This thread is seriously in need of some tough love.
@faang0722, you're being a slacker, and not doing right by either your company or yourself.
You're at one of the top companies in the world, and are safe from the jobs disaster that's gripping the entire country. Millions of people are desperate to receive $600-1600 from the government this month because they are unable to work. Millions are putting on shitty facemasks and still showing up to work at grocery stores and warehouses and wherever, risking disease because they have no other choice. Meanwhile you can't be bothered to work at home on your laptop more than one day a week, because the build system and tech debt makes you sad?
You say the company is evidently pleased with your work and that may be true, but now you're part of the problem. You think the company tolerates shitty work, so you've decided to tolerate shitty work. Don't.
Since you don't think what you're doing is ethically wrong, have you told your manager that the work assigned to you is so simple that you only actually work one day a week? Of course not.
So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better... or else accept that you're being a freeloader and pretending to do more work than you really are.
Don't listen to this guy. You don't have to change your own identity and your own personal compass to fit your company. You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given. This life has a billion paths you can take. Understand the tradeoffs and make a calculated decision but follow your own path. Granted you may end up homeless. But from experience there are way more people slogging it out at work doing the 9-5 putting in the bare minimum than people who find a passion and go for it. If your passion is basket weaving you are probably screwed but given that you are an engineer there are a million problems that need to be solved. Find one, might even be within your own company.
> So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better... or else accept that you're being a freeloader and pretending to do more work than you really are.
It's definitely a choice here, but the point is the OP needs to actually make some active choices and decide what they're ok with.
I agree with what you are saying. The "tough-love" message is usually to "suck it up" and stay where you are. "Life sucks, get over it." My point is if you are smart enough to be in a FAANG you are smart enough to do great work and make an impact on this world. You don't have to settle for fixing tiny bugs in some admin page for an ad company. I know there are people that are 100% cool with doing that for $$$. If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it because there are enough problems to solve that if you are a smart engineer and you aren't doing shit and hating your day then you are wasting your talent.
You are assuming that FAANG companies are offering "fair" compensation for the output of their engineers. How would anyone ever make a profit doing that?
Employees are very rarely the exploiters and almost always the exploited.
It can simultaneously be true that 1) FAANG employees (including myself) are compensated and rewarded well above the national average, and potentially better than any other stable option available, and 2) FAANG employees are not adequately compensated for the value and revenue they generate for the company.
Amazon does not get the richest CEO in the world by truly compensating employees what they are worth to the company. Facebook literally tells employees that they target 90-95% of "market rate" for engineering salaries, based on location of the office they work in, and they refuse to negotiate with competing offers, resulting in massive compensation disparities between London and Seattle/Menlo Park.
I'm 35 and compensated far and above what I ever could have dreamed of making as a teenager, but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair". A pat on the back, an "exceeds" rating, and a 15% increase in my bonus for that half is peanuts by comparison.
Yes, but where it goes off the rails is when people expects the corporation to act against their own incentives. When people complain about compensation they get confused about how compensation is set.
Pay is not about the value you bring as much as it is about your leverage in negotiations. There’s many ways to get leverage like being the only person who can solve the problem, or systemic levers like unions.
If people aren’t getting paid adequately it’s usually because they don’t have the negotiation leverage to fix it. Conversely, we all probably know people who are of dubious value yet can command handsome salaries because they have some unique leverage.
Yes, unions and coordinated negotiation are the correct answer, but that's very difficult to pull off in companies this large with employees compensated so far above the cost of living.
100% agree that it's not easy, but it's almost certainly easier than the fight for collective bargaining during the industrial revolution. The idea that people just have too much to lose by fighting for it just underscores the point about negotiation leverage.
> but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair"
This is a failure in reasoning about how pay works.
Pay (salaried jobs, not commission) for a role is related to the difficulty in hiring (replacing) and retaining an employee for that role. A role's impact in terms of dollars changes over time. The safety in this is that if you don't happen to save $10mm this year, you still probably have a job. And your company can have roles like R&D (where many projects don't generate money at all), internal tools, etc.
> when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work
I would hazard a guess that this work wasn't 100% yours. Ops, oncall, infosec, accounting, etc etc all participate. This is Obama's "you didn't build that alone" argument.
The question isn't how much did you save, the question is could your employer hire someone else to drive the same outcome for less (or more).
Why go out of your way to judge what he said based on global socioeconomic conditions instead of on the local context? What good does it do other than emotional reinforcement and cultural signaling?
He wasn't asking for your sympathy, he was trying to contribute to a discussion and not every discussions needs to be immediately relevant to all seven billion people to be constructive.
Even shareholders have a historically unusual inability to participate in corporate governance at Facebook. The closest comparison I have found is the oil trusts from the 19th century. But that's not a good comparison, because they were trusts, not corporations.
I seriously can't believe Delaware allows Facebook's voting structure. Corporate law has evolved in a really strange direction over the past few decades.
Interesting, I don't know much about FB governance. I would venture to say it's probably (and unfortunately) becoming the norm rather than the exception that employees have little input into governance. This is another area where I think unions have benefit.
My point about being a tech "underclass" was more about avoiding conflating FAANG employees with those who have little opportunity or options. FAANG employees generally have more portable skills than, say, an uneducated immigrant employee and I don't know that I agree they could both be "exploited" in the same way. While it may be rooted in valid points, it's a bit cringey to use the same language to describe both.
> You are assuming that FAANG companies are offering "fair" compensation for the output of their engineers. How would anyone ever make a profit doing that?
Are you saying companies should have no profits in order to be fair? Profitability doesn't really reflect ethical pay, just look at Amazon, they had no profits for years.
I think it's a fallacy to think that you are smarter if you land a job at a Big N company. I know a few, you I wouldn't qualify as smarter than average on any scale are working at those companies because they happen to get good referrals and got lucky on interview days.
Exactly this. People fall for the blackshine of FAANG and large corporations etc. but this is just a PR. In reality, the larger the company is (was working for a few bluechips as subcontractor, including two from FAANG), more miserable is life for a developer that has still some life. It is a golden cage, where the largest problem is huge number of different "best practices" as they try to streamline the job. Endless discussions, processes, politics,...
For someone young, corporations are waste of life. See the world, get expiriences and when you are over 40 and you are sick of adventures take your enourmous CV and join the corp to wait for a pension. You will like the peacefull pace and they will love not having problems with you.
Suggestion over the thumb, before employing in large company, check two things. Number of manager levels from team manager to CEO and how fast they got additional levels of management. This will tell you all about the company you are joining.
I think the point is that OP is short-changing his/her own career. If you're doing the equivalent of 1 day of work over 5 days, and it's OK to your manager, you are performing at what most FAANG companies would call "Meets Expectations" which is just treading water career-wise. If your goal is to just tread water for the rest of your life and take a paycheck, then by all means keep doing it. If your career goals include climbing the ladder, working on something "meaningful", joining a high performing team with cool technology, standing out and getting prestige, whatever they are, you're probably not going to get there by relaxing on the "Meets Expectations" cruise control setting.
One thing I wish I learned earlier in life is that your career is your responsibility, not your manager's, not your company's. I spent way to many of my early years asking "What tickets should I work on now, boss?" and too few asking myself "Where do I want to take my career long term, and what steps do I take now, next year, and next 5 years, to get there?"
> If you're doing the equivalent of 1 day of work over 5 days, and it's OK to your manager
As developers, we want our managers to trust us. We don't want managers to micro- us and question our time estimates. If I say doing some task will take X weeks, I don't want management to say "do it faster". The manager doesn't know the technical details and complications like the developer does.
Here, OP is explicitly abusing that trust, taking most of the week off but pretending to be working. He/she is meeting expectations by misrepresenting the complexity and difficulty of the work.
> You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given
Just opinion so feel free to downvote to oblivion.
It's hard for me personally to rationalize their position as a 'crap job' (as I have had really crappy jobs in my life - see US Army). Maybe op's take is a little brash, however, there's some perspective to be drawn from the comment. Agree with your sentiment though.. If you don't like it do something about it.
I think 'crap job' can be multifaceted. For instance take someone making a million a year at a hedge fund with a strategy of frontrunning public pension fund trades. To some that is a dream job, to others that is a waste of life. It depends on the individual. Some hate the Army, and some sign up to do 4 tours. You have to find your own purpose and your own way of staying motivated.
>To some that is a dream job, to others that is a waste of life.
This is what a lot of people forget - your experience isn't everyone's experience, and your perspective is just that - your perspective.
Just because OP has a job that you would consider a dream, his opinion isn't invalid.
For an example: I went to college to escape a farming life. Now all of my young, relatively wealthy friends tell me how lucky I was to grow up on a farm and live a simple life. They talk about how they want that simple life. And they're confused when I respond with something to the effect of: bitches, farming isn't simple. It's hard work for really, really, really low margins. There's a reason I went to college, and that was to get away from that mess.
> You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given.
That’s very true, but there’s also the reality check that the job market has a lot of uncertainty right now. We tech people tend to have pretty good career mobility, but if the market contracts badly enough, it really may come down to taking whatever job you can get. Which as much as it sucks it’s what a lot of people have to do to put food on the table. The OP seems to be lacking motivation. Maybe the prospect of being jobless and without health insurance can be its own motivation ;).
I do agree with your point though, which I think is don’t just take what’s being given to you, do something about it. I think that’s also a version of what the parent comment was getting at (you don’t have to do little work just because management sets the bar low). And like someone else said on this thread, taking action may be extra important now. These low-output teams and employees are at a higher risk if the company decides to trim the fat.
Oh please, being a software dev in the US is being nothing but privileged. 'Starving Ethiopians' is not a fallacy - more than half of America makes less than $30,000. So yes, you are privileged and should be grateful.
> Right, because doing something that ~everyone can do after some learning is such privilege
Because the GOOG or M$ is hiring former waiters right out of a sketchy code bootcamp? Good fuckin luck. You don't need to go to MIT to get in, but you certainty need some sort of legitimate qualifications.
OP is working at a FAANG+M type of place, which are universally well-known and offer base salaries that are are known to be some of the highest in the industry / country / world.
Literally thousands and thousands of other people are applying to those jobs online, and I'd bet several hundred of those could probably do the job adequately enough.
It absolutely is. There certainly isn't equal access to 'some learning'. Sure, resources may be online, but learning still takes time, energy, and a background of prior learning.
>You say the company is evidently pleased with your work and that may be true, but now you're part of the problem. You think the company tolerates shitty work, so you've decided to tolerate shitty work. Don't.
For a non-manager in a large organization, the choices are pretty much accept your work environment or leave it. Fighting the entire company's culture as a low level employee is like trying to move a mountain by pushing harder.
To OP: Accept the pace your department moves at, and look for little victories. Your never gonna get to write a new app in a week and be a hero in your current company/department, but there is still some satisfaction to be found in ironing out little wrinkles one at a time.
If/when you leave, look for a job you want to go to, rather than just looking for a way out of your current job.
I have a subtly different take on this; op is cheating themselves. They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job, but they aren't because they are living down to the expectations of others.
We're inundated with stories of how Person X changed the world with their software, or Person Y who solved this amazing issue, or Company Z is doing this cool thing- with out realizing that we're only seeing the people who broke through the mundane. Working at a FANNG means you might get a chance at being in the room where they're picking people for a new team that might do something cool.
Where I work, we have this amazing internal database system we're going to open source. It's amazing tech, but for the 10 developers who made it, we have 1000 doing grunt work solving problems like "We need to get Apple Sign In working, but to do that we need to add X to Service A, Y to Service B, and refactor how we store accounts to make it work." It's not exciting.
Yeah good post here. Even within each of these organizations, there's always people starting to work on the "cool" project. You could get yourself to work on it, but if you're not spearheading it you'll prob end up as one of the guys who does 80% of the work to make the last 20% of the design work.
Essentially my job right now. Learning a lot, but man is it frustrating.
> They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job
Do they?
Not saying you're wrong, I'm really asking. It's not my perception that FAANG software devs have high satisfaction--more often the impression I have from talking to FAANG devs is that they feel trapped in golden handcuffs. But I'm open to the possibility that someone has better evidence than me.
It can vary highly from one half to the next, and changes with your teams, projects, etc. It can be extraordinarily rewarding to work on products that everyone you know uses every day. It can also be very frustrating and demoralizing to work on important components of the stack that noone inside or outside the company ever notices unless it breaks. The golden handcuffs are real, but most of FAANG gives you ample opportunity to switch teams and projects to find something to work on something that interests you, fulfills you, or lets you learn something that traditional companies would never let you work on unless you already had "industry experience". If you are proactive–and are "meeting expectations" in your current position–you almost certainly have the freedom to find something new whenever you start to get bored.
You're answering a subtly different question than the one I'm asking. It sounds like you're saying people have opportunities to take steps to find satisfaction at FAANG jobs, but I'm asking, do people actually find satisfaction at FAANG jobs?
I can see how self-directed-ness might give people a sense of agency. And I can also see how being able to seek out novelty could keep you from getting bored. But I don't think that agency and interest are enough to equate to satisfaction for me. For example, I think it would be difficult for me to find satisfaction at Facebook, Amazon, or Google, because the vast majority of the effect I see these companies having is harmful--I'd be waking up and going to a job where I believed I was making the world worse. No amount of agency or novelty would fix that.
Obviously everyone is different, so maybe FAANG employees are able to find satisfaction in ways that I can't. I don't know--I'm genuinely curious if there's any actual data.
As "satisfaction" is such a subjective measure, I'm not sure there's any good public data, but at least a strong majority of folks fill out internal surveys indicating that they are happy in their current roles.
We all find satisfaction in different ways though. Some get it from the products they work on, even if their individual work isn't exciting. Some get it from the actual challenges they're solving and code they're writing. Some get it from the flexibility and engineering-driven work environment and the opportunity to choose which problems they tackle each half. Some get it from the freedom to work 9-5 and have a strong separation of work and home life (barring periodic oncall or the current bizarro pandemic world). Some simply get satisfaction from knowing that the benefits and compensation they receive are helping to protect themselves, their family, and their loved ones, and ensure they have a comfortable life outside of their job.
Many find satisfaction in FAANG roles simply because they have access to one or more or all of those at the same time.
Internal surveys are pretty unreliable. Story time (details vague for obvious reasons):
I worked at a company where we were collecting safety compliance data on workers. The data was partially medical in nature, so we were legally bound by HIPAA, meaning we could not share the data with their employers. Some of the data we collected was self-reported, while some of the data was measured objectively via sensors.
Consistently, the self-reported data showed the workers were in compliance with safety standards. Consistently, the sensor data showed them to not be in compliance.
We changed the messaging around the self-reporting, to make it clear that a) we would not share self-reported data with their employers, and b) we were bound by HIPAA, and therefore could not share self-reported data with their employers. The number of workers self-reporting non-compliance increased significantly (more than doubled) but remained lower than 30%, while the sensor data continued to show compliance in single-digit percentages. The only thing we had achieved was objective proof that the self-reported data was unreliable.
The purpose of the self-reported data was to identify faulty sensors, and it was clear we weren't achieving that goal, so we eventually dropped the self-reported data from collection entirely.
Ultimately, there's no personal benefit to expressing discontent in an internal survey. Doing so takes the risk that the data will be used against you.
I do agree, there are some reasons to believe that people DO find satisfaction at FAANG job. It's just that there are reasons to believe the opposite as well, and I don't feel like I can draw a conclusion as confidently as the poster upthread who said, "They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job". The only thing I'm convinced of at this point is, "I don't know."
Seriously? I don't know anyone in this field who derives immense satisfaction from their job. Maybe if they're less than 5 years out of school and reality still hasn't hit yet...
I've had some very enjoyable periods of time across various programming jobs, but it's far from the norm. I know plenty of folks who tolerate their jobs, are okay with them. But actually love their jobs most of the time? No way.
I loved every week (though not every hour) of my computer programming jobs. I literally do it for free in my spare time and here some fools are willing to pay me handsomely to do it at their little glass and concrete spreadsheet/Powerpoint mine. The only "catch" is I have to work on problems they pick instead of ones I pick. Sounds fair enough to me; where do I sign?!
If you feel this way then maybe programming isn't for you. Which is fine. But that doesn't make it that way for other people.
There are a large number of programmers in this world, there's room for there to both be tons of people who love their jobs and tons of people who hate them.
You should ask yourself, though: why are you arguing so hard against other people, who you don't know, enjoying their jobs? Why is it so important to you that this myth of happiness be debunked?
the power software engineers wield is almost unfair, compared to non-software laborers - there's unlimited ways in which to get paid fairly well, ridiculously easy lifestyle, and also work on tech that aligns with doing good in the world, generally speaking. one can't have it all at the same time... but with software, you can probably have one of the largest spreads of [mission, comfortable income, low stress, {fill in with your requirement}] out of lots of other jobs.
It's easy and pays well, yes. It's generally not satisfying though. Maybe 20% of the time you're working on solving an interesting problem or doing what feels like "real" work. Much of the time you're spending in awful meetings / conference calls, answering emails, or working on features that nobody's even going to use. Maybe it's different in Silicon Valley.
This seems like good advice, but is presented poorly.
You're meeting expectations, which is great, but don't stop there. You recognize that you (and your teammates) could be doing more, so make it happen. You're entirely capable and empowered to do so:
- Fix that technical debt.
- Identify better tooling and demonstrate it's value to your teammates.
- Proactively find things your software could do better and write about them. Don't be discouraged if people don't bite on the first few, you'll find one eventually that's too good to not pursue.
Sure, you could accept the status quo and coast like some of your teammates, but you'll be unhappy (and bored). Do what makes you happy -- identify, evangelize, prototype and build.
All of this doesn't mean you're lazy for having posted this -- just that you need encouragement to make the things happen that'll make you happier and more fulfilled at the end of the day.
What if the "personal" project is like "introduce this new tooling to the team, get it integrated into our CI pipeline"?
Anything that introduces new technology or has the potential to require some time from other teams (Devops, SRE) I can see running into organizational roadblocks in the final stages of the project, even if the individual is free to start the experimentation and justification steps them on their own.
I think you're referring to "gatekeeping." If the employee, for instance, proactively fixes a bug or resolves some technical debt, it's possible another team member might try to prevent it from being merged. Their reasons might seem non-objective and rooted more in the fact that they weren't involved in the change, or involved in the decision to make the change. I've ran into this.
It's easy to be discouraged and, in the event this occurs, stop trying. That said I think this is the wrong thing to do. Instead I view this type of scenario as a chance to convince my teammate of the value I'm adding and the rationale behind the change being made without being explicitly planned. It's hard work, and sometimes involves some long, strained conversations with your team mates. That said at the end of the day you just might encourage that individual to proactively solve these types of problems. This will probably make that person happier as well, and unlock additional productivity for your team.
The hardest part of software is the people part :)
If they're willing to do the integration and support work on their own, then it shouldn't be a roadblock, and they should be able to prove the impact that it offers to other engineers and be rewarded if they did all of the work.
Being new doesn't mean you can't try to do things. If the OP takes that perspective then they're just limiting their own potential.
Code is code, and can be changed. There's this weird inhibition in our industry to just trying things.
Senior or not, there's no harm in opening a PR. If there's a clear reason for not applying a change it's just a learning exercise. The PR can be closed without any negative impact.
Who knows, maybe discussing the PR will be teach the senior contributor something. I can't tell you how many times I've realized a prior constraint is no longer valid via a discussion o'er a PR. I end up informed, the new contributor ends up empowered and the code base lands in a better state -- win, win and win!
IMO these types of changes and the resulting discussions are healthy and absolutely crucial to the longevity of a successful piece of software.
This is nuts. This guy doesn't owe the maximally extractive amount of his labor to the FAANGCorp. If they're happy with his work output, fine. He fulfilled his end of the bargain.
Totally deranged protestant work ethic run amok to think otherwise.
It's also extremely not this guy's fault other people have to work exploitative shit jobs during a pandemic, and his working harder (for FAANG!) isn't the thing that will fix it.
> If they're happy with his work output, fine. He fulfilled his end of the bargain. Totally deranged protestant work ethic run amok to think otherwise.
By this reasoning...
Manager: Our users are asking for this feature, how long will it take us to ship it?
Developer: I can do it in six weeks.
Manager: Ok, I'll let them know.
(Six weeks later)
Manager: I just found out that this was actually super simple for you and only took a few days. What were you actually doing the last month? Our users were waiting this whole time.
Developer: You said you were OK with six weeks! Your protestant work ethic is deranged!
Do you know how demoralizing it is to work in an organization where the people trying to lead have no power to effect change, and the leaders are incompetent and force bad decisions on a constant basis? Where there is no real vision for the company?
The OP is describing being trapped in a tar pit, and you're saying "run faster".
"Hey boss, I'd like to move faster on Project X, but there are too many review processes"
That's just the way it is, John.
"Hey, I'd like to change the change review process to streamline it from a catch-all form, to one more appropriate to our workflow"
Sorry John, QA will never sign off.
"Hey, why are we wasting 30% of our team on Project Z? It's a total duplication of work for Project Y, and brings no value to the company - it's the pet of that VP of finance, because he ate dinner with an Azure rep three months ago."
Man, I hear ya, John. What a stupid project. But that VP has the ear of the Board.
"Hey, I'd like to work my way into a design role, to help craft more common-sense engineering and be at the table when we talk about backlog priorities"
Let's put that in your development plan for 2022. We need to knock out Project X.
---
Working at large companies can be soul sucking. There is a comic called "Dilbert" that touches on it.
This is exactly how it goes and it's clear you've worked at a large company.
At the end of the day you have to accept that, yes, you are a cog in a machine. You have to morally reckon with the fact that the company is making millions or billions of dollars and sometimes you're not giving 100% of your mental effort because there's a lot of bureaucratic crap in the way. That's how it is. You either accept that and make peace or leave and go to a small company and try to make an impact that way (with way less pay).
Being super efficient at your job is not a "moral goal" when working at a big company. It's too big and complicated to draw clear lines about what is right and what is wrong when doing your work there. Even if you become more efficient at your job and make better product, often the thing holding back your product is something else entirely. You could improve the product by 1% by working harder but maybe your marketing department sucks or your senior leadership doesn't know what they're doing. The people in those positions could make different decisions and make your product 5x better, so it doesn't even matter.
Work long enough at a big company and you realize even if you do a bang up job, it won't make a huge difference in most cases. (Sometimes the product you're working on gets cancelled or fails in the market, so what was the point of stressing anyway??)
I agree it can be demoralizing but what you've presented takes the perspective that you are just a victim to an organization rather than part of that organization.
>That's just the way it is, John.
Maybe you didn't communicate the value of moving faster that speaks to your boss's incentives.
>Sorry John, QA will never sign off.
Maybe you didn't show QA how the improved workflow actually improves the quality of the work
>Man, I hear ya, John. What a stupid project. But that VP has the ear of the Board.
Maybe you can find a way for that VP to get credit for that 30% reduction in waste
>Let's put that in your development plan for 2022. We need to knock out Project X.
Maybe you can take a lead in project X so you can build the trust needed to be given a role in design with more responsibility
I know these can come off as glib, but the point is that sitting on the sidelines talking about how things can't get done only ensures things won't get done.
Having done transformation work for the last 4 years I can tell you...the individual employee will almost certainly literally die of exhaustion before they see meaningful change.
Yup. I haven't done that type of work, but I feel like to make change at a large company you need to be okay with imperfection all around you first and then find one or two things that could actually make a huge impact. Trying to fix little things here and there is just an exercise in futility.
I can commiserate with this attitude but still find myself disagreeing. I have worked in the type of role where I was expected to lead a transformational change when it seems like the incentives at every level are aligned against it.
I do personally feel an obligation to keep trying because if I didn't I'm not doing my job. Throwing up my hands in exasperation means I'm collecting a pay check just to keep the status quo. That makes me part of the problem as well as resigning myself to be miserable. I think we owe it to ourselves and the organization to move on if we get to that point.
I think the saying is “frustration is a failure to manage expectations”.
I think often we get into organizations overestimating the impact we’ll have. It seems our impact can be inversely proportional to the size of the company. But that may be an artifact of how we define “meaningful change”
AKA, please work harder for your corporate masters because poor people are suffering. What's that? You want your corporate masters to pay a fair share of tax so poor will suffer less? No, just work harder and that extra work won't benefit people who need it.
To be fair it’s the OP who’s implying he or she wants to do more. Its not about working harder to please your corporate masters but about taking action to improve your own happiness.
Yes, for OP they seem to have some kind of motivation to work. I was criticizing framing of the issue as not "doing right by your company", not the idea that working harder might be useful for OP. I think we've all been in the situation of having a reason to work harder but still feeling unmotivated. I don't know how "tough love" would help someone like this and the reasons given by khazhoux for working harder make no sense.
Yes, he should work harder -- he admits to working only one day a week, and then actively pretends (by "trickling out" work) that it took longer. Let's please not pretend that it's normal or OK to have 6-day weekends every single week.
He is being compensated (I infer) very well for a safe and comfortable job, except he doesn't like the tooling and he's realized that people trust him and he doesn't need to be honest to collect his paycheck.
You are misrepresenting this and spewing some garbage perspective about how work should operate.
Hours put in is completely pointless and an old win by unions to prevent companies from further exploitation of workers. If you can do 6x the work of the other devs on your team you have literally no obligation to work any harder.
The company does not have your interests at heart.
Reflectively pointing to imperatives like "normal or OK" when someone is having a moment of questioning imperatives that have got them this far is unhelpful. Why does it matter what's normal or OK? Maybe the thing that OP should be doing is something that's considered by many to be abnormal or not OK. If you want to convince OP that they should be working harder then fine. I'm not saying that's the wrong conclusion, but at least give a reason that's more useful than (a) other people are suffering therefore work (makes no sense) or (b) do what's normal or OK (why?) or even (c) you have a moral duty because you're being paid well (unconvincing as an argument and psychologically unmotivating).
It would be easier if he could just give this job to someone willing to work those all day, but let’s not pretend that most of these people will never get the job anyway.
I don’t see how being honest makes this world a better place.
What's with this moralizing? If you can get away with working only one day a week, there's nothing wrong with doing exactly that. Is this like some Protestant work ethic thing?
In general, I certainly wouldn't advocate trying to do the least work possible to get by in some job long-term. It doesn't sound fulfilling and likely isn't good for one's career long-term.
But I don't get this moralizing about cheating the company.
Especially since OP already indicated that they're feeling unmotivated.
If you're feeling unmotivated and force yourself to work harder on something that doesn't motivate you to fulfill some kind of a moral standard, that might end up being a fast track to burnout. (Depending on the exact circumstances, your personality etc. of course, but burnout doesn't only happen because of too much work but also because of bad matches between people and their jobs.)
The key is to see if there's some way OP can find the motivation, and then work harder on getting more things done because they have the motivation to. Or to find some other kind of a solution to the unsatisfying situation.
I don't really get the moralizing about other people having to work in objectively worse conditions either. It's not like OP's (or anybody else's) mental well-being and satisfaction with something that doesn't appear to suit their personality should magically become better because someone else has bigger trouble.
It's also possible that this one day of intense work is unsustainable for 5 days, and this is just their working style. There's nothing wrong with that as long as this isn't done out of laziness.
So what if it's done out of laziness? There's no law that says that a lazy person can't participate in the economy without giving up their laziness. There are jobs out there that are well suited for lazy people. Maybe OP has found one of them.
To be fair, they didn't say they're working one day a week, they said it takes them only one day to provide equal value to what their teammates achieve in one week, a value that seems to meet their company's expectations.
FAANGS employees are salaried, and not paid by hour, because you are compensated for ROI. If it takes you one hour and you bring in lots of value, that's still a good deal. On the flip side, you could also work 60 hours week if that's what it took you to meet and exceed on the value expectations.
Still agree with much of your comment though. Since they're complaining about the situation, something does feel off.
Ya that's why I still agree mostly with OP in this particular case it seems something is off.
I just wanted to explain that with software, a small effort can deliver huge returns. So the idiom of: "Don't work hard, work smart" is in full effect. If you can deliver on the expected business value with less effort on your part it is still a win/win scenario. A business who'd replace you for someone who fills up all 40 hours would not necessarily gain anything, in fact, might lose on ROI. Hours put into software does not translate directly into the output delivered.
And, there's only so much creative juice per week you can deliver on, so that cleverness of solutions you can come up with, and those good ideas you have which don't take very long to implement, but deliver big returns, you can't necessarily just be asked to come up with them twice as often by working more hours either. In fact, sometimes those come by taking a break, a step back, getting more rest, etc.
And maybe since we're on the topic, I've had a fare share of jobs prior, server, construction, military, and yet nothing drains me more than software engineering at the end of the day, even if it was only a 6 hour day. There's something about just thinking all day and discussing heavily all day that is super draining mentally. Where other jobs I've had that were more physically demanding tired me, but in a good way, that almost energized me in my off time. The mental work is hard.
It’s a transaction. The goals of the company and employee parties is to maximize their own gains with as little effort as possible. The moral imperative argument is very dubious, and sounds one-side to further the gains of the company party at the expense of additional energy from the employee. Raising matters of social change as if the employee should have some gut wrenching “come to Jesus” because “they’re so lucky” relative to global social and market changes is a bunch of smoke and mirrors to, again, unevenly place the gains from the employee-business relationship on the company. Business is only a transaction; maximize gains for minimal effort, between all parties.
That “million people would kill for a chance” to be at a FAANG is not the employee’s problem anymore. The moment the company extended the job offer already created “a million” job applicants who didn’t get an offer. Behaving in a way that suggests continually begging “to stay in” just to get to create the net gains for other people, the investors and top management, deserves a therapy session on personal self-worth, which is a personal problem not a business matter.
Now, as for the matter of personally going above and beyond, that’s actually a separate matter - no need for emotional entanglement of the the business reality and personal reality. If the employee wishes, as they’ve expressed, to go above what is satisfying the business (given they’ve reported no management has complained) then by all means, find more work with outside teams within the company, tactfully speak to the manager about the concern, or just leave and start a new job or venture.
The moral guilt argument over the transactional relationship between an employee and the business, though, is at best naive, and at worse unevenly extracting more energy from the employee than the business. If the company has continued to pay the employee without complain, that’s their own moral dilemma for allowing it.
You're seeing some responses to this that are very cultural. Personally, I don't think a slow coast is a good long-term strategy for most people under a lot of circumstances (for many reasons). But putting the least effort in is seen as pretty normal in a lot of cultures. As someone else said, you're seeing a lot of Calvinist moralizing here IMO.
> Millions of people are desperate to receive $600-1600 from the government this month because they are unable to work. Millions are putting on shitty facemasks and still showing up to work at grocery stores and warehouses and wherever, risking disease because they have no other choice. Meanwhile you can't be bothered to work at home on your laptop more than one day a week, because the build system and tech debt makes you sad?
I'm always impressed at how much American culture promotes labor vs. labor infighting instead of recognizing that the issue is not the 1%. It's the top 0.1% (and 0.01%) that's causing this problem.
lol. this is insane. he's doing his job and asking a question.
Lets say he decides to start being more diligent and taking the initiative to do as much work as is possible. His company is the only entity that benefits from this arrangement, and the benefit is marginal at best. Ultimately, this literally provides the resources for the company to pay the salaries of more useless workers and perpetuates the issue this post is trying to address.
Every worker's duty is purely to themselves, not some sort of bizarre worship of their employer.
Your duty to yourself under capitalism is to extract as much capital and benefit as possible from the market in exchange for your labor. If you can commit a line of code a week and still get paid your salary, you're working EXTREMELY efficiently. Even better if you manage to get a job where they're failing to get any labor from you at all.
Conversely every employer is focused on extracting as much production as possible from their employees. Efficient companies will cut off under-producing workers without a second thought and will continuously strive to minimize the cost of any employee.
You feel the bar is being set very low. The hard part of your job is working within the established environment (the technical debt?). You're choosing to put the effort in 1 day a week because you're comparing your contributions to your coworkers.
If you're unhappy in this dev environment that's one thing, and if you're unhappy with your contributions that's another.
I would try setting expectations for yourself if it's easy to impress the company. You could be a huge asset even assisting your team. It's concerning that you aren't aware of why their progress is slower and that no one has spotted your complacency. Perhaps you have something to offer as a mentor and maybe that will give your work more meaning/value (something to consider).
As the guy above me said, a lot of people are facing crisis right now. I honestly don't blame you for having an easier time of it if most of the week you're just collecting money.
PS: I learn best by teaching others. I think you should get more involved with your team to help them :-)
PPS: I have grown SO MUCH as a developer by forcing myself to "do as the Roman's do". Watch your mental health. If you feel like you're losing your identity you should walk, but otherwise try immersing yourself in understanding your companys' stack and design decisions. Make your contributions indistinguishable from all that code that together makes something amazing. It's bad to measure progress by SLOC. You can always switch to Sprite if you don't like the Koolaid.
PPPS: You may be able to be honest with your supervisor and ask for time at work to work on passion projects. They care about your meaningful contributions and would likely do whatever you need to keep those rolling in. A FAANG company would accomodate this.
The danger here is that others might be happy with the pace and lack of stress, or they might simply not be good enough to do any better. In either case, they're happy with the situation, and don't want it to change.
If you do good work, they'll fear managers might notice, and it'll make them look bad. So they won't be happy with that. They'll sabotage you, bully you, not proactively tell you things you don't know you don't know, etc.
Before you start that fight, make sure you want to fight that fight, and that if it happens you stand a good chance of winning.
Otherwise you'll just put in more effort than now, and the result will be that more people than now will hate you, and eventually you'll get fired because your work will suck because your colleagues have deliberately withheld information.
Well the point is that OP is obviously not happy being a freeloader, which is why they posted here about it.
This sort of tough-love feedback to really useful to someone looking for meaning in their work. The reality is, sometimes you have to make your own meaning. If what you're being handed at work is boring and easy, it can be self-love to start asking around for more interesting stuff to do.
Young people in particular can have a hard transition coming out of school, where the structure and goals are handed to you, into the "real world", where a lot of the rewards flow to people who have the ability and willingness to create structures and goals for themselves and others.
By bringing in the bigger picture, it seems you're just making the moral case stronger? That means he's profiting from rent seeking, just like the shareholders. (And probably is a shareholder too.) The money comes from the same places.
To complicate things a bit though, this looks like systematic failure in some parts of the organization. Doing your bit to try to fix that failure seems like a good cause.
you’re right if the person was not working at a FAANG. so what if they’re one of tnt most valuable companies in the world? one way they became so valuable is by vacuuming up all the talent and giving them tedious work to do so they don’t compete with FAANG itself.
Have you ever worked for a company like this? I have worked for a startup which was acquired by a FAANG company and later transferred internally to a "normal" team within the FAANG company. That's three different scenarios: 1) startup 2) recent acquisition; small startup-cultured enclave in a big company 3) pure big company.
I was an extremely motivated worker in scenarios 1 and 2. I had a lot of "momentum" and worked extremely hard. Burnout was a consideration not just because of long hours, but because I liked working so much that it was easy to overwork over the course of a couple months. In scenario 3 it is a constant struggle to remain motivated and I constantly feel as though all of my momentum is lost.
Here are some differences I noticed:
Scenarios 1 and 2:
a. Extremely aggressive goals and deadlines. Deadlines constantly missed, but our velocity was impressive. Goals were very short term - few goals were more than 1 business quarter in the future. This changed once we were acquired because the acquiring company demanded longer term deadlines.
b. Scrappiness and the pride in your work and yourself that accompanies scrappiness
c. Iteration speed prioritized highly. Build and deploy times to a staging environment often less than 3 minutes.
d. I wore many hats. DBA, sysadmin, full stack software engineer, product guy, security person, devops. Worked in many domains - search, distributed systems, building in the Cloud, etc.
e. Hard work and ownership are seen and rewarded.
----
Scenario 3:
a. Smaller goals. Every goal was designed to be hit, since missing goals is anathema in my FAANG company.
b. No scrappiness whatsoever. Just meet the deadlines.
c. Iteration speed barely prioritized. Since your tasks have been mapped out months ahead of time, what need do you have to iterate quickly? Just build to the spec. Build times were extremely long. Deploy times were often 12 hours (you think it wouldn't take that long to deploy something, but when your company has strict rules about only deploying to 1 region at a time and taking 30 minutes to monitor metrics in each region before moving to the next, it adds up). Many of the best tools or tricks I used to iterate quickly in scenarios 1 and 2 don't work due to security measures, or more likely, due to the FAANG company leveraging their own tools rather than open source ones I used in scenario #1 and #2.
d. I wear 1 or 2 hats.
e. Hard work and ownership aren't really seen unless you're in the right project.
I can't tell you how many times I've told my manager I feel like I haven't done a lot of work recently, or feel like I could be doing more. I'm always assured that I'm doing very well in his eyes and meeting all my deadlines. From my perspective I've done a disgustingly tiny amount of work since I started.
Anyway, I wrote all of this out to try and illustrate that it is really hard to work hard in a scenario where you are actively discouraged from working harder. I didn't really do a good job of doing that, but I hope I've kind of hinted at the problem. Most of your teammates at FAANG companies have worked at FAANG or other large companies their entire careers and have no idea how slow the entire freight train is moving. They have no idea that in other companies the role of being a software engineer is much more dynamic than their experience has been.
There are a lot of compounding issues other than just unimaginative deadlines that I don't have time to touch on. Legacy systems, defined promotion processes that make it so that you know ahead of time which projects actually stand a chance of promoting you, a strong hierarchy, entrenched politics, etc etc.
I just want to say that I have been in scenario 3 for a year and it has taken about that long to build my momentum up again to where it was in scenario #1 and #2. It is really, really hard to keep your motivation to work harder when almost every part of the job is incentivizing you to just sit down and meet your pathetic deadlines.. Trying to motivate someone by shaming them is never going to work here.
No - the company appears satisfied with OP's performance. Therefore they're not freeloading, rather they are selling the company services at the price point the company set. If someone comes to my business and we agree that I'll provide a widget for $10k, if it costs me only $1k to make it, we call that profit - i don't give them 10 widgets or a refund. A salaried job is an agreement that i will provide X KPIs, if it takes me more than 40hrs I don't get extra money, so if it takes me less an 40hrs I shouldn't give back money.
Now there may be laws or authoritarian morals around how I should lick the boots of my boss and give away more hours or outperform the KPIs, but basic capitalism says that's just a thing for suckers.
because they don't have solutions or useful advise. They don't think anything is wrong but the person who's presenting the actual problem. It's sometimes useful to consider the possibility you're wrong, but what OP describes is clearly not unique to his team or company. Many of us are in the same boat. So at least in this particular case, the "toughlover" is indeed, a "douchebag".
Sometimes you need to be slightly offended or put off in order to change your own stubborn mindset. I see both sides in this exchange. OP has a choice they can make. They can continue to coast or strive to do better. There isn't necessarily a wrong choice here, but I do believe their long-term future outcomes will be strongly affected by the choice they make.
@faang0722, you're being a slacker, and not doing right by either your company or yourself.
You're at one of the top companies in the world, and are safe from the jobs disaster that's gripping the entire country. Millions of people are desperate to receive $600-1600 from the government this month because they are unable to work. Millions are putting on shitty facemasks and still showing up to work at grocery stores and warehouses and wherever, risking disease because they have no other choice. Meanwhile you can't be bothered to work at home on your laptop more than one day a week, because the build system and tech debt makes you sad?
You say the company is evidently pleased with your work and that may be true, but now you're part of the problem. You think the company tolerates shitty work, so you've decided to tolerate shitty work. Don't.
Since you don't think what you're doing is ethically wrong, have you told your manager that the work assigned to you is so simple that you only actually work one day a week? Of course not.
So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better... or else accept that you're being a freeloader and pretending to do more work than you really are.