Why so many Engineers
Student here. Just curious to know what the many engineers at big companies like Intel, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Nvidia and similar hardware and software companies do at work on a daily bases. Are they designing that many different products at the same time all year round? Are they maintaining them? Improving old products? I am asking because these companies have hundreds of engineering positions open all year round, from college grad to higher levels. Educate me please.
There is more to a company than it's products. A lot of internal infrastructure needs to be built and maintained for the company to grow and function.
Thanks for the reply. Can you elaborate on that? Like an example?
This video will do more justice than I can in a comment. https://youtu.be/FVdQETvHBoE
đđŠđŠ and đ”đ”
Some are designing new products, but most are implementing, maintaining servers, fixing bugs. But Dilbert should give you a rough idea.
Please tell me Google isn't like Dilbert's Co :(
We honestly do nothing. At Amazon retail, you can fire my entire org of around 200 people and there will be zero or maybe even positive impact on the company, and my friends in other retail org have similar feelings. And everybody in the management chain knows this too, but why would anyone raise a voice and shoot themselves in the foot.
That's what happens when you're bloated with employees. Better to keep teams lean.
Managers are evaluated based on how many people report to them, and senior managers too are evaluated on how big their orgs are, and everyone has imperative to prove (falsely) how their work is improving Amazon's revenues and profits. Everyone's busy writing one pagers and six pagers of full of piles upon piles of bullshit lies. We have strict deadlines and we work overtime to chase after goals. But those goals are totally made up nonsense with sole focus on how it'll get the manager promoted. Many a times we don't even pretend these days.
The noobs and the unlucky are maintaining some shitty internal tools or something
Write an application which inserts a record in database 1) Student - 5 lines of code. 2) Noob engineer - 5 lines of code plus 10 lines of logging 3) Experienced engineer- modules to parse different kind of inputs, modules to manage database connections , logging , exception handling 4) Engineers at FAANG: High performance parser which can leverage AVX2 , Restful service secured with OAUTH2, Distributed transaction management , support for 200 different databases With scaling ability to handle over 1 billion requests. The point is that work does not vary much. Vast majority of work is maintaining code already written. But the approach for doing a piece of work is vastly different and convoluted.
So whatâs the point? Wasnât the question about why so many engineers?
Try to map out all the things that one big company does. When you dig deeper you will find the big companies are doing a lot of things. And if you think about it, each thing probably took effort from multiple teams. Some examples: - Google released realtime augmented reality walking directions. How many tens of people might have been involved? - Amazon is building up its Alexa Shopping team. It's not the Alexa team nor the shopping team. It's a team that will let you buy things via Alexa. Not sure the team size but maybe 100?
What you see on the outside is only a small amount of work that went into the product. You donât see all of the products that were built but didnt get released to the public for one reason or another. You donât see all of the tools that have to be built or set up to support all of the people involved in that product. You donât see all the communication that happens. You donât see all the legacy code and systems that make everything more complicated but there isnât time to rewrite it. You donât see all the manual labor involved because it hasnât been automated with software and hardware yet.
Well said
Watching upper management lie to investors is a big part. Oh and watching big cloud companies suck on our upper management balls for free cloud services is pretty funny too
At Intel we do nothing.
Lol... you are HR? I understand :)
At Microsoft, we do nothing until Intel does something.