NGL, I'd jump through hoops for 250k + other compensation

Part of why this has stuck around for so long is that so many people are willing to do that because it's a life-altering amount of money

Plus the prestige of being able to walk into your next job and captain the ship. I've been at a few places that hired former Googlers, and they were all treated like gods.

Yeah, the ex-Googler's I've met have always been average; but I guess if no one will say the emperor has no clothes it doesn't matter

It used to mean something more than it does now. I noticed ex-Googlers were well above average in 2012, now they can be below avg. I have a colleague of mine at my current job that makes a point of being an ex-Googler but they only worked there for 6 months, so it is kind of meaningless.

It's always been a distribution. Some are amazing, some are normal, others are less than normal. They're all really good at the handful of things Google screens for, but otherwise it's just like any other distribution of developers.

As a hiring manager I view Google on someone's resume as a non-signal. If however they are the sort of person who draws attention to having worked at Google I view that as a negative signal.

Global average or people-who-work-at-FAANG average?

The frame of reference here is important, otherwise average is pretty meaningless since we have no objective list of what an average developer consists of.

Is that really true? I've interviewed ex-FAANG employees at some jobs and there was never any pressure to hire them, and I didn't feel like any one of them would be treated as a god if hired. They were pretty universally above average though.

They were also not "walking in to captain" anything. They were applying for standard engineering jobs. Think of an average individual-contributor software engineer from, say, Facebook. Is a smaller company really going to hire them as Director Of Engineering (a totally different job than software engineering), just because of the company name on the resume? That sounds absurd.

The amount of osmosis learning of how things should be that comes from working somewhere that things were that way is hard to explain. The density of good ideas you get exposed to has a huge effect, even if you aren't in leadership. It also doesn't necessarily come across in interviews, it's reflexes you might not realize you have.

I was very skeptical about this, then I worked for one. Now I get it.

I'm not in a leading role but I did "impactful" things like introduce CI to a company. I'm not sure that it matters what position you have, because if you are the first one doing something you actually get to do a lot of decision making.

This is such a glorified and Heroes statement which just tells that some faang guys has such a skewed view of the world because of faang.

All I see is that faang is a term for expert code monkey.

And really only an expert in the things that FAANG companies do. Granted for a place like Amazon that's potentially a very broad space, but it's still a small slice of skills compared to the world where software is ubiquitous. Among other things, zero preparation for safety-critical software. An attitude like "move fast and break things" would end up being "move fast and kill people", and that's kind of a drag on your career. (Insert long discussion about trolly problem and how self-driving car researchers are justifying their crappy algorithms)

Not my thing personally (at least not today). I could buy a lot more toys and BS and retire earlier if I took one of those jobs, but my already generous (not by FAANG standards) programmer salary is enough and it comes along with a sane schedule and reasonable work expectations. The value in this is I get more time outside of work to enjoy my life, which is worth more than an extra pile of lucre when I already get by pretty comfortably.

I don't know where this misguided implication comes from that FAANG doesn't have a sane schedule or reasonable work expectations. The people that work a lot do so because they're some of the most passionate in the industry and enjoy working a lot as a result. On average, I would speculate FAANG is less stressful and more reasonable than other companies. The reason you may think that is not the case is that negative stories stick to the same "brand" (i.e. "FAANG") that employees hundreds of thousands of people whereas a story about a random mom'n'pop shop doesn't register on your radar because there are many of them.

I would describe FAANG (in my and many friends' experiences) as "adult daycare." Not in a bad way, mind you, but very much "get your homework done and go have your free time after." (This excludes higher management and architects, etc., of course. I mean this as a middle-of-the-road SWE on a decent team.)

I'm not quite sure where the GP got stressful, but it is soul-sucking if you expect your work to be interesting, impactful, and creative, which doesn't really happen apart from a few core or research teams. There is a ton of piping and rewriting of frameworks going on all the time, even when it need not be extremely useful. This is the main reason I found it thoroughly drab—even though it is likely that the lines of code I wrote there are likely to touch many orders of magnitude more people than anything else I ever work on for the rest of my life.

I guess that's just how it goes, though.

I fully agree. It is soul-sucking at times, but nowhere near as soul-sucking as the life I came from and I will never stop being grateful for that. If I want more excitement from working, I can always pick up the exact work of my personal interest on the side (but I don't, because there are so many other interesting things to do outside of software). I'd rather have great security and quality of life from the work that puts a roof over my head.

Absolutely! There's a kind of beautiful freedom about it, too.

A number of people (myself included) seek to align work and passion all in one, which is fine, except it's certainly not the only (or, indeed, even close to "best") way to live and work. I've been lucky because my passion is in a field that now actually has applications in both theory and practice, after 50-or-so years of lying in relative academic obscurity.

The point is: if you care primarily about things that aren't your work (and this is true for literally 99.9% of people in the world, and is probably much healthier than the alternative) then FAANG is phenomenal in every possible way. The perks, compensation, and freedom to do pretty much anything are incredible. Quant (which nets around the same, if not slightly more profit) certainly does not fall in this category, due to its insane hours, and most other jobs with sane hours and good work-life balance don't pay nearly (read: really even close to) as much, or aren't as secure, or have anywhere close to the perks. It really is about the best gig you can get, if you can swing it.

On the other hand, for the weird, obsessive .1% of people (e.g., me) who would be happy to work all day in their mother's basement so long as it's interesting work, then FAANG (or, at least, many teams within it) can feel almost beside the point. Which is also fine!

I guess the point is that it all depends on what you want out of work and out of, well, not-work!

This comment chain is well said. There are more likely to be various random events that screw you over or suddenly put extra pressure on you at smaller companies, not to mention the lack of perks and compensation. Recently an analogy that I've come up with is index fund investing: Sure one can attempt all sorts of creative investment combinations/maneuvers, and sometimes they do make it big, but in the end, the most reliable and care-free way to grow your wealth is simply to follow the mainstream advice and go for the index funds, even though they "sound" boring af. They are recommended by the mainstream for a reason just like how people flock to big tech companies for a reason (at least this still applies in our current day and age). I've had some alternative ideas about my career with various excuses (e.g. I'd only work with a functional language), but increasingly I realize that I should probably just quit all the tossing around and go for such a path instead. It's similar with my investments: Had I not performed various stupid active trades here and there and just put my money into the index funds, or even just parked my money in cryptocurrency and held on to them, I would have got amazing, carefree returns.

Feels to me there are a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions about FAANG floating around in this thread, which I guess is not exactly surprising given the type of post this is (criticism of the "broken" interview process). It almost feels like some people find excuses to not even try, or have some sort of sour grape mentality/avert their eyes from the issue, if they feel themselves unlikely to pass the interview, even though they haven't spent the time required to master the algorithms questions at all. (Of course, there might also be people who simply find it quite hard to find such time, as mentioned in the article, which is understandable.)

My understanding is that those companies themselves also freely acknowledge that interviewing is hard. Due to the sheer volume of applicants, fast algorithms questions is the most reasonable compromise they can find at the moment. If you were in the position of the interviewer, it would also be hard for you to come up with an alternative that works for all sides involved. So instead of complaining about this reality, one needs to face up to the challenge.

It is actually a paradox: You seem to be unfree and doing something pointless when you were grinding interview questions. But after you've made it, it would suddenly be very easy for you to have a lot of freedom and security in your life with all the capital you have accumulated. In a sense it's like how college entrance exams work. It's unfortunate but again, if no better practical solution could be found at the moment, one just has to face the reality and do it. It could even be fun. Talking about "ideals" wouldn't get you anywhere in the real world.

Regarding work-life balance, perks and life quality, just as the comments who replied to you pointed out, working for big tech is most likely one of the best options you can have out there, compared to many smaller-scale companies.

The one valid thing I think you may get by not working for FAANG is complete freedom in shaping what you're working on. However this is hard anywhere unless you're the founder/executive of the company yourself. If that's what you're after and you have the safety to pursue it, sure. However, in terms of working as a common employee, there are very few possible reasons why a place could be better than big tech.

Well, there are also counter-examples to your thinking. Brian Acton was rejected by Facebook, then went on founding WhatsApp and eventually selling it to the same Facebook for $19B. "Life altering amount of money", wouldn't you agree? Probably one of the most expensive rejections in history.

That's an extremely, extremely, extremely, unlikely edge case though. You're more likely to get simultaneous offers from all the letters in FAANG while also simultaneously becoming a 1MM+ subscriber Youtube star than you are of repeating Brian's story (or even a fraction of it).

well there is the story of when Google acquired youtube at the all-hands meeting the CTO addressed the engineering department and asked them how many of them had been rejected by google, and half of the people there shot their hands up. Probably they had a better windfall, and "Google could have saved more than a few billion"

On a similar vein, I recall a story that said most Googlers thought they probably wouldn't pass the technical interview if they had to go through it again. Does match with what my friends who made it into FAANG say as well - none of them are confident they'd be able to do it again with any certainty.

There's a story, mentioned many times here on HN, where Google (I think) hiring team were given their own anonymized CVs and they rejected all of them. It's a perfect example to describe the staggering level of hypocrisy at those companies.

Source please? I would love to read more about this. Couldn't find anything on Google.

Private communication, sorry. Source considered 95% reliable.

I think a major take away here is the interviewers weed out ppl who don't know complex algorithms off the top of their head but you don't really need that to make a successful app anyhow.

Yes, but he would have to work on something else. It’s not like he would have built WhatsApp at FB.

Greed is basically all of humanities problems, isn't it.

Or, with the crazy amount of applicants they get, it’s very hard to come up with an alternative process e.g. pair programming for a day like what some small companies can afford to. They have to be able to do interviews efficiently.

Interview is hard. A while ago there was a post by Jane Street that explicitly emphasized this point. They also require algorithms questions even though programmers there write a lot of OCaml. I guess if you were in the position of the interviewer it would also be hard for you to come up with alternatives that are much better for all sides involved.