How many days a week do you work in the office (hybrid) for FAANGMULA companies (Silicon Valley specifically but ok if other regions)? How many hours a week for actual work on product vs attending meetings?
How many days a week do you work in the office (hybrid - as in, the expectation of coming in-person) for FAANGMULA companies (Silicon Valley specifically but ok if other regions) as a ratio to work from home/remote?
How many hours a week for actual work on product vs attending meetings are in-person vs. Zoom or remote?
I'm looking at interviewing at different positions at FAANGMULA companies and tech startups in Silicon Valley (from SF to South Bay) and trying to compare against my commute if I work 2-3 days out of the week from home vs work from home/remote and want to know what the standard expectation is.
I ask since I had a friend (director level) who works in analytics/data science that worked remotely from Hawai'i most of the pandemic at a L5-L7 level depending on how folks define that and was able to work 20 hours a week. Their new job they work remotely from Silicon Valley and commute to another state once a quarter for meetings.
I wonder how common this is, it's a pattern I see with a lot of friends, all CTO, founder, investor type of folks (fractional, etc.) who are "full time" on paper (1099 contract paid an equivalent of what I would have previously expected a W-2 working 40 hours a week would pay). I am having issues explaining to my family and my partner who work the traditional 9-5 job, 40 hours a week in old school Silicon Valley (publicly traded companies, biotech etc.), where they are expected to come in the office 3-5 days a week and work on a W-2 so cannot seem to fathom how I see these examples as possible and how it could be a possibility for me have a better work-life balance, working lesser hours, commuting 2 or 3 days a week ideally and remote.
![Senior Software Engineer [E5] at Meta company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Fmeta.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3Da7a5bcc0-e178-4b5b-b71e-09bf6c6aefae&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
![Entry-Level Software Engineer [L3] at Google company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Fgoogle.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D780356ef-3efc-4728-9eb4-d909b75bb4a6&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
Discussion
(6 comments)- 3
7 months agoStaff Eng @ Google, Ex-Meta SWE, Ex-Amazon SDM/SDEAre you hoping to get a 1099 job where you’re paid for full-time work and work part time? Or are you expecting to work “normal” hours for one of these companies and just need to know what hybrid schedule looks like?
I was full remote at Google until a few weeks ago, and am now hybrid, going to a local office 2x per week. The 2x per week was established from my org when RTO happened, so that’s why this is the standard. I am adjusting, it’s going OK.
I consider attending meetings work, but I have a pretty significant amount of time to be heads down. Much more than when I was at Amazon (even as an engineer, but as a manager it was close to no time out of meetings). Right now I probably have 4-6 hours of meetings per week. I don’t count a huge org all hands type things where I have it on one monitor passively and still work on other things, but that’s maybe an hour meeting one a month.
- 07 months agoSenior Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
Bingo you hit the head on the nail "Are you hoping to get a 1099 job where you’re paid for full-time work and work part time" YES. Basically. And thanks for sharing!
- 17 months agoStaff Eng @ Google, Ex-Meta SWE, Ex-Amazon SDM/SDE
I guess if you are providing the employer a value of full time pay in part time, I don’t think there is anything like… morally objectionable to this.
If you commit to do work, and do it in whatever time you allocate, cool. If you are leading them to believe you’re working full time… I don’t know. Grey area, leaning toward “I don’t like it”.
I don’t know anything about contract work, or being a partial CTO or whatever, so… shrug maybe others have a better take on this.
- 37 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
May I make a meta-comment? I truly, genuinely want to help here, and I spent about 8 minutes reading and then re-reading what you wrote.
I am having a hard time getting to the heart of your question 😭
I tried to reflect on why this question felt so difficult to answer. The first thing that stands out is the average sentence length. The average number of words per sentence in your question is 31.5 with 60% of the sentences having more than 25 words.
A quick google search suggests that optimal readability is < 20 words per sentence, and you should aim for 15.
Both in Taro and in the workplace, I think you'll get faster and better feedback if you aim for brevity (Asking Effective Questions That Get Great Answers Quickly). Just wanted to share my observation. Your question is very valid and I want to ensure you get the insight/guidance you're looking for!
- 2
7 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroHow many days a week do you work in the office (hybrid - as in, the expectation of coming in-person) for FAANGMULA companies (Silicon Valley specifically but ok if other regions) as a ratio to work from home/remote?
From what I've seen, Big Tech is generally doing 3 out of 5 days per week of RTO (OpenAI is doing this too).
How many hours a week for actual work on product vs attending meetings are in-person vs. Zoom or remote?
So the meeting presence will depend on if you're in the office or not I imagine. If your team is all in-person, you should probably attend in-person.
The other part of this question I think is about heads-down IC work vs. meetings if I'm interpreting this correctly, and this will depend on your level and what kind of engineer you are. At Staff+ (and even for many senior engineer), they will have far more meetings and less heads-down IC work (I've seen Staff Engineers with meeting loads equivalent to managers). Meetings were like 35% of my weeks overall at Meta (I was on the higher-end though as I was mentoring 10+ engineers to prepare for an EM transition).
- 17 months agoSenior Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
Thanks for the comment @Alex and Rahul - and promise I will try to be less verbose. Good to know, and ya my friend was as TPM and a Director and was able to do meetings but keep a lesser workload at 20 hours a week (and they were ex-Google btw, I guess it depends on the department and product).
