Not all Big Tech is the same. At Google, for example, the social norm is that if someone not on your team helps you out in a notable way, you thank them with a peer bonus. The peer bonus, in addition to being a bonus, will notify the helper's manager and is a publicly visible artifact that the helper can put in the community contributions category of their next performance assessment.
It is the norm though isn’t it? When it comes time for your review you still have to show “impact” on your promo document. At least at AWS when I was there, it might help since part of your promo document was getting feedback from someone one level up.
I always say, if it takes longer than 15/30min. Go get it approved. If it's not approved by my manager and it's not on the roadmap. I'm not touching it. They get the message and move on to the next sucker. :)
It’s not a God syndrome or toxic. If you are interested in a promotion at large tech companies, you optimize your behaviors to do that.
If you aren’t interested in promotion and you are less than a senior or whatever the terminal position is considered, you’ll be pushed out.
I couldn’t deal with the politics of BigTech when I was there between the ages of 46-49. I didn’t care about the money enough and I didn’t have the shit tolerance or the will power to act like I did.
You literally couldn’t pay me enough to work at any large company at this point in my life and I’ve ignored opportunities that were basically handed to me to make six figures more than I make now.
There are two articles from this author on HN right now. You are in both comment sections attacking any criticism of this sort of selfish and bad for team morale work style. What's your angle?
I’m not attacking it. I’m telling you how it works in BigTech companies. That’s also why I got the hell out of BigTech and prefer smaller companies - where I was between 1996-2020 and after 2023 and I’ve turned down opportunities to make a lot more money at larger companies.
They prey on your time and don’t or probably can’t return the favor. You also don’t get credit for helping them when it comes time for your review/promo.
Do you care about optimizing your compensation? The author is telling you how to do it. I don’t. But I’m also 50 and did my bid in BigTech. This is good advice for early career folks or people who care about getting ahead.
> They prey on your time and don’t or probably can’t return the favor. You also don’t get credit for helping them when it comes time for your review/promo.
that qualifies as a predator, but you just ignored it and dismissed it.
I believe you are projecting your emotions onto others and trying to find justification for certain behaviors you don’t agree with. However, not every workplace has the same dynamics. I work in a large corporation, and I don’t see the kind of issues you’re experiencing. Moreover, behavior like yours is considered negative in my environment.
Are you working in a large tech company that pays top of market?
Of course you aren’t going to get the same type of environment working for Delta, Home Depot, or some other random large non tech company as you do at Google, Facebook, etc.
Most of these behaviors seem perfectly normal to me. When I worked at FAANG, I often had to ask people (not my direct reports) to do something for me. And that was often the only way to get things done, "influencing without authority". Of course, I've always helped them with something else in return, publicly gave them credit etc.
I was fortunate to work on high-profile initiatives (some with board-level visibility) so I could sometimes help with that, directly or indirectly. Sometimes I was better at things they were having trouble with.
You’re there to do work and be helpful to people. Do it if you can. If you can’t, explain why and don’t do it.
I can’t imagine someone who sees their colleagues as predators is much fun to work with. There’s going to lots of attitude and angst. Steer clear of employing this type of developer.
So I personally am out of the rat race, I’m already the highest level of IC at my current company (IC5) and no longer playing the game.
But, the cynical take and the one I would advise anyone to take who wanted to maximize their compensation and was early career is that you work to exchange the maximum compensation for your labor to exchange for goods and services. “This type of developer” is the only one that gets ahead in BigTech or adjacent companies.
Does that make it any better even if it is true? (And I don’t think that it is as true as you make it out to be, e.g. it’s not true for my medium-sized organization)
Just because it’s good for “career optimization” does not make it less of a strange mindset to view your colleagues as predators. The article also puts all of the blame on the so-called “predators”, when it should be blaming the organization’s culture and leadership if helping others is viewed in this way.
And in tech, unless you work for the relatively few medium side companies that pay in the range of BigTech, you don’t optimize your career by working in medium size companies.
But the author is very explicit about who the predators are - PMs from other teams who use back channels to ask you for help and other non junior developers who ask you to troubleshoot or do work without doing any research themselves.
The fact that engineers now think that helping others and working with others is negative value, just shows how terrible tech culture has become.
This all comes from management wanting to assign and claim credit. It is this credit system that ensures that people will not cooperate but instead let "others" fail.
> Not all requests for help are predatory. It’s part of your job to help out engineers on your team, and cross-org impact really does involve helping others sometimes, even if you get nothing in return. Predatory behavior is a consistent pattern of drawing on your time for nothing in return.
I don't think it's universal, there are definitely teams and management structures where it's a group effort and people aren't hoarding story points or metrics or whatever.
I could go off on one about how is when the leadership becomes so detached from the with that they need layers of managers to deal with it, leading to horsetrading, artificial metrics and political chicanery. But fundamentally, if an organisation allows such cancer to develop within it, it chose to. Whether by carelessness or on MBA infection, the result is the same.
If you're a salary-chaser who signs up for that kind of company for the pay, you know what you're walking into. You might as well join the army and complain about the food as work for, say, Google in 2025 and complain about management cancer.
"Big" tech is almost tautologically companies that are long-term setting up battlements around their fiefdoms now they've made the land grab. But big tech isn't all tech.
Of course, nothing lasts forever. One company I worked at, where I would have thrown myself into traffic for the team, got acquired and the new owner's MBAs started their process. Cuts, layoffs, new policies, commissars sent in to keep tabs, sales targets airdropped from another continent, endless, endless IT "harmonisation". The usual. So I left them to it. Life is too short to play that game if it isn't your thing.
The post is specifically about “large tech companies”.
But even in smaller companies if your entire job is “to close tickets” and you don’t close your tickets, that’s what you will be judged on. The only way that you can close the amount of tickets you should and help others who are not in the position to help you is by working overtime.
The author is specifically referring to PMs from other teams using back channels instead of going through the proper channels. He isn’t saying don’t help either junior engineers who need hand holding or other team members after they put some effort in their question and have already tried some things.
It’s been almost a decade since my job was mostly “to close tickets” even as an IC and I need to build relationships with other teams to get my job done. But I would be leery of reaching into another team for help and would first ask a team lead or PM could they spare someone.
> Of course, nothing lasts forever. One company I worked at, where I would have thrown myself into traffic for the team, got acquired and the new owner's MBAs started their process
This is inevitable. The second law of dynamics is that “entropy always increases” or things always go to shit over time.
On another note, I’m 50 and spent 25 of my 28 years of working in non Big tech companies except between the ages of 46-49 and have no need to chase max compensation. But if the compensation of BigTech had been available to me when I was younger and unencumbered (instead of older and unencumbered), you best believe I would be “grinding leetcode and getting into a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions) and that’s my recommendation to anyone who is early career.
Again at 50, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than deal with any large company - especially BigTech.
The author, rather unfortunately, focuses primarily on the predation from the "generalized colleague", and that wasn't welcomed by many commenters, possibly because people in big-tech tend to be young and do need help, so have to ask for it.
But the way I see it, the predation is institutionalized in big companies.
-- The Intellectual Property department blocking the entire R&D of the entire product division for the whole day, to give a presentation on how to file a patent. Knowing full well that only a dozen of these people will every do, at best.
-- IT dept locking down everything, because, you know, there are risks and we don't want to take it. Doesn't matter if it slows down everyone else everywhere.
-- "Security" disabling access to slightest technical information, because, you know, someone could steal it. Just ask and you'll have access. (How does one asks for something one doesn't know exists?)
-- Purchasing that shortlists only some contracting shops and not accepting any others. Doesn't matter if the shortlisted one don't "carry" the competence (e.g., try EMC specialists).
All these people consider that as their achievements and are not shy about it when yearly appraisal comes. We all work as one team aren't we? And then comes the day of layoffs. One reason of it being that the R&D hasn't been performant enough. Guess what, we aren't so much of one team anymore.
I disagree with the take. You do whatever you do and then you go home. If you help someone at the expense of real priorities that's your fault. If you have spare time and do something for someone then why not. You get paid a fixed amount. Everything else is politics.
