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mymar101 t1_jbauh75 wrote

As a programmer I’ve heard working at Meta is considered a black mark on your record and you could have hard time in the future getting a job. I don’t know if this is true or not.

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DoesntWantToBe t1_jbb5p02 wrote

To a degree this applies to a lot of FAANG (Exceptions Apple and, if you count them, Microsoft).

I've done a lot of hiring at mid-sized companies, and while I wouldn't necessarily call it a black mark, but it does create this sense of a candidate that's both very expensive, and possibly very coddled. The hiring teams at mid-sized companies definitely tend to assume that someone who's worked at FAANG may be missing what's considered fundamental skills at lower levels, where they assume other mid-sized company developers probably have those skills.

It leads to some more basic questions coming up in interviews for ex-FAANG candidates that might not be asked in the normal interview process. At some companies, with some interview groups. I want to be as clear as I can, this is something I've seen at some midsized companies. It's by no means an absolute truth or even a majority of companies.

At others it might be a full on black mark, at others it's probably a leg-up over the competition. There's really no accounting for personal biases, and it's not really worth worrying about building your career around them.

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Intrepid_Mud_6949 t1_jbbflg6 wrote

So the theory is that they were overpaid and did not really do much work while at FAANG to develop their skills? So basically layoffs make sense?

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DoesntWantToBe t1_jbbkczk wrote

It's not so much about whether or not they do much work. It's about the breadth of that work. FAANG devs tend to be relatively focused in their skillsets, if they need to cover a different skill set those companies just hire someone full time for that role (or many someone's, creating a whole department).

In mid-level and especially in small enterprise companies there's a lot more of breadth than depth. You don't need someone who can squeeze milliseconds out of a particular framework or compiler, but you might need someone who normally writes code to set up a config for nginx or help data put together a report for the next board meeting.

The complexity of the tasks isn't necessarily as high in smaller companies as in FAANG, but the variety can be much higher. In some jobs I've done SSRS, Nginx, Excel, and worked in C++ in a single day. and that was as a Ruby/Rails developer.

Context switching and more general technology skills are things we've tested for/asked about when interviewing ex-FAANG employees, where someone coming to us from a nearby competitor or similar industry might get a more general set of questions about their experience with ancillary technologies, rather than being tested against it directly.

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TrainsDontHunt t1_jbcj2md wrote

This can be especially true if the company is hiring directly out of college, and then putting them in one small area of specific tech.

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whitexheat t1_jbckve9 wrote

I work at a tech company in a non-programming role and this is true for us as well. I ask a different set of questions for anyone coming from a FAANG to sus out if they've been scrappy and done a breadth of work. They're all smart and capable people, but like you said, they've often have more resources at their disposal and haven't had to wear 5 different hats in a day.

Also, in my field, a lot of people got hired at FAANGs straight out of PhD programs and there are some issues with that as well. Like clearly bright people, but don't always have the soft skill sets we're looking for so I tend to hire from similarly-sized companies.

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