FAANGs employ so many people, working for one doesn’t particularly impress me. Quite the opposite, really. I look at what comes out of most FAANGs (and similar companies) and the number of people they employ to get that done, and I kind of roll my eyes. Like can someone please explain to me why it takes more than a few dozen engineers to write the code at Twitter or Snapchat? Furthermore, the tech challenges that FAANG & gang face are really 0.1% problems. One of the worst things that’s happened to our industry is the folks like The Secret Programmer who read how Netflix engineers code to solve the problems that are kind of unique to Netflix (like having to deal with 8 year old Roku’s that will never get an update, but not being able to afford to lose a customer because CAC is a year of revenue!) and then applying it to every problem in sight. I have clients talking about microservice architecture running on containers + K8s for… 2,000 users and the site is a corporate portal, and the only consumer of the microservices are the corporate portal, and it’s total overkill architecture, it’s a pyramid when they just need a bike shed! But these folks with little experience but a lot of media consumption keep hearing “this is the way”… real architects know that half the skill is knowing what techniques are appropriate for what problems. Remember when Paul Graham convinced everyone they should be using functional programming for everything? :D

J.Ja