I would like to say, I am going through a very similar experience at Meta. Is there any Big Tech company where internal tooling isn't broken for front-end development?
Does such a company exist?
Laying myself off from Amazon
361–370 of 374 posts
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#362I'm reminded of the quip: "Amazon is a place where smart people go to feel bad about themselves."
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
That works in mostly self-contained projects. As soon as you interface with other teams, or even hardware that is still in development, you better make sure that everyone is aligned on the critical details before plowing ahead. Otherwise it can get very expensive (in terms of time, money, and motivation) to prototype yourself into a corner. Just this week I witnessed some team having built feature without consulting…
> As soon as you interface with other teams, or even hardware that is still in development, you better make sure that everyone is aligned on the critical details before plowing ahead. Otherwise it can get very expensive (in terms of time, money, and motivation) to prototype yourself into a corner. Even then, writing a prototype is often a quicker and more effective way to flush out disagreement than endless discussio…
But "endless" discussions or disagreements weren't implied at all. For a sufficiently large and complex project, where every participant (individual or entire teams) is only able to fully grasp a relatively small piece of it[1], there is sometimes just a lot of details to talk through, even if all participants are in full agreement and perfectly willing throughout that entire process.
To stay in the embedded world for an example, sometimes the actual code is just a few dozen lines with a handful of assembly instructions, or even less. But the danger and potential pain those lines of codes might incur on countless involved subsystems, if not properly thought out, even if seemingly "working" at first, can be immense.
[1] To give a sense of scale of complexity in the embedded world for example, the ARM Architecture Reference Manual alone is well over 10000 pages now. And that isn't any actual implementation, and only the "main CPU" itself!
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Poorly designed, failure-prone, brittle internal tooling was a time and energy sink to the point where even the most trivial deployment change was a nail-biter. Considering rather good quality APIs they expose to the external world, this is shocking to read.
Good is a big word, but they exist and have docs. A lot of the time the docs are even correct, if you can find them.
I have most often interacted with their APIs via the golang library. Compared to Azure, the AWS stuff is pretty solid.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The goal is to determine the state of the internal tools, not to purge any dissenters… Well ... maybe?
I suppose? I’ve always answered honestly and never been purged so far. N1 doesn’t really help, but it’s a start.
Same. Seems really nonsensical to purge someone from a tool satisfaction poll/survey.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#366Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good is a big word, but they exist and have docs. A lot of the time the docs are even correct, if you can find them.
I have most often interacted with their APIs via the golang library. Compared to Azure, the AWS stuff is pretty solid.
Everyone says this, but in terms of discoverability of the actual apis I have found the opposite is true. Azure tends to have docs with small mistakes, but they are extremely thorough. With AWS it seems to be a tossup: You can be lucky and have complete and accurate information, or you can be fucked.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#368Sigh... another loss at the hands of, "Code is Art!" It's not art. Art requires no function, it exists as a representation. (Professional) code, and software engineering generally, must produce valuable things, and sometimes the process of making those valuable things isn't "fun", but that's never been part of the equation. Aligning "fun" with "valuable" is nearly impossible, and when you try you're dooming yourself…
Nothing requires a function, you can have code without a function.
I think good art (to me) requires some function. And code is art. Like architecture , or furniture design, or gardening, or dance, or many art where the design and precision and purpose is all tied into what the artist is doing.
I don’t think coding is pointless and think that coding for the purpose of being beautiful can be dangerous and painful to support or refactor. But I’ve read a lot of code and appreciated it on some aesthetic level and remember thinking, “that’s neat.”
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#369My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). My advice is to look for founder-led teams (not companies). If there are plenty of founders still on the team, they will likely care a lot about the product and code and hold everyone to high standards which make the work easier in the long run. On the other hand when I've been on teams where all the original founders left, it's been a constant s…
Yup, and the other flipside is devs being extremely nitpicky and regurgitating irrelevant Amazon principles BS in code reviews because they're trying to get promoted.
That shit never stopped sounding culty to me. When they broke out "Best employer on Earth", it was a new level of weird.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#370Sigh... another loss at the hands of, "Code is Art!" It's not art. Art requires no function, it exists as a representation. (Professional) code, and software engineering generally, must produce valuable things, and sometimes the process of making those valuable things isn't "fun", but that's never been part of the equation. Aligning "fun" with "valuable" is nearly impossible, and when you try you're dooming yourself…
besides your point - I tangentially would like to mention:
art HAS a function. It sometimes appears invisible because it is we who are affected by it.
Art is anything that functions to manipulate a {conscious being}'s internal state (traditionally emotional state).
That said - I agree mostly with your point besides that one pedantic complaint :)