> So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better... or else accept that you're being a freeloader and pretending to do more work than you really are.
It's definitely a choice here, but the point is the OP needs to actually make some active choices and decide what they're ok with.
>So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better.
You and the OP are essentially saying the same thing, except they are adding that an honest days wage deserves an honest days work
Employees are very rarely the exploiters and almost always the exploited.
Let’s not pretend that FAANG employees are like an underclass that has to accept a job out of desperation.
Amazon does not get the richest CEO in the world by truly compensating employees what they are worth to the company. Facebook literally tells employees that they target 90-95% of "market rate" for engineering salaries, based on location of the office they work in, and they refuse to negotiate with competing offers, resulting in massive compensation disparities between London and Seattle/Menlo Park.
I'm 35 and compensated far and above what I ever could have dreamed of making as a teenager, but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair". A pat on the back, an "exceeds" rating, and a 15% increase in my bonus for that half is peanuts by comparison.
Pay is not about the value you bring as much as it is about your leverage in negotiations. There’s many ways to get leverage like being the only person who can solve the problem, or systemic levers like unions.
If people aren’t getting paid adequately it’s usually because they don’t have the negotiation leverage to fix it. Conversely, we all probably know people who are of dubious value yet can command handsome salaries because they have some unique leverage.
This is a failure in reasoning about how pay works.
Pay (salaried jobs, not commission) for a role is related to the difficulty in hiring (replacing) and retaining an employee for that role. A role's impact in terms of dollars changes over time. The safety in this is that if you don't happen to save $10mm this year, you still probably have a job. And your company can have roles like R&D (where many projects don't generate money at all), internal tools, etc.
> when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work
I would hazard a guess that this work wasn't 100% yours. Ops, oncall, infosec, accounting, etc etc all participate. This is Obama's "you didn't build that alone" argument.
The question isn't how much did you save, the question is could your employer hire someone else to drive the same outcome for less (or more).
He wasn't asking for your sympathy, he was trying to contribute to a discussion and not every discussions needs to be immediately relevant to all seven billion people to be constructive.
Depends on your baseline.
If you use other workers in the US, then you are correct.
If you use a counterfactual in which employees meaningfully participate in corporate governance, then you are incorrect.
Can you elaborate on this point? Do you mean that FAANG employees do or do not have a seat at the table?
I seriously can't believe Delaware allows Facebook's voting structure. Corporate law has evolved in a really strange direction over the past few decades.
My point about being a tech "underclass" was more about avoiding conflating FAANG employees with those who have little opportunity or options. FAANG employees generally have more portable skills than, say, an uneducated immigrant employee and I don't know that I agree they could both be "exploited" in the same way. While it may be rooted in valid points, it's a bit cringey to use the same language to describe both.
Are you saying companies should have no profits in order to be fair? Profitability doesn't really reflect ethical pay, just look at Amazon, they had no profits for years.
For someone young, corporations are waste of life. See the world, get expiriences and when you are over 40 and you are sick of adventures take your enourmous CV and join the corp to wait for a pension. You will like the peacefull pace and they will love not having problems with you.
Suggestion over the thumb, before employing in large company, check two things. Number of manager levels from team manager to CEO and how fast they got additional levels of management. This will tell you all about the company you are joining.
One thing I wish I learned earlier in life is that your career is your responsibility, not your manager's, not your company's. I spent way to many of my early years asking "What tickets should I work on now, boss?" and too few asking myself "Where do I want to take my career long term, and what steps do I take now, next year, and next 5 years, to get there?"
As developers, we want our managers to trust us. We don't want managers to micro- us and question our time estimates. If I say doing some task will take X weeks, I don't want management to say "do it faster". The manager doesn't know the technical details and complications like the developer does.
Here, OP is explicitly abusing that trust, taking most of the week off but pretending to be working. He/she is meeting expectations by misrepresenting the complexity and difficulty of the work.
Just opinion so feel free to downvote to oblivion.
It's hard for me personally to rationalize their position as a 'crap job' (as I have had really crappy jobs in my life - see US Army). Maybe op's take is a little brash, however, there's some perspective to be drawn from the comment. Agree with your sentiment though.. If you don't like it do something about it.
This is what a lot of people forget - your experience isn't everyone's experience, and your perspective is just that - your perspective.
Just because OP has a job that you would consider a dream, his opinion isn't invalid.
For an example: I went to college to escape a farming life. Now all of my young, relatively wealthy friends tell me how lucky I was to grow up on a farm and live a simple life. They talk about how they want that simple life. And they're confused when I respond with something to the effect of: bitches, farming isn't simple. It's hard work for really, really, really low margins. There's a reason I went to college, and that was to get away from that mess.
Very MOS dependent and POGs tend to have a good time in the military
IT really is the top of the food chain, if you can handle stress, for employee type positions.
Try some farming, concrete work or other manual labor if you want to experience shit jobs
That’s very true, but there’s also the reality check that the job market has a lot of uncertainty right now. We tech people tend to have pretty good career mobility, but if the market contracts badly enough, it really may come down to taking whatever job you can get. Which as much as it sucks it’s what a lot of people have to do to put food on the table. The OP seems to be lacking motivation. Maybe the prospect of being jobless and without health insurance can be its own motivation ;).
I do agree with your point though, which I think is don’t just take what’s being given to you, do something about it. I think that’s also a version of what the parent comment was getting at (you don’t have to do little work just because management sets the bar low). And like someone else said on this thread, taking action may be extra important now. These low-output teams and employees are at a higher risk if the company decides to trim the fat.
1. Exploitation and immiseration are real and severe at home and abroad.
2. This guy is luckier than most since he's not in one of the most hyper-exploited groups.
3. Therefore: he should check his privilege and work hard to make the FAANG corporation earn more money.
Connect the dots for me.
Because the GOOG or M$ is hiring former waiters right out of a sketchy code bootcamp? Good fuckin luck. You don't need to go to MIT to get in, but you certainty need some sort of legitimate qualifications.
OP is working at a FAANG+M type of place, which are universally well-known and offer base salaries that are are known to be some of the highest in the industry / country / world.
Literally thousands and thousands of other people are applying to those jobs online, and I'd bet several hundred of those could probably do the job adequately enough.
For a non-manager in a large organization, the choices are pretty much accept your work environment or leave it. Fighting the entire company's culture as a low level employee is like trying to move a mountain by pushing harder.
To OP: Accept the pace your department moves at, and look for little victories. Your never gonna get to write a new app in a week and be a hero in your current company/department, but there is still some satisfaction to be found in ironing out little wrinkles one at a time.
If/when you leave, look for a job you want to go to, rather than just looking for a way out of your current job.
We're inundated with stories of how Person X changed the world with their software, or Person Y who solved this amazing issue, or Company Z is doing this cool thing- with out realizing that we're only seeing the people who broke through the mundane. Working at a FANNG means you might get a chance at being in the room where they're picking people for a new team that might do something cool.
Where I work, we have this amazing internal database system we're going to open source. It's amazing tech, but for the 10 developers who made it, we have 1000 doing grunt work solving problems like "We need to get Apple Sign In working, but to do that we need to add X to Service A, Y to Service B, and refactor how we store accounts to make it work." It's not exciting.
Essentially my job right now. Learning a lot, but man is it frustrating.
Do they?
Not saying you're wrong, I'm really asking. It's not my perception that FAANG software devs have high satisfaction--more often the impression I have from talking to FAANG devs is that they feel trapped in golden handcuffs. But I'm open to the possibility that someone has better evidence than me.
I can see how self-directed-ness might give people a sense of agency. And I can also see how being able to seek out novelty could keep you from getting bored. But I don't think that agency and interest are enough to equate to satisfaction for me. For example, I think it would be difficult for me to find satisfaction at Facebook, Amazon, or Google, because the vast majority of the effect I see these companies having is harmful--I'd be waking up and going to a job where I believed I was making the world worse. No amount of agency or novelty would fix that.
Obviously everyone is different, so maybe FAANG employees are able to find satisfaction in ways that I can't. I don't know--I'm genuinely curious if there's any actual data.
We all find satisfaction in different ways though. Some get it from the products they work on, even if their individual work isn't exciting. Some get it from the actual challenges they're solving and code they're writing. Some get it from the flexibility and engineering-driven work environment and the opportunity to choose which problems they tackle each half. Some get it from the freedom to work 9-5 and have a strong separation of work and home life (barring periodic oncall or the current bizarro pandemic world). Some simply get satisfaction from knowing that the benefits and compensation they receive are helping to protect themselves, their family, and their loved ones, and ensure they have a comfortable life outside of their job.
Many find satisfaction in FAANG roles simply because they have access to one or more or all of those at the same time.
I worked at a company where we were collecting safety compliance data on workers. The data was partially medical in nature, so we were legally bound by HIPAA, meaning we could not share the data with their employers. Some of the data we collected was self-reported, while some of the data was measured objectively via sensors.
Consistently, the self-reported data showed the workers were in compliance with safety standards. Consistently, the sensor data showed them to not be in compliance.
We changed the messaging around the self-reporting, to make it clear that a) we would not share self-reported data with their employers, and b) we were bound by HIPAA, and therefore could not share self-reported data with their employers. The number of workers self-reporting non-compliance increased significantly (more than doubled) but remained lower than 30%, while the sensor data continued to show compliance in single-digit percentages. The only thing we had achieved was objective proof that the self-reported data was unreliable.
The purpose of the self-reported data was to identify faulty sensors, and it was clear we weren't achieving that goal, so we eventually dropped the self-reported data from collection entirely.
Ultimately, there's no personal benefit to expressing discontent in an internal survey. Doing so takes the risk that the data will be used against you.
I do agree, there are some reasons to believe that people DO find satisfaction at FAANG job. It's just that there are reasons to believe the opposite as well, and I don't feel like I can draw a conclusion as confidently as the poster upthread who said, "They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job". The only thing I'm convinced of at this point is, "I don't know."
We just love to solve puzzles, coincidentally this is also well paid.
There are a large number of programmers in this world, there's room for there to both be tons of people who love their jobs and tons of people who hate them.
You should ask yourself, though: why are you arguing so hard against other people, who you don't know, enjoying their jobs? Why is it so important to you that this myth of happiness be debunked?
the power software engineers wield is almost unfair, compared to non-software laborers - there's unlimited ways in which to get paid fairly well, ridiculously easy lifestyle, and also work on tech that aligns with doing good in the world, generally speaking. one can't have it all at the same time... but with software, you can probably have one of the largest spreads of [mission, comfortable income, low stress, {fill in with your requirement}] out of lots of other jobs.
Large companies always have politics getting in the way of engineering decisions, resulting in annoyed engineers who can't do satisfying work.
Small organisations have less politics, more creative freedom (usually) and you can have a larger impact on the organisation.
However, they usually pay less, too. If your main priority is money then you might have to suck up the misery.
Trying to work at something you enjoy has always been the path to not enjoying that which you used to, for me anyway.
You're meeting expectations, which is great, but don't stop there. You recognize that you (and your teammates) could be doing more, so make it happen. You're entirely capable and empowered to do so:
- Fix that technical debt. - Identify better tooling and demonstrate it's value to your teammates. - Proactively find things your software could do better and write about them. Don't be discouraged if people don't bite on the first few, you'll find one eventually that's too good to not pursue.
Sure, you could accept the status quo and coast like some of your teammates, but you'll be unhappy (and bored). Do what makes you happy -- identify, evangelize, prototype and build.
All of this doesn't mean you're lazy for having posted this -- just that you need encouragement to make the things happen that'll make you happier and more fulfilled at the end of the day.
Anything that introduces new technology or has the potential to require some time from other teams (Devops, SRE) I can see running into organizational roadblocks in the final stages of the project, even if the individual is free to start the experimentation and justification steps them on their own.
It's easy to be discouraged and, in the event this occurs, stop trying. That said I think this is the wrong thing to do. Instead I view this type of scenario as a chance to convince my teammate of the value I'm adding and the rationale behind the change being made without being explicitly planned. It's hard work, and sometimes involves some long, strained conversations with your team mates. That said at the end of the day you just might encourage that individual to proactively solve these types of problems. This will probably make that person happier as well, and unlock additional productivity for your team.
The hardest part of software is the people part :)
Code is code, and can be changed. There's this weird inhibition in our industry to just trying things.
Senior or not, there's no harm in opening a PR. If there's a clear reason for not applying a change it's just a learning exercise. The PR can be closed without any negative impact.
Who knows, maybe discussing the PR will be teach the senior contributor something. I can't tell you how many times I've realized a prior constraint is no longer valid via a discussion o'er a PR. I end up informed, the new contributor ends up empowered and the code base lands in a better state -- win, win and win!
IMO these types of changes and the resulting discussions are healthy and absolutely crucial to the longevity of a successful piece of software.
As a newbie at a FANG its going to take at least 9 months to a year to get that familiar with such a large code base.
And most of being a developer is not KLOC's or its modern eqvielent Fuature Points
Totally deranged protestant work ethic run amok to think otherwise.
It's also extremely not this guy's fault other people have to work exploitative shit jobs during a pandemic, and his working harder (for FAANG!) isn't the thing that will fix it.
By this reasoning...
Manager: Our users are asking for this feature, how long will it take us to ship it?
Developer: I can do it in six weeks.
Manager: Ok, I'll let them know.
(Six weeks later)
Manager: I just found out that this was actually super simple for you and only took a few days. What were you actually doing the last month? Our users were waiting this whole time.
Developer: You said you were OK with six weeks! Your protestant work ethic is deranged!
;-)
Do you know how demoralizing it is to work in an organization where the people trying to lead have no power to effect change, and the leaders are incompetent and force bad decisions on a constant basis? Where there is no real vision for the company?
The OP is describing being trapped in a tar pit, and you're saying "run faster".
The simplest thing to do would be to sign up for more tasks (his calendar is open, after all) and/or tell his manager he wants more challenging work.
That's just the way it is, John.
"Hey, I'd like to change the change review process to streamline it from a catch-all form, to one more appropriate to our workflow"
Sorry John, QA will never sign off.
"Hey, why are we wasting 30% of our team on Project Z? It's a total duplication of work for Project Y, and brings no value to the company - it's the pet of that VP of finance, because he ate dinner with an Azure rep three months ago."
Man, I hear ya, John. What a stupid project. But that VP has the ear of the Board.
"Hey, I'd like to work my way into a design role, to help craft more common-sense engineering and be at the table when we talk about backlog priorities"
Let's put that in your development plan for 2022. We need to knock out Project X.
---
Working at large companies can be soul sucking. There is a comic called "Dilbert" that touches on it.
At the end of the day you have to accept that, yes, you are a cog in a machine. You have to morally reckon with the fact that the company is making millions or billions of dollars and sometimes you're not giving 100% of your mental effort because there's a lot of bureaucratic crap in the way. That's how it is. You either accept that and make peace or leave and go to a small company and try to make an impact that way (with way less pay).
Being super efficient at your job is not a "moral goal" when working at a big company. It's too big and complicated to draw clear lines about what is right and what is wrong when doing your work there. Even if you become more efficient at your job and make better product, often the thing holding back your product is something else entirely. You could improve the product by 1% by working harder but maybe your marketing department sucks or your senior leadership doesn't know what they're doing. The people in those positions could make different decisions and make your product 5x better, so it doesn't even matter.
Work long enough at a big company and you realize even if you do a bang up job, it won't make a huge difference in most cases. (Sometimes the product you're working on gets cancelled or fails in the market, so what was the point of stressing anyway??)
>That's just the way it is, John.
Maybe you didn't communicate the value of moving faster that speaks to your boss's incentives.
>Sorry John, QA will never sign off.
Maybe you didn't show QA how the improved workflow actually improves the quality of the work
>Man, I hear ya, John. What a stupid project. But that VP has the ear of the Board.
Maybe you can find a way for that VP to get credit for that 30% reduction in waste
>Let's put that in your development plan for 2022. We need to knock out Project X.
Maybe you can take a lead in project X so you can build the trust needed to be given a role in design with more responsibility
I know these can come off as glib, but the point is that sitting on the sidelines talking about how things can't get done only ensures things won't get done.
I do personally feel an obligation to keep trying because if I didn't I'm not doing my job. Throwing up my hands in exasperation means I'm collecting a pay check just to keep the status quo. That makes me part of the problem as well as resigning myself to be miserable. I think we owe it to ourselves and the organization to move on if we get to that point.
Most roles have nothing to do with leading transformational change. You can concede that much?
I think often we get into organizations overestimating the impact we’ll have. It seems our impact can be inversely proportional to the size of the company. But that may be an artifact of how we define “meaningful change”
It's like politics, but at least political change and civil rights are worth some mental exhaustion.
He is being compensated (I infer) very well for a safe and comfortable job, except he doesn't like the tooling and he's realized that people trust him and he doesn't need to be honest to collect his paycheck.
Hours put in is completely pointless and an old win by unions to prevent companies from further exploitation of workers. If you can do 6x the work of the other devs on your team you have literally no obligation to work any harder.
The company does not have your interests at heart.
I don’t see how being honest makes this world a better place.
But I don't get this moralizing about cheating the company.
If you're feeling unmotivated and force yourself to work harder on something that doesn't motivate you to fulfill some kind of a moral standard, that might end up being a fast track to burnout. (Depending on the exact circumstances, your personality etc. of course, but burnout doesn't only happen because of too much work but also because of bad matches between people and their jobs.)
The key is to see if there's some way OP can find the motivation, and then work harder on getting more things done because they have the motivation to. Or to find some other kind of a solution to the unsatisfying situation.
I don't really get the moralizing about other people having to work in objectively worse conditions either. It's not like OP's (or anybody else's) mental well-being and satisfaction with something that doesn't appear to suit their personality should magically become better because someone else has bigger trouble.
Why the hell wouldn't it be?
Not at all. Simply please stop complaining about how easy and well compensated your job is.
FAANGS employees are salaried, and not paid by hour, because you are compensated for ROI. If it takes you one hour and you bring in lots of value, that's still a good deal. On the flip side, you could also work 60 hours week if that's what it took you to meet and exceed on the value expectations.
Still agree with much of your comment though. Since they're complaining about the situation, something does feel off.
They said exactly that though. They work one day a week and otherwise just log on for standup and when messaged.
I just wanted to explain that with software, a small effort can deliver huge returns. So the idiom of: "Don't work hard, work smart" is in full effect. If you can deliver on the expected business value with less effort on your part it is still a win/win scenario. A business who'd replace you for someone who fills up all 40 hours would not necessarily gain anything, in fact, might lose on ROI. Hours put into software does not translate directly into the output delivered.
And, there's only so much creative juice per week you can deliver on, so that cleverness of solutions you can come up with, and those good ideas you have which don't take very long to implement, but deliver big returns, you can't necessarily just be asked to come up with them twice as often by working more hours either. In fact, sometimes those come by taking a break, a step back, getting more rest, etc.
And maybe since we're on the topic, I've had a fare share of jobs prior, server, construction, military, and yet nothing drains me more than software engineering at the end of the day, even if it was only a 6 hour day. There's something about just thinking all day and discussing heavily all day that is super draining mentally. Where other jobs I've had that were more physically demanding tired me, but in a good way, that almost energized me in my off time. The mental work is hard.
That “million people would kill for a chance” to be at a FAANG is not the employee’s problem anymore. The moment the company extended the job offer already created “a million” job applicants who didn’t get an offer. Behaving in a way that suggests continually begging “to stay in” just to get to create the net gains for other people, the investors and top management, deserves a therapy session on personal self-worth, which is a personal problem not a business matter.
Now, as for the matter of personally going above and beyond, that’s actually a separate matter - no need for emotional entanglement of the the business reality and personal reality. If the employee wishes, as they’ve expressed, to go above what is satisfying the business (given they’ve reported no management has complained) then by all means, find more work with outside teams within the company, tactfully speak to the manager about the concern, or just leave and start a new job or venture.
The moral guilt argument over the transactional relationship between an employee and the business, though, is at best naive, and at worse unevenly extracting more energy from the employee than the business. If the company has continued to pay the employee without complain, that’s their own moral dilemma for allowing it.
I'm always impressed at how much American culture promotes labor vs. labor infighting instead of recognizing that the issue is not the 1%. It's the top 0.1% (and 0.01%) that's causing this problem.
https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/never...
Lets say he decides to start being more diligent and taking the initiative to do as much work as is possible. His company is the only entity that benefits from this arrangement, and the benefit is marginal at best. Ultimately, this literally provides the resources for the company to pay the salaries of more useless workers and perpetuates the issue this post is trying to address.
Every worker's duty is purely to themselves, not some sort of bizarre worship of their employer.
Your duty to yourself under capitalism is to extract as much capital and benefit as possible from the market in exchange for your labor. If you can commit a line of code a week and still get paid your salary, you're working EXTREMELY efficiently. Even better if you manage to get a job where they're failing to get any labor from you at all.
Conversely every employer is focused on extracting as much production as possible from their employees. Efficient companies will cut off under-producing workers without a second thought and will continuously strive to minimize the cost of any employee.
You feel the bar is being set very low. The hard part of your job is working within the established environment (the technical debt?). You're choosing to put the effort in 1 day a week because you're comparing your contributions to your coworkers.
If you're unhappy in this dev environment that's one thing, and if you're unhappy with your contributions that's another.
I would try setting expectations for yourself if it's easy to impress the company. You could be a huge asset even assisting your team. It's concerning that you aren't aware of why their progress is slower and that no one has spotted your complacency. Perhaps you have something to offer as a mentor and maybe that will give your work more meaning/value (something to consider).
As the guy above me said, a lot of people are facing crisis right now. I honestly don't blame you for having an easier time of it if most of the week you're just collecting money.
PS: I learn best by teaching others. I think you should get more involved with your team to help them :-)
PPS: I have grown SO MUCH as a developer by forcing myself to "do as the Roman's do". Watch your mental health. If you feel like you're losing your identity you should walk, but otherwise try immersing yourself in understanding your companys' stack and design decisions. Make your contributions indistinguishable from all that code that together makes something amazing. It's bad to measure progress by SLOC. You can always switch to Sprite if you don't like the Koolaid.
PPPS: You may be able to be honest with your supervisor and ask for time at work to work on passion projects. They care about your meaningful contributions and would likely do whatever you need to keep those rolling in. A FAANG company would accomodate this.
If you do good work, they'll fear managers might notice, and it'll make them look bad. So they won't be happy with that. They'll sabotage you, bully you, not proactively tell you things you don't know you don't know, etc.
Before you start that fight, make sure you want to fight that fight, and that if it happens you stand a good chance of winning.
Otherwise you'll just put in more effort than now, and the result will be that more people than now will hate you, and eventually you'll get fired because your work will suck because your colleagues have deliberately withheld information.
This sort of tough-love feedback to really useful to someone looking for meaning in their work. The reality is, sometimes you have to make your own meaning. If what you're being handed at work is boring and easy, it can be self-love to start asking around for more interesting stuff to do.
Young people in particular can have a hard transition coming out of school, where the structure and goals are handed to you, into the "real world", where a lot of the rewards flow to people who have the ability and willingness to create structures and goals for themselves and others.
To complicate things a bit though, this looks like systematic failure in some parts of the organization. Doing your bit to try to fix that failure seems like a good cause.
Situation: "I only have to work one day a week to keep up, and so I only work that one day and slack off the rest of the time".
Possible causes:
1. Depression / Mental health issues
Seek help. I know: depressed; so hard to do.
2. Doesn't actually enjoy programming.
Wait till the pandemic is over and get a different job or start a company doing something you enjoy.
3. Enjoy programming, Team sucks.
FAANGs are huge companies with thousands of teams. Find a different team.
I was an extremely motivated worker in scenarios 1 and 2. I had a lot of "momentum" and worked extremely hard. Burnout was a consideration not just because of long hours, but because I liked working so much that it was easy to overwork over the course of a couple months. In scenario 3 it is a constant struggle to remain motivated and I constantly feel as though all of my momentum is lost.
Here are some differences I noticed: Scenarios 1 and 2: a. Extremely aggressive goals and deadlines. Deadlines constantly missed, but our velocity was impressive. Goals were very short term - few goals were more than 1 business quarter in the future. This changed once we were acquired because the acquiring company demanded longer term deadlines.
b. Scrappiness and the pride in your work and yourself that accompanies scrappiness
c. Iteration speed prioritized highly. Build and deploy times to a staging environment often less than 3 minutes.
d. I wore many hats. DBA, sysadmin, full stack software engineer, product guy, security person, devops. Worked in many domains - search, distributed systems, building in the Cloud, etc.
e. Hard work and ownership are seen and rewarded.
---- Scenario 3: a. Smaller goals. Every goal was designed to be hit, since missing goals is anathema in my FAANG company.
b. No scrappiness whatsoever. Just meet the deadlines.
c. Iteration speed barely prioritized. Since your tasks have been mapped out months ahead of time, what need do you have to iterate quickly? Just build to the spec. Build times were extremely long. Deploy times were often 12 hours (you think it wouldn't take that long to deploy something, but when your company has strict rules about only deploying to 1 region at a time and taking 30 minutes to monitor metrics in each region before moving to the next, it adds up). Many of the best tools or tricks I used to iterate quickly in scenarios 1 and 2 don't work due to security measures, or more likely, due to the FAANG company leveraging their own tools rather than open source ones I used in scenario #1 and #2.
d. I wear 1 or 2 hats.
e. Hard work and ownership aren't really seen unless you're in the right project.
I can't tell you how many times I've told my manager I feel like I haven't done a lot of work recently, or feel like I could be doing more. I'm always assured that I'm doing very well in his eyes and meeting all my deadlines. From my perspective I've done a disgustingly tiny amount of work since I started.
Anyway, I wrote all of this out to try and illustrate that it is really hard to work hard in a scenario where you are actively discouraged from working harder. I didn't really do a good job of doing that, but I hope I've kind of hinted at the problem. Most of your teammates at FAANG companies have worked at FAANG or other large companies their entire careers and have no idea how slow the entire freight train is moving. They have no idea that in other companies the role of being a software engineer is much more dynamic than their experience has been.
There are a lot of compounding issues other than just unimaginative deadlines that I don't have time to touch on. Legacy systems, defined promotion processes that make it so that you know ahead of time which projects actually stand a chance of promoting you, a strong hierarchy, entrenched politics, etc etc.
I just want to say that I have been in scenario 3 for a year and it has taken about that long to build my momentum up again to where it was in scenario #1 and #2. It is really, really hard to keep your motivation to work harder when almost every part of the job is incentivizing you to just sit down and meet your pathetic deadlines.. Trying to motivate someone by shaming them is never going to work here.
Now there may be laws or authoritarian morals around how I should lick the boots of my boss and give away more hours or outperform the KPIs, but basic capitalism says that's just a thing for suckers.
The complainer says "It's not my fault!" The tough-lover responds, "Yes, it's not your fault. But it's still your problem."
@faang0722, you're being a slacker, and not doing right by either your company or yourself.
You're at one of the top companies in the world, and are safe from the jobs disaster that's gripping the entire country. Millions of people are desperate to receive $600-1600 from the government this month because they are unable to work. Millions are putting on shitty facemasks and still showing up to work at grocery stores and warehouses and wherever, risking disease because they have no other choice. Meanwhile you can't be bothered to work at home on your laptop more than one day a week, because the build system and tech debt makes you sad?
You say the company is evidently pleased with your work and that may be true, but now you're part of the problem. You think the company tolerates shitty work, so you've decided to tolerate shitty work. Don't.
Since you don't think what you're doing is ethically wrong, have you told your manager that the work assigned to you is so simple that you only actually work one day a week? Of course not.
So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better... or else accept that you're being a freeloader and pretending to do more work than you really are.