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Comment by lostcolony | Hacker News Reader

Only if you very narrowly define real engineering.

Google, collectively, may be among the best (I'm not hazarding an opinion) at solving technical problems.

I, however, expect good engineers to help with product vision, understanding and addressing customer pain points, and amongst the senior engineers especially, be effective at communication and helping manage upwards to achieve those ends. Somewhere, Google engineers are dropping the ball there, or are so detached from those problems that their abilities in those skills are untested.

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Yeah, that's fair. I'm just trying to discern between building a distributed database system with 5 9's and writing a crud app I guess. I agree "real" isn't the right term for that difference, I don't know what is.

Here's a counterintuitive piece of wisdom: building both is equally hard.

Running marathon is way harder than running 100m. Most people are not even capable of doing marathons.

But that doesn't mean that winning 100m is easier than winning a marathon. Might even be the opposite, because of harsh competition.

When you're building products, your goal is not run. Your goal is to win.

Nah, it's not. Consultants pump out CRUD apps with 4th rate engineers left and right.

About 10 people on planet earth could have come up with Spanner.

I'm just talking about engineering. I'm not talking about building products which get market acceptance, which is a lot more than engineering, and might be your point.

some of the most valuable companies on earth are "just CRUD apps", which was the point of the comment above. Knowing what to build is important, which google fails at in most cases. Google has incredible engineers working on stupid projects

Sure, but it's a non-sequitur from my comment.

> About 10 people on planet earth could have come up with Spanner.

I'm not convinced. I've worked in many industries and many company sizes and I've met smart people everywhere. I think a lot of devs who are busy pumping out CRUD could create these kind of systems if they were in a situation that called for them (hell, it gives you a chance to actually use all that stuff from your CS degree), just as I know for sure that a lot of devs who are busy pumping out CRUD are more than capable of creating a programming language. The bottleneck isn't technical ability, it's being in an environment that will actually pay you to work on that stuff.

Some people convince themselves that Lebron isn't that good, that the guy at the high school across town was almost as good. Or that they can hit a 90 mph fast ball. Or that they could take Mike Tyson. There are all these funny stories of guys wanting to fight Mike, race Michael Johnson etc. They really just can't see how far they are away from the really freakishly talented folks.

Folks like Jeff Dean at Google are really out there. He built a number of systems that very few people were capable of. But you have to be at a certain level to even see it.

> Running marathon is way harder than running 100m. Most people are not even capable of doing marathons.

> But that doesn't mean that winning 100m is easier than winning a marathon. Might even be the opposite, because of harsh competition.

If we go much, much farther into this analogy, it tells us that for any given agent, one of these races is always going to be much easier than the other one.

If you want to be competitive in marathons at a world level, you need to be East African. If you want to be competitive in 100m sprints, you need to be West African. Which race is easier? That depends who you are.

> "I, however, expect good engineers to help with product vision, understanding and addressing customer pain points, and amongst the senior engineers especially, be effective at communication and helping manage upwards to achieve those ends."

Not necessarily. FAANGs have an army of product/project/program managers, market researchers, and other analysts and experts to handle product vision, etc. for the engineering team. That's the big advantage of being a megacorporation: they can afford the overhead of having their employees be narrowly focused specialists.

(It's also why one sometimes see people who leave FAANGs stumble when they join a startup; they're used to having all that infrastructure supporting them and have to adjust to an environment where it isn't there.)

Yes necessarily, as I'm defining my expectations. If Google has made it so engineering doesn't participate at all in product direction, that means they're not letting their engineers work optimally in accordance with my expectations (whatever those are worth); the 'untested' case I mentioned before. Which, as you note, is why in other companies those individuals may not be as able to shine, since they're being measured against a number of other skills that form the holistic whole of "solving business problems", rather than just the subset of "solving technical problems".

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