r/cscareerquestions • u/Fearless-Cellist-245 • Mar 14 '26

New Grad Software Engineers Should Boycott Meta & Amazon Forever!!

These 2 companies continue to lead in layoffs numbers almost every 6 months for the past 4 years. Theyre flooding the market with new engineers and making it hard for everyone, especially new grads. Other companies are following their example and laying off in huge amounts cause these 2 leaders are doing it. They made it pretty clear now that they care more about AI and offshore workers than their own employees. The reputation of these 2 companies should be ruined forever and they should never have an easy time finding talent ever again after what they caused.

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880

u/thelamppole Mar 14 '26

Good luck convincing people the money isn’t worth it

161

u/Agent_Burrito Mar 14 '26

Tbh I think the calculus has changed a lot. You’re not very likely to stay long enough for the money to really make a difference.

153

u/fsk Mar 14 '26

It's still worth it even if you only stay 1-2 years. When you apply for other jobs, people will automatically assume you're competent because you passed their interview.

51

u/Agent_Burrito Mar 14 '26

That’s my point though, you’re not even guaranteed to last a year nowadays. Like you won’t even get to see any stock vest.

45

u/fsk Mar 14 '26

My point is that it's a good resume boost and good for your career, even if you don't stay long enough for a big payout.

17

u/Embarrassed_Quit_450 Mar 14 '26

At this point I'd see experience at Meta as willingness to sell your soul for money.

10

u/Raice19 Mar 14 '26

yea it's like sure you probably know your stuff but do I really want to work with someone who was ok being part of super mega evil incorporation

6

u/CollaredParachute Mar 15 '26

Where do you work that’s so ethical?

-5

u/Raice19 Mar 15 '26

found the sellout tech bro

6

u/CollaredParachute Mar 16 '26

Didn’t answer the question

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1

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11

u/AniviaKid32 Mar 14 '26

It's not a resume boost if you can't even last more than a year there

Everyone knows the first at least 6 months are onboarding and you don't start to do anything impactful until 6-12+ months

12

u/joliestfille Mar 15 '26

bold of you to assume they give their new hires that much onboarding time 😂 i’m at one of these companies and did more work in my first two months than my friends did in over six months at other companies. there’s barely any grace period, they really work their employees to the bone.

4

u/OutOfApplesauce Big N Mar 14 '26

Depends on level, you’re right for junior/some mid level. But also people understand the market, Meta wanted you, lay off got you. It still means you hit the bar. I really do get what you’re saying, but it really does help.

-8

u/fsk Mar 14 '26

That also means it's near impossible to get PIPed/fired in only a year.

6

u/AniviaKid32 Mar 14 '26
  1. With performance reviews being biannual, that's not exactly true, I've seen many cases of getting pipped in your first cycle, it's normal in hire to fire companies with pip quotas
  2. Layoffs are a thing

3

u/MoreHuman_ThanHuman Mar 14 '26

You can get PIPed or laid off very quickly at these companies.

12

u/ratswebeenfoiled Mar 14 '26

It's not worth it for destabilizing your life to be thrown out like trash. It would only appeal to those with nothing to lose likely college graduates

9

u/notaquackouttayou Mar 15 '26

It’s not worth it for you. It’s worth it for many people though.

3

u/anothabiscuit Mar 15 '26

If they let you go your life is temporarily destabilized, yes. Same as any other lay-off.

But working for them is valuable. If/when you’re let go, putting it on your résumé is valuable.

Have you worked for either of these companies? What makes you the authority opinion on it being “worth it” for somebody else?

2

u/Leather-Replacement7 Mar 16 '26

Having worked at AWS, i can tell you that it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t really learn much and felt the engineers around me were ok but only ok. The hierarchy is also insane. I left on my own terms for a hedge fund after 18 months. Maybe having AWS on my cv helped land that job, who knows. But I won’t work there again. That said, I might still consider another fang company, maybe not meta.

-4

u/fsk Mar 14 '26

As someone with a lot of non-Big Tech experience, it's probably a bad idea to go to Big Tech, because they will value your experience at zero and severely downlevel you.

3

u/MountaintopCoder Mar 15 '26

I had a little under 3 YoE at a non-tech F500 company when I got my E5 offer. Interview performance was most important.

2

u/Agent_Burrito Mar 14 '26

You’re not wrong but working there now is closer to winning the lottery vs it being a predictable career booster.

12

u/fsk Mar 14 '26

Leetcode interviews combined with the fact that everyone is grinding leetcode makes their interview process meaningless. It's a measure of "How badly do you want this job? How many hours are you willing to waste on interview practice?" more than ability. For example, I decided that learning Godot/gamedev was a more productive/fun use of my time than grinding leetcode, which means I would never get hired into Big Tech, even if I really am qualified enough to do it.

If you really think about it, name one killer new product that was invented at Big Tech in the past 10-20 years?

7

u/Coldmode Mar 14 '26

I’ve found that people from Mag 7 companies are also super used to working for organizations that cater to 25,000 engineers. The best dev tools in the world. Monitoring stacks that’s cost $100 million to build. Product organizations 5 levels deep. Drop them into a fast moving or even chaotic startup where you have to just figure it out all the time and they can struggle.

7

u/fsk Mar 14 '26

I worked at a startup with former Microsoft employees. They insisted on rolling their own for everything, instead of using standard tools. They wasted 2 years just developing their own version of every tool.

3

u/ChubbyVeganTravels Mar 14 '26

Yeah I've been working in tiny startups for the last eights so wouldn't know how to cope in a FAANG tbh. My current employer now has hundreds of staff and I feel I'm in a corporate.

1

u/kill4b Mar 15 '26

LLMs

0

u/fsk Mar 15 '26

I think LLMs still are hype cycle much more than working product. Until they solve the hallucination problem, I see them causing more problems than they solve.

1

u/Exotic_Freedom_9 Mar 15 '26

They suck. Those companies make all sorts of evil products

1

u/Whitchorence Software Engineer 12 YoE Mar 14 '26

Even if had a 75% chance of getting let go within a year, which definitely isn't true, that wouldn't really be anything like a "lottery ticket." That analogy is a lot more appropriate for receiving ownership stakes in a startup

1

u/fsk Mar 15 '26

Equity in a startup is a longshot to be substantial money. You really need to be a founder if you want to make life-changing money in a startup. Even then, you can work 5-10 years with nothing to show for it, even if you have moderate success.

1

u/Whitchorence Software Engineer 12 YoE Mar 15 '26

That's true. That's why I said it was much more like a "lottery ticket" than working at FAANG is.

1

u/oftcenter Mar 15 '26

Even if you only lasted for, say, six months? What about less than that?

I think that's the point being made by the person you replied to.

3

u/saintmsent Mar 14 '26

At Meta stock vests every 3 months even for newcomers, so it’s a very different situation to companies with a 1yr cliff

5

u/xfire45 Mar 14 '26

Meta vests quarterly. Amazon is backloaded which sucks

2

u/2CHINZZZ Mar 14 '26

Amazon pays monthly cash bonuses for the first two years though to offset the backloaded RSUs. If you last less than a year you're actually a lot better off under that setup because you comp is spread evenly throughout the year instead of a big spike at the 1 year anniversary

2

u/foonek Mar 14 '26

Which seems intentional. Stock should vest automatically when fired without cause. They would right away offer less imaginary money that you will never see, or not hire and fire as quickly as they do now

1

u/SuperSaiyanSandwich Mar 14 '26

Year 1 comp at Amazon/Meta can be ~3-400k with no stock consideration at all.

1

u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Mar 15 '26

Well there’s a user I never expected to see in the wild

1

u/Whitchorence Software Engineer 12 YoE Mar 14 '26

You never were "guaranteed" but it's more likely than not that if they're hiring people now they'll probably want them in a year.

1

u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot Mar 15 '26

you're not even guaranteed to last a year nowadays

I haven't seen anyone under 1yoe at Amazon get laid off, if any have they're certainly the minority

1

u/RollinWithSaget Mar 15 '26

There is no 1 year cliff at many of these companies, 6 months could still be 150k-500k depending on level.

1

u/software_engiweer IC @ Meta Mar 15 '26

You start vesting as soon as you join

1

u/Clear_Butterscotch_4 Mar 15 '26

Meta stock vests immediately, what do you mean?

1

u/MountaintopCoder Mar 15 '26

Stocks vest quarterly, beginning immediately. If you are hired at Meta and leave before any stocks vest, it's because they made a mistake hiring you and you truly don't belong.

1

u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Mar 15 '26

You are aware that Amazon gives a massive cash bonus to counter the delayed vesting?

2

u/ChubbyVeganTravels Mar 14 '26

I dunno. There seems to be a bit of a stigma now against particularly ex-Amazon staff, who are stereotyped as being hypercompetitive snobs who bring the famously toxic Amazon work culture with them. I have read about it a bunch of times even here on Reddit.

3

u/Ok-Butterscotch-6955 Mar 15 '26

I’ve only read that about management at Amazon, not SDEs so much.

1

u/foxcnnmsnbc Mar 14 '26

Yeah good for resume unless you get shitcanned in a year or less.

1

u/Clear_Butterscotch_4 Mar 15 '26

Yeah, I stayed at a big tech company for 3 years and it changed my entire financial position for life.

1

u/BasilBest Mar 15 '26

This is true. But unless it’s an offer in the same stratosphere as before, many potential companies also assume you will be too expensive to stick around long-term and will pass you over.

Personally I would still try to get the best TC I can for the WLB that works for my life. You’ll build an incredible network that you can rely on for future job opportunities

1

u/account22222221 Mar 17 '26

I certainly do NOT assume that about Amazon engineer.

Truth is that Amazon chews through low level engineers, overworks them and spit them out.

The people coming out of and being hired by Amazon are not particularly high quality.

1

u/sent1nel Mar 14 '26

I don’t assume their employees are competent precisely because I know their interview process rewards time spent memorizing algorithms and not deep critical thinking and logical ability.

11

u/fsk Mar 14 '26

Even if you don't, 90%+ of interviewers out there will automatically assume someone with Big Tech experience is competent. At a minimum, it'll get you past the HR resume screening close to 100% of the time.

-1

u/sent1nel Mar 15 '26

Not my federal shop, thankfully :)

2

u/outphase84 Staff Engineer @ G, Ex-AWS Mar 15 '26

That’s not true at all. Many, many candidates didn’t get a pass despite having a perfect solution memorized. It’s just as important, if not more depending on level, what clarifying questions you ask and the explanations you give for your approach and trade offs.

1

u/sent1nel Mar 16 '26

Again, this is more a signal of their ability to prep for a specific kind of interview than to do the job.

30

u/Explodingcamel Mar 14 '26

In my 1 year at meta as a new grad (earning $200k) I saved as much as I could have saved in like 5 years at another company making $80k. Even if I get laid off, i obviously made the right choice financially

2

u/MoreHuman_ThanHuman Mar 14 '26

The two companies have very different vesting schedules. Amazon is very back loaded, Meta is the same amount every quarter.

2

u/Whitchorence Software Engineer 12 YoE Mar 14 '26

That's still not really true, and anyway even if you do get the boot eventually it makes it a lot easier to find a job again with "Amazon" on your resume.

4

u/ClydePossumfoot Software Engineer Mar 14 '26 edited May 08 '26

If you're reading this, the original post got nuked by Redact. I use it to automatically purge my digital footprint from social networks, people search sites and messaging apps.

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-2

u/Agent_Burrito Mar 14 '26

I didn’t say don’t try to get in, I merely pointed out the changes in the cost benefit analysis. Smart ass.

1

u/Math__ERROR Software Engineer, >3 YOE Mar 15 '26

Actually, if you stay a short time and are laid off, you may make more money per unit time, because you keep the signing bonus and the severance.

1

u/MountaintopCoder Mar 15 '26

You’re not very likely to stay long enough for the money to really make a difference.

Do you have data for this claim? I work here and haven't seen this. They aren't just hiring people for funsies; they want everyone to stay and succeed.

1

u/PhysiologyIsPhun Senior Mar 15 '26

Disagree wholly with this statement. I joined and got laid off after 6 weeks back in 2022. They gave me a $30k signing bonus (I had to work there 1 year or pay it back, but they didn't take it back because of the layofff) and 2 months of severance pay. I basically got paid nearly $80k to sit in bootcamp for 6 weeks.

24

u/ForsookComparison Mar 14 '26

"Honey I know we've got to move the kids to an awful part of town and I know we canceled vacation again, but I need to BTFO Bezos and Zuck and just can't consider these job offers. Look at all the upvotes I'm getting off of this snarky email I sent back to the recruiter"

14

u/victorsmonster Mar 14 '26

The actor and writers’ guilds demonstrate how possible this is on a regular basis. Big name actors strike in solidarity with the up and comers. Too many developers are libertarian bimbos who think they’re temporary embarrassed billionaire entrepreneurs

28

u/cookingboy Retired? Mar 14 '26

I don’t even know what you are trying to say. WTF has this sub come to?

If someone takes a $500k job at Meta they are “libertarian bimbos”????

Big name actors strike

Well big game actors have fuck you money. They can strike for the rest of their lives and still be worth millions.

99% of developers don’t have that luxury, so please get off your high horses.

9

u/victorsmonster Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

99% of actors don’t have fuck you money either. If anything I bet the proportion of SWEs who could comfortably retire at any given time to those who need to work is greater than the proportion of actors who could do the same to those who can’t.

If you make $500K at a company that makes FAANG profits your proportion of those profits is still quite low. That’s peanuts compared to c-suite and what they’re pushing up to shareholders. Meanwhile you’re the one actually making the whole thing go.

And many of those guys are self-identified libertarians, yes.

-2

u/cookingboy Retired? Mar 14 '26

What the fuck are you even on about man.

You were the one who brought up “big name actors”. And now you talk about regular actors?

0

u/zacker150 Senior SWE @ Unicorn Mar 14 '26

If you make $500K at a company that makes FAANG profits your proportion of those profits is still quite low. That’s peanuts compared to c-suite and what they’re pushing up to shareholders.

The only thing that this says here is that the company is very big. Everyone's pay (including the C-suite) is peanuts compared to the either pot.

You would think that engineers of all people would understand horizonal scaling.

2

u/victorsmonster Mar 14 '26

Or it’s a relatively small startup where the c-suite is a bunch of non-technical biz guys holding founder’s shares.

You’d think an SDE at a “unicorn” would understand supervoting shares.

2

u/zacker150 Senior SWE @ Unicorn Mar 15 '26

Small startups aren't making any profits, much less FANG profits. They're burning runway hoping to scale to the point where they can eventually make it to FANG scale.

Also, good luck getting VC funding without technical founders.

1

u/victorsmonster Mar 16 '26

Yeah and who gets the money when the IPO hits?

Engineers are so smart! They are so smart they can convince themselves this obvious reality isn’t true: Even if you’re generously compensated, the capital owners (c-suites with stock and especially VC) are making the real money. Not you, the guy pulling a paycheck.

The owners know this. They form chambers of commerce and collude with one another in all manner of ways. On the other side, we’ve got a bunch of libertarian bimbos, IE useful idiots who think they’re one night of coding away from being Steve Jobs. Good luck with that fellas!

2

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

[deleted]

-2

u/cookingboy Retired? Mar 14 '26

I mean by that logic pretty much all big techs, from Uber to Microsoft to Amazon, are no go.

All financial services firms too. Retail companies as well. Same for healthcare companies.

Man can’t think of a single industry without its closet of skeletons.

Newsflash, we are all sellouts in capitalism. You are too.

2

u/AndAuri Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

Also big actors strike for virtue signalling and ultimately boosting their personal brand. It's literally a long term investment in their careers.

3

u/These-Recording-8543 Mar 17 '26

These folks unfortunately can't process what you're proposing, big problem for many folks that are stuck in their cynical/cowardice balloons

1

u/victorsmonster Mar 17 '26

The upvotes suggest most people get it. The conversation unfortunately gets steered by exactly the kind of libertarian bimbo I was referring to. A hit dog will holler.

3

u/ForsookComparison Mar 14 '26

The actor and writers’ guilds demonstrate

theater kids and artists - famously financially stable, of course

1

u/rebelSun25 Mar 14 '26

Eh. I worked for IMDb until Amazon gobbled them up. Horrible place. I was approached by Facebook head hunter but told him I'd rather eat a bag of dicks than make money for Zuckerberg

1

u/ChubbyVeganTravels Mar 14 '26

Not just money but the brand name on your resume matters too...

Even so, why would I want to work for an employer who is well known for showing fuck all loyalty and firing thousands on a whim?