If you are looking to join such a company as an engineer, will you want to work for one of their product teams, or any of the supporting infrastructure/platform teams?
Edit: sorry didn't understand all the letters in the acronym. I don't think Netflix are bad, Apple I'm on the fence, Goog/Face/Amaz no way.
Most of the guys there were great and I loved working with them.
But I found too many people in the larger organization who expected me to be their own personal Steve Jobs and to know what they wanted and needed before they knew it themselves, and if I couldn't magically deliver that in advance, then I was useless to them.
IMO, I managed to dodge a bullet there. It was a great experience, I learned a lot, and I'm happy to be an Apple customer. But knowing what I know now, I wouldn't want to work there.
Though even within a BigCo it just depends on the team sometimes. I talk to a few people who are very happy on the support side, much happier than being in product before, I also talk to others who aren't at all happy. I've seen teams and managers evaporate on both sides too. In my sample of one the biggest sources of frustration on either side seem to be the priorities of upper management, and there can even be mutual frustration. Like some people on product will get annoyed at support people for not providing enough support in something (e.g. test automation infrastructure), but support people are equally annoyed at not being able to provide enough support because upper management decided to shift more resources to product.
Personally after working in my support role (we support our main revenue generating platform), I'm absolutely changing my next position to be more on the revenue/main-platform side.
Of course, those product guys really do need a lot of support, and sometimes they arrange to have their own internal support because they can't get what they need from the guys who are supposed to perform that job. That can be a good gig, at least until the Enterprise discovers that the product guys had set up their own shadow IT group and get all that stuff merged back into the central IT group.
That said, I don't recommend a company whose product is something you're against. Yes, you're not directly working on it but I do enjoy my job a lot more knowing that I'm helping product developers build cool stuff. I think it'd be a lot harder to do that if I wasn't proud of what they were working on, by extension.
I'm a student, and I think infrastructure is the place I want to be (interested in concurrency, distributed systems, Erlang etc).
Is there anything you'd recommend building/studying/doing to prepare myself for an career in infrastructure?
do you prefer orange or green?