What's the right way to look for my next job?
I’m about to start applying for jobs. I’d like for my next job to be at FAANG for all the reasons that Alex and Rahul mention it’s good to begin your career at FAANG. This is my third job out of school, so I’m a little late, but better late than never :)
I believe what Alex and Rahul said about working at FAANG is that it’s good because you:
- Get to work with really talented people and learn good fundamentals and practices.
- Get top-of-the-market compensation.
- Set yourself up for more 1 and 2 in the future whether or not you leave
My crude approach to getting into a FAANG/FAANG-equivalent company is to look at levels.fyi, and run down the list of companies and apply. This approach certainly satisfied point 2 above, and is also very good for getting 1 and 3 as well given that all 3 points are highly correlated.
I know that referalls are important, so I do plan on tapping my network as well.
But I wonder, am I thinking about this the right way? Is there a better approach? If I could in theory get super-amazing 1 and 3, and get less 2, I think I’d be willing to do that. But I’ll never come across such an opportunity if I’m just using levels.fyi
All thoughts are welcome 😊
![Mid-Level Software Engineer [SDE 2] at Amazon company logo](/_next/image/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffirebasestorage.googleapis.com%2Fv0%2Fb%2Ftech-career-growth.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fcompany_logos%252Famazon_logo.jpg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3Dff5f2302-08be-43bc-b7b1-d381ba508d99&w=48&q=75){kind=logo}
Discussion
(1 comment)- 12 years agoRobinhood, Meta, Course Hero, PayPal
If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend our full session on finding a proper company/team for you.
The first part of that session is the most important, and it essentially says: Seriously think about your priorities, stack rank them, and work backwards from there.
At the end of the day, you are the person who knows you the most, so nobody can really tell you what your priorities should be. All the benefits you mentioned to working at FAANG are great (I've experienced them myself), so if those match your top priorities, your thinking makes sense to me!
One thing I will say is to be careful of tunnel-visioning on getting into FAANG - It can be very unhealthy and ironically hold you back from getting in. There are many other great companies out there besides FAANG, particularly high-growth startups. Keep an open mind and just focus on getting into a company where you can grow - Don't make your goal explicitly "I absolutely have to get into FAANG".
