Source: https://diego.cool
FAANG refers to big tech companies that are high growth, working on trendy services across different industries, pay well, and have a large market cap or potential. The acronym originally stood for the companies Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, although the actual companies have changed over time (today, tech giants like Microsoft, NVIDIA, OpenAI, and SpaceX may be considered in this category). A career in FAANG is often the dream of software engineers for a variety of reasons, but there are both merits and drawbacks to such a life.
FAANG as a Lifestyle
Working at FAANG means the company itself becomes part of your identity.
For example, to work at Amazon Web Services means to be at the cutting edge of cloud computing, a trendy yet important domain space in the software industry. There’s excitement in being part of the evolution of technology, and your work contributes to the movement and your company’s position in the industry. Of course, innovation happens in FAANG companies as much as out of it; the external visibility and attention of their impact is what sets FAANG apart.
Most FAANG companies have a very generous compensation and benefits package. You are paid competitive salary and stock that has moonshot potential, companies have generous PTO options including unlimited PTO at some, and the office itself might have amenities such as gym, shower, or food court options. Subsidized by FAANG, it’s easy to live the high class lifestyle and raise your personal standard of living.
Joining a FAANG company is not easy. The interview process is famously standardized and rigorous, and lots of effort goes into interview prep for “Leetcode” exercises, system design practice, and behavioral interviews. Clearing the hiring bar for a FAANG company becomes a symbol of accomplishment, as if you’ve proven yourself a competent enough software engineer to work in the big leagues.
When I first joined a FAANG company, I felt elated to have finally made it. Joining one had always been my long-term dream, and I had always been envious of those who work in the heart of the tech industry, working on cool technology and making stacks of money. For the first several months after joining, I genuinely felt accomplished and successful.
Having FAANG as a long-term goal by itself gives purpose to your individual life. It’s a clear finish line that can be met with enough time and effort, and it acts as a motivator to help improve your own software engineering skills. Should you job hop until you make it into FAANG, you may even see your own income increase over time until it reaches FAANG-equivalent pay, a linear indicator of your career progression.
FAANG on the Resume
Outside the company, having FAANG on your resume opens many doors because of their fame and scale.
FAANG companies have a reputation for their rigorous hiring bar: for example, working at Google means you cleared Google’s hiring bar, a feat worthy of respect and status. Working at any FAANG also unlocks a private network of ex-FAANG members, which makes it easier to make professional connections. This helps to build rapport with strangers, whether they be new friends, hiring managers, or professional contacts.
I regularly get recruiter messages on Linkedin due to my prior experience. This is not something I ever anticipated, but it indicates just how competitive the software industry is. Putting “Meta” or “ex-Meta” in your tagline catches eyes, regardless of how good of a candidate you are.
FAANG companies typically are very large, which creates opportunities for career growth. You may start as a junior software engineer and dream of climbing all the way to principal or distinguished engineer, and you start to find meaning in career promotion. Such opportunities would not be present in a smaller company with fewer positions. Lateral transfers are also an option, for example pivoting from software engineer to becoming a product manager or an engineering manager. You may discover a role you didn’t know existed and make that your next goal, and you may also discover a business line you become fascinated in and wish to internally transfer to. Regardless of the business, there are always difficult problems to be solved across the company you may find fulfilling and take on to grow professionally.
FAANG carries prestige because of the success of the company, which you have first-hand access to by working for them. By seeing how “the big guys” do things, you can quickly learn cutting-edge practices and tooling for doing things at their level of success. Whether it be best practices for development testing, software deployment, or oncall duties, FAANG serves as a reference point for software implementation at scale.
Reasons to Not Join FAANG
In some sense, the many advantages of working at FAANG make it difficult to leave. This is sometimes referred to as “golden handcuffs,” where the pay and benefits are worth it to never leave the company. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, this can mask many legitimate reasons to leave such as demotivation, burnout, and disagreement with company direction which have more impact on your personal wellbeing. Avoiding FAANG also avoids the inertia felt of being trapped at the company.
Due to the company size, chances are you may not get to build the large scale systems you were dreaming about. FAANG tends to make your individual contributions small because the systems are so large. You become a “cog in the machine,” and even if your product is innovative and exciting, your individual lines of code might not make the contributions you were actually hoping for. A 0.1% improvement to delivery rates might have huge, measurable impact at scale but might not sound very exciting conceptually.
As I worked longer and longer at FAANG, I started to learn the realities of what a company of this size does. Despite working on massively scaled systems, my individual impact and scope was small, and a lot of the work was highly bureaucratic and political, rather than the technical I actually cared about. I experienced steady career growth up to a certain point before stagnating and not finding any exciting scope to pursue. I tried transferring teams, and in the process, I learned that I actually valued work-life balance and direct customer impact, which I would only find in a smaller company. I don’t regret working at FAANG because it served as a meaningful reference point, but this only occurred after I had more experience across different teams and companies.
Aside from experience, FAANG carries a significant amount of “external validation”. You may be tempted to view FAANG as meaningful because of the company’s size, status, or wealth, none of which have any bearing on you. Should you tie your self worth or the worth of any software engineer to FAANG, you create a bias that only FAANG companies carry good engineers (the mentality of “if you’ve never worked for FAANG you’ve never done real software engineering”). The average FAANG engineer is neither smarter nor more capable than any other software engineer, and joining FAANG alone does not change your individual capabilities as a software engineer.
Is joining FAANG worth it?
Working at FAANG carries a lot of meaning, internally to yourself and externally from others. As a lifestyle, identity, and resume piece, FAANG gets hyped up as a final destination for a software engineer, and working there may not be what you expect.
In my opinion, as a career software engineer, it’s worth working at FAANG at least once to experience it and decide for yourself whether you are a good fit for FAANG. You don’t have to work at FAANG forever; careers evolve over time, and FAANG is an excellent checkpoint to reach in order to re-evaluate your career direction.