Are software engineers working for Google/Facebook incompetent? | Hacker News Reader

Are software engineers working for Google/Facebook incompetent?

12 pointsdonnie1234536 comments

Read this before commenting Reference: https://wap.business-standard.com/article/international/too-many-employees-but-few-work-pichai-zuckerberg-sound-the-alarm-122080801425_1.html

This is not a troll question or a question asked to criticize Googlers/Meta employees.

Pichai and Zuckerberg are of the opinion that hardly few engineers at Google/Facebook are productive.

Their observation leads me to ask another question: Does this mean that engineers working for Google/Facebook are only good at memorizing Leetcode questions?

Bilderberg members like Peter Thiel have monopoly over Tech industry and he is not happy,he says that we are in a era of stagnation. https://rootsofprogress.org/technological-stagnation https://youtu.be/nHXEjdYwoYE

I expect an honest opinion from everyone.

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I've never worked for Google, Meta or any of the big companies.

But based on the several multi-national corporations that I have worked at, the problem is not with the engineers. The core problem is the layers of managers who are pursuing various perverse incentives.

AFAIK all large companies introduce yet more layers of management, procedures, rules, etc whenever they encounter any problems. Having a large proportion of politically inexperienced junior staff who do not push back only exacerbates the problems.

It is said that the fish rots from the head down. So too with corporations, the executives chasing ever increasing shareholder returns and fattening their own stock grants leads to a variety of ills.

I've seen this too.

The hierarchy is upside down.

The person with the least skills in a team (the manager) is often making solo decisions without consulting the team.

You should be able to choose your manager or decide not to have one. The 90% of managers that are incompotent can then be shaken out of the hierarchy.

Please answer this question https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34996991

I was in same boat at a large multi-national corporation with employee count between 50k-100k globally. Its definitely not incompetence of the end line employee, its that the organization is too large, probably not organized well, and likely for big tech companies, with one exception, they grew too fast.

The one exception is Apple. Over the same time period of the last few years they grew at a slower pace. They are also organized differently: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio....

I think the multi-divisional structure where each org is run as its own business creates fiefdoms, political infighting, competing for resources, etc. Throw in incentives like stock options that vest quarterly and you will likely find end line employees spending time watching organizational dysfunction perfectly fine if their stock is going to net them 2-3x their salary every year.

Please answer this question https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34996991

Something tells me there's a new agenda being pushed from the echelons that a lot of people in big companies are unproductive and I see some people are buying into it.

It's not the fault of an engineer if they are mismanaged or provided with leadership where they can actually ship useful products.

There's a lot of people working on things that dont produce monetary value for the company because someone decided it's necessary.

Do you think a lot of companies need all that insane machinery and automation to ship a trivial web page? Probably not.

A lot of work is done for vertical integration, indirectly driving new customers to your main platform or maintaining your existing customers. There's insane amount of manpower being allocated to work on app screens that will probably be used by a very few users.

Productivity cannot really be measured.

I disagree. Software engineers will be judged by the quality of product they produce.

Meta employees are not using the same product that they have created.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/...

It's not the engineers fault that the product they created is bad. It might simply be because there's no place for such product in the first place independent of execution.

Surely you're not saying that Meta's Metaverse is a bad product because the engineers are likely bad?

Or is Meta's Metaverse likely bad because there's probably a bad management setup with many layers of managers all trying to get their influence into parts of the product, lots of teams that don't communicate very well, lots of pointless meetings that drain the motivation out of people, dictates from higher ups that must be implemented on a set schedule with no thought to a cohesive product?

Love or hate Steve Jobs, I think the most likely way a massive company can genuinely thrive is if they have a central figure who genuinely understands human psychology and enough about the technology to make the right tradeoffs in designing products.

Outside of the startup bubble, this is how 90% of software engineering jobs work. If I had a dime for every product I worked on that I didn't go on to use, I would have one dime for every place I've worked at.

Honestly, your gripes with Meta and Google sound like they could be fixed by cleaning out management and making them engineering-led again. All of these companies hire plenty of talent, but your issue seems to be that they're applying it to useless walled-garden products. It is indeed a problem, but only regulation and worsening market conditions can compel them to stop; engineers don't call all the shots in any of these businesses.

> Software engineers will be judged by the quality of product they produce.

This hasn't felt true for as long as managers have run performance reviews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34996991 Please answer this question. I would like to know your opinion

At my previous company, no one knew or used a SQL index. I'm neither kidding nor exaggerating

Except one 10y engineer who knew about indxes but had no idea what type to use and when. Front-end turned backend engineer so i would give him a pass.

Of course, i left the company asap. I don't try to correct/educate people it's a waste of time, after all I'm not going to live forever

There’s no honest answer to your question because it relies on a generalization and a vague metric. Clearly not all Google and Meta engineers lack competence. And competence depends on circumstances — the team, the project, the organization.

I think all organizations experience a Pareto distribution, where a relatively small number of people contribute the most to productivity. That doesn’t mean the majority lack competence, though it might. It could also mean the organization prevents people doing their best work. John Carmack said as much on his way out of Meta. Some projects fail even though the engineers did good work.

I think it’s going too far to suggest “engineers working for Google/Facebook are only good at memorizing Leetcode questions.”

On the other hand a shocking number of working programmers can’t effectively produce code. Jeff Atwood described this almost two decades ago.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

On the other hand Peter Thiel says that we are in a era of stagnation. https://youtu.be/nHXEjdYwoYE https://rootsofprogress.org/technological-stagnation

IMO its just hard to be very productive at that scale/in such a large company, so most arent.

Oh god it's the beaurocracy and office politics that gets in the way, not just the skillset. They have thorough review processess too so you know these devs are at the bare minimum capability to do the tasks on hand.

Part of the answer is here

"Former Googler pulls back the curtain on a bureaucratic ‘maze’—and lambastes bosses and employees for losing sight of what’s important"

https://fortune.com/2023/02/16/alphabet-google-former-employ...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/...

What about Meta employees? Why don't they use their own product ?

My theory is the early employees tend to be more competent than ones in the giant phase. The former built a lot of real shit, the latter learn from existing system and probably do ways few things. A lot of Leetcode engineers as well at some points. It's sort of like the process of getting higher education with a bunch of ineffective tests. Those who are optimized for taking tests passed and got in.

Which big company has significantly more competent engineers than those? And in what way would you say those are more competent? If you don't give us a good point to compare with then we can't have a discussion.

I think majority are highly competent, many of them have achieved great feats before or after joining. There is no shortage of successful start ups / companies that are run by ex-googlers and ex-Facebook employees.

On the other hand Bilderberg members like Peter Thiel are not happy. He says that we are in a era of stagnation.

https://rootsofprogress.org/technological-stagnation https://youtu.be/nHXEjdYwoYE

Software engineers from Google and Facebook consistently ace interviews, not do well, but ace.

They also complain about their company cultures. The leadership of Google and Facebook is weak. They stopped putting people first and instead looked at extracting money.

Once the culture changes from improving humanity to extracting money, motivation goes down and the people who push forward despite poor leadership stop fighting leadership so much and become cynical.

Once cynicism sets in, innovation stops.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/...

Why don't Meta employees use their own product ?

Because they are smart and competent

Clearly elites like Peter Thiel are not wrong when they say https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/g...

Hollywood too I’m pretty sure. It really feels like everyone is “running out of ideas”.

On the other hand Bilderberg members like Peter Thiel are not happy. He says that we are in a era of stagnation.

https://rootsofprogress.org/technological-stagnation https://youtu.be/nHXEjdYwoYE

“Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way… do not complain about illogical behavior…” - Eli Goldratt

It's more likely a management problem, with managers who've fallen into the Peter Drucker "Activity Trap".

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-gra... Yegge on Google

The FAANG skill set is very different from that of more nimble organizations. I wouldn't call this incompetence, but more of a misalignment of incentives.

This also leads me to ask another question: Why all Universities around the world are pushing incompetent graduates into the job market?

Supply and demand? those people find decent jobs and the industry don't complain too much. Raising the bar for higher education will send less developers to the market, making recruitment even harder than it is today.

Graduates are not incompetent, they're a valuable part of any software team.

this comes from the leetcode oriented hiring process

the process optimizes for people who can repeatedly practice and memorize a set of problems 1000s of times until they can solve them in a few minutes

building real software in practice requires creativity and experience which is not what they hire for

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