[pillowkusis]

I strongly recommend working for a FAANG. Even a few years are going to give you lasting benefits:

- You make significantly more money at a FAANG than most of the rest of the industry

- The klout of a FAANG on your resume will open a lot of doors to more interesting, higher paying, or more prestigious jobs

- You will gain a professional network that will be useful for the entire rest of your career

- Most SWE teams at any FAANG are using state-of-the-art tech, tooling, and patterns, which will be very useful experience to draw from in future jobs, even if not applied in exactly the same way

There's plenty of downsides to working at a FAANG, which every blog post can tell you. But in my experience those downsides are exaggerated and it's rarely so intolerable you can't last at least a few years.

So even if you have a terrible time, those lasting benefits are worth a lot of trouble. It could be a life-changing career move, and if you hate it, you can always quit whenever you want.

A relevant Dan Luu post: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

[decafninja]

This is a clear cut objective summary IMHO. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Also like you said, there are downsides to working at FAANG. However there are downsides to working at every company, and IMHO, the downsides at FAANG and FAANG-like companies are at least compensated for by the upsides.

The one exception might be Amazon. I'm just hearing too many horror stories coming out of Amazon that it might be the one FAANG I have zero interest in working for. But even then, if you can bite the bullet and put up with everything for a year, you'll probably be in a better spot for the rest of your career than if you were to have been at some lesser company.

[spearingthehead]

Does this exempt Amazon as well? I heard from an ex Amazon employee saying that 50-60 hour work-weeks is the norm there, and they work you to the bone, but he also didn't specify if that was for his particular team/department only.

I'm guessing this is one of the exaggerated downsides, possibly coming from a skewed perspective of what is "normal" for a SWE if you spent your entire career in FAANG.

In any case, I'm still sure that working as a Amazon SWE would be light years farther ahead than working in a bottom of the barrel chop shop that pays less than half of market salary.

In other words, worst of the FAANG should still beat the best of the bottom-tier companies, especially if you're taking home much more money in the end.