
One take on working in some of the major tech companies - slyall
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/one-smart-guys-frank-take-working-major-tech-companies.html
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seattleeng
This is interesting for its notes on Google's organizational history and what
it got right/wrong, but the bits about other companies don't seem to make
sense to me, particularly Facebook:

> Facebook is kind of nothing. It’s a product company and I (personally) don’t
> think the product is very compelling. I think they hit a moment and will see
> the fate of MySpace in time. I can’t pick out product innovations that were
> particularly awesome (other than incubating on college campuses and
> exploiting sex more or less tastefully). And, their infrastructure is pretty
> crude which means they’ll run into the problem, eventually, hiring the kind
> of people who can do the kind of scaling they’re going to need.

Surely a company that services billions of users (the kind of scale only
rivaled by companies like Google) and worth $500b+ got something right when it
comes to scaling organizationally/technically. They're Google's arch nemesis
when it comes to recruiting, for one. Strange to see such dismissal from
someone who purports to be a high level manager at Google. Anecdotally, I've
heard that Facebook is less bureaucratic than Google, particularly during
promotions.

~~~
bamboozled
The issue is that there isn't a great deal of talent around and talent does
not scale easily. Once you get a critical mass of average people drowning out
the talented engineers, it's a slippery slope to the bottom.

You're right Facebook is worth a lot of money today and so was Yahoo!

~~~
harlanji
I wonder how much talent is turned away at HR or decides to not even pursue
for cultural reasons. The brightest I know are mostly in business for
themselves. The only reason I want a job is to work on massive scale problems
again, but being an SF city gardener would pay $65k plus benefits and I’d just
do that if I weren’t on the hook paying for student loans for my CS degree.
Cultural reasons being that IME across 5 jobs in SF that I am not welcome in
the profitable tech scene (recent lawsuits and news are vindicating) and also
it turns out a lot of people at the top have lied to get and stay there like
the truth is a sickness which is antithetical to creative talent.

~~~
aantix
“Cultural reasons” isn’t very helpful to you or the HN audience in assessing.
If you ever want to do a mock interview I’ll gladly do it. There’s probably a
few spots where you’re going wrong.

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KKKKkkkk1
_Remaining challenges in tech industry: scaling and incentives (and incentives
at scale :). I also see a major extrovert bias, which might seem a little
funny for tech. But, again, product managers (or, God forbid, Sales people)
are all really subject to the “let’s just get some people in a room” style of
planning and problem resolution. I firmly believe some massive amount of
productivity is squandered from people choosing the wrong communication
paradigm — I think it’s often chosen for the convenience or advantage of
someone who is either in an extrovert role or who is just following extrovert
tendencies. Massive problem at Google, which is ironic given their
composition. Amazon had some obvious nods to avoiding these sorts of things
(e.g., “reading time”) but I don’t know how pervasive they were or how
effective people believed them to be._

Oftentimes you will have even engineering managers (usually ones who can't
engineer their way out of a paper bag) fall back onto this tactic.

~~~
crdoconnor
I do this as a developer, although not because I have an extrovert bias (I
think). I'd generally rather not, but when there are so many disparate
stakeholders for a particular issue then asynchronous planning and decision
making just gets drawn out and stalls. The process keeps getting blocked by
someone or other who is not responding or isn't available.

This problem of actually _having_ too many stakeholders for different problems
I think tends to crop up because the organization or its systems are tightly
coupled - 'spaghetti organizations' and 'spaghetti systems architecture'.

If you don't have this you're lucky, I guess. Small startups obviously won't,
some big orgs with talented and ruthless architects will stop it (Amazon seems
pretty good at this). If you do, well, you need to deal with the problem
somehow or you'll keep stalling.

I've long suspected that Google, in spite of their reputation for having the
creme de la creme of engineers, has a massive spaghetti code and spaghetti
organizational problem, but this is just based upon bits and pieces I
overhear. It's hard to know for sure.

~~~
trevyn
> _I 've long suspected that Google...has a massive spaghetti code...problem_

It’s worse, it’s cold congealed spaghetti. Warm spaghetti you can insert and
remove noodles easily, but when it congeals, removing or inserting an
individual noodle gets problematic. They can get away with this because they
have a huge number of engineer brains that are used to locally heat the
spaghetti.

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bm1362
I do miss the Amazon design reviews; where we’d all ready the design in
silence and then discuss. In the few jobs I’ve had since then, people are less
engaged in reviews and often unprepared- asking basic questions to earn their
participation badges.

~~~
6ak74rfy
Yes, the design review process in Amazon is good. I'd love to know how other
big companies do this.

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obblekk
> influx of people responding primarily to financial rewards (related).

This is surprising. Based on the relative success of the financial industry, I
would have guessed that it's easier to organize a company when people are
motivated by (and responsive to) money.

People who aren't motivated by money are much harder to organize/control and
in a corporate structure that seems like a weakness not a strength.

But early Google's results speak for themselves. Not much to argue with...

~~~
nopinsight
Perhaps the difficulty of success/failure attribution in complex engineering
projects makes it hard to motivate people properly with money as the primary
means. One might be able to hide bad hacks/technical debts in a product for a
long time after one is promoted or has received bonuses. It might not always
be clear why the decisions were made and who others helped shape the decisions
as well.

The financial industry tends to have clearer attribution and shorter feedback
cycle, in some way similar to sales, and this allows tangible rewards to be
given out more objectively.

~~~
mattnewport
The equivalent of bad hacks / technical debts exist in the financial industry,
it's just when they blow up the cost gets socialized onto the rest of society.
This is basically what happened in the financial crisis.

~~~
sokoloff
There are a lot of hacks in finance that play out and cost only the company
making the errors dearly. It’s probably 99+% of them, but you hear about the
half-dozen that got larger than that.

I’m not minimizing the problem of the latter, but there’s plenty of the
former.

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indogooner
The problem with money motivation is that it lasts short term. I speak for
myself but whenever I was given a raise it kept me going for 6 months at the
most. Post that it felt like normal but good and challenging (yes they are
different) work kept me going for much longer (1-2 yrs).

Now the problem with 6 months is that the engineers typically leave after
launch once their target of raise and promotion is met and the company suffers
to varying degree. In the long run this may or may not matter depending upon
external factors - for ex. cloud services kick-off helped Amazon a lot so even
if there are significant number of engineers pulling up 60-80% it won't matter
that much. Or if you are already a leader by long distance (Google, Microsoft
and IBM earlier).

~~~
humanrebar
> Now the problem with 6 months is that the engineers typically leave after
> launch once their target of raise and promotion is met and the company
> suffers to varying degree.

I think the article has it right when it referenced the importance of "the
ability to reward engineering work that had little visible outcome". Rewarding
mostly shipping (or launching) seems to be broken in particular, I'm not sure
rewards themselves are entirely ineffective.

~~~
paulryanrogers
> Rewarding mostly shipping (or launching) seems to be broken in particular

I've fallen into this kitchen-sink trap in the past. Though I think it's tough
for stakeholders to appreciate the invisibles like security or reliably until
those get bad enough to cross a critical threshold.

~~~
humanrebar
Agreed. Though in my experience they appreciate it in general terms. They just
have a hard time prioritizing and rewarding particular behavior. The concrete
tradeoffs like "she decided not to ship three months ago in order to do the
security audit" still need to be evaluated.

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trhway
>Later, there was a tragicomic story of when they changed bus schedules so
that people couldn’t exploit the kitchens by getting meals for themselves [and
family…seen that with my own eyes!] “to go” and take them home with them on
the Google Bus — someone actually complained in a company meeting that the new
schedules…meant they couldn’t get their meals to go. And they changed the bus
schedule back, even though their intent was to reduce the abuse of the free
food.

company made mistake and self-corrected. A stage in the lifecycle where
company has already got bean counters who can't see beyond a penny in front of
their nose (food, even with "to go" is such a penny expense, especially
compare with the hit such change took upon the engineers' morale), yet still
had the ability to self-correct. From what i hear today they have reached the
stage where bean counters have overtook and the ability to self-correct is
pretty much gone.

~~~
naveen99
Taxes are to blame for this as much as the bean counters. Since we lost the
fight on taxes in counting take home free food as income, then the food isn’t
really free anymore either way. [https://www.lawyers.com/legal-
info/taxation/tax-deductions-f...](https://www.lawyers.com/legal-
info/taxation/tax-deductions-for-employee-meals.html)

------
6ak74rfy
_significantly decreasing the power that managers hold treating organization
problems_

While the article gave examples of this in Google, I haven't seen this
happening in Amazon. Engineering Managers here hold a lot of power on the
business side of their product (in addition to the usual career growth of
their reportees and project management). For e.g., a PM (product manager) can
suggest what we should build next, but the final call is very much, if not
all, up to the EM. Another example is annual planning- EMs play an important
role in deciding, around the end of each year, what their team will build next
year.

 _Microsoft — the epitome of high pressure big software, abuse of market
dominance, decline, and then pivot into new relevance. IBM II. I don’t know
that there’s much about their culture or current business that’s particularly
admirable._

I recently read Satya Nadella's book, Hit Refresh, where he talks at length
about the culture change he is driving at Microsoft. I gathered that his
intentions are good, but the book felt like a hotch-potch of ideas without any
clear direction. I'd assume that to change the core culture of a company as
big as Microsoft, you'd have to start with some basic themes or ideas and
build a more detailed plan on top of them. What I found was a long
unstructured list of things he wants to do that didn't seem practical at
Microsoft-scale.

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chapill
>they told me they like to set arbitrary deadlines for their projects because
once people are late they work harder.

This is all of SV though, not just Apple. I noticed author didn't compare
working hours. Every SV company I know of is totally abusive about hours.

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majestik
I found this persons grammar difficult to understand at times.

~~~
Buge
It seems to have been copy and pasted from an email, and in the process lost
some important formatting.

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xtrapolate
I appreciate the insights, and respect OP's point of view, but some of these
"takes" are extremely dichotomous.

> " _Microsoft - I don’t know that there’s much about their culture or current
> business that’s particularly admirable._ "

Really? Absolutely nothing at all about Microsoft's culture/business practices
is "particularly admirable" to OP?

~~~
SmellTheGlove
Not sure why you're downvoted here, this is a very fair concern. Microsoft is
as impressive as it gets - they've been around for over 40 years, and are
still extremely relevant. Tech has a graveyard full of impressive companies
that no longer exist - Google and Facebook are sitting on campuses of two such
examples. Whatever Microsoft is or isn't doing admirably, they've stuck and
that itself is impressive in this industry.

