Finally, when I received this offer letter with dazzling compensation package and prestigious logo, I felt that I was doing this. After working in a service company for years and later, I was going to the promised land after a middle -layer technology company where the processes were relatively simple and expectations are open: a senior engineering role in a Faang company.
The latest technology, brilliant colleagues and products used by billions of visions dancing in my head. I dreamed of deep technical discussions on free gourmet lunch and complex engineering problems that will change the world.
I am still here in five years, but my experience … It was different from expected. Not necessarily worse – better in many ways – but it’s definitely not what I dream of. If someone had shown a “day of life” video of my real job before I started me, I might have thought that they had shown me a completely wrong role.
If you are on a high -level role in a technology giant, I wish someone to tell me before I start.
Reality control
Internal vehicles are complex
My first struggle came during recruitment. The internal team view will be learned with a wide and sophisticated, dozens of special construction system.
Do you want to run a query against production data or make a simple configuration change? This usually requires navigation in multiple systems, approval processes and sometimes coordination with teams in different time periods.
An unforgettable day, I spent a few hours with a permission workflow for a service with my team. The process was designed for security and accountability, but definitely a learning curve for a new person.
An unforgettable day, I spent four hours to get permission to view the diaries for a service that my team has. The approval work flow sent me with a circular reference that would make me jealous of the function that would be self -esteem.
Of course, there are documents – thousands of pages, most of them are outdated. I spent the first three months learning to shorten (we had 347 internal TLAs with the last census) and I realized that Wiki has the right information for the system I was working on. The irony of building stylish, intuitive products for the public seemed to be designed in 1995.
Coding is easy part
When I joined, I was expecting to spend most of my time to combat challenging technical problems. In fact, I spend about 20% of my time writing code. Rest? Meetings. Documents. Reviews. Planning. Politics.
As a senior engineer, your value is not measured by how much code you write – it is measured with how much you activate others and travel in the organization to do things. I had to quickly cross a force multiplier from thinking myself as a code producer.
Hierarchy
On paper, Faang companies have relatively flat hierarchies with simple engineering levels. In practice, informal power structures have a complex network.
There are engineers who have been there since the first days – they can be at the same level as you on the career staircase, but their views have ten times the weight in design investigations. There are “high visibility” teams working on strategic projects and “maintenance” teams that continue the critical infrastructure but are less recognized.
You quickly learn that the title of a senior engineer can mean crazy different things depending on your team and organization. A senior engineer in a consumer team team may be fundamentally working on different challenges from someone in cloud infrastructure or ML systems.
Actually the important thing
Metriks on innovation
I came with dreams of architectural grace and innovative solutions. I had a nice micro -service architect to be scaled and replaced by something sustainable. Graphql and I was ready to evangel the event sources. I have implemented my step in modernizing our Tech Stack.
Then reality hit. What really cares about the company is the metrics that move the need for work.
Has it reduced the delay with a smart algorithm using consistent mixed and probability data structures 5 ms? The Architecture Review Committee politely shook his head while controlling the e -mails. With a simple CSS change, a simple CSS change that makes the button to blue instead of green increases 0.1% increases? Leadership was suddenly hidden around my desk, which requested daily updates.
One of our most famous “innovations” was to carry a 20 pixels higher button on the page. He earned $ 140 million for three -month additional income. Testing A/B, the engineer was promoted faster than people who had spent months to reorganize the critical infrastructure.
The most successful engineers I have observed are not the most brilliant – which understands which metrics are important for leadership (usually MAU, holding and income) and cruelly focus on them.
Art of increment
In Startups, I was accustomed to large, grounding rewriting and dramatic changes. I learned that the success of the Faang is the success currency.
Great, comprehensive changes are risky and politically difficult. Developing engineers are a series of small, safe changes that can be shipped independently. Less eye -catching but much more effective.
Storytelling Trumps application
This was perhaps my greatest revelation: Your ability to tell a compelling story about your work is often more important than the job itself.
I saw that mediocre projects were celebrated because technology leaders mastered while preparing narratives around the impact and value. On the contrary, I saw that the groundbreaking technical achievements were ignored because the engineers could not explain why anyone should care.
Learning to turn technical work into stories of business impact has been the most important skill I have developed.
How did I adapt (and you can do it too)
Establish Relations with Leadership
Perhaps the most irrational lesson was to realize that technical perfection alone could not take me where I wanted to go. It was enough to be the best engineer in my previous companies. In Faang, I discovered that the engineers who are really successful, there are engineers who have strong relationships with leadership while still embodimenting company principles.
This does not mean being a person or playing politics in a negative way. It means understanding that managers and main engineers operate in a different reality with different restrictions. While they are worried about the transitions of the Database scheme, they balance organizational priorities, number of personnel wars and three -month business investigations.
I started planning monthly coffees with my director, not to discuss my projects, but to understand their difficulties. I volunteered to create technical slides for three -month presentations. When the leadership announced new initiatives, I tried to connect our team’s work to these wider goals and frame it in terms of company values.
Conclusion? When I needed a owner of critical projects, my name came. When restructuring occurred (and always happens), my team’s statute expanded. And when I needed support for a controversial technical decision, I had allies relying on my leadership level.
It is an art form to see leadership without selecting itself. The key is to really add value to exhibit your skills. Don’t expect “discovery” – position yourself as someone who understands the technical and work layers of the organization.
Focus on the force multiplication
I stopped trying to be the hero who wrote the most code or finds the most wise solution. Instead, I focused on making everyone around me more effective.
I created better documents. I have created tools to automate joint tasks. I guided young engineers. In our processes, I identified and fixed the bottlenecks.
These contributions rarely occur directly in performance metrics, but they have a reputation as someone who makes the whole team better – this is much more valuable at the highest level.
Create your political capital
I started to deal with creating a relationship as part of my job, and it is not a distraction of attention from it. I planned regular coffee chats with engineers from other teams. I volunteered for cross -functional initiatives. I understood what other teams were working on and how my team’s work affected them.
When I needed support for a project or design decision, I no longer have to convince foreigners – I can reach the people I have already established relationships.
Learn to say no (strategically)
In Startups, I said yes to everything-you survived like this in a limited environment. Faang is a recipe for burnout and mediocrity.
I have learned to evaluate demands on the basis of visibility, impact and compliance with my career goals and company priorities. “It is not the best use of my time right now, but that’s not what I can do instead …”
This selective approach allowed me to focus on the really important thing.
Find your niche
The most respected senior engineers I know have an expertise – they are not only good in everything. They are “performance expert” or “reliability guru” or “scaling specialist”.
I have deliberately developed expertise in the distributed system observability. I became the Prometheus and OpenLemetry Wizard of our team, I created a really logical special graphan display tables, and I created a trace sampling system that reduces our observability costs by 72% while improving our signal-organization ratio.
This expertise meant that I was withdrawn architecture for high-scale systems and that I was a Go-to person when things went to the side in production. My environment may come out more often, but I only solve the challenges that really concern me, regardless of the ticket at the top of the Sprint Work List.
Unexpected benefits
Despite the first cultural shock, I found unexpected advantages for life in Faang:
- Scale and effect: After working in smaller companies, he stands against the pure access of what we build. It is deeply satisfactory to know that our study affects the lives of millions of people every day.
- Learning Opportunities: The complexity of problems and the existing resources to solve them are unique.
- Career capital: The brand name in my resume and the network I have built will open the door for the rest of my career.
- Human Impact Stories: Perhaps the most rewarding, occasional filtered customer stories – how our technology helped keep it in connection during a pandemi, allowing a small business to survive or made your daily life a little better in half of the world.
Is it worth it?
In five years, can I make the same choice again? Absolutely – but with more realistic expectations.
The job is not about being a coding hero who committed 2,000 perfect code per day or even the only revolutionary system architect. It is about taking advantage of the company’s large scale to create an impact. This is about visiting the complexity (technical, organizational and human) to send the products used by hundreds of millions.
If you are thinking of a high -level role in a Faang company, go openly. The difficulties will be different from you expect. You will spend more time than your IDE in design documents. Sometimes even if they sound like corporate speech, you need to be fluent in the principles of the company. You will have to learn a new definition of success in which your Github contribution graph looks sparse but your effect is everywhere.
However, if you can adapt, you will gain skills that are impossible to develop elsewhere. The satisfaction of seeing your work affects millions of users. And only the role you have – diplomat, partially architect, part coach – you can see that you are more interesting than the completely technical role you dream of.
The author is a senior software engineer at a Faang company, where the distributed system specializes in observability. After working at a service company and at a middle -stage technology company, they joined Faang five years ago and gained experience with structured environments before dived into the complexity of a technology giant.
