
Ask HN: Would you work as product engineer or as platform engineer at BigCo? - coderatwork
Many large tech companies (like FAANG) have infrastructure&#x2F;platform teams that are separate from whatever the business of the company happens to be (selling ads, streaming movies etc).<p>If you are looking to join such a company as an engineer, will you want to work for one of their product teams, or any of the supporting infrastructure&#x2F;platform teams?
======
jwbensley
I would never work for one of those companies, their ethics and morals are
disgraceful.

Edit: sorry didn't understand all the letters in the acronym. I don't think
Netflix are bad, Apple I'm on the fence, Goog/Face/Amaz no way.

~~~
bradknowles
I did a six month contract for Apple Retail Software Engineering in Cupertino.

Most of the guys there were great and I loved working with them.

But I found too many people in the larger organization who expected me to be
their own personal Steve Jobs and to know what they wanted and needed before
they knew it themselves, and if I couldn't magically deliver that in advance,
then I was useless to them.

IMO, I managed to dodge a bullet there. It was a great experience, I learned a
lot, and I'm happy to be an Apple customer. But knowing what I know now, I
wouldn't want to work there.

------
Jach
It probably depends on the BigCo... I'm happier on the product side of the
fence at my current BigCo gig than I think I would be on the support side,
though at somewhere like Google with a strong SRE culture and a tendency to
kill many products it might be the other way around. I'd probably be happiest
if I got to do a bit of both again, but BigCos love specialization.

Though even within a BigCo it just depends on the team sometimes. I talk to a
few people who are _very_ happy on the support side, much happier than being
in product before, I also talk to others who aren't at all happy. I've seen
teams and managers evaporate on both sides too. In my sample of one the
biggest sources of frustration on either side seem to be the priorities of
upper management, and there can even be mutual frustration. Like some people
on product will get annoyed at support people for not providing enough support
in something (e.g. test automation infrastructure), but support people are
equally annoyed at not being able to provide enough support because upper
management decided to shift more resources to product.

------
rayvy
Be prepared to be on a _support_ team, if that's your choice. You'll always
play second fiddle to the main product/platform folks and the revenue
generating folks. It's not a _life in the spotlight_ type of job, but if you
just want a slightly more relaxing gig, it's not the worst.

Personally after working in my _support_ role (we support our main revenue
generating platform), I'm _absolutely_ changing my next position to be more on
the revenue/main-platform side.

~~~
bradknowles
In my experience, if you're a support guy, then you are a cost center, and the
only purpose of a cost center is to get reduced to zero. Increasingly
Herculean efforts can stave off that pressure for a period of time, but that's
just the basic fundamental nature of the game on that side of the fence.

Of course, those product guys really do need a lot of support, and sometimes
they arrange to have their own internal support because they can't get what
they need from the guys who are supposed to perform that job. That can be a
good gig, at least until the Enterprise discovers that the product guys had
set up their own shadow IT group and get all that stuff merged back into the
central IT group.

------
miranda_rights
I'm an infrastructure engineer (and love it), so I'd only consider joining in
that role.

That said, I don't recommend a company whose product is something you're
against. Yes, you're not directly working on it but I do enjoy my job a lot
more knowing that I'm helping product developers build cool stuff. I think
it'd be a lot harder to do that if I wasn't proud of what they were working
on, by extension.

~~~
hazz99
> I'm an infrastructure engineer (and love it), so I'd only consider joining
> in that role.

I'm a student, and I think infrastructure is the place I want to be
(interested in concurrency, distributed systems, Erlang etc).

Is there anything you'd recommend building/studying/doing to prepare myself
for an career in infrastructure?

------
pmiller2
Generally, I like to work on product-oriented teams. I like being able to push
code and actually see the results of what I've been doing on the site or in
the app when it's deployed to prod.

------
jiveturkey
let me rephrase the question:

do you prefer orange or green?

