From a developers perspective youre right, most of us here probably wouldnt be able to keep up with the amount of work it takes to thrive at apple, sure. Im looking at it from a future employers view, who sees "Apple", has an iPhone, and immediately has an idea in his head about what kind of developer you are, even if its completely inaccurate- Its all marketing. But also, immediately assuming youre not gonna make it at Apple because of what you heard about their work culture alone sounds like a quitter mindset. I mean at least try. If its not right, good riddance. Its not like having been there is gonna cost anything besides the time you invested.

Apple recruiters have the professionalism and organizational skills of a shady manual labor staffing firm. 5 1-hour rounds, low-balled, and treated with what felt like an ad-hoc process. Wasn't impressed with the people, nor the caliber of engineering talent.

The same is true of Microsoft (Azure specifically), Google, and Amazon.

Only two "traditional" big tech companies of any note for having sharp people and all-around good vibes are Meta and Netflix. Otherwise, I'd rather go with a unicorn like Snowflake or Databricks, which feels more what software engineering was like in the aughts: exploratory, pioneering, actually building things that people haven't before, rather than gluing stuff together or being drowned in the machinations of some incompetent director.

I wouldn't make it at Apple, because I would get pissed off and quit. There's more to life than money. I don't want to work with people that see "FAANG" (or use "staffed by ex-FAANG" in their recruiting pitch) and think it's a good signal to be presenting.

Putting in a stint at any of these lower end tech companies would cost me intangibles that I'm not willing to give up at this stage of my life. Namely, my sanity, spiritual well-being, and fulfillment with life.

Good vibes at Meta? That place absolutely oozes phoney hyper-idealized cringey millennial youth culture. It feels like a cult.

I found Apple recruiters very clear and fair.

Haven't noticed it. All of the E5+s I know are real. Might just be luck and selective filtering on my end to not get involved with the... overgrown children.

Apple's recruiters were flaky on comms, rescheduled me a couple of times, and were disappointing for a company I had higher expectations for.

Meta? Out of the BigTech companies I would least want to work for are Meta and Amazon (again).

I can’t really trust anything else you say with the absoluteness which you claim Meta is better vibes than the rest.

Sure, your experience is probably true, but it’s anecdotal and the sweeping generalizations you’re making on limited datapoints makes things untrustworthy

Second, you’re assuming money is mutually exclusive from all else at those companies. You admit not being able to get in, which makes this the equivalent of “money can’t buy happiness” from someone who never had money to know first hand that they wouldn’t be happy

Your values are likely different than mine. You cannot trust what I've written, because it goes against your values. This is fair. I write what I write to express my values, and let those of a similar mettle and spiritual composition get more usable info to navigate their careers. A good example of this is Ludicity. He has values that aren't popular on HN, but that doesn't mean what he's written is untrustworthy or wrong or that his generalizations don't "click" for people who think like them.

Here's what I value: getting shit done, being surrounded by intelligent, hard-working, and perceptive people, not being treated like a peon and gaslit to work to the bone. With that in mind, Meta and Netflix are the only ones that satisfy those conditions. Microsoft is working on some very cool stuff, but those are all in their research orgs, while the rest are effectively the same people that would work at Intel: lifers. Not even coasters, but people who don't care that much at all about tech, and are putting in their hours and moving on with their lives. Nothing wrong with that if that's your value system, but it's not mine. Amazon is a neo-feudalist code mill, no different than Infosys. The people there are better than most devs out in the wild, but that's not a high bar. Google lost its touch when Sundar hopped in around 2015. It's not cool. And Apple I've already lambasted. Netflix's and Meta's engineering cultures are great; I like the people; and I like how none of the people I know there are stressed to the core. Though the problems they're working on aren't interesting to me.

I never admitted to not getting in, that's a conclusion you made yourself. I received offers from all of these companies at various points, but chose not to accept.

Snowflake? You mean the guys who spent 700 million to buy streamlit, a (worse than gradio) python front end.

They’re unicorns for being extremely stupid. I’ll give you that.

They're the only big company that are doing any practical development on database systems (MongoDB doesn't count; and Yandex, while fantastic, is removed from the count for being Russian, in these times).

Every company has their warts. Some warts don't matter to me.

Parent comment:

> Majority wouldn’t want to deal with bullshit at FAANG

Your comment:

> most of us here probably wouldnt be able to keep up with the amount of work it takes to thrive at apple, sure

You have some weird fetish with FAANG?

You have a very idealized view of BigTech. You don’t work any harder at BigTech than anywhere else. I’m not saying that the work is easy and there aren’t crunch times. But if you can deal with corporate BS - something you have to deal with at large companies that pay a lot less - and you have the skillset, you don’t work any harder there than you do at most other companies.

Well Amazon is a well known shit show (been there done that)

There are certainly non big tech jobs that pay well, give people tons of autonomy and have a great work environment, but do you really not understand why many people who write software would want to work at places where:

1. Their software gets used by millions of people 2. They are paid incredible amounts of money 3. They have wonderful working environments and perks 4. Are generally given more autonomy than non big tech companies?