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The book Disciplined Minds goes into some of this. It helps one understand the answers to questions like why companies prize things like performance on coding t
by thewarrior 5y ago
The book Disciplined Minds goes into some of this. It helps one understand the answers to questions like why companies prize things like performance on coding tests that don’t correlate very well to the job.
Even FANGs are not looking for truly innovative engineers. Most of the innovation comes via acquisitions or when they hire some industry luminaries to lead projects. The rest are only there to fill in the lines and be highly productive coding machines that will learn the “syllabus” just like they learn to leet code.
These deep technical skills don’t matter as much because a lot these highly paying companies don’t have work that is deeply technical. Their challenges are primarily around management and scaling the number of engineers.
This requires reducing people down to something very simple and being able to treat engineers as fungible resources. Hiring and evaluating each person as a special snow flake is not the most profitable thing to do at large scales.
This is exactly the thesis behind Paul Graham’s ideas on startups and innovation. The scaling of a large corporation inevitably jams up the gears of the system and a small team can completely outflank a large company with employees keeping more of the returns and the work being more fulfilling.
Unfortunately the incumbents have sucked in most of the revenue so even though you regularly have small teams of people knocking out work that puts the biggies to shame making money is hard to impossible. So everyone on “Hacker news” is now left reverse engineering every detail of how big co works to get ahead .
- kebman 5y agoThank you for your insight! Hm so perhaps statistics and probability are actually more valuable for companies like that?
- thewarrior 5y agoDo not think only in terms of technical skills. Large companies operate via easily scaled algorithms for everything including promotions and hiring. The simplicity of these algorithms often means that they can be circumvented. You want to get hired at Google. What do you do ? Spend 3 years doing side projects or spend 3 months befriending and impressing some engineers so you get a referral. There maybe god level engineers who are stuck at junior levels because they simply don’t know how to fit into the gears of the hierarchy. If you want to get promoted your relationships and trust with the management chain is as important as the quality of your work. Don’t buy into the official stories about systems and processes work. Learn how they actually do.
- robertlagrant 5y agoI have to do my 6-monthly plug of The Inner Ring [0] by CS Lewis here. Dives into some of this, drawn from War and Peace. [0] https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring
- 908B64B197 5y ago> Even FANGs are not looking for truly innovative engineers. Most of the innovation comes via acquisitions or when they hire some industry luminaries to lead projects. The rest are only there to fill in the lines and be highly productive coding machines that will learn the “syllabus” just like they learn to leet code. FAANMG also has a deluge of resume thrown at it every semester. Ever since mainstream media filmed at the Google Campus/Facebook HQ, every parent wants their kid to work there since "he's really good at this computer stuff" and "he's gaming all the time, he might as well make money at the computer!". And then you get to interviewing and realize this candidate cannot write 2 lines of code...
- closeparen 5y agoThere's a big world between "cannot write 2 lines of code" and "studied Leetcode full-time for only two months instead of three." I give a lot of interviews, the majority of candidates who fail are in the latter category.