Hacker News Reader

Comment by scaleout1 | Hacker News Reader

Why are almost all the replies by ex Google engineers? I thought I would see an even distribution from all FAANG companies but replies are pretty heavily skewed toward ex google employees. Is this because 1) Google culture is completely different from other FAANG companies? 2) Engineers at other FAANG companies dont quit their job? 3) or they dont browse HN in their free time?

View on HN

If I were to guess, don't kill me for this.

Working for Google creates a much bigger cognitive dissonance compared to other FAANGM.

Google disproportionately promotes culture as number 1 reason to work there, where as the rest of the companies are just that: companies that make money.

Imagine the surprise when a person joined Google and realize it's nothing but another large company.

I have heard that FB has similar issues, but those are just that: rumors or things I read online.

The companies are all of varying sizes and distribution of types of workers. Google has a heavy engineering component to it - Apple and maybe to a lesser degree Amazon does as well, but one thing about Apple is that it has a culture of generally not talking about work as much outside of work, in part due to the whole wanting to keep things secret. Netflix as a company is also just small at around 5000 employees last I heard. Facebook is somewhere around 20k I believe at HQ, although that number seems to go up every time I hear more recent numbers, Google is at ~60kish I remember reading, and Amazon is around 100k I believe? Apple is at a little over 120k employees, but Apple and Amazon both have a lot of non-engineer workers as well (retail and warehouse employees, respectively).

Probably mostly 3, and that Google is larger than the other faangs where you might (Netflix and Facebook).

That doesn't sound accurate. Anecdata, but in my current org in Amazon Retail I think about 1 in 15 engineers browse HN daily. When I was in AWS it was around 1 in 3.

Why do you think people in Google/Netflix/Facebook browse HN more than Amazon/Apple?

Historical trends on similar threads. Other "Ask FAAMNG" threads seem to have a disproportionate number of responses from Googlers.

I think the population you're observing here are people who first joined a FAANG before 2014 (since I imagine most people stayed for their initial four-year grant given FANNG stock performance). Facebook (not sure about the others) in 2014 had ~2k engineers IIRC, but Google IIRC had like 10-15k engineers around that time. The gap has closed in recent years, but looking at current engineering numbers isn't the right approach IMO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com