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What I'm suggesting is that there may be a disconnect between the way companies interview, hire, and place engineers and how the companies use those engineers. I understand that there are some employee-initiated internal transfers. Though I suspect those aren't necessarily automatically granted. What I don't see, though, is company management acting as if the engineers were all replaceable cogs who can be assigned to any project whatsoever at any time. That would be insanity, I think, because there actually is a great deal of value in experience and domain-specific knowledge and skill. Would you really want a company based on dilettantism? It sounds like — "Long time ago, details are hazy" — extreme jumps are the exception rather than the norm. Can smart engineers learn pretty much anything given the time? Probably yes. I've learned many things over my career, and I'm sure I could learn more and different things if I were given the economic opportunity to do so. Nonetheless, I dispute the notions that generalists are somehow smarter than specialists or that BigCo assembly-line hiring identifies the smartest people. The advantage of known specialists is that they've already taken the time to learn what they are assigned to do, so the time between hire and high quality work is much shorter, maybe years shorter than throwing a smart generalist into an unfamiliar specialty. Obviously if you're creating a new technology from scratch, there's less value in experience. But how many BigCo employees are actually doing that, as opposed to maintaining existing tech? Probably too many of the employees aspire to create new tech and don't want to maintain existing tech. Google in particular is infamous for starting new projects and then later abandoning them. (Google has the luxury of this wastefulness because it still has ye old search monopoly. Though that too seems poorly maintained, and many people complain that Google Search is worse now than in the past.) I would say a big part of this is that BigCos such as Google are selling an ideology to current and potential employees. "We are the best of the best. Any one of us could design a whole new operating system." Yadda yadda. The ideology is part of the attraction of working there, even though the daily reality of working there doesn't necessarily match the ideal. |