I'll match your anecdote with mine. I'm an engineering leader at a small company that has worked at FAANG. I have personal mixed feelings about working at FB, but it's a very strong positive signal about someone's engineering ability (and comp expectations lol). Send any good coders you toss out because they worked at FB my way!!
I’ll match your anecdote with mine. I’ve been everything from CTO to lead engineer. I’ve made sure we always pay well above average for every role because I’d rather have one exceptional engineer than 10 regular ones.
FAANG on your resume is an instant disqualification.
I would like to know this as well. Anyone willing to write off literally millions of engineers because they happened to work at some huge companies is someone worth avoiding.
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.
> Because they made the choice to work at some incredibly evil corporations
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.
> 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.
What about Microsoft? Do their employees get a pass because the company wasn’t included in Jim Cramer’s acronym? It seems odd to single Cramer’s stock picks out specifically. What about Philip Morris ex-employees? Palantir? HSBC or any other evil investment bank? I think those three have done far more evil, but you’ll consider their alumni because they are not specifically “FAANG”? So odd to single out five specific companies that are only associated with each other because a TV personality made an acronym out of them.
There is plenty of evil. FAANG has no lock on it. Microsoft, Oracle, ransom gangs, Goldman Sachs. Wanting to get out of them ought to be a mark in one's favor.
I personally wouldn’t hold it against someone for working at FB. Life and people are way more complicated (or not complicated, for that matter) than what you’ve reduced it down to. For one thing, consider that just because you exclude people who worked at FAANG, you’re not actually accounting for all the other thousand ways people can behave immorally or amorally. Screening out FAANG employees doesn’t actually get you very far in this regard. So it just looks like you’re harping on this one thing. Do you screen candidates who you think associate with politics you think are immoral? Or who have worked at tobacco companies? Etc.
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.
So how do you hire the best people? Seems like most employers focus on name-brand resumes and leetcode. I've never met anyone who does an actual substantial interview.
What kind of mistakes did you make, what kind of bad hires did you have? I'm curious what kind of flaws would correlate with having worked for a big company before.
If you're going to judge people for working at faang, you better never shop at Walmart or Amazon, never buy any foreign electronics because they're made with child labor, work for a non profit that doesn't shovel money away from those who produce it into the hands of shareholders that control the public policy allowing for atrocities like DuPont, never buy anything with Teflon in it, take the bus instead of owning a car, and boycotting cable and internet companies. We're all in the same exploitative evil system, get off your high horse and stop judging people for being employed. The workers aren't the evil, it's the people who call the shots and make the investments. If Jeff Bezos wants to go to space, he's going to space whether you help or not, so might as well take what you can get.
> If you're going to judge people for working at faang, you better never shop at Walmart or Amazon
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?
CTO and lead engineer of what size companies? How big was the tree of reports under you? What is the band of your total compensation recently? $100-200k? $500-1000k?
Honestly sounds like a bit of cope, especially if you've tried hiring in the past 10 years.
You're not going to dox yourself with compensation bands or something more specific than 400-1500. There are way too many people like that, and comp is not very public info.
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.
“ FAANG employees are liabilities best avoided, everyone in leadership positions knows it.”
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).
What? I don’t know what you wrote. However all of your attention seeking and grand standing does appear you are seeking something from others and are coping hard to have yourself believe you are not a sell out like every one else. Why you have to frame things so negatively is beyond me. I would not do so myself.
in which case it isn’t selling out. It is living life as an average person getting through life
Taking you at your word that you do this, I'm very glad I don't work with you. I would never want to associate with the kind of person who holds the employees responsible for the decisions of management, and then punishes them for wanting to leave that same management. Seems pretty biblical, in the original sin sense.
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?
> I would never want to associate with the kind of person who holds the employees responsible for the decisions of management
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.
I don't disagree with this, and I've never worked at MAGMA for these reasons, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't incredibly tempted. As an experienced dev (possibly not a great one though), I'm struggling to make ends meet with one dependent. Being able to eat out without having to update a spreadsheet to see what other things we're not going to be able to afford is a pretty big draw.
And I'm above the median for software devs in my area, but in a high CoL city in Canada.
Make sure you’re not violating your company’s guidelines. If I were at a company and I knew of signals based on subjective morality being used for filtering, I’d summarily fire the offending employee.
Clicked "favorite", because I have a feeling that a year later I'll be like "Dammit, what was that comment that made me think 'Now this is peak HN cringe'? Can't find it again..."
Not sure if you're making things up, but I really like your attitude. The world only moves forward because of people with principles, not because of people who make 'tough compromises'
I waited a while to reply to you, because the thread got overwhelmed with some pretty over the top opinions.
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 don't think anyone is being discarded just for working at Facebook, but if you're borderline in any of these other categories, working for a long time at Facebook is certainly a negative factor for getting a call back.
I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in when scoring a candidate. I guess someone could lie and say a candidate performed worse than they did, but unless the candidate actually performed poorly on other rounds, that isn't an automatic rejection (sometimes we'll ask for a follow-up round). Candidate performance tends to be pretty strongly correlated across rounds (unsurprisingly), so sharp outliers are pretty rare.
> I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in
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 mean, if you've been brainwormed by the idea that FAANG (what, literally all of them?) are _strongly net negative_ compared to the most realistic counterfactual that would spring up in their absence, and not only that, but that engineers working there are therefore morally tainted, then sure.
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.
> how does refusing to hire someone _leaving_ one of those companies improve the situation?
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.
Whoa, it seems like you might want to be careful with politics creeping into your decision making.
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.
It’s an entirely rational decision. The kinds of people who take a fat salary from FAANG are the exact kinds of people I want to keep out of my companies at all costs.
They are negative value add employees and I’ve yet to find a better way to filter them.
If you can make it into a FAANG/MAMAA/whatever flavor of the year acronym, you can make it into most tech companies (and still make a salary that's more than enough to live a dignified life and support yourself, and family if you have any).
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.
> If you can make it into a FAANG/MAMAA/whatever flavor of the year acronym, you can make it into most tech companies (and still make a salary that's more than enough to live a dignified life and support yourself, and family if you have any).
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.
> 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.
It's hilarious reading these anonymous hiring managers discussing how they'd hypothetically snub people like Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Andrew Morton, James Gosling or John Carmack for lack of morals and values.
All I can say is, the more I gain life experience, the less judgmental I get of other people and the less I believe in the concept of "good" people and "bad" people.
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.
No I wouldn’t. I’d feel gross being so judegemental and thinking so highly and self righteously about myself. I highly doubt the work your company does is blessing the earth with immense positivity.
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.
> No I wouldn’t. I’d feel gross being so judegemental and thinking so highly and self righteously about myself.
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.
Of course we have no way of knowing what you or your company does. You believe you make the world a better more honest place. Funny how often self righteous people believe that. I’d be willing to bet there will be plenty of people who have in my opinion more consistent views and principles on the problems with the current status quo and capitalism that would easily find your business not as amazing as you claim.
> 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.
Some hiring managers will care about your moral compass and your motivations more than others. (This isn’t a moral judgement on my part, just stating the phenotypes of hiring managers that I’ve seen.)
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.
But it’s certainly a factor when I’m reviewing resumes.