Why You Should Leave Your FAANG Job

TL;DR

FAANG jobs are often not essential or even useful for aspiring founders; many assumptions about gaining hard technical experience, transferable skills, or automatic VC funding are false or misleading. The companies engineer retention systems (vesting equity with loss aversion, lifestyle inflation) that trap unhappy employees.

Key insights

• Most FAANG employees work on mundane projects (e.g., "shitty ad server," Android settings page), not core infrastructure; recruiters market the glamour regardless.
• Skills learned at FAANG often do not transfer to startups – founders report college coursework being more relevant because FAANG internal tooling is absent in a startup.
• The FAANG retention system uses stacked equity grants vesting over four years, creating loss aversion: if you leave, you forfeit large chunks of "savings," making rational escape very hard.