Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this? - <AUTHOR> 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? <comment><USER3> 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!

<comment><USER4> > 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?

<comment><USER5> 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.

<comment><USER3> 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!

<comment><USER6> > I prefer not to discuss compensation

Why not?

<comment><USER3> 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.

<comment><USER7> 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.

<comment><USER8> 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.

<comment><USER9> #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?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 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).

<comment><USER11> 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?

<comment><USER12> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 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.

<comment><USER14> _> 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.

<comment><USER15> > 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.

<comment><USER16> 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.

<comment><USER17> Not all feelings of "this sucks" are necessarily depression, though.

<comment><USER18> And also, we are not his therapist. I am not concerned with helping his depression.

<comment><USER16> I did not imply that the poster has depression.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >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.

<comment><USER20> 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.

<comment><USER21> > 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.

<comment><USER22> 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.

<comment><USER23> 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.

<comment><USER22> 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.

<comment><USER23> 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)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 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.

<comment><USER25> > 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.

<comment><USER26> 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.

<comment><USER27> 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...

<comment><USER28> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 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.

<comment><USER30> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> 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.

<comment><USER32> 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?

<comment><USER33> 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.

<comment><USER34> Some of us end up working at jobs infinitely worse than adtech, the public service.

<comment><USER35> What? What do you mean by worse...

<comment><USER34> 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.

<comment><USER36> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> 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.

<comment><USER38> This really goes a long way towards explaining the current state of macOS.

<comment><USER39> MacOS is less than 10% of their sales, so makes sense.

<comment><USER40> Counterpoint: All iOS apps, and the OS itself, are built macOS. Measuring importance in terms of sales seems shortsighted to me.

<comment><USER41> And that means if you care about writing iOS apps, you have to buy a Mac whether you like it or not.

<comment><USER42> 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.

<comment><USER41> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> 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.

<comment><USER44> > 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?

<comment><USER45> I believe he means you can't just arbitrarily browse the source code for any Apple software you're curious about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> 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.

<comment><USER47> > 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.

<comment><USER48> > _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.

<comment><USER49> or maybe programmers are overpaid...

<comment><USER50> In the U.S., it's much more likely that the custodians/janitors are getting underpaid.

<comment><USER48> 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.

<comment><USER51> 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?

<comment><USER52> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> 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.

</comment><comment><USER54> 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.

</comment><comment><USER55> 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.

<comment><USER56> "Move slowly and don't break anything."

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> 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.

<comment><USER58> Sounds like a pretty sweet gig if making money is the primary goal of employment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> 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.

<comment><USER60> He's not showing what he can do though. Making changes take a week when he finished them in a day is self-sabotage.

<comment><USER61> 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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> 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.

</comment><comment><USER63> 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.

<comment><USER64> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> 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/](https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/)

:)

<comment><USER66> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> 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.

<comment><USER68> > 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> 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.

<comment><USER70> 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.

<comment><USER71> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> 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

<comment><USER73> 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%..

<comment><USER74> 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.

<comment><USER75> It's called a corporation to describe a collection of resources into one body (corp). Latin(?) roots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> 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.

<comment><USER77> FWIW, big DOD and BioPharma companies can be like this too. It's more like this is just how large companies _are_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> > 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.

</comment><comment><USER79> 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.

</comment><comment><USER80> 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.

</comment><comment><USER81> 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.

<comment><USER82> 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".

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> > 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.

<comment><USER84> > 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.

<comment><USER85> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> 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.

<comment><USER41> Does it really take skill to get into a FAANG or just the ability to do algorithms well enough to get past the interview?

<comment><USER86> 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.

<comment><USER41> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> 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).

</comment><comment><USER88> 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.

</comment><comment><USER89> >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.

<comment><USER90> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> 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.

</comment><comment><USER92> 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.

</comment><comment><USER93> 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.

</comment><comment><USER94> 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.

</comment><comment><USER95> 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.

</comment><comment><USER96> 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.

</comment><comment><USER97> > Is all of FAANG like this?

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

</comment><comment><USER98> 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?

</comment><comment><USER99> 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!

</comment><comment><USER100> 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.

<comment><USER101> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> 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.

</comment><comment><USER103> 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.

</comment><comment><USER104> 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.

</comment><comment><USER105> 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.

</comment><comment><USER106> 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.

<comment><USER107> > 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.

<comment><USER106> 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.

<comment><USER107> 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?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> 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..

<comment><USER109> > 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.

<comment><USER108> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> 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.

</comment><comment><USER111> 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.

</comment><comment><USER112> 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.

</comment><comment><USER113> And FWIW, Amazon isn't a typical prestigious company. FNG are different compared to it.

<comment><USER41> Who cares about "prestige" when working? Since when did HN become r/cscareerquestions?

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> @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.

</comment><comment><USER70> 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.

</comment><comment><USER115> 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.

</comment><comment><USER116> 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.

</comment><comment><USER117> > 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.

<comment><USER118> 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).

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> 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.

</comment><comment><USER120> 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.

</comment><comment><USER121> 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.

</comment><comment><USER122> > 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."

<comment><USER123> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23455415)

<comment><USER125> Additionally: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961560)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER126> 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.

</comment><comment><USER127> Get their money, fill your pockets.

Use their time, start your hobby projects.

Don't forget to have fun.

Fun is skipping the classes.

</comment><comment><USER61> 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.

</comment><comment><USER128> 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.

</comment><comment><USER129> 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.

</comment><comment><USER130> > 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.

</comment><comment><USER131> 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.

</comment><comment><USER132> 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

</comment><comment><USER133> That sounds comically bad, and doesn't match my experience in big tech.

</comment><comment><USER134> > 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.

</comment><comment><USER135> 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.

</comment><comment><USER136> 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).

</comment><comment><USER137> 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.

</comment><comment><USER138> > 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.

</comment><comment><USER139> 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.

</comment><comment><USER140> 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

</comment><comment><USER141> 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.

</comment><comment><USER142> I wonder if you are at risk of doxxing yourself with some peculiar typos and grammar mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER143> 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.

</comment><comment><USER144> 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 - <USER2> 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.

</comment><comment><USER145> 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.

</comment><comment><USER146> 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.

</comment><comment><USER147> 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.

</comment><comment><USER148> > 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)_

</comment><comment><USER149> 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?

</comment><comment><USER150> 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?

</comment><comment><USER151> 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.

</comment><comment><USER152> "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.

<comment><USER153> 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.

<comment><USER152> 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.

<comment><USER153> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER154> 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.

</comment><comment><USER155> "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.

</comment><comment><USER156> 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).

</comment><comment><USER157> 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.

</comment><comment><USER158> 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.

</comment><comment><USER159> 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_.

</comment><comment><USER160> 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.

</comment><comment><USER161> 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.

</comment><comment><USER162> 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.

</comment><comment><USER163> Side question: Why is Netflix in FAANG? When people talk about the "Big 5" companies they have Microsoft, not Netflix, in there.

<comment><USER164> 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech)

</comment></comment><comment><USER165> 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).

</comment><comment><USER166> 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.

</comment><comment><USER167> This sounds more or less familiar to me. Except that everyone is working their ass off and still nothing gets done.

</comment><comment><USER168> 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.

<comment><USER69> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER169> > 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.

<comment><USER28> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER170> 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.

</comment><comment><USER171> 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.

</comment><comment><USER172> 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

</comment><comment><USER173> > 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?

</comment><comment><USER174> 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.

</comment><comment><USER175> 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.

<comment><USER105> 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.

<comment><USER176> > 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.

<comment><USER105> 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.

<comment><USER177> >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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER178> 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.

</comment><comment><USER179> 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.

</comment><comment><USER180> 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.

</comment><comment><USER181> 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.

</comment><comment><USER182> 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.

</comment><comment><USER183> 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.

</comment><comment><USER184> Don't be the shrug-shoulders guy, try to do something about it.

</comment><comment><USER185> 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.

<comment><USER123> Care to elaborate? Genuinely interested.

<comment><USER185> Just any recruiter if they will echo my sentiment.

<comment><USER123> Thanks for editing and clarifying on the original comment, appreciate it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER186> 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.

</comment><comment><USER5> 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?

</comment><comment><USER187> 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)

</comment><comment><USER188> 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.

</comment><comment><USER189> 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.

</comment><comment><USER190> 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.

</comment><comment><USER191> FAANG; Facebook , Amazon, Apple, Netflix, And Google.

We can pretty much rule out Apple and Netflix, which leaves you only with Facebook, Amazon and Google.

</comment><comment><USER192> If you find yourself with significant free time but don't want to abandon the comfort of your current role, start a side project.

</comment><comment><USER193> It's all like this. Mostly because nobody feels excited about making rich richer by improving the conversion rate on ads.

</comment><comment><USER194> Are they happy with 8hr a day? I keep worrying that I'd have to put in 12 hr shifts to keep up with the graduate hires.

</comment><comment><USER195> this happens in large companies, not just FAANG. things slow way down since there's a lot more gears turning. also, screw up bad enough and stockholders notice. "well we're suppose to move fast and break things right? " isn't going to get a pass like it would in a small company.

</comment><comment><USER196> I work at VMWare and I am pleasantly surprised it is not at all like that. Join VMWare's core team ;)

</comment><comment> the-dude > I don't feel what I'm doing is ethnically wrong

Interesting typo considering the current climate.

</comment><comment><USER197> Why not move to another team for a while to learn what and how they are doing?

</comment><comment><USER198> Answer: no.

Take a look at the work life of FAANG employees in their APAC and India offices.

<comment><USER199> Any discussion on FAANG culture in India?

</comment></comment><comment><USER200> Milk it as long as you can.

</comment><comment><USER201> Betteridge's Law says no, and so do I. I work at one of these companies. The raw productivity level of the people I work with is as high as at any of the dozen other companies (mostly startups) I've worked at over 30 years. I've been the guy who could get away with really working one day a week (but didn't succumb to the temptation) and I honestly have trouble keeping up with some of my peers now. To be sure, a lot of that "productivity" is bandaging self- inflicted wounds, implementing features that everyone knows will be thrown away within a year, and generally going around in circles. Despite that, there's continual forward progress on par with anywhere else I've been. I've worked with some real superstars in my time, and I've never worked with _anyone_ who could put in 20% effort here without getting managed out the door.

</comment><comment><USER202> What would happen if you discussed your concerns with your manager ?

</comment><comment><USER203> What's the second A in FAANG for ? Apple / Alphabet ?

<comment><USER204> Apple

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAANG](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAANG)

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Aside: A reminder to HN to re-read The Gervias Principle by Venkatesh Rao. It is a deeply _cynical_ look at corporate structures, everyone is flayed and ridiculed. But, there are many good lessons to be learned in it. Think of it more as another pair of lenses with which to view the world.

> The Gervias Principle: Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly > promote over-performing Losers into middle-management, groom under- > performing Losers into Sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort > Losers to fend for themselves. >

[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais- principle/](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/)

</comment><comment><USER205> hmmm but one team is not representative of one company, I'm not sure why all this debate on such obvious thing

</comment><comment><USER206> I only have experience at one FAANG (and the culture varies from one to the next, so not knowing which one you're at, it's hard to say).

Couple of things about them that can differ from other firms:

1) The one I was at heavily rewarded self-motivation. If no work is getting done, the work for the engineer to do is identify why that is and either overcome the obstacle or build support and service tooling so that when the obstacle is removed, the team is ready to hit the ground at full speed. Think like water; if you hit a wall, don't freeze... flow around or over it, and fill the space you occupy.

2) Software engineering at the FAANGs differs from other places (especially startups) because, to be blunt, there are stakes. The only thing startups are out if they fail is money. FAANGs make software relied upon by billions of people, trade hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, and have sweeping cultural (and in some cases physical) impact. I don't know what project you're on, but some projects _cannot_ allow for error in software development; it translates to lost dollars, lost goodwill, or possibly lost lives. I've never seen practice at a FAANG that rises quite to the level of industrial / physical infrastructure or aerospace engineering for quality control, but it gets up there. To that end, the processes are wildly different from ones a person may be accustom to at a smaller company, because there are systems in place designed to minimize the risk of engineer error. Sometimes, that means the engineer can't make progress until they learn enough to know why the system is stopping them, and that is by design; it's how the company encodes decades of hard-learned failure lessons into the process itself. It's more taxing than a startup's process, but that's because startups tend to create, in contrast, teetering edifices of fragility (consider Twitter's early years when they unexpectedly got popular; Facebook, Google, and Amazon can't afford to just have a service not work because of the failure mode "people actually want to use it"). And sometimes, progress at FAANGs gets slowed because unlike smaller companies, they have to consider whether what they're doing is _good for society_ in some sense (either from a moral stance or, far more often, the practical stance of "We need an internationally-scoped legal review on this feature so we don't get sued out of a tenth of a quarter's worth of profits").

3) Some FAANGs are much better at software than management. They assume individual engineers will know when things aren't going well for them and will self-correct. To my mind, that's an error (not a lot of engineers I've met are comfortable with emotional self-direction, and it's certainly not taught in software engineering curricula), but it's what I've observed. It may be helpful to talk over your concerns with a trusted coworker (ideally on another team, to minimize the odds of any promotion jealousies creeping in) and see if they experienced something similar and what they did about it. In my experience, most engineers at the FAANGs went through a period of feeling like this wasn't for them at some point.

4) There is _absolutely_ such a thing as a sucky dead-end project in FAANGs. My first project was one. I didn't do anything like find my footing until I got off of it. It eventually disintegrated under the weight of its own bad engineering decisions, but I lacked the perspective at the time to realize I was standing on a sinking ship. It was a ship that made an awful lot of money though, so the company was extremely willing to throw careers at it to keep it afloat, if the engineers doing the bailing were willing to hold the buckets.

All of that having been said... Even after I found projects that resonated with me and I could make real contributions to, I left because I felt like my career was stalling out working on projects at a glacial pace with mixed chance of success, even knowing why we did it that way. If the work isn't fulfilling, and if you can't see a clear path from the value of the product to benefits for real people... Maybe it's not worth you're time.

</comment><comment><USER207> Let me explain. I was browsing Facebook on my phone at Philz one day and saw Mark Zuckerberg come in wearing a suit (it was a Friday). I asked him "are coding interviews good?". "No", he said, "they're very bad". I would have asked him to explain, but he seemed to be engrossed in the last level of some sort of Mario Bros game. I went back to my phone and clicked on an ad. Only I never click on ads: it was all a dream. I woke up. "Is this still dream?" I wondered. I spun my phone on my desk like the top from Inception. It fell off and the screen shattered instantly.

<comment><USER208> Is this GPT-3 output?

<comment><USER209> I love (well, kinda...) that we're going to have to start asking this question on a much more regular basis.

What will be really interesting is when it is actually a GPT-3 bot but no one has any clue, conversing with it like it were anyone else.

<comment><USER210> I really enjoy /r/SubredditSimulator, but also _because_ it is bad. Hopefully it doesn't get too realistic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER211> Non-stop VC funding and explosive growth usually lead to this. Eventually your managers aspirations get the best of them and they hire middle managers and those people hire program managers and the feedback loop continues. This excludes the "friends" I mean _cough_ cough "colleagues" that get hired into newly created positions of power. Then you have reorgs which is a whole separate issue.

I don't think there is anyway way to stop this cycle, I've seen it play out too many times. The only way to sort of delay it is to ensure the C-levels are lined with at least one technical ex-SE type that'll call out BS when they see it.</comment>