261–270 of 449 posts
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Isn't it standard that grants are renewed yearly? If so you'll always be "leaving money on the table" (but then if you switch company you'd probably get a new grant, right?)
Nothing is "standard". I've never talked to a startup that offered an equity refresh like GOOG does.
Ex-Netflix here. I was a senior dev at Microsoft and Netflix (8 years of professional experience) and decided to switch to freelance for a variety of reasons. Eventually that turned into starting a company that provides a home for ex-FAANG (etc) devs that want to switch to freelancing. Facet Development is a freelancer network made up exclusively of ex-FAANG engineers. Facet does the work of finding freelancing jobs/…
Can you give an idea of what an ex-FAANG dev can expect after signing up? Like what's the frequency of projects? (not sure when you started this, if you just started it I understand you might not have a clear answer yet)
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This is spot-on, and it's also true in organizations without stack ranking. It's actually not a cynical way to view your job. If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? I've consistently seen that successful engineers focus on work that has an impact, and they are good at making it known. The first part is obviously good, but a lot of enginee…
> If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? The problem is that, at review time at Google, you have to be able to "quantify" the impact. Many types of impact are quantifiable (e.g. "Made server request scale from 100 query-per-second to 1,300 qps", "reduced code size by 30%", etc.). It's much harder to measure, say, the impact of a refactor…
I've also seen refactors that just made life difficult for everyone else with constant non-functional changes. In the end there is a lot of fashion in programming, and while some refactors are worthwhile most are not in my experience.
The refactor is supposed to provide payoff in the future, but what normally happens is fashion changes and someone new comes by and says "this code is shit" and starts the process over. The supposed benefits never accrue.
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> If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? The problem is that, at review time at Google, you have to be able to "quantify" the impact. Many types of impact are quantifiable (e.g. "Made server request scale from 100 query-per-second to 1,300 qps", "reduced code size by 30%", etc.). It's much harder to measure, say, the impact of a refactor…
You quantified what you said is hard to quantify. Measure commits/authors before and after a refactor.
Measuring number of commits? Create fewer, larger commits. Measuring commit size? Pull in more third-party libraries, even where it does't make sense. Author count? Add more/less documentation and recruit or inhibit new devs depending on what your goal is.
Not to mention the number of commits/authors before and after an arbitrary point in time might conflate a successful growing project with a project in a death spiral being passed around from group to group.
It's a good idea, but in practice simple metrics like this often (but not always) devolve into prime examples of Goodhart's law.
Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ( https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ ). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue…
> bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage Thanks for sharing your experience Michael in that blog post. Can I read that "$200k paid in case" as in all paid off without loans even from family/friends? If so, $200k seems like a high saving amount considering average American household are in credit card debts. In other words, Google job did pay really well…
It’s strange that there’s nobody from Amazon here, just people from G
I am in NYC, and hiring for a place that pays very well, possibly above FAANG salaries. I see a lot of resumes. A lot of those resumes are from Google, but very very few are from Facebook, and I find that to be a very curious thing. FBs office is not quite as large as Google's in NYC, but they have been around awhile and we are hiring out of both coasts and offer relocation. I am not sure if it is a quirk of our recr…
Why are almost all the replies by ex Google engineers? I thought I would see an even distribution from all FAANG companies but replies are pretty heavily skewed toward ex google employees. Is this because 1) Google culture is completely different from other FAANG companies? 2) Engineers at other FAANG companies dont quit their job? 3) or they dont browse HN in their free time?
What am I doing now?
I enjoy building dev tools. I am currently building ReviewNB (https://reviewnb.com) that helps with Jupyter Notebook diffs and commenting. I built https://nurtch.com earlier this year to help Dev/Ops teams write executable incident runbooks.
How?
I moved back from Seattle to New Delhi, India. Cost of living is less than $2000 per month which gives me enough time to work on my projects without being stressed financially.
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You quantified what you said is hard to quantify. Measure commits/authors before and after a refactor.
The problem is that metric, like any metric, is both easy to game _and_ can provide misleading information. Measuring number of commits? Create fewer, larger commits. Measuring commit size? Pull in more third-party libraries, even where it does't make sense. Author count? Add more/less documentation and recruit or inhibit new devs depending on what your goal is. Not to mention the number of commits/authors before and…
If you can’t find a measurable benefit to a refactoring (or anything else, really) then maybe it was not worth doing in the first place.
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> I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true. That's most places, FAANGs notwithstanding. 6 months getting up to speed, realizing what a clusterfuck it is by 12 months, dealing with it to 18 months, and then getting to the I-Want-Out point at 24+ months. Plus the whole "jump ship every 2-3 years to maximize salary" thing is possible for FAANG-level engin…
devops are like brake pads on trucks, you stomp the hell out of them whenever you didn't look far enough ahead, and when they start to make a squeaking noise you throw them out and get new ones.