Comment by solarmist
2 days ago
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?
It has turned into something similar to what people in trading companies on Wall Street deal with. Constant grind, unrealistic expectations, and projects done in order to get a promotion instead of because it provides value to the customers or the business.
That said the amount that you make is insane some of the smartest engineers I’ve ever worked with have been at these companies and a lot of them have really strong engineering cultures, and standards.
The current work environment seems designed to use up bright young engineers, and burn them out within a few years. This is a significant shift from 15 years ago, where it was a much more sustainable place to be.
Yeah, that sounds hypercapitalist. At least I hope those engineers make enough money to retire when they burn out.
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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!
I find this attitude baffling.
In my time at tier one companies I have worked with the best engineers I have come across in my entire career (even the worst engineers were more than competent) who were working on deep issues that could affect the revenue of the entire company because they’re laser focused on providing value to the business, instead of doing engineering for engineering’s sake. I have grown by far more in these kinds of roles than I have anywhere else because the kind of problems you encounter at such a high scale just don’t exist elsewhere. And most of them have been there for at least five years if not longer you don’t make those kind of contributions to accompany without a long tenure.
> In my time at tier one companies I have worked with the best engineers I have come across in my entire career
You’re throwing a giant red flag right here. First of all, FAANG isn’t “tier one” except to people who idolize these companies. More agile startups are trying to disrupt these dinosaurs and do not thing very highly of them. Many of us who have worked with FAANG and ex-FAANG engineers were not impressed.
I mean, I'm just sharing the practical ground truth of how a resume like yours effects recruiting in certain contexts.
Just like there are innumerable brilliant, effective engineers who would contribute tremendously to a FAANG but don't suit the modern interview funnel (leetcode, etc), smaller companies surely do miss out on strong, suitable FAANG engineers in anticipation of negative experiences they've had with others.
There are a lot of people who accumulate FAANG entries on their resume and many of them really don't suit smaller companies for a number of reasons.
Honestly, though while I'm only seeing a very narrow picture of you here, it sure sounds like you see these "tier one" companies as a desirable place to work, with prestigious colleagues and profound learning opportunities on high scale problems that just don't exist elsewhere, and surely for much more money. Are you sure you're really going to be happy somewhere else? Or might you get restless? That's precisely the kind of concern these smaller companies carry when seeing FAANG stuff on a resume, and it doesn't seem like it should be baffling that they would do.
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