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Comment by badfrog | Hacker News Reader

> these engineers, while they all tend to be very smart, tend to be borderline junior engineers in the real world

Define "real world"?

Small-medium sized businesses without dedicated devops people. I'm working with an ex-Googler who struggles with basic dev stuff like

* How to make a Python environment for a brand new project

* Source control basics like commits and merging

* Reading documentation or using SO

* Basic command-line debugging or even using print() statements!

I've asked a few times: "How did you get anything done before?". And (S)He responds that they never had to worry about this at Google.

[Edit]: I don't think all or even many Googlers are this way. But that this person made $10k/month for a year and a half gives me pause. I don't thing FAANG's are touchy about firing people. At this rate (S)He likely won't make it through our ninety-day review.

Wtf ? This is not true. 99% of devs at Google would go above and beyond this.

Yeah, I work at another large tech company and I'm pretty sure all of my coworkers know that stuff or would be able to easily figure it out.

hmm I didn't have to do #1 in the list when I was at Google, but I did 2,3,4 pretty much everyday. I guess this really depends on which team your coworker was in.

> I don't thing FAANG's are touchy about firing people.

Google basically doesn't fire people unless they are grossly incompetent or if you broke some rules. It is very likely it took a year and a half to fire the person and they joined your company thanks to their credentials at Google and not their skills.

Does Google have a time limit for new grads to reach L4? Seems like this person may have hit that wall.

$10k/month gives you pause? that’s intern wages. so that you hired a low skilled person gives you pause? it should.

Outside the tech bubbles, that is an obscene amount of money.

The fact that that amount of money is regarded basically as chump change is something that is very strange to certainly myself and I'd guess most people outside those regions.

We're specifically talking about somebody who came from Google, so whether that's a lot to an average person is irrelevant. Somebody making that at Google would be very inexperienced, and the fact that they left to work for much less at another company probably indicates they were struggling at Google. So this person is by no means an accurate representation of a typical Google SWE.

But the thing that the OP is talking about is specifically that they think it is nuts that said person made that much money, regardless of the fact that relatively speaking that wasn't much money for the company.

I've heard a similar commentary about Microsoft millionaires founding startups and having absolutely no clue how hard logistics is.

Because if you have a guy showing up on Monday, there's an office already set up and ready for him by close of business the previous Thursday.

I like to solve problems at work with openly available tools. I will often file patches or add comments to tickets or StackOverflow so that when I am at a new place all of that information is still documented somewhere I can get at it.

In house tools are a siren's call. And the fact of the matter is that if you wrote a tool because you had a need for it before anyone else did, that eventually others will want it too, and there will absolutely come a day when their version eclipses yours. You have to have a way to run your systems without tying them that tightly to a specific tool. And you have to accept that the 4 years of utility you got out of that tool was money well spent and you can retire it now with a clean conscience.

How on earth did she pass their interview screen?

But yeah, at Amazon I encountered people who passed their tech screen but spent days trying to figure out basic bash / zsh config problems.

Companies that operate without a firehose of money from advertising or shiny hardware to fund everything.

I came from a series of real world companies struggling to turn a profit to a FAANG, and the difference in, well, everything is pretty vast.

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