Comment by throwaway1414 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway1414 | Hacker News Reader

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> Most jobs are in those companies in Bangalore are in QA/SRE/SysAdmin area.

Came here to record my anecdotal data and say that this comment is blatantly false and very misleading.

Let us take FANG one by one.

Facebook: There is very little QA in the Hyderabad office of Facebook. Most of the work is in software development area.

Amazon: Are you kidding me? Many high profile projects of Amazon such as Amazon Prime and Amazon Pay are executed in Bangalore. The Bangalore office of Amazon developed many critical services for Amazon Prime from scratch.

Netflix: Can't talk much about Netflix because most of the work that does Netflix does in India is in the business, legal and marketing area.

Google: Are you kidding me again? A significant portion of some Google infrastructure services and some Google public services are developed in Bangalore.

Source: I have worked in two of the FANGs in Bangalore and I have friends in the others.

And I don't know where you are getting your heavily biased data point about NetApp from. If you take one data point and say the whole company works on internal PHP tool, well then here is a surprise for you. All companies work on internal PHP tools or something to that effect. They have their enterprisey systems to run. Every company does that.

Whoever has told you this very naive view of NetApp has forgotten to tell you that NetApp also works on data storage systems, cloud analytics, performance analytics, OpenStack based private cloud orchestration (whole distributed software systems developed from scratch in Bangalore). Before you keep spreading this kind of false data about the top-tier software companies in Bangalore, please lookup NetApp ONTAP and enlighten yourself.

Source: I have worked in NetApp too for 3 years.

> Are you kidding me? Many high profile projects of Amazon such as Amazon Prime and Amazon Pay

I'm sorry, but those are not "high-profile projects of Amazon". Some things in the AWS roster are.

Prime Video and Prime Music are shoddy technical work. The former refuses to play movies on HD on Linux, and their technical support has no idea why, instead spouting bullshit like "Oh, Adobe Flash does not support Linux". The latter launched in India exclusively on Flash, and that was this year. Their current HTML5 music player locks up one of my CPUs even when nothing's playing, by making the browser constantly refresh the whole layout.

If your objective was to claim Amazon's Bangalore office put out good work, Prime Video and Prime Music are poor examples.

It's amazing to see how some people seem to be sitting on a high horse here and thinking that a HTML5 music player issue is somehow indicative of the work going on behind the scenes.

Granted there are issues in Prime (Which software does not? Either people bitch about a software product or nobody uses it) but the context of the discussion here was comparison between the likes of Amazon and the likes of Cognizant. Tell me which Cognizant or Wipro can execute something like Prime Video in Bangalore and take it to market like Amazon has with even half as much quality?

What is the alternative you are hinting at? That someone should not work for Amazon and work on developing and improving their Prime product just because it has got issues and instead go develop a AJAX-based chat application that does not work on anything other than IE in Cognizant?

Why do you think Amazon pays 4 times the salary Cognizant pays its employees? Because developing something like Amazon Prime at the scale Amazon works at is hard. There are people who enjoy working on such hard problems even if the solution is not perfect.

Calm your horses (sorry, couldn't resist).

I made no argument comparing Amazon to Cognizant, or anything else. My only comment was on how Prime is not a "high-profile" project at Amazon.

You brush aside the issues I mention as "all software has issues". My point was to show the quality of the product, unlike the actually good technical products that Amazon has, not that the product has issues.

You seem to be emphasizing the distinction between the backend service and the frontend players. Given that Amazon owns AWS, I'd go out on a limb here and say building the backend they already have is not a challenge. I'd also like to point out that a poor technical product built by the Amazon Bangalore doesn't reflect well on Amazon Bangalore, and the frontends are indeed poor technical products.

> AJAX-based chat application that does not work on anything other than IE in Cognizant?

I think your claim that the likes of Cognizant cannot build things beyond IE-only AJAX-based chat apps hyperbole.

> Why do you think Amazon pays 4 times the salary Cognizant pays its employees?

Making no claims about the relative skill-levels of Amazon and Cognizant employees, I must argue, from first-hand experience with clients' tech teams, the notion of 'higher pay must mean higher skill' is wrong, especially in the Indian IT sector.

"I made no argument comparing Amazon to Cognizant, or anything else."

You are missing an important context of the discussion then.

No matter what complex software working at large scale one comes up for an example, one can find problems with it. Every software has at least one problem that makes it a deal-breaker for at least one person. Even Linux, which is so popular in the tech world. These problems more often occur due to priorities than due to dearth of engineering competence.

But these issues are orthogonal to the context of discussion. What you said about Prime's quality may be correct but irrelevant in the context of this discussion.

"I think your claim that the likes of Cognizant cannot build things beyond IE-only AJAX-based chat apps hyperbole"

Perhaps you can provide some examples then?

I've worked in FANG companies too. In fact most people who left Google I know did it because they were largely in QA and their friends who were so called working in crappy services companies, often from colleges considered bad, did more code work then them. They were largely forced to leave and join start ups because the difference in experience was catching up with them.

Fb was purely a 'hire and send' unit in Hyd, and even now most of their core work is either Menlo Park or London. In fact London is where most of the folks go should H1B fail. The dev work Fb does in Hyd is an acquired company.

Amazon is a different case as dev teams do all the work, and there are no separate production engineering teams. So you do all that work, under a 'Software engineer' title. You would also be curious to see the attrition numbers in Amazon. They rival Infosys. :-)

Yup, NetApp if you don't work on core teams. Same with Cisco and Juniper networks. If you are not with core teams, internal tools is what you do.

This whole trope Services companies being crap, Mythical opportunities in product companies or 'Promised land' land immigration opportunities have forced hordes of talented people to get into SRE and other non-dev work, and then later end up realizing that immigration et al is largely political lottery which most of them lose. And yes once you go down these non dev paths for a few years, the guy from tier-2/tier-3 college whom you laughed at, for joining Wipro, will be having the last laugh.

Looks like the people who left Google you know were not hired into Google proper. What you describe sounds like they were working for a vendor providing QA services to Google. Sure your friends were probably walking into Google office with a Google ID card but being on Google payroll is a completely different thing from being on a vendor payroll.

Every company has core teams and non-core teams. Why do you present the non-core teams' work as representative of the company as a whole and not the core team's work as representative of the company as a whole?

Your comparison of Amazon with Infosys is ridiculous. The high attrition rate of Amazon has nothing to do with the quality of work. It is due to the culture - long working hours and the demanding work culture. But the work in Amazon is at least two orders of magnitude better than what you get in Infosys.

Which FANG companies have you worked for? You might throw one of the names from FANG at me but I cannot believe you. I know I am a stranger on internet and so are you, so it is just going to be my word against yours and a lot of anecdata from both sides. But per the anecdata I have, I see that your comments here are so misinformed that I do not believe you have worked for any FANG company.

>>But the work in Amazon is at least two orders of magnitude better than what you get in Infosys.

No. In fact this is precisely the kind of binary classification that forces people to make bad decisions.

Please try to understand that people working Wipro or Infosys or TCS are humans like us, who use the same programming languages and same computers.

This binary classification is why people up becoming SREs at Google, while they could have probably been programmers at Cognizant.

You mean if someone decides to work for Amazon instead of Infosys, it is a bad decision? If you really believe that you sound like one of those thousands of employees from the likes of services companies like Cognizant or dated product companies (looking at you Cisco and Oracle) who want to justify it to themselves and others that they are in a place as good as any FANG and there is no good reason to work for FANG. This sounds like crying sour grapes. Sorry to burst your bubble, but things are really really that much better in FANG than the Ciscos and Oracles and Cognizants.

I began my career in the services industry. Later I have worked for two FANGs for two years each. I quit them not because the work was bad. The work was damn good. I quit because I got a better job with a better salary and easier working hours.

And what's with this silly comparison of SREs at Google with programmers of Cognizant? Why compare SREs with programmers? That's comparing apples to oranges!

Compare apples to apples. A programmer at Google or Amazon is going to be doing far more interesting work than a programmer at Cognizant. A programmer at Google or Amazon is going to be far more skilled than a programmer at Cognizant. Likewise for a QA at Google vs. a QA at Cognizant. Likewise for an SRE at Google vs. an SRE at Cognizant.

If someone who wants to be a programmer chooses to be an SRE instead, then the choice of profession, not the choice of the company, is the problem here.

And SREs are not some kind of low class work that you seem to believe in. If you really think a programmer at Cognizant is somehow a better job at SRE at Google, please come out of this service industry mentality where one kind of work has to be better than another. One is not better than another. They are just different. They require different skill sets. A lot of very smart people I know are SREs. They enjoy the thrill of cutting through the complexity of network topology, load balancers, DNS, container orchestration, system performance, hardware and software issues to resolve puzzling issues when services go down.

>>You mean if someone decides to work for Amazon instead of Infosys, it is a bad decision?

If some one decides to be a SRE at Google than be a programmer at TCS, I'd say that person's other skills are even irrelevant at this point. You have just committed career suicide.

>>If you really believe that you sound like one of those thousands of employees from the likes of services companies like Cognizant or dated product companies (looking at you Cisco and Oracle) who want to justify it to themselves and others that they are in a place as good as any FANG and there is no good reason to work for FANG.

That is because most of the work in FANG's is not OS kernel programming or writing some earth shattering code. Most people are fetching stuff from HTTP end points, parsing XMLs/JSONs and posting to another HTTP end point. Or the same with a data base.

The peak hype I have seen is using Pig/Hadoop to deal with files of size a few KBs and call it 'Big data' programming.

>>This sounds like crying sour grapes. Sorry to burst your bubble, but things are really really that much better in FANG than the Ciscos and Oracles and Cognizants.

Lol. I'm going to say again. Companies mean nothing. Show me your projects.

>>Compare apples to apples. A programmer at Google or Amazon is going to be doing far more interesting work than a programmer at Cognizant.

Thanks for bringing this up, there are units at Infosys who design chips. None of your folks at Facebook will do that quality of work their whole life.

>>Likewise for a QA at Google vs. a QA at Cognizant. Likewise for an SRE at Google vs. an SRE at Cognizant.

I've had friends at Infosys who worked on Airbus 380's software's validation team. To listen here that people like you think that's lower quality work than how HTML pages look on IE7 is one epic thing I've heard in a while.

>>If someone who wants to be a programmer chooses to be an SRE instead, then the choice of profession, not the choice of the company, is the problem here.

As of now chances of landing into an SRE job is very high in FANG companies in India. Because that is the kind of work they want to be done from here.

>>And SREs are not some kind of low class work that you seem to believe in. If you really think a programmer at Cognizant is somehow a better job at SRE at Google, please come out of this service industry mentality where one kind of work has to be better than another.

It has to be. Some work is bad. I give it to you that people move for money. But they also end up committing career suicide.

Yes I do believe being an SRE worse than being programmer at Cognizant. This is not 'service company' mentality. These are facts.

"If some one decides to be a SRE at Google than be a programmer at TCS, I'd say that person's other skills are even irrelevant at this point. You have just committed career suicide."

With such a narrow and demeaning view I doubt anything can change your mind. But I have many colleagues who have switched roles between SREs and full time development many times in career. They are some of the most competent developers at my workplace. They have seen so many systems crash and burn at high loads that they instinctively design and develop systems with multiple points of redundancies to fail gracefully and recover automatically in distributed environments.

So choosing SRE was far from suicide. Instead it enriched their careers. Don't underestimate the kind of experience a SRE work at Google or Amazon can give you. An average SRE at Google works at a scale and complexity that an average Cognizant employee can't even begin to imagine.

> there are units at Infosys who design chips. None of your folks at Facebook will do that quality of work their whole life.

The arrogance displayed in this statement is unbelievable.

I know the specific chip design projects in Infosys you are talking of. It is an abuse of the word "design". They implement the HDL for the chip, sure, but "design"?

And who decides designing chips is a superior quality work compared to image to alt-text translation (yes, happens in Facebook Hyderabad)? You?

I guess it depends on which team you are in. I have worked for some of the well know MNCs(not FANG) in Bangalore, some of the teams I was part of did really hard core development work. Some of my team members in Bangalore were more competent than our US counterpart.

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