A megacorp is not your dream job

https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/01/Megacorps-are-not-your-dream-job.html

by ddevault • 6 years ago

159 92 6 years ago

opportune3• 6 years ago

I don't really think these are compelling arguments, since at least for me, the only better thing than working for a megacorp as far as finances and QOL would be running my own company and succeeding which is substantially riskier.

If you quit, remember that they will have forced you to sign an NDA and a non-compete.

Not really likely considering there is a huge revolving door between all the major tech companies. There is also a risk I get hit by a car on the way to work.

You will probably be much happier at a small to mid-size company. The “dream job” megacorps have sold you on is just good marketing.

Actually I've worked on interesting, highly used stuff at megacorps in mature work environments, and was paid much more than most random small companies would. The concept of a "dream job" doesn't exist, neither in big companies or small companies, IMO.

They could hurt you, and they could make you hurt others.

I could just leave and get another job at any time. I don't understand why this author is so paranoid.

ssklash2• 6 years ago

I feel like you skipped the most compelling reason. I posted it in this thread already, but it's the abhorrent behavior that these companies routinely engage in and the harm they cause, enabled by well-meaning engineers who just want to solve problems and do interesting work.

opportune3• 6 years ago

Yeah, the issue with that is that for most megacorps only one or two of those criticisms are valid. I've definitely refused to work at companies (like Facebook) on the grounds that I think they are doing much more harm than good in the world. But there are also megacorps which I consider to be doing less harm per capita than other technology businesses which I would work for.

Part of the issue is that media companies have darlings and enemies that they don't really cover proportionately to their offenses, IMO (for example if Google even considers doing any business in China - uproar. But Bing actively sells out Chinese users to the Chinese government and nobody cars, because right now Microsoft is a media darling). And the media doesn't write about smaller companies doing bad things usually, unless they are particularly bad, because they fail the "who cares" test.

There is also an inherent chaos that comes with companies with hundreds of thousands of employees - bad people will get through hiring and do bad things, people will make very high impact mistakes, things become uncoordinated. So for me personally I try to think of companies in terms of badness-per-capita and whether the rot is coming from the top (Facebook) or is seemingly "random".

Youden• 6 years ago

I have a couple of objections to that:

- These companies aren't monolithic. If you object to say Google's monopoly on advertising, you can take a job on a team that has nothing to do with it, like image compression.

- If you disagree with the company's practices, you might have more impact by changing the company from within than trying to compete with it.

abdabab2• 6 years ago

... and they could make you hurt others

This is the part you missed. You can’t easily walk away from that.

opportune3• 6 years ago

I don't see how that's possible. I could just quit if I felt I was doing something unethical. It is easy to get hired as a software engineer, though if you are on a restrictive work visa "just quitting" becomes a much harder decision.

WJW• 6 years ago

Did you not read the part in the GP where he said "I could just leave and get another job at any time."? How is that not easily walking away from it?

ssklash2• 6 years ago

"They may hurt you, but even worse, they will make you hurt others. You will be complicit in their ruthlessness. Privacy dragnets, union busting, monopolistic behavior and lobbying, faux-slavery of gig workers in domestic warehouses and actual-slavery of workers in foreign factories, answering to nations committing actual ongoing genocide — this is only possible because highly skilled individuals like yourself chose to work for them, build their war chest, or even directly contribute to these efforts. Your salary may be a drop in the bucket to them, but consider how much that figure means to you. If you make that $500K, they spend 1.5× that after overhead, and they’d only do it if they expect a return on that investment. Would you give a corporation with this much blood on its hands $750K of your worth? Pocket change to them, maybe, but a lot of value to you, value that you could be adding somewhere else."

I hope FANG employees recognize themselves in this paragraph. Where you work matters.

kevinprince• 6 years ago

Not just where you work but the work you do.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

For me the sufficient reason is in the second paragraph

You will have little to no meaningful autonomy, impact, or influence.

This is pretty much by definition true if the place you work at hits a certain size, you become an ant in an anthill, hyper-specialized with no meaningful holistic task.

Life is too short to move things in and out of protobufs for a living, I'd rather live in a garage like a broke college student and have some agency in a five person company and see an entire project through and do interesting work rather than fixing the pipes on some gigantic monolith.

I read that Airbnb blogpost recently about moving to react native and back and I can only imagine the amount of hours of human life that were wasted in meetings alone makes Kafka's novels look harmless, why do people do this to themselves.

StavrosK• 6 years ago

This is pretty much by definition true if the place you work at hits a certain size, you become an ant in an anthill, hyper-specialized with no meaningful holistic task.

This size is much smaller than a megacorp, though, at around 100 people you'll either have very little user-influencing work or you'll be working on such small features that they won't be very noticeable.

falcolas• 6 years ago

Exactly. Even on a team of 10, unless you're especially outspoken, you're not going to be heard very often.

chefkoch• 6 years ago

why do people do this to themselves.

Lots of money.

zem• 6 years ago

i work in a megacorp, in developer tooling. so in some sense i'm fixing the pipes, and nothing i do is even remotely related to any of the company's core products. but on the other hand my primary project has a three-person team, we have tons of autonomy, and a pretty large impact on code quality and developer experience across the company. plus most of what i do is open-sourced, and there is a lot of engagement with the open source community at large. and this year i'm going to expand my role to spend some time contributing to the cpython interpreter, which my manager is very supportive of.

this pretty much is my dream job; everyone's dream doesn't have to include having visible user-facing impact or being part of product development. also the work-life balance is great; i get to put in my hours at work and actually be able to make plans that involve leaving at a reasonable time, which was not the case when i worked at a startup.

tayo42• 6 years ago

Life is too short to move things in and out of protobufs for a living, I'd rather live in a garage like a broke college student and have some agency in a five person company and see an entire project through and do interesting work rather than fixing the pipes on some gigantic monolith.

This is really just dependent on whats important to you. If spending all your waking hours in front of a computer writing commercial software is how you want to spend your life than sure work at a small company that will become your identity. Or write plumbing, get paid well, and live a well balanced life, one thats not dominated by work.(I think the language to describe the scenario emphasizes the spin on the scenario)

amelius2• 6 years ago

(...) Or write plumbing, get paid well, and live a well balanced life, one thats not dominated by work.

More than 1/2 of your awake life is spent working. So better make sure it is fulfilling.

safog• 6 years ago

Have to disagree almost entirely.

Any big tech co worth its salt acknowledges the outsized impact a single engineer can make and rewards them appropriately. The important thing here is defining "impact" and "influence". As a standard L4 / SDE-2 engineer, you can have enough impact to make a company like Amazon several 10s of millions of dollars year in and year out. Sure you can't change the strategy of a trillion dollar company, but very few people can claim to have such an outsized impact and still complain about it. It might be adding some prime badges here and some ads there, or improving a recommendations algorithm by 1% but given the scale at which they operate, a 0.25% win in conversion rate because of an idea you've had / executed is enough to drive 10s of millions of dollars in top-line revenue. In terms of technical impact, L4s generally have a fair share of interesting problems to work on - reducing latencies, saving fleet costs, solving recurring bugs are all well rewarded.

- As a Sr SWE (~5-6 years of experience) - you're expected to have an influence on the direction of an entire team. You have input into setting OKRs and idea generation is expected for this level (especially at Amazon, not as much at G from what I've seen).

- As a Principal Engineer - your influence has to stretch across an entire org.

You can vaguely say "oh but I don't care about making my employer gobs of money or solving somewhat interesting problems" but then you'd have to define impact in engineering terms.

joshuamorton2• 6 years ago

As a Sr SWE (~5-6 years of experience) - you're expected to have an influence on the direction of an entire team. You have input into setting OKRs and idea generation is expected for this level (especially at Amazon, not as much at G from what I've seen).

FWIW as a non-yet-Senior-SWE at Google, I have input and influence in OKRs both for myself and others on the team. This depends a lot on the particular work though. I work on internal infra, which is driven less by PMs and external market things, and much more by engineers proactively identifying areas for technical improvement and user pain.

spicyramen2• 6 years ago

The reason why I work for a mega corp is because of the salary and opportunities. I understand that they don't care about me, I don't want that they care about me, I care about the paycheck, stock options and bonus. Thanks to that i was able to buy my Model X, 1 house in Bay Area and 2 investment properties one in Austin and other in Financial District in Sao Paulo. I will continue to work for the evil corp because it brings economic benefit to me and my family, I don't care if my product is popular or not. I'm happy that my family has all they need

the_only_law2• 6 years ago

What level are you at in one of those companies to be able to afford all of that?

jpollock• 6 years ago

Sounds like an average standard Senior Engineer salary level.

If you don't sell your stock to live, wealth accelerates in a hurry.

BeetleB2• 6 years ago

I can't speak about the house in the bay area, but everything else is very affordable even if not in a FAANG. Plenty of people in my much lower paying company have investment properties here and there. You need enough to pay the down payment, and need skills to find houses at a discount. If you're really good at it, you can find houses at incredible discounts (with lots of risks attached).

Shivetya• 6 years ago

I was originally going to reply with, when I was younger I had a similar concern, but you went off the rails with buzzword bingo with exaggerated issues as if they plague large corporations. Hell you can experience much of the same in any size corporation and even have them within your own business inadvertently.

However I found that working for a Fortune 500 company to be both rewarding and comforting. I have been doing it for over two decades. I see the winds of change all the time but I also see incredible people I would have never met otherwise, new technologies that only were present because being so large we had teams for everything, and the opportunities expanded when working with large vendors who did not just ignore us or take us for granted.

Are there issues working in a company which probably lost more in a backroom than they pay you. Sure. The key is knowing how to manage yourself and know the boundaries of your environment so that you don't because replaceable cog.

You think megacorps are bad, well have you considered the gargantuan that is your Federal or State level government. Here are countless agencies and officials who supposedly are there to look out for you and all the others but no one actually holds them to that. You can try but you are not going to get far. Hiding behind Sovereign Immunity and even Qualified Immunity; which applies to all officials not just police; when they do something wrong or even illegal. Play side games with grant money to fund each other or writing contracts to hire friends and family for big money. No, corporations when they get large can be a threat to you if you work for them but government is a threat to everyone but who do you run to first and point fingers at someone else for them to act upon?

ddevault5• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

This is Hacker News. This is an appeal to hackers, software engineers, tech workers - not government workers.

analognoise4• 6 years ago

I'd work for the devil himself for 500k/year, and just convince myself he was misunderstood.

"Blood on your hands" - oh boo-boo.

Blood washes out.

pgcj_poster• 6 years ago

If real life were a Disney movie, do you imagine that you would be a hero or a villain?

meddlepal2• 6 years ago

Neither, just a minor character of low plot importance.

analognoise4• 6 years ago

I know infantilization is big with the tech set, but is this a serious question you'd ask an adult?

ThrowawayR2• 6 years ago

They'd be an uninteresting background character, just like myself and everyone else here.

dwaltrip2• 6 years ago

That's too bad. There are whole worlds of fantastic experience that this type of viewpoint is holding you back from experiencing.

Life can be very rough. It's certainly not fair, that's for sure. But there are many more possibilities and new perspectives waiting to be discovered and explored.

We are limited by our current frame of mind and past experience. If we strive to continually break through these barriers, we will never stop surprising ourselves at what we find and learn. The universe is a vast and incredible place. It is can also be quite scary and dangerous, this is true. But deep within all of us is an unrelenting urge to work together to face these dangers and overcome them. If you stop for a minute, I'm sure you can feel it.

My best wishes to you :)

analognoise4• 6 years ago

I work with others to overcome dangers - by building things like missiles.

The breathtaking presumptuousness and pompous assumption that my life viewpoint is holding me back is...amusing, honestly.

I mean, you have your kid get cancer, then tell me if you wouldn't take a "blood on the hands" job like...working at Facebook?? Then tell me if my life experiences limit my views, or are perhaps just different than yours.

I'm held back by my viewpoint from joining a cult. I don't see this as a loss.

the_only_law2• 6 years ago

I sometimes browse jobs boards for no reason except to see if there's anything cool out there. Bluntly, 99% of jobs I see from any company look absolutely dreadful. The rare occasion I see a job that makes me think "damn that would be a cool thing to work on" tends to be at one of these megacorps. The one's that aren't tend be be gate kept by things I can't simply acquire. Admittedly, I'm in no state to pass a leetcode interview atm., but it seems a hell of a lot easier to grind that for a few months that anything else.

underwater• 6 years ago

I've worked at a dozen companies from two-person dev shops, legacy enterprise companies, all the way up to a FAANG as it scaled from 5k to 30k people.

The FAANG "megacorp" was my absolute favourite job. I learned more, had more impact, made more money, and boosted my own career further than anywhere else I've worked.

Large corporations are not the Evil Co. from your Saturday morning cartoons. Yes, they have immense power, but from what I've seen unethical behaviour and treating employees like shit are more common in non-tech or smaller, dead end, companies.

jfim• 6 years ago

a FAANG as it scaled from 5k to 30k people

It might be a different experience joining when the FAANG is already at 30k people though. More protobuf engineering and less "hey let's try this completely new thing."

crmrc114• 6 years ago

Yeah, see that is when I joined a FAANG. So it was basically the Borg collective- you, mindless drone repair plamsa conduit x347B.

I was not able to use my creativity and problem solving and it was soul killing. I am now back in Small-Mid Enterprise and I love it. I get to design solutions from the ground up, sell them to other teams and build consensus then slam through development and implementation. So I guess my lesson was, never join a megacorp again- people are expendable there and there is no value placed on their individuality.

Matthias247• 6 years ago

Not necessarily. There might be some things that are already set in stone. E.g. the companies build and version control system might be fixed, you might be deemed to use protobufs, etc.

But there can still be one area to innovate on! It's usually not productive trying to reinvent everything anyway. Pick one thing, and excel at that. There are enough of those challenges also at bigger companies. Maybe not at every team, but there is likely enough internal flexibility that one can find a suitable team.

And really, inventing the 100th iteration of a custom CI or RPC system at a small company isn't that exciting either.

flatiron• 6 years ago

I’m a contractor and currently “work” for a FAANG on a 3 year contract. I love it. Learning a bunch. Seeing their internal processes will change how I work. But I’m still free (after 3 years)

ddevault5• 6 years ago

Just to give you some perspective, using Google as an example. I don't know when Google had 5,000 employees, but I have a source[0] that says they had 3,000 in 2004, when they went public, and after the market settled their market cap was $23 billion. Today, it's $1.185 trillion.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/google-employee-growth-2001-...

When you joined, it wasn't a megacorp, and when it became a megacorp, you had become the "tenured staff" I referred to in my article. Your experience was not the same as the target audience will have.

throwaway3699• 6 years ago

How is a public company worth $23B not a megacorp??

thelittleone• 6 years ago

Here's a few observations from 25 years in tech including megacorps:

1) is what you do core to the business? 2) is the company a growth leader? QoQ, YoY, market share, revenue etc. 3) is the company innovating organically

2) and 3) have a fairly big effect on culture. People are busy making shit happen, there's enough exciting projects and career advancement opportunities going around. There's no risk of downsize (firings) so there's less politics it's more about how well you produce.

At some point the company gets too big. Organic growth slows, reorgs happen culture slides, "A" player's leave and it just perpetuates.

Once company can no longer sustain the growth shareholders demand organically, the culture and quality of job experience slides. That's a good time to bail.

zcw100• 6 years ago

One of the problems is people don’t stick around for their entire career. They know a lot of the work is unfulfilling. They stick around for long enough that their departure doesn’t look like they were fired and try to obscure it in something innocuous like, “I was looking for something more challenging” and the recruiter thinks,”wow, more challenging than Google?!? This candidate must be hot”. The amount of status these people enjoy in their careers after leaving is amazing. After that they’re captured. They’re never going to tell you the truth about what it’s like working for Google. They gain an enormous cache from having worked there.

The amount of respect I afford these people is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes them to say where they worked or went to school. Went to MIT and don’t ever manage to bring it up in a conversation and I have to learn it from someone else? Massive respect, but they usually mention it in the first 30 seconds.

fennecfoxen• 6 years ago

*cachet

amelius2• 6 years ago

One of the problems is people don’t stick around for their entire career.

This is what I don't understand about people working for a company that builds silos or walled gardens. You always know that one day you are not working for that company anymore and you will be outside the silo/garden, and the company will effectively work against you (or against your entire profession) in ways you perhaps did not anticipate.

These companies pretend they have an "engineering" culture. But the policies of these companies show very little of that. When do these engineers wake up?

rossjudson• 6 years ago

There is no "working for Google". There is "working at Google on Something, with People". There's a great deal of variety within Something, and variety within People. There's cutting edge research, there's the boring slog of what must be done, and there's everything in between. There's 20% time, where you can define your own Something. There's very hard work being done on a massive scale to ensure user and customer security and privacy are pervasive through everything.

Plenty of xooglers will tell you exactly what they thought about working at Google. You will hear all types of opinions when you do. Cachet simply isn't a factor for most.

Apply Occam's razor to the stories that xooglers tell. Are they all lying and "covering up"? Or is the diversity of opinions you read about real, and reflective of the experiences of that writer?

I'd go with with real.

mlthoughts2018• 6 years ago

All of the criticisms of megacorps listed here are just as applicable to startups (especially with any whiff of VC funding) and mid-sized companies, without competitive compensation.

You very likely won’t be happier at other tech companies, because despite promises of career growth, autonomy, greater responsibility and company mission, it will just be the same ruthless corporate shilling, just with worse hours, worse vacation, worse pay, and worthless lottery-like equity.

I urge a lot of caution. The only reason to work at a startup (all other constraints like visa issues, geolocation preferences, etc., being equal), is because you have absolute faith in the core business model.

Choosing to work at a startup because of the technologies you will supposedly use, the seniority of the role you’ll supposedly be given, the fun-seeming optics and kid-like atmosphere, lack of dress code, etc., is a massive, massive mistake - not because those preferences are wrong, but because startups absolutely don’t fulfill them. They just pay lip service to it.

For 90% of employees, the choice is purely between medium-corp and mega-corp, based on your relative appraisal of work/life balance and compensation.

It would be great if this were different and the charismatic nature of startups really did offer offsetting benefits through learning, autonomy, etc. But that is just across the board a total false promise bill of lies in startup marketing to bait & switch tech workers they otherwise can’t afford on the basis of market compensation.

jiqiren• 6 years ago

After doing small startups, government work (research), and contract work.

Megacorp is easily the best. That pay of nearly $500k/year is actually really really great.

skyfaller• 6 years ago

The flip side to this is that startups looking for VC funding and explosive growth are wannabe megacorps, and can commit the same sins writ small even if they don't make it to the "top". And if they do hit the jackpot, well, they become the megacorps (or achieve "success" by being sold to a megacorp).

I generally agree with what Drew is saying here, but it's important to remember it's not just the business's size. It's the mentality and values. A "lifestyle business" that isn't dedicated to growth at any cost may be less likely to leave a trail of bodies behind it, but petty mundane evil still exists in mom-and-pop shops. It's all part of the same capitalist system, from top to bottom.

It's very difficult to maintain any values when your life depends on submitting to capitalism, and I think picking on specific entities within capitalism may be a distraction. It's easier to make choices based on your values if e.g. leaving a job doesn't mean losing your healthcare during a pandemic. Only systemic change can meaningfully prevent the evils of megacorps, rather than shuffling around who is doing the harm that capitalism incentivizes.

I do think you should avoid working for evil megacorps, but perhaps it's not the best use of your time and energy to vilify people who feel that doing so is necessary. It may be better to help e.g. unionize those workforces so they can organize to e.g. hold Amazon to their climate commitments.

christiansakai• 6 years ago

I worked in small startups, mid sized, and now a mega corp (one of the tech giants, btw I think my current company is the most ethical amongst all the tech giants). I liked this one the most, mostly because:

- salary and perks are nice - people are smart - people are understanding

I don't solve interesting problems, mostly just run of the mill internal tools web app.

The only downside is that I can't do it remotely (this will be an onsite job, after this pandemic ends, said the management), or from another country. I'd love to just go to another country (my country of origin, or my wife's country of origin) and work there, but with US salary.

I'd love to have financial independence, spending time with my families which live apart from me. Thinking of starting my own, but SaaS software is extremely competitive and risky, and probably won't be making money.

Btw I see a lot of hostility among the comments. I myself actually appreciate the post, thank you for the author. I do think a lot about ethical concerns when applying to companies, and I'm happy to have found one that I have no problem with.

analog31• 6 years ago

A megacorp is my dream job. They hired me 20+ years ago. I got in through the back door during a hiring freeze, and have carved my own niche, mainly by enjoying the kind of work that most engineers hate and being able to communicate the results. I live in a pleasant town, ride my bike to work, play in a band, and enjoy outdoor activities. I've received regular promotions, and am at the highest level that anybody's ever gotten without being a manager.

And I'm working with really nice people.

Maybe it's my imposter syndrome speaking, but I always think that I've pulled a fast one by getting this far in my career without being exposed as an incompetent.

Certainly, there's someone X levels above me who doesn't know who I am and doesn't care, but that really doesn't affect my life.

mmkos• 6 years ago

I worked at a very mature software company (15k+ strong) for a couple years until recently. I was on a product team. The work was depressingly unfulfilling. I'm pretty sure I wrote less than 1k lines of code while working there. There's so much cruft - tests that break randomly, routine tasks not strictly related to software engineering, meetings, ticket investigations... If you find yourself in this kind of environment and seek excellence, I'd recommend switching.

Since then my preference definitely shifted towards smaller companies so I can get more experience working on greenfield projects.

meddlepal2• 6 years ago

Perhaps this isn't appealing to a certain mindset, and I'd probably go crazy myself, but I definitely know plenty of engineers that would love this and work for these kind of companies. Low effort, highly stable pay. Exceeding the bar and earning your 2-10% bonus every year while still raking in 120K+ base w/ health benefits and an OK 401k match.

TrackerFF• 6 years ago

Every year, some newspapers publish various "most 'popular / sought after / prestigious / etc.' employer" lists, where they've polled various students and fresh grads, typically among STEM/Business/Law students.

The company rankings, seem to correlate by how much they spend on ads and recruiting campaigns.

But what's strange, to me at least, is that FAANG companies also dominate those list - despite the fact that they only have very small satellite offices here in my country (in Scandinavia), where they work on quite niche products / problems.

I always found it a bit curious, when talking to highly motivated and talented young people in tech, that basically dream about joining companies like Microsoft, knowing fully well that they'll be working on some Office 365 feature - probably fixing bugs.

Microsoft, on their side, can pick and choose among talent - because they'll get run down with applicants either way. They could hire good students with Master's Degrees, make them janitors, and still it wouldn't even dent their reputation - because kids will blindly follow lists as mentioned above, and the dream of a prestigious employer on their CV.

dasudasu• 6 years ago

Pay at a FAANG is often significantly higher, even in remote satellite offices, compared to the local market. Also, working at a FAANG early in your career, especially in an area where this is uncommon, is a very clear boost to your CV. You don't have to spend your entire career there. People don't give enough credit to new grads to know where the market is.

vertoc• 6 years ago

As an FYI, most of the newspapers’ dream places/best places to work are bought and paid for by companies’ PR departments - it’s not a meritocratic competition and afaik, they rarely actually conduct polls or ask real employees. At best they’ll take a glance at Glassdoor rankings

scottjg• 6 years ago

i don't work for a FAANG company but if i did, the reason would be primarily pay. if you're making 500k$/year in california, you can take home around 280k after taxes. no small/medium tech business i'm aware of is paying that much.

it's easy to say money isn't everything. but you don't really need to work very long to retire with that kind of money. if you're single (even in the bay area) it should be relatively easy to live a fairly cushy life on 100k$/year spending. that means you can pocket 180k$/year in savings. if you invest it, and the stock market returns 7%/year on average[1], you will be a millionaire in 5 years. it's one of the lowest risk ways for a young engineer to accumulate wealth. definitely within reach to retire in your early 40s, depending on how much money you want to spend.

[1] no investment is guaranteed but the stock market has been very reliable in the past with a long enough timeline.

csomar2• 6 years ago

I really like Drew Devault's work. I don't disagree with what he is saying here. The way I see it, corporations are much like countries. They are living entities run by people, and they have a goal to extend their reach and survive. They have their own challenges too (they need to pay bills and their army of employees). They see the law as some sort of constraint rather than a moral contract.

Corporations are not evil. They are a byproduct of this environment we live in. If I have an issue with the OP, is that he thinks his ideals as some sort of divine atheistic moral code we should follow. Morals are subjective and relative. It's dangerous to try shaming people because you think your ideas have some kind of "higher morality". That's basically what religion is, and it ended up killing (and still is) lots of people.

aparsons2• 6 years ago

Since Drew referenced it in this article, does anyone actually know what is going on in China with the Uygurs? I can’t seem to find an unbiased source.

Some of the stuff covered by the MSM sound horrific.

I also have chinese colleagues who brought up some interesting points- namely that Uygurs and certain communities had more privileges (especially wrt one child policy exceptions) that are simply being revoked now.

A lot of the “reports” in MSM also reference Adrian Zenz [1] who these colleagues claim has an anti-China agenda.

In this age of disinformation, I just don’t know who to trust.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zenz

pestatije• 6 years ago

The Uygurs, Tibetan, Taiwanese, Hong Kong-ese, all of them have this anti-China agenda.

The same as any other nationalist regime will tell you: "if you are against the regime, you are against the nation". And it has been proved, time and again, that the majority of citizens buy it.

aparsons2• 6 years ago

Thanks for the perspective.

offtop52• 6 years ago

Like the 20-person startup, who expects you to work on Christmas Eve, and then hires your replacement behind your back cares about you. This article came off as very naive, give me the the blandest job, at the biggest mega Corp as long as my pay is nice.

The goal is to make so much money you can save it, and retire early. Or if you're doing the family thing put your kids into a fantastic college. I have no qualms about working on a product which is absolutely boring, and I have no real influence over.

If they tell me to stare at a wall for $400 an hour I'll be the best wall starer .

heavenlyblue3• 6 years ago

Unfortunately money is not the only thing in the world. Staring at a wall for a huge price will not make you any friends and puts you in a position where you are degrading at other skills while doing so (making your future employability less certain).

triceratops• 6 years ago

If staring at a wall paid $10m/year, would you really care about future employability? I'd do it for 3 months and then fuck off to enjoy the rest of my life.

offtop52• 6 years ago

where you are degrading at other skills while doing so (making your future employability less certain).

I taught myself Python a few years back and greatly increased my income.

I don't expect any job to improve my skillset .

leetcrew• 6 years ago

FWIW, I agree with you, but some people prefer to enjoy their job rather than maximize dollars per effort. I don't entirely understand them, but I can't tell them their life goals are wrong.

life to work and work to live are both perfectly valid approaches.

I do feel it is important to own your decision. if you chose money, don't complain (too much) about how boring your job is. if you chose passion, don't complain about the pay. most people get neither.

_peeley• 6 years ago

As someone that's had a bullshit job[0] where I might as well have been paid to stare at a wall, it's really not what it's cracked up to be. Considering you're spending 40 hours a week (1/3 of all your weekday hours, and half your weekday waking hours) at your job, the creeping realization that you're wasting your life and labor gets unbearable after a short while. It's even more miserable when you have to pretend to your boss and coworkers that your job is Making A Real Difference (tm).

I think it's best to just settle for a healthy medium between the outlooks of "who cares as long as I'm paid" vs. "my job is my life and identity".

[0] Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber is a great book on the topic.

jeffreyrogers• 6 years ago

I keep seeing people talk about "nepotism" at Big Tech companies. Is this really a thing? Or are they using it loosely to say people who know influential people get better positions within the company? Which, btw is true of any company. That's part of what office politics is about.

oh_sigh• 6 years ago

I've worked at a FANG for a decade and it's basically my dream job. I'm not trying to level up, so I don't work that much, and it provides my family and I with more than enough money to do whatever we want. For example last year I took 4 months leave without any complaints from management, or concerns of budgeting, and traveled around western and northern europe. What's not to like? Maybe my difference from the author is I don't look for emotional or intellectual fulfillment from my job - it's something I do so I can have the freedom to pursue those goals outside of work.

mistyfud• 6 years ago

They may hurt you, but even worse, they will make you hurt others. You will be complicit in their ruthlessness. Privacy dragnets, union busting, monopolistic behavior and lobbying, faux-slavery of gig workers in domestic warehouses and actual-slavery of workers in foreign factories, answering to nations committing actual ongoing genocide — this is only possible because highly skilled individuals like yourself chose to work for them, build their war chest, or even directly contribute to these efforts.

This is the highlight of the article to me. We software engineers are paid a lot of money and gifted many cushy benefits to ignore the negative impact of our work. Just read some of the other responses in this thread for examples!

My question to those who feel this way: do you need that second property? That new car? If you were less insulated from the negative externalities, would you make the same choice?

Not all of us are driven solely by a paycheck. I know I could be earning 2-3x times more at a company like Facebook, but I chose not to because I want to sleep at night. As I have gotten older I've started to learn what actually makes me happy verses what I am told should make me happy. Endless consumption and unfettered capitalism do not make me happy. I can achieve the standard of living that keeps me fed, sheltered, entertained, and saving for retirement without working for a megacorp that hurts people less privileged than myself.

aidenn0• 6 years ago

Megacorps have made the bay area untenable for working at other companies. If I'm not 25% or more equity, then I'm only working for the paycheck, and I would take an after-expenses paycut if I moved to the bay area for a non-FAANG company, despite likely getting a $20k/year raise!

Retiring at 50 instead of 60 is pretty good dream job.

benhurmarcel• 6 years ago

even if you made an exorbitant $500K salary […]. They are not invested in you. Why should you invest in them? Why should you give a company that isn’t invested in you 40+ hours of your week

Because they pay you that huge salary. That sounds like a pretty good reason.

Hell I'm a mid-career engineer and I'd spend 40+ hours of my week moping a lake if they paid me that much.

jaredcwhite• 6 years ago

Interesting to see this show up on HN the same day as this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605211

I have absolutely no problem simultaneously enjoying the products sold by megacorps (Apple in particular) while also believing I would likely want to curl up and die if I had to work there. I can't stand anything even remotely approaching office politics and corporate culture and have worked freelance most of my career. I most definitely want to keep it that way. =)

tomkat0789• 6 years ago

In 2020 I managed to leave my megacorp job for a smaller situation (new and fun subsidiary of a megacorp that feels really small). My experiences agreed with most/all of the article. Pros and cons of the new situation:

Pros: I feel much less like a cog in a big machine at the smaller organization. My pay went up significantly because they actually wanted some of my unique skill set, and just before the end of the year I got a project of importance from the R&D director, with the VP of product development explaining the longer term importance of the project. My manager is pretty hands off, so I can totally get away with building my skills when he thinks I'm working on short term projects -WFH helps too ;)

Cons: more variation in people. The megacorp had more standard cooperative folks, but I think some people I work with now are trying to protect their fiefs at the expense of my work. I'm slowly learning to do their jobs though hehehe...

At the megacorp (a big name you've heard of), I was in a huge side office. They made some nice sounding efforts to train me, but my time was billed by the hour (standard in the industry), so every hour learning something was an hour i had to make up later. I was moved between random projects with vacancies, so when I did learn something I'd have to shelve it for months or years until the funding situation or other variables aligned. My own ideas: there was a way to get funding, but it wasn't much and nobody above the director level cared if my idea worked, even if it impressed the company's anointed experts. I was an experienced engineering hire, was there for a few years.

I'm pretty happy with my new job! The industry is renewable energy, which makes me feel better than my old corporate jobs on the oil/defense side of the moral spectrum. I got lucky! We'll see how this goes. At the old job people came and went a lot, so I have reason to believe I can go back if the new thing flames out.

My two cents.

throwaway91228• 6 years ago

Mostly disagree. Background: >7 years at a FAANG. In the "corners of the company" I saw (multiple teams) they do care for people. They invest in us via courses (with transferrable skills, not only internal technologies), by letting us pick projects that are good for advancing our career and learning something else, even when the product would benefit from the n-th quick delivery of results on an already familiar topic. They invest in us by considering us as humans and whenever someone had personal issues, there was some solution offered. I saw a low-performer turned into a consistently high-performer by a manager who cared and carved out the time to help the person. I saw the effort spent on collecting facts for fair performance reviews - for both ends of the spectrum. I saw people having trouble with their direct manager getting moved to other teams, where they ultimately thrived.

What is the biggest perk, to complement the big salary? My colleagues. I worked with really amazing people, and learnt a lot from them.

Did I end up in the only few good spots at the company and spoke mostly with people in the remaining good ones? Statistically unlikely. I'm aware there are rotten parts, but I don't think it's the majority.

wdr1• 6 years ago

I completely disagree.

Disclaimer: I work at a megacorp, but as someone with 25 years in companies of a variety of sizes, I think I have some perspective.

Early in my career I worked as an IC at a non-profit, a small tech company, a startup (that went from 15 to 200 to 75), and some other medium/large tech companies. I'm currently a senior engineering director at a FAANG.

If I had a time machine and could do it all over again, I'd absolutely start by joining a FAANG. I'm actually a bit jealous when I compare the T3/T4 experience to what was available to me. They're able to learn from & work with some of the best in the industry. Their ability to advance is based largely only on themselves. Sure, I had a lot of autonomy but it's also a lot like learning the piano without a teacher. You make so many mistakes that you don't know you're making.

Likewise the tech-stack is pretty good. Not perfect (by any measure) but heads & shoulders better than what you'll find at most places.

And the variety of problems is hard to beat. Work at a company that does X, your only choice are going to be problems relating to X. Get tired of working on something at megatech? Transfer. If you're good, teams will be thrilled to have you. A lot of your knowledge will carry over, and so too, your reputation.

Now do megacorps care about you? Well, as much as any company will. To be honest, I don't think any company really will "care" about you (at least in how I care about family) and I think it's disingenuous for the author to pretend otherwise.

Both megacorps & smaller companies do care about you in a sense of wanting you to do well. But if push comes to shove, both will lay you off if financially they're forced to. I learned the hard way at the startup. Not because I was laid off, but because I had to make the list of people to layoff in my group. It really, really sucked as we felt like a family. I really admire that the CTO saw I was struggling and talked with me at length about it. I learned as a manager at any company you have to be willing to do these things for the good of everyone overall, and the best you can do is be fair about the decisions and be humane to those let go. Is that caring? My family would never do that. And if that's caring, that's exactly the same mindset I see in megacorps.

Obviously megacorps aren't perfect, but if you apply the same standard to them & whatever other option, I think they stack up pretty well.

joshuamorton2• 6 years ago

There's a few claims made here:

Autonomy/impact/influence. This is maybe true, depending on things. My manager^4 knows who I am. As does my manager^5. I've interacted personally with both of them. I've openly criticized both of them. I've openly criticized other VPs. It's possible that I'm on someone's shitlist, though at this point I doubt it.

In term of impact and autonomy, I set most of my own goals at the 6 month and 1 year scope, and have influence with my leadership on defining our long term initiatives. I have the autonomy to work on a pie in the sky project that takes up 30-40% of my time that has no chance of being valuable for months, and only a potential for being useful at all. I came up with this, from the ground up, myself.

I think I've had an above average experience. But the idea that everything interesting is already taken isn't true. The idea that nepotism runs rampant also isn't particularly true. One thing I'll note about larger corps, especially G and FB, is that managers get more training on how to be managers than at most other companies, this means that they'll encourage you to set career goals, and work with you on figuring out how those can happen. This can include helping you move to other teams. Again this isn't universal, bad managers exist, but I'd hypothesize that the median manager at FAANG is less shitty than the median manager at a smaller but still billion dollar company.

The H1B abuse stuff applies, as far as I know, significantly less to FAANG than other tech companies. If you include contractors/vendors this can get murky though.

I don't disagree about HR not being particularly friendly at megacorps. But you're not going to have a particularly better experience at a smaller company. If you antagonize a smaller company, it may still end badly (and I'd argue there's a higher likelyhood something you do will get taken personally).

Arguments about gig workers and unethical behavior by the company apply as much, if not more, to smaller companies like Uber and Lyft (and Doordash and and and). And ultimately reduces to a sibling of the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" argument. We certainly shouldn't throw up our hands about such things, but if you try to self-host your server, you're still purchasing components that probably involved dangerous cobalt mining and there's a good chance that you'll be using more energy than if you ran in a datacenter in the cloud.

There are indeed many other companies. But that doesn't mean that small companies are better. Is Uber-under-Kalanick more ethical than Amazon? Is Uber-today more ethical than Google? Is Square more ethical than Microsoft? Sure, maybe, but I don't think the answer is so blatantly obvious that these conclusions can be drawn so strongly and with so little nuance.

The core argument here seems to be that since big companies are large, and they do bad things, they're somehow worse than average because they are big. I'm at least somewhat receptive to these arguments, since things like monopoly concerns come into play at some size, but trying to blame individual employees for choosing what is ultimately a much better deal for them when the problem is that the company is (maybe) too large isn't a great approach.

Heck, for a particular ethical individual, the concrete ethical impact one could have by working at a FAANG as opposed to a smaller company is probably larger, you're betting on the influence you'll have in the small company being comparatively greater than the influence the small company has compared to the big one. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not though.

And the whole time, the big companies are on average treating employees better than small ones.

A megacorp is not your dream job

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