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Heard similar stuff from a friend who used to work at AirBnb. He was an ex-Facebook engineer who quit AirBnB even before his stocks vested because we was so unh

Heard similar stuff from a friend who used to work at AirBnb. He was an ex-Facebook engineer who quit AirBnB even before his stocks vested because we was so unhappy at this company. I am really surprised. Things are going well for them as a company. Why do they want to screw it up for themselves?

exBarrelSpoiler 9y ago
Did he say why he was unhappy? Just look at the Frightful Five. At least two of them are renowned for having brutal, sometimes abusive, corporate cultures. Three if you include stack ranking-era Microsoft. Having an awful culture doesn't preclude business success.
- ralfd 9y ago
  I only hear bad stuff about Amazon, they churn through fresh graduates. Apple has this whole secrecy stick, but people stay long term there, even when (especiall when?) working for Jobs. I dont recall any negative stuff about Facebook. Google would frighten me personally, because everyone is smarter than me and I would sink as a rock. Microsofts stack ranking seemed like institutional crippling.
  - xkcd-sucks 9y ago
    If you get in to the right department at Google, everyone is smart enough to not work too hard. Finding these departments can be difficult as they're also smart enough to appear hardworking
  - exBarrelSpoiler 9y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12502336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12502336 https://mic.com/articles/154788/apple-employees-say-their-mental-health-issues-came-from-alleged-hostile-work-environment https://mic.com/articles/154788/apple-employees-say-their-me...
- moomin 9y ago
  I've said this before: toxic cultures are value-destroying stains on a company's resources. A strong host can survive a bad disease, a weak one dies. So yeah, there's plenty of finance firms, VC backed unicorns and Fortune 500 behemoths with lousy cultures. But I'll bet that the cultures weren't that toxic _for the initial employees_. NB People are different. What's toxic for one person isn't for another. However, in large firms the law of large numbers means that toxic looks much the same. So you can start a firm with founders and initial employees who are shouty abusive a-holes and it's not a problem. Scale to a thousand employees and it most definitely is.
z1c 9y ago
Most of the people I work with here absolutely love it (in engineering). However, I will admit that some of the teams have crappy managers. Good thing is they've started bringing on new managers over the past 6 months that are much more experienced (without outing myself, my new manager had run the data team at a fortune 100 company for several years). I think there was just this notion that you can promote from within to get your leaders... but this only works in some cases. Those directors at "stuffy" corporations like Oracle/Cisco/Microsoft? Fact is, they know how to manage teams at scale and you need some of them in your organization as it gets bigger. Even if the environment gets a little more bureaucratic.

exBarrelSpoiler 9y ago

Did he say why he was unhappy? Just look at the Frightful Five. At least two of them are renowned for having brutal, sometimes abusive, corporate cultures. Three if you include stack ranking-era Microsoft. Having an awful culture doesn't preclude business success.

ralfd 9y ago
I only hear bad stuff about Amazon, they churn through fresh graduates. Apple has this whole secrecy stick, but people stay long term there, even when (especiall when?) working for Jobs. I dont recall any negative stuff about Facebook. Google would frighten me personally, because everyone is smarter than me and I would sink as a rock. Microsofts stack ranking seemed like institutional crippling.
- xkcd-sucks 9y ago
  If you get in to the right department at Google, everyone is smart enough to not work too hard. Finding these departments can be difficult as they're also smart enough to appear hardworking
- exBarrelSpoiler 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12502336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12502336 https://mic.com/articles/154788/apple-employees-say-their-mental-health-issues-came-from-alleged-hostile-work-environment https://mic.com/articles/154788/apple-employees-say-their-me...
moomin 9y ago
I've said this before: toxic cultures are value-destroying stains on a company's resources. A strong host can survive a bad disease, a weak one dies. So yeah, there's plenty of finance firms, VC backed unicorns and Fortune 500 behemoths with lousy cultures. But I'll bet that the cultures weren't that toxic _for the initial employees_. NB People are different. What's toxic for one person isn't for another. However, in large firms the law of large numbers means that toxic looks much the same. So you can start a firm with founders and initial employees who are shouty abusive a-holes and it's not a problem. Scale to a thousand employees and it most definitely is.

z1c 9y ago

Most of the people I work with here absolutely love it (in engineering). However, I will admit that some of the teams have crappy managers. Good thing is they've started bringing on new managers over the past 6 months that are much more experienced (without outing myself, my new manager had run the data team at a fortune 100 company for several years). I think there was just this notion that you can promote from within to get your leaders... but this only works in some cases. Those directors at "stuffy" corporations like Oracle/Cisco/Microsoft? Fact is, they know how to manage teams at scale and you need some of them in your organization as it gets bigger. Even if the environment gets a little more bureaucratic.