Why Is The Tech Industry Obsessed With FAANG?
I am going to open by talking about free ice cream
Someone commented on another one of my articles and asked how to get into a FAANG company: What I wanted to say in response is that I don’t know, I’ve never gotten into one. I have interviewed with a couple of them (Facebook and Google), or three if you count automated coding tests. If you want to actually hear an insider perspective on what FAANG companies are like or how to get into one, read an article by someone who has actually done it.
There are a plethora of tech articles on Medium about FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google), but they are all missing a critical ingredient: Free ice cream. Yes, the pay is excellent and they carry a certain prestige. But I feel there is one thing no one is talking about, so I am going to talk about it:
Some of these campuses are really, really nice.
Everyone at Facebook calls the company’s sprawling, suburb-wide headquarters in Menlo Park a “campus”, and it certainly looks more like a university than a corporate office. There are bike racks everywhere, canteens, ice cream parlours, burger joints, a swag store where you can buy branded “merch” and even a games arcade.
— Source
Imagine this: You work every day at a Disney-land themed campus, except there are…computers…instead of rides…
Free arcades. Ice cream parlors you don’t have to pay for. Sweeping views. I once interned at a non-FAANG startup that had its own arcade, music room, and 24/7 bar, but I noticed an unmistakable lack of free ice cream parlors. Now that I work from home, I never get a single shipment of ice cream unless I buy it myself with the paycheck I receive.
Some people in the comments section above argue that these perks are not to attract the best talent, they are just an underhanded method for getting employees to work longer hours. I will neither agree nor disagree with this belief.
In a Sense, FAANG Does Not Exist
FAANG is a term coined by Cramer to characterize high-performing tech stocks — he wants us all to stop saying FAANG so we can say MAMAA instead, but MAMAA just does not have the same ring to it. Facebook is now Meta and Google is technically part of Alphabet, but the noticeable change in MAMAA is that it swaps out Netflix for Microsoft.
I want to emphasize this: FAANG was coined by a TV personality who is famous for being an investor. If you watch his show or listen to his podcast, you will repeatedly hear him say that he believes in investing in companies that will make the most money, not the ones that are the most ethical, have the coolest tech products, or that contribute the most to society.
I can see the majority of investors, in my mind, reading this and rolling their eyes at my statement. Duh, of course we don’t just invest in companies based on their ethics. But what this means, in essence, is that FAANG companies were designated as such because of their profitability. The designation is not necessarily indicative of what company will teach you the most, what company will let you contribute the most, or even what company will pay you the most.
Although…logically speaking…it does track that the most profitable tech companies also tend to pay their engineers pretty well.
Hey, I wonder why Tesla isn’t on the list?
Some Companies Are Exploiting The Promise Of FAANG
Now, would I ever work at a FAANG company if they gave me an offer, complete with an extremely high salary, perks, and the promise that I could boost this blog’s readership by approximately 7000% because I would have the legal right to put “FAANG engineer” in my bio?
Of course not. I love my current job. Wayne, that’s for you. I know you are reading this.
For an outsider like myself, FAANG companies are certainly easy to make fun of. Netflix is off the list for a reason, as its stock value has seriously decreased. Meta stock has plummeted, Amazon is infamous for its working conditions, and Apple products are notoriously expensive (yes, that’s the biggest burn I could think of more Apple. The real reason I don’t buy Apple products anymore is that my brother works there, and I want to think different from him). Does this actually make them bad companies to work for, though? I have no idea, because I haven’t.
I am always impressed when tech influencers like Chloe publicly come out on major news publications and criticize their previous employers. Doing this is somewhat risky, and if any claims are false then a person runs the risk of being accused of libel. But I have no issue coming out and saying this: Of all these companies, Facebook has one of the best interview processes I have ever seen.
The interviewer was polite and professional. The company gave out a ton of useful resources, some of them only available to people who had passed the initial technical round. They judged for underlying problem-solving abilities, instead of just checking a “yes” or “no” based on whether the code produced the right results when it ran. I don’t have as positive of a comment to make about their rather abrupt hiring freeze and subsequent interview cancellations, but Facebook was in a pretty tough spot and money doesn’t just grow on binary trees.
Get it? Binary trees? Because Facebook loves asking tree questions for some reason.
Though this is just my personal opinion, I want to come out and say that FAANG interviews are really, really hard. If anyone tells you that they’re not, ask them to show you an offer letter.
Now on LinkedIn, Quora, and my personal email, I see a constant barrage of advertisements for bootcamps and coding companies that promise to get anyone an offer at a FAANG company. “Disgusting” is a pretty strong word, but I do think these kinds of ads are opportunistic. That being said, at least they have qualifications.
Blog posts are a few orders of magnitude worse. This article, touting itself as a 40-day method for getting into MAANG (Facebook->Meta), is definitely something you should read. It is one of the worst articles I have ever seen on Medium, the writer does nothing to indicate that he has any idea what he is talking about, and the fact that 218 people liked it is completely baffling.
Although, to be fair, some user named cziffra7 made those exact assertions against me, so maybe I am just internalizing the vitriol.
His advice, in essence, is to do a lot of LeetCode questions. Yeah, you don’t say. The first step of his 40-day plan is to learn a programming language in ten days; the next is to do 10 easy questions a day for 10 days, then 6–8 medium questions a day for 10 days, then 4–5 hard questions a day for 10 days. And that is after edits, as his original advice was to do 10 medium questions a day and then 10 hard questions a day.
This advice is about as nuanced, insightful, and braindead as telling weightlifters to lift 100 pounds, then lift 500 pounds, then lift 1000 pounds.
Also, if you have time, read this. This blog post, in contrast, frequently demonstrates that it is written by someone who actually knows a lot, informs us that the strategy actually worked, and specifies what questions and topics were actually solved. I think it is pretty cool that the first comment is by the author of Cracking The Coding Interview.
Shooting For FAANG Could Be A Good Goal For Companies In General
My original motivation for writing this post was this article. Garner is an excellent writer, and he has one of the best blogs I have seen so far, but I kind of agree with the other commenter here: There is more to the “FAANG goal” than just money.
I think this links nicely into another debate I see: If you spend a lot of time preparing for an interview at a FAANG company, will that benefit you at other companies?
In my experience, LeetCode-style interviews are very common across the board, from large companies to small companies. Yes, there are exceptions. I have interviewed at companies that do not require you to write a single line of code, companies that ask you to code but do not give you a choice of programming language, and companies that rely more on take-home tests.
That being said, your average interview goes something like this: You get a CoderPad link, you get a question that is very similar to something you can find on LeetCode, and you spend about 45 minutes talking through your work as you code and an interviewer watches.
Closing Thoughts
The economy is in a bad place right now, due to a mix of factors from war, to rate hikes, to supply-chain issues. Now all kinds of tech articles are cropping up on Medium, promising that you can get a FAANG job and a 300K+ salary if you just pay a few thousand dollars.
And maybe you can. I don’t know.
If you want to get it for free, try something like Grind75, BaseCS, InterviewNoodle, or the extremely vast sea of free YouTube channels like BackToBackSWE, Nick White, NeetCode, and Kevin Naughton.
Maybe start with NeetCode, since he started the series while out of a job and is actually at Google now.
