Show HN: Earn Bitcoins with your t-shirt - <AUTHOR> http://badgerhunt.com

<comment><USER2> This idea is not viable as far as I can tell... Besides the obvious flaw of this service (it is a centralized business, which compromises most of the benefits a decentralized currency like Bitcoin has to offer) there HAS to be an objective way to determine whether a person is fulfilling their obligation to wear the tshirt. The only way I can think of to do that is to have "eyes on the ground", a second group of people who are "verifiers" who monitor the "badgers", and who are independent contractors willing to accept a very fluid employment arrangement... at this point you are sort of hamstrung with bitcoin because it has no significant smart contract system to encode the responsibilities of the various parties (the verifiers, badgers, and badgerhunt.com)

Until a cryptocurrency-based smart contract system becomes established (such as ethereum or codius) I just don't see how this type of business idea is going to be feasible (but certainly the roads of silicon valley are paved with the bodies of people arguing this or that business model is never going to work :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> We are actively working on a multisig scheme where advertisers won't need to trust us with the money and we will only act as a pure middleman, signing transactions when the campaign is completed. The scheme is relatively well know at the present stage of Bitcoin development, but it still takes some time to implement right. We ourselves are not interested in holding other people's funds, it's dangerous.

<comment><USER2> Well, I guess I'm not too worried about the question "can badgerhunt run away to Cuba with everyone's money", which is of course always a concern and is the problem multisig solves... I just see that the incentives of a "badger" are not aligned with the incentives of an advertiser- The incentives of a badger are to PRETEND to advertise a product, in a way that requires the least effort. Unless you can find a way to penalize "badgers" who cheat (through a sophisticated independent verification and enforcement mechanism) I'm thinking the compliance among "badgers" would be low.

On the other hand, if you DO have a way of providing such penalties in a cost- effective way, this concept would have more potential... and the only solutions I can think of still need more technology infrastructure to be developed.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a good question. But think about it, why would compliance be low? It's not like you have to wear a giant rubber dick on your head to advertise something. You only wear a t-shirt or put a bumper sticker on your car. Possibly, of a brand that you might actually like. Where exactly is the incentive to cheat? Sure, some people might cheat and there are ways in which you can minimize this number of people which we've been discussing. But for the majority, there's really no incentive whatsoever to not wear that t-shirt and not fulfill their obligations.

<comment><USER2> Certainly, lots of people said airbnb customers & hosts would cheat like crazy and were proven wrong. Best of luck to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Services like getchute.com use image recognition to make pictures with logos available to brands. They mostly use the pics for online advertising. In a sense, they broadcast the brand to a bigger audience than what you could make with one person in the street and offer a way to track how many people have seen / will see the ad.

How would you compete with those kind of services? What would be the advantage(s) for a brand to offer free tshirts/stickers/caps to people so they can become "living ads"?

This kind of sponsor/ad thing has been working with celebrities, do you think everyone can be visible enough to be interesting for big brands?

</comment><comment><USER4> One thing I found a bit alarming is that the FAQ page says advertising funds are held by the site. It's good they realize the threat though and say a multisig solution will be rolled out. I hope this multisig solution will be rolled out quickly, otherwise I don't see big advertisers trusting the site with a lot of money.

<comment><USER5> This especially worries me for a site where the contact page doesn't list any names or addresses. A site with no address that only wants BitCoin screams scam to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So this looks like a dating site for advertisers and those who are willing to provide some advertising space on their t-shirts. Seems to me, not a very new concept. But somehow, I find it less humiliating then when people are dressed as mascots for some real-estate agency. Decency preserved.

</comment><comment><USER7> Slightly offtopic, but it's nice that the default option when signing up is "Never send me news emails". Says a lot, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why involve Bitcoin into the whole thing? Couldn't you just use cash?

<comment><USER9> I think it'd be impossible to do such a thing on a large scale with cash or credit cards/paypal, especially if it perates worldwide. High fees, many people unbanked, subject to lots of regulations depending on the jurisdiction. That would be a major pain in the ass. Projects like these is where Bitcoin shines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-tRPhxm41I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-tRPhxm41I)</comment>


The Facebook Era: Small-town lifestyle for all of us, on a global scale - <AUTHOR> http://andrewoneverything.com/the-facebook-era-small-town-lifestyle-for-all

<comment><AUTHOR> Curious what you guys think of this, since Facebook and the loss of privacy get discussed a lot here on HN.

Basically, I noticed that the life that we seem to be heading towards (where due to face recognition everyone we meet on the street will know who we are and where we live) is not that different from small-town life that people used to have. That wasn't so bad (though it was restrictive), so maybe this brave new world won't be as bad as people fear.

On the other hand, this is on a much larger scale, so the consequences are as yet unknown.</comment>


Evernote Privacy Policy Lets Employees Read Your Notes - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/12/14/worst-privacy-policy-evernote/ <comment><USER2> Not a user of Evernote as I would only use such a service if the data on the server is encrypted. I assume a lot of users see Evernote not as a sharing but as a note keeping tool and are assuming a great deal of privacy. I understand it is tempting to have so much data potentially to access but frankly I find the plan horrifying, the opt out not acceptable and the notice period too short.

<comment><USER3> End-to-end encryption is tricky for companies like these, and until the main stream starts demanding encryption, private companies will continue to ignore it.

I'm working on open standard for encryption and ownership of notes. See [https://standardnotes.org](https://standardnotes.org).

If you'd like to contribute, send me a message.</comment></comment>


The Night is Dark - <AUTHOR> http://nightra.in/the-night-is-dark/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the read. It might seem strange to some but this is a solid image to see when you're camping - there are machine cycles going on that is keeping your data alive and you have no control over those machines, and you don't have your own data.

Which is crazy to me, and i would never let that happen. Ever. Everything that i have online is copied to two different locations which i have physical access to, lol... why aren't you doing the same?

Also... Spotify. Convenient for discovering new music, but I can't imagine myself relying upon an internet connection to actually listen to music, in absolutely horrible quality. Do you honestly not store music on your mobile devices?</comment>


Google, Amazon 'n' pals fork out for AdBlock Plus 'unblock' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/02/google_amazon_taboola_microsoft_adplock_plus_unblock/ <comment><USER2> and this is why you use ublock or similar :)</comment>


Ask HN: A/B Testing in Ruby on Rails? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have any experience A/B testing in Ruby on Rails and/or have any tools to recommend? <comment><USER2> There's a free A/B testing app offered by Google

<http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/></comment>


Stanford bioengineer develops a 50-cent paper microscope - <AUTHOR> http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2014/03/10/stanford-bioengineer-develops-a-50-cent-paper-microscope/ <comment><USER2> This is an incredibly exciting project -- congrats to the Prakash lab. One of the most exciting advances in global health and science education I've seen in a long time.

Given where some of their funding is from (Gates Foundation, NIH Fogarty Institute Global Health Equity Scholars (GHES) Fellowship, other global health foundations), I really hope they open source this design under an appropriate open source license. The benefits to the developing world of having this design available to the public under an open source license are tremendous.

The only details I can find for licensing don't look too promising (hopefully I'm wrong): [http://techfinder.stanford.edu/technology_detail.php?ID=2922...](http://techfinder.stanford.edu/technology_detail.php?ID=29223)

Edit: Is the CAD file public?

<comment><USER3> I was asking myself JUST this as I've got a printer lined up :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The laser cutting surprised me. I know it's almost certainly just for prototyping, but I couldn't help but think that a full scale industrial process could drive costs far lower. I would love to work on the line trying to produce a quarter million a day per line. Ram a ribbon of that paper between an anvil roll and a pattern cutter, with another line rounding and polishing ball bearing lenses.

I hope it takes off - these sorts of cheap tech solutions will bootstrap the rest of the world faster than anything else!

<comment><USER5> Yeah, their plan is to use a die cutter for mass production of the paper parts. The glass beads used as lenses are already mass produced for other applications.

Source: I've worked with them on an educational pilot of foldscope.

<comment><USER6> If there somewhere I can acquire some of these? I'd absolutely love to get them into the hands of my daughter and her classmates!

<comment><USER7> Yes. From one of the comment:

> To sign up for the "10,000 Microscope Project" where Prakash will give away > 10,000 build-your-own-Foldscope kits to 10,000 people who pledge to share > their experiences and experiments on his website, go here: > [http://www.foldscope.com/contact-us/](http://www.foldscope.com/contact-us/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why is this impressive? It's not made out of paper. I see plastic lenses, LEDs and batteries. I can buy a microscope on eBay for less than $2 ([http://www.ebay.com/bhp/pocket-microscope](http://www.ebay.com/bhp/pocket- microscope)). Why is it better for the housing to be made out of paper than plastic?

Here's my 2 cent microscope "made out of water": [http://citizenscientistsleague.com/2013/08/29/the-instant- mi...](http://citizenscientistsleague.com/2013/08/29/the-instant-microscope- just-add-water/)

<comment><USER2> The pocket microscopes you linked to provide 60x magnification. Imaging of most microbial infections that can be diagnosed visually requires at least 1000x magnification.

The Foldscope project provides over 2000x magnification.

Also, the 50-cent cost is right now. They hope to get the cost down significantly lower by scaling up production.

Finally, it doesn't hurt that the Foldscope is significantly more rugged than a plastic microscope. You could easily stack a thousand of them in a small pack and bring them to some remote region on foot, horse, or motorcycle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's one of the better "we made a thing" videos I've seen in a long time. Major props to the video team and Manu Prakash, that was excellent.

And the thing is cool, bordering on "coolest thing in a long time". This would also be _phenomenal_ for use in schools, especially with younger kids. I really really want to see lots of these built and sold and in everyone's hands.

<comment><USER5> I agree that these are great for teaching kids science, but there are a few hurdles. First, kids don't really know what makes a good slide - they'll take opaque things like a orange peel and hope to see something (you can only see transparent or semi-transparent stuff). Second, it takes a fair bit of attention to learn how to hold it up to your eye and move the focusing stage around. Third, it's hard for a young kid to build one of these without supervision, and if you're a teacher in a 30-kid classroom, you can't supervise kids individually. None of these problems are insurmountable, but they do prevent Foldscope from being an instant educational hit.

<comment><USER6> If you can drop a bunch of tablets in a village and kids can get themselves up to speed with no supervision, I sure that these problems are insurmountable :-)

The more I read about learning, the more I think structure, testing and to a lesser extent supervision are detrimental to younger kids. My little girl brings home weekly spelling tests at the age of 5, I'd much rather give her things like this, a minimal amount of instruction and let her loose!

[http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian_kids.php](http://www.dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian_kids.php)

<comment><USER10> just an FYI, but judging from the context of your comment I think you may mean "surmountable". Insurmountable means they cannot be overcome.

I have to totally agree with you about learning though. I went to a Montessori school for much of my youth and really attribute my love for learning to it.

The day is divided into blocks, and the classroom is divided into sections of activities related to subjects. The child has to do a certain number of activities for each subject each week, but they get to choose when and what they did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kind of wary about putting a sample of Malaria-infected fluid up to my face like that. But mostly I'm jealous that nothing I'm working on stands to have a tenth the impact this could make.

<comment><USER12> If it's under a microscope slide cover then you're pretty safe - the fluid is sandwiched between the slide & the cover and isn't going to go anywhere.

(You don't normally try and image free standing droplets that could run off for a couple of reasons: Except for the clearest liquids they'd be too optically thick to see anything useful and you'd have problems focusing on objects that can move in the z direction as well as laterally with respect to the lens.)

<comment><USER2> Plus, malaria isn't transmitted via fecal-oral or respiratory route, so holding it up to your face isn't terribly risky. Taking the sample is much more risky, since there are sharps involved.

Now, if it were cholera...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does the microscope cost compare with paying the technician who will do the diagnosis? Assuming even $1000 per tech - which is roughly the per capita GDP(nom) of many countries - in this case maybe it's just better to buy the scopes in volume from Alibaba?

So the real value of the 50-center may be for people to make their own samples, and use a local shop to upload a cell phone picture to an online analysis service. Running on the cloud, maybe?

<comment><USER14> The more expensive microscope will be good enough when you already know what application you have in mind. The almost free microscope let's you explore without risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a hole. You can do the same thing with a coke cap and a bright light. Also notice that the work wasn't published in a scientific journal.

As somebody who works in optics this is the most infuriating thing I have seen in a while.

ITS A BLOODY HOLE.

<comment><USER5> It's not just a hole. There is a ball lens that provides 140x magnification. The lens can be translated in the x, y, and z directions. To me, that's deFinitely a microscope.

Why are you so infuriated?

<comment><USER8> He's infuriated because, despite the hype, the TED talk and the Gates funding, it's not clear why this is better than other simple microscopes which can be made for even less money. Also, why does it need to be so cheap? Not everyone in a poor community needs one of these. Surely they could buy/receive a more conventional instrument and share it.

<comment><USER5> "other simple microscopes that can be made for even less money"

What microscopes are cheaper? It seems incredibly hard to beat this on price without sacrificing a lot of magnification or durability.

<comment><USER8> By trading off field of view, eye relief, brightness and aberrations you can get any arbitrary magnification by sticking in a different sized plastic ball lens. Just like all the 500x junk telescopes that are sold.

Given all the attention this is getting, I have to conclude that I'm missing a critical element of what makes this notable. I get that it's very cheap and can be stepped on, but maybe you can explain the application for this that wouldn't be better served by the shared use of a more conventional design made out of plastic instead of paper and which could still survive rough handling.

<comment><USER5> The paper vs plastic issue is unimportant, in my opinion. In fact, the latest designs I've seen are made of polypropylene sheets instead of paper sheets.

I think the critical element is that it's cheap to build and ship.

Again, what microscopes do you know of that are cheaper?

<comment><USER15> I do like one thing, this has the potential to inspire kids about optics. I sure would have loved to have one growing up!

These point of care services aren't limit by the cost of the microscope, they are limited by staff and the cost of histology. Most of the scopes I see at the clinic are cheap brightfield ones used to look at stained specimens, and are kept as backups when the Beckman-Colter machine fails. Can your microscope distinguish white blood cell morphology? Working with live cell imaging you learn that red-blood cells are evil because they carry no detail and little information, they are trivial to see and deconvolve. You can see relevant features even if you are beyond the diffraction limit, but then again you need those fancy slides that spread the cells out so that you can inspect them one- by-one.

I see no new science and an attempt to address non-existent problems and seems way out of touch with the needs of medical staff. The test for malaria looks something like this: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/PLDH_Mala...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/PLDH_Malaria_Antibodies.jpg) [http://www.csinnovation.com.sg/upload_files/8/Anti_Malaria_H...](http://www.csinnovation.com.sg/upload_files/8/Anti_Malaria_Home_Rapid_Tes.jpg)

tldr: We knew you could do this hundreds of years ago, it won't change the world because it didn't then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is awesome, I want one.

Until then, for folks that can afford there are some really great ~$50 usb microscope web cams. I have this one [http://j.mp/usbmicroscope](http://j.mp/usbmicroscope), it is UVC compliant and works on Ubuntu/OS X/Windows as a web cam.

</comment><comment><USER17> Amazing. This talk is also very good for more depth [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoP5MdpMBc4&feature=share&lis...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoP5MdpMBc4&feature=share&list=PLkCqtkRNkFgA6MRBj1VT7myATRZJIk0vJ&index=8)

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm really excited that this is now public! Congrats to Manu, Jim, et al.

FYI, a paper with technical details is available here: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.1211.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.1211.pdf)

<comment><USER19> I skimmed through and it seems dedicated to the optical side of foldscope, while I was very curious on how they achieved micrometer precision, IIUC of lens parameters (position, focus) through folding ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> …but apparently nobody can actually _get_ the thing unless they are chosen as one of 10.000 beta testers. And who knows what the actual license will be on the designs, if they are ever released.

</comment><comment><USER21> What is the component providing the actual magnification?

<comment><USER22> The article mentioned spherical lenses produced as a by product of an industrial process:

 _The poppy-seed-sized lenses where[sic] originally mass produced in various sizes as an abrasive grit that was thrown into industrial tumblers to knock the rough edges off metal parts_

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> For me this is linked to the 19bn for WhatsApp. We only spend stupid amounts on IM apps when we think there is nothing else left to spend money on.

Its similar to the USPO comment at the end of the 19C - "Everything that can be invented has been invented". With that attitude you will sink your billions into anything - but this shows there is always scope (#) for invention and innovation.

(#) See what I did there.

<comment><USER12> This is pretty much Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's original microscope design ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leeuwenhoek_Microscope.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leeuwenhoek_Microscope.png) ) using modern materials. So in that sense, it has already been invented!

Which doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile & important of course: the reapplication of old technologies can lead to great things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting, I like how they call it "Microscopy." Kind of a throw back to those old pin-needle hole microscopes.

</comment><comment><USER25> Anyone know where I could find schematics? I would like to do it with kids in our summer tech camp.

<comment><USER26> [http://www.foldscope.com/](http://www.foldscope.com/) has some info about the project, but you can also signup for their beta program. re: > _To signup, please send an email to firstname.lastname@example.com with description of community you are involved with or one question you would like to tackle. See categories below for details._ @ [http://www.foldscope.com/#/10ksignup/](http://www.foldscope.com/#/10ksignup/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Earlier prototypes:

[https://pictures.lytro.com/barry.allard/albums/47077](https://pictures.lytro.com/barry.allard/albums/47077)

<comment><USER19> 50cts microscopes pictures taken by 300$ lytro lenses. Funny.

<comment><USER27> \o/

Someone finally gets a 2 year old joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> 1) This is wicked cool.

2) The feat itself is impressive. Sucks they have to "sell" it with the malaria application. I guess science has almost always been like that.

</comment><comment><USER29> Sounds too good to be true. I'll believe it when I can buy/build it. Until then it's vapourware, period.

<comment><USER5> It's not vaporware. I've built them myself. Why make such a critical and cynical comment? I ask sincerely and not judgmentally. What value does it offer other readers?

<comment><USER30> We in the tech community deal with "X made! Follow us for commercial release"...

And that day never comes for many projects. So yes, skepticism is warranted in the sciences. And frankly, until I can buy one or download the CAD drawings, it effectively does not exist.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What industry/dept. is easiest to sell to? - <AUTHOR> medical/Government seems to be the worst place to sell the product as it involves lot of regulatory hurdles and long sale cycles for a small software companies. I find marketing dept. are easiest to sell to as they are always looking for novel solutions and are not considered "cost" centres. What do you think? <comment><USER2> Marketing has a large discretionary budget in many organizations - usually the largest (discretionary) in many organizations. So that makes it a good target.

Sales will throw money at anything with a clear ROI. If you can reliably say it'll make salespeople 1% more effective, then that's an easy decision. If you look at Chorus.ai / Gong.io / VoiceOps - these are new sales tools that have really burst into the market.

That said, as a result of this, there is a lot of tech in both of those domains. Your customers will have a lot of tech and be bombarded with a lot of options. Is is very noisy and confusing. So it gets harder to get above that noise and stand out. Particularly in the early days.

So even in those cases, I think starting out in a niche can make sense (A niche of startups can be a good one for a bunch of reasons). Simplifies your approach to the market.

</comment><comment><USER3> The easier a market is to sell to, the more crowded the market will become -- barring other factors that restrict the number of players in the market (e.g. the cost of building factories, regulations, etc).

Marketing budgets are huge, but the barrier to entry for creating another SaaS marketing tool is low.

If you yourself are looking to start a company, the easiest thing to do is figure out what advantages you have that other companies don't have.

If you have a proprietary advantage in a crowded market, then don't worry about the competition and focus on telling your story to your customers.

But I would avoid entering markets that have low barriers to entry and where you don't have a proprietary advantage, simply because you want to avoid markets with high barriers to entry.

</comment><comment><USER4> I agree, marketing and startups - so many startups made selling to startups (see [https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/startups-selling-to- other-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/startups-selling-to-other- startups-a-house-of-cards/))

</comment><comment><USER5> We started our sales automation SaaS product a couple years ago when the market was relatively young. Today it is super saturated. Would not advise people to get into this market, we just got super lucky and got big.

</comment><comment><USER6> Law firms. Every single cost center is passed on to the client.

</comment><comment><USER7> The one you know best.</comment>


Wood for Trees interactive global temperature graphs - <AUTHOR> http://woodfortrees.org/plot/ <comment><AUTHOR> You can easily compare different data series there.

Example: [http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/mean:20/plot/rss/mean:20/pl...](http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/mean:20/plot/rss/mean:20/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:20/from:1960/plot/gistemp/mean:20/from:1960/offset:-0.3)

For example satellite data has only more recent data points.</comment>


Fact checking universal basic income: can we transfer our way out of poverty? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/fact-checking-universal-basic-income-can-we-transfer-our-way-out-poverty <comment><USER2> Summary: Someone at world bank has a "mental exercise" based on a supposition that subtracts an assumption from the estimate of another group of researchers based on several abstractions applied to a number of estimates.

I used to wonder how I got so lucky -- to live in an era where we no longer bleed people for ailments. Nowadays, I sometimes wonder if we'd be better off having physicians bleed people with leeches instead of having bankers and economists bleed the world with finance.

</comment><comment><USER3> Researcher calculates that world poverty could be reduced by more than 20% with just $66 billion, decides it's not worth it.</comment>


Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ([https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit- google/](https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/)).

Since then, I:

* Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue things for fun without worrying about how much it's costing me in terms of time.

* Attempted to build a startup on top of a distributed storage cryptocurrency ([https://blog.spaceduck.io/](https://blog.spaceduck.io/)). Didn't work because the underlying platform wasn't mature enough yet, so it was more expensive and less reliable than centralized solutions.

* Attempted to build a business with a ML-powered recipe ingredient parsing service. Found out recipe apps aren't really willing to pay for it. ([https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/](https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/))

* Currently working on toy projects to sharpen my web development skills because I've found that part of my skillset to be a bottleneck with my previous projects.

<comment><USER3> Great article about the promotion process and the employee dynamic at Google. It very accurately summarises much of why I quit there so quickly after coming in via an acquisition.

 _That conversation made me realize that I'm not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money._

I was very lucky to have a friend who taught me that very early (not about Google specifically, the same applies to _any_ company). Working as a contractor just cemented it - I was sitting next to people earning half as much as I was or less, just because I was a contractor and they were an employee. Once you can see this, it's amazing when employees get sucked into killing themselves working crazy hours because they identify so strongly with the company they work for. Companies go to great lengths to promote the idea that we're all one big family, of course, precisely because it allows them to exploit their workers more easily.

Since leaving Google, I now make a software product I sell online. I have no boss, no employees and no investors. Occasionally I miss having coworkers, but mostly it's great. Freedom is really worth a lot of money, at least for me.

<comment><USER4> > I was sitting next to people earning half as much as I was or less, just > because I was a contractor and they were an employee.

Was this still true after all the taxes, insurance, and stability factors are considered, or was this just your hourly rate?

<comment><USER3> As a contractor in the UK, I paid less tax than an employee would. HMRC brought in IR35 to try to combat that, but at the time I was contracting (early 2000's) most contractors were still paying less tax - I'm not sure if that's stricter these days.

I was in London working in web & finance at the time, so it was a fairly distorted market. I did get bitten by the dot com crash, but even so I was only out of work for about 6 months or so and that was a pretty extreme event. Realistically in the current environment job stability in a major IT centre like London is so good that contracting is pretty safe. In a more unstable market there would be a higher element of risk, for sure.

<comment><USER5> Contractors still do a bit better than employees, though HMRC keep talking about seriously cracking down on the practice.

<comment><USER6> Cracking down seems like a bad idea.. you lose dynamic flexibility on both sides. What would the upside be?

<comment><USER7> Taxes mostly and fairness towards people who are actually employed.

<comment><USER6> In the US you pay more to freelance in taxes than you do as an employee (because the employer pays some on your behalf) but you can have other deductions as a contractor. So I think fairness is not specifically a sufficient motivator. The UK can have a tax advantage for freelancing but these freelancers lose out on employment protections. Dunno..

<comment><USER8> US contractors don't seem to get anything - they seem to think getting a 20% premium over FTE is good.

In the UK you would normally expect 3x for a short 6 month contract.

<comment><USER6> Right but UK salaries are about 2-3x lower than US (at least for software engineers).. or at least they use to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I worked on the same team at Google for 4.5 years, and left 3 years ago. I was bored; I was getting better at doing the same thing, but I wasn't expanding as an engineer. I worked on a free product. We had no market incentives to make time-boxed decisions and could declare anything we did a success whether it was or not, which drove me nuts. I was at the New York office, so when the company got bad press you could usually rationalize it as "oh, it's this Other Google in Mountain View making these really bad decisions and having this weird cultural obsession with needing everything you do to be as hard as putting a man on the moon," but it dampened my enthusiasm for looking for an internal transfer. Staring down the end of my 20s, I ended up taking almost a year off to relax, reconnect with old friends, do a little traveling, fail to start a small business, and eventually interview.

I ended up at Etsy. A major criteria of mine was "find a business model I want to work for." Etsy checked all the boxes -- I was impressed by the caliber of people that I talked to when I was interviewing, I got a fair offer, I think the business model of selling local goods internationally is a good thing for the world, and I would be working directly on things that affected the bottom line. It hasn't been all sunshine and roses. There were 2 rounds of layoffs and almost everything has changed since I joined. But something that doesn't change very fast at a small established company is its business model, so I've managed to still be motivated to work there despite all the churn around me. It also helped me realize that some of the ennui I felt at Google was really a shifting of interests -- I'm not interested in technology for technology's sake anymore, but instead am motivated to solve problems that I think can be solved via technology.

<comment><USER10> Sadly a lot of what's featured on Etsy now is mass produced crap masquerading as handmade.

I get why it was essential to the business. You can only grow so much as a small truly handmade market. Then it's OK to sell "vintage" clothing and on and on...

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I hear that. Growth is absolutely a factor, and fairness is another factor. Like, how do you define "handmade" without punishing people who get too successful ("oh no, I have more orders than ever and can't make them all myself anymore. Do I have to stop selling if I get help?"), and while still being simple enough that content moderators can fairly and reproducibly apply rules for listings that are challenged. You basically end up at one end of the spectrum or the other, "everything has to be truly handmade, and we're okay being really restrictive" or some variant of "authorship is really the thing we care about".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I did ten years at Microsoft; loved it, but wanted a change, and Google desperately wanted people with VM experience to build GCE.

I was at Google for six years; I had a lot of fun building various parts of cloud, but then at some point realized I didn't really care a lot about the component I was working on, and looking around, I didn't see a lot of other projects going on that I really felt passionately about.

I had some savings, and wasn't really worried about finding •some• other software engineering job in Seattle if that ran low, so I decided to take off to think about what I really wanted to be doing in life. And then a friend reached out to me - he was founding a startup, and was I interested in joining?

So I did an ML startup for a couple of years. It was tremendous fun; lots of work, but I felt very connected to what I was building, why I was building it, &c; it felt good to be really thinking about the product from an end-to-end, "How is this going to delight the customer?" point of view. I think I'd have had to be a director at Google to have the same level of involvement with the entirety of what I was building...

And then, we were bought by Intel. It's not too different, though - it's a much bigger company, of course, but I feel pretty connected to the stuff I'm working on; I see and understand the business case, and my role in it. I don't know that I'll work at Intel forever, but certainly for the foreseeable future; I'm having fun, and feel pretty fortunate to be working here.

<comment><USER12> It sounds like you're very happy with your career decisions. How long did you work on the startup before it was acquired?

<comment><USER11> The startup was vertex.ai; I worked there for a little over two years.

It was very educational (in a good way), despite the uncertainty around paychecks (just from the higher odds of going under at some point down the road). For people who're in a financial position to handle some paycheck risk, I'd definitely recommend trying a startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ex-Netflix here. I was a senior dev at Microsoft and Netflix (8 years of professional experience) and decided to switch to freelance for a variety of reasons. Eventually that turned into starting a company that provides a home for ex-FAANG (etc) devs that want to switch to freelancing.

Facet Development is a freelancer network made up exclusively of ex-FAANG engineers. Facet does the work of finding freelancing jobs/projects and then we send them out to devs in the network. We also provide project management and billing/collections, help with taxes, etc, so freelancers get to spend a lot more of their time doing the enjoyable parts of freelancing and not trying to run a small business.

We target FAANG companies and companies that wish they could hire FAANG devs when finding work for our freelancer network. When I was a dev lead at Microsoft, bringing on vendors or outsourcing was a terrible experience, because they always seemed to be below our hiring bar. So I started Facet to solve the problem I had when I was an engineering manager at a FAANG company.

We have more work than we can handle, so if you are a FAANG or ex-FAANG dev that wants to switch to freelancing or already is, you should sign up!

You can read more about the Facet Developer Network here: [https://www.facetdev.com/blog/the-facet-developer-network- th...](https://www.facetdev.com/blog/the-facet-developer-network-the- freelancer-network-for-former-faangetc-engineers)

<comment><USER14> Wow, this is a great idea. I can see both sides of it:

"Look, you've always wanted to jump ship to freelance, but it's hard and you're used to being heavily supported by your org. We have that for you."

"Look, you want to hire these people but you can't. I can, and they can complete your project in a super high quality way, you just need to pay for it. We can be there next week."

<comment><USER13> Exactly! :)

I always wanted to jump ship so I could work on my own startup, but was afraid cause I had no idea how to find work as a freelancer, and was totally not the sales type. I figured there had to be more people out there like me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I left Google after three years as an SDE because I had really _really_ had enough of my bosses, I wasn't promoted when I figured I deserved it, and a project that meant a lot to me wasn't getting the staffing it needed to succeed.

I left for a more senior position at a smaller, less prestigious software company, though I've moved again since. Right now I'm working remotely from Toronto for a Silicon Valley start-up.

Ultimately, I wish I had approached working for Google a bit differently. I thought it was sort of an overgrown startup, and you were supposed to look for something that needed doing and do it. No. Google is a large highly structured company with a distinctly process-oriented culture. It's a place where you do what you are told. That famous proverb about Japanese nails absolutely applies. I eventually figured that out, but by then it was too late.

<comment><USER16> > That famous proverb about Japanese nails absolutely applies.

"The nail that sticks out gets hammered down."

<comment><USER17> I'm guessing there are some "nail dimensions" that get hammered down, and some that are encouraged. (There are some anomalous characteristics that are accepted or incentivized, and some that are penalized.) I'm curious, could you (or someone in this thread working at google) help me understand which these are? Which weird character traits are ok, and which are not?

<comment><USER18> I'm going to make a guess here, but based on my experience of this type of culture at other organizations, weird character traits that are okay = anything unusual done by the very senior, generally-accepted-company-success- story people. So if you started a successful spin-off that Google funds and makes a ton of money from, then your penchant for rollerblading around the building is cute and HR smile when describing it to interviewees. However if you are one of the other 99.9% then get those damn things off your feet, your going to hurt someone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ex-Amazon engineer here. Worked for ~4 years in the Prime Music team. Contrary to popular belief, I had incredible time at Amazon. Learned a lot, good work life balance, progressed to L5 etc. Primary reason I quit is to start something of my own and not live under a draconian H1-B visa that treats people like second class citizens (will save H1-B rant for some other time).

What am I doing now?

I enjoy building dev tools. I am currently building ReviewNB ([https://reviewnb.com](https://reviewnb.com)) that helps with Jupyter Notebook diffs and commenting. I built [https://nurtch.com](https://nurtch.com) earlier this year to help Dev/Ops teams write executable incident runbooks.

How?

I moved back from Seattle to New Delhi, India. Cost of living is less than $2000 per month which gives me enough time to work on my projects without being stressed financially.

<comment><USER20> $2k/mo seemw very high for India (I'm not too familiar), are you supporting a family/spouse as well or is New Delhi just expensive?

<comment><USER19> South Delhi is expensive. I pay $1000/month on rent. That's also because I have a larg'ish space (home office, guest room etc.)

Living in tier 2 Indian cities or suburban areas can cut down the expense in half. ~$1000/month for a comfortable lifestyle.

<comment><USER20> Ah I see. Yeah, to do <2k in the bay area either roommates or studio + ramen :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ex-Google SWE L5 (Senior) - Left in 2014 after almost 9 years spanning from my late 20's to mid 30's. I really can't complain, and would easily rank it as my most fulfilling and lucrative full-time employment experience so far, though the previous and post employment were in defense and startups.

In short, I left due to burnout, though I think it wasn't so much the team/work as it was my character lends itself to burnout if I'm not very careful to erect work/life barriers and not trample them in spite of myself. I also tried hard but failed to get promotion to L6 SWE, and that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. This was mostly a matter of personal immaturity at the time though. In retrospect my technical skills may have passed muster, but my ability to make things happen in the organizational and interpersonal sphere weren't really at an L6 level. My foot was already half out of the door by then, anyway.

In the intervening time, I've worked on an (unsuccessful) Android game, worked at a startup (again, burnout is easy when you internalize the existential precariousness of this sort of venture), and have since moved back to my hometown, bought a nice house, started a family, and done remote contract work. I have a few projects incubating and am planning on pursuing some entrepreneurial bootstrapping once my current contracts peter out shortly.

I miss the proximity to amazing engineers and casual availability of supercomputing resources, but in the end, I'm grateful to have saved enough to have a great deal of freedom in how I spend my days and to have been fully present for the first few months of my son's life.

Another benefit of time outside of Google is getting acquainted with the equivalent software ecosystem outside of their walled garden. Borg -> Docker/Kubernetes, MapReduce/Millwheel -> Spark, Dremel/bigquery-> Presto, etc etc.

<comment><USER22> What is L5?

<comment><USER23> L5 is one of Google's internal levels. They're putting it there to let people know where they were in Google's hierarchy and they note that it denotes Senior. From what I know, people generally start at 3 right out of school.

<comment><USER24> To expand a little bit, you usually start at L3 as a fresh graduate, and then are expected to be promoted to L4 within ~2-3 years, and then L5 after another 2-3 years (although it could be shorter). L5 is considered a "terminal" position, in the sense that once you get to that level you're no longer expected to get promoted. (L3 and L4 are, by contrast, more "up or out", where if you don't get promoted after long enough you can get fired.) I actually met an L5 engineer at Google who had been there since 2002. Promotions to L6, L7, etc. start to get exponentially more difficult.

<comment><USER25> This is no longer the case. L4 is the new coasting position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ex-Amazon (and ex-Vmware) here.

Worked at AWS from 2008 to 2014 (Europe, then Asia, then USA), then Vmware (also USA) from 2014 to 2016.

I then spent ~1 year at a startup, as CTO - the experience sucked, and I consider it to simply be a big mistake.

1.5 years ago, I left that job, worked on a new idea, and in August 2017 I founded a startup, Fabrica, with two other friends.

I am still there. No salary. Bootstrapped until March, then raised some angel money. Doing ok.

I will never go back to the corporate world. I'm done with it. I have some money on the side, and I firmly believe that money is to buy things that matter to you. To me, not working at a corporation matters.

<comment><USER27> >I firmly believe that money is to buy things that matter to you. To me, not working at a corporation matters.

Damn dude that is a very good way of putting it

<comment><USER26> Not sure I interpret your comment properly, but did you mean that you particularly liked the sentence? Or was there irony instead?

<comment><USER27> Yeah I meant that I loved the sentence! I worked in corporate before deciding to go back to Uni and it really resonated with me, even though unfortunately I wasn't able to already buy my own freedom to not be in corporate but need to be supported by family still. Hope I can make it one day :)

<comment><USER26> Thanks for clarifying!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Running my own bootstrapped SaaS startup, Canny ([https://canny.io](https://canny.io)). I've always wanted to do a startup.

Last year I wrote a blog post about the biggest lessons learned during the transition. Seems pretty relevant. [https://hackernoon.com/software-engineer- to-saas-founder-c16...](https://hackernoon.com/software-engineer-to-saas- founder-c16154013e12)

Also left SF to be a digital nomad. SF is so expensive and if you aren't fundraising you don't need to be there. There's so much of the world to see, and it's easy to be productive anywhere there's internet.

<comment><USER29> Digital nomad - are you AirBnBing around various countries or are you staying in coliving/coworking communities?

I ask because I'm interested in doing that soon.

<comment><USER28> Have lived in Airbnbs for the past year and a half :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I spent about 7 years at MS and 7 in amazon - mostly around databases. Now I have been with Snap for about 3 years and it has been going great. My reasons were:

\- Agility. Snap moves 10x faster than amazon/ms.

\- Small size. Our dev community is so much smaller than Fb etc. Last quarter our reported user count was around 188MM? So the amortized # of customers influenced per dev is very high.

\- Ownership. I am the tech lead for all of analytics in snap (an uber lead as we call it). In Dynamo I was the TL for the storage part alone, my other offers from fb/twitter/oracle et al were around running parts of their machinery. Nothing came close to the extent of ownership provided by snap. An L1 in snap owns 5x of what an L1 would own in FAANG.

\- Rest of the benefits remain equal / better: You are surrounded by smart people, you have hard problems to solve, perks, benefits and comp are very equivalent to / better than fang.

That's pretty much what I tell people during my job sells / interviews as well! If you are looking for the above, you can't beat small companies. On the flip side - FANG do have the scale very few others can only dream of reaching (dynamo did millions of qps per region and ran in 10s of regions). I am obviously hopeful we will make snap that big :)

<comment><USER31> That stock tho.

<comment><USER32> Not much to complain if you are shorting it :P

<comment><USER33> Shorting SNAP via puts was one of the best decisions I've made this year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Several years at Google, but got bored/frustrated like every Googler, and left to do a startup. That started off great but eventually fizzled, we got acquihired into a lame-ass company that I rode out for a couple of years, and then tried to do another startup never got off the ground. Now several years later, I'm at another FAANG. Fairly certain that my savings, salary and stock, career development, and overall confidence would be an order of magnitude higher had I stayed put and used the leverage I had at Google, to find a better project instead of leaving.

I don't actively regret all this -- I took the risk and did not come out on top. But the warning I'd give to others is that since 10 year ago, FAANGs probably give you the best possible deal, despite what VCs and entrepreneur bloggers want to tell you.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ex-Amazonian, not in a software related position. I left for the same reason a lot of the fellow commenter did, internal politics, promotion / development and shitty bosses (two levels up, but that's where it counts).

For one, as great as Amazons Leadership Principles are in theory, in practice they are used more than a weapon than anything else. Once the higher ups have made up their mind about a person, no amount of feed-back will change that. In the end perf reviews resemble court-martial, except in a decent court-martial you are present to defend your self.

I realized that too late. Internal "voting rings" self-promoting members at the expense of other are aggravating this even further. I would still do it again though, only with a clear exit strategy from day one. Rough guideline, if you failed to get promoted or transfer internally by year 2 - 3 you are by default dead. A transfer buys you another 2 odd years of runway.

What did definitely not help was stock development. I joined in early 2014, initial RSUs have beem granted nased on 2013 expectations, the value increased by a factor of 10 by now. So AMZN had yet another incentive to reduce the number of employees in my generation of hires. And they did.

Funny side note, around two years after I left they implemented tje two high level solutions I proposed back the day and got axed for.

Since then I had two employers which didn't work out. Mental note: take the sabbatical immediately after leaving, failed to get start-up ofbthe ground and finished my studies.

<comment><USER36> I worked for an Amazon subsidiary for about 4.5 years. By the time that last review & reorg came around, I was mentally already out the door, being burned out. Having my job change to doing mostly Windows help desk (I'm a linux sysadmin) was what made me crazy. Unfortunately, that layoff came right after the "Great Recession" got going, and I was out of work for a year and a half. My nice $125/share stock RSUs had to be sold for living expenses. If the timing hadn't sucked like that I could have paid off my house by now. I still have 5 shares...

I kind of had a forced sabbatical after that. At least I was not in debt going into it.

Then I went to work for some big names, this time in Linux operations, some contract, some regular. Since I have the wrong age and plumbing, I constantly have title deflation and other BS to deal with. I'm currently at a university, at a pay drop and title drop, but it's more stable with more time off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was a E5 security engineer at Facebook. Left after 4 years because I married a Canadian, was sick of living in the bay area and FB had no way for me to continue working where I wanted to live. I enjoyed the job a lot but non- career stuff (including allowing my wife to start her career after finishing her PhD) was a higher priority.

I moved to Canada and spent two years working remotely as a security manager for Uber which I also enjoyed. I eventually left because of burn out and took a few months off completely. I now live in Montreal and am working on a startup with a few friends in NYC.

<comment><USER38> Hi, interested in learning more about your security career. Your contact info is not on the profile. Would like to catch up. My email is in the profile :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ex-Facebook. After five years I found my pace of learning had basically plateaued. Combine with organizational politics at any large company and I started looking for something smaller.

Ended up at Atrium, a legal startup in SF. Similar to mtlynch, I didn't expect how much I'd have to hone my front-end chops on leaving a FAANG.

Getting the opportunity to learn what I hadn't been learning and shore up those weaknesses reenforce my decision to switch.

Best parts so far:

* It's 30x smaller than FB was when I joined and 300x smaller than FB was when I left.

* Great people abound. I was worried that this wouldn't be the case at a smaller company but I joined partly on the basis of how intellectually curious the engineers I met were during my interview.

* It's a non-traditional tech company. We work with attorneys and build domain expertise in the problems CEOs and VCs face every day. The hard legal problems of starting a business.

If any of that sounds interesting, we're hiring! Reach out to username at gmail or [https://www.atrium.co/careers#current- openings](https://www.atrium.co/careers#current-openings)

</comment><comment><USER40> You won't see a lot of ex-Apple people posting here because of the deeply- ingrained conditioning to never talk publicly about anything that goes on there, even after you leave.

I'll say I liked the company in general. The rank and file engineers were smart and nice to work with, a real pleasure. But people were meaner and egos were huger the higher up the org chart they were, and I had to interact regularly (daily) with people 2-3 away from Tim.

Ultimately I made it 4 years, pretty much to the day my last stock vested. Manager said they don't give refreshes, so I'm not going to take that big a pay drop to keep going there so reluctantly quit. I'd go back in a heartbeat if they weren't so stingy with pay/RSUs.

<comment><USER41> I am reading the end of your comment like "Apple does not pay good salaries". Is that true? I have no interest in shares / stock, just the net sum at the end of the month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Does it count if you move from one to the other?

I spent 2 years as a L5 (Senior SWE) at Google in MTV. I could not negotiate a deal to work remotely under my VP or find a team under a different VP allowing remote work that I was interested in (and which was interested in me).. I left after promotion to staff (L6) and went to Netflix where I work on the Openconnect CDN. Netflix is so much smaller that I feel like I have an impact, and I'm not just a cog in the machine.

<comment><USER43> Congratulations on making Staff after only 2 years. You'd think it would be alarming to Google how often engineers leave immediately after being promoted.

<comment><USER44> What's the benefit of waiting for promotion and then leaving? Any benefits you gain from that? Naïvely I'd assume it'd make sense to collect some of the extra cash for a while.

<comment><USER42> It was in the pipeline, and it seemed silly to leave just weeks before it was in effect because:

1) If you are a regretted departure, there is a good chance you'll be hired back at your old level with a minimum of fuss. There is a pretty big difference in salary, bonus factor and probably GSU grants between L5 and L6, so I did not want to loose that advantage should I ever want to return.

2) It was a personal goal. I suck at whiteboarding, so was hired as L5 when I should probably have been L6. So I did not want to leave before I finally got to the level that I thought I should have been at all along.

3) There is an internal Google system (go/epitaphs) where you can look up an Xoogler, and it will tell you when they worked at Google, what their title was, what their level was, etc. If I ever wanted to join a startup that was being founded by Googlers, I thought it would look better if they could confirm the L6 was claiming on my resume. If I had left after the promo was announced to me, but before it was effective, it would look like I was an L5 and just spinning a story.

<comment><USER45> Being a Staff Engineer vs just Senior gives you more leeway for negotiation with prospective employers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Ex SWE at AWS (2013-2014) – I enjoyed working with the team I was on and I learned a lot. It was a great experience, but I've always wanted to work on some ideas I'd written down. I resigned as soon as my student loans were paid off and I'd saved enough money to pursue those ideas for a couple years.

One of the most memorable days of my life was the day after I resigned from Amazon.

For most people, their decisions, stressors, happiness, etc. are largely defined by external forces – whether by school, work, finances, family, etc. For me, this was much more true than I realized. I had always thought of myself as someone who was highly independent. But, that following morning (and most mornings since) I woke up with a feeling of nearly complete autonomy. That feeling was much stronger than I expected. It has been incredibly freeing and has significantly affected how I approach life.

Since, I moved back to Minnesota and am currently working on my second project – [https://mutambo.net](https://mutambo.net). Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to play recreational sports. We raised a small seed round and our remaining runway is a little over 1 year.

\--

My first project was put on pause after teaming up a with co-founder (Ex Google) and choosing another idea. I would like to finish the first project some day.

</comment><comment><USER47> I was a SWE L3 at Google for three years. I left after having similar problems with the promotion process mentioned by others.

Since then, have moved from SF to Ecuador and started a humor publication explicitly making fun of companies like FANG ([https://techloaf.io](https://techloaf.io)).

It's very cathartic...

<comment><USER48> Hey, uh .... why the f __ __ __do I need to give you my e-mail address to read your stuff?

<comment><USER49> You don't have to, just click "the email" which is a hyperlink to the archives:

[https://mailchi.mp/872ceee548ec/its-loaf- time](https://mailchi.mp/872ceee548ec/its-loaf-time)

[https://us17.campaign- archive.com/home/?u=14538d8f8591165977...](https://us17.campaign- archive.com/home/?u=14538d8f8591165977d9a9d93&id=e21336ec0c)

<comment><USER50> I wonder what % of people you lose right there because you're trying to be smart/clean/whatever with "the email" link.

<comment><USER51> It lost me until I came back and read this comment; I did not think to click "the email." The page reads as a standard newsletter subscription form so I just closed the tab.

<comment><USER47> Helpful feedback, thanks. Just updated the landing page to make things clearer.

<comment><USER48> Thanks. Good content! I still believe you're limiting your audience by not running it like a typical blog. But it seems like that's partly what you want to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I served at Google as an SRE for 2+yrs. I burnt out and ragequit. Now I'm an SRE at a startup.

I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true.

<comment> barrow-rider > I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. > Dirty open secret if it is true.

That's most places, FAANGs notwithstanding. 6 months getting up to speed, realizing what a clusterfuck it is by 12 months, dealing with it to 18 months, and then getting to the I-Want-Out point at 24+ months.

Plus the whole "jump ship every 2-3 years to maximize salary" thing is possible for FAANG-level engineers.

<comment><USER53> devops are like brake pads on trucks, you stomp the hell out of them whenever you didn't look far enough ahead, and when they start to make a squeaking noise you throw them out and get new ones.

<comment><USER54> I know at least ten SREs at Google with ten years service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I was E6 at Facebook for 1.5 years.

Left due to a combination of not finding the right team/project and constant pressure to work on something impactful rather than fixing existing issues I cared about. This seems to be a common issue at FB with senior engineers joining and having to ramp up quickly (2 of the senior teammates left while I was there for the same reasons).

Currently at WeWork where you don't have to write multi-page assessment of all the impactful things you've done during the last half.

It's not perfect but the work-life balance at senior level is better than at FAANG.

<comment><USER6> "multi-page assessment of all the impactful things you've done" ... ?

So things aren't organized along a product line?

<comment><USER55> I was on an infra so the "product" was improving both developer experience and user experience. Thing is — as a senior engineer, you're encouraged to do work that spans across multiple teams. The self-review would include all the impactful things you've done by helping person X or team Y or product Z, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Throwaway for obvious reasons. Just to add some AMZN perspective:

Amazon has big company problems just as much as any of these. In fact, from what I've heard from friends working for other FAANG and similar companies, AMZN tends to have a bigger proportion of terrible managers. This is because the Leadership Principles can be interpreted in several ways and more often than not, gets interpreted in a way that works for managers to push their agenda. The promotion process is a joke. There's a lot of politics, and you have no control over when you're getting promoted. For those that believe that they had enough leverage on when to get promoted, IMO they simply were at the right place at the right time (or as I've seen, got promoted later than they think they deserved to.)

AMZN managers like to quote Jeff a lot. Two of those have worked terribly at the org I work at:

"good intentions don't work" has introduced so many processes in the org that getting actual work done is getting harder by the day. Engineers don't like to do project management, but all these processes are a micromanager's wet dream.

"Amazon is a great place to fail". It really is not. AMZN is a terrible place to fail because once you fail, they bring it up every single time to ensure you don't have leverage. AMZN managers don't seem to appreciate growth. Or they're intentionally blind towards it to ensure they can squeeze a few more years from you while keeping you at the same level. Title being connected to both compensation and the kind of work you get sucks, and if you joined AMZN after the boom in late 2015, compensation is definitely not a reason to stay.

The only folks who are happy at AMZN are those that aren't deluding themselves by saying they are making a real impact. If you're anywhere below senior SDE you're not making any impact. Of course, exceptions exist.

</comment><comment><USER57> Freelancing and consulting. It's fun, pays decently well and is fully remote.

Left Google SRE because of how mentally draining it was, how draconian the IP clauses were (everything you create belongs to Google!), and how generally I didn't see a future for myself there.

<comment><USER58> Even something you create in the weekend belongs to google when you are in contract with them ?

<comment><USER59> Like many companies, yes.

However, unlike many companies, they actually have a process where you can submit your "weekend projects" for Google to review and "gain back" explicit ownership of them.

Basically Google just checks to make sure it's not competing with anything Google's already doing, and then contractually assigns it back to you. (And anecdotally, if it does compete, you may be offered the opportunity to join said team, since it shows you're passionate about it.)

<comment><USER60> It's also pretty easy to contribute to FOSS projects on your own time, as long as you're OK with Google being the owner of your contributions (I personally don't care since it's open source licensed anyway). [https://opensource.google.com/docs/patching/](https://opensource.google.com/docs/patching/) is an almost fully public version of the process Googlers have to follow to contribute stuff to open source projects.

Disclaimer: works at Google, maintains some FOSS code in my own time, both under my own copyright for some projects and under Google's copyright for others.

<comment><USER61> Have you encountered any project maintainers uneasy with the idea of Google "owning" that part of the source code? In practice it doesn't matter, but that part kind of confuses me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Moved back to Atlanta after five years at YouTube in SF to be close to family and afford a house.

Discovered that Square has an office here, saving me from a descent back into Corporate IT. Haven't looked back. We're hiring :-)

<comment><USER63> Interested in hearing more about what you're up to. What's the best way to get in touch?

<comment><USER62> I'm ${firstname.lastname@example.com or @${USERNAME} on the Tech404 Slack and Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Does Microsoft count? It's in the same market cap as Amazon and Google.

I've been consulting for the past year while I build a few side-projects, hoping they'll turn into businesses.

I'm making more than I ever have before and this was only year one. My hope is the next few years the time spent marketing myself through blogs, podcasts, and some books I'm working on will pay off either to make raising money easier for a business idea or to solidify higher rates for consulting.

<comment><USER65> Thats great! How did you start with finding consulting projects and building street cred? Has writing blogs bring you more business yet?

<comment><USER64> The million-dollar question: how do you find clients?

Honestly, the first one approached me via HackerNews. The rest have been from my network.

Blogging has yet to bring me more business, because my name and brand have not reached the mind-share yet to rely solely on that. But I'm working on it!

I also realize that this is a long-term play, it will likely take me 3+ years before my name is reputable enough to be the reason someone hires me from all the places they've seen my name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Why are almost all the replies by ex Google engineers? I thought I would see an even distribution from all FAANG companies but replies are pretty heavily skewed toward ex google employees. Is this because 1) Google culture is completely different from other FAANG companies? 2) Engineers at other FAANG companies dont quit their job? 3) or they dont browse HN in their free time?

<comment><USER67> Probably mostly 3, and that Google is larger than the other faangs where you might (Netflix and Facebook).

<comment><USER68> That doesn't sound accurate. Anecdata, but in my current org in Amazon Retail I think about 1 in 15 engineers browse HN daily. When I was in AWS it was around 1 in 3.

Why do you think people in Google/Netflix/Facebook browse HN more than Amazon/Apple?

<comment><USER67> Historical trends on similar threads. Other "Ask FAAMNG" threads seem to have a disproportionate number of responses from Googlers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Ex-Amazon here. The "people leave bosses, not companies" proverb applies to most people I know.

<comment><USER70> This.

And in my experience, there aren't many good bosses out there.

I always envy the stories of some corporate engineers who had excellent mentors and bosses, but sadly there aren't many of them.

<comment><USER68> This is something I learned recently, but some people who get lucky and find a good manager will just follow them around for a while. At least at Amazon, having a great manager is the most critical external component of having a sustainable job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Now working on a game after 11 years as a Staff SWE at Google. I left for a complex mix of reasons, largely because I can and because I wanted to work on my own stuff, also not least because I don't have a good feeling about the digital world the big companies are creating. I wrote just a bit about this on my blog on leaving.

</comment><comment><USER72> I worked at Microsoft for about 3 years as a product manager and as an applied scientist. Most of the people I worked with were passionate, worked long hours and knew their shit. What drove me to leave eventually was that I had little leverage in deciding what to work on so had little control over what I'd become an expert in.

Right now I'm working solo on a strategy game inspired by the Lebanese Civil war and platforms to make running reinforcement learning algorithms in different environments much easier. TBH, I'm not sure if things will work out but I feel a lot happier and find some comfort in knowing that I'm learning many transferable skills.

As others have mentioned in this thread, I think of this experience as buying out my freedom for a couple of years with a hope that I can extend it should things work out. Contract work would be ideal but I'm still figuring out how to meet good potential clients in my area (Core ML + Data science + Infra)

</comment><comment><USER73> Ex-Amazon here. I spent eight years working at Amazon in Edinburgh, on three different teams - a now-dead music encyclopedia to complement IMDb, a team doing recommendations on the Amazon homepage (we were the 'customers who bought X also bought Y' team!), and finally an ill-fated graphic storyboarding tool for Amazon Studios.

I'm now working at Sequentec, a two-person contracting company providing engineering services, primarily for wave/tidal power startups in Scotland. My boss, a veteran of the industry, is a mechanical/hydraulic/electrical/control systems engineer and general jack of all trades. I write C code for B&R industrial controllers, using a proprietary Windows-based toolchain. I also write a lot of Python to get logged data off the controllers and into databases, and occasionally I'm called on to do fairly random things - reliability analysis, network/VPN engineering, wi-fi antenna selection, wiring and soldering of sensors, and a lot of interfacing to serial peripherals with custom protocols. I've programmed atop a tidal platform in the middle of a large river, and on a gantry above one of the world's most advanced wave tanks. It's great.

I left Amazon for a lot of reasons: eight years is a long time for a graduate job, the culture had changed a lot since I'd joined (less of an emphasis on work-life balance, and growing from 30 to 90 devs meaning that I no longer knew everybody's name), and I needed a job with more flexibility (I now work effectively part-time). It was definitely the right choice for me, even though I took a large pay cut to do so.

<comment><USER74> I'm curious how much is the TC for doing stuff like this?

<comment><USER73> No idea in general. My chargeable rate, which is apparently cheap for the industry, is £45 an hour. My actual pay rate is £18 an hour, and I'm contracted for 3 days of 7.5 hours a week minimum, with anything over that as overtime. But that was a very custom deal and I suspect others in the industry are paid very differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Another ex-Googler. I worked there as an SRE for six years, then left due to lack of career advancement opportunities[0]. Currently I work at Stripe, which is less capable on some narrow technical metrics but a far more pleasant environment.

Stripe is hiring. We list open positions at [https://stripe.com/jobs#openings](https://stripe.com/jobs#openings). Email me at email@example.com if you'd like to hear more about the engineering work here.

\---

Good differences:

* It's about 70x smaller than Google (100x smaller when I joined a year ago). My CEO knows engineers by name, knows generally what we're working on, and occasionally DMs us congratulations on especially interesting blog posts (hello Patrick!). The effects of your work (good and bad) are obvious, and people know who's doing what. I'm not sure if there's a "monkeysphere" equivalent for engineers, but in Infra at least we've not yet reached the limit.

* More transparent. Private companies have fewer restrictions on what business metrics they're allowed to share with non-executive employees, and people here are enthusiastic about sharing both (1) what's going well and (2) what could be done better.

* A general feeling of optimism and cheer that is absent at Google. We don't end up in the news for easily avoided own-goals that employees protested for months before they hit the public.

* The business model (supporting business growth across the globe, and scraping a bit off the top) is directly coupled to the success of our customers. At Google there's always a thought in the back of your mind that the people using the product are in conflict with the people generating revenue. At Stripe we're in partnership with our customers, working against people who are not customers (i.e. fraudsters).

* Much more support for remote work. I live in the Bay Area and am planning to go remote some time in the next six months. I don't think this would have been possible at Google, which is focused on offices and especially focused on "main campus" (Mountain View).

\---

Bad differences:

* We use third-party open-source code more than Google does, and the average quality of open-source code is _far_ lower than internal Google code[1]. I've reported critical crashing bugs upstream and gotten nothing but [tumbleweed noises]. At Google I once reported a bug in the getopt() equivalent, and it was personally fixed by Sanjay.

* Fewer engineers mean non-critical bugs in internal tools sometimes don't get fixed. We just don't have time. I've seen more JS stack traces on .corp pages in the last _three months_ then during my entire Google tenure.

* Hiring engineers away from different companies (instead of entire cohorts fresh out of school) can lead to cultural conflict around dev velocity vs reliability. Obviously as an ex-Googler and an SRE I'm double-biased toward reliability, but folks with other backgrounds feel differently and there can be some difficult conversations there.

\---

Overall I'm very happy with the outcome of leaving Google. I attribute most of this to Stripe itself. It turns out I got lucky, and things could have gone much worse (company full of ex-startup engineers = campfire horror stories all day long).

\---

[0] During my last perf cycle, my manager's manager told me "senior engineers don't implement, they write design docs. Implementation is just code writing". Either he was wrong (and I was now stuck under someone who believed my chosen career was low-skill + not valuable), or correct (and I was in a _comapany_ that believed same). Either way, the situation was clearly undesirable.

[1] External Google code is also lower-quality than internal Google code, which shocked me. I've found memory errors in protobuf ([https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/issues/3752](https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/issues/3752)), all sorts of wacky stuff in Bazel, and every day I wonder why go-protobuf doesn't have DynamicMessage yet.

<comment><USER76> >Fewer engineers mean non-critical bugs in internal tools sometimes don't get fixed. We just don't have time.

This sounds like everywhere I've ever worked. I didn't even realize that the alternative actually existed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I left Google after 3 years to join a startup in the project management space. It was clear that I could work on a product that made lots of money (ads) or was in front of lots of people (maps), but I couldn't actually make a difference in how the company operated. So I joined as employee #2 of a startup and eventually managed some people.

I now work at Amazon. I understand that I'm working for a company who will pay me very well in exchange for me to show up and write code and not think about engineering any other time without prior allowance (lol opensource). This is a bargain that I feel fine with, now that I've entered into it with eyes open.

Eventually, the money won't be enough to keep me and I'll look around for a medium sized startup that sells thing to people for money and has a sustainable business model (aka not into hypergrowth).

</comment><comment> oh-kumudo Ex Amazonian, left Amazon, now rejoin Amazon.

Joined a startup. Had many rosy fantasies about how life could go for me. It turned out not very honky dory after all. The management could be best categorized as directionless, worst completely chaos. In terms of salary, it is less, if not much so, if your startup fails to take flight. So I quit, and rejoin my previous employer, but in a much different group on different things.

Lessons learnt, your situtation won't change dramatically as you might hope by changing companies. Grass is always greener on the other side, and patience is something you only can only learn to gain it.

Ultimately, I want to work on something that I believe is valuable, and useful. That is what will keep me in my position for longer term.

</comment><comment><USER78> Ex-Amazonian here.

Aside: Despite the company's not-so-good reputation in the media and forums, I enjoyed working there. For the most part I had good managers and coworkers. And once you've been there a while, you can transfer to a team with more interesting work, less on-call support, etc.

Anyway, my wife is a doctor, and she had to move for her residency. Amazon wasn't willing to consider remote work, and I'm not sure I'd want to be the one "remote guy" anyway, so I switched jobs to a 100% remote company. We're hiring, in case others would like to make a similar jump. :)

</comment><comment><USER79> Worked at a few startups gobbled up by Google. Second time decided to stick around. I think Google is an overall incredible company to work for. Far from perfect (and getting worse in some important areas of employee happiness), but I'd do it again.

I just need to be my own boss for a while. Working on things that you're not 100% passionate about can really wear one down.

<comment><USER80> > (and getting worse in some important areas of employee happiness)

Would you mind elaborating?

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I worked at Apple straight out of college for a bit less than 2 years. I left because I worked on a small project that I had trouble connecting to the broader mission, and differences with my manager. Big company experiences will always be heavily situational. You end up on a good team, you're having a rewarding (personally and professionally) experience. Bad team/manager/whatever, you have a bad time. FAANGS are no different.

I joined a startup after, stayed for many years, they went public, I took some time off, worked at some other startups, and now I'm back at a FAANG. This time, though, I know what to do - and what I want out of working here - so I'm looking forward to a wholly different experience.

I'll likely throw my hat back into the startup ring in a few years but who knows?

I will say this, I look back fondly on my time at Apple.

</comment><comment><USER82> Working on my saas [https://chartpoet.com](https://chartpoet.com)

Worked at Amazon from 2010 - 2012. Left because I wanted to create something of my own. Have failed twice at since then, hopefully will succeed this time.

<comment><USER83> Website looks nice! My 2 cents would be to maybe have a demo dashboard without signing up? I just feel like it forces people to invest without knowing what it is. Wish you success!

<comment><USER82> Here are some demo dashboards, will link to them on the home page soon.

Presentation Mode [https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/](https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/)

Dashboard Mode [https://demo.chartpoet.io/dashboard/frB1lGMWa_q7/](https://demo.chartpoet.io/dashboard/frB1lGMWa_q7/)

Raw Data Mode [https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/](https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> After ten years at Google, I returned to my field of interest and work for a drug discovery/machine learning startup.

</comment><comment><USER84> Ex-Googler, worked in ads for ~3 years. Wonderful experience, don't regret any of it, had a great manager and director, definitely focused my opinions on what leadership can and should do (Take responsibility, back you up). I really appreciated the engineering culture and learning experiences.

Left to join a 4-person startup my friends founded, still there going on ~5 years. Definitely enjoy the freedom and faster pace of changes, but the stress of responsibility is much more real.

</comment><comment><USER43> Retired after 8 years as a Staff SWE at Google. Do I really need a why for retired?

<comment><USER6> Sure! You could've kept working! Why did you retire?

<comment><USER42> I'm guessing "because he could". 8 years of L6 at Google should set you up for life if you move to a moderate cost area of the country.

<comment><USER85> What's the net worth of an L6 for 8 years at Google?

<comment><USER86> Since from what I hear a fresh grad in the Bay Area gets $100k+ just in cash, we could extrapolate. I'm guessing that's at least $150k (probably more like $200k+ in today's market) in total compensation for year. Add about $20k+ in cash and probably the close to the same in Google shares per level, that would make it easily $400k per year. So he would have gotten $3.2 million, I can't imagine his expenses being higher than half of that, so he should be worth $1.6 million after 8 years. Probably more.

I'm curious how off my estimations are :)

<comment><USER87> You're so low it's actually kind of uncomfortable.

<comment><USER86> thausamiote thinks I'm at the other end of the spectrum because I forgot taxes :o)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Ex-Netflix. I left right after my first child was born (this was before the 1 year of parental leave was added) and then I started a startup with some friends. Then we exited that startup and I started another one, which I work on now from home, which lets me play with the kids during my breaks.

The flexibility of working for myself at home is the main reason I do this instead of working at an office or cowering space, because it lets me do daytime events with my kids, like 10am gymnastics class and 4:30pm tap class. If it weren't for the kids I'd still be doing the startup, but I might not be doing it from home. I'd probably be digital nomading instead.

I suppose if the startup thing doesn't work out, once the kids are both in school full time during the day I'll probably try to get a job at another FAANG company and build up the savings again for another startup. :)

</comment><comment><USER89> I was firstname.lastname@example.com for 2.5 years, email@example.com (failed startup), and then firstname.lastname@example.com for 5 years. Now I'm bootstrapping a dating app business. I'm doing this because:

1) I want to do work that aligns with my passions: technology, making the World a better place, being respected, making money, and feeling peaceful.

2) I'm burned out and this way I can give myself time to rest and recover. Some days I don't work at all.

3) I spent 15 months using the dating apps heavily. They all provide poor experience for people looking for serious relationships. I have a lot of ideas for making the experience better and I want to test them.

If you want to try the app and have influence over its design, send me an email (see my profile) and I'll invite you to the alpha test.

</comment><comment><USER90> Ex Amazon Ex Microsoft here.

Moved to bay area, bought a cheap house in Hayward CA, paid off my mortgage early.

Started my own company Goodly (www.goodlyapp.com) I am learning a lot on daily basis and enjoying it throughly. Even though I work crazy hours it doesn't feel like work at all.

<comment><USER91> Looks pretty interesting. I work in Hayward too. Let me know if you would like to get away from your computer to stretch your legs and meet for coffee sometime. I work right next to a starbucks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> It's strange that there's nobody from Amazon here, just people from G

<comment><USER93> I am in NYC, and hiring for a place that pays very well, possibly above FAANG salaries. I see a lot of resumes. A lot of those resumes are from Google, but very very few are from Facebook, and I find that to be a very curious thing. FBs office is not quite as large as Google's in NYC, but they have been around awhile and we are hiring out of both coasts and offer relocation.

I am not sure if it is a quirk of our recruiting pipeline, but this seems to be an indicator that FB is a potentially better place to work.

<comment><USER94> That's very interesting. I had a chance to possibly work at the NYC Facebook office which I didn't capitalize on, after reading this I'm having intense FOMO.

Are you in Big Tech or Finance?

<comment><USER93> In a general sense, both. I am working in finance at a hedge fund now, but for a more or less pure tech group. My previous job was for a large e-commerce player, but before that I spent about a decade doing various forms of algo trading and HFT.

<comment><USER95> What skills do you need to work as a software developer in algo trading and HFT? What sort of job titles should you be searching for? Most jobs in this space seem to want Statistics or Applied Math related majors. I want to look for software development jobs in HFT.

<comment><USER93> Generally low level C++ will do it. I have been out of the game for about 5 years now, but when I left the game was all about speed speed speed. We weren't trading smarter anymore, it was just about trading fast. If you are faster, you don't just put an order out there with an opinion that the market will move in your favor, you get an immediate risk free return (risk free assuming operationally everything works as expected). I also worked on the "benchmark strategy" side- VWAP/TWAP type algos, when they were very new, and there was some statistics involved but the math was fairly simple. I haven't kept up with that side of the space, I am sure they have added complexity, but fundamentally you are looking at how a particular security has traded in the past- IE how much volume does it tend to trade at 10am vs 10:30 vs 11am, compare that with market statistics for the current day- is it high or low volume, is volatility higher- and apply some heuristics about what % of a parent order to put in the market at any given time.

This is a bit separate from the actual execution in the market, which is called smart order routing, and that just focuses on speed.

The best book on this still seems to be the now almost 10 year old "Algorithmic Trading and DMA" by Barry Johnson. If you want to get a feel for the strategies involved, this is your best bet: [https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Trading-DMA- introduction-...](https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Trading-DMA-introduction- strategies/dp/0956399207)

As for job titles, they tend to be generic like "infrastructure developer, strategist" but look for key words like "Smart Order Router, Algorithmic Trading, Index Arb (itrage), statistical arbitrage, market making, dark pool. I put two of those in Morgan Stanley's site and got a bunch of relevant hits. Posting numbers 3119617 3120636 are actual jobs in this space.

A better bet is to just look at job openings for the companies who specialize in this stuff- Virtu, Jump, Hudson River Trading, Citadel Securities, etc...

<comment><USER95> Great, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> Ex Netflix.

Joined a promising startup with 1 - Great mission 2 - Impressive engineering culture 3 - Super boring name: Farmers Business Network

FBN is the only reason I haven't moved away from the Bay Area.

We're hiring too, if anybody wants to shoot me an email I'll forward it along. firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER97> Can you expand on 2) please if possible ? How it is different from Netflix ?

<comment><USER96> Sure thing. I was blown away with the intelligence, experience, and humility of the people on the engineering team when interviewing. I went into the process thinking "this could be cool, I like the mission" and left the process with "These people are really sharp and down to earth, I hope this happens." Since we're a small team here (<10) I get to learn something from them every day.

I don't want to make it sound like I'm bashing my old team, because they very good at the layer they work on. The depth of knowledge across the stack is probably deeper at FBN. For example:

I was having an issue with Hibernate not doing what I wanted it to do. A knowledgable former team member showed me the bug ticket that had been open for some years and how to work around it.

At FBN, my first project involved multiple systems + the front end, a I was annoyed by a networking issue. I raised it, was showed a workaround by using socat, and the root cause was fixed a couple days later. I had no idea socat even existed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Ex-AWS. I joined when the service I was on was under a year old. It was a good team to be on inside AWS, in general.

That said:

1) I ultimately felt powerless to make changes. Hiring people in to the service was (at the time) proving to be a massive uphill struggle. It just wasn't one of the "sexy" services to be working on, and the ops team didn't have a dedicated manager who could focus on that. It left about 90% of my work consisting of two things. Compliance work, and region builds. Even outside of that, a lot of the things that slowed us down were things like established tooling that had seen _zero_ proper business funding until later in my time there (I some are drastically improved), and this absolutely absurd obsession with re-inventing the wheel in every single team to do exactly the same things, even when the task required months of engineering time (I shudder at the thought of how much money got wasted paying engineers to re-do the same work, and re-discover the same bugs and problems.) I ultimately had no power to drive things forwards.

2) One manager left, and the replacement had absolutely no interest in the operational aspects of the platform. They seemingly only felt empowered to say "yes" to managers above them. Even if that meant their team was working 80 hour weeks. (the manager has since left and things have improved, so I'm told). One of the things that got to be absolutely insane was the amount of effort involved in launching a region. It needed dedicated developer time, and that particular manager just didn't give a damn. That manager's attitude and refusal to work on operational concerns were a big source of my frustration in the team. Looking around AWS, all I could see were other teams that were in a worse operational position, suffering serious levels of burn out, and I just decided I wanted nothing more to do with it.

Here's a big tip: If you make operations a priority, you can land features far faster. You don't keep tying up staff doing manual stuff or fighting fires.

I left AWS and joined Oracle to work on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, for a number of reasons. Not least of which was that a former manager from the service I worked for in AWS is running the Compute platform. I knew him, knew what he was like, and trusted him when he said one of the most important things to him was keeping operational burden of the platform down. I'd learned to trust his judgement in AWS, and it's something he's continued to deliver on here.

I'll be honest, this is one of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever had. Better pay, better benefits than AWS, great co-workers, senior directors with their priorities straight. Managers that politely but firmly insist you take time off if you ever have to do extra hours (and follow through with you if you don't.)

</comment><comment><USER99> At the moment, what are some notable startups founded by ex Googlers ?

<comment><USER100> Off the top of my head:

\- Pete Koomen left AppEngine to start Optimizely.

\- Kevin Gibbs left AppEngine to start Quip.

\- Dave Byttow left Plus to do Secret, and just became eng director at Snap.

\- Bret Taylor was on Maps before he started Friendfeed with Paul Buchheit (Gmail), becoming Facebook's CTO and now Salesforce's CPO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> A lot of the answers are a bit underwhelming. Which is fine. But it makes me think, sure working in a bigco is lackluster, but so are many of the other options, and you might as well get paid for your trouble. "Being the one in charge" seems cold comfort to me if the thing you're in charge of isn't all that great itself.

Working in a big company allows you to disconnect a bit, focus on getting done what you need to accomplish that day, and then going on about the rest of your life. And then eventually you can just stop altogether. It seems just fine so long as you don't get caught up in the internal rat race, and don't get too wrapped up in the ideas they try to sell you about being part of a community and all that stuff. Just do your piece, every day.

Also, it's darkly ironic that one of the best-case scenarios after leaving is that your new venture gets picked up by... a large company.

<comment><USER20> That's a good attitude to have, 'just do your piece, every day.'

It makes sense, and after a few years you have much more freedom bc of the savings.

I'm a recent grad though, and I find my work very boring and tedious. I'm given tasks to do that may not even be useful. The lack of ownership + feeling like a cog makes it hard for me to do good work. I have been rational my whole life, but it is difficult to remain this way. Any advice? How did you like your first job?

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> So, this usually gets negged, but I am _very_ curious about the salaries which people are walking away from and whether they can match them elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER103> Was at Amazon. At Microsoft now.

Tired of it but I can't get another job. Feel like I've pretty well tanked my career. Pretty unhappy about it.

</comment><comment><USER104> Participating in selection bias!

<comment><USER105> Hi looks like you've been shadow banned as this comment was dead, and your previous comments look OK (nothing spammy) so not sure what happened there but thought I would let you know.</comment></comment>


Vice Guide to North Korea (You won't see this on CNN) - <AUTHOR> http://www.vbs.tv/shows.php?show=1442318652&source=sc

<comment><USER2> While I'm not 100% a fan of Vice Magazine, this was pretty interesting. No finger pointing!</comment>


What the People of Wal-Mart actually want - <AUTHOR> http://justinjackson.ca/people-of-wal-mart/

<comment><USER2> I feel like paving the cowpaths is all well and good, but there must be some room for innovation as well. Let's take Dropbox, for example. Sure, it stands out as the de facto file synchronization and cloud storage service in use today, but had the founders of Dropbox set out to merely improve on users' habits rather than reinvent them, their service would probably look like a fancy way to juggle the multitude of different versions of documents we used to have sitting around our harddrives and fileservers.

At times, usability improvements demand breaking with old paradigms.

<comment><AUTHOR> In many ways, the Dropbox experience matches the user's current habits: it's a folder, on your computer, that you can drag files into.

There were other habits that people had as well: they were using external hard drives to schlep files from work to home. They were emailing themselves files. They were sharing large files on CDs.

What Dropbox did was take the pain out of all those things. Instead of burning a large file to CD, you just drag it to your "Public" folder.

I think the post has two main points: \- you can't always trust what customers say, you have to examine what they actually do. \- just because something seems "better" doesn't mean it's what the customer wants.

Technically, we could say Microsoft's SkyDrive is "better" because it offers more free storage than Dropbox. But there's something about Dropbox that users prefer.</comment></comment>