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DoesntWantToBe t1_jbbkczk wrote

Reply to comment by Intrepid_Mud_6949 in Meta's 'year of efficiency' continues, thousands more expected to be laid off by chrisdh79

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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