- ML/SWE with 3YoE. - I have more drive and interest working on small projects/alone. Leetcoding and doing generic memorizations unrelated to what I'm building slows down my motivation and interest. - End goal is to build small projects by myself / bootstrap with 1-2 partners and scale slowly. Not a "fast-hyper-growth raise $50M" startup, but a more stable venture. Question: is FAANG worth pursuing first to gain credentials, learn some best SWE practices and experience with scale? Obviously it would help in future ventures with raising funds and recruiting strong teammates, but at the moment it's a huge personal sacrifice that I have low motivation for. Not chasing quick & safe TC... But long term learning and resourcefulness.
Yes. Even when you try to get vc funding, prestige is important. If you don’t have a good school on your history, you should at least have a prestigious company. Unless you can bootstrap your product to runaway success yourself.
I wouldn't. Most processes are FAANGS are fairly unique. Only applies to big companies. Most people are cogs that are happy to be in the rat race and get to the next people. You will meet way more interesting and driven people at startups or smaller companies. So only thing left is the prestige and that's all fake and going away anyways. Nobody thinks Google and Facebook mean anything anymore.
From my experience FAANG job adds value to your resume especially to attract VC funding and to get people trust in you. If you have a good idea right away, go ahead and implement without going to faang. How ever, if you are clueless try to get experience in one of the big faang for a year just for a name tag, network and different perspectives
Disagree. If you want to create a startup your best bet is to go to a startup. FAANGs are not that prestigious, especially inside the valley and to VCs.
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Depends on the order. At Apple you legally cant have any side projects as part of your contract, but if you want to quit and then start the project that’s fine. Also keep in mind that FAANG you typically work long hours and don’t get much in the way of vacation so keep that in mind as well. That being said my friend did meet his cofounder while they were both at Facebook so it is possible
Thanks! What about experience point of view? Working with high-scale systems and teams of highly specialized employees, as opposed to small startups where you build things from the ground up? PS I have no intention to start working on my projects in parallel to full time work, asking from an experience perspective.
There are a lot of sharp people at FAANG and not at FAANG. Honestly the only person I’d start a company with is someone I worked with before coming to Apple. My coworkers here are fine but there is a certain creativity founders need to have and honestly a lot of FAANG people at the IC level are just leetcode slaves. Also for starting a company it would be more practical to have experience working on a new project (whether at FAANG or a startup) it’s not going to help you launch a company if you are maintaining facebooks gigantic codebase. You need to know how to build a codebase not maintain one. Working with large datasets is good experience though