That is not only true for tech companies like that but also for instance for top tier investment banks and consulting firms. They hire only the best and brightest and then relegate them to juggling spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations. It seems to be more about being able to say that your people are the best and brightest (and charging appropriately) than about actually leveraging their skills.
In mgmt consulting at least, being bright is actually important because it is immensely important to be able to put on a guise of competence and mastery to your client even when you have no idea wtf is going on. "Looking and sounding the part" is one of the selection factors.
My friend once told me that the most important skill he picked up at one of the big 3 firms is to appear utterly confident in his ideas and proposals when in reality, he had no idea what he was talking about. (then again, these guys will then turn it around and actually learn a crap ton about the industry in the following 2 days by pouring over research)
> to appear utterly confident in his ideas and proposals
I'm sure this clip has probably crossed your screen before, but I think that protagonist eventually realizes he has to out-BS the BS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Ehh. Maybe, but I doubt it. It seems like they are just people that were born lucky (mostly) and followed every single little rule ever. Yeah, they worked hard, no doubt, but to say that they are the best and brightest isn't true. If they were, we'd see a lot more Nobels and such out of them.
Brilliant is a very bold word -- I've met a number of people who work (or who have previously worked) at Google and Facebook that are a long way from brilliant.
But the point is valid in that we have an industry where every company likes to posture and interview as if they are hiring the top 1% of programmers only to turn around and give them jobs that a well-trained monkey could almost do.
Well, in this industry at least, every great engineer you do manage to hire is one fewer great engineer that your competitor can't hire. In an environment of talent scarcity, resource hoarding actually seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy.
Certainly with caveats... I know a number of smart people who work there, but they primarily want a 'safe' thing for the resume and finances, and take their San Francisco lifestyle a little more seriously than their work-based challenges (if they are considered challenges). That's only a few data points granted.
Is it possible that this you've gathered this impression because you're interacting with them in the context of their San Francisco lifestyle, rather than the context of their professional workplace?
Companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and (yes, even still) Microsoft are wonderful door openers, sort of like ivy league colleges. You may have learned nothing more than someone who worked at a local CRUD shop, but just having been through the vetting process of a highly-recognizable tech company gives you two legs up when you are interviewing at other places later.
Facebook pays well, has good benefits, is relatively stable (very stable compared to an early stage startup), offers an opportunity to work on a much larger scale than almost any startup, and is (mostly) populated with a group of very smart people. I'm puzzled by why wanting to get into that situation would seem odd.
Well, at risk of trying to read the mind of your parent poster, I suspect it seems odd because that person thinks that working at Facebook is unlikely to (for a junior employee) involve stimulating work, interact meaningfully with Facebook's scale, or build skills necessary for more senior-level work later in one's career. And be frustrating on an organizational level and involve working at a kind of douchey company.
And right now, I think there's at least a perception that the instability of smaller companies is compensated for by a very strong job market, that you can find very smart people in lots of places, and that most of the non-monetary benefits are unlikely to be really worthwhile at least for young healthy people. Leaving basically pay as the differentiating factor.
I don't whole-heartedly endorse the above analysis, but I think it has large elements of truth in it. If my hypothetical 22 year old niece told me she had job offers from Facebook and also from a small start-up, I suspect I'd advise her to take the Facebook job and quit 1-2 years later. But I'm not sure my advice would be correct.
> I suspect I'd advise her to take the Facebook job and quit 1-2 years later. But I'm not sure my advice would be correct.
No idea about the short term stay as they always have interesting challenges, but, yes, Facebook is a household name; everybody's used it. It counts for quite a bit in the self-marketing department, even if you _are_ just doing entry level work.
They pay well and if you leave the HN/Reddit bubble, there are CS students out there (that are pretty smart) that really would LOVE to have jobs at Microsoft/Facebook/Yahoo/ (insert any company unpopular on HN here).
Graduating CS student here, Google is my dream job. I would also be exceedingly happy to work at any of the following: Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Amazon, Intel, etc.
Starting my own startup sounds cool and all but it would be too much work for me and I just because I don't agree 100% with a companies policies doesn't make them an undesirable workplace.
Mainly the prestige but all four of those are good points. There aren't many places where you have an opportunity to do things for the sake of doing them, most places either don't value technology or don't have to budget to investigate new and interesting technology. I love the place I currently work and love the people I work with, however I don't want to be doing line of business crud apps forever. If I could get a good wage in academia I would but it seems much less likely than getting a job at one of those companies I listed.
From my outsider perspective, I don't even keep track of these things much:
* Amazon seems to have a reputation for burning employees out.
* IBM seems quite stagnant. They're basically a huge consulting/services company, not very interesting.
* No one really thinks Microsoft can innovate anymore. They're pretty much coasting on Windows and Office, and that's been eroding for a long time. They don't seem to be able to execute anything successfully. Do you know anyone with a Windows phone? Remember the Zune? Do you search with Bing? What are they doing? Desperately trying to do anything to stay relevant, and failing badly. They're on the IBM lifecycle path, but they're not yet just a large services/consulting company. They're still trying to build products, and they just suck. What are your associations with Microsoft right now? When I think of Apple, I think of the iphone/ipod/itunes. When I think of Microsoft, I think of the Windows 8 interface.
One fellow student of mine wanted to work at microsoft so she could develop the next (I forget exactly) which was never developed at MS, they just bought a little startup, slapped the MS name and logo on it, marked the price way up, and went into maint mode (which is really boring).
She genuinely thought they innovate internally rather than thru purchasing startups (aka outsourced R+D)
Some people specifically want to do maint mode work, but she very specifically wanted to develop "new products" like an example I know was merely a turnkey purchased startup.
You make it sound like Facebook is a 10 man operation where everyone gets to make decisions and have an impact on the outcome of company initiatives. Trust me that's not what it looks like when you're on the ground floor.
For the people building the customer accessible stuff, yes. But they also have a need for things that aren't at the point where saving cycles will make a difference.
They build some amazing technology. I don't think I could get over my issues with Facebook enough to work there, but part of me desperately wants to work on Hack and HHVM with them (thank the flying spaghetti monster for open source software!).
It's all open source. Here's HHVM: https://github.com/facebook/hhvm. What's stopping you from working on it now? For all intents and purposes you would be hacking on it with them.
I am, hence my parenthetical. Currently on the application/tools side, building some infrastructure and pushing the language to find it's rough edges, but I've been learning OCaml to be able to get stuck into the code directly.
On the other hand, there's something to be said for working directly with the main developers in a room with them!
