6 months of working at a hypergrowth startup
jacobbrazeal.wordpress.com
jacobbrazeal.wordpress.com
As an ex-employee, I can confirm that being frustrated and stressed for hours at a time accurately describes the engineering experience at Scale – a large part of it in fact
Needless to say, I decided to bow out after that.
This was for natural language processing at search so very much the foundation of google's bread & butter/cash cow (pick your favorite metaphor) and something you may think requires pretty sophisticated work. But I guess by then a lot of the fancy work has already been done & I'd have been one of 1000s of programmers working on it.
Even? Those places are probably the worst in that regard. The amount of support programmers for the core is enormous.
Facebook has what, 20 000 developers?
This simplistic assertion only shows your lack of experience working with huge volume of data / txs.
It seems like engineers generally like clever names.
Like, you can always assign whatever coefficient you want to this. It is like wholly to my advantage to encourage people to make information available. Like, why would you want the counterfactual universe where you can only see how people feel 5 years in. Ideally, for me, I could query at any given instant.
Since I work in the space I'm biased, but having to pull someone else's code locally to test out their feature is such a non-starter for me. If your company is in hyper growth mode (or even if it isn't) and the engineers don't have their own dev environment or better yet an ephemeral dev environment to allow others to test run the code, the company is hampering their product velocity.
I like to check things out so I can take a look at it through the eyes of an ide.
Just running it doesn't tell me the whole story.
I wish them luck. That’s not a bad list, but it’s probably an environment that I’d find uncomfortable, personally. I work extremely quickly, but in a very different way.
> It’s important to make people feel at ease right away in an interview. Relax and show interest in them and their story
This never happened to me, even once, while I was looking (I stopped looking, some years ago). In fact, several companies started off, being quite disrespectful, right off the bat. It was almost universal, and convinced me that it’s de riguer HR policy, these days. I assumed that it’s because it’s a strategy to keep the applicant off-balance, and in a subservient position, right from the git-go.
For myself, as a hiring manager, I made sure to be polite, respectful, and interested, all the time. I felt that it was important to make the applicant comfortable. It usually paid off, as they let their guard down, and often volunteered a great deal of information that they would have otherwise kept to themselves. Even if we didn’t offer, I wanted them to think of us in a positive manner.
I think a lot of these lessons learned apply to any larger organization (> 10) that has well defined internal structure with an eye to scale or has already scaled. I recently transitioned to working more within a larger organization (with a lot of healthy cross-team collaboration), and had to learn and relearn many of the same lessons.
Nice aforisms though.