Have you ever worked for a company like this? I have worked for a startup which was acquired by a FAANG company and later transferred internally to a "normal" team within the FAANG company. That's three different scenarios: 1) startup 2) recent acquisition; small startup-cultured enclave in a big company 3) pure big company.

I was an extremely motivated worker in scenarios 1 and 2. I had a lot of "momentum" and worked extremely hard. Burnout was a consideration not just because of long hours, but because I liked working so much that it was easy to overwork over the course of a couple months. In scenario 3 it is a constant struggle to remain motivated and I constantly feel as though all of my momentum is lost.

Here are some differences I noticed:
Scenarios 1 and 2:
a. Extremely aggressive goals and deadlines. Deadlines constantly missed, but our velocity was impressive. Goals were very short term - few goals were more than 1 business quarter in the future. This changed once we were acquired because the acquiring company demanded longer term deadlines.

b. Scrappiness and the pride in your work and yourself that accompanies scrappiness

c. Iteration speed prioritized highly. Build and deploy times to a staging environment often less than 3 minutes.

d. I wore many hats. DBA, sysadmin, full stack software engineer, product guy, security person, devops. Worked in many domains - search, distributed systems, building in the Cloud, etc.

e. Hard work and ownership are seen and rewarded.

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Scenario 3:
a. Smaller goals. Every goal was designed to be hit, since missing goals is anathema in my FAANG company.

b. No scrappiness whatsoever. Just meet the deadlines.

c. Iteration speed barely prioritized. Since your tasks have been mapped out months ahead of time, what need do you have to iterate quickly? Just build to the spec. Build times were extremely long. Deploy times were often 12 hours (you think it wouldn't take that long to deploy something, but when your company has strict rules about only deploying to 1 region at a time and taking 30 minutes to monitor metrics in each region before moving to the next, it adds up). Many of the best tools or tricks I used to iterate quickly in scenarios 1 and 2 don't work due to security measures, or more likely, due to the FAANG company leveraging their own tools rather than open source ones I used in scenario #1 and #2.

d. I wear 1 or 2 hats.

e. Hard work and ownership aren't really seen unless you're in the right project.

I can't tell you how many times I've told my manager I feel like I haven't done a lot of work recently, or feel like I could be doing more. I'm always assured that I'm doing very well in his eyes and meeting all my deadlines. From my perspective I've done a disgustingly tiny amount of work since I started.

Anyway, I wrote all of this out to try and illustrate that it is really hard to work hard in a scenario where you are actively discouraged from working harder. I didn't really do a good job of doing that, but I hope I've kind of hinted at the problem. Most of your teammates at FAANG companies have worked at FAANG or other large companies their entire careers and have no idea how slow the entire freight train is moving. They have no idea that in other companies the role of being a software engineer is much more dynamic than their experience has been.

There are a lot of compounding issues other than just unimaginative deadlines that I don't have time to touch on. Legacy systems, defined promotion processes that make it so that you know ahead of time which projects actually stand a chance of promoting you, a strong hierarchy, entrenched politics, etc etc.

I just want to say that I have been in scenario 3 for a year and it has taken about that long to build my momentum up again to where it was in scenario #1 and #2. It is really, really hard to keep your motivation to work harder when almost every part of the job is incentivizing you to just sit down and meet your pathetic deadlines.. Trying to motivate someone by shaming them is never going to work here.