The basic tech, I agree, like Youtube is great for watching videos, it barely buffers and you have billions of videos at your disposal and can watch each one and it just works.

But polished? The search is atrociously bad. "Set your location" basically doesn't work. Comments under videos are a mess, half of them are deleted, but you can still see "10 replies", only nothing will load, creators will say "I didn't delete it, Youtube did".

Shorts? Oh, the ability to upload TikTok clips and then get them presented in a way that's worse than random and actually makes you want to stop scrolling?

I don't know Stadia, but I had a similar experience with a lot of Google services. It works, the fundamentals are solid, but the UX leaves much to be desired.

The frequency with which new features point blank did not work at all just blew me away. The problem 100% of the time was that some dev had written a feature given a bug ticket, written some unit tests that covered the code, but never actually brought the serving stack up and played with it themselves. They thought QA meant some test with lots of mocks, not, ya know, actually testing the feature as a user would see it. It was painful to run the servers locally so they just didn't bother a lot of the time.

Can’t separate that from the product - as a user I care about the whole thing

Funny. I don't disagree, but I find Youtube's search much better than Google Search itself lately.

Apart from the "barely related" videos interspersed with real results, it actually shows results related to the keywords I typed.

They helpfully put a parental lock button right where a child would hold a phone, so they are constantly hitting the button, and bringing up a bright red screen interrupting the video.

Seems like no one really gives a shit about it, I don’t know?

The general attitude seems to be that they can take the "build it, and they will come" approach. Who cares what people want, when you can build what you want them to want?

This is backwards from what parents typically want, as managing another stream of content is obnoxious.

My kids only get to use curated experiences where a human has actually picked the content (ie. pretty much every other Kids video app).

lol, I nearly choked on my spit laughing at this. The way Google Home spectacularly fails to work on my Android phone without throwing any error message, would beg to differ.

In fact, most recent Android releases have been buggy nightmares for many users pushing them to switch to iPhones in masses.

Google has some products that work very well. The others feel like abondonware in beta stages.

Some are outstanding.

Search was outstanding, I'm not sure what it is now.

That said, the speed with which the product evolves is glacial these days. OK I'm only a lite user but other than non-paged mode I'm struggling to recall what they've really added even in the last 5 years.

No titlebar, no scrollbar, big logos using a big part of the screen, automatic updates, warning or error messages obstructing other GUI elements without a close or cancel button, etc.

Google’s problem was never a lack of ability to build and run impressive engineering artifacts. It was always that the business and product side of things was run very poorly.

I've been working professionally for 25+ years depending on when "professionally" starts and almost _never_ has been "the team can't build it" even in the context of companies that are basically mountains of mediocrity. The problem has _always_ been that the team didn't know what to build, and very occasionally, the best way to build it for the long term.

The difference is stark even at large companies. Oncall shifts for friends at places like Amazon and Meta are nightmares of constant pages and stress. Oncall shifts for my friends at Google have tended to be far lower key, with dramatically fewer pages and more straightforward resolutions when issues appear.

That Amazon and Meta are worse than google, well, I will grant that. Meta's internal culture is crazy.

Their problems lie in management: executives, line managers, product, etc.

Apple and Microsoft appear far more intentional and successful with the products they choose to launch.

Though engineering at FAANG in general is overrated. Know plenty of underperforming people at my company that ended up there. All you needed in the past is ~average IQ and willingness to grind

The entire pipeline there doesn't even make any sort of coherent sense. WPF was clean, had extensive interest and support, and could have been trivially extended with more refined and "modern" styling/functionality. That's fundamentally all that UWP/WinUI are anyhow. But with each branching off, they splintered and annoyed developers in the XAML domain, to say nothing of the fact that I'm just pretending MAUI/Xamarin doesn't exist here.

I feel that the constant desire to push onto new things is, somewhat ironically, really holding back major progress. Because you put out some new awesome and really exciting tech, but things take time to mature. C# is absolutely awesome now, but was a mediocre java clone when it first emerged. It took decades of incremental and focused progress to get there.

Then we finally have Native AOT, but still fails short from .NET Native capabilities.

There's a lot of smart engineers who don't work for FAANG or will never work for FAANG, but your dismissal of engineers who work for FAANG as essentially bad engineers is completely wrong and insulting.

That hasn’t been my experience.

What I said was self contained and factual, nothing more.

The fact that you don't understand implies to me that you're close to the bottom of that threshold.

And I'm already wealthy and pseudo-retired from writing >million lines of code for a successfully exited startup, thanks

Your brain doesn't work well. Re-read your post, you made a blanket statement "all you need" and claim that doesn't mean blanket statement. Ontop of the fact your original post implies all FAANG engineers suck (sorry, just because you add that it's from your experience doesn't change the meaning), you seem not to really have a logical brain.

But what can one expect from someone whose rich, you have other things to worry about, not use logic or reasoning!

SWE at Google means you're good at interviewing, and that's it. There's a reason why Go was made, because, of of Rob Pike's own admission, most new devs at Google are dumbasses. There's all the half baked products, the dogshit APIs, all working on some internal ad software that runs in O(n^n^n) because who gives a shit, we're google, we have spares in our datacenter. The same applies to Facebook, that has hired up the wazoo and has basically led to a pass-the-interview culture. Passing the interview means you're good at remembering interview questions.

I do have some praise for Netflix engineers, mostly because they remain a small-ish team with insane talent, and Apple and Amazon I can't really speak for. But just like every company, they have mediocre and average software developers.

>most engineers DO want to work there

In the past, maybe. Nowadays, you're in a pretty massive bubble if you see people still interested in joining fucking Meta. Although I guess $400k TC would make me question my morals too.

I agree that FAANG engineers aren't necessarily the geniuses they hype themselves out to be, but making broad assertions needs some baseline aside from personal experience as my personal experience with FAANG engineers has been mostly positive. That's not to say non-FAANG engineers aren't competent either, as I have worked with non-FAANG engineers as well and they were perfectly fine.

The intent of the OP was simply to dismiss anyone working at FAANG and insinuate they were all subpar and average. He thinks you can just say "from my experience" and that just absolves him from any criticism of his statements. It's completely disingenous.

This statement says nothing about the average skill of a FAANG engineer. The bizarre extrapolation of statement A to fabricated statement B is quite astounding. Truly.

The other thing, of course, is that small companies can afford to be extremely judicious in a way that G/M can't (for example the old thing where Netflix only hired staff-equivalents). But I ultimately agree with you (like I said!) that at that point you're basically saying Google and Microsoft contain the below average engineers only from the index of current-and-former faang employees, which is sort of trivially true.

As for grind, idk I think it's good that my coworkers are below average grind. I am too. Wlb is good. Grind is unhealthy.

Love how you keep reiterating something is a fact without zero evidence.

The fact that is being considered a controversial statement is truly mind boggling to me.

It's pretty absurd that you continue to think you're somehow making a logical argument and somehow think your IQ is above 120.

> "The minimum threshold to get hired for FAANG is ~average talent and the willingness to grind"

> "Some average talent people work for FAANG"

> Thus, somebody who is average can get hired by FAANG

I said absolutely nothing about the skill distribution or histogram of talent across all of FAANG engineering.

Anybody who's worked in the Bay Area has known a number of untalented people who have joined FAANG. That's reality. Believe whatever you want.

That an untalented person can join FAANG does not say anything about the talent of the FAANG engineer on average.

An interview process threshold defines the left tail of the skill distributions of the hires, and tells you nothing about the shape of the distribution beyond that. Though you can likely assume it's normally distributed.

How many ways do I need to slice it for you?

> Though engineering at FAANG in general is overrated. Know plenty of underperforming people at my company that ended up there. All you needed in the past is ~average IQ and willingness to grind >

You have to be specific here, what do you mean "all you need"? Is this time to study algorithms? Because not everyone who studies algorithms, at the same rate, the same number of problems get an offer after an interview. Not only that, you're implying the interviews for other companies are exactly the same in regards to checking for IQ, which is completely laughable.

You simply assert that someone with average IQ that you know (and even underperformers) made it into FAANG, so you then broadly extrapolate, without evidence, that it means the selection criteria S for FAANG is simply a matter of if the person spends time studying and has an average IQ, and is no different than any under interviews.

Astounding.

Solid reasoning there.

> Anybody who's worked in the Bay Area has known a number of untalented people who have joined FAANG. That's reality. Believe whatever you want.

"Statistically and logically sound" lol

Nothing to see here works. Can't you see the obvious?

Edit: I too believe that FAANG engineers are not special but that belief is not proof of that statement.

> If plenty of average talent people get hired at FAANG (they do, from a statistically reasonably sized sample). Then being above average talent is not a minimum requirement for joining FAANG.

Where is the study or data on that? Just repeating things and sprinkling in terms "statistically reasonably sized sample" doesn't make it true. I know you want it to be true (and it may be true) but that is not evidence for that.

Google's interview process requires two things:

1) That you're compliant

2) That you study.

Smart people can get by this filter, as long as they're compliant with less studying.

Average people can get by this with more studying.

Even if you're smart, you will be studying.

"Rockstars" can't get by this filter, which is probably the intent of the interview more than finding amazing engineers.

I think it's possible that you've attached a certain weight to illustriousness of FAANG, but it's an open conversation outside of FAANG that it's not hard for an engineer of 8-10y to get a job there, the question usually becomes: "Why would you want to".

As soon as you get to a certain level in tech, your primary financial needs are met completely and you start to see the shiny veneer of FAANG wearing off.

A lot of what makes them seem competent from the outside is the sheer volume of staff, 100k people can make a LOT of shiny documents and good ideas (the borg paper has definitely made me think of working there).

The veneer falls of Facebook first "Ew, they're scooping up all that data, gross!"

Then Amazon: "They treat people like slaves and everyone I know Ex-Amazon is a burnout"

Then Google: "Everything that isn't ad-tech is a toy, sure, they're rich but you live in a massive bubble.. also "Googliness" makes it sound like a cult"

For all of these you have the implicit knowledge that you're going to be a tiny cog and overall the bureaucracy will be insane.

Anyone who has pulled back the curtain on these companies knows that while the comp is good, the engineers aren't extraordinary just because they work there or work on "x scale problems".

In fact, most Google engineers taken out of Google are fucking useless, because they've developed a body of knowledge built entirely on systems that do not exist on the outside, many of which were developed many years ago to make hard problems simpler.

> In fact, most Google engineers taken out of Google are fucking useless, because they've developed a body of knowledge built entirely on systems that do not exist on the outside, many of which were developed many years ago to make hard problems simpler. >

Who is making this unpleasant? You critique a body of engineers, using biased personal anecdotes and no hard metrics, and think I am the one being negative and unpleasant? Insane.

1) I said that hiring has less to do about intelligence than compliance (which is what the parent was saying).

Do intelligent people work there? absolutely.

Does working for FAANG mean you are intelligent? No.

This is the distinction in which you seem to be confused. The interview process does not mean that everyone working in Google is smarter than anyone else, it just means (and in no uncertain terms) that you were willing to jump through hoops.

2) I stated that there are skills you learn inside google which are not relevant outside.

Google themselves know this, it's part of why their literature is littered with "in a google context" or "a problem exclusive to google's way of working".

For example: Piper, a centralised source code storage system is not available outside Google. Everyone uses Git, or, in the games industry they use Perforce (and you will quickly learn if you work in this context that the lush SCM tools that you're used to don't exist, there might be 1 person looking after perforce for an entire studio of 1,500 people -- if you are extremely lucky).

Blaze, the build tool which was open sourced as Bazel: Does not make sense to most engineering orgs and has very low penetration in the real world.

Monarch (and its query language) are exclusive to google.

Borg, has no corollary, Kubernetes is both completely different (borrowing a few ideas) and less mature at running most kinds of workloads. You would have to re-learn this.

The statement: "knowledge of these tools is not helpful outside" is absolutely correct.

Maybe there are some ideas that if you had 5 years to redesign you could build something. Similarly though, if you took a person from today and sent them 100 years into the past and they described a smart-phone.... well, you're no closer to actually having a smart phone.

I'm simply saying that most ex-Google employees will have to learn the tools used on the outside. In some cases they're going to be annoyed at not having certain conveniences.

But then again none of this is as painful as using Xcode so I can't really complain.

Not quite true. As a hiring manager I lost several really good candidates to competing offers from Google. And these were strong engineers not only interviewing-wise.

It does not matter how good an engineer you are when you produce crap. There are great engineers working for 3 letter agencies and the result of their work is people going to jail or getting killed because they are against the official narative. See Assange for example.

How on earth did you come to that conclusion?

I can't speak about Apple but Microsoft is trying to copy Google closely.

"You are in power saving mode. This function might be affectd." Is it or it is not affected ? What is the result ? On a 1.8 GHz proceesor with 4 GB of RAM this is left as an exercise for the reader.