I'm interested to know more about the "initiation rites."
I'm guessing he means readability. Google fetisihizes consistency, even at the cost of ingenuity and productivity. Heroism is a virtue at some other companies; at Google, it's a sin.
> Heroism is a virtue at some other companies; at Google, it's a sin.
This is not entirely true. I've seen many people being promoted for "jumping on grenades", especially in SRE. A culture of heroism is unsustainable, but individual acts of heroism (when required) should always be appreciated.
Pivotal. I've had the pleasure of working with many Pivots, and Rob Mee has built a great XP culture.
Pivotal is the first company I've worked at where I genuinely felt like I was engineering . Most places you work have one or two people who really care . They care about people. They care about process. They care about technology, software design, about doing the right thing the right way. At Pivotal that's everyone . I've yet to meet a single example of the shrugging "eh, it's just a job" archetype I've previously f…
I worked for a public healthcare company with a lot of red tape and new development in Visual Basic as recently as 2012, that also had developers leave and come back.
I'm biased, but I'd say out of all the "big" tech companies, FB has the best engineering culture. * With few exceptions, engineers aren't hired for a specific team; they go through bootcamp where they get exposure to all parts of the stack and tasks from different teams. * Ideas usually come from engineers. Managers are there to be a sounding board/connect you with people resources as needed. * Moving fast is valued…
I don't think I could work in an open plan office. I just can't concentrate well enough to do really good work in an environment like that.
I'm biased, but I'd say out of all the "big" tech companies, FB has the best engineering culture. * With few exceptions, engineers aren't hired for a specific team; they go through bootcamp where they get exposure to all parts of the stack and tasks from different teams. * Ideas usually come from engineers. Managers are there to be a sounding board/connect you with people resources as needed. * Moving fast is valued…
I think Facebook has very poor engineering culture. They built their iOS app with 18k classes, then claim that iOS and Git can't handle their 'scale'. Let's avoid putting here obvious companies and companies who over-engineer, maybe? http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-th... https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/faceboo...
I'll be very blunt: In situations like this, they are far far closer to the code than an armchair observer like you. I trust their engineers far more than I respect your pithy complaints.
I'm biased, but I'd say out of all the "big" tech companies, FB has the best engineering culture. * With few exceptions, engineers aren't hired for a specific team; they go through bootcamp where they get exposure to all parts of the stack and tasks from different teams. * Ideas usually come from engineers. Managers are there to be a sounding board/connect you with people resources as needed. * Moving fast is valued…
I think Facebook has very poor engineering culture. They built their iOS app with 18k classes, then claim that iOS and Git can't handle their 'scale'. Let's avoid putting here obvious companies and companies who over-engineer, maybe? http://quellish.tumblr.com/post/126712999812/how-on-earth-th... https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3m5n2n/faceboo...
Even worse, look at their Android app - They made an overly complex open source image loading library which is despised by most quality Android Engineers because it uses parts of memory it shouldn't be using, switching to and from it is terrible, has a big dex footprint and often results in OOM crashes. They use runtime hacks and then complain directly to Android developers when something breaks during updates, their SDK is terrible and pulls a ton of dependencies, they made a "2D physics engine" just to make a bounce animation. Met a dozen of their developers and I have noticed way more arrogance than brilliance. None of them are the kind of people I'd like to work with.
They have amazing engineers, contribute a ton to open source, their devs travel around the world, write blogs and generally do really cool stuff. They put emphasis on clean code, maintainability and testing.
Long time lurker. First comment at HN. Apologies if this sounds too HR.
I had a year stint at Cloudera working remotely, meeting up with our distributed team 3-4 times/year. I was smitten with the approach they took in implementing 18 different open source project into enterprise big data offerings. They had proper software development lifecycle. There was/is lots of talent and maturity. I absolutely loved my team, the maturity and the culture at Cloudera.
Google has an unique software engineering culture that was built and designed by the first engineers. Many of the practices show deep understanding of the challenges that growing an engineering culture faces. A few examples: There are clearly defined initiation rites for new employees that make them familiar with the engineering practices. Focus is on a few key languages (C++, Java, Javascript, Python, Go) and code r…
I'm interested to know more about the "initiation rites."
He may be referring to the on boarding process + first commit. Generally you'll have a few classes that introduce you to Google's build tools and any technologies that are relevant to you/your team. Then you'll start work and go through your first code review. This is probably what is refereed to as 'initiation rites'. Depending on the size of the change you may get a handful of comments or quite a few. After going through the code review process you will have successfully internalized Google's commitment to code quality. Generally you'll get a bunch of comments and suggestions that seem nitpicky but help keep things consistent and a few that are eye opening and help you become a better engineer.
Netflix's stack ranking is a huge turnoff though. Netflix's philosophy is that it has no loyalty to employees and expects none in return. Regardless of Netflix's other attributes, this policy is a huge turn-off. https://www.fastcompany.com/3056662/the-future-of-work/she-c... If I wanted great pay and cutthroat competition, why wouldn't I just work in finance? The finance industry isn't stupid. They have developer eff…
How does loyalty even work? Let's you'r a valuable developer, but your performance dropped significantly for 6-12 months because you got a baby. The company should stick with you not because of loyalty, but because it's good business - they know you will bounce back once you start getting enough sleep. Another example - you were a valuable developer, but got a crippling, chronic disease which makes it harder to conce…
Your first example relies on the tired employee have specialized skills. Instead, if the tired employee were easily replaceable, then loyalty would be sticking with that person despite the fact that they could be easily replaced.
For your second example, loyalty would be working with the employee to find a more suitable position in the company (or outside of the company) and helping with medical bills and any rehabilitation.