I’ve worked at a couple FAANG and questioning things is pretty much always viewed as a positive when it’s done in a productive and professional manner

What isn’t viewed positively is when you refuse to accept a decision after it’s been made and your concerns have been heard. People get pissed if you keep relitigating the same points over and over again

I've worked in various teams on the infrastructure side of a FAANG from early career/L4 to sr staff eng/L7 and have always been encouraged and rewarded for asking questions, even when those questions have led to unexpected multimillion dollar costs and in one case a loss of ~1% of fleetwide compute capacity.

I think this comes down to how you go about asking. You have to take the time to understand what is and how it's seen by others by being curious, reading docs, etc instead of rolling in making assertions disguised as questions to assert authority like so many are wont to do.

I suppose it's possible that I'm the designated court jester and that's why I can get away with questioning, but I don't think that's the case :)

Some of us intentionally avoid FAANG for that reason.

I’ve never worked at a FAANG and have no intention to.

I did work at Stripe, which in places did this pretty well. It still felt like a huge company (this was back in 2022) that had lost part of that spirit depending on org leadership. I had to pull that out of engineers who had been scared out of that level of vulnerability. But building that trust is part of leadership and great people tend to want to question and improve things.

Most of us haven't, good for you

Usually the people who question decisions are shot down because they don’t have a wholistic understanding of the decision and (respectfully) don’t have good arguments. This is only because they are focused on some narrow aspect of the business which distorts or reduces their visibility and understanding.