Why I don't work for FAANG

If you've watched any of my coding tutorials, you know I'm not too shabby when it comes to programming. And if I was going to describe my expertise as a Haribo gummy flavor, it would definitely be the yellow one, which is far above the orange flavor for sure, but still has some room to improve compared to the green flavor. Now what confuses a lot of people is when they look at my bio, it doesn't say ex-Googler, and it doesn't say ex-Facebooker, and it doesn't even say ex-millionaire. Given that 99.99% of developers dream of working at Fang, it can be quite rare and startling to find a developer like myself who has reached yellow Haribo gummy status, yet does not work at a Fang company. And that's why I'm making this video, to explain to you that not everyone is Fang sexual. I was in the middle of editing this video and I realized not everyone will know what Fang sexual means, so I figured we do a quick interlude to define it. So Fang sexual is an adjective describing someone who is sexually attracted to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and or Google. It's kind of like how your gay friend can recognize a girl is hot, but at the same time not be interested in her romantically. Google has some nice perks, and I can see why other developers are interested in working there, but at the same time it's not my type. It's a huge turnoff when I see the company do so many things to just make the world a worse place, most notably creating AngularJS. Now not all Fang companies have made as major of mistakes as Google, and for a while I thought I might be interested in one of them, but it's hard looking back on it now to tell if I was actually interested, or if it was just the environment that I was in. Because if you weren't aware, there is a teeny bit of an obsession with these companies and the computer science community, and if you don't believe me, head on over to CS Career Questions on Reddit and you will just see a cult of Fang sexuals. Someone choosing an entry-level software engineering role at some no-name company in Idaho for $70,000 a year is seen as a wrong choice and a step in the wrong direction, and they act like the next thing you know that person is a carrot farmer when they weren't even, you know, using Angular. Like, what? I think it's great if you want to set a goal to work at a top company, but I've just seen way too many people just put their blinders on and tunnel vision on the same five companies when there's a lot of other good choices. Everyone just wants to date Chelsea, and then they get all depressed when they find out she's got a boyfriend, and it's like, bro, open your eyes. Audrey is right there, and she would be an even better match. It turns out, even if you start dating Chelsea, at the end of the day, she's still a company, and she can assign you to do grunt work, or to sit in on meetings all day, or even worse, assign you to a legacy Angular codebase, and we all know where that leads. Given that I was in an environment that had a lot of fangsexuals around me, and coupled with the fact that I'm a very competitive person, naturally, it became one of my goals to work at Fang. And one of the things that I look forward to most, well, besides the food of course, is being able to work with people that were smarter than me and just receiving mentorship. Because I didn't see Fang as my main goal. I saw it as a stepping stone to get where I wanted to go. And ultimately, I knew that I either wanted to start a software company, or to start a software consulting company and do more of a freelance style thing. I knew that's what I wanted to do. When I realized a couple things about myself. Number one, the inefficiencies of just normal office life just absolutely drive me crazy. Like, I can just feel the life being sucked out of my soul. As I just sit there twiddling my thumbs through some hour, two hour, three hour long meeting that I'm required to attend, or I'm going through the motion of some stupid process to get something approved, and I just, I just can't. Secondly, I'm not very satisfied by just getting by or just putting in half effort. I really like working hard at something. And it's extremely demotivating when the amount of work that you put in or the amount of results you achieve are not really correlated to what you get back. Or there is some sort of like virtual cap on the returns you can get. For example, let's say as a software engineer, you produce four times the results or four times the value for your company this year, it is extremely rare to see a company then compensate you four times your salary. More often what will happen is they'll give you a nice pat on the back. And then they'll promise you a promotion soon. As a result, that just switches my entire mindset. Like I'm no longer thinking about how I can do my best or do my best work. I'm thinking about what is the minimum amount of work or effort I need to output for my boss to tell me that I'm doing good. Also, it's kind of rough being managed by noobs and just watching them make terrible decisions and being relatively powerless to fix anything. Like I would much rather be the noob in charge making those bad decisions. If I was going to work for a company, it would probably be a smaller one or a startup where these problems are just less prevalent. Now they are kind of still there. And that's why really the most appealing option to me was just starting my own company. Okay, so this is kind of how I saw it playing out in my head, I would work at a fan company for a couple years, and just kind of grip my teeth through the parts I didn't like, and maybe I enjoyed parts of it. And then once I got some experience, and I kind of felt ready, I would then start my own company. But somewhere along the way, I realized that working at Fang first was just kind of an unnecessary step. And I could just jump to doing exactly what I wanted to do. And there was really no reason not to, I figured the best way to prepare myself to start a company would be just to start a company. And while working on Google would probably improve my skills, I was getting quite good at coding by just working on projects I was interested in, and using the internet as my mentor. And so I kind of felt like I didn't really need Google. Well, the company, the search engine, I definitely need. With that said, there was one argument that almost swayed me, because I make YouTube videos, and you pretty much get instantly more successful if you have the ex-Googler title. So that was very tempting. But ultimately, I decided that was kind of a dumb reason. And it just kind of didn't sit right for me to just do it for that, if that was my only reasoning. Anyway, that is why I do not work at Fang. And it's not that I think it is a bad place to work, or that I think you should not aspire to work there. It's just not for me. And I just prefer doing my own thing. Plus, guys, let's be real. If I got a job at Google, I wouldn't even last a week. All it would take is one Freudian slip about AngularJS, or one accidental confession of love for ReactJS, and well, I'm a goner.