The dissonance of calling Google/Twitter/FB centres of “top engineering talent” | Hacker News Reader

FB centres of “top engineering talent”

twitter.com

52 pointsluu14 comments

I have to say, this is pretty stupid. The tweets are barely coherent and have little correct grammar, capitalization, or punctuation. And the substance of the argument is pretty thin. The author just asserts that all products released by these companies are crap and thus their engineers are crap too, and it's due to class warfare that we think they are good... or something. He seems to conveniently ignore the fact that it's through these products that he is free to unleash his inane argument on the poor citizens of the world. I feel dumber for having read this, and I don't know why it's upvoted.

The only grammar mistake I noticed was not capitalizing "i"

I may have missed the others, are there any you can point out to me?

It’s generally trivial to find a large number of grammatical improvements for anyones writing. In this case, the first tweet:

> i will never get over the dissonance between how we call google/twitter/fb centres of "top engineering talent" despite the products released by such continually demonstrating otherwise

Generally “dissonance between” should be used in the form “dissonance between a and b” however here it’s used ”dissonance between a, despite b”. You can understand what the author meant, but it’s not proper use of English.

“Such” is probably inappropriate here. “Them” would be a better choice, “those companies” better still.

A better tweet, grammatically, might be:

I’m struck by dissonance whenever I hear FAANG companies referred to as “centers of top engineer talent.” The superlatives clash with my personal negative experiences; their products feel like rather low-quality work, not paragons.

You're missing the point. The engineers might be great but the incentives are all wrong. Engineers from those.companies aren't specialized in making software that improves peoples' lives. They are specialized in making software that makes money. These tweets call out what that end result looks like from organizational and technical perspectives. People confound money-making with good engineering. "Good" is where people disagree. The tweeter is taking good as "good" for the consumers. Orgs make "good" mean "makes more money".

This seems more oriented towards tech interviews, which are rightly critiqued. I do think that it would be wrong to equate product decisions with “bad engineering,” though. There’s a lot of Google engineering in particular that made waves in distributed systems and AI. Many NewSQL DBs are all based on the Spanner white paper, and BigTable was one of the bigger NoSQL DBs that people looked at as inspiration. Even things like protocol buffers have seen more usage lately as a way of sending typed messages between systems more easily.

Now, none of that means that Google can actually build and market a chat app correctly, but I’d say these are all “top engineering talent” foundational infra that only are needed at companies that operate at that scale.

  INTERVIEWER: So, you can reverse a linked list, but can you put these posts in chronological order?

  CANDIDATE: Absolutely not.

  INTERVIEWER: You're hired!

This one got a chuckle out of me.

I don't think anyone thinks of Twitter as a center of top engineering talent.

Bootstrap was/is an extremely popular front end framework, probably still in the top five.

There isn't anything super special about Bootstrap. I don't know the people so I don't want this to be construed as opinion about the people who develop this, but it is my opinion that Bootstrap does not require top talent.

Bootstrap set the stage for responsive CSS framework. It's easy to look at it these years later and say it's not that impressive but that's ignoring the context in which it was built.

Yeah, but it does not require impressive engineering (as in requiring super brilliant devs to get it done). It is mostly a good idea followed with a reasonable execution.

Is that not good development?

Unless the author is famous or has a compelling point, I don't think tweets deserve to be posted as if they're news.

curious if anyone can share who the author is? It is implies he is a very good programmer, but his bio/site doesnt mention anything or show any code

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