This is the golden piece for me. I too recently left a big corp to a smaller place, expecting to sacrifice WLB and my free time - yet I ended up feeling happier and spending less time consuming short-form online contents, to the point that I even have more free time now! It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.

For a while, I spent my days mostly doing tutorials, reading ebooks and papers, watching lectures, ...

Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible luxury to get a consistent salary and be able to do that! But the thing is, you can't help but feel utterly useless after a while. It's especially bad if everyone else has their projects, so you also don't really feel like part of a team.

So it's very understandable that if 1 of 3 is missing your psyche becomes strained.

I used to study this theory as part of my game design interests and found it extremely useful to analyse a lot of stuff from your own situation to a game or even customer experience. Just be aware of the word perceived here... allowing the theory to be used for dark patterns.

For what it’s worth, almost everyone I talked to before leaving had the same take as what you described—that I should do the safe thing and just keep working there because the pay was high and it was relatively easy. I thought I was going crazy, because it seemed so obvious to me that I needed to move on.

Sounds like you had plenty of chance to fulfil your needs for free time, and the ability to pursue your own curiosity and carry out intellectual inquiry. Which is definitely nice, and which most people lack the time and space to do (I imagine friends and family telling you that it sounds like a dream job, etc.).

But I think anyone who has been in that situation knows that after a while, it's kind of a nightmare :)

This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks? Does Meta not have those options?

The frustration feels almost artificial, if one does not want to get more work, then maybe just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games.

It's GOING to happen, best not to get too caught up in it.

Going into SIEM build #8 in my life....it's just another SIEM. I take my enjoyment in the people, the compensation is adequate, it's contributing to a retirement that's getting nearer and more comfortable all the time. I try not to get too hung up on the work product.

On the one hand, if the person is not given productive work to do and decides to just go for a jog then they must be racked by guilt for being a slacker, like GP.

But if our organisations are diverting people's productive energy into unproductive waste, they need not feel any guilt about it at all since it is absolutely self-evident that this is the best and most productive of all possible economic systems.

In the first case, you are maladjusted because you are performing self-punishment to appease feelings of guilt about failing to live up to your own ideals. Another way to think about it is that you are just experiencing the inability to reconcile your basic human need to be a productive member of your community with the reality that your community is dysfunctional and has no interest or ability to provide a healthy psychological environment for its members.

In the second case, you are well-adjusted because you recognise that the society is just a machine and you are using the machine to get whatever you can out of it. Okay, it's not providing for the health and wealth of the community and the emotional needs or psychological well-being of it's constituents is either a non-goal or a goal it fails to achieve. But it does pay money. And you definitely do need money because money can provide for your physical needs. And while it can help with your other needs, you've already traded off the majority of your time and energy so, at best, you can maybe balm some of the damage that's been done by having a huge part of your life voided out.

I sometimes wonder, if I were some alien species keeping humans as animals in a zoo, would I would want to view them in this condition, or would it be too disturbing to see animals being maintained in an environment that is so impoverished?

It isn't very self-evident from my perspective, could you please explain how?

When they ask you in three years about how you have spent the time. If you convert XML requests to JSON messages for a living and not even with Spark.

This happened to me a few years ago. I got assigned to work on a small greenfield project solo. I had virtually full creative control, and it would solve a real imminent problem for the team. Sounds like a dream project, right? And it was for the ~1 month or so I worked on it, got positive feedback from the team, etc. However, with a stroke of a (figurative) pen, the project's no longer needed and was scrapped. The manager found more money in the team's budget.

I can't say I disagreed with the decision: often it _is_ better to just throw money to make a problem go away. I felt bummed out nonetheless. _That_ I could live with, but getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month" during performance review, now that really stung.

My story might have a happy ending though. A few months ago the same problem resurfaced, this time due to a different, company-wide constraint. The lead dev solicited solutions, and I couldn't help but feel a bit smug inside when I said "um, remember that project I worked on a few years ago? I basically have your solution on a platter." We'll see: who knows maybe the manager will somehow carve out an exception for our team. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t think I could have lived with that if that was done to me. I’d either resign on the spot or shortly after.

A bruised ego is a small price to pay for the safety of my family and dependents, so I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it. dang, erase that GP.[0]

[0] With apologies to _In The Pale Moonlight_

Either way, I don’t expect my current employer to do something like that :)

> I felt bummed out nonetheless.

Why? Don't get emotionally involved with work done for the company. They want to toss it? Why give moments care. Your time wasn't wasted. It was done doing what they asked in exchange for pay. That's it.

>_That_ I could live with, but getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month" during performance review, now that really stung.

And that's why, you shouldn't care or get emotionally involved in the work you create for the company. The company clearly, demonstrably doesn't care about you. They do not care about you. Why should you care deeply about work you create for them?

Sure, everyone should be prepared to tolerate a level of meaningless and nonsense in the corporate world. I fully agree that one should not become too invested in work that ultimately serves the company.

Nevertheless, if humans were meant to live as sysipheans, by now we would have found more straight-forward ways of doing so, and we might even take pride in doing pointless work. Yet few if anyone is openly proud of doing nothing and still getting paid even when there's no social recourse. Naturally, when enough time passes and a person has yet to be able to actually contribute to the system, they are liable to be alienated. And why shouldn't they? If they can sit around for months or years being practically useless while still having to trade one's finite time for the privilege of food and shelter, there may be a breaking point where they can't make logical sense of the situation anymore. Where's the excitement? For many, we spend more hours at work than at home, especially if you discount sleep, and those hours are usually tired. That time at work had better mean at least something at some point; how is one then supposed to feel when they've reached senior status and... the situation is exactly the same or quite possibly worse?

It would be nice if humans could get more fulfillment out of their personal lives, but that usually doesn't come by default and rather requires considerable work on top of one's day job; family, friends, and social status all require work, and may of us don't even have adequate time for those. Is it reasonable to put a sapient mind through the anguish of being irrelevant in nearly every aspect of their lives for the promise of a distant retirement and expect them to not feel a sense of disengagement because the world is constructed in such a ridiculous fashion?

This isn't to say that you are entirely wrong, but I have to wonder if you believe that in every fiber of your being, because otherwise you could have been a burger flipper or a circus clown instead of the occupation that brings you to HN. I assume that you have a set of skills that came to you at least somewhat naturally, and that if you were unable to ever properly execute those skills that those skills (and thereby you) would seem worthless to yourself.

In my personal opinion, life is way too short to deal with meaninglessness for extended periods. If your job continues to be meaningless after years of experience, chances are you are doing the wrong thing and can benefit from a course correction.

I’m exactly in this spot right now. And yes, self-training on side quests like k8s or anything related to the field looks nice on the paper.

The problem comes from when 1/ you already associated all these training with the field you’re working in, and it feels helpless and boring, 2/ you still feel somehow disloyal to use your time like that.

Distract yourself in a positive manner. Don't dwell on meaningless thoughts that you'll never defeat. Only way to win is to do something else with your time.

It's fine if you don't think that's the solution but straight up misrepresenting what has been said to you is not cool.

I am personally 41 and I've fought tooth and nail to not just sit at the computer for the sake of it, neither in an office nor at home. Nowadays when I sit at my desk, I have goals in mind and if I catch myself not working towards any of them in an hour, I just get up and go do something else and someplace else.

But I maintain that nowhere did I imply something as dismissive and shallow as "just don't be sad" or, not shallow but still far from what I meant, "fight this with positivity". It's not that at all, it was much more along the lines of: "find your own purpose and don't wait for others to impose theirs on you".

In my current job I am one of 3 recent hires (just recently hit the 4 months mark) and since we come from very different backgrounds compared to the company's culture, we often have 5 PRs just waiting on reviews and we find ourselves completely blocked on any further progress (can't even open other PRs since we still haven't received feedback on the current ones and that would severely change what code we should put in the new ones).

I have raised the problem multiple times, from squad leaders all the way to the CEO, but it seems that the people are cool with it and don't mind if you just twiddle your thumbs every now and then. So I started picking up more and more sysadmin skills which I need for my home NAS management and potentially other home servers in the future. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But maybe my comment up-thread was way too short and open for negative interpretation?

I too have grappled with this for a while but I believe this struggle was for the better and it eventually led to reduced stress. Nowadays when I mentally proclaim "I am done for the day!" I know that I did my best and that I have put enough hours / effort to not feel guilty about not putting more.

So yeah, you are right. I just think people should go through this fight for discipline because it's ultimately better for their mental health when they learn to put boundaries.

It still reads too much as a very first world of a problem to me, admittedly. I recognize that us the people need to have a goal and a direction, otherwise we start feeling like aimless leaves on the wind -- but you can still do a ton of things at home (if you work remotely which you should) while checking your Slack and email every 15 minutes, no?

But if it really bothers you so much then you have to make a choice between (a) prestige / a lot of money / boredom and (b) enjoyment / medium money / purpose. Apparently in big corps you can't have both. Being stuck in a FOMO feedback loop and being unable to choose between either path is very toxic and produces a lot of internal pressure. At some point you have to choose for the sake of your mental well-being.

...Or, as other commenters alluded to, find a job that allows you to combine them. I do doubt that many other companies can give salaries in the $250K - $500K annual range though. But who knows.

As a general observation throughout my life, us the Homo Sapiens seem to suck super bad at picking a side and/or to leave a toxic relationship before it starts to poison us long-term. We must proactively work hard to periodically challenge our priorities and reassess our situation. So if you are up for an advice from a stranger: do that and do it often, something like 2-3 times a month, for whatever period of time, until you feel you finally are where you belong. We the people hold on to things for way too long. It seems to be our default mode of operation.

It also doesn't help at all that our current civilization seems to thrive on bombarding people with FOMO, sigh. But we gotta adapt and find our own way through it all regardless.

> This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks?

Where did he mention wanting more work? He mentioned unsatisfying work, I doubt doing interview loop recruiting people when you find your own work unsatisfying is gonna make you a good interviewer (and I'd hate to be the interviewee there). And take classes/training to what end? At 9 years in, I doubt there's many relevant trainings, and learning the intricate details of yet another internal proprietary system has limited returns.

> just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games.

None of these activities leads to finding satisfying, purposeful work, nor are they really good at negating the effects of the unsatisfying work.

Another issue is evaluating whether the juice is worth the squeeze. It's easy to say "learn a new skill bruh", but what happens when you spend the time learning something, you get hired at a new job relevant to that skill only to run into your original problem all over again? The risk of that is significant, and in the world of tech it's extremely difficult to know what a position at a company is really like because so many of us are kissing ass, and we are avoidant of any real criticism or confrontation.

None of the argumenta here are necessarily wrong, but speaking as if there are clear solutions that those complaining aren't seeing and calling this a first world problem is pretty dismissive.

Are you saying that people who are dissatisfied with privileged situations shouldn't have opinions or write about them? Everything is relative.

(A) Because there's a fundamental cognitive dissonance to being able to say both "My job is important enough to stay in" and "My job is unimportant enough that I should spend a lot of time doing unrelated things."

(B) Because author doesn't want to pursue alternative hobbies with his work chunk of time. He wants to write exciting code.

(C) Because while employed, there's an expectation that you're doing the work well. If you feel like you aren't, even if you're doing as decent of a job as the system allows you to, it eats at you. Badly.

because it's never that easy. If you try to get work from somewhere else maybe your manager starts to think you're bored or not interested, you definitely can't just leave and go mountain biking because then you look even lazier. So at the end of the day in every gigantic organization a substantial amount of people sits around and does nothing, that's just how it goes.

it's not first world, it's just that in bug business you're just a salaryman.

Ship it

It’s a common obstacle to making good use of your time even when underworked and working remotely. Ideally one could find non-team settings where this wouldn’t be an issue

I have one life, I need to have money to live but thats easy, actually having a positive impact is a reason to do something for someone else.

I dont necessarily apply but its its all i am thinking about untill I have value to add again: what am I doing here?

Track that over time. Make radical changes if it starts plummeting, because otherwise you're going to be backfilling entire teams' worth of vacated roles.

Find something that you enjoy doing, like you would enjoy a nice puzzle.

Purpose is all in your head.

In even my most over-resourced client, there is never a paucity of improvements to make. Ever.

My current working conclusion after seeing this many times and doing what I can to informally coach the ones expressing this kind of sentiment, is that there isn't a lack of meaningfulness, or purpose, or other lofty language. There is a lack of will to go outside of their comfort zone, very often due to non-technical factors. Or a lack of a sense of joy in the craft in even the smallest details and accomplishments. And that's okay. It's the reason we use specialization.

But let's not kid ourselves. I've yet to walk into a client that is so on top of their to do list much less wish list that there is nothing to improve. We also need to recognize there is also a substantial subset of people expressing this sentiment who dislike implementing some improvement without significant recognition, praise, and advancement; these are the ones who seek the big, splashy wins over the steady, incremental attention to craft that accumulate into the 20-year overnight successes.

What I have gathered from those who do is that it's not that there's a shortage of problems to solve in the organization, it's that the bureaucracy is so thick that they couldn't solve extra problems even if they tried.

From your references to "clients" I assume that you work as a consultant of some description. Obviously, no one brings in a consultant without having a lot for them to do. Additionally, few orgs bring in a consultant with the intention of them doing only what they're told.

But if you're just one coder among tens of thousands, that's exactly what your organization expects of you. And that's what the people who tell these stories find so draining.

This is why I called out "...very often due to non-technical factors" of what I found when I dug deeper. It is very rare I find the bureaucracy "too thick", and much more often, I find first a lack of communication, and if the communication is clarified, second I find a lack of desire to work on unglamorous, tedious, time-consuming aspects of the extra problems.

A frequent example: developer has an idea how to improve and existing process. Developer is informed they need the buy-in of SRE, Devops, and NOC teams. The presentations are made, and the team representatives/managers/directors Swiss cheese the idea pointing out all sorts of gaps to address. Endless forms to fill out, approvals to obtain, more presentations to give. Developer is dejected, and comes onto HN to say it's impossible to improve at BigCo.

When I ask what could it hurt to reach out more than halfway to those teams and find out what it would take to use this experience as an exercise to create and document a "minimal integration with stakeholder teams" package that all future projects can base themselves off of, I get met with "but it's not worth it", or "that's too much hassle", and similar fend-off-the-now-not-so-quick-hit-project explanations.

Except here's the clincher for me: I have yet to meet a BigCo team that has done this even for their big projects. No one wants to do the documentation work, nor the documentation maintenance work, because assistive infrastructure enablement isn't incentivized on annual performance reviews, only what sounds like "new progress" going up the leadership chain.

Every project ends up as a bespoke process to integrate into other teams' processes and mechanisms. The bureaucracy is so thick because no one spends the time trying to document, much less automate what processes look like from other teams' perspectives. And this is one of the pillars of my current working conclusion: everyone agrees there is constant documentation maintenance that needs to be performed everywhere, but in all these discussions, extremely rarely do I see someone say, "yeah, I use the extra time to learn some new procedure/tech, and update the onboarding/how-to documentation from the perspective of a newbie" (hugely valuable IMHO), and tons of other people slapping their foreheads and scurrying off to do the same.

Even thick bureaucracy its very self can be addressed with extra time, and that is arguably one of the most frictionless actions to take; pick up the phone/chat/email and start writing what you find out. That so, so few people kvetching about all this "boring extra time" make this frictionless action their revealed preference signals volumes to me.

I want to stress it's fine that people don't want to do this kind of work. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. But so far I haven't bought into the commonly-accepted wisdom why "soul-crushing extra time" exists in our industry, with exceptionally rare variations (like defense-related highly-compartmentalized or similar contexts).

The work is primarily organizational/drudgery and moves at a slow pace because of all the red tape and walls they've built around their projects in order to manage all the people. Endless incremental code reviews for small changes that get pondered for days and days. Design docs for trivial features written up and then basically entirely reworked by comments from people higher up who have more information but no time to do it because they're too busy being higher up and writing design doc comments all day. Horribly inefficient, painful to get anything done, and demoralizing.

Just left Google after 10 years. I found in that time I spent more time trying to find where I fit in and what work I could even do than actually doing any work. In some parts of the company, any interesting project was like a piece of red meat thrown into a pack of hungry wolves looking for "impact". Any project "given" to you quickly got competed with or downgraded in importance unless you got super self-promotional. There'd be talk about some new exciting thing coming down the pipe and you'd eagerly wait months for it to find out the work was either already parceled out or it didn't really exist.

I ended up seeking our "boring" organizations and projects within the company, in order to avoid the frustration and drama. But then motivation suffered.

Oh, and remote work has made them even more terrible because it's even more asynchronous and ponderous now. Can't tap someone on the shoulder and run something by them really anymore, it's just more "fork many threads of work and then spin on all the blocking issues waiting to make progress on any of them". Which sucks if you are the kind of person who is better at picking one thing at a time and sinking your attention into it, like me. So yeah, at some point you just start to lose focus out of sheer annoyance/frustration/boredom. And you're just there to collect the paycheck.

And maybe you feel guilty about it, but then, that was kind of the point. Maybe in your previous job you were a top contributor, potentially competing with BigCorp in some domain. Now you're not. They can push wheelbarrows full of money around to do the thing you were doing before, but at way higher scale and precision... but at the cost of way lower velocity because they've employed PhDs to nitpick over the comments in a protobuf description. (And if you leave and start your own thing and compete, they'll probably just come and buy it and bury it, too.)

They're bad for our industry and not so great for our brains... but good for our wallets. 10 years at Google messed up my passion and skills.... but it sure was good for my mortgage.

(FWIW, I thought in that time that I had lost my passion for coding. But two weeks after leaving to take some time for myself, I found myself firing up CLion and writing a synthesizer from scratch and loving it. Writing code is great.)

> These BigCorps are hiring like mad and paying big $$ to fill seats more for the purpose of starving their competition of brains than actually using the brains they hire.

I used to apply Hanlon’s Razor to these types of hypothesis. After spending more time with the decision making class, the amount of psychopathic behavior and analysis I’ve seen has let me to reconsider.

Not speaking from any inside knowledge, BTW. Just my philosophizing.

I see it as an invasive vine using all its spare energy to block out the canopy and choke out the forest. Rather than a native tree that uses spare energy to bear fruits, which nourish various critters who in turn contribute to a more efficient and robust ecosystem.

Allmost every addiction is like this. A shallow replacement for the real desires unfulfiled.

When I got to therapy, we traced it mostly to the internal critic (schema therapy). It was gone just like that with a flick of a finger almost! I have been productive and having fun with my life for two months leading up the this new year. When suddenly my manager decided that he does not stimulate me enough. He started getting deep into my ways of working saying something like “he does not understand how I perform my tasks and how they progress”, he started moving some not urgent tasks in ways he saw as better than my plans. He did not notice his direct spending 6-7 hours a day instead of 1 and he sarted really pushing and critiquing me and my teammate in a way that even our wives heard some changes during the zoom calls. It lead to a huge nervous breakdown for me. Two weeks passed by in a recess and now I slowly regain myself back.

But my views towards big corp are finalized: some cog a little bit higher than you can at some point decide that he has a right for any method to increase his perceived impact on team’s productivity and you will get hit.

I love myself a little bit more than this, gotta figure out the financial side a bit. The view towards “being fired” has shifted a bit too, now I think that if you’re not close to being fired based on your performance, the pay you too little and you work too hard (for them!) Work hard for yourself, don't work (too) hard for THEM!

Oh shit I must sound so priviliged, but yep this is the place I’m at right now

> GP: It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.

The worker no longer trusts that they won't be a replaced by a machine. The investor no longer trusts that they will get a return on capital. The manager no longer trusts that they will have employment for life after more than a bad quarter or two.

With so much of our trust eroding, management is left with little else to hold on to, and so they grasp the false hope of blunt instruments like forced rankings and quarterly forecasting — no matter how illusory it all may be.

...We seem to have a false sense of joining something when we enter companies these days, just as Rousseau stipulated society had entered into a false social contract. This may be what's driving newer generations to look for "purposeful work" as they launch their careers: They are looking to take control by demanding meaning from work right from day one...

But Rousseau also had the idea that humans can remake themselves via their institutions, and Deming appears to share this belief.

This is what's so interesting about companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple. These rare birds tend to operate outside of our norms and customs: They educate their employees differently; they collaborate differently across silos and divisions; they incentivize people in different ways. Because of their overwhelming ability to make cash (either initially through giddy investors and eventually via customers) these companies appear to start out more like communes. They are Gardens of Eden where there is little fighting for resources and oftentimes even the core customers freely partake.

Moreover, these companies almost appear to be for the common good, and the management appears to instinctively follow Deming's philosophy. But what's even more striking is that efficiency and performance naturally improves inside of these companies without the standard methods that more established firms pursue. Sadly, there's often also a fall from grace that typically happens as these corporations become "normalized" and a more traditional battle for resources sets in.

Perhaps the answer lies deeper in what Deming was trying to say about "profound knowledge." As Deming implied, we work in complex systems with forces of good and evil always in play, and it may just be that the single most important responsibility of our top leaders is to artfully mold and shape this dynamic in a way that best suits their organizations — and produces a self-selecting ecosystem of workers, partners, customers, and shareholders who naturally align.

All of this implies a more-progressive approach to leadership. And yet we all too easily succumb to our Taylor-like impulses that assume the worst about workers — using automation to track productivity down to the nanosecond, if possible. Unfortunately, this tends to exacerbate the growing trust gap between workers that festers between our corporate silos and stymies the very productivity that we seek to enhance.

None of this is easy. And many of us will surely struggle with these issues throughout our entire lives. But in a world where the stakes appear to be getting higher by the minute, building lasting trust and cooperation across companies and communities — binding together people and long-calcified silos — may be the only way for the corporation to survive.

hbr.org, The management thinker we should never have forgotten (2016), https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-management-thinker-we-should-nev...

It’s simple, silly me, I consider work a big part of my life. And given the fact that I have to do it for living anyway, it *must be* gratifying.

I currently work at a large fintech company and have a decent salary. I have been there for quite some time now so I have the reputation and trust in the organization however, I am having the worst time of my career. I can also barely work a few hours a day and I feel horribly burnout. Hence I made the opposite decision - to move to one of the FAANGs where I will massively shift my current WLB. I am confident that I made the right decision.

It's not really fair to belittle stories like this with a "you know nothing of pain" mentality. Your startup founders and bootcamp attendees would sound similarly sheltered if set against stories of starving children in Africa. Should we all refrain from talking about our pains because someone else's pains are worse?

Humans struggle everywhere, with different things, and it's helpful for us to learn from people who've been through similar.

A note of caution that this is not the common Facebook experience. I joined being fully aware of their reputation for poor work life balance, but even then it was soul-crushing. The pressure to perform is near constant, consequences of not performing are real, and the bar for meeting expectations is very high to start with, such that externally hired senior engineers are frequently overwhelmed by the sheer amount of expectations.

I was a manager there and got the distinct impression that the expectations bar was also rising over time. FB/Meta tends to hire the overperforming types, who put extra pressure on themselves to get those Exceeds and Greatly Exceeds ratings that come with real monetary rewards. The problem is you can't have everyone exceeding, not at the macro level anyways. So there's a real pressure on the managers with too many of those Exceeds ratings. The goal is to prevent a manager that misunderstands the expectations from giving everyone Exceeds, but the side effect is that over time there is a drift of expectations from Exceeds to Meets side. Having been with the company for so many years, the author likely did not notice this drift and was able to adjust over time naturally. Newer hires (which, given FB's rate of growth, is the large majority) aren't so lucky.

The other thing is that for many people, getting a normal Meets All rating is totally fine. You don’t need to push yourself to Exceeds level.

Why do we make this the gate keeper to our industry when we know (except for the very specific roles) we will rarely need leet code type problems. When we do we just google them.

So silly to me.

Why is it weird that people should spend time preparing for ask for a new job? I mean, ask an orchestra musician how much time they put into preparing for auditions, or how much time many degreed professionals put into passing a certification (e.g. the bar exam or medical boards).

If you don't want to spend time preparing for job interviews, then fine, don't. But don't claim "discrimination" when there are those of us willing to sacrifice to put in the hours to prepare.

Because that preparation, by and large, is not related to the actual job.

> I mean, ask an orchestra musician how much time they put into preparing for auditions, or how much time many degreed professionals put into passing a certification (e.g. the bar exam or medical boards).

Those are all instances of people being asked to do/know things that they will need to do/know for their actual jobs. An actual comparison would be if the orchestra musician was asked to perform blindfolded on a random piece of music, and have to spend 6 months training to memorize the most often requested pieces to be ready for the interview, only to play for the rest of their career with the sheet in front of them. (Not trying to compare difficulty, but absurdity. I don't doubt orchestra musician's auditions are harder)

Also, bar exam and certifications are not job interview. You also have exams and certifications in CS and no one is complaining about having to train for those. A lawyer/doctor certainly doesn't have to pass the equivalent of the bar/medical exam every time they want to change firm/clinics. They just talk about their past experiences. Barely any prep required beside being able to give a good sales pitch about you.

Meanwhile, as a dev, you are expected to do it all over again every time you will change job. Even for internal moves, many of the GAFAMs expect you to go through this again.

Granted, it's more representative than leetcode performance but still far from a perfect system.

A bit off topic, as this isn't orchestral music, but in college I was in a couple of bands as a bassist, and in one of them the guitarist was probably one of the best musicians I ever played with technically. However, because he was so good, sometimes he would get taken by surprise when someone less talented in the band messed something up during a performance. When practicing before one of our gigs, I noticed that our rhythm guitarist was playing a certain section incorrectly and essentially finishing it in half the time he was supposed to; the drummer and I would generally catch on immediately and course-correct, but the lead guitarist tended to be flummoxed and took the longest to group up with everyone. I made sure to mention it to everyone since I figured it might come up again, but I think everyone else forgot by the time the gig happened, and the same exact thing happened, and even though it was the rhythm guitarist who made the initial mistake, the lead guitarist ended up being the one who "looked" the most wrong to the audience because the drummer and I knew that the only way we'd get back on track was grouping up with the rhythm guitarist and leaving the lead guitarist behind. If anyone were trying out our two guitarist to join an existing group, I think almost everyone would take our lead guitarist due to how much better he'd perform in an audition. However, if the band he tried out for wasn't able to keep up with him, it's very possible he would have been the wrong choice. This seems pretty similar to "leetcode" style interviews for a software engineering role; the person who is able to impress the interviewers the best technically might end up being a bad fit for some teams if they aren't able to collaborate as effectively with their team.

TBH, depends on the job.

I think the problem is hiring people with these skills to do jobs that don't require them. That's bad for both parties. The employer is going to be paying for a skill it is not required, and the employee will get bored and switch jobs, costing everyone time and money.

Does seem like there is a growing movement to explicitly not do leetcode style reviews at many places which is good.

It's weird because the preparation is often the thing we're not doing in our day to day.

I'd also go as far as saying if you need to cram crazy hours shortly beforehand to pass any exam or test then you're not really qualified to pass. If you were qualified you wouldn't have to do this because you'd already comfortably know the answers. I get wanting to casually review the finer details which is fine, but if you're in "oh crap, it's Tuesday and the test is in 3 days, time to drop my life and cram 10 hours a day to prepare" mode, maybe you're not ready?

I also think you can't compare software development to musicians or sports. I do play the guitar and there's a massive amount of muscle memory involved. I've gone a few years without playing in the past but within a few minutes of picking it up somehow my brain can resume where it left off and my hands just move to the right places almost on their own.

The same can be said for sports, there's a lot of practice and warming up to burn in muscle memory and literally get your physical body in an optimal state. Also the stuff you're practicing is directly applied to what you're "really" doing in your professional day to day.

Tests are different because you are on a timer and they are balanced around it. I almost got straight A's in university, apart from a single B in a course I was confident I actually understood. I got A's in shit I couldn't even begin to explain. But signals and systems, which I genuinely understood at the time, I got a B because I didn't bother studying and memorising shit. I had to work stuff from first principles and ran out of time.

I feel like it's the same in programming interviews. There's no time to actually work out anything from first principles or any original thoughts. Either you know the answer immediately and you spew some shit to make the interviewer happy, or you fail.

Like you say, it's very different for physical activities (can't comment on music), because you cannot drastically increase performance by cramming for a few hours. I was an amateur powerlifter, I stopped training when covid started. There's no way I can get my strength back in 3 days. But I bet I can get an A in some random exam after cramming for 3 days in some random university course I did however many years ago.

I've had a professor who said that the purpose of an exam is to study for it.

The same professor said that if you don't learn something in an exam, then the exam is useless.

By and large, professional musicians are paid for a standard level of performance competence and a strong level of versatility. The small handful of remainders are the famous ones renown for exceptional levels of performance.

Plenty of professionals are paid to play the musical equivalent of e-commerce site.

Pretty much anyone can do that. We’re looking for someone who can do the other 20% of the job that’s novel and difficult. Ideally someone who recognizes that rereading glue code is a waste of human effort, and automates it away instead.

Training is basically the main work performer has to do to earn his life, and all training is valuable. You could compare with professional athlete and see how it’s absurd.

> If you don't want to spend time preparing for job interviews, then fine, don't.

The idea is that you have to understand the process. If you don’t see the point of certain exercise, you search for a rationalization, and discrimination looks like a good one. Also, the discrimination is not against people that won’t train for interview, but to give a bias to people that don’t evaluate returns on their invested time

Additionally, I find the logic behind this strange. It implies that just because some people can afford to sacrifice that this setup isn’t discriminatory. But the criticism is that some demographics are disproportionately unable to sacrifice. Discriminatory doesn’t mean no on in that demographic is able to afford to dedicate whatever resources towards the thing. In fact systems of discrimination often work better when there’s a model minority or “one of the good ones” that can be pointed to as an example as to why a discriminatory system isn’t really a problem.

Doctors have to recredential over their whole career. Used to be every ten years, but some specialties are moving to annual “quiz-sized” credentialing over once-a-decade cramfests.

They only do it once, though, not for every single interview.

Yeah, older people are more likely to have other priorities, but they’re also more likely to be financially secure and thus able to trade money for time to study. Also, they’re more likely to have gained time management/prioritization skills and discipline that they could apply toward studying.

Ultimately it seems like arguing that older people lack time or inclination depends on ageist stereotypes.

I could never go back to university for that reason - studying, fine, I did a ton of courses on edX and Coursera, but I pick what interests me and a lot of test problems you are given (at least in my experience, at university and later online) too often are more about understanding the intent of the person creating the problem rather than anything useful. I could also never go back to the army (Germany, mandatory service, battle tank mechanic) and take commands from some guy who just wants to posture.

I'm not any less willing to study than I was at university - but now I refuse to do what I think is useless or meaningless. Studying for tests is high on that anti-list. Not all tests, I had no issues with tests I took for things that needed certification, e.g. sailing or for the pilot license, but that stuff was useful in practice and not nearly as over the top because those tests were not designed to "weed out weaklings".

EDIT: An anecdote for that last phrase

After writing the comment I got curious and googled that exact phrase. I found this in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Smythe_(physicist)

> He authored a textbook on electromagnetism called Static and Dynamic Electricity, which was a widely used reference in the field during the 20th century. His electromagnetism course was modeled after the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos examinations and designed to "weed out weaklings." Smythe's course was so infamous that future Nobel Prize in Economics laureate Vernon Smith switched to electrical engineering from physics to avoid it.

Interviews are by definition a legal way to discriminate.

To be clear, I dislike the current way interviewing is, but do you have a better solution to screen out 7,000 applicants? The vast majority will be knocked out by the leetcode style interview, and sure, some brilliant minds might fail because they can't remember linked lists in the moment, but atleast you screened down from 7,000 -> 70. If there is a better way, we'd all love to know.

I am prepared for this to be voted down, but I am genuinely wondering the answer to this.

My belief is that if you aren't doing Ph.D. level research, all you need to do is get the candidate to prove they can write themselves out of a bag with React/Python. Anything else is overkill, and a real cost loss to the business in terms of money and time.

I will admit that for most businesses there will be times to do the first, and time to do the second. But I imagine this distribution is something like 20/80, whereas most companies are doing 80/20.

Coding is hard, but so is marketing, accounting, management ... But are your marketing candidates being put through the ringer too? I suspect software engineers are being uniquely hazed.

Peace & Love

But if I must write code as an applicant, it better be similar to real world tasks and not some bullshit, especially if my chances of getting hired are still slim. Having to do work in order to get hired is literally sucking the lifeforce out of me, so don't suck even more out of my via the agony of glorified brain teasers.

And yet, all these companies would have complicated hiring pipelines to hire. I have seen examples which made me laugh; like receiving tens of cvs and asking almost all of them for take home exams (felt sorry for the reviewers and the candidates who lost their time), multi stage technical reviews for companies with less than 10-20 employees, final executive level interviews with more than 5 candidates in parallel, time to hire times of 3-6 months, etc.

My girlfriend works on the business strategy side of Fortune500’s. Our interviews look like a joke compared to theirs.

He's now doing two jobs at the same time and the companies don't notice he's barely doing anything but appearing in meetings.

YMMV

Big corporations are incredibly wasteful, so I'm not surprised.

I also know plenty of developers who do little at work, but at least they need to produce a substantial amount of code, at the end of the day.

I've never had to prepare for an engineering interview in some 15 years of doing this professionally.

> the job takes way less effort compared to software

The easiest part of my job these days is writing code.

The challenging fun part is setting a technical strategy that aligns with the business and gardening the team around me with soft influence towards that strategy. Super challenging. Would've been easier to just do it myself, but there's only so much I can do on my own.

Ultimately, you should go do whatever comes to you easiest and/or is most fun. No sense grinding away at something you're not good at. Maybe your friend has an immense talent for business and strategy.

That’s kinda what they do.

You are put through an initial ringer to vet for basic fit and competence. Then you get a take-home exercise that consists of several business case studies. You have to detail a strategy for what you would do in that situation, support your argument with research, etc. My girlfriend said it’s a lot like writing a term paper in college.

Last time she interviewed it took her I think 2 or 3 days of full-time work to do the case studies.

Then you go back and defend/present/discuss your work at an interview.

Her job consists of doing basically that, but with a team, larger consequences, more direct ownership, and loooooonger processes because so many people get involved in everything. Her team is strategizing what could become a trillion dollar product (in like 10 years) if they get it right. It’s pretty cool.

I've always been of the opinion that a take home software engineering project that I can present in the interview would be preferable. Coding alone for a few hours and then being able to get all my ducks lined up.... Sounds like a practical and great interviewing process to me.

I've been in organizations that were spawned by both of the above extremes. The former is definitely more pleasant to work in (everyone is at least competent) even if the interview was much less pleasant to do. I do feel like more orgs should try to target the middle ground instead of just aping Google and going ham on the leetcode shit.

If they "cheat" by having stack overflow do their work for them, but they can explain it well enough, they probably understand the concepts at least.

Do you have any hard data behind that ratio?

Or are you just kind of ... making those numbers up?

Because they, you know, "feel right"?

I concur with the parent's point. HN is perpetually complaining about tech interviews, but nobody ever suggests a viable alternative that can cope with such application volumes.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/17/heres-how-many-google-job-in...

While remote positions can certainly receive a lot of "noise applicants", as I discovered in my last job, you can filter out half, if not more, on just a quick pass. Most companies are dealing with dozens of candidates at the most, often less. Certainly not thousands of them.

The parent poster was literally saying that LC screening by itself will get you your 99 percent reduction.

The actual hiring ratio at google is something like 0.2%. They pass over 998 out of 1000 applicants, so no matter what they do, they'll pass over a substantial number of qualified people, and no matter what they do there will be complaints on HN.

It was this resorting to made-up numbers that I found to be kind of weird.

More realistic explanation: they try to make an 'American Idol' like process, this gives them the feeling of having chosen 'the best'. Now it probably takes some standardized task to do that kind of competition, as it is necessary to maintain the claim of having an objective hiring process.

I was once told, that in the olden days there was a different kind of hiring process (that was not about programming jobs, actually, they didn't have that job at the time). It would go as following: the owner would invite the candidate to join the crew for lunch, if the candidate eats a lot, then he would count as a good worker. Actually that would make a good test for 'culture fit'...

BTW, the article has a link to a free course on hiring practices, thanks for the link! https://course.jobsearch.dev/01_introductions/01_course_intr...

I've thought this too. Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm were hit with antitrust litigation starting around 2010 because they were all involved in colluding to reduce the ability of devs to switch jobs. Since then we've only seen the rise of leetcode style interviews. We're way way past the days of tree traversing and FizzBuzz. We're asking candidates to recite Dijkstra's but pretend they've never seen it before. It's just way more convenient for tech companies if people don't leave in the first place. I know I've stayed at my job much longer than I should because I hate interviews.

> as it is necessary to maintain the claim of having an objective hiring process

Yeah no one wants to admit they don't know what they are doing. It's bad for FAANG myth-making. A company the size of Google or Facebook is never not hiring. They are a big boat that can't just stop moving like that. They have a constant churn rate, the need to keep interviewers sharp, and a certain target rate they need to hit of applicants in, new employees out. All the process between the in side and out side is Scientology. It's just complete fabricated cultish nonsense. The owners of LeetCode must be enjoying it though.

I didn't know that, really interesting detail.

>no one wants to admit they don't know what they are doing.

Interesting perspective, though I don't know about the vodoo part. They seem to be taking the matter quite seriously, at least google does. Take the matter of competitive programming: Peter Norvig says they were checking, if taking part in programming contests would correlate with good performance at the job [1]; I think having read somewhere that Norvig revised his negative judgement later on, as they had examined more data [2]. (actually that would mean that they didn't act on the data to begin with, well well).

These companies are good at data processing, any data that is, at least they seem to be taking it dead seriously (disclaimer: I never worked at google, though I have managed to fail at interviewing there, however i am not sure if i would have accepted an offer ;-)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdmyUZCl75s

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming#Benefi...

If any of these companies knew what they were doing then they wouldn't require multiple interview rounds. I expect the correlation between one's ability to perform at Google with their ability to pass the interview gauntlet to be no better than a coin toss.

But I guess, that this is all speculation..

I do nothing that looks anything like leetcode whatsoever.

It’s hazing. Nothing more.

That being said I’d rather work for a shop that had at least some code tests. I’ve worked in places with none and the code quality is about as shifty as you’d expect.

You’re right though — I might as well be saying they were also incredible bakers or skaters. If those were also high signal identifiers of good devs then we’d be kneading dough while doing ollies in the interview rooms.

What irks our industry is that there are plenty of good developers out there that produce quality day to day plumbing and integration work that suck at leetcode. That’s fine. We should hire them too, but if you are FAANG you don’t need to if you have post grad leetcoders knocking down your door every day of the week to supplement your already burgeoning cadre of sensible staff engineers.

It’s easy to study leet code, and it’s relevant because it shows the interviewer you can write code.

I’ve had non-leet code interviews, like write some feature in 60minutes. It was fine. It tests code and knowledge as opposed to just algorithms and tricks.

I dunno I’ve always felt that the people who can’t leet code are the ones that complain about it. The ones that can just spend a bit of time to practice and ace the interview.

I have a million things I want to learn about. If a potential employer would rather I spend time on what amounts to trivia, then great, I don’t want to work there.

> I’ve had non-leet code interviews, like write some feature in 60minutes.

This is also a problem because it’s impossible to understand the constraints, context, specifications, etc. during this time. When I am asked to implement a feature in the real world, it takes time to understand the domain and context. Writing code is usually the last and easiest bit. It also never occurs that you need to understand and complete something in just an hour or two.

So in leetcode interviews you’re asked to turn on a bunch of knowledge you don’t really need. And in implement this feature interviews, you need to turn off a bunch of important knowledge and experience.

Both are irritating interviews.

The best way to interview, in my experience, is to ask about a project or projects someone has worked on. Even better if there’s time for them to present on it. That way you get a real world picture of their skills, they are comfortable, and you can ask detailed questions without jumping the shark. Further, it is perfectly reasonable for someone to be required to present and answer questions over something they’ve worked on in an hour or two. That does happen in the real world.

I've interviewed hundreds of people over my career and I've never had an interview where I couldn't figure out their technical abilities through a conversation.

I'll tell you what leetcode interviews do find you though, they find you people that have no idea how TCP/HTTP work, they have no idea how you would debug a distributed system. They've never deployed anything to a server. They probably have no idea how to even measure the amount of work being performed by a server. They've never thought about CI/CD/Deployment/Scalability. They've never used any cloud resources. They have potentially never been through a code review.

etc, etc, etc, etc.

Someone crushing a leetcode test tells me about 1% of the stuff I'd like to know about their knowledge and abilities.

Some solutions are rejected on the spot (bad practices, does not solve the task correctly), other candidates are invited for a technical interview. Some generic questions, then we go through the solution - with emphasis on less than perfect areas. It is quite easy to see when someone is bluffing, and you also see how the person deals with feedback.

This doesn't scale and introduces a bunch of biases on other dimensions. People who don't have time to prepare for leetcode interviews might be the same ones that don't have time to work on FOSS, and it could be that they can barely talk about their past work for IP issues. It's also way easier to fake your way through a high-level discussion of a software engineering project (that the candidate prepared) than through a leetcode interviews.

You mean the ones that randomly receive a random problem that they hadn't memorized before.

I'd say a lot of us learn about algorithms and data structures early in their career. But most of them are guidelines, not rules. So, you just remember how to google for them, not learning specific ones by heart. No one has ever told me: You need to work on this string manipulation and be done within 30mns.

So I dunno, it’s not fun doing the gimmicky leet code questions but it definitely filters candidates.

I think people in this thread take them for granted… many candidates struggle with them. The ones that think they’re easy and you just gotta study a little bit — they’re honestly probably pretty smart.

I am exceptionally good at algorithms problems and I recognize it is not a useful skill I want to filter on when hiring. A dev team of 20 may only need a few to really understand algorithms to look over relevant pull requests. and even then such situations may be rare

And that you just don't particularly see a need to cater to other people's made up (and sometimes downright farcical) rituals to such an excessive degree.

No matter how much money they may dangle in front of you.

> And that you just don't particularly see a need to cater to other people's made up (and sometimes downright farcical) rituals to such an excessive degree.

> No matter how much money they may dangle in front of you.

I confess to not understanding this take, money can purchase back a substantial portion of time. Working at big tech can fairly easily reduce your working life to 10 years if you spend conservatively. Outside of big tech the norm seems to be more towards 20-30.

The cost of those decades of saved time? About 100ish hours of prep for your first interview, 40-50 from there on (based on personal experience, conversations with my colleagues, and a friend who runs a FAANG interview class). Assuming 3 job hops in your 10 year working life, that's 200ish hours to save 20 years. Is there a reason you don't think that's worth it?

(1) Most chiefly, the egregiously unethical behavior of nearly all of the "big" players (the rest being merely moderately unethical)

(2) Reports from close friends of the day-to-day grind at these places (literally none have anything more than superficially positive to say about it; some have suffered significant health problems, include one full-scale nervous breakdown)

(3) And the intellectual dishonesty implicit in the LC process also, but only as icing on the cake, as it were.

And independent of all that - it is by no means a binary (either you work or for big tech, or you grind along at for an extra decade or two at middle range). There are high-paying opportunities out there, if that's what you're out for -- they just aren't as immediately obvious to find as FAANG.

Sounds like you'd need to spend some time to find these :)

To your other points, I get feeling revulsion to Google or Facebook, but I feel there are other companies like Netflix or Stripe that are ethically fine. The idea that the employees are generally overworked doesn't mesh with my lived experience the bay area, I have a fairly wide social circle and I don't know anyone putting in more than 40 hours a week at a big tech company unless they're trying to climb the ladder super fast. I think we also may have to agree to disagree on whether all leetcode is intellectually dishonest. 4 leetcode hard problems is a silly way to interview, but when working on problems at scale I appreciate a gut check problem on big O and an algorithmic workhorse like depth-first search or something.

Meanwhile your data points on 'N' and 'S' are appreciated and I will add them to my (mental) notes.

No I won’t get a job at a FAANG this way, but I’m not particularly fond of megacorps.

I've interviewed at plenty of them (only one in recent years, though) and while I wouldn't say they were easy, they aren't doing completely irrelevant challenges like leetcode.

I've certainly never studied for one, unless you count flipping through a book or two just to remind myself of things I may not have thought about in a while. Like 1-3 hours tops.

You don't have to dribble the ball, you don't have to answer a quiz about the rules of the game, you don't have to tackle anyone, you don't have to kick the ball, you don't have to be good at positioning yourself.

Clearly the test seems pretty odd as a way to pick players. But it has benefits as well. The expectations are clear. People who can't do it won't try. People who are in the ballpark and pass will feel special.

Grinding leetcode also shows you've got grit, and are willing to prepare for a task and do what it takes to succeed.

Grind leetcode, show the companies that you can meet their minimum threshold of cognitive and executive capability for entry into their tech department... or don't work for them, it's that simple.

If I ever do an on-site interview again, I’ve given thought to just bringing in a six pack of beer. If I get any bullshit questions, I break out the beer and say “how about we pretend that I did a good job on this question and talk shop about what you really need here, because that’s what I’d like to talk about.”

I've interviewed at a lot of other places and it's mostly take-home assignments or just talking about past projects or my open source projects. I've never had to do leetcode for an interview in 14 years of working as a software engineer.

Most startups I have applied to previously rarely asked ds/algo interview questions.

It's not that they want to, it's that they have to.

You have 10 dev positions in your team. You receive 5000 applications, where 3000 look like a suitable match based on the CV. How do you proceed?

It is a valid metric. It screens for "overachieving" types who have the will power to power through unpleasant drudgery for a pot of gold in the end. If they really want those kinds of people who am i say its 'silly'.

I think it is a case of this being the least worst option.

Not a great metric, but is there a replacement? Not everyone has github side projects to see how their code actually looks.

But, I also don't feel like it's some huge indignity? I have spent far longer on take home tests from companies than practicing leetcode most interview circuits. I wouldn't discount a company for asking these kinds of questions to try to get more signal from applicants.

I had the opposite experience leaving Facebook for a company that uses externally-available tools.

I do miss 2017 Scuba, Workplace, and Deltoid, since they worked well in Facebook's ecosystem. I do not miss the 2021 versions of those tools (and of most other internal tools in Facebook), which are bloated messes with less functionality and also somehow being slower and more resource-heavy.

One of my positive impressions when moving companies are how much better Grafana, Prometheus, JIRA, Slack, and many other external tools are from internal Facebook tools.

It makes sense if you see it from an influence perspective: external tools need to improve to get new users and retain current ones, but Facebook's tools need to constantly add new features to get PSC performance points and they always keeping a guaranteed audience of the entire company.

Phabricator is miles ahead of anything.

Automatic flaky test detection works like a charm and I miss it every day.

However, the organizational culture… I agree with a lot of what he noted about reorgs and that it feels like walking through molasses trying to get anything done quickly.

Most other tools are just unambiguously worse than their public counterparts though.

If the Chat team is ever able to get inline-threads out the door: https://chromeunboxed.com/google-chat-rooms-become-spaces, it should make rooms/spaces a much better experience.

There’s very basic usability and performance things that frustrate me on a fundamental level. The rest is at the margins.

Also, the builtin @silent way to chat a thread without notifying anyone is gold. Same goes for reminders. Also it’s chat + a consistent way to communicate out for a team. Workplace solves actual problems working with other people. Google Chat simply does slack-like chat, and poorly at that.

Edit: also all those things are drastically simpler than inline threads but not as sexy which tells you something about what the incentive structure looks like here. Disclaimer. I’m an ex googler. Thought chat was good when it came out but it’s regressed since then.

Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview. Wondering if I should be trying for FaceBook as long as Im bothering to study. Had a very positive-feeling convo with a recruiter there ~6mo ago before "Meta". Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your resume now though?

Any thoughts?

Some people get extremely sanctimonious about the latest thing their politics or corporate "news" media or the current popular trend on twitter gets them riled up about. Of course they will never face up to the fact that the companies they work for and buy from are neck deep in politics, consumerism, advertising, influencing, the war industry, corruption, greed, etc., too.

These people aren't nearly so brave or numerous in the real world as they would have you believe though. If you personally feel okay working for a company then I wouldn't bother worrying about the opinion of hypocrites.

I do know one or two people who think and care very deeply about this stuff and they (to some degree) put their money where their mouth is by attempting to avoid and not support these things they disagree with. They are typically the last to point their finger at others.

I've been at Meta for 3+ years. I'm also interviewing. I have somewhere between 4 and 8 offers right now (not a humblebrag, just the facts). Not a single interviewer (from junior engineers to directors and VPs of engineering) asked me anything remotely like "Why are you still at an awful company like Facebook?"

The plural of anecdote is not "fact", but that's my experience: for engineers, it's still seen as a positive, or at worst, neutral.

But it’s certainly a factor when I’m reviewing resumes.

FAANG on your resume is an instant disqualification.

It’s tens of thousands, tops. And let’s be honest, most of them are highly overrated.

> because they happened to work at some huge companies

Because they made the choice to work at some incredibly evil corporations. Give them some credit, they didn’t sleepwalk into their roles. They did it for that fat cash, and they sold their morals out to do so.

Jokes on them, I have the “fat cash” now and get to choose who I hire. Turns out I’m not a fan of the people who sold out.

FAANG are not incredibly evil corporations.

They are average evil, and incredibly successful.

If you are CTO at another company and you think your company is less evil, it's probably just less successful and you’re blinded to its evil by your vested interest in changing the “less successful” part.

> I haven't worked at FAANG

I doubt that.

> but I most definitely would not want to work for a company like yours.

You do you. But I make sure we pay way above average, I want the best people and the best people don’t work for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.

Not sure what makes Netflix evil, though. Clue?