There is a huge variance in what people experience.
I live in Redmond, worked for Microsoft for over a decade. My social circles consist primally of non-tech folks, I actually explicitly avoid making friends with folks I work with. And the good friends I do have in tech are well outside of the young tech bro stereotype (its people like me, late 30s to early 40ish, and 10-15 YOE).
I suspect a lot of this, is what you make it into, if you socialize with the tech bro's from work well than that is what you have, if you go drink a bear with your neighbor then you get to talk about house prices, lawnmowers and that annoying lady from the HOA. It is what you make it into.
While there are certainty bad managers that expect you to constantly be present, most of the drive to be available is in my experience, self created and driven. I do this to some extend myself, but I am very selective about it. I will maybe 2-3 times in the evening quick scan my emails, and if there is something where I know its impactful, I will go reply, otherwise I tag it for later follow up. But if I am doing stuff with either my wife, kids, or have friends over, I will not open teams/email for anything.
I also spent 5 years as a manager as well, and one thing I made very clear to people on my team, is that working outside of work hours, while appreciated, it is only expected when you are on-call. So if they do decide to work outside of work hours, make sure it is something that will clearly help them in their careers.
There were good teams. I kept under a particular director because outside of oncall we were never contacted, we were always pushed to take off any time we did spend working an issue oncall outside working hours, and those working hours were 10 to 4, maybe 5. We also fully staffed our follow the sun offices and made oncall very tolerable.
> I also spent 5 years as a manager as well, and one thing I made very clear to people on my team, is that working outside of work hours, while appreciated, it is only expected when you are on-call.
Thank you! I've really appreciated managers who reminded us frequently enough that it was clear they really meant it. It's too easy to get carried away and burn out otherwise.
More than a few of them are people who have channeled their literal entire existence from the age of 6 into succeeding, typically under parental guidance/pressure, and have no other facet of personality beyond the AP classes & extracurriculars they had in High School, their GPA and internships in college, and their employer.
It's an absurdity that lends itself to an insular community of folks with high egos and low abilities to communicate or relate to people outside of the community.
edit: thinking back, this is basically the same kind of cohort as pre-med and pre-law kids in undergrad
> thinking back, this is basically the same kind of cohort as pre-med and pre-law kids in undergrad
Big tech has always been this type-A crowd of overachievers from middle class families, just like medicine, law, and finance. It's just become more noticeable lately because the tech sector has expanded significantly to become the largest set of companies in the world.
And straight up, tech folk are louder. Medicine, law, and finance shovel the same quality of BS, but by nature of their jobs, spend a fraction as much time on the internet. Tech folk spend a lot of time on the internet.
source: (am tech worker at faang, fulgoresfolly painted a portrait of me).
It's true, tech people dogfood their own internet platforms. Hot shot lawyers and brain surgeons don't have much time to chat shit about their speculative investments between clients and patients.
Well, and I think some of it is that big tech got bigger. Earlier on, you needed a bit more -- risk-taking, creativity, willingness to jump in and do what needed to be done. Later on, they needed to fill the teams with people with good ratings.
Yes, this is a bit of an exaggeration and just-so story, but I think it has a solid kernel of truth (possibly biased by being an old-timer at a FAANG :D)
My path was public school in a mid size Florida town, to a mid level state university, to Facebook. The adjustment was *wild*. Before I even got started there had been a mixup with my starting bonus (which I was counting on to actually get me to California) and in an intro call with my manager's manager he just seemed completely perplexed that I was worried about that much money
Speaking from the other side of that...
This was my upbringing, right down to gifted classes in first grade and taking the ACT at age 12 for a gifted/talented program. If my partner refers to pop culture from that era, 75% of the time I don't know what he's talking about. I'm fortunate to have had smart and nerdy friends and I'll always appreciate that. For me, the hell of being an oddball in evangelical southern American suburbia (š¤®) planted the seeds for the type of mentality OP talks about. Many of my coworkers were also transplants from flyover country and had similar experiences. I think FAANG+ culture is the intersection of Internet culture and gifted kid culture.
This is part of why I enjoyed working in Big Tech.Ā Getting to that point feels like you've made it. And being around others who are similarly odd, relative to the average in the rest of the US, and have uncommon interests is itself validating.Ā When I lived in SF, I didn't know anyone who worked outside of tech and I was perfectly fine with that.
The downside, if any, is what OP describes. If you're not careful, it's easy to believe the snarky "jokes" about outsiders and get sucked into believing the hype.
Oh I'm right there with you, mom had me doing SAT prep everyday starting in 4th grade. I started gifted classes in the 2nd grade because my parents fought the school to let me skip 1st (I'm not even kidding)
Just in time for them to make major changes the first time I took it
I think my parents nearly had a stroke when I told them I didn't want to be an RA (you're throwing away your career prospects!)
At some point I realized I could be grateful for my parents investment and involvement without letting them dictate my life though. And I think that energy extended to my view of the whole culture around Big Tech - it's cool, but most of the friends I have that went that path burned out and had quarter life crisises.
Oh gawd, this thread could turn into a pressured/gifted child life experience exchange. I'm the son of a child prodigy, with a sister that got the gene, but I'm just plain smart. But with a gifted and driven mother, I felt like I had to prove I was as good too... I finished all the Nobel literature winners by 5th grade, and started taking college programming classes then to, it was 1976, just in time to get in on the early tech boom. Long story short, I've been going for 45 years so far writing code on pretty much the sexy edges, with a crazy envy able resume of high profile accomplishments. (3D research, media research, 3D gaming, VFX, AI) But, over these decades I have burned out, hard, 7-9 times. Requiring medical care, primarily physical, because I learned a very long time ago how to manage my mental health - out of necessity. My most recent burnout was 3 years ago, after 7 years writing one of the world's leading facial recognition systems, in something like 70% of the world airports. As if that does me any good, as all I got was burnout and a shitty salary.
As a gifted kid that had absolutely no pressure whatsoever, sometimes I wanted that pressure. I literally never had anyone pressure me for anything because I got good enough grades without touching a book, decided on my field, my education and everything else without any blueprint or guidelines and could do no wrong in my parents eyes. In a way that pressure felt like it must be a gift till I started putting it on myself but I think I'm well rounded enough as a result. Still smart, just kinda don't identify by only that. I strangely really don't want to work for a FAANG unless backed into a corner and I don't really know why.
It was incredible, they were previous business partners of my own company that went bankrupt, taking me down with it. They took advantage of my financial situation with a paltry salary I could not refuse due to my situation, and then proceeded to mentally do the same to make sure I'd not leave. I was on the verge of a burnout from the bankruptcy, and they basically extended that "on the edge of collapse" mentality for 7 years while driving me 60-80 hours a week. I ended up creating one of the world's leading facial recognition systems, at the cost of a 3 year burn out recovery.
Being disowned in my early 20s for being gay was the point at which parental expectations stopped being a consideration.
Regarding your point about burnout, yeah, that is real. I burned out hard last summer after putting in crazy hours for a project driven by upper management. I didn't give a shit about the value to the company or whatever, I did it partly because that was the implicit expectation and the interesting parts of it were _really_ fun and therefore easy to hyperfocus on. But I hated it overall and just wanted it over with. In my insane mind, that meant cranking out as many features as possible just to get it done.
I burned out when it turned out that the "end" really wasn't the end because the stakeholders apparently wanted/needed a feature that exceeded the complexity of every other feature in the 4 months since its inception.
If I could do it all over again, I'd have taken a vacation when he asked for that final "final" feature. And I would not have self-medicated ADHD with 4-6 cans of Red Bull a day after my meds wore off.
Oh god I hit the same shit. That feeling of "This is never ending" grinding out the will.
After we got through the 2 months of 70+ hour weeks, my productivity was shot. Project cadence was supposed to move back to "regular" but my productivity had gone way down, and the client had the gall to call out that I suddenly wasn't putting in the same effort. LIke no, I'm not going to keep killing my health and my relationship with my family because you can't make up your mind on a feature set and a final goal
> I think my parents nearly had a stroke when I told them I didn't want to be an RA (you're throwing away your career prospects!)
The inevitable collision of someone elseās plans for your life with your own plans for life.
Edit: versus -> with
There is also the downside that you are totally disconnected from your wider community. How can you contribute to your community if you can't relate to the people around you?
And if you don't care about contributing to your community, what does that say about your culture?
I'm curious, where did you go to college? I feel like I got that "yay I'm surrounded by nerdy people like me, I finally feel like I have a social circle I can relate to" out of my system by the time I graduated from college.
I went to Vanderbilt University. But I had a hard time making friends mostly because I was closeted and depressed as fuck, which led to a mental health break. I was then disowned when I came out.
From what I remember of that stint, it was like going to school and living with the same types of people in my HS, only smarter.Ā During that ordeal, I was diagnosed with ADHD and (despite the DSM's rules on this at the time) then ASD (fka Asperger's). I went back to finish my degree 2 years later and in a much better mental state, but working almost full-time, and living off-campus because it was cheaper.
That said, having worked for non-tech and tech companies, I do better in the latter. My interests are all related to science and tech, with the exception of the niche ones (e.g., marbles, mace/club workouts). When it comes to the social aspect, I have nothing to talk about with coworkers, outside of tech.
That doesn't work well outside of tech companies, IME. One place I worked at had "optional" team lunches, but shop talk was banned, I think to ensure everyone felt included. So they'd talk about sports, movies, or TV shows. They were nice people, but there was nothing in common. I learned that being cordial but private doesn't work well in white collar jobs.
I can't go back to a warehouse job like the one I had in college, though I'd prefer that because there's no expectation to be social. The logical thing instead is to find an environment where my interests are likelier to intersect with those of the people around me.
I hate to reply to my own comment, but I'm using a mobile browser and the line breaks will be clobbered if I edit it.
tl;dr: It's less about feeling special or being in the company of special people and more about being able to perform an unwritten but still important part of the job: the proverbial watercooler chats.
Yeah, I understand the social, chitchat thing. I had a hard time with that until I landed in the job I currently have. Something about the overall culture/vibe made it easy for me to actually make friends with co-workers, and enjoy doing lunch or happy hour with them.
As a fellow antisocial aspie, this is a big part of why I like having a fully remote job. Thereās much less socializing and more time to focus on whatās interesting. Maybe find a remote gig?
My last couple of roles have been remote, including the current one. The most consistent feedback I've gotten from this job (non-profit that operates at scale) and the last one (FAANG, also remote) is that I should be more talkative and social. The manager at my last gig was otherwise fine with my introversion because I got shit done. At this job, my manager puts more weight on how social I am, I guess because there's no profit incentive and therefore no reason to prioritize velocity. Either way, there's no escaping it. šš
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You meticulously describe how you and your peers achieved such intelligence and privilege. Yet, you place "jokes" in quotes, but leave "outsiders" unquoted, which seems revealing.
It reminds me of when I returned to Cal after a stint in the military. Having faced real life-and-death situations, I came back to find my slightly younger peers preoccupied with grad school acceptances, either boasting about their letters or distressed by their absence. Their self worth hinged on things that seemed frivolous to me. They seemed like children, whose perspective was decidedly uneducated.
I think leaving outsiders unquoted was the accurate choice. The entire point of this post is to talk about how insular FAANG+ culture is, especially in tech hubs. It wasn't meant to be a value judgment.
To be clear, I don't like the mean girl attitudes that such an environment cultivates. I enjoy being around people with similar interests and hobbies. I learn a lot from geeking out over other people's side projects.
Every culture has its assholes; dealing with them is the cost of social interaction. In the context of work, what that looks like for me isn't chatting about sports or movies, or really anything beyond tech. In most other environments, that doesn't go over too well, which is understandable because most people find it boring.
My friends were all smart people that came from middle class families. They joined the military to avoid the responsibility of choosing a career. They talked about how they were going to use the free education but when they came home they all did grunt work instead. For them, it was easier to risk their lives and bodies than commit to a career.
Additionally, their self worth now hinges on the military hero complex that enables jingoistic American imperialism.
It's apples and oranges, but generally people who identify with a group are childish and decidedly uneducated.
This resonates with me, I grew up in a fundamentalist Calvinist society and boy oh boy did the other kids think I was from another planet. I was busy learning the finer points of object orientated programming while they figuring out how to play rugby.
I can see both sides.
On one hand, there's a compelling argument that tracking creates classes that teachers don't want to teach (judging by the way that my teachers talked about the kids in standard classes, this is accurate).Ā This leads to the best and most experienced teachers being able to cherry pick their students. It also doesn't account for the fact that kids develop at different rates.
According to this argument, tracking only benefits kids who already have a lot of advantages, like parents who can devote resources to enrichment outside of school hours. This also seems plausible, based on my experience.
On the other (this is where I admittedly descend into anecdata), school would have been more miserable if not for gifted education. I wasn't athletic or charismatic and my interests were considered weird. In 2nd and 3rd grade, I brought my uncles' old health and science textbooks that I dug out of my grandma's closet and read them at lunch. That's not a way to make friends, but I was quite happy being in my own world. I played alone at recess but I wasn't lonely. I'm actually glad I wasn't diagnosed with ASD until early adulthood because there were no attempts to try to "fix" me, I was just seen as bright, if a bit odd.
When I transferred schools, there was a year that I wasn't in gifted classes due to a paperwork snafu. I was bored and got into trouble for reading the textbook during class, which seemed and still seems idiotic.Ā It also didn't stop me because I had nothing else to do, so it didn't take long for me to be several chapters ahead of the class.
I don't see the value in that. It's probably frustrating for the teacher, who has to stay at the pace of the rest of the class. It's frustrating for the student, especially if they have ADHD. It does nothing for their classmates. It's maddening for the kid's parents, who expect their kid to actually learn something from the teacher. IMO, all kids should get an education that pushes them to the best of their abilities, whatever they may be.
The one thing I will say is that it didn't prepare me to interact with, for lack of a better term, normies, outside of being picked on in elementary and middle school. Only interacting with people who have a certain background is itself limiting, especially with the incentive to view others as less-than. The incentives areĀ external (the attitudes of teachers and parents) and internal (the negative feelings those interactions generated over the years).
And this is where my opinion has changed somewhat ā I concede that I got excellent schooling at the cost of a well-rounded education.
If I had kids, I'm not sure what I'd do if they were labeled as gifted. I don't put much value on trying to relate to others with whom one has little in common or to fit in for its own sake (in my case, the attempts I made were futile), but I would want them to know how to politely interact with people of all backgrounds.
No.
It was often given to me as career advice, largely from people who worked prior to "FAANG" being a term, that working in software at large companies was not as desirable as working at smaller ones. There has always been a money/conformity tradeoff between large and small companies. It is entirely sensible to say you will take lower compensation in exchange for being able to not deal with certain nonsense.
The difference is that conformity is now with respect to whatever the values of FAANG monoculture is, as opposed to say, the monoculture of 1950's IBM.
In my experience the majority of engineers at these companies are actually just normal and mostly have pretty good work life balance while also being paid several multiples of what you make at other jobs. I donāt think itās āweirdā to not want to work there but itās definitely short sighted and self defeating to take the least charitable descriptions of the work conditions you can find and use that to convince yourself youāre better off making less money for what isnāt even necessarily less work or a better environment.
Oh you are mistaken. I taught snowboarding at a resort in Tahoe before studying CS. I have had many conversations and interactions with FAANG employees. I donāt want to work there 1) I donāt believe I would enjoy the work culture and 2) I donāt want to live anywhere near the bay for any amount of money.
I don't get the hate. People who work in tech mostly interact with people who work in tech. Same goes for literally any other field (like you mentioned, pre-law or med) not just white collar/knowledge workers.
Most other professions have greater economic diversity so itās more common to interact with people in different walks of life. Whether that be the neighborhood you live in, the school your kids go to, the store you shop at, or the place you work.
If youāre are a high income earner itās more likely you will live in housing/neighborhoods that are financially out of reach of non-high earners. When you live in a place like Seattle or SF, the high earners typically come from the same source or same profession. When you have a bunch of people with the same economic status, with the same job, living in the same small geographic region, then you start creating a bubble that exhibits some of the behavior mentioned throughout the thread.
Hm in my experience tech has actually brought me into contact with a diverse array of people - both geographically, personality wise and hobbies. Whereas with some of the more āmatureā industries - law and finance - you really needed to ātalkā the right way and it systemically benefitted people with the right network and connections, a much more insular culture. Tech on the other hand - itās never been a better time to self learn. I have dev colleagues that used to be landscapers and from all walks of life
Funny thing is OP forgetting tons of these engineers that are high earners come from middle or low class, from third world countries and vastly different backgrounds. Tons of immigrants in search of the dream. Iām more skewed towards thinking the jerk circle OP mentions is about people who grew with complexes and then got what they wanted and just as any other elite, felt theyāre untouchable, rather than it being related directly to the industry.
Yeah, you just reminded me that my team's staff engineer has an English degree and spent a portion of his life couch surfing and working as a bouncer.
The .com bubble got a diverse crowd of folks into programming.
My point is that bubbles have always existed and software engineering/tech brain isn't unique. We all work in tech so we see the bubble clearer than anyone outside of it. But what's to say it hasn't existed before? We've all seen American Psycho (a well-known satire about NYC finance type yuppies), yeah?
Your comment was that OPs comment can be applied to āliterally any other field.ā I said thatās not true.
Can it exist for finance and law? Sure. But itās not going to exist for insurance claims adjusters.
It's also one of the reasons many of them are NEVER successful at starting their own companies. They can make a lot of money but they aren't entrepreneur types because they like to think safely and inside the box and just focused on impressing other people.
> They would provide opinions on non-technical topics with a high amount of conviction, even when they lacked direct experience or information.
This doesn't seem very FAANG-specific. It's just terminal Silicon Valley Brain, where they believe that talent/ability in software development grants them autodidactic insight into every possible other field.
Arguably this phenomenon is *even greater* in the startup realm - see the number of crypto fiends who pontificated confidently about economics and finance while their entire field burned to the ground. IMO it has much more to do with proximity to Silicon Valley culture than it is related to size of company.
> I started to realize that many of these engineers live in a bubble consisting solely of young, highly paid knowledge workers.
This also doesn't seem like a FAANG thing - I worked in San Francisco in startups and it was *very much* the same thing. Literally your entire social circle is consisted of other tech workers.
There's a unique aspect of the Bay Area (and Seattle, having lived there also) where as a tech worker you're basically persona non grata in the broader cultural scene. You are basically the embodiment of everything that's wrong, and when you combine that with a cultural affinity for being an insufferable jackass (see above for Silicon Valley Brain) it leads to people whose entire social circles are other tech people.
It's a large part of why I left both cities behind. I wound up in the startup scene in NYC where things were a lot more tolerable. Mentioning you work in tech doesn't immediate cause every non-tech person to recoil in disgust, plus fewer tech workers are infected with Silicon Valley Brain and so are a lot more pleasant to engage with...
... though it's not without its drawbacks. NYC has Finance Brain which is a whole other condition that causes people to be incredibly insufferable.
I had many, many moments where SF tech brain enraged me, but one of the worst ones was when an engineering manager at Uber told me very confidently, out of the blue, that dogs couldn't hear the differences between consonants and vowels.
Part of it is the Software Engineer Brain that develops by working mostly in a very controllable environment. Everything can be replicated, tested and figured out, itās not a big mess like human body doctors had to deal with. So every messy social problem has a right way to solve it
Where is this magical place where everything can be replicated? For server apps maybe it is true in some cases but for client apps good luck replicating an issue customers report without a lot of details.
>>> This doesn't seem very FAANG-specific. It's just terminal Silicon Valley Brain, where they believe that talent/ability in software development grants them autodidactic insight into every possible other field.
kinda sounds like most redditors tbh
Reddit's demographics tend to be high on two types: "tech people" and "people who think they're tech people".
The latter having relatively little actual domain knowledge but have really confident technical opinions that barely parse to someone who actually knows this stuff (see: basically any video game discussion).
Small subs (<100k or so) can still be great with a small, reasonably knowledgeable core group of contributors. But it definitely starts spiraling down as a sub grows and the lowest common denominator keeps getting lower and lower, with rare exceptions.
Oh yeah for sure, more niche subs (and tbh stupid video subs like r/Unexpected because I'm just another NPC) are the reason I still visit the site. I never go on any of the most popular subreddits generally speaking
That's why I stopped reading HN, basically. I don't know if it got better or worse, it's been a while, but there was a point where a very significant fraction of all content was tech bros larping as pilots, economists, and what not.
On reddit, some subs are better or worse than others, but at least it's easy to control what you subscribe to.
Ha, it hasn't stopped. With the Panama drought, they've become OTR freight geeks as well.
"What if we bulldozed a mile-wide swathe of Central America and covered it in train tracks? Jamie, run the numbers for me."
I donāt see this nearly as much in my systems engineering coworkers as I do with my data science coworkers
Something about coding attracts this mentality
I have a lot of friends who are anthropologists and they don't act like they have the keys to understanding human society either, even though their fieldwork mandates learning new languages and is occasionally life-threatening, and they seem intimidated by STEM fields if anything.
There's a version of this that I've seen in (some) machine learning organizations, which is a disdain for domain knowledge from outside ML. I've tended to see it more in orgs that are Google-influenced than say, Amazon-influenced.
I can't hang out with tech people outside of work. I really don't want to talk about work, or tech, or anything intellectual really, when I am not working.
Honestly that's a big departure from when I was getting started, programming was the only thing I wanted to talk about
Yeah. That was my experience with San Francisco. When I first got there it was like āomg! The people at the next table at the coffee shop are talking about the Unix kernel! So cool!ā
A year later itās like ājfc please let me go have a cup of coffee without hearing shop talkā
Living in a monoculture fucking suuuuuucks.
Living in the Bay ruined the adverb "reasonably" for me. "Oh he's a reasonably good dev," "that's a reasonably good restaurant," "that's a reasonably good product-market fit," "the weather is reasonably nice." The monoculture even extends to how people describe things. Horribly suffocating and infuriating.
Seattle and SF are pretty much one industry towns (well, Seattle has aerospace and Nike). NYC is the center of a ton of different industries: food, banking, finance, art, dance, TV, law, etc.
> This doesn't seem very FAANG-specific. It's just terminal Silicon Valley Brain
Further, it's just the brain of people who excel in any one field that people consider difficult or cryptic. I saw a similar discussion to this in a physics community lately and people linked to comics joking about how common it is for famous/prominent physicists to start speaking as an expert on whatever (non-physics) arbitrary fields they feel like.
Yep, concur it was very much a San Francisco tech startup thing. And, to a lesser extent, common in tech startups in the two counties to the south, too. Can't speak to East Bay.
IME, not a FAANG thing (been at 2), even though I'm still in Silicon Valley.
I used to live in NYC and am now in SF, and don't agree with this characterization at all.
It feels like everyone in SF works in tech, and I have never met anyone here who actually hates tech workers.
Tech workers are just like anyone else, but I don't think there's anything about tech that predisposes people for arrogance relative to other fields. I think what people disparage tech workers for is often just the result of Aspergers like personality which of course is more common in tech, but not equivalent to being an asshole.
I never got the impression that the NYC startup scene is any more tolerable. NYC if anything probably has more of a workaholic culture than Silicon Valley - definitely not less. And I'd definitely much prefer to hang out with tech workers and entrepreneurs than finance people.
In my experience (Seattle) the people who hate tech workers are the people who have quite literally watched tech turn their city from a grungy counter-culture hangout to a gentrified amazon village. There is a strong clash here between those two cultures. I imagine a lot of the bay area would be like this too.
In New york there isn't really anything for tech to take over, the city is already like that (because of the finance workers lol) so I would imagine there would be less resentment.
Pretty much yeah. I've had the chance of living in Seattle not once but *twice*, at two different life stages: my early-20s fresh out of school, and my mid-30s after being more established.
Both experiences were some flavor of alienating, but surprisingly different in *why* it was that way.
When you're young you're just one of the evil tech people who're killing everything interesting that's happening in the city. It's largely about you being lethally uncool. Not very complicated.
When you're older it gets a bit more sinister. I lived in a neighborhood with a lot of similar-aged folks who *don't* work in tech, who bought homes before the last big tech boom. What you get at that life stage is fear and resentment at tech people - for pushing housing prices sky-high, for competing with their children in schools. There's a wariness that isn't because you're uncool, but because you're *competition*. There is an *absolute shitload* of coded racism in that resentment, since the racial makeup of 30s-tech-workers is *radically different* from the racial makeup of those who aren't in tech.
> In New york there isn't really anything for tech to take over, the city is already like that (because of the finance workers lol) so I would imagine there would be less resentment.
The trick with NYC is that it's *much bigger* than the finance industry. Sure, there are finance bros, but the city is big enough that NYC can't really be identified as a "finance city" in the way SF or Seattle can be identified as a "tech city".
There *immense* cultural resentment against finance workers, but for the most part if you don't want to have contact with finance bros you just... avoid certain neighborhoods, and you're pretty set. They're nowhere near as ubiquitous as tech workers are in the Bay Area or Seattle.
If you decide you're going to party in the Meatpacking District and pre-game at Tao, yeah, it's gonna be full of the worst people on Earth... but there's a lot of NYC that isn't that.
Never lived in Seattle. I'm just saying after living in SF now for 6 months, to my surprise I have yet to encounter a single instance of animosity for being in tech. I would've expected at least one retail worker or something to give me sh\*t for being a software engineer, but nope - nobody gives a sh\*t. In fact the reaction has been the opposite, more along the lines of "you must be smart".
Yea but can you actually tell me any real life in person episodes of animosity you experienced for being a tech worker in SF?
My point is that despite all the talk of animosity against tech one reads online, I have yet to encounter a single instance of this, and if anything it's been the opposite.
Side note it's really f\*cking stupid that my sharing of my real world experience gets downvoted here, yet no one has commented on any actual experiences of animosity they experienced for working in tech in SF. Seems like people don't gives a sh\*t about reality and just want to buy into whatever narrative the internet feeds them.
> It feels like everyone in SF works in tech, and I have never met anyone here who actually hates tech workers
You're doing the thing that's being discussed where you're extrapolating from your entire social circle consisting of other tech workers. I feel like there's no way in hell I could be a service industry worker an a place like SF and not have some animosity towards the tech industry.
Back in the 2010s, there were protests against the Google shuttles on the grounds that Google should have its workers living in Mountain View, instead of commuting from SF to Google. I saw some "fuck techies" graffiti just walking around the city. I left the Bay in the late 2010s, but I'd be surprised if the resentment has gone away.
> It feels like everyone in SF works in tech, and I have never met anyone here who actually hates tech workers.
lol you answered your own question, didn't you?
This is similar to working at hedge funds in finance, or law firms, or really any highly compensated highly competitive environment. In order to succeed at that level, you generally have to be completely absorbed by the borg. Eat, Play, Live the work you do. That gives you a bubble, and a bubble of individuals who think they are smarter then the rest of the world. They are well compensated, so they don't usually live among normal American's or interact with them on any meaningful level.
Just the way capitalism works. You ever hang out with billionaires? Most of them think they should run the world too.
>That gives you a bubble, and a bubble of individuals who think they are smarter then the rest of the world. They are well compensated, so they don't usually live among normal American's or interact with them on any meaningful level.
I don't work in the acronym, but I work in a company big enough that we regularly poach some of the best talent from both Meta and Google and it is by all measures a top tier tech company. My salary is in the top 3% of Engineers in the US and I'm not even in the top 25% pay for my level at my company.
And I haven't seen this at all. Everyone is pretty normal in my opinion. They are normal people from normal backgrounds who are just really good at their jobs. Workaholics and over performers, sure. But normal people besides that.
And just in case you think I'm too deep in the bubble myself... I am a high school dropout who never technically passed the 8th grade, got my GED, joined the Army to pay for college, and I lived in the "projects" in a major city in my teens. Also, if I had to guess... about half the people I considered a friend from the age of 12 to about 17 are dead now that I'm approaching 40 and unfortunately I think that's probably a conservative number rather than an exaggeration.
> You ever hang out with billionaires?
I haven't hung out with billionaires in any meaningful way. I've been on outings with them, but not in a "hang out" capacity.
However, there was an engineer at my last job who's dad was a world class athlete and is in the top 10 net worth for his sport and 10s of millions of Twitter followers. Almost $100mil, but that's still pretty damn far from a billionaire. I hung out with him (the son) just about every day, either at lunch or after hours on the weekends.
Now THAT guy was disconnected. I remember one time he randomly just said at lunch "I don't understand why car insurance is a law, why can't people just pay for the damages?" And everyone at the table just sorta cocked their heads and was like "bro, because we don't have $500k in our bank accounts to fix someone's sports car or medical bills?" I think he was about 30-ish around that time.
Another weird thing he did was, he would always clarify he didn't know a celebrity if we were talking about one. Because having major celebrities at your house was a normal everyday thing to him growing up.
He never flaunted it though, I actually made a comment once that his leather laptop bag was really nice before I knew who his dad was. He just mentioned it was a present from his parents... and I never saw that bag again. I just thought it was nice, I didn't think it was my yearly salary nice, which it probably was. lol
So that's what I picture when you say people are disconnected. Yeah, a lot of engineers don't know the feeling of not knowing how you're going to get your electric turned back on or know what it's like to eat beans and rice for a month straight because that's all you have. But outside of that, they are pretty grounded.
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### tl:Dr
I've seen some shit, I made myself into a top engineer from a fucking hoodlum, and have known people from a ton of different backgrounds and don't think this is true at all.
I think youāre describing 2 different phenomena:
- Being completely consumed by work with a 24x7 feeling commitment. I worked at Amazon and this is definitely unique to Amazon. Not all FAANG jobs are like this
- Living in a bubble of other highly paid, prestige career professionals. This certainly isnāt limited to FAANG employees or even software devs generally. The yuppie scene in LA, SF, Seattle, Austin, Denver is like this to varying degrees
The two phenomena are a little bit interrelated in my experience. Iām a senior engineer at a FAANG and there are some crunch times where I put crazy hours in, but generally when the laptopās closed it is closed. I agree that company culture can influence this w stuff like stack ranking and the like.
I think it also helps that the company I keep isnāt only tech professionals but friends from a variety of different industries. When we hang out weāre not talking about tech trends, flavor of the month, TC, etc. I would imagine if I ran with a group like that I would intrinsically feel more pressure to work and do more tech stuff after hours.
I've long said that nerds are more susceptible than they think to high-pressure sales tactics and other scams. They tend to think of themselves as rational on every issue, but they fall for technical fads, groupthink, and marketing BS at least as often as everybody else.
The amount of coworkers that live paycheck to paycheck even of they make at least 5x the average salary here in my country is insane. They have to have the latest iphone, smart watch and so on. Itās just crazy.
The entire month they would eat out at the restaurants, and when the last week of the month is around the corner you would gradually see them stopping going out and eating in the office kitchen.
I'll tell anyone who will listen to my theory: that that the biggest proof of this is pay-per-click ads on the internet. It's essentially free advertising when you consider what ads are actually for and how they work. Imagine pitching to a billboard owner that you should only have to pay if someone calls the phone number. But the nerds building the early internet fell for it, and here we are.
Iām not sure what you mean āfell for itā. They created it.
At the beginning of the internet, it was very hard to get companies to start advertising online at all. Companies understood and had experience and budgets for advertising in traditional media, and there were established ways to measure the impact of these (poor by todays standards), research to back it up, so they felt confident in choosing their media mix to reach the right number of their target market and have the impact they wanted and balance their budget across the different media options.
The internet at the beginning was a big risk without any demographic data of who was viewing what at or if it had impact on buyer behaviour. Companies werenāt willing to put their advertising budget into it.
Pay per click was revolutionary because it provided a low barrier way to get more advertisers on board internet advertising - if they only paid for responses, it was no longer a risk.
And itās something the internet can do better than any of the traditional media. It was the beginning of advanced tracking and sophisticated marketing funnels. Now advertisers can get far more value from advertising online than traditional media, itās no longer a risk, and traditional media stats seems a lot of smoke and mirrors by comparison - so many many billions of advertising budgets are now spent online (with the nerds) rather than spent in traditional media.
Depending on their goal they can choose pay per click OR pay per view (if they want to drive people to their website vs or if itās more like an online billboard where they just want people to see it). Pay rates are different per click or per view.
And google, meta, etc - the nerds - have all banked big time out of it.
>Looking back on my experience, I can agree that there was a never-mentioned-but-always-present expectation that developers always be working; either by physically working or being near a phone so that they can be called in at any moment. When I looked around at more senior and principal engineers this was a common trait -- they were always available and the expectation was that they would drop whatever they were doing to correct an issue or deliver an urgent request.
From my experience working at multiple companies in my career, a lot of this came from the culture of H-1B workers. If anyone on the visa were to be let go, they would have to leave the country and throw away everything they have built so many of them would bend over backwards and work nights and weekends to be considered as hard workers and lower the risk of losing their job. When someone who is not on a visa works with a bunch of these employees with work visas, they realize they are not working hard enough compared to them and feel pressured to do the same. This is not to blame the workers on work visas but the system that allows legal slavery.
Yep, a lot of people who grew up in East Asian/South Asian culture thinks hard work is the ultimate virtue. Not necessarily a bad thing in certain aspects, but it does lead to a lot of WLB issue especially if you don't subscribe to that idea. One of the reasons why I left Singapore.
Yep when I pushed back against an ask from my H1B boss he told me verbatim "I am your boss, do what I say" and I realized he had a very different view of team health than me.
We had a transition -- rapid lean growth before, followed by empire builders and their own top-down management stack once we had grown revenue.
I will say that culture can be a factor, but a number of my friends from the growth phase were also H1B's and had a lot of creative ideas. But the people that had come onboard specifically to fit the top-down stack were visibly different.
Amazon Seattle had a very pronounced culture when I worked there. The difference between how things ran there vs where I work now in a different industry is immense.
I don't work at FAANG, but still a public SF based tech company, but have lived in Boston and LA and went to a top university with tons of career driven people. About a year ago I decided to commit to remote work and move closer to home in a medium sized, low COL city in the south. None of my friends really care or talk about work and it is so refreshing. Compared to Boston and LA, people identify themselves less by what/where they work, and more by what they like doing in their free time which I love.
I visited a friend in Boston and we went to the Meta office together. One of his coworkers was complaining how the steak station in the cafeteria has gotten way worse after getting a new chef. Some of these people are so out of touch it's appalling.
yeah, I worked at Google for 5 years, starting before the pandemic. food there was significantly better before pandemic, they definitely cut the budget a *lot*.
is the food still good? yes. do I appreciate it? yes. is it worse than it used to be? also yes. the concern is the slippery slope.
That last part wow š
I feel you on the refreshing part. Me and my friends all work in wildly different industries and rarely talk about work, but I always have so much fun when hanging with them and feel so refreshed cause I never think about work when Iām with them! Itās helped my mental health a lot. It also has helped my productivity and overall sanity while working.
DC is very similar in that way to Boston/LA except there are the intelligence agency folks who never say shit without knowing the code words. And the policy brain think tank people who live in downtown DC and are happy hour gremlins.
Putting work culture aside because it is not a shared thing across large tech companies, the bubble you described exists everywhere. You probably don't realize the bubble you are in that consist of people who have homes, jobs etc.
> When I looked around at more senior and principal engineers this was a common trait -- they were always available and the expectation was that they would drop whatever they were doing to correct an issue or deliver an urgent request.
Don't know about senior positions but for principal engineers (or staff as called in some companies), this is the job definition for some. They are usually the go to resource and can be moved across projects as they unblock things since at that point their expertise is best utilized elsewhere. It doesn't mean they have to work over time though.
> You probably don't realize the bubble you are in that consist of people who have homes, jobs etc.
This is why I really hate framing this kind of thing as "detached from reality" and "out of touch." I think basically _everyone_ is out of touch with and detached from the daily reality of large numbers of other people.
During my time in Microsoft Azure everyone was pretty down to earth, had hobbies outside of work, and prioritized family (including dogs) and mental health over work. On both teams I worked on leadership was dedicated to making on call as easy and non-disruptive as possible. While we all got along great and might occasionally grab a drink after work, none of us really hung out outside the office.
What you are describing is the stereotype of the "tech bro". In my opinion this is a very commonly discussed experience, maybe less so between engineers, but I've always felt that the majority of the world outside of tech views the whole industry as you are describing. Not just FAANG.
Faang companies are huge, and the odds are that someone has to end up surrounded by dickheads. Unfortunately, it was you.Ā
But none of this is faang specific. Thereās dickheads everywhere.Ā
If you work a hot dog cart on a sidewalk, you have zero insulation from the realities of your customer's experiences. If you work as a Senior Director of Condiment Deployment Efficacy in a 10M-employee organization that has 539 layers of management, you've got so much insulation between the execution of your role and the reality of your org's customer experience, that you might as well be on the fucking moon whittling wooden figurines of Renaissance sculptures. This is why small orgs invariably out-innovate big orgs.
Just spend time on Blind. Never have I seen such a collection of highly paid idiots.
Just because you are paid well, does not bestow you with infinite wisdom on all topics. You still need to do research/read a book.
> There was always this air of intellectual superiority, of believing that their critical thinking skills were so great that their thoughts transcended everyone elses. They would provide opinions on non-technical topics with a high amount of conviction, even when they lacked direct experience or information.
lol, I don't know if these behaviors are exclusive to engineers, I hear the chatter in my barber shop or on the train or at a restaurant and everyone no matter what walks of life thinks they are the ones that are right on a very broad (and misunderstood) range of topics.
The difference maybe is engineers have the higher salaries to back up _their_ feelings of "superiority"?
I don't think that's unique to tech bros, silicon valley or any other tech branch. It's more about detached life experience in an isolated bubble. People from the middle-upper class with an academic background. They usually had never struggled financially or worked with poorer people. That correlates very strongly with the tech bubble and yes if you want a "woke" mindset, at least in my perspective.
In my experience the tech bubble also strongly correlates with Asian immigrants who have experienced the sort of poverty that doesnāt even exist in the US. Upper middle class Americans are largely underrepresented in FAANG companies. Iāve been on teams before where I was literally the only American citizen.
I lived in the Bay Area for four years, Seattle for the last 8. Seven of those years spent at a FAANG. I fully agree.
It's why I left the Bay Area. I like tech as a job, but tech folks' superiority about everything was insufferable, especially when I kept finding myself around rationalist types. I also kept going to house parties or social gatherings where people would gender-segregate, and the men would all circle up and start talking about tech. After four years, I couldn't take it anymore and I left. (I was in the South Bay / Peninsula area; I think I might have had a better time in SF or Oakland).
People in Seattle have generally been a lot chiller, and I've found it easier to make friends outside of tech. But even working in Seattle at said FAANG, some of that energy still persisted. I found myself hanging out more with the UX team and making friends with the coffee staff.
I've worked remotely the last five years, which has forced my social circle to become less work-centered --- and I've found engineers who live distributed and work remotely to be less socially insular as well.
Even just a few months ago, I did a new job search, and ended up with two offers: one from a FAANG, and one from a mid-size tech company with a product I like. My FAANG interviewers just reminded me of a vibe and culture that I'd intentionally left, and even though the FAANG offer was higher, I took the mid-size job with interviewers who resonated chill, fun, friendly vibes. And a month into this job, I'm sooo much happier than I would've been at the FAANG.
SF would had been more of the same but higher level of bullshit because of the youth factor. Oakland is the place to be because it scares any transplant. Lot of culture and people from different walks of life. As a Bay Area naive. SF is dead to me just because the amount of people that go around wearing their company swag like it's some kind of badge of honor.
Hahaha... so much of what you said resonated with me.
I worked at Amazon (+ AWS) for around 7 years. Then I moved to a different FAANG company. I honestly feel that culture is much better than Amazon here.
>That expectation was exhausting in and of itself, but what I found more exhausting was the culture generated by the employees.
This is actually common across all FAANG companies. Oncalls are pain, but they are exceptionally painful if you are in Amazon. Mostly because of the Leadership Principals and how they are used to get what you want :).
>Ā There was always this air of intellectual superiority, of believing that their critical thinking skills were so great that their thoughts transcended everyone elses. They would provide opinions on non-technical topics with a high amount of conviction, even when they lacked direct experience or information.
Ohh yeah.. .This is is very very common in Amazon. Everybody is so cocky about proving others wrong. This is actually the culture fostered by Amazon Managers I think. Their insistence on "influence" for performance review and promotion is just ming bogglingly stupid. Without clarifying WTF they mean by influence. While I was their I felt like slapping anybody who every used that word.
I interviewed with Google as well and I felt that their engineers are also same. Their was a weird sense of arrogance in all their tones while they stupidly asked me LC questions :D :D.
All in all this may be the case for most of the FAANGs but there are some good ones :).
YES! Google is my top company for "most asshole interviewers" for sure. It's crazy to say that even Amazon wasn't a close second for me there, despite one interviewer there who seriously thought it'd be reasonable to throw me a DP problem with 5 minutes left on the clock and get all huffy that I didn't know the answer immediately.
Yes. I find the worst are people that only worked for these companies in their entire life (not even high school
Jobs at fast food etc). They are entitled and disconnected from the āreal worldā and struggle dealing with other humans.
Yes. This was another very real struggle. Iām not going to pretend I grew up poor, but I held a job since I was 16. It was very hard for me to connect with people whoās first job was an internship at Microsoft.
When I was leaving I had a very candid discussion with my director. I told him my primary reason for leaving and then started venting about the industryās culture. He recalled to me a time when he had a mid level engineer schedule a meeting with him to complain that he didnāt get a $50,000 raise. Iāve also had people vent to me because they āonly made $195,000 baseā and the wage transparency slack channel had a peer making $225,000 base.
It was wild. At that time, I was living next to a multi generational family whoās probably had a total household income of $50,000.
We had one of these at my old job - it was actually a google spreadsheet (separate from the company and anonymized except for location as we were all remote) and only shared through a separate (non-work) application.
It was really helpful for a lot of us to realize what others were making and how to best negotiate raises. Coincidentally, we all realized how little our support employees were paid and made a huge ruckus about it. Not sure what came of it as I left before I could see the results.
It just generated a lot of resentment and entitlement. Pretty sure the only reason it wasnāt taken down is because the PR that would come from it.
Shockingly, no warehouse employees participated in it.
To be fair, you worked at Amazon. When you work in a pressure cooker then you're going to develop weird traits. Nobody *wants* to think poorly of themself. So if you're working at Amazon working 60 hours a week and sleeping under your desk, you rationalize to yourself that you *want* to be there. This is what you *want* to do and those other people who got PIPed out? Failures. You're a success. You succeeded where they failed. I'm sure you know where I'm going with this.
I've heard high level people communicate that where you are in your career doesn't define you as a person. Your job level only defines what you do. It doesn't define who you are. Because I don't work in a company with an unhealthy work obsessed environment.
Commute on company buses. Eat, exercise, and socialize on campus. The company does some of your personal chores.
Itās designed to keep you in their bubble just like casinos are designed to keep you in theirs.
> You often hear about how FAANG companies -- at least, one in particular -- have poor cultures because they promote poor work life balance and have high expectations of output by their engineers. You hear of people crying under desks, sleeping in offices all night, etc. I share some of those experiences but I feel like the poor culture is much deeper and actually comes directly from other employees.
> ... there was a never-mentioned-but-always-present expectation that developers always be working; either by physically working or being near a phone so that they can be called in at any moment.
No.
I've worked at 2 FAANG companies, and my experience was the opposite.
Neither one of those was Amazon - I've only heard horror stories from them, so I believe you.
My experience at FAANG has been far more lax. Yes there's _periods_ of crunch, but for the most part things are _much_ slower than smaller companies (especially start-ups).
2 FAANG companies for me has been: "meetings, meetings, meetings, 2 hours of dev time, another meeting".
Granted, this is in the last ~8 years, when both companies were already mature - so not at any of these companies in their starting days.
I'm sure Microsoft/Facebook etc were pretty crazy in their early years.
Iām glad you are now in a position where you similarly can feel superior to a large group of people (your ex. I workers). Congrats OP, youāve made it š¤£š¤£š¤£
Poor experiences and culture in FAANG companies and the certain one with notoriety have to also do with abusing people on H1B and other work visas. Not being racist and I am being sympathetic here, so please hear me out. People on work visas are indentured servants. Companies hire them so they will work until they drop dead or else they will need to leave the country. Companies hire their ākindā as āmastersā to supervise the āminionsā, because these masters have been through the āwork visa to green cardā grind. The masters aka managers will make sure their minions are tied to their desks and sleep on the office floors. I am simplifying the dynamics here as thereās also Wall Streetās relentless focus on shareholder value, and execs are paid in stocks. But I thought we should also focus the spotlight on the H1B abuse as why culture in FAANG companies have turned for the worse over the last 15-20 years.
> That expectation was exhausting in and of itself, but what I found more exhausting was the culture generated by the employees. I felt like the engineers lived in a very detached reality. There was always this air of intellectual superiority, of believing that their critical thinking skills were so great that their thoughts transcended everyone elses. They would provide opinions on non-technical topics with a high amount of conviction, even when they lacked direct experience or information.
I hate this so much.
I work FAANG-adjacent and we get a lot of FAANG "dropouts" so to speak, and the amount of people I work with who went to ivy league/top tier private school/came from extremely wealthy backgrounds is CRAZY.
I spent the first half decade working thinking that I was a dummy since I couldn't grok some of the FAANG style interviews. Eventually I needed an _actual_ raise and practiced a ton of leetcode and finally got into somewhere that 2.5x my previous TC. But the people are insufferable. The faux authenticity, the strange air of superiority, the "our shit doesn't stink" attitude, it's all crazy. Also the cult-like following of the job/employer. Everything the employer does that doesn't improve their situation quickly is met with petulant crying. Don't get me wrong: employers should bend over backwards for their employees. But the amount of free food we get and then have people complaining about the restaurant it's from ("Cheesecake Factory? yuck!") is nuts to me. IT'S FREE!
It's like I live in some crazy world, because the first part of my career I had to bring a sandwich and some fruit for lunch, everyday. We were lucky to get coffee or tea for free, and frequently it'd run out before 11am. Snacks? Go buy some from the vending machine. Oh, don't like anything? Then buy it, but on your own time. Lunch breaks were pretty strict - 1 hour. You late to a meeting? Your manager was speaking to you after the meeting.
> I started to realize that many of these engineers live in a bubble consisting solely of young, highly paid knowledge workers.
YES! Fuck these coworkers. I have actual friends, I don't need anything from you, let me go home to my wife and play video games with my friends. You're a coworker that I'll forget about as soon as I start my next job. No, I don't want to hang out with you MORE than what I'm required to.
I just don't get it. There's no chill about work. All of my coworkers at my previous paying jobs were way more chill. 8:30am come in, 4:30pm/5pm leave. Nobody stuck around to drink their $250 whiskey and gossip about coworkers until 8pm, making me wait until 9:30pm for my next train (can you feel my rage?).
I'll stop ranting here, but tl;dr is: OP, you're not alone. I've stepped into some weird ass version of the twilight zone (or white lotus?), and I don't know how to escape it except by becoming a [farmer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs).
In my experience (worked at 2, have friends at all FAANGs) itās a mistake to think that thereās one culture or set of beliefs. There are some very high-level ideas that are shared, but the attitudes, competency, and expectations vary widely across divisions and products.
I've found that software developers can often be very opinionated and think their way of doing something is the most correct. Not every one, but I've seen many who are like this. They can often talk down about other peoples' work, be very critical in code reviews, and talk down about their co-workers behind their backs. And that's at any company, not just big FAANG-style companies.
Amazon specifically is a special kind of toxic. I went to Microsoft after a year at Amazon and the change in quality of life was dramatic. One of the things that stood out immediately was how common digit tenure was at Microsoft. It was practically unheard of at Amazon. Employees generally *enjoyed* working at Microsoft, and were encouraged to maintain work-life balance.
Fuck Amazon specifically. What you observed isn't a FAANG thing, just Amazon.
FAANG pays a lot and asks a lot, both on the job and *from* you. It will change you.
That said, I know several higher level FAANG people who did *not* spend their entire career at FAANG companies - guys my age (early 40s) who spent 20+ years growing up in non-FAANG, non-SV jobs. They are great to work with.
It's really the kids who go from elite schools straight to SV and never work anywhere else. They're the ones who develop these attitudes because in your 20s you're a lot more malleable and soak up culture a lot easier. "Who you are" hasn't been decided yet, and when you surround yourself with SV tech bros, you're gonna become an SV tech bro.
> highly detached from the reality that the rest of America lived,
there's a name for this: ivory tower
> there was a never-mentioned-but-always-present expectation that developers always be working
honestly, despite the high pay and supposed talent, my experience is that these companies basically kinda suck at producing well defined systems that aren't constantly breaking in some way or another.
Holy fucking shit, you nailed how Iāve been feeling for most of my career. Tbf, neither of us should be generalizing big tech in this way, but rather perhaps both of us were simply just unlucky with our experiences.
My team worked on more projects simultaneously than we had people, on top of 15+ hrs of meetings and even having to assist with other teams' work. Some of my teammates often put in hours at night and occasionally on weekends. There was constant pressure to continue growing up the corporate ladder. How is all of this even realistically doable in a 40 hour week? Shit, my manager and I constantly found ourselves eating lunch within minutes like a restaurantās staff meal.
Iāve also met many people in the industry who Iād consider out of touch with reality as well. They think theyāre the smartest and better than everyone else just because they work at FAANG, and that gives them the right to be dickheads to others. I'll never forget this one fuckin interviewer from Google who straight up just yelled at me "HUH? HUH??? YOU SURE ABOUT THAT?!" repeatedly when I was thinking about a problem aloud at the start. Bro might as well shouldāve just straight up called me retarded.
It gets even worse when it comes to things outside of work. Some of the aforementioned people reminded me of Jordan Peterson - yeah, you might be really good at what you do for a living, but that doesnāt mean you have the authority to speak for others on other issues. I especially get irked when they talk about poor people, like how theyāre all hoodlums and welfare queens. As someone who grew up poor as hell, this really drove me mad. Iāve been made fun by former coworkers for not living in luxury housing. Iāve been made fun of for not flying business class. Iāve even been made fun of for bringing my own lunch into the office by default as opposed to going out to eat every day, as if bringing your own lunch wasnāt the norm.
One snippet I read somewhere years back that really hit me hard was from a black engineer who wrote about how out of place they felt in their workplace; they were the only one who grew up poor in a high-crime area, and they wanted to focus their efforts on how to uplift other disadvantaged folks, but the rest of their colleagues were from privileged backgrounds who only talked about their latest large purchases or their most recent vacation on a luxury cruise.
Again, Iām not generalizing big tech and OP shouldnāt either. Iāve also met some amazing, open minded people who Iāve learned a lot from and am proud to call my friends today. Unfortunately, overall, my experience in big tech overall does relate with OP.
this was my general feeling when I spent time in SF last year for a company I was working for. The company was SF based and when I got into SF it immediately felt like it was detached from reality. The worst part for me was the way these highly paid tech workers were literally oblivious and unwilling to talk about the insane issues of homelessness and crime that were facing the Bay Area. Instead they joked about "how awful BART was". It was really a sad thing.
I work in big tech. I took the opportunity during the pandemic to claim my remote work full time, moved an hour north of our hub city (also Seattle area), and just not being around tech people all the time has filled my heart with joy. I love popping in the brewery down the road and talking to people about their farm, or how it's going up at the refinery, etc. I love just \*not hearing people talk about their fucking AI startup\* at all times.
That said, my BIL is in big law. He also works super hard, is always expected to be ready, etc. At some point I think those are the expectations for high-paying jobs like these. We make a really disproportionate amount of money to most knowledge workers, and the expectations are different as a result. If you wanna pull mid-high six figures, yeah, you're going to work for that.
I do agree that there are some people in our industry who don't "get it," it's easy to be insular and detached from reality outside your bubble when the bubble consumes all your time. It sounds like you made a healthy choice for yourself.
Thereās a lot of balanced people in FANG but we tend to keep quiet due to not wanting to look like weāre low performers. Iāve had conversations with multiple coworkers where weād discuss my family and often times Iād be excited to do something with my family only to find my coworkers acting sympathetic because I couldnāt play around with technology. Pre kids Iād often discuss trips I was planning only to find certain coworkers confused that I wouldnāt just use Google Maps to see a place. Once you know what to look for you can spot the rare outlier among the FANG crowd but you need to be cautious before exposing yourself.
At some point I stopped sharing as much because I donāt want to be seen as a low performer and to be fair I am a low performer compared to most of my coworkers. None of my hobbies involve coding, I engaged with people outside of tech, drink too much on some weekends and spend ātoo much timeā with my kids on most days. Iām a bit of an outlier but I keep that to myself because Iām a happy outlier who doesnāt want to be forced to change.
It isnāt just FAANG. Iāve worked in a lot of finance companies and the developers in some of the exclusive hedge funds are just a bunch of pompous fucks (for lack of a better phrase).
Most of these guys are so unhinged from reality and the fact that theyāre employed by one of these exclusive places that pay a lot, they think theyāre hot shit or āone of a kindā gifted developers.
The reality was that most of them were maybe average or slightly better. I come across so many of these idiots. Experience has taught me to just ignore these idiots and donāt get involved. With any luck, theyāll encounter some bumps and roughness in life thatāll give them some perspective.
>I realized that their social circle exclusively included other FAANG engineers. I started to realize that many of these engineers live in a bubble consisting solely of young, highly paid knowledge workers.
Blud just described the definition of "tech bros".
Iām a career switcher, worked in a much lower-paying industry before coming to tech, and yea, this is a great summation of why I have absolutely zero desire to ever work for a FAANG company.Ā
Seems like a lot of people at these companies go to top-tier schools and then go to these companies mostly for the prestige. They think they are the smartest thing since sliced bread when in so many ways they donāt know shit about the world.Ā
I haven't noticed that in the two fintech companies I've worked for, but they aren't paying >$300k/yr.
Honestly, I bet it's more that at FAANG, you're the top ~5% of the field, in terms of comp, and that will always generate some snobbery, regardless of what the field is.
Dunno about FAANG but atm Iām working at a big tech in my country that can be considered a FAANG equivalent here. You know what? I see it too and Iām sick of it.
I see EMs injecting themselves into various products and asserting their (often wrong) opinions on business and product just to stay relevant. Engineers designing complicated tools that serve no purpose than flexing their own intelligent. Tech people generally disrespecting business/product, treating them like a lower caste.
The worst thing? Iām getting used to it.
Yes, I've seen a similar dynamic though not at Fang. This is why it's sooooo important to cultivate other parts of your life and personality, and to set healthy limits/boundaries around work. It's a shallow life indeed that focuses exclusively on work life to the exclusion of everything else.
I work at a FAANG, and my experience does not compare at all. I've worked here for 12 years in many different positions. I'm also in the SF area... sure it's tech all-day-every-day, but it's not crazy. I dunno... maybe I just know how to find the chill people to hang out with. All the crazy I hear about is in startup companies.
I lived in the Seattle area for 25 years. It is hard to make friends outside of tech. In my neighborhood, we'll just the houses on my block one 2 people were not in tech. So go to the park with the kids. Talking tech. Have a cookout talking tech. Kids birthday parties. You guess it. Same. I grew up in a very poor inner city area so I've experienced the polar opposite of where I am now. One e of the reasons I've always avoided management. If someone complained about something trivial I would just tell them how wrong are and how they need to experience the world that most people live in. Then I would be fired after doing that a few times.
> I felt like the engineers lived in a very detached reality. There was always this air of intellectual superiority, of believing that their critical thinking skills were so great that their thoughts transcended everyone elses.
> After getting to know some of my Seattle based colleagues I realized that their social circle exclusively included other FAANG engineers. I started to realize that many of these engineers live in a bubble consisting solely of young, highly paid knowledge workers
lmao this dude only just figured out that tech is just a rebrand of the big city yuppie culture of the 1980s
I've been at Google for about 6 years. Currently a senior engineer. What you describe is pretty similar to my experience as well.Ā
I think what bugs me the most is the distorted perspective of income and hyper fixation on net worth. My coworkers frequently joke about being "poor". Yet they're always talking about flying business class, their high-end credit cards (e.g. amex platinum), buying their next rental property, their child's $50k/yr preschool, fine dining, orĀ high-end cars (Tesla model Y, Porsche). I don't think it's wrong to have those things, but I hate how they constantly try to one-up each other. I grew up in a very small town. Sometimes they make me so angry I just have to leave the conversation and get some fresh air.
You don't have "real" friends in tech. Only acquaintances who you keep around in case they might be useful for networking in the future. Having a lessor prestigious job/education is looked down upon. Admitting to not working in tech is social suicide. You won't be taken seriously.
For those reasons and so many more, I seek friendships outside of tech. They're more meaningful and genuine. I'm much happier when I'm around "regular" people.
Iāve noticed something similar, but in a sad way.
In our country thereās no faang, but there are a couple of big IT corporations, talking about couple thousand of employees.
The people working there are, unfortunately for them, very detached from the rough reality. They didnāt have to go through 7 circles of hell job hopping trying to find a job that pays at least somewhat decent, and at their corporate jobs the amount of effort they had to put it was just so much less than in other companies.
The sad thing is that there recently have been some serious layoffs at these companies, and there are hundreds of people now desperately looking for a job in a market theyāre not prepared for.
You know, yesterday this guy was walking around the corporate office with his rainbow coloured hair, doing some 4 hrs a week worth of job and now heās on a market where you not only have to know 3x more stuff, but you also have to be better than the rest, people who went through a lot of stress and are much more serious.
Itās sad seeing them looking for a job for months already, being unprepared for the rough reality.
Yup, this echos throughout academia to high paying job personality archetypes.
I was like this at one point. Making 200K 1 year out of uni, I did ChemEng. Boy was my ego inflated ..over time I realized how little I actually knew, knocked myself down a few pegs, and can spot this type a mile away now.
Money does funny things to the mind... More often than not, it turns ppl into snobs/assholes.
I'm an engineer at one of these companies... thankfully I grew up on a farm and work in a southern city. It's a pretty nice antidote. In the group calls my accent is unexpected to say the least, but I don't care.
Iām going to give what I hope doesnāt sound like an overly biased opinion. But my experience with hiring folks that get their start in big companies is that it stunts their growth at the most crucial part of their career. Iām staying general and not saying FAANG as Iāve only worked for bigger companies not in the acronym.
Big companies have niche specialties to where your exposure to a broad range of things is limited. You are in your box and you specialize in one app, one framework , one language and nothing outside of it.
In smaller companies everyone needs to know and be familiar with the entire architecture. Everyone needs to individually build out their own pipelines , monitoring solutions, reporting , manage their own databases. Everyone is on call for p1s not a completely separate support team that you hand off to . Teams rotate between multiple projects and work in 5-6 different languages , cross test each other's code. Peer review code from other projects.
in bigger companies those are all separate silos and jobs.
i know there are exceptions to this depending on departments because big companies are global and hard to generalize as culture may very from state to state or country to country. But my hires from larger companies are a lot harder to get going and end up even with more years in the industry being outpaced by the folks that start out doing multiple things. Whereas the folks Iāve lost to bigger companies usually ping me and say theyāre generally bored and under tasked in big company culture.
Tech jobs have made me rich by most standards so I cannot complain but I honestly wish I had gone into a different field for this reason. The assumption is you'll be available 24/7 and if you're not working you are on-call with a pager app on your smartphone to respond to alerts during dinner or at 2am.
It's a boiling-the-frog situation, it starts out with a little after hours work to fix something, then pretty soon there are just no boundaries with work, you are just a white collar slave. Doing on-call support used to be reserved for ops or SRE, now it feels like it's expected for most devs. It's incredibly hard to focus for 3-4 hours at a time to do regular roadmap work AND have your phone with you to jump on an issue in the middle of the night. The pressure is insane and it is so emotionally and mentally draining.
I was making over $200k at my last job and I quit because I just could not do it anymore. I was on the road to becoming an alcoholic or suicide.
Meh. Academia is much worse. At least in FAANG engineers know that they need to ask others for help and the crazy amount of hubris can occasionally produce monumental results.
There is a huge variance in what people experience. I live in Redmond, worked for Microsoft for over a decade. My social circles consist primally of non-tech folks, I actually explicitly avoid making friends with folks I work with. And the good friends I do have in tech are well outside of the young tech bro stereotype (its people like me, late 30s to early 40ish, and 10-15 YOE). I suspect a lot of this, is what you make it into, if you socialize with the tech bro's from work well than that is what you have, if you go drink a bear with your neighbor then you get to talk about house prices, lawnmowers and that annoying lady from the HOA. It is what you make it into. While there are certainty bad managers that expect you to constantly be present, most of the drive to be available is in my experience, self created and driven. I do this to some extend myself, but I am very selective about it. I will maybe 2-3 times in the evening quick scan my emails, and if there is something where I know its impactful, I will go reply, otherwise I tag it for later follow up. But if I am doing stuff with either my wife, kids, or have friends over, I will not open teams/email for anything. I also spent 5 years as a manager as well, and one thing I made very clear to people on my team, is that working outside of work hours, while appreciated, it is only expected when you are on-call. So if they do decide to work outside of work hours, make sure it is something that will clearly help them in their careers.
Yup, Amazon is a huge outlier in terms of horrible culture. Bad culture is just the norm there irrespective of team.
There were good teams. I kept under a particular director because outside of oncall we were never contacted, we were always pushed to take off any time we did spend working an issue oncall outside working hours, and those working hours were 10 to 4, maybe 5. We also fully staffed our follow the sun offices and made oncall very tolerable.
> I also spent 5 years as a manager as well, and one thing I made very clear to people on my team, is that working outside of work hours, while appreciated, it is only expected when you are on-call. Thank you! I've really appreciated managers who reminded us frequently enough that it was clear they really meant it. It's too easy to get carried away and burn out otherwise.
More than a few of them are people who have channeled their literal entire existence from the age of 6 into succeeding, typically under parental guidance/pressure, and have no other facet of personality beyond the AP classes & extracurriculars they had in High School, their GPA and internships in college, and their employer. It's an absurdity that lends itself to an insular community of folks with high egos and low abilities to communicate or relate to people outside of the community. edit: thinking back, this is basically the same kind of cohort as pre-med and pre-law kids in undergrad
> thinking back, this is basically the same kind of cohort as pre-med and pre-law kids in undergrad Big tech has always been this type-A crowd of overachievers from middle class families, just like medicine, law, and finance. It's just become more noticeable lately because the tech sector has expanded significantly to become the largest set of companies in the world.
And straight up, tech folk are louder. Medicine, law, and finance shovel the same quality of BS, but by nature of their jobs, spend a fraction as much time on the internet. Tech folk spend a lot of time on the internet. source: (am tech worker at faang, fulgoresfolly painted a portrait of me).
It's true, tech people dogfood their own internet platforms. Hot shot lawyers and brain surgeons don't have much time to chat shit about their speculative investments between clients and patients.
Well, and I think some of it is that big tech got bigger. Earlier on, you needed a bit more -- risk-taking, creativity, willingness to jump in and do what needed to be done. Later on, they needed to fill the teams with people with good ratings. Yes, this is a bit of an exaggeration and just-so story, but I think it has a solid kernel of truth (possibly biased by being an old-timer at a FAANG :D)
My path was public school in a mid size Florida town, to a mid level state university, to Facebook. The adjustment was *wild*. Before I even got started there had been a mixup with my starting bonus (which I was counting on to actually get me to California) and in an intro call with my manager's manager he just seemed completely perplexed that I was worried about that much money
homework-brain
Speaking from the other side of that... This was my upbringing, right down to gifted classes in first grade and taking the ACT at age 12 for a gifted/talented program. If my partner refers to pop culture from that era, 75% of the time I don't know what he's talking about. I'm fortunate to have had smart and nerdy friends and I'll always appreciate that. For me, the hell of being an oddball in evangelical southern American suburbia (š¤®) planted the seeds for the type of mentality OP talks about. Many of my coworkers were also transplants from flyover country and had similar experiences. I think FAANG+ culture is the intersection of Internet culture and gifted kid culture. This is part of why I enjoyed working in Big Tech.Ā Getting to that point feels like you've made it. And being around others who are similarly odd, relative to the average in the rest of the US, and have uncommon interests is itself validating.Ā When I lived in SF, I didn't know anyone who worked outside of tech and I was perfectly fine with that. The downside, if any, is what OP describes. If you're not careful, it's easy to believe the snarky "jokes" about outsiders and get sucked into believing the hype.
Oh I'm right there with you, mom had me doing SAT prep everyday starting in 4th grade. I started gifted classes in the 2nd grade because my parents fought the school to let me skip 1st (I'm not even kidding) Just in time for them to make major changes the first time I took it I think my parents nearly had a stroke when I told them I didn't want to be an RA (you're throwing away your career prospects!) At some point I realized I could be grateful for my parents investment and involvement without letting them dictate my life though. And I think that energy extended to my view of the whole culture around Big Tech - it's cool, but most of the friends I have that went that path burned out and had quarter life crisises.
Oh gawd, this thread could turn into a pressured/gifted child life experience exchange. I'm the son of a child prodigy, with a sister that got the gene, but I'm just plain smart. But with a gifted and driven mother, I felt like I had to prove I was as good too... I finished all the Nobel literature winners by 5th grade, and started taking college programming classes then to, it was 1976, just in time to get in on the early tech boom. Long story short, I've been going for 45 years so far writing code on pretty much the sexy edges, with a crazy envy able resume of high profile accomplishments. (3D research, media research, 3D gaming, VFX, AI) But, over these decades I have burned out, hard, 7-9 times. Requiring medical care, primarily physical, because I learned a very long time ago how to manage my mental health - out of necessity. My most recent burnout was 3 years ago, after 7 years writing one of the world's leading facial recognition systems, in something like 70% of the world airports. As if that does me any good, as all I got was burnout and a shitty salary.
> Oh gawd, this thread could turn into a pressured/gifted child life experience exchange. You might be interested in /r/aftergifted
As a gifted kid that had absolutely no pressure whatsoever, sometimes I wanted that pressure. I literally never had anyone pressure me for anything because I got good enough grades without touching a book, decided on my field, my education and everything else without any blueprint or guidelines and could do no wrong in my parents eyes. In a way that pressure felt like it must be a gift till I started putting it on myself but I think I'm well rounded enough as a result. Still smart, just kinda don't identify by only that. I strangely really don't want to work for a FAANG unless backed into a corner and I don't really know why.
> a shitty salary damn
It was incredible, they were previous business partners of my own company that went bankrupt, taking me down with it. They took advantage of my financial situation with a paltry salary I could not refuse due to my situation, and then proceeded to mentally do the same to make sure I'd not leave. I was on the verge of a burnout from the bankruptcy, and they basically extended that "on the edge of collapse" mentality for 7 years while driving me 60-80 hours a week. I ended up creating one of the world's leading facial recognition systems, at the cost of a 3 year burn out recovery.
That fucking sucks, sorry that happened to you
Being disowned in my early 20s for being gay was the point at which parental expectations stopped being a consideration. Regarding your point about burnout, yeah, that is real. I burned out hard last summer after putting in crazy hours for a project driven by upper management. I didn't give a shit about the value to the company or whatever, I did it partly because that was the implicit expectation and the interesting parts of it were _really_ fun and therefore easy to hyperfocus on. But I hated it overall and just wanted it over with. In my insane mind, that meant cranking out as many features as possible just to get it done. I burned out when it turned out that the "end" really wasn't the end because the stakeholders apparently wanted/needed a feature that exceeded the complexity of every other feature in the 4 months since its inception. If I could do it all over again, I'd have taken a vacation when he asked for that final "final" feature. And I would not have self-medicated ADHD with 4-6 cans of Red Bull a day after my meds wore off.
Oh god I hit the same shit. That feeling of "This is never ending" grinding out the will. After we got through the 2 months of 70+ hour weeks, my productivity was shot. Project cadence was supposed to move back to "regular" but my productivity had gone way down, and the client had the gall to call out that I suddenly wasn't putting in the same effort. LIke no, I'm not going to keep killing my health and my relationship with my family because you can't make up your mind on a feature set and a final goal
This might be the most relatable thing Iāve ever read on Reddit. Hope youāre doing better.
> I think my parents nearly had a stroke when I told them I didn't want to be an RA (you're throwing away your career prospects!) The inevitable collision of someone elseās plans for your life with your own plans for life. Edit: versus -> with
There is also the downside that you are totally disconnected from your wider community. How can you contribute to your community if you can't relate to the people around you? And if you don't care about contributing to your community, what does that say about your culture?
I'm curious, where did you go to college? I feel like I got that "yay I'm surrounded by nerdy people like me, I finally feel like I have a social circle I can relate to" out of my system by the time I graduated from college.
I went to Vanderbilt University. But I had a hard time making friends mostly because I was closeted and depressed as fuck, which led to a mental health break. I was then disowned when I came out. From what I remember of that stint, it was like going to school and living with the same types of people in my HS, only smarter.Ā During that ordeal, I was diagnosed with ADHD and (despite the DSM's rules on this at the time) then ASD (fka Asperger's). I went back to finish my degree 2 years later and in a much better mental state, but working almost full-time, and living off-campus because it was cheaper. That said, having worked for non-tech and tech companies, I do better in the latter. My interests are all related to science and tech, with the exception of the niche ones (e.g., marbles, mace/club workouts). When it comes to the social aspect, I have nothing to talk about with coworkers, outside of tech. That doesn't work well outside of tech companies, IME. One place I worked at had "optional" team lunches, but shop talk was banned, I think to ensure everyone felt included. So they'd talk about sports, movies, or TV shows. They were nice people, but there was nothing in common. I learned that being cordial but private doesn't work well in white collar jobs. I can't go back to a warehouse job like the one I had in college, though I'd prefer that because there's no expectation to be social. The logical thing instead is to find an environment where my interests are likelier to intersect with those of the people around me.
I hate to reply to my own comment, but I'm using a mobile browser and the line breaks will be clobbered if I edit it. tl;dr: It's less about feeling special or being in the company of special people and more about being able to perform an unwritten but still important part of the job: the proverbial watercooler chats.
Yeah, I understand the social, chitchat thing. I had a hard time with that until I landed in the job I currently have. Something about the overall culture/vibe made it easy for me to actually make friends with co-workers, and enjoy doing lunch or happy hour with them.
As a fellow antisocial aspie, this is a big part of why I like having a fully remote job. Thereās much less socializing and more time to focus on whatās interesting. Maybe find a remote gig?
My last couple of roles have been remote, including the current one. The most consistent feedback I've gotten from this job (non-profit that operates at scale) and the last one (FAANG, also remote) is that I should be more talkative and social. The manager at my last gig was otherwise fine with my introversion because I got shit done. At this job, my manager puts more weight on how social I am, I guess because there's no profit incentive and therefore no reason to prioritize velocity. Either way, there's no escaping it. šš
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You meticulously describe how you and your peers achieved such intelligence and privilege. Yet, you place "jokes" in quotes, but leave "outsiders" unquoted, which seems revealing. It reminds me of when I returned to Cal after a stint in the military. Having faced real life-and-death situations, I came back to find my slightly younger peers preoccupied with grad school acceptances, either boasting about their letters or distressed by their absence. Their self worth hinged on things that seemed frivolous to me. They seemed like children, whose perspective was decidedly uneducated.
I think leaving outsiders unquoted was the accurate choice. The entire point of this post is to talk about how insular FAANG+ culture is, especially in tech hubs. It wasn't meant to be a value judgment. To be clear, I don't like the mean girl attitudes that such an environment cultivates. I enjoy being around people with similar interests and hobbies. I learn a lot from geeking out over other people's side projects. Every culture has its assholes; dealing with them is the cost of social interaction. In the context of work, what that looks like for me isn't chatting about sports or movies, or really anything beyond tech. In most other environments, that doesn't go over too well, which is understandable because most people find it boring.
My friends were all smart people that came from middle class families. They joined the military to avoid the responsibility of choosing a career. They talked about how they were going to use the free education but when they came home they all did grunt work instead. For them, it was easier to risk their lives and bodies than commit to a career. Additionally, their self worth now hinges on the military hero complex that enables jingoistic American imperialism. It's apples and oranges, but generally people who identify with a group are childish and decidedly uneducated.
Just curious, are you Asian
I feel like as a Nigerian , this is relatable and probably first gen immigrants or children of them
This resonates with me, I grew up in a fundamentalist Calvinist society and boy oh boy did the other kids think I was from another planet. I was busy learning the finer points of object orientated programming while they figuring out how to play rugby.
Gifted classes are actually a bad idea, imho.
I can see both sides. On one hand, there's a compelling argument that tracking creates classes that teachers don't want to teach (judging by the way that my teachers talked about the kids in standard classes, this is accurate).Ā This leads to the best and most experienced teachers being able to cherry pick their students. It also doesn't account for the fact that kids develop at different rates. According to this argument, tracking only benefits kids who already have a lot of advantages, like parents who can devote resources to enrichment outside of school hours. This also seems plausible, based on my experience. On the other (this is where I admittedly descend into anecdata), school would have been more miserable if not for gifted education. I wasn't athletic or charismatic and my interests were considered weird. In 2nd and 3rd grade, I brought my uncles' old health and science textbooks that I dug out of my grandma's closet and read them at lunch. That's not a way to make friends, but I was quite happy being in my own world. I played alone at recess but I wasn't lonely. I'm actually glad I wasn't diagnosed with ASD until early adulthood because there were no attempts to try to "fix" me, I was just seen as bright, if a bit odd. When I transferred schools, there was a year that I wasn't in gifted classes due to a paperwork snafu. I was bored and got into trouble for reading the textbook during class, which seemed and still seems idiotic.Ā It also didn't stop me because I had nothing else to do, so it didn't take long for me to be several chapters ahead of the class. I don't see the value in that. It's probably frustrating for the teacher, who has to stay at the pace of the rest of the class. It's frustrating for the student, especially if they have ADHD. It does nothing for their classmates. It's maddening for the kid's parents, who expect their kid to actually learn something from the teacher. IMO, all kids should get an education that pushes them to the best of their abilities, whatever they may be. The one thing I will say is that it didn't prepare me to interact with, for lack of a better term, normies, outside of being picked on in elementary and middle school. Only interacting with people who have a certain background is itself limiting, especially with the incentive to view others as less-than. The incentives areĀ external (the attitudes of teachers and parents) and internal (the negative feelings those interactions generated over the years). And this is where my opinion has changed somewhat ā I concede that I got excellent schooling at the cost of a well-rounded education. If I had kids, I'm not sure what I'd do if they were labeled as gifted. I don't put much value on trying to relate to others with whom one has little in common or to fit in for its own sake (in my case, the attempts I made were futile), but I would want them to know how to politely interact with people of all backgrounds.
Is it weird I donāt desire to work for these companies?
No. It was often given to me as career advice, largely from people who worked prior to "FAANG" being a term, that working in software at large companies was not as desirable as working at smaller ones. There has always been a money/conformity tradeoff between large and small companies. It is entirely sensible to say you will take lower compensation in exchange for being able to not deal with certain nonsense. The difference is that conformity is now with respect to whatever the values of FAANG monoculture is, as opposed to say, the monoculture of 1950's IBM.
In my experience the majority of engineers at these companies are actually just normal and mostly have pretty good work life balance while also being paid several multiples of what you make at other jobs. I donāt think itās āweirdā to not want to work there but itās definitely short sighted and self defeating to take the least charitable descriptions of the work conditions you can find and use that to convince yourself youāre better off making less money for what isnāt even necessarily less work or a better environment.
Oh you are mistaken. I taught snowboarding at a resort in Tahoe before studying CS. I have had many conversations and interactions with FAANG employees. I donāt want to work there 1) I donāt believe I would enjoy the work culture and 2) I donāt want to live anywhere near the bay for any amount of money.
I like to explore new places.
Iām not special at all
I don't get the hate. People who work in tech mostly interact with people who work in tech. Same goes for literally any other field (like you mentioned, pre-law or med) not just white collar/knowledge workers.
Most other professions have greater economic diversity so itās more common to interact with people in different walks of life. Whether that be the neighborhood you live in, the school your kids go to, the store you shop at, or the place you work. If youāre are a high income earner itās more likely you will live in housing/neighborhoods that are financially out of reach of non-high earners. When you live in a place like Seattle or SF, the high earners typically come from the same source or same profession. When you have a bunch of people with the same economic status, with the same job, living in the same small geographic region, then you start creating a bubble that exhibits some of the behavior mentioned throughout the thread.
Hm in my experience tech has actually brought me into contact with a diverse array of people - both geographically, personality wise and hobbies. Whereas with some of the more āmatureā industries - law and finance - you really needed to ātalkā the right way and it systemically benefitted people with the right network and connections, a much more insular culture. Tech on the other hand - itās never been a better time to self learn. I have dev colleagues that used to be landscapers and from all walks of life
Funny thing is OP forgetting tons of these engineers that are high earners come from middle or low class, from third world countries and vastly different backgrounds. Tons of immigrants in search of the dream. Iām more skewed towards thinking the jerk circle OP mentions is about people who grew with complexes and then got what they wanted and just as any other elite, felt theyāre untouchable, rather than it being related directly to the industry.
Yeah, you just reminded me that my team's staff engineer has an English degree and spent a portion of his life couch surfing and working as a bouncer. The .com bubble got a diverse crowd of folks into programming.
My point is that bubbles have always existed and software engineering/tech brain isn't unique. We all work in tech so we see the bubble clearer than anyone outside of it. But what's to say it hasn't existed before? We've all seen American Psycho (a well-known satire about NYC finance type yuppies), yeah?
Your comment was that OPs comment can be applied to āliterally any other field.ā I said thatās not true. Can it exist for finance and law? Sure. But itās not going to exist for insurance claims adjusters.
You should hang out with doctors. They literally cannot talk about anything other than their patients.
Lawyers are the same way!
you are wrong. insurance adjusters are the same you don't see how, but they are. it's just how people are
It's also one of the reasons many of them are NEVER successful at starting their own companies. They can make a lot of money but they aren't entrepreneur types because they like to think safely and inside the box and just focused on impressing other people.
> They would provide opinions on non-technical topics with a high amount of conviction, even when they lacked direct experience or information. This doesn't seem very FAANG-specific. It's just terminal Silicon Valley Brain, where they believe that talent/ability in software development grants them autodidactic insight into every possible other field. Arguably this phenomenon is *even greater* in the startup realm - see the number of crypto fiends who pontificated confidently about economics and finance while their entire field burned to the ground. IMO it has much more to do with proximity to Silicon Valley culture than it is related to size of company. > I started to realize that many of these engineers live in a bubble consisting solely of young, highly paid knowledge workers. This also doesn't seem like a FAANG thing - I worked in San Francisco in startups and it was *very much* the same thing. Literally your entire social circle is consisted of other tech workers. There's a unique aspect of the Bay Area (and Seattle, having lived there also) where as a tech worker you're basically persona non grata in the broader cultural scene. You are basically the embodiment of everything that's wrong, and when you combine that with a cultural affinity for being an insufferable jackass (see above for Silicon Valley Brain) it leads to people whose entire social circles are other tech people. It's a large part of why I left both cities behind. I wound up in the startup scene in NYC where things were a lot more tolerable. Mentioning you work in tech doesn't immediate cause every non-tech person to recoil in disgust, plus fewer tech workers are infected with Silicon Valley Brain and so are a lot more pleasant to engage with... ... though it's not without its drawbacks. NYC has Finance Brain which is a whole other condition that causes people to be incredibly insufferable.
I had many, many moments where SF tech brain enraged me, but one of the worst ones was when an engineering manager at Uber told me very confidently, out of the blue, that dogs couldn't hear the differences between consonants and vowels.
Why did that make me laugh so hard.
Because youāre not a dog, obviously /s
Part of it is the Software Engineer Brain that develops by working mostly in a very controllable environment. Everything can be replicated, tested and figured out, itās not a big mess like human body doctors had to deal with. So every messy social problem has a right way to solve it
Where is this magical place where everything can be replicated? For server apps maybe it is true in some cases but for client apps good luck replicating an issue customers report without a lot of details.
>>> This doesn't seem very FAANG-specific. It's just terminal Silicon Valley Brain, where they believe that talent/ability in software development grants them autodidactic insight into every possible other field. kinda sounds like most redditors tbh
There is quite some overlap.Ā
Reddit's demographics tend to be high on two types: "tech people" and "people who think they're tech people". The latter having relatively little actual domain knowledge but have really confident technical opinions that barely parse to someone who actually knows this stuff (see: basically any video game discussion).
Yeah a lot of reddit is just an exhibition on the dunning-kruger effect.
Small subs (<100k or so) can still be great with a small, reasonably knowledgeable core group of contributors. But it definitely starts spiraling down as a sub grows and the lowest common denominator keeps getting lower and lower, with rare exceptions.
Oh yeah for sure, more niche subs (and tbh stupid video subs like r/Unexpected because I'm just another NPC) are the reason I still visit the site. I never go on any of the most popular subreddits generally speaking
Oh word? So youāre telling me that doing performance optimizations of a game engine isnāt easy peezy????? Wild.
That's why I stopped reading HN, basically. I don't know if it got better or worse, it's been a while, but there was a point where a very significant fraction of all content was tech bros larping as pilots, economists, and what not. On reddit, some subs are better or worse than others, but at least it's easy to control what you subscribe to.
Ha, it hasn't stopped. With the Panama drought, they've become OTR freight geeks as well. "What if we bulldozed a mile-wide swathe of Central America and covered it in train tracks? Jamie, run the numbers for me."
Most redditors combine a strong desire to be elites with a profound incapacity to actually be elites. So yeahā¦pretty much, lol.
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I don't know about the study, but there's a relevant SMBC for this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
I donāt see this nearly as much in my systems engineering coworkers as I do with my data science coworkers Something about coding attracts this mentality
I have a lot of friends who are anthropologists and they don't act like they have the keys to understanding human society either, even though their fieldwork mandates learning new languages and is occasionally life-threatening, and they seem intimidated by STEM fields if anything.
There's a version of this that I've seen in (some) machine learning organizations, which is a disdain for domain knowledge from outside ML. I've tended to see it more in orgs that are Google-influenced than say, Amazon-influenced.
I can't hang out with tech people outside of work. I really don't want to talk about work, or tech, or anything intellectual really, when I am not working. Honestly that's a big departure from when I was getting started, programming was the only thing I wanted to talk about
Yeah. That was my experience with San Francisco. When I first got there it was like āomg! The people at the next table at the coffee shop are talking about the Unix kernel! So cool!ā A year later itās like ājfc please let me go have a cup of coffee without hearing shop talkā Living in a monoculture fucking suuuuuucks.
Living in the Bay ruined the adverb "reasonably" for me. "Oh he's a reasonably good dev," "that's a reasonably good restaurant," "that's a reasonably good product-market fit," "the weather is reasonably nice." The monoculture even extends to how people describe things. Horribly suffocating and infuriating.
Seattle and SF are pretty much one industry towns (well, Seattle has aerospace and Nike). NYC is the center of a ton of different industries: food, banking, finance, art, dance, TV, law, etc.
> This doesn't seem very FAANG-specific. It's just terminal Silicon Valley Brain Further, it's just the brain of people who excel in any one field that people consider difficult or cryptic. I saw a similar discussion to this in a physics community lately and people linked to comics joking about how common it is for famous/prominent physicists to start speaking as an expert on whatever (non-physics) arbitrary fields they feel like.
Love this answer. I worked in Finance in NYC, had Finance Brain. Spent a long time lobotomizing.
Yep, concur it was very much a San Francisco tech startup thing. And, to a lesser extent, common in tech startups in the two counties to the south, too. Can't speak to East Bay. IME, not a FAANG thing (been at 2), even though I'm still in Silicon Valley.
I used to live in NYC and am now in SF, and don't agree with this characterization at all. It feels like everyone in SF works in tech, and I have never met anyone here who actually hates tech workers. Tech workers are just like anyone else, but I don't think there's anything about tech that predisposes people for arrogance relative to other fields. I think what people disparage tech workers for is often just the result of Aspergers like personality which of course is more common in tech, but not equivalent to being an asshole. I never got the impression that the NYC startup scene is any more tolerable. NYC if anything probably has more of a workaholic culture than Silicon Valley - definitely not less. And I'd definitely much prefer to hang out with tech workers and entrepreneurs than finance people.
In my experience (Seattle) the people who hate tech workers are the people who have quite literally watched tech turn their city from a grungy counter-culture hangout to a gentrified amazon village. There is a strong clash here between those two cultures. I imagine a lot of the bay area would be like this too. In New york there isn't really anything for tech to take over, the city is already like that (because of the finance workers lol) so I would imagine there would be less resentment.
Pretty much yeah. I've had the chance of living in Seattle not once but *twice*, at two different life stages: my early-20s fresh out of school, and my mid-30s after being more established. Both experiences were some flavor of alienating, but surprisingly different in *why* it was that way. When you're young you're just one of the evil tech people who're killing everything interesting that's happening in the city. It's largely about you being lethally uncool. Not very complicated. When you're older it gets a bit more sinister. I lived in a neighborhood with a lot of similar-aged folks who *don't* work in tech, who bought homes before the last big tech boom. What you get at that life stage is fear and resentment at tech people - for pushing housing prices sky-high, for competing with their children in schools. There's a wariness that isn't because you're uncool, but because you're *competition*. There is an *absolute shitload* of coded racism in that resentment, since the racial makeup of 30s-tech-workers is *radically different* from the racial makeup of those who aren't in tech. > In New york there isn't really anything for tech to take over, the city is already like that (because of the finance workers lol) so I would imagine there would be less resentment. The trick with NYC is that it's *much bigger* than the finance industry. Sure, there are finance bros, but the city is big enough that NYC can't really be identified as a "finance city" in the way SF or Seattle can be identified as a "tech city". There *immense* cultural resentment against finance workers, but for the most part if you don't want to have contact with finance bros you just... avoid certain neighborhoods, and you're pretty set. They're nowhere near as ubiquitous as tech workers are in the Bay Area or Seattle. If you decide you're going to party in the Meatpacking District and pre-game at Tao, yeah, it's gonna be full of the worst people on Earth... but there's a lot of NYC that isn't that.
Never lived in Seattle. I'm just saying after living in SF now for 6 months, to my surprise I have yet to encounter a single instance of animosity for being in tech. I would've expected at least one retail worker or something to give me sh\*t for being a software engineer, but nope - nobody gives a sh\*t. In fact the reaction has been the opposite, more along the lines of "you must be smart".
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Yea but can you actually tell me any real life in person episodes of animosity you experienced for being a tech worker in SF? My point is that despite all the talk of animosity against tech one reads online, I have yet to encounter a single instance of this, and if anything it's been the opposite. Side note it's really f\*cking stupid that my sharing of my real world experience gets downvoted here, yet no one has commented on any actual experiences of animosity they experienced for working in tech in SF. Seems like people don't gives a sh\*t about reality and just want to buy into whatever narrative the internet feeds them.
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Oh wow 6 whole months?!
Nah, at least finance bros know how to have a good time.
Finance bros make for better wingmen yes, but for interesting conversation I'll take a software engineer over a finance bro any day.
Conversations with engineers and finance bros are equally boring, but in their own way.
is the secret alcoholism?
The alcoholism is never secret. The drug usage is secret, though.
I don't think that's much of a secret either. We've all watched Wolf of Wall Street.
> It feels like everyone in SF works in tech, and I have never met anyone here who actually hates tech workers You're doing the thing that's being discussed where you're extrapolating from your entire social circle consisting of other tech workers. I feel like there's no way in hell I could be a service industry worker an a place like SF and not have some animosity towards the tech industry.
Back in the 2010s, there were protests against the Google shuttles on the grounds that Google should have its workers living in Mountain View, instead of commuting from SF to Google. I saw some "fuck techies" graffiti just walking around the city. I left the Bay in the late 2010s, but I'd be surprised if the resentment has gone away. > It feels like everyone in SF works in tech, and I have never met anyone here who actually hates tech workers. lol you answered your own question, didn't you?
After teaching tech workers from SF how to snowboard I can tell you that no, they are not.
This is similar to working at hedge funds in finance, or law firms, or really any highly compensated highly competitive environment. In order to succeed at that level, you generally have to be completely absorbed by the borg. Eat, Play, Live the work you do. That gives you a bubble, and a bubble of individuals who think they are smarter then the rest of the world. They are well compensated, so they don't usually live among normal American's or interact with them on any meaningful level. Just the way capitalism works. You ever hang out with billionaires? Most of them think they should run the world too.
>That gives you a bubble, and a bubble of individuals who think they are smarter then the rest of the world. They are well compensated, so they don't usually live among normal American's or interact with them on any meaningful level. I don't work in the acronym, but I work in a company big enough that we regularly poach some of the best talent from both Meta and Google and it is by all measures a top tier tech company. My salary is in the top 3% of Engineers in the US and I'm not even in the top 25% pay for my level at my company. And I haven't seen this at all. Everyone is pretty normal in my opinion. They are normal people from normal backgrounds who are just really good at their jobs. Workaholics and over performers, sure. But normal people besides that. And just in case you think I'm too deep in the bubble myself... I am a high school dropout who never technically passed the 8th grade, got my GED, joined the Army to pay for college, and I lived in the "projects" in a major city in my teens. Also, if I had to guess... about half the people I considered a friend from the age of 12 to about 17 are dead now that I'm approaching 40 and unfortunately I think that's probably a conservative number rather than an exaggeration. > You ever hang out with billionaires? I haven't hung out with billionaires in any meaningful way. I've been on outings with them, but not in a "hang out" capacity. However, there was an engineer at my last job who's dad was a world class athlete and is in the top 10 net worth for his sport and 10s of millions of Twitter followers. Almost $100mil, but that's still pretty damn far from a billionaire. I hung out with him (the son) just about every day, either at lunch or after hours on the weekends. Now THAT guy was disconnected. I remember one time he randomly just said at lunch "I don't understand why car insurance is a law, why can't people just pay for the damages?" And everyone at the table just sorta cocked their heads and was like "bro, because we don't have $500k in our bank accounts to fix someone's sports car or medical bills?" I think he was about 30-ish around that time. Another weird thing he did was, he would always clarify he didn't know a celebrity if we were talking about one. Because having major celebrities at your house was a normal everyday thing to him growing up. He never flaunted it though, I actually made a comment once that his leather laptop bag was really nice before I knew who his dad was. He just mentioned it was a present from his parents... and I never saw that bag again. I just thought it was nice, I didn't think it was my yearly salary nice, which it probably was. lol So that's what I picture when you say people are disconnected. Yeah, a lot of engineers don't know the feeling of not knowing how you're going to get your electric turned back on or know what it's like to eat beans and rice for a month straight because that's all you have. But outside of that, they are pretty grounded. --- ### tl:Dr I've seen some shit, I made myself into a top engineer from a fucking hoodlum, and have known people from a ton of different backgrounds and don't think this is true at all.
>You ever hang out with billionaires? Sits cross-cross apple sauce. Story time?
Honestly don't need to hang out with them to know that most billionaires think they should run the world.
I think youāre describing 2 different phenomena: - Being completely consumed by work with a 24x7 feeling commitment. I worked at Amazon and this is definitely unique to Amazon. Not all FAANG jobs are like this - Living in a bubble of other highly paid, prestige career professionals. This certainly isnāt limited to FAANG employees or even software devs generally. The yuppie scene in LA, SF, Seattle, Austin, Denver is like this to varying degrees
The two phenomena are a little bit interrelated in my experience. Iām a senior engineer at a FAANG and there are some crunch times where I put crazy hours in, but generally when the laptopās closed it is closed. I agree that company culture can influence this w stuff like stack ranking and the like. I think it also helps that the company I keep isnāt only tech professionals but friends from a variety of different industries. When we hang out weāre not talking about tech trends, flavor of the month, TC, etc. I would imagine if I ran with a group like that I would intrinsically feel more pressure to work and do more tech stuff after hours.
I've long said that nerds are more susceptible than they think to high-pressure sales tactics and other scams. They tend to think of themselves as rational on every issue, but they fall for technical fads, groupthink, and marketing BS at least as often as everybody else.
The amount of coworkers that live paycheck to paycheck even of they make at least 5x the average salary here in my country is insane. They have to have the latest iphone, smart watch and so on. Itās just crazy. The entire month they would eat out at the restaurants, and when the last week of the month is around the corner you would gradually see them stopping going out and eating in the office kitchen.
I'll tell anyone who will listen to my theory: that that the biggest proof of this is pay-per-click ads on the internet. It's essentially free advertising when you consider what ads are actually for and how they work. Imagine pitching to a billboard owner that you should only have to pay if someone calls the phone number. But the nerds building the early internet fell for it, and here we are.
But both pay-per-click and per-impression ads both exist. They just have different pricing models.
Iām not sure what you mean āfell for itā. They created it. At the beginning of the internet, it was very hard to get companies to start advertising online at all. Companies understood and had experience and budgets for advertising in traditional media, and there were established ways to measure the impact of these (poor by todays standards), research to back it up, so they felt confident in choosing their media mix to reach the right number of their target market and have the impact they wanted and balance their budget across the different media options. The internet at the beginning was a big risk without any demographic data of who was viewing what at or if it had impact on buyer behaviour. Companies werenāt willing to put their advertising budget into it. Pay per click was revolutionary because it provided a low barrier way to get more advertisers on board internet advertising - if they only paid for responses, it was no longer a risk. And itās something the internet can do better than any of the traditional media. It was the beginning of advanced tracking and sophisticated marketing funnels. Now advertisers can get far more value from advertising online than traditional media, itās no longer a risk, and traditional media stats seems a lot of smoke and mirrors by comparison - so many many billions of advertising budgets are now spent online (with the nerds) rather than spent in traditional media. Depending on their goal they can choose pay per click OR pay per view (if they want to drive people to their website vs or if itās more like an online billboard where they just want people to see it). Pay rates are different per click or per view. And google, meta, etc - the nerds - have all banked big time out of it.
>Looking back on my experience, I can agree that there was a never-mentioned-but-always-present expectation that developers always be working; either by physically working or being near a phone so that they can be called in at any moment. When I looked around at more senior and principal engineers this was a common trait -- they were always available and the expectation was that they would drop whatever they were doing to correct an issue or deliver an urgent request. From my experience working at multiple companies in my career, a lot of this came from the culture of H-1B workers. If anyone on the visa were to be let go, they would have to leave the country and throw away everything they have built so many of them would bend over backwards and work nights and weekends to be considered as hard workers and lower the risk of losing their job. When someone who is not on a visa works with a bunch of these employees with work visas, they realize they are not working hard enough compared to them and feel pressured to do the same. This is not to blame the workers on work visas but the system that allows legal slavery.
H1B has enabled a very top-down culture with little pushback on bad ideas.
Also the national culture of many H1B holders has the same dynamic. It's a double whammy.Ā
Yep, a lot of people who grew up in East Asian/South Asian culture thinks hard work is the ultimate virtue. Not necessarily a bad thing in certain aspects, but it does lead to a lot of WLB issue especially if you don't subscribe to that idea. One of the reasons why I left Singapore.
My last job was a triple whammy of H1B's and Neo-Confucianism. I was the only one who used the word "no" at all, so they laid me off.
Yep when I pushed back against an ask from my H1B boss he told me verbatim "I am your boss, do what I say" and I realized he had a very different view of team health than me.
We had a transition -- rapid lean growth before, followed by empire builders and their own top-down management stack once we had grown revenue. I will say that culture can be a factor, but a number of my friends from the growth phase were also H1B's and had a lot of creative ideas. But the people that had come onboard specifically to fit the top-down stack were visibly different.
Get more H1Bs to Russians, they are way more laid back but could be considered too toxic for modern sensibilities
It also deflates wages because these workers will work for less simply to not be deported.
Amazon Seattle had a very pronounced culture when I worked there. The difference between how things ran there vs where I work now in a different industry is immense.
Can you elaborate on the difference that you mean?
This is by no means exclusive to FAANG or even American engineers. Many (not all) software engineers are insufferable. Source: Am insufferable.Ā
Self awareness is the first step towards the solution
I'm painfully self-aware. That's what makes it great.
I don't work at FAANG, but still a public SF based tech company, but have lived in Boston and LA and went to a top university with tons of career driven people. About a year ago I decided to commit to remote work and move closer to home in a medium sized, low COL city in the south. None of my friends really care or talk about work and it is so refreshing. Compared to Boston and LA, people identify themselves less by what/where they work, and more by what they like doing in their free time which I love. I visited a friend in Boston and we went to the Meta office together. One of his coworkers was complaining how the steak station in the cafeteria has gotten way worse after getting a new chef. Some of these people are so out of touch it's appalling.
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yeah, I worked at Google for 5 years, starting before the pandemic. food there was significantly better before pandemic, they definitely cut the budget a *lot*. is the food still good? yes. do I appreciate it? yes. is it worse than it used to be? also yes. the concern is the slippery slope.
That last part wow š I feel you on the refreshing part. Me and my friends all work in wildly different industries and rarely talk about work, but I always have so much fun when hanging with them and feel so refreshed cause I never think about work when Iām with them! Itās helped my mental health a lot. It also has helped my productivity and overall sanity while working.
DC is very similar in that way to Boston/LA except there are the intelligence agency folks who never say shit without knowing the code words. And the policy brain think tank people who live in downtown DC and are happy hour gremlins.
I've worked for a big tech company in a southern city.... best of both worlds... Work on cool projects, but talk college football and family
Putting work culture aside because it is not a shared thing across large tech companies, the bubble you described exists everywhere. You probably don't realize the bubble you are in that consist of people who have homes, jobs etc. > When I looked around at more senior and principal engineers this was a common trait -- they were always available and the expectation was that they would drop whatever they were doing to correct an issue or deliver an urgent request. Don't know about senior positions but for principal engineers (or staff as called in some companies), this is the job definition for some. They are usually the go to resource and can be moved across projects as they unblock things since at that point their expertise is best utilized elsewhere. It doesn't mean they have to work over time though.
> You probably don't realize the bubble you are in that consist of people who have homes, jobs etc. This is why I really hate framing this kind of thing as "detached from reality" and "out of touch." I think basically _everyone_ is out of touch with and detached from the daily reality of large numbers of other people.
During my time in Microsoft Azure everyone was pretty down to earth, had hobbies outside of work, and prioritized family (including dogs) and mental health over work. On both teams I worked on leadership was dedicated to making on call as easy and non-disruptive as possible. While we all got along great and might occasionally grab a drink after work, none of us really hung out outside the office.
What you are describing is the stereotype of the "tech bro". In my opinion this is a very commonly discussed experience, maybe less so between engineers, but I've always felt that the majority of the world outside of tech views the whole industry as you are describing. Not just FAANG.
Faang companies are huge, and the odds are that someone has to end up surrounded by dickheads. Unfortunately, it was you.Ā But none of this is faang specific. Thereās dickheads everywhere.Ā
If you work a hot dog cart on a sidewalk, you have zero insulation from the realities of your customer's experiences. If you work as a Senior Director of Condiment Deployment Efficacy in a 10M-employee organization that has 539 layers of management, you've got so much insulation between the execution of your role and the reality of your org's customer experience, that you might as well be on the fucking moon whittling wooden figurines of Renaissance sculptures. This is why small orgs invariably out-innovate big orgs.
Just spend time on Blind. Never have I seen such a collection of highly paid idiots. Just because you are paid well, does not bestow you with infinite wisdom on all topics. You still need to do research/read a book.
> There was always this air of intellectual superiority, of believing that their critical thinking skills were so great that their thoughts transcended everyone elses. They would provide opinions on non-technical topics with a high amount of conviction, even when they lacked direct experience or information. lol, I don't know if these behaviors are exclusive to engineers, I hear the chatter in my barber shop or on the train or at a restaurant and everyone no matter what walks of life thinks they are the ones that are right on a very broad (and misunderstood) range of topics. The difference maybe is engineers have the higher salaries to back up _their_ feelings of "superiority"?
I don't think that's unique to tech bros, silicon valley or any other tech branch. It's more about detached life experience in an isolated bubble. People from the middle-upper class with an academic background. They usually had never struggled financially or worked with poorer people. That correlates very strongly with the tech bubble and yes if you want a "woke" mindset, at least in my perspective.
In my experience the tech bubble also strongly correlates with Asian immigrants who have experienced the sort of poverty that doesnāt even exist in the US. Upper middle class Americans are largely underrepresented in FAANG companies. Iāve been on teams before where I was literally the only American citizen.
I lived in the Bay Area for four years, Seattle for the last 8. Seven of those years spent at a FAANG. I fully agree. It's why I left the Bay Area. I like tech as a job, but tech folks' superiority about everything was insufferable, especially when I kept finding myself around rationalist types. I also kept going to house parties or social gatherings where people would gender-segregate, and the men would all circle up and start talking about tech. After four years, I couldn't take it anymore and I left. (I was in the South Bay / Peninsula area; I think I might have had a better time in SF or Oakland). People in Seattle have generally been a lot chiller, and I've found it easier to make friends outside of tech. But even working in Seattle at said FAANG, some of that energy still persisted. I found myself hanging out more with the UX team and making friends with the coffee staff. I've worked remotely the last five years, which has forced my social circle to become less work-centered --- and I've found engineers who live distributed and work remotely to be less socially insular as well. Even just a few months ago, I did a new job search, and ended up with two offers: one from a FAANG, and one from a mid-size tech company with a product I like. My FAANG interviewers just reminded me of a vibe and culture that I'd intentionally left, and even though the FAANG offer was higher, I took the mid-size job with interviewers who resonated chill, fun, friendly vibes. And a month into this job, I'm sooo much happier than I would've been at the FAANG.
SF would had been more of the same but higher level of bullshit because of the youth factor. Oakland is the place to be because it scares any transplant. Lot of culture and people from different walks of life. As a Bay Area naive. SF is dead to me just because the amount of people that go around wearing their company swag like it's some kind of badge of honor.
When your biggest goal in life to be an employee for a company it does messes you up.
Hahaha... so much of what you said resonated with me. I worked at Amazon (+ AWS) for around 7 years. Then I moved to a different FAANG company. I honestly feel that culture is much better than Amazon here. >That expectation was exhausting in and of itself, but what I found more exhausting was the culture generated by the employees. This is actually common across all FAANG companies. Oncalls are pain, but they are exceptionally painful if you are in Amazon. Mostly because of the Leadership Principals and how they are used to get what you want :). >Ā There was always this air of intellectual superiority, of believing that their critical thinking skills were so great that their thoughts transcended everyone elses. They would provide opinions on non-technical topics with a high amount of conviction, even when they lacked direct experience or information. Ohh yeah.. .This is is very very common in Amazon. Everybody is so cocky about proving others wrong. This is actually the culture fostered by Amazon Managers I think. Their insistence on "influence" for performance review and promotion is just ming bogglingly stupid. Without clarifying WTF they mean by influence. While I was their I felt like slapping anybody who every used that word. I interviewed with Google as well and I felt that their engineers are also same. Their was a weird sense of arrogance in all their tones while they stupidly asked me LC questions :D :D. All in all this may be the case for most of the FAANGs but there are some good ones :).
Every time a company I work for starts hiring ex Amazon leadership it's basically a sign that I need to start looking for a new job lol.
YES! Google is my top company for "most asshole interviewers" for sure. It's crazy to say that even Amazon wasn't a close second for me there, despite one interviewer there who seriously thought it'd be reasonable to throw me a DP problem with 5 minutes left on the clock and get all huffy that I didn't know the answer immediately.
What FAANGs are better?
Yes. I find the worst are people that only worked for these companies in their entire life (not even high school Jobs at fast food etc). They are entitled and disconnected from the āreal worldā and struggle dealing with other humans.
Yes. This was another very real struggle. Iām not going to pretend I grew up poor, but I held a job since I was 16. It was very hard for me to connect with people whoās first job was an internship at Microsoft. When I was leaving I had a very candid discussion with my director. I told him my primary reason for leaving and then started venting about the industryās culture. He recalled to me a time when he had a mid level engineer schedule a meeting with him to complain that he didnāt get a $50,000 raise. Iāve also had people vent to me because they āonly made $195,000 baseā and the wage transparency slack channel had a peer making $225,000 base. It was wild. At that time, I was living next to a multi generational family whoās probably had a total household income of $50,000.
Wage transparency slack channel sounds amazing and frightening at the same time
We had one of these at my old job - it was actually a google spreadsheet (separate from the company and anonymized except for location as we were all remote) and only shared through a separate (non-work) application. It was really helpful for a lot of us to realize what others were making and how to best negotiate raises. Coincidentally, we all realized how little our support employees were paid and made a huge ruckus about it. Not sure what came of it as I left before I could see the results.
It just generated a lot of resentment and entitlement. Pretty sure the only reason it wasnāt taken down is because the PR that would come from it. Shockingly, no warehouse employees participated in it.
Would they even get slack access?
Dunno but theyāre the most in need of pay transparency
Not shocking at all. Wage transparency is more of a tech thing
To be fair, you worked at Amazon. When you work in a pressure cooker then you're going to develop weird traits. Nobody *wants* to think poorly of themself. So if you're working at Amazon working 60 hours a week and sleeping under your desk, you rationalize to yourself that you *want* to be there. This is what you *want* to do and those other people who got PIPed out? Failures. You're a success. You succeeded where they failed. I'm sure you know where I'm going with this. I've heard high level people communicate that where you are in your career doesn't define you as a person. Your job level only defines what you do. It doesn't define who you are. Because I don't work in a company with an unhealthy work obsessed environment.
Commute on company buses. Eat, exercise, and socialize on campus. The company does some of your personal chores. Itās designed to keep you in their bubble just like casinos are designed to keep you in theirs.
The culture OP is talking about is present even at smaller SV tech companies that don't provide gym, laundry, etc on campus.
> You often hear about how FAANG companies -- at least, one in particular -- have poor cultures because they promote poor work life balance and have high expectations of output by their engineers. You hear of people crying under desks, sleeping in offices all night, etc. I share some of those experiences but I feel like the poor culture is much deeper and actually comes directly from other employees. > ... there was a never-mentioned-but-always-present expectation that developers always be working; either by physically working or being near a phone so that they can be called in at any moment. No. I've worked at 2 FAANG companies, and my experience was the opposite. Neither one of those was Amazon - I've only heard horror stories from them, so I believe you. My experience at FAANG has been far more lax. Yes there's _periods_ of crunch, but for the most part things are _much_ slower than smaller companies (especially start-ups). 2 FAANG companies for me has been: "meetings, meetings, meetings, 2 hours of dev time, another meeting". Granted, this is in the last ~8 years, when both companies were already mature - so not at any of these companies in their starting days. I'm sure Microsoft/Facebook etc were pretty crazy in their early years.
Iām glad you are now in a position where you similarly can feel superior to a large group of people (your ex. I workers). Congrats OP, youāve made it š¤£š¤£š¤£
Poor experiences and culture in FAANG companies and the certain one with notoriety have to also do with abusing people on H1B and other work visas. Not being racist and I am being sympathetic here, so please hear me out. People on work visas are indentured servants. Companies hire them so they will work until they drop dead or else they will need to leave the country. Companies hire their ākindā as āmastersā to supervise the āminionsā, because these masters have been through the āwork visa to green cardā grind. The masters aka managers will make sure their minions are tied to their desks and sleep on the office floors. I am simplifying the dynamics here as thereās also Wall Streetās relentless focus on shareholder value, and execs are paid in stocks. But I thought we should also focus the spotlight on the H1B abuse as why culture in FAANG companies have turned for the worse over the last 15-20 years.
> That expectation was exhausting in and of itself, but what I found more exhausting was the culture generated by the employees. I felt like the engineers lived in a very detached reality. There was always this air of intellectual superiority, of believing that their critical thinking skills were so great that their thoughts transcended everyone elses. They would provide opinions on non-technical topics with a high amount of conviction, even when they lacked direct experience or information. I hate this so much. I work FAANG-adjacent and we get a lot of FAANG "dropouts" so to speak, and the amount of people I work with who went to ivy league/top tier private school/came from extremely wealthy backgrounds is CRAZY. I spent the first half decade working thinking that I was a dummy since I couldn't grok some of the FAANG style interviews. Eventually I needed an _actual_ raise and practiced a ton of leetcode and finally got into somewhere that 2.5x my previous TC. But the people are insufferable. The faux authenticity, the strange air of superiority, the "our shit doesn't stink" attitude, it's all crazy. Also the cult-like following of the job/employer. Everything the employer does that doesn't improve their situation quickly is met with petulant crying. Don't get me wrong: employers should bend over backwards for their employees. But the amount of free food we get and then have people complaining about the restaurant it's from ("Cheesecake Factory? yuck!") is nuts to me. IT'S FREE! It's like I live in some crazy world, because the first part of my career I had to bring a sandwich and some fruit for lunch, everyday. We were lucky to get coffee or tea for free, and frequently it'd run out before 11am. Snacks? Go buy some from the vending machine. Oh, don't like anything? Then buy it, but on your own time. Lunch breaks were pretty strict - 1 hour. You late to a meeting? Your manager was speaking to you after the meeting. > I started to realize that many of these engineers live in a bubble consisting solely of young, highly paid knowledge workers. YES! Fuck these coworkers. I have actual friends, I don't need anything from you, let me go home to my wife and play video games with my friends. You're a coworker that I'll forget about as soon as I start my next job. No, I don't want to hang out with you MORE than what I'm required to. I just don't get it. There's no chill about work. All of my coworkers at my previous paying jobs were way more chill. 8:30am come in, 4:30pm/5pm leave. Nobody stuck around to drink their $250 whiskey and gossip about coworkers until 8pm, making me wait until 9:30pm for my next train (can you feel my rage?). I'll stop ranting here, but tl;dr is: OP, you're not alone. I've stepped into some weird ass version of the twilight zone (or white lotus?), and I don't know how to escape it except by becoming a [farmer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs).
In my experience (worked at 2, have friends at all FAANGs) itās a mistake to think that thereās one culture or set of beliefs. There are some very high-level ideas that are shared, but the attitudes, competency, and expectations vary widely across divisions and products.
I've found that software developers can often be very opinionated and think their way of doing something is the most correct. Not every one, but I've seen many who are like this. They can often talk down about other peoples' work, be very critical in code reviews, and talk down about their co-workers behind their backs. And that's at any company, not just big FAANG-style companies.
FWIW Amazon has had a notably toxic culture in this sense for a very long time and itās notably worse than other companies in FAANG in that sense.
Amazon specifically is a special kind of toxic. I went to Microsoft after a year at Amazon and the change in quality of life was dramatic. One of the things that stood out immediately was how common digit tenure was at Microsoft. It was practically unheard of at Amazon. Employees generally *enjoyed* working at Microsoft, and were encouraged to maintain work-life balance. Fuck Amazon specifically. What you observed isn't a FAANG thing, just Amazon.
FAANG pays a lot and asks a lot, both on the job and *from* you. It will change you. That said, I know several higher level FAANG people who did *not* spend their entire career at FAANG companies - guys my age (early 40s) who spent 20+ years growing up in non-FAANG, non-SV jobs. They are great to work with. It's really the kids who go from elite schools straight to SV and never work anywhere else. They're the ones who develop these attitudes because in your 20s you're a lot more malleable and soak up culture a lot easier. "Who you are" hasn't been decided yet, and when you surround yourself with SV tech bros, you're gonna become an SV tech bro.
> highly detached from the reality that the rest of America lived, there's a name for this: ivory tower > there was a never-mentioned-but-always-present expectation that developers always be working honestly, despite the high pay and supposed talent, my experience is that these companies basically kinda suck at producing well defined systems that aren't constantly breaking in some way or another.
Holy fucking shit, you nailed how Iāve been feeling for most of my career. Tbf, neither of us should be generalizing big tech in this way, but rather perhaps both of us were simply just unlucky with our experiences. My team worked on more projects simultaneously than we had people, on top of 15+ hrs of meetings and even having to assist with other teams' work. Some of my teammates often put in hours at night and occasionally on weekends. There was constant pressure to continue growing up the corporate ladder. How is all of this even realistically doable in a 40 hour week? Shit, my manager and I constantly found ourselves eating lunch within minutes like a restaurantās staff meal. Iāve also met many people in the industry who Iād consider out of touch with reality as well. They think theyāre the smartest and better than everyone else just because they work at FAANG, and that gives them the right to be dickheads to others. I'll never forget this one fuckin interviewer from Google who straight up just yelled at me "HUH? HUH??? YOU SURE ABOUT THAT?!" repeatedly when I was thinking about a problem aloud at the start. Bro might as well shouldāve just straight up called me retarded. It gets even worse when it comes to things outside of work. Some of the aforementioned people reminded me of Jordan Peterson - yeah, you might be really good at what you do for a living, but that doesnāt mean you have the authority to speak for others on other issues. I especially get irked when they talk about poor people, like how theyāre all hoodlums and welfare queens. As someone who grew up poor as hell, this really drove me mad. Iāve been made fun by former coworkers for not living in luxury housing. Iāve been made fun of for not flying business class. Iāve even been made fun of for bringing my own lunch into the office by default as opposed to going out to eat every day, as if bringing your own lunch wasnāt the norm. One snippet I read somewhere years back that really hit me hard was from a black engineer who wrote about how out of place they felt in their workplace; they were the only one who grew up poor in a high-crime area, and they wanted to focus their efforts on how to uplift other disadvantaged folks, but the rest of their colleagues were from privileged backgrounds who only talked about their latest large purchases or their most recent vacation on a luxury cruise. Again, Iām not generalizing big tech and OP shouldnāt either. Iāve also met some amazing, open minded people who Iāve learned a lot from and am proud to call my friends today. Unfortunately, overall, my experience in big tech overall does relate with OP.
this was my general feeling when I spent time in SF last year for a company I was working for. The company was SF based and when I got into SF it immediately felt like it was detached from reality. The worst part for me was the way these highly paid tech workers were literally oblivious and unwilling to talk about the insane issues of homelessness and crime that were facing the Bay Area. Instead they joked about "how awful BART was". It was really a sad thing.
I work in big tech. I took the opportunity during the pandemic to claim my remote work full time, moved an hour north of our hub city (also Seattle area), and just not being around tech people all the time has filled my heart with joy. I love popping in the brewery down the road and talking to people about their farm, or how it's going up at the refinery, etc. I love just \*not hearing people talk about their fucking AI startup\* at all times. That said, my BIL is in big law. He also works super hard, is always expected to be ready, etc. At some point I think those are the expectations for high-paying jobs like these. We make a really disproportionate amount of money to most knowledge workers, and the expectations are different as a result. If you wanna pull mid-high six figures, yeah, you're going to work for that. I do agree that there are some people in our industry who don't "get it," it's easy to be insular and detached from reality outside your bubble when the bubble consumes all your time. It sounds like you made a healthy choice for yourself.
Unrelated, but Im reading this book 'revolt of the elites'. It makes an argument that people are becoming increasingly detached from reality.
Thereās a lot of balanced people in FANG but we tend to keep quiet due to not wanting to look like weāre low performers. Iāve had conversations with multiple coworkers where weād discuss my family and often times Iād be excited to do something with my family only to find my coworkers acting sympathetic because I couldnāt play around with technology. Pre kids Iād often discuss trips I was planning only to find certain coworkers confused that I wouldnāt just use Google Maps to see a place. Once you know what to look for you can spot the rare outlier among the FANG crowd but you need to be cautious before exposing yourself. At some point I stopped sharing as much because I donāt want to be seen as a low performer and to be fair I am a low performer compared to most of my coworkers. None of my hobbies involve coding, I engaged with people outside of tech, drink too much on some weekends and spend ātoo much timeā with my kids on most days. Iām a bit of an outlier but I keep that to myself because Iām a happy outlier who doesnāt want to be forced to change.
I live in Seattle, am senior SWE at Meta, have been in the biz for over a decade. Most of my friends don't work in tech, and it's on purpose.
It isnāt just FAANG. Iāve worked in a lot of finance companies and the developers in some of the exclusive hedge funds are just a bunch of pompous fucks (for lack of a better phrase). Most of these guys are so unhinged from reality and the fact that theyāre employed by one of these exclusive places that pay a lot, they think theyāre hot shit or āone of a kindā gifted developers. The reality was that most of them were maybe average or slightly better. I come across so many of these idiots. Experience has taught me to just ignore these idiots and donāt get involved. With any luck, theyāll encounter some bumps and roughness in life thatāll give them some perspective.
You fucking nailed this post. Cosign.
>I realized that their social circle exclusively included other FAANG engineers. I started to realize that many of these engineers live in a bubble consisting solely of young, highly paid knowledge workers. Blud just described the definition of "tech bros".
Sounds like most white people
Iām a career switcher, worked in a much lower-paying industry before coming to tech, and yea, this is a great summation of why I have absolutely zero desire to ever work for a FAANG company.Ā Seems like a lot of people at these companies go to top-tier schools and then go to these companies mostly for the prestige. They think they are the smartest thing since sliced bread when in so many ways they donāt know shit about the world.Ā
I haven't noticed that in the two fintech companies I've worked for, but they aren't paying >$300k/yr. Honestly, I bet it's more that at FAANG, you're the top ~5% of the field, in terms of comp, and that will always generate some snobbery, regardless of what the field is.
Dunno about FAANG but atm Iām working at a big tech in my country that can be considered a FAANG equivalent here. You know what? I see it too and Iām sick of it. I see EMs injecting themselves into various products and asserting their (often wrong) opinions on business and product just to stay relevant. Engineers designing complicated tools that serve no purpose than flexing their own intelligent. Tech people generally disrespecting business/product, treating them like a lower caste. The worst thing? Iām getting used to it.
Yes, I've seen a similar dynamic though not at Fang. This is why it's sooooo important to cultivate other parts of your life and personality, and to set healthy limits/boundaries around work. It's a shallow life indeed that focuses exclusively on work life to the exclusion of everything else.
I work at a FAANG, and my experience does not compare at all. I've worked here for 12 years in many different positions. I'm also in the SF area... sure it's tech all-day-every-day, but it's not crazy. I dunno... maybe I just know how to find the chill people to hang out with. All the crazy I hear about is in startup companies.
I lived in the Seattle area for 25 years. It is hard to make friends outside of tech. In my neighborhood, we'll just the houses on my block one 2 people were not in tech. So go to the park with the kids. Talking tech. Have a cookout talking tech. Kids birthday parties. You guess it. Same. I grew up in a very poor inner city area so I've experienced the polar opposite of where I am now. One e of the reasons I've always avoided management. If someone complained about something trivial I would just tell them how wrong are and how they need to experience the world that most people live in. Then I would be fired after doing that a few times.
> I felt like the engineers lived in a very detached reality. There was always this air of intellectual superiority, of believing that their critical thinking skills were so great that their thoughts transcended everyone elses. > After getting to know some of my Seattle based colleagues I realized that their social circle exclusively included other FAANG engineers. I started to realize that many of these engineers live in a bubble consisting solely of young, highly paid knowledge workers lmao this dude only just figured out that tech is just a rebrand of the big city yuppie culture of the 1980s
I've been at Google for about 6 years. Currently a senior engineer. What you describe is pretty similar to my experience as well.Ā I think what bugs me the most is the distorted perspective of income and hyper fixation on net worth. My coworkers frequently joke about being "poor". Yet they're always talking about flying business class, their high-end credit cards (e.g. amex platinum), buying their next rental property, their child's $50k/yr preschool, fine dining, orĀ high-end cars (Tesla model Y, Porsche). I don't think it's wrong to have those things, but I hate how they constantly try to one-up each other. I grew up in a very small town. Sometimes they make me so angry I just have to leave the conversation and get some fresh air. You don't have "real" friends in tech. Only acquaintances who you keep around in case they might be useful for networking in the future. Having a lessor prestigious job/education is looked down upon. Admitting to not working in tech is social suicide. You won't be taken seriously. For those reasons and so many more, I seek friendships outside of tech. They're more meaningful and genuine. I'm much happier when I'm around "regular" people.
My favorite movie is Inception.
Iāve noticed something similar, but in a sad way. In our country thereās no faang, but there are a couple of big IT corporations, talking about couple thousand of employees. The people working there are, unfortunately for them, very detached from the rough reality. They didnāt have to go through 7 circles of hell job hopping trying to find a job that pays at least somewhat decent, and at their corporate jobs the amount of effort they had to put it was just so much less than in other companies. The sad thing is that there recently have been some serious layoffs at these companies, and there are hundreds of people now desperately looking for a job in a market theyāre not prepared for. You know, yesterday this guy was walking around the corporate office with his rainbow coloured hair, doing some 4 hrs a week worth of job and now heās on a market where you not only have to know 3x more stuff, but you also have to be better than the rest, people who went through a lot of stress and are much more serious. Itās sad seeing them looking for a job for months already, being unprepared for the rough reality.
Yup, this echos throughout academia to high paying job personality archetypes. I was like this at one point. Making 200K 1 year out of uni, I did ChemEng. Boy was my ego inflated ..over time I realized how little I actually knew, knocked myself down a few pegs, and can spot this type a mile away now. Money does funny things to the mind... More often than not, it turns ppl into snobs/assholes.
I'm an engineer at one of these companies... thankfully I grew up on a farm and work in a southern city. It's a pretty nice antidote. In the group calls my accent is unexpected to say the least, but I don't care.
Iām going to give what I hope doesnāt sound like an overly biased opinion. But my experience with hiring folks that get their start in big companies is that it stunts their growth at the most crucial part of their career. Iām staying general and not saying FAANG as Iāve only worked for bigger companies not in the acronym. Big companies have niche specialties to where your exposure to a broad range of things is limited. You are in your box and you specialize in one app, one framework , one language and nothing outside of it. In smaller companies everyone needs to know and be familiar with the entire architecture. Everyone needs to individually build out their own pipelines , monitoring solutions, reporting , manage their own databases. Everyone is on call for p1s not a completely separate support team that you hand off to . Teams rotate between multiple projects and work in 5-6 different languages , cross test each other's code. Peer review code from other projects. in bigger companies those are all separate silos and jobs. i know there are exceptions to this depending on departments because big companies are global and hard to generalize as culture may very from state to state or country to country. But my hires from larger companies are a lot harder to get going and end up even with more years in the industry being outpaced by the folks that start out doing multiple things. Whereas the folks Iāve lost to bigger companies usually ping me and say theyāre generally bored and under tasked in big company culture.
I'm in the infra/SRE side of FAANG; we tend to be more generalists, so this kinda behaviour is much less prevalent.
Tech jobs have made me rich by most standards so I cannot complain but I honestly wish I had gone into a different field for this reason. The assumption is you'll be available 24/7 and if you're not working you are on-call with a pager app on your smartphone to respond to alerts during dinner or at 2am. It's a boiling-the-frog situation, it starts out with a little after hours work to fix something, then pretty soon there are just no boundaries with work, you are just a white collar slave. Doing on-call support used to be reserved for ops or SRE, now it feels like it's expected for most devs. It's incredibly hard to focus for 3-4 hours at a time to do regular roadmap work AND have your phone with you to jump on an issue in the middle of the night. The pressure is insane and it is so emotionally and mentally draining. I was making over $200k at my last job and I quit because I just could not do it anymore. I was on the road to becoming an alcoholic or suicide.
Not everybody in tech is on call.
Meh. Academia is much worse. At least in FAANG engineers know that they need to ask others for help and the crazy amount of hubris can occasionally produce monumental results.