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Comment by zcw100 | Hacker News Reader

The one tool everyone missed was marketing with being able to call yourself an ex-googler being the biggest tool in the toolbox. Let me share the other side of the diaspora (I dislike this term). Tons of former X, pick your popular Silicon Valley company, employees with little else to sell other than that they worked foe x company. The vain CEO hires them hoping that they’ll sprinkle some magic fairy dust on their dysfunctional company. Never mind that the reason it’s disfunction is because the CEO hired his buddy from high school with a degree in poly sci to run things and is having an affair with the head of hr. Our intrepid developer constantly mumbles “we’ll at x we used to do whatever.” Afraid that the CEO will realize that the fairy dust is just a combination of cool aid and glitter starts throwing people under the bus and the knives come out.

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I have one experience with that. Guy, late 20's or early 30's at best, ex-Googler joins a bank and becomes CTO. Pushes for them to replace Angular (which they went all in on, migrating from a set of JQuery UI components) with, drumroll, Polymer.

Nothing finished yet, performance issues (because guess what, polymer's routing turned out to be pretty much the same as a 'tab panel'), aaand Polymer 2 rolls around, backwards incompatible. Scramble to make all their components suitable for Polymer 2, and they're just about to sigh a breath of relief aaaaand polymer 3 rolls around and becomes deprecated in favor of lit-html at the same time.

Moral of the story: Ex-Google doesn't mean shit, and don't force the use of experimental technology for your whole fucking multi-billion company.

They should've stuck with Angular, it's fine, or migrate to React instead which has / is becoming an industry standard.

One of my worst decisions as a developer was to build upon a component framework maintained by Google.

Material Components for the web is constantly introducing breaking changes that make building upon the framework a nightmare. Lately they've even set this expectation in the project description. The problem is that the components are rather buggy, so you must regularly update them to have upstream bugs fixed.

> Material Components Web tends to release breaking changes on a monthly basis, but follows semver so you can control when you incorporate them. We typically follow a 2-week release schedule which includes one major release per month with breaking changes, and intermediate patch releases with bug fixes.

https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

The development team's decisions have been questionable [1][2][3], so consider this a warning in case you are tempted to use the project.

[1] https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

[2] https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

[3] https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

I feel like the breaking changes must be because they're used to working in a monorepo, where you can just change the code and the clients at once. No need to worry about compatibility

When someone says "ex googler" usually during the beginning of a call,I immediately multi-task, let them finish with their chest pounding and move on from them, trying to avoid them going forward. If you can't convince people with the technical merits of your plan, I guess you just try and name drop (company drop). Some people buy it, most don't and they sit in some enterprise architect role with maybe a few internal fans. If you want to waste tons of money, scale your company for billions of users when you have 2000, hell don't even scale just say you can and claim success before you even do it, it works there are tons of these guys and gals ripping apart companies for their perfect "designs" that worked at google.

(i never worked at google but did interview, argued with the interviewer and hung up, he thought computers worked differently than they do in reality and just spoke with this heir of authority, without having a spec of it )

The funny part of the story is that Angular is from Google.

It's surprising that the fact "Something that works for Google doesn't necessarily work for company X" is not common knowledge.

One of the things that amuses me most is ex-FAANG engineers who are absolutely stymied when they don't have access to the tools and support systems available at their former employers. They've never had to deal with some of the very rough systems the rest of us deal with on a daily basis just to make the business run.

Hubris runs rampant in the ex-FAANG crowd, and businesses who aren't tech companies who hire these folks do so precisely because they don't understand that what worked at ex-FAANG won't necessarily translate to their business.

There are many companies where ex Googlers have made an impact as founders or senior engineering leaders. Your anecdata has many counters.

At this point there are probably 100k ex Google employees.

It wasn't an absolutest statement but interesting that you've tried to make it so.

It is called cargo cult culture [0]. The idea is to succeed by replicating what other successes have done. The problem is that from the outside, we only see how the successes got where they are in a superficial way.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

I agree that it isn't a perfect predictor of future success, but it is a free indicator that carries a decent amount of signal.

And I would encourage anyone who loves the field IMO should have a goal to do a stretch at one of the big ~5 (an internship may be enough). I speak as someone who was very anti-big tech until 2014 when someone convinced me to get my head out of the sand.

Your technical abilities can still improve (as long as you keep practicing yourself, because dev speed will slow down at a big org), you will gain tons of practice working with a lot of talented people, but irreplaceably you will understand more about how the industry is piloted.

> CEO hired his buddy from high school with a degree in poly sci to run things and is having an affair with the head of hr.

Thats pretty close to the Google story.

didn't understand.

Yes... It's a huge pet peeve of mine when recruiters, companies, tools, say something like "written by ex-googlers", "work with ex-googlers", etc. Like it means anything at all that you have an engineer from a company w/ 100k employees. It's absolutely meaningless. And you see it all the time, especially in link-bait Hacker News headlines.

Did you even read the article ? It's incredibly well written with pros and cons of each tool. I know you have a hatchet to bury against Google but why don't you read the article first.

Why are you carrying water for Google?

I did read the article and yes it does have some good parts.

I carry water to douse the flame you hold.

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