I’ve spent most of my life thinking I wasn’t good enough to be a Google engineer, but as I got older, I realized that they aren’t smarter, they just had a better resume. I don’t doubt that some of them are way smarter than me, but most of them are just smart, or at least domain smart.
The FAANG companies have an internal kind of elitisim that would make staff less effective.
If you look at any Google Java library, GWT, GSon, Guava, Gradle, Protobuf, etc… there was a commonly used open source library that existed years before that covered 90% of the functionality.
The Google staff just don’t think to look outside Google (after if Google hasn’t solved it no chance outsiders have) and so wrote something entirely from scratch.
Then normally within 6 months the open source library has added the killer new feature. The Google library only persists because people hold FAANG as great “Its by Google so it must be good!” Yet it normally has serious issues/limitations.
The Google libraries that actually suceeded weren’t owned by Google (E.g. Yahoo wrote Hadoop, Kubernetes got spun away from Google control, etc…).
Every big company suffers from “not invented here” syndrome. It’s not always just because of arrogance. For example, as an engineer at Google, it can be less hassle to use a first-party library than a third-party one.
Also your list of examples is pretty bad. Guava is one I remember filling a real need when I worked at a small Java shop, and as I recall there was no widely used alternative to Protobuf when it came out. Gradle isn’t even from Google at all!
I’ve spent most of my life thinking I wasn’t good enough to be a Google engineer, but as I got older, I realized that they aren’t smarter, they just had a better resume. I don’t doubt that some of them are way smarter than me, but most of them are just smart, or at least domain smart.
I kinda worded it badly, but my main gripe is how difficult it’s getting to get jobs, so this is the only part that matters.
The FAANG companies have an internal kind of elitisim that would make staff less effective.
If you look at any Google Java library, GWT, GSon, Guava, Gradle, Protobuf, etc… there was a commonly used open source library that existed years before that covered 90% of the functionality.
The Google staff just don’t think to look outside Google (after if Google hasn’t solved it no chance outsiders have) and so wrote something entirely from scratch.
Then normally within 6 months the open source library has added the killer new feature. The Google library only persists because people hold FAANG as great “Its by Google so it must be good!” Yet it normally has serious issues/limitations.
The Google libraries that actually suceeded weren’t owned by Google (E.g. Yahoo wrote Hadoop, Kubernetes got spun away from Google control, etc…).
Every big company suffers from “not invented here” syndrome. It’s not always just because of arrogance. For example, as an engineer at Google, it can be less hassle to use a first-party library than a third-party one.
Also your list of examples is pretty bad. Guava is one I remember filling a real need when I worked at a small Java shop, and as I recall there was no widely used alternative to Protobuf when it came out. Gradle isn’t even from Google at all!