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0 pointsCydeWeys7y ago0 comments

To use a sports analogy: Two people could each have 5 years of experience playing baseball, but one is in a AAA league and the other plays for an MLB team. Years of experience doesn't necessarily say anything about actual skill.

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rafiki67y ago

You just told me that Google is the MLB. I don't see any evidence for this. Many great software companies exist. You are working on the assumption that everyone applying to Google is coming from low-rate companies. Further, if I get hired into the MLB from an AAA team, it's likely I am playing at a professional level. I might get a rookie contract upfront, but that doesn't mean that my skill level is that of a rookie. The key difference here is that in the MLB it's much harder to quantify skills whereas that's not the case with software engineers. If I was part of a team that released a solid piece of software, even if it's from a non-giant software company, I'm not entirely sure why my experience isn't transferable to Google (outside of a different stack). By that logic, since people are stuck in the proprietary stack at Google, they would have similar struggles moving out of Google and should be down leveled.

carlosdp7y ago

I don't think a lot of L4 and higher engineers at Google are very concerned about stack, that's what makes them the "MLB". At a certain point, the tooling shouldn't really be very important, it's the ability for someone to jump in on a problem and use critical thinking and efficient engineering methods to solve it.

Say what you will about Google, but I don't think it's a very controversial opinion to say they do hire a lot of the best software engineers, and they are very good at it.

CydeWeysOP7y ago

And none of this is particular to Google, either. There's other top-tier employers with similarly high salaries and talent. YOE at these kinds of employers is just not straight-across comparable to other employers, hence the baseball analogy. I know, I've worked at both kinds of companies -- the people at Big N companies are getting paid more for a reason.

CydeWeysOP7y ago

You're reading way too much into my comment. It wasn't meant personally. I'm simply pointing out that years of experience by itself doesn't mean much. It's possible to spend lots of time doing something and nevertheless not be particularly good at it relative to others, for a variety of reasons. I've interviewed plenty of people with 10+ YOE who've sucked. They wouldn't get a position at a top-end employer at all, let alone a senior one.

vp89897y ago

"The key difference here is that in the MLB it's much harder to quantify skills whereas that's not the case with software engineers. If I was part of a team that released a solid piece of software, even if it's from a non-giant software company, I'm not entirely sure why my experience isn't transferable to Google (outside of a different stack)."

I'm sorry but that is completely the opposite.

In MLB and a lot of other sports now, every single play is tracked. Every player has rate and counting stats to measure efficiency and overall production in every category. Anyone in the world can subscribe to the tape library and watch your entire career on loop and analyze every single moment of your professional career.

No one can do anything like that in closed-source software. Infact, that is the big unsolved problem in tech hiring. No one can tell who the good devs are because your "track record", your resume is just not a reliable indicator of your ability.

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rafiki67y ago

carlosdp7y ago

Say what you will about Google, but I don't think it's a very controversial opinion to say they do hire a lot of the best software engineers, and they are very good at it.

CydeWeysOP7y ago

vp89897y ago

I'm sorry but that is completely the opposite.

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