6 ms·

> mature tooling that exists at FAANG I never worked at FAANG but even after more than 10 years working in tech, it still surprises me how undervalued well wor

> mature tooling that exists at FAANG I never worked at FAANG but even after more than 10 years working in tech, it still surprises me how undervalued well working tooling is. I'm not talking about 100% automation with infinite possibilities. Just really basic stuff, like deployment or setting up a development environment. That should always be a no-brainer.

draw_down 7y ago
Maybe it should, but that stuff is hard to get right and therefore expensive. It only starts making sense once you have a lot of engineers to amortize the cost over, and who are too expensive to be kept idle due to issues that arise from bad tools/lack of tools.
verletx64 7y ago
Easier said than done even if you _do_ get the time to invest into it.
Quarrelsome 7y ago
it doesn't show up on the books. All companies over optimise for things they measure and under optimise for things they don't. Nobody has a reliable measure for development productivity so it oft doesn't receive the love it deserves.
mepiethree 7y ago
I used to work at Google, and I find the tooling much better on the outside. Heroku is much better than Google's deployment tool; Github is much better than their review tool. The only things I miss are the snacks and the searchable codebase
- devicetray0 7y ago
  > and the searchable codebase Do you mean that you'd search Google's entire codebase monorepo for code examples, or that there was a better, searchable code snippet tool internally?
  - ertemplin 7y ago
    Not sure about google, but most of the big tech companies have a code browser website with a search feature that shows the most "relevant" repositories first in the search results. For example, repositories that people in your team or org have recently modified will show up near the top of the results.
  - paulgb 7y ago
    > Do you mean that you'd search Google's entire codebase monorepo for code examples As another former Googler, yes, searching the entire monorepo was a frequent occurrence. Internal code search is pretty good (it's a search company, after all) but I have to say that I don't miss it so much now that Sourcegraph exists.
- hinkley 7y ago
  I did a short contract at Amazon (not AWS) and I couldn't get away fast enough. What a rat's nest.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
o-__-o 7y ago
Pro tip: Building repeatable and distributable tooling patterns is a great way to break into client sites as a consultant
nscalf 7y ago
And it's totally reasonable that this isn't common place. The team I'm with now has been spending a lot of our spare time at work trying to get a suite of tools built out to make things like logging, message publishing, etc. spun up easily. It is very painful. The simple case is pretty simple, but if you add any complexity to it you're in for a world of pain.
- GFischer 7y ago
  Not sure what stack you're using, but Azure Application Insights is very nice for logging. And they have lots of tools for what you're mentioning (but you have to pay for them). If not, maybe you do have to build them (and it might be monetizable even!)
GFischer 7y ago
We're using Azure at my current workplace, and the amount of legwork you can get done is pretty amazing (as long as you're willing to pay for it). We have an ARM template to set up environments, deployment is painless with Azure DevOps, etc.

draw_down 7y ago

Maybe it should, but that stuff is hard to get right and therefore expensive. It only starts making sense once you have a lot of engineers to amortize the cost over, and who are too expensive to be kept idle due to issues that arise from bad tools/lack of tools.

verletx64 7y ago

Easier said than done even if you _do_ get the time to invest into it.

Quarrelsome 7y ago

it doesn't show up on the books. All companies over optimise for things they measure and under optimise for things they don't. Nobody has a reliable measure for development productivity so it oft doesn't receive the love it deserves.

mepiethree 7y ago

I used to work at Google, and I find the tooling much better on the outside. Heroku is much better than Google's deployment tool; Github is much better than their review tool. The only things I miss are the snacks and the searchable codebase

devicetray0 7y ago
> and the searchable codebase Do you mean that you'd search Google's entire codebase monorepo for code examples, or that there was a better, searchable code snippet tool internally?
- ertemplin 7y ago
  Not sure about google, but most of the big tech companies have a code browser website with a search feature that shows the most "relevant" repositories first in the search results. For example, repositories that people in your team or org have recently modified will show up near the top of the results.
- paulgb 7y ago
  > Do you mean that you'd search Google's entire codebase monorepo for code examples As another former Googler, yes, searching the entire monorepo was a frequent occurrence. Internal code search is pretty good (it's a search company, after all) but I have to say that I don't miss it so much now that Sourcegraph exists.
hinkley 7y ago
I did a short contract at Amazon (not AWS) and I couldn't get away fast enough. What a rat's nest.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

o-__-o 7y ago

Pro tip: Building repeatable and distributable tooling patterns is a great way to break into client sites as a consultant

nscalf 7y ago

And it's totally reasonable that this isn't common place. The team I'm with now has been spending a lot of our spare time at work trying to get a suite of tools built out to make things like logging, message publishing, etc. spun up easily. It is very painful. The simple case is pretty simple, but if you add any complexity to it you're in for a world of pain.

GFischer 7y ago
Not sure what stack you're using, but Azure Application Insights is very nice for logging. And they have lots of tools for what you're mentioning (but you have to pay for them). If not, maybe you do have to build them (and it might be monetizable even!)

GFischer 7y ago

We're using Azure at my current workplace, and the amount of legwork you can get done is pretty amazing (as long as you're willing to pay for it). We have an ARM template to set up environments, deployment is painless with Azure DevOps, etc.