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Comment by codingslave | Hacker News Reader

The competency of FAANG is completely overblown. Mostly they enjoy massive profits by being monopolies. Because they're monopolies, they can afford to waste a ton of money on software. Facebook is not even known for high software quality, theyre actually known for speed and getting the work done as fast as possible. Same for Amazon.

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Not entirely true. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, etc... They all wrote (or greatly contributed to) a bunch of high quality open source projects that you probably use on a daily basis.

Yeah they did. But its a small fraction of engineers that wrote those libraries. Not only that, most of the engineers doing foundational work at those companies are not getting hired through standard interviews. When Google wants to hire people for a team to write a new distributed database, they arent asking a bunch of leetcode questions to engineers. They're hiring out of PhD programs and from accomplished teams across industry. People do get pulled onto those teams from other teams in the company, but it's only after those people have proved themselves. As a whole, only 1% of the engineering at those companies is what you are describing.

Look at the white papers for the foundational systems at Google and FB, most of them are authored by the same few teams. Jeff Dean had a hand in designing a ton of large scale Google systems, just because he came up with some brilliant solution, does not mean Joe programmer at google who can implement A* in 30 mins is in the same league.

Sure, they don't have to be efficient so they can afford to spend more on tool development. Not everything works but the better approaches get more adoption.

Also, I think you're underestimating the effects of having a lot of code. This pushes limits that smaller companies don't have to worry about.

Elite startups and hedge funds have the best software quality. There are funds in NYC where every programmer makes more than 500k a year, some in the millions. They have people on those teams who have been programming since they were in middle school. FAANG just hire in bulk, they just want you to memorize solutions to algorithms problems, and if you can do that youre in. Some huge percentage of programmers at Google have less than three years experience. They can absorb all the bad engineers they hire, a few end up being good, who they promote to the teams actually writing the software critical to the business. The rest just write CRUD Apis and shuffle data around, using some framework written by the top 1% in the company.

One of those funds famously blew themselves up in 45 minutes, with causes including reusing an old feature flag rather than defining a new one and a complete lack of code review or incident response procedures. In all my (admittedly anecdotal) knowledge, it may be true that the top funds have the top software engineer quality, but their skills are put to use writing software that's absolutely terrible.

> Elite startups and hedge funds have the best software quality.

Most startups that I hear about have rather shitty software quality because they're focused on velocity. VCs don't care about sustainability since they don't even know whether the business is even worth sustaining.

Sure, but a truly world class programmer writes better code in a rush than a mediocre one does in a slow enterprise environment. Programming skill doenst work like that, some people are just better.

Surely there are some teams in the heavily-regulated aerospace and medical technology spaces as well. NASA would apply.

If you haven't been writing code since middle school, how would you recommend getting into those funds?

It’s a weird world. I worked at D. E. Shaw and their initial phone screen includes SAT score. I was 26 at the time and had to ask twice to be sure I’d heard the recruiter correctly. For whatever reason, that was part of the process. They were also the origin of the “every new hire must have an articulated dimension in which they are better than the median for their role and level” that Bezos later took to Amazon.

That was the most consistent top caliber colleagues I’ve ever worked with. (I’ve worked with other excellent colleagues, but Desco was uniformly very good. Our office manager had a PhD. Our recruiter had a masters degree. It was crazy.)

Probably the easiest path is to be referred in from a current employee. Next would be outstanding achievement in some academic or technical field (if applicable). You don’t have to be an autodidact or a savant. You need to be competent, intelligent, and willing to work hard and then to find a way to get a warm intro to recruiting.

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