Why You Should Leave Your FAANG Job · Y Combinator

“Technical founders often misunderstand the value they can get out of Fang. And misunderstand is an understatement. They grossly misunderstand what value they can extract from a Fang job and what value they can't extract.”

“Most people that get most jobs at Fangs, when you talk to them after they have the job, if they're, you know, get a couple of beers in them, they're working on some bullshit ad server. They're working on like one pixel on one corner of one thing. They're worki…”

“A lot of what you learn is how to use the tools of the FAANG, which you don't get to use when you don't work there anymore.”

“Their standard for getting a product into even beta at Google is 10 X what an MVP in a startup is, and they just have to unlearn. It's like, can anyone find this useful? Launch.”

“But I think at some point, the more time you spend there, what was once a good positive signal could turn into a negative one. Again, I can't speak for all investors, but at some point you lose the shininess of getting that validation as well as what team you'…”

“If they can keep you spending your entire salary, and if they can keep the money that you haven't vested yet larger than the amount of money that you have in your savings by like two to three X, you never leave.”

“In many ways, this is a defensive tactic to warehouse talent. Out of the fear that maybe someone else can use you in a way that can hurt the company.”

“If you're a good programmer, if you're a good programmer and you leave and you leave in a nice way, no matter what happens to you can come back. There's actually not that much loss you have to take.”

“Yeah, like, I know a lot of ex-Facebook people who kind of, like, feel that they did evil, and they made money doing it, and they seem pretty unhappy about it. They're not happy about the work that they did in the universe.”

“If you're fighting the bonus head to head with no plan, bonus wins most of the time.”