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Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

This last year I finally landed a SDE job at a FAANG company! However, I'm considering quitting because I am not happy.

The good: I get paid better than my last jobs. I can browse internal resources to satisfy my curiosity about how things work.

The bad: Basically no work gets done and there's no motivation to do any.

The dev tools, docs and tech debt impart such a slow iteration speed that even when I am working a full 8 hours, only a few very small changes get done, yet somehow this is even more than most of the rest of my team can muster during an entire week.

Because of this, I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during the the week. The other days I only open my computer for standup and if I get an IM. As far as I can tell, if I can be just barely the best on the team by doing there's nothing the company will offer me to work harder. If I get asked about why it takes long to make a simple change I can point to the environment and shrug my shoulders. Of course, it's possible the rest of the team is doing that too, but I have no way of knowing.

This amounts to a glacial development pace and when I look back at the progress made since I joined and estimate the cost to the company (salary, servers, etc) it's frankly disgusting. I don't feel what I'm doing is ethnically wrong, because the company is evidently pleased with my current productivity, but I find it unsatisfying and like a waste of my time on earth.

So my question is: Is all of FAANG like this? If the market value of such incompetence if FAANG salary, how can I do good work and get paid preportionally?

738 points faang0722 6 years ago 614 comments

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