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As someone who's been around 10 years in the game, what is this deal of everyone wanting to go to FAANG?

2 of Michael's comments in this thread · View thread on Reddit ↗

u/michaelnovati replied ·
I've been around for "10 years in the game" and spent 8 years at FB from 2009 to 2017. I had originally planned on doing my PhD right after undergrad and started off as an intern in 2009. The company was private and the salaries were relatively low - being the tail end of the recession, so I did not work there for the money. Not that many people even though Facebook had engineers at the time (they had over 200) so it wasn't the prestige either. I worked there because I just got enthralled in the work. I was working on internal tools (think code review, discussions, task management) 30+ tools FB had built from scratch on the Facebook code stack but for employees only. I thought bringing real identity from Facebook into your work life was a really good idea (spoiler alert: it wasn't and the world has hard pivoted away from that). I really had unlimited room to take on whatever I wanted to do and pacman-style chomped through a lot.... became the number one committer of all time when I left in 2017, and they created an E7 archetype for me. It really was the right place, right company, right time for and nothing to do with the comp.

u/gtruck wrote (the comment Michael replied to):

Let me ask, how many meetings you had to have before you could put idea from your mind to implementation? In my case, way too many when I was in a big company, if that was not the case in your case, respect.

u/michaelnovati replied ·
I would work with my managers to find a project to work on and then had a lot of freedom to just have "impact", which would come in many ways. There were a lot of meetings to discuss team priorities, unblock other people, etc... but we didn't spend a lot of time talking, we spent most of the time doing. I did an internship at IBM in school and that's why I wanted to go to grad school, I wrote very little code and there was a lot of talking. At Facebook it was way more doing than talking. However with all the recent negative press and issues with Facebook, I think they are spending more time thinking about things before doing haha.