Bad Sides of Working at a FAANG

• Terrible Work-Life Balance
• You'll be treated as an employee number, sometimes it will feel like a sweatshop
• They want you available 24/7 all day, everyday, at night, weekends, and even holidays
• Work may be reduced to mostly mundane and boring pigeon hole
• Lots of bullying, favortism, sexism, and racism
• Lots of cultural fit innuendos at team events, meetings, and conferences
• Managers will try to steal your ideas and take credit for it
• Only a few people get a chance to do really interesting work
• Pay scales can be meh for majority of the employees
• Huge amount of red tape and slow decision-making process
• You are unlikely to make a huge impact
• High expectations and long hours
• Very competitive environment
• Very performance-driven culture
• Performance reviews can be very biased, they are already setting it against you
• Imposter syndrome
• Lots of frequent performance reviews means job insecurity
• Redundancies can happen at a drop of a hat, especially as management doesn't care about employees, they are just a number
• Shareholders matter over all else
• Corporate culture, less collegial
• Limited growth opportunities, you will be stuck in a rut, your talents and skills wasted
• Overly pretentious culture
• They will try to spoil you with benefits
• People can be rude, obnoxious, and unapproachable
• Lots of corporate secrets, and when things leak they follow huge dramatics and PR
• Lots of lying and deception, nothing as it seems
• Lots of interaction with dumb people who act like they are really smart when they really aren't
• Lots of gaslighting and cognitive biases
• Politics is the order of the day, every day, and it trickles down from management to employees, across regions
• You have to drink their "Kool-Aid", like live and breathe their corporate culture
• Lots of privacy concerns and pressure with public scrutiny
• You will feel like a small cog in a silo of work in a big company
• Culture of secrecy and lack of transparency
• Limited tolerance for mistakes
• Constant changes and sudden decommissions on projects
• Massive codebases so you have to be really careful on what you push out
• Lot's of ethical and moral dilemmas
• Good places to start your first job, not mid-career, or senior-career
• Don't aim to work there for more than couple years due to meager growth opportunities
• Lots of interaction with arrogant people, especially senior management who have very little to show for it
• All the interesting work happens in USA by very few select people in secrecy
• Lots of people who go to ivy league schools who suddenly think they know everything, but are practically zero
• Some people only want to be there because of the brand premium, not because they actually like the job
• It will feel like working at a frat with all the bells and whistles, just a lot worse, with a lot more unprofessional and talentless people
• Very patriarchal corporate culture
• They can be dead beat places for people with lots of ideas and mind for practical innovation as you will suddenly feel lack of value from clueless and lethargic people you interact with at work on a daily basis
• People get used as scapegoats all the time, especially ones that are really into their work or have even a slight glimmer of talent
• Corporate culture is rife with insecure people
• Lots of rush to churn through projects, high project turnover, low quality code everywhere
• Leave best practices out the door, they are not welcome here
• Lots and lots of hypocrisy