It can vary highly from one half to the next, and changes with your teams, projects, etc. It can be extraordinarily rewarding to work on products that everyone you know uses every day. It can also be very frustrating and demoralizing to work on important components of the stack that noone inside or outside the company ever notices unless it breaks. The golden handcuffs are real, but most of FAANG gives you ample opportunity to switch teams and projects to find something to work on something that interests you, fulfills you, or lets you learn something that traditional companies would never let you work on unless you already had "industry experience". If you are proactive–and are "meeting expectations" in your current position–you almost certainly have the freedom to find something new whenever you start to get bored.
You're answering a subtly different question than the one I'm asking. It sounds like you're saying people have opportunities to take steps to find satisfaction at FAANG jobs, but I'm asking, do people actually find satisfaction at FAANG jobs?
I can see how self-directed-ness might give people a sense of agency. And I can also see how being able to seek out novelty could keep you from getting bored. But I don't think that agency and interest are enough to equate to satisfaction for me. For example, I think it would be difficult for me to find satisfaction at Facebook, Amazon, or Google, because the vast majority of the effect I see these companies having is harmful--I'd be waking up and going to a job where I believed I was making the world worse. No amount of agency or novelty would fix that.
Obviously everyone is different, so maybe FAANG employees are able to find satisfaction in ways that I can't. I don't know--I'm genuinely curious if there's any actual data.
As "satisfaction" is such a subjective measure, I'm not sure there's any good public data, but at least a strong majority of folks fill out internal surveys indicating that they are happy in their current roles.
We all find satisfaction in different ways though. Some get it from the products they work on, even if their individual work isn't exciting. Some get it from the actual challenges they're solving and code they're writing. Some get it from the flexibility and engineering-driven work environment and the opportunity to choose which problems they tackle each half. Some get it from the freedom to work 9-5 and have a strong separation of work and home life (barring periodic oncall or the current bizarro pandemic world). Some simply get satisfaction from knowing that the benefits and compensation they receive are helping to protect themselves, their family, and their loved ones, and ensure they have a comfortable life outside of their job.
Many find satisfaction in FAANG roles simply because they have access to one or more or all of those at the same time.
Internal surveys are pretty unreliable. Story time (details vague for obvious reasons):
I worked at a company where we were collecting safety compliance data on workers. The data was partially medical in nature, so we were legally bound by HIPAA, meaning we could not share the data with their employers. Some of the data we collected was self-reported, while some of the data was measured objectively via sensors.
Consistently, the self-reported data showed the workers were in compliance with safety standards. Consistently, the sensor data showed them to not be in compliance.
We changed the messaging around the self-reporting, to make it clear that a) we would not share self-reported data with their employers, and b) we were bound by HIPAA, and therefore could not share self-reported data with their employers. The number of workers self-reporting non-compliance increased significantly (more than doubled) but remained lower than 30%, while the sensor data continued to show compliance in single-digit percentages. The only thing we had achieved was objective proof that the self-reported data was unreliable.
The purpose of the self-reported data was to identify faulty sensors, and it was clear we weren't achieving that goal, so we eventually dropped the self-reported data from collection entirely.
Ultimately, there's no personal benefit to expressing discontent in an internal survey. Doing so takes the risk that the data will be used against you.
I do agree, there are some reasons to believe that people DO find satisfaction at FAANG job. It's just that there are reasons to believe the opposite as well, and I don't feel like I can draw a conclusion as confidently as the poster upthread who said, "They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job". The only thing I'm convinced of at this point is, "I don't know."
