Pros and cons of FAANG vs startup

Ask a personal question, not some mass marketing questionnaire. #connections

FAANG will have fewer responsibilities and a smaller scope of work.

Growth can be much faster at a smaller company. On the flip side you need to deal with more chaos and less structure. And there is more risk and possible reward from equity in pre-IPO companies.

Also most startups dont focus on the breadth of problems that g/fb do. For eg startups dont care about optimizing compilers to save cost. In general the kind of problems which I care about compilers, low level perf like writing k8 instead of using it as a blackbox are not focussed by startups, they care more about product fit than cool engineering problems.

Lyft is not a late stage startup just like a 45 year old is not a young engineer. Lyft is a publicly traded company now.

FAANG move slow and safely. You'll work on a tiny thing that admittedly affects many users. Usually in a big team. Non trivial features will involve cross team collaboration. Startup truly move fast and break things. You can work end to end and have ownership of a huge piece of software. You can wear more hats, e.g. UX or PM and make decisions. Works best if you're talented. Way more fun if that's your passion. FAANG pay more and have better social recognition, but can be really boring. Some teams might feel closer to startups, though.

Think of startups as lottery tickets vs established companies like FAANG. FAANG will earn you a comfortable living but is unlikely to earn you life changing amounts of money in a relatively short time whereas the right startup can earn you a windfall (that’s how FAANG became FAANG). Ofcourse that comes with no guarantees and more risk but that’s always going to be the case - more risk, more reward.

I was at Amazon for several years. Then I went to a startup. One customer cancelled their contract: 20% layoffs. Went to another startup: bankrupt. Another startup: shut down my division. Another: on fire, founders leaving. Now at Salesforce. Sure, nothing's sexy about *most* of the dev work. But my job and stock are rock solid.

Startups: * high risk / reward. Low TC from what I’ve seen. * focus on different types of engineering problems. Deliver this feature, MVP, cut corners and be scrappy. Find the best library or framework and follow the readme. It works, build another feature. * Maybe your startup will succeed! Maybe not. Only so much is in your control and a lot of your efforts could be completely forgotten if the startup fails, which is likely. FAANG: * a lot more TC from what I’ve seen, looootts more. * problems consider scale, integration with internal systems, long tail optimizations. You probably can’t use that fancy new library or framework but maybe you can. You’re much more concerned about finding the ideal tools or solution for the problem, given a lot more constraints. Not focused on playing with shiny new toys. You can build shiny new toys though. * A lot more meetings, mentoring others, design reviews. Politics, you need to be assertive, confident and other psychological things or you’re going to be stuck building low impact feature work. People claiming “FAANG jobs are boring” are missing this. * Opportunity to make a really big impact if you work your ass off and with a little luck. For resumes / career, I think FAANG looks a lot better. A startup can have any bar for quality, your next job interviewer wont know what that was unless you were at a well known company. You also have opportunity to work on problems at scale that you won’t with an early stage startup. With FAANG, you do a lot of interviewing other candidates and that will help you when you’re on the other side.

I’ve done both. People who transition from FAANG to startups have a really tough time. Big company process doesn’t translate well to startups. More than five years at FAANG can work against you. You become “damaged goods” to a startup with too much “process baggage” after that long.