Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch. If you think Netflix hires top tier talent, you don't know Netflix.
They obviously have some really good engineers, but many low-tier ones as well. No idea how long they stay there, though.
I'm watching the fight now and have experienced the buffering issues. Bit embarrassing for a company that fundamentally only does a single thing, which is this. Also, yeah, 900k TC and whatnot but irl you get this. Mediocre.
Have you considered that maybe you're being overly harsh about your co-workers? Maybe take the fact that one of them was hired by a top paying employer as a sign that you should improve your own ability to judge skill?
But given how much they spend on engineering, how much time they had and how important this event is ... mediocre performance.
How are you involved in the hiring process?
> Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch.
Very indicative of a toxic culture you seem to have been pulled in to and likely have contributed to by this point given your language and broad generalizations.
Describing a wide group of people you're also responsible for as "fucking morons" says more about you than them.
I don't think I'd want to work for you.
Apparently he was smart enough to get away from the Fortune 500 company he worked at, reporting to yourself, and "got a pay raise too."
> Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch.
See above.
> If you think Netflix hires top tier talent, you don't know Netflix.
Maybe you don't know the talent within your own organization. Which is entirely understandable given your proclamation:
Our engineers are fucking morons.
IOW, either the guy left to get out from under an EM who says he is a "fucking moron" or he actually is a "fucking moron" and you failed as a manager to elevate his skills/performance to a satisfactory level.
It's more likely that you are bad at managing, growing and motivating your team.
Even if it was true, to refer to your team in this way makes you look like you are not ready for management.
Your duty is to get the most out of the team, and that mindset won't help you.
And so on
If he still works there the morron who left was less of a.
If your "dumbest engineer" got a job and a hefty raise going to Netflix, it means he was very capable engineer who was playing the part of moron at this Fortune 500 company because he was reporting to a manager who was calling him and the entire team morons and he didn't feel the need to go above and beyond for that manager.
Also, highly likely that it was the manager that was the moron and not everyone around him.
I interviewed at Netflix a few years ago; with several of their engineers. One thing I cannot say is that they are morons.
their interview process is top notch too and while I was ultimately rejected, I used their format as the base template for how I started hiring at my company.
It can be both true that Netflix has God tier talent and a bunch of idiots. In fact, that's probably true of most places. I guess the ratio matters more.
It's also possible that there's very little correlation between capability, reputation and salary.
Don't we all know someone who is overpaid? There are more than a few well known cases of particular employers who select for overpaid employees...
Not well-known enough, apparently. Where should I be applying?
sometimes managers don't have the authority to fire somebody and are forced to keep their subordinates. Yes good managers can polish gold, but polishing poop still results in poop.
Example - the manager who started this sub-thread may be a pretty smart guy and able to accurately rate the intelligence of the engineers at his organization - but he had a minor momentary failing of intelligence to post on HN calling those engineers fucking morons.
You've got to rank how often the intelligence fails in someone to be able to figure out how reliable their intelligence is.
In fact it would be incredibly weird to ask a close friend who at their work kicks ass and who sucks and have them respond back, "I've never really thought about how good any of my coworkers were at their jobs"
Why do you call your engineers morons? Is it a lack of intelligence, a lack of wisdom, a lack of experience, inability to meet deadlines, reading comprehension, or something else?
I wonder if Netflix is just hiring for different criteria (e.g. you want people who will make thoughtful decisions while they want people who have memorized all the leetcode problems).
The timesheets were on paper so good luck putting your real hours on without your manager, who files it, finding out.
I’d be amazed if they ever cleaned up their act.
cost arrayIneed = [];
const arrayIdontNeed = firstArray.map(item => {
if(item.hasProp) { arrayIneed.push(item); }
});
return arrayIneed;
the above is very much a cleaned up and elegant version of what he would actually push into the repo.
he left for a competitor in the same industry, this was at the second biggest company for the industry in Denmark and he left for the biggest company - presumably he got a pay raise.
I asked the manager after he was gone, one time when I was refactoring some code of his - which in the end just meant throwing it all out and rewriting from scratch - why he had been kept on so long, and the manager said there were some layoffs coming up and he would have been out with those but because of the way things worked it didn't make sense to let him go earlier.
> a company that fundamentally only does a single thing, which is this
… isn’t true. From the couch, watching Suits and watching a live sports match may seem similar but they’re very different technical problems to solve.
The reality though is that large companies with thousands of people generally end up having average people. Some company may hire more PhD's. But on average those aren't better software engineers than non-PhD's. Some might hire people who are strong competitive coders, but that also on average isn't really that strong of a signal for strong engineers.
Once you have a mix of average people, on a curve, which is the norm, the question becomes do you have an environment where the better people can be successful. In many corporate environments this doesn't happen. Better engineers may have obstacles put in front of them or they can forced out of the organization. This is natural because for most organizations can be more of a political question than a technical question.
Smaller organizations, that are very successful (so can meet my two criterias) and can be highly selective or are highly desirable, can have better teams. By their nature as smaller organizations those teams can also be effective. As organizations grow the talent will spread out towards average and the politics/processes/debt/legacy will make those teams less effective.
Managers aren't teachers. They can spend some time mentoring and teaching but there's a limit to that. I've worked with someone who could not write good code and no manager could change that.
Most people I've worked with aren't like that of course (there's really only one that stands out), so maybe you've just been lucky enough to avoid them.
I do find it unlikely that all of his engineers are morons, but on the other hand I haven't worked for a typical fortune 500 company - maybe that's where all the mediocre programmers end up.
The trick is to use my massive brain to root cause several significant outages, discover that most of them originate in code written by the same employee, and notice that said employee liked to write things like
// @ts-nocheck
// obligatory disabling of typescript: static typing is hard, so why bother with it?
async function upsertWidget() {
try {
// await api.doSomeOtherThings({ ... })
// 20 line block of commented-out useless code
// pretend this went on much longer
let result = await api.createWidget({ a, b, c })
if (!result.ok) {
result = await api.createWidget({ a, b }) // retries for days! except with different args, how fun
if (!result.ok) {
result = await api.updateWidget({ a, b, c }) // oh wait, this time we're updating
}
}
// notice that api.updateWidget() can fail silently
// also, the three function calls can each return different data, I sure am glad we disabled typescript
return result
} catch (error) {
return error // I sure do love this pattern of returning errors and then not checking whether the result was an error or the intended object
}
}
function doSomething() {
const widget = await upsertWidget()
}
I am so tired of these people. I am not a 10x rockstar engineer and not without flaws, but they are just so awful and draining, and they never seem to get caught in time to stop them ruining perfectly fine companies. Every try>catch>return is like an icy cat hand from the grave reaching up to knock my coffee off my desk.
So again, maybe they're a bad employee but it seems like nothing's done to even try and minimize the risks they present.
At that point it's not one person being obnoxious and never approving their team members diffs and more of a team effort to do so.
But at minimum if you have a culture of trying to improve your codebase you'll inevitably set up tests, ci/cd with checks, etc. before any code can be deployed. Which should really take any weight of responsibility out of any one member of the team. Whether trying to put out code or reject said code.
- The recent story of AWS using serverless for video processing comes to mind [1].
- Google is renowned for rest and vest.
- Many government jobs pay more than their private counterparts.
- Military contractors
- Most of the healthcare industry
- Lobbyists
Which, yes, does raise interesting questions about how someone who can't be trusted to handle errors in an API call ended up in a senior enough position to do that.
Sure, there's such a thing as stupid code, but without knowing the whole context under which a bit of code was produced, unless it's utterly moronic, (which is entirely possible, dailywtf has some shiners), it's hard to really judge it. Hindsight, as applied to code, is 2020.
Incentives are fucked across the board right now.
Move on a low performer today and you'll have an uphill battle for a backfill at all. If you get one, many companies are "level-normalizing" (read: level-- for all backfills). Or perhaps your management thinks the job could be done overseas cheaper, or you get pushed to turn it into a set of tasks so you can farm it out to contractors.
So you keep at least some shitty devs to hold their positions, and as ballast to throw overboard when your bosses say "5% flat cut, give me your names". We all do it. If we get back to ZIRP I'll get rid of the actively bad devs when I won't risk losing their position entirely. Until then, it's all about squeezing what limited value they have out and keeping them away from anything important.
I’ve worked with engineers where I had to wonder how they found their computer every morning. I can easily see how a few of those would make you bitter and angry.
I used to want to work at a FAANG-like company when I was just starting out thinking they were going to be full of amazing devs. But over the years, I've seen some of the worst devs go to these companies so that just destroyed that illusion. And the more you hear about the sort of work they do, it just sounds boring compared to startups.
You just have to accept most staff at any corporation are simply just average. There has to be an average for there to be better and worse.
The difference for me is that this is pervasive. Yes, sometimes I might write code with a bug in error handling at 3am when I'm trying to bring a service back up, but I don't do it consistently across all the code that I touch.
I accept that the scope is hard to understand without having worked on a codebase which a genuine fucking moron has also touched. "Oh strken," you might say, "surely it can't be that bad." Yes, it can. I have never seen anything like this before. It's like the difference between a house that hasn't been cleaned in a week and a hoarder's house. If I tried to explain what hoarding is, well, maybe you'd reply that sometimes you don't do the dishes every day or mop the floor every week, and then I'd have to explain that the kitchen I'm talking about is filled from floor to roof with dirty dishes and discarded wrappers, including meat trays, and smells like a dead possum.
That's not out of respect or anything, but because they're all good. I hired and mentored them, and they all passed probation.
Sure there are junior devs who are just starting, but they're getting paid less, so they're pulling their weight proportionately. They're not worse.