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We finally fired the guy. (I'm a SWE at FAANG.) I'm so relieved. You would not believe how much time and documentation it took. I'll estimate 20 pages of explaining his mistakes, not counting the code itself, over the course of six months. I have no idea how much time and energy our manager had to put into it - probably more than me. After 3.5 years, he was at what I consider 1-1.5 years of skill. How the hell he got promoted, I do not know.
I got asked to be his lead (kill me), which is good for my shot at promo to senior (results tomorrow!), so obviously I said yes. I immediately start complaining. Our manager doesn't see the problem. After a couple months of casual complaining (read: spending ~half my highly-valued weekly 1:1 sharing examples), I put together a meticulous spreadsheet. He sees the problem and says Junior needs to rapidly improve or will be fired. Junior makes no progress. Junior insists he is making great progress. Four months later, Junior is offered a severance or PIP and, in his first display of real intelligence, takes it.
Two of my favorite mistakes:
I have complained about this ongoingly to everyone I know for months. It was getting to be a problem. Work is so much chiller now. I can literally see the day he got fired in my sleep tracking metrics, as everything discontinuously improved.
What drove me the craziest was that my manager, reasonably, was too discrete to be straight with me about his agreement. I'm not sure at what point I really won him over. This left me chronically feeling unsure if, in the eyes of He Who Writes My Reviews, I was nitpicky and disagreeable, shitting on a coworker who he thought was just fine. Thankfully, the ending of the story strongly suggests he didn't think that, but it's still unclear if it hurt my reputation.
Or helped it - I did just save the company over 1 SWE-yr/yr, in perpetuity.
Got the promo! 6.5% raise, although it'll be more over the next 5 years as the 4 year stock grants (each March) come in at senior size, and the base will continue to go up, etc. Maybe 50% total, long term.
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This isn’t particularly related to your post, but I’m curious about what it takes to get past that initial screen to be considered at FAANG.
Long story short: I have a PhD in (pure) math and am finishing up a postdoc, but I’m just done with academia for a number of reasons and wanting to transition to industry. Other than a brief 1 year stint at a small company before starting grad school, almost all my coding experience is in an academic context.
I’m fairly confident I would demolish most Leetcode-style DSA interview questions and can learn new skills pretty fast, but it’s hard to get my foot in the door because I don’t have any shipped products or industry connections. I’d really appreciate any guidance or advice!
I don't think we're really hiring, so hard to say. In practice, the answer is, as it is for everyone at all times, grind leetcode and spam recruiters/your network.
With a PhD, you'd come in at typically mid level (new grad + 1, aka senior - 1). Expectation there is just leetcode, no system design. If you can comfortably do mediums, and communicate well while doing it, that's likely good enough. You might catch a hard now and then, but we'd really rather see if people can write clean code for a medium and communicate well (tradeoffs in algorithms or naming, working through examples, etc)
Thanks for that, I really appreciate it. I’ve been grinding leetcode and feel very confident, if only I could manage to get my foot in the door. I’ve just haven’t had any luck getting interviews in the first place. I’ll try spamming more recruiters, but as for networking, I don’t think I know anyone working in FAANG at the moment.
I'd expand from just faang. Get your foot in the door by looking at every generic startup. If you don't already live in the bay (SF), consider moving.
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How did he get through the interview? Was it on-site, or could he have used AI?
It was virtual. I don't think he used AI. I think he got in during a low bar covid era. Leetcode is just easier than the job, in some ways. It's a test of "can you grind for a while with lots of money on the table." It doesn't show if you can sustain that, or if you have the attention to detail, or - in particular - the critical thinking to solve novel problems needed for the job.
As much as I could tell you a thousand stories of him being not up to snuff, he wasn't totally incompetent. I think he'll be adequate at a startup. Hell, he might even be OK if he started with us at new grad level today and just took ramping up more seriously. The bar isn't that high at FAANG, perhaps especially at mine, but it's not low, either.
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Reading this and then seeing how the same corps fire people by the thousand without any fault of theirs, and also knowing if I sent them the resume they'd probably not even notice it (not that I actually want to work at any of them but maybe Netflix, but still), gives me really eerie impression. I'm old enough to be fine with a lot of things in life making no sense. But this involves a lot of obviously very smart people, who control trillions of dollars, and yet it all makes so little sense... Why must it be so wrong?
Generally, this is layoffs, not firing. It's about juicing the stock and moving employees to lower cost areas, not about firing for performance. Re-orgs are also good for your resume as the person doing the re-org: I figure it's like when I refactor the codebase to be leaner, just with people instead of code. Lines deleted are still part of the
git diff --statcount, so reorg layoffs are by analogy good.The difficulty of firing is more about aversion to lawsuits for wrongful termination/discrimination. He was in some protected classes, which idk if lengthened timelines. I don't think so honestly. As much as I'd love to be able to say I think he was a diversity hire or treated more easily because of it, because I do think that happens in general not infrequently, I think this was actually all just par for the course megacorp inefficiency and incentives.
E.g. the actual answer to how did he get promoted is almost certainly that it'd been a reasonable amount of time, and it looks good for everyone for him to get promoted, so he did. I think that doesn't happen as much with the later promotions - the bar for senior seems genuinely high to me (although we'll see what I have to say in 97 minutes after I get my news) - but consider that without the entry -> mid promotion, one is fired by about the 4 year mark.
The ignoring of resumes is weird. I referred a hilariously well qualified friend and he didn't even get a recruiter phonescreen.
I applied to major corps (FAANG, MS, etc.) several times over the years, and I knew I am at least qualified enough to get the interview (I think qualified enough to do like 90% of tech jobs they have, but that's just my opinion) but the only time I ever got a call back was when it was a referral through a specific person to a specific team (not that it always worked - I had several referrals that led to nothing at all). I got an offer then, decided not to go for it, no regrets about it - but I am just wondering, how do they actually source? Is that just random luck? Is there a secret code? Is there some criteria I miss? I mean I'd be fine if they talked to me and said no thanks. But there's never even a call back, ever. Not that I really need it - of the FAANG five I probably would only consider Netflix - but I'd like to understand the process.
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