I'm graduating soon with offers from both. I have some startup ideas I want to work on in a couple of years. But I first want to learn the best engineering practices and how to design scalable, rock-solid systems at already established companies. For learning purposes, which company do you recommend? P.S: Regarding username, I've interned at Facebook on an Infra team.
CS majored? May I ask what school?
A reputable big public state school :)
Go Bears!!!
The Blind meme is that Fb builds fast and hacky, while Google builds things slower but does things right
But all on google infra
fb
This. Use the time limits (24 months to E4, 33 months to E5) to ur advantage in order to gain experience with system design.
One thing I've felt was that some of the infra systems felt hacky and not completely thought out (they were being refactored). Could this be the reason?
Neither. You won't get to own anything significant at these companies coming out of college. Better to focus on late startups like pinterests lyft etc that are hitting scale limits and need rearchitecting
I can also learn from senior engineers who have solved similar problems for Google and Facebook in the past. However, that's a very good point -- solving problems first hand is very different than hearing about past experience.
If you get F and G offer at age 21, there's no better start to your career. Definitely pick F or G over late stage startup, early stage startup, whatever.