[Taro Classic] FAANG Career Guide: What Big Tech Is Like For Engineers
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It seems like for 90%+ of engineers, their ultimate career goal is to break into FAANG, otherwise known as Big Tech. While this is a perfectly fine aspiration to have, many of these engineers don't actually know what life at FAANG is like at all, especially those earlier-in-career with weaker networks. FAANG looks great on the surface with its many genuinely helpful career perks, but it's full of darker downsides underneath the surface as well.
In a nutshell, that's what this in-depth course is meant to help you with - We're going to demystify and lift up the veil around FAANG, so you can get a full, objective look at what it's actually like being an engineer at these tech behemoths. After going through this course, you will:
- 🧠 Have a framework to plot a course toward your career success
- ✅ Understand the full suite of career benefits FAANG provides you as an engineer
- ❌ Get a real look at the many cons of working at FAANG
- 🔍 See common scenarios where it does or doesn’t make sense to work at FAANG
- 🎯 Know the true pure ultimate goal every engineer should have with their career (hint: it’s not to work at FAANG)
Alex Chiou and Rahul Pandey built their careers at FAANG, spending an almost combined 10 years at Meta. They have also worked at FAANG-adjacent companies like Pinterest and Robinhood.
Alex Chiou: Across his ~4 years at Meta, Alex achieved meaningful career growth as he got an "Exceeds Expectations" rating or higher every single half. However, with increased seniority comes more exposure to the negatives of FAANG, particularly with politics and bureaucracy. Back at Instagram, Alex had the (dis)honor of working on a project to make a button bigger for ~6 months only to have it shot down by the CEO of Instagram at the last minute.
Rahul Pandey: Rahul spent almost 5 years at Meta, also working his way up quickly. Rahul has a unique perspective on what Big Tech is truly like as he became an engineering manager in his later time at Meta, developing an understanding of both the IC-track and M-track experience at FAANG. During his time at Portal, he went through more reorgs than you can reasonably count.
