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0 pointsnonameiguess5y ago0 comments

I think this is the opposite of how FAANG or FAANG-like companies treat the hiring of SWEs. They don't want people to specialize in any particular area. They want engineers who can be freely moved to whatever product line or team has a need for years to come, possibly working on fairly greenfield stuff that nobody has pre-existing expertise on. But deep knowledge of the fundamentals of computing and software engineering are non-negotiable.

They're looking to build a maximally deep bench even if you don't meet a specific immediate need they have. It's sort of like the dichotomy you see in pro sports draft philosophies, where some teams focus quite specifically on finding players who fill existing holes in the current roster and some teams just try to draft the most talented person possible even if they can't figure out what to do with them right away.

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_qulr5y ago· 2 in thread

The sports analogy is not great, because tech companies can't trade engineers to fill a need, and there are no multi-year contracts, so any engineer can quit at any time.

There's also no hard industry-wide salary cap. With the salary cap, the best way to maximize your overall team performance is to get superstars under contract when they're young and underpaid, because a team can only afford a few veteran superstars. Also, sports teams have a hard roster limit, whereas big tech companies can hire as many employees as they like. The analogy breaks down in so many ways.

nonameiguessOP5y ago

The analogy is with the dichotomy in incentives between teams that have to win now versus teams trying to build for the future. Some companies need you to hit the ground running because they are presently making no money and need to get a product out the door as quickly as possible. Some companies are going to make more money than God next year no matter what and are more concerned with ensuring they'll still be in a dominant position ten years from now. That affects the kinds of candidates they're looking to hire in terms of narrow specialists versus generally talented people, independently of any constraints in the candidate pool and compensation markets.

_qulr5y ago

This is a false dichotomy. Why not both?

Again, the sports metaphor breaks down, because winning and losing is a zero-sum game, whereas companies aren't necessarily playing a zero-sum game. Moreover, a team's draft position is inversely correlated with its record, so there's an incentive to "tank" to get better draft picks. ("Rebuilding" often means getting rid of your expensive best players and intentionally losing for a while.) No such analogous situation exists in business, it's just an arbitrary effect of how sports leagues are organized. It's actually designed that way to encourage competitive parity among teams, prevent any one team from dominating forever.

908B64B1975y ago

It's also that they don't necessary hire for specific positions. They know they'll need 500+ junior devs by next year so they can afford to hire then determine placement.

It's also why they are frequently the firsts on college campuses.

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