[solarmist]

I find this attitude baffling.

In my time at tier one companies I have worked with the best engineers I have come across in my entire career (even the worst engineers were more than competent) who were working on deep issues that could affect the revenue of the entire company because they’re laser focused on providing value to the business, instead of doing engineering for engineering’s sake. I have grown by far more in these kinds of roles than I have anywhere else because the kind of problems you encounter at such a high scale just don’t exist elsewhere. And most of them have been there for at least five years if not longer you don’t make those kind of contributions to accompany without a long tenure.

[adastra22]

> In my time at tier one companies I have worked with the best engineers I have come across in my entire career

You’re throwing a giant red flag right here. First of all, FAANG isn’t “tier one” except to people who idolize these companies. More agile startups are trying to disrupt these dinosaurs and do not thing very highly of them. Many of us who have worked with FAANG and ex-FAANG engineers were not impressed.

[swatcoder]

I mean, I'm just sharing the practical ground truth of how a resume like yours effects recruiting in certain contexts.

Just like there are innumerable brilliant, effective engineers who would contribute tremendously to a FAANG but don't suit the modern interview funnel (leetcode, etc), smaller companies surely do miss out on strong, suitable FAANG engineers in anticipation of negative experiences they've had with others.

There are a lot of people who accumulate FAANG entries on their resume and many of them really don't suit smaller companies for a number of reasons.

Honestly, though while I'm only seeing a very narrow picture of you here, it sure sounds like you see these "tier one" companies as a desirable place to work, with prestigious colleagues and profound learning opportunities on high scale problems that just don't exist elsewhere, and surely for much more money. Are you sure you're really going to be happy somewhere else? Or might you get restless? That's precisely the kind of concern these smaller companies carry when seeing FAANG stuff on a resume, and it doesn't seem like it should be baffling that they would do.

[solarmist]

I definitely used to. The work culture and attitudes, particularly of management, passed the breaking point for me a few years ago. I realized work was not my whole life nor did I aspire to that.

As I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121594)