ThoughtWorks?
Yep, it's an amazing place. Freedom to do stuff is enormous. They are not listed on any stock exchange so they have no fiduciary duty to generate profit. It's an amazing place full of smart people.
Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?
131–140 of 226 posts
Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?
#132In regards to mega companies, it's hard/impossible to talk about culture in a meaningful way because the organization is so large. For a personal example, saying "I work at IBM" is not terribly informative because IBM has more employees than most island nations have citizens, and its branches and divisions are extremely different. Some are doing really cool, cutting edge work, some are doing uncool, arthritic, blue-polyester-suit-style work. And the culture may not be homogenous across those either. Considering two "uncool" divisions, maybe one, despite being uncool, has a really innovation-oriented exciting culture and the other has more of a who-took-my-stapler vibe. Maybe the same holds true for divisions doing cool work.
I would venture to say that this more or less applies at any company of a sufficiently enormous size. It's just hard to generalize.
I will definitely agree with posters here who have said different strokes for different folks. Megacorps of all kinds, regardless of internal culture, are just different from startups.
Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?
#133Biased as well, but for that other side of the world: Atlassian Engineering culture is amazing, and repeatedly ranked best place to work in Australia. Atlassian is also very actively hiring in Sydney with great relocation experience (feel free to poke me on that).
I think the perception of 'Atlasssian Engineering' has been tainted by HipChat
Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?
#134Facebook --- far and away the best engineering culture I've ever seen, and I've been programming for 20 years. Other companies aren't even in the same league. Facebook has an incredibly high hiring bar. I never once met someone who I didn't feel was qualified to be there. I was seldom the smartest person in the room. The high average engineer quality allows the company to give developers almost complete autonomy. At…
Fewer developers? There have 15,000 employees, what do they all do?
Facebook engineering is probability based. If you hire enough engineers and produce enough code, eventually some people are good and some code is good. The culture seems laughable.
Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm assuming you're kidding, but if not, would you be willing to elaborate?
I don't have direct experience, but, judging by what I've heard, they're probably "best" by some measure. ;)
Ah, Infosys! My only experience of dealing with them stands out as one of the more amusing of my career. I was contracted to lead a team for a digital agency to rebuild the front-end of one of the UK's largest supermarkets; Infosys already had an existing contract to handle the back-end and integration; the supermarket had just a couple of (not very) technical leads (glorified project managers, really) to steer everything from their end.
About monthly, the supermarket's tech leads, myself, a project manager working with me, and anywhere up to about ten Infosys employees would meet up physically in the supermarket's offices. Only one of the Infosys employees would ever address the table, and rarely at that. The others all had identical laptops (perhaps even identical clothes?), and all took notes during the meeting, but never spoke, apart from just occasionally to mutter quietly to each other.
It was absolutely surreal. Needless to say, the integration did not go especially smoothly.
Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?
#136I'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…
> * With only very few exceptions, every engineer has access to the near-entirety of source code at FB (Oculus, Whatsapp, Instagram...). Sorry, this could be slightly off topic for this thread. I'm curious if this kind of access also applies to all the data that users put up on the platforms? To put it in other words, how does FB prevent or work to prevent LOVINT [1] like cases? If it's the same kind of access, would…
Why do you think that having access to source code implies having access to customer data?
Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?
#137Biased as well, but for that other side of the world: Atlassian Engineering culture is amazing, and repeatedly ranked best place to work in Australia. Atlassian is also very actively hiring in Sydney with great relocation experience (feel free to poke me on that).
I think the perception of 'Atlasssian Engineering' has been tainted by HipChat
JIRA taints their perception, for me at least.
Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 rehabil…
I've read that that's how it pretty much works in a lot of Japanese companies (i.e. even when you're pretty much of no use because of bad luck (illness, accident), they give you for example a janitorial job where it's understood that little is expected of you).
That's completely at odds with Western individualistic culture though hence it's rare here. Netflix is not really an exception - if you are the "weakest link", they will just fire you after your yearly review instead of waiting for a panic fire of bottom 10-20% of staff when stock price plummets (like most other corps do).
Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've spoken to Facebook engineers who work on their internal source control systems, and it was pretty obvious from talking to them that Git wouldn't work for their purposes. There is plenty of writing about this topic that explains in some detail why Git is unsuitable, and why Mercurial was a better option for them. As for the 18k classes in their iOS app, I don't see why this is a sign of bad engineering? I'd expec…
It's nothing more complex than 100,000s of other apps out there. Yet somehow they managed to create 18k classes? Scale is handled at the back-end.
I can't immediately think of any apps that are just as complex as Facebook's, but maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough. Could you give me some examples (honest question)?
Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?
#140I'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…
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