5 ms·
As someone who worked at both Microsoft and Google... you can get await with doing little work at those companies for maybe a year, two years at most, but after
by Kranar 5y ago
As someone who worked at both Microsoft and Google... you can get await with doing little work at those companies for maybe a year, two years at most, but after that you're gone. The expectation at those places skyrockets after the first year.
- abledon 5y agohypothetically, do you think if people weren't allowed to drink caffeine or use performance enhancing drugs (adderall etc..), what % would not make that threshold of performance?
- Kranar 5y agoNo idea; most people I worked with drank coffee but never once was I exposed to performance enhancing drugs. At Microsoft I worked on IronPython and the people I worked with were productive not in the sense that they churned out 1000s and 1000s of lines of code a day, but they were productive in the sense that they were constantly outputting fairly novel solutions. A similar thing was true at Google, I worked in the platforms division there (storage systems, BigTable, Linux kernel tweaking), and it was mostly about identifying bottlenecks and coming up with interesting solutions to squeeze out more performance. Most of this work wasn't like massive lines of code, but you had to really understand the problem at a deep level and have the kind of rigor and discipline to make changes to large systems without breaking anything in the process. That last bit was very hard to do, since coming up with optimizations that don't break anything is surprisingly difficult.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoI’ve never mentioned my ADHD diagnosis and medication to my coworkers and none have ever mentioned it to me.
- paxys 5y agoAt Microsoft at least that wasn't my experience at all. I knew several people there who hadn't done any real productive work for the last 7-10 years, probably longer.
- agagrgar 5y agoI've been in Azure and GCP. IDK how anyone would get away with it. You constantly have customer issues, people from other teams pinging you, needing help with something. I don't see how it would be possible just to do nothing and survive. Maybe in some team that is further removed from customers?
- theskypirate 5y agoIt's easy to be productive in that context. People pinging you to get help with something, that's a "positive distraction." You'll write a block of code super fast and send it back to them.
- sjtindell 5y agoAren’t there still tons of developer jobs at Google, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle, etc. where you aren’t on call and just get to write code?
- ayewo 5y agoNot to disagree with your experience at Azure and GCP, but the grandparent specifically mentioned their parent entities: Microsoft and Google, each of which have several divisions apart from their respective cloud divisions. Keep in mind that Azure and GCP are playing catch up to AWS, so they necessarily have to run a tight ship in order to close AWS’ lead. So its possible for laxity to exist in other divisions in a large company, as long as the money keeps rolling in, e.g. the Windows division at Microsoft (which still enjoys a good share of the desktop market) and the Search division at Google (which still enjoys a good share of the search market).
- agagrgar 5y agoYeah, I mentioned Azure and GCP specifically, to imply that other divisions within those companies may be different. Anything where you're constantly deploying to enterprise customers, you're going to need to be responsive to issues that come up, and that alone will take a good chunk of the day.
- mathteddybear 5y agoAs someone who put more lines of code into <50KLOC hobby project, that is not guaranteed, especially when your "little work" affects the bottom line on megabucks scale.
- dboreham 5y agoLove the async-ian slip