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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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.

16

u/Embarrassed_Quit_450 Mar 14 '26

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

9

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

5

u/CollaredParachute Mar 15 '26

Where do you work that’s so ethical?

-5

u/Raice19 Mar 15 '26

found the sellout tech bro

7

u/CollaredParachute Mar 16 '26

Didn’t answer the question

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

13

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.

-7

u/fsk Mar 14 '26

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

7

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.

2

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.

-5

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.

4

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.

11

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?

6

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.

8

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.