People who rejected a FAANG offer. Why?

I've rejected multiple interview requests for FAANG jobs because I do not wish to study strange-toy-programming-quiz-tricks for three months just to be able to say I work at Hooley-Soft.

I rejected a Google offer in 2012, and they've been bothering me ever since. They seemed really surprised that I didn't feel all warm and fuzzy about their lowball offer. I ended up going to Blizzard and then SpaceX, and I don't regret anything. My big thing is that while the money might have been better at a FAANG, I've done a lot more interesting work I can talk about (and some I can't). But at Google, and Microsoft where I worked for about 10 years, there are frankly so many people (many quite talented) that it's hard to get something interesting or useful to work on. It's just a lot of politics and empire building. Also, the mobility especially for women is pretty bad. We always joked the best way to get a raise was to leave and come back. It was funny because it was so true.

Fulfilling life. Half the salary of FAANG is more than enough to live on, and I love my job, and I love my family, and I get plenty of time for both.

Alternative would be twice the salary, retire early, I guess. And I think if I did that, I'd be spending my time the exact same way I am right now. Only after a few hellish years having my soul drained by making people click on more ads.

I’m in my mid 30s, and have had a healthy, fun career as a comp. engineer. I thought of applying to one of the FAANG companies recently, but the idea of whiteboard/hackerrank Code tests was a severe turn off, and put that idea away. I don’t have the energy to put into preparing for weeks like a code monkey to give a shot at a test and mostly never using them at the job. I’d rather spend more time playing with my baby boy.

I’m not saying learning data structures and algorithms are useless. Only that testing for them using timed tests with toy puzzles is silly and not for everyone.

I was offered significantly more money from a non-FAANG than any of my (three) FAANG offers were willing to give me, with better liquidity. At the end of the day, that's all I cared about. I'm very happy with where I landed, and have no plans to leave in the near future. My present company has an academic engineering culture that prioritizes outcomes over process, while encouraging curiosity and autonomy.

I never got an offer but I've rejected interviews (won't take part of the code challenges culture).

At one of them I had a strong recommendation for a specific project which allowed me to skip the initial screening but I declined in an interview as I didn't want to move to the USA and they weren't remote friendly.

I am quite happy where I am in my career and industry ! Feel that I have a huge impact in the business at a global scale. Starting over as just-another-sw-engineer-in-a-large-company doesn't seem attractive.

I realized FAANGs are not the holy grail of tech, and that it’s possible to get excellent TC while working on interesting projects with more autonomy and possibly better WLB as well at smaller, faster organizations. Granted, a downside is that most equity is unlikely to be meaningful (except for the lucky), but I found a far more exciting path. Though I could certainly see the appeal in the more innovative arms of some companies (like Alphabet’s X) to do bleeding edge work...

I also have ethical issues with spending my existence working for some of them (Facebook is the grimiest offender by far), and the line blurs quite a bit into questionable territory for some of these companies.

I’ve turned down feelers (politely) because I like where I live and don’t want to be forced to move to $expensiveBigCity.

(I'd rather share this anonymously, so this is a throwaway account.)

I'm a software engineer and technical manager with just shy of 20 years of experience. I've never received a job offer from a FAANG company, but I've said "no thanks" to Google recruiters a number of times over the last ~10 years, and several years ago I did an initial remote interview with Netflix before declining their offer of an onsite interview. Here are my own personal reasons against working for a FAANG company:

Facebook/Google: Surveillance capitalism at its finest; working for one of these would be using my talents to further the greatest privacy-violating data collection regime (with virtually zero government oversight) the world has ever seen. I'd rather give up programming entirely and work retail.

Amazon: less objectionable than FB/Goog, but only slightly. They treat their non-engineer employees like complete crap, and I've heard that the quality of life even on the engineering side is very much dependent on the org you end up in and your manager.

Apple: Their privacy game is much stronger than any of the above, and I use their devices daily. Their walled gardens and locked-down devices mean they are a far cry from the hacker-friendly Apple I remember as a kid in the 80s. Their culture also seems very secretive and rather cult-like which leaves a bad taste in my mouth (though maybe this is improving since Steve's death?)

Netflix: by far the least objectionable FAANG, many fewer privacy concerns and the product is good IMHO. However, they have a hard policy against remote work, at least for the team(s) I was looking at, and I don't want to live anywhere near SF Bay. This is the only reason I ended the interview process with them.

Aside from all of the above and even if you disagree with everything I said, FAANGs are just so huge that the incremental value you add by joining is likely to be tiny. I've spent the last ~10 years working at startups to mid-size companies (from 5 up to 200 people) and I feel that my work is much more impactful than it could ever be at a FAANG.

On one occasion, Google offered a reasonable amount of money to do something I had basically no interest in. On another occasion, Google gave me a 4-day exploding offer for way below market. So I didn't work for Google so far

Didn’t want to sell my soul to a heartless company that exploits workers. I’d rather be part of the solution and build products and services for unions, non-profits, and movement organizing.

Rejected a Google offer in 2008 to join a company called DataDomain. I had just finished my PhD and my co-advisor was in Data Domain so it wasn't a very hard choice. At that point, Google also didn't assign you a team before joining so the choice was between join an unknown team at Google VS go and work for someone I knew and respected. Also, Google paid well but wasn't as crazy as things today.

Learned a lot at DataDomain as it scaled from a reasonably small team to a large enterprise and eventually got acquired. Financially though, would have fared much better in Google (assuming I had stuck around).

I didn't even apply. I sort of wish I did. I don't know that I would have even gotten an interview, but my god... my current job just seems so boring.

I turned down interviewing with one of this companies because they didn't want to disclose the salary, not even a salary range.

Also, the interviewer explained that I had 3 weeks for studying a list of computer science concepts for the interview.

I already have a Master's degree and I am working, I don't need to study to proof my profesionality.

I’m loving the comments of this thread. Gives me more courage that cool tech and software does exists out of FAANG World.

I’m just a new grad soon to be graduating whereas my peers are always talking about landing positions at FAANG while missing out on other opportunities. I think its important to look at things from different perspective.

Honestly, slightly more appealing kool-aid.

I interned at one and turned down a grad-job offer. I never was proud of myself for working at a big-tech company that is infamously awful to its more replaceable staff. The pay cut (at least at this point in my life) is worth not feeling like I'm actively contributing to a global evil.

It was straight out of college. I'd have had to move across the country, and wanted to stay closer to home. The startup that I joined instead also appeared to be offering work more aligned with my technical interests, though in practice it didn't work out that way and I left after less than a year.

Everytime I was interviewing, some other company out bet FAANG offer. There are many companies in the bay area, which can match/give you more than FAANG. Fb being the only exception. But then, you are working 2X more for 1.5X the salary. So its not really worth it.

I did not get an offer, but I did reject interviews to work in the support team at Google Cloud. Moral implications aside, the job required me to move from Brazil to the US, and I had no interest in living in the US.

No regrets about my decision.

I wanted to be a digital nomad instead.

Edit: it was Twitter though, so not FAANG, although I'd also interned at Amazon previously.

- I don't like to work at a public company, it's very stressful to work in an environment where every day you are waking up and reading stock market news.

- I had already worked at Microsoft for 2 years in 2009-2011, there isn't much value addition to your resume after you have worked at one such big tech company.

- I was hired by the Android TV team, which is not a product I use and not my area of interest. It was mildly disappointing that they only gave one option in the team matching process.

- I am not a very suburban person, and commuting from SF to MV every day seems appealing at the outset but gets very cumbersome after a few weeks. Google doesn't tell you whether the team will be located in SF / MV when you interview, you are allowed to choose when you go through team matching.

In summary, I had made enough money already and my resume had Microsoft brand (though it was not a FANG in 2009). Touchwood, I have been able to get through all the recruiter filters whenever I have applied and I think that's the only advantage of working at FANG.