Why is it required not to say "no" or suggest alternative directions in order to work with your employer to make their goals happen?

I don't think it's cynical at all. Quite the opposite: I think it's how functional teams work effectively.

Of course you can get rich from a FAANG job. But most of us don't work at FAANG. And there are plenty of slackers even at FAANG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21961560 "Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?"

My thesis here is that this person wasn't doing anything wrong. They don't need to feel bad about providing value to their employer by only "patching things together from an internal codebase" or "not deeply understanding every aspect of what they do." The vast majority of the world operates this way, and I'm not sure FAANG is much of an exception.

I totally agree with push back when necessary: my own career has seen lean times and heavy times as well and thankfully I had built enough work-equity with my employers that they gracefully helped me tide over them. So that’s not what am contesting.

I was addressing the heretical point you mentioned - ignore employer’s goals.

May be I missed an exaggeration there.

It's a balance. I think most people care too much about their employer's goals. The heresy is that you can't just say "Well, I don't care about my employer's goals," or else you'll be facing some negative reviews.

The trick is to make it a mental shift. Here's a concrete example: Suppose you were coordinating with some large bank that takes a very long time to do anything. Should you feel bad that most of your day is spent waiting for them? Should you proactively go out of your way to find extra work for yourself?

I don't think so. You waiting for Big Bank is the business goal. But most people will tell their manager "I have nothing to do; please find me more work" (in so many words).

There's no reason to stress yourself out like that. Some would say you'd be doing the bare minimum. I would say that you'd be fulfilling your business obligations, and that you'd be acting professionally.

Most people won't have such direct opportunities to minimize their workload. But they often maximize their own workload for no reason, until their managers practically force them to take time off. (Or they don't, which is worse.)

Well, again from personal experience and what I have seen, going the extra mile exactly like you said (not to) is what enabled many to grow both professionally and financially. For many, that’s exactly what put them on the faster track to all that’s good.

I know only a lucky few who got there by being there at the right time and coasting out. Most had to work it. I can really feel how it is easier to focus on those lucky ones (or the ones who missed out), but I prefer to still focus on the middle ones with right values for whom it worked out.

Few months back an SVP type came for internal talk about journey and growth that led to their present position. So their matra was: looking for opportunities, mentoring, having great mentors, learning, proactive problem solving blah..blah.

Now this all seems reasonably true. Most important thing they missed to tell was joining industry/company at time of explosive growth in sector. If one is out with graduate degree in EEE field in late eighties or early nineties and joined a growing tech firm they undoubtedly ended up doing very well even if not an SVP or higher. To their credit was not to totally screw up things and not some great leadership lessons.

This story is not going to repeat for engineer joining in 2020s. There are no great green field projects coming, or customer negotiations happening for a low/mid-level engineers. Most of them will be put to churn out and integrate thousand little micro services and feel grateful that they still have job and health insurance.

Reflecting on myself who joined in mid 2000s all interesting work is now past and even after gaining lot of experience I ended being a JIRA slave and daily agile standup chump today. I can't imagine what an extra mile would be in this environment. I might, however, get fired if I tell a lot of work they are trying to efficiently should not be done at all in first place.

I don’t know your exact situation - but I precisely started working full time in 2003. I have many peers who have grown to vp levels from that time.

Without more details, any points I make / advice I give will just sound like platitudes. But I do hope you turn it around. The job market is very hot right now fwiw if you want a fresh start.

What's the Big Dream at FAANG these days? What "greater goal" is there at Facebook in 2021? Or Amazon? I mean sure, if you want to switch off your moral compass and make lots of money, go you, I guess, but it sounds almost cultish at this point to still believe that there's a higher purpose to working for these companies.

Well I was a part of SqlCE efforts which was the first storage engine tuned for flash devices during a time when flash meant you had to account for wear in software etc. I launched dynamodb - tech lead for storage engines. I’ve been a part of few infrastructure projects in snap where savings are huge (there are talks from my peers in reinvent). Those savings enable snap to make investments like our AR glasses (again I was a part of launching this). I am currently looking at other infra projects which mean big picture efforts that are mind boggling in scope (sorry for being vague about snap - most of these efforts aren’t public).

Each one of those represent very big dreams for me. Dynamo powers practically half the internet. AR experiences are the future of computing interfaces (IMO).

That’s just my experience. I also know of a million projects with equal scope getting built out even today.

It comes down to this: do you want to be judged by your best day or your worst? I personally don’t focus on the media narrative that target a sliver of badness in these places. I prefer to work within the system either advancing the goodness or trying to rethink the issues affecting folks - sometimes luckily both. I believe these companies are too big to be brushed off in a single stroke.

Probably “Discretionary Equity”, a small-to-The-Company but large-to-the-Individual extra grant of restricted stock units given (in secret) to people whose contributions literally make-or-break the business. Think “invent HHVM”.

I do hope that people who got rich by being Faang employees are cynical, because that would be a better option (in my eyes, at least) to being sociopaths.

And "caring about your employer's" goals in this day and age while you're working at FB/Google/Amazon (I'm on the fence about Apple, don't have much of an opinion about Netflix) actually makes you look like a sociopath in my eyes. Again, imo being a cynic beats being a sociopath.

Please see my answer above. I really hope it makes you reconsider that opinion. Most of us are just regular Joe’s looking to make a good life and have an impact.

> And "caring about your employer's" goals in this day and age while you're working at FB/Google/Amazon actually makes you look like a sociopath in my eyes

Google and Amazon are very large corporations. Someone who works in GCP or AWS is benefiting rest of us.

Another way of seeing this is acknowledging that anyone who owns S&P 500 technically owns these companies. So if you’re making money in stock market, it’s happening due to the very same people you’re condemning. In this day and age it’s very hard to draw a line for “us vs. them”.

How do you figure I am in that bucket? (Fwiw - I am not).