A thing I think with medium confidence:
Big tech cares modestly about engineering productivity in the large, but rather little about absolute time to market. They’ll hit market when their org is ready to and not a day before.
And their constraints are engineer and PM brainsweat
Big tech cares modestly about engineering productivity in the large, but rather little about absolute time to market. They’ll hit market when their org is ready to and not a day before.
And their constraints are engineer and PM brainsweat
Big tech would care modestly if another company in the club got categorically better at attracting brains or extracting sweat, but they don’t care nearly so much if they get better or worse in a year as long as they stay in the same relative positions.
So if you believed that perk culture or remote cost you 5 points of brainsweat per engineer per year, you’d say “Ahh, a nice equilibrium. All of us are here at this Schelling point now. None dare defect; they’d lose hundreds of engineers. Meanwhile, barrier to competition up.”
You can also sort of see this with engineering choices. I am not maximally cynical; I think there are some systems which solve problems Google has which Startup doesn’t, and Startup engineers implement them for career reasons rather than because Google is actively trying sabotage
But something which maximizes does scalability or UX and makes development 3X as expensive is Cheap At The Price for AppAmaGooFaceSoft. What’s a few billion more in headcount costs a year on their flagship products?
Mobile development is really good for users in aggregate and good for the industry in aggregate but is bad for any individual company engineering budget relative to desktop web apps, etc.
(More users = more money but the most marginal users make more money for Google then they do for independent software vendors, almost all of whom now need apps now to remain competitive with user expectations.)
(Saw an investment platform public strategy memo where they’re putting about a year of engineering effort into apps for something which is really a classic “You do it at your main computer during standard hours” task.)
