5 ms·

A lot of FAANG people want to get paid FAANG levels of money but also work on exciting and meaningful projects, we can't have it all.

com2kid 4y ago
The issue is, originally FAANG jobs were exciting. Think about it this way, everyone who was early at Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/etc has awesome stories of being on the first team in the world to ever try solving some really difficult problems. Exploring unknown new fields of computing, designing new UIs for never before imagined devices. You did super cool things. It is comparatively recent that FAANG jobs have become sort of lame. Remember how cool Google maps was when it first came out? Or how awesome Gmail was? Those were ground breaking projects! Heck we take distributed databases for granted now days, but Facebook pioneered a lot of amazing technology, so did Google, Amazon, and Twitter. Microsoft actually may have had the right model way back when, back when they had teams and job roles in charge of making new products, and another org just devoted to maintaining current versions of software. Of course that division was easy to make back when software came on CDs. Now days everything is cloud based and evergreen. Maybe companies need to have a career path that is just "maintain stuff" and your promos are based on how well stuff keeps working and any cost savings/perf improvements you can squeeze out of the existing code w/o doing a massive rewrite.
- chrsig 4y ago
  When they first came out, neither google maps nor gmail was really unique. They were just better than the alternatives. Mapquest and hotmail were the true trail blazers in that respect.
  - VikingCoder 4y ago
    When it first came out, the Tesla Roadster wasn't really unique. It was just better than the alternatives. The Model-T was the true trail blazer in that respect.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    There's such a huge gap in usability between Mapquest and the first Google Maps release it would be hard to overstate it. Both gmail and google maps were groundbreaking not for the fact that they gave you "webmail" or "maps on the web" but for the fact that they did so as properly interactive applications where the HTTP connection got out of your way and you could dynamically interact. Back then Google was doing this kind of groundbreaking stuff. Other people had all the technology pieces but Google was kind of the only company doing these things at scale and letting their engineers cook it up and ship it quickly, and in the early/mid-2000s it seemed like they were dropping a new "wow, nifty" type of thing every few months. From the people I know who were there at the time (I joined later, end of 2011 time frame, right as "the social wars" and the G+ era was happening) it sounds to me like a serious empowered-nerd culture where people just got out of your way so you could do stuff with all the neat tools that were available to you. That era at Google has ended some years ago now. It's too big, too political (and no, I don't mean "woke" politics, but corporate / promo / perf politics) and if you had a "neat idea" like how, say, Gmail started, you'd have a hell of a time making it happen past the layers of product managers etc. ... And if you work in a codebase like, say, Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the product of very complicated decisions and a massive build that will bog down a machine with a couple dozen cores and 128GB of RAM, and bring any IDE to its knees. A far cry from the breath of fresh air of lightness and speed that original beta Chrome version felt like, with its graphic novel / comic introduction [1] and raw "hey isn't this neat check this out" vibe... [1] https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/ https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/
    - robocat 4y ago
      > Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the product of very complicated decisions and a massive build As a webdev a few years ago, the Chromium team was oodles better than anyone else at delivering a reliable browser, and wayyyy better at fixing bugs than any other software team I have ever dealt with in my career (I just submitted bug reports to them, no direct or formal interaction). No idea what they are like now, but hotdamn that team was superlative. I hope it is enjoyable to work there, because the work output was phenomenal.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- crabmusket 4y ago
  Google Maps was acquired from another company though. I wonder how much of the UX was there already before the port to the browser.
  - cpeterso 4y ago
    For the history of Google Maps, Earth, and Street View, check out "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality". Written by one of the founders of Keyhole (the company that built what became Google Earth), the book is mostly about the founding of Keyhole and gathering map data from many sources, but also talks about Google's acquisition of Where 2 Technologies (the company that built what became Google Maps).

com2kid 4y ago

The issue is, originally FAANG jobs were exciting. Think about it this way, everyone who was early at Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/etc has awesome stories of being on the first team in the world to ever try solving some really difficult problems. Exploring unknown new fields of computing, designing new UIs for never before imagined devices. You did super cool things. It is comparatively recent that FAANG jobs have become sort of lame. Remember how cool Google maps was when it first came out? Or how awesome Gmail was? Those were ground breaking projects! Heck we take distributed databases for granted now days, but Facebook pioneered a lot of amazing technology, so did Google, Amazon, and Twitter. Microsoft actually may have had the right model way back when, back when they had teams and job roles in charge of making new products, and another org just devoted to maintaining current versions of software. Of course that division was easy to make back when software came on CDs. Now days everything is cloud based and evergreen. Maybe companies need to have a career path that is just "maintain stuff" and your promos are based on how well stuff keeps working and any cost savings/perf improvements you can squeeze out of the existing code w/o doing a massive rewrite.

chrsig 4y ago
When they first came out, neither google maps nor gmail was really unique. They were just better than the alternatives. Mapquest and hotmail were the true trail blazers in that respect.
- VikingCoder 4y ago
  When it first came out, the Tesla Roadster wasn't really unique. It was just better than the alternatives. The Model-T was the true trail blazer in that respect.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  There's such a huge gap in usability between Mapquest and the first Google Maps release it would be hard to overstate it. Both gmail and google maps were groundbreaking not for the fact that they gave you "webmail" or "maps on the web" but for the fact that they did so as properly interactive applications where the HTTP connection got out of your way and you could dynamically interact. Back then Google was doing this kind of groundbreaking stuff. Other people had all the technology pieces but Google was kind of the only company doing these things at scale and letting their engineers cook it up and ship it quickly, and in the early/mid-2000s it seemed like they were dropping a new "wow, nifty" type of thing every few months. From the people I know who were there at the time (I joined later, end of 2011 time frame, right as "the social wars" and the G+ era was happening) it sounds to me like a serious empowered-nerd culture where people just got out of your way so you could do stuff with all the neat tools that were available to you. That era at Google has ended some years ago now. It's too big, too political (and no, I don't mean "woke" politics, but corporate / promo / perf politics) and if you had a "neat idea" like how, say, Gmail started, you'd have a hell of a time making it happen past the layers of product managers etc. ... And if you work in a codebase like, say, Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the product of very complicated decisions and a massive build that will bog down a machine with a couple dozen cores and 128GB of RAM, and bring any IDE to its knees. A far cry from the breath of fresh air of lightness and speed that original beta Chrome version felt like, with its graphic novel / comic introduction [1] and raw "hey isn't this neat check this out" vibe... [1] https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/ https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/
  - robocat 4y ago
    > Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the product of very complicated decisions and a massive build As a webdev a few years ago, the Chromium team was oodles better than anyone else at delivering a reliable browser, and wayyyy better at fixing bugs than any other software team I have ever dealt with in my career (I just submitted bug reports to them, no direct or formal interaction). No idea what they are like now, but hotdamn that team was superlative. I hope it is enjoyable to work there, because the work output was phenomenal.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
crabmusket 4y ago
Google Maps was acquired from another company though. I wonder how much of the UX was there already before the port to the browser.
- cpeterso 4y ago
  For the history of Google Maps, Earth, and Street View, check out "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality". Written by one of the founders of Keyhole (the company that built what became Google Earth), the book is mostly about the founding of Keyhole and gathering map data from many sources, but also talks about Google's acquisition of Where 2 Technologies (the company that built what became Google Maps).