[Grustaf]

He's undoubtedly a world class indie developer, but we were discussing his abilities as a programmer, in the sense of writing good code. True, it's not necessarily important or valuable in life, but that is what we were talking about.

Most of the people I worked with at my FAANG job were excellent programmers, surely better than Marco, but none of them would have any chance of even coming up with a decent idea for an app, let alone carry it through and launch it. So they are absolutely useless as indie developers. It's just different skill sets.

[scarface74]

Our definition of a “well written app” is different.

An app to me is well written if it is meets a need well enough to be successful. I would be much more impressed by an Indy developer who has a successful sustainable business without being slimy than a “FAANG” software engineer that got in because he can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling two bowling balls and riding a unicycle on a tightrope.

I also know we are both talking hypothetically. If you listen to him about some of the low level audio processing he does, he’s definitely pretty good.

Before I get the expected replies, no I’m not “jealous of FAANG SWEs”. I work for BigTech myself after a very slight pivot from enterprise development.

[Grustaf]

The interview is the least demanding part, working as a software developer at an ambitious company has nothing to do with binary trees.

What does it matter which skill is more impressive? Obviously there are way fewer successful indie developers than top tier developers, and obviously life as a successful indie is way better. Yet, there is such a thing as writing high quality code, which is more or less orthogonal to being a successful indie. And that was what we are discussing.

It's a bit like being a fast runner and being a good football player. There's some connection, but it's not like the fastest runners are the best players, or the other way around. Different skills.

As to low level audio, I know what you're referring to, and it doesn't say that much really. My co-founder at my previous startup wrote a bunch of DSP code that worked, and was probably more complex than the pause removal, but he was still a pretty random developer. His code was sometimes surprisingly bad. Marco's strength is to not shy away from anything, even if it sounds scary or complex. DSP sounds complex, but it's not string theory.

[scarface74]

You saw the part about I work at BigTech? Trust me, the code is not rocket science that the vast majority of what software engineers do at BigTech. Well at least the code that runs 2/3rds of the cloud infrastructure in existence.

Many of them could never handle the complexity of writing an entire app and maintaining the backend running on 20+ Linode VMs without the support of a trillion dollar corporation.

You really overestimate the skill and complexity of most code written by “FAANG” engineers.

FWIW, I’ve been coding for a long time (the 74 is a hint) and I started at 12 writing assembly language and spent a decade writing C including maintaining a proprietary compiler/VM for Windows CE devices.

[Grustaf]

> Trust me, the code is not rocket science that the vast majority of what software engineers do at BigTech.

Again, that is not the discussion. Nobody said that you have to write high quality code to make it in tech, or as an indie. You keep coming up with strawmen but all I am saying is that I don't believe Marco Arment writes very high quality code. That's it. No judgement, no conclusions or correlations, no nothing.

As to FAANG, I can only be certain about my own experience, and the dozen or so direct colleagues I had all wrote better code than every other colleague I've had over 10 years. Not saying they are better people, happier, richer or anything else. Just to be clear.