>I'd say also, I currently perceive Google/Facebook as a place to "slow down". They're big enough and have enough resources to do anything they want, so it seems like there's gonna be a lot of people just hanging out and going the slow route.

Having worked in a startup and midsize environment and now at Google my experience has been the opposite. Getting to focus intensely on one or two projects at a time allowed me to push the needle on velocity. I don't push as many LOC, sure, but that isn't how I measure impact or progress. At Google I can make measurable, verifiable impact using a development cycle the loops over a few days. It's very hard to do that even at midsize companies.

Thanks for sharing, that is reassuring. Do you think the focus is more of a specialization thing and having all the people around to deal with other specializations (IE, clear lines)?

Of course. I didn't start out my career thinking I'd solve all the problems a given company has. I think that hero mentality is the reason a lot of startups fail, at least in a technical sense. I always viewed engineering in general as a process of abstracting complexity into easily understood components. Why do the hard work of making good abstractions if you don't put them to use by specializing your employees?

It’s news when hiring stats come out, e.g. Stanford students are no longer accepting Palantir. For example, one report found that Facebook’s new grad acceptance rate has fallen below 50% this year: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/new...

These stats are important for disseminating competitive information about the job market to job seekers and small companies. If Google et al own all the salary and resume data, then they have an unfairly outsized effect on the market.

Why did you link an amp page?

It loads faster on mobile.

> Google/Facebook as a place to "slow down"

I don't know where you've gotten that impression. Neither of those two companies got to where they are by having a culture of slowness.

Any team you're on doesn't have all of the company's financial resources at its whim -- rather the team has a set budget and quarterly objectives and everyone's breaking their back to meet them like in any other company. And if your team doesn't deliver, then your promotion won't happen... and most people are working towards that promotion.

There is absolutely nothing slow about it.

> I don't know where you've gotten that impression. Neither of those two companies got to where they are by having a culture of slowness.

My visibility is limited (don't work at FB/Google), but I have several friends and ex-colleagues who do and I have to say, I have the same impression that it's a company for people to slow down.

They're already at the top of their game and I think assuming everybody there is an A-player is misguided. It's more likely you become another cog in a giant machine with limited reach for better or worse.

There's a lot of politics and while it's true everybody wants a promotion, it's clear to me (at least from my sources) that promotions are more about learning to play a game according to their rules rather than being a fast, high-achiever.

Not everybody wants to have financial resources at their whim. But some people are happy getting to the office 11am, moving a button 1px to the right then 1px to the left once in a while, and then leaving at 4pom. From what I heard, if you're ok with that, a place like Facebook or Google is great.

Again, I don't assume it's the norm, but I heard enough to make me think "slowing down" is very doable.

Ex-Googler here. I found working at Google to be slower pace than the previous startups I worked at due to the code review process (reviewers sometimes being in different time zones or just being slow for whatever reason) and the time to takes for tests to run. (Global presubmits often had to run overnight for example.)

You can get around it by having multiple changes going in parallel, but it's still a lot of overhead. I don't think it was just me either. This seemed to be a common complaint. Maybe it's fixed by now?

This is going to vary a lot depending on the team and where you are working in the stack. Lumping Google and Facebook together and saying "there is absolutely nothing slow about it" seems too strong, though.

Lethargy isn't the issue. It's the growth plateau (after ~ year one) and stifled upward mobility that are the real dealbreakers, for some. The phrase "slow down" is imo accurate insofar as a fairly middling effort exerted by any sufficiently smart person will ensure continuity of employment at GooFace.