The bigger the company, the smaller your role's coverage. You get well-compensated and aren't worked too hard, but your job might effectively be "you're responsible for these two screens of this one component of this particular application". The conflict is that the bigger the company, the higher the bar for entry. So you end up with a bunch of really bright, challenge-loving people cooped up working day in day out on very specific cogs of the giant machine, and that's not an ideal lifestyle for all of those people.

I work in one of the top tech companies that is not FAANG, and the sentiment is the same. They hire only PhDs for a big chunk of the company and they pay relatively well - most of the people who complain about this cannot get a better paying job.

A friend of mine even said to his boss 6 months after he was hired "Why did you hire a PhD like me for this job? This work is not even close to requiring a PhD".

While I feel for him, my counter is "OK. Where would you rather work where you will do work worthy of a PhD?" They'll usually name the same few places, and not realize that those places are already "full". And they all pay less.

The reality is that there are many more qualified people than positions for the interesting work. If my company decided that yes, you're right, we don't need to hire PhDs for the job and we'll just hire MS folks, then the very people complaining would be in another company, getting paid less, and complaining about the same thing.

Politics does not have to be a zero sum game but often those who view it that way and are absolutely ruthless rise to the top. Perhaps that's just the human condition.

I think we have a bit of a meta-false-dichotomy here. I agree it's a mistake to think of it as a zero-sum game. I also would say it's a mistake to think your advice will reliably work.

I've often sat in career advice talks and they often give the same advice you gave. Invariably during Q/A someone will point out they followed that exact advice and got screwed. The responses by the panelist fall into two categories:

1. I don't believe it and there must be more to the story.

2. You're in a poor organization. I suggest you find a better place to work.

So yes, the advice is good, but only when it works :-)

As a company gets bigger, the likelihood of faulty incentives existing goes up. The likelihood that what's good for my team + boss is bad for the company goes up.

Personally, I don't have illusions. I've worked in jobs where the advice you gave won't work. And I side with the second answer. Instead of playing bad politics, it's just a lot better to find an organization that is worthy of me/you. The advice people who had been in the org gave me was consistently "Forget about what's good for the bigger picture and the company. Make your boss look good even if it's a bad solution and will waste others' time and money." I didn't follow that advice and I paid for it. At the same time, my time and effort is valuable - I'd rather use it for something better than this. Either I work to change the organization's culture, or I leave.

It's a mistake to think that it's not a zero sum game.

If there are 5 people and one available spot for promotion, you can get selected by bolstering your appearance or by tearing the other 4 down. Either one works.

And yeah, the best tactic is usually "make my boss look good".

You say this like it's a bad thing. You should be making your boss, your team, and your teammates look good. If you are doing those things, you are probably also making the company look good.

It's thinking about the long vs. short term. Focusing only on your own optics may work okay in the short term, but they cap out fairly quickly.

Think about how it looks from the outside. Employee A is only focused on themselves. It is recognized that A is good, but any team A is on still struggles. Employee B makes the whole team look good. It becomes recognized that B not only does well, but any team B ends up on does well. Who do you think advances the farthest long term?

I certainly don't think it's a bad thing to make your teammates look good, but in general it's more effective to give the lion's share of the credit to the boss rather than them. And credit is a limited resource.

I say that like it's a bad thing because it kind of is.

I believe there are some companies where coworkers rather than management decide promotions and this tactic would not work but they are few and far between.

This also has nothing to do with a just world fallacy. This is thinking long term. Rarely can someone politic all the way to the top. In order to lead, you need the support of your team. You get that by being a great team member yourself.

/rant

Finally, I'm tired of hearing how awesome people are, but their team sucks or their boss sucks (doubly so for people working at FAANG, because the low bar is so much higher). If they are so awesome, then get out there and help the team improve. Instead it's I'm so smart, but everyone is holding me back. I'm stuck on a crappy team, etc... Grow up.

/rant over

If you want to succeed as a SWE at a FAANG company you'll have to be an exceptional engineer, or have other skills (leadership, pm, ...). You can't just weasle up the ladder by playing "political games".

Though, most of my colleagues don't even care about their career - most of us just want to work on cool projects which immediately affect billions of people.

I worked at one the FAANG and I found in my team and some of the neighboring teams the most insecure, unfriendly, back-stabbing, conspiratorial bunch of technically semi-competent losers I ever had the displeasure of working with. Other people were competent, trustworthy, confident in themselves and thus enjoyable.

I also interviewed at other FAANGs and maybe the interviewers were all wonderful people, but I had a mixed experience. Some appeared to be ok, some definitely not. Very different experience from the parent's.

I think a lot of people would enjoy a blog post elaborating on that experience (possibly under a pseudonym to protect you from vengeance).

Wonder what the false negative rate is?

Google's culture and hiring process is so well documented at this point, I suspect any suitably talented individual could appropriate some cultural fit.

Of the (current and former) googlers I know personally, they are a mixed bag but there are some traits that are more common. Self assurance and the uncanny ability to never be seen to be demonstrably incorrect are prevalent tbh - but that applies equally to most of the industry.

I think that may be very easy to do, just state that everything you say is just a theory or your opinion... but this is just a theory.

Google hired him to be a salesperson.

I definitely wonder if he could be happy in that role. I understand that it's important to have technically adept salespeople, but I can't see him being happy in that long term.

> On Leaving Google [...] But when I went in the next day, the energy drained out of me. I suddenly felt like I used to feel working at Intel. Partially I think Google had grown so much in my absence, but it was also partly a “boiling the frog” effect: before I spent time away, I hadn't noticed things slowly changing, but when I got back I realized, “Oh wow, here I am in a meeting with a bunch of people I don't know who are telling me to do stuff that I don't care about.”

Everyone still says Google is so great. Enough that I still wonder what happened. I also couldn't settle in, didn't like anyone, and was continually interrupted/harassed/followed.

In Western cultures, people put so much spin on what they say that I wouldn't assign much value to it. "Loving the job" may often literally mean "the job sucks less than the all my other previous jobs, my long-term depression is somewhat better now". Sharing the unpleasant truth is usually seen as career and social suicide, so people put on a face.

At my first job on campus at Cranfield university my shared office was a portacabin which was next to the hardstanding between two of the hangers and they used to test run executive jets after being serviced < 100m away now that is loud.

Can't imagine that you were sourrounded by assholes.

The reduction of individuals to acronyms sounds to me like unhealthy judgment, so maybe Google did a better job than you realized in attracting “like minded” individuals!

> On the other hand, the same happens wherever I go.

Is that you, mchurch?

My use of the term Targeted Individual was more literal (another reason most would say Paranoid Schizophrenia): https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=targeted%20i....

Note that neither AT&T nor Xerox were the prime beneficiaries of technologies developed at Bell Labs or PARC, respectively.

Bell Labs delivered a fair bit of tech, but Xerox PARC did great demos. Xerox PARC == Magic Leap or something like that.

Right, just because you haven't bothered to look it up, it doesn't exist. Here are just the Xerox PARC work that was commercialized by Xerox I can think of off the top of my head: Ethernet, XNS, Interpress, the Star and D-series workstations, Mesa, Smalltalk, Cedar.

I was under the idea they never really wanted to release a product for mass consumption.

At the end of the day they have the money, and they do provide ridiculous perks.

Actually Netflix much more so, only their projects are not in software. Just sayin.

For instance, Amazon and Google became huge between 2000 and 2005. That was a stretch of time when great engineers were a dime a dozen. Tons of dot coms had cratered, and Sun Microsystems was circling the drain.

That created a huge pool of educated talent, eager to be hired.

That situation doesn't exist any longer.

The game done changed.

There are some very peculiar properties of a dlt, that makes them special.

Another is with all systems taking the roles traditionnally filled with state actors ( registers of some sorts).

But you’re right, so far no « killer app » has been found. That’s what makes it interesting today, imho.

edit : to answer your question more precisely, a talk by one of hedera founder to a university class was eye opening to me ( here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjQkag6VOo0)

How long do we have to wait until the lack of a killer app stops being interesting, and simply means the technology is not useful?

How many of today's Internet giants were founded in 1998? Amazon. Plenty of defunct also-rans: Netscape, Ebay, Yahoo, AOL, Geocities, Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Pointcast, Monster.com, RealAudio, Pets.com, Kozmo, AllAdvantage.com, Webvan, DoubleClick. Netflix was in its infancy (~1 year old). Apple was a dying hardware company, a few months from bankruptcy and kept alive by Microsoft's cash infusion.

Google's official founding was several months in the future. PayPal was right around then. Napster was a year in the future. Friendster and LiveJournal were 4 years in the future, MySpace 5 years, Facebook almost 6. SomethingAwful.com, Bodybuilding.com, and Fark.com were a year in the future, 4chan 3 years, Digg 6 years, and Reddit 7. Twitter was 8 years in the future. YouTube was 7. Heroku and Weebly were 8-9 years in the future, which was the same time SquareSpace graduated to more than one employee. Dropbox was 8 years in the future. AirBnb was also 8 years, but didn't catch on for a further 5 years or so. Indeed was 6, Etsy was 7, Indiegogo was 9, Kickstarter was 11, GoFundMe was 11, Pinterest was 12, Patreon was 14.

So to answer your question going by the web's example - probably about 7 years. The "killer app" for the web (communication & coordination, IMHO) started becoming apparent to the mainstream around 2005, with Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Etsy, Indeed, and Twitter all being founded within +-1 year of that. Interestingly, analogues of all of them existed in 1998 (Classmates.com, DejaNews, RealVideo, EBay, Monster, and...well, nothing really for Twitter), but it took almost 20 years for the underlying infrastructure to get mature enough to get mass consumer adoption.

I don't know if you were on the Internet in 1998. I was. The Web was useful, mature, and had tens of millions of paying customers in 1998. In contrast, all the people I have known to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies only do it for speculation.

You bring up PayPal and list eBay as a "defunct also-ran." The only reason people started using PayPal was to shop on eBay, and the only way PayPal got anyone to start using them for payments was to bribe people with $20 referral bonuses, which they could only do due to their VC firehose of money, and a huge spambot campaign where they pestered eBay merchants with messages along the lines of "I'd like to bid, but I can only do PayPal." (see The PayPal Wars)

PayPal is a great historical lesson in explaining why BitCoin and other libertarian hash chain schemes will fail as a currency, because PayPal was founded on the same deluded libertarian fantasy:

"“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” Thiel predicted. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”"

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/who-killed-payp...

The real value of PayPal turned out to be fraud prevention and consumer protection, something that hash chain schemes lack by design.

I've been on the web since 1994. I certainly found it useful in 1998, but the things it was useful for included:

1.) Looking up Geocities pages for my favorite bands.

2.) Reading rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan.

3.) Playing DragonRealms, an early MMORPG.

4.) Instant-messaging my friends.

5.) Earning money through AllAdvantage.com. Think I made about $40 from them off referral fees.

6.) Looking up information for school papers.

7.) Amusing myself with the HampsterDance.

Streaming video existed but was far too slow and glitchy to be worth watching. Amazon.com existed, but my parents refused to buy anything online. My sister was an avid user of Kozmo.com when she went to college, but then they went bankrupt a year later. MapQuest existed, but took too long to load and still required that you print out directions, since you couldn't exactly bring a computer in the car.

By contrast, I've spent over $5K at about 2 dozen different AirBnBs in the last 5 years (and stayed at a hotel...erm, twice, maybe?). I just booked a haircut online, after reading the Yelp reviews and looking up the location on Google Maps. I spent 15 minutes typing up this comment on Hacker News, which I guess is the spiritual successor to Usenet. I don't own a TV, but I watch a bunch of YouTube and my wife's an avid Netflix user. We get almost all our packages delivered via Amazon.

In terms of how much the Internet changed behavior, a lot more happened in the 10 years between 1999-2009 than the 10 years between 1989-1999, and arguably even more happened between 2009-2018 than 1999-2009.

Isn't it easy to change teams at Google?

The world does not begin and end with mega-cap companies you listed. There are many many many more companies at far smaller scale.