What surprised you after you started working at FAANG?

I was surprised at how political people were at the bottom of the org chart.

I expected the front-line ICs to be united against middle-manager politics, but I found the opposite. Middle management was generally professional and transparent, while the toxic politics came from younger ICs looking to claw their way up the ladder.

I think it's a side effect of selectively hiring people who have been high achievers all of their lives. Drop them into a company where their intelligence is just average and many people resort to politics to get a leg up. Not everyone was like this, of course, but I've never worked with so many people rushing to throw their coworkers under the bus if they thought it might help get them closer to their next promotion.

Politics. I found that getting promoted within FAANG depends largely on your ability to navigate politics, not on how good you are at your job. You will move up much faster if you optimize for "Find the right people and get them, through whatever means, to say great things about you at performance reviews" - I've seen many brilliant people at the company who never moved up because they were bad at navigating or manipulating human relationships. And I've also seen people who were, let's say, not the brightest, but extremely good at manipulating people and make themselves look good - they moved up very quickly.

It has also given me a new appreciation of why startups can be so efficient. The joke that every gmail redesign made the product worse but had to be done because someone needed to get promoted is no joke. When politics falls away and everyone's incentive is to become profitable or to build a good product the result can be magical.

Not a FAANG, but a couple of "world-class" employers that pay similarly.

Probably most surprising was that there were a substantial number of people that (though very sharp) had pretty severe personality problems. The challenges and politics of dealing with these people seemed to dominate the merely technical challenges.

As a corollary, though their hiring filters were quite tight, these shops seemed to be only somewhat more productive than what you might see in a random US corporation. I would have thought it would be a day and night difference, but it wasn't.

A third minor surprise: Sometimes these companies spend huge on salaries but don't provide very good working conditions (office, desk size, quiet, decent bathrooms, etc.).

I was surprised by how much I hated it. It caused an existential crisis for me to have reached the "pinnacle" job and to feel so alienated and pointless.

Haven’t worked at a FAANG but a similarly large well known trendy company. The access I had to their users’ data simply as an employee

One thing that really surprised me was the massive scale of it all. These companies are sooo huge and have so many resources to play with. They can afford to expirement and have huge teams work on things that may not pay off in the end.