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- Hacker News
- When your employer has a vested interest in you using a specific tool above all others, even if it's worse, then success is no longer measured with a rational, objective metric. Once you do not have objective metrics to gauge success, you will always fail in the long, and the long run tends not to be very long. In every single company I've ever worked for or with, I've never seen a "I demand it be done like this" policy ever succeed. I've seen it close businesses, but never succeed.by burnte
- If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. Save most of what you make. Assume it’s not going to last.
Do NOT have an expectation that this is “normal” income. You’ll probably end up destroying your integrity or doing tons of BS work just to do anything to maintain that level of income.
Expect the norm to be a startup, non tech company, or some other non FAANG big tech corp.
by throwarayes - This really isn't true. I'm nothing special and have survived in the FAANG world for going on two decades. Excepting the very new in their careers, nearly everyone on my team has managed good length careers at the various FANNGS, possibly with stops at smaller companies.
It was the startups prior to those that were terribly unstable and where you couldn't be sure your badge would open the door when you came to work.
Meta may be a dumpster fire today, and the others have had bad layoffs, true. But they all have huge headcounts, and median employee tenure that is above average in the industry.
Of course, saving for catastrophe is wise, especially in these times, but that's true no matter if you work for a FAANG or a startup.
by compiler-guy - In other words, do not buy a house or start a family within 2 hours of any of their supported work locations.by closeparen
- I have a friend that did that, in a 4y stint there, and was happy to get to one of the layoffs phase. He was fairly lucky with the stock price RSUs vs stock price(though he knew a few that were so lucky that their 100k RSUs grant at sign got to like 800k, not that lucky, but yeah, his 4 years of flying to office made him basically "I can retire whenever I please to".
Most of developers don't understand what opportunity they got into to be highly paid eng with RSUs. My friend is managing 500 people in a factory and gets salary that everyone would laugh at here...
by cvak - > or some other non FAANG big tech corp.
The acronym is outdated. I don't really see a difference between FAANG or Nvidia/Stripe/Uber/etc in terms of brand recognition.
And also it depends on where you land org-wise. What you actually are working on is more important than the brand name
by menloshark - I don't think this is really true, there are plenty of engineers/managers who rotate through major tech companies. Many Meta folks will head off to new companies which would pay at similar levels.by lumost
- > If you get a FAANG job you need to think like a professional athlete. S
This is what Netflix has always been advocating for. Reid Hoffman also wrote the book The Alliance, in which he argues that employees and employers are allies. When they are aligned, they work together. When not, they part ways.
I find that these two views are realistic and we can use them to guide our actions.
by hintymad - Engineering org aside, there's something much larger here burgeoning under the surface:
> I talked with several engineers in infra orgs, who had 30-50% of their teams drafted into the ADO org. And in some cases, it was the best engineers who left.
> On Tuesday, Meta’s Chief Information and Security Officer (CISO), Guy Rosen, announced his departure.
This Guy was here since 2013, after his mobile tracking app Onavo was acquired, VP of Trust & Safety / Integrity during the high-stakes times of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, handling platform abuse and election interference during a very "yuge" election cycle.
With that goes the accumulated ethics, philosophy, and tribal knowledge that drives organizational cybersecurity and risk, 3 very important factors that can't be automated away or even openly spoken about. This sounds like a massive change to decision making that is larger than engineering.
by ux4 - It's certainly interesting that someone who founded Onavo would be made VP of "Trust & Safety"by mwambua
- I think there is a shift here that a lot of people don't recognize.
If you worked in TV in the early days, especially when TV was highly experimental and the standards changed every year, you probably did a lot of hands-on engineering or otherwise worked closely with engineers. Today, there is very little engineering in television.
I suspect the same thing is happening with social media: The product is mature and will have less and less engineering problems to solve.
by gwbas1c - Agreed. The article says Meta has 25,000 engineers. How in the world do you need 25k engineers to support Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp? VR is a side business.
You can probably do it with 2,500 engineers. Maybe even fewer.
by aurareturn - Well probably the whole idea from Meta was to invest these engineers in growth areas. And they haven’t succeeded in that.by softwaredoug
- Which is probably why Meta has been getting into all kinds of side projects like VR/AR and AI lately. Because there just isn’t that much they can think of in the social media space that’d be worth doing.
Of course, with how mediocrely those side projects have been going, I’m not surprised Meta is turning to layoffs. They seriously over hired and never really found a good use for all those engineers.
by brokencode - Sad. I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers, especially compared to Google. If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday.
Kubernetes has held back cluster technology for the last decade and prevented a better alternative for smaller companies or companies that can't piss away monopoly profits on unwieldy technology and process. It would have been much better had somebody tried to make an open source product based on IBM's old Parallel Sysplex but there gotta be patents in there (now expired though!)
As much as people like to complain, React has come out on top in a highly competitive market. I've looked at a lot of systems for building UI objects which look superficially similar like Microsoft's XAML and Oracle's FXML and React's system is by far the most simple and flexible... An example that shows you can apply the ideas in On Lisp to any language which has basic functional programming practices with just a tiny compiler tweak on top to make it fluent.
by PaulHoule - Instagram runs on angular doesn't it? They make more money per user than the core FB product... You might want to revisit your criteria for your FAANG journeyby smrtinsert
- How do you decide to use useContext, useReducer, useState, or a third party management tool to manage state?
(I know useContext isn't great for state management, but I've worked on a web application where useContext was used to store complex global state).
by gulugawa - Someone who would compare React to Kubernetes instead of React (Facebook) and Vue.js (Google) does not have enough domain knowledge to provide an informed opinion on this matter
Kubernetes is the industry standard cluster orchestrator for a reason - it's fantastic
by ukprogrammer - > I thought Meta did a lot of things right when it came to using engineers
How is using talented software engineers to track users and design addictive algorithms any good? React might be a nice side effect, but it's certainly not the first thing when I think of Meta.
by spacechild1 - Why would you compare React to Kubernetes instead of comparing React to Vue.js?
- > If I had a choice between React (Facebook) and Kubernetes (Google) I would pick the former anyday.
Can you elaborate on why these are at all comparable techs to use as a developer?
React seems to be the frontrunner in FE, but what do you see the BE equivalent to be?
by gitonup - Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come.
But what I don’t understand is how screen recording / keyboard recording is useful AI training data?
It seems like a lot cost and a lot of pissing off people for something that is actually not very valuable.
by chvid - Yes those are stable businesses, but we’re probably at peak social media. They need something new to be interesting in long term investment.
Zuck IMO doesn’t have the halo Musk has where there’s results mixed in with the BS. And Meta doesn’t seem to have a good track record of developing new products.
Is a rage bait machine currently at / near its peak of usage still an interesting investment in 2026?
by throwarayes - "Strong businesses"
Like the feeds not showing any posts, like a login wall on everything, like... god. Any Zuckerberg products
by alex1138 - > Facebook and Instagram are such strong businesses that they could completely stop development work and the businesses would still be unbeatable monopolies for years to come.
maybe, but I disagree. a lot of businesses - keep sinking money into social ads - yet don't get results coz if you don't know what u r doing, Meta will use a massive amount of ur budget on your current customers instead of bringing in new customers.
which is also the reason Amazon Ads Unit has grown lately - it works. Whereas paid social / paid search are becoming relics. yeah they might print money in the near future - but the full assault from native ads, media n amazon etc where first party data/pixels count n you also respect privacy.
I know this - cz I own a small martech business that's a competitor to ga4 n expanding into native ads.
by dzonga - Computer useby vanuatu
- Ah, but that is the old world, before AI. Given AI, dumb leaders can trash a business at the speed of thought.by ajb
- One thing I've learned over my career is that engineering seems to matter so little to a business's success. As long as the engineering problems and failures aren't so bad that the salesfolks will get crucified in the town square and convince customers to leave, then seemingly everything can eventually be duct-taped over.
Obviously this isn't as true for things where it truly matters - encryption software, financial software, etc. - but it's amazing how little engineering excellent has to do with a company's success.
by pavel_lishin - On a complete tangent: there's a drawing of an iceberg halfway through the article, the typical vertical shape with 10% above the surface. It turns out that icebergs don't float that way; they rotate until they are mostly horizontal. It's one of those things that once I found out, I see wrong icebergs everywhere.
For details, read the article https://axbom.com/iceberg/ and try the iceberg simulator https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html or read the tweet that started it https://xcancel.com/GlacialMeg/status/1362557149147058178
by kens - Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to allocate your top performers at an org like Meta.
This is one of those things where a (tech) celebrity founder was permitted to blew up a high-performing engineering culture. If shareholders knew the nuances of this they'd demand his ouster. His leadership has been lacking in merit, excellence, and intelligence.
by spamizbad