Comment by mattgreenrocks
3 years ago
I’m convinced at least 75% of devs consider working at a FAANG to be the absolute apex of a career, regardless of what’s worked on. Which, to me, says it’s purely about prestige.
It’s impossible to say for sure, but there’s a certain pervasive collective worship of these employers that will just not quit.
If by “prestige” you mean “enough money to work for 4 years and retire anywhere that’s not the Bay Area and never work another day” then yea, it’s prestige.
> enough money to work for 4 years and retire anywhere that’s not the Bay Area
Four years is probably optimistic, unless you got lucky with stock growth.
I searched for "average cost of living map" and found a site[1] that says cost of living at Santa Clara County is $138K. I then did a search for "average salary at Google" and one website[2] says it's $124K, which suggests saving enough money in 4 years on salary alone would be difficult.
You might think that working for Google while living somewhere outside of Bay Area would be a good way to save, but because compensation is dependent on where you live, this doesn't always work out.
[1] https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/budget-map/
[2] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Google%2C_Inc....
That's cost of living for 4 people, mind you:
> The cost of living for a two-parent, two-child family
The typical case is more likely single or DINK.
Manage the money well, throw in a couple of bonuses and a favorable liquidity event around y4 and it's plausible enough to become a motivator or rationalization, I assume.
The people building this ad tech nonsense make well over $124k. I'd wager that number comes from nation/worldwide salaries, and the folks that the original comment described aren't data center janitors or whatever. These folks get paid very well to insure Google dominance – in salary and in stock.
Thank you for bringing data to the discussion. I’m not sure that average salary is the right metric, however. The people inventing new adtech projects are being paid 4-5x that number based on my experience. Although anecdotes can only be trusted so far I guess…
That average salary must include non-engineers.
The average salary for a mid-career engineer at google is north of $300k if you assume no stock movement.
https://levels.fyi
Oh, crap. You put an actual number in your comment, and now there's going to be a whole subthread debating the accuracy of it, completely ignoring the relevant point of the comment.
Is there? I'm happy to not be making hiring decisions these days but if I was I'd definitely think twice about hiring somebody who was ok spending their days making the web worse.
In fairness, if they're applying to work elsewhere, it wouldn't be safe to assume they were ok with what their current or former employers are doing. That might be why they're leaving. I don't give points or demerits for working at Google, personally.
> there’s a certain pervasive collective worship of these employers that will just not quit
That's my observation as well. And I think this applies especially to Google: for some reason it still has the reputation of this cool tech company here on HN, even though it's an advertising and user tracking/profiling company at this point, and there is really nothing "cool" about it anymore. But criticize Google on HN and you'll get downvoted really quickly.
The collective worship is the set of people who (1a) have worked there previously and (1b) didn’t hate it, or (2) want to work there in the future.
It’s a pretty large absolute number of people, although thanks to section 1 clause b, it’s growing smaller.
YMMV, but “people who worship recent FAANG employment” can be a filter that’s positive to apply when seeking employment.