Ask HN: Is working for FAANG as big of a deal in Europe as it is in the US?? How different is it to work for a big tech company in Europe compared to the US? Are FAANG jobs really that different compared to the rest of opportunities people have in Europe (in the same way that they are in the US)? |
Majority of people just think of FAAMG as "giant companies", so working for them is always very good, but it's not the same level as e.g reddit's cs careers question where people seem to be insanely desperated to get there
I'm currently studying (and working full time), so I'm close with opinions of peole that are in 20-25 years old range that are relatively new to the industry (0-3 years of exp) and people very rarely talk about FAAMG or any serious attempts to get to them
When it comes to online communities, then there are people who work in US or in FAAMG-ish companies and there's way more (relatively to _normal_ programmers/computer people) talk about it, but there's also a lot of people who prefer e.g Zurich, London and similar cool places.
So, overall I don't think that it is BIG deal, it is for sure significant topic that's happening from time to time because BIG tech companies are associated with doing cool stuff instead of CRUD Apps, so people can peak there, but nothing crazy.
I'm personally interested because I'm bored with CRUDs and I'd want to try to compete (or just test myself) against good people during recruitment :)
Also depending on the product, it is possible to move to US positions if you'd like, so there's that.
One of the best pros of working in a FAANG in Europe though is that for some countries, the companies inherit the culture. In my case, the country has an excellent work life balance culture. This has caused quite a few employees who moved to a US based product and then returned here, escaping the much worse working conditions in comparison. The only takeaway is that the compensation is much lower than the US, but this is largely due to the extremely higher taxes.
IMO people are not that desperate to work at FAANG in EU as in US (from what you can feel reading HN, blogs etc. "FAANG or die", "leetcode for life").
Reasons are: 1) FAANG have limited presence in EU. Often you'd have to move countries or at least cities. In many smaller cities you can also make good money in IT with lower cost of living outside of FAANG; 2) they pay better, but nowhere near the US market craze; you can get,say, 20k better but not 200k better; 3) FAANG in EU tend to hire rather senior engineers; 4) there's this feeling that it's hard to get there and you get whiteboarded with irrelevant process, so many people don't even bother trying; 5) many people are perhaps not very up to date with US companies' salaries possibilities (open salary sharing in EU is not very common, and glassdoor often has few / outdated data points; outsiders don't know about Blind, levels.fyi etc).
Having said that I'm in my 30s so I don't know what current students think.
Base salaries are usually similar but RSU and other benefits make the real difference. For example, most of the tech companies in London don't even provide health insurance, since they rely on NHS.
Startups try to use options to convince people but what you're given mostly wouldn't make you a millionaire in the event of exit or IPO.
I guess the other group of companies who could match what FAANG offers as a whole package would be hedge funds. I would say it's harder to enter them tho, since they still can throw your CV to the bin just because you don't have a degree from oxbridge.
I'd be happy if they stopped the salaries being like 2-3x smaller than the USA though - I get it, the CoL is lower, but it's not that much lower.
Another reason for crazy salaries in the valley is limited talent pool, which might change soon with companies moving to remote or at least being remote friendly. It’s quite hard to get someone into the US with H1B. As far as I know even Facebook and Google stopped sponsoring.
Pro tip: you can safely assume that any of the stuff you read online in terms of ethics in those companies exists solely for people to feel "woke" and for you to click on, and is highly biased. Do not take what you read online as the common viewpoint about those companies.
Companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google has had way more positive impact on society that surpasses any negative things that they have done. The negative things should be ignored, but require proper contextualization and accuracy to really understand what the overall impact is.
The difference is exactly the same, just that salaries are much worse overall in Europe so even though FAANG pay the same percentage more those salaries here don't look as impressive. The main reason not a lot of people work for FAANG in Europe is that FAANG doesn't hire a lot of people in Europe so those jobs are really hard to get compared to in USA.
The only problem is that the local branches tend to be small, probably due to higher costs of salaries, real estate and operations.
We do have the same amount of tech cartels (and other cartels), but working for one is not a big deal here. Here managers do hate engineers, so it's not high profile. And managers working for a FAANG don't have the highest respect neither. They could as well try to get into politics.
To put all of EU into one basket in terms of this is not really accurate. For example, in Russia/Poland and likely other Slavic countries where people saw a much better life when capitalistic principles were adopted, there is definitely a prestige associated with working at a big famous company and earning big bucks. Ironically, there is very much aura of "earn good salary, then spend it on BMW/Merc/Audi and a big house to impress your friends and family" with people from that background, which seems significantly less applicable to native US employees within the company.
Meanwhile, in places like Switzerland/Germany/France, while my exposure to those people is limited (friends of family in Poland/Russia), it seems that people care more about the quality of life than high salary. In those regions, high salaries have traditionally been very hard to get (you need connections almost more than talent), so most people don't see this within reach, and as a result value things like good work life balance, ability to have a family, vacation, and other common things.
(This isn't to name the even longer list of private companies that have comparable comp with reasonable assessment of their equity)
For example a friend of mine had a gallbladder removed on private last month but would have had to wait till middle of next year in NHS.
Not usually that bad, but covid means a lot of NHS hospitals are having to push back non-essential surgery.
[1] https://uk.virginmoney.com/virgin/living/article/is-private-...
If you go on the metric of how many people use the products these companies provide versus the drawbacks of using those services, both Facbook and Google are very valuable.