“Stability” over status: the article goes on to say that people are choosing (amongst other things) to freelance. It then goes on to talk about people moving to startups?
I’m not sure the author had a real point here. I’d love some hard data on how many people are pivoting to canned food companies after FAANG life
I worked on the top project at a FAANG company. I was burned out, in a terrible commute, and had to send my cats to live with a family member because I felt they couldn’t get enough attention from me.
I now work at a small company (~22 people) making less money but with no expectation of OT or weekend pushes. Nobody’s ever heard of the company and that’s fine. I took the position to coast for a bit and found out I really like the vibe. I’ve been there for five years later this year.
I have the luxury of being able to be paid less (no dependents), but boy is it great. Post-FAANG I have nothing to prove to anyone (including myself). I just want to pay bills and have a life. This gives me that.
Sadly, they were up in years and both died of old age in the care of my mother. However, she loved them like her own and I know they had a good life with her and her own cats. Thanks for asking.
I have two furry friends again and plenty of time to dote on them.
Good to hear. We have always had cats when we could and have found, like others, that their value increases as one gets older. Good to have a reason to get outside one’s head to appreciate or take care of others.
You can live a pretty chill life at most FAANGs too if you avoid the burnout high pressure projects and choose not to have the crazy commute by moving close to work? They pay you plenty enough if you are a single person to not have a bad commute. There is a reason why there is jokes about google employees working from 11-4.
IMO it's the small startups and certain industries that have crunch.
Yes for many years, and I have many other friends that do so too. Just recently left to work even harder at a small place and I got promoted past sr eng.
The hardest part about FAANG is the fucking leetcode when you change jobs. IMO working at a FAANG is the most optimal place to be if you want to put on the slippers, have a good work life balance and get paid the most.
Wait what? You’re saying for people who already went through the leetcode hazing to join the company, they have to do it all over again for internal promotions? That’s absurd, I had no idea.
Isn’t the “rationale” for leetcode that they dont know you and as far as they can tell, you copy pasted all your open source code from SO, so there is no other way to prove that you can actually write code than to take a leetcode? But if you’re already working there, couldn’t you (bear with me because this is a little crazy) just point in the general direction of the code you’ve worked on at said org and ask your colleagues or manager for their opinion on how much of that was copy pasted from the internet?
That’s a little less absurd even though leetcode is a waste of time.
FWIW, I typically decline code challenges. I have ample open source code that’s commented, publicly visible, and tested. I’ll sometimes humor them if I like the team and it really takes an hour or less to complete (note that when they say an hour it really means 4–8h, so I assess it myself). But otherwise, I point at my open source code, offer to pair on a feature/bug on these OSS projects, or drop out of the pipeline if it’s not acceptable to them.
Same with quoting a salary number or salary history: if they ask I decline to answer and if “the software won’t let me continue without” I offer to fix their software and drop out of the pipeline if “tbd” or “1” won’t work.
Yeah I never understood the whole leetcode between positions, even lateral moves that you choose for culture or personal interest reason required another leetcode. I swear it was just there as a dis-incentive to keep people from moving.
Do all FAANGs do this? Or did we just happen to work at the same one?
google doesn't, as far as I know; changing teams has just required talking to the manager and a couple of engineers from the new team to make a case for them taking me on. so interviewing of a sort, but not the leetcode rituals that getting hired in the first place needed.
I work fully remote. I rarely work past 5pm. I have worked on a weekend I think one time in 10 years. I have had one "urgent problem, VP on the phone" situation in 10 years. I happily take off time in the middle of the day to handle various errands (vet appointments, etc). "I will have the time and energy to make dinner for my family every single day" was one of the first things I mentioned to my manager upon joining. All this despite managing a team and being the final escalation point for a fairly critical system.
I did the same about 8 years into my career. I've been here for about 4 years now and I don't ever see myself leaving. I get to work on neat stuff, the leadership is genuinely nice and open to anything. I feel like a human here and I can see myself being friends with most everyone at the company. We have about 45 people.
There is something to be said about being a former FAANG worker getting paid above average salary at (insert boring tech company here).
Partially because maybe if they weren't seen as a 10x developer at FAANG with the competition all trying to make the next promotion, they surely might be close to one in any other company depending upon how good/bad that company's hiring has been (often terrible).
Many F500 companies have crummy tech stacks and lousy in house developed systems that would be better replaced with counterpart open source systems. An ex-FAANG worker in the right job might be able to be a 10-100x force multiplier, just by building the right tech to make other developer's job simpler.
> An ex-FAANG worker in the right job might be able to be a 10-100x force multiplier, just by building the right tech to make other developer's job simpler
I don't think your random FAANG worker could show up somewhere and just "build the right tech" on their own, especially in a not so good team. There are some very strong SWEs, but the average one isn't a super star. My experience working at a FAANG is that everyone in my team is good (able to solve problems, hard working, good foundational CS knowledge), and there may be 1-2 very strong ones who really make things happen. Also, a lot of the skills we develop are with our own internal systems, I don't know how easily it would transfer to open source world.
In my previous company, there were some good engineers, but also some mediocre ones. This led to a lot of bikeshedding, wasted time trying to convince people, to review bad codes and so on. What I'm trying to say is that a very good engineer may not be able to unlock their potential in bad team, unless they also have good leadership skills.
The top 1% of SWEs in any FAANG are world-class engineers and are unique. I'm talking about the John Carmack's of the world who are top of their field.
The top 10% at FAANGs are game changers, and having them in any company would probably accelerate them. I've worked with some really extra ordinary, high-output engineers that were brilliant.
The rest of the 89% are very, very ordinary. I'm at a FAANG and the vast majority are exactly like every other SWE I've worked with in my career. There's nothing special about them. I'm currently working with some of the laziest, dumbest SWEs in my career despite their employment at a FAANG.
So to those that think FAANG is some badge of honor, don't believe the hype, I don't think FAANG employment is a meaningful signal at all.
> So to those that think FAANG is some badge of honor, don't believe the hype, I don't think FAANG employment is a meaningful signal at all.
I honestly think FAANG employees sank their own boat. The constant bragging of how little work the do in a week on anonymous forums, and the "day in the life" videos that show everything but work. Despite their bragging about being 10x, I don't see any proof of it.
The 1% of SWE though are very good (especially older employees with years of experience e.g. Rob Pike). The rest of the 89%, as you say, are mediocre at best. A Google employee in 2010 is not the same as a Google employee in 2020.
The 1% who brag are rarely SWEs IME - usually PMs and admins and the SWEs who do rarely do it for long generaly just a lull between projects or during research phase or just recovering from burnout. There's a lot of very bursty types here though - people who don't do much for a few weeks at a time then drop something massive in a marathon or something.
Isn't an 11% chance to be hiring a really good to incredible employee good signal? I don't think you can have the same chance when hiring from most small companies, not based on company reputation alone.
> The top 1% of SWEs in any FAANG are world-class engineers and are unique. I'm talking about the John Carmack's of the world who are top of their field.
My point is that employers (esp Google/Facebook/Amazon) try to consolidate roles. The term "Full stack developer" encompasses a lot. That's a "10x"/rockstar dev.
Carmack or Cerf probably would not make it through the levelling at Google. They are at a Distingushed engineer level.
There’s no need to build the right tech on their own. They can simply miss some tech and find a close enough FOSS or build a close enough version.
Where “close enough” means build 80% with 20% effort. Or even 20% solution with a day of effort. Whatever makes sense in the new environment (which doesn’t need to scale to billion active users, for example)
As someone who's been both at top startups as well as boring tech companies, my experience suggests that it's not as much a difference of tech stacks or skills as opposed to priorities.
For better or worse, in a lot of tech companies, tech wins hands-down. It has to be the "right" kind of tech (suggesting pragmatic but old-school solutions not fitting the current groupthink might not pan out), but generally, tech nevertheless works (maybe because there are enough resume-driven-developers that regardless of management/politics concerns, pushing for the right tech will always get enough people on your side to win).
In legacy companies, tech alone won't get you very far regardless of its merits - if anything it's the opposite. "Too much" tech will actually be seen as a threat and you may encounter roadblocks, because the tech you're proposing is too good and will threaten some entrenched positions or entire departments within the company.
If you want to succeed as a tech guy in a big legacy company as an employee, you need to stay within your lane and not push the boundaries - the boundaries you are being given (explicitly - or implicitly as in "why hasn't this been done before? this seems so easy") are there for a reason and are there to protect some position(s), and unless you have a direct relationship with the CEO and/or investors, you are unlikely to win this battle (it took me a firing to actually understand that). Remember that you may be hired to provide business value as much as you could be hired to be a number on some manager's direct report's list where your only true job is to pad that list and otherwise not rock the boat too much.
On the other hand if you determine the limits and manage to automate day-to-day tasks well or at the very least automate the BS and make your workday enjoyable, it can be a nice cushy job that only require a couple hours a day - not to mention that doing the right favours to the right people will give you good career progression (if the company itself appears to be on solid foundations). Of course, please do any of the juniors a favour and try to explain them these dynamics in private, so they don't shoot themselves in the foot early and get fired by threatening some high-up position/department.
TLDR: don't join a legacy company because of passion, but join it if you're ready to put morals/perfectionism aside and make a decent bit of dough. The reason their tech is so shit is not because of lack of skills or money but because a lot of existing money depends on nobody having those skills. If you can operate within that environment you will have a good time.
As someone that joined a legacy company 6 months ago to weather the recession, I agree with the majority of what you said. You are talking entrenched interests in keeping the way things are. Especially those that have worked in the company for years. They don't want change, because change would threaten their position.
It has been very difficult to adjust to the culture personally. On the one hand, I hardly have any work. On the other, I am struggling with the meaningless work assigned to me. The tech is abysmal, but given the culture, it's not worth dying on this hill. Countless people have tried before. You can accept it or move on.
I am staying around because of the economic environment. The upside is that I am free to work on my side projects because my IP clause is strictly related to work only. I don't expect much else because it can't offer any other than words.
I wish I would have read some of this commentary 15 years sooner.
> The reason their tech is so shit is not because of lack of skills or money but because a lot of existing money depends on nobody having those skills.
Are you summarizing what you wrote earlier in your comment? Or generalizing? I’m not following and/or skeptical of this characterization.
In my experience with large organizations, the lacking quality of technology tends to result from:
- hiring outsiders (often contractors but sometimes corporate IT teams) to build things
- the outsiders have little incentive to build it well to solve long term problems
- the managers hiring the outsiders don’t really understand the technology domain well enough
Put another way:
A. the people who build software “solutions” for internal business processes may be the only ones who appreciate how complex and messed up these processes are.
B. If they are not compensated nor respected properly, and don’t stick around for future iterations, how is the next version going to be significantly better?
I'd summarize it by saying that the reason behind technology generally lacking in large companies is a result of mismatched incentives.
In large, established companies, a lot of processes that could nowadays be replaced by software and automation are done by people. Some of those people are senior employees and/or have a manager whose standing within the company depends on the number of people they manage. Some of those people may even have "money under the table" relationships with vendors of subpar solutions that will be jeopardized by a new in-house solution being developed.
The feedback loop in large companies is long enough that individual employees can make decisions that are beneficial to their individual situation at the expense of the firm's profitability, but that fact will only come to light in so long that by that time they will have moved on or retired.
Therefore the reasons behind tech being shit at large companies is typically a blend of:
* nobody within the company having enough expertise to truly vet the people/consultancies they're hiring, resulting in lackluster results
* people within the company know (or eventually realize) that the people they've hired are competent enough to put them out of a job, so they give them intentionally-sabotaged instructions to deliver something subpar as to protect their job
* the working conditions, pay and/or working conditions within the company are so bad that nobody competent enough to make a change walks through the door, so the only people that do walk through that door wouldn't be able to make an improvement even if there were no other roadblocks in the way.
In general, in my opinion, it is a combination of all these factors. Incompetence of the incoming talent is a big one (that benefits the people relying on the status-quo), but should there be a breakthrough employee that can actually make a difference, he will be stopped because of the other reasons (otherwise he'd put many people in a tricky situation and they don't want that).
"the boundaries you are being given (explicitly - or implicitly as in "why hasn't this been done before? this seems so easy") are there for a reason and are there to protect some position(s)"
Do you mean "positions" as in roles or jobs? If so, why would it be a goal for the company to keep people around that can be automated away? That seems opposite to their duty to their shareholders. Am I misunderstanding or missing something?
> why would it be a goal for the company to keep people around that can be automated away
The explanation that I always use is that in a small company, the feedback loop all the way up to the CEO and/or investors is short enough that any misbehaviour from employees for their own interests will be easily detected, so it doesn't happen.
In a big enough hierarchy however, the feedback loop can span decades of real-world results, so middle-managers can make decisions that are detrimental to the long-term performance of the firm but gain them short-term results (from which bonuses and promotions are derived), not to mention plausible-deniable "money under the table" that is still technically a "bonus" though off-the-company-books. By the time the long-term impact of the decision comes to light (if it ever does), they would've long since moved on or even retired.
Therefore, in a big company, you need to keep in mind that people may not act within the firm's best interests if they know they can get away with it, and you may merely be a pawn within their chessboard - in which case they're happy to pay you to keep you around but you need to move exactly as they say and not rock the boat too much.
And I'm not even talking of outright blackmail where multiple high-standing people within the company could have dirt on each other (or at least pretend to?) and thus cooperate with each other because any defection means mutually-assured destruction.
Aside from the existing system having inertia, there may be regulatory or legal requirements protecting certain teams and processes that make automation trickier. Even if this isn't the case, the current system works, and so improvements need to be weighed against that; most likely, it's a long-term, strategic shift to a new process, because large organizations rely on processes to shield themselves from the legal system. Finally, any individual coming in and waging civil war on other departments within the organization is always bad, even if they're right in the long run.
> Finally, any individual coming in and waging civil war on other departments within the organization is always bad, even if they're right in the long run.
Yes, an individual going alone against entrenched powers will feel an unpleasant burning sensation.
Still, at times an entire department is already looked at as a black sheep. A key hire can just provide “cover” for what most people in the organization already know. The new blood might not tread lightly. It can work, if the attack dog has cover and support. This has the added benefit of providing a ready to burn scapegoat if the “excision” / reorg doesn’t go well.
Out of curiosity, given that you appear to have more experience in this domain:
1) if there is a regulatory reason behind "protectionism" of some employees/departments, why not outright announce it to the rest of the company?
2) if you're saying that someone that wages "civil war" against other employees is bad regardless of their motivations, what would be your alternative for someone genuinely knowing the best long-term outcome for the company but otherwise lacking the necessary connections to play "puppet master" behind the scenes or pass money under the table to influence the right people?
You are missing that shareholder value drives very little corporate decision-making below the C-suite. A director benefits the more people report to them. They don’t necessarily care whether any of them are doing anything as long as they can slingshot to their next job before it all implodes. But nothing ever implodes, it just reorgs.
Having been in a director position myself, financials always mattered. Sure having more folks to execute on plans is great, but ultimately there'd be pressure to grow revenue and revenue/employee.
> "Too much" tech will actually be seen as a threat and you may encounter roadblocks, because the tech you're proposing is too good and will threaten some entrenched positions or entire departments within the company.
In consulting work I find myself asking the question, “is this limitation technical or is it a business decision?” If it’s technical I can offer solutions or workarounds, but if it’s to avoid an entry level product eating the high end version’s lunch, I won’t waste my time.
In my case it was very implicit and it's only in retrospect after many years in other companies that I can realize it. To be clear, this was a textbook "growth & engagement" startup, but my experience nowadays suggests the same would apply in legacy, conventional companies too.
The firing itself was over a stupid misstep outside of my domain of expertise and also wasn't of any consequence to the business, which IMO means that it should outright be forgiven or at the very least downgraded to a formal warning considering I was otherwise on good standing (or at least I thought so).
The problem was that I was questioning and pushing back against a supposedly "technical" decision that even after 5 more years of expertise still feels correct - however by now I realized that the whole reason behind the decision wasn't a technical one but to farm out business to some high-up person's friends' company back in their home country. Tech-wise, this decision wouldn't have improved the supposedly-claimed problem (according to tickets and meetings) one bit.
The mistake I did was just a convenient excuse for a firing, but overall it worked out both ways - they eventually got a lucky exit (and I'm sure whoever was involved in that scheme also benefited even earlier regardless of the exit), and I got to learn a decent lesson about office politics to carry with me in my freelancing career (I didn't have any stock options or any good money on the line anyway, so no hard feelings and I still got a good reference).
Ha ha oh did that make me laugh. Companies like that are not suffering from a tech problem, that is only the symptom. They’re suffering from a people problem, often a big entrenched structural one. You can throw all the smart engineers you want at them but they won’t be allowed to plan the work, do the work, given the necessary tools or have their work adopted. Plus you’ll first need to convince them to drop vendor x that someone influential and important decided to spend $y00,000 on.
That's just an excuse and concealment of the real reason(s). If there's a will there's a way. It takes 5 minutes to open any could provider (or dedicated server host) account and all it needs is a credit card and billing address.
In this day and age just putting company business/data on a third-party provider with a personal credit card is probably at least grounds for a stern talking to at many companies.
That’s not how it works in many corporations especially when you are dealing with sensitive data. You have to go through some kind of approval process.
You don't just land in a place like that with SWE skills and suddenly affect change. Ordinary SWEs don't have enough leadership or management skills to understand the problems and coordinate the process of building a solution.
A single person has only 8h a day (usually) to do anything, a great leader has many more hours than that. I'd say even FAANG employees who are top at their field aren't necessarily good with this skillset.
I'm sceptical an F500 company would be willing to replace existing systems that are working ok and that integrate with their ERP system and the other cobbled-together offerings from their enterprise software/services vendor (eg Broadcom/AVGO). There's likely not much new there ... but maybe ChatGPT is an exception.
If your goal is to implement open source systems are ex-FAANG workers the right choice? I would assume they'd be more likely to have experience with in house systems rather than implementing open source ones.
> I would assume they'd be more likely to have experience with in house systems rather than implementing open source ones.
Every hiring process I’ve been apart of (FAANG to startups) is an exercise in mostly measuring intelligence and empathy. That’s a long way of saying smart people aren’t limited by in house systems or open source ones. They’ll figure it out in a few days.
I don't doubt there are low performers at FAANG. I just believe when you're doing a 10% layoff, there's no way you're not going to cut high performers as well. Some layoffs are just purely based upon the department level.
Sure, there will be some high performers that get caught in that 10% net. The F500 shops wants their recruiting teams looking for those candidates, but they need protect themselves from adverse selection. An ex-FAANG developer who thinks they're 10x and is given unconstrained runway to prove (or disprove) it can cause a lot of damage to an unprepared but otherwise functional team of 1xers.
I’m not sure the author had a real point here. I’d love some hard data on how many people are pivoting to canned food companies after FAANG life
I don't get this common/popular notion where just because you lose a lucrative job or opportunity that suddenly you become poor. What happens to all that accumulated $? Does it just go away? I think we want to believe that it does because it gives us comfort knowing that some sort of balance has been restored to the universe--that people have are so successful have to be reset to zero.
People who lose their FANG jobs are still going to be in a better position, all else equal. Maybe they are in a better position by virtue of having more money and being more qualified or smarter, making finding a new job easier.
Imagine you recently bought a Bay Area house, a few kids, have day care and/or pre-school costs, various other debts, etc. Sure you were making a huge salary and hopefully have some savings. But it’s all relative and you’re just a middle class dude that can have family vacations that involve an airplane, all things considered. But you have a $8k mortgage payment due every 30 days. You can burn through savings real fast.
Regarding the home and mortgage, the wealth does not go away. The home can be sold and you keep all the equity, sans the mortgage. Of course, if the market crashes, then you've got a problem. THIs is is regardless if you have a job or not.
Even 150k in SF doesn't get you as far as you would think. That person is probably living pretty close to paycheck-to-paycheck.
Granted, the average FAANG salary is higher than that, but still I think the general public seems to think FAANG workers are richer than they actually are.
Most FAANG workers are solidly comfortable. But not independently wealthy.
I can vouch for commercial banking settlement systems. Far and away, they are running on IBM AS/400 mainframes. Most of the code is C or something before it. I have seen the source for more than a few in my career. The code is rock solid, if poorly tested, but it has been running so long that it is essentially bug free. If any changes need to be made, first, unit tests are written to find all the edge cases in old code. Then, refactor + add new business logic. It's not perfect, but it works much better than anyone from the outside could imagine. And, I agree with your "normie" comment. The code is _so_ bland. Zero tricks, ever. The goal is to write code that will last 15-30 years. No joke.
I went from 20 years of several FAANG jobs to working for a small tech company with about 300 engineers. It was a bit of a rude awakening. The technology stack is a house of cards consisting of hundreds of homegrown wrappers around AWS. Everything is brittle, undocumented, and constantly changing. Every little thing is a huge pain in the ass.
Note to OP - when that developer leaves the company they will host a session called a "handover". At the handover meeting they rapidly run through how they think the pipeline works, lay out some caveats and then they're gone. That's the documentation. You own the pipeline now.
It's probably a good idea to take vacation whenever the person who owns the Jenkins pipeline announces that they've handed in their notice. Otherwise you might be invited to the handover meeting.
Yep, been to a lot of these. We call them "KT" sessions (knowledge-transfer). I shiver all down my spine when I hear "KT".
You basically take the person who's been working on something for thousands of hours most likely and has probably written a lot of work arounds and shortcuts to get their job done and they now have a 1 hour zoom session to brain dump their entire existance onto the poor souls who have to pick up the pieces when they are gone.
After that hour, they basically sign off with: glhf
> Most companies cant afford to throw large amounts of money at a team who’s entire job is managing a Jenkins pipeline.
I don't agree with this at the 300 engineer level; Specifically that they can't afford it. At that point, one or two more engineers is 1-2% increase in spend on compensation, and if you can get someone to handle architecture and developer support (ideally two different people) and empower them to make useful changes, you can probably get the ball rolling.
Now, if you're talking about a 20-50 engineer shop, the math can be a fair bit different and there I do agree with you.
It seems more down to the evergreen issue of tech debt and fragile tech stacks being a hard-to-quantify cost and mostly hidden from those making the budget decisions. No budget for maintenance or architecture -- things are done in the cheapest most expedient way possible. Then it becomes harder to make future changes, so doing it the right way starts costing even more, and the cycle repeats.
> Welcome, Neo, to the real world.
Indeed. Gamedev was frustrating for this quite often.
When Elon went and laid off everyone at Twitter and everyone kept saying, why do they need to many people. Like this is why. It was a shit show at time but it wasn't that much of a night mare because there were teams like that.
For me, 300 is a large company. I try to work for companies of several dozen people, with a dozen or fewer engineers. It makes my impact much more visible. The tech stack is usually already a hodgepodge, but it's small enough, and parts can be improved or replaced easily enough.
Being to a FAANG company (I worked for the F and the G) gives one a view of colossal tech stacks, some wonderful achievements of technological thought, some well thought-out processes (and also downsides, all well-known). It's a great learning experience, but a chance to make any publicly visible dent are pretty small.
IME there is a code quality/sanity valley of death between about 50-1000 people, with the lower bound shifting upwards a bit depending on the maturity of the company's founding/early stage technical contributors. You get more bang for your buck with five of the right people than 50 of the wrong ones in the early stages, and sometimes that determines five years later whether you are drowning in tech debt (bad) or 1000 years ahead of the competition (inefficient, probably) or maybe just barely staying one step ahead of the reaper (optimal, probably). But a lot of companies limp into the valley, get enough revenue to stay alive for a while, and then slowly fade into obscurity the second a nimbler competitor shows up on the scene and eats their lunch. That's why small companies are fun. All that visible impact and you know you won't be mired in the bureaucratic death spiral of a medium-sized company lurching into obscurity!
I've worked at the G and hated it. It was too big and agree 100% with your analysis. Money and benefits are great, especially considering how little work is actually expected of you (compared to smaller orgs). I enjoyed always being able to find someone who knew more than me, which opened up really good learning opportunities. But as you said, good luck getting any of your accomplishments noticed. Your direct manager would notice and you hope they write the right kinds of letters and accolades to other people to notify them, but that's about all you can ask for.
I've also been at small startups. I worked somewhere early in my career where I was employee #5 and stayed there until we were about 70 employees. It was exciting and I can say humbly that I touched essentially every feature and decision that happened during those ~3 years, which can be rewarding. I'm not saying I personally built the whole company, i had other good engineers around me, but you were involved in everything, so you touched everything and played at least a partial role in everything that was built. That's a great learning experience in its own right. But I found it very stressful to have so much expected of you. At these small companies you will always have more on your plate than even the most efficient engineer can accomplish. The backlog is endless, and solving even basic problems often required new systems or decisions because everything is new and no precedent exists for anything.
I've found my happy place at what i call a "mid-size" company. By my defintiion that is ~250 employees (+/- 100). I admit that the industry definition of mid-size is generally 500-1000 though. I really like this 200-300 range size. It is big enough that at least basic systems exist for everything already. There are teams for each product meaning that you aren't building everything and can focus on a certain area. But you also aren't pigeonholed in a narrow job description either. While you might have a sector of the app you manage, it can still be moderately broad giving you good variety. The team isn't so small that you are doing everything, but its also still small enough that if you accomplish impressive achievements that it still gets noticed. It is small enough that you know most people in the company by name but the team is still large enough you can always find someone with expertise in a weird thing you might want help with. By the time the company is this size, they aren't going to dissapear overnight like a 20 person startup might (although in tech anything is still possible). I'm happy where I am now, so no plans on leaving. But when I search again, I am going to be targeting companies of 100-400 employees again. I really think its the perfect size.
I went from 10 years in startup to fang and felt fang was awful.
Everything was built in-house, and none of it held a candle to industry-standard tools. Every single thing: observability, containerization, CI/CD, code-review, source-control, etc was mostly written in PHP with seemingly no UI input and no documentation.
The economy of scale largely favors the startup, because they simply rent best-in-world tools hosted by another company that has hundreds of people dedicated to source control or IDE (or whatever) versus 20 engineers a FANG company would put on it.
Those tools are affordable until the company making the tool needs to start actually making a profit and they raise their prices or they decrease their LOS. Then the tools become an expensive risk and the price increases end up percolating into your own startup. If you raise prices to compensate, you'll affect your growth. That's how startups go under.
In a ZIRP world using the tools of other startups makes sense but the stability of the FAANGs and their in-house tooling means they can weather much choppier economic conditions than the equivalent startup.
Link some of these mythical industry standard tools for the rest of us, please. And share how you’re operating them with a small startup that they’re working so well.
AWS: Superior to the cloud compute at the Fang I was at. Best-in-class API, and documentation, and support on-call. Tenancy issues are rare.
Docker: Run any application on any server with one command. Isolates all state from that application to one-directory. Allows spinning up test-environments with your whole stack (~6 applications or so if you're a small team, including DB) on a server in a few minutes with docker-compose.
Github: Solid UI design, lots of little niceties, adequate search.
Splunk: Best-in-class logging solution (the place I was at asked you right-click download 200megs of logs and grep them). Can be intergated with Jenkins
Jenkins: Can do almost anything well, easily with the right plugins. Acts as both CI/CD job system and scheduled job system with full premissioning, history for auditing, logs, supports dynamic workers easily with AWS.
Packer, artifactory, slack for integrations, Jira (which can represent complex workflows well)
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How they work at a startup - You can setup jenkins in a couple hours if you know what you're doing. Thanks to docker, it's 1-command to get it running. I'd then have nightly backups of it (easy via AWS or a jenkins job). Integrate it with LDAP so that you can lock down certain functionality if necessary (e.g. deploys, private creds). Set most jobs to have reasonable timeouts, retries, and alert the devops team on failures (devops will own making sure known-failure-cases emit the proper message and failure-code). Connect jenkins to splunk, and you'll have reliability and time statistics on every CI job.
Github PRs plug into jenkins, which can auto-lint, auto-build docker containers, and such.
Splunk (or sumo): Get logs / metrics / traces into here and/or datadog.
You can say whatever you want about Facebook, but their tool/system for committing code changes is sheer perfection. Starting with managing source code changes on your own dev server, getting it code reviewed, merging it into the main branch, and getting it deployed to production. All of it is easy to figure out, and it works without complications. It can handle pull requests of 20000 files without any trouble.
I’m surprised people are responding talking about being more visible in a small company. The best thing about moving to a small company (for me) is knowing everyone, even if I don’t necessarily like everyone. I’m on a first-name basis with the entire org and we can all celebrate an achievement together by going out to a restaurant plus drinks. We have board game nights at the office (we’re barely over 20 people).
These types of connections aren’t anything like when I was in a huge multinational and was close with a handful of people. (Not everyone wants to participate in the group activities and that’s fine too.) (Also, again, I have this luxury because I don’t have dependents. I know this calculus doesn’t work for everyone.)
That's interesting. 300 engineers isn't what I would consider small in my startup experience. That's 3x larger than the current engineering organization I would in.
This is not a small tech company. This is medium to large. If the company itself has over 1,000 employees - it's a large company. It's just not a giant company like any of the FAANG types.
Job stability at that company is not guaranteed. Often times it is poorly run and their lack of formal processes and adherence to discipline is a result of the managements' incompetence.
I think I'd be more worried about my job in a 10000 person company than a 300 person company.
If Im in a 300 person company I'm probably one of 40-60 devs, and most of my peers know me and have met me. If I'm a senior dev, there's a good chance I'm on first name basis with the executive team, and they know what I work on and the impact I have. There's a lot better chance of me being able to demonstrate my value and avoid being let go if cuts are needed.
At a 10000 person company I'm basically guaranteed to just be an employee number next to a salary number in a spreadsheet, when it comes time for cuts.
I worked on a team that managed the build systems at a FAANG. It was seriously the worst. Teams would come to you and say
> "we made this service, we need a pipeline that does this, exactly this way, and we need it.... by Friday, let me know if I need to escalate it."
Whenever people threatened to escalate stuff, I would always laugh and say "go for it", to be honest I can't remember the last time I worked on something that wasn't "escalated". Basically the escalated pipeline was e size and our bandwidth was 0.9e - so we never would catch up and if it wasn't escalated it basically didn't exist.
Try an actually small company with like 3 engineers. Then if there’s an issue you talk to Bob if it’s hardware related or Fred if it’s software related, and hopefully both of them keep their part of the stack a little more streamlined purely out of self defence.
How old is this tech company? I find most smaller companies use well known open source frameworks + AWS services. It’s the big companies that do everything in house
I’m coming up on a year of my post layoff sabbatical and there’s no world where I go back to corporate America - which to be clear is any tech company also.
It’s so obviously bad for society to be the high risk exploratory appendages of the financial markets. Make no mistake Venture Backed “Tech” and “startups” are the means through which capital accretes value.
While I’m on the extreme end, I’m hearing echoes of this from others who at the senior level who have been in tech for a few rounds as engineers.
I’m at 1 year and 9 days since I quit my corporate job for sabbatical.
I really loved chasing whatever I fancied, and just living life. I’ve leaned so much, read so much, matured mentally, repaired relationships and friendships.
I feel ready to go back, but I will miss it. It’s nice to have the days stretch endlessly before and behind you, to mark the passage of time mainly by seasons, and to really feel like a human instead of a mule.
My previous job was horrible though, I may even have light PTSD! The only reason I don’t go work for USPS or drive a bus is because I think other companies are much better.
Job hunt is gonna be brutal and dehumanizing, though. I may just wait more, and I won’t be shy about withdrawing my candidacy in the face of red flags!!
Similar situation (albeit 18 months for me) and similar feelings. I wish I didn’t have to work ever again (ie it would be a choice and an option, not an obligation) but I’m not there yet.
It is hard to find a job that isn’t soul sucking and/or that doesnt feel pointless though. Even more so after such a long break and realizing how much of the things people spend money on are a direct result of working too much and being advertised at too much so they don’t have any time to do basic things for themselves or want things they don’t need at all.
Disclaimer: Was laid off in Jan. from Google. Previously worked at Walmart.
What I'm seeing is those that were impacted by the layoffs are still looking for tech industry jobs as a primary, but not completely shutting down non-tech positions.
There's definitely a heightened focus on the work and impact that a role can achieve though, working on big things where a lot of their large systems experience can be useful. Places that, despite "current macroeconomic conditions" , are still growing and need that experience.
I haven't worked at either... but I did work at a regional retail company.
Walmart is a massive logistics company that dwarfs any other - save maybe Amazon (and it would be interesting to see the break down side by side).
I believe it is dangerous to put the FAANG companies on such a pedestal.
Consider even McDonalds Tech Labs - which sold to IBM which was doing some rather interesting things with machine learning, and bilingual natural language processing (drive throughs).
My point is one of "Walmart to Google is likely much less of a jump than people imagine... other than the name attached."
> We’re you at Walmart labs? Pretty impressive jump from Walmart to google. Any tips as to how you did it? Did you leetcode grind?
The engineering practices at Walmart are quite similar to those at Google.
As someone who also made the transition from a smaller company to Big Tech, I can say that while the user base is much larger, the engineering practices and quality remain relatively consistent.
If you’re looking to land a job at a Big Tech company and want to practice by solving LeetCode problems, go for it. However, keep in mind that solving these problems alone won't guarantee you a job.
Might be a non-SWE role at Google. Account managers, solutions engineers and roles like that often have interviews that focus less on the perfect engineering skill and more on good engineering skills + human skills which Walmart might actually teach better than tech.
Interesting an article like this would not mention h1b at all. On Blind you see posts of people laid off from fang willing to settle for whatever pay as long as the employor can sponsor their visa to avoid deportation
In my personal opinion, H1b visas are made this way so that the people on them are kept docile and will pretty much accept anything from employers who are then free to abuse them.
It was funny seeing people bikeshed the use of the word "master" in a code base while not realizing H1B workers are the next best thing to actual slaves.
Getting deported OR settling for first acceptance jobs within 60 days. OR going to Canada that has opportunistically opened their doors. OR going back home.
Obviously, the American voters don't want lots of immigration any more. They said so quite clearly when they voted for Trump. Even well before that, America's immigration system (namely the H1-B) was highly exploitative. Prospective immigrants should think a lot about why they want to go so badly to a country that clearly doesn't want them, and look for countries that treat immigrants better.
This is slightly off topic but wondering how those left behind are faring? I wonder if the situation has gotten a lot more toxic (was never a bed of roses) except now big tech employers know they hold the cards? Are people getting overworked more than before? Are some people coasting hoping to get severance?
I suppose everybody sees it differently, but in my case I'd say no visible change as my team hasn't been directly impacted so far and we don't talk much about this situation.
But I can tell that some people are worried and I suspect people work more. Nobody wants to get laid off in that context, and it's better to have good performance, even if it's not the only criteria.
There's also less money to spend, less traveling, no more interviewing, no headcount.
One question is when is it going to stop? how many rounds of layoffs before things stabilize? will it ever be like "before" considering there's not much room for growth.
> That said, there is still an appetite for talent at well-funded, early-stage companies in emerging areas, including electric-vehicle batteries, as the auto industry shifts away from gas-powered cars, and artificial intelligence, a technology with the potential to change industries that has prompted a global race to build AI products.
My Wellfound (previously AngelList) inbox begs to differ!
Those high paying positions that came with all the perks need to be unlearned. Many of those folk will have trouble adjusting to lower pay and lesser perks. Such companies might not be willing to risk hiring them.
Why are you so certain of that? They never earned that much because they were unique talented, but because demand was so high and you couldn't find anyone cheaper filling the requirements. Why are you sure demand won't return?
Bigger tech companies and winner-take-all markets means bigger salaries and more perks to attract top talent when the stakes are so high. The next big arms race is AI. You can be sure tech companies are offering huge salaries for top talent there too.
Perhaps, but the difference between now and then was all those years had near-zero interest rates. It's a lot easier for tech (and growth companies in general) to stage a comeback in that macro environment. Especially when it comes to issuing all the RSUs to fund those compensation packages.
Has it even stopped? From where I am sitting it doesn’t look like it has stopped, just that a small subset of people who were doing it previously are no longer doing it now.
In 2023 Meta will fire about 20,000 people, and Zukerberg will pull about $30,000,000 from the company.
If Zukerberg took 0 it would save about 1500 per laid off person. Tech is generally cutting costs at a large enough number that C-suite compensation packages couldn't cover it.
Beyond that, Zuckerberg's salary is already $1. Most of his total compensation is in the form of security services for him and his family. I suppose you can consider that a perk that could be cut in order to save some tech jobs (at the cost of security jobs). But the company probably views something happening to him as an existential threat that would result in the company failing (and everyone getting laid off), which is why they provide the security.
During the pandemic the Fed slashed interest rates, giving companies more money so they can hire more people and keep unemployment down.
Then the Fed raised interest rates, forcing companies to lay people off to save money, so we can increase unemployment to fight inflation.
You could argue that Facebook's management could have predicted the Fed's rate hikes. Then they could have refused to hire people for new projects because they might have to cut those projects later. I don't think that's better.
Forces of nature aside is a given. However, FB (and other FAANG) rampant overhearing before and through out the pandemic to basically horde talent was poor management.
> Meta’s board declared that the 40% increase was “appropriate and necessary under the circumstances” and was in place “to address safety concerns due to specific threats to his safety arising directly as a result of his position as Meta’s founder, chairman, and CEO”.
> The tech mogul’s salary is just $1 a year – but his earnings are far more. Zuckerberg ranks as the 16th richest person in the world on the Forbes billionaire list due to his shareholdings in Meta. In 2021 he received compensation from the company worth $27m.
> There were no bonus or stock awards given to Zuckerberg in 2019, 2020, or 2021, but that "other" amount increased by nearly $2 million each year. The bulk of this goes to pay for the Zuckerberg family's security at home and while traveling, even for personal reasons.
> Zuckerberg and COO Cheryl Sandberg both get an allowance for personal and family security, which Meta said is necessary to address specific threats to their safety. "We require these security measures for the company's benefit because of the importance of Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg to Meta, and we believe that the scope and costs of these security programs are appropriate and necessary," the proxy statement said.
> Zuckerberg is in the unique position, Meta said, of being synonymous with the company because of the size of its user base and its continued presence thanks to less-than-positive legal and media attention. "As a result, negative sentiment regarding our company is directly associated with, and often transferred to, Mr Zuckerberg."
Seriously. Perhaps this article written from a multi-verse perspective, one in which the author lives in a version of the world that didn't experience one of the greatest wealth grabs of all time by C-suite and the like (their reward for repeated execution of poor and ill-timed investments, of course).
Since when is freelance "stable"? Since when is any job "stable"? It's a job, one we have to do because capitalism and healthcare. That's not stability; it's coercion.
Just a reminder that the WSJ and Washington Post has been pushing a lot of articles over layoffs in tech, overinflated SWE salaries and generally pushing the narrative that tech workers are "overpaid" and that it's time for this to end. With the Washington Post, of course, being owned by Bezos, and the timing of these articles coinciding with the RTO policy at Amazon I can't help to think that this isn't a coincidence.
Reminder that most "tech workers" laid offs were in non-technical positions as well (ie not engineers). HR, recruiting, DEI...
