High stakes means high investment. You can’t just hire a dev and have them running in a week, their bad work could cost the company multi-millions in obvious and non obvious ways and proper onboarding takes months at minimum.
On the other hand, a cashier can be replaced in a week, and they don’t effect the entire future of the company as SOP.
> their bad work could cost the company multi-millions
That's such patently absurd bullshit. Google has a code review process. Almost any large tech company has this today. The review process is to ensure that it's a team effort when a major screw-up happens. You don't just let some new employee merge untested and unreviewed code.
You know who I always see harming the company with outages and downtime? Seniors and managers that cut corners. I've had managers before that put in place all these safe guards that go out the window the very second a deadline is threatened. They merge untested code. They route traffic haphazardly. They fuck around with DNS or user accounts on a whim. Because no one is there to tell them not to. They believe they are the exception. The rules are for the minions below them. If you're working late on a weekend cleaning up a huge mess, there is a good chance it's because some manager-turned-arsonist fucked around with the process. They cut corners on the planning, the implementation, or the roll-out.
Ok, for the record, I haven't worked at a FAANG company so the stakes weren't as high. Just video game studios, so million dollar companies not billion.
Even on our systems, we had so many redundancies and test servers run, that even when a mistake did run through (which was exceedingly rare, given the testing), the roll back was quick. A single dev, especially a new hire, was unable to make multi-million dollar mistakes. It had to be several systems to fail, in order to be released to the wild. I can't believe any of the FAANG companies got to where they are with such a "cowboy" attitude as to say, "it's your third day, push that untested code straight to prod".
> we had so many redundancies and test servers run
How did you hire the developers who built those systems? Was the bar higher then?
Lots of companies have institutional memory of how their first few hires were crucial to make the company successful. It's a tough decision whether to keep standards high, or risk losing the skills that got you this far. Eventually the early people leave. Where I work, the stuff they built is viewed as some kind of godlike crystalline shrine that you dare not touch.
It isn't just a one person show, is all I'm saying. The many are more capable than the one. Even if mistakes get made, there are processes (maybe a better word than systems) in place to keep it from turning into a failure in the wild, and if it does sneak through, it's a relatively simple roll back.
When a new hire comes on, that institutional knowledge must get passed on - hopefully there is good documentation, though it's never as good as hoped. No matter how well a new hire does on their knowledge test, TBH, the most important thing I hope someone I get to work with is culture fit and the ability to learn fairly quickly =[ how to interview for that is pretty difficult, though.
Eh I don't believe it is a million dollar hit. If it is then you have bad controls and bad process.
Google is optimizing for the wrong things. The reason Google has hard interviews is to minimize attrition and make everyone who passes the interview feel smart.
Have you worked at GAFAM? I've been on 3 person teams with over a million dollars a year in hardware expenses and we've done some crazy optimizations on our c++/java code.
> their bad work could cost the company multi-millions
They is false and hyperbole to justify your argument. If a single employee can cost a big company like Google multi-millions, then there is a company structure problem. You make it sound like there are no system of checks. The very definition of being 1 in 10,000 employees at big corp is that no one is important enough to cost the company multi-millions.
On the other hand, a cashier can be replaced in a week, and they don’t effect the entire future of the company as SOP.