3 ms·
I've definitely worked with engineers that are 10x slower or have extremely poor engineering practices: copy-pasting chunks of code, 8+ nested ifs, all code in
by Vadoff 7y ago
I've definitely worked with engineers that are 10x slower or have extremely poor engineering practices: copy-pasting chunks of code, 8+ nested ifs, all code in one giant function, use of global variables throughout, clueless how memory management works/tons of cyclic retains, etc.
I've seen plenty of purported "senior" engineers with 7+ yoe that code worse than new grads.
Now that I'm in FAANG with a high hiring bar, these type of engineers are completely absent. I'm sure that's not a coincidence.
- ryandrake 7y agoI agree, this was the biggest striking difference I saw between the engineering workforces at FAANG companies vs "everywhere else". You'll encounter a similar percentage of geniuses and top performers at both types of companies. You'll see plenty of regular 1X to 2X engineers, too. But somehow the FAANGs have, for the most part, figured out how to filter out the programmers who literally cannot program, whereas many other companies have not. You'll never see The Brilliant Paula Bean [1] at FAANG, but you will encounter them once in a while pretty much everywhere else. 1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean
- fg6hr 7y agoI think there are actually a lot of Paula Beans in FANGs, they just perform at an entirely different level. In short, in order to be called out an incompetent liar, someone needs to make an assessment, but if the domain is too complex, if the knowledge is spread across 100 people, nobody will ever be able to assess or even notice the incompetent do-nothing types. Senior management don't understand the technicalities, middle managers see only their own area, very technical architects are very technical only in their domain and so on.