Big Tech Q&A and Videos

I have been at my current organisation for a year and i just received a good performance rating and a raise. I have been doing pretty well overall. However, over the last two months i have felt that this role doesn't fulfill my intellectual needs and I am not challenged enough. I would like to widen the tech stack that I work on and have more flexibility in impacting the product (it's a big tech company and has a lot of hierarchy). To continue to be good at my work, I need to spend a good amount of time (~50% of the time) doing non-challenging/repeated/admin work. I have started taking courses and my attention has derailed from office work quite a bit.

I realise that if i want to get promoted here, I need to continue to do what I did to get the good rating and do it even better perhaps. But at the same time, I yearn to work on a broader tech stack and take on more challenging work which may or may not come my way at my present org. The reasons to not switch would be : it's just been a year here, I have vested RSUs (spread out over 4 years) and a promotion would be good for my career (and good for my self confidence), also the work life balance is decent. But I have the urge to switch my attention to side projects and eventually to a role and company where I'm challenged more and hopefully make a lot more impact (startups).

Do you have any advice for me?

Today during office hours Rahul talked about this a tiny bit (sans the legal), but I'm curious as I've had many friends who worked at Google previously that discouraged me from applying to Google (like 10 years ago) if I still wanted to do a startup (this was long before Area 120 was a practiced thing). Recently, a friend (VC whose girlfriend works at Google) said many people still build venture/angel funds on the side while still working full time for Google. But of course, don't create your startup company using company property (a la Silicon Valley HBO lessons).

Questions

(1) What companies are flex about having things on the side - a side hustle (but you can't advertise it), examples being two different companies on both ends of the spectrum: Google, Apple etc.)? I've heard some FAANGMULA companies are more stringent than others (Apple being very much against this and super private and only sorta kind supporting open source, vs. others which are all for it and have accelerator/internal incubator programs at the company (Area 120), or even sponsoring ex-employees (a cohort of my class at Verizon Ventures one year was all MIT alumni, ex-Googlers that were sponsored by Google, paid their incorporation fees, I was one of the two weird VR founder people).

(2) I've also heard that from friends if you work at Google, you are not allowed to get paid for speaking gigs on your technical expertise or whatever your functional role is at that company (this differs from from Meta I've heard from other friends). Is this true?

(3) If you go into a FAANGMULA company, what info (legally) what information do you need to provide the the employer? What docs from the state/federal/govt or whatever) that says you have a a DBA, LLC, S/C-Corp etc. What do you need to disclose more specifically and what documentation and legal paperwork do you have to provide?

For example, I currently take consultations and speaking gig money and have revenue (royalties from my book I published years ago) and plan on having an existing app that generates money in the app store that is runs auto-pilot prior to coming into the company. Also note, that I'm aware that this product should not compete with the company's main product lines.**

(4) If you are going to start all this AFTER being hired into FAANGMULA, how do you inform your company employer formally (HR, direct report boss), and that your side hustle does and will not interfere with your primary role at the FAANGMULA company hour wise and that you will still meet all of your core duties/goals/tasks/deadlines for the company and this is sort of 'hack on the weekends thing?'

Last year I was invited to an event at a Big Tech office and saw a few talks.

After the talks I ended up chatting briefly to one of the Big Tech speakers about certain aspects of their talk that resonated with me.

A few weeks after the event I had a meeting with one of the recruiters (you could submit your interest to have one reach out to you) and you could seek official mentoring from one of the employees.

I asked if it'd be possible for that person above to be my mentor and they said they'd arrange it if possible.

I got an email officially introducing me but they'd be busy for X amount of time.

After X amount of I time I reached out to them, no answer.

It's been many months and have tried to reach out to them sporadically between that time but have never gotten a response both via email & LinkedIn.

I'm not too bothered now but do still question why?

I normally apply to companies on a warm basis, with warm contacts so I can always try to get feedback post-interview to land a job, or sometimes while I apply cold, limit these and prioritize warm ones. I've noticed a lot of new software coming out during the pandemic for mass applications, but I am not sure this will work for me as a non-traditional candidate who has mainly interviewed for positions in the non-standard way. I do realize that given layoffs, the numbers is game is one I might need to play more and could invest some money into this, but I know some software might be better than others. There seem to be so many new services out there, that the market is saturated and I'm wondering how effective this would be and if it's worth the money and that maybe I would rather spend my time (instead of just money) instead focusing on applying more thoughtfully through my warm networks and referrals, rather than mass cold applications via an AI bot or other software service.

Will I get screened/frozen out and auto-rejected for two years if my resume is crap because I hit 'apply' to a hundred companies?

Thoughts?

Currently, I hold a high senior position (~ L6) within a large tech company. At this point in my career, I often find myself grappling with the decision of whether to focus on advancing as an individual contributor (IC) or transitioning into a management role.

Although I genuinely enjoy mentoring junior engineers and helping them grow in their careers, I have a strong aversion to certain aspects of management, such as the frequent meetings that come with it. Given my introverted nature and my passion for staying closely connected to technology, I don't believe that a management role would be the best fit for me.

Conversely, the idea of progressing as an IC to roles like Principal or Senior Staff can be quite daunting. I grapple with feelings of imposter syndrome, wondering if I can meet the necessary standards and I am concerned that it might negatively impact my work-life balance.

I would greatly appreciate any advice or insights from the community regarding this situation.?

I recently joined a Big Tech company. My assigned mentor is helpful when I have questions, and is also friendly.

However, apart from asking questions when I get stuck, I'm not sure how to best use their time so I can onboard and grow effectively. Does anyone have some suggestions and insight on this?

I've considered asking them to explain how some parts of the codebase work when I have issues, but it feels like unless I work on those parts of the codebase, I will forget what I learn. The domain and codebase is large so this feels low-ROI, especially since I am not working on some of these pieces.

tldr; I am a Tech Lead working in of the big tech giants, getting burnt out due to office politics and ignorant managers.

I am one of the few people (~20) who accidentally was made remote, this was the result of one of the irresponsible move from one of the tech giant.

Anyways, I was part of a team for almost more than a year and the company culture was a bit shocking to me as my manager refused to do 1:1, lack of quality work and ignorance because of me being the remote was evident.

Six months before I, including my team, was transferred to another team with a greenfield project (with little or no prior info), we worked really hard but after 3-4months, another reshuffling happened and most of the team was moved to other projects/team. After couple of months the team was finally dismantled, I thought we will go back to our original team but to my surprise, instead of retaining me, they hired two new lead engineers in their location. In between all of this I was surprised to know that my manager (previous) didn't fill my annual review, when I tried to contact him I didn't get any response. I also scheduled a meeting with him but he didn't show up.

Few weeks before, I was moved to another team, which I found was in the mid of big release. The Principal engineer who was responsible for the design and architecture of the system was moved out before I joined so there was no knowledge sharing per se. I tried to contact him but he is too busy to entertain me now. During the first couple of days, my new manager briefed me that I am the owner of this new project and I have to look after each and everything. The project in itself is very huge: It was in design phase since last 1 year, and it depends on 2-3 teams. Everyday I am pulled into random meetings where there is a lot of alignment going on with some crucial decision making as the project is going to be live in new few months. In the daily sprint the manager wants to make sure I have enough work assigned to me as well. In two weeks I am almost burnt out as I have little or no time left after hours of meeting and going through the random documents.

Recently I came to know that there will a week long in-person workshop to get an alignment on the various decisions on the current project and I am not invited, I pinged my manager for the same but there is a long silence.

As of now, I have little or no breathing space to prepare for the interviews and almost on the verge of burnout.

Few important points:

• To my surprise my official manager is still the same manager (first team) and he has still not filled up my performance review.
• I moved countries because of personal issues so leaving the company may not be easy as of now. I have a lot of financial responsibilities, plus the current market and immigration condition has made the condition worse.

I've been working as a software developer in federal government for the last 5 years with the last 2 being primarily within an innovation division.

Over those years I solo developed many internal projects; initially during downtime/upskilling time and later on doing it fulltime.

Each one of these I believe could of had a profound impact on internal processes and ways of working which would then have a positive knock-on effect to the general public.

However these projects never saw a big enough audience that could have that sort of positive impact.

No matter how much the users or executive would love the product/s - the endorsement would only ever go as far as a good CV piece or getting to work on what I wanted.

From what I've heard this is different in big tech. (ala Paul Buchheit w/ gmail)

But is it really like that and if so, how can you encourage institutions that are not known for risk taking and innovation to change?

I currently work in a FAANG company, and I joined in the 3RD quarter of 2023. I am currently a SWE, but I did my masters in AI focusing on planning, reinforcement learning, and imitation learning. (I have 4 yoe relevant to my work and I have a 2 year Ms in AI. I'm currently an L5 engineer )

I need to communicate and reorient my career at my current company.

My manager has asked me initially if I am ok with the team and the product. They also communicated that since our product launch, the team will be in operational mode and hence, it would be good to network and build connections within the company so that I can eventually get into a green field initiative of my choice. Now I have these questions:

• How do I start the conversations for the same?
• What do I need to keep in mind and how do I figure out the details of teams and orgs that are doing what I am interested in?
• Anyone who has done this before, would you mind lending mentorship?

More details on the situation: Initially, I had a couple of conversations about joining at 1 level above, but I did not go through with, it because I knew I would have to do a safe transition and that 1 level above would make it too expensive for me to transition.

I'm in my early 20s and started a startup with my friend from college shortly after we graduated. We got into Y Combinator and worked on the company for about 2 years in total before shutting it down recently. I didn't go to a name-brand school, and didn't work full-time anywhere after graduating, but I did a few prestigious internships, one of which being in Deep Learning.

I've heard larger companies and recruiters in general don't like former founders, and I mostly did sales/product for our startup. We built a few web-based products and a few AI infra/AI apps, but nothing crazy and nothing with massive traction. We spent most of our time pivoting and doing user interviews/sales.

I want to get an engineering job rather than PM, because I have internalized the value of being technical when being a founder and don't want to give entrepreneurship up yet. There aren't too many entry-level positions open, and I was hoping to not have to go into an entry-level role, but simultaneously I'm not sure I have enough experience to feel confident in being self-sufficient as an engineer.

Before starting the company, I had a return offer at one FAANG company, and a New Grad SWE offer at Facebook that I let expire. I emailed my recruiter to try to reinstate it, and she implied that I would not be eligible for New Grad since I was too far from my graduation date.

Ideally, I'd like to work in AI at a larger company since that's where all my experiences in college were and where I see the most opportunity (ideally OpenAI or FB). Otherwise, probably back-end/infra at a post-IPO startup/FAANG or worst-case post-PMF startup. I have a few questions:

1. Should I only apply to entry-level engineering jobs, and am I even eligible for them? If not, what level of experience should I apply to and how do I convince them I'm qualified?
2. How should I write my resume/describe my experience+title (especially for larger, more bureaucratic companies which are less open to former entrepreneurs)? Should I even include that I was a co-founder?
3. How custom should I make my resume for each different kind of job I'm applying to (new grad swe, new grad mle, ai eng, at faang+ vs. growth stage startup)?

What is the company looking for or expecting when they ask "Why do you want to work at Meta?"

Is saying something like "I have used Instagram/Facebook for a long time so it would be great to work on a product that I use daily" a good answer?

What is a good answer for this question for Meta and other companies in general?

Hi all,

I was put on PIP today. The PIP period is from 01/2024 till end of 01/2024. He said unsatisfactory performance & had to do this to be fair to others in the team. I think I was being benchmarked against others who work on weekends as outlined in my previous question: .

Yesterday I asked my manager for a 1-week remote and 3 weeks PTO (the company has unlimited PTO) from end of January to 3rd week of February. Do you think this was one of the reasons leading to me being PIP during the month of January?

What should I do now? Should I strive to overcome the PIP or should I find a new job? Anyone successfully overcame the PIP? How do I balance PIP and finding new job?

For more information, my 1st-year stock won't be vested till 06/2024 (so 25% of my RSUs won't be vested till end of the 1st year working for them). I think I'm out looking for a new job, but don't want to lose the RSUs.

For the sake of extreme ownership what could I have done better? If you need more info from me I can definitely provide in the threads below.

I was looking in the questions but couldn't find anything about it. There is a ton of info in the internet about bottom-top approach but still can't understand how it works in reallity. Any actual example projects would be great. I read many times that you as Senior/Staff should convince team/teams in an idea/project, and this is one of the ways to get promoted. An example - Staff Engineer created scope for 20+ people and worked on feature X. So my questions there:

• How does it happen?
• Is there any management involved here?

I've always worked for top-bottom companies and even if we have an idea for a feature/improvement, eventually the management decides if we should go for it or not. After all, the management is the one "holding" the budget.

The company I work for started tracking a wide range of metrics related to our day-to-day work (with an external tool called LinearB). It integrates with pretty much everything to collect as many metrics as possible such as lines of code, number of PRs, size of PRs, time spent on reviewing, cycle time, time spent in meetings, etc. These tools feel like they only aim to gather as many metrics as physically possible, but do not always manage to put them into context. For example if you go on holiday or sick leave, all your metrics go down (for obvious reasons).

Personally I feel some of these metrics are straight up toxic and I also see that many people in our company started feeling paranoid about this and feeling an urge to “game” the metrics so their numbers look good.

The reason for this is that initially we were told the metrics are only going to be used on a team level, but now we are getting strong signals that this is used on the individual level as input for things like determining promos, raises, bonuses, etc. I know that there are standards and best practices to follow (like having small, meaningful PRs), but using these metrics as a signal for perfomance feel stupid, because it depends so much on the type of work I do. One week I'm debugging a production incident and it may be resolved with a single line config change, the other week I'm writing tons of unit tests, etc.

We were told that this whole thing is pretty much industry standard and very common at big companies like FAANG. Is that really so? If yes, could you elaborate on how is it implemented and how do you deal with the stress associated with trying to maximize your metrics (which may not be a direct consequence of "getting the work done", so you have to do extra just to increase your metrics).

Really appreciate all you inputs. Thanks.

I am inquiring on behalf of my wife. She currently holds an H4 visa and is expected to receive her Employment Authorization Document (EAD) around October 2024. She has a Master's degree in International Public Policy and Management, which is unrelated to UX/UI design. Recently, she completed the "Google UX Design Professional Certificate" bootcamp.

She recognizes two main challenges:

1. Her degree is not related to UX/UI design.

2. She has a three-year gap since her graduation in 2020. The reason for this gap is my H1B status, which has not yet led to an i-140, preventing her from obtaining a sponsor for a visa in her field. Initially, she did not plan to seek employment in the US, as she was focused on pursuing public sector jobs in our home country, Thailand. However, after meeting me during her Master's program and my subsequent employment in the US, she decided to stay here with me.

I would greatly appreciate advice on how she can break into the tech industry, possibly at a FAANG company, as a UX designer. If possible, please provide a plan or roadmap for her career transition. Your guidance would be immensely helpful.

How would you spend you first 30 days to achieve the an impactful start (ideally from a staff perspective):

• What would you prioritize?
• What questions would you ask?
• When given your first tasks, what additional/beyond scope extras would you consider?
• What would you be mindful of NOT to do?
• How would you start prepping to figure out what to become an SME in?

Hi all,

I joined my current company (known in our industry for not-so-good WLB) 6 months ago as a Senior Software Engineer and have been doing side hustle in the evening and weekends over past 6 months beside my main job. This means I still completed the 9am to 6pm work schedule before doing my side hustle.

Now my manager is saying I have low bug fix count and my team consists of some weekends workaholics which I suspect I’m being benchmarked against. My upcoming performance review is due end of December 2023 (1 month away). The expectation for my level is ramping up in 3 months which means the last 3 months are no longer considered ramp-up period.

What should I do in this last 1 month leading to the performance review? Should I go all in on the weekends too or should I keep the pace I’m working (I’ve started working in the evening from 7PM to 10PM since receiving this feedback 2-3 weeks ago but on weekends I still hustle). Was I wrong in doing side gigs / projects while ramping up for my full time job and should have instead pushed weekends to ramp up? What could have I done better in the past 6 months and moving forward in 1 month ahead?

I know Rahul talked about doing side contract gigs and Alex talked about doing side projects while both are still at Meta (a very demanding big tech company). How did you guys handle the pressure and what are your schedules like? (Wake up @ 4AM, work on side hustle till 6-7AM, then go to sleep at night around 12AM LOL)? I'm curious about how people organize their side gigs schedule.

Thank you for your advices. I really appreciate it.

I'm currently employed at a startup where we're building bookkeeping tools. My work mainly involves Python, some database work, and a lot of business logic wrangling. Due to the small size of our app and engineering org, I don't have many opportunities to gain the necessary experience in distributed systems. I'm seeking advice on how to transition to distributed systems. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

I am a senior engineer and would like to get in to MAANG, but I'm rusty in DS. I don't want to give interviews to MAANG companies until I figure that out Are there any power patterns to start with? And what would be the good starting point to solve problems? I am looking for a smart way to achieve this.

In reality most of the Fortune 500 companies I worked in the past, they never dig too much in DS problems. Most care about system design and knowledge about code.

I see few people mentioning solving 200+ problems in LeetCode which is a lot of time consuming process. I'm trying to find answers from few people who already went through this.

Hi All,

I have a situation, can you help me on how you'd navigate it?

I have a potential project idea that has staff level scope.

There's a pain point across our company and this project would help the entire company.

I want to lead this project because it'd be a tremendous opportunity for my growth.

Given that I'm mid-level and lack of experience leading projects, I fear ownership of the project will be given to someone else to lead if I speak on it. This project shouldn’t be done in silo, this project needs to be part of the engineering priority because it will span across multiple teams.

Can you help me navigate how to maintain ownership/lead this project?

I'm an E5 iOS at a Big Tech company reporting to an M2. I'm leading the mobile side for a multi-quarter product project that leverages work from 2 platform teams. Most of the complexity of this project will be on the mobile side. My backend lead is an E6 full-stack web engineer reporting to an M1 who reports to my M2. The M1 is on parental leave until late Dec / early Jan. This E6 has been an amazing partner and teammate.

The 2 platform teams have missed a lot of their timelines. One dependency is about a month behind schedule. They often give us deliverables that are dev-complete and not tested (e.g., compilation errors, etc.). We have sync meetings 2x/week, but 1 platform team has never attended any of these meetings. The other platform team doesn't always send the same engineers to the meeting and doesn't always know the status of their own deliverables. That platform team's EM got terminated for performance reasons before this project started, so their M2 and a TPM have been tag-teaming to fill in the gap. That means sometimes their M2 attends the sync meetings, sometimes the TPM attends, sometimes both attend, and sometimes neither attends. The TPM sends a weather report on that team's deliverables every other week, but hasn't sent one in the past month. In his last email, he listed my E6 and me as the DRIs for their team's deliverables. When I confronted him about it, he said it was a mistake and he'll fix it in future emails. How do I bring visibility into these delays to external stakeholders?

I created a shared Google Doc to track all the dependencies, including when our team needs the deliverables, the other team's ETAs, and any notes. However, it's been challenging getting ETAs from the other teams. When I tagged them in the Google doc asking for ETAs, they just ignore me.

My manager gave me feedback to "influence engineers to hold up their timeline than push for hard commitments". Do you have any concrete advice here? I'm not sure how to do this.

After I escalated the 1st platform team's unresponsiveness to their Director (3 levels up), the E6 iOS DRI became very responsive. Escalating to that E6's skip level had not been effective. Should I just keep escalating everything or is there a better approach?

How do I find edge cases in DSA problems?

Are there some common edge cases that everybody knows about?

Is there some sort of method or procedure to find those edge cases?

Just wondering if FAANG companies hire engineers at Staff level (or higher). What kind of experience do they look for when hiring folks from outside?