Comment by solarmist
2 days ago
I hear this all the time, but I have yet to experience it. It may be because the small companies that I interview with are all startups, but I have yet to be able to get a call back from any other kind of small company. And the startups I do interview with have a full FAANG interview loops.
There seems to be a weird selection bias that if you're FAANG or FAANG adjacent these small companies aren't interested.
At a former gig we had a newly hired ex-facebook employee give notice within a month because she didn't like that dev setup had bugs that devs themselves had to fix. At fb they obviously can spend millions of dollars for a whole team that ensures that working dev env is always a button click away, a startup (even a scaleup) usually can't afford to. This is just one example out of many I can tell...
And I’ve heard just as many horror stories about companies hiring from small companies that the engineers haven’t kept up with engineering, culture and practices and are coding like it’s 2004.
Also, those types of stories tend to pop up with any engineer who’s only worked at a single place.
My point isn’t that there’s not bad engineers at Facebook it’s that there’s bad engineers everywhere and filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.
The sad truth of hiring is that you can't afford to interview everyone, and have to keep in mind that prospective employees are showing you a different version of themselves than they'll actually bring to work.
Especially in a small company where your hiring manager may also be busy with development and sales, and not have an HR department to run the process for them, you're much better off interviewing candidates you are 50% sure of being a good fit vs 5%. Personally I prefer interviewing candidates coming from FAANG-ish companies and often make exceptions for candidates that demonstrate exceptional skill/interest, but when you can only interview 1-10% of your applicants you have to prioritize those who are likely to succeed at your company (keeping in mind implicit bias and such).
> filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.
In aggregate it most likely is useful for those companies.
> And I’ve heard just as many horror stories about companies hiring from small companies that the engineers haven’t kept up with engineering, culture and practices and are coding like it’s 2004.
Big cos can afford to onboard their engineers for months, sometimes years. Startups usually can not
>”There seems to be a weird selection bias that if you're FAANG or FAANG adjacent these small companies aren't interested.”
Many smaller companies have noticed that former and wannabe FAANGers are looking for FAANG-type jobs, and are not good fits in their niche. Small companies often have more uncertainty, fewer clear objectives, less structure, and often lower pay. They’re not a good substitute for megacorps.
And then there's people like me who have been at startups, midsize companies, tiny small businesses and FAANGs.
Not everyone at a FAANG is purely motivated by the amount of money that they can get.
I’m looking for a smaller company because I’m tired of the FAANG mentality personally.
The problem is that many smaller companies have hired people from FAANG, and had them quite after a short tenure, so they're unwilling to try their luck again, as it's just not worth it. You may be different, but they've heard that story before, and had it not work out.
> I’m tired of the FAANG mentality personally.
As someone that never had a desire nor ever made an attempt to work at any of those companies, do you mind elaborating on the mentality of such places?
I'm just your boring below-average to average dev, so I know I'm not cut for those types of places, but it never truly bothered me anyway. Any reason that I can personally think as to why I would work for such a company would either be due to my own egotistical desires or for monetary reasons, but those were never strong enough to actually compel me.
I am just mainly curious about two things:
1. Is working at those places all it's cracked up to be?
2. Assuming one had to work hard to get into such companies, was the juice worth the squeeze?
I've often wondered if one's experiences for these companies is often something akin to the old advice of, "Don't meet your heroes." In other words, was the conflicting dyad of expectations vs. reality present?
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Sure, but in this context, your FAANG experience is a negative signal for people who don't know you well yet. It's unfortunate for you, but a genuine factor you now need to account for.
Your path through will probably look like having the luck of breaking in at one of these kinds of companies, and then staying for several years to demonstrate earnest commitment/fit while building a new network of connections, and then leveraging those connections to get more opportunities if it becomes necessary to do so. If you have connection from your previous non-FAANG work, that's probably your best route.
It won't happen overnight and you'll always be at a disadvantage when you find yourself applying through resume portals. Good luck!
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Yup. You can check out of FAANG anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Was path dependency for careers always this bad?
I don’t feel like it was. Every role is hyper specific nowadays.
And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience.
>"And most refused to look at anybody deviating from their ideal background in my experience."
This is often because the culture of job-hopping for better pay every 18 months has eroded the willingness to pay for training or adaptation. Why pay for someone to learn if they're just gonna leave soon; the pre-trained person is a better deal if you'll have to pay to retain anyway.
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It's a more mature industry.
I'm guessing the majority of people now in their 50s and 60s in computer-related careers had very eclectic jobs before settling down in computer-related stuff. After all, many never used computers at all until college or beyond.
My understanding is even in the early 2000s it was pretty much just firmware versus desktop software with a small niche for Mac developers.
Edit: my point was not that specialized software applications didn’t exist. It was that people were expected to be able to jump from stack to stack when they change roles in a way that has disappeared from modern job applications.
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I've had a few good experiences with interviews at small companies and startups, so they do exist.
But I have also had really terrible experiences, similar to what you've mentioned. Sounds like you've just gotten unlucky and gotten the terrible ones.
Yeah, been there, done that; wannabe FAANGs are the worst.
At least those are typically honest about what they try to be and give a very clear signal, right at the interview time.
It's much worse when the interview gives you different vibes (and expectations) than the actual day-to-day work.
I've had both I've had ones that only tell you what the next interview looks like. Unless you specifically prior it out of the recruiter's hands.
The only way to test actual work is to do actual work, should be obvious but here we are.
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