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in what way does FB "costly signal tech"? a few years ago I was interviewing at tech companies and got the impression that FB was *not* the place you go if you love the art of programming
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Big tech-focused acquisitions (you don't buy Oculus or a solar plane wifi company if you don't at least intend to be a tech company first, milk-the-ads company second). Also stuff like metaverse vision, exploring custom silicon, building an ML lab...
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Other examples include problems running large data centers, all the Big Data stuff, Google's Spanner... big, high-risk infrastructure dev, where there may be little fundamental R&D to do, but a shit ton of systems design, architecture, optimization, and risk taking.
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Good point. I didn't think about it from that pov. I think in some fields (eg. space travel), conservatism and quality go together and people die if you are too liberal. But software is uniquely forgiving in the range of tech risk-taking it permits.
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Yeah I’m convinced! That is an impressive achievement on FB’s part, and it’s pure “liberalism”, and it actually worked! I was wrong; those guys clearly do care a lot about technical/engineering goals.
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A thing to keep in mind is that the larger the org, the less room there is for people who operate in this mode. I'd say maybe you need 4-5 such people in a company of a few thousand. The need scales sublinearly with size. So the *average* engineer will never get a shot at it