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Comment by kailuowang | Hacker News Reader

It seems that it's more of a product oriented (solve problems) culture than an engineer oriented (create something cool) one. Not necessarily a bad or good thing but it's consistent with the impression I got from Facebook in the last couple of years.

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I think that's a false dichotomy. Every employed programmer is building software to solve problems. The "product" of that labor doesn't have to be something that a non-programmer uses. For example, our memcached engineers at Facebook are building a product in the sense that other engineers will consume the service that they maintain. The word "product" simply helps to frame the fact that the goal of their work is to build, maintain, and optimize this service. If the work they are doing isn't towards that, then they aren't doing their job.

So I was a memcached engineer. The memcached team barely works on memcached anymore, because there are no real returns. Being product focused means that it doesn't make much sense to really increase the perf on something when there's other stuff to be done, even if you could do it in a really glamorous way (user space network drivers spring to mind for this -- that'd be pretty cool)

Instead, they focus on superior libraries and different use cases that make the stack more efficient. (Mcdipper was my project here). In infra, you are measured by two things: 1) dollars saved and 2) features made possible (in a very global way, sometimes this means business deals). You also get points for the site continuing to work

It sounds, based on what you say, that they are replacingthe famous meritocracy of google with a technocracy?

Is this your impression?

I had the impression that Google was engineer oriented but I wonder if this is still the case with their recent refocus into a small number of key products.

With that in light, how would we (to the best of our knowledge) characterize some of the big/promitent software players? (FB, GOOG, AMZN, MSFT, NFLX, RAX, DBOX, etc.)

> small number of key products.

Are we thinking of the same Google? Google has gotten its hands on everything from niche programming languages to web browser to computer vision and neural networks. This, of course, in addition to its traditional strengths in search, distributed databases, and infrastructure.

Yes, they are still an engineering company. Watch the I/O keynote. They are deeply vested in various areas of computer science, machine learning, and distributed systems.

Yes, Google is still very engineering oriented. No questions about that. It is also one of their issues. They struggle to market products. Facebook on the other hand, is good at marketing products, and is also good at engineering (not as good as Google though). Though Im not saying Google engineers are better than Facebook's. It is the focus of management towards engineering thats different.

I wonder why AAPL isn't ever mentioned in these discussions. They may be chiefly hardware focused, but they do plenty of software.

I intentionally left them out since imo their software serves to augment their hardware and the nature of the beast seems to be a bit different from others.

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