171–180 of 226 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)?
Unreal Engine.
Could someone explain to me why so many people on here fetishize scale? Scale is a constraint on a problem, and it affects the solution you come up with. I don't understand why solving problems around that constraint is considered cooler than solving problems around other constraints like uptime, performance, memory cost, etc. Does "Our API serves 234 million requests" hold more cachet than "Our medical device firmwa…
Because of the democratization of "big data" and the (relatively) recent uptick in large internet services, serious scale is an engineering challenge that a few have been tackling for awhile, but many are facing for the first time. Think any company that has recently realized their data needs are bigger than what Excel can handle.
Could someone explain to me why so many people on here fetishize scale? Scale is a constraint on a problem, and it affects the solution you come up with. I don't understand why solving problems around that constraint is considered cooler than solving problems around other constraints like uptime, performance, memory cost, etc. Does "Our API serves 234 million requests" hold more cachet than "Our medical device firmwa…
This is just a guess, but I suspect that "scale" also generally correlates positively with compensation. A medical device company with 50 employees just doesn't have the same resources as a company with 1M+ users, for example. Following from that, compensation is one of the easiest ways to measure professional "success", which is why large, highly-compensated companies are commonly viewed as the pinnacle of software…
I am surprised that no one mentioned Microsoft so far. These days they are professional, innovation-driven, and do not bring in much of the unnecessary cult that comes with companies like Google. They are more open than Apple. Also from a personal experience I think their interviews / hiring methods are better than all of the other big players.
But are their engineering practices better? They used to take test seriously, but then they fired all the testers and quality of basic things has slipped. They don't even hire for dedicated testing roles any more. I get that devs are supposed to test their own code, but they are surprisingly bad at it overall and unit tests, despite being a great meme, just don't cut it. Some examples of quality issues: new limit to…
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All these things also apply to Google, except: * you decide on a team before you start, but after you know you passed the interview * moving fast is not valued as much I would also add that Facebook uses a lot of Open Source, meaning your experience will be applicable elsewhere. Here are some potential advantages about working at Google: * Being ethical is a core value of the company. * Google/Alphabet is more divers…
Being ethical? Maybe the engineers need to have some ethics but not all products do.
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Yes, because they do 100% pair programming. When you rely on someone else being there at the same time as you, you need predictable hours. It's possible they don't need to be as fixed as they are, but that's how they've chosen to do it.
Basically they hire 2 people to do 1 person's work. I guess its a nice employment policy. But I would never work there.
At some point you're going to need more than one person to understand the code and they either go through that learning process months down the road or right now when they can be most useful in shaping that code.
It's not simple mathematics.
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…
How is the work/life balance at Facebook?
Could someone explain to me why so many people on here fetishize scale? Scale is a constraint on a problem, and it affects the solution you come up with. I don't understand why solving problems around that constraint is considered cooler than solving problems around other constraints like uptime, performance, memory cost, etc. Does "Our API serves 234 million requests" hold more cachet than "Our medical device firmwa…
I am surprised that no one mentioned Microsoft so far. These days they are professional, innovation-driven, and do not bring in much of the unnecessary cult that comes with companies like Google. They are more open than Apple. Also from a personal experience I think their interviews / hiring methods are better than all of the other big players.
But are their engineering practices better? They used to take test seriously, but then they fired all the testers and quality of basic things has slipped. They don't even hire for dedicated testing roles any more. I get that devs are supposed to test their own code, but they are surprisingly bad at it overall and unit tests, despite being a great meme, just don't cut it. Some examples of quality issues: new limit to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being ethical? Maybe the engineers need to have some ethics but not all products do.
I am assuming you are talking about privacy issues. Google collects a lot of data, but is very thoughtful about how they use it, who has access to it and gives users options to view and delete it.