Underrated comment.
Re:John Carmack Leaves Meta
by PragmaticPulp on Monday December 19, 2022 @10:55AM
(#34053503)
> The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process.
That’s why I mentioned that their development skills were actually quite good.
The issue was that they were playing a full-time workplace game of not only self-promotion, but of elevating themselves over peers.
This would manifest as things like campaigning for total rewrites of other people’s code because they all but refused to participate in anyone else’s projects. We couldn’t get them to do anything unless they thought it was going to be a good line item on their resume.
SWE is more of a mixed bag. There are obviously incredibly bright people doing cutting edge software development at Google. But on the whole must of us were just doing very modest and incremental changes on protobuf shuffling super yak-shaved services that someone else had built the foundation of.
The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process.
The workplace culture stuff, again, mixed bag. Certainly to survive and thrive there, you needed to be thinking what to write about in perf twice a year, and it's such a constant that there were seminars and "how to get promoted" sessions where the whole self-promotional side of things was discussed in depth.