I used to think so regarding Microsoft, but since the WinRT reboot, deprecation of the tooling and rebooting again back to Win32/COM, while at the same time rebooting Xamarin.Forms into MAUI, and parallel to those two efforts, trying to push Blazor everywhere there is some form of Web Widget, I am no longer sure.

That's not even scratching the surface. They're spread far and wide and the ice is cracking. WPF -> UWP -> WinUI 2 -> WinUI 3 is an even bigger mess that's creating a system of frameworks that completely overlaps in functionality with MAUI, except it's Windows only - but not really.

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.

What has pissed me most was the way they managed the C++/CX to C++/WinRT transition, because not only does WinDev expect .NET devs to keep their C++ skills up to date for specific APIs, now they want us to author components like in the ATL glory days.

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

I think you're insulting anyone who has worked for FAANG as someone who is not a good engineer, has an average IQ, and only got into the position via grinding. That's pretty disingenuous and not an honest assessment of the talent in FAANG and how most engineers DO want to work there.

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.

> most engineers DO want to work there.

That hasn’t been my experience.

That’s point. Just because your experience differs doesn’t make it false.

Well hold on now. Parent presented that as fact with no evidence too!

The fact that you interpret my statement of a required threshold to get hired as a blanket statement about all FAANG engineers implies a lack of reading comprehension.

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

Cope. you literally said "All you needed in the past is ~average IQ" and then claim you didn't make a "blanket statement." Do you bother to understand the meaning of words buddy? Perhaps you should learn some algorithms and data structures and basic logic before you retort to ad hominem attacks that are clearly due to getting constantly rejected at interviews.

Yes, that's all you need. But that statement doesn't imply anything about the skills of the people, just the skills required to pass the interview.

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

Oh, sorry, I made a mistake talking to such a successful person like yourself, you wrote a million lines of code and you're wealthy! Wow, you seem like really secure and confident person Adam, retorting to self-praise when the topic at line has nothing to do with personal achievement. You sound like a real cool person to hang out with, must be nice to constantly hear about your "successfully exited startup"! I can only wish I had such a rich, successful friend like yourself.

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!

Kids, stop fighting. It's the weekend. Go outside and play.

Good idea, thanks :-)

Statistically, FAANG workers are not good engineers, mostly because Facebook and Google skews that by the sheer amount of people that they have.

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.

Good engineers relative to what? You're conflating averages within a company, to averages in general to software engineers in the market. And you're basing this on the failures of a product without using some baseline.

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.

I said the minimum threshold required to get hired is "~average IQ and willingness to grind". This is a fact.

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.

Not sure if it helps, but this is exactly how I read your earlier comment. I still don't quite understand the defensiveness coming from some of the responses.

While I don't entirely agree with your claim, the claim being responded to here is not what you said and opens with "Statistically, FAANG workers are not good engineers". So the reason people are replying to a statement that you didn't make is because someone else did.

Don't be pedantic, that was absolutely the intent of Arthur's post. Re-read it. He clearly insults FAAANG engineers as incompetent, then follows with FAANG engineers are just average in intelligence and grind. You're being dishonest if you think that's not meant as an insult.

Perhaps, but I choose to read his first post as saying that the startup he works for isn't capable of giving some people a successful environment, which is often true. Broadly, I see no need to prove myself, if I choose to change employers I'll be fine.

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.

Do you go around giving IQ tests as soon as someone gets into FAANG?

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

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.

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

That logic is not sound. If there's some selection criteria to select engineers from the general populace S, and a subset engineers who make it past S are average, that doesn't mea the end distribution of IQs (you're the one who brought up IQs) of FAANG engineers vs the distribution of IQs of the general SWE population would match in statistics. That is, large statistics don't just match because some subset of the populations match at some level. It's a clear misunderstanding of statistics and sloppy logic.

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 logic is sound.

> "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?

You keep worming your way, distorting your initial statement. You initially stated the following:

> 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.

> The logic is sound.

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.

The fact that some folks think repeating something is enough to show that it is true is truly mind boggling to me.

> 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.

Honestly this defensiveness is quite unpleasant.

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.

Why is the defensiveness "unpleasant" when you're the one calling engineers incompetent because they work for FAANG? I quote you:

> 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.

Ok, let's break it down because if you're working for FAANG (and this is why you're defensive) then I think you're making your own case here, by not understanding what people are saying.

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.

My experience looking at the quality of Android tooling raises some questions about those skills.

My experience is the same. Could be " good engineers" and "bad management" but this would not explain why the " good engineers" would work for "bad management".

Isn't the Android tooling mostly Gradle and IntelliJ though, which Google don't make.

If only. At least I'd only have to master Gradle's batshit insane logic. But no, between the Android Gradle Plugin which is clearly the work of a tortured soul, various tools like aapt, the Android API changes (lol MediaStore, lol version & extension checks), some tools in Android Studio which have been terrible for a while, there's a lot of bad stuff coming from Google.

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

Netflix and Alphabet engineers on par with each other, because it’s a revolving doors situation in Silicon Valley. There are under currents that move employees into different companies that have nothing to do with talent or meritocracy it’s just people hiring people they know from their past jobs.

> SWE at Google means you're good at interviewing, and that's it.

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.

> I think you're insulting anyone who has worked for FAANG as someone who is not a good engineer

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.

As far as I read the comment, it is pushing back on the idea that people who work at these companies are all amazing, and does so by saying there exist under-performing people. You are at some other extreme, and so are trying to read the comment as saying "anyone who has worked for FAANG" is under-performing, which is so far off from what the comment you responded to is saying as to be a bit comical... maybe, defensive? ;P (edit: oh wow I just noticed your other flagged comments--which is why I hadn't seen them before replying here--and it is clear you are just being irrationally angry today.)

>most engineers DO want to work there.

How on earth did you come to that conclusion?

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

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