A big company contains a large number of units that are culturally distinct. That is a strength instead of a weakness because a monoculture will certainly go bad and not be responsive to reality.

All organizations fall short of their ideals in some places. I worked at a startup where the CTO thought monads were great for error handling in Scala. I was skeptical but I was working on Python at the beginning and wasn’t involved.

I got tasked w/ working w/ the Scala subsystem later and found that habitually coders would fail to implement error checking and these got through code reviews done by that guy who thought monads were so great.

I used the phrase ‘normalization of deviance’ all the time there and it raised eyebrows. One day I got let go because of the mismatch.

Where I am now there are gaps between ‘what we do’ and ‘what we say we do’ but the contradictions don’t bother me and we move the football down the field consistently so I am satisfied. When i make a mistake it gets caught in code review which makes me feel like they have my back.

Bad code is endemic outside FANG but you have to travel far and wide to find really good code. Good code is not expensive, actually it is cheap because devs are much more productive and they don’t have to hire so many of them. Those devs don’t turn over and the firms don’t hire many devs.

Places with bad code have awful productivity and hire huge numbers of devs to make up for it. They are always hiring.