I’ll just say as a meta comment that this thread is some of the most beginning-to-end Google frontend development ingenuity and organizational imperatives bashing I’ve ever read here.
There’s not a single poster here that didn’t throw a rock.
In defense of large orgs, faangs and non faangs, from my experience I can tell you that some talented developers on teams will notice exactly what is wrong with a product (frontend or backend). They might know parts of the UI need to be trimmed and made performant, api calls need to be restructured to be made performant, and so on, but don’t speak up.
There’s a variety of reasons here and it mostly has to do with the old adage ‘no good deed goes unpunished’. On teams there are egos, and you will bring out unwanted peer pushback (who do you think you are with your fancy ideas all the time, you don’t think the rest of us thought of this too?) when you take up some of these mantles. This is a dynamic that is coupled with general management issues that come from the product/project management, where your great idea might not be seen as worthwhile. On a team, socially and professionally, it’s better to not rock the boat here because the reward is not fair, and if it were outsized, it could be taken bad by coworkers as grandstanding.
Why bother? Which leads to the manifestation of the phenomenon: death-by-a-thousand-cuts. This is where professionally team members look like people with a self absorbed agenda. Now no one ever takes up reducing the bleeding, and finally, a world class company, with world class talent, builds laughably bad end results.
The only solution to this is for the egos to restructure the direction of their energy into a monomaniacal focus on ‘the final product is all there is’, where a good idea is a good idea. The ego has to be abstracted into the final output, where everyone involved derives their self worth from how good the thing they shipped is, and nothing else matters.
There’s not a single poster here that didn’t throw a rock.
In defense of large orgs, faangs and non faangs, from my experience I can tell you that some talented developers on teams will notice exactly what is wrong with a product (frontend or backend). They might know parts of the UI need to be trimmed and made performant, api calls need to be restructured to be made performant, and so on, but don’t speak up.
There’s a variety of reasons here and it mostly has to do with the old adage ‘no good deed goes unpunished’. On teams there are egos, and you will bring out unwanted peer pushback (who do you think you are with your fancy ideas all the time, you don’t think the rest of us thought of this too?) when you take up some of these mantles. This is a dynamic that is coupled with general management issues that come from the product/project management, where your great idea might not be seen as worthwhile. On a team, socially and professionally, it’s better to not rock the boat here because the reward is not fair, and if it were outsized, it could be taken bad by coworkers as grandstanding.
Why bother? Which leads to the manifestation of the phenomenon: death-by-a-thousand-cuts. This is where professionally team members look like people with a self absorbed agenda. Now no one ever takes up reducing the bleeding, and finally, a world class company, with world class talent, builds laughably bad end results.
The only solution to this is for the egos to restructure the direction of their energy into a monomaniacal focus on ‘the final product is all there is’, where a good idea is a good idea. The ego has to be abstracted into the final output, where everyone involved derives their self worth from how good the thing they shipped is, and nothing else matters.