But where do we learn how things are done in the trenches in Big Tech companies like FAANGMULA?
Sure, there are eng blogs, but those are such a small subset of resources and too high level, if you search for anything practical (e.g. trying to make an architectural decision), they almost never show up in search results. They're mostly a hiring tool rather than really trying to help anyone.
Sure there are books like DDIA, but they're very academic and definitely not searchable when you have practical questions.
I feel like whenever I search for tech stuff on Google, the majority of the stuff on the first page are content-milled articles from India.
For context, I've worked at FAANGMULA for many years, and am now building a tech company. I know in general how things are done technically and have a taste of what good solutions look like, but some of the stuff that are further removed from my day-to-day I need to either refresh on or learn about, but high quality resources like this are pretty hard to locate online.
What I have ultimately realised is that having a middle path to software architecture development is the optimal way i.e. build critical sections on your own and outsource others. For example, at the start do not think about horizontal scalability, it is a nightmare scenario to handle even if outsourced. So concentrate of vertical scalability with the help of a hosting provider. Horizontal scalability is a luxury that you can afford when you have dedicated people to manage it. There is a reason people developing Postgres have resisted the temptation to support horizontal scalability. It is a very hard problem to solve.
So if you are starting small and at an early stage then concentrate on how you will be able to own the data, how you will be able to own the business logic, and how you will be able to migrate from one service provider to another avoiding any vendor lock-in.
High availability, fault tolerance, always-on architectures are very difficult to achieve and maintain. There is a reason why FAANG spend so much resources on this and still get it wrong.
In case you want to go that route, then for some practical advise refer to https://sre.google
After evaluating lots of HA and fault-tolerant solutions and thinking about it for some time, personally I have come to the conclusion that having a single node with postgres, backed by streaming replication for backup, with dynamic vertical scaling using a hosting service where I can easily migrate my setup to other hosting provider is the way to go.
If your journey has made you to come to some other conclusion then please do share.
(I worked at a MAAMA for 3 years).
The problem, as I kept pointing out to anyone who would listen at my BigCorp, was that about 80% of what was necessary to know was what one colleague called 'tribal knowledge'.
This is just a weird way of saying, "we couldn't be bothered to write it down, you have to know a guy."
Incidentally, aside from being inefficient and bus-factor dangerous, it's also murder for any "diverse hire", because, you guessed it, you're not part of the tribe.
He has a book that I've not read, but could be worth getting https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/
FWIW I've worked at FAANG for 5+ years.