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Comment by orange_joe | Hacker News Reader

It’s fine to say the best engineers want to work on the most interesting problems, and that’s totally valid, but truthfully Google and other big tech companies need an army of highly skilled engineers to turn the red button blue. A simple fact is that maintaining the behemoth requires lots of skill and relying on people being intrinsically interested in that doesn’t scale to the army that Google would need to employ (even if it reduced its current headcount).

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I could be wrong as I never worked in the hyper-optimized space, but I don't think that's necessarily a boring problem to work on. It's highly scientific and I'm sure a lot of talented engineers are interested in A/B testing. It's not much different than compiler optimizations that squeeze out tiny efficiencies that are not noticeable and irrelevant to 99.9% of use cases. If you can make red button blue and quantify its effects in terms of UX (people being able to find the button or make reality more aligned with expectations of the user), I think that could be interesting. But I would love to hear from someone that has labored over such a task.

If I were hiring someone to figure out which buttons to turn from red to blue, I would at least try to find people curious and serious about the task. I wouldn't just accept that its monkey work, throw some money at it and hope for the best.

It is not monkey work. But A/B testing can often be more a trapping of scientific than the real thing. Google UXR is hit or miss. They have done a number of poorly run studies on what shade of blue to color buttons without thinking about multiple comparison corrections, seasonality or evolution in display technologies. I am increasingly unconvinced that these efficiencies are meaningful for UX. Compilers are different and those optimizations are real and matter for both the bottom line and UX.

I was using the phrase “turning the red button blue” as a description of the fundamental toil that goes into maintaining complex systems. There might be thousands of people who find that work interesting, but there are millions of buttons.

Learning whether the button should change colors is different from actually changing the colors.

I agree that the learning part is interesting but at google I suspect those are two different jobs.

> I could be wrong as I never worked in the hyper-optimized space, but I don't think that's necessarily a boring problem to work on. It's highly scientific and I'm sure a lot of talented engineers are interested in A/B testing.

That's why Google ends up with 25 shades of blue because each button is "scientifically interestingly A/B tested to death": "When you desgined 5 screens in Figma, but couldn't be bothered to chose the better buttons, fought with managers and requested an A/B/C/D/E test" https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1555686876274630656 and https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1557755746686754818

> relying on people being intrinsically interested in that doesn’t scale

Every time i see businesses taliing about passion, they are aiming to underpay and exploit employees.

Gaming industry has the most passion, very skilled people and the worst working conditions in the entire IT.

Capitalism for me but not for thee

I agree with this 100%. I don't work in the gaming industry, but always used to be the "passionate/caring/agreeable" person in my team, until I realised that being so agreeable made me work more for less.

The place I work is actually nice, but since that realisation, I managed to get an offer from a different place, to make my current company to counter with a massive salary increase.

I know and also share the salary numbers with most of my closer friends in the company, so I know how good I'm doing. If they stop giving me the fair regular salary increases, then I'll leave without any regrets.

Lesson for me that blind loyalty - even in nice places - will give you nothing but frustration and exploitation.

Airline pilots are also exploited for their passion (most people don't rack up the needed flying hours by accident).

It's also a false dichotomy: I am both passionate about my work and could do it for free (which I do with F/OSS contributions), but I also care about my compensation.

In fact, if you see that on a job post it's a red flag to steer clear from that company.

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