I've heard this claimed but not sourced, and it doesn't really make sense - there are millions of software engineers out there and Google or Meta only employ a tiny fraction of them.
100,000 of the best out of a pool of approximately 10 million professional software engineers worldwide is a sizeable portion. Additionally, not all 10 million are even close to being up to BigCorps peculiar standards (perhaps the standard is "someone competent enough that they could potentially build a competing product line").
Goog, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle.. all have huge rosters and it adds up to a significant portion of the market. There is also a huge amount of medium sized whales such as SAP and PayPal who in total end up also consuming a lot of the talent.
I don't think grinding leetcode for an interview is the best indicator of a good engineer, and graduating from a prestigious university is not always an indicator either. imho it seems like the best engineers now are the ones doing their own thing outside of the large companies, or are at smaller startups.
Having said that, the national labs do seem like good places to go geek out in your own advanced intellectual cul-de-sac.
Seriously - why does this not mean they're the best engineers (as opposed to the most prolific).
Having said all that, I don't discount the possibility of work life balance in the 60-80 hour range, but that's a whole separate skillset.
Maybe there are some super great private projects but I expect those amazing capabilities would still be evident in the stuff that is put out.
Note, there’s some good stuff out of NIST and NASA (check out open.nasa.gov) but I don’t see things being handed off to Apache and stuff.
It’s hard to judge “great programmers” so I think the best is to proxy using whatever factors you have access to.
I guess it could also be books written and presentations given. Or contributions to other projects using nasa and nist addresses.
Point being, I don’t think there’s any evidence to think that nasa and nist have great progs.
I bet NASA and NIST have a great bunch of quality all-round engineers, but I'd be surprised if they were better at leetcode than the average FAANG dev. After all, FAANG devs have literally been filtered through an "are they good at leetcode" process. FAANG may be full of money chasers, but if the way to get more money there is by "being a good engineer" that does not mean much.
For example I'd call a BMW a quality car. I wouldn't call a Lada a quality car, though it's much cheaper and has a much higher bang-to-buck ratio than a BMW.
In that sense sometimes government work has to be the highest quality, especially when it concerns security or safety. Sure it could end up being magnitudes more expensive but I'd say that's a question of efficiency not quality
Not firing folks, low pay, focus on the best work life balance in history, heavy affirmative action, politics, and having to work hard to carry the coasters isn’t an environment that naturally attracts skill and competence. Work 500% harder than the next guy and get the same promotion. No thanks.
The gov and contractors, like it or not, are jobs programs first and foremost. A remarkably effective jobs program if you just measure folks employed and not output.
Their employees are also the subset of those who can get to a location where they have offices and have the relevant work permits. Those who do not object to and specifically want to work at those companies. Those who find their technical challenges of interest. Those who do not already have a satisfactory job elsewhere and are actually in the market for a job.
Most of those companies have less than 30k SWEs, not 100k - https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1527004655540133888?... (feel free to google the others)
So for each company they represent at most around (edit: 0.3%) of all professional devs, and presumably the "overhired for anti-competitive reasons" portion is a small fraction of that.
Just because someone "uses JavaScript" doesn't mean they are a full-time professional. In fact, most are dabblers. The number depends entirely on the definition - are all IT professionals considered software engineers? If so, that's about 24 million.
I am talking about full-time SWEs.
In any case Drew, it sounds like we're mostly in agreement. What a relief! :D
We can't really know what is in the minds of Zuckerfk and Pikaichu, in the end it's all speculation.
I'm glad you put it that way. It's not necessarily smarts or talent, but it does take a particular willingness for the institutional peculiarities to integrate with a big organization. I'm not one of those people, I tried it, and I will never do it again. I did note, you either had people who had just joined, or people who had been there for nearly a decade or more. I think of the word "institutionalized", as in, they had bought into the institution lifestyle, and were so full of it's arbitrary knowledge that moving on would be like starting over.
It turns out that being able to solve cute little puzzles while interviewing doesn't really help with systems level thinking.
I think he might have backed himself into a corner by coming in as an 'advisor'. How can I be an advisor if I look like i don't even understand what is going. That must have been his mindset. So the only escape is being arrogant and belligerent.
The recruiting reach is high because every single sub-group of teams within amazon has their own recruiters, and none of them communicate with recruiters from outside of that. Sometimes i get multiple emails from different AWS sub-group recruiters per day, but it isn't because AWS is desperate for me. It is simply because for them, the existence of the other ones reaching out at the same time is completely immaterial, just like if they were recruiters from other companies.
And while yes, Amazon's interviewing bar might not be as high as Meta/Google/Dropbox/etc, it isn't far behind at all, and it is pretty much on par with Microsoft.
Disclosure: never worked at Amazon, but interviewed with them and the rest of the companies mentioned, and worked at (or got offers from) some of them.
That said, the interactions I've had with the people working on AWS have been uniformly positive. They're easy to work with and obviously very skilled engineers.
Yes, but they are competing for the same tiny fraction.
Where the hell did they think productivity would go?
My current employer is very lenient, and as a result I am very happy working here and put in more than I am required to. If they were very strict, I would work _exactly_ 9 to 5 and not a second longer - if I even wanted to work there at all.
Fact is, you simply can't be 100% effective 100% of the time. So you either end up with people _pretending_ to be busy, or people who are free to openly de-stress and are way happier employees.
It's widely known among the sort of person who tends to believe in conspiracy theories, I suppose. The oppressive bureaucracy and misaligned incentives that allow senior leaders to destructively compete among themselves is more than enough to explain why ill-conceived and ill-run projects are common at FAANG-level megacorporations without resorting to making things up.
Even if I admit yours sounds more likely (companies choosing to spend more of their own money vs managers choosing to waste the company's money)
I work for Amazon - for a decade. I love it - best job I've ever had. And historically, while it's been a tough place to work, we've always been able to attract top talent. Partially - impactful work. Partially - stock doubles every year.
Well guess what happened in 2020/2021? Despite incredible perseverance through the Pandemic, the stock stopped doubling.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, Meta, and others figured out that they can poach our engineers with a promise of way more base salary, and a less intense work environment.
We've had SDE1s (Juniors) leave Amazon for Meta because they got more money than our SDE3s (Seniors) were getting.
SDE2s (Intermediate) looked at their status quo thought "I COULD bust my ass and get promoted to Senior...or I could go to Microsoft TODAY, get a Senior offer for what I'm already doing, and for more money than my raise would be". (No offense to any of my friends at Microsoft, but https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Microsoft&track=Softw... doesn't lie)
I've talked to a few acquaintances that have left and the universal responses is: "My job is so boring now. I miss Amazon. But It's not stressful (because there is no pressure on me), and I get paid more money".
How can anyone think there is anything wrong with that? You can't. You can speak about Mission and Impact, and some engineers will be attracted to that - I work on building Forever APIs in the AWS Cloud that gets millions of transactions per second. That to me is WAY more interesting than working on Chat app 15/18.
But for most people they just want to make money and live their lives. Fair enough!
The result? Even though Amazon has adapted somewhat by bumping salaries, they've still lost an ocean of people to nothing particularly ambitious or interesting. They're being parked by Microsoft/Google/Facebook to work on boring unimpactful projects so they can't help Amazon kick their asses.
Sometimes one way to make your house nicer is by breaking the windows in the neighbor's house.
They get pulled away by the lure of money into an environment that causes them to stagnate in their skill and career development, then companies pull the rug after only a few years of this high pay with layoffs. Now you've got hoards of developers with junior/mid skills who expect senior salaries and can't find jobs. Amazon doesn't want them anymore, because the new grad pipeline has plenty of people nearly as technically capable and much hungrier.
Only those who manage to recognize this short term period of plenty and rapidly stack investments toward financial independence will be alright in the end. Those who thought the raining cash would never end are in for a world of hurt.
On the bright side for Amazon, they get to trim off the employees who a) aren't paranoid enough about the viciousness of the business world, and b) are looking for a way to cruise and do minimal work.
Microsoft is in an insane number of markets, far more than Amazon. While at Microsoft I did everything from compilers to robots to wearables, and if I talk to 10 Microsoft alumni they will have a job history of working on a completely disparate set of amazing technologies.
If you are bored at Microsoft change teams. You can find teams writing assembly, or C++, or C#, or Rust, or JavaScript, or Typescript. You can find teams working on browser engines, on ISO standards, or consumer tech.
Get bored with all of that, go work on video games for awhile.
They put lipstick on a pig but everyone's getting ranked and the lowest performers getting weeded out.
The whole "People get fired even if they're doing a good job just by being a low performer on a strong team" is an edge case that happens INCREDIBLY rarely but when it does gets all the attention.
I worked for a while at another company also known for being hyper-aggressive and a brutally difficult work environment -- probably the poster-child for that sort of thing, back then. I burned out hard after a couple years and ended up prioritizing "work-life balance" in my next job searches.
I landed at a 40-hour/week place where I usually work less than that. There's a strong appeal to working so little for a solidly decent salary. I have to remind myself often how good I have it, especially when others don't have jobs at all -- or they have to do back-breaking labor for table scraps.
But I agree it's also undeniably boring. I constantly find myself fantasizing about being back in the adrenaline-fueled environment of my last job. A large part of why I burned out was my own poor stress-management skills, and I like to imagine that I could probably perform well -- and excel -- in that sort of boiler-room environment now. (Especially if the comp could be what it was, too!)
On the other hand, I think all companies that have tried that aggressive approach have not made it sustainable. People burn out, or the whole company burns out, or both. It's tough to keep it going without lots of support and motivation (financial and otherwise).
The idealistic part of me likes to imagine it's theoretically possible to sustain such a thing, though -- a healthy, psychologically-safe place where people could work on ridiculously impactful things at a velocity and scale not available anywhere else. But it doesn't seem like anyone's cracked the code -- not my former employer, who faded away in a blaze of toxicity, and certainly not Amazon.
"My job is so boring now. I miss Amazon. But It's not stressful (because there is no pressure on me), and I get paid more money"
On the other hand, if no-one stops it, there are always incentives to grow your team as much as possible.
As leader this increases your status both in absolute terms (100 vs 10 people under you makes a difference on your CV and on the title you can claim) and in relative terms (your team is larger than the teams of your peers and you can get ahead that way).
And so every leader at every level tries to expand their team.
There is definitely enough work to go around at Google, Amazon, and Apple.
Whether promotion makes any sense, and whether people are working on the things that actually move the needle is a different question.
Wow, I've suspected this for many years and people told me it was nutty.
Managers are happy when they get their hands on a new role to hire into because they all have more projects than they (think that they) can deliver at good quality with the people they have.
Purposely over-hiring to prevent work being done elsewhere, and then claiming there is not enough work to be done, feels like it shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
Hell, Google has created ~18 (I think?) different messenger/chat apps at this point. If you wanted a clue that there wasn't enough work to go around (and that your promotion incentives may not be aligned with the business), this should have been the first clue.