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I feel that the NYT article may have probably cherry-picked support for their arguments due to the fact that it seemed fairly one-sided. It would have been nic
by Yhippa 11y ago
I feel that the NYT article may have probably cherry-picked support for their arguments due to the fact that it seemed fairly one-sided. It would have been nice to see more balance in the story. Who knows, maybe they actually are very accurate about what it's like to work there.
On the other hand I've worked for big companies in the past and there are some tells about what they described that are familiar. The concept of having stack ranking and "managing out" the X% of the bottom performers. A tacit expectation of answering emails and texts outside of normal working hours. Lots of politics and unsolicited feedback going on.
The way this rebuttal goes it's a lot of "I've never seen this so it's obviously not true" and "If it is true then shame on that manager". What I suspect that's going on here is that he's only been there for 1.5 years and that's not enough time to evaluate the culture of a big company. There are lots of times when I heard how things were run in a different part of the company and I thought "Do we work at the same place?"
I say we ask him his opinion again in 5 years. If he's around for that long.
- saosebastiao 11y agoComing up on 4 years at amazon here and I agree far more with the NYT article than this one, even though I agree it is a bit cherry picked. There is a saying that goes around quite a bit here: Amazon hires intelligent people, and they retain the sociopaths. You don't acquire colloquialisms like that without some sort of truth behind it. Some people get lucky and find a reasonable team/org right away, and some people get unlucky and get the sociopaths right away. Either way, as people stay longer, they become more alienated and broken down, or they become more sociopathic themselves. I don't find it surprising that there are plenty of amazonians defending the culture...they are probably the ones that thrive in it. Everybody else will slowly find themselves under a manager that gives them stress-induced kidney stones (like I did), and will either move teams (like I did, and I quite enjoy my team) or quit altogether (like the other 90%).
- BurningFrog 11y ago> he's only been there for 1.5 years and that's not enough time to evaluate the culture of a big company It's also questionable to what extent giant companies "have" a culture. Different parts of these vast organizations can have very different cultures.
- steve19 11y agoFor what its worth, it is accepted in academia that large companies do have cultures. I would think aspects of those cultures cross geographic boundaries. The US Army and US Navy might have different cultures, being two very large and very different sub-organizations, but they retain many aspects of the same overarching culture. I worked for one company that had two vastly different workforces, non-unionized white collar and highly unionized blue collar. Despite the head office (where the white collars worked) being a different parts of the city and country as where the blue collars worked, the same rotten, thieving and sexist culture was evident in both.
- BurningFrog 11y agoI don't disagree that large organizations have distinct cultures. I'm saying that there can also be substantial variations within them. My experience at Google was possibly extreme, but my team and other teams I knew people at were very different.