Warning: this is going to get very long and ranty.
I worked on Wall Street 2006 to 2008, and I had friends on the Street before that. I went into "tech" in 2008, saw the mini-crash and read the Sequoia ScareDoc, and now I'm watching this bubble.
Wall Street has a bad reputation, but I've seen far worse ethics and much less professionalism in technology, which is supposed to be above that garbage. On Wall Street, people know what the rules are. They're pretty clear, because the scummiest shit has generally been tried. You front-run your customer, you go to jail. You get a reputation for being unethical, it ruins your career. You defraud people, you get fired for life from the securities industry. You have to take a Series 7, so you have no excuse. Sure, the industry has some slimeballs and some slip through, but not so brazenly, and they at least are supposed to feel bad about it. In technology these days, there are so many people who don't give the square root of a shit about making good software but just want to play the angles. The vast majority of them aren't engineers, those who are tend engineers turning into junior executives by putting their ethics through a fire sale, but none of those fuckers belong here.
Google: generally professional and probably ethical macroscopically, but careerist to a fault. Bureaucratically overgrown. Full of horrid legacy systems that are built to flip-- specifically, to be "interesting" enough to merit a promotion for the original architect, who then moves on before it goes into maintenance phase and falls to pieces. That's how you get promoted at the big G. Launch and flee, every 18 to 24 months.
Startupland: I can name two major ($100M+ valuation) VC-funded companies that have committed major ethical faults in the past 6 months (one wasn't published and won't be, one developed last week and might be in the next 3 weeks). Both of these startups have some of the best, nicest, and most interesting engineers I've ever met... but are run by scumbag executives that would have fit in better with 1980s private equity people than with the (more decent, much more boring) typical Wall Street quant. I've never met a VC and I'm sure they're not all bad, but my theory is that the scumbaggery in so many VC-funded startups has to come from the top. I assume they fund people who are like them, and that would make sense, given that VCs are mostly MBAs, and something like 60 percent of B-school students at top schools cheat in their coursework.
Why do I bring this up? Because it's fucking nuts that some unprofessional, vindictive jerk like this guy was just acquired for $200 million. The world is seriously on tilt here. What are we even doing?
Your dig at Google here is astonishingly out of place. Even if what you say is true, you're comparing fraud and serious ethical violations with... being bureaucratic and having bad legacy systems? I don't even know what to say.
Also, what you say isn't true. Google has the shallowest management structure and the most aggressive attitude towards refactoring (both in the large and small) of any company I've ever worked at. I'm sure that you could find plausible complaints to make about Google, but these two aren't even close.
I don't think it's really possible to have a constructive yet critical discussion about Google culture on HN. There are too many members here with personal ties to the company. I imagine Facebook would be similarly hard to publicly deconstruct.
Google has a lot of really stupid policies that are unethical and hurt peoples' careers. For example, Perf. Five percent of employees end up on PIPs for no other reason than getting shat on in Neutron-Jack-style stack-ranking. People on PIPs can't transfer. They rarely actually get fired (most quit, most PIPs on people who stay are inconclusive; rare is for a person to get fired and even rarer is for a person to actually pass... inconclusive PIPing isn't "passing" because it leads to a shorter and more obnoxious PIP, 2 quarters later) but the effect is just the same-- an utterly fucking pointless waste of peoples' time, jobs lost for no good reason, billions of dollars of capital being destroyed. I'd guess that most of those people who run afoul of the completely arbitrary 5% yank-point are on those launch-and-flee systems.
Then there is the rampant abuse of process that goes on related to Perf. I know one person who, as a protest, wrote negative unsolicited feedback to 5 random Googlers each cycle. I would actually say that he is a lot more unethical than Perf's designers, but it just shows how silly the whole system is.
Then there's Real Names (for which people were PIP'd if not fired, even though Google is supposed to be so open it would never do that). Don't get me started on that shit. With Real Names, I can only ask: do you not want your product to succeed? Are you afraid of users?
I think Google is unethical to promote and retain, in management positions, sometimes with global impact, severe and obvious incompetents in the same way that it's unethical to let a 4-year-old fly a plane. If you're a billion-dollar company, you have no excuse for promoting the kinds of stupid fucks who think that company-wide stack-ranking is good for your culture. That shit might make sense in a piece-rate sweatshop, but not in tech.
To me what you described looks like classic description of any big company not any one company in general.
The founders ideals are torn to shreds the moment the management layers begin to take control. Management by leadership either works only on paper or there are very few people who follow it.
Most managers rank only by following methods. The most competent guy is always seen as a threat. Promotions and rewards are given to guys who can polish their boots and offer a degree of allegiance to them. And a guy who is capable of growing and doing something on himself gets kicked in the teeth. Nepotism, partiality and biased behavior are extremely common in management layers.
I like Perf. I've worked at a lot of big companies, and promotions were correlated to whether or not they thought you would quit or not. Perf is a lot of work, but it seems perfectly capable of promoting the best employees. Everyone with a title above or equal to Senior Software Engineer has seemed worthy, which has not been the case at other companies.
I think your problem is: you can't work at Google if you want ego-inflating titles for doing nothing. When I was at Bank of America, the lowest title you could have (if you weren't hired straight out of college, that is) was "Vice President". It inflated your ego but meant nothing.
They do, and they were supposedly in the process of redoing titles as I left, but my guess is that it didn't go very well. Nobody likes to give up an important-sounding title.
"unethical to promote and retain, in management positions, sometimes with global impact, severe and obvious incompetents in the same way that it's unethical to let a 4-year-old fly a plane."
I should have clarified: personal reputation vs. organization reputation.
Wall Street's a big industry and has a lot of unethical people in it, but corporations are good at distancing themselves from bad actors (even if they supported them while they were being scummy). People have a hard time recovering from a bad reputation; companies reinvent themselves more easily.
Ok, that's upper class, which is a different culture from Wall Street.
If you're a VP or a middling MD and you get a reputation for being scummy, it hurts you. Not to say there aren't lots of scummy people at middle ranks of banks; it's just that getting caught doesn't help you.
Corporate executives, on the other hand, are a different breed and live in a world that's much more tolerant of scumbaggery (like the world of politicians and well-connected people in general).
The upper class is the same whether you're in finance or non-profits or regular corporate America. They like scumminess. Or, at least, they're more invested in the mob-like tendency to always protect their own than any other ethical principle.
> If you're a VP or a middling MD and you get a reputation for being scummy, it hurts you.
So Goldman managing director, Scott L. Lebovitz sat on the BoD of a company which hosted of the biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls. Village Voice Media had 70% of prostitution ads.
Is this what hurt him that he had to step down after many years?
BTW, we can play this game all day. If you think that there is an iota less scumminess on Wall Street, then you haven't worked there or looked too carefully.
I think there's less scumminess among average people on Wall Street than among average non-engineers in VCistan, which is only a small percentage of startups, much less technology.
I think there's way more scumminess on Wall Street than in technology as a whole, or than in the private-sector in general, but I think the current crop of darling-at-the-ball social-games/network-coupon VC-funded startups have some really scummy executives. This is something I've observed through experience, and it surprised me a lot, to tell the truth.
yeah it's the same with gambling and poker. In these worlds if you slip up you probably won't be given another chance, and once you lose your reputation, you have nothing left. Nobody wants to deal with you anymore. Sure gamblers are no angels, but to be honest, I have found that online poker players, especially at high stakes, are much more ethical and considerate of other people than a lot of the other people I see. The fact that they are constantly under scrutiny from their peers and the rest of society probably makes them think a lot more about what's ethical and what's not ethical.
So, paradoxically when you are part of a negatively connotated industry, there is a good chance you're actually much more ethical than the vast majority of other people.
I agree with you in general but I think that only three classes of Silicon Valley companies attract jerks like that: 1) gaming, 2) social networks (glorified dating), 3) market place / "new business model" companies.
I worked on Wall Street 2006 to 2008, and I had friends on the Street before that. I went into "tech" in 2008, saw the mini-crash and read the Sequoia ScareDoc, and now I'm watching this bubble.
Wall Street has a bad reputation, but I've seen far worse ethics and much less professionalism in technology, which is supposed to be above that garbage. On Wall Street, people know what the rules are. They're pretty clear, because the scummiest shit has generally been tried. You front-run your customer, you go to jail. You get a reputation for being unethical, it ruins your career. You defraud people, you get fired for life from the securities industry. You have to take a Series 7, so you have no excuse. Sure, the industry has some slimeballs and some slip through, but not so brazenly, and they at least are supposed to feel bad about it. In technology these days, there are so many people who don't give the square root of a shit about making good software but just want to play the angles. The vast majority of them aren't engineers, those who are tend engineers turning into junior executives by putting their ethics through a fire sale, but none of those fuckers belong here.
Google: generally professional and probably ethical macroscopically, but careerist to a fault. Bureaucratically overgrown. Full of horrid legacy systems that are built to flip-- specifically, to be "interesting" enough to merit a promotion for the original architect, who then moves on before it goes into maintenance phase and falls to pieces. That's how you get promoted at the big G. Launch and flee, every 18 to 24 months.
Startupland: I can name two major ($100M+ valuation) VC-funded companies that have committed major ethical faults in the past 6 months (one wasn't published and won't be, one developed last week and might be in the next 3 weeks). Both of these startups have some of the best, nicest, and most interesting engineers I've ever met... but are run by scumbag executives that would have fit in better with 1980s private equity people than with the (more decent, much more boring) typical Wall Street quant. I've never met a VC and I'm sure they're not all bad, but my theory is that the scumbaggery in so many VC-funded startups has to come from the top. I assume they fund people who are like them, and that would make sense, given that VCs are mostly MBAs, and something like 60 percent of B-school students at top schools cheat in their coursework.
Why do I bring this up? Because it's fucking nuts that some unprofessional, vindictive jerk like this guy was just acquired for $200 million. The world is seriously on tilt here. What are we even doing?