Current FAANG/MANGA employee here. In my mid-thirties and have been in the industry for a while now. Also spent a lot of time in school.
I started off being interested in computers in my youth because of games, and spent a lot of time on this forum learning things.
For anyone like me who may be interested in pursuing a similar career path (money is very good), I figured I would share some learnings I've had over the years that have surprised me, or that I wasn't expecting:
I started off being interested in computers in my youth because of games, and spent a lot of time on this forum learning things.
For anyone like me who may be interested in pursuing a similar career path (money is very good), I figured I would share some learnings I've had over the years that have surprised me, or that I wasn't expecting:
- Working on consoles/devices for a big company as an engineer is shockingly similar to doing a lot of the hacks discussed here on the forums. If you can mod a 3DS, you probably already have a decent chunk of the necessary skills to do firmware development.
- For highly paid engineers, the one part of their skillset they are usually missing is the above, and it usually takes them ~6 months to learn how to work with devices once joining a company.
- Advanced degrees will land you interviews, but not increases in pay. Increases in pay come instead from years of experience in the industry. If you are good at LeetCode interview questions and networking, you are leaving a ton of money on the table by staying in school longer than you have to.
- Coding is actually the minority of the job. The much larger and more complicated portion of things is planning things out, getting others onboard with the changes, and figuring out why XYZ happens to be broken today. Being a Junior Dev means you are still mastering the coding part - anything above that means you are mastering the others.
- Modern software development means that things are always in a state of flux - something not actively tended to for a few months will inevitably end up broken. Combine this with the very short tenure of most employees, and a general lack of willingness to write documentation, and the result is a shocking amount of resources being spent just to keep the lights on.
- In the USA, if you want to buy a house anywhere near the companies you are looking to work for, your spouse also needs a similarly high income (probably also in tech). You cannot do it just with 1x tech salary anymore. You also have to be comfortable throwing away a small fortune to have below-average accommodations. So, unless those two things are true, plan to move for your job, stay there as long as you can suck out the money for, and then move back to a lower cost of living area.
- You are financially punished for staying at any of the big tech companies for more than 4 years.
- You should plan to spend at least 6 months practicing for interviews. The competition is such that you need to know the answer to any question that is asked, the second they ask it. There is no way around this other than straight memorization, and you need to go through it again every time you switch jobs.
- It is very common for folks to view working for one of these companies as a status symbol, and to celebrate "making it" by dropping their starting bonus (~$100K) on a fancy car. A shocking amount of people driving Porsche's, Mercedes S-Class's, Rivian's, brand new Tesla's, etc. have never driven before in their lives and know nothing about cars. The result of which is them effectively just flushing that money down the toilet and then being salty when they realize what has happened. I am really into cars, and even my advice would be "Don't do that."
- Expect to never meet your coworkers. While not all employees at all companies are remote, there is enough of a critical mass of remote/hybrid workers that even if you aren't remote, you're still remote because no one else is around. The industry used to be much more collaborative and have much more of a sense of community, but that has changed following COVID and will never go back.
- There are folks out there who, given the opportunity to do anything with their time/lives, would program. They will even do it in their free time. These are the people who get promoted/make a huge impact - the folks who love it. For most people, however, it ends up being just a job. If you are one of those, you need to accept the fact that you will never be able to compete with the folks who love it. Being average is OK!
Last edited by PityOnU,
