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by jghn 1177 days ago
> FANG like companies also do a lot of things different then most other,

As a hiring manager, this is a factor that weighs heavily in my mental math. My experience with ex-BigTech engineers has been that they tend towards wanting to make everything to match their BigTech experience. But they often don't have the pragmatism to understand that X is a good pattern at BigTech because *of the size of BigTech*. Have had way too many conversations of the form, "Yes, that is objectively better. But at our scale, the value add does not warrant the effort involved". Or "there's no need for these 15 layers of indirection because there's 5 of us, not 5000".

Obviously this is a stereotype and doesn't apply to everyone. But that's no different than how people have a positive stereotype of ex-BigTech employees being sharp.

1 comments

i got into an argument with a bigtech employee (outside of work, in a social setting) that senior engineers should spend 25% of their time mentoring junior hires.

he literally could not understand that a small company can't afford to do this.

not only that, he also could not understand that small companies doesn't even make junior hires. there's nobody to mentor!

and i would guess this guy has like a top 1% iq, whatever that is.

IMHO the whole Software Enginer training pipeline is fully broken for a lot of overlapping reasons and I have no idea how to fix it.
If you can’t afford ~25% of your week educating junior hires, then you shouldn’t have junior hires.

It is a sin of the industry to not train new folks, and I would argue that many “senior engineers” do not know how to mentor juniors because they don’t see it as a priority.

I was heavily mentored during my time in small businesses with limited resources and profit. I hope others get that experience too.

Sounds like a lack of experience, aka knowledge... orthogonal to IQ.

Boils down to not realizing most companies don't have buckets of money raining from the heavens. Inconceivable!

that makes no sense, big tech companies are expected to be training small company employees? who is supposed to hire juniors?
see, everyone? these people exist. i'm not making things up.
High IQ, low EQ