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Comment by freeopinion | Hacker News Reader

I don't know you. I don't know anything about you. I don't mean any disrespect to you, but...

I'll match you against somebody willing to take $150k for the exact same work. I'll match 4 of you against 8 of my hires. I'm willing to bet that my $1.2M team will outperform your $2M team. I'll very happily match 50 of your team against 75 of mine. You could poach 25 of mine who prove to be superstars, and I'll hire more.

That doesn't mean that you are dumb or incompetent or less skilled. I just think that there are some very smart and capable people willing to work for $150k. I think that many of them are as good as any AWS hire. And I think they could be motivated by something besides money to create something as good or better than anything from AWS. Indeed, less money could itself be a strong motivation to outperform.

Thankfully, we don't live in a world where there are only 10 geniuses to go around. The world is much much cooler than that!

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That's nuts, dude

I'd take ONE top faang engineer over 8 government software contractors. There's so much tribal knowledge out there that people in the Midwest just don't have, not to mention a can-do attitude.

It blew my mind the first time I worked with a guy from Microsoft on something. We were having issues with some code, and he just popped open the kernel and started actively debugging things that I'd only vaguely even heard about. I feel like I was twice as good at engineering after that experience alone.

I had the same experience from the other direction later on.. a team of smart, hard-working coders had been dealing with stability/perf issues for years on some product. I was able to root cause and straighten all of them out in a couple of weeks, even though this was in an area of software development using a set of tools I'd never touched before.

I'll bet a single FAANG-hardened code wizard could outperform 20 or 30 government coders.

Can you expand on what do you mean by "just popped open the kernel"? I'm genuinely interested in this kind of "tribal knowledge" you talk about. Maybe there is something we (those reading this thread) could learn and make use of.

maybe WPA, which lets you sample stack traces from user-mode all the way through drivers? Or DbgView, which lets you see printk output from kernel mode. Or hell, maybe even Windbg debugging the kernel of a Windows VM over simulated serial (you need a checked build of Windows to get the most bang for your buck there, though.)

the hardest-core thing I've done was step my way through Windows startup into the container subsystem, on a real, physical target machine I had connected to my dev machine over FireWire. I felt like Indiana Jones. (It helped having the source code though!)

I think Sterlind already covered about as much as could fit in a casual comment online.. The basic idea is that you draw a box around your system, then check all the inputs and outputs. If the inputs are good and the outputs are bad, you open the box and draw boxes around what's inside.

Don't be afraid to dig through heap dumps or decode assembly if you have to, although when you hit that point you're probably just going to have to swap out whatever component is misbehaving

> I had the same experience from the other direction later on.. a team of smart, hard-working coders had been dealing with stability/perf issues for years on some product. I was able to root cause and straighten all of them out in a couple of weeks, even though this was in an area of software development using a set of tools I'd never touched before.

I've done this at a company full of ex-Googlers. Some programmers are simply incompetent, no matter where they've worked.

I’ll take that bet. 10 150k public sector employees vs 10 250k private sector, its going to be a slaughter in terms of productivity in favor of the private sector. In fact I would take 10 private sector engineers at 250k vs your 20 public sector at 150k and would still win.

The reason is not talent, but process. Governments are bureaucratic by nature, companies are meritocratic by nature. Obviously this is a vast simplification and there are exceptions but I wouldn’t bet on your team being one.

I've observed that large corporations are also quite capable of bureaucracy.

Although I've never worked in public sector so I can't make a cross comparison.

I didn't say my hires would be public sector. They just have to produce something that is freely available to the public sector and meets a specific public sector need.

lol - the larger the company the more bureaucratic they become. I have friends inside the casino industries and they are 10 times worse than I've ever seen government when it comes to gross internal inefficiencies. Makes sense - the government doesn't have to earn its money, it just uses the IRS to confiscate it and casinos don't earn their money either, they just steal it.

Lol I'm sorry but the average FAAMG level developer is far superior to the average developer. You're not going to be able to win that bet.

I don't have to hire average developers. Obviously, I will need some exceptional developers.

People that work at FANGs frequently say this isn't true

In my experience the good teams have truly exceptional people and the bad teams are filled with people who would be superstars elsewhere. But yeah this isn't proof and hey maybe I'm just saying that because I'm not that good , which is definitely possible.

Yeah that makes sense. I'm sure after 5+ years there you would be far better than the average developer. I am talking from the perspective of people that I've seen go to those companies. Sure they were above average programmers, smart and driven but they weren't superstars or truly exceptional.

Ah yes, that must by why Google's golang has been created because, by the creators own words, Google's hires are not able to pick up things fast enough and that the language was made simple in purpose.

Wasting 500k on an expensive school that pretends you're going to be an engineer, then learning how to reverse a tree on a blackboard so you can be hired at Google or Amazon doesn't make you a code wizard. That's a very expensive code monkey.

> I think that many of them are as good as any AWS hire. And I think they could be motivated by something besides money to create something as good or better than anything from AWS.

If you think people's claims that they aren't motivated by money are anything other than lies they've learned they're expected to tell, perhaps you're just as ignorant as your $150K hires who have no idea that FAANG companies pay their developers $500K or more (which is the only reason you are able to hire them).

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