HACKER Q&A
📣 dev_0

Quiet quitting in FAANG doesn't work now?


Imagine working in FAANG now and competing with tons of smart leetcoders for projects now or you will be terminated


  👤 ozzythecat Accepted Answer ✓
Amazon had tons of quiet quitters. We probably could have coined the term.

1/4 to 1/3 of the engineering teams checked out during COVID. They operate in klo mode, keep the lights on.

Leetcoding doesn’t make you an effective hire. Plenty of leetcode geniuses who landed a job but can’t solve problems and either can’t do the work or just don’t want to.

Maybe 1/3rd are still active and faking it and last third are moving things forward.

I left last year, and it was a very political place. Management quality also regressed. One team I worked with were all former IBM employees who came to manage at Amazon. They quiet quit on Day 1.


👤 GuB-42
Why is it called "quiet quitting"? It is a very confusing term.

It is not quitting, you are still doing your job and you still get paid (unless you are fired). Is it different from regular work-to-rule (if you do that as a form of protest) or just doing your job (if you simply don't take unreasonable, out-of-contract requests)?


👤 salmonlogs
As someone who has worked for two FAANGs so far, I can tell you that leetcode is a running joke that has almost zero correlation to actual skills.

Sure people practice a bit when they play the interview game, but being successful in FAANG is pretty much unrelated to solving leetcode problems.


👤 CodesInChaos
How do you define "quiet quitting"?

Doing the absolute minimum required not to get fired?

Or not meeting unreasonable expectations? Working unpaid overtime, responding to emails outside working hours, etc.


👤 malermeister
Quiet quitting is a dumb term.

It's just doing your job. And of course it works anywhere.


👤 leros
Nobody can tell. FAANG companies always had developers that were pushing out 3 tickets a quarter and developers pushing out 20 tickets a quarter. Some of that was due to mediocrity. Some of that was due to some projects being harder than others. Some of that was due to team structure problems. Nobody can really accurately evaluate this stuff and it was all just accepted.

The thing that has changed now is a lot more people are pushing out 3 tickets a month than before. But you can't necessarily point to who's slacking off and who's not.


👤 djohnston
Is this an "/s"? Leetcode is nothing but a pulse for hiring. Most jobs are about connecting systems together like Legos to unlock value for the business. The minority that actually require deep knowledge of DS/A require actual knowledge of DS/A, not just grinding a bunch of BST problems.

👤 ianpurton
I'm currently revising to get through a FAANG interview.

So lot's of Leetcode etc.

Rust is my thing, so imagine struggling with the borrow checker during an interview.

It may not be the best way to choose if a developer is going to be good on the job (is there even a way).

But, I feel I'm a better programmer now than before.


👤 travisporter
Would be interesting to know if people agree with the Wikipedia definition on such a new phrase. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_quitting

👤 shetill
Imagine every top company and SWE in general being reduced down to LC

👤 jstx1
Quiet quitting doesn't work in environments that put a certain kind/amount of pressure on people. It's not about FAANG vs non-FAANG.