A Reflection At 1 YOE At FAANG After Undergrad

09 August 2025

Silicon Valley seen from the hills, with downtown San Jose in the distance.

Pick A Niche

I regret being a generalist in college. Take the harder systems classes, not the AI ones. There is always compute infrastructure to maintain no matter what the product is, so that’s where the jobs are.

Engineering Skills

They get your tasks done. But if you want to move things at a bigger scale, you have to be good with people: persuading them your proposal will work, navigating around politics. I’d generally prefer to write code all day, but given how FAANG is structured you often need to talk to the team that owns a tool you depend on and ask them to change it.

Learning

Always be picking up something new, on and off work, the same as college. Go a little extra and learn another language, another design pattern. I call it the nights-and-weekends nerd out, and I enjoy it because I’ve liked CS since middle school and never stopped.

Writing Skills

You need good reading and writing. Reading means large technical documents describing complex designs written by very senior people. Writing means reports that keep your manager updated.

Meetings

I attend as few as possible unless they’re truly necessary. That still comes out to about three a day, and it’s still too much.

School Prestige

No relation to engineering ability whatsoever. The most cracked engineers on my team went to schools you haven’t heard of and wouldn’t consider prestigious, and they’re still the most cracked engineers on my team.

Food And Benefits

I barely spend anything on food during the week. The medical insurance is extremely good for what you pay into it. The 401k matching is generous, though I won’t see that money for another forty years. The rest of the benefits are so-so.

Quality Of Life

Way up from my college days. My own apartment. Finally replaced the car that used to break down constantly. A little saved on the side. The signing and relocation bonuses really helped set things up at the start.

Burnout

Real. PTO helps. It has also gotten better as I’ve become more proficient with the codebase and the tooling.

If you’re earlier in the pipeline than this, I also wrote about whether the CS major is still worth it and how the eight CS-related majors at UCI differ.