'd assume it'd make sense to collect some of the
extra cash for a while.

~~~
drewg123
It was in the pipeline, and it seemed silly to leave just weeks before it was
in effect because:

1) If you are a regretted departure, there is a good chance you'll be hired
back at your old level with a minimum of fuss. There is a pretty big
difference in salary, bonus factor and probably GSU grants between L5 and L6,
so I did not want to loose that advantage should I ever want to return.

2) It was a personal goal. I suck at whiteboarding, so was hired as L5 when I
should probably have been L6. So I did not want to leave before I finally got
to the level that I thought I should have been at all along.

3) There is an internal Google system (go/epitaphs) where you can look up an
Xoogler, and it will tell you when they worked at Google, what their title
was, what their level was, etc. If I ever wanted to join a startup that was
being founded by Googlers, I thought it would look better if they could
confirm the L6 was claiming on my resume. If I had left after the promo was
announced to me, but before it was effective, it would look like I was an L5
and just spinning a story.

~~~
motxilo
Being a Staff Engineer vs just Senior gives you more leeway for negotiation
with prospective employers.

------
briantmaurer
Ex SWE at AWS (2013-2014) – I enjoyed working with the team I was on and I
learned a lot. It was a great experience, but I've always wanted to work on
some ideas I'd written down. I resigned as soon as my student loans were paid
off and I'd saved enough money to pursue those ideas for a couple years.

One of the most memorable days of my life was the day after I resigned from
Amazon.

For most people, their decisions, stressors, happiness, etc. are largely
defined by external forces – whether by school, work, finances, family, etc.
For me, this was much more true than I realized. I had always thought of
myself as someone who was highly independent. But, that following morning (and
most mornings since) I woke up with a feeling of nearly complete autonomy.
That feeling was much stronger than I expected. It has been incredibly freeing
and has significantly affected how I approach life.

Since, I moved back to Minnesota and am currently working on my second project
– [https://mutambo.net](https://mutambo.net). Our goal is to make it as easy
as possible to play recreational sports. We raised a small seed round and our
remaining runway is a little over 1 year.

\--

My first project was put on pause after teaming up a with co-founder (Ex
Google) and choosing another idea. I would like to finish the first project
some day.

------
ccantana
I was a SWE L3 at Google for three years. I left after having similar problems
with the promotion process mentioned by others.

Since then, have moved from SF to Ecuador and started a humor publication
explicitly making fun of companies like FANG
([https://techloaf.io](https://techloaf.io)).

It’s very cathartic...

~~~
solarkraft
Hey, uh .... why the f __ __ __do I need to give you my e-mail address to read
your stuff?

~~~
theunixbeard
You don't have to, just click "the email" which is a hyperlink to the
archives:

[https://mailchi.mp/872ceee548ec/its-loaf-
time](https://mailchi.mp/872ceee548ec/its-loaf-time)

[https://us17.campaign-
archive.com/home/?u=14538d8f8591165977...](https://us17.campaign-
archive.com/home/?u=14538d8f8591165977d9a9d93&id=e21336ec0c)

~~~
softawre
I wonder what % of people you lose right there because you're trying to be
smart/clean/whatever with "the email" link.

~~~
dxhdr
It lost me until I came back and read this comment; I did not think to click
"the email." The page reads as a standard newsletter subscription form so I
just closed the tab.

~~~
ccantana
Helpful feedback, thanks. Just updated the landing page to make things
clearer.

~~~
solarkraft
Thanks. Good content! I still believe you're limiting your audience by not
running it like a typical blog. But it seems like that's partly what you want
to do.

------
myWindoonn
I served at Google as an SRE for 2+yrs. I burnt out and ragequit. Now I'm an
SRE at a startup.

I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs.
Dirty open secret if it is true.

~~~
barrow-rider
> I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs.
> Dirty open secret if it is true.

That's most places, FAANGs notwithstanding. 6 months getting up to speed,
realizing what a clusterfuck it is by 12 months, dealing with it to 18 months,
and then getting to the I-Want-Out point at 24+ months.

Plus the whole "jump ship every 2-3 years to maximize salary" thing is
possible for FAANG-level engineers.

~~~
cagenut
devops are like brake pads on trucks, you stomp the hell out of them whenever
you didn't look far enough ahead, and when they start to make a squeaking
noise you throw them out and get new ones.

~~~
dekhn
I know at least ten SREs at Google with ten years service.

------
kangax
I was E6 at Facebook for 1.5 years.

Left due to a combination of not finding the right team/project and constant
pressure to work on something impactful rather than fixing existing issues I
cared about. This seems to be a common issue at FB with senior engineers
joining and having to ramp up quickly (2 of the senior teammates left while I
was there for the same reasons).

Currently at WeWork where you don't have to write multi-page assessment of all
the impactful things you've done during the last half.

It's not perfect but the work-life balance at senior level is better than at
FAANG.

~~~
sjg007
"multi-page assessment of all the impactful things you've done" ... ?

So things aren't organized along a product line?

~~~
kangax
I was on an infra so the "product" was improving both developer experience and
user experience. Thing is — as a senior engineer, you're encouraged to do work
that spans across multiple teams. The self-review would include all the
impactful things you've done by helping person X or team Y or product Z, etc.

------
amznthrow01
Throwaway for obvious reasons. Just to add some AMZN perspective:

Amazon has big company problems just as much as any of these. In fact, from
what I've heard from friends working for other FAANG and similar companies,
AMZN tends to have a bigger proportion of terrible managers. This is because
the Leadership Principles can be interpreted in several ways and more often
than not, gets interpreted in a way that works for managers to push their
agenda. The promotion process is a joke. There's a lot of politics, and you
have no control over when you're getting promoted. For those that believe that
they had enough leverage on when to get promoted, IMO they simply were at the
right place at the right time (or as I've seen, got promoted later than they
think they deserved to.)

AMZN managers like to quote Jeff a lot. Two of those have worked terribly at
the org I work at:

"good intentions don't work" has introduced so many processes in the org that
getting actual work done is getting harder by the day. Engineers don't like to
do project management, but all these processes are a micromanager's wet dream.

"Amazon is a great place to fail". It really is not. AMZN is a terrible place
to fail because once you fail, they bring it up every single time to ensure
you don't have leverage. AMZN managers don't seem to appreciate growth. Or
they're intentionally blind towards it to ensure they can squeeze a few more
years from you while keeping you at the same level. Title being connected to
both compensation and the kind of work you get sucks, and if you joined AMZN
after the boom in late 2015, compensation is definitely not a reason to stay.

The only folks who are happy at AMZN are those that aren't deluding themselves
by saying they are making a real impact. If you're anywhere below senior SDE
you're not making any impact. Of course, exceptions exist.

------
q3k
Freelancing and consulting. It's fun, pays decently well and is fully remote.

Left Google SRE because of how mentally draining it was, how draconian the IP
clauses were (everything you create belongs to Google!), and how generally I
didn't see a future for myself there.

~~~
jpic
Even something you create in the weekend belongs to google when you are in
contract with them ?

~~~
branksy
Like many companies, yes.

However, unlike many companies, they actually have a process where you can
submit your "weekend projects" for Google to review and "gain back" explicit
ownership of them.

Basically Google just checks to make sure it's not competing with anything
Google's already doing, and then contractually assigns it back to you. (And
anecdotally, if it does compete, you may be offered the opportunity to join
said team, since it shows you're passionate about it.)

~~~
delroth
It's also pretty easy to contribute to FOSS projects on your own time, as long
as you're OK with Google being the owner of your contributions (I personally
don't care since it's open source licensed anyway).
[https://opensource.google.com/docs/patching/](https://opensource.google.com/docs/patching/)
is an almost fully public version of the process Googlers have to follow to
contribute stuff to open source projects.

Disclaimer: works at Google, maintains some FOSS code in my own time, both
under my own copyright for some projects and under Google's copyright for
others.

~~~
drewmate
Have you encountered any project maintainers uneasy with the idea of Google
"owning" that part of the source code? In practice it doesn't matter, but that
part kind of confuses me.

------
zellyn
Moved back to Atlanta after five years at YouTube in SF to be close to family
and afford a house.

Discovered that Square has an office here, saving me from a descent back into
Corporate IT. Haven't looked back. We're hiring :-)

~~~
ccostes
Interested in hearing more about what you're up to. What's the best way to get
in touch?

~~~
zellyn
I'm ${USERNAME}@squareup.com or @${USERNAME} on the Tech404 Slack and Twitter.

------
acconrad
Does Microsoft count? It's in the same market cap as Amazon and Google.

I've been consulting for the past year while I build a few side-projects,
hoping they'll turn into businesses.

I'm making more than I ever have before and this was only year one. My hope is
the next few years the time spent marketing myself through blogs, podcasts,
and some books I'm working on will pay off either to make raising money easier
for a business idea or to solidify higher rates for consulting.

~~~
zabi_rauf
Thats great! How did you start with finding consulting projects and building
street cred? Has writing blogs bring you more business yet?

~~~
acconrad
The million-dollar question: how do you find clients?

Honestly, the first one approached me via HackerNews. The rest have been from
my network.

Blogging has yet to bring me more business, because my name and brand have not
reached the mind-share yet to rely solely on that. But I'm working on it!

I also realize that this is a long-term play, it will likely take me 3+ years
before my name is reputable enough to be the reason someone hires me from all
the places they've seen my name.

------
scaleout1
Why are almost all the replies by ex Google engineers? I thought I would see
an even distribution from all FAANG companies but replies are pretty heavily
skewed toward ex google employees. Is this because 1) Google culture is
completely different from other FAANG companies? 2) Engineers at other FAANG
companies dont quit their job? 3) or they dont browse HN in their free time?

~~~
joshuamorton
Probably mostly 3, and that Google is larger than the other faangs where you
might (Netflix and Facebook).

~~~
rjayatilleka
That doesn't sound accurate. Anecdata, but in my current org in Amazon Retail
I think about 1 in 15 engineers browse HN daily. When I was in AWS it was
around 1 in 3.

Why do you think people in Google/Netflix/Facebook browse HN more than
Amazon/Apple?

~~~
joshuamorton
Historical trends on similar threads. Other "Ask FAAMNG" threads seem to have
a disproportionate number of responses from Googlers.

------
ex_amazon_sde
Ex-Amazon here. The "people leave bosses, not companies" proverb applies to
most people I know.

~~~
k__
This.

And in my experience, there aren't many good bosses out there.

I always envy the stories of some corporate engineers who had excellent
mentors and bosses, but sadly there aren't many of them.

~~~
rjayatilleka
This is something I learned recently, but some people who get lucky and find a
good manager will just follow them around for a while. At least at Amazon,
having a great manager is the most critical external component of having a
sustainable job.

------
raphlinus
Now working on a game after 11 years as a Staff SWE at Google. I left for a
complex mix of reasons, largely because I can and because I wanted to work on
my own stuff, also not least because I don't have a good feeling about the
digital world the big companies are creating. I wrote just a bit about this on
my blog on leaving.

------
formalsystem
I worked at Microsoft for about 3 years as a product manager and as an applied
scientist. Most of the people I worked with were passionate, worked long hours
and knew their shit. What drove me to leave eventually was that I had little
leverage in deciding what to work on so had little control over what I'd
become an expert in.

Right now I'm working solo on a strategy game inspired by the Lebanese Civil
war and platforms to make running reinforcement learning algorithms in
different environments much easier. TBH, I'm not sure if things will work out
but I feel a lot happier and find some comfort in knowing that I'm learning
many transferable skills.

As others have mentioned in this thread, I think of this experience as buying
out my freedom for a couple of years with a hope that I can extend it should
things work out. Contract work would be ideal but I'm still figuring out how
to meet good potential clients in my area (Core ML + Data science + Infra)

------
camtarn
Ex-Amazon here. I spent eight years working at Amazon in Edinburgh, on three
different teams - a now-dead music encyclopedia to complement IMDb, a team
doing recommendations on the Amazon homepage (we were the 'customers who
bought X also bought Y' team!), and finally an ill-fated graphic storyboarding
tool for Amazon Studios.

I'm now working at Sequentec, a two-person contracting company providing
engineering services, primarily for wave/tidal power startups in Scotland. My
boss, a veteran of the industry, is a mechanical/hydraulic/electrical/control
systems engineer and general jack of all trades. I write C code for B&R
industrial controllers, using a proprietary Windows-based toolchain. I also
write a lot of Python to get logged data off the controllers and into
databases, and occasionally I'm called on to do fairly random things -
reliability analysis, network/VPN engineering, wi-fi antenna selection, wiring
and soldering of sensors, and a lot of interfacing to serial peripherals with
custom protocols. I've programmed atop a tidal platform in the middle of a
large river, and on a gantry above one of the world's most advanced wave
tanks. It's great.

I left Amazon for a lot of reasons: eight years is a long time for a graduate
job, the culture had changed a lot since I'd joined (less of an emphasis on
work-life balance, and growing from 30 to 90 devs meaning that I no longer
knew everybody's name), and I needed a job with more flexibility (I now work
effectively part-time). It was definitely the right choice for me, even though
I took a large pay cut to do so.

~~~
bitcoinmoney
I’m curious how much is the TC for doing stuff like this?

~~~
camtarn
No idea in general. My chargeable rate, which is apparently cheap for the
industry, is £45 an hour. My actual pay rate is £18 an hour, and I'm
contracted for 3 days of 7.5 hours a week minimum, with anything over that as
overtime. But that was a very custom deal and I suspect others in the industry
are paid very differently.

------
jmillikin
Another ex-Googler. I worked there as an SRE for six years, then left due to
lack of career advancement opportunities[0]. Currently I work at Stripe, which
is less capable on some narrow technical metrics but a far more pleasant
environment.

Stripe is hiring. We list open positions at
[https://stripe.com/jobs#openings](https://stripe.com/jobs#openings). Email me
at jmillikin@stripe.com if you'd like to hear more about the engineering work
here.

\---

Good differences:

* It's about 70x smaller than Google (100x smaller when I joined a year ago). My CEO knows engineers by name, knows generally what we're working on, and occasionally DMs us congratulations on especially interesting blog posts (hello Patrick!). The effects of your work (good and bad) are obvious, and people know who's doing what. I'm not sure if there's a "monkeysphere" equivalent for engineers, but in Infra at least we've not yet reached the limit.

* More transparent. Private companies have fewer restrictions on what business metrics they're allowed to share with non-executive employees, and people here are enthusiastic about sharing both (1) what's going well and (2) what could be done better.

* A general feeling of optimism and cheer that is absent at Google. We don't end up in the news for easily avoided own-goals that employees protested for months before they hit the public.

* The business model (supporting business growth across the globe, and scraping a bit off the top) is directly coupled to the success of our customers. At Google there's always a thought in the back of your mind that the people using the product are in conflict with the people generating revenue. At Stripe we're in partnership with our customers, working against people who are not customers (i.e. fraudsters).

* Much more support for remote work. I live in the Bay Area and am planning to go remote some time in the next six months. I don't think this would have been possible at Google, which is focused on offices and especially focused on "main campus" (Mountain View).

\---

Bad differences:

* We use third-party open-source code more than Google does, and the average quality of open-source code is _far_ lower than internal Google code[1]. I've reported critical crashing bugs upstream and gotten nothing but [tumbleweed noises]. At Google I once reported a bug in the getopt() equivalent, and it was personally fixed by Sanjay.

* Fewer engineers mean non-critical bugs in internal tools sometimes don't get fixed. We just don't have time. I've seen more JS stack traces on .corp pages in the last _three months_ then during my entire Google tenure.

* Hiring engineers away from different companies (instead of entire cohorts fresh out of school) can lead to cultural conflict around dev velocity vs reliability. Obviously as an ex-Googler and an SRE I'm double-biased toward reliability, but folks with other backgrounds feel differently and there can be some difficult conversations there.

\---

Overall I'm very happy with the outcome of leaving Google. I attribute most of
this to Stripe itself. It turns out I got lucky, and things could have gone
much worse (company full of ex-startup engineers = campfire horror stories all
day long).

\---

[0] During my last perf cycle, my manager's manager told me "senior engineers
don't implement, they write design docs. Implementation is just code writing".
Either he was wrong (and I was now stuck under someone who believed my chosen
career was low-skill + not valuable), or correct (and I was in a _comapany_
that believed same). Either way, the situation was clearly undesirable.

[1] External Google code is also lower-quality than internal Google code,
which shocked me. I've found memory errors in protobuf
([https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/issues/3752](https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/issues/3752)),
all sorts of wacky stuff in Bazel, and every day I wonder why go-protobuf
doesn't have DynamicMessage yet.

~~~
2spicy_thrwaway
>Fewer engineers mean non-critical bugs in internal tools sometimes don't get
fixed. We just don't have time.

This sounds like everywhere I've ever worked. I didn't even realize that the
alternative actually existed!

------
justinlilly
I left Google after 3 years to join a startup in the project management space.
It was clear that I could work on a product that made lots of money (ads) or
was in front of lots of people (maps), but I couldn't actually make a
difference in how the company operated. So I joined as employee #2 of a
startup and eventually managed some people.

I now work at Amazon. I understand that I'm working for a company who will pay
me very well in exchange for me to show up and write code and not think about
engineering any other time without prior allowance (lol opensource). This is a
bargain that I feel fine with, now that I've entered into it with eyes open.

Eventually, the money won't be enough to keep me and I'll look around for a
medium sized startup that sells thing to people for money and has a
sustainable business model (aka not into hypergrowth).

------
oh-kumudo
Ex Amazonian, left Amazon, now rejoin Amazon.

Joined a startup. Had many rosy fantasies about how life could go for me. It
turned out not very honky dory after all. The management could be best
categorized as directionless, worst completely chaos. In terms of salary, it
is less, if not much so, if your startup fails to take flight. So I quit, and
rejoin my previous employer, but in a much different group on different
things.

Lessons learnt, your situtation won't change dramatically as you might hope by
changing companies. Grass is always greener on the other side, and patience is
something you only can only learn to gain it.

Ultimately, I want to work on something that I believe is valuable, and
useful. That is what will keep me in my position for longer term.

------
guitarsteve
Ex-Amazonian here.

Aside: Despite the company's not-so-good reputation in the media and forums, I
enjoyed working there. For the most part I had good managers and coworkers.
And once you've been there a while, you can transfer to a team with more
interesting work, less on-call support, etc.

Anyway, my wife is a doctor, and she had to move for her residency. Amazon
wasn't willing to consider remote work, and I'm not sure I'd want to be the
one "remote guy" anyway, so I switched jobs to a 100% remote company. We're
hiring, in case others would like to make a similar jump. :)

------
puglr
Worked at a few startups gobbled up by Google. Second time decided to stick
around. I think Google is an overall incredible company to work for. Far from
perfect (and getting worse in some important areas of employee happiness), but
I'd do it again.

I just need to be my own boss for a while. Working on things that you're not
100% passionate about can really wear one down.

~~~
tango24
> (and getting worse in some important areas of employee happiness)

Would you mind elaborating?

------
arcticbull
I worked at Apple straight out of college for a bit less than 2 years. I left
because I worked on a small project that I had trouble connecting to the
broader mission, and differences with my manager. Big company experiences will
always be heavily situational. You end up on a good team, you’re having a
rewarding (personally and professionally) experience. Bad
team/manager/whatever, you have a bad time. FAANGS are no different.

I joined a startup after, stayed for many years, they went public, I took some
time off, worked at some other startups, and now I’m back at a FAANG. This
time, though, I know what to do - and what I want out of working here - so I’m
looking forward to a wholly different experience.

I’ll likely throw my hat back into the startup ring in a few years but who
knows?

I will say this, I look back fondly on my time at Apple.

------
gt5050
Working on my saas [https://chartpoet.com](https://chartpoet.com)

Worked at Amazon from 2010 - 2012. Left because I wanted to create something
of my own. Have failed twice at since then, hopefully will succeed this time.

~~~
axhue
Website looks nice! My 2 cents would be to maybe have a demo dashboard without
signing up? I just feel like it forces people to invest without knowing what
it is. Wish you success!

~~~
gt5050
Here are some demo dashboards, will link to them on the home page soon.

Presentation Mode
[https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/](https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/)

Dashboard Mode
[https://demo.chartpoet.io/dashboard/frB1lGMWa_q7/](https://demo.chartpoet.io/dashboard/frB1lGMWa_q7/)

Raw Data Mode
[https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/](https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/)

------
dekhn
After ten years at Google, I returned to my field of interest and work for a
drug discovery/machine learning startup.

------
omgbear
Ex-Googler, worked in ads for ~3 years. Wonderful experience, don't regret any
of it, had a great manager and director, definitely focused my opinions on
what leadership can and should do (Take responsibility, back you up). I really
appreciated the engineering culture and learning experiences.

Left to join a 4-person startup my friends founded, still there going on ~5
years. Definitely enjoy the freedom and faster pace of changes, but the stress
of responsibility is much more real.

------
romed
Retired after 8 years as a Staff SWE at Google. Do I really need a why for
retired?

~~~
sjg007
Sure! You could've kept working! Why did you retire?

~~~
drewg123
I'm guessing "because he could". 8 years of L6 at Google should set you up for
life if you move to a moderate cost area of the country.

~~~
tinktank
What's the net worth of an L6 for 8 years at Google?

~~~
oblio
Since from what I hear a fresh grad in the Bay Area gets $100k+ just in cash,
we could extrapolate. I'm guessing that's at least $150k (probably more like
$200k+ in today's market) in total compensation for year. Add about $20k+ in
cash and probably the close to the same in Google shares per level, that would
make it easily $400k per year. So he would have gotten $3.2 million, I can't
imagine his expenses being higher than half of that, so he should be worth
$1.6 million after 8 years. Probably more.

I'm curious how off my estimations are :)

~~~
rpcastagna
You're so low it's actually kind of uncomfortable.

~~~
oblio
thausamiote thinks I’m at the other end of the spectrum because I forgot taxes
:o)

------
jedberg
Ex-Netflix. I left right after my first child was born (this was before the 1
year of parental leave was added) and then I started a startup with some
friends. Then we exited that startup and I started another one, which I work
on now from home, which lets me play with the kids during my breaks.

The flexibility of working for myself at home is the main reason I do this
instead of working at an office or cowering space, because it lets me do
daytime events with my kids, like 10am gymnastics class and 4:30pm tap class.
If it weren't for the kids I'd still be doing the startup, but I might not be
doing it from home. I'd probably be digital nomading instead.

I suppose if the startup thing doesn't work out, once the kids are both in
school full time during the day I'll probably try to get a job at another
FAANG company and build up the savings again for another startup. :)

------
mleonhard
I was leonhard@amazon.com for 2.5 years, mike@restbackup.com (failed startup),
and then leonhard@google.com for 5 years. Now I'm bootstrapping a dating app
business. I'm doing this because:

1) I want to do work that aligns with my passions: technology, making the
World a better place, being respected, making money, and feeling peaceful.

2) I'm burned out and this way I can give myself time to rest and recover.
Some days I don't work at all.

3) I spent 15 months using the dating apps heavily. They all provide poor
experience for people looking for serious relationships. I have a lot of ideas
for making the experience better and I want to test them.

If you want to try the app and have influence over its design, send me an
email (see my profile) and I'll invite you to the alpha test.

------
hemantv
Ex Amazon Ex Microsoft here.

Moved to bay area, bought a cheap house in Hayward CA, paid off my mortgage
early.

Started my own company Goodly (www.goodlyapp.com) I am learning a lot on daily
basis and enjoying it throughly. Even though I work crazy hours it doesn't
feel like work at all.

~~~
ultrasounder
Looks pretty interesting. I work in Hayward too. Let me know if you would like
to get away from your computer to stretch your legs and meet for coffee
sometime. I work right next to a starbucks!

------
akhilcacharya
It’s strange that there’s nobody from Amazon here, just people from G

~~~
kevstev
I am in NYC, and hiring for a place that pays very well, possibly above FAANG
salaries. I see a lot of resumes. A lot of those resumes are from Google, but
very very few are from Facebook, and I find that to be a very curious thing.
FBs office is not quite as large as Google's in NYC, but they have been around
awhile and we are hiring out of both coasts and offer relocation.

I am not sure if it is a quirk of our recruiting pipeline, but this seems to
be an indicator that FB is a potentially better place to work.

~~~
stuxnet79
That's very interesting. I had a chance to possibly work at the NYC Facebook
office which I didn't capitalize on, after reading this I'm having intense
FOMO.

Are you in Big Tech or Finance?

~~~
kevstev
In a general sense, both. I am working in finance at a hedge fund now, but for
a more or less pure tech group. My previous job was for a large e-commerce
player, but before that I spent about a decade doing various forms of algo
trading and HFT.

~~~
thrwthrwthrwy
What skills do you need to work as a software developer in algo trading and
HFT? What sort of job titles should you be searching for? Most jobs in this
space seem to want Statistics or Applied Math related majors. I want to look
for software development jobs in HFT.

~~~
kevstev
Generally low level C++ will do it. I have been out of the game for about 5
years now, but when I left the game was all about speed speed speed. We
weren't trading smarter anymore, it was just about trading fast. If you are
faster, you don't just put an order out there with an opinion that the market
will move in your favor, you get an immediate risk free return (risk free
assuming operationally everything works as expected). I also worked on the
"benchmark strategy" side- VWAP/TWAP type algos, when they were very new, and
there was some statistics involved but the math was fairly simple. I haven't
kept up with that side of the space, I am sure they have added complexity, but
fundamentally you are looking at how a particular security has traded in the
past- IE how much volume does it tend to trade at 10am vs 10:30 vs 11am,
compare that with market statistics for the current day- is it high or low
volume, is volatility higher- and apply some heuristics about what % of a
parent order to put in the market at any given time.

This is a bit separate from the actual execution in the market, which is
called smart order routing, and that just focuses on speed.

The best book on this still seems to be the now almost 10 year old
"Algorithmic Trading and DMA" by Barry Johnson. If you want to get a feel for
the strategies involved, this is your best bet:
[https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Trading-DMA-
introduction-...](https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Trading-DMA-introduction-
strategies/dp/0956399207)

As for job titles, they tend to be generic like "infrastructure developer,
strategist" but look for key words like "Smart Order Router, Algorithmic
Trading, Index Arb (itrage), statistical arbitrage, market making, dark pool.
I put two of those in Morgan Stanley's site and got a bunch of relevant hits.
Posting numbers 3119617 3120636 are actual jobs in this space.

A better bet is to just look at job openings for the companies who specialize
in this stuff- Virtu, Jump, Hudson River Trading, Citadel Securities, etc...

~~~
thrwthrwthrwy
Great, thanks!

------
tankdoan
Ex Netflix.

Joined a promising startup with 1 - Great mission 2 - Impressive engineering
culture 3 - Super boring name: Farmers Business Network

FBN is the only reason I haven't moved away from the Bay Area.

We're hiring too, if anybody wants to shoot me an email I'll forward it along.
tan@farmersbusinessnetwork.com

~~~
stillworks
Can you expand on 2) please if possible ? How it is different from Netflix ?

~~~
tankdoan
Sure thing. I was blown away with the intelligence, experience, and humility
of the people on the engineering team when interviewing. I went into the
process thinking "this could be cool, I like the mission" and left the process
with "These people are really sharp and down to earth, I hope this happens."
Since we're a small team here (<10) I get to learn something from them every
day.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm bashing my old team, because they very
good at the layer they work on. The depth of knowledge across the stack is
probably deeper at FBN. For example:

I was having an issue with Hibernate not doing what I wanted it to do. A
knowledgable former team member showed me the bug ticket that had been open
for some years and how to work around it.

At FBN, my first project involved multiple systems + the front end, a I was
annoyed by a networking issue. I raised it, was showed a workaround by using
socat, and the root cause was fixed a couple days later. I had no idea socat
even existed.

------
Twirrim
Ex-AWS. I joined when the service I was on was under a year old. It was a good
team to be on inside AWS, in general.

That said:

1) I ultimately felt powerless to make changes. Hiring people in to the
service was (at the time) proving to be a massive uphill struggle. It just
wasn't one of the "sexy" services to be working on, and the ops team didn't
have a dedicated manager who could focus on that. It left about 90% of my work
consisting of two things. Compliance work, and region builds. Even outside of
that, a lot of the things that slowed us down were things like established
tooling that had seen _zero_ proper business funding until later in my time
there (I some are drastically improved), and this absolutely absurd obsession
with re-inventing the wheel in every single team to do exactly the same
things, even when the task required months of engineering time (I shudder at
the thought of how much money got wasted paying engineers to re-do the same
work, and re-discover the same bugs and problems.) I ultimately had no power
to drive things forwards.

2) One manager left, and the replacement had absolutely no interest in the
operational aspects of the platform. They seemingly only felt empowered to say
"yes" to managers above them. Even if that meant their team was working 80
hour weeks. (the manager has since left and things have improved, so I'm
told). One of the things that got to be absolutely insane was the amount of
effort involved in launching a region. It needed dedicated developer time, and
that particular manager just didn't give a damn. That manager's attitude and
refusal to work on operational concerns were a big source of my frustration in
the team. Looking around AWS, all I could see were other teams that were in a
worse operational position, suffering serious levels of burn out, and I just
decided I wanted nothing more to do with it.

Here's a big tip: If you make operations a priority, you can land features far
faster. You don't keep tying up staff doing manual stuff or fighting fires.

I left AWS and joined Oracle to work on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, for a
number of reasons. Not least of which was that a former manager from the
service I worked for in AWS is running the Compute platform. I knew him, knew
what he was like, and trusted him when he said one of the most important
things to him was keeping operational burden of the platform down. I'd learned
to trust his judgement in AWS, and it's something he's continued to deliver on
here.

I'll be honest, this is one of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever had. Better
pay, better benefits than AWS, great co-workers, senior directors with their
priorities straight. Managers that politely but firmly insist you take time
off if you ever have to do extra hours (and follow through with you if you
don't.)

------
pyb
At the moment, what are some notable startups founded by ex Googlers ?

~~~
bsimpson
Off the top of my head:

\- Pete Koomen left AppEngine to start Optimizely.

\- Kevin Gibbs left AppEngine to start Quip.

\- Dave Byttow left Plus to do Secret, and just became eng director at Snap.

\- Bret Taylor was on Maps before he started Friendfeed with Paul Buchheit
(Gmail), becoming Facebook's CTO and now Salesforce's CPO.

------
draw_down
A lot of the answers are a bit underwhelming. Which is fine. But it makes me
think, sure working in a bigco is lackluster, but so are many of the other
options, and you might as well get paid for your trouble. “Being the one in
charge” seems cold comfort to me if the thing you’re in charge of isn’t all
that great itself.

Working in a big company allows you to disconnect a bit, focus on getting done
what you need to accomplish that day, and then going on about the rest of your
life. And then eventually you can just stop altogether. It seems just fine so
long as you don’t get caught up in the internal rat race, and don’t get too
wrapped up in the ideas they try to sell you about being part of a community
and all that stuff. Just do your piece, every day.

Also, it's darkly ironic that one of the best-case scenarios after leaving is
that your new venture gets picked up by... a large company.

~~~
dhnsmakala
That's a good attitude to have, 'just do your piece, every day.'

It makes sense, and after a few years you have much more freedom bc of the
savings.

I'm a recent grad though, and I find my work very boring and tedious. I'm
given tasks to do that may not even be useful. The lack of ownership + feeling
like a cog makes it hard for me to do good work. I have been rational my whole
life, but it is difficult to remain this way. Any advice? How did you like
your first job?

------
madeuptempacct
So, this usually gets negged, but I am _very_ curious about the salaries which
people are walking away from and whether they can match them elsewhere.

------
bernardrubble
Was at Amazon. At Microsoft now.

Tired of it but I can't get another job. Feel like I've pretty well tanked my
career. Pretty unhappy about it.

------
scubaguy
Participating in selection bias!

~~~
quickthrower2
Hi looks like you've been shadow banned as this comment was dead, and your
previous comments look OK (nothing spammy) so not sure what happened there but
thought I would let you know.

