throwawayFanta

At my FAANG, there was a team of experienced engineers that proved they could deliver faster and more performant code than a complete org that was responsible for it earlier.

So now a lot of different parts of the company are trying to replicate their workflow. The process is showing what works, you need to have AI first documentation (readme with one line for each file to help manage context), develop skills and steering docs for your codebase, code style, etc,. And it mostly works!

For me personally, it has drastically increased productivity. I can pick up something from our infinitely huge backlog, provide some context and let the agent go ham on fixing it while i do whatever other stuff is assigned to me.

As a counter point, at the bigTech i work at, since Trump's H1B visa fee announcement all H1B hiring requires approval from pretty high up in the management chain.

It won't work that way. If you look at the internal structure of amazon, you realize that majority of the good engineers have been there for 5+ years. Amazon always churned through people, causing good engineers who couldn't deal with the culture to leave within 2-3 years, and mediocre engineers getting pipped over 3-4 years.

It's mostly money. If you are good at your job, amazon pays much better than most companies. I tried looking for a new job last year, and the only ones increasing my current comp were HFT and pre-ipo startups. Google wouldn't even match my current comp.

In terms of the rest, only Netflix, meta, snowflake and roblox (why?) might have offered better, but the wlb in the first two is similar to amzn, and i didn't like the outlook of the latter two.

Microsoft is stuck because anything they'd do would reduce the "freedom" of end users.

I work in big tech, and unfortunately we frequently need to have conversations about the smallest features because we have evidence about us giving users an inch and they taking a mile.

It depends on if that aligns with your management's views. In aws, ive seen teams spend some effort on keeping their backlog low (but no zero) since if it balloons out of control you know you're gonna get called out on it.

i recall a team that had all its feature releases struck down for the coming year so they would work through their backlog.

Opinions are my own, bla bla bla

What this exec did was very illegal, but anyone in the startup scene would know that things like this are very common, but probably on a smaller scale.

Maybe there are no wads of cash changing hands, but I've personally seen contracts being earned less due to the feature set, but more because the startup got introduced to some C level and them applying downward pressure to choose that startup during the vetting process.

It's kinda noticeable when you're on a call with a big company's tech team and they sound defeated when talking about the success criteria and stuff

I think this blog fails to take into account that 2021 is not 2002. Computer Science is a much more formal/mainstream field of study now, and people don't operate "in a vacuum with no mentorship, guidance, or reference points.”

Some comments on the previous blog post raised important questions regarding minimum understanding/knowledge of technology one utilizes as part of their day job. And I would agree that indexing is a fundamental aspect while using relational databases.

But unfortunately this isn't very uncommon these days, way too often have I heard people in $bigco say, let's use X, everyone uses X without completely understanding the implications/drawbacks/benefits of that choice.

Just looking at the raw numbers they all seem outrageous. But if you take a look at some of these companies it makes a lot more sense.

The FAANG I work for makes a PROFIT of $2 mill/year for every employee. So it's easy for them to think, lets pay this lot $300-600k and use em to keep our advantage/keep them away from competition. For all I care they could be paying all of us $1 mill and still be making a good sum of money.