[casualscience]

> Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving somebody else to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and violent on-call isn't something to be rewarded IMO.

Sadly you've described precisely the optimal engineering strategy for promotion at my FAANG

[ytoawwhra92]

> FAANG

And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.

There's a cognitive dissonance that arises when you join a company that is performing extraordinarily well only to perceive dysfunction and incompetence everywhere you look.

It's so hard to reconcile the reality that companies can be embarrassingly wasteful, political, and arbitrary in how they run and yet can still dominate markets and print money hand-over-fist.

[drivebyhooting]

That’s because FAANGs are successful due to monopolization and network effects. Not by the quality of their work.

This is especially true for Meta.

[casualscience]

People succeed in spite of these systems. They have resources, tremendous network advantages, and the people at the very top crust of engineers are indeed quite good at their job.

[8note]

nothing says its the people getting promotions that are making the value.

there's still plenty of people not on that grind trying to make whatever thing nearby them work, or have other career goals than promotion or money

that promo option getting people who want to build a bunch of junk out of the way and into positions where they arent building stuff might be relevant to why those companies are succeeding

[cdf]

Because big companies can crush competition, either via lobbying for government regulations, acquiring the competitors, or driving the competition out of business by offering something comparable but cheaper or free.

It's the old Microsoft playbook of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but with more finesse.

It is also why their acquisitions tend to just die, because once the big company inefficiencies get integrated, the acquired startups just cannot function.

[sgarland]

This is my every day, and I’m not at a FAANG. It is horrifying and infuriating at how much could be improved, and how much cost could be cut like that if there wasn’t an absurd amount of internal politics, and we had a high-trust environment.

[onion2k]

And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.

... after Nvidia.