Why you should not work at FAANG/MANGA (Meta/Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google)

hey everyone how's it going welcome back to another video so a lot of people want to work in big tech and by big tech i mean they used to be called fang companies now called manga companies and people want to work there for very legitimate reasons like the high salary the perks the high caliber of people learning opportunities being on the cutting edge of technology all very valid reasons but in this video we're going to talk about the opposite why you may not actually want to work in big tech all right let's go number one is ethics i

really cannot not talk about ethics i'm sure you've heard at least one of these scandals that big tech companies have gotten into in the past few years are they valid well i think yes in my opinion these companies did really start off wanting to do good and to change the world for the better however the lack of regulations and the unintended huge significant impact that they ended up having in the world there just wasn't any precedence for the things that now we can see is causing a lot of issues without going into too much detail because i'm not allowed to i do know that there are both internal and external pushes to drastically change the way that these big tech companies are functioning but honestly at a scale this large it's really hard to see changes happen very quickly unless you come into the company at a really high level like if you're very senior you may be able to influence a lot of people but as evidenced by these articles over here which i'll link below if you're coming in you know at like a entry level or mid-level product manager data scientist some something like that um it's really hard to influence that massive amounts of change internally and this is for several different reasons the first one is that it's really easy to get lost in the sea of day-to-day tasks and unless it's like actually your job just to change the ethical issues that are there it's hard to focus on these hard difficult problems in addition to the stuff that you're already doing another reason is that huge problems require huge paradigm shifts throughout the company and as i mentioned earlier unless you're like at a very high seniority level it's hard to get buy-in from everybody around you and make these huge changes that will likely impact the top line and operational efficiency because a lot of these practices are just super ingrained into all aspects of the company i do want to point out that by working in a big tech company you will get pointed questions asking about you know things that are happening related to your company your stocks may go completely wild when there's like certain news that comes out and speaking of the news you are likely to have your company being featured in the news like at least once a week for something that has happened so if these are things that will bother you and you think will cause a lot of stress and anxiety you may want to stay away from working at a big tech company next reason for why you may not want to work at a big tech manga company

is that you won't have as large an impact compared to working at a startup for example in startup world it may look something like this hello there i have an excellent idea oh wow what's your idea let's have a team meeting to talk about the idea this is so good we all agree that we should do this idea there's a 10 to 20 impact on your top line amazing now in big tech world it will look more like this hello friends i have an excellent idea oh wow let us have a team meeting to discuss your excellent idea what say you my esteemed product manager hmm by that sizing it does look quite tempting perhaps we can start off with an mvp and go from there after we've proven our impact and what about you my creatively inclined colleague no hmm this is satisfactory oh but wait uh what's the policy for such projects again i think we need to get sign off from like legal and privacy and like the other legal and the other privacy yay we can finally start i hope it has the one percent impact so the reason why things are like that are due to three different components and let's talk about them one by one the first one is impact compared to a startup at a big tech company like the manga companies when you really look at the amount of impact you can actually have like seriously one percent is considered like very huge impact if it's on the top line and that's just because a lot of these low hanging fruits have already been done you're now testing out and trying out these non-obvious ways of increasing your top line or like being more operationally efficient cutting down costs et cetera of course i do have to say a caveat to this is that if you're working on a more innovative area um there may still be low hang fruit in that area but there is like a risking trade-off here because you do have a lot more opportunities to drive impact but because the spaces in which these big tech companies are investing in are spaces that are just like super out there you know like we're talking about like virtual reality and stuff so the trade-off here is that you could be working on these things and then you know they just don't amount to anything in the end because you know those are just big bets another thing is the bureaucracy so yes it is tech and there is like that mentality of getting things done and moving fast and such but still it is still a large company and it has the drawbacks of a large company like you need to get all the buy-ins from different stakeholders and then there's also those increased regulations and checkpoints and the next reason why things are like this um are the regulation changes things actually change super quickly in regulation land in a lot of these big tech companies and these are changes that are driven both externally and internally so very often just new regulations and things just kind of like pop up and it is like your responsibility to kind of keep up with what it is that now needs to be signed off before you can like do your thing i do think that this is very necessary and i think it's a good thing but because of so many of these regulation changes from like a practical perspective it can be pretty annoying and distracting because you're trying to like you know do your project or finish things um before the deadline so overall if you want to have really big impact like clear-cut ways for you to drive massive impact less bureaucracy so you can move quickly and just not a lot of regulation changes then big tech and probably just bigger companies in general are not for you next reason why you may not want to work in a big tech manga company is that it

has really high standards in this poll where i asked you guys why you would want to work at manga many of you guys put learning new things as your primary reason and also in my google's really great video which i'll link below she also emphasizes the high standards the caliber is a really big reason why people want to work at these companies and honestly speaking 100 super valid reason it does have really high standards and you will learn lots of things people all around you are passionate so why am i listing this as a reason for why you may not want to work at a manga company i think in theory people are like yay high standards you know i want to learn lots of things in the high caliber um but in practice they may not have really thought about what it actually feels like to be in that kind of environment and what it feels like is really high pressure in many places it's not enough for you just to do what you're supposed to be doing you're actually measured by not your efforts but by the impact that you drive and what that means is that you can try really hard but ultimately still not meet the standards because you didn't actually drive any impact so you gotta be able to stomach that for example i have a very talented software engineering friend but for a variety of reasons the project that he was working on didn't end up driving any impact and for that reason he individually did not meet the expectations for his level and that's because he was expected to do more than just implement and make sure that the project was done in a very high quality high standard way it was also his responsibility to actually drive the direction of that project and make sure that it's going in a direction that will drive impact you may be thinking well he's a software engineer like why does he also have to think about this kind of stuff and that's the reality even if you are a technical person um you're expected to do more than that as they say great power comes great responsibility and you need to measure up to these standards in addition to that not all companies but some companies do also have what is called like a up or out policy and this just means that if you're not increasing your level and your seniority um at a specific pace then you will probably get fired which of course is very stressful i do really encourage you to really think about what high standards actually means um in practice is your career actually the biggest priority for you um do you want to do things on the side as well trust me on that one doing things on the side in addition to keeping up with the standards at your day job is very hard next reason for why you may not want to work at a big tech manga company is that you're expected to learn very

quickly and problem solve very quickly the way that big tech interviews work is that it's multiple rounds like usually between five and eight different rounds which tests you on several different aspects the questions that they often ask you are very hard and very vague and this is done on purpose because they're not testing you just on your knowledge and your skills they're also testing you on how you react to these vague difficult questions and how good you are problem solving and working through them a lot of people end up failing these tech interviews even though they do really great on the skills and the knowledge side but it's because they weren't able to demonstrate quick problem-solving skills um in face of these hardware problems this is done on purpose because dealing with these hard big problems is precisely what it feels like to work in a tech company i was looking at one of these articles that talks about why people eventually leave their tech jobs and there are you know multiple different reasons but one that really stood out to me was it will define projects like i said earlier you're working on the cutting edge of technology but basically nobody knows the answer where things are going to go so naturally it's kind of like your job to figure out how to define it and then do the project or solve the problem i get so many asks from different people like different stakeholders and they usually come to me with very vague questions that are also questions that i have no idea the answer to either but what i do is i go like oh yes very interesting question let me get back to you on that and then i go and quickly learn and quickly figure it out and then deliver so yeah if vaguely define projects and problem solving and quick learning which requires lots of your brain cells is not your cup of tea then you probably would not like to work at a big tech company all right that's all i have for you today i hope this gives you some insights um into whether or not you want to work at a big tech company uh comment below about what you think do any of these reasons catch you by surprise do you still want to work at a big tech company or you're kind of like second guessing yourself a little bit on that i will see you guys in the next video or live stream