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Comment by tomuli38 | Hacker News Reader

Aren't the best engineers generally at national labs and NIST and NASA? FAANG is known to be full of money/status chasers.

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That would surprise me. I have attended targeted career fairs with both FAANGs and national labs recruiting, and the national labs give off way more 'work-life balance' vibes. Plus, as the largest bureaucracy in the history of the world, the federal government isn't a good place to get a high return on brain damage when you want to actually get something done.

Having said that, the national labs do seem like good places to go geek out in your own advanced intellectual cul-de-sac.

> national labs give off way more 'work-life balance' vibes

Seriously - why does this not mean they're the best engineers (as opposed to the most prolific).

The implication that smart people don't desire the balance to be with their families every day is bizarre.

Well from experience of being an undergrad and going to career fairs, this assessment is spot on. You don't realize this whole thing is bullshit until a few years into your career.

The implication that the best engineers are just the smartest people is, likewise, bizarre and doesn't track with what I've seen.

Because my frame of reference is being early or maybe early-mid career, where you can't possibly have the necessary experience to be 'best' without working significantly more than 40 hours weekly, and from my perspective most of getting there in the future follows that path too. I'm not discounting that some top engineers could exist outside of working a lot, but for most people the path to that distinction is a lot of work, and in most places that lot of work gets done outside of the hours when people are distracting you with meetings and small talk, which means not stopping at 40 hours weekly.

Having said all that, I don't discount the possibility of work life balance in the 60-80 hour range, but that's a whole separate skillset.

FAANG's currently have a problem with ideological mono-culture. I dont know if recruitment has exactly suffered because of that, $$$$$ can allow for a lot of suppression of personal beliefs, but I do know a few people that have outright refused to work in those companies because of that, who are pretty excellent programmers

I would not expect the best software engineers to be at nist or nasa as evidenced by their lack of amazing open source projects.

Maybe there are some super great private projects but I expect those amazing capabilities would still be evident in the stuff that is put out.

Note, there’s some good stuff out of NIST and NASA (check out open.nasa.gov) but I don’t see things being handed off to Apache and stuff.

Using open source to judge quality seems wild. Maybe people just have no interest in maintaining an open source project. Looking from the outside at some of the stuff people put up with, it doesn't look worth it at all. I'll just work privately

This is a good point, but it’s all I can see. It’s not like there are famous NASA and NIST closed source software projects.

It’s hard to judge “great programmers” so I think the best is to proxy using whatever factors you have access to.

I guess it could also be books written and presentations given. Or contributions to other projects using nasa and nist addresses.

Point being, I don’t think there’s any evidence to think that nasa and nist have great progs.

As the sole maintainer of a popular open source NASA project (and contributor to several others), I can say that my open source work reflects very poorly on my work overall. We have a real problem in that there is a drive to open source things, but there is no money at all to support open sourced work. As soon as the open sourced work is no longer something I use day to day, I have to either maintain it on my personal time or it gets abandoned.

NIST and other government institutes are not known for open source work mainly because most of their work is a combination of science and technology communication. They deal in publications, conferences, and reference datasets. In my industry, NIST and the NIH produce the most important R&D reference datasets in the world, and everyone else looks to them for guidance. With that said, the NIH also occasionally produces world class software too (NCBI BLAST, etc.) although they do have some issues with parts of their software engineering culture being a bit out of date.

That question is pretty meaningless unless you can somehow measure the quality of an engineer. Is it the engineer who can build systems nobody else can, the one who can build the cheapest system that performs to spec, the one that can work well in a team, the one that is always available, the one that can teach others, etc etc etc etc. I'm sure anyone can think of many more aspects to being a good engineer.

I bet NASA and NIST have a great bunch of quality all-round engineers, but I'd be surprised if they were better at leetcode than the average FAANG dev. After all, FAANG devs have literally been filtered through an "are they good at leetcode" process. FAANG may be full of money chasers, but if the way to get more money there is by "being a good engineer" that does not mean much.

Government work sometimes has the most stringent standards

Indeed, but "works to the highest (quality) standards" is only one of the many aspects of being a good engineer. For example: government engineers are often not as good at completing projects within budget.

As someone who was a government worker, a lot of the issues why projects go over budget is because management believes that a single developer can do the workload of 4. So the product never gets delivered and that developer leaves to work somewhere else.

I think that dilutes the meaning of "quality" to nothing. Like if someone says "that's quality work" or a "quality engineer" I think of something specific.

For example I'd call a BMW a quality car. I wouldn't call a Lada a quality car, though it's much cheaper and has a much higher bang-to-buck ratio than a BMW.

In that sense sometimes government work has to be the highest quality, especially when it concerns security or safety. Sure it could end up being magnitudes more expensive but I'd say that's a question of efficiency not quality

Feds have some of the most useless engineers/bureaucrats in the world. They do have a very, very tiny amount of mission motivated folks who are the best of the best, but that number is a rounding error. Ask anyone who has left.

Not firing folks, low pay, focus on the best work life balance in history, heavy affirmative action, politics, and having to work hard to carry the coasters isn’t an environment that naturally attracts skill and competence. Work 500% harder than the next guy and get the same promotion. No thanks.

The gov and contractors, like it or not, are jobs programs first and foremost. A remarkably effective jobs program if you just measure folks employed and not output.

No, I don't think that's the case. There's enough bureaucracy in those organizations that the best folk get frustrated and move on.

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