Trying to come up with a list of NYC companies where the tech part is strong. I'm not talking about prestige or brand, what I mean is: * good approaches (examples: proper automated testing, high-quality code, reasonable architecture) * sane stack (for example statically compiled languages) * reasonable balance of maintenance/development * interesting engineering problems (usually correlates with at least somewhat high load) * good vibe overall (exploration of new technologies, open-source contribution, participation in tech events…) ... Examples of why something is not a good candidate for this list: * Consultancy - everything depends on the customer even if the company itself has a good reputation * We are a big brand but doing video streaming on PHP * High load but the core is Ruby * Everything is cool even a static language for the backend but this language is for Node.js * A lot of problems with keeping things working, absence of testing, production only testing, a lot of manual testing * Painful monolithic core … So far what I was able to assemble is Well-known tech companies: * Apple * Google * Lyft * Uber * Twitter * Spotify * LinkedIn * Microsoft * Snap * Dropbox * Jane Street (overall they are present on the tech scene and one of the big functional programming shops ) * Stripe Heard some positive things but not exactly sure: * Amazon (look at Amazon/LIwu77 comments) * Reddit (guess I saw some mentions and some tech articles about engineering from these folks) * Palantir (no real insides why except everybody saying that) * Hudson River Trading (from the comments) * Two Sigma (from the comments) * Citadel (from the comments) * DE Shaw (from the comments) * Arcesium (from the comments) * Five Rings Capital (from the comments) * PDT (from the comments) * Bloomberg (present on the tech scene but very mixed feedback, Market data team on 3rd Ave mentioned as strong, maybe BDE (C++) see comments) * Goldman Sachs (present on the tech scene but very mixed feedback) * Etsy * Yelp * Datadog * Slack (overall feedback is good, but I’ve heard something about PHP) * Coinbase * Meetup * Ebay (mixed feedback) Heard mentions, no idea if they are really techy : * Peloton * Oscar * Grubhub * Asana * Yext * WeWork Overall would appreciate any suggestions, comments or amendments with explanations to the list. Especially additions no matter what the company size is #reddit #palantir #citadel #twosigma #hudsonrivertrading #hrt #deshaw #arcesium #fiveringscapital #frc #pdt #bloomberg #goldmansachs #jet #walmart #etsy #yelp #slack #coinbase #meetup #ebay #datadog #peloton #grubhub #asana #yext #wework #squarespace #stripe #janestreet #dropbox #snap #microsoft #linkedin #spotify #twittter #uber #lyft #google #apple #amazon #facebook #oscar #nyc
If you want strong engineer culture, avoid financial firms. They are faster paced and pay well, but most of their technologies suck.
Would you recommend removing Bloomberg ? :)
@OP BLP is huge and there are some elite groups, so it’s up to you
If you want good engineering culture, you may consider remove amazon. Or just be really picky about teams - operationally, not automation focused - a ton of tech debt in AWS, keeps people up every night but little has been done to address it - standard is hugely varied among team, but since nyc is growing its only going to be worse - potentially interesting problems, but most likely Just inheriting tech debt - decent engineers overall, so you can probably learn from a bit
Removed Amazon
Ok edit - Maybe don’t avoid amazon since it’s team dependent but really be picky about teams! Ask about 1) how prioritized is reducing tech debt if you’re going on a service team! If they are handwavy, that means very little 2) if they are more focused on developing new features (“customer obsession”) and handling on call(emphasis on on call), maybe also a red flag. Just means you’ll deal with bad engineering...3) ask about how much their system is automated. 4) average Oncall. If they’re woken up twice a night on average no one is really going to change the engineering quality dramatically. They’ll just say “we care about our customers” which is a sad excuse for not having good engineering. What to watch out for - using leadership principles to “‘not really” answer your questions - any amounts of hand waviness - specifics on Oncall (assuming they’re honest )
I personally think BLP is more or less the same as any other big tech company, now that we’ve embraced open source. No reason to troll its legacy codebase .. those only account for a small part of your everyday job (for most teams)
BAS is just an internal framework. You can still write python3.7 and modern C++ with it. Also, from a user’s POV comdb2 is just another sql database. Is comdb2 the only database solution your team is using?
Squarespace has a few of the attributes you listed in the post to avoid and none of the good attributes. Some parts of the tech stack are Stone Age; we constantly have SEV-1/2 incidents; people love to skip testing or test in prod; system acts like a monolith in which where one part goes down, the entire system goes down (which is a contributing factor towards the many severe incidents, along with the lack of proper automated testing); culture is very cliche-y and architectural decisions are made based on how long you have been at the company and who’s friends with the CEO instead of weighing technical tradeoffs/merits.
Wow those are great insights thanks! Removed Squarespace
Add "Most startups" to the list. I have yet to see one with solid engineering talent and often they don't need it. The important thing for NYC startups is sales (if B2B) or marketing (if consumer). I would love to be proven wrong.
Also avoid the various crypto firms that sprouted overnight. Most of them are cycles of raise, burn and founder gets rich.
Agree, Would be really great if somebody from smaller firms crypto or not chimed in and gave us more examples of strong small/new companies
I think Citadel some teams fit the bill for good qualities that you listed. You hash tagged it... but it’s not on the list yet?
I was there I just jammed it together with Two Sigma like this Two Sigma and Citadel (everybody is saying they are cool but nobody mentioned why except money) But now I’ve added them as a separate entry, thanks. Do you have any specific team names ?
Jet is a java shop now. Part of walmart labs. High bar on eng left the room in 2016 when we sold.
Thanks removed this entry: Jet.com (at least when it was an F# shop before the acquisition )
Add Hudson River Trading