Ask HN: Does Google employ better software engineers than Apple?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32580038

by carlycue • 4 years ago

7 14 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I have both the latest Pixel and iPhone devices here and navigating complex apps are equally fast and multitasking is equally smooth on both. It's quite odd how the iPhone is not faster when benchmarks show it has 70% faster performance in single thread tasks. Does Google attract better software engineers who can squeeze a lot of performance out of less capable hardware?

jareds• 4 years ago

Why can't the answer be that the hardware is so fast on both platforms that for day-to-day tasks there's no perceptible difference?

jleyank• 4 years ago

There’s so much glop in the “use standard libraries” approach to coding I would be surprised that the gui gets anywhere near the chip’s theoretical performance. Perhaps individual applications can avoid code bloat but it’s still a handheld.

And I suspect there’s so many people working on these products that it’s the mean-engineer performance. And I would think these are about the same.

togaen• 4 years ago

Do you drive your car at top speed every time you use it? Of course not. One would assume that, for both devices, the interface is as fast as it is designed to be for the task at hand, not necessarily as fast as the hardware can run it.

gnicholas• 4 years ago

It's possible Apple optimizes more for battery life or other benefits. I'd rather have an iPhone that isn't noticeably faster but has noticeably more battery life instead.

iExploder• 4 years ago

I always found whatever code I saw from Apple to be more readable and neat than things from Google, granted, I never had access to anything serious but still...

My impression is Apple likes to polish everything about the user experience and Google likes to have as much broad impact as possible.

Performance of apps depends much more on the actual app developer than OS supplier I would say, I bet you could find more inefficiencies in Apps than in actual OS code (famous last words).

abc_lisper• 4 years ago

Clickbait and poor understanding of how things work imo. While Apple chips are faster they are also paired with less memory, not to mention the programs are written in different languages using varying frameworks . Apples vs oranges lol.

That this boils to engineer capability for you tells me you are young and inexperienced.

srvmshr• 4 years ago

The pool is mostly concentrated in Bay area & I would assume the general quality of SWE skills don't differ by much. Its more about what the company priorities are.

keepquestioning• 4 years ago

Yes.

olliej2• 4 years ago

Cite your sources?

JohnFen• 4 years ago

I think this question is a bit misguided. There is so much more that affects product quality than how good the engineers are, including what a company counts as "product quality".

olliej2• 4 years ago

I’ve worked at both, and the quality of engineers is about the same. The general caliber is higher than I’ve encountered elsewhere, but there’s still variation.

I think what you’re seeing is more likely UI design decisions, or performance gates on other factors. E.g someone at each company probably decided the amount of time a given animation/interaction should take, browser page loading is for most sites dominated by networking traffic, etc - nothing gated by CPU time.

At the same time there are also large hardware differences, android devices still tend to have something like 2x the ram of idevices, as well as more cores, which means what is needed to make multitasking responsive is different.

But you also need to realize that you should not notice that in terms of responsiveness - in all likelihood none of the devices are coming close to using all the available cpu time for any interaction - simply because the closer you get to pegging the cpu the closer you are to hitting some kind of perceptible stuttering.

Finally, you’re ignoring battery life - one of the reasons for having a fast cpu is the ability to return to idle, because for whatever reason and cpu that takes X% longer to get back to idle uses potentially much more than X% more power.

So a lot of things are involved here that mean that a simple “this harder is better but the UI performance feels the same” is not going to tell you who has the better engineers.

carlycue• 4 years ago

Thank for you for the insight!

faangiq• 4 years ago

Yes, because Apple underpays. But your line of reasoning is flawed.

mbrodersen• 4 years ago

There is no objective way to measure whether software engineer A is “better” than software engineer B. Which means that any claims that thousands of software engineers working for company X are “better” than thousands of software engineers working for company Y is just silly.

Ask HN: Does Google employ better software engineers than Apple?

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