5 ms·

I'm always amazed with how big tech companies get in terms of employee count. I once wandered the engineering area of the HQ (with an employee) of a FAANG (MAAN

I'm always amazed with how big tech companies get in terms of employee count. I once wandered the engineering area of the HQ (with an employee) of a FAANG (MAANG sounds... silly) and made a tick mark on my notebook when I saw someone actually coding - or at least having code on screen. There were over 1200 people on the development team and at the time most worked out of HQ. So... when I was done walking, I had 22 tick marks. Lots of email, lots of documents, and very little programming.

abduhl 4y ago
Yes, but haven't you heard that productivity has gone up since we've moved to WFH? You'd probably have like 30-40 tick marks now if you toured all their homes.
- arroz 4y ago
  Yeah i don’t think this is true though people love to say it is true Productivity is a very subjective term Are you making more dollars for less money? This is productivity, everything else doesn’t matter
  - throw123123123 4y ago
    I think a developer productivity is measured by the eng output, not the market pricing of the goods they sell. Im pretty sure LOC/person went down a lot with the pandemic across all companies.
  - hallway_monitor 4y ago
    I would love to make more dollars for less money. I think.
kristjansson 4y ago
Its almost like the practice of software engineering in a large organization involves (much) more than writing code?
- why5s 4y ago
  I get the sentiment here. But I can understand why someone would want to optimize towards writing more code than dealing with organizational politics. I guess the tradeoff would be to go to a smaller company.
- christophilus 4y ago
  Everywhere I've worked (including for MAANG companies), software engineering was best done by a combination of three things, listed in priority order: A) thinking B) programming ... Z) meetings The meetings contained something useful maybe 1/10th of the time, lasted maybe 4x longer than they should have, and involved maybe 20x more people than they should have. Those numbers skew higher the larger the organization. Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
  - kristjansson 4y ago
    May we all be so fortunate to have tasks defined so specifically and selected so precisely that one can accomplish them only by thinking and programming, and find satisfaction in doing so.
    - christophilus 4y ago
      Heh. I knew I’d get downvoted. I’ve generally been on the most productive teams in my segment of the business. The biggest differentiator seems to be that my teams had devs that knew when to ask questions and what questions to ask. This is probably the most important skill a dev can learn. The solution to ambiguous requirements is not meetings. At least, not in the usual sense. It’s knowing who and what to ask, and occasionally meeting with customers or knowledgeable stakeholders.
- indymike 4y ago
  22 is less than 2% of the engineering effort. I agree that code part of the engineering effort, but if your business is software driven, you would think it is more than 2% of the effort. A lot of the adjacent roles to an engineer, i.e. documentation, devops, sre, all have code involved, too.
andsoitis 4y ago
> (MAANG sounds... silly) and mangy.
scarmig 4y ago
Big MAMAA?
marcinzm 4y ago
At a certain level of complexity, necessary to support everything a large company does at their scale, simply mindlessly churning out more code actually makes things worse not better. The big question is how to do something and not the actual work of doing it. Bringing down Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code.
- citizenpaul 4y ago
  >Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code. I simply don't believe this is true. Its one of those things that has become "fact" through repetition. I don't think there is even a way it could be proven if you wanted to. I don't think amazon loses $X millions if the site is down for an hour. I think people just say oh its down and come back later and buy exactly what they were going to anyway. Perhaps they have to pay out some SLA type stuff to advertisers. However I don't think there is a single outage of a major tech company that has lasted 24hrs in the last 20 years. Major tech company is of course debatable.
  - wonderwonder 4y ago
    Facebook does not make money selling physical items though, it makes money on page views and clicks. If the site is down, they lose all of those ad views and clicks, they are gone because the time needed to view them and all of the other ads is gone.
    - citizenpaul 4y ago
      I have not worked in the ad space so I'm certainly ignorant of the day to day mechanics. How can you prove that the people didn't just come back 6 hrs later and spend the same time clicking and viewing the same ads? Just in a different timeframe? Is the cost of an ad at 6PM really that much greater than at 10PM? IME SLA's rarely pay out enough to really make it worth pursuing. However I have gotten a couple payouts from SLAs for companies i worked at in the past. I didn't think it was worth the time but I got paid either way. I get they have profit models that "prove" they lost money but they all must be based on an assumption. The assumption that there was only this one chance to catch the attention of the customer and never again. To me this is a very big assumption that simply cannot be proven and is probably wrong.
RBerenguel 4y ago
Mentally I always chuckle at MANGA (sleeve in Spanish, or the comic style),and it could also be MAGNA, but has possibly too good of a sound to it to be worth it.
jdavis703 4y ago
Most of these jobs hire software engineers, not programmers. The job is more than coding. Software engineering is writing technical design docs. Gathering business requirements. Gathering technical requirements. Negotiating with stakeholders like InfoSec, legal and accounting. Discussing user research and new features with UX practitioners. Etc.
wbsss4412 4y ago
FAANG sounds silly too, we’re just used to it.

abduhl 4y ago

Yes, but haven't you heard that productivity has gone up since we've moved to WFH? You'd probably have like 30-40 tick marks now if you toured all their homes.

arroz 4y ago
Yeah i don’t think this is true though people love to say it is true Productivity is a very subjective term Are you making more dollars for less money? This is productivity, everything else doesn’t matter
- throw123123123 4y ago
  I think a developer productivity is measured by the eng output, not the market pricing of the goods they sell. Im pretty sure LOC/person went down a lot with the pandemic across all companies.
- hallway_monitor 4y ago
  I would love to make more dollars for less money. I think.

kristjansson 4y ago

Its almost like the practice of software engineering in a large organization involves (much) more than writing code?

why5s 4y ago
I get the sentiment here. But I can understand why someone would want to optimize towards writing more code than dealing with organizational politics. I guess the tradeoff would be to go to a smaller company.
christophilus 4y ago
Everywhere I've worked (including for MAANG companies), software engineering was best done by a combination of three things, listed in priority order: A) thinking B) programming ... Z) meetings The meetings contained something useful maybe 1/10th of the time, lasted maybe 4x longer than they should have, and involved maybe 20x more people than they should have. Those numbers skew higher the larger the organization. Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
- kristjansson 4y ago
  May we all be so fortunate to have tasks defined so specifically and selected so precisely that one can accomplish them only by thinking and programming, and find satisfaction in doing so.
  - christophilus 4y ago
    Heh. I knew I’d get downvoted. I’ve generally been on the most productive teams in my segment of the business. The biggest differentiator seems to be that my teams had devs that knew when to ask questions and what questions to ask. This is probably the most important skill a dev can learn. The solution to ambiguous requirements is not meetings. At least, not in the usual sense. It’s knowing who and what to ask, and occasionally meeting with customers or knowledgeable stakeholders.
indymike 4y ago
22 is less than 2% of the engineering effort. I agree that code part of the engineering effort, but if your business is software driven, you would think it is more than 2% of the effort. A lot of the adjacent roles to an engineer, i.e. documentation, devops, sre, all have code involved, too.

andsoitis 4y ago

> (MAANG sounds... silly) and mangy.

scarmig 4y ago

Big MAMAA?

marcinzm 4y ago

At a certain level of complexity, necessary to support everything a large company does at their scale, simply mindlessly churning out more code actually makes things worse not better. The big question is how to do something and not the actual work of doing it. Bringing down Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code.

citizenpaul 4y ago
>Facebook for a day due to a bad config is going to cost more money than a century of someone writing code. I simply don't believe this is true. Its one of those things that has become "fact" through repetition. I don't think there is even a way it could be proven if you wanted to. I don't think amazon loses $X millions if the site is down for an hour. I think people just say oh its down and come back later and buy exactly what they were going to anyway. Perhaps they have to pay out some SLA type stuff to advertisers. However I don't think there is a single outage of a major tech company that has lasted 24hrs in the last 20 years. Major tech company is of course debatable.
- wonderwonder 4y ago
  Facebook does not make money selling physical items though, it makes money on page views and clicks. If the site is down, they lose all of those ad views and clicks, they are gone because the time needed to view them and all of the other ads is gone.
  - citizenpaul 4y ago
    I have not worked in the ad space so I'm certainly ignorant of the day to day mechanics. How can you prove that the people didn't just come back 6 hrs later and spend the same time clicking and viewing the same ads? Just in a different timeframe? Is the cost of an ad at 6PM really that much greater than at 10PM? IME SLA's rarely pay out enough to really make it worth pursuing. However I have gotten a couple payouts from SLAs for companies i worked at in the past. I didn't think it was worth the time but I got paid either way. I get they have profit models that "prove" they lost money but they all must be based on an assumption. The assumption that there was only this one chance to catch the attention of the customer and never again. To me this is a very big assumption that simply cannot be proven and is probably wrong.

RBerenguel 4y ago

Mentally I always chuckle at MANGA (sleeve in Spanish, or the comic style),and it could also be MAGNA, but has possibly too good of a sound to it to be worth it.

jdavis703 4y ago

Most of these jobs hire software engineers, not programmers. The job is more than coding. Software engineering is writing technical design docs. Gathering business requirements. Gathering technical requirements. Negotiating with stakeholders like InfoSec, legal and accounting. Discussing user research and new features with UX practitioners. Etc.

wbsss4412 4y ago

FAANG sounds silly too, we’re just used to it.