How Working At FAANG Makes Your Life Harder (From A Staff Engineer at Meta)

If you're new to Big Tech, some parts of your job as a software engineer become harder, not easier. In this video, I'll talk about four dimensions of development that become more painful working in FAANG/MANGA relative to a small company.

Hi! I’m Rahul, a software engineer and founder with a passion for teaching.

#TechCareerGrowth

Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
0:39 - Problem #1: Enormous codebases
2:21 - Problem #2: Company-specific abstractions
4:28 - Problem #3: Huge number of changes
6:28 - Problem #4: Tons of stakeholders

[RahulPandeyrkp]

Name something more frustrating than having your feature stuck in "review hell" at a big company 👇🏽 I'll wait...

[truthalonetriumphs]

Let me add one more thing - changes in the team by people leaving the company or the group. Sometimes there's no one to go to, to understand why a certain complicated design happened. Was it the integration of different products? Was it creeping changes that needed a good cleanup now? Do you modify the code (potentially breaking something) or copy and make changes (parallel implementation that's hard to maintain )? You need the help of people who have been there 5 or 10 years and they are just not available. Keeping experienced people (with familiarity of legacy code) around is one reason large companies are forced to pay higher and higher salaries.

[ybergik]

After 25+ years in the business, working in companies with anywhere from 20 to 100, 000 employees, I've found that the best experience by far is to be had in the smaller companies. In smaller companies (a few hundred employees), you not only get to work on the complete stack, but also be much more involved in deciding what to do and be responsible for testing and supporting it, rather than just be a tiny insignificant cog in the giant machine. Just avoid the smallest companies that don't have enough people to relieve you when you need time off.

[abdulbadisabir]

This is amazing! Nobody else discusses nor articulates at this level of technical depth. Thank you

[keyone]

I am working for a FAANG, but one company that got acquired by a FAANG few years ago, it's a little bit different, we have a code base, we use Git, and normal CI/CD pipelines, popular tools for managing the infrastructure, microservices architecture, no mono repo, even within big tech you can end up in very different situations :)

[srinivaskalyanpotru]

100% on point. Could not agree more. Able to communicate well at various levels in a big company is crucial in oder to succeed in your role.

[ChasquiSoy]

1. Startups hire one person to do five jobs. Big companies hire five people to do one job.
2. Don’t fall into the big salary money honey trap. There is a reason why big companies want to do your laundry
3. Big companies are filled with bullshit. Prepare for politics, pecking orders, and mediocrity
4. Big companies fight Innovation, Startups breed it. Public shareholders want you to milk it, startups need you to build it.
5. Keep your burn extremely low and your options open. Overhead kills options.
6. Joining a year-one startup is your best first option. Don’t worry about salary; worry about how much you will learn and how fast you will learn it.
7. Now is the best time ever to build a startup. Everyone is scared, talent is abundant, absurd salary packages are getting pulled, and cash is on the sidelines.
8. Work hard and learn everything you can. Specialize and generalize
9. Equity = Destiny. Power, Freedom, and money are driven by equity
10. Days are long but years are short. You will wake up one day and be 30, 40 and 50. And sadly, one day, you simply won’t wake up.
- Jason Calacanis (Founder University)

[TransmentalMe]

Really awesome information and accurate representation of the differences. As someone on the platform team at a big tech company, I can say this applies across roles outside of engineering as well. If you want to work on big tech, whether that is in Customer Experience, Engineering/Platform, UI/UX, etc. You WILL need sharp collaboration and communication skills. You must be able to get out of your comfort zone if you're not used to working with people across multiple teams and many different levels (ICs, Managers, Executives) and talking styles.

[oleksandrasaskia]

This is spot on! Thanks a lot! My other frustration: often your work is evaluated based on your power point presentation skills…

[rafatmunshi]

After working in Amazon for 6 months, I have experienced each of these, so this is so on point. Thanks Rahul for the confirmation of the challenges. Somehow I won't call them challenges, it's so enjoyable and admirable for me, that it's fun!

[erabhikdasgupta]

I was having a great time learning in a smaller company but the pay is less. That's because ethey have less customers, hence less revenue so they won't give you a great pay.

But as a PM, I was not there to just set the big picture, but did a lot of hands on job. I owned the Cloud infra keys, manage and control what releases needed to be sent when, had more control over design and most importantly took decision very fast.

Now I work at a FAANG level one and God it's so slow in process. Decision making takes for ever. YES, I do get 5 times more than what I used to do before but I feel that all that I learnt to get into such a company and then literally have no view on anything. Even if you want to do a POC you literally need to raise a ticket wait for days for someone to pick it up so that you can have some libraries installed and then if you feel you need one more you wait again. You will feel so frustrated sometimes that you might end up writing the very library you wanted to install because that's much quicker and even keeps you busy.

So if you are born talented, you can join FAANG right early in career, but if you want to grow join a startup, work really hard in that to gain as much exposure and experience, if they give you ESOPs even better because you will also grow richer.

Anyhow as long as it's not your own startup, it's all the same be it FAANG or something else. As long as you get paid, you are dojng really well in life.

[chidianuforo]

I currently work at Meta and see you were an Android engineer. As an Android user, that's pretty cool.

[lukezhuo]

Problem #5: Being an ex-FAANG intern and encountering FAANG hiring freezes.
*Rahul timed his startup exit perfectly

[LifeReadiness]

Completely agree to all the points. I am currently working in MAANG and face most these problems on a regular basis. After a point, it is really frustrating TBH.

[truthalonetriumphs]

Seeing these challenges right now at Meta. Good job on the video!

[Italya]

One of the most amazing and honest videos I have even seen about big tech! 👏👏🔥🔥
Many thanks for sharing with us the authentic side of the big tech 👍🔥
May Allah bless you 🙏

I interacted with Alll ads to support your amazing video!

[returncode]

All junior devs who follow those twitter tech influencers "go to fullstack in 6 weeks" or something, that's the truth, you will literally freak out when it's your first time joining a larger tech company and your codebase for the first time see. You don't know how challenging that is. The point is that you cannot prepare for this experience. You must have the ability to think in a very structured way and be a very disciplined person. Otherwise you fail and prepare for a nervous breakdown.

[crowel]

The first problem you mentioned is poor design, not an inherent problem of FAANG companies. I've been at a FAANG company for 10 years now and have never encountered a codebase that would not load onto my local machine. We use GIT and have many smaller projects. We don't have one giant monolithic software product, because that's not how you build good software.

[lmze]

Curiously, this is not about coding interviews, but it explains why they are the best way to evaluate people - you got to know how to communicate, face challenges and actually solve problems, not just google them

[jaldeepupadhyay]

Tech Stack. you might be using php at your local web dev but if you move to meta then you have to work with Heck(Php version of meta) but if you move to amazon from meta then you have to work with their defined version of spring. bottom line is small companies are not tech agnostic which might be good for some developer.