I know the consensus on HN is that FAANG is nothing special (and not that hard to get into!), but for a recent grad with mediocre internships from the pandemic and minimal opportunities for development in the role I'm currently in, getting clout like that on my resume early in my career would be awesome. Here's hoping the slowdowns really don't end up hitting technical roles as hard.
If I can offer my voice - focus on doing some real shit. Don't worry about the career ladder - find experiences where you accomplished some real goals. Getting on the FAANG career ladder too early is probably very limiting. The big differentiator is whether you can take on accountability for making decisions; this requires practice (and luck) => experience.
Don't stress it. People told me this when I was a recent college grad in the mid 2000's. Develop your own heuristic of learning and growing versus stagnating. On the outside-of-FAANG-world, there are so many more opportunities for growth than a kept engineer can imagine.
I can’t help but at chuckle at this with how big a barrier there is in comp between faang and non faang companies. You can get in if you spend months studying again or have a job that legitimately has you using comp sci on a day to day basis but for most folks they are gonna forget the skills needed to get a faang job shortly after college if they don’t get into one
Source: I went the process of failing the SWE interview but got an offer as an SRE.
That said, if you already possess this knowledge it could be easier as it takes a bit of the randomness out of getting a LeetCode question that you can’t figure out.
Definitely ask your recruiter and have them confirm which track you're interviewing for.
They just have numbers to hit. They will try to drop you into whichever track they need to. If a recruiter ever "seemingly misspoke" and moved you from SWE to SWE-SRE, ask for confirmation and/or insist on interviewing the track you are actually interested in.
Why do you think this would affect you interviewing as a software engineer?
It's nothing special to those who are OK with leaving 6-figures on the table per anum - or are independently wealthy.
Maybe it is okay to slow hiring if 'normal' is ten thousand new hires in three months
No inside info here, just noting that that kind of hiring is par for the course.
This meme never made sense to me. How big is Google compared to it's competitors? Even if we narrow the scope down to the top 5% of talent - Google jas plenty of competition there. At best, Google can hang onto employees for a few years: not a great strategy for competing when employee churn is high.
If Google really wanted to hoard talent, they'd ensure current employees earn as much as new hires.
Not sure what my options are now but I’m running out of steam during a recession that is projected to last for 1-2 years. I’m the sole provider for a young family and also my aging mother whom didn’t plan for retirement.
Hopefully this all blows over quickly or I can harness resolve to keep grinding it out.
What leads you to believe this will be the case?
I'm just stating this in case people fool themselves in any way at the moment. Things are bleak and those who aren't lay people have pessimistic outlooks.
If you think companies are some kind of accurate leading indicator here, you’re being highly selective in the data you’re evaluating.
The economy is complex, it’s safe to slow down hiring, no one will remember a company that left money on the table when the storm clouds started forming, but they will remember a company that ignored “obvious” signs of a problem.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
Real wages are declining not growing. $393/week median in Q2 2020, $362/week in Q4 2021.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Number of job openings are declining after peaking in March. 11,855,000 in March, 11,254,000 in May.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL
Gas prices went from $1.94 a gallon in May of 2020 to $5.03 in June of last month.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=e...
Yes, prices might have come down slightly since June. But overall, the statistics you cite are all trending negative.
(I know people don’t like Krugman, but this piece is nuanced and apolitical)
For companies connected to these trends or the capital cycle, yes...it is going to be bad, most companies that failed to IPO won't survive, a lot of the late stage flippers have already lost everything (they just aren't marking down yet).
But this is a small part of tech, and a small part of the world. US tech had the fun on the way up...well, this is the next part. But the general economics of demand for tech are still good. The problem with large tech companies is that they took profitable businesses and then started hiring like mad and setting fire to cash (this isn't only unprofitable companies, Google is a tech company with a bureaucracy attached, the way that company is run is just comical). Tomorrow has come.
So… deciding to move to channels where ROI is unknowable?
And not much consequence for that, and that too in a slowing economy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-23/morgan-st...
If people are worried about their jobs (or being laid off/unable to find new jobs), they'll spend less...
I don't know if it's impostor syndrome or just sheer brand strength, but my first reaction was "why would Google be interested in me?".
Judging by the tone of those emails it might be that Google turned up the heat in HR already and people are racing to meet KPIs.
Due to the literal hoard of cash sitting around, any meaningful then existential threat would have required a large rapid change of the world economic order and demanded a large scale reorg and mass firings anyway - so they may as well have assumed the world wasn't ending and just kept hiring. That decision then really ended up mucking things up internally.
A software engineer who does't care about gaming the FAANG Leetcode interview process is still valuable - even more valuable.
Right now probably isn't a great time to negotiate an impressive comp package with Big-G, Facebook, Oracle, SAP, or Netflix.
Comp bands themselves aren't changing, only the numbers of hires are being reduced. If you are good enough to get and pass the interview loop at FAANG during a recession, the company really wants you - so you can probably negotiate the maximum comp package - which is doubly beneficial as stock prices are low right now.
Source: I and some of my friends have recently received offers from FAANG
- software engineers, who create, initially maintain, and develop long term maintenance plans for software
- site reliability engineers, who keep existing products healthy, deal with unexpected complications in realtime, and continuously engineer improvements on how to do their jobs so they can carry more and more active software per SRE.
But no, it's site reliability engineering.
