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by moviewatcher333 1348 days ago
> Those 12,000 employees are first in line for every and any job, before anybody who does not have FAANG credentials.

At the same time, I think there’s growing awareness of the “quality” of a lot of tech giants. Once the market gets flooded with people who are too bad to even be retained at companies like Facebook or Google, it may merely end up being a black mark on your résumé.

Similar to how some people choose to leave the specifics of their degree or some unscrupulous jobs off their history when looking for jobs, people may minimize time at a FAANG if thousands of them are entering the market all at once.

When you’ve got 5 applicants who twiddled their thumbs at Facebook for 5 years and all with similarly overinflated work history, someone with a decent GitHub profile and a visibly launched product from a tiny Midwest shop doesn’t look bad.

5 comments

Yeah, I've found a sizeable portion of these people will gladly stall a project indefinitely by bringing a "but does it scale" mindset to a deployment that fits on an instance and a few AWS services.

Like no really, we don't need to argue about a 5 page git branch management and deployment policy for 4 developers. We don't need datadog or whatever for 100KB of text files. Editing that github action that takes 2 hours to generate a docker deployment from scratch is a massive waste of time. etc.

What we do need is something that generates revenue and an engineering philosophy that mainly comes from the rest-and-vest crowd isn't it.

> Editing that github action that takes 2 hours to generate a docker deployment from scratch is a massive waste of time.

Definitely worth fixing this one.

No see, some guy from Heroku wrote a blog post about comprehensive build artifacts so now that's what we have to do. What don't you understand about comprehensive build artifacts? Maybe we can get on a long, long, long call to discuss how I'm right and you're wrong, I did work at $HUGE_COMPANY after all.

We can't possibly do things the wrong way, no matter how dumb our current practice is.

Immutable-ish builds are a great idea, but you should fix why on earth it's taking 2 hours for a Docker build :)
It already is a black mark since years if it was your only relevant employment.

Not because they are bad employees, but because they to used/focused/conditioned on Big Tech work. Which has often very different requirements and processes. Or in other words for such employees it can be especially challenging to onboard them. Which historically seem often is combined with an increased risk of them leaving your company not to long after on-boarding, weather that is for a different startup which now takes them or for founding their own company because they have the money reserves to risk it.

Or in other words, it's in general a risk you don't want to take when hiring.

Exceptions include: You have problems to hire anyone qualified. The person can somehow show through other qualifications that this isn't really a risk (pre "big tech" work, sometimes open source contributions but not always, etc).

I think reality will hit lot of these people. Similar thing happened in Finland with Nokia. A massive company for location, with compensation and internal politics and culture of big company. Many found it hard to adapt in new environment. Thus outside connections it not necessarily being positive thing on resume.
But the ex-FAANG engineer grinded leetcode harder than the guy with 1000 GitHub stars on a passion project.

Person with 1000 GitHub stars likely gets wrecked in leetcode style interviews. Just ask the creator of homebrew (yes, THAT homebrew) about what happened to him when he got an interview with Google

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