[gloryjulio]

Uhhh, no? I don't think u realize how big of the gap between the average programming work vs fanng+ companies. Note that I didn't say the quality of the candidates, because I don't think it's hard and most of the ppl can achieve that level if they really tried. But the difference in work is so huge it's basically 2 type of jobs. In typical fanng companies, most regular ppl wont survive. It's highly competitive and require ppl to be able to ramp up repidly. At the same time, u need to maintain high performance all the time. Hard deadlines everywhere. Required to lead different projects and be oncall at the same time.

It's highly competitive and demanding basically the opposite of what ppl going through in the regular school system right now.

[onethought]

I’m calling bs on this. Many people in faang companies I know are pretty average work effort required is also pretty average, could you provide more concrete examples of where this isn’t true?

[gloryjulio]

Lets start from faang, Amazon/meta/Netflix have high review bar, u r behold to biquaterlly review and sometimes quarterly review. If u havent heard of ura, go look it up. Google is somewhat more relaxed as their culture encouraging improving the employees instead of performance based firing outright but this might change, look it up regardless. apple's wlb is suprisingly bad as their very top down, of coz the pay is good.

Outside faang,twitter was famed to be a more relax place. its gone now after elon take over. stripe is famous for being aws 2.0. these are the places are either i worked at or have friends there. Also consider thr currently layoff is largely performance based

for wlb, 40-50 is the norm if u r good. if u are average in putting out the effort, i dont think u can survive the ramp up in the first year with less than 50h per week. companies like amazon doesnt even give u time to ramp up.

But if u survive the first 2 year, u r probably fine. An 'average' employee in this sense will be vastly capable of dealing with the org chaos and oncall, and churn out the commits at the same time. The wlb will be much better if he is in a stable org. He will be more experienced in gaming the reviews too.

Once again, i never mentioned the quality of the candidates, i only talk about the work and performance. i think most of the ppl are capable,just whether they really tried.

[onethought]

You described politics not performance. 40-50 hours is pretty standard across most industries. It’s rare to find non-unionised places that truly do 40 hours. I’d say in the software industry 50 - 60 is gut-feel where I see a lot of people working (just my own personal network).

I think companies that went remote probably automatically shifted it up towards 50 as default, just because the home/work separation became more leaky.

(No data to back any of this up, but I’m still unconvinced that the FAANGs are anything special other than being big mega-corps)