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I have to strongly disagree. When doing business you are solving a business problems. Facebook, Google, Microsoft as business has grown so much they have proble

I have to strongly disagree. When doing business you are solving a business problems. Facebook, Google, Microsoft as business has grown so much they have problems of scale no open tools are able to handle. On the other hand, any kind of smaller company doesn't have those business problems, but a cost of having and maintaining in-house solutions of that scale will just effectively topple and sink them. This is why I'm always frowning during job interviews with engineers telling stories about they migrations from monolith to microservices and putting it all into k8s, while their headcount in the firs tens and their DAU in about 10000 users. Disclaimer: I worked in Yandex, virtually Russian Google. Loads and operations scale there are comparable with second rank international tech giants. Yandex has and have lots of internal tools to handle that load and scale, but I've almost never really needed them in smaller companies. Maybe "nice to have" couple of times.

cnst 7y ago
It's also a lot about the marketability of your skills. The only reason the OP can boast about the experience with these proprietary tools is because they're used by FAANG. No other reason — it's just an indirect and inconspicuous boasting about having worked at FAANG. If it was yet another proprietary non-OSS language used by one of the investment companies that has no direct analogues at any of their competitors — good luck boasting on your resume that you have skills in programming languages that noone cares about. Proprietary software sucks. Just because it's written and used internally by FAANG doesn't make it suck any less. When you're evaluating whether or not to join a company, presence of such tools should be more of a red flag, if anything. Same goes with software-as-a-service. Tools should be OSS, and easily portable between the workplaces. Another case in point — it kind of works both ways — many companies start around with Erlang and ejabberd, because it's a really great tool, but then, after having issues finding developers who can understand it properly, they eventually, one way or another, convert their stack back to the more common languages; I recall this has happened with Facebook Messenger and Heroku, and also at a random startup I was interviewing with during the course of my interview (they just hired a manager who knew Java — and, what do you know, he decides to set a direction to eventually replace all Erlang with Java).

cnst 7y ago

It's also a lot about the marketability of your skills. The only reason the OP can boast about the experience with these proprietary tools is because they're used by FAANG. No other reason — it's just an indirect and inconspicuous boasting about having worked at FAANG. If it was yet another proprietary non-OSS language used by one of the investment companies that has no direct analogues at any of their competitors — good luck boasting on your resume that you have skills in programming languages that noone cares about. Proprietary software sucks. Just because it's written and used internally by FAANG doesn't make it suck any less. When you're evaluating whether or not to join a company, presence of such tools should be more of a red flag, if anything. Same goes with software-as-a-service. Tools should be OSS, and easily portable between the workplaces. Another case in point — it kind of works both ways — many companies start around with Erlang and ejabberd, because it's a really great tool, but then, after having issues finding developers who can understand it properly, they eventually, one way or another, convert their stack back to the more common languages; I recall this has happened with Facebook Messenger and Heroku, and also at a random startup I was interviewing with during the course of my interview (they just hired a manager who knew Java — and, what do you know, he decides to set a direction to eventually replace all Erlang with Java).