[PumpkinSpice]

Few people write blog posts to say "I worked at Foo Corp and it was okay." There's a strong bias toward horror stories. There's also a HN selection bias: a story about FAANG is a lot more likely to be upvoted than a story about some small startup.

I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better. They all have their idiosyncrasies, they all have good teams and terrible ones, they all have a ton of red tape.

I think the main problem is that they built their reputation by claiming they invented a new way of doing business and a new way of treating their employees. They were supposed to be the antidote to the corporate culture at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and whatnot. But ultimately, they converged on pretty much the same.

[personjerry]

I cared a lot about work-life balance so I did take some notes from friends.

First, it matters most what team you're on at these big companies. There are definitely teams that are more chill, and you better believe there are great managers that care about you. But many don't, and often teams that are "high impact" (i.e. move the needle on growth by owning the signup funnel) are more intense.

As for FAANG, Netflix was known to be the most laborious, although the best paying; They'd slash the bottom x% every cycle. Apple was known for being secretive and siloed, and because of their shipping cycles many teams can have intense overtime, but overall it seemed ok. Amazon in general sounded like a half a tier lower in terms of pay and work culture. Google and Facebook were often similar on most fronts and generally pleasant to work at, although I did hear Google's promotions were more bureaucratic.

In terms of "a new way of treating employees", well yes they achieved that. Outside of silicon valley have you heard of those flexible hours, rest and vest, unlimited free food, arcades, swag, best equipment, or even well-documented formulaic promotions? I remember telling my friends and family for the first time and without fail their jaws would drop. That's why most people in the world would love to work at FAANG still. You better bet those thousands of employees are very much happy there. These practices have spread by way of tech startups, but are still not "common" by any measure.

Anyway that's my 2c, I worked on a very pleasant team at FB.

[zaphar]

I worked on 3 different fantastic teams at Google for my 7 year tenure there. It's a big company so you are going to find outliers on both ends of the spectrum but at least on the teams I worked with we were all productive, competent, and pretty chill.

[John23832]

The one that always gets left out (because it doesn't have a letter in FAANG), is Microsoft which, while bureaucratic, is stable and chill by all accounts.

[jefftk]

> There's also a HN selection bias: a story about FAANG is a lot more likely to be upvoted than a story about some small startup.

And an HN selection bias in tone too: a story about how great it was to work at a FAANG is probably also not going to get many upvotes.

[eru]

I did work at Google between 2014 to 2016. It was ok. I enjoyed my time there (about as much as I enjoyed other jobs I had).

> I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better.

Amazon had a reputation for working their software people pretty hard. Not sure if that's still the case.

[programmertote]

I know a little about that. Programmers in Amazon have to work harder mainly due to the poorly-designed/thought-out (despite sometimes unnecessary process like writing design docs and "discussing" over your solution with various 'stakeholders' until it gets approved) systems and tools supporting their internal development work. Pipelines is their CI/CD platform and boy, looking at the interface wants me to puke.

Every single step you need to implement requires you to look up several internal wiki pages, some of which are outdated and/or poorly written or linking out to another wiki page, and so on. My ex-manager always talk about 'scalability' (because they want to sell it to other teams for visibility) although that tool we are designing is going to be used by like 2-3 people and is processing at most like 500GB-1TB a day (which is not big data in my experience). In the name of scalability and rapid deployment, the manager wants us to use CDK, and we spend probably half of our team's effort maintaining/patching/upgrading that CDK dependencies (like Node.js and others). This is not to mention that when you want to tear down the resources created by CDK, it doesn't do things cleanly, so you are left with lots of CDK-created S3 buckets over time. Oh man, I can recount a few more problems surrounding the tools used within Amazon and how obtuse they are for usability and ease-of-development.

[yolovoe]

Depends on the team. I work in arguably one of the most core teams at AWS, and I’ll say that most oncalls, I am doing 60 hour weeks at least and getting woken up at night and/or paged in on weekends.

Outside of oncall, I’m constantly pushing back people who try to give me more work. Team is great, manager is great. We’re a team and I can definitely rely on them for support and my welfare. Work life balance can be really bad at times, but we get a good amount of PTO, promotions seem achievable, and my pay at least is really good cause of my manager and perf rating.

[kevincox]

I worked at Google 2016-2020 as an SRE in Ads. It was ok. It was definitely big corporation in that making globally optimal decisions was mired in bureaucracy and the upper management would say whatever they think would make the company happiest rather than their actual goals (lots of internal "PR" instead of transparency). But I don't think this is actually much different from other large companies, and day to day work was clear and valuable to the company.

[marcodave]

Funnily, isn't it what happens with "disruptor" companies like Uber and Airbnb? first they revolutionize the taxi/hotel market, then they slowly become what they were supposed to revolutionize

[shuntress]

Uber and Airbnb did not "revolutionize" taxis or hotels. They just used modern technology to skirt around dated labor/safety and zoning laws.

Edit: to be more clear - you have always been able to ask strangers for rides or to sleep at their place. It's just obviously impractical without a marketplace linking you cheaply and easily to willing hosts.

[musicale]

I concur that regulatory escape was key to both companies' success. (I think the term "regulatory entrepreneurship" was coined as well.)

However Uber did improve upon traditional taxi pricing by adopting the airport shuttle model of paying for the destination – rather than the perverse incentives and unpredictability of pay-per-mile or pay-per-minute. They also had better app-based dispatch and ride tracking.

[PumpkinSpice]

The desire to disrupt almost always arises out of ignorance. I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just that if you know the complex reasoning and all the institutional baggage that explains why hotels, banks, or old-school tech companies operate in a particular way, it's hard to say "let's blow it all up."

On the flip side, if you can explain it away as "they just don't get it and I do," it's a lot easier to act. And the thing is, sometimes, you get good results. Sometimes, the old way of doing business is just a matter of inertia, and the justifications used by others turn out to be bad.

But about just as often, you end up reinventing the wheel or re-learning the lessons that others learned before.