> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption.
I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices.
It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for themselves while shifting blame for anything that didn't work.
The strange thing was that many of them were actually good programmers when it came down to it. It seemed like they had been conditioned by their FAANG employers to put self-promotion and survival above everything else, which turned into an extremely toxic trait once they were removed from FAANG managers who were playing the same game. The company had to steadily ratchet down the levels of trust and independence granted to teams, while steadily increasing the amount of management oversight and process to keep them within bounds.
Now whenever I see famous builders and founders leave FAANG companies out of frustration, I get it. The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution.
I worked for the three largest mining companies in the world, and a much smaller miner before that. The small company had 1 geologist, 1 mining engineer, 1 general manager and an office admin person. The next place I went to was a similar sized mine with about 200 people in the office, and many more support people in the city. The resource was 1:1 coal to dirt and much higher quality, compared to the previous place which was 1:13 coal to dirt and way harder to mine. The large miners have the best resources in the world so they can afford to over-hire, those people don't actually do anything but make things worse doing "improvement projects", and then use bullshit charts to show why it's better. We had a huge downturn in mining about 15 years ago and they fired about 15,000 people across Australia, and overall production improved! I only work for startups now where I can be a core engineer, I had a role before where I knew I wasn't doing anything valuable and it's soul crushing, I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.
Imagine that you're paid 2-3x, the work is confined to 9-5, gourmet meals on the 2x days you're not wfh, generous vacation policy, world-class benefits, and ample time to pursue side hobbies or family.
I know so many exceptional engineers that went this route... after they got over the perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and wild ambitions to just accept the status quo. Now, their lives are comparably stress-free compared to their startup brethren, and many of them live vicariously through angel investments using the delta in comp.
I used to work at a FAANG and worked from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., with no work weekends. Occasionally there was a longer work day, but also a shorter day. I think that was a fairly common day for many of my technical colleagues, whereas non-technical people tended to work longer.
Now I work for a legacy tech company and my workday is definitely shorter and less stressful, with European-style PTO, semi-interesting work and glacial speed of execution. My life has improved, visibly. I earn 75%-80% in CT of what a FAANG employee in an equivalent position would earn, career advancement is unlikely, but I find it exciting to have the means to live the life I want and pursue the interests I dream about at night, which are mostly non-work and non-tech related, without the time constraints and stress of a low-impact FAANG corporate position.
In the end, when I worked at a FAANG, I felt intensely the pressure of the job, the responsibilities -- mostly made-up -- and the ultimate insignificance of my work, not in the grand scheme of things, but in the context of the company. However, the money and the prospect of earning more were exciting.
Ironically, I did work at FAANG. I was a delusional youngster who was a perfectionist & workaholic like many of my peers.
The people I'm referencing who stuck around: they're now in their late-30s and early-40s. They eventually shunned ladder climbing and realized that their L6 positions could ultimately be sustained with much less grind while steadily maintaining "meets expectations" on perf.
Totally. My team often had people working past 8pm. But you could take a walk around the office at 6pm and find whole open floor plan areas that were completely empty. And you’d hear rumors that some other teams were expected to work 70 hour weeks. It just depended on your part of the company.
> I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.
Maybe they just don't want to?
Anyway. Don't be sorry. They get lots of money for almost nothing (in an engineering sense). And they have free time, so some of them they can do something valuable (incognito, of course. Otherwise faang lawyers come).
It's the big enterprise management who creates all these broken incentives leading to increase in politics instead of engineering.
> I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.
I bet there is a lot of jobs where you don't feel (and probably don't do) anything valuable with your time, but that is not necessarily tied to large organizations. There are a lot of engineers who make computers, cars, civil infrastructure components, smartphones, computers, game consoles, test equipment, appliances, power plants, industrial processes... at large organizations that feel that they are doing something valuable, and something that they could not do in this manner at a smaller company.
Ultimately, yes - nobody should feel bad for FAANG employees or anybody else who has chosen the golden handcuffs of the "cushy IT salary life." It was a choice and we are all responsible for our own choices... and in a world where people are starving, we shouldn't feel bad for somebody making a cushy living.
But it gets complicated.
A typical scenario is somebody choosing that life and after X years realizing it's not for them. But by then it's too late. You've got a partner, mortgage, pets, kids, whatever. And even if you haven't chosen any of that baggage, maybe you have a few hundred grand in student debt.
Yes, these were all choices. But it's awfully tough to know how you'll feel X years later when you are making those choices and by then there's no escape.
(FWIW, I have not worked at a FAANG. Just your average HN engineer type in a less glamorous part of the country.)
I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. Woe be unto you if you worked on a "leaf" system -- something that consumed internal services but did not expose services to other engineering teams. You would have no internal engineers willing to vouch for your promotion because they weren't using your service or codebase. I really wanted to just execute and be rewarded without having to invest excess energy in marketing myself internally in the company.
> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted.
I have no reason to doubt that in the particular corner of your organization that may well have been the case, but you cannot generalize this over the whole field. As stated elsewhere, I never played any game to be promoted, I simply never consciously sought the goal of promotion, and I was promoted anyway just because of the real, substantial job I did.
We have multiple people giving their anecdotes saying big tech positions emphasize self-promotion, and one anecdote (yours) saying they don't.
So, sincere question: for those of us who haven't worked at a FAANG, why should we believe that your experience is the norm while the other people's is the "corner"?
I am a staff engineer at meta. I can certainly relate to Carmack's pain in getting things done on a large scale, there are I think about 9 levels between me and Zuck (so a lot of ladder climbing to reach my goal of CEO)!! But I don't feel like I have to be good at politics. You would probably be surprised at the level of snark which is openly published!
I don't see my colleagues self-promote very much at all. I am in a very practical and focused team though, there is certainly a variety of team cultures. I will say that the performance review process is a pain, I feel like it is a lot of work documenting everything I have worked on...
Literally every single company I've worked at has had loads of bullshit to deal with. Some BS was easier to handle than others! Overall I feel like things are interesting and there are good opportunities to grow in a big tech company, so I am happy for now. I've learned more in one year at meta than multiple years at other places.
The performance review process at Meta and Google is so exhausting… It eats up a good 50% of everyone in the EM structure, without (in my and my colleagues’ experience anyway) any tangible benefit.
I also work at a faang in a senior engineering role.
I agree with what the other commenter is saying. I’ve been in several teams with several managers and xfn partners and you have a lot of different cultures. From the toxic wasteland to the ultra focused get shit done right fast environment engineers love.
To your point about why more people complain than not, it’s the human condition. Haters hate is stronger than non haters happiness and are more than willing to share their salt
Because there is a huge selection bias that influences the sample of people that comment on these types of posts. I will back up the claim that, in my experience, a lot of this thread is hyperbole. There is some truth to it, sure, but don't make the mistake of thinking these anecdotal accounts actually represent the typical experience.
There is an obvious selection bias in who posts. Anyway I also never seeked promotion (even tried to avoid it) but have been promoted four times now. I never chase glory and only focus on quality engineering and I’ve always gotten credit.
People who don’t get promoted are likely to complain about it — often that the system was out to get them. I mean how often do you hear somebody go, “Yeah I was passed over for a promotion and you know what, I didn’t deserve it.” People who do get promoted at a FAANG (either by self-promotion or not) probably don’t want to brag about it because of the general sentiment here at HN.
That’s true. There’s also the flip side that those who choose the systems are likely the ones who succeeded in those systems.
I’m talking about directors, senior managers of engineering who worked their way up the corporate ladder. The system worked for them, so they think it’s a good system.
Listen, you're talking about companies with hundreds of thousands of employees scattered all across the globe. Do you really think there's one homogeneous culture across everything? Single orgs can have the population of small towns. "culture" is a local phenomenon.
There are promotion oriented people. There are not promotion oriented people. There are mutants who work 12 hours every day and call into meeting while on vacation because they want to climb the ladder. There are teams which are hyper focused on visibility and self-promotion, and there are teams which just quietly churn out good tech. There are hundreds of thousands of people. You're going to get different experiences. I'm not sure why that's such a crazy idea to you.
These companies are cities, not villages. You'll find every type of experience at them. You'll find some incredibly exciting work, some boring work, great managers, crap managers, and everything in between all of that.
Just look in front of you. The monitor you are using right now. That's incredible technology. You think that would be possible if people did not care about engineering, having a number of peers around them across multiple levels of the organization that cared to a similar level?
EDIT: What I mean is, you need multiple passionate people across many levels to achieve that. If reward culture wasn't somewhat healthy, I don't believe this could work.
That has absolutely no bearing on the comment you replied to or my own. OP didn't say anything about engineering, OP said you had to play games to get promoted. That's not mutually exclusive with having good engineers.
I am not sure it is realistic to expect that all the good engineers never get promoted and that there would still be something good coming out over time.
I'm not sure where I said that good engineers don't get promoted. Of course they do. They either worked for a good management team, aggressively self-promoted, or were in a visible project.
What I am saying is that there are a lot of good engineers don't get promoted, despite doing important work on vital systems, because they don't aggressively self-promote and optimize their careers around the promotion path.
There are also companies that are good at recognizing good yet normally-under-appreciated work, and there are companies that are bad at it. FAANG is bad at it, in my experience, and the experience of people I've worked with. It's an anecdote and not data.
And in my experience, FAANG are not bad at it, so my point is: These generalizations don't work.
I even stated that I don't doubt this may have been true for you. But if every large company were really so bad in general as is portrayed here, the people who make good stuff, and who need to work with each other a great deal to achieve that, would leave.
I feel like there are a lot more promotions to go around in bigger companies though! I've worked in smaller orgs and promotions are harder to come by, if there is even a career ladder at all that is.
You're still putting words into people's mouths. No one said none of the good engineers get promoted, they said that being a good engineer is not sufficient to be promoted. A good engineer who is also good at playing promotion games would presumably do very well.
PragmaticPulp specifically said the engineers his team hired were actually rather good, just had bad habits:
> The strange thing was that many of them were actually good programmers when it came down to it.
I said: "I never played any game to be promoted, I simply never consciously sought the goal of promotion, and I was promoted anyway just because of the real, substantial job I did."
And I did see other peers who did not play any games that I could see be promoted for merit.
So maybe generalizations over large companies just don't work well.
Now we're back to where I started: I don't disbelieve your experience, but given that you're the only one here who shares that experience I asked you to tell me why I should believe that your experience is more representative than the half dozen other people who have shared theirs? To me it seems more likely that you had a particularly good corner of the organization.
FWIW, my experience is not substantially different from the other poster.
I think that this largely depends on how good or bad one's immediate management is. Good managers hold the line to insulate their teams away from this kind of corporate culture to the extent possible. And the proportion of such managers varies from company to company, and even between different units in the same company.
We're moving in circles, but again, I don't believe a company can bring out good products for very long if my experience is the exception. And as so often the case, the "half dozen" other people might be venting for their experience.
If there is no somewhat healthy reward culture, the multiple passionate people in the many different levels needed would leave.
> I am not sure it is realistic to expect that all the good engineers never get promoted and that there would still be something good coming out over time.
I have heard lots of stories about how the only real way to get promotion/real raise was to change company you work for. Because getting raise is harder compared to hiring someone of the street with hefty premium on top.
I have heard lots of stories about how the
only real way to get promotion/real raise
was to change company you work for.
That's definitely the best way. Here's my take. I am ignoring promotions/raises given to junior/intern type employees who become regular engineers.
80% of engineering promotions/raises come from switching companies
10% of engineering promotions/raises come from doing greenfield work. If you can find a way to do greenfield work you will look great (because you can move fast) and multiple other people will be dependent on the mess you left behind and they will look bad because they are moving at a fraction of your speed.
10% of engineering promotions/raises come from engineers who show obvious managerial talent and are interested in a managerial role
0% of engineering promotions/raises come from maintaining somebody else's system
I did sometimes, though it still benefitted something in the end. After all, my boss and other people further up the chain have a say in whether I get promoted as well, not just my peers.
> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted.
So then don’t get promoted? I was at two large companies for many years in my career, (almost) everyone’s obsession with promotion was bewildering. A FAANG L5 salary is pretty rewarding for just executing IC work, and that’s about what is expected of that role.
So much this. I might even panic a bit if I got promoted. Nowadays I got so used to the work and tools that I can finish work in less 8 hours on most days. It pays well, I'm having enough free time, low stress because it's the same work I have been doing for a number of years already. Not much politics at my level. I just enjoy it.
The extra bad part about this is it's propagating into the industry as a whole. Much better to be ruthlessly egoistic and clear tickets. Demo or go bust. Collaboration? Ah well of course as lip service at best, for sure always restrained for basic survival. No wonder people are less happy than they used to be. And less creative in outcome. This is not how humans usually work in groups. Trust and camaraderie is prime. I hope at one point we will look back and say "Wow that was some silly culture we had going back then".
Their counter-argument is that leaf services like that without measurable impact aren't things the company should be investing in and it is up to the individual to recognize that and re-allocate themselves onto something that's actually aligned with the company's goals.
You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project.
You get promoted and compensated more if your work aligns with the company, and less (or none) if it doesn't. It's your job to figure it out. Just as it's the company's job to figure out what the market needs. Yeah, projects that are most valuable to a company will be competitive. If you don't want to compete, you'll have to figure something out on your own that isn't as sexy but still provides value.
This becomes especially true as you become more senior at this kind of company.
If you don't want to work in that environment that's fine, maybe that's not the right corporate culture for you. I hope you found somewhere that was a better fit!
This is a pretty condescending post that assumes quite a lot about my work.
> You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project.
No, my project was measurably useful to the company. It wasn't useful for engineers, but it was useful for internal, non technical users.
I helped build a team from scratch and launch a product with high internal user satisfaction. But I was told that I needed, specifically, engineers from outside my immediate team to vouch for me. And I met with other people with the same problem and they told me "Don't work for products for business users."
As an aside the internal tooling for non-technical users was atrocious. Wonder why. :)
> This is a pretty condescending post that assumes quite a lot about my work.
Sorry if it came across that way, that was not my intent.
> No, my project was measurably useful to the company. It wasn't useful for engineers, but it was useful for internal, non technical users.
If that's not what the company values, then that's not a project the company wants to incentivize you to make. If you choose to make it anyways, would you really expect them to reward you for it? It sounds like the issue was as I was suggesting, that what you were trying to solve for wasn't what the org wanted and wasn't what they were goaling you on.
> If you choose to make it anyways, would you really expect them to reward you for it?
A healthy organization should reward developers for making internal tooling that is deemed necessary for the functioning of the org and drives value, yes. You're kinda ignoring the part here where I said that it was measurably useful to the company.
If you're saying that you need to ignore necessary internal tools and get on the big visibility projects to get promoted, then thats exactly optimizing for self-promotion. Companies that ignore vital internal work that is not sexy and don't provide ways for engineers working on that vital internal work to advance their careers will end up unable to drive revenue due to low productivity.
This is the problem in a nutshell, no? A company that does not value a team that delivers measurable value to non-technical teams, and that provides no "alternate paths" for its non-technical users to vouch quantitatively for the promotability of technical team members, is creating a culture that is suboptimal for its financial goals. That quantitative bar must be high, of course, but if I heard as a C-level that people were getting advice "don't work for products for business users" I'd clear my calendar and get to the heart of why that was, because the very "routing fabric" of the company would be at stake. If they're not allowed to build i-tools, your technical teams will miss insights they need to build the right things, from the users who know more about the domain than anyone else.
I would love to have some positive XFN feedback! The farther away the better!
Unfortunately I was helping out with our hiring process, and let's just say with the recent downturn that hasn't been the most important work lately :(
Are you saying that people should only focus on building infrastructure for other engineers and never actually make a product?
Because it sounds like OP was doing that: making something useful for the customers, just not for the other engineers. Hence the engineers couldn't vouch for the system and secure OP a promotion.
That being said, bad projects definitely exist within big companies, and it's not always easy for (junior in particular) people to know if they are working on something useful or not.
> Are you saying that people should only focus on building infrastructure for other engineers and never actually make a product?
Sorry, maybe I was unclear. I wasn't intending to opine on that aspect. I think product and infrastructure are both super valuable. You're goaled on impact not necessarily on whether you build infra or product per se. Infra you're rewarded based on the impact of the product teams leveraging your infra - and product teams you're goaled on moving specific metrics.
I've worked at 2 FAANGs - on product teams - and my experience has been that if your product moves metrics that your org has decided are important then you will be rewarded.
What I meant when I said "leaf services like that" was "leaf services whose measurable impact doesn't align with org goals."
> That being said, bad projects definitely exist within big companies, and it's not always easy for (junior in particular) people to know if they are working on something useful or not.
> Infra you're rewarded based on the impact of the product teams leveraging your infra - and product teams you're goaled on moving specific metrics.
This was not the case for me. I was told that my project had significant positive impact, and had many product teams vouch for me, but it didn't matter because "the principal engineers don't know who you are".
You just did not approach this constructively. It would have been better if you asked first about how the impact was and could have be measured. Or at least responded more directly when they tried to explain the impact better. Instead of making and sticking to an assumption that the service wasn't useful.
It may well be that the person misunderstood their impact, but your arguments did not address that after the person came back with theirs. They could have been an edge case, that they are in an unfortunate situation in the human process of deciding rewards, where choosing and calculating metrics is itself subject to errors in judgment, and you tried to generalize your experiences to their corner of the world, which normally requires a stronger questioning.
Now, it's also perfectly fine advice that if a person wants to be rewarded, they should pursue projects that move the metrics of what's normally perceived as important. But that is also trivial advice.
A common chokepoint in an engineer's career development is challenging others' preconceived notion of what is important. Often this is with non-technical management, but unfortunately this is sometimes needed with technical peers too. It's politically convenient to just go with the flow and align oneself to the most visible metrics, but that way only a limited amount of bottom-up innovation can happen, and those can be critical to the business.
The best one can do is to establish the importance of the project before you do it, but I've seen important projects that were initially not supported by management, and only got traction when an IC did it anyway and demonstrated the value. Sometimes ICs were lucky that the impact was measurable and recognized, sometimes not so much and were deemed to have wasted precious company resources.
The world is not perfect and we often have to choose between taking a calculated risk or to conform. It's hard to get business processes 100% right, and not easy for a person to do things with guaranteed outcome, so we just have to live with it and try our best to navigate strategically.
That's fair criticism, and I appreciate your sharing it. I'm not always mindful that tone doesn't carry well by text, and I could have done a better job approaching this.
> Because it sounds like OP was doing that: making something useful for the customers, just not for the other engineers. Hence the engineers couldn't vouch for the system and secure OP a promotion.
For internal customers. Not real customers. Because they are captive audience. What they are going to do if generating a report takes 10hr? Purchase* different tool? Force devs to make w better one? Not their pay grade. They aren't even allowed to set requirements for features/functionality.
*That's when consulting firm swoops in to make great promises about how tool that they will make will solve all the problems. But because people who are using such tools can't set priorities for features/functionality, reports will generate in 9hr, but they will have to click ok every X minutes.
> You get promoted and compensated more if your work aligns with the company, and less (or none) if it doesn't. It's your job to figure it out.
I have never worked at a FAANG. Wouldn’t it be the manager’s job to figure out what I should be working on? What is the manager’s job at such a company?
Figure out how to argue for more headcount, by expanding the scope of the team or by asking reports to narrow the breadth of their work to create headcount gaps.
At these companies successful senior folks don't sit around waiting to get told what they're working on. It's their job to pick or start impactful projects in line with their org goals. If they're right they get rewarded but if they're not, they don't.
If you're junior it won't really matter. If you're senior, and you're sitting there hoping your manager is going to give you something meaty you're not long for that company - because that is not your job.
This was my experience at two FAANGs and also at one non-FAANG company over the last 10 years. Maybe it's different at the ones I didn't work at, but your snark is neither useful nor interesting. It also gives folks considering FAANGs here a false impression of what working there is actually like.
As a senior SWE at Amazon I had the autonomy to do this sort of thing as soon as the several years worth of work my team had planned was done. Half the senior SWEs at a big job board that calls itself a tech company are concerned with migrating everything to per-table microservices that expose endpoints that do exactly the SQL queries other services used to do directly. Thanks for your report of your different experience in a different org. I'll try not to give people a false impression by posting about mine.
I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea
I fantasized about someone buying Google and slimming it down too, because it used to be a great place to work (I worked there for over a decade). There were lots of great builders but they got drowned out by careerists
In fact I worked in the SF office around "fail whale" times at Twitter (2009), and there was a steady trickle of coworkers over to Twitter. Though from what I hear the leadership there was the real problem, and allowed the other problem to fester
Slimming down Twitter's workforce is indeed a valid choice. But perhaps Elon should have spent six weeks meeting every team and asking what they did before acting, like Steve Jobs did at Apple.
As it stands, it didn't seem like it helped focus the company in any way shape or form.
> I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea
I don't know how you're relating those two things, but it's funny you should say that. At the time he was firing people, throngs of self-proclaimed "experts" started pontificating about how Twitter was going to implode and crash and burn. There was about two weeks of non-stop posts from various acquaintances on social media about it. They've all been very quiet lately.
Yes, I remember these self-proclaimed experts' timeline for failure being continually pushed out. First it was currently imploding, then a few days, then weeks, then some vague unfalsifiable time in the future, and then they just gave up talking about it.
Makes you wonder if maybe they're the dead weight in their organizations, and therefore are unable to see how much of it is around.
No you've misunderstood. What I actually said was essentially that a lot of experts, aren't. Even ones who really believe they are.
Whether Twitter is doing better or worse really has nothing to do with these predictions that were made. The issue is that you obviously don't need literally hundreds or thousands of engineers to keep Twitter generally running and providing a similar kind of service. It might see a down tick in quality or outages, new features might take longer to be implemented. But that's not the service exploding and grinding to a halt.
I was just musing -- maybe some of the people making these kind of predictions are people who think meetings and work groups and committees and powerpoint slides constitutes useful work as opposed to a (sometimes unavoidable) drag that is to be minimized at all costs.
I understood what you meant, it's not a complex point, and it's not novel or interesting. That you can find people who are wrong about the future is not exciting.
> The issue is that you obviously don't need literally hundreds or thousands of engineers to keep Twitter generally running and providing a similar kind of service. [...] It might see a down tick in quality or outages, new features might take longer to be implemented. But that's not the service exploding and grinding to a halt.
1. That is not a "similar kind of service", it's worse service.
2. Those aren't the only things that are happening. Normal people are finding out that "the service" is more than 240 character text values (even if HN engineers disagree).
Spaces "coincidentally" shut off while Elon was in one and getting grilled with questions about banning journalists. Also, about 7 hours ago he tweeted "Spaces is back"
To me that's convincing circumstantial evidence that Spaces didn't break, he turned it off.
I’m not sure we’ve ever seen a giant company successfully “slimming down” ?
Sure, some go though catastrophic downfall and miraculously rebound from there, but that feels more like throwing someone down a mountain with a only a bottle of water and see if they can make it back to civiliation.
The more natural cycle would be frustrated workers moving out to make their own company and build something better from there. In the current climate that doesn’t work because of mono/duopolies and corruption, but that should be the thing to strive for IMHO.
Apple is I think a different case as it comes after a (reverse) merger, in particular as the main product (the OS) was rebased from Next’s stack and not Apple’s legacy one.
Laying off redundant people after a merger is basically part of the plan, and it’s more akin to cutting off the bits that don’t fit in the new org (they’re bringing in 500 Next people at the same time), than “slimming down” in the sense of making the same org leaner and more efficient.
Or if we take that definition, car manufacturers merging and getting rid of thousands of workers as a cost saving measure would also count as successful slimming downs, and we’d have many more example of it. That would work as well.
The answer to almost every modern financial wizardry is M&A. Sure, a DCF yields the theoretical value of a stock’s stream of cash flow. But in reality, M&A secures that lower bound. Yes, an efficient firm may reduce headcount willingly. But in reality, M&A provides the culture shock.
A few people including myself remarked how it sounded like Google now
And I noted that I don't think Google will "ever" slim down, because they're making money and Apple wasn't
i.e. there's not enough justification for a leadership shake-up. Twitter had more justification -- there were many CEO changes and the board wasn't happy with the leadership
I would see a world where the ad business gets seriously impaired and Google struggles enough to keep up with the enterprise market that they lose out to MS.
In that fantasy world something like Salesforce could get bought by Google and they’d reshape the whole Google’s product tree to solely focus on enterprise money, and a landslide of redundant engineers would probably be let go.
Back in the day, Twitter's error page showed a cartoon picture of a whale, which became nicknamed "the fail whale". The fail whale was a common sight on Twitter circa 2009 because the site couldn't scale fast enough to match the demand and errors were frequent - that's the era GP is referring to by the fail whale times.
> The fail whale is a graphic that appears when the social networking website Twitter.com is experiencing technical difficulties. The image is of a whale being lifted by 8 orange birds and was created by Yiying Lu.
> self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for themselves
A pal who was a manager at a FAANG said, "If you give people one game to play, they're going to play it very energetically." He was speaking of the promotion game, of course.
"You show loyalty, they learn loyalty. You show them it’s about the work, it’ll be about the work. You show them some other kind of game, and that’s the game they’ll play."
I often find it interesting how many people think the game is just whichever one they learned first, and don't grasp that the actual game is recognizing and learning how to play new ones.
Great quote and I think Daniels’ advice really had an impact on Carver. His character development over the course of the five seasons was one of the many excellent aspects of the show.
My impression when I was there was that most people hated the game. But one still had to play it. Well, I didn't, but that wasn't to my advantage at all.
The entire incentive structure and cycle at FAANG and FAANG-like companies requires relentless self-promotion and buck-passing not just to move up but to _not get fired_. Many of these companies have levels with a clock attached, where if too many quarters pass while you're at that level you're automatically managed out. If you don't get promoted you get fired, and the way to get promoted is to get relentlessly good at the perf cycle metagame.
In fact Google got rid of the 'up and out' for L4. And from L3 (many new hires) to L4 is a pretty easy jump.
Promo at Google was still toxic AF when I left, but it wasn't as bad as when I started when there was a clear 'L4 -> L5 within 3-4 years or bye' thing going on.
When you read the job description for L4 it's absolutely baffling that they figured people had to 'move up' from that. It's basically "solid and competent individual contributor." You'd think companies would want to fill their benches with that.
I did Google for ten years and I'd say this: SRE culture at Google is solid, with excellent skills and knowledge about how to build and run services at scale. Unfortunately it's mostly their own custom bespoke stuff, so those skills don't immediately translate into a new org. But they can.
SWE is more of a mixed bag. There are obviously incredibly bright people doing cutting edge software development at Google. But on the whole must of us were just doing very modest and incremental changes on protobuf shuffling super yak-shaved services that someone else had built the foundation of.
The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process.
The workplace culture stuff, again, mixed bag. Certainly to survive and thrive there, you needed to be thinking what to write about in perf twice a year, and it's such a constant that there were seminars and "how to get promoted" sessions where the whole self-promotional side of things was discussed in depth.
> The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process.
That’s why I mentioned that their development skills were actually quite good.
The issue was that they were playing a full-time workplace game of not only self-promotion, but of elevating themselves over peers.
This would manifest as things like campaigning for total rewrites of other people’s code because they all but refused to participate in anyone else’s projects. We couldn’t get them to do anything unless they thought it was going to be a good line item on their resume.
Working for 2x FAANGs, management incentives engineers to work on new features and not on integration testing and optimization. Quality, testing, automation are highly looked down upon and generally don't give huge refreshers come review time. However QA, automation, and testing are not only looked down in FAANG, but the majority of companies and engineers. How often do you see engineers in any company call themselves test engineers? How often do you find a software engineer who wants to work as a test engineer? There's a hidden snobbery in the industry against quality, testing, and automation engineering.
You see it on Hacker News quite frequently too. Quite a lot of people here silo people into "builders" and "maintainers". They then exalt the builders and talk down the maintainers.
I've worked as a principal engineer at Amazon before, and I can tell that testing and quality there isn't looked down upon. You can definitely get promoted just for improving products and never building any new feature.
However it will matter a lot on where you spend your effort on, and whether your environment understands why it matters. If you just mention "I'm writing integration tests" - and nobody knows why it's important to do that right now - it will likely not go too far. However if it's along "we have this regular operational issue that everyone in my org including the director was aware about, I fixed it, added integration tests, and made sure I added automation that will catch further regressions before our customers will observe them" - it will go a long way.
I work for a European unicorn and that's definitely not the case. We explicitly reward quality, testing, automation, etc—partially it's on your manager to explain the value of non-product work. We are literally having a pause on feature work right now to focus 100% on QA, automation and testing!
It's amazing how some engineers will try to politic their way out of doing unit tests and will do as much as they can to avoid testing.
It feels like any process that requires discipline, they'll run away from. Theres even tribes of people who will intentionally group all tests as "unit tests." There are other tribes who will try to write all integration or feature tests as "their unit tests". It's pretty frustrating to see a ridged and very well defined group of tests get ignored.
This isn’t something limited to big tech companies - this is ubiquitous. Humans automatically optimise for the greatest reward for the least effort. It turns out, office politics and self-promotion are a lot better for your career than being good at what you do.
Therefore, everywhere you go, people are usually where they are not because of competence in their professional domain, but due to competence in the social arts. You see true creativity, throughout history, from tiny enterprises (a fistful of people, no hierarchy to compete for, an actual shared goal) and from individuals. Never corporations. They just do more of the same, at scale, which makes up for their aching inefficiencies.
I watched my business grow from a fistful of coders to a political hellscape. Even no hierarchy has a hierarchy. Us apes just can’t be without it.
Many labour under the misapprehension that hard work will be noticed and rewarded. This is not so, and never will be, as long as humans are involved.
it's so wild to me that FAANG has these hiring walls set up — like crazy coding challenges — only for the best engineers to then do work equivalent to what you see at gov't or consulting jobs.
Why do they make it so hard to work for them, just for their employees to play status games?
>Why do they make it so hard to work for them, just for their employees to play status games?
"We only hire the smartest folks with the highest GPAs from these schools."
That was a hiring strategy that was famously debunked by Google itself. Now they hire folks that never went to college or were not CS majors. As in they can also be physicists, mathematicians, artists.. etc...
However, I guess they still though think leetcode is a useful signal to identify talent. Or talent that can be trained. So it is more of an aptitude test. Like how a college degree is a signal that you completed something. And a PhD is a signal that you can do research. It doesn't mean other folks can't.
We all know this fails to assess actual work performance (which is subjective anyway) but that is presumably proven by your work history itself. Work performance is a better measure of actual performance than the leetcode proxy any day.
It also most certainly does not select for diversity and different problem solving perspectives. This is a big blind side for any corporation. But you have to be an interested and motivated hiring manager to identify those people. Those are probably the best to hire though. I imagine YC is looking for those types since it is sort of a required trait for a startup.
Some of the best software engineering managers and software product types I've worked with are not CS majors and cannot program.
By now Google has the data to run the analysis for these types studies across the board.
They may even have natural controls (people who've transferred roles internally etc...) if they don't have proper randomized controls.
The coding challenges are basically IQ tests that have been laundered into something tangentially relevant to the job, since actual IQ tests for employment are on shaky legal ground in the US.
I've always thought that learning how to play the game was the primary value proposition of an Ivy League education. You can learn mechanical engineering or whatever just as well elsewhere.
They do get disrupted. All the time. And so then they turn around and buy the companies that disrupted them, and take them apart.
Also they have a firehose of revenue which makes it possible to hire hire hire, push compensation levels up, and suck the air out of any other interesting companies.
Dang, man. Where do you work that this ruthless self promotion (and denigration of all else) is not the norm? That’s been my experience throughout my 27 years, in 3 Fortune 250’s AND 2 mom-and-pop’s.
Same. I’ve been at companies that paid really well and ones that only paid ok. We still had to go through all these hoops. All things equal, I might as well get paid better.
Moreover, it wasn’t better than the smaller startups I’ve worked at either. There was little self promotion because your connections mattered more than what you did or your impact. If you weren’t in the club with founders and other early employees, you were a have-not.
> The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution.
This is yet another reason why I'm certain the whole metaverse project will fail.
If this moonshot had any chance of succeeding, the only way is to give this project entirely over to a someone who is passionate about the vision and has an incredible track record of execution.
Even if it where the case that Carmack where being ignored I would feel like that's a bad sign, but him being driven out by the culture means that nothing of substance will really happen. Certainly not the industry changing break through they're hoping for.
In the last decade Meta has had no impressive, game changing releases (unlike say Apple that has several), clearly the current culture is not great at solving hard problems. Sticking with that culture to see something like the metaverse through is hopeless.
I always wonder how "old silicon valley" work culture would compare to the current one? How was it like working for Sun Microsystems in the 90s? Digital in the 80s?
That is a bit too much of a generalization. I mean, sure, what you describe does in all likelihood exist somewhere in some capacity in any company that is large enough (and likely many smaller ones as well), because "humans", but to pretend that this trait is so endemic to work in a large organization is just wrong.
Because meanwhile, HN thread after HN thread was, for example, fawning over (very real) gains that some new technology brings (be it, say, the monitor you're staring at), while generally using a staggering amount of products coming out of large organizations. And before you think that there is a lot to complain about those products sometimes, there is also a very large amount of stuff that you don't complain about, that just works, and so you don't consciously think about it very much.
This work is put together by many passionate people at those organizations. Some of them are very passionate, and some of them feel that a small company would not have the resources to do the same level of work with the same impact.
Incidentally, I never cared about promotion at all, I just did the work that I wanted to held up to my own standards and those formed by my peers, and I got promoted because of the outcomes. I am honest when I say that it came as a pleasant surprise each time. And I do have quite a number of peers who seem to think and work similarly around me.
It's just infinitely more profitable to build up social capitals and leverage network effects and stage wins in this world, where economic utility is determined purely by subjective judgements and payments are autonomously collected. It makes no sense to construct a municipal road bridge when $15 gratuity transaction for 5% conversion from a social media post with million Likes pays more. Fortunately we are not there yet, but not far away either.
There's a strong bias for "just world hypothesis" stories like this one. Someone wealthy has to be poor in other areas. Someone smart must also be dumb. In fairness, to strive for anything you must have faith in a just world, that your efforts won't just be dashed by bad luck or a cheater. That doesn't mean it reflects reality though. It's just a story to help us sleep at night.
I think a lot of that is the unofficial stack ranking all the FAANGs are using. It always pays to self-promote since the marginal difference between you and another person on the team might be zero. But if you've been promoting yourself to your manager and the other team member hasn't, you get RSUs/bonus while they get a PIP. You can even have lower actual performance but if your self-promotion is better than their output you get rewards while they get a PIP.
It makes a certain kind of sense. Many FAANG companies are in such a dominating business position due to network effects and the like that they capture a massive economic surplus, and when organization capture huge economic surpluses, the employees are less incentivized to help the company succeed (since that’s going to happen anyway) and more incentivized to extract what they can personally.
I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices.
It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for themselves while shifting blame for anything that didn't work.
The strange thing was that many of them were actually good programmers when it came down to it. It seemed like they had been conditioned by their FAANG employers to put self-promotion and survival above everything else, which turned into an extremely toxic trait once they were removed from FAANG managers who were playing the same game. The company had to steadily ratchet down the levels of trust and independence granted to teams, while steadily increasing the amount of management oversight and process to keep them within bounds.
Now whenever I see famous builders and founders leave FAANG companies out of frustration, I get it. The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution.