6 ms·

One take on working in some of the major tech companies

146 points by slyall 9y ago

majestik 9y ago
I found this persons grammar difficult to understand at times.
- Buge 9y ago
  It seems to have been copy and pasted from an email, and in the process lost some important formatting.
obblekk 9y ago
> 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...
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > ...I would have guessed that it's easier to organize a company when people are motivated by (and responsive to) money I'm thinking it goes the other way. It's hard, once you get larger than Dunbar's number, it's very hard for organizations to understand what everyone is up to and what they think about it. The straightforward financial rewards are to keep things simple for the people in charge of strategy and organizational health in general.
- nopinsight 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
- wils1245 9y ago
  Depending on the role, I find it hard to believe that people being motivated by money is a bad thing as the company grows. Sure, at a start up it’s easy to connect the dots with what you work on and your end-customers, so it’s good to care about and empathize with them. But if your job is to keep the lights on, that passion for the cause isn’t going to feel vindicated too often. Not to say that keeping the lights on can’t be a rewarding problem to work on, good plumbers will take pride in there work and find it interesting. But do you care if your plumbers are passionate about the building they are working on? No.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  They have a huge burnout rate. If you are not interested in having a life for 5-10 years, I am sure the money is great. That is also organizationally problematic though.
- rifung 9y ago
  > 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. The issue I've seen at Google with people who are money, or more likely promotion, obsessed is that they start prioritizing work which will help them get promoted or a good review. This probably works well when it's easy to objectively identify work performance like in sales and I imagine in finance, so perhaps that's why it works well there, but for SWEs it's often difficult to objectively measure impact in my opinion. So then this misalignment in what's rewarded and what is good for the team will cause issues because people who just focus on the team's well being might end up always doing the work that is not financially rewarded while those who want to be promoted fight for the projects that matter for promotion. An interesting thing to note is that even though the compensation has decreased recently as far as I know, we all still get paid extremely well so while I would have thought that would prevent people from caring so much about promotion, that seems to not be the case.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    If you’re not a homeowner yet, you need raises at least as fast as real estate is appreciating to feel like you have a fighting chance (or even to maintain your standard of living under rising rent).
bm1362 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Yes, the design review process in Amazon is good. I'd love to know how other big companies do this.
KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    >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.
seattleeng 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
indogooner 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago
    > 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 9y ago
      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.
- 9y ago
xtrapolate 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
6ak74rfy 9y ago
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.
dontyouremember 9y ago
One thing that’s been really motivating at Microsoft lately is a sudden increase in the number of hackathons. In each of the last three months I’ve had the freedom to spend a week working on something completely separate from my day job (all focused on a different high priority business goal) and the organizers have done a good job of getting executives to attend the final presentations. It’s been extremely motivating. There has been a marked shift in our lunch conversations from complaining about engineering systems and technical debt to brainstorming and pitching ideas to each other. It’s also a lot of fun to dive into code you’ve never touched, and meeting new people along the way. When you tell people you need help with a crazy, time-limited experiment they seem much more likely to want to help.
trhway 9y ago
>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 9y ago
  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-for-employee-meals.html https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/taxation/tax-deductions-f...
chapill 9y ago
>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.

146 points by slyall 9y ago

majestik 9y ago

I found this persons grammar difficult to understand at times.

Buge 9y ago
It seems to have been copy and pasted from an email, and in the process lost some important formatting.

obblekk 9y ago

> 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...

humanrebar 9y ago
> ...I would have guessed that it's easier to organize a company when people are motivated by (and responsive to) money I'm thinking it goes the other way. It's hard, once you get larger than Dunbar's number, it's very hard for organizations to understand what everyone is up to and what they think about it. The straightforward financial rewards are to keep things simple for the people in charge of strategy and organizational health in general.
nopinsight 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
wils1245 9y ago
Depending on the role, I find it hard to believe that people being motivated by money is a bad thing as the company grows. Sure, at a start up it’s easy to connect the dots with what you work on and your end-customers, so it’s good to care about and empathize with them. But if your job is to keep the lights on, that passion for the cause isn’t going to feel vindicated too often. Not to say that keeping the lights on can’t be a rewarding problem to work on, good plumbers will take pride in there work and find it interesting. But do you care if your plumbers are passionate about the building they are working on? No.
paulie_a 9y ago
They have a huge burnout rate. If you are not interested in having a life for 5-10 years, I am sure the money is great. That is also organizationally problematic though.
rifung 9y ago
> 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. The issue I've seen at Google with people who are money, or more likely promotion, obsessed is that they start prioritizing work which will help them get promoted or a good review. This probably works well when it's easy to objectively identify work performance like in sales and I imagine in finance, so perhaps that's why it works well there, but for SWEs it's often difficult to objectively measure impact in my opinion. So then this misalignment in what's rewarded and what is good for the team will cause issues because people who just focus on the team's well being might end up always doing the work that is not financially rewarded while those who want to be promoted fight for the projects that matter for promotion. An interesting thing to note is that even though the compensation has decreased recently as far as I know, we all still get paid extremely well so while I would have thought that would prevent people from caring so much about promotion, that seems to not be the case.
- closeparen 9y ago
  If you’re not a homeowner yet, you need raises at least as fast as real estate is appreciating to feel like you have a fighting chance (or even to maintain your standard of living under rising rent).

bm1362 9y ago

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 9y ago
Yes, the design review process in Amazon is good. I'd love to know how other big companies do this.

KKKKkkkk1 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  >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.

seattleeng 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

indogooner 9y ago

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 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago
    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.
9y ago

xtrapolate 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

6ak74rfy 9y ago

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.

dontyouremember 9y ago

One thing that’s been really motivating at Microsoft lately is a sudden increase in the number of hackathons. In each of the last three months I’ve had the freedom to spend a week working on something completely separate from my day job (all focused on a different high priority business goal) and the organizers have done a good job of getting executives to attend the final presentations. It’s been extremely motivating. There has been a marked shift in our lunch conversations from complaining about engineering systems and technical debt to brainstorming and pitching ideas to each other. It’s also a lot of fun to dive into code you’ve never touched, and meeting new people along the way. When you tell people you need help with a crazy, time-limited experiment they seem much more likely to want to help.

trhway 9y ago

>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 9y ago
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-for-employee-meals.html https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/taxation/tax-deductions-f...

chapill 9y ago

>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.