Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. It’s also hard to overstate how many incredible engineers work at Google. Many - perhaps most of them are doing very low value work of adding marginal features nobody cares about to mature products. And in many cases doing so at a glacial pace. Every year thousands of brilliant engineers add ~1m lines of code to Google chrome. And almost nobody notices or cares. As browsers get faster, companies respond by adding more bloat to their websites.

If Google suddenly went out of business and 5% of xooglers started companies, we would see a gigantic burst of innovation in computing.

View on HN

I am sure there are many capable people working at Google, but the exaggerating of their skill level needs to stop. Some leet coder doesn't necessarily deliver better designed systems than any another engineer. And with that, the cult of believing in whiteboard coding interviews also needs to go away.

I’ve worked there. They certainly aren’t all geniuses. But there are a huge number of brilliant engineers there - many of whom spend their lives schleping protobufs around for a fat paycheck.

It’s not the whiteboard interviews that makes that possible. It’s the prestige (especially from a few years ago), job security and salary. And the opportunity to work with other smart people. Google has an excellent talent pool.

Breaking up Google would likely result in many great new businesses being built if that talent pool was shoved out of their comfort zones.

The current crop of googlers are largely normal and it’s hard to find exceptionally talented engineers until you meet an l7 and up. The faang engineers as exceptional engineers is largely marketing to attract experienced engineers to join faang at below average market rates.

I've had the lucky position to be able to think positively about a lot of the tech and gaming layoffs in the last couple years for pretty much this reason -- that we'll eventually look back on them as unleashing a lot of previously locked up potential. On the other hand there are people at google and elsewhere who get paid to do important maintenance work, not requiring much innovative thinking, but if they leave/are laid off that work just stops happening, and something valuable is lost. On the other other hand, if AI keeps getting better at a similar pace as the last 5 years, none of this will matter on global economy-doubling timelines of ~15 years.

Sycophant much? Incredible, Brilliant… Please.

You think my comment is sycophantic? If so, only on the surface. Another way to read what I wrote is that google has robbed the world of many smart people. Instead of contributing meaningfully, these people - trapped through money and inertia - spend their days doing useless work for an ad company. What a pity.

That is true of all of capitalism, that is true of 2 billion people on this wonderful planet that live on scraps. They didn't decide to be born in their condition any more than we ours.

One of the most detestable parts of Google are all the people with a smarmy self entitled sense of elitism. I had someone get off of a call, and they showed utter contempt for the customer, because in their words, "if they were smart enough they would work here, and every one wants to work here, therefor they are dumb and I shouldn't have to deal with stupid people" What a fucker.

I went to a google users' group meeting once - maybe 15 years ago. I got to chatting with this smarmy ~22 year old googler who was there. We somehow got onto the topic of ruby on rails - which I've barely used. He very loudly and confidently told me rails was bad technology, and people who used it were idiots. I asked him about his experience using rails - and he said he's never used it before. I asked him the obvious question - why does he thinks its bad if he's never used it before? "I don't need to use it."

We went back and forth. He readily admitted he didn't know anything about rails. But his position was essentially that because he worked at google, he was smart enough to know rails is bad without needing to actually know anything about it. He was beyond needing any facts or experience to know it was bad.

It was amazing. I've never seen someone convince me they were an absolute tosser like that before. Nothing I could say would make him think twice about his stupid opinion.

But, Google isn't that one guy. They have 183 000 employees. Thats a really large number of people - more people than most of us will meet in our lifetime. They have some entitled wankers for sure. But also, some of the best people I've ever worked with are googlers or ex-googlers. I'm sure Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc are just the same. You don't really work with the hundreds of thousands of people at the company. You work with the dozen or so people on your team. At the end of the day, getting on with them is what actually counts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com