[joeblau]

Their recruiters reach out to me about 4 times a year. I will say that some of the challenges and scale of the problems Facebook is solving really can't be found at other companies. You're doing data analytics, product design, infrastructure engineering, dev ops, security and software engineering at a scale that's pretty much never been done before. Also, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google generally define frameworks that other companies use. Think about products like Angular (Google), Bootstrap (Twitter), ReactNative/ReactJS (Facebook) — If you want to work on a project of that scale, there aren't that many options for companies to work for. I always tell my buddy who works at Turner — Your company is never going to be better than Facebook when all of the tools you use are built by Facebook. I also hear that compensation and benefits are really good, plus their stock value is going up faster than other companies in the market. If you live in the Bay Area, you need that equity boost to move up the socioeconomic ladder.

I probably won't ever work at Facebook (I have all of their services blocked in my host file and I've deleted my account and they aren't working on anything interesting to me) but I'm just trying play devils advocate and paint a picture of why someone would choose to work there.

[joeseeder]

Interesting bit is that, I wanted to counter the Stock price argument but after checking current trend it’s back to former values from last year. Well thought out arguments. cheers!

[blaisio]

I agree with everything except the projects. It is true that Google Amazon and Facebook have projects that are exclusive. But there are lots of other interesting and widely used projects out there. Redis, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Rust, Firefox, Python, VueJS, Linux, Apache Hive, Hadoop, etc. If you care about projects that involve the largest number of servers, you need to work for one of those companies. But if you care about your code being used by a huge number of people, there are lots of other interesting things out there.

[rak00n]

Also you may not end up in one of those "cool" projects either even if you land on a FANG job.

[akhilcacharya]

All of those things apply to Amazon too, yet for some reason that’s not considered in these conversations...I wonder why

[uahYqvaxHzj]

The difference is that Amazon doesn’t compensate their employees well.

[rak00n]

They pay on the same par as other big techs. See https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Amazon/Google/Facebook

[badfrog]

Compared to what? They're almost certainly >= 95th percentile for software engineer compensation.

[akhilcacharya]

That’s...debatable.

Disclaimer I work at Amazon.