[ohgodplsno]

Statistically, FAANG workers are not good engineers, mostly because Facebook and Google skews that by the sheer amount of people that they have.

SWE at Google means you're good at interviewing, and that's it. There's a reason why Go was made, because, of of Rob Pike's own admission, most new devs at Google are dumbasses. There's all the half baked products, the dogshit APIs, all working on some internal ad software that runs in O(n^n^n) because who gives a shit, we're google, we have spares in our datacenter. The same applies to Facebook, that has hired up the wazoo and has basically led to a pass-the-interview culture. Passing the interview means you're good at remembering interview questions.

I do have some praise for Netflix engineers, mostly because they remain a small-ish team with insane talent, and Apple and Amazon I can't really speak for. But just like every company, they have mediocre and average software developers.

>most engineers DO want to work there

In the past, maybe. Nowadays, you're in a pretty massive bubble if you see people still interested in joining fucking Meta. Although I guess $400k TC would make me question my morals too.

[ablatt89]

Good engineers relative to what? You're conflating averages within a company, to averages in general to software engineers in the market. And you're basing this on the failures of a product without using some baseline.

I agree that FAANG engineers aren't necessarily the geniuses they hype themselves out to be, but making broad assertions needs some baseline aside from personal experience as my personal experience with FAANG engineers has been mostly positive. That's not to say non-FAANG engineers aren't competent either, as I have worked with non-FAANG engineers as well and they were perfectly fine.

The intent of the OP was simply to dismiss anyone working at FAANG and insinuate they were all subpar and average. He thinks you can just say "from my experience" and that just absolves him from any criticism of his statements. It's completely disingenous.

[adam_arthur]

I said the minimum threshold required to get hired is "~average talent and willingness to grind". This is a fact.

This statement says nothing about the average skill of a FAANG engineer. The bizarre extrapolation of statement A to fabricated statement B is quite astounding. Truly.

[Upgrayyed_U]

Not sure if it helps, but this is exactly how I read your earlier comment. I still don't quite understand the defensiveness coming from some of the responses.

[cscurmudgeon]

Do you go around giving IQ tests as soon as someone gets into FAANG?

Love how you keep reiterating something is a fact without zero evidence.

[adam_arthur]

If plenty of average talent people get hired at FAANG (they do, from a statistically reasonably sized sample). Then being above average talent is not a minimum requirement for joining FAANG.

The fact that is being considered a controversial statement is truly mind boggling to me.

[ablatt89]

That logic is not sound. If there's some selection criteria to select engineers from the general populace S, and a subset engineers who make it past S are average, that doesn't mea the end distribution of IQs (you're the one who brought up IQs) of FAANG engineers vs the distribution of IQs of the general SWE population would match in statistics. That is, large statistics don't just match because some subset of the populations match at some level. It's a clear misunderstanding of statistics and sloppy logic.

It's pretty absurd that you continue to think you're somehow making a logical argument and somehow think your IQ is above 120.

[adam_arthur]

The logic is sound.

> "The minimum threshold to get hired for FAANG is ~average talent and the willingness to grind"

> "Some average talent people work for FAANG"

> Thus, somebody who is average can get hired by FAANG

I said absolutely nothing about the skill distribution or histogram of talent across all of FAANG engineering.

Anybody who's worked in the Bay Area has known a number of untalented people who have joined FAANG. That's reality. Believe whatever you want.

That an untalented person can join FAANG does not say anything about the talent of the FAANG engineer on average.

An interview process threshold defines the left tail of the skill distributions of the hires, and tells you nothing about the shape of the distribution beyond that. Though you can likely assume it's normally distributed.

How many ways do I need to slice it for you?

[cscurmudgeon]

The fact that some folks think repeating something is enough to show that it is true is truly mind boggling to me.

> If plenty of average talent people get hired at FAANG (they do, from a statistically reasonably sized sample). Then being above average talent is not a minimum requirement for joining FAANG.

Where is the study or data on that? Just repeating things and sprinkling in terms "statistically reasonably sized sample" doesn't make it true. I know you want it to be true (and it may be true) but that is not evidence for that.

[joshuamorton]

While I don't entirely agree with your claim, the claim being responded to here is not what you said and opens with "Statistically, FAANG workers are not good engineers". So the reason people are replying to a statement that you didn't make is because someone else did.

[ablatt89]

Don't be pedantic, that was absolutely the intent of Arthur's post. Re-read it. He clearly insults FAAANG engineers as incompetent, then follows with FAANG engineers are just average in intelligence and grind. You're being dishonest if you think that's not meant as an insult.

[joshuamorton]

Perhaps, but I choose to read his first post as saying that the startup he works for isn't capable of giving some people a successful environment, which is often true. Broadly, I see no need to prove myself, if I choose to change employers I'll be fine.

The other thing, of course, is that small companies can afford to be extremely judicious in a way that G/M can't (for example the old thing where Netflix only hired staff-equivalents). But I ultimately agree with you (like I said!) that at that point you're basically saying Google and Microsoft contain the below average engineers only from the index of current-and-former faang employees, which is sort of trivially true.

As for grind, idk I think it's good that my coworkers are below average grind. I am too. Wlb is good. Grind is unhealthy.

[pjmlp]

My experience looking at the quality of Android tooling raises some questions about those skills.

[hulitu]

My experience is the same. Could be " good engineers" and "bad management" but this would not explain why the " good engineers" would work for "bad management".

[fidgewidge]

Isn't the Android tooling mostly Gradle and IntelliJ though, which Google don't make.

[ohgodplsno]

If only. At least I'd only have to master Gradle's batshit insane logic. But no, between the Android Gradle Plugin which is clearly the work of a tortured soul, various tools like aapt, the Android API changes (lol MediaStore, lol version & extension checks), some tools in Android Studio which have been terrible for a while, there's a lot of bad stuff coming from Google.

But then again none of this is as painful as using Xcode so I can't really complain.

[lr1970]

> SWE at Google means you're good at interviewing, and that's it.

Not quite true. As a hiring manager I lost several really good candidates to competing offers from Google. And these were strong engineers not only interviewing-wise.

[birdyrooster]

Netflix and Alphabet engineers on par with each other, because it’s a revolving doors situation in Silicon Valley. There are under currents that move employees into different companies that have nothing to do with talent or meritocracy it’s just people hiring people they know from their past jobs.