I never worked at FAANG but even after more than 10 years working in tech, it still surprises me how undervalued well working tooling is. I'm not talking about 100% automation with infinite possibilities. Just really basic stuff, like deployment or setting up a development environment. That should always be a no-brainer.
The only things I miss are the snacks and the searchable codebase
Do you mean that you'd search Google's entire codebase monorepo for code examples, or that there was a better, searchable code snippet tool internally?
As another former Googler, yes, searching the entire monorepo was a frequent occurrence. Internal code search is pretty good (it's a search company, after all) but I have to say that I don't miss it so much now that Sourcegraph exists.
The difference is that certain talents and deep specialists only exist in the hubs. It’s similar to medicine where you want to go to NYC or Boston for certain diagnoses.
Short version is organising your finances and life in such a way that you can retire as early as possible. Things like maxing out the right kind of investment (not sure in the US but in UK it's things like ISAs), controlling outgoings, being frugal, ...
The core idea is to define your annual expenditures (let’s say $50k), a long term investment strategy you personally feel comfortable with (say 5% ROI), and from there you can deduce the amount you need to save to be financially independent (in this case, $1M).
Could you elaborate? Why would you need a level of comfort with an ROI? Or is the thing you need to be comfortable with actual the risk involved in getting that target ROI? Is that what you mean?
Also is the "million" you mention just a hypothetical? Although a million is a lot of money I don't thinks it's enough it's large enough to to qualify as being financially independent no? At least not in the US or EU. You would still need to work full time as it's not enough to retire on.
if you'Re thinking of a McMansion with several cars which you exchange every so often and constantly buy new gadgets etc then no, its not gonna be enough.
You sure as hell do need more than that if you want to retire in your early 50s and you plan on living another 30 years. At least if you want to live somewhere remotely interesting. $1 million divided by 30 would mean you need to live on 33K a year. Which is about $2,750 a month without accounting for future inflation which would erode this figure substantially over those 30 years. An average inflation rate of 2.50% would be a cumulative inflation of 109.76%. Your $2750 would trend towards half that during that time[1]
A common thread that these people tend to find though is that once you've saved up that much money, what you have actually learned is how to efficiently grow wealth, and I have seen very few examples of people actually just stopping there and coasting. Usually they just keep on trucking, maybe shifting into a different field.
Define "real world"?
* How to make a Python environment for a brand new project
* Source control basics like commits and merging
* Reading documentation or using SO
* Basic command-line debugging or even using print() statements!
I've asked a few times: "How did you get anything done before?". And (S)He responds that they never had to worry about this at Google.
[Edit]: I don't think all or even many Googlers are this way. But that this person made $10k/month for a year and a half gives me pause. I don't thing FAANG's are touchy about firing people. At this rate (S)He likely won't make it through our ninety-day review.
Google basically doesn't fire people unless they are grossly incompetent or if you broke some rules. It is very likely it took a year and a half to fire the person and they joined your company thanks to their credentials at Google and not their skills.
Because if you have a guy showing up on Monday, there's an office already set up and ready for him by close of business the previous Thursday.
I like to solve problems at work with openly available tools. I will often file patches or add comments to tickets or StackOverflow so that when I am at a new place all of that information is still documented somewhere I can get at it.
In house tools are a siren's call. And the fact of the matter is that if you wrote a tool because you had a need for it before anyone else did, that eventually others will want it too, and there will absolutely come a day when their version eclipses yours. You have to have a way to run your systems without tying them that tightly to a specific tool. And you have to accept that the 4 years of utility you got out of that tool was money well spent and you can retire it now with a clean conscience.
But yeah, at Amazon I encountered people who passed their tech screen but spent days trying to figure out basic bash / zsh config problems.
The fact that that amount of money is regarded basically as chump change is something that is very strange to certainly myself and I'd guess most people outside those regions.
I came from a series of real world companies struggling to turn a profit to a FAANG, and the difference in, well, everything is pretty vast.
First, your salary is absolutely ridiculous. I know hard working people who have built their own businesses with blood and sweat, and they still don't make as much as a slacker engineer at FAANG. So I'd say try not to take it for granted - you will find it difficult to even make a fraction of your comp if you leave FAANG.
Second, in my experience working with ex-FAANG - these engineers, while they all tend to be very smart, tend to be borderline junior engineers in the real world. They simply don't know how to build or operate something without the luxury of the mature tooling that exists at FAANG. You may be in for a reality shock when you leave the FAANG bubble. On the other hand it could be a great challenge if you're bored, and will broaden your engineering experience greatly.
If I was in your position, I'd look into FIRE and then you can just relax and do whatever you want without worrying about finances.