Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 226 posts

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#191

Post by exfacebook »

jansanchez wrote: post #166
exfacebook wrote: post #32

Facebook --- 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…

How is the work / life balance at Facebook?

It's whatever you want it to be. You're responsible for the impact you make, not how long you're at your desk. Facebook has high impact expectations, but if you're smart, you can have a big impact and still have a life.

Facebook culture also has a big social aspect. I think I made more personal friends at Facebook than I made in the entire rest of my career. One downside (according to some people) of this effect is that Facebook tends to become your social life. Personally, I appreciated the personal relationship formation, since it's rare to see so many smart people in one place.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#192

Post by exfacebook »

taway_1212 wrote: post #65
exfacebook wrote: post #32

Facebook --- 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…

How is their remote/work from home policy? How are the offices? Are they massive refurbished warehouses where hundreds of people constantly distract each other?

I'm not aware of any remote work policy, but there are the occasional remote people. Every big tech company will make exceptions for their top people and accommodate unusual arrangements, even Microsoft.

> massive refurbished warehouses

I wouldn't say "warehouses" --- the visual design is quite good, with a modernist bent. Frank Gehry designed the last few new offices.

But yes, the offices are very open. Fortunately, you don't have to be there in order to code.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#193

Post by taway_1212 »

exfacebook wrote: post #192
taway_1212 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is their remote/work from home policy? How are the offices? Are they massive refurbished warehouses where hundreds of people constantly distract each other?

I'm not aware of any remote work policy , but there are the occasional remote people. Every big tech company will make exceptions for their top people and accommodate unusual arrangements, even Microsoft. > massive refurbished warehouses I wouldn't say "warehouses" --- the visual design is quite good, with a modernist bent. Frank Gehry designed the last few new offices. But yes, the offices are very open. Fortunately…

What are the realistic expectations of in-office presence? Are there core hours when everyone is more or less expected to be present? Or is it accepted to hop in to the office every other day for a couple of hours of sync, and code from home otherwise?

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#194

Post by exfacebook »

taway_1212 wrote: post #193
exfacebook wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not aware of any remote work policy , but there are the occasional remote people. Every big tech company will make exceptions for their top people and accommodate unusual arrangements, even Microsoft. > massive refurbished warehouses I wouldn't say "warehouses" --- the visual design is quite good, with a modernist bent. Frank Gehry designed the last few new offices. But yes, the offices are very open. Fortunately…

What are the realistic expectations of in-office presence? Are there core hours when everyone is more or less expected to be present? Or is it accepted to hop in to the office every other day for a couple of hours of sync, and code from home otherwise?

I've worked in both modes. I've never heard of anyone being chastised for not being in the office enough --- but of course, that kind of feedback would be given in private.

I think the expectation is that you just be an adult about your work habits. Make sure that you're not slowing down the people you work with. It's up to you to figure out how to do that. One strategy is to just be in the office, but there are other options too.

(I'd say "teammates", but close collaborators aren't necessarily teammates at FB. You might work closely with someone every day and share only Zuck as the lowest common manager.)

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#195

Post by dang »

zump wrote: post #42

yawn

You've posted plenty of unsubstantive comments to HN. We eventually ban accounts that do that, so please only post civilly and substantively from now on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13316569 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#196

Post by _John-Titor_ »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #123
FlorianRappl wrote: post #49

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.

Microsoft is one of the few places where you can pretty much switch to using any part of your CS degree just by making an internal transfer. Operating systems? Compilers? Consumer applications? Cloud infrastructure? Search engines? Games and console development? Embedded devices? Database engines? CS research? All there in one place. Only Google and Amazon come close but Google is 90% search and ads and Amazon is 90%…

This sounds pretty amazing. I don't particularly hate the MS stack. I like most of it, in fact. This puts it in my list of companies-to-consider list.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#197

Post by blakeyrat »

ma2rten wrote: post #184
V-2 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Being ethical is a core value of the company." How does it make them stand out? What does it translate to in practice?

It means that Google often passes on opportunities to make more money if that would hurt or mislead users, advertisers or publishers. Google's search rankings are unbiased. The ads team is separated from the search team. It's business model benefits from and supports an open internet, unlike other companies which lock users into their ecosystem. Google is very transparent internally for a company it's size. Google re…

You should get the YouTube developers in on this, because their ContentID system is about the LEAST ethical piece of software in common use.

In my 2 dozen or so ContentID flaggings, maybe two of them have been by parties with a legitimate claim to the material. All the rest have been fraud.

My most recent "pleasant" experience with ContentID was some scam copyright company claiming they owned the soundtrack to Elder Scrolls: Morrowind. The beauty of this system is that not only are they fraudulently claiming they own that content, but to get my video published I have to swear that I'm not stealing the content they actually stole.

How do I report this scammer to YouTube? Well you can't. There's no automated way, and there's no support whatsoever. They can just scam in peace for years and years and nobody can do anything about it because nobody at Google cares.

"Ethical". Riiight.

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#199

Post by blakeyrat »

ma2rten wrote: post #175
Insanity wrote: post #152

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.

Nobody who's been a victim of ContentID scammers (basically, 80% of YouTube Creators) would never say Google is "ethical".

Re: Ask HN: What current companies have the best software engineering culture?

#200

Post by p-squared »

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #153
akerro wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The problem of 'scale' they were addressing in the iOS app wasn't scale of users, but rather scale of devs. They have 18k classes because they came up with a rather clever way of allowing many separate developers to all work on different features of the same app, without stepping on each others toes. This might not seem like a hard problem if you've never worked on a non-trivial iOS app, but it is a pretty impressive…

> They have 18k classes because they came up with a rather clever way of allowing many separate developers to all work on different features of the same app, without stepping on each others toes.

What makes you believe this is "clever" as opposed to a poor engineering decision? I strongly suspect that FB might have delivered a higher quality product through a more traditional team-ownership development model. Throwing large numbers of developers at a single app is unlikely to lead to a well-architected holistic solution.

Post reply on HN