eyajpngJan 4
something i dont think a lot of tech workers have figured out yet: the tech industry isn’t in the business of making tech products anymore. they’re a banking/advertising empire with tech as a front business.
Show threadeyajpng

working at a FAANG company used to be this impressive thing because these companies were ostensibly doing all the most exciting innovation and hiring all the best software people to make it happen.

i dunno if that was ever actually true but it certainly hasn’t been true for years. these companies are not doing anything impressive or innovative in tech, they’re solely in the business of making money.

Jan 4 at 3:21pmWeb
Show threadeyajpngJan 4
which is to say, my reaction to someone citing the chief engineer at google is not “wow what an impressive credential” but more along the lines of “wow that is probably someone who is pretty good at math and also has their head so far up their own ass it came out their mouth and then right back up their butt again”
Show threadeyajpngJan 4
what impressive engineering has google done recently? what is meant to impress me about being chief engineer there? we’ve all watched every product they make get worse at everything.
Show threadeyajpngJan 4
anyway i don’t actually care about tech, i just like ranting, so im gonna mute this thread lolz
Show threadstudio craque 54 🏳️‍🌈Jan 4
@jepyang Give me any chance to dunk on a FAANG and I'll take it
Show threadMatildaJan 4

@jepyang all tech companies stop being able to develop new products at some point.

The management and accounting prevent any actual R&D. There is a small period were they get by with a "skunkworks" approach but after quite a short period those products can't actually be adopted.

(this is one reason why I no longer work for my startup - I have "ideas", I don't deliver incremental updates and I'm generally a pain in the arse as well as not fitting in with the MBA brainworm havers)

Show threadMatildaJan 4

@jepyang I've seen it happen in loads of places - I also think google have been unable to deliver anything new for a very long time

Companies switch to buying stuff in order to innovate (look at Apple - very little of their new tech was developed in house and they are still quite good at at least _some_ innovation)

Eventually they lose the ability to even buy in tech and they just become sales aggregators (Native Instruments in music space great example of this)

Show threadMatildaJan 4
@jepyang (to be clear - I'm differentiating between "buy in and pretend we made it" and "we're now selling someone elses shite"
Show threadstudio craque 54 🏳️‍🌈Jan 4

@jepyang Google is still seen by a huge majority as having a corner on the "how to do SRE" market. Sure, there are enlightened orgs that understand the "Google SRE book" is how one very enormous FAANG is capable of doing it and this doesn't really apply to teams just starting to build a function.

But I see on job descriptions, at orgs multiple orders of magnitude smaller, that they "follow the Google model". Or even worse, at a lot of places the whole concept of "Google SRE" is a cargo-cult, people don't even try to make it apply to their own context, it's just some unwritten rule that we must bow unquestionably to the Religion of Google in order to be successful.

Show threadakahnJan 4
@jepyang I have a friend who is a kernel hacker specializing in networking. Sadly for him the employers who can pay you to do that are few, and huge, with the business practices that get you huge. He’s at Meta now but I don’t see him lasting there because it goes against his values…
Show threadJoe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉Jan 4
@jepyang if you want to be paid a lot to work on ways to inject more ads into eyeballs and extract more information about every user, they've got just the job for you.