There's been this vein of advice from the past decade that's in the realm of "just work at FAANG". Always rubbed me the wrong way; they make it sound so easy, lol. The couple of interviews I managed to get after hundreds of ghostings, I was absolutely demolished in the interviews. It seems like if you get nervous doing math problems in front of people who really don't want to be there (and tell you to your face), you don't get to work at FAANG.
Just started my own business instead.
Theres a difference between something being easy, and something being achievable given a large investment of time and effort. FAANG is the second. Not for everyone but if you have anxiety then practice, therapy and possibly prescribed medications for anxiety. I’m sure there whole groups of people who mutually pair mock interview to get over anxiety like this. Or that you can pay to interview you.
Totally; and big respect to the people who put in hundreds of hours of prep. I did leetcode, practice interviews, 4.0 gpa, all that. I think the big hang up for me was, no matter how many practice interviews I did, there were only 4 real ones, with long waiting periods between attempts. And honestly... 3/4 my FAANG interviewers were really rude/late/apathetic. I actually did make it to second round at Google on the third try, but at that point I was so exhausted with the process, I took an offer from a company that at least pretended to give a shit whether I joined them or not. Had a wonderful 3 years there building green-field B2C products.
Getting some work experience and then starting my own thing was a better fit for me.
Clearly the advice can’t be for the literal 50th percentile HN reader in 2025… because nowadays there are hundreds of thousands of readers.
And all the FAANG combined probably don’t even have half that many positions, with negotiable salaries, in total worldwide.
i mean, even if we only include Apple Microsoft and Google you're already up to more than half a million employees
Are you confused about the comment?
The majority of positions at any of these (except maybe Netflix) are not hired through negotiable salary packages of the types relevant to the post. I never said anything about overall employee count.
What do you mean? All standard engineering offers (and probably most non-engineering) roles at FAANG are negotiable; in fact, Netflix might be the least flexible - or at least used to be, because they tried to hit what they thought would be "top of market" for you, and would be much harder to budge unless you had an actual competing offer for more than they thought your market value was. (Might be less true today, since they've moved to having actual internal "levels", but idk.)
Because the total employee count as disclosed in annual reports are not limited to solely the typical engineering positions…?
Have you never read a report from any of the FAANGs?
e.g. Out of Google’s 183,000+ total headcount… maybe a quarter are engineering positions with negotiable salaries of any kind.
You may want to try moving to the bay area or NYC for a few years if you're not already in one of those places. It's much easier to get a good job, then you can move away after you have the "right" experience. Also follow the advice in the article, in particular find people you want to work for and DM them
I have 5+ years experience at a no name place and can’t even get an interview anywhere. Maybe my resume is shit but I’ve tried many different versions with no luck in the last 4-5 months.