I just joined a major tech company, after consulting for 8 years all around the industry.
My take is code quality is concentrated in the FAANG level companies. They have a strong moat in just really good software engineering that leads to stable, fast reliable products.
I ask myself why this is?
I think there's something to:
- They hire the best technologists, have high standards when hiring... these folks put the effort in to make something they're proud of
- The leadership is tech literate, and understands how/where to build and payoff technical debt. What you need to build in-house, what to outsource/purchase, etc
- Because of higher tech literacy: the leadership/devs tends not to heavily cargo-cult buzzwords like "AI" etc (even though this is what their marketing depts push) and focus on the unsexy work that maters (reliable, maintainable software)
HOWEVER
Outside of the FAANG-verse, you have a variety of different cases with different incentives for code quality:
- The startups that just need to do whatever it takes to deliver an MVP before the money runs out. Lots of coding heroics to do this!
- The enterprisey big companies without strong tech leadership, they hire anyone with a pulse that can do development. These places there's often a couple smart people holding things together with lots of mediocre devs at best augmenting the smart devs, at worst moving things backwards. You also have leadership that doesn't understand how to make good tech leadership decisions, and often doesn't understand the tradeoffs carefully.
These are gross generalizations, of course, but on average with this pattern I think high quality code concentrates in the upper end of the market.
My take is code quality is concentrated in the FAANG level companies. They have a strong moat in just really good software engineering that leads to stable, fast reliable products.
I ask myself why this is?
I think there's something to:
- They hire the best technologists, have high standards when hiring... these folks put the effort in to make something they're proud of
- The leadership is tech literate, and understands how/where to build and payoff technical debt. What you need to build in-house, what to outsource/purchase, etc
- Because of higher tech literacy: the leadership/devs tends not to heavily cargo-cult buzzwords like "AI" etc (even though this is what their marketing depts push) and focus on the unsexy work that maters (reliable, maintainable software)
HOWEVER
Outside of the FAANG-verse, you have a variety of different cases with different incentives for code quality:
- The startups that just need to do whatever it takes to deliver an MVP before the money runs out. Lots of coding heroics to do this!
- The enterprisey big companies without strong tech leadership, they hire anyone with a pulse that can do development. These places there's often a couple smart people holding things together with lots of mediocre devs at best augmenting the smart devs, at worst moving things backwards. You also have leadership that doesn't understand how to make good tech leadership decisions, and often doesn't understand the tradeoffs carefully.
These are gross generalizations, of course, but on average with this pattern I think high quality code concentrates in the upper end of the market.