I’ve been working at a FANG for 2 years now and I feel like my career goals and interests are not aligned with where I’m at. Outside of my FANG I was a go-getter who loves learning new things and taking on hard problems. Inside my company I have tried over the past 2 years to propose different solutions to hard problems and I just get blown off.
I’m good at my job I already got promoted in 1 year and am moving up. I am making more money than I expected, but at work I’m not able to express myself creatively or do things outside the box. I just get assigned straightforward work from my manager that the product managers and “leadership” assign to our team with barely any input on the overall project or ability to propose new projects.
I feel like if I stay here I will just get stuck in a cycle of never accomplishing my goals but I’m scared to move teams or companies or build a startup because I have a good manager, a good comp and my job isn’t that stressful.
I could become more involved at work in building paper reading groups or other kinds of side projects to creatively express myself at work but I don’t want to be the person whose life revolves around their FANG.
Anyone else feel like this? What did you do?
Five years in, you'll have a huge pile of cash and an insane chunk on your resume that will almost certainly guarantee you an interview wherever you want. Once you hit that point, take some time off and do literally anything. Start a startup, be a contractor, get a new degree.
You have stumbled onto the sort of prosperity (easy low-stress job) that 99.95% of the world literally dreams about. To throw it away because you're not "creatively expressing yourself" would be foolish.
This advice doesn't apply if you're a relentlessly competitive founder type like Gates or Bezons, but if you were of that mentality, I doubt you'd be having the same troubles you are.
Also if you want to go back to earlier stage companies or different places than FAANG, the FAANG experience is not some golden ticket, but can be also a potential flag to those who know how things work. Basically a flag to verify can this person still build things outside of bigco or are they just a professional coaster at this point. It can be surprising to people that even though you did work at Facebook or Google, you are not automatically a good fit for some other company.
My personal way of thinking has been always to join companies or pick jobs where I learn and that pushes me in some way, especially while I'm still young. I also did work at FAANG but the main thing I learned was how manage politics. Also within FAANG there is always teams or roles where you are actually challenged but majority of the roles are fairly easy.
Ideally at each role you learn something that improves and expands your skills. Each role prepares you for your next role or the step you want to take in your career. Taking home a paycheck and being a professional coaster doesn't help you make progress or make your life interesting (not to say that work is all your life but it is part of it).
So true, I worked with a guy that was mostly hired because he had worked at Microsoft. It wasn't even long. He was lazy and mostly at the bottom of our team's ability. Working at the right place will open doors for you.
BTW, OP, the best ideas aren't always the ones that get implemented. The ideas that get implemented are those that the leaders feel comfortable with and come from the people they feel comfortable listening to. There's a whole world of work related politics that you should learn to get your ideas heard. If you don't learn to play the game you'll have the same problem every where you go.
This is a seen in The Godfather II that always comes to mind when people say they aren't being heard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgHXHtHSsNo
Then again I’ve rarely had the discipline to stay put and make a short term sacrifice for long term gain when it comes to my daily work.
It is critically important to me to be fulfilled daily in my work and explore my ideas and passions.
To me, even if I was never financially well off, but I got to pursue my passions and creativity, that would be a life well spent.
Remember, the journey is the reward, not the end.
Disclaimer: I am a college drop out, couldn’t even be patient long enough for that.
That's pretty difficult to obtain. For typical creative passions, you need to be in the top 1% for them to sustain you.
These golden shackles chained me to my faang job for a over a decade. Now I look back and my youth is gone. I have less energy , less creative drive, less inclination to shift my brain into a different groove to spin on. Makes me sick when i think about the fact that i gave my youth away to a corporation. I was just a 'young blood' willing to bang out code on demand.
I look back my past decade and I have no idea what I was doing. Its all just a blur.
I spent years on creative pursuits at college in gaming, got no money for it, then took a corp job. Ultimately I regret pouring out so much creative energy, especially since it was modding based on IP I didn't own. Anyway, my creative pursuits today are so modest and routine it would make the younger me scoff. And yet now I'm satisfied with a corporate job and hobbies like home improvement and occasional game playing and podcast recording.
The way you describe is how it is in FAANG (I work at one, haven’t at others). Until you get to a certain level, you implement what others (PMs, higher level eng) put together. If you keep advancing in your career you may have creative freedom in FAANG. But it will never be like that of a startup - which is how I read your post.
Doing creative work for big co, someone else’s idea or a startup is overrated when you look back 10 years later. This is just my opinion but I believe it is very common and comes with age.
Good luck. Sounds like you have a few good options.
Also, I highly disagree that FAANG jobs are "easy, low-stress" jobs, but maybe your experience is significantly different.
At this point, I can't even express how grateful I am and full of joy since my life is just so great. Yes, I suffered, but it is was so worth it.
Here is the core problem in my life: I hired a private chef which tilts the retirement math out of whack, but I have three decades to solve this problem. It's a fantastic problem to have, and if I had taken opportunities to be happy then I couldn't be here maximizing my own personal creativity.
Right now, I'm building my own platform to mess around and have fun: https://www.adama-platform.com/ and I'm exploring the nature of what I like to make and embracing myself for random detours.
Eh Bezos worked a couple different jobs. I’m sure he had these thoughts and doubts at that age.
This person has the ability to make that possibly serious with enough prepared latitude in making the jump if/when the soul desires. Worst case outcome: a fun social life.
I wouldn't be so sure. There's plenty of conglomerates around the world with huge piles of cash.
Dead Comment
Your story reminds me of a Peter Thiel anecdote on "Leaving Alcatraz." [1] The gist of the story is Peter Thiel is living his "tracked" life. He goes to an elite school, studies law, joins an elite law firm... And discovers he doesn't like it, so he quits. He's a couple months in. When he's quitting his colleague tells him "It's nice to know it is possible to escape Alcatraz." But, of course, it's possible for anyone to "escape" the doors aren't locked and leaving is always allowed. You are made a prisoner to the status quo by your own fear of change.
1 - (I think this is the right clip but my speakers are currently not working) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in2ktnsfwkw
This resonated with me, but because of an opposite experience, I didn't go to a good school, and for a long time had imposter syndrome any time I started a new job. It took many years to internally get over that.
If it wasn't that stressful, you wouldn't be posting this. Feeling unfulfilled is stressful. You are stressed and you are probably burning out (yes it's possible to burn out on boredom).
Change things. Start with easy low risk changes and work your way out from there. If you want to stay in the job you have now, you likely need to change your approach to how you try to make an impact, because what you're doing now obviously isn't working.
But there are likely teams in your company where you'd feel more fulfilled. If not, being promoted at one megacorp is basically catnip for recruiters at others.
It's stressful, but only when one feels they must climb that maslow ladder (and frankly, probably jealous of the stories from successful people who seems to have done so).
A perspective change is another way out - your job is just a job. You can merely do adequate (and by the sounds of it, the OP's capable enough to not be challenged, which means they can accomplish all tasks easily).
Leave mental energy for weekends on hobbies and interests outside of job. It could be programming/software engineering related, but doesn't have to be.
Take leave often, and consider working part time if salary allows it. Use that extra time to focus on hobbies and interests. "Rest and Vest" is the phrase i heard thrown around for such behaviour, and i absolutely consider it something one should do if one is lucky enough to be in that position.
1. I'm not learning things that feel relevant outside the company. Our build processes, templating language, version control, and even our IDE are all proprietary and internal-only. It requires a lot of work to master these things, and that mastery is not transferable anywhere else.
2. I continually scan the internal job boards, and have yet to see another position that looks significantly more appealing.
3. The amount of red tape required to make any change, while expected and understandable for enterprise software, makes it hard to feel innovative or creative.
4. It takes 2 minutes to recompile/reload after every trivial changes. This is hugely detrimental to my "flow," and this is unlikely to ever be fixed due to the size of the codebase.
FANG's are fundamentally mature, and the key thing to understand is "Price's Law" which states that half of the work is done by the square root of the people. It's a brutal reality, and you will find yourself with a tremendous amount of muck to deal with.
The first challenge is to respect this as a fundamental property of big companies and a self-fulfilling despair.
My advice is to focus on a period of time towards just building and maximizing wealth. Find opportunities, talk to people, do what is asked of you, try to push limits on making things better. Once you have a nice bank account, then you can take freedom.
That's the enduring aspect of golden handcuffs because it's brutal to be bored, but then you have more freedom to explore and pick better opportunities. Right now, I'm living a monastic code machine lifestyle and it's pretty great.
https://www.adama-platform.com/2022/07/02/the-path-of-the-mo...
The second challenge is the discipline to suffer. My bias is to accept that there will be a time in your life where you must maximize your discipline, build wealth, and then balance for the later years.
I'm 40 and basically retired. Granted, I want to improve my cashflow as I recently hired a private chef, but that's a great problem to have.
quit. I mean it's that simple really. If you don't like the job you're doing and it's not meaningful, get another job. You'll have a good resume, so that shouldn't be a practical issue.
I think any other advice is really just copium. Collecting more money and joining a knitting circle or the bowling club isn't fulfilling, neither is retiring at 40 and even in a non FANG dev job you likely earn twice a middle class wage, and the only thing you don't get back is your time. It's scary but nothing's worse than not changing and regretting it later.
I now live below the poverty line, using food stamps, have a child with a partner, am growing a community of supportive loving people, and am pursuing radically different projects of my own creation, including a culture construction carnival that's donation driven.
Economic self-determination is a luxury of people who have lots of money AND/OR creativity AND/OR willingness to live radically.
Fuck the norms. Postactivism is where it's at for meaningful life changes. That's a relatively recent word that effectively acknowledges that activism will always be necessary, so it makes sense to be in a way that accomplishes activism as a side effect, rather than setting aside time to do activism.
There's no way I would trade what I'm doing now for money. And the things me and my friends are working on require life skills FAANG doesn't teach, like embracing death and communal healing.
OP: don't let the money fool you. There are so many ways to go about life not involving money. Developing an awareness of what constitutes universal human needs and how to meet them without money can help focus on figuring out ways to cut money out of your life. This can help you dial down your dependencies on money. It will also reinforce the idea that money is absolutely not a need. Finding and accessing gift economies (such as Buy Nothing) is an easy first step to learning how to meet needs without money. Learning to live without money includes developing the skills of need identification, strategy identification, asking for help in coming up with the previous things, asking for and receiving freely given things/help, abandoning shame & healing through trauma around gift giving/receiving, and offering/giving freely offered things/help.
Don't let haters sway you if you choose this path. Many people will try to shame or guilt you into not following this path with nonsense thinking like "you owe it to society to use money" or "you can't possibly cut out all money usage from your life and, even if you figure it out, you're a hypocrite if you use money in the meantime." Debt is a myth, especially debts to society. Hypocrisy is a shaming term for "in a transition from one state to another"; embrace messaged of hypocrisy as signs to keep going.
Keep calm and clown on.
Reading your whole post but coming to this, it reads like Frank Gallagher from Shameless.
It sounds like you’re capable of much more, but you choose to live on food stamps because “debt” is a myth, among other advice you gave to op.
100% disagree with everything you said. I definitely support food stamps and other forms of assistance for families in need and people who cannot support themselves, but you’re bragging about living off of others when you could support yourself.
Do better.
So what are you doing?
Here are some questions you should ask yourself that might be helpful:
- If you were laid off tomorrow what would you do?
- What are some things you would LOVE to do? What would it take to accomplish the things on this list?
- What are your minimum long term financial goals? The idea here being that, depending on the minimal lifestyle you are comfortable with, you would need to stay at your current job (and invest wisely) for X years. It might make the current job much more enjoyable if you know that in X years you will have 100% of your time available for projects of your choice without financial consideration.
- Are there ways to satisfy what is missing AND keep the job? For example, starting something as a side project, even if you can't devote full time to it. You can always decide in the future if you need to pursue it. (ie: don't force an all or nothing decision when you don't have to)