What is it like to have 20+ years of dev experience working at companies average people have never heard of?
Posted by 0kyou1@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 67 comments
I’ve recently came across this talk on YouTube about AI coding from mapocock (first time hearing this person and his work). It reminds me of all the tutorial-ish videos I’ve watched before from someone with presumably good experience and knowledge but lesser shiny resume. They have amazing ideas and imo much more mature understanding of software as if they are treating it as a craft.
So I kept wondering what was that like to work on smaller scale company (I am assuming that it wouldn’t be a lesser known company if traffic scale is global), not as a product/marketing/ceo but a full time software engineer for decades? Did you choose this life because it gave you the opportunity to write good complete software or you have other priorities in life that FAANG rat race is just not attractive?
swamy7799@reddit
Many engineers at smaller or lesser-known companies end up wearing multiple hats for years, which can create very deep practical understanding of systems and tradeoffs.
disposepriority@reddit
That's literally the majority of software engineers in the world though, people outside of reddit/social media really don't care/fetishize FAANG like you see on here.
Beneficial_Map6129@reddit
?
Definitely not in my case, although I did go to a T10 university and work in FAANG/silicon valley
newEnglander17@reddit
You are exactly what many of us don’t want to be. I remind all my coworkers that they shouldn’t work any more than 40 hours a week because salaried folks don’t get paid any more for those extra hours so they’re lowering their own pay. Software Engineers are supposed to be good at math but can’t figure that part out.
You’re using abbreviations like T10. Regular people outside of Silicon Valley do not talk like that. There’s also plenty to do in tech that isnt just writing new technology. There’s two types of programmers: those that have no idea what it is to work too much/easily taken advantage of, and those that got into programming because they’re lazy/dislike work and automating tasks means less work. I fall in that second half and as a result I love my career but I also don’t live in a bubble like you seem to.
OGicecoled@reddit
T10 university but no reading comprehension. Congrats.
Beneficial_Map6129@reddit
No I genuinely cannot emphasize with devs who have 5 YOE but are satisfied with making less than 100K, it just does not compute but I see it sometimes.
I can understand devs who can't make the cut, but wouldn't they at least try to get into FAANG for a 300K salary?
Worried-Panic5936@reddit
T10 university but can’t spell ‘empathize’
Beneficial_Map6129@reddit
Sorry I'm getting paid 300K to crank claude not spell here buddy
washtubs@reddit
We're doing what to Claude now? Does that get you a token discount or somethin'
IkalaGaming@reddit
“I'm over here cranking my Claude I got vim motions on my Claude right now. I'm just cranking my Claude I'm agentic as fuck man I'm a freak man like for real.”
ksceriath@reddit
Why did I read that in Jesse Pinkman's voice?
snakebitin22@reddit
What a dumb thing to brag about.
SHITSTAINED_CUM_SOCK@reddit
You got a stick up your arse don't you mate.
reboog711@reddit
There are so many factors in total compensation and a persons ability to live off that compensation. Location is a big factor. This statement has a lot of selection bias in it.
Case in point: It took me a lot more than 5 years to reach 100K. I eventually did it in the early 00s; over 20 years ago.
OGicecoled@reddit
Again T10 university but no reading comprehension. Congrats. And no comprehension outside of your lived experience. Congrats again.
FAANG and FAANG adjacent employ maybe 3% of all engineers? The other 97% are what to you?
Beneficial_Map6129@reddit
The other 97% couldn't make the cut and are struggling
OGicecoled@reddit
You’re a pathetic individual and I hope your meaningless existence is empty and filled with emotional suffering. Someone making \~$100k in Georgia being a dev is not struggling.
Beneficial_Map6129@reddit
Jesus Christ some really sensitive and salty people on this thread
Substantial-Twist674@reddit
I make ~250 and think you're a boner
NoobChumpsky@reddit
I'm 40 and can retire very comfortably, never worked at FAANG and think this guy is a boner (small one tho)
OGicecoled@reddit
No I’m just not letting you slide for being a douchebag weirdo. Calling out assholes isn’t being salty.
Silamoth@reddit
I can promise 97% of devs aren’t struggling lol. Source: I am one
Repulsive_Role_7446@reddit
"struggling" by making a decent honesy living like the rest of the world. Obviously we all live in a hellscape where there's seemingly not enough to go around because of the billionaires, but I would not characterize most non-FAANG software engineers as struggling.
FetaMight@reddit
I think the repeated layoffs have made it abundantly clear that there's nothing special about devs in big tech.
It's always funny when they start non-big tech jobs and flail strings like inbred cult members.
The_Real_Slim_Lemon@reddit
“Scraping by” - bro some of us care about work life balance, I get 100K working part time for a medium sized SAAS company, tech is cool, I have a lot of freedom to float between the teams and projects
I’m very satisfied with my lot in life
midniteslayr@reddit
lol ... I have near 20 years of tech experience as an engineer, and I remember a time when you'd be lucky to get a 60k a year job. Granted, now, at the Principal level that I am at, I am in the running for jobs that pay 250k, but it took me nearly 15 years to get to that pay wage. Oh and I don't have a college degree either.
The fact that you're looking down at "lesser" pay wages tells me that when the FAANG company actually lays you off, which is an inevitability at this point, you're gonna be a toxic hire and you won't last a month at any job until you eat some humble pie.
razzledazzled@reddit
You should have spent less time working and more time being a human being
IkalaGaming@reddit
> Why the hell would you get into this competitive field and not aspire to be in a leading company?
I like programming, so I went to school for that.
I don’t earn ludicrous money, but it’s plenty for me, I like my job, and I have good work life balance.
I like coding, but I also like having evenings and weekends for hobbies, hanging out with family, or relaxing. Chasing extrinsic aspirations would only increase my suffering, I have no interest in that.
gastro_psychic@reddit
Because I can travel the world and do whatever I want. Enjoy your desk job.
Specific_Ocelot_4132@reddit
We’re not talking about what people aspire to, we’re talking about what people actually experience.
ngqhoangtrung@reddit
you’re just a cog in the machine man
Repulsive_Role_7446@reddit
As another commenter hinted at, you likely do not have the skills to work at a ton of non-FAANG jobs, in the same way that many people who do not work FAANG jobs are more than qualified to do so. The main difference is they have a healthier outlook on life and value things other than money.
juggernawddy@reddit
Because those big companies are filled with people like you.
otro-wey-mas@reddit
Because they care about other things other than money and status?
not_a_racoon@reddit
So I can work an average of 40 hours a week, make 6 figures in a LCOL area, and spend the majority of my time doing things I enjoy with people I actually like.
metaphorm@reddit
believe it or not, other people aren't you, don't value the same things you do, don't see the world the same way you do, have different priorities in their life than you do, and define their aspirations differently than you do.
FetaMight@reddit
Christ.
dacydergoth@reddit
Work life balance, getting fucked over by every startup I've worked for, liking stable incoming in a LCOL area instead of $M to share a house in Bay area? Self respect where I don't have to kiss someone's ass daily to get their "approval"?
Bright-Secretary-710@reddit
I would argue most of the time faang engineers are doing the least interesting work too
iprocrastina@reddit
My experience making a career change and working in FAANG is that most people do care.
My first career was neuroscience, I worked in labs, I was published, no one really cared. People would humor me, but no one understood wtf I did, they were just like "oh, youre a scientist, you must be really smart" and then changed the topic.
I changed to SWE and worked at a no name company. Again, no one really cared and were even less interested than when I was handling brains all day.
Then I got a job at a FAANG. Now when people find out where I work they are very impressed. WAY more impressed than when I was a neuroscientist. Americans do very much fetisize working at huge corporations they hear about all the time.
Honestly it's kind of depressing.
barravian@reddit
I think he means most other devs don’t care that much. When I hear someone works at FAANG, I try to probe what they do, because some have super interesting jobs; but the majority are glorified paper pushers.
Necessary-Focus-9700@reddit
IMHO and IME some of those smaller companies are awesome. Management that knows how to set reasonable goals so everybody is going the same direction. No micromanagement. No psychopathic CEOs. No weird kindergarden meets cult vibe.
Honestly FAANG feels far and away the outliers. And the whole FAANG pedigree thing is obnoxious.
spez_eats_nazi_ass@reddit
Fuck you pay me. And to those who have never heard of my employer. The guy who owns your employer’s building hears the same thing from my employer when the insurance bill is due. Same for the surety bond on that data center project. Fuck you. Pay me.
Eric848448@reddit
> Fuck you. Pay me.
I’ve recently come into this particular phase of my career. I start a new job in two days at a quant shop after having worked in the industry years ago but left due to.. well, long story.
spez_eats_nazi_ass@reddit
The downvotes are all laid off faang developers that call themselves engineers that have been out of work 2 years because the thought of doing tech outside tech never occurred to them.
Eric848448@reddit
I’ve applied to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, AND Meta and got rejected! I suppose I’ll have to apprentice myself to a pipefitter.
spez_eats_nazi_ass@reddit
Gonna go drive a bus because fartcoin.ai’s team decided the description of my agenic ai setup was too 90s retro and i couldnt gape my asshole wide enough for the cto to get up to his elbow.
blckshdw@reddit
Lmao
Ya seems alot of the FAANG “engineers” have this weird cuck fetish where they like to be abused and then disposed of a d keep going right back to it
Eric848448@reddit
You don’t understand! The Meta recruiter who spammed me on LinkedIn was VERY IMPRESSED with my experience! That means Mark Zuckerberg personally saw my profile and said HIRE THIS MOTHERFUCKER ASAP!
juggernawddy@reddit
I was owning end to end features in my first month lol. Very fast senior promotion (had to jump jobs). Smaller companies is where all the actions at. I get to see my work impact the world around me on a daily basis. In most cases there was just one position between me and the CEO/president. I see it as a craft for sure. My experience has provided me a deep understanding and mastery of computers and coding. I close my eyes and can see entire software systems from only vague specification. It is something I take deep pride in as an individual.
wrex1816@reddit
What the fuck man. The internet has broken some peoples brains.
Prime_1@reddit
Lots of experienced devs at smaller or unknown companies that are more capable than some at famous ones.
Most companies are pretty much the same.
stonerbobo@reddit
I mean its funny but even 10 years ago there were probably like 10 big software companies average people had heard of. Go back another couple years, maybe like 5. Honestly your question sounds funny to me like you're so trapped in the FAANG/clout bubble you don't understand there are 10,000s of companies with large scale and/or interesting and challenging problems. Only people who've never worked outside FAANG tend to assume anything else is just trivial, but its just a different set of problems and constraints and you will learn different things working there, for example how to design systems from scratch with low resources, tight time constraints and then evolve them as time goes on.
Fabulous-Possible758@reddit
Having both worked small teams and done contracts in FAANG, the thing that always blew me away was how wasteful FAANG is. Like there are definitely cool problems they work on, and occasionally they have the resources to just set some people on producing cool optimized libraries that make them look better, but the majority of what I saw was “we have compute to spare so we’re just gonna use it.” The comparison to “We really need to run this MMO server on the boss’s old desktop cause that’s what we have for hardware” and the level of creativity that could bring out was very stark.
midniteslayr@reddit
A lot of the time, those smaller companies have better work-life balance and can still pay a living wage without the headaches that the large scale companies have. Also, you can easily get lost in the shuffle in a bigger company and not affect as much change or see as much success as you'd like, and even work on projects that aren't meaningful to you. Smaller companies, on the other hand, offers better opportunities for your career, skill set, and motivation that is really enticing to more senior developers.
Basically, it boils down to scale. Those bigger, known companies operate on a scale that 99% of other software developers aren't operating at. And because that scale is so much bigger, there is more at risk, and there is more stress for it, but the compensation is enticing (including equity or stocks that can set you up for life) and that is why there are many people trying to get those jobs.
I have worked at a number of places that have a huge "name" in the world, and yeah, it's kinda cool to say you work there, but the issues they have usually outweigh the benefits they provide.
FetaMight@reddit
I've done work for tiny companies doing truly crazy fun engineering and I've also worked for companies in the top 200 (by market cap).
The smaller companies area BY FAR more enjoyable. Large corporations tend to attract knobs making the day to far job more about navigating knob politics than actual engineering.
Sure, the money is better, but almost everything else is worse.
Work is better when you like your colleagues and they're not one possible promotion away from backstabbing you.
Amoeba_Academic@reddit
It's literally the same as working in a company that people would recognize? This might be the stupidest question I've seen here all day
nana_3@reddit
As some other comments say, this is the average developer with 20+ yoe.
A lot of my coworkers have been at the small company I work at for over 20 years. Long term they’ve been at various small companies for 30+ years.
The scale of the problems they face might not be billions in traffic and petabytes of data but they consistently have run into the messy reality of programming something for real life. And often they’ve done it in scenarios where there’s little money or manpower to help them so they just learn to figure it out.
localhost8100@reddit
I have worked in small companies. Max in one company was 50 people. My average has been 20 people companies.
Whole app life cycle depends on in smaller companies. I can decide how I implement things. I can do any automation, pipelines, etc.
Working in 50 people company was nuts. They changed their direction of product and laid us off cause we were not skilled in that stack. Just absurd.
Always made less than average money. Never stress about on calls.
SHITSTAINED_CUM_SOCK@reddit
I was the only "Dev" (a geologist with interest) for four years building things out of necessity. Went and actually studied (learned nothing new oddly enough) then joined a large team of seven developers.
I don't think I'd survive a large team without direct input into product/deliverables. No stress is great. Money isn't important in life anyway once the bills are paid.
metaphorm@reddit
15 years at startups, all of them in their seed round through Series B/C phases. It's a personal choice based on my own sense of well-being at work. I thrive in environments where the total org size is less than about 80 people.
Every company is different. Working in smaller engineering orgs means you get really used to wearing lots of different hats, and doing more with less. It's a different kind of challenge than operating at a global scale. It's working at a modest scale but having a lot of resource constraint (people, time, infrastructure, etc.) that has to make it into the calculus for a good solution.
It also refocuses the value proposition really sharply. The companies I'm working for have customers that have pretty demanding requirements. we solve business problems that they have with our product. it's got to work the way our customers need it to work. it's a very different kind of thing than "increase advertising revenue by 0.1%". it's "retain $5 million worth of customer revenue by delivering value add features they've asked for specifically".
originalchronoguy@reddit
I did work that was by far more challenging at smaller companies than in Big Tech. Big Tech has a lot of CRUD admin dashboard slop.
I was doing stuff like making tools to create animation, interactive video games, authoring tools for magazine layout, pushing out 2,000 dynamic videos to 2,000 facebook pages for companies with 2,000 locations. Highly personalization, recommendationi engines, funnel builders. Web apps that act and behave like desktop apps. I was doing a lot of 3D stuff like virtual walk throughs, design your own living room,etc.
At my day job, whenever something remotely interesting comes up, I'll be like, "I built something like that 10 years ago, here is a git repo." It was simply more challenging.
Now, it is rather formulaic. Make things scale fast, handle large loads and make sure it can be unplugged with disaster recovery. After a while, system design for hyperscaling is repetitive.
diablo1128@reddit
I've only worked at private non-tech companies in non-tech cities that you have never heard of. I created safety critical medica devices, think of things like dialysis machines that need clinical studies and FDA approval. I've been doing this for 15 years because that's the job I got out of school.
The software isn't particularly "good" from a quality perspective. Lots of C with classes style C++ with methods 100's of lines long and multiple levels of nesting. Also classes that encapsulate more than 1 concept with 50 public methods.
At the end of the day it's a job that pays well for the area, but I'm not getting rich at 110K. I am a big fish in a small pond which has it's pluses. I even got my name as an inventor on granted patents, which is kind of cool even if nobody cares.
I'm not smart enough to get in to big tech companies and I find grinding Leetcode boring. I've interviewed at many of the big tech companies over the years and I never get an offer. Though those opportunities seem to have dried in the past year when they do call I just do them for shits and giggles because I know I'm not getting an offer.
dmcnaughton1@reddit
Not yet at 20+ yrs, but having hit 8.5 yrs with the same company I feel like I have at least a decent perspective on this. I enjoy the work, the tech stack, and have a genuinely good set of coworkers and leadership. The kind of product (e-commerce essentially) is a lot more appealing to me than say working at Lockheed where I'd be building software for missiles or something else more ethically problematic.
It's also easier to grow your career in an organization like this, where you can build both a mastery of the technology side, but also the business end. Business domain knowledge is probably the most valuable commodity in organizations like this. I am now the manager of the team I originally joined back when I was an SE2, and only now do I feel like I have a solid grasp of the platform as a whole.
RapidRoastingHam@reddit
Not myself, but my old job was for a company now owned by Boeing but still on the smaller/unheard of size. Mostly in DoD space. Guys been here 40 years, retiring soon. He runs the whole program, redoes most people’s code himself, knows so much that no one else does and isn’t documented anywhere. Pretty scary thinking of when he’s gonna retire. Will be real tough developing and not introducing bugs without him, with peoples lives literally on the line. Big push to modernize right now but that won’t be done before he leaves.
kabekew@reddit
Similar, I worked in DoD/Aerospace in the D.C. area with guys who had been there 30+ years and were still actively developing. I think they loved the quality of life because the office emptied at 5pm on the nose, no weekend work, everything would shut down Christmas to New Years', and management was great with no pressure or micromanaging. Probably the best place I ever worked.
dfltr@reddit
I’ve worked at a few companies that people have definitely heard of, and a lot of smaller ones ranging between 5-50 people.
Honestly, the work is the work. It’s fun working at insane scale and high stakes, it’s also fun working on 0->1 problems and justifying your existence every day. Engineering is fun, and other things rarely override that in terms of importance to your everyday experience.