Why didn’t I choose a FAANG to start my career? — Career — Appendix I
A letter to new grads,
For the ones that are unfamiliar with FAANG, is an acronym for the five best-performing American tech stocks in the market: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet (formerly Google).
Let’s acknowledge something first, just the fact of being called to an interview is a privilege, and it’s all about connections and pulling some strings to get a recruiter to talk with you. Especially if you’re not coming from a well-known university.
Back in 2011, I saw some of my friends going to do internships at Facebook and Google, most of them were very excited by the sole idea of working with world-class engineers and learning from them.
The fact was that they neither didn’t interact daily with the rockstar engineers, but also most of the time they spent on delivering small tasks like adding a new button in the Business Facebook Ads Manager for companies creating campaigns.
Besides the paycheck which is good if you’re single and coming from a developing country like me, there are of course things that you learn by being in a structured company. Processes, ship code safely, and learn how to interact with other humans.
At any big tech company you’re dealing with scale, hundreds of millions of requests per minute, daily access that you never imagined possible. But the reality is that complexity it’s already abstracted from you as an intern or new grad.
What I find more exciting is being part of the creation of the abstractions, dealing with real problems at scale, and being close to the company’s core product.
I feel that I learned more than I can even imagine by starting my career at Wildlife Studios, my friends called me crazy, and that I was throwing away my career (and money) by working at a small mobile gaming startup in Brazil.
My recommendation is if you have the privilege to work at any FAANG, choose a place where you’ll unleash your potential rather than following others’ paths. A fact is that the FAANG are going to be there always for you, but startups will grow and the opportunity will fade away.
Thanks!
