During my nearly five years at Google, I have switched a number of teams and projects, as a contracting SDE.
There were vast differences in the pace, communication style, and project success rate among them. There were very fast-paced projects with extremely sharp colleagues. There were small projects in contact with the prospective (non-engineering) users of the tool being built. There were slowish projects with some red tape thrown in. One project was outright canceled because of architecture not matching the changed requirements.
No, not al FAANG is "like this". No, every single company inside FAANG is huge, and very much varied within.
Walk around. Talk to people. Get interested in what other teams are doing. Do some research, because I bet the tools to look into other teams' work are there, as are informal internal forums. Find a better team, and migrate to it.
Seconding this, I had some similar questions as OP at my Amazon internship (moreso stemming from going from Data Science work to web dev). The thing is every team at Amazon is so different u can find teams moving at breakneck speed in JS monorepos and u can find teams barely moving just fixing random build configs for months without even many unit tests in their repo (some people enjoy maintaining mature software in a customer focused team).
I suggest OP browse through the internal code search tool, find a team that fits their needs/values, and then try to find a job under that manager. OP has the unique ability to see the actual day to day work a team is doing before applying, they should take advantage of that. You can find a team like OP describes at any company but how many times can you see the day to day work before applying, take advantage.
Not FANG, but at Fortune 50 company. I can second to this.
There are teams that move quickly, use new technology, create new products.
But most of the SWEs work on mature products with moats- the development is slow because of the complexity of the product, and redtape.
There were vast differences in the pace, communication style, and project success rate among them. There were very fast-paced projects with extremely sharp colleagues. There were small projects in contact with the prospective (non-engineering) users of the tool being built. There were slowish projects with some red tape thrown in. One project was outright canceled because of architecture not matching the changed requirements.
No, not al FAANG is "like this". No, every single company inside FAANG is huge, and very much varied within.
Walk around. Talk to people. Get interested in what other teams are doing. Do some research, because I bet the tools to look into other teams' work are there, as are informal internal forums. Find a better team, and migrate to it.