[teirce]

Been looking since about February. I've probably sent out at least a hundred apps for positions I was interested in and met qualifications for.

I think I've made it to a recruiter screen around ~10 times, and I've had less than 5 actual interviews follow.

I have 6+ years in industry, 4 and some change of which were FAANG (which everyone believes is a golden ticket into any company). And I can't even get an interview.

I'm with OP. The grind is straight up depressing, demoralizing, soul crushing. I'm close to moving in with family just to preserve my money at this point.

[alexpotato]

>which were FAANG (which everyone believes is a golden ticket into any company).

In a past job, I saw a LOT of former FAANG candidates as a hiring manager (SRE @ hedge fund) at a past job.

In my experience, FAANG folks have a somewhat barbell distribution where it's either:

A. "This person is incredibly talented, well spoken and will probably find a job anywhere"

B. "This person spent 5 years at a FAANG and worked on basically two projects that would have taken <6 months at a hedge fund"

There doesn't really seem to be an in between.

I also distinctly remember learning that Google had 100K+ employees. To me, that is moving into "big bank" size territory and it's clearly impossible for EVERYONE who is former Google to be amazing.

[dehrmann]

My experience with FAANG candidates, especially those with only FAANG experience, while at a startup is they often have isolated skills and experience with bespoke, idiosyncratic ecosystems.

[russh]

> Isolated skills and experience with bespoke, idiosyncratic ecosystems.

Sounds like a good tagline for my Resume.

[outrun86]

“I have a very specific set of skills”

[sumanthvepa]

That was hilarious!

[ghaff]

At conferences and the like I've always been super-impressed by the Google folks I've spoke with and listened to. But it's also my understanding that Google doesn't let just anyone "out in the wild" so I assume I'm pretty much seeing one end of the barbell (or probably a smallish slice of it).

[master_crab]

Yeah all the FAANGs do this. They won't sponsor their bottom half to go to conferences, much less speak at them.

[scarface_74]

I can’t speak for Google. But Amazon has an internal speaker certification and you have to be approved before they let you go out in the wild.

[PaulRobinson]

Let’s be clear here: the certification steps are required to give a talk as an Amazon staff member. You can go to conferences as an attendee, you can mention where you work. You just can’t get up on stage and give a talk about what you work on without going through some steps to make sure you’re not inadvertently giving away secret sauce or putting the share price into a tailspin.

[ecshafer]

> I also distinctly remember learning that Google had 100K+ employees. To me, that is moving into "big bank" size territory and it's clearly impossible for EVERYONE who is former Google to be amazing.

Ive worked at 3 places, sizes: <10, ~10k, and ~20k.

I cant even imagine 100k. 100k for Toyota or Walmart, sure, that makes sense. But at tens of thousands of engineers you must have a lot of people not doing anything. Even at 20k, so maybe 5k engineers you only have so many people pushing on new stuff. Most are doing maintenance on crud and batch apps and keeping up with whatever "initiatives" are being pushed while attending meetings.

Most impressive to me imo are the instagram type companies that have 20 employees when they are sold/ipo or whatever.

[ghaff]

When I was an industry analyst and had more exposure to large companies at fairly high levels, the thing that impressed me was that they were able to function at all. So many layers of management, so many moving parts, so much coordination needed.

It also wan't unusual for me to be consulting with some group and some topic would come up and we'd be--you do know that so and so at your company is working on this, right? And they usually wouldn't.

[screwturner68]

I worked for a company with over 200,000 employees and honestly it feels like working at a small company that is at war with 1000 other small companies and four times a year we get together to re-sign cease fire agreements. Except for the endless amount of corporate bullshit it feels like a much smaller company than you'd think.

[Glawen]

I did places with 300k, 8k, 1k and 150 (industrial companies).

Believe it or not, but the places I slacked the least was (obviously) the 150 employee company and the 300k! It was really well organised, you had no time to spare.

I'm now in the 8k place, and it's crazy the amount of people doing nothing.

[kmoser]

100K+ employees doesn't necessarily mean they're all engineers, even at Google. Many of them are probably either engineer-adjacent (meaning they work with engineers but don't code themselves) or are scientists of another sort (not coders).

[discordance]

> at tens of thousands of engineers you must have a lot of people not doing anything

Although the org sizes may be large, the smaller subgroups within run like smaller semi-independent companies. They have their own business targets, roadmaps and backlogs just like any start up or mid-sized company. Some of the most productive times I have had have been at >100k companies.

[genmud]

Walmart has like 2 million+ employees, which is insane to think about. I have worked at a few ultra huge corps, one which had about 140k people, and like 240k devices in their org.

When I changed jobs there in 2007, I had just come from a hosting provider where we had engineers that managed 500-1000 servers per person, depending on their role or the amount of automation. It was like I stepped back in time to 1999 and everything was manually managed/maintained.

[vaxman]

ROFL (we had well over 100K other engineers at DEC when I worked there and connected via a pre-Internet system called EasyNet and were managed in a matrix)

[screwturner68]

We plumped up to over 350,000 after the Compaq, HP, EDS mergers. When the HP and the DEC engineers got together it was like a 1960's love in and then...Czarly.

[jitl]

At this point I’m more hesitant to hire FAANG employees who are used to really strict guardrails both culturally and technically to keep them “on track”. Most startups don’t have the guardrails and need people who make good choices without the bumpers. Hiring a bunch of FB and Google people did not improve Airbnb’s average engineering skill, rather it sank because a substantial part of our population only cared about promo and promo projects.

[araes]

Interesting from a couple perspectives (taking the above as honest about AirBNB). Confirms a bit about what's been weird with the economy and hiring.

From the man on the street's perspective (and apparently teirc's view above), FAANG work is where you want to go, and what you want to have on your resume. Per the quote, "a golden ticket". Pretty much all the news talks about.

However, if you talk to the rest of the tech community, they're like: "We tried poaching a few of them. We didn't really like the results. You work at one of those places and you get infected with something that's 'not startup'".

This seems a lot like Stanley and Neck's recent work [1]. The people you've historically been most likely to get as hires are the people most likely to ditch FAANG's for anything shinier. The people who don't "only care about promo", don't actually leave.

Other note, also similar to other recent posts [2] and comments about the change in Google. Like people finally realized: "wait...they're just like MS. All that 'Don't be evil' stuff was just corp-speak. Two decades later, and its strategy deja-vu with Android / Search / Ads. With MS now being the caring innovator who values your freedom of choice."

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00221...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37111317

[majesticglue]

I've heard of people who had terrible experiences with ex Amazon engineers. I've met a few of them, and not the greatest group of people to work with. Of course I'm stereotyping a very large company so take it with a grain of salt.

[esafak]

Any commonality?

[red-iron-pine]

> With MS now being the caring innovator who values your freedom of choice

they most certainly do not, but might be a slightly lesser evil in some ways

[araes]

Most certainly agree.

Yet, its not whether they 'actually' care. Just the noises they're making.

Google looks inept and malicious. MS wants health care money, cause its the next big market as everybody dies. "We care, cloud health innovation. All MS innovation is powered with empathy.[1] Nano, cyber, quantum, big data ... technobabble Tourette's, How the F** do we get defense contracts?"

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/empath...

[teirce]

I agree with that assessment, but with the caveat that I think this mostly applies to new-grad hires. In my experience, people who brought outside experience into FAANG weren't nearly as affected by these guard-rails outside of things I think most firms would approve of (mandatory code reviews, unit/integration tests, don't write inscrutable wizard code golf changes, don't be an ass).

I've spoken with recruiting firms before that literally told me companies asked them to stop sending people who were hired as a newgrad to FAANG.

[jokethrowaway]

That's a great explanation for why Airbnb was pushing out open source torture software like their eslint preset (I still have nightmares about it) while having the slowest and clunkiest frontend ever.

I started using booking.com first because of how bad that website was working and I had the latest MacBook.

[bennyg]

Are you filtering before the interview?

[agumonkey]

How did you structure your hiring, your teams and project lifecycle ?

[oldtownroad]

We hired a former Googler recently, great hire. Your resume couldn’t be more different from his: yours is so generic that my only takeaway is “oh he worked at Google”. I fear you’ve taken resume advice along the lines of “…explain the value of what you did…” (which is great advice) but should be used to augment technology experience, not replace it. I have no idea what you’re good at.

Find some former Google colleagues who have managed to get new jobs and ask to review their resumes. Google is noteworthy on a resume: it won’t guarantee you a job but it’ll mean someone reviews your resume. If you’re struggling so much with a 4 year Google stint under your belt, there’s something wrong with your resume.

[teirce]

> but should be used to augment technology experience, not replace it.

Do you have some specific feedback or bullets that stand out to you? Most of Google tech is all in-house stuff that nobody would recognize, outside of a few open-source counterparts (Blaze -> Bazel). I'm confused how my resume could better convey what I'm good at. I can say I worked with Java, Angular, Typescript, etc. But that's all exceedingly generic.

If I say something like "automated X thing in WombatLand using BlogSplort tool, saving 20% of engineering time" I don't see how that is more useful than saying "Automated the creation of full stack internal web-apps to launch in a production environment [...] saved hundreds of ENG-hours for teams launching internal applications"

[oldtownroad]

You’re describing work that has no relevance outside of a megacorp like Google which even amongst megacorps is quite unique because it invents technology and can afford to do so.

If you look at the type of work being done at “normal” companies you’re applying for, you’ll likely see work that is much more at the coal face and so experience at the coal face is worth much more than work that most people can’t even conceptualise — even if it happened at Google.

In a competitive hiring environment, you need your resume to tell the person reviewing it why you’re a safe bet. Your resume tells me that if I need someone to build internal full stack web-app automation then you’ve got experience of doing that at Google… which is great except Google is pretty much the only place where that work is required.

Don’t think of your experience as a list of things you’ve done, think of it as evidence for why you’re the right candidate to fill a role. If you’re applying for a company that has an internal customer support system then absolutely shout about how you did exactly that at Google, it’ll get you an interview… if you’re applying for a company that builds AR furniture previewing for e-commerce, it’s probably not worth even mentioning.

The perfect resume is a copy-and-paste of the job spec, you need to get as close to that as is possible. If you did a random weekend project at Google that can be framed as relevant to the job you’re applying for, that will do more for you than the hundreds of engineering hours you saved by automating the deployment of full stack apps.

Google is valuable to have on your resume because it lends credibility to the work you did, but that work has to be relevant to the job you’re applying for.

> I can say I worked with Java, Angular, Typescript, etc. But that's all exceedingly generic

For example, if you’re applying for a company that uses Angular, the focus of your experience section should be having used Angular at Google. A single paragraph that says “Google created Angular, I worked every day with Angular at Google. I built web apps that help support millions of Google customers via a customer service team processing thousands of calls per day. I used angular features x y and z and contributed code to Angular itself.” would be an order of magnitude more effective than what you have now.

[tayo42]

> In a competitive hiring environment, you need your resume to tell the person reviewing it why you’re a safe bet. Your resume tells me that if I need someone to build internal full stack web-app automation then you’ve got experience of doing that at Google… which is great except Google is pretty much the only place where that work is required

This is so incredibly dismissive and naive about the work being done. I can't believe you actually think this way. Its almost insulting

These kinds of projects require everything any other project needs. He learned a new tech, was able to identify a real problem then solve the issue with real measureable results. All of this within an organziation where you need to design and plan correctly

all of this is generalizable to almost any software work being done. and important skills for experienced engineers

[oldtownroad]

I absolutely do not mean to suggest his work was not valuable or that he is a bad software engineer. I am sure he is very talented. My point is that his resume is the problem, not his skill. A resume is a sales tool, and sales is about knowing your audience. His resume would be great if he was applying for a job at Google… but he isn’t and so he needs a resume that sells his skills to companies that aren’t Google.

I am sorry that my comments came across as anything other than encouraging and positive: I think he has great potential and that his time at Google will be a differentiator for him and will help him get interviews… as long as the resume is good.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

I'd also note that just like a cover letter, a resume can be customized to the job you're applying for. I keep a base resume with all my experience, and then selectively delete irrelevant portions for each job application.

[teirce]

Thank you for taking the time to write out this detailed feedback. I will have to think hard about how my resume may change, and in what ways.

I may end up starting from scratch and seeing what I can come up with and get further feedback from there.

[asfasdfaaaaaaa]

I didn't even notice you worked at Google until i spent like a minute reading your resume. You really need to remove that gigantic wall of text and briefly summarize things better and add some visual hierarchy.

When i look at this resume i get the impression you wouldn't be able to communicate very well.

[teirce]

Thank you for the fresh set of eyes and the feedback. I think I have spent so much time staring at, reading, and revising this thing that I’ve become blind to issues like these.

[mushbino]

I did exactly this. Moved back in with my folks and I'm almost middle aged. There has been zero job security for the past year and a half at least. Also periodically over the years put especially the past year and a half. Otherwise, I'm burning through money for rent, paying bay area prices and health insurance and everything else. People in tech usually scoff at the idea of unionizing, but I feel like we will have to at some point. At least for some amount of sanity and security.

[jokethrowaway]

There's definitely a bias in the interviewing process when someone is ex fang, everybody wants to have a FANG in team to brag about it. At the same time we try to keep the interview objective: we want someone who is nice to work with.

A quick tip:

When interviewing engineers I noticed that ex FANGs tend to fail the soft sides of the interview.

The type of interviews we do are relatively easy coding exercise (implement a frontend in react to do X, implement an API, fix an existing codebase). It's way easier than any fang exercise.

The core is not really getting the exercise 100% right (bugs may creep in, especially in a stressful situation), as long as you can prove you know how to work with some (=any) frontend or backend technology and reason about your code.

Something else we evaluate is how well they work with the interviewer to solve the problem.

From my experience FANGs people tend to be great problem solvers, but poor coworkers. Try to fine-tune that in your next interview!

Best of luck!

[james-revisoai]

You could always try leaving the FAANG name off or adapting it to the project name, and see how things go, given the associations people have with FAANG outside of SV/HN nowadays. Helped my friend a lot.

[iknowSFR]

How is this possible? Surely at this point you would have a network to lean on that wouldn’t leave you applying for jobs online? I’m hesitant to believe you don’t have a network and more willing to believe you don’t realize you have that network and maybe even not sure how to use it. I truly don’t mean this to be critical and instead curious: Why would you spend that much time applying for jobs with that type of success rate?

[teirce]

> How is this possible? Surely at this point you would have a network to lean on that wouldn’t leave you applying for jobs online? I’m hesitant to believe you don’t have a network and more willing to believe you don’t realize you have that network and maybe even not sure how to use it.

It's possible because of a couple reasons. The market is cold right now, and most of my network is _still at google_. There are a few folks I've worked with that have left for other places - but those places are either in hiring freezes or actively laying people off for the last few months.

You're partially right, though. Maybe I don't know how to utilize this network efficiently. Friend of friend etc, is probably something I need to work on more.

> Why would you spend that much time applying for jobs with that type of success rate?

Because I need a job?

[zlg_codes]

I'm sorry but this comment shows an immense amount of social privilege. Most of us don't have networks that can get us jobs. Those are exclusive cliques and it's foolish to assume everyone can lean on nepotism. Also, isn't it a bit scummy to keep someone in your life just in case you need a job?

[Solvitieg]

It's normal to leverage your connections to find a job. Arguably it's the preferred way for both employees and employers.

"It's not what you know, it's who you know"

You too can acquire this "privilege" by building relationships with people.

[laurels-marts]

This is true. The better you're at networking and building relationships the easier it gets in almost every domain of life. There's a point at which when you have enough connections and relationships you'll likely never need to write another motivation letter. You can just leverage your network.

[zlg_codes]

In what way is it moral to hire someone based on network instead of merit? That practice is itself the problem.

It is a privilege because the bar you're meant to reach is lower if you know someone.

What relationships would you build? You're coworkers. Friendships require outside-work time and effort, which is already in scant supply. I truly don't know how anyone manages these relationships.

[kmoser]

You're assuming a hire based on networking is somehow unqualified. In reality people hire based at least partly on networking because there is an assumption (whether true or not) that you can trust that person to some degree: I know them, they seem to have their act together, they can communicate reasonably well. In other words, they are more of a known quantity than a stranger with nothing more than a decent looking resume. One's network may not be perfect, but it tends to provide more qualified candidates than the Internet at large, so people tend to look to their network first.

If you live near even one person, you can get together with them and talk. That's how networking starts. If you don't live near anyone, there is no shortage of online forums where you can network.

[zlg_codes]

That assumption may not be correct, though maybe it is statistically better than a random Internet resume.

Where would you begin? Just talking doesn't do anything for me. I'm not into small talk or chit-chat. I think part of it for me is suspected neurodivergence, since I have great difficulty following what other people are coasting on instinctively. I'm drained within an hour or two and get incredibly irritable.

I went to a networking event once, on frontend dev and responsive design. This was back in 2012. I attended the talks and had some brief chatting, but the vibe there seemed like it was meant for people already well-networked or in the industry. I don't feel like I belong in these places, despite sharing an interest in computing.

[desert_rue]

I got my last job by kicking ass at the job before that. When someone left the previous company, she made sure to let me know she was hiring. I wouldn’t say we were friends; we never hung out outside of work. But she knew my capabilities and she knew what my interests were.

[red-iron-pine]

some people are born with social privilage, but a lot of folks work at it.

meetup.com groups, linux user groups, powershell scripters forums, python guilds, SCADA code conferences, etc.

doesn't even have to be tech stuff per se, my ISP account executives (sales guys) used to pull leads from Cars and Coffee meetups, painball, beer tasting events, etc.

you may not be born with blue-blood connections, but you can certainly build lots and lots of connections, and tech, esp. startup tech, is a place that lends itself well to that. go get em, killer.

> Also, isn't it a bit scummy to keep someone in your life just in case you need a job?

if you only see this as transactional, esp. in a one-way transactional sense, you're never going to network successfully; it's quid pro quo, and you need to be willing (and able) to give as well as receive. and not always just job stuff.

[zlg_codes]

What are these connections, really? Are they actually relationships, or just a list of people you can call for favors?

I've struggled to digest the feedback in the whole subthread. Quid pro quo makes sense, but then, you need something to give. I don't have anything people would want. I don't know anyone hiring, nor could I put a good word in about it.

You mentioned it's not just job stuff; what sort of stuff is it? I'm legitimately confused about how these relationships are any different than a half-baked, not-really-a-friendship, or acquaintance. The whole "why" for me would be to find better opportunities. This seems incompatible with what you and others are saying about networking, like it needs to be more than jobs. I'm struggling to grok what that "more than jobs" would be in networking compared to a friendship.

It's weird to express in light of what others have posted here. It really highlights the difference in how we process or understand socializing.

[jhatemyjob]

You're right. It's not friendship. It's reputation.

If you don't know someone's reputation, knowing whether or not they are good is very hard. That's what networking is for. When people know who you are and know your reputation, they feel safer hiring you.

[iknowSFR]

Privilege? Because I interact with coworkers and keep up with them? Get out of here.