Instead, I'm on a team that has and horrendous turnover and is staffed with below-average IQ people.
This company builds EVERYTHING in house, and the toolset is like going backwards in my career 10 years.
If I do want to stick this out and turn this team around, I'm going to be working nights and weekends for at least a year - there's just too much to fix.
I've told this to lots of people who work in other division (that I can trust) and they've said the easiest thing is to just accept it as it is and coast. I've never done that in my career and don't think I could do that.
Has anyone been in the same boat? I'm told that it becomes easier to switch teams after a year.
I feel like I've made a terrible decision and don't know what to do next.
Any advice is appreciated.
I'm not sure why your co-workers' IQ is your concern. To come out of the gate with a comment like this sounds like you have a strong disdain for them.
Part of your reason for joining the company was the paycheck. I assume the checks aren't bouncing.
My advice is the same advice I would give to many people: Learn from your coworkers. Understand the problems that the team and the company face. Make incremental improvements.
If you really want to you can work late every day and at weekends. It's your choice. Bear in mind your job won't love you back.
Before joining this company, I hired and managed teams across various startups. I don't think I would be speaking out of turn to say in every company we looked for aptitude and intelligence. I don't know what my previous or current colleagues literal IQs are, but you know a highly intelligent person when you meet and work with one.
Through my entire FOUR MONTH interview process, I met a dozen people, all of whom would be considered highly intelligent. Maybe I am naive to assume that's what that interview process was designed for.
And to be clear, those folks I interviewed with and many other people around me are highly intelligent. But the people I work with on daily basis, whom I did not meet in my interview, are categorically less intelligent and honestly at the root of most of the problems I've dealt with since starting.
Sorry if it is rude, but I think it's an honest depiction of the situation.
That being said, if you consider yourself intelligent, and wanted to work amongst "smart" people, you would have asked questions about the team and the process, and made your decision on that. And also not equate IQ and intelligence when talking about people.
http://www.jokes.net/heavenandhell.htm
Perhaps you should reconsider selling out to the megacorp, and sell out to VC instead. Now that you're a Xoogler (or FANG-er, whatever), raising money will be easy.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
And how are they to work with otherwise? I've worked with many "high IQ" people who were awful colleagues because they had superiority complexes, had no concept of collaboration, were crap communicators, especially for audiences not familiar with their domains, etc.
Meanwhile I've worked with others who may not be traditionally smart, be deeply technical, etc. But they got people. And people liked talking and working with them. And that led to progress, alignment, and less stress.
I know who I'd prefer to work with any day of the week.
In other words, all you've done is attempt to establish that we should just trust you when you say they're "low IQ", rather than give us any actual evidence that they are, or even any elaboration of what you mean when you say that.
FWIW, I agree with you and am in the same boat. I joined a FAANG so that I could work alongside and learn from truly impressive people. So far, after a few years of working at my FAANG, I have not worked alongside one single person who I would consider impressive. I won't go so far as to say they're "low IQ" or dumb or anything like that. I enjoy them as people and I like working with them, but they certainly don't inspire me and I do not feel like I am learning things from them that further my career. All of them, even the ones at higher levels than me, seem just as clueless and lost as I am. And that's an awful environment to be in.
It's frustrating, disappointing, feels like you were lied to, etc. My only advice to you is to just quit. Don't stick around searching for something that you already know isn't here. It's very unlikely to get better.
I was fortunate enough to work in an environment, where I was the "below-average IQ person," and I am not below-average, but I worked with some fairly smart cookies.
I know that some of my co-workers looked at me with disdain; but I was honored that most did not.
Working with frustrating people has been a very useful part of my career. As a manager, I had to make life-changing decisions for employees, and it was important for me to be empirical in my decision-making.
It appears that working for FAANGs is a "mark of distinction," these days. I know they pay ridiculous salaries. I'm pretty much aware of the working environment, and don't find the prospect enticing.
In NY, I know many, many folks that worked in the finance industry as brokers and traders. They got their licenses, and made a whole boatload of money in a few short years, while absolutely destroying their mental and physical health.
They then left, when they couldn't stand it anymore, and used the money they made to start companies, doing the things they liked doing.
Maybe that could be the approach the OP may want to take.
I had a rule after my time working a peer equivalent to FAANG: if I consistently find myself the obviously smartest person in the room, I should go else where. There has been so much joy working in an environment where there are people who are more experienced, skilled, and/or talented than me.
At my current startup, which has been just amazingly successful, our engineering team hires a lot of people who are a lot like how you sound: no dummy and also emotionally intelligent/mature. It's been such a wonderful experience. I never have to hear any silly debates over the nuances of some irrelevant issues so some people can proof their intelligence. People know what the company's business is and just worry about that. Most of the times we work a 9 to 5 (10 to 6 because of Bay Area traffic) and go home. It's taught me a lot about startups and what it takes to succeed. Having the smartest people around working for you is one possible path but there are other very viable alternatives. I've also worked at companies with lots of former FAANG engineers, several Ph.D., and 3 full CS professors that burned that down ignominiously.
Anecdotally, a lot of engineers (and especially managers) have this mentality where they don't treat the job as something that puts food on table and helps the company move their products forward in what ever pace the overall organisation is happy with. They want to get the high of entire life's achievement there which results in dissatisfaction/burnout.
The notion that any type of consistent "bar" exists for hiring at FAANGs is a myth. These companies are far too large to consistently apply hiring standards. Some teams intentionally have different standards, some teams unintentionally (due to the hiring managers or interviewers just not being on the same page) have different standards, even within their specific team. Some teams are so desperate for people that they'll hire anyone with a pulse, while others are so flooded with applicants that they don't hire anyone unless you have 6 PhDs and won a nobel prize.
At my FAANG, it's so well known that the "hiring bar" is bullshit that when someone wants to do a team transfer, we usually require them to go through a full hiring loop again, just like an external hire, because there are some teams/organizations within my company that we do not trust to have upheld a reasonable bar when initially hiring someone.
Boomer?
Best and funniest comment.
OP really should have a side project or something to keep skills nice and sharp but I don't see a reason to complain about working for CV companies like a FAANG making shovel-loads of cash from every orifice. Not sure what the downside is, maybe I've been too poor for too long.
I'd be more interested in productivity, adding value, understanding the problem space, leadership, communications, technical range, ability to listen.
I’ve also worked with people who are against trying something new or take forever (thanks processes) to do simple things. It doesn’t equate with how hard the interview and gatekeeping is. People know they can coast and riding out a year or two until the bottom 10% are weeded to make a half million or more is worth it to some.
All that being said yeah the comment was a bit crass for sure.
OP should also consider being perhaps less inflammatory with his language. Be mindful of others.
Simply complaining won't help you, OP. Be proactive and seek to synergize[1]. If you are Einstein-level smart, then why don't you synergize with people instead? In a gearbox, every part counts. The smaller gears and the bigger gears do play a role in the final transmission.
Learn to make the best out of a given situation. If you can't or don't want it, you can leave and go somewhere else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_7_Habits_of_Highly_Effecti...
It's a concern as much as working with a smart person that can understand - and support, and improve on, and challenge if needed - your ideas is a delight and brightens your day. And working with somebody who can't get the basic things and you have to waste time on explaining the obvious and treading water instead of moving forward is a drag and makes your life hell. Of course we're not talking about IQ score on a puzzle test or something like that - I'm sure the OP talks about practical skills as seen in everyday interactions. I've been lucky to work mostly with very smart people - but occasionally there was a dud, and it's very annoying and sucks a lot of energy out.
Dead Comment
Many people in the industry have a very glorified view of FAANGs, and in particular one of the reasons that many people want to work at a FAANG is because of the idea of working and learning from the most impressive people in your field. If you've ever heard the saying "if you feel like you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room", I think that is a saying that these types of people ascribe to.
The problem is that oftentimes someone joins a FAANG and that glorified view is shattered. The reality is that the people at a FAANG are not necessarily geniuses (there are geniuses at FAANG, as there are at any company, but they are far and few between compared to the 'average' FAANG engineer). I work at a FAANG (look at my name and you can guess which one) and I would certainly say that it is very frustrating to me that my career has felt like it has effectively stalled ever since joining, because everyone on my team is just as clueless as I am and I do not find any of my direct or extended teammates particularly impressive or inspiring.
When this happens, the "shattering" reality that your new job isn't some wonderland and is full of all the same issues of your old companies can make you quite frustrated and dissapointed, and it's quite easy to place that blame on your coworkers or the tools they use. I don't think it's disdain as much as it is disappointment, and OP probably feels like they were sold a false bill of goods. I know I certainly relate to that a lot.
..
> Any advice is appreciated.
Not shitting on your colleagues with this generation's phrenology would be a great start.
More generally, it sounds like you are starting with the idea that you're better and smarter than everyone you work with and only you can see the problems, as opposed to everyone you work with being (by and large) decent and hard working people who are making the best of a complicated situation. Learning about that situation, chesterton's fence etc, will be more productive that presuming everyone you work with is an idiot.
Wonder what this person's teammates might have to say about them?
"They just started and think they have all the answers without even considering there might be complex and higher-level reasons why a decision was made."
"This supposedly smart person joined our team and does not respect the strengths our diverse experiences and skills bring to make the sum of the team greater than it's parts."
"This person is a condescending jerk who treats everyone who disagrees with anything they say as inferior to them."
"To make matters worse he handles code reviews very poorly, complains about his abstractions being flagged as unacceptable while systematically failig to understand they are not needed and just worsen code quality and maintainability while really adding nothing in return."
"Ultimately he just shows he has a fundamental misunderstanding of the basics of software engineering, specially the importance of making things as simple and as maintainable as possible, displays an unwillingness to learn and adapt, and when faced with any sort of criticism he shows poor attitude and professionalism such as accusing everyone around him of being dumb."
> Phrenology
Pseudoscience which involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits.
The study of the conformation of the skull as indicative of mental faculties and traits of character.
> Chesterton's fence
Principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
> Pseudoscience which involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits.
Funny story (for us who live a century later):
I heard Norwegian phrenologists traveled around Norway to measure Norwegian skulls and how it related to personal traits and their conclusions were that there were broadly two kinds of Norwegians:
- "long-skulls" in the eastern part: these were friendly, generous, open-minded and intelligent.
- "short-skulls" on the western coast: these were dumb, stingy and distrustful
Wonder were those researchers came from ;-)
"Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."
Very reasonable.
I work for a FAANG, and have for a while. Maybe I have below average IQ, too, but I've met and had the pleasure of working with some of the smartest, hardest working, kindest people in my career here. Some assholes too, of course, but we're all human.
Everything is built in-house because it needs to solve problems at a scale that you've never worked at. Be humble. If the tooling is terrible, congrats! There's a bunch of impact in your future making the tooling better. And because it's a big company, it cares a lot about marginal productivity improvements like better tooling, and will reward you for it. That's pretty different than my experiences at startups that are struggling for survival.
Maybe you picked a bad team. That's a possibility, because large companies are less homogenous than startups. But that also means that there are good teams, whereas if you pick a bad startup the whole thing is bad. Sounds like you didn't do the homework you should have before choosing a team. Maybe, again, be humble and accept that you have things to learn, even if it's just how to see red flags prior to joining a team, and use what you've learned when choosing a team next time.
Good luck!
No you don't. I find OP's bold characterization of his co-workers inflammatory. Below average in general means "borderline retarded"[1]. You are obviously not below average. Stop saying that, please.
[1] https://paulcooijmans.com/intelligence/iq_ranges.html
I think the issue is because of people who care less about learning a topic deeply. Understanding why something works at all etc. This might be the actual complaint of OP.
Is this really what people think when joining a large company such as FAANG ? I mean not everyone can be an A player in a company with 1000s of employees, correct ? Also not every team is going to be solving hard problems. Someone has to do the dirty things. Isn't that understood ?
Not trying to shit on you OP but I would have tried to learn more about the team in interviews if possible or is that just not a thing with FAANG interviews ?
FAANG companies certainly have a lot of very bright engineers. There's no disputing that. And they contend with some really thorny problems that admit no easy solutions, such as scale and content moderation.
But there's also plenty of smaller companies that have difficult problems with very sharp coworkers. Of course, they don't have the same prestige.
Or money.
Or visibility.
Or value on your resume (in certain circles).
But what smaller companies have that I've found big companies don't: a distinct lack of places to hide.
Sure, you can get folks who don't work out (I've been one!) but at all the small companies I've worked out, everyone is pulling together and no one is really slacking. My theory is that it's too easy to see when someone is slacking at a smallco, so folks don't do it.
I find that delightful.
This right here is exactly the problem. In the interview you are expected to write a fault tolerant k-way distributed sort and publish it to production, in 3 hours. Once you are embedded in your team they'll have you fixing typos on the landing page.
"Our interview process is good at finding people who are good at interviewing, not good at their job." ~ Someone I follow on Twitter
On top of their hoop jumping game.
I've interviewed at a few and they were the hardest interviews I've had. So it stands to reason that the people making it through must be good.
Of course you could claim the people making it through just "leetcode" all day or whatever. But still we all know these companies because they're omnipresent in our lives, we use their products, we assume they've got smart talent internally.
Depends on the FAANG, but a lot of them do pooled interviews and assign a team later. Some do a weeks long orientation/training and you have some ability to more or less interview for final placement, and there's some other styles as well. For important teams that have trouble hiring, probably some people get selected into it without a lot of choice.
Either way, in a pooled hiring environment, you're probably not meeting with people on the team you'll work for before you join, although maybe you'd get to talk to a hiring manager after an offer; maybe.
With any company of any size the scale of grunt work / tedious maintenance and troubleshooting old stuff is going to grow massively.
Being Google or anyone will not change that.
Eh. IMHO they are a group of super good test takers and white board ninjas.
Maybe they let the newbie to clean the dojo floor, and sweep the garden, and cut the wood, and take out the garbage, and paint the walls, and so on for a while and then he learns the ropes and knows more he could find himself a team that is more to his taste.
Well if you pay top salaries and have a tough recruitment process maybe. They claim to hire the best from all over the world.
FAANG usually don't hire for a specific team, you get matched after. It's a crapshoot where you end up, but they usually let you transfer relatively easily if positions are opened.
With any company of any size the scale of grunt work / tedious maintenance and troubleshooting old stuff is going to grow massively.
Being Google or anyone will not change that.
Perhaps that startup history with greenfield type situations blinded OP to that reality?
The U.S.'s $13 Billion Aircraft Carrier Has a Toilet Problem
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a319296...
He definitely went after people who he saw as coasting, and in some cases that was undoubtedly justified. He got results but there was also a lot of churn. He also made the mistake of taking too much on himself because he saw that as easier than the hard work of understanding and motivating people. After a while the atmosphere fell into bad faith, cynicism, and lack of trust. After some span of time he was moved to a position that kept his rank but removed his reports. The churn got so bad that upper mgmt had to deal with it, and HR also got involved.
I think he's working at Amazon now.
Deleted Comment
Sounds about right.
This comment doesn't reflect well on you.
I've recently joined a FAANG as well, and I've been disappointed with the code quality and the tooling. I expected better. Yet I feel there are tons of things to learn, and there are definitely bright people there. If anything, it reminds us that it's not easy to build software.
As someone in a movie once said, "Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem... and you solve the next one... and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home"
Use this as an opportunity to learn how to adjust your thinking so you can thrive personally in a challenging environment. You may never get to a point where you love it, but you can probably get to a place where you are successful and can focus on the positives.
Learn how to work well with challenging people. You'll encounter more of them later in your career. Again, adjust your thinking. These people almost certainly have their positive qualities. Work with those positive qualities and become a master at mitigating or avoiding their bad qualities.
As far as working nights and weekend goes... do you really have to do that? Are other team members doing that? Big companies are not like startups. All the things will never get fixed, and you simply need to do your best with things in a permanently semi-broken state.
I understand that you don't want to coast. You don't have to even if others are. Focus on doing an excellent job on your corner of the world. Your projects, your code, helping others, etc.. Worry less about the bigger picture.
Also remember that it's not forever. This is an investment in your future career.