I have spent the last 10 years working for FAANG companies, but nowadays I find their performance-review and promotion obsessed cultures to be really draining. Worse, those negative feelings seem to be leaking into my personal life and slowly alienating friends and family.
Therefore, I've been pondering a change of pace. The classic HN answer is of course "create/join a startup", but I've also been looking at areas more adjacent to scientific research.
One option that has come up is the US Department of Energy's national laboratory network[0]. From what I understand, the pay is 33-50% of FAANG, but they do seem to have interesting projects (e.g. the nuclear fusion facility that was recently in the news).
Has anyone here worked at one of them before? What is/was the day-to-day like?
[0] https://www.energy.gov/national-laboratories
Things don't move fast, as another commenter said. In my area of work, projects tended to last 1-3 years and you'd be on several projects at any given time. In general, it is ICs rather than managers who run the projects. Your manager might say "Bob over in 9876 has a neat project that could use somebody like you, send him an email if you're interested".
You have to acknowledge that the core mission of the DOE National Labs is nuclear weapons. You might not ever come in contact with the mission, but it is there. They have strong HPC programs--because HPC as we know it is basically driven by the need to simulate nuclear weapons. Some people have moral objections to this, and that's fine!
I thought it was a good place to work, all in all.
Edit: I'd like to stress that probably the biggest advantage of the labs is the opportunity for self-directed work. If you can convince somebody (external sponsors, internal R&D funding committees) to give you money, you can work on just about anything. If you can't get funding of your own, you are still more or less able to choose what you work on.
Your work environment will depend highly on which group you're in. Some groups look like a university department without the students: you work in the unclassified area, you publish papers, you can even open-source software (with some effort). Other people spend their whole day in a windowless SCIF working on very sensitive stuff which they can never, ever discuss outside of a SCIF -- but while their public visibility is nil, their impact is arguably greater.