So Many Software Engineers Get This Wrong About FAANG - Big Tech Isn't A Monolith

Many software engineers who aspire to get into Big Tech have this consistent, utopian vision of what working there is like. This couldn't be further from the truth and thinking in this way severely holds back your career direction.

Here are the core points from the video:

• Big Tech companies aren't all the same - Even though there are commonalities working at companies with such massive scale, each company has its own culture and unique way of doing things. For example, the life of the average engineer at Amazon is going to be very different from that of the average engineer at Microsoft.
• Big Tech can vary within themselves - Once you reach 5,000+ employees, it is impossible to maintain a completely homogenous culture throughout the entire company. Organizations and teams will develop unique sub-cultures, so even 2 engineers within the same company can have very different experiences, even if they're the same level and working on the same tech stack.
  • Meta is an extreme example by giving its major acquisitions (WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus) a lot of autonomy in how they run. Meta is almost like 4 different companies in 1.

Related resources:

• [Masterclass] Should You Work At FAANG? - What Big Tech Is Like For Software Engineers - The full video where this clip was taken from
• "Typical Day of Average FAANG Software Engineer?"
• "How much is the tech culture within a company a predictor of its overall growth?"
• promotions.fyi - This is the website Rahul mentions at the end of the video