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Comment by yodsanklai | Hacker News Reader

> My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google).

I would expect Google to have better engineering discipline than Amazon or Meta.

It was much better 5+ years ago. It's impossible to maintain high code standards when a company grows as fast as Google has. Eventually the law of large numbers applies. It's probably still better due to starting from a stronger base, but they are all converging.

There’s really a percent growth rate above which you just can’t build watchers fast enough to keep making sure the new people integrate. The more time the watchers spend trying to watch the less time they have to demonstrate the culture by their actions, and less time to reduce code rot personally.

So you either hope that others will be inspired to do better by your example, or you become a gatekeeper who loses respect because nobody likes to be lectured by someone who isn’t walking the walk.

I spent 10 years at Google (left in April) and I do think it's much better than how Amazon is described in this thread. Not perfect, but really still quite good.

Googles engineering culture is much better, but their culture around customers is bottom rung compared to MS and Amazon

I can't comment on Amazon, but I find the engineering culture very similar at Meta and Google, having worked at both.

olladecarne's story lines up very well with my own experience working on a post-startup-acquisition org at Google.

Why better than Meta? My impression was that Meta have outstanding engineering (regardless of what else is happening with their products and company direction).

Meta has a more a hacker culture "move fast and break things". On the other hand, Google is well-known for its engineering culture (they wrote numerous articles and books about it).

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