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Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
738 points by faang0722 on July 23, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 614 comments
This last year I finally landed a SDE job at a FAANG company! However, I'm considering quitting because I am not happy.

The good: I get paid better than my last jobs. I can browse internal resources to satisfy my curiosity about how things work.

The bad: Basically no work gets done and there's no motivation to do any.

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.

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

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's frankly disgusting. 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.

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?




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!


I think that is solid advice. Take the bull by the horns and make your own destiny. There is not much downside to reaching out to the legends but so much upside potential here.


> 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?


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.


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!


> I prefer not to discuss compensation

Why not?


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.


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.


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.


#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?


I'm not trying to convince you to reveal what you make, but I don't think "it's not good for anyone" is right. It might cause a bunch of conflict and I can definitely see wanting to avoid that, but that doesn't mean the outcome isn't ultimately beneficial...


I see things the other way - if it's all in the open, there is no possibility that it can cause issues down the line.

The absence of this allow employers to employ people below their true value, which is not only unfair working conditions, but also unfair in that some people get paid vastly more for equivalent (or worse) performance, depending only on awareness of worth and negotiation skills.

Public pay figures will not only tell you what you can expected to be worth, it will also tell you what the company truly values and rewards (as opposed to PR bullshit). Opening up salary figures means a company must face its own contradictions, if any.


Principal is L7. No way they make millions unless they are exceptional Principals and get discretionary pay.


I'm contrary on this. I see salary level as a negative, not a positive. I want to be paid comparably to my peers.

I don't think I'm unique. I think just about all workers want to be paid comparably to their peers. They get upset if they discover others doing the same stuff with the same levels of skill and experience are making more than they are. (And here I mean a lot more, not just "been with the company longer and got regular raises".)

Value is relative. Something is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, and that includes the workers labor. And focusing on pay can be misleading. I saw an IT salary comparison a while back. An IT staffer in San Diego might make more than double what a staffer doing the same job in Wheeling, WV made. The reason was simple. It cost far more to live in San Diego. Employers there had to pay far higher salaries so their people could afford to live there. And the chap in WV might actually being doing better, relative to peers in San Diego, because even at half the salary, his living expenses were a lot lower, and more of what he made was disposable income, instead of just covering his rent.

If the salary you make is your main focus, I think you are doing it wrong. Money is a means to an end. Having money lets you buy things you need. Having more money lets you also buy things you want. If all you have is money, you have problems. You can't eat it, wear it, or live in it. All you can do is exchange it for food, clothing, and shelter.

And if your main focus is salary level, you are like the character played by James Garner in a film called The Wheeler Dealers. Garner was a Texas entrepreneur, buying and selling, being followed around by a breathless female financial analyst trying to understand what he was doing. He stated it very clearly. "It's a game. Money is how you keep score." If that's the game you like to play, you probably shouldn't be in IT.

I had an interchange a while back with a chap elsewhere who was folding a startup that had not proved out. That's the normal outcome for a startup. Most fail. Too many people think "Oh, I'll go work for a startup! I'll put in 90 hour weeks for shit pay. But the startup will succeed and IPO and I'll get filthy rich" No, you won't. Even in a startup that succeeds and IPOs, only the founders are likely to get rich.

If you found a startup, the goal shouldn't be getting rich. You should be doing something you love to do, and will continue to do regardless of whether your startup succeeds and you IPO. If the startup succeeds, you may get filthy rich, but that will be a side effect, and not the point of the exercise. The chap I was talking to agreed completely with my notions.

The OP's complaint wasn't money, it was inability to make a meaningful contribution. The company was too big, with too many little cubbyholes where folks could get tucked away and not have an opportunity to contribute. His challenge was to find another place in the company where he would have an opportunity to make a contribution, or to find another company to work for that would provide the opportunity. If I were him, I might even accept a starting salary that was lower than my current one, simply because I could do stuff that made a contribution, and I saw potential for growth and making more money later.


This isnt true. Top performers on top products always have larger compensation. Its not discussed openly, but guaranteed they are receiving bonuses in the seven figures. If you think this isnt happening, you are naive or havent been on an inner circle at a large corporation.

Whoever told you theres no bonuses at Amazon is not a top employee


Is there any actual evidence of this, though? Whenever software engineer salary comes up on HN, there are always one or two people who come out of the woodwork to share this oh-so-secret information. "Despite the pay bands that all big companies have and some even publish, there are secret squirrel individual contributor software engineers who make $600K and get million dollar bonuses! Trust us, it happens, guaranteed!" But nobody ever actually produces evidence of this, and none of these unicorn engineers ever post to confirm it. Inevitably, someone will point to one of those online self-reported surveys and one of the rows will show some ridiculously huge salary. But that's the only thing I've seen that even remotely looks like evidence that there is this secret cabal earning millions as employees writing software.


Yes there actually is "secret squirrel" business going on. Secrets are a thing, especially around money. It's a fact some computer programmers get profit sharing and it is not advertised.


Him: "Is there actual evidence of this?"

You: "Yes. But it's a secret."


You think the people inventing the critical algorithms behind amazon s3 and aws in general are line of business employees making what everyone else in their band makes? A trillion dollar corporation is going to let that guy walk out the door to save instead of chipping him an extra million?

This isn't about people who get their work done fast and execute on projects well.


I have no idea--that's why I'm skeptical and would love to see evidence. In some of these companies, veteran outlier high-performers end up getting promoted several times to things like "Distinguished Engineer" and have enormous staffs of engineers reporting to them. They are executives in all but title, so I'd expect them to be in the executive pay bands and get executive salaries. Those aren't the people we're talking about. We are talking about regular "top performer" individual contributors (write code as their job, no direct reports). Why would a company artificially keep them at some low promotion level but pay them as if they were multiple levels higher?


Do you think a multi-billion corporation would pay a low level employee an extra million just because they can? You may overestimate the value of individual engineers, big corporations don't. That's how they become big. The money they make is the difference between the value of your work and the money you make. The smartest and best connected people in the company are working to make that gap as wide as possible.


Yes, but if this engineer's achievements are well known, competition between companies is what drives crazy comp because they are seen more like a strategic asset rather than another engineer. They wouldn't quite be a low-level employee, these unicorn ICs often report directly to middle management or above. I'm surprised how little industry experience some of these commenters seem to have given that it's HN.


Competitors are also multi-billion corporations. I do work for one of those big multi-billion corporations, it's my second, and I've also worked for others not so big. Only newbie engineers fresh out of college believe the myth of the genius engineer who gets grossly overcompensated because they're so smart. You can find 10s of thousands of brilliant engineers in any of these companies, that's the bottom line. Not a single one of them is, on their own, irreplaceable. Specially valuable individuals get awarded distinctions like "fellow" or "distinguished". They're valuable, more than anything else, because of their contacts and rapport within the industry. It's never technical competency; not that they're technically incompetent, but most of their underlings will likely be more technically competent than them (if they're smart, after all, they will do the technical work). If you haven't figure this out yet, don't worry, you'll get there.


You clearly don't work for one of the ones that grant 7 figure salaries. I'm not saying they're common or that any engineer can aspire to achieve one, I'm saying they exist, I've seen it first hand, and I don't understand why it's so hard for you to accept they exist. Nothing in your comment constitutes novel insight to me, and neither of us have a good measure as to which of us have more credibility than the other, but I suspect you're just judging based on your own narrow experience.

Edit, just for more context I'm speaking of FAANG level companies here and very rare individual unicorn engineers who have been specifically hired into these kinds of positions for past achievements that have impact across the whole industry. I would agree with your general skepticism in any other context.


As I said, I'm on my second FAANG. The "very rare individuals" you mention are hired L9 or above. That is, distinguished engineers+. You don't get to L9 with "a valuable technical contribution", you get there because people know who you are, you have strong network of connections within the industry, and you are in a position to make strategic decisions. It's very much not a technical position, it's borderline executive. Let's put it this way, the people with that kind of compensation, you know who they are. It's never an anonymous whizz kid who's very good at solving technical problems, it's the guy who hired them and/or knows how to direct their work.

As you said, you don't know me and I don't know you, so I don't have a reason to doubt your word. If you say you've met engineers who get that kind of compensation, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Everyone I've met or I've known to be in that level of compensation were the people I already knew were making that kind of money.


Getting special bonuses is more about being part of an inner circle than being a "top performer" or inventing critical algorithms for s3. Yes, the people truly behind a lot of the important stuff are standard engineers making within band compensation (possibly out of band only due to stock appreciation).


Just because something would make sense to be true doesn’t mean it is, so I’m not sure if that counts as a valid argument


People who see it happen don't even have enough hard details to confirm it to themselves aside from the fact that they're witnessing it firsthand. The best I can do, for example, is to say that at FB I worked with someone who was very well known as a very highly ranked IC, and that the comp in the band he was known to be in is astronomical (1m+ annually). Another factor is that we don't want to dox ourselves by giving out biographical details that would otherwise have built a case. This particular engineer had built foundations of particular unprecedented things within industry with enormous current relevance, even to laymen, before acquiring their current rank. I can't get more specific than that, but $1m is absolute peanuts compared to the size of the market sectors these engineers have a hand in shaping.


Whoever told you there's no bonuses at Amazon is not a top employee.

So that's how Amazon works - people can't even get a straight answer from management as to the existence of a bonus structure (let alone how it works)? They need to whisper it to each other offer coffee, or... go on Hacker News to find out what the actual deal is?


Sometimes not even management has the whole picture knows. I know someone who was a former employee (top performer) at FB. He would have his end of year (or half year? Not sure what the cycles were) with his boss, receive his bonus and salary increase. Then his boss's boss would pull him aside and give him another bonus, that his own boss was completely unaware of.


Imagine working at a place this toxic. Holy shit.


> I know someone who was a former employee (top performer) at FB

Yup, checks out


I mean just think about it. You write some critical piece of Amazon S3, generates massive value for the company. Amazon knows they cant lose you, how are they not paying you a ton of money? Individual employees can get into situations where they have massive bargaining power over large corporations. Your average or even regular top performer is not getting this, but people definitely are.

The bonus structure works like this.

1.) You provide massive value, maybe move the needle on the bottom line

2.) Someone way high up who probably doesnt even know you wants to know whos responsible.

3.) He tells HR, give that guy an extra million and let me meet him


I've seen bonuses like this at Amazon. You forgot the detail where some clown who has been taking credit with no technical understanding of the project gets the bonus while the people who delivered the actual value are ignored.


That’s not how software development works


Not sure why I was downvoted, it’s absolutely true. SDE is not a meritocracy.


If you're concerned about your downvotes perhaps you can give us your theory of how it works.


Compensation is decided by a hierarchy of managers, with each manager giving his subordinates a budget to compensate his subordinate managers, trickling down layer-by-layer to the peons.

If your manager's manager's manager is awesome at self-promotion, you'll make more money.

The End


unfortunately, self-promotion matters a lot, sometimes. Shitty or competitive places will require it.


^ This guy reads the Dictator's Handbook.


You're downvoted because you post a shallow dismissal. Look it up in the guidelines, link at the bottom of the page.


Would love to connect to those engineers in retail :) We're looking at solving data quality issues and would be useful to understand how they are doing it.


SubuSS's advice is sound.


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).


It's especially important at a big corporation to actively take responsibility for your career, and ask your manager about what will affect your career. For a talented young software engineer, this may seem fundamentally uninteresting, and you may moreover feel humbled by the sheer amount of money they are throwing at you, so it is easier to avoid this task — and in any case you may be able to coast for a long time if they recognize your talent. Eventually, though, you will run into a situation where your talent and their evaluation of your talent diverge, and you may be blindsided by this, and even if you aren't you will need to make a real effort to realign those.

No one seems to train for this sort of career-self-management explicitly, and most engineering managers are actually not all that experienced or good at managing people. Many will try to make things more comfortable for themselves by being less confrontational and downplaying the negative things which will come back to hurt you later. As such, you should work to combat these anti-patterns, asking your manager on a regular basis questions like these:

- What are the company's objectives and goals for me if I am to remain in my current position? Am I meeting these objectives?

- How about if I want to advance in the company? Am I making progress on these objectives?

- Is there any feedback which I need to take into account which will affect my performance review?

- I have responded to earlier feedback; has my response been satisfactory?

Go over all of these regularly, especially the question of feedback (feedback is much more actionable if it's timely). When you're done, summarize to your manager what you heard, and your sentiment analysis of that. "It sounds like everything is on track for now without the need to make major changes, and I can expect a timely promotion; is this right?"

Take notes every time, noting the date. (They don't have to be long.) Keep the notes organized in one location.


"It's especially important at a big corporation to actively take responsibility for your career,"

100% agreed.


As someone very early in my career at a large company, I am bookmarking this, thanks!


This is great advice, thanks for sharing.


Great points!

FAANG companies like to manage people without giving negative feedback. This can be very confusing if you are used to explicit feedback and come from a more direct culture. "Listening to your manager" can be difficult if you are not used to decoding the issues.

Coasting is often possible. But this is not a good strategy - you are throwing away a huge opportunity to excel, grow and take on more challenges and scale. If you are not having a great time with growth on your current team, it's not advantageous to do the minimum. Instead, look for more exciting projects!

Why do FAANG companies allow coasting? It means people can feel safe, find passions and ideally excel and uncover huge value in these growing industries. Rather than a visible stick, there are (invisible) carrots. Take advantage of these!

As noted, eventually, lack of progression will count against you. You will be overlooked when big chances come up and fail to build relationships that will aid you in your career. It's hard to hire people who find these tasks easy - showing your capabilities will open doors.


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?


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.


Look at Crucial Conversations. Don't take it as gospel, but it's a good starting point.

Stick to facts. Clearly state your expectation, and show how they are not meeting that expectation. Then place the ball firmly in their court. The goal is not fixing the issue for them, but getting them to take responsibility for fixing it themselves.

Refrain from creating a "shit sandwich" by putting the critique in the middle of praise. That makes the conversation ineffective. These conversations are never fun, but they are important to have, and you eventually get used to it.


I really found the Manager Tools podcasts on feedback very helpful https://manager-tools.com/2005/07/giving-effective-feedback

It's not about berating anyone. It's about constant subtle modifications. They compare it to driving a car. Even if you're on a completely straight road, you can't just keep your hands off the wheel and expect the car to continue going straight. You provide regular nudges to keep the car on the road.

Maybe this analogy doesn't hold up that well anymore with auto-correcting cars :)

I think your concern about not providing stronger feedback is valid. Highly recommend the series of podcasts they have around this topic. You'll think about feedback in a much different fashion.


There are two approaches to negative feedback: growth vs deficit. In a deficit mindset, the negative feedback is everything your report is doing "wrong". In a growth mindset, it is things your report can "improve". Subtle framing like this can help with the morale of your employees as it's now how they can take the next step in their career rather than here are all the reasons you're a bad employee.


Some companies have "competency matrixes" (or "growth matrixes") which show what's expected at each level. These can be helpful - showing that whilst a Junior person might just be expected to fix a bug, a more senior person may actively seek similar bugs, add test-cases etc. This is great at setting the scene as "how to level up" rather than of negative feedback.


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.


>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.


With all due respect, the fact that you haven't found that "dream job" yet kind of proves the commenter's point.

I'd love to work a "dream job" myself, it just doesn't exist. The whole purpose of a job is to make a company money, and money just never really motivated me other than in the freedom it buys me to not have to sell my time. Everything I enjoy doesn't make money, and if I wanted to "monetize" any of my hobbies it'd completely kill the fun out of it.

Being an entrepreneur and your own boss sounds amazing, but it's difficult and requires a lot of hard work, time, and money. The safest path for anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur is thus to get the highest paying least demanding job with the most prestigious title (for fundraising purposes), and work on it on the side until it has enough traction and you have enough financial cushion to quit the day job and go full-time on it.

Of course one shouldn't put up with a job they absolutely loathe, but in my experience the search for a "dream job" is a journey bound for disappointment. If the job were so fun, the company wouldn't have to pay people to do it.


True enough. Have you tried to get a paying job playing with puppies for example? It's hard enough to get a volunteer position for that.


I agree with that to a point, but I think it's more like a job employed at someone else's company and making them money is never going to be a dream job. I do think there's hope in creating your own dream job via entrepreneurship and paving your own way, working for yourself. It can be a job that you control the schedule and all that you do. Everything you say I still 100% agree with and have also never found a dream job out of what are considered great positions. I think it's out there if you take and make your own music, start your own company, whatever is that you like/want to do on your own terms and if that becomes a successful venture. Self made.


Well they’d have to pay people to do it well haha


Just wanted to let you know that I'm exactly the same way. In fact, I've even thought perhaps I was the one with the psychological defect where I simply can't stand the 9-5 grind, regardless of the pay, status or type of work. No amount of hobbies, travel or social efforts have made a dent in the deep, existential dread I feel after only a few days in a "normal" job.

Unfortunately, while I have had some successes working for myself, I tend to find down periods come along where I need to work again and I convince myself it will be different this time. It usually never is, the only difference being the length of time I can stomach being employed and even then it's a difference of a few weeks at most.

Is this actually a defect that needs some kind of therapy to correct? Or is it an acceptable way to be? Who knows but I thought I'd let you know that it's not just you.


I'm in the same boat as well, and I'm also questioning whether this mindset is something that is best to fix (e.g. through therapy), deal with ("suck it up, work isn't meant to be enjoyable"), or work with (by finding a fulfilling job). I'd love to hear from someone with the same mindset who's found satisfaction in one way or another.


I'm currently in therapy for work/career anxiety so I can weigh in on this. I've always felt like work should be fulfilling, as long as I can remember. It was around 5 minutes into my first job out of college when the feeling of "this isn't right" started and it hasn't left yet. I started trying to get over it but from working through why I feel this way with a CBT therapist, I believe I just need to follow this. I've found some satisfaction in I'd say 3 things:

1. Knowing that I'll always feel this way and always have a need to do something meaningful. It's my life and I get to decide what's important. This might not sound like much but just cementing that I don't need to change has helped me get through bad days.

2. Starting to make a career change. I'm going to try to get into med school, and to get healthcare experience I've just recently completed an EMT certification. I absolutely loved this class. Such a diverse group of people all from different backgrounds who also just want to have direct impact on someone's health. My therapist says I sound like a totally different person when I talk about how EMT is going. I think about that a lot. Last week I got to help a stranger with heat exhaustion and she was incredibly thankful, I think about that a lot too. Just starting to take the first steps towards something more fulfilling has been huge towards giving me something to wake up excited about.

3. I now treat my CRUD app office job like how most people would treat selling stuff on Craigslist - I do not care about it beyond the paycheck. I don't think about how it should provide any fulfillment. I don't think about being here a year from now, or even a month from now. It won't matter in the long run.

Possibly some of these things can be applied to your life as well. Hope this helps.


I'm currently working on a combined approach - deal with it + fix it via therapy/CBT/Mindfulness. Dealing with it by practicing gratitude for the benefits it provides and the goals it allows me to work towards. Current plan is to use this approach for 5-7 years working towards FIRE and then move into something more fulfilling with less pressure to secure a high salary.

We are lucky that tech pays so well that we could, in theory, retire early. It is very difficult to keep that in mind when you're miserable at work though...


Definitely ok to feel the way you feel. Talking to people is always an option as well. For me i was lucky to find a wife and now have a child. The 9-5 literally blows by, i'm at a giant mega co (not faang) and it sucks similarly. Sometimes it's crunchtime and u gotta work hard, other times no one gives a shit as long as systems function. I've put in my time grinding (5 years at startup) and now want to milk the shit out of these corporate bastards as much as possible.

Basically my wife and now child have changed my life , work sucks (just like blink182) said but hey they are payin me big $$$ to chill out. As a father and husband consitent steady income is name of the game. If you are single and want to hustle, sure fuckin job hop all you want bud!!


"isolated 9-to-5 soul-sucking slog"

jupiter90000 said not to bank on finding your "dream job" that fulfills you; you jumped to talking about "isolated 9-to-5 soul-sucking slog".

There is an in-between. Rather a lot of it, actually.

My job does not on its own fulfill my self-actualization needs on the Maslow hierarchy. I don't think any job could. That's rather a lot to put on a job. But I am satisfied with what I am doing, satisfied with the effect it has on the world (I'm not even remotely working to make advertising more effective), and I don't see it as a "isolated 9-to-5 soul-sucking slog". Sometimes I have to do some less-than-fun stuff, but then again, that is why they're paying me.

Does your mental models of jobs encompass this in-between? While you can continue to search for the "dream job", it may well not exist, whereas the "good enough jobs that are not isolated 9-to-5 soul-sucking slogs" do.


Absolutely 100% this. I worked for several very large organizations, and I am one of those people who just cannot cope with what feels like the pure insanity of it all. I would far, far rather take a huge pay cut for a more sane life, and I did. The alternative is feeling like I'm slowly dying.

Another thing-- even if your job is 'easy', the commute, the drudgery and the psychological stress we've been discussing leaves people like me drained at the end of the day. So the idea of finding fulfillment in hobbies doesn't work out in practice, because the energy just isn't there. Everything feels too hard, and not good enough.


> 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.


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.


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


Of course not. I was reaching for an analogy


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


I did not imply that the poster has depression.


In my experience menial jobs are not necessarily soul sucking. One of my jobs was literally 90 percent cutting open plastic bags and throwing their contents into a machine. Sure that is not nearly as rewarding as cleaning up some messy code or thinking up an elegant software architecture but it beats having to deal with an horrible third-party API day in and day out without any hope of fixing it. During a lot of menial work you can let your thoughts float around so I digested many an abstract idea which I had read about the day before while my body was engaged in an activity that only needed a fraction of my attention.


This is an important perspective. I'm grateful for what I have, but I deeply struggle with the same feelings others have shared in this thread. Knowing that I'm fortunate to not be subsistence farming doesn't fill that hole where purpose should be. It seems some humans might not be wired to feel okay about this, no matter how hard they try.

Maybe our goal should be to free everyone else from soul sucking slog jobs through automation/reorganization of incentives to not have these make work jobs? I'm really interested in finding/working towards a solution for everyone.


> but I deeply struggle with the same feelings others have shared in this thread.

Yeah, it's like the old saying "rich people problems are still problems". :-)

I get it and I sympathize, everyone should strive to make their lives as fulfilling as possible. But a tiny bit of humility and outside perspective works wonders.

> Maybe our goal should be to free everyone else from soul sucking slog jobs through automation/reorganization of incentives to not have these make work jobs?

110% this. We must reach post labour as soon as possible to stop the insane waste of human potential.


Citation needed!

The global employment rate is about 60%, for reference... So nearly all of the employed would have to have such a demoralizing job to make an absolute majority.

I think many relatively low income workers still have things meaningful social relationships at work, or perform jobs frequently rated as meaningful like nursing/farming, which can make up for some of it.

In nearly all western countries people could get all the things you mentioned even as unemployed, but most people choose to work, frequently because they like luxuries and status.


Seconded.

I've been quite miserable in my day job for the last 2-3 years.. At first it was allright, but the shit just kept coming. I even started looking for something new late last year, but when the lockdowns etc came, I gave up on the job hunt, since my anxiety of "nobody is going to hire me" now had two companions named "who in their right mind would be hiring now?" and "i don't want to meet any new people" XD

Since jan or feb I've been getting up everyday at 5am to work on an assortment of private projects until I have to leave for my day-job at 9am. I love working on these projects, I used to play Overwatch a lot, but now my favorite pasttime is my non-day-job work.

I still would love to get rid of my day-job but just to commit even more time to my own projects.

However, none of these pay any bills, and so I toil away...

Oh yeah, and to top it off I meditate for 15 minutes in the car before I get in the office. Helps me alot against "the shit" that just wont stop coming.


May I suggest finding a cause you truly believe in and volunteering your tech skills. Most non-profits and advocacy groups have such a huge tech deficit that they could use someone like you.


But why would you do this passionate activity for someone else to profit from? Why not build it for yourself? And I don't mean necessarily starting your own business but if your day job is something else you put some amount of effort into that to accomplish whatever you've set as the minimum standard for meeting your work goals and then you put the rest of your energy doing what you ready want to do?


I feel the same way. I don't see the point in wasting 40hrs of my life every week doing something I hate, I'd rather go all-in on something that interests me and have something to show for the hours I put in.


Have you tried finding fulfillment in having a family?


I'm sorry if I'm taking this the wrong way but that sounds like settling for mediocrity to me.

Who said jobs can't be fulfilling?


> Who said jobs can't be fulfilling?

The person you're responding to did not claim that jobs can't be fulfilling.

They merely said that people shouldn't expect to work a fulfilling job. And they're totally right.

In fact, I'd argue that the extreme majority of jobs are not fulfilling for the majority of the people working them. Retail, fast food, call centers...nobody enjoys those jobs. And yet people work them because they have to, because they pay so little that trying to get out of them takes an incredible amount of work, which is hard to find the motivation to do when you're so beat down by how incredibly shit your job is combined with constantly being stressed about lack of money.


Of course they can be, but the problem is finding one that has some overlap between:

- Fulfilling

- Stable

- Decent salary

I find that it’s hard to get all of them in the same position.


> Who said jobs can't be fulfilling?

Life experience. ;-)


Yours maybe


Are you telling me that if you had the financial freedom to work on any project you wanted, you’d choose what you’re doing right now?


I'm not there person you replied to, but I think I would probably stay at my current job if I was financially independent.

I work for a small company. The company does foreign language training. Most of the business is one-on-one classes between real teachers and students. My job is basically R&D to figure out ways we might use software to improve the teaching/leaning process. My primary focus is on virtual reality, but I'm also exploring a lot in teleconferencing.

For about a year, I was the only software developer on staff. Our company website and our student portal are all developed by a consulting firm. I got to hire another developer about a month ago. We will never be responsible for the website. We strictly work on these R&D projects.

It's been the best job I've ever had. Most money I've ever made. It helps that the company culture is strongly tilted towards "employee empowerment", and not just as a platitude. Nobody brow beats me over anything. Nobody asks me to justify any hardware purchases (though I still do, because I think it's an important part of developing and documenting the projects). When I say something will take X long, they believe me and that's that.

If you like your work, if you like to build things, try finding a small company that isn't a software company. Definitely avoid consulting companies. I spent 15 years in consulting across a variety of company sizes and it was universally soul sucking (though the smaller orgs were definitely less so, up to the best time I had as a consultant was as a freelancer. It still wasn't as good as my current job, though).

Edit: somehow my phone auto corrected 15 years to 25. I'm not quite that old.


This is awesome man, truly happy for ya.

Your comment isn't the first time I have heard this advice, "Find a small non tech company and get involved" however I have previously written this advice off for w/e reason.

I now find myself in search of a new opportunity and am very much like many other commenters in this thread, highly unsatisfied with "rat race" type jobs, and if I'm not happy I don't perform up to my ability well.

I'm actually very interested in exploring your path, possibility finding a small non tech company and seeing where/ if I could add value to their organization with my software development experience.

All my previous jobs have been found via standard software development job boards though, StackOverflow, LinkedIn, homegrown software job boards, etc. Do you have any advice on finding a small non tech company that might be looking to add a software developer to their ranks?

Honestly I'd love to chat with ya personally. If you're comfortable shoot me an email otherwise any incite here would be wonderful. Email in my Bio


Stooooop using job applications. You're limiting yourself to an extremely tiny pool of jobs when you go through the front-door of posted jobs. The vast majority of jobs are filled through networking, not cold applications.

My last 10 years of jobs have all been gotten through networking. I've still applied to jobs through postings, but I've mostly not gotten any replies from them. And definitely stop using recruiters. They don't have any access to jobs you can't find on your own. They're just trying to move candidates as fast as possible into companies that can't find employees on their own.

Get out into your community. Get to know people. Be friendly and helpful to them, and eventually they start asking you if you're looking for a job.

The primary problem is that you just don't know what work is out there. Networking is like getting dozens of people looking for jobs for you, and you don't even have to ask them to (and seriously, don't ask them to, it hurts your ability to build relationships with them).

That was the biggest change for me. I grew up in a podunk town and had to get out of it to find people I could stand to hang out with long enough to build useful relationships. I didn't realize at the time that that was what I was doing. And maybe if I understood the importance of finding "the good people", I could have worked harder back there to find the types of people I wanted to work with, and been fine even there. But it's definitely easier in a major metro center.

If you can't, go to conferences. Go to conferences in industries other than tech. Go to enough of them in one industry and you'll end up meeting the same people. It takes a little more time, but actually not a lot. Something about seeing the same people at conferences tends to open people up to each other.

And there are a lot of online conferences these days (for the obvious reason, but there were a lot before, too). Definitely use this time to get out and start meeting people. Hell, I live in DC and one of the communities I'm more active in is actually centered in Austin, TX, and I've never even been there. The particulars of why it happened aren't important, just that it's very much possible to get involved in different groups without actually having to travel.

You might even volunteer at a local foodbank or some other community service type thing. On the surface it will sound unrelated to what you want to do, but you're also meeting other volunteers. Some of whom might be people you want to work with. My first major freelancing gig came from an engineer at a sensor manufacturer that I met because we were volunteering at the same place to teach kids STEM skills.

Hell, take up marathon running. I have never done it, but my wife used to do it, and she always ran and bumped into the same people (if you'll excuse the pun). Anything that gets you into a position to reliably meet people. That's it.

It's hard when you're in a miserable job. All you can think about is the misery you're going to experience next week. And then a year goes by and you've had 52 miserable weeks without even realizing it. "The future always gets here". Literally do anything that breaks you out of that routine (short of shooting heroin, I guess) and you'll probably be a lot better off in a year.


I’m genuinely happy for you! Few people will ever get this level of satisfaction.


Yes, it's not easy to find, but it exists out there.

I think a lot of people's dissatisfaction comes from the narrative surrounding "financial freedom". We get bombarded with the idea that financial freedom is the one, true path to working on your passions.

For a variety of reasons, I think that's bullshit.

It creates a false hope that there is some state one can achieve that is free of misery. There is no perfect job. Every person working on their passion project also has a lot of chores they don't like that they have to perform or their project will never see the light of day. C'est la vie.

But more insidiously, it denies the concept that one could be happy working as an employee somewhere. It makes me wonder whether it's a narrative intentionally designed to keep people "in their place". By creating a narrative that "financial freedom" is necessary to work on one's passions, it pushes the worker to not look elsewhere for greener pastures. "Stay where you are, the grass is always greener, blah blah blah". Sure, we can certainly get into situations where we are blind to how good we have things. But there are also lots of very toxic places. And just because you're more likely to go from one toxic place to another doesn't mean that the toxicity is "natural" or "inevitable" or "just the way things are".

So the first step is to accept that happiness and satisfaction and having a contented disposition are choices one can make now, not the result of achieving some financial endpoint. Your boss wants you to work overtime to make an impossible deadline happen? His problem. You weren't the one to set the deadline. He needs to own up to his failures.

And then the second step is to be more open minded about where you might work or what work you might do. I used to do nothing but web and database development. I thought that was the only thing I'd ever get hired to do. And I had only ever done it for consulting companies. I tried to get out of it by getting a job doing software product development at a bunch of companies. I kept getting told that I didn't have any product experience, that my consulting experience "didn't apply", that I had never worked on a single project for 10 years straight.

Uh, I don't know a whole lot of people in any field who have worked on a single project for 10 years. They exist, and that's amazing, but that's just not the bulk of people in any industry.

So I just stopped asking permission to do the things I wanted to do. I just started writing exactly the software I wanted. I dragged it into my consulting work (a little easier when I was freelance, but ultimately not that hard even when I wasn't). I didn't ask approval for anything. Occasionally, I got in trouble for it, but most of the time either went completely unnoticed or the benefits were recognized, and it was fine. But the key point was that, even those few times I was getting in trouble for doing whatever the hell I wanted, it was still better than the long period when I was doing what I was told and getting brow-beat all the time to work overtime and do things "The Company Way" or whatever.

That's one of the reasons I constantly advocate for exclusively working for smaller companies. Most small companies don't care how the work gets done, as long as it gets done. Sure, Microsoft and Google and Facebook are going to flip their shit if you unilaterally decide "this code that I wrote is open source". They want you to ask permission first, to write up a business case for why it's better to be opened first, probably develop it in-house for a while before opening it, if ever opening it, if you ever get approval to work on it at all. And some smaller companies attempt to cargo-cult this behavior, but if you just end-run around them, they don't realy care. They just put up with it.

Or not. Maybe they fire you. But if they do, it's not the end of the world. I've only ever been fired from one job, and that was unrelated to my technology decisions. It was also one of the best things that ever happened to me, as it broke my fear of getting fired. I started on this life of "do whatever I want, but do it to the best of my ability" after that and everything has been so much better ever since.

Just... protect yourself. Be a little mercenary about your work. It's your work. Most places actually have lots of jobs, you just don't know where to look for them. Get out into the community and meet people to find them.

Most of our fears about what could happen with our employers and our work situations are pretty unrealistic. It's pretty rare for people to end up on the street, homeless, just because they refused to work overtime. It usually takes a substance abuse problem, or a mental health crisis. Which you're more likely to fall into if you're unhappy. So choose to be happy. And then do whatever it takes to protect that happiness.


I work at a company that's very much not FAANG (more of a small, niche CAD-flavored Adobe), and I do a lot of what you describe.

Namely, a lot of "whatever the hell I want," almost never asking permission, and I don't recall ever needing to beg forgiveness. The end result seems to be that I now know lots of trivia about dusty corners of our massive, legacy code-base and my manager seems to be consulting me on a bunch of architecture-level decisions. Granted, I ... exercise savvy about playing in a leaf-node sandbox vs. a trunk-node jenga tower, and I'm a fluent English speaker with a PhD-level math background so maybe I get a little more latitude than other people.

Still, I find that I feel a lot more free working here, under considerably less pressure to ship, than I did in the PhD program.


This post reads like someone who has achieved (or perhaps inherited) financial freedom and now does whatever they want and doesn't understand why others don't do the same thing. Your first third of your comment argues against trying to obtain financial freedom, but then tries to nudge the reader to do things that likely require financial freedom to achieve.

> Or not. Maybe they fire you. But if they do, it's not the end of the world.

For the majority of people, if they lose their job and don't get something new within two weeks, they don't pay their rent and lose their home.


No. We're not hurting, but we are not by any means financially independent.

You're kind of proving my point on "fears are typically unfounded". Missing a rent payment one month does not usually lead to immediately losing your home. Also, I would wager that a lot of people have friends and family through which they can get assistance if it goes longer than that. It's going to be extremely stressful, but it's not usually going to mean the person is suddenly homeless.

This is what I'm advocating: being more realistic about the worst case scenario. You're probably not actually going to get fired, and you're probably not going to end up homeless if you do.

If your personal, intersectional position is much more precarious, by all means, proceed with more caution. I'm just some dude on the internet. I don't know you. But I'm not writing specifically to you, I'm writing to the aggregate. It doesn't negate that most people have more fear than they need to about getting fired.


I enjoy doing what I do. I think it's possible to combine financial success with personal satisfaction. In fact I believe the greatest financial successes are the ones that are most intimately tied to their creator's personal satisfaction, enjoyment and alignment with what they do


> I enjoy doing what I do. I think it's possible to combine financial success with personal satisfaction.

That's supremely rare, mon ami. "Do what you love and you'll never work a day" doesn't apply to like 90% of the workforce. And even when you do cool stuff, there is often no shortage of BS to go with it.

You are very lucky to love your gig and be well compensated for it; most people are not well compensated and live lives full of endless drudgery.


not the question that was asked


You don’t need the money. You’ve been given the financial freedom to do whatever you want. And you seriously will just plug away at your job? You can’t think of a better way to spend your time and talents? That’s a bit sad.


I think you're projecting. I suppose in normal times I'd take more time off but otherwise I'm not sure I would quit and do something different. Admittedly lots of people get addicted to effectively the gamification aspects of compensation but there are still lots of people in tech and elsewhere that could absolutely retire comfortably and/or do whatever they wanted at a relatively young age if they wanted to.


bookmark this and come back in 20 years. your life should be fulfilling not your job.


I honestly don't see how a life could be fulfilling if you hate or even just don't care for what you spend most of your time on (work)


You're not always in control of whether your job is fulfilling. Maybe you've been lucky so far, but it's unlikely to last forever.

A piece of advice: The moment it stops being fulfilling for you, you may get the urge to change jobs to something that you think will make you happier. You may change jobs several times trying to rediscover that initial feeling that made you satisfied with your work. But it may never come back. And if it's anything like my situation, in the end, the first job you left may have been the best of the bunch, and you come to the realization that the original satisfaction you had was a fluke and you may never find it again.

There's two ways you could go about fixing this. One is to keep job hopping until you get something that was as good as the first job. The other is to accept that it's just a job, and to try and not derive too much of your happiness purely from work. (Or, more generally, try to not derive too much of your happiness from anything you can't control.)


I think it's important to figure out why you found some piece of work fulfilling. I think a lot of people don't have a good understanding of why they like doing the things they do.

I know a lot of people who say, "I do this job that I hate, and I have this other hobby that I truly love, but if I were to make my hobby my job, I think I'd learn to hate my hobby." I used to say it about a number of things. I love to cook, or I love to paint, or whatever, but I work as a programmer because it's what I can stand to do for work.

And then one day I had gotten so sick of working for terrible companies that I thought I couldn't be a programmer anymore. Then I spent about a year kicking around a bunch of bullshit ideas, trying to find work that wasn't programming, that was "more fulfilling". And ultimately ended up doing a lot of programming in that time, because I had falsely concluded that my terrible work experiences were just "the nature" of working as a programmer.

I didn't hate programming. I hated working for consulting companies ran by MBAs. What I eventually realized was that I love programming. If I had been a graphic designer in those same situations, it would have made life even worse. Programming itself was the thing that I was enjoying that mollified my discontent with my employment situation. Any other job would not have been as satisfying as programming, which is where the concept that I'd "learn to hate" photography or music or teaching or whatever.

Some people I know do the work because they love solving problems for their users. Some people do it because they love learning new things all the time. But I don't think they really know that about themselves. I think they have a surface understanding that, somewhere around this area of this job that I'm doing, there is something here that I like. But they don't have their thumb on what part, exactly, that they like.

I think it's very important to pin it down because I also think it's very important to be able to recognize if it is no longer the thing you love. It's perfectly valid to change your mind about what you love. You might start out on your career loving the intellectual challenge of programming, and you might learn over time that you love interfacing with users even more. But if you haven't taken the time to deeply introspect on what particular aspect of the work it is that you are enjoying, you'll lump it all together as "I love software development", and then wonder why things have gotten bad when you're still a software developer but are now working on database schemas rather than requirements gathering.

You can't know how to fix a thing if you don't know how it's broken. And you can't know it's broken if you don't know what it should look like when its fixed.


How about trying to get back into that first job? ;)


A man cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.

The circumstances that made the first job great were no longer there even before I left it, and the role doesn't even exist any more at this point. I've looked at joining (roughly) the same team again but the responsibilities have changed so much that I can't really recreate the same magic.


ninkendo has written some wisdom here.


Live close to work or remote. This reduces commute times and frees up time during your day. Take vacations and do things that excite you. If not remote, take advantage of days you can work from home and go for a long weekend somewhere. Or work from home for a week and go somewhere.

Work to live not the other way around. Clock out and do things.


I'm not sure that's quite the scenario the parent posited. But there is something of a middle ground where you don't necessarily love/are energized by every hour of every working day but you like it well enough on net and you have the flexibility and financial freedom to do things outside of or adjacent to your day to day job that you want to do.


Many people like jobs that are not fulfilling.


You have answered your own question :-)


> Who said jobs can't be fulfilling?

As a worker, a job will always have elements that are inherently stacked against you and are unfair, and those elements are enforced by the same laws that force you to accept such an arrangement otherwise you won't eat and your kid will never be able to see a doctor.

You give part a part of yourself you cannot get back, your time, a limited resource that you can't regain once spent. You often do this for little to no equity in the business you spend the majority of your waking time advancing, and you often have little to no say in how or where your time is spent. For the vast majority of people, they will never be paid enough to be able to live off of their assets, and their time will be spent building wealth for those whose income is derived from their assets.

Unsurprisingly, there are some people who aren't happy with such arrangements and have a lot to say about them.


Who said they must be?


You spend around half of your wakeful hours at your job, if it's unfulfilling you're trading misery in addition to time for money.


That's why they pay you money for it. If it was fun, people would do it for free (see the FOSS world and its endless discussions on how to monetize).


That answers a point I didn't make.

Everyone exchanges their time for money, if you work a job that's entirely unfulfilling you're trading happiness too. It's an exchange that no one wins.


The company might still win in that exchange, since they get the labor they paid for anyway. Whether you are happy or not is only important insomuch as it alters your productivity. Don't fall into the trap of thinking a company of FAANG size cares all that much about individual employees.


I'm not saying big companies deeply care about you as a person, but their interests are at least partially aligned with yours on this. Happier employees are more engaged, work harder, work longer hours. In many cases the things that make employees "happier" are a lot cheaper for employers than increasing someone's salary by x%.


> Don't fall into the trap of thinking a company of FAANG size cares all that much about individual employees.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking everyone posting on HN comes from a similar background. I work for a non-profit who go to great lengths to make the workplace comfortable.


Don't get me wrong, I think that's great and I'm happy you have a nice workplace. My comments were in the greater context of the thread, which is about working for FAANG companies.


Well, you adapt yourself to find some fun/fullfillment in the work that is available.

To approach work with the mindset "it must be fun or else!" can lead to a lifetime of misery.


They pay you money because you bring them value. Not because it's fulfilling or not for you in any way.


> They pay you money because you bring them value

Not at all. They pay what it would cost to replace you. If someone accepted to do the same job for cheaper (or free), they'd take it, regardless of the value it generates.


> If someone accepted to do the same job for cheaper (or free), they'd take it, regardless of the value it generates.

They wouldn’t hire you for the job in the first place if it generated negative value.


Do you not agree that value creation is correlated with salary?


Not particularly strongly.

Salary is correlated with market demand and alternatives, both for the company and the employee.

For example, I know engineers who are some of the most valuable people in the company, and some engineers who are borderline useless. You can be borderline useless but good at self promotion / good at negotiation and be paid a lot more than very valuable eng. fwiw, I'm on the business side of the house, but used to be an engineer. So I think primarily in terms of business value.

Or think of CSMs. They get paid a lot less, on average, than engineers. Are they less valuable / do they create less value? It's quite hard to make that argument: No CSMs, no customers and no upsells.


I agree salary is correlated with demand, but I also believe there's a reason for that demand.

CSMs have no leverage. Engineers are powerful because their work can have an org-wide impact.

If we're talking about business value I think that sales (B2B), marketing (B2C/DTC) and engineers are the largest generators of business value in companies because of the leverage they have.


I have worked in b2b selling to enterprise or midmarket for my whole career, so individual customers are generally noticeable amounts of revenue. And our lowest end customers have CLVs in the 250k+ range. So that obviously influences my view of whether CSMs have org-wide impact.

I can see how that differs with a different business model, but I don't see how you can simultaneously believe CSMs don't have leverage, but salespeople do. In a business -- particularly in a saas model -- where you have CSMs and AEs, CSMs have more leverage, because you probably barely break even on year one of a customer.


If half of all software engineers suddenly died, the remaining software engineers would be able to negotiate higher salaries. But they wouldn't be adding any more value to any given company than they were previously. Conversely, if a spaceship landed with 10 million highly capable software engineers, we'd all be on minimum wage. It doesn't matter how much value you generate. If there are hundreds of other people who could do your job equally well, then you won't be able to negotiate a good salary.

But it's cute that serfs under the yoke of capitalist exploitation think that they are being paid in proportion to the value they generate!


If it was the case, salaries wouldn't vary so much depending on geography.


They pay because you wouldn't bring them value if they didn't pay. Otherwise Facebook would be paying the developers of every open source project that they use.


Not value, money. Every job centers around money because we're working for businesses. "Value" is just a side effect (and not a necessary one at that).

Some people find making money meaningful and fulfilling, many of us don't.


My job brings me opportunities of scale that I'm unlikely to find elsewhere, and I genuinely enjoy the challenges, but I'd work on something else if they didn't pay me to do it.

It's not that it's not fun, but fun doesn't pay the bills. If it didn't _have_ to pay the bills, I'd probably still develop software but with a very different focus.


Got to believe that it’s possible before you can find it.


If it was fun, it would be a sole proprietorship.


welcome to the workforce! Where you receive money for doing a task you don't care to do.


Marx?


Marx was big on getting people to the place where they don't feel like their work is pointless. But in order to get there, you have to get rid of the social stratification of the current system, where some people do their labor and give it to somebody else to sell. That seller not only gets to keep the majority of the profit, but it also keeps the work from being very fulfilling since you're disconnected from the end product of your effort.

So Marx didn't say it was impossible. He just said that getting from here to there was going to require changes -- changes that could easily be unpleasant.


I agree. Don't look for personal fulfilment in work: that's not what it's for.

Work for money, and use it as one of the tools you have for seeking fulfilment, not as an end in itself. Life isn't short but it's not long either, and the only thing you really have is time.


And that is how under-performing teams like OP describes are born.


Do you think like, high performing teams at a FAANG corporation is the meaning of life, or?


I would like to think like this but can't, may be some elaboration can help me and others who can't think this way.

For several times, I left a comfortable job for an adventure, and ended up wasting months (sometimes years) for no outcome actually.

If I only had an answer for this; how would we convince ourselves to not do more than we can and be satisfied with the reward of getting relatively better paid than the market ?

And what is out there outside the job that can fill the gap of doing nothing 40 hours a week for whole life ? Traveling the world ? Check. Getting scuba diving licenses? Check. Pottery workshops ? Check.

What would we head towards while getting used to the comfort of thick paychecks and not really growing on the other hand ? It feels like we're not in charge of our lives in that case and something can come up and take what we're given by those comfortable jobs. Isn't that a concern for anybody else ?


I think you are right, and that makes me sad.


There's much more to life than working a job. Work-life balance can be tricky, especially if you seek fulfillment, it may take years/decades to find what you seek, be fulfilled and then contribute from your own source.

This is a healthy thing, and one would do well to pay attention and focus on what matters.


https://youtu.be/zgTRPjHVrFE


I think you're on the money with this answer. I would recommend to the OP to consider hiking, bike touring or some other multi-day slow consistent outdoor pursuit. Working inside all day is a special kind of hell.


>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.


> 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.

This is really good advice. Your organization is given tens of millions of dollars to meet a set of goals. Those goals take X SDEs to accomplish. SDEs get paid roughly the same amount, regardless of their day to day.

At some point you will be in crunch mode on a highly visible project. Other times you will be updating wikis or doing things that don't need an SDE (I spend a lot of time getting paid as an SDE to work on tech documentation). The later are great times to do something you find interesting (maybe even loosely correlated with your org).

If you are an enjoyable person who can get things done, you are well worth the money. (except at amazon where the first part is frustratingly optional :)


> 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.

This has been one of the most disorienting and most important realizations of my career. Hard work, or even effectiveness, are only loosely correlated with comp. Often it’s even inverted, and that sense you get that your higher-paid betters aren’t very good and are barely even working is actually true when you get there yourself. It’s very weird but you must not tie expectations of effort or difficulty to compensation. Remember, we’re operating in an economic system where some of the best-compensated and richest people do essentially no work at all. It’s a topsy-turvy world out there. Your hardest work, highest stress, and most abusive job can easily be the one you’re paid the worst for.


@pantaloony

Isnt it interesting:

Economic theory is so incomplete that it is wrong

Currently taking note of economic inconsistencies and compiling them on the side so that we can create a more complete economic theory in a few years' time.


You don't need to @ the person you're replying to. It's clear from the comment threading and only adds unnecessary noise.


As a fellow game developer I really identify with this. I found a job that I am passionate about, even though it came at a significant tradeoff in terms of total compensation compared to FAANG. I would rather optimize for personal fulfillment and building something worthwhile, even if it comes at the expense of money.


Please don't take this as a disparaging comment because it's not meant to be, but...how to you define "worthwhile"? I had to read the OP's comment twice because it wasn't immediately apparent to me that coding in the gaming industry met my intuitive definition of a "worthwhile" endeavor.

FWIW, I think it's awesome you found something that meets your personal goal, I'm just curious how you arrived at that definition of what constitutes "worthwhile".


Worthwhile for me means that it has a net positive impact on the world. Specifically, that people who play games I've worked on derive meaning from their interaction with it or simply find an escape for a few minutes at a time. I make entertainment for a living; ultimately, the creative goal is to make people happy.


This is a compilation of people reacting in real time to the next game I'm working on. Nothing I could ever build at a FAANG company compares to this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtxaEDp3AFI


That’s not gameplay. Actually playing the game will look completely different. You might as well just be making an animated film.


???

What are you talking about. That's people reacting to the announcement trailer for the game. The point being that nothing I could ever produce at Facebook or Amazon would ever produce that sort of genuine reaction from people.


You said FAANG. Either way, I think you greatly overestimate the importance of a video game trailer and greatly underestimates the joy Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, etc. bring to people. Not to mention that for many, they also provide an income and livelihood. BTW: Youtube is filled with reaction videos like that for all kinds of products and stuff.


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.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


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)


Thank you for sharing your story.


All you've said is that labor market is fundamentally flawed in terms of price efficiency.


Well, no. I also explain why.


> 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.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make. There is no fallacy, only a collosal misconception. Salary is not, not ever was, a proxy for happiness. At most, it's a reflection of the employer's willingness and capacity to pay.

Of course a company that makes billions and wants to poach the best talent out there has the means and opportunity to pay a whole lot more than a small company with no viable business model that's burning through cash. Hell, boring institutional jobs on old banks and insurance companies pay handsomely, even though you might be required to wear a suit and tie to churn out that sweet sweet COBOL code.

Salary is not a fun index. Some industries pay more than others, and are more fun than others. This isn't news. Where is the need to spin this a capitalist conspiracy?


You know you are not a machine, right?


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.


> 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

This was Bezos' reasoning for making as much of their internal software available to the public via AWS, a) now it's required to be documented, b) it's now subject to competition, you know it's not the best if no one's using it.


This meme needs to die. AWS was always built from the ground up to be a new product not an offshoot from Amazon retail.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...


Jeff issued a famous memo early on that mandaded public interfaces even for internal usage [1].

GP was talking how this improves reward structure, not about AWS

[1] https://medium.com/slingr/what-year-did-bezos-issue-the-api-...


Which has nothing to do with

This was Bezos' reasoning for making as much of their internal software available to the public via AWS

Those APIs had nothing to do with AWS. So how was the original poster not talking about AWS when they mentioned AWS?

Also a clean public interface says nothing about how badly written and documented the underlying code is.


I'm using AWS to mean the 212 different cloudy services they offer, not the original compute and storage products


No Amazon retail doesn’t develop a service internally and turn it over to AWS so they can sell it to customers. AWS treats Amazon Retail as just another customer that sometimes gets access to services before they are made publicly available. They talk about this all of the time at reinvent.


I mean Amazon as a whole, not specifically the retail arm. Wasn't the point that every internal service should be able to be productised? This was much later than when AWS was started.


So I guess I should disclose this now. I work as an implementation consultant (not my official title but it’s more descriptive - I actually do hands on keyboard coding) at AWS. But I’m just as far removed from the going ons between AWS and Amazon retail as anyone on the outside. So I’m definitely not trying to do the “appeal to authority”.

The mandate was in 2001. AWS first launched in 2006. From reading the letter, it wasn’t about being able to make services productizable. It was more so teams could work independently and choose whichever underlying technology they wanted. It also prevents the issue the original poster was having. It’s much easier to make changes to a small API than a monolith.

It takes a lot to go from internal API to product even on a small scale. Werner Vogels said at the last Reinvent that S3 is made you of hundred or more separate internal services exposed internally via an API. My last company we also had a mandate to be “API first”. Not because we were trying to be like Amazon with less than 75 people, but we actually sold access to our APIs to our customers - large business that used them as the backend for their websites and mobile apps. We also used the APIs internally for our websites and large ETL jobs where sour clients would send us files for bulk changes.


> 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.


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.


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...


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.


A counterpoint is that companies making money through sale of software code alone is the lowest ever. Google loses nothing from open source, as they sell nothing. The biggest companies have moved to SaaS stacks or enterprise sales models. We're seeing less value in the code itself, so the release of it is getting easier every day.


Open source is going to be used to co-opt people into service contracts. For example one product I use right now. If you use it in a very particular way you do not have to pay much if at all to use it. But if you get out of that lane you need to goto the 'service contract' route. I am not talking 10 dollars a month either. I am talking 1-3k per machine. These things almost all want clusters. So usually at least 3. If you are using that level you probably will want at least 2 areas (dev, prod), more if you are doing it 'right'. So now your 'free' stuff just went sideways and now costs 200k+ just to get the software, per year. Oh but just use AWS/Azure/Google you say, add even more to that cost as they bury it in their usage fees. Then on top of that you need to develop your own programs.

I predict the open source bits will be bait. With many 90% solutions. The proprietary bits will be the ones you need to make it work like a real program. Oh there will still be soup to nuts full on free stacks. But I seeing more and more of this service fee way.

As for making hiring easier? Not so much. When you can get 100+ applicants for 1 position. The reality is at least 99 of those have to go away. One more filter does not do much other than let you round bin things faster say 'cant find anyone' then grab your favorite contracting firm and hire them anyway.


Elasticsearch was (is?) like that with AWS. The managed version lacked a lot of important enterprise features (LDAP integration) and was "optimized" to require several times as many machines for the same storage, since you had a ~1.5TB disk limit per node.

But I went from needing technical support from elastic 4-5 times a year, to zero and found work arounds for the other limitations, like cognito for authorization and storing less data in the cluster. The end result was a six-figure savings on licensing and less weekend work for me at the cost of a five-figure increase in AWS costs.

I'd say it was worth it.


This is a very interesting perspective, had not noticed this advantage for companies to have more open source projects.


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.


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.


Not FANG, but at Fortune 50 company. I can second to this. There are teams that move quickly, use new technology, create new products. But most of the SWEs work on mature products with moats- the development is slow because of the complexity of the product, and redtape.


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.


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?


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.


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


What? What do you mean by worse...


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.


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.


And in addition slacks as much as he can get away with. There is that option where even if it looks like you can get away with working only on Mondays spreading results, you would work on Tuesday, Wendsday etc too.


I was in the same boat as OP a few years back at an old grimy tech megacorp. I worked my ass off, and couldn't make any progress because of terrible tools, terrible teammates, terrible process. It was a fucking nightmare.*

If that'd been my first tech job, I might have just ragequit the whole industry.

Fortunately, I'd already been around the block a couple of times, so I knew that I just had a particularly bad team at a mediocre company. I hopped ship, and everything was great at the next company.

*A bad job:

My teammates were annoyed any time I asked them any questions. "Just read the code! It's in the code!" Yeah, OK, I'll spend 8 hours digging through this fucking code when you could have spent 10 minutes explaining it. I think this is probably the worst thing for productivity I've come across in my career. Any time someone asks you for help at work, DROP EVERYTHING AND FUCKING HELP THEM. Teach them how to fish, too, don't just walk them through things. Show them where you're finding documentation, show them the local equivalent of a man page, introduce them to the people with the tribal knowledge. If they spent an honest 10 minutes trying to figure something out on their own, it's part of your job to go help them out.

I'd fix a bug, then have to go to meeting after meeting after meeting to try and get permission to check in my fix. It'd often be either rejected, or I'd have to redo the same handful of lines of code a dozen times before I could get it in.

I'd have to set up some internally-developed test infrastructure, but it was a 40 step procedure to get the tool running and if any one of those steps went wrong, you'd have to go back to the start and start over. Nobody who was familiar with it was willing to walk me through it, so it took an incredible amount of willpower to force myself to get that shit set up.

There was another team working on the exact same thing as my team in another org, but we weren't "tented" (AKA: "disclosed") on each other's super secret projects, so we weren't allowed to work together at all or share any information. My team hated the other team, and they in turn hated our team. (I knew this because I had a close personal friend on the other team)

The development environment was almost completely paralyzed by company-wide bugs. The company was sharing a single insanely gigantic codebase across thousand and thousands of engineers, and there'd be month+ long stretches where the build and tools were broken. Since things were broken so long, people would check in new build breaks without realizing it, and it ended up in a vicious circle of badness.

And of course, the product we were building was a useless piece of crap that everybody hated.


If you're hiring smart people and they get into your company and find no way of succeeding, that's because your company sucks, not your hiring. This person isn't complaining that the job is to make people click on facebook ads, they're complaining because the company is so badly organised that 90% of the time is wasted not even on doing the job.


He didn't say they were hiring smart people, he said they were hiring people who could pass the interviews.


But there's literally nothing to indicate this person isn't smart. There's evidence that they are smart- they passed the interview, which let's face it, might not be perfect but certainly requires some level of intelligence. There's nothing int he Op post that indicates they're not capable of doing good work, only that they're in a situation where they and their colleagues aren't.


Smart enough to know yourself > smart enough to pass interview.


Knowing oneself has little correlation to intelligence as far as I can tell.


Any effective 'theory of mind' requires intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind


It's a wisdom skill.


I knew a very smart guy who even won some competitions and such.

He never found a company or position where he would be productive. He was "demotivated" in multiple companies (I met his former colleges from other companies who confirmed and seen him in multiple teams).


Reminds me of Paul Graham’s essay: http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

“I had avoided working for big companies. But if you'd asked why, I'd have said it was because they were bogus, or bureaucratic. Or just yuck. I never understood how much of my dislike of big companies was due to the fact that you win by hacking bad tests."


What you are trying to say sounds interesting, but not entirely clear. Was the FB exec complaining that when they hire, they are getting what they asked for ? Ie people who are very good at tests.


They hire people who can pass algorithm tests, those same people once employeed game the performance review process. You can't fire them because they "meet expectations" but they also have no interest in maximizing their impact towards helping the company succeed.

For example, if the company gives you a goal of contributing to OSS you could add some feature that no one asked for and contribute 200 lines of code quickly. Or you could debug and fix a bug that many people complained about and that may take much longer and may be just a one line change. But your manager doesn't have the time to drill down into the details of that on your performance review. So the bug fixers looks worse than the feature adder during performance review.

You could say the problem is management for having a bad review system but as soon as they update the review system it will be gamed by the people who don't care about the company.


This is a side-effect of hiring smart people to do simple work.

These companies optimize for hiring people who've spent their live trying to beat the next "level" of their lives with a bigger score than all of their peers. And once you have them, you make them QA the game of life on easy mode. Some people will invent some meager challenges to stay sane, and others will just be bored and miserable without a challenge and the prestige that comes from overcoming them.


Maybe the focus on leetcode is not the best way to hire.

Every company wants to automate or streamline the hiring process to get warm bodies in chairs in front of computers.

What about culture and vision? What type of people do you really want working for you? A cog?


The only thing I disagree with is that it's "bizarre." I think on average people have 6 careers in their lives. And people change jobs every few years as well. It's just a part of life to improve or change what you work on and there is no shame in that. I've worked in the bay area for almost 4 years at the same company and I think about changing things all the time.


>And people change jobs every few years as well.

That's a fairly tech (and probably Bay Area) view of the world. I've been ~10 years or longer at three separate companies and I know tons of people in the same boat.


If you look at leetcode style interviews this is pretty much exactly how I'd expect it to end up. FB probably is worst as most people would only go there for the money.


I have a different take: Nothing really wrong with gaming the system. If someone has successfully "gamed" the interview but not effective at their role, then the interview isn't testing the candidate for the role and sounds like a broken interview loop.


I'm struggling with the purpose of my job too.


I’ve been struggling with just purpose in general for years. I’m a husband and father - those are supposed to be my purpose. But sometimes I don’t feel very good at them. Hang in there. We’ll figure this all out.


Me too. I've stuck with my miserable job for the last 4 years so I can support them. I feel like if I quit I'd be failing them.


I'm probably not one to be giving advice but I feel like your family might gain more from having a happy fulfilled parent with less wealth possibly? How that might affect you/the way you act/the things you do day to day could be more valuable long term. Obviously thats ignoring a lot e.g. finances, practicality.


That would be nice, but I'm responsible for all our bills and I can't get a job that pays the same or better due to my experience in obscure tech, like Neoxam.

I'll just continue to grind in this job until I get fired, die, or hopefully can retire someday (maybe coastFI).


Yeah, it's never simple unfortunately. Good luck all the same.


You too!


Feeling like you're not doing well at something is a key motivator towards growth & getting better. And yet through growth you have to grapple with the truth -- you're not doing as well at something as you could be. Some days I really struggle because the more you're growing the more you'll deal with intrusive thoughts that originate in that growth. Like you said -- keep going :).


Yeah, I'm familiar with the pyramid/staircase of mastery and the inertia period as it pertains to intrusive thoughts.

I like to learn new things, struggle (within reason), and iterate on my previous attempts or prototypes to build a better product that I can be proud of. I did this when I was building my android apps and loved it.

My problem is that the company sets us up for failure and doesn't even realize it. The business consistently gives us terrible requirements. They can't build a business process map or anything else to describe the processes they follow. They constantly miss big pieces so we end up with systems that are spaghetti code to cover all these things they miss.

The company also views struggling with new tech or roles as a negative. They don't provide any real training either, but I guess the Plural Sight self-learning trend is more of an industry thing. I joined my new team about 4 months ago and worked on a AWS Lambda in Python, Slunk alerts/dashboards, Tableau dashboards, and I have no training in any of it. I had to self-teach AWS (2 certs), Python, Splunk (User cert), and Tableau. The demoralizing part is that little of this seen as valuable. I can't improve my career by "developing" Tableau or Splunk dashboards. I need to have a steady diet of AWS and Python where the requirements are 90% there so I can architect and develop elegant, or at least practical, solutions to an interesting business problem.


I've gotta read up on the staircase of mastery cause I am not familiar :D

When you say self-teaching you mean you're paying for certs/doing on your own time? Or work is paying on one hand but going out after it isn't seen as valuable on the other? I'm just curious but by no means am I saying that there's not just bad situations to get out of, just that discomfort and feeling like you're not doing well aren't _solely_ reasons to leave. Hope your situation improves though, sounds like you're doing the work.


They will pay for AWS certs (contract price goes down as certs in org go up) and a few others, but you have to do it on your own time, which is fair.

I guess the better way to put it is: would you assign Tableau work to someone who has no training or experience in it and then tell them they are taking too long? The only way to do it is to learn it as you go, which is going to be slower than someone who is trained. I really want to become an expert in something useful/marketable like AWS and Python, but these no-value assignments are throwing a wrench in that.


Hysterically this usually "turns" for a company right around the point where someone successfully pitches they really need someone coming to the office in a suit on a Friday to signal seriousness.


Formal Friday was a very loose excuse for a happy hour, I assure you :)


This is on the companies themselves. You show young talent some kind of game then that's the game they'll play.

https://youtu.be/FNEDJPeoHZo


Reminds me of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."


considering that the entire point of programming is to automate your job, i'd say it's just about right.


But they can always point to their resume, which lists a prestigious faang company.

I worked for a well-known tech company for a couple years, with a grueling interview process. I regularly get cold called by recruiters asking me about "my time at X".

So it's a good thing, from a career perspective. Whether it's a worthwhile thing of itself is a personal choice.


Does this ever get old? From what I've seen, former FAANG hires get paraded around like some exotic pet at some smaller companies. It's kind of cringy as an onlooker. I once worked at a place with executives who had "hire 3 people from google" as a KPI.


It's cringey as hell, but from a "making my career" perspective, it's clearly valuable to many in charge of hiring.


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.


I don't know if I should feel happy or sad that even the employees are getting the app store review treatment.


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


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


Being less than 10% of $260b in sales doesn't excuse neglecting the product. Also maybe their Mac sales would be higher if they hadn't destroyed their laptop by replacing the function keys with a touchbar.


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


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


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.


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.


I doubt any company would prefer to spend its time on the small product vs it’s cash cow (iPhone).


Most interesting post of this whole thread!


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.


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

You mean interesting career. That may impact your life -- may. I've known a lot of STEM types who made good money, worked 60 hours a week, hated their lives -- but they had a good career! -- and eventually moved on to something else.

Don't lose sight of that career/life divergence. Being at a FAANG gives you access to a lot of good opportunities, but they're only good if they can get you the lifestyle you want.


edit: see jupiter90000's post, which does a far better job explaining my points :/


> 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?


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


I know engineers at Apple and they have full access to the source for almost any project.


Microsoft has SDEs as well


No 'M' in FAANG ;-)

(Sorry, couldn't help myself! Many people still refer to it as a FAANG company)


FAAMG is so much more appropriate to describe the dominant tech players. People just like the sound of "FAANG".

Netflix doesn't come close to matching Microsoft or the others.


In terms of what? Money and power? Certainly not.

Engineering chops? Well-run organizations? Doing interesting and fun work? Absolutely. Probably even more so.


Market Cap


I keep hearing FAMGAN to describe these, Facebook Apple Microsoft Google Amazon Netflix.


I just go with FAGMAN, it rolls off the tongue nicely


It probably depends on the criteria. Is this the biggest West Coast relatively sexy tech employers or is it the large-ish companies with the highest average comp for a given level of software engineer? (I actually agree that, in general, Microsoft probably belongs on the list more than Netflix does.)


In France the acronym that stuck was GAFA, or GAFAM if you want to includes Microsoft. I always prefered GAFA / GAFAM to FAANG.

However GAFA probably sounds better to the ear when pronounced the French way than the English way. This may explains that.


Does Microsoft generally pay software engineers as much as Netflix though? My impression is no.


Also my impression. FAANG isn't necessarily about market cap, it's about the highest paying and sexiest jobs you can get for a large employer


The term FANG (and FAANG) was coined and popularized by stock market investors, not tech workers/job hunters. So it's about the highest growth large-cap tech stocks, not the absolute largest market caps or most well-paid/prestigious jobs.

It was coined in the Ballmer days, when MSFT's stock price had been stagnant for about a decade, so no surprise that it got left out. Things are different today though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech#FAANG


Thanks to cheems I now prefer the sound of FAAMG :) https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cheems


GAFAM is the more sensible acronym.


which is why we ought to switch to the all-encompassing FAGMAN acronym


ive heard FANMAG mulitple times nowadays.


If you drop a few you can have MAGA - Microsoft Amazon Google Apple :-)


If you add a fictional one and switch out a social network you can cave MATH - Microsoft Amazon Twitter Hooli


I think that for it to make sense, Netflix needs to be removed just as much as Microsoft needs to be added.


I think you're underestimating the international potential of Netflix. The only place where they are facing any competition is the US.

Even there the content produced by their competitors is getting bought by Netflix later down the line for international distribution.


Hollywood is terrified of Netflix. It's much more exciting than Microsoft.


Question: shouldn't G actually be another A? Or are we actually referring to Google entity of Alphabet corporation?


FA*M. Or we could add SFDC, Uber, and Palantir to form

SUP FAM.


It is not a FAANG, by definition :)


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.


> 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.


> 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.


I don't feel like the multiples of a toilet cleaner's wage should be a measurement system since it mostly shows income inequality.

For example in Sweden and most of Europe, most devs only make 2x-3x NET of what the toilet cleaner makes. Not only because we're underpaid(which I hate) but the toilet cleaners tend to be paid fairly(which I like).

In places with high inequality like South Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the USA, a SW dev is expected to make multiples of low-end blue collar wages.


> For example in Sweden and most of Europe, most devs only make 2x-3x of what the toilet cleaner makes.

Most devs in Europe are massively underpaid, and should work on the internet instead of some local underpaid wage-slave job.

There is a shortage of skilled programmers in the world. There’s no reason to remain underpaid other than really, really wanting to work a very specific set of local timezone hours.


What do you consider underpaid? Is it when you're making significantly less than people in similar positions somewhere else on the globe? Is it when you're in a low income percentile of your country / geographic area, taking the skill into account?

I tend to think it's the latter. I'm one of those devs in Sweden. I certainly make less than developers in the US, especially those in SV, and my effective tax rate is higher than for SV devs, even if California is considered a high-tax state. On the other hand, I'm firmly in the top 10% of earners in Sweden. Am I underpaid? By the first definition, certainly. By the second definition, not at all, even if my income is roughly 3x of the lowest-paid workers.

Then again, I approached the whole situation from the point of view where I first consider where I want to live, and then look for a job there. One could certainly take a different approach and go where the money is.

I also don't think it's that easy to get SV-level salaries for remote jobs. All-remote companies are perfectly aware of different economic circumstances in each country, and aren't keen on offering 100k$ to someone in a country where 70k$ is already an above-market rate.


You are right about the underpayment, but you're underestimating the challenges of finding good remote working opportunities that pay more. For one thing, why would an American company offer to pay me twice as much as I could make in the UK if I'm in the UK? They only have to offer a little bit more to inceltivize me to take the job.


> why would an American company offer to pay me twice as much as I could make in the UK if I'm in the UK? They only have to offer a little bit more to inceltivize me to take the job.

If they have the money, e.g. they're a large corp or a startup with VC money to burn, they tend to not watch costs that closely and it should not be a problem. I've received multiple offers for six-figure remote jobs in the US (I'm from Eastern Europe) and so far only one offer for less than $100k - that one offer was from a small, profitable self-funded startup.

OTOH, if you're already making say $100k in the UK and want to double it by getting a $200k remote offer, then it's considerably harder. I'm betting it would require a lot of valuable and unique experience in your CV.


If I may ask, how did you find those six figure remote jobs?


"Who's hiring" thread, here on HN, with one exception, which was IIRC a direct application to their website (it's a known startup that happened to be open to global remote hiring at the time).

The common denominator of most of these offers was that they were in expensive US cities and wanted to hire "talent", but, in these locations, it would probably cost over $200k (esp. including health insurance, retirement contribitions etc. which I wasn't offered) to have their pick. So they were happy to offer $120k-$130k to a comparable remote candidate. BTW they also employed people from cheaper areas of the US.


Well, I don't actually mind being "underpaid" when I can get home every day at 4pm, have 30 vacation days, ~20 months of sick leave, pay 400€ for my apartment, and have fun at work.

And while I might be underpaid compared to SV, I'm still in the top 10% income-wise.


Even getting home at 4 PM every day, you only end up with 2-3 hours to do whatever you want per day, vs 12+ if you aren't going to work.

You should work a year in Silicon Valley and save every penny, then go spend 3-4 years back in your home country IMO. Just imagine what you could do with all that time, completely yours. The best hours of the day would be all yours again.

I took a couple of years off full-time work, and it was indescribably great. It took a few weeks to unwind and get out of "rat race" mode mentally, but after that.. I finally understood the cliche of "living more" because I would do more interesting stuff in a day than my friends and family would in a week. I had to force myself not to talk to anyone more than once a month, since I just sounded like a jerk to them, and they never had anything new to say any sooner than that.

I honestly felt like I lived more in that two year stretch than I did in my whole life up to that point beforehand.

I didn't manage to achieve enough of a stable financial equilibrium, so I'm back in the rat race now. My current job is awesome, I love it. I couldn't ask for a better job. But compared to that time to myself, I honestly feel like I'm dead. Wake up -> Work -> Chores -> TV/Games -> Sleep -> Repeat. Weekends are almost entirely devoted to resting and catching up on chores I couldn't take care of during the week. Days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years, everything just slips by.

Fortunately, I know I can come back to life again once I get enough money saved, so I'll keep at it.


Why not only work only every other day until 4pm, spend more time with your friends/family/books, pay twice as much for a nicer apartment, and save even more each month for a rainy day or retirement?

Being paid properly isn’t about having enough to get by and have fun. It’s about not squandering your most valuable nonrenewable resource: minutes of your life.


I work in R&D for a marquee brand corporation in Europe. Senior Dev, salary is €60k minimum salary in my country is €20k.


Which country if i may ask?


Depending where you're based this isn't true. At my country in Europe I could earn 1000€ / month cleaning offices and common Programmer salaries' are 1200 - 1500€ / month


Programmers in Europe are underpaid as a group. I moved from London to New York and literally doubled my salary (almost exactly 2x). And London is at the high end for Europe.


Corollary, toilet cleaners in America are underpaid as a group. I don't want to get into a heated political debate, I just want to suggest an alternative view point that I find compelling when discussing American vs. European software salaries. Don't toilet cleaners in Germany have better lives than toiler cleaners in Kentucky?


My point is that if those are your options, start being “based” on the internet instead of wherever you consider yourself “based” now, because good programmers on the internet are paid €10k+ per month.

If you have a lot of experience and a good network, you can easily double that (€20k/mo, €125/hr) as well. Triple that is not out of the question, either.

High end specialty researchers are billed at >=$400/hr by large firms.


US employers are very reluctant to hire remote devs from Europe imo. As soon as they hear you are from Europe the dialog is over.


So don’t mention where you are? As long as you don’t have a window in frame, work the same timezone hours, and have decent internet, I think you can sidestep this issue.

That said, I don’t think this is as big a blocker as you seem to think. It’s a different issue in the sales process.


You're only underpaid if the company couldn't replace you for the same pay.

In many parts of the world it's not a problem to find good and experienced engineers/devs for 5x the minimum salary.


or maybe programmers are overpaid...


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


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.


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?


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.


I learned at a previous job that one of the biggest challenges in janitorial-services is the insane rate of turnover and difficulty in guaranteeing that a particular floor of a building has been serviced on a particular night...


US janitors can't go work in Sweden, where janitors are paid more fairly.


In what country in the UK id be doing very well to earn as much in London as the train driver - and they have a FS pension.


Supply and demand.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


“Move slowly and don’t break anything.”


i mean, it's definitely not "ethnically" wrong LOL. (ps: in case people missed it, it's ethically, not ethnically)


> My advice to you would be to pick up a more rewarding side-project

But read your contract of employment (or equivalent) first ;-)


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.


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


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


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.


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.


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.


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/

:)


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.


Big companies are too slow, small companies are too fast.

Large = we're stable, most likely a monopoly or oligopoly, so there's no threat and no need to move fast while things work

Small = we need cash, we need customers, we need that product done yesterday!

Medium size is where it's at - there can be medium size companies within large companies. These are more stable but still need to innovate and move along. Either smaller companies are going to start nipping at their heels or big companies with decide to move into their neighborhood and guzzle up everything.

If countries wanted a bubbling, innovative and competitive economy, they'd limit the size of companies and preemptively break up big companies.


Thank You, that was a pretty entertaining story.


Amazing read


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.


> 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.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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%..


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.


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


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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".


> 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.


> 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.


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.


OP said he's working at 20% capacity for one because the tools and documentation are bad. If fixing those problems increases the team productivity by some non-trivial amount it's a positive data point for a promotion.

At my current co, promotions and job levels are measured by increasing impact at an individual level, within a team, across teams, across orgs, etc. Cutting waste is everyone's job.


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.


I've never worked at a FAANG, too. But main reason I want to work at one is that ability to do project at a scale which is not possible anywhere. Few project are no use for small companies/startups.

For example: Optimizing compile time (no need to invest for extra 1 minute speed up), working on high quality labelled data (i came from ML background, this is not possible in most of startups), analytics on data (questionable ethically), working on Ad platforms, working on large scale system.

In the last, Imagine, even making simple changes have bigger impact on real world.


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


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.


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.


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).


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.


>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.


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.


I remember this in the first place I worked at.

Damn that was bad. Lots of positives in how that huge company handle tech but speed was not one.

Since then I have only worked for startups. Everything is not rosy but we execute very quickly.


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.


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.


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 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.


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.


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.


> Is all of FAANG like this?

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


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?


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!


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


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?


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..


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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


Whats your opinion on Amazon?


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.


@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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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).


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.


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.


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.


> 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."


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.


Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455415


Additionally: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961560

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


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.


Get their money, fill your pockets.

Use their time, start your hobby projects.

Don't forget to have fun.

Fun is skipping the classes.


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


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


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


> 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.


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.


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).


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.


> 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.


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.


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


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


> 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)_


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?


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.


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?


"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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


"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.


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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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


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).


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


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.


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.


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.


> 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.


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.


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.


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.


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


> 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?


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.


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.


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.


Parent is not asking them to do that:

> 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.

It's definitely a choice here, but the point is the OP needs to actually make some active choices and decide what they're ok with.


I agree with what you are saying. The "tough-love" message is usually to "suck it up" and stay where you are. "Life sucks, get over it." My point is if you are smart enough to be in a FAANG you are smart enough to do great work and make an impact on this world. You don't have to settle for fixing tiny bugs in some admin page for an ad company. I know there are people that are 100% cool with doing that for $$$. If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it because there are enough problems to solve that if you are a smart engineer and you aren't doing shit and hating your day then you are wasting your talent.


>If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it

>So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better.

You and the OP are essentially saying the same thing, except they are adding that an honest days wage deserves an honest days work


You are assuming that FAANG companies are offering "fair" compensation for the output of their engineers. How would anyone ever make a profit doing that?

Employees are very rarely the exploiters and almost always the exploited.


If it wasn’t fair, why did you accept the offer?

Let’s not pretend that FAANG employees are like an underclass that has to accept a job out of desperation.


It can simultaneously be true that 1) FAANG employees (including myself) are compensated and rewarded well above the national average, and potentially better than any other stable option available, and 2) FAANG employees are not adequately compensated for the value and revenue they generate for the company.

Amazon does not get the richest CEO in the world by truly compensating employees what they are worth to the company. Facebook literally tells employees that they target 90-95% of "market rate" for engineering salaries, based on location of the office they work in, and they refuse to negotiate with competing offers, resulting in massive compensation disparities between London and Seattle/Menlo Park.

I'm 35 and compensated far and above what I ever could have dreamed of making as a teenager, but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair". A pat on the back, an "exceeds" rating, and a 15% increase in my bonus for that half is peanuts by comparison.


Yes, but where it goes off the rails is when people expects the corporation to act against their own incentives. When people complain about compensation they get confused about how compensation is set.

Pay is not about the value you bring as much as it is about your leverage in negotiations. There’s many ways to get leverage like being the only person who can solve the problem, or systemic levers like unions.

If people aren’t getting paid adequately it’s usually because they don’t have the negotiation leverage to fix it. Conversely, we all probably know people who are of dubious value yet can command handsome salaries because they have some unique leverage.


Yes, unions and coordinated negotiation are the correct answer, but that's very difficult to pull off in companies this large with employees compensated so far above the cost of living.


100% agree that it's not easy, but it's almost certainly easier than the fight for collective bargaining during the industrial revolution. The idea that people just have too much to lose by fighting for it just underscores the point about negotiation leverage.


> but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair"

This is a failure in reasoning about how pay works.

Pay (salaried jobs, not commission) for a role is related to the difficulty in hiring (replacing) and retaining an employee for that role. A role's impact in terms of dollars changes over time. The safety in this is that if you don't happen to save $10mm this year, you still probably have a job. And your company can have roles like R&D (where many projects don't generate money at all), internal tools, etc.

> when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work

I would hazard a guess that this work wasn't 100% yours. Ops, oncall, infosec, accounting, etc etc all participate. This is Obama's "you didn't build that alone" argument.

The question isn't how much did you save, the question is could your employer hire someone else to drive the same outcome for less (or more).


[flagged]


Why go out of your way to judge what he said based on global socioeconomic conditions instead of on the local context? What good does it do other than emotional reinforcement and cultural signaling?

He wasn't asking for your sympathy, he was trying to contribute to a discussion and not every discussions needs to be immediately relevant to all seven billion people to be constructive.


> Let’s not pretend that FAANG employees are like an underclass

Depends on your baseline.

If you use other workers in the US, then you are correct.

If you use a counterfactual in which employees meaningfully participate in corporate governance, then you are incorrect.


>If you use a counterfactual in which employees meaningfully participate in corporate governance, then you are incorrect.

Can you elaborate on this point? Do you mean that FAANG employees do or do not have a seat at the table?


Even shareholders have a historically unusual inability to participate in corporate governance at Facebook. The closest comparison I have found is the oil trusts from the 19th century. But that's not a good comparison, because they were trusts, not corporations.

I seriously can't believe Delaware allows Facebook's voting structure. Corporate law has evolved in a really strange direction over the past few decades.


Interesting, I don't know much about FB governance. I would venture to say it's probably (and unfortunately) becoming the norm rather than the exception that employees have little input into governance. This is another area where I think unions have benefit.

My point about being a tech "underclass" was more about avoiding conflating FAANG employees with those who have little opportunity or options. FAANG employees generally have more portable skills than, say, an uneducated immigrant employee and I don't know that I agree they could both be "exploited" in the same way. While it may be rooted in valid points, it's a bit cringey to use the same language to describe both.


> You are assuming that FAANG companies are offering "fair" compensation for the output of their engineers. How would anyone ever make a profit doing that?

Are you saying companies should have no profits in order to be fair? Profitability doesn't really reflect ethical pay, just look at Amazon, they had no profits for years.


I think it's a fallacy to think that you are smarter if you land a job at a Big N company. I know a few, you I wouldn't qualify as smarter than average on any scale are working at those companies because they happen to get good referrals and got lucky on interview days.


Exactly this. People fall for the blackshine of FAANG and large corporations etc. but this is just a PR. In reality, the larger the company is (was working for a few bluechips as subcontractor, including two from FAANG), more miserable is life for a developer that has still some life. It is a golden cage, where the largest problem is huge number of different "best practices" as they try to streamline the job. Endless discussions, processes, politics,...

For someone young, corporations are waste of life. See the world, get expiriences and when you are over 40 and you are sick of adventures take your enourmous CV and join the corp to wait for a pension. You will like the peacefull pace and they will love not having problems with you.

Suggestion over the thumb, before employing in large company, check two things. Number of manager levels from team manager to CEO and how fast they got additional levels of management. This will tell you all about the company you are joining.


I think the point is that OP is short-changing his/her own career. If you're doing the equivalent of 1 day of work over 5 days, and it's OK to your manager, you are performing at what most FAANG companies would call "Meets Expectations" which is just treading water career-wise. If your goal is to just tread water for the rest of your life and take a paycheck, then by all means keep doing it. If your career goals include climbing the ladder, working on something "meaningful", joining a high performing team with cool technology, standing out and getting prestige, whatever they are, you're probably not going to get there by relaxing on the "Meets Expectations" cruise control setting.

One thing I wish I learned earlier in life is that your career is your responsibility, not your manager's, not your company's. I spent way to many of my early years asking "What tickets should I work on now, boss?" and too few asking myself "Where do I want to take my career long term, and what steps do I take now, next year, and next 5 years, to get there?"


> If you're doing the equivalent of 1 day of work over 5 days, and it's OK to your manager

As developers, we want our managers to trust us. We don't want managers to micro- us and question our time estimates. If I say doing some task will take X weeks, I don't want management to say "do it faster". The manager doesn't know the technical details and complications like the developer does.

Here, OP is explicitly abusing that trust, taking most of the week off but pretending to be working. He/she is meeting expectations by misrepresenting the complexity and difficulty of the work.


> 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.


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.


>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.


US Army ranked about middle of the road as far as crap jobs went for me. ( MOS 19D )

Very MOS dependent and POGs tend to have a good time in the military

IT really is the top of the food chain, if you can handle stress, for employee type positions.

Try some farming, concrete work or other manual labor if you want to experience shit jobs


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

That’s very true, but there’s also the reality check that the job market has a lot of uncertainty right now. We tech people tend to have pretty good career mobility, but if the market contracts badly enough, it really may come down to taking whatever job you can get. Which as much as it sucks it’s what a lot of people have to do to put food on the table. The OP seems to be lacking motivation. Maybe the prospect of being jobless and without health insurance can be its own motivation ;).

I do agree with your point though, which I think is don’t just take what’s being given to you, do something about it. I think that’s also a version of what the parent comment was getting at (you don’t have to do little work just because management sets the bar low). And like someone else said on this thread, taking action may be extra important now. These low-output teams and employees are at a higher risk if the company decides to trim the fat.


Oh please, being a software dev in the US is being nothing but privileged. 'Starving Ethiopians' is not a fallacy - more than half of America makes less than $30,000. So yes, you are privileged and should be grateful.


This line of reasoning is insane to me:

1. Exploitation and immiseration are real and severe at home and abroad.

2. This guy is luckier than most since he's not in one of the most hyper-exploited groups.

3. Therefore: he should check his privilege and work hard to make the FAANG corporation earn more money.

Connect the dots for me.


Right, because doing something that ~everyone can do after some learning is such privilege


> Right, because doing something that ~everyone can do after some learning is such privilege

Because the GOOG or M$ is hiring former waiters right out of a sketchy code bootcamp? Good fuckin luck. You don't need to go to MIT to get in, but you certainty need some sort of legitimate qualifications.

OP is working at a FAANG+M type of place, which are universally well-known and offer base salaries that are are known to be some of the highest in the industry / country / world.

Literally thousands and thousands of other people are applying to those jobs online, and I'd bet several hundred of those could probably do the job adequately enough.


It absolutely is. There certainly isn't equal access to 'some learning'. Sure, resources may be online, but learning still takes time, energy, and a background of prior learning.


You and op might be more violently in agreement than you might have surmised.


>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.

For a non-manager in a large organization, the choices are pretty much accept your work environment or leave it. Fighting the entire company's culture as a low level employee is like trying to move a mountain by pushing harder.

To OP: Accept the pace your department moves at, and look for little victories. Your never gonna get to write a new app in a week and be a hero in your current company/department, but there is still some satisfaction to be found in ironing out little wrinkles one at a time.

If/when you leave, look for a job you want to go to, rather than just looking for a way out of your current job.


I have a subtly different take on this; op is cheating themselves. They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job, but they aren't because they are living down to the expectations of others.


It's selection bias.

We're inundated with stories of how Person X changed the world with their software, or Person Y who solved this amazing issue, or Company Z is doing this cool thing- with out realizing that we're only seeing the people who broke through the mundane. Working at a FANNG means you might get a chance at being in the room where they're picking people for a new team that might do something cool.

Where I work, we have this amazing internal database system we're going to open source. It's amazing tech, but for the 10 developers who made it, we have 1000 doing grunt work solving problems like "We need to get Apple Sign In working, but to do that we need to add X to Service A, Y to Service B, and refactor how we store accounts to make it work." It's not exciting.


Yeah good post here. Even within each of these organizations, there's always people starting to work on the "cool" project. You could get yourself to work on it, but if you're not spearheading it you'll prob end up as one of the guys who does 80% of the work to make the last 20% of the design work.

Essentially my job right now. Learning a lot, but man is it frustrating.


> They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job

Do they?

Not saying you're wrong, I'm really asking. It's not my perception that FAANG software devs have high satisfaction--more often the impression I have from talking to FAANG devs is that they feel trapped in golden handcuffs. But I'm open to the possibility that someone has better evidence than me.


It can vary highly from one half to the next, and changes with your teams, projects, etc. It can be extraordinarily rewarding to work on products that everyone you know uses every day. It can also be very frustrating and demoralizing to work on important components of the stack that noone inside or outside the company ever notices unless it breaks. The golden handcuffs are real, but most of FAANG gives you ample opportunity to switch teams and projects to find something to work on something that interests you, fulfills you, or lets you learn something that traditional companies would never let you work on unless you already had "industry experience". If you are proactive–and are "meeting expectations" in your current position–you almost certainly have the freedom to find something new whenever you start to get bored.


You're answering a subtly different question than the one I'm asking. It sounds like you're saying people have opportunities to take steps to find satisfaction at FAANG jobs, but I'm asking, do people actually find satisfaction at FAANG jobs?

I can see how self-directed-ness might give people a sense of agency. And I can also see how being able to seek out novelty could keep you from getting bored. But I don't think that agency and interest are enough to equate to satisfaction for me. For example, I think it would be difficult for me to find satisfaction at Facebook, Amazon, or Google, because the vast majority of the effect I see these companies having is harmful--I'd be waking up and going to a job where I believed I was making the world worse. No amount of agency or novelty would fix that.

Obviously everyone is different, so maybe FAANG employees are able to find satisfaction in ways that I can't. I don't know--I'm genuinely curious if there's any actual data.


As "satisfaction" is such a subjective measure, I'm not sure there's any good public data, but at least a strong majority of folks fill out internal surveys indicating that they are happy in their current roles.

We all find satisfaction in different ways though. Some get it from the products they work on, even if their individual work isn't exciting. Some get it from the actual challenges they're solving and code they're writing. Some get it from the flexibility and engineering-driven work environment and the opportunity to choose which problems they tackle each half. Some get it from the freedom to work 9-5 and have a strong separation of work and home life (barring periodic oncall or the current bizarro pandemic world). Some simply get satisfaction from knowing that the benefits and compensation they receive are helping to protect themselves, their family, and their loved ones, and ensure they have a comfortable life outside of their job.

Many find satisfaction in FAANG roles simply because they have access to one or more or all of those at the same time.


Internal surveys are pretty unreliable. Story time (details vague for obvious reasons):

I worked at a company where we were collecting safety compliance data on workers. The data was partially medical in nature, so we were legally bound by HIPAA, meaning we could not share the data with their employers. Some of the data we collected was self-reported, while some of the data was measured objectively via sensors.

Consistently, the self-reported data showed the workers were in compliance with safety standards. Consistently, the sensor data showed them to not be in compliance.

We changed the messaging around the self-reporting, to make it clear that a) we would not share self-reported data with their employers, and b) we were bound by HIPAA, and therefore could not share self-reported data with their employers. The number of workers self-reporting non-compliance increased significantly (more than doubled) but remained lower than 30%, while the sensor data continued to show compliance in single-digit percentages. The only thing we had achieved was objective proof that the self-reported data was unreliable.

The purpose of the self-reported data was to identify faulty sensors, and it was clear we weren't achieving that goal, so we eventually dropped the self-reported data from collection entirely.

Ultimately, there's no personal benefit to expressing discontent in an internal survey. Doing so takes the risk that the data will be used against you.

I do agree, there are some reasons to believe that people DO find satisfaction at FAANG job. It's just that there are reasons to believe the opposite as well, and I don't feel like I can draw a conclusion as confidently as the poster upthread who said, "They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job". The only thing I'm convinced of at this point is, "I don't know."


Seriously? I don't know anyone in this field who derives immense satisfaction from their job. Maybe if they're less than 5 years out of school and reality still hasn't hit yet...


I think you might be in a bubble of evil, I know tons of people who love their programming jobs.


I've had some very enjoyable periods of time across various programming jobs, but it's far from the norm. I know plenty of folks who tolerate their jobs, are okay with them. But actually love their jobs most of the time? No way.


I loved every week (though not every hour) of my computer programming jobs. I literally do it for free in my spare time and here some fools are willing to pay me handsomely to do it at their little glass and concrete spreadsheet/Powerpoint mine. The only "catch" is I have to work on problems they pick instead of ones I pick. Sounds fair enough to me; where do I sign?!


Yeah, I think lots of engineers feel the same.

We just love to solve puzzles, coincidentally this is also well paid.


What GP meant is that after 5 years, you are just solving the same puzzles again and again.


If you feel this way then maybe programming isn't for you. Which is fine. But that doesn't make it that way for other people.

There are a large number of programmers in this world, there's room for there to both be tons of people who love their jobs and tons of people who hate them.

You should ask yourself, though: why are you arguing so hard against other people, who you don't know, enjoying their jobs? Why is it so important to you that this myth of happiness be debunked?


yikes, this is painful to read.

the power software engineers wield is almost unfair, compared to non-software laborers - there's unlimited ways in which to get paid fairly well, ridiculously easy lifestyle, and also work on tech that aligns with doing good in the world, generally speaking. one can't have it all at the same time... but with software, you can probably have one of the largest spreads of [mission, comfortable income, low stress, {fill in with your requirement}] out of lots of other jobs.


It's easy and pays well, yes. It's generally not satisfying though. Maybe 20% of the time you're working on solving an interesting problem or doing what feels like "real" work. Much of the time you're spending in awful meetings / conference calls, answering emails, or working on features that nobody's even going to use. Maybe it's different in Silicon Valley.


It sounds like programming isn't for you. I hope you find happiness in whatever other things you choose to do.


I've been programming for 30+ years, since I was a teenager. I enjoy it more as a hobby than as a career, but it does pay well.


Stop working for large companies then.

Large companies always have politics getting in the way of engineering decisions, resulting in annoyed engineers who can't do satisfying work.

Small organisations have less politics, more creative freedom (usually) and you can have a larger impact on the organisation.

However, they usually pay less, too. If your main priority is money then you might have to suck up the misery.


Work is not really something I have come to identify myself with. Its a way to make money so I can do the things I enjoy.

Trying to work at something you enjoy has always been the path to not enjoying that which you used to, for me anyway.


This seems like good advice, but is presented poorly.

You're meeting expectations, which is great, but don't stop there. You recognize that you (and your teammates) could be doing more, so make it happen. You're entirely capable and empowered to do so:

- Fix that technical debt. - Identify better tooling and demonstrate it's value to your teammates. - Proactively find things your software could do better and write about them. Don't be discouraged if people don't bite on the first few, you'll find one eventually that's too good to not pursue.

Sure, you could accept the status quo and coast like some of your teammates, but you'll be unhappy (and bored). Do what makes you happy -- identify, evangelize, prototype and build.

All of this doesn't mean you're lazy for having posted this -- just that you need encouragement to make the things happen that'll make you happier and more fulfilled at the end of the day.


This is good... only IF he can actually get to work on this stuff without being stomped on and blocked from every corner of the organization.


None of the FAANGs block personal projects from staff who are productive enough in their primary responsibility


What if the "personal" project is like "introduce this new tooling to the team, get it integrated into our CI pipeline"?

Anything that introduces new technology or has the potential to require some time from other teams (Devops, SRE) I can see running into organizational roadblocks in the final stages of the project, even if the individual is free to start the experimentation and justification steps them on their own.


I think you're referring to "gatekeeping." If the employee, for instance, proactively fixes a bug or resolves some technical debt, it's possible another team member might try to prevent it from being merged. Their reasons might seem non-objective and rooted more in the fact that they weren't involved in the change, or involved in the decision to make the change. I've ran into this.

It's easy to be discouraged and, in the event this occurs, stop trying. That said I think this is the wrong thing to do. Instead I view this type of scenario as a chance to convince my teammate of the value I'm adding and the rationale behind the change being made without being explicitly planned. It's hard work, and sometimes involves some long, strained conversations with your team mates. That said at the end of the day you just might encourage that individual to proactively solve these types of problems. This will probably make that person happier as well, and unlock additional productivity for your team.

The hardest part of software is the people part :)


If they're willing to do the integration and support work on their own, then it shouldn't be a roadblock, and they should be able to prove the impact that it offers to other engineers and be rewarded if they did all of the work.


The OP is of course the new guy/gal so your not going to being doing major things from day 1.


Being new doesn't mean you can't try to do things. If the OP takes that perspective then they're just limiting their own potential.

Code is code, and can be changed. There's this weird inhibition in our industry to just trying things.

Senior or not, there's no harm in opening a PR. If there's a clear reason for not applying a change it's just a learning exercise. The PR can be closed without any negative impact.

Who knows, maybe discussing the PR will be teach the senior contributor something. I can't tell you how many times I've realized a prior constraint is no longer valid via a discussion o'er a PR. I end up informed, the new contributor ends up empowered and the code base lands in a better state -- win, win and win!

IMO these types of changes and the resulting discussions are healthy and absolutely crucial to the longevity of a successful piece of software.


Just opening a PR ? some time you have to step a way from a laser focus on JIRA and GitHub.

As a newbie at a FANG its going to take at least 9 months to a year to get that familiar with such a large code base.

And most of being a developer is not KLOC's or its modern eqvielent Fuature Points


This is nuts. This guy doesn't owe the maximally extractive amount of his labor to the FAANGCorp. If they're happy with his work output, fine. He fulfilled his end of the bargain.

Totally deranged protestant work ethic run amok to think otherwise.

It's also extremely not this guy's fault other people have to work exploitative shit jobs during a pandemic, and his working harder (for FAANG!) isn't the thing that will fix it.


> If they're happy with his work output, fine. He fulfilled his end of the bargain. Totally deranged protestant work ethic run amok to think otherwise.

By this reasoning...

Manager: Our users are asking for this feature, how long will it take us to ship it?

Developer: I can do it in six weeks.

Manager: Ok, I'll let them know.

(Six weeks later)

Manager: I just found out that this was actually super simple for you and only took a few days. What were you actually doing the last month? Our users were waiting this whole time.

Developer: You said you were OK with six weeks! Your protestant work ethic is deranged!

;-)


I guess I'm supposed to sympathize with the manager in this hypothetical (which is different from the OP's situation anyway). But I don't!


How about the people who were waiting for the work to be done? Users and customers.


I wonder your background.

Do you know how demoralizing it is to work in an organization where the people trying to lead have no power to effect change, and the leaders are incompetent and force bad decisions on a constant basis? Where there is no real vision for the company?

The OP is describing being trapped in a tar pit, and you're saying "run faster".


He's not describing a tar pit, though. He says he works one day a week -- he could, in fact, be running faster.

The simplest thing to do would be to sign up for more tasks (his calendar is open, after all) and/or tell his manager he wants more challenging work.


"Hey boss, I'd like to move faster on Project X, but there are too many review processes"

That's just the way it is, John.

"Hey, I'd like to change the change review process to streamline it from a catch-all form, to one more appropriate to our workflow"

Sorry John, QA will never sign off.

"Hey, why are we wasting 30% of our team on Project Z? It's a total duplication of work for Project Y, and brings no value to the company - it's the pet of that VP of finance, because he ate dinner with an Azure rep three months ago."

Man, I hear ya, John. What a stupid project. But that VP has the ear of the Board.

"Hey, I'd like to work my way into a design role, to help craft more common-sense engineering and be at the table when we talk about backlog priorities"

Let's put that in your development plan for 2022. We need to knock out Project X.

---

Working at large companies can be soul sucking. There is a comic called "Dilbert" that touches on it.


This is exactly how it goes and it's clear you've worked at a large company.

At the end of the day you have to accept that, yes, you are a cog in a machine. You have to morally reckon with the fact that the company is making millions or billions of dollars and sometimes you're not giving 100% of your mental effort because there's a lot of bureaucratic crap in the way. That's how it is. You either accept that and make peace or leave and go to a small company and try to make an impact that way (with way less pay).

Being super efficient at your job is not a "moral goal" when working at a big company. It's too big and complicated to draw clear lines about what is right and what is wrong when doing your work there. Even if you become more efficient at your job and make better product, often the thing holding back your product is something else entirely. You could improve the product by 1% by working harder but maybe your marketing department sucks or your senior leadership doesn't know what they're doing. The people in those positions could make different decisions and make your product 5x better, so it doesn't even matter.

Work long enough at a big company and you realize even if you do a bang up job, it won't make a huge difference in most cases. (Sometimes the product you're working on gets cancelled or fails in the market, so what was the point of stressing anyway??)


I agree it can be demoralizing but what you've presented takes the perspective that you are just a victim to an organization rather than part of that organization.

>That's just the way it is, John.

Maybe you didn't communicate the value of moving faster that speaks to your boss's incentives.

>Sorry John, QA will never sign off.

Maybe you didn't show QA how the improved workflow actually improves the quality of the work

>Man, I hear ya, John. What a stupid project. But that VP has the ear of the Board.

Maybe you can find a way for that VP to get credit for that 30% reduction in waste

>Let's put that in your development plan for 2022. We need to knock out Project X.

Maybe you can take a lead in project X so you can build the trust needed to be given a role in design with more responsibility

I know these can come off as glib, but the point is that sitting on the sidelines talking about how things can't get done only ensures things won't get done.


Having done transformation work for the last 4 years I can tell you...the individual employee will almost certainly literally die of exhaustion before they see meaningful change.


Yup. I haven't done that type of work, but I feel like to make change at a large company you need to be okay with imperfection all around you first and then find one or two things that could actually make a huge impact. Trying to fix little things here and there is just an exercise in futility.


I can commiserate with this attitude but still find myself disagreeing. I have worked in the type of role where I was expected to lead a transformational change when it seems like the incentives at every level are aligned against it.

I do personally feel an obligation to keep trying because if I didn't I'm not doing my job. Throwing up my hands in exasperation means I'm collecting a pay check just to keep the status quo. That makes me part of the problem as well as resigning myself to be miserable. I think we owe it to ourselves and the organization to move on if we get to that point.


> I have worked in the type of role where I was expected to lead a transformational change.

Most roles have nothing to do with leading transformational change. You can concede that much?


Yes, but the comment I was replying to specifically spoke to the exhausting nature of transformation change


I think the saying is “frustration is a failure to manage expectations”.

I think often we get into organizations overestimating the impact we’ll have. It seems our impact can be inversely proportional to the size of the company. But that may be an artifact of how we define “meaningful change”


I have tried - and though I still push, I still call out the craziness, it truly isn't worth the effort.

It's like politics, but at least political change and civil rights are worth some mental exhaustion.


AKA, please work harder for your corporate masters because poor people are suffering. What's that? You want your corporate masters to pay a fair share of tax so poor will suffer less? No, just work harder and that extra work won't benefit people who need it.


To be fair it’s the OP who’s implying he or she wants to do more. Its not about working harder to please your corporate masters but about taking action to improve your own happiness.


Yes, for OP they seem to have some kind of motivation to work. I was criticizing framing of the issue as not "doing right by your company", not the idea that working harder might be useful for OP. I think we've all been in the situation of having a reason to work harder but still feeling unmotivated. I don't know how "tough love" would help someone like this and the reasons given by khazhoux for working harder make no sense.


Yes, he should work harder -- he admits to working only one day a week, and then actively pretends (by "trickling out" work) that it took longer. Let's please not pretend that it's normal or OK to have 6-day weekends every single week.

He is being compensated (I infer) very well for a safe and comfortable job, except he doesn't like the tooling and he's realized that people trust him and he doesn't need to be honest to collect his paycheck.


You are misrepresenting this and spewing some garbage perspective about how work should operate.

Hours put in is completely pointless and an old win by unions to prevent companies from further exploitation of workers. If you can do 6x the work of the other devs on your team you have literally no obligation to work any harder.

The company does not have your interests at heart.


Reflectively pointing to imperatives like "normal or OK" when someone is having a moment of questioning imperatives that have got them this far is unhelpful. Why does it matter what's normal or OK? Maybe the thing that OP should be doing is something that's considered by many to be abnormal or not OK. If you want to convince OP that they should be working harder then fine. I'm not saying that's the wrong conclusion, but at least give a reason that's more useful than (a) other people are suffering therefore work (makes no sense) or (b) do what's normal or OK (why?) or even (c) you have a moral duty because you're being paid well (unconvincing as an argument and psychologically unmotivating).


It would be easier if he could just give this job to someone willing to work those all day, but let’s not pretend that most of these people will never get the job anyway.

I don’t see how being honest makes this world a better place.


What's with this moralizing? If you can get away with working only one day a week, there's nothing wrong with doing exactly that. Is this like some Protestant work ethic thing?


In general, I certainly wouldn't advocate trying to do the least work possible to get by in some job long-term. It doesn't sound fulfilling and likely isn't good for one's career long-term.

But I don't get this moralizing about cheating the company.


Especially since OP already indicated that they're feeling unmotivated.

If you're feeling unmotivated and force yourself to work harder on something that doesn't motivate you to fulfill some kind of a moral standard, that might end up being a fast track to burnout. (Depending on the exact circumstances, your personality etc. of course, but burnout doesn't only happen because of too much work but also because of bad matches between people and their jobs.)

The key is to see if there's some way OP can find the motivation, and then work harder on getting more things done because they have the motivation to. Or to find some other kind of a solution to the unsatisfying situation.

I don't really get the moralizing about other people having to work in objectively worse conditions either. It's not like OP's (or anybody else's) mental well-being and satisfaction with something that doesn't appear to suit their personality should magically become better because someone else has bigger trouble.


It's also possible that this one day of intense work is unsustainable for 5 days, and this is just their working style. There's nothing wrong with that as long as this isn't done out of laziness.


So what if it's done out of laziness? There's no law that says that a lazy person can't participate in the economy without giving up their laziness. There are jobs out there that are well suited for lazy people. Maybe OP has found one of them.


It is absolutely 1000000000% "OK to have 6-day weekends every single week" if you can swing it.

Why the hell wouldn't it be?


> AKA, please work harder for your corporate masters because poor people are suffering.

Not at all. Simply please stop complaining about how easy and well compensated your job is.


This is the logical yet unfortunate conclusion to the 4 hour work week.


To be fair, they didn't say they're working one day a week, they said it takes them only one day to provide equal value to what their teammates achieve in one week, a value that seems to meet their company's expectations.

FAANGS employees are salaried, and not paid by hour, because you are compensated for ROI. If it takes you one hour and you bring in lots of value, that's still a good deal. On the flip side, you could also work 60 hours week if that's what it took you to meet and exceed on the value expectations.

Still agree with much of your comment though. Since they're complaining about the situation, something does feel off.


> 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.

They said exactly that though. They work one day a week and otherwise just log on for standup and when messaged.


Ya that's why I still agree mostly with OP in this particular case it seems something is off.

I just wanted to explain that with software, a small effort can deliver huge returns. So the idiom of: "Don't work hard, work smart" is in full effect. If you can deliver on the expected business value with less effort on your part it is still a win/win scenario. A business who'd replace you for someone who fills up all 40 hours would not necessarily gain anything, in fact, might lose on ROI. Hours put into software does not translate directly into the output delivered.

And, there's only so much creative juice per week you can deliver on, so that cleverness of solutions you can come up with, and those good ideas you have which don't take very long to implement, but deliver big returns, you can't necessarily just be asked to come up with them twice as often by working more hours either. In fact, sometimes those come by taking a break, a step back, getting more rest, etc.

And maybe since we're on the topic, I've had a fare share of jobs prior, server, construction, military, and yet nothing drains me more than software engineering at the end of the day, even if it was only a 6 hour day. There's something about just thinking all day and discussing heavily all day that is super draining mentally. Where other jobs I've had that were more physically demanding tired me, but in a good way, that almost energized me in my off time. The mental work is hard.


It’s a transaction. The goals of the company and employee parties is to maximize their own gains with as little effort as possible. The moral imperative argument is very dubious, and sounds one-side to further the gains of the company party at the expense of additional energy from the employee. Raising matters of social change as if the employee should have some gut wrenching “come to Jesus” because “they’re so lucky” relative to global social and market changes is a bunch of smoke and mirrors to, again, unevenly place the gains from the employee-business relationship on the company. Business is only a transaction; maximize gains for minimal effort, between all parties.

That “million people would kill for a chance” to be at a FAANG is not the employee’s problem anymore. The moment the company extended the job offer already created “a million” job applicants who didn’t get an offer. Behaving in a way that suggests continually begging “to stay in” just to get to create the net gains for other people, the investors and top management, deserves a therapy session on personal self-worth, which is a personal problem not a business matter.

Now, as for the matter of personally going above and beyond, that’s actually a separate matter - no need for emotional entanglement of the the business reality and personal reality. If the employee wishes, as they’ve expressed, to go above what is satisfying the business (given they’ve reported no management has complained) then by all means, find more work with outside teams within the company, tactfully speak to the manager about the concern, or just leave and start a new job or venture.

The moral guilt argument over the transactional relationship between an employee and the business, though, is at best naive, and at worse unevenly extracting more energy from the employee than the business. If the company has continued to pay the employee without complain, that’s their own moral dilemma for allowing it.


You're seeing some responses to this that are very cultural. Personally, I don't think a slow coast is a good long-term strategy for most people under a lot of circumstances (for many reasons). But putting the least effort in is seen as pretty normal in a lot of cultures. As someone else said, you're seeing a lot of Calvinist moralizing here IMO.


> 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?

I'm always impressed at how much American culture promotes labor vs. labor infighting instead of recognizing that the issue is not the 1%. It's the top 0.1% (and 0.01%) that's causing this problem.

https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/never...


lol. this is insane. he's doing his job and asking a question.

Lets say he decides to start being more diligent and taking the initiative to do as much work as is possible. His company is the only entity that benefits from this arrangement, and the benefit is marginal at best. Ultimately, this literally provides the resources for the company to pay the salaries of more useless workers and perpetuates the issue this post is trying to address.


Nonsense and completely detached from reality.

Every worker's duty is purely to themselves, not some sort of bizarre worship of their employer.

Your duty to yourself under capitalism is to extract as much capital and benefit as possible from the market in exchange for your labor. If you can commit a line of code a week and still get paid your salary, you're working EXTREMELY efficiently. Even better if you manage to get a job where they're failing to get any labor from you at all.

Conversely every employer is focused on extracting as much production as possible from their employees. Efficient companies will cut off under-producing workers without a second thought and will continuously strive to minimize the cost of any employee.


I agree with this guy.

You feel the bar is being set very low. The hard part of your job is working within the established environment (the technical debt?). You're choosing to put the effort in 1 day a week because you're comparing your contributions to your coworkers.

If you're unhappy in this dev environment that's one thing, and if you're unhappy with your contributions that's another.

I would try setting expectations for yourself if it's easy to impress the company. You could be a huge asset even assisting your team. It's concerning that you aren't aware of why their progress is slower and that no one has spotted your complacency. Perhaps you have something to offer as a mentor and maybe that will give your work more meaning/value (something to consider).

As the guy above me said, a lot of people are facing crisis right now. I honestly don't blame you for having an easier time of it if most of the week you're just collecting money.

PS: I learn best by teaching others. I think you should get more involved with your team to help them :-)

PPS: I have grown SO MUCH as a developer by forcing myself to "do as the Roman's do". Watch your mental health. If you feel like you're losing your identity you should walk, but otherwise try immersing yourself in understanding your companys' stack and design decisions. Make your contributions indistinguishable from all that code that together makes something amazing. It's bad to measure progress by SLOC. You can always switch to Sprite if you don't like the Koolaid.

PPPS: You may be able to be honest with your supervisor and ask for time at work to work on passion projects. They care about your meaningful contributions and would likely do whatever you need to keep those rolling in. A FAANG company would accomodate this.


The danger here is that others might be happy with the pace and lack of stress, or they might simply not be good enough to do any better. In either case, they're happy with the situation, and don't want it to change.

If you do good work, they'll fear managers might notice, and it'll make them look bad. So they won't be happy with that. They'll sabotage you, bully you, not proactively tell you things you don't know you don't know, etc.

Before you start that fight, make sure you want to fight that fight, and that if it happens you stand a good chance of winning.

Otherwise you'll just put in more effort than now, and the result will be that more people than now will hate you, and eventually you'll get fired because your work will suck because your colleagues have deliberately withheld information.


OP is a freeloader at a rent seaker. Your simplistic morals fail to account for the bigger picture.


Well the point is that OP is obviously not happy being a freeloader, which is why they posted here about it.

This sort of tough-love feedback to really useful to someone looking for meaning in their work. The reality is, sometimes you have to make your own meaning. If what you're being handed at work is boring and easy, it can be self-love to start asking around for more interesting stuff to do.

Young people in particular can have a hard transition coming out of school, where the structure and goals are handed to you, into the "real world", where a lot of the rewards flow to people who have the ability and willingness to create structures and goals for themselves and others.


By bringing in the bigger picture, it seems you're just making the moral case stronger? That means he's profiting from rent seeking, just like the shareholders. (And probably is a shareholder too.) The money comes from the same places.

To complicate things a bit though, this looks like systematic failure in some parts of the organization. Doing your bit to try to fix that failure seems like a good cause.


you’re right if the person was not working at a FAANG. so what if they’re one of tnt most valuable companies in the world? one way they became so valuable is by vacuuming up all the talent and giving them tedious work to do so they don’t compete with FAANG itself.


We could get into the conversations about entitlement, sociopathy, whatever, but lets try to help:

Situation: "I only have to work one day a week to keep up, and so I only work that one day and slack off the rest of the time".

Possible causes:

1. Depression / Mental health issues

Seek help. I know: depressed; so hard to do.

2. Doesn't actually enjoy programming.

Wait till the pandemic is over and get a different job or start a company doing something you enjoy.

3. Enjoy programming, Team sucks.

FAANGs are huge companies with thousands of teams. Find a different team.


Have you ever worked for a company like this? I have worked for a startup which was acquired by a FAANG company and later transferred internally to a "normal" team within the FAANG company. That's three different scenarios: 1) startup 2) recent acquisition; small startup-cultured enclave in a big company 3) pure big company.

I was an extremely motivated worker in scenarios 1 and 2. I had a lot of "momentum" and worked extremely hard. Burnout was a consideration not just because of long hours, but because I liked working so much that it was easy to overwork over the course of a couple months. In scenario 3 it is a constant struggle to remain motivated and I constantly feel as though all of my momentum is lost.

Here are some differences I noticed: Scenarios 1 and 2: a. Extremely aggressive goals and deadlines. Deadlines constantly missed, but our velocity was impressive. Goals were very short term - few goals were more than 1 business quarter in the future. This changed once we were acquired because the acquiring company demanded longer term deadlines.

b. Scrappiness and the pride in your work and yourself that accompanies scrappiness

c. Iteration speed prioritized highly. Build and deploy times to a staging environment often less than 3 minutes.

d. I wore many hats. DBA, sysadmin, full stack software engineer, product guy, security person, devops. Worked in many domains - search, distributed systems, building in the Cloud, etc.

e. Hard work and ownership are seen and rewarded.

---- Scenario 3: a. Smaller goals. Every goal was designed to be hit, since missing goals is anathema in my FAANG company.

b. No scrappiness whatsoever. Just meet the deadlines.

c. Iteration speed barely prioritized. Since your tasks have been mapped out months ahead of time, what need do you have to iterate quickly? Just build to the spec. Build times were extremely long. Deploy times were often 12 hours (you think it wouldn't take that long to deploy something, but when your company has strict rules about only deploying to 1 region at a time and taking 30 minutes to monitor metrics in each region before moving to the next, it adds up). Many of the best tools or tricks I used to iterate quickly in scenarios 1 and 2 don't work due to security measures, or more likely, due to the FAANG company leveraging their own tools rather than open source ones I used in scenario #1 and #2.

d. I wear 1 or 2 hats.

e. Hard work and ownership aren't really seen unless you're in the right project.

I can't tell you how many times I've told my manager I feel like I haven't done a lot of work recently, or feel like I could be doing more. I'm always assured that I'm doing very well in his eyes and meeting all my deadlines. From my perspective I've done a disgustingly tiny amount of work since I started.

Anyway, I wrote all of this out to try and illustrate that it is really hard to work hard in a scenario where you are actively discouraged from working harder. I didn't really do a good job of doing that, but I hope I've kind of hinted at the problem. Most of your teammates at FAANG companies have worked at FAANG or other large companies their entire careers and have no idea how slow the entire freight train is moving. They have no idea that in other companies the role of being a software engineer is much more dynamic than their experience has been.

There are a lot of compounding issues other than just unimaginative deadlines that I don't have time to touch on. Legacy systems, defined promotion processes that make it so that you know ahead of time which projects actually stand a chance of promoting you, a strong hierarchy, entrenched politics, etc etc.

I just want to say that I have been in scenario 3 for a year and it has taken about that long to build my momentum up again to where it was in scenario #1 and #2. It is really, really hard to keep your motivation to work harder when almost every part of the job is incentivizing you to just sit down and meet your pathetic deadlines.. Trying to motivate someone by shaming them is never going to work here.


No - the company appears satisfied with OP's performance. Therefore they're not freeloading, rather they are selling the company services at the price point the company set. If someone comes to my business and we agree that I'll provide a widget for $10k, if it costs me only $1k to make it, we call that profit - i don't give them 10 widgets or a refund. A salaried job is an agreement that i will provide X KPIs, if it takes me more than 40hrs I don't get extra money, so if it takes me less an 40hrs I shouldn't give back money.

Now there may be laws or authoritarian morals around how I should lick the boots of my boss and give away more hours or outperform the KPIs, but basic capitalism says that's just a thing for suckers.


[flagged]


because they don't have solutions or useful advise. They don't think anything is wrong but the person who's presenting the actual problem. It's sometimes useful to consider the possibility you're wrong, but what OP describes is clearly not unique to his team or company. Many of us are in the same boat. So at least in this particular case, the "toughlover" is indeed, a "douchebag".


Because the tough love solution is always "Take responsibility for improving your own situation."

The complainer says "It's not my fault!" The tough-lover responds, "Yes, it's not your fault. But it's still your problem."


Sometimes you need to be slightly offended or put off in order to change your own stubborn mindset. I see both sides in this exchange. OP has a choice they can make. They can continue to coast or strive to do better. There isn't necessarily a wrong choice here, but I do believe their long-term future outcomes will be strongly affected by the choice they make.


Isn't that the case by definition?


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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.


Care to elaborate? Genuinely interested.


Just any recruiter if they will echo my sentiment.


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


Fear. It can always get worse.


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.


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?


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)


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.


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.


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.


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

W