For those who left FAANG to join a startup, a few questions (& feel free to expand & add) What do you wish you knew before moving to a startup? What's better / worse than you'd anticipated? Why did you move? & Did you find what you were looking for? what would you have placed more weight in when recruiting ? Thanks :) #FAANG #startup #startups #tech
TC or respectfully GTFO
The tooling isn’t as refined and robust as FAANG. Things at Facebook for example are all so well-integrated because almost everything is custom built in-house. Startups will have more off the shelf tools that get duct taped together. Pleasantly surprised at the level of talent - in my experience, startup engineers were on average as good or better. People very nice, passionate, excited about the mission.
For Google specifically, you should know that returning to Google is not an easy process. It can be extremely slow, and you may get low-balled. Unless you are 100% sure you will return even if low-balled, wait until the alumni folks reach out to you. If your former manager facilitates the return, and you reject it, you risk them hating you and giving negative feedback to future HMs when you try to return again afterwards.
oh interesting! I've always seen many xooglers internally so assumed it would be similar. How are you enjoying your startup?
I generally wouldn’t recommend leaving Google to join a startup TBQH. Find another team at Google if you’re bored.
I wish i knew more about how equity worked and that you’re not gonna get strong mentorship depending on the stage of the company. Also you’ll be working a lot in exchange for a lot of ownership and experience, so consider that. Also consider if you plan to stay until they exit because it might pay off just staying at faang which will experience stock appreciation.
Thank you for commenting! These are all variables I naively hadn't considered. Have you found the lack of mentorship to be detrimental (I'm only 2 YOE to be fair and thinking of switching from PMM to PM at a startup... Though maybe it's better to do it at google?) Does the work volume depend on the start up too?
You may actually learn *more* in a startup, just in different ways. In a big company like Google, you will likely only work on a very small sliver of the problem. In a startup, you’ll get exposure to all parts of the business.
I wish I knew it was waste of time working at FAANG
Startups have been great, would probably not heavily consider going to a FAANG again after my startup experiences. A few points of potential bias though: obviously the past year+ has been very validating for seeing all of them exit, but even before that I generally found the work to be more interesting. I've also only worked at "intense" FAANGs before, so I imagine my experience was likely different from someone who'd be comparing a startup to Google. I'd probably still consider Google in the future.
Kind of shit blind is for +1
wdym?
Good question :)