If I had taken a Reddit/HN approved job instead of working at FAANGs for 20 years, I’d be looking at another 20 years of soul crushing work. Instead, I’m retired. Sure you have to roll your eyes at the corporate nonsense sometimes but I’m happy I made that trade-off.
Nothing wrong with that in principle, I just can't imagine it. I've never worked at FAANGs, but I have at some pretty closely adjacent outfits (swarming with ex-FAANGs) and 3-4yr is just about the most I can stand before I have to quit (or get myself fired) for a while and reset. Whenever push comes to shove between the medieval politicking and just.. engineering fact, I just can't bring myself to throw what I know to be true and accurate under the wheels of petty nonsense. Surely there must be some middle ground, where companies can grow beyond O(100) people and not lose the plot entirely?
I don't know. I've always worked at the big companies and they all had slightly different variants of the same nonsense. New companies may begin with mission-driven people but once it grows beyond a certain point, enough money/power-driven people join that the company irrevocably changes. Seems inescapable. Given that, and the fact that being mission-driven doesn't pay for my kid's piano lessons as well as FAANG did, I held my nose and compartmentalized work into the working hours as best as I could. There's less corporate backbiting in the less glamorous parts of a FAANG (test/QA, internal tools, etc.) but the pay is just as good, so that's where I always gravitated.
3-4 years is also about my tolerance for the run-of-the-mill bullshit and bureaucracy and politics at any company. I need a fresh slate every few years as well.
Interestingly, my worst career experience was at a company with ~30 people. So you don't necessarily need size to produce bad results.
Yea this idea that I should provide less for my family in order to pass some HN morality smell test is a luxury belief that those of us in the real world sneer at.
I quite like welding. Every time a tech job has gotten to the point where it's like "fuck you, fire me or I'll quit" I always fall back on that. If nobody will hire me to program computers, I'm a pretty good fabricator and I can lay down decent welds all day long. MIG, stick, torch, TIG.. whatever you got. It's less money but life isn't all about that.