4 ms·

I don't think an elevated salary at a FAANG implies over-qualified, though. I phone-screened someone from a FAANG, and they knew very little about non-propriet

• jghn 4y ago
  > and they knew very little about non-proprietary technologies that we used on a day-to-day. I had an eye opening experience several years ago. My group was partnering with a group at Google. Their developers were sharp, as one would expect. But were very lacking in what would otherwise be considered table stakes, the reason always wound back to they had a proprietary Google equivalent of X, so thus they weren't familiar with X. The one that really hit it home was that we had to teach them how to use Google Cloud, because at least at the time, internally Google folks didn't use GCP but instead used their own internal versions of things.
  • stcroixx 4y ago
    I'm running into this with increasing frequency, particularly people coming from Amazon. For example, they know nothing about something like Kafka because they've been using some Amazonified version of something similar instead. They of course we'll never be able to match what they used to make and it would be more risk than I want to take to have them use us as a stepping stone while they try to get back to that level.
    • QIYGT 4y ago
      You can learn everything most devs need to know about Kafka in a couple hours. I can't imagine why companies would ever hire based on current knowledge rather than problem solving skills and ability to learn.
      • stcroixx 4y ago
        We might be unique, but here's no situation we're using Kafka where someone unfamiliar with it would be able to design and support production level systems to the standards we do after a couple hours. That would result in a time bomb for someone else to clean up later when all the stuff you weren't aware you didn't know becomes a problem. These skills are common, some would say table stakes, so it's not hard finding them as long as you look outside the proprietary tech shops like FAANG, which is why I have no reason to prefer people that don't already have them.
        • ikiris 4y ago
          You aren't unique, you're just really bad at training and documentation.
          • stcroixx 4y ago
            We don't train people on or write our own documentation for any widely used open source tools. We use them as they're provided and don't expect any unique knowledge beyond that. That's a large part of the value in choosing tech like this instead of proprietary solutions we'd have to document and train people on. It's also why a developer with those skills can take them with them from job to job over the course of their career and they're still valuable or start at a new company and make valuable contributions from day one before they learn the proprietary bits of the company.
        • ecshafer 4y ago
          My initial reaction reading this is that you really screwed up somewhere with your infrastructure. A pretty large company needs a Kafka team, a smaller company needs their infrastructure team to have a decent understanding with maybe one person / consultant with deeper knowledge. Kafka for 99% of developers in the company should be "Can I use our internal library to read/write some topic".
  • ikiris 4y ago
    This just shows how dumb it is to require specific knowledge of products of clearly qualified people.
    • hadlock 4y ago
      If you're hiring for a specific skill set it might be because you have a target you're trying to hit. In my experience purse strings typically open because the company has a new project they want to complete in N time, and need X additional headcount to accomplish the goal in the time required. If it takes 3-6 months to onboard someone, you might not get your new headcount fully onboarded before v1 of the project ships.
      • ikiris 4y ago
        It doesn’t take 3 months to do this even at wholly internal faang environments except in some special cases. Most of what people are talking about can be learned in days because they’re 90% the same as other products. Sometimes it's hours as someone else said because they're just generic databases or a pubsub system.
        • oblio 4y ago
          And then you get an edge case bug with the new platform and the new guy takes N times longer to find the root cause because it's his first time using the platform. Or the design is wonky because the new platform isn't a 1:1 match to the proprietary solution.
    • feoren 4y ago
      100% agreed that it's dumb to require extremely specific knowledge of one product, and 100% disagree that a Googler is "clearly qualified" simply because they came from Google. I have absolutely no idea why we've all just accepted the narrative that any FAANG employee is automatically better than the rest of us, despite evidence that FAANGs are nothing more than code mills optimizing for exploitable ambition over actual intelligence or engineering ability.
  • sangnoir 4y ago
    > But were very lacking in what would otherwise be considered table stakes, the reason always wound back to they had a proprietary Google equivalent of X, so thus they weren't familiar with X Occasionally X is an open source implementation of a Google paper, published after Google decided its proprietary tech no longer provides a competitive advantage and/or has moved onto a better architecture internally. There's an astounding number of Google publications that spawned Billion-dollar industries.
• furyofantares 4y ago
  > they knew very little about non-proprietary technologies that we used on a day-to-day Day-to-day tools are things that really takes no time to learn on the job imo. They take more time to get up to speed from scratch but when dropped into an environment using them I expect experienced folks to get up to speed very quickly. If they resent not having the awesome dev tools though, like you mention, that's another thing entirely.
  • taude 4y ago
    I think they resent the fact that they'll make 175K/year for senior level work.