Why aren't more people writing blogs while still employed @ FAANG?

Publicly "documenting degradation" - at the huge, tech-savvy firm you're still employed by - may not be the best of career moves. Nor of much use if you're trying to fight the degradation. Who, in middle 80% of Google's org chart pyramid, actually cares?

It does happen occasionally. For example Justin Garrison wrote what I would consider a fairly scathing review of Amazon's HR practices related to laying people off, while he was still at Amazon: https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sa...

He left recently, but he wrote this blog while still being employed there, as mentioned at the bottom of the post.

Trash talking your current employer publicly isn’t a great career move. It arguably could be more effective to work internally, but even if it’s not as effective, it’s far less risky.

Then later, you have been at Google long enough you’re relatively wealthy. You feel free to speak your mind.

I work at Google. I like it fine. As I pointed out in another comment, these days the gap between Google and say, any moderately well run company is much smaller than it was 15 years ago. Lots of the good things about google, both technical wise and culture wise, has spread throughout the industry.

For almost every amazing 'web scale' tech or developer tool that google has, there is pretty darn good open source equivalents now. Giving employees stock for retention and rewarding high performers is now much more common, as well as snacks and perks and pleasant offices.

Most companies have a more consistent hiring bar to some degree. When I joined the industry in the early 2000s, many companies didn't make candidates code at all, so half your coworkers might be fakers. Now that's a lot less common.

Say what you will about the pros and cons of whiteboard coding, but some coding to have a consistent bar is probably a good thing overall for the industry.

Google still has pretty darn good free food and pays pretty well, and most people who work there are at least fairly smart. It still has plenty of hard problems to solve at scale, which is the most fun part of the job.

However, it's not 2007, where the choices were the fantasy land of Google or Office Space. Now there are a lot of great companies to work for.

Documenting/blogging about organizational dysfunction externally probably won't go over very well with one's management chain. I imagine the giant bags of cash and stock options are a strong incentive to not bite the hand that's feeding you.

People tend to think big tech companies are somehow immune from human behaviors but I would counter that any organization beyond a certain size is going to have a fair amount of dysfunction (bureaucracy, politics, sociopaths, etc.) it doesn't matter what industry the company is in.

FAANG are likely to operate similarly to IBM, GE, ATT, and any other large mega-corp except they have hip furniture and cafe's.