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.
Honestly sounds like a bit of cope, especially if you've tried hiring in the past 10 years.
Largest? 400-1500.
Smallest? 30-70.
Compensation was highly variable.
FAANG employees are liabilities best avoided, everyone in leadership positions knows it.
Are you working in Europe as part of an old tech / non-tech company and the most you've ever made is $300k/yr or are you actually competing on the same level as big tech companies compensation wise where director+ who manages 300-500 makes $+1m/yr?
There are highly paid small places that are not FANG that still pay FANG or better, but they have really high standards. I want to know if your one of those, or one of those who as part of an ego protection cope say FANG is bad.
Now if you were a startup manager, yeah I can get why you might want to avoid FANG because you don't want people with big company habits in your small company that is trying to go fast, but usually those people say that out right, and they also tend to explicitly hire FANG types to scale their engineering org after a certain scale, because startup style stops working after your engineering org gets to a certain size.
I literally know a couple of unicorn founders in my personal life. They don’t think that. You’re full of shit and are probably a shit leader (if you’re not bluffing) if you make categorically false statements with such conviction (much like the former president).
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.
But I’ve definitely made mistakes, and so far every hire I’ve honestly regretted worked for a megacorp prior to me hiring them.
Given the diversity of rewarding roles available to them, the best people aren’t pressured to accept morally compromising positions.
My point is I make sure my companies pay well. I want every employee to feel like they’re robbing me.
But I also want to make sure that I have as few employees as possible.
That said I appreciate your attitude here. These companies are civilizationally damaging. It’s good to keep repeating that. I’m just not sure your approach makes sense.
Not sure what makes Netflix evil, though. Clue?
“ I want the best people and the best people don’t work for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.”
Tell me when you hire a Yann LeCun or Jitendra Malik. Your claim is random shit-talk that’s not verifiable.
in which case it isn’t selling out. It is living life as an average person getting through life
I do my best, but I fully admit I am not perfect in this regard.
> allowing for atrocities like DuPont, never buy anything with Teflon in it,
I completely agree with you here. The leadership of these corps should have faced serious jail time for C8 contamination.
> We're all in the same exploitative evil system, get off your high horse and stop judging people for being employed.
I get it, but look at it from my perspective. I have a lot of money. I can hire people based on X or Y. I have the luxury of selecting skilled, amazing people who did not work for the system. Why would I see that as a bad thing?
Is it only FAANG, or are there others that you blacklisted? E.g. is MS on the list as well? How long is the list? Genuinely curious.
They might not ask you to your face to explain things like joining a company right after it got #metoo-ed, but if they care they’ll absolutely be thinking the question.
Then it’s entirely possible you work for an immoral mega corp and your judgment has been compromised by your paycheck.
Let me put it in a more blunt way you are more likely to understand. Your team is interviewing someone who was a process engineer on the deep water horizon oil spill. You’d probably feel gross hiring someone whose incompetence poisoned the Gulf of Mexico.
They did a fraction of the damage that FAANG engineers do to our society on a daily basis.
I'm seeing several of your posts here and it seems like you are making the inference "worked at FAANG" -> "horrible person", and while I have never worked at FAANG I have many friends I respect who have, and eventually left though it took some time.
It feels like you might be making an ad hominem attack here.
They are negative value add employees and I’ve yet to find a better way to filter them.
Working at Facebook as a software engineer is a choice; just like working at a bulge bracket investment bank is a choice.
The type of people that choose to work at either of these two are (more likely than not) people who do not have morals or a sense of character and values.
In my experience, being a good person only works when you're interacting with good people. If you're a good person interacting with a "bad" person, you tend to get a worse deal -- and if not alert, will unconsciously "sink" to their level, and start mirroring their behaviors in order to not get a bad deal.
Sooner or later, you're surrounded by "bad" people and have become a "bad" person yourself, simply by moral "osmosis," all because a few "bad" eggs spoiled the quiche.
I have been the type of person that naturally gravitated towards the "money money money" professions, because I did not have any strong role models to build a value system. Now that I'm out of that moral rut, I do not wish to go back. Just like an ex-addict who decides not to associate with other ex-addicts, because the chance of relapsing increases exponentially: I do not want people without any moral compass dragging me back down to their level.
I like the way things are. Things are good. Associating with Facebookers will make things bad. I don't want things to be bad.
I've tried very hard to express this viewpoint, without making value judgements, but it's moot: I have standards for what it means to be a good person, and Facebookers do not meet my standards -- so I won't associate with them. I won't hire them. And I will avoid collaborating with them.
Thank you, exactly this
Not actually true for early career SWEs, especially those that switched from a non-CS field. Because FAANG relies so much on coding puzzles, they are often the best option for someone that is self-taught without formal training. Since they often have a large recruiting pipeline, they are often the easiest places to get interviews without any connections, too.
I would also add that their ability to sponsor H1Bs is unmatched.
Everyone has good and bad in them, it's just the context you're interacting in and your own predispositions that brings out one or the other.
But no, I don't work for FAANG. I could say the same about any of my previous places of employment, none of which were even tech companies (unlike the current place).
But let's put all that aside - how does refusing to hire someone _leaving_ one of those companies improve the situation? Are you trying to establish an equilibrium where it becomes more costly in expectation to join one of those companies, because it might be harder to find another job afterwards? Good luck, I guess! I don't expect you'll move the needle much, especially given that there'll be quite a few people actively working against efforts like that.
It massively improves the situation. The kinds of people who work for these companies now are morally bankrupt. Everyone knows the score going in. They’re smart enough to pass l33t code but dumb enough to not make their own startups.
These are not the kinds of people you build groundbreaking companies with, they’re opportunistic parasites you’d do well to avoid.
I highly doubt, just based on sheer numbers and basic data, that the people working at your company are amazing humble people who care so much about the world. I doubt they are concerned with the homeless population and other disenfranchised groups. Vs in your case being all gung ho about the evils of FAANG that you are so above. The number of people who are against the current status quo enough and willing to sacrifice the comforts of their lives to fix the issue are so small. It’s not even a bad thing. That’s a hard thing to do. It’s much easier to point to a couple of big companies and say how evil they are and any one working for them.
Why is applying realistic negative values to behavior such as willful FAANG employment “judgmental”
You made the choice to work for a morally bankrupt megacorp because they paid you a crap ton of money. They paid your bills. You sold out, just own it and be a human instead of coping.
I didn’t say I have some kind of employee utopia, but we build real things that help real people and honestly do make the world a better more honest place.
> You made the choice to work for a morally bankrupt megacorp because they paid you a crap ton of money. They paid your bills. You sold out, just own it and be a human instead of coping.
Almost all of this can be tuned up a bit and be used against you. Unless you’re an incredible rarity that is doing amazing selfless work. I highly, highly doubt it.
It is much easier to point to easy “bad guys” and delude one self of one’s own work not being such great stuff either. Beyond that. This is a general moral stance. I’m sure if one was to compare you overall life, principles, morals, and a good hearted person working for a FAANG, your life wouldn’t be the one coming out ahead.
At least most humbler people can see “selling out” is not binary. You have sold out too. We all have.
—
Just realized. It appears you or whomever owns the business and companies. It is so incredibly easy to point to how self serving and it being the definition of selling out to gain more from the effort of others without doing equal amounts of work and effort. And no I’m not a socialist.
When I am considering whose resume is worth a call back for, there are a variety of signals:
- Is your resume even vaguely coherent
- Do you have things on your resume that suggest curiosity and the ability to get things done
- Are you likely to stick around long enough to be worth investing in you? So if you changed jobs every 1-2 years, you're going to lose a lot of points
- If you worked at a company which I don't think aligns with good treatment of the general public, how long did you work there? Was it early in your career, or late?
I explicitly codify that the hiring of former surveillance capitalism mercenaries is a fireable offense.
“But the equity was great” is not an excuse.
Anyone sub 40 was old enough to see the problems with Facebook and steer clear.
Working for them and “seeing the light” after years of collecting the blood money doesn’t give you any points with me.
The whole "won't say it to your face" is the absolute cherry on top. If you don't talk about it, how do you know they didn't join the company out of an overly optimistic sense of being able to change things from within, then quit when reality struck?
That excuse is maybe acceptable for someone who worked at Facebook 10 years ago, but someone who is still working there in the last couple of years? You might just be an employee but you’re willfully helping well-known behaviors.
This isn’t like some revelation of fraud that employees don’t know about. Countless articles have been written about the problems with Facebook and it has been in the crosshairs of national politicians several times.
At this point taking a job at Facebook is not really any different than accepting a marketing job at a cigarette company.
And I'm above the median for software devs in my area, but in a high CoL city in Canada.
Sure, we disqualified you when you listed them on your resume. You never got callbacks and probably blamed it on XYZ. You don’t understand, there’s a growing group of us in Silicon Valley that will never hire you if you have FAANG on your CV.
Similarly, I will not go to a company if people up the chain, including my immediate boss or the CEO are ex-FB.
If the CxOs are ex-FB I cannot expect it to be an ethical company.
But, that’s me.
They just don’t get it, we don’t want them. We believe they’re evil. We see them, and their skills, as a liability and not employable asset.
You seem to have an enormous chip on your shoulder towards FAANG companies. Did you work for one and fail spectacularly, or did you just get rejected a bunch of times?
How can the number of offers be indeterminate?
Also, who says I'm a "he"? FAANG companies have smart female engineers too (not nearly enough, but we're working on it)
Assuming you're saying this as a way to effectively double the pool of people your throwaway comes from, adding a bit to the entropy. Adding more writing style sample, and on another topic, probably does more to identify you than the extra bit of entropy reduced.