Comment by throwaway1414 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway1414 | Hacker News Reader

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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?

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