[ratorx]

I work at a Big Tech and I’d agree that the development speed is slow. However, I’d disagree with the characterisation that figuring out things like guarantees, capacity etc. are not “actual engineering work”.

My parents are chemical engineers and the work they do seems fundamentally pretty similar to Software Engineering at Big Tech (with different inputs and outputs and constraints), in that it’s less about getting any individual thing done, and more about getting many people to agree to a set of tradeoffs and implementation. Also, the scope for ground up work is pretty much non-existent and it’s a lot more about gluing together existing components with well known tradeoffs and tested characteristics.

Cross-team communication cost and latency can always be improved, but I think some slowness is unavoidable due to the possible impact that changes have.

There are pockets within Big Tech, which work on less critical things and they often have a much more startup mentality and approach to development. However, it’s still difficult for these teams to fully extricate themselves from the overhead imposed by the systems of other teams, since those systems are generally designed for bigger, more important and more critical systems.

[pcmoney]

That is a fair point, a friend is working on ChromeOS tooling for testing/deploys and seems to be able to move fairly quickly and his work has large impact internally but not millions of users directly, also less coupled to a multitude of internal services.