Be Apple, innovate, give us second iPhone moment so you wouldn't worry so much about revenue drop in services. Or make payment via Apple so good, your customers would go for it even with price difference. Just stop stupid, monopolistic tactics.

I notice this pattern of shoving nodejs / js, especially react through people's throat for the apps developed on the platform. Polaris, Session tokens and all the boilerplate apps the CLI generates are great examples of that.

I would rather having Polaris as CSS framework + some JS bits in vanilla-JS, Auth + Session tokens as just as a small JS library. But instead I am forced to use React. I know Polaris is also available as CSS only but that's almost impossible to use as it's not designed for human use really. Or Bridge exists as a library but for many cases it's just way too bloated and documentation for non-react version of those things are not so good.

However, your life as SRE after Google if you don't take an SWE role can be very different to what you experience at Google. The reality is in majority of the companies system administration teams labelled as SRE as hiring tactic and code base quality, the type of things you develop, amount of project vs toil varies massively towards negative.

But some things like adding a column with default value is still hard.

https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/safe-operations-for-h... this article has a good guideline on this.

It clearly works for them so they continue doing it and able to grow their eng organisations to thousands of engineers. Any other solution to this problem wouldn't be without its trade offs. If he really wants to contribute to tech industry he is more than welcome to found his own company and hire the way he wants, instead of saying "I don't like this FAANG find a new way!".

I feel like the secret agenda in the UK is making NHS so bad, people would beg to have some sort of health service, costs a fortune like US but at least cuts the pain.

So, although I understand where you are coming from and the naive belief that they want to improve the service, I think for the politicians it’s not the case. They also don’t have courage to come out and say we want to make NHS private, as it would cost quite a loads of votes.

This is how I am able to explain the service quality, stupid phone calla you need to make and totally inefficient management.

I understand unit tests and e2e tests are used but what I'm referring is just simple opening web browser, navigating to the localhost:3000/foo/bar/something and seeing if it's ok, I found this as much faster feedback loop while writing code in addition to the tests. Can anyone from Google share that?

With classical MVC + Transaction Scripts you can go quite a long way, as boring as it is it can scale up to 500 people working on it. When the time comes, you will have waay more knowledge to your domain and would be able to go with this kind of approach while going towards service oriented architecture or while implementing those boundaries within your monolith like Shopify does.

Otherwise you just waste your time for the things that don't give any benefit to you in short / mid term at all. On the long term nowadays it's really rare people stay at job that long or if that time comes your company will have enough money to throw money into the problem.

I have a question regarding the migrations, in the website you say it's safe to run them with automated flow, we know it uses Postgres under the hood and we know that sometimes migrations on large datasets can cause downtime in the database clusters. How do you handle them? I guess since you don't have a backing "users" table for a "User" model adding / removing fields is not actually happening the same way it happens in a normal relational database, thus it's not a blocking or resource consuming operation for you?

There are eng offices of soon to be IPO'd startups such as Stripe or Intercom in London, those don't ask something you don't do in your day to day job, however comp at this stage would be base + maybe bonus + stock options. You can never know when that stock option will turn into something, so in a way it's even worse than lottery, at least in lottery you know the date to check if you get rich or not.

There have been few IPOs from London startups like Deliveroo, but I would say they perform pretty badly and things are not going well for people who relied on the return from there.

So, I would say Yes to this. Unfortunately.

Sometimes you just join to a company thinking "It's X at the end of the day, how bad it could be?", from the first hand experience I can say it can be absolutely terrible. So if you directly interview with the team you're going to work with, like you do in Apple, and if you didn't feel like you would enjoy working with the people you saw in the loop, trust that feeling. It possibly tells you the truth.