Why You Should Leave Your FAANG Job

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:00)
We all know these people that want to just tell you their darkest secret, which is they wake up every day and they dream of quitting.
Like, they have fantasies of quitting every day. Those are people that probably should quit.

**Michael Seibel** (0:19)
This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell, and today we're talking about how to break out of fame. I think almost inadvertently, because we talked to so many young technical people, young technical founders and potential founders, we've become experts at career advice, and specifically big tech career advice, which I don't know about you, Dalton, it's not an expertise I ever wanted to develop at all.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:45)
Yeah, I mean, I've never worked at a faing. Like, this is probably the last thing I'd be interested in talking about with people, but man, we get exposed to lots of this stuff.

**Michael Seibel** (0:57)
And I think what's interesting is that technical founders often misunderstand the value they can get out of faing. And misunderstand is an understatement. They grossly misunderstand what value they can extract from a faing job and what value they can't extract. I think mostly because a lot of founders are mixed in with other people with different motivations, right? Most people want to be managers or employees.
I think a lot of founders have friends who want to be managers, employees, and they kind of like see those people attracted to faing, and they assume all those things apply to them as well. Whereas, you know, as we both know, the founder path is quite different than the employee path.

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:36)
Yeah, it's funny. I remember when I was an undergrad, a lot of the recruiters, the people that had the most recruiters and the best recruiters tried to create cache. I remember, you know, when I was in school, it was all around management consulting, was the high status, cool jobs to get.
And it was a certain kind of person that would like fall for that, that like working at McKinsey or Accenture or something was like the cool thing to do. And what's funny is at the time, Google was like an 80 person startup and they were trying to recruit on campus, but it was like, Nobody cared. Do you want to be different? Like it was exactly the opposite brand of what Google is now, because there was this kind of a grubby little startup.
But the point is it's easy to look at folks that employ the most recruiters and use that as your basis. Like whoever has the best booth at the career fair, whoever gives out the coolest stuff and make your selection that way, right? If that's the criteria you use to select what college to go to, which is like, oh, whatever has the best rankings, you look at the best career rankings for where to work after college, and that's going to drive you towards, you know, Google, Facebook, whatever, right? It's not crazy. I get why this happens.

**Michael Seibel** (2:51)
And if you want to be an employee or a manager in a large tech company, that's great. Like that's correct. In fact, I'd argue all those guides are written for you, and it makes sense the right guides for you because you're the vast majority of people.
The problem is what should the founders do? What should the potential founders do? What should the future founders do?

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:12)
People that are curious, founder curious people, the people that might want to maybe, they're like, oh, start, I think that'd be cool.
What's their move? Exactly.

**Michael Seibel** (3:20)
So let's start with some of the assumptions that we hear from these potential slash future founders about why working at Faang right out of college or soon thereafter makes sense. Why it's, and it never presented us to us as like it's a pretty good opportunity. It's always presented to me at least as like, oh, of course it's essential. It's an essential part of this.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:41)
Yeah, they state a fact. They're stating facts.

**Michael Seibel** (3:44)
It's like, we must work. So here's the first one we hear a lot. Before I start a company, I want to get experience working on the hardest technical problems at the largest scale. And Faang is the only place in the world to do this.
What do you think, Dalton?

**Dalton Caldwell** (4:04)
That's just quoting the recruiter.
You're like reading what the recruiter's line is. I mean, look, most people that get most jobs at Faang's, when you talk to them after they have the job, if they get a couple of beers in them, they're working on some bullshit ad server. They're working on one pixel on one corner of one thing. They're working on some project that's gonna get killed.