Hacker News Reader

Comment by olladecarne | Hacker News Reader

My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). My advice is to look for founder-led teams (not companies). If there are plenty of founders still on the team, they will likely care a lot about the product and code and hold everyone to high standards which make the work easier in the long run. On the other hand when I've been on teams where all the original founders left, it's been a constant struggle to make anyone care about anything. At that point there is no ownership and most people are there for a paycheck. Lots of sloppy code gets shipped, everyone approves anything that looks like code, and eventually adding a single line anywhere feels like playing Russian roulette. Extreme short term thinking takes hold and no one cares that in 2-3 years the code will be unmaintainable because they don't plan to be on the team by then.

View on HN

Yup, and the other flipside is devs being extremely nitpicky and regurgitating irrelevant Amazon principles BS in code reviews because they're trying to get promoted.

Agreed! If I never hear "You should employ a bias towards <some Amazon principle of dipshittery>" again it will be too soon.

Everytime I bypass some stupid process or break glass, I now just put 'bias for action' as the reason. Ahahaha I don't give a shit anymore.

That one is my favorite. At Amazon, "bias for action" is a knee-jerk managerial phrase that typically means, "I'm going to spew ambiguous/ignorant bullshit into the room and you do something meaningful with it."

“Disagree and commit” aka “bend over and take it” is my personal fave

Those principles are so obnoxious. You can use them to justify or excoriate literally any action at any time.

That shit never stopped sounding culty to me. When they broke out "Best employer on Earth", it was a new level of weird.

> My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google).

I would expect Google to have better engineering discipline than Amazon or Meta.

It was much better 5+ years ago. It's impossible to maintain high code standards when a company grows as fast as Google has. Eventually the law of large numbers applies. It's probably still better due to starting from a stronger base, but they are all converging.

There’s really a percent growth rate above which you just can’t build watchers fast enough to keep making sure the new people integrate. The more time the watchers spend trying to watch the less time they have to demonstrate the culture by their actions, and less time to reduce code rot personally.

So you either hope that others will be inspired to do better by your example, or you become a gatekeeper who loses respect because nobody likes to be lectured by someone who isn’t walking the walk.

I spent 10 years at Google (left in April) and I do think it's much better than how Amazon is described in this thread. Not perfect, but really still quite good.

Googles engineering culture is much better, but their culture around customers is bottom rung compared to MS and Amazon

I can't comment on Amazon, but I find the engineering culture very similar at Meta and Google, having worked at both.

olladecarne's story lines up very well with my own experience working on a post-startup-acquisition org at Google.

Why better than Meta? My impression was that Meta have outstanding engineering (regardless of what else is happening with their products and company direction).

Meta has a more a hacker culture "move fast and break things". On the other hand, Google is well-known for its engineering culture (they wrote numerous articles and books about it).

I think you might have cause and effect mixed up a bit there. I’ve absolutely worked with people who left because they were unappreciated, and they were unappreciated because they wrote unmaintainable code and were defensive about it. Being a quitter and writing shitty code are very compatible personality traits.

To an extent then, if the original authors are still around, they were either appreciated or feared, but you probably won’t know which just from the interview. If they split it may be good riddance.

I do have a couple of mystery cases where I believe that someone who previously thought very highly of their own work had a change of heart, and realizing what they’ve done and how hard it would be to fix it, have decided it would be easier to start over someplace else. That may be true but I would recommend that it’s a character building exercise if you at least try to clean up your mess before leaving. There will be other messes, from other blind spots.

>people are there for a paycheck

>adding a single line anywhere feels like playing Russian roulette

I worked at a company where all 4 founders were still there (15 years in) and that was very much our reality. I think the founders still cared, but that didn't matter - beyond a certain size (>100 employees), the majority of the people in the org didn't care the same way.

Jamie Zawinski thought there were two kinds of people. Those who want to make a company successful, and those who want to work at a successful company. He was salty enough about what happened at Netscape Corp that he quit the industry and opened a bar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com