“During Meta's developer conference in October, Carmack hosted a solo hour-long talk about the company's Oculus or Quest headset. He admitted he had many things to be ‘grumpy’ about, like the company's rate of progress on technological advancements and the basic functionality of the headsets. He said it was frustrating to hear from people inside Meta who found the Quest 2 headsets so unreliable that they refused to u…
> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices. It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for them…
SWE is more of a mixed bag. There are obviously incredibly bright people doing cutting edge software development at Google. But on the whole must of us were just doing very modest and incremental changes on protobuf shuffling super yak-shaved services that someone else had built the foundation of.
The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process.
The workplace culture stuff, again, mixed bag. Certainly to survive and thrive there, you needed to be thinking what to write about in perf twice a year, and it's such a constant that there were seminars and "how to get promoted" sessions where the whole self-promotional side of things was discussed in depth.