Comment by BigJono | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BigJono | Hacker News Reader

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> I've worked at little startups and a medium-sized tech company as well as FAANG. In each case, we spent most of our time working on projects with 2-3 month time horizons. The small and medium companies called their development strategy "agile". In FAANG we mostly just did our work and didn't spend any time on the Kafkaesque exercise of "sprint retrospectives" and "grooming sessions". Our product manager didn't tell us what to build, but acted more as an advisor for the engineering team leads.

Wtf? I've worked mainly for startups, with a couple of large companies in-between, and I've had the exact opposite experience. The engineering in every startup has been fairly lean and efficient with a few mistakes here or there, and every large business has been an 'agile' hell where everything feels ludicrously slow and nothing gets done.

I've always avoided interviewing with FAANG etc because I just assumed they'd be in the latter category with the sheer number of employees they have. It's interesting to hear that Facebook actually runs smoothly.

I agree with the parent poster. I've spent 6+ years at FB and the whole time I've just worked on what I thought was important. No one was ever assigned a project to me. The process normally involves managers and PMs highlighting problems and potential solutions and then developers picking projects that interest them. It sounds crazy but it is a controlled chaos. We incent people to work on non-sexy work by aligning with performance reviews. So everyone is required to show some better engineering impact (like writing documentation, unit or integration tests, cleaning up deprecated code etc).

It's the longest I've stayed at a company (worked a decade at startups and web dev companies) because of the freedom to constantly work on things that are interesting. For example I've changed the type of developer I am twice since joining.

So if it's worth a look if that's a style that works for you.

It likely depends somewhat on the team and specific company.

However, the baseline level of individual competence and motivation is relatively high, which seems to reduce the need for process.

EDIT: the medium-sized company I worked at (~200 engineers) probably falls into the category of "agile hell" you described. The startups weren't as bad.

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