Ask HN: People of FAANG, do your coworkers and mgmt read HN mentions of company? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: People of FAANG, do your coworkers and mgmt read HN mentions of company?

12 pointsRicoElectrico10 comments

What do they make of it? Let's exclude open source and stuff posted on devblogs - as this is intended to land on HN anyway.

Like: people on HN often say Google results quality has deteriorated, is this brought up at the proverbial water cooler (WFH, I know) or all-hands?

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I can't speak for Google, but as a Microsoft eng/manager, I _CERTAINLY_ keep an eye out for discussions on my product not only here but on other social channels, and will, if actionable/relevant, try to get it in front of the right eyes; you can likely find some of this in my comment history.

Full disclosure, this is not some MS policy or otherwise, and I don't want to convey that I have some deep system/make assurances that I catch everything, just to emphasize that I find keeping an ear to the ground valuable, and that peers often appreciate hearing the news as well, even if (and sometimes especially if) it's bad news.

In terms of what they "make of it", that's obviously situational, but I've usually seen it approached constructively or as a potentially novel/holistic source of insight.

Any chance you work on MS teams?

Hah, I must admit the shadow of that question crossed my mind while I was writing my post; for better or for worse I do not work for teams :) I'm currently on the power-query side of the world, and have largely worked in the data/distributed systems space.

In my experience, it is rare. HN is not a good representation of general population. And often, especially on HN, there is a vocal set of users that distort the opinion. IMO, there is also a subset of users that will have an axe to grind, so they will always take the most negative take, etc.

Also, this is my personal theory (not backed up by any data, etc.): I think there are a lot of products which get wayyy better with personalization. So, when people go all out and disable all history, obfuscate their location, and other personalization, it is not surprising that they get a non-optimal experience.

Disclaimer: My opinions are my own, and not of my employer.

Most people at these company are just trying to get through their day and don't care that much. At amazon the only time I heard social media/blogs/HN brought up was if one of the systems that your team directly worked on was in the news or if there is some obviously explosive story going on (like that NY Times article a few years ago about how much of a terrible workplace amazon was with people crying at their desk).

I work for a FAANG and I've noticed there's a very different social media culture for each FAANG and other big tech companies.

- Stripe: extremely active on HN, somewhat active on Twitter

- Shopify: many levels of employees are active on Twitter

- Cloudflare: active on HN

- Meta: only active on Meta owned social media

- Amazon: active nowhere

- Microsoft: few employees active on Twitter

- Netflix: active nowhere

I don't work on FAANG but work on a very big tech corp.

I often see mentions and read whole discussions about the company I work for. People love to talk about our company and they often say things that are completely wrong. They also guess our roadmap wrong more often than not. But I can understand why people are wrong, there's a lot of speculation and it requires knowledge you just don't learn if you don't work here.

I also pay attention to discussions about the specific product my team works on. Whenever I see those, I share the link with my team. But those are rare. Once a bunch of people had a complaint about something we've been trying to raise to management for a while, so I used the discussion to try to escalate it again. No success.

Not at a FAANG (or MAANG) - but at a company that pops up here on occasion. Opinions are typically pretty muted. I've seen an occasional flame war - complete with conspiracy theories - it was funny.

We do surface to leaders when we appear on HN or Twitter - and we try to respond to complaints. But we also laugh when we are accused of colluding with foreign governments

I can't speak for Amazon execs but a couple times I've seen either a customer need on HN and was able to get them attention or have seen my product mentioned and shared the link with my team and org.

Hah I doubt Facebook err Meta execs like what they about Meta here.

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