Sorry for the bad title, but do Software Engineers at FAANG deal with anything like optimizing the underlying deployment environment (be it a virtual machine, container, etc.) or are they abstracted away from dealing with these problems by now? At my last job, my title was strictly Software Engineer and I became so bored writing Java boilerplate and unit tests every day. Currently, I'm optimizing code and deployments, squeezing as much performance out of the instances, the network, and the application as possible. But, at the scale that I operate, my team only deals with a couple thousand concurrent users so management is satisfied with the performance and is about to throw our project over to some ops team where it will be maintained until it dies. Do SWEs at FAANG still deal with these optimizations or has it been abstracted away to a point that most time is dedicated on new features? Is there a job title (aside from Sys Admin) that deals with these optimizations? I'm aware of SRE, but not every company treats them the same. Was my last position just that I was at a low-tier engineering firm and/or too junior at the time to do anything more exciting than Java CRUD applications?
If you're talking about low-level details like which kernel version to run or which packages to install, the deployment environments are standardized, so for most SWEs, the problem is abstracted away. There are teams dedicated to optimizing the environments, and their titles are a mix of SWE and PE/SRE. If you're talking about high-level details like how many instances to run in which regions, that's something the average SWE has more involvement in.
Most of the issues we face regarding infra at c1 has already been solved at faang as per my understanding ; the scale faang operates at is 100x more than c1 products
This is somewhat my fear; for Google, do engineers sling some code, write some tests, commit, code review, and then once merged it just goes to the great borglet in the sky and you're moving on to the next story? It sounds so dull...
My understanding is that some teams are probably more exciting than others and the level of impact ( meaning if your working on a feature that customers readily see) is probably also team dependent as well . Also working with competent peers is probably also a big plus lol