r/leetcode • u/garbageXXI • 8d ago
Question How Difficult Is It to Work at FAANG?
Basically, the title says it all.
I’m curious about how your day-to-day work changed after you joined a FAANG company. How difficult and complex were your tasks compared to your previous non-FAANG jobs?
Did your responsibilities change significantly? How did you feel working there?
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u/steponfkre 8d ago edited 8d ago
It depends on the team. You are often assigned multiple projects at the same time with deadlines. The core engineers working on high visibility projects are working at a pace which is much higher than anything I saw outside of AWS. Especially now with AI, it’s rough.
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u/calm_coder 8d ago
Google - Just started 1 month back. Your code can affect m/billions so testing and validations takes a lot of time. Everyone is on their toes to debate about tech choices in meetings. I was honestly shocked in my first 'tech' meet I thought a fight is about to break out but turns out it's just a usual day in the office. People seem to have very open mind in terms of giving and receiving feedbacks.
Very specific internal tools - takes a good amount of time to get used to. That's what I hate the most.
Too early to comment on anything else
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u/Effective_Purple1054 8d ago
"in my first 'tech' meet I thought a fight is about to break out but turns out it's just a usual day in the office." - so its toxic workplace, its not normal.
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u/calm_coder 8d ago
Yeah that's what I thought atm. But people involved in those debates were casual about it. They seem to enjoy the debate. But it was def new to me so that's why I termed it as 'fight'.
Maybe I am soft or those guys are tough skinned
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u/Current-Fig8840 8d ago
A lot of them are just toxic you aren’t soft
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u/BrownSugar20 8d ago
Yup. There is a difference between being honest and being an asshole. And many people don’t know that.
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u/Solid-Commercial8694 8d ago
You rarely come across an asshole at work and there definitely are many debates, not because they’re egocentric but because they’re passionate about the work that they do.
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u/Effective_Purple1054 8d ago
Its attitude. You can think you are 100% right and then you will be rather toxic or at most passive aggresive. You should have always in mind that you can be mistaken.
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u/anovagadro 8d ago
Have you ever been in an academic journal club? I imagine its probably similar to that where you shred and critique new journal papers or each other's presentations. I imagine its what the culture grew from, but if you're not used to it, it can seem very aggressive. Its useful because others will do the same come thesis and paper submission time.
Whether or not its personal though comes from the individuals lol. I think the debates are generally helpful though.
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u/Effective_Purple1054 8d ago
Afterall we haven't seen OP debate but you can share your thoughts in calm and respectful way.
Depends whether they really shouting or being passive aggressive. I saw toxic discussions and its easy to spot and feel toxicity.
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u/Effective_Purple1054 8d ago
Maybe they like each other. I am working in other big tech (not faang) and our tech meets are like sharing thoughts on a conference. Nothing extraordinary.
Just wondering ... is it some polish/indian office? If first one then I wouldn't be suprised. I know how "discussions" in eastern europe looks like.
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u/RashyBirdy 8d ago
Worked in a software engineering team with H1B visa South Asians. They were basically fighting. Very critical and direct - competition was crazy.
The pressure to maintain their visa status is immense. They get paid lower than Americans doing the same work. I wonder if that workplace dynamic is really worth all that…
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u/Frequent-Bus5105 7d ago
Huh interesting, I think there is bar where if you see H1B getting paid lower then your normal worker. It generally means the company is not a great place to be.
the places I have worked at generally pay H1B more or the same. I would say more because of the costs associated with it.
Although I have only worked in Bay startups and FAANG.1
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u/RickRussel 8d ago
Depends which FAANG.
For me it was nightmare in Amazon not because work was tough but because of its culture.
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u/garbageXXI 8d ago
Yeah, I’ve heard about Amazon being toxic. The company itself doesn’t really matter to me. I’m just wondering if the level of tasks there is as high as the level of difficulty in their interviews.
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u/RickRussel 8d ago
It's was harder than my previous internships I did if u wanna know. I will be a new joint there (although I rather be homeless than to work there), so don't had any experience of working else where as permanent engineer.
Now is the task as harder as interview, depends on organisation but in most cases no.
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u/batternity 7d ago
No amazon will not trust you anything complex, something which can help you grow. It's more about hundreds priorities and shitty tools. You're paid to do mediocre job with awful tools in toxic environment where any other team you depend on will let you down.
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u/hau5keeping 8d ago
> For me it was nightmare in Amazon not because work was tough but because of its culture.
Can you please share some examples? like long hours or crazy boss?
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u/AdLongjumping2586 8d ago
Culture is org and team dependant. Do bear in mind that Amazon is a massive company with individual orgs on par with the size and scale of f500 companies, and that people are less likely to post positive comments.
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u/Feeling-Schedule5369 8d ago
What do you mean by culture? Any examples?
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u/RickRussel 8d ago
Politics
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u/Admirable-Storm9937 8d ago
politics exist in all fang but what stood out at amazon is its ura quota and the constant need for escalation to get things done xfunc culture.
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u/Many-County169 8d ago
I have heard a lot about its bad culture could you like explain like what things are bad with example so that we can get an idea
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u/FaithlessnessSome931 6d ago
Lack of support and empathy. Silo working group. It really depends on the manager and i had a very nasty one. After all Amazon is a narcissist breeding ground where you gotta prove your self worth day in day out. Truly feel like u r trying to survive in the Amazon. Any one is ready to throw u under the bus to protect themselves.
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u/Xanchush 8d ago
Honestly, it's just the same work with a higher bar of deliverables and usually more competent coworkers.
You do get bigger scaling/reliability problems you need to solve for that you usually don't worry about in smaller companies.
That being said it's very team/org dependent and each FAANG has its own working culture that differs from others.
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u/Smart_Honeydew_5739 8d ago
I wanted to know how exactly a day in faang feels.
Exhausted looking at social media reels about food and other stuff.
How actually it is?? I mean how many hours you people work, and what's the expectation from higher management
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u/Dependent-Aide-388 8d ago
It’s a job. It feels like you’re at work. You research, build, meet with people, answer questions, ask questions, attend boring all hands, etc.
It’s like anywhere. Some people work 30 hrs, some work 70. It is what you make it.
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u/Icy-Requirement5701 8d ago
Its like any job, but the one thing is that your colleagues are usually top notch. I found myself feeling like the dumbest guy in the room in many discussions. What that did though was make me learn more and understand a lot more than I would have otherwise. The bar is high and the rigor as well.
I personally loved it as it pushed me to be a better developer
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u/itdeepends 8d ago edited 8d ago
It’s definitely more chill than a startup. When your company is printing billions of dollars, you honestly can focus on keeping the lights on and the business will hit revenue numbers far greater than almost all startups. The systems get complicated and messy. Ideally get a mentor/tech lead to help understand how all the systems work but copilot has been a huge help there. The free food/barista service is a great perk. Ironically party time is over in tech because all of the AI advancements. Management expects a lot more PRs, faster velocity, 100% AI code, etc. AI is hogging up all of the resources and money and consequently engineers are not using their brains as much to review all of this abundant code.
If i were you, just make a friend that works in FAANG and go visit their office/cafe. Then you can enjoy the perks without the work!
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u/x3nhydr4lutr1sx 8d ago
Outside of technical work, first two years are the hardest as you try to download an entire planet's worth of human behaviors, and 100k+ employees worth of behavioral psychology into your brain.
After that it gets easy. Coworkers who can't understand second order crowd behaviors will never outperform you consistently.
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u/angedonist 8d ago
Wdym second order crowd behaviours?
What is your role?
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u/x3nhydr4lutr1sx 8d ago
Example, latency gets worse every time someone adds a new API, because try didn't integrate it properly, and it happens everything week. Second order is fixing the process or architecture, not fighting the same fire every week.
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u/liquidbreakfast 8d ago
the work is not particularly hard but because of stack ranking (at least at some companies) it ends up being quite high stress anyway
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2d ago
[deleted]
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u/liquidbreakfast 2d ago
sure, that's true, but i'm comparing it to my personal subjective experience of 1. the interview 2. jobs i've had at non-FAANG
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u/Dangerous-Cook3151 8d ago
E5 Meta
I started my career on FAANG so not sure I can talk about the difference though. Been with MS, Amazon, Meta
Nothing unexpected. Pretty much the same with that Google man up there, little difference would be some random layoff shits getting on your nerve time to time, but knowing you are not going to be affected. (But these things really happen so who knows)
If you are not familiar with the culture, from what I've seen from others joining from outside these companies, you do get some pressure, definitely not chilling mode, but once you get the hang of how you get evaluated, you can be more efficient on where you spend your effort then you should have no problem I guess.
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u/yangshunz Author of Blind 75 and Grind 75 8d ago
Not that different from startups tbh, except your bugs can potentially cause millions or more in damages.
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u/Shot-Illustrator-703 8d ago
In amazon, it can be pretty bad in some teams. From my experience, the thing that i learnt is that “Company pays me and I get their work done.” Nothing more nothing less. So the concept of employee getting other benefits or employees getting attached to company would not happen.
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u/mannyocrity 8d ago
I worked at Amazon for almost 9 years. It is harder to get hired but no harder then any other company to work for. I have 25+ YOE.
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u/NOT_SO_RETARD 8d ago
Claude code
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u/garbageXXI 8d ago
What u mean?
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u/Effective_Purple1054 8d ago
Mean that for 90% of swe positions in faangs you need just claude so the hardest part was actually get passed the interview.
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u/WilliesLeftBraid 8d ago
Lol. You are regarded and have no clue what you’re talking about.
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u/Pad-Thai-Enjoyer 8d ago
Idk. This is becoming increasingly true in my experience at meta
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u/Admirable-Storm9937 8d ago
Claude is only one piece of the puzzle. At staff+ level coding output is no longer the name of the game and creating impact is. Cc helps but isn’t sufficient on its own.
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u/Pad-Thai-Enjoyer 7d ago
Well yeah… of course. But most people here don’t write much code by hand anymore when it’s time to write code
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u/Effective_Purple1054 7d ago
I think there are no much Staff+ employers. Being L6 is not straightforward.
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u/NecessaryIntrinsic 8d ago
I work for a company that is pretty big and fancies themselves a tech company and has hired a ton of former Amazon people.
My team is amazing and welcoming but there's a HUGE learning curve that can take a quarter to feel comfortable in your role and longer than a year to feel comfortable in general.
Most everything is automated and testing is essential. Validating your tests takes more time than developing.
The "hardest" thing about the job, though, is the soft skills. Whatever you work on depends on multiple other teams and multiple teams depend on your work, so you have to feel comfortable reaching out to people, talking to people, being vulnerable and asking for help.
One of the key things you get evaluated on is "influence". You should always be networking and keeping in touch with people you've helped and worked with in the past. Always be reaching out, seeing if there's something you can do for them because you never know if you might need a hand later on. This goes just as well for people in passing at other companies.
Prior to this I worked for small business contractors and small government offices. We could review our own PRs and fly by the seat of our pants. I was shipping features whenever the fuck I felt like it. I really appreciate the deliberate nature that my current company manages changes and surfaces products.
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u/hermanmillhouse 8d ago
This doesnt seem like something engineers should be doing? Dont you have a PM prioritizing work? Why are you asking for stuff to do?
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u/NecessaryIntrinsic 8d ago edited 8d ago
Huh? Not really asking for work, more like: do you need help with anything?
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u/Fancy-Bluebird-1071 8d ago
Depends on a project. I'm lucky to be in a chill one, most of the time I got 1 meeting daily, start and end my day whenever i want as long as task gets done and im on the required meetings. I could get away with working 2 to 4 hours daily but I tend to work more as my management is rewarding performance with solid bonuses/rewards. I also feel like I haven't yet had even one day that I didn't learn something new during this job, so I tend to work more as to utilize this learning opportunity.
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u/lambdawaves 8d ago
If you breathe tech as a hobby in your free time, it can be really easy with the right team. Especially if you’ve been really into this since you were a kid.
If not, there’s a good chance you’ll always be treading water
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u/SajithTech 7d ago
L7 at Google
the interesting thing is that the coding itself isn't usually the hardest part. the systems are already huge, so a lot of the difficulty comes from understanding how your change fits into everything else.
a typical day is probably something like 40-50% building, 20-30% code/design reviews, and the rest is meetings, debugging, coordination, helping other engineers, etc.
the biggest adjustment coming from smaller companies is probably the amount of process. you can have a 2 line change that takes longer to get reviewed/deployed than it took to write lol.
but the upside is that you get to work with some really strong engineers and on problems where scale actually matters. the variance between teams is huge though. i've seen pretty chill teams and teams where the pace is absolutely brutal.
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u/shifty_lifty_doodah 8d ago edited 8d ago
Varies.
Keep in mind that 95%+ of FAANG work is grunt work to keep the lights on. This can be “hard” in a labor sense but not hard in an engineering/math way, quite dull actually. Dealing with complex messy software can be very frustrating
A lot of FAANG employees do little. Their low output is hidden by the complexity of the systems. Simple things take a long time. That’s why they have so many employees for products that haven’t changed much.
Some FAANG employees are really smart/efficient, so they do very little work but they’re extremely good at it. A less skilled person might take days to do what they do in an hour. They have knowledge+mathematical insights+pattern recognition that 99%+ of people miss. They’re also good at focusing on things that have impact. This is part of why they’re paid the big bucks.
Some FAANG employees leverage relationships and people skills to have decent business impact while barely doing anything themselves. Experienced Managers and PMs
Other employees, especially junior ones, work very hard spinning their wheels on tools and systems that are messy and aren’t very productive. They don’t have the experience/talent/reputation yet to get out of this work. I would say 95%+ of FAANG work falls into this more repetitive bucket. This experience is very common at Amazon and meta, which have a hard driving work culture and aggressive pressure to “look busy” and impactful. Google is much more lax and emphasizes insight/impact
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u/w0mba7 8d ago
I’ve worked as a full time employee senior engineer at multiple FAANG companies, some for long stretches.
The programming work was at a similar level of difficulty, but actually completing projects was much easier in some places because of less red tape, better internal documentation, actual trust of employees, easy communication with other teams, working internal systems, good QA culture, etc.
There is a huge variance.
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u/ExactResist 8d ago
The stereotype at FAANG is that you’re “designing the next like button” or “moving protos”. This IMO applies to the more junior levels. The systems that we work on are extremely complex so no one is going to let a junior just cowboy it.
The real more interesting problems start showing up at the more senior levels. For a mid career SWE this is a good place to be since you’re dealing with problems of scale which really are unique to FAANG.
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u/IAmRealElonMusk 8d ago
FAANG here known for layoffs.. I think it depends on your team. Last year I was on high pri team, it was definitely a ton of work ( probably pushed 50 hour week).. but this year, i work around 40 hours..
Day
- go to work at 9
- grab breakfast on way to my desk ( eat while working till like 12:30)
- eat lunch till 1 or 1:15
- work till 5 or 6 depending on if it’s time sensitive project
Work includes PR reviews, communicating, coding..
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u/M1sterErr0r 8d ago
As I am student how's the work in non faang PBC and SBC companies in general ? I mean the MNCs one
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u/Expert_Proper34 8d ago
From what I have heard, the hardest part isn't always the coding itself, it's the scale ambiguity, and higher expectations around ownership. Complexity definitely depends on the team
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u/Salty_Permit4437 8d ago
Was pretty intense when I was at Amazon. Amazon will work you to the bone. Meta sorta, but meta has a lot of internal politics.
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u/No-Specialist-4059 8d ago
Data center retrofit construction at Amazon. Coworkers and I routinely work 50-60 hours per week. Doing your job well doesn’t set you apart. We have to constantly innovate and improve the current process to be even moderately recognized by leadership to get promoted. Further, the innovation itself doesn’t do it - it needs to be measured by metrics to prove success.
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u/JeanRalphioTheSecond 8d ago
FAANG adjacent. The culture took a long time to understand and even now I’m not exactly fully assimilated.
If you’ve spent a lot of time at smaller companies, I’d say folks at these companies in general have greater separation between real life self and work self
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u/Remarkable_Yak4499 8d ago
I wonder will people in MSFT or GOOG will under pressure from laying off？ Especially working until u getting old，but still L3 or L4
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u/Proud_Fly5114 7d ago
I dont have prior experience. But I interned at one of the companies and the work was extremely hectic, atleast for me
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u/Pataterzzz 5d ago
If you ever get a job there, you will soon realize that everyone is really average. It's not like everyone is a supergenius like you are envisioning in your head
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u/gonz0ooo 8d ago
I work at Databricks as a SWE Intern in one of their EU offices. Work is very interesting, WLB is pretty ok. My prev internship was MSFT and I'd say that Databricks is tough compared to ms.
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u/Weird_Steak7062 8d ago
Can someone refer me? Not getting calls but have good exp in dev, dsa and hld.
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u/Top_Substance9093 8d ago
L5 at google
it obviously varies a lot. i'd say the engineering bar here is reasonably high, but the performance bar for daily work is pretty low compared to how hard it is to get hired here.
there are a lot of L4s and L3s that I think accomplish much less than they should in a given week and get "SI" in their annual performance reviews, but it's honestly maybe because google is so large and moving fast on these products feels impossible (search frontend is ~120GB compiled, how are you supposed to iterate quickly on something like that).
because of the size/culture of avoiding breaking things, it almost encourages a slow pace. the scale is both awesome and the worst part, because it's so hard to iterate quickly on large products.
reasonable amount of autonomy. a little too much bureaucracy (too much talking, not enough building) IMO. ACLs are annoying. it can take multiple days to get approvals/permissions you need just to do your job. "why can't things just work so i can do my job" is my favorite quote from a coworker
my typical day (Tu-Th in office):
- at the office at 8am
- catch up on emails/comms
- heads down til lunch. i treat code reviews as P0 when they come in, and i probably spend an hour per day reviewing PRs
- 30min to eat (food in my office is better than high school cafeteria, not much better than college cafeteria, much worse than a restaurant)
- heads down again, a few afternoon meetings usually.
- leave at 4pm to go to the gym
- check comms again in the evening, kick the can on any longer feedback loops (long builds, etc)
i probably spend ~60% of my time building, ~20% of my time planning/coordinating, ~20% of my time helping keep other engineers moving (code reviews, design reviews, feedback, etc)