You can coast in a lot of jobs at Google and Microsoft (speaking from experience). It was a bit of a trap for me though, and wasn't a great feeling coasting though as I wanted to build / achieve things.
Any tips on how to get placed on these coast teams at FAANG? I'm currently working on a side project and it would be awesome to have a FAANG-income working 20-30 hours a week so I can grind on my project w/o having to sacrifice my savings.
For me it was time and luck. Some patterns I have noticed:
1. Product groups suck. Avoid those unless you want to feel the burn.
2. Avoid sales engineering where you are either billable, have targets or have a million customers.
3. Find a group/area going through lots of growth (cloud is the spotGCP/Azure/AWS). It's much easier to ride the macro waves. Avoid groups with lots of competition/in-fighting.
4. Make friends and be good company. People prefer good company over good workers.
5. The longer your tenure, the more likely you are able to engineer whatever role you want to have. You will also have the network to support you.
The perception these companies has created is totally bullshit and you are self selecting yourself out.
Although these companies create artificially high barriers, most of the work is pretty ordinary and my colleagues are pretty ordinary too. That's totally OK because people would be very unsatisfied and leave if they were working too long below their ability/aspiration.
Sure, there are the big throbbing brains here and there but that's maybe a few percent. Most SWEs are just stringing APIs together, doing boring YAML work or whiling away their days in meetings.
Wow, that's a bingo on my day today. Literally started with a meeting, did some API integration work, and fiddled with YAML a bit. Just a run of the mill small healthcare software company, but there's work to do and the people/leadership are pretty good, so I can't complain.
