hknd

I did this - moved from Western Europe to London a couple of years ago as a SWE.

Initial compensation was a bit more than before but expenses were much higher (back than I was in doubt where I made the right decision).

Now I'm making much(!!!) more than when I moved here, and life is great. Other countries (except Switzerland) won't be able to pay salaries as high as you'll get in London.

FAANG/Hedge Fund SWE here.

I'm not doing any coding in my free time (as have too many other things to do), and I'm doing very well as a high level IC.

Getting banned, and not getting any explanation from support sucks big times. Hope someone from Airbnb Support reads this and can help out.

It's actually with any company which gives you that much of freedome and voting power. And people hate it if something is being taken away.

When they talk about documents it's more about Google docs (sheets, ...) created internally by employees.

Getting access to personal information within Google is very, very difficult - it's not like you can query the user's sql table and get all the PII. Everything PII related is highly protected.

Internal documents though are created on a "public to all" basis - e.g. let's say you create a document with some ideas or issues with the next Pixel phone. This doc would be accessible by anyone in the company by default (you can obv change that).

It's an awesome philosophy if everybody plays by the rules and doesn't leak stuff to the outside world. Sometimes people create "Ideas Docs", "Best practice docs", "Design Docs", "Algo Docs" etc, and then receive feedback from random Googlers which accidentally stumbled upon them. It's also a fantastic way of knowledge transfer as anyone can look up the design doc for problem X of product Y and read about it.

And that's exactly the reason AMP is so popular with end-users. It's fast, and opens instantly on slow networks with your phone. End-users don't know what AMP is, and most don't know that the lightning symbol is AMP. What they know is clicking it gives them fast results, and that's what 99% of people care about.

UK - SWE - 3y - totally worth it (compensation wise)

Google has a very open culture, e.g. all documents/calendars/... are open to anyone by default. If it's private, you'll need to mark it as private and then nobody has access.

Same news, no paywall: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/21/wework-lays-off-2400-employe...

This is actually really good and tangible advice - will defo support that project.

"Support Your Friends" chapter is really good! I've making mistakes mentioned there all the time.

`How internet ads work` Most of the things in this article are just bluntly wrong. Like a "deal"(2) is not an "order"(1) - there are completely unrelated concepts. An order is a collection of line items.

fyi: Academy for ads explains exactly what this blog post is trying to explain.(3)

(disclaimer: I used to work on DFP/Google Ad Manager)

1: https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/82235

2: https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/7630763

3: https://landing.google.com/academyforads

I'm working with >100 engineers in my team and >1000 engineers in my building, and nearly everyone has a mbp.

We usually just drop our macbooks somewhere if we attend an event, or a meeting, or go for lunch in our building.

Not having stickers (or any other unique feature) makes it very difficult to find your computer.

That looks absolutely amazing!

The person is probably a temp/vendor from a consulting company (think accenture or cognizant), who should've signed the same NDA agreements as anyone working on that stuff.

It's ddos protection.

Probably a lot of users are trying to refresh calendar right now (which will probably hit the calendar service).

If they put ddos protection in front of it, it won't hit the calendar service but the ddos-protection-service.

It's like with any big company: they'll have a bunch of SREs and SWEs working on it and trying to solve this asap, but it's probably too technical to give more details than "we're investigating".

works for me :|

Calendar is loading, but not my events o_O

Looks like it's back up for me

These pages at Google/Amazon/Netflix are updated by the incident response team, so it's a manual task.

The Google Search team is always ranking pages to get the best metric (ctr, time-spend-on-website), s.t. it indicates that users are happy with the result.

If any feature/change introduces a regression, they will not ship it. (That kinda indicates that people outside of hn actually like amp)

Keep in mind that: amp team != search team.

Yes it's possible and a lot of teams try to convert their temps into full-time employees.

A conversion requires interviews (2-3). Candidates usually get statements of support from their team colleagues, which has quite an impact during the hiring committee discussion.

E.g. I'd reckon it's easier passing via the tvc->fte route.

The caching doesn't necessary need to be by Google.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-amp-real-url/

OMG! I didn't know about the location reminder, and now I will be using it all the time.

^ this.

It was not fully down, there were issues with their blobstore.

Google is not using kubernetes internally but it's predecessor "borg". Kubernetes was build from scratch with the same idea, but not used internally.

https://www.quora.com/How-are-Borg-and-Kubernetes-different

That sounds cool. Could you elaborate on this "Our use of Bazel quickly gets us around git scale issues by enabling external dependencies that can be loaded into the workspace without fully vendoring everything."?

It is, like most of the tools in Google/Facebook/..., a custom solution. These companies need their custom solution because of their scale.

Dropbox started in python (and is still using it a lot)

...and we all know how horribly they failed.

I think it attracts a lot of great engineers that they can (mostly) work on something which is used by billions of users. You can basically improve the life of 1B ppl by writing code.

Also: having a FAANG company in your CV makes it super easy join any other tech company.