# Dalton & Michael: Why you should leave your FAANG job

**Author:** Dalton Caldwell, Michael Seibel
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Ih-dalton-michael-why-you-should-leave-your-faang-job
**YouTube ID:** sM2reZib2RY

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Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel discuss the struggles of working at FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google)
and how to strategize leaving a big tech job to become a founder at a startup.

## Transcript

we all know these people that want to just like tell you their darkest secret which is they wake up every day and they like dream of quitting like they have fantasies of quitting every day those are people that probably should quit [Music] this is michael cybel with dalton caldwell and today we're talking about how to break out of fame i think almost inadvertently because we talked to so many young

technical people young technical founders and potential founders we've become experts at career advice and specifically big tech career advice which i don't know about you dalton it's not an expertise i ever wanted to develop at all yeah i mean i've never worked at a fang like this is probably the last thing i'd be interested in talking about with people but man we get exposed to lots of this stuff and i think what's interesting is that technical founders often misunderstand

the value they can get out of feng and misunderstand is an understatement they grossly misunderstand what value they can extract from a fang job and what value they can't extract i think mostly because a lot of founders are mixed in with other people with different motivations right most people want to be managers or employees i think a lot of founders have friends who want to be managers employees and they kind of like see those people attracted to fang and they assume all those things apply to them as well whereas you know as we both know the

founder path's quite different than the employee path yeah it's funny i remember when i was an undergrad a lot of the recruiters the people that had the the most recruiters and the best recruiters tried to create cachet i remember you know when i was in school it was all around management consulting was the high status cool jobs to get and um it was a certain kind of person that would like fall for that that like working at mckinsey or accenture or something was like the cool thing to do and what's funny is at the time google

was like an 80 person startup and they were trying to recruit on campus but it was like i would have cared do you want to be different like it was exactly the opposite brand of what of what google is now because there was just kind of a grubby little startup um but the point is it's easy it's easy to look at folks that employ the most recruiters um and and use that as your basis like whoever has the best booth at the career fair whoever gives out the coolest stuff and and make your selection that way

right if that's if that's the criteria you used to select what college should go to which is like oh whatever has the best rankings you look at the best career rankings for where to work after college and that's going to drive you towards you know google facebook whatever right it's not crazy i get i get why this happens and if you want to be an employee or a manager in a large tech company that's great like that's correct in fact i'd argue all those guides are written for you and it makes sense to write guides for you because you're the vast majority of people

the problem is what should the founders do what should the potential founders do what should the future yeah people that are curious founder curious people the people that might want to maybe they're like oh start i think that'd be cool what's their move exactly so let's start with some of the assumptions that we hear from these potential future founders about why working at fang right out of college or soon thereafter makes sense why it's and and it never it's never presented us to us as like it's a pretty good

opportunity it's always presented to me at least as like oh of course it's essential it's an essential part of the state of fact they're stating facts that's like we must work so here's the first one we hear a lot um before a car i start a company i want to get experience working on the hardest technical problems at the largest scale and fang is the only place in the world to do this what do you think dalton that is that's just quoting the recruiter

[Laughter] you're like you're like reading the you're reading what the recruiter's line is i mean look most people that get most jobs at fangs when you talk to them after the job if they're you know get a couple of beers in them they're working on some [ __ ] ad server they're working on like one pixel on one corner of one thing they're working on some project that's going to get killed like again if if you're someone that's like a good enough programmer to get hired to work on some deep technical infrastructure google then this line is

true but most folks that i talk to at least kind of have what is like a shitty job but that's been presented in brand to them branded to them is a very cool thing and again this is marketing like they want you to take the job they want you to keep the job and someone's got to do all the crappy ad server work right someone's got to and so if you actually look at the numbers way more folks that you meet that work at a fang job have the equivalent of like some shitty ad server

like buttons or translating into foreign languages or something just like the worst job android settings and the people then the people that are working on the core search infrastructure at google which again that actually sounds really cool and that is working on hard technical problems the larger scale you know so i think you just want to be honest about what the job actually is and not just quote the recruiter well and let's be clear the way that you actually learn what the job is is you talk to someone doing it you don't talk

to the recruiter like i think maybe people don't quite understand how the entire job of the recruiter and the number one they get way they get paid promoted everything is convincing you to sign up yeah they get comped per person it's just it's like a car salesman they don't make money if they don't sell their car if they don't if you don't sign on the dotted line they're not getting paid um the next one is dalton and this is a little a little more vague like it's going to be easier for me to be successful at my startup

i'm going to learn important lessons i can apply to my startup if i work for a while at fang right because the lessons i learned at a big company can directly apply to my early stage startup right isn't that how it works look i think in some situations folks that are really green can learn a lot about working on a team and having a manager learning about how corporations work learning about politics it's a great way to learn about politics but you'd be surprised at how many founders that we talk to

will tell you that nothing they did in their job translates at all to their startup like could not be less relevant versus their college coursework was more relevant isn't that weird like and it's because in a lot of things you have so much tooling again i'm talking about programmers here but you have so much infrastructure inside of google or facebook to do your job and they have their own way of doing code reviews like there's just all this stuff so when you start a startup and you have none of it and you're starting from scratch you're like wait what happened to all those tools i was

used to using and bigtable and bigquery and all you know whatever whatever you had yes and you like you're dependent on those tools and so it's a lot more like doing a college project again where you kind of have there's no tooling there's no infrastructure you have to create everything from scratch and so again what's funny is like you know you learn a lot of stuff but a lot of what you learn is how to use the tools of the fang which you don't get to use when you don't work there anymore get what i'm saying again this is a very programmer-centric point but like yes i've seen founders run into this problem

a lot the way that i would say this slightly differently is that i think when you work on fang founders find that there's more they have to unlearn whereas like college wasn't actually set up to help them get products out in the wild but it didn't give them a whole process that they can't use with their startup whereas like in many ways the big companies give them a whole process that is just completely irrelevant from when you're doing a company and so you have to unlearn i've worked with so many google engineers who are just like

their standard for getting a product into even beta at google is 10x what an mvp in a startup is and they just have to unlearn it's like can anyone find this useful launch and i've had to fight with founders on that where it's like oh well this would never this would never see the light of day at google and it's like yeah that's not that's not the standard okay here's another one right well vcs they care right like a vc is good like

we all know that google um engineers can just raise a series a can raise five to ten million dollars like with almost nothing right like this is my path to getting funded i mean it depends on i mean certainly depending on your resume it could it could be helpful right it's it's a good brand name to have so i i don't think that's false 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 um as well as what team you're on and all this other good stuff and so you know i think there's some truth to that is what i'm saying but like if you stayed there for eight years that doesn't apply anymore you kind of have to get out to get the benefit of it i also think there's this weird feeling i think people will read techcrunch and see oh these google people are getting funded and then the kind of assume vcs are like walking the halls like being like engineer here's term sheet the flow

that you walk through to work to like go to mit and be a cs major and then get employed at facebook is nothing like the flow you'd work you'd walk through to go from a facebook engineer to raising money like these are not the same flow and i think people really mistake those this is one of my big talking points to founders in the batch which is you don't read about the unsuccessful fundraisers and so if all you read is the successful fundraisers it looks like everyone is raising and every google engineer is

raising and every because we just never hear about the ones that didn't happen and so don't fall for that it's not that easy you can't just wave a magic wand and they're not just handing out you know we say this they won't believe us michael but like i think people actually think they just hand out party favors or something you know oh yeah you worked at google like yeah isn't there a special door at a16 you just walk in that door present your google credentials and money money

maybe not well that's the thing is there's just there's a lot of google employees and ex-googlers now do the math it doesn't pencil out let's talk about the trap right so so these are a lot of assumptions that future founders have let's talk about on the other side what's the company trying to do right and i think this is something that i hear a lot where the company is trying to retain you and trying is not the right word the company has engineered and iterated a system

over often times a decade plus to retain you and when you sign that piece of paper you have to understand you're going into the same retention flow or retention flow built by a company that often is trying to retain uses on its product like it's really good yeah it's highly gamified it's highly gamified oh i can get my next level michael i want to get the my next level upgrade and then i unlock my booster pack founder blah blah blah share reward and then i get level 14 like

yeah and one of the things that i see that founders don't realize is how the fangs will do this around equity so here's a story that founders will tell me right i'm going to get in with some kind of signing bonus i'm going to feel good some kind of sound i'm going to feel good some kind of equity package i'm going to feel good i'm well compensated this is great and then i'm gonna get out but of course that equity is vesting over four years right like you know you're in that equity a little bit of time over four years so that's the first part of the trap right it's like if you if you leave

you say goodbye to that money the second part of the trap is that if you're good six months in you get another chunk of equity but it's vesting over four years so think about it you've been there for six months but there's disproportionately more money that you have invested yet which incentivize you to stay a little bit longer this is a dark pattern it's a loss aversion which is people do a rash if you give someone something and then threaten to take it away they will irrationally value it to avoid a loss

versus they never had to begin with they won't do it again you know google this loss of version is a thing so yes there's a lot of stacked lock over loss aversion around vesting especially because founders will think of it as their savings and this is the second part of the trap right you're around a lot of people who want to be employees and managers not founders oftentimes they're up styling they're upscaling their lifestyle nicer apartment car nicer vacation because they want to be in this world they're not looking to save money to start their company right and so the people around you start

spending money especially because they see that vesting equity as almost savings so bam you're not saving money because you're going on instagram vacations bam you continue to get these little equity bonuses that vest over four years if they can keep you spending your entire salary and that they can keep the money that you have invested yet larger than the amount of money that you have in your savings by like two to three x you never leave like you like like your brain tell like a rational human says don't leave

yeah and again where's this coming from we talk to these people and they're like yeah i hate my life but this is the setup like they explain this to us as like the reason they can't do the thing they want to do it's kind of sad to talk to someone who's like ex they lay all this stuff out for us and they're like and therefore you know i can never do a startup or something and like they're like 25 and it's like and this is how the math works out i can't i can't i can't i'm not free i

can't do it 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 whereas if they warehouse you on the android setups team yeah think about it's like speculative science projects that get axed and that never ship like i saw that facebook built some kind of silicon they built a chip and then they were like no never mind and like they never shipped the thing that probably people dozens of people spent years of their

life on i saw that paypal had some kind of research lab they just laid everyone off this week like basically if you're not on the core thing you have no promises that your work will ever turn anything and how bad does it feel to spend five or six years and just oh yeah we were in the moonshots group they decided not to do our thing they shut down our group that sucks and oftentimes that's the thing that got you to sign right that was the thing oh like i would have never worked on the normal thing it

was the moonshot so if you're getting ta if you're technical and you feel like you're getting trapped here dalton like how do you know it's time to get out like how do you know like okay like or even if you see a friend in this situation how do you know it's time to tell them like hey like hey think about breaking up i think for the people that i talk to which again it's it's probably not a representative set of the average it's probably the people that are more disgruntled but um to the extent that you have conversations where it's like talking to someone

that's like an alcoholic and it's like i gotta stop drinking like i can't do this anymore again i'm trying to be funny but it's like when someone's just like i don't know why i'm doing this but i'm still doing it and i can't stop but i hate my life like like if that sounds like you or your friend talking about your job at facebook that's probably a good sign you maybe shouldn't do it anymore and and the actual tactical thing you do is keep your personal burn low so you can do it and not get hooked on the money with all this gamification we talked about

and realize you can always come back 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 you can come back there's actually not that much loss you have to take and so versus the people that are like no this is cool i like my life yeah stay there right this this message is not for you but we all know these people that want to just like tell you their darkest secret which is they wake up every day and they like dream of quitting like they have fantasies of quitting every day

those are people that probably should quit and it's interesting because we're probably talking to like one percent of the developers at fang companies like one percent for like 99 developers at fantom is irrelevant this is this is not relevant yeah this is not for you we're not we're not trying to argue with you right we're just saying though if you know someone that's deeply unhappy because of decisions they're making they can just make different decisions you can tell them that you can break the spell you can break the spell so to wrap up

right like the fang optimization i think there's a couple kind of takeaways here like i think the first one is that like if you're technical and you want to be a founder um and you decide that faying is the the right part for you the right path for you at least to start um a couple things you should be thinking about one is how long you're going to stay right like how can you stay for long enough to get the value without getting trapped

so if you get trapped your plan goes to [ __ ] it sounds like the second one and you were touching on this like don't work on projects that will like make you hate your life make you hate tech like cause you to decide to just become like a a nomad who roams like you know weird beaches in southeast asia like we know these people like 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 seemed pretty unhappy about it

they're not happy about the work that they did in the universe and so yeah don't don't do that like like the psychic scars of doing that stuff is is expensive well and it'll prevent you from being optimistic about tech which you need to be if you're going to be a startup founder like you need to be optimistic i say the last one is have a plan at the start like know what you're trying to accomplish you're trying to get a visa you're trying to save money are you trying to get this on your resume have a

plan for what you're trying to accomplish by taking one of these jobs and a plan for when you want to leave it's a lot easier to have a plan when you're not looking a bonus in the eye right if you come in with the plan when the bonus thing happens you'll see it coming if you're fighting the bonus head to head with no plan bonus wins most of the time all right with that that's how to break out of fang thanks dalton thanks [Music]

[Music] you
