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by deltaonefour 1438 days ago
>These aren't just random libraries that some FAANG dev worked on in their free time. These are company-released libraries and frameworks, that have full time employees working on them. If these companies are willing to pay FAANG engineer salaries for these employees, I expect it to be FAANG level work

You seem to view FAANG as some school of superior humans. I can assure you the amount of variance in intelligence is quite high.

But let's assume everything you said was true. It doesn't change the fact that FAANG can put full time employees on EASY problems to produce "FAANG level" work. FAANG companies have a bunch of menial developer jobs that need doing. And if the only people in the building are geniuses then the geniuses are the only people available to clean the toilet. Yeah and you can probably expect them to build a robot (that no one will use) that automatically cleans the toilet.

Additionally I should mention that google in FAANG is a bit different in terms of web. They use C++ for most of their backend services for scale, so it's a step above typical web development. Although I'm very sure it's not too far away as their developers extensively use frameworks so the experience of development doesn't deviate too much from your traditional golang or java app.

>As for anecdotal evidence, sure I have some, my professional experience is pretty evenly split between Java and Javascript, both backend and frontend. I feel like they are of equal difficulty

A web dev includes both "backend" and "frontend" your statement shows that your experience is exclusively web dev and as I suspected very javascript focused. When I said web dev was easy, I wasn't talking about just front end. I was talking about everything from the front end all the way to the back end. This includes architecture, optimizing queries and all that jazz.

>I have no doubt you won't be happy with this answer though

No of course not. Don't attribute it to some predictive power you have about my bias. It's not, I stated plainly what was needed. I literally stated what it takes for me to be interested, and you literally stated that you had nothing. I'm pretty sure your opinion will change if you ever do a big software engineering career switch outside of web.

Well you did say you have experience with Java but you never said what you were doing with that Java. So if you're one of the few developers doing things outside of web with java then I stand corrected.

1 comments

You are making a lot of assumptions. "Very javascript focused" I said evenly split between java and javascript, I don't know where you got that conclusion. And while the work I did for java was partially related to a web service (as practically everything is nowadays), it was focused on distributed data processing, and was rather far away from the actual service. I would not consider it part of web dev, and I suspect most companies would not categorize it as such either.

Your (incorrect) assumptions are a bit of a red flag. But honestly not too surprising given your earlier statements. However now that I've shared my professional experience, what about yours?