Today I am going to talk about the hardships in the life of a FAANG engineer while switching jobs. Some people might not see this as an actual problem but then they are the people who are working outside of FAANG or are comparatively new.

Intro/Background
YOE : 5 yrs 6 months
Designation: SDE 2
Previous Company: Amazon

I have been working with Amazon as an SDE 2 (L5) from the past 2 years. The work culture has always been poor in my team and my manager is crazy. In Amazon, managers have unquestionable authority to put you into PIP and he had already done it with multiple people from the team for no valid reason.

My Amazon manager is poor at everything including project planning, technical understanding, leadership and every other thing you can possibly think of. However, he is extremely good at pleasing the upper management. That comes at the cost of making your team work 12 hours, 7 days a week for 365 days.

Anyways, I always tried not to piss him off and stay on his good side. However, having worked for almost 2 years I could see no more of what he was doing and decided to confront him. Other reasons to leave:

• Promotion to SDE3 would have taken 2-4 more years and under the current manager? who knows.
• Increments are very small at the same level.
• My Sign on bonus component was also going to get removed after my 2 years work anniversary so I wanted to leave. Sign on bonus was like 1/3 rd of my overall salary. After 2 years, you do get more RSUs but they are half yearly and don't interest me too much.

I just needed an offer first from some company.

Note - Good about Amazon
Just to be clear, other than my manager I loved everything about Amazon. Be it other fellow engineers, the tech, the perks and the work. It was just that I happened to be under a bad manager and this can happen to anyone anywhere. About Amazon as a company, it is a FAANG company afterall and is at the forefront of tech. There are a ton of good teams there. Its just that I was under a bad manager, thats it.
The work I got to do here was amazing. From designing some of the most performant scalable applications I have ever designed, my system designing skills right now are at another level. I feel overall I am now a better and way more experienced developer than I was 2 years ago.

1 month later
Now I had revised some basic DSA with some system design. All this was done along with the office work which already took 10-12 hours daily, including most weekends.

Job search - The big FAANG irony

1. When I was searching for jobs, I realised there were only a handful of companies that could offer me Amazon L5 level salary (i.e. 60+ LPA - including sign on bonus and excluding RSUs) at my years of experience.

2. Most of these were startups which were offering me senior roles like Technical lead or Engineering Manager. This is because only at this level the salary matched my current salary.
   If you are already at Amazon like me, then no other FAANG pays that much fixed component (Base+Sign on) at SDE2 level. But their RSU vesting cycle is better than Amazon.

3. Intimidation: Some of these startups will respect your experience but most of them will not. I observed that most of the people at startups will be intimidated by you. Either because they were always rejected by a FAANG or because of the fact that you are so young compared to them and still hired at a senior level like them.

Intimidation Examples

Cleartax (Interviewed for Senior software engineer):

• System design round with Hiring Manager :
  The interviewer at cleartax gave me a design problem. Somehow, as per him it was better to store values as a set attribute in a single SQL database row instead of creating multiple rows. When I pointed out the basics of normalization, CRUD and proved him incorrect through google search, stack overflow and chatgpt results, he was so pissed off that he started panicking.
  In the end he started abusing Amazon DynamoDb table for some reason and said that Amazon is a weird company and does not know how to design Cloud. Like dude, what is AWS then? And why are you even telling me that?
• I gave my feedback to the recruiter and told him I was not interested anymore.

Park+ (Technical Lead position)

• CTO Round:
  The company follows the typical LALA culture. In the CTO round, the CTO was really pissed off with me being so young. Also, it was hard for him to believe my current salary numbers. I already had multiple offers when I came here so this guy said that once an individual receives an offer, he should not explore anymore and all such nonsense. He lacked basic technical knowledge, professionalism and was highly intimidated by the fact that I am in my mid 20s and he is in his late 40s.
• I never spoke to them again.

Phonepe (Senior software engineer)

• System desgin round: The interviewer (Engineering manager) asked me a system design question. For some reason, he kept changing requirements everytime I proposed some solution. He did not like me asking questions which is pretty weird in a design round. Still I was able to give him the solution.
  In the end, he said that amazon like to over engineer things and that is the problem with all its developers as well.
• Probably, they found someone at a lower salary and decided to go ahead with him. I was not interested either.

2 months passed

1. I interviewed with multiple startups, solved 4 leetcode medium everyday and did 1-2 system design problems every week.
2. I recieved a couple of offers from some startups but had not cleared any FAANG yet.

Confronting my Amazon manager

• Once I had received an offer , I confronted my manager in a 1:1 call. I poured my heart out and told him how bad of a manager he is and how bad the overall project planning, work culture , leadership is there in our team. My manager was both confused and shocked regarding what was going on. He was astonished about the fact that how come I suddenly speak of all such things. I raised valid points so he was unable to defend himself much. Mostly in his defence, he blamed everything on Amazon, said that is how things work here and that I am being paid handsomely for all the work that I do.
• I gave my resignation within a week before he could even think of moving me to PIP or Focus :D .

Startup trial run

1. After 4 months preparation I still did not have any FAANG offer and my FAANG interviews were still under progress. I had offers from some startups and decided to join a couple of startups, one after another.
2. Its not like I have not worked in startups before. Prior to Amazon I have worked with multiple startups.
3. I did join two startups and then resigned within 1 week from both of them, one after another.
4. I was unable to feel comfortable at these startups:

• People at my level were way older than me and did not seem very acceptable of me. There were people with 15 years of exp working at my level. Also they were paid less than me.
  I think it is understandable to some extent why they felt uncomfortable.
• In these startups, there were no defined processes for projects/work, substandard coding practices, inefficient system designing, lack of exposure to cutting edge tech and then there were other issues like lack of office space, limited/no parking space, limited toilets etc.

5. Ultimately I received multiple FAANG/Tier 1 offers and decided to go ahead with them.

Epilogue

• Ultimately I received multiple FAANG and Tier 1 company offers and decided to go ahead with them.
• These past 4-5 months have been amongst the hardest phases of my life. Life was much simpler when I worked at just some small startup.
• Competition is severe and hiring is also less now. This further adds to your pain.

Contact me
I am keeping this discord channel invite here: https://discord.gg/gGcFKFYS
If anyone wanna join , I am there as TheQubitGuy.
I am happy to answer your questions and provide any help needed.