191–200 of 1001 posts
I'm reading this as "Executive leadership makes hiring and planning mistakes and punishes employees opposed to taking personal responsibility" Also, I block everything Facebook at the router level with unbound.
But isn't this a business decision? "Punishment" implies a fault, but the employees are not at fault here.
What would "taking personal responsibility" look like for management?
Google would have been a lot more productive if it had hired people to work on one good messaging app instead of 13+ bad messaging apps. Google has long had an attitude of "we hire the best so we can afford to have them stand on one leg and balance on a ball while holding a cane in their mouth and balancing a bunch of dishes on the end of the cane while typing with one hand on a chorded keyboard and looking at a moni…
We’ll a lot of their products come out if individual side projects, Google is an incubator of sorts so I’m not surprised that’s how their product gets made.
If you are doing that for your products though you are never going to get long-term traction no matter how good or bad your engineers or marketing people are.
I'm a bit worried that this will trigger some kind of move to measure productivity in increasingly crude ways -- i.e. exhaustive, invasive telemetry that tracks every mouse click and keypress.
I'm a bit worried that this will trigger some kind of move to measure productivity in increasingly crude ways -- i.e. exhaustive, invasive telemetry that tracks every mouse click and keypress.
IMO In-person five days a week is preferable to dystopian tracking automation, not that they're mutually exclusive.
FAANG employees make up a group of some of the most hire-able employees I can think of. If leadership makes work hard, they will quit.
(Baring H1B employees, they just get the shit stick all around, but that's not unique to this particular issue)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The full word is perquisite. Perk is slang.
Huh. I'm a native English speaker and I've never seen that word in my life. I thought it was a typo for a moment
It's the tax they pay for offering such high salaries regardless of team, and having so much grunt work because they are too big to care that they're paying some people 300k to click "deploy" (source: getting paid right now to manually roll out changes at a FANGetc and silence alarms that have been red forever because backlog)
Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… or maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays. Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. Look, if I can ‘crack the coding intervi…
I see this argument all the time, but I can't find any other place that it comes from other than disappointment from those that didn't or can't pass those interviews. (Disclaimer, outside of college internships I've never interviewed for a FAANG SWE position nor have I ever worked for one).
Is it an objectively good measure of being a software engineer? Hard to say honestly. I doubt you'll ever find a truly great measure that you can test for in an interview. When I was interviewing candidates for my company, did I ask those leetcode algorithm questions? Not really. Maybe at most one basic tree traversal question (probably would fall under leetcode "easy" if I had to guess, but honestly the kind of thing a student would learn in AP computer science in high school). Most questions were system design and problem solving with a coding challenge (building something simple, not solving algorithmic puzzles). So by evidence of my own actions, I don't believe that they're the optimal questions for screening engineers.
That having been said, I don't understand why people are upset by these interviews. Who cares? If you really think it's suboptimal, then other companies who have "better" interviewing practices should be better at identifying undiscovered talent and hiring them. Better for you if you're hiring in those cases. Let FAANG fail on their own hiring practices. FTR I don't think they're that bad either, they just filter for a bunch of left-brained people who are good at math. Maybe they do make good engineers also. And if results are anything, clearly it's been working for FAANG for the past decade so who's to say that they shouldn't keep doing it?
> Look, if I can ‘crack the coding interview’, then I can certainly crack ‘how to do as little work as possible and stack paper to the ceiling while my stock vests’.
This is a reach (to put it mildly) and unfairly paints people who are good at algorithms as inherently unmotivated and whose primary goal is to cheat the system without any evidence. Are you saying another talented developer who isn't good at algorithms could not or would not hack the system as such? I don't see any reason to expect either to be the case. Hacking said system does not require you to be able to prove the runtimes of a Van Emde Boas queue, it just requires some common sense that any human being has.
> I wonder when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod.
This is pure ad hominem and unrelated to whether or not these questions are good screening questions. I certainly hope that Mark or Sundar are not wasting even a millisecond of their time writing code and trying to get a PR out to production. It's one of the absolute worst uses of their time. But while we're on the topic, Mark literally built the first version of Facebook (to be fair, probably in a bad hacky way) and Sundar was a product manager so I certainly don't expect him to write code.
Maybe it’s not the employees fault, but the management who hired them… or maybe it’s the fact that it takes forever to get anything done at FAANG nowadays. Or maybe, just maybe, interviewing based on esoteric computer science problems isn’t the best way to identify high performing builders.. but a great way of identifying people who can hack a process to secure maximal reward. Look, if I can ‘crack the coding intervi…
> when the last time was that Mark or Sundar actually wrote any code they pushed to prod That would be a surpreme waste of company money, and probably they have engineers working for them who are far better developers than they are.
Glad these guys seem to finally be noticing. I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single quarter of profit, of course. I and my team had so many good…
You know; there are two sides to view this coin from: either "those tech people are insane with all their beautiful buildings, great perks, and fantastic work-life balance" or "those tech people are forward-looking with how we could just make work less shitty for everyone, if only other industries would catch on". I'm sad that even many on here seem to be opting for the "insane" line of thinking, and not recognizing…
It is telling when small perks that don’t effect the bottom line are cut.