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This rings true for anyone who has ever worked at a big tech company (I work at Google). At Google when your project begins to scale up you can ask for more mo
by habosa 7y ago
This rings true for anyone who has ever worked at a big tech company (I work at Google).
At Google when your project begins to scale up you can ask for more money, more people, or both. Most teams ask for both.
What you can't ask for is different people. You can't solve your distributed systems problems by adding 5 more mid-level software engineers to your team who have not worked in the domain. Yet due to how hiring works, this is what's offered to you unless you want to do the recruiting yourself. Google views all software engineers as interchangeable at their level. I have seen people being sent to work on an Android app with hundreds of millions of users despite never having done mobile development before. That normally goes about as well as you'd expect.
So you end up with teams of 20 people slowly doing work that could be done quickly by 5 experts. In some cases all you lose is speed. In other cases this is fatal. Some things simply cannot be done without the right team.
- natalyarostova 7y agoI see the same thing, and the only way I can reconcile this is that the benefit to sr leadership in terms of treating SDEs as fungible is so massive that it is still worth the massive productivity loss from assuming exchangability.
- amznthrowaway5 7y agoWhat are the benefits to treating SDEs as fungible? At Amazon, Sr. Leadership and HR love to pretend all SDEs at a given level are interchangeable, level actually indicates competence, and leetcoding external hires with zero domain knowledge have far more worth than internal promos. All of the above assumptions seem completely insane to me and have resulted in the destruction of many projects.
- natalyarostova 7y agoYeah me too. Also at amazon. And yet amazon is obscenely successful, as are other big tech companies which take similar strategies. It seems that matching expertise to projects is so fucking hard that just giving up at the start and accepting it’s impossible is the optimal strategy. Honestly I don’t know. I agree it’s weird. But these companies keep succeeding doing it this way, so I’m not sure what to make of it.
- amznthrowaway5 7y ago> But these companies keep succeeding doing it this way, so I’m not sure what to make of it. That doesn't necessarily mean anything. The fact that a system might be working, doesn't mean it's anywhere near optimal. I think these companies are successful in spite of these types of policies, not because of them.