Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand G.O's obsession with Amazon RTO and not the rest of the industry. No, it's not "unprecedented pushback", Apple employees fought much harder, executives publicly quit, and employees went to the media with names publicly exposed. And yet they went back to the office (those who didn't quit, which might of been intentional on Apples part)

Now back to G.O, I really really don't understand the hype surrounding him in the industry as if his words mean anything.

He was a line manager at Uber 2017-2020. And left the industry. He writes as if he had held multiple SVP positions analyzing how and why engineering orgs do things. He writes about Uber once in a while, in such a generic way, as if in a 30,000 person org all teams have the same ways of working

His writing in clueless, its 90% "I have been told", "people in the company are telling me", its basically a mix of DJT's ex-twitter feed and Blind.

His latest "trick" was scanning LinkedIn to show that in the past 45 days Google's engineering org grew by 6%. I really doubt that happened, Googlers I know really doubt that happened, and using LinkedIn which doesn't verify employment is a very poor way of analyzing data

Hi! The G.O. here who you refer to.

To reply to some of the factually incorrect parts of this comment:

On why I don’t cover other companies’ RTO? But I do! You asked about Apple: wrote about them and RTO last month [1]. Other companies doing this - also [2]. You can find my articles on my blog [3] and I really try not to “obsess” about any one company.

I am a bit puzzled on the comment about writing about Uber in “such a generic way.” Here’s a deepdive that happens to be about Uber’s data center history, just from two weeks ago [4]. I am not aware of these pretty specific - and not that easy to track down - details shared before.

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-scoop-apple-rto/

[2] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-scoop-rto/

[3] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/

[4] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/uber-move-to-clou...

A lot of Google subcontractors represent themselves as Google employees on LinkedIn etc.

Yeah, it's very strange when people think of LinkedIn "data" as some finely calibrate scientific instrument.

At best, it produces "anecdata at scale" (biased heavily towards people who or of a certain personality type that enjoys spending time on LinkedIn).

In fact, this data could actually indicate the opposite effect as well, with the LinkedIn org growing because people update their profile to start looking for jobs.

He claims (or at least implies) to have a lot of contacts in the industry, especially among the cool known brands. If true, relatively few people can claim so.

He's a journalist now, therefore he does what journalists have always been incentivized to do: write clickbait articles. Amazon RTO is a hot topic, simple as that.

He writes interesting medium-to-long articles on topics that are on topics senior engineers / engineering managers care about and don't get much informed coverage elsewhere. There aren't that many genuinely technical journalists in our space, and I'm not aware of any as prolific as him. (I'd love to hear some, though!). I am a happy subscriber.

For anybody else wondering what/who "G.O" is, it's the author of the article, Gergely Orosz.

Yes - he is referring to me.

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