I'm a seasoned engineer (17 yoe) and received offers from both Roblox (Senior Principal) and Snowflake (Principal). I'm curious about what this community thinks about the two companies in terms of culture, quality of tech, prestige, and work-life balance. I am interested in comparing the companies and not the offers they gave me.
> culture No idea what snowflake is like. At the top level I think the culture here is overly optimistic, not data-driven, and fairly dysfunctional. At a team level though most people and most managers ime are pretty nice. > quality of tech Absolute dumpster fire here, nearly certain snowflake is a lot better. > prestige who gives a shit > wlb Roblox is solidly ok on average, from the third-hand rumors Iâve heard itâs probably a good bit better than snowflake.
Yeah nobody gives two shits about prestige unless your audience are all villagers who attest their identity with the company they work for
> nearly certain snowflake is a lot better Lol, I wouldn't be so sure. Sometimes it feels like I am back in 2010.
Snowflake has a great product and a ton of smart people. No brainer to me unless you like Roblox product for some reason
Share the offer numbers? I'm expecting both over 1M
I want to skip the pros and only talk about the âconsâ about Snowflake. May be they are pros to you. 1. The expectation for Principal Eng is very high. We care less about leadership skills but focus a lot more on technical contributions. 2. We are a 2B business, which means we are a completely top down company. All we need to do is to fulfill whatever our customers ask for. 3. The wlb can be tough. If you are interested in hard core engineering problems and love coding then you may like it here.
Thanks for the insights! I have some questions: 1. Curious how hards on does principal or higher level ICs do. 2. For leadership skills of ICs, do you mean the company not even care about technical leadership? 3. How does top down affect for senior ICs? Does that mean they donât need to have initiative?
1. The vast majority of the engineers at Snowflake are senior and above. It varies by team but most principal engineers still write a lot of code. The expectation for high level engineer is to have deep knowledge in system programming and should be able to come up with the solutions for complex technical problems and execute on them. 2. ICs are expected to focus on execution. There are a bunch of PMs, EMs and TPMs to handle the planning, tracking and cross team/functional collaboration. Most of the ICs are senior enough to operate on their own. 3. As a business driven company, you donât need to worry about finding the work to do. On the other hand, there isnât much need for you to influence the top. The most common style of ICs here is to be a strong coder.
How close are the offers?
Being at Snowflake as a Staff Eng, Iâd love to be at Roblox if they can match my pay haha but thatâs just my opinion. YMMV
I'm IC6 at Roblox. Was previously at Google. I'm pretty happy here. There are some cultural challenges (technical maturity), but fixing those is part of the job. From internal Blind, happiness seems to depend on group quite a bit. I hear very positive things about Creator and Engine, very negative things about Growth. Maybe vaguely negative sentiment about Infra. But of course this is all in the Blind echo chamber.
TC at both? Can you share?
Whatâs your level at Meta?