More like you gradually come to a realization that your time in this world is extremely, extremely precious.
And that you just don't particularly see a need to cater to other people's made up (and sometimes downright farcical) rituals to such an excessive degree.
No matter how much money they may dangle in front of you.
> More like you gradually come to a realization that your time in this world is extremely, extremely precious.
> And that you just don't particularly see a need to cater to other people's made up (and sometimes downright farcical) rituals to such an excessive degree.
> No matter how much money they may dangle in front of you.
I confess to not understanding this take, money can purchase back a substantial portion of time. Working at big tech can fairly easily reduce your working life to 10 years if you spend conservatively. Outside of big tech the norm seems to be more towards 20-30.
The cost of those decades of saved time? About 100ish hours of prep for your first interview, 40-50 from there on (based on personal experience, conversations with my colleagues, and a friend who runs a FAANG interview class). Assuming 3 job hops in your 10 year working life, that's 200ish hours to save 20 years. Is there a reason you don't think that's worth it?
(1) Most chiefly, the egregiously unethical behavior of nearly all of the "big" players (the rest being merely moderately unethical)
(2) Reports from close friends of the day-to-day grind at these places (literally none have anything more than superficially positive to say about it; some have suffered significant health problems, include one full-scale nervous breakdown)
(3) And the intellectual dishonesty implicit in the LC process also, but only as icing on the cake, as it were.
And independent of all that - it is by no means a binary (either you work or for big tech, or you grind along at for an extra decade or two at middle range). There are high-paying opportunities out there, if that's what you're out for -- they just aren't as immediately obvious to find as FAANG.
> they just aren't as immediately obvious to find as FAANG
Sounds like you'd need to spend some time to find these :)
To your other points, I get feeling revulsion to Google or Facebook, but I feel there are other companies like Netflix or Stripe that are ethically fine. The idea that the employees are generally overworked doesn't mesh with my lived experience the bay area, I have a fairly wide social circle and I don't know anyone putting in more than 40 hours a week at a big tech company unless they're trying to climb the ladder super fast. I think we also may have to agree to disagree on whether all leetcode is intellectually dishonest. 4 leetcode hard problems is a silly way to interview, but when working on problems at scale I appreciate a gut check problem on big O and an algorithmic workhorse like depth-first search or something.
I’ve been a dev for over 20 years and have never had to do leetcode to get a job. You either find a place that doesn’t require it (more places than you think) or rely on your network to get jobs (which is probably what OP is referring to).
No I won’t get a job at a FAANG this way, but I’m not particularly fond of megacorps.
For every software engineering faang level company that requires leet code interviews, there are 100 others that do not. Your rhetorical question is patently absurd.
I mean how much money is enough money? You have FAANG tier people crying about TC - at some point it becomes clear that's their whole identity. Maybe they're just sad to be stuck in horrible cities (I'm also in one of them lmao) where no amount of TC buys them peace and happiness. It is pretty cringey, and honestly sad. I've been to so many meetups which basically turn into grieving sessions for highly paid engineers to cry about how their friend got an offer for xx amount while they make 6x the average US person in a year.
And you have people making 6x less than you working at different jobs than yours. These kinds of complaints really lack perspective imo. Getting paid less at work is the same as over paying when buying something. Would you call it cringey if someone doesn't want to pay 30% more than all their neighbors for their house? They can "probably" afford it, can't they? Just be happy you have a house at all, right? What's a few dollars anyway?
What finance jobs? The only companies in software engineering paying more than FAANG are trading companies like Jane Street. And AFAIK they have harder interview loops than Google.
Yes, trading companies and even trading divisions at banks.
I've interviewed at plenty of them (only one in recent years, though) and while I wouldn't say they were easy, they aren't doing completely irrelevant challenges like leetcode.
I've certainly never studied for one, unless you count flipping through a book or two just to remind myself of things I may not have thought about in a while. Like 1-3 hours tops.
