I agree that there are cultural differences, but culture definitely varies from team to team in any large tech company. I think a job at any of the big tech companies is interchangeable. I hear stories about learning from code reviews, maintaining build systems, and building out new cross team products at all of the big tech firms, I don’t think the lessons learned at google are particularly special.
Yes they do. In all these places except Amazon, the engineering culture is essentially identical. I’ve worked at 2 FAANG companies and a few startups that had a big influx of ex-Google engineers. In fact it’s a whole process that startups go through to copy Google: monorepo + misguided in-house tooling for it, homebrewed canary deployment strategies, naming things “mon” like “altermon” or “datamon”, etc.
The engineering culture among FAANG companies is pretty much the same because of the industry that they operating in and the location of the HQ. Expand that to military or automotive, aerospace, in non-US companies and you might start seeing different engineering cultures.
Engineering culture at Google is vastly different than Amazon. Even Facebook which is more product oriented and iterates faster than focusing on the "right engineering design" first.
Yes because lots of Google left to join FB. And yet, I've heard everyone say in terms of pure engineering and tooling Google is far ahead. That's still F&G though not AAN.