HN user

bottle_roket

212 karma
Posts0
Comments17
View on HN
No posts found.

me: 11 years experience with big tech on resume. Located in major tech city.

I get 1-2 new recruiters in my mailbox each week for different random startups. I haven’t acted on any so IDK what the process is really like, but it does seem like people are hiring. Almost 100% seem to be some sort of AI product. Senior Eng comp base seems to be in the 200-240 range plus however much worthless equity.

This tracks for me because I am a developer with a 4 year degree in a field completely unrelated to CS and I have never felt any of the stigma or othering from my coworkers on the measures you described.

My guess is that they mean “$25k including potential federal and state rebates” which actually means 33k for the base model that will have a 6 month order lag time.

Yeah NYC doesn’t need to offer subsidies because it already has what Amazon wants, lots of highly educated young people who want to work in tech.

Most places don’t already have that (or at least not enough of it) and so it could make sense to offer short term subsidies in exchange for long term industry presence.

Obviously it’s a huge company with thousands of teams, but I’ve been an engineer on 3 different product teams and certain things have been the same everywhere.

I would say purely from a coding perspective the workload is typical ~40ish hours a week. The stress comes from the biannual performance reviews that grade you explicitly across 4 axis.

If you got your projects delivered on time with high quality code that’s just 1 axis. What did you do to improve the codebase? What did you do to help drive the mission of the team? How many code reviews did you do(they count)? What did you do to improve the team culture?

I think these things are all important, but everywhere else I have worked a lot of these are more implicit. At FB you need to have bullet points and evidence of these contributions every 6 months to get a satisfactory rating. Couple this typical giant corporation red tape (legal, marketing sign off, metrics reviews) to getting anything released.

Some people seem to not have trouble keeping up with it, but I find it exhausting. I’ve gotten good reviews during my employment here but it’s been grueling.

I’m a FB employee and I’m giving my notice tomorrow.

I interviewed with them in 2019 just so I could get a competing offer and had no intention of working there, but at the end of my interviewing run they were the only offer I had. It was 2x my current salary and it was too hard to turn it down when the money was right there in front of me.

I had sincere moral issues with the company but I convinced myself their worst days were likely behind them, that they were committed to doing the work to to fix their reputation. The last 2 years have only gotten worse and it’s very clear the leadership has no interest in making meaningful changes to address social harm caused by the platform. I legit don’t like telling people what I do for a living when I meet someone new at a bar for fear they ask where I work.

Couple this with a culture that has masterminded a set of carrots and sticks that gets people to push themselves very hard all of the time, I’m completely burnt out. My GF pretty much told me she can’t handle living with someone so stressed out all the time.

I don’t have another job lined up but I’m not too worried. I’m excited for a reset. I’m taking through the end of the year to cool off and prep for interviews. I think it’s imperative at my next job that I at least somewhat believe in the product. I’ve learned that money isn’t enough to keep me going in the face of giving 0 fucks about the company mission.