3 ms·

There's a lot of great points in the article, though I'm unsure how Silicon Valley's early/mature companies stack against average ones. Take for instance: - A

There's a lot of great points in the article, though I'm unsure how Silicon Valley's early/mature companies stack against average ones. Take for instance: - Are managers at a pizza shop / drywall contractor / design studio better than the average startup? - Are managers at IBM / GE / JPM better than ones at Facebook / Apple / Google? At first blush, I'd think that we're actually better correcting for firm age, but I'd love to see the data/research.

jevanish 6y ago
The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business. In Silicon Valley, you can hide it behind more recruiters and funding. I've talked to multiple companies with first hand accounts of that level of turnover, which is rare in other industries because they'd go out of business losing that many people.
- quanticle 6y ago
  >The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business Really depends on the business. Walmart and Amazon have considerably greater than 35% turnover. Yes, 35% turnover is fatal if you're trying to do specialized, high-skill work. However, most businesses are not doing specialized, high-skill work. They're doing the routine work of delivering the goods and services that people need every day to live their lives. 35% turnover in that situation is arguably an advantage because it prevents bonds from forming between employees. It's a lot harder to organize and form a union to demand rights when you don't even know if that person you're talking to is going to still be there a month from now.
quanticle 6y ago
If anything, I would argue that management in Silicon Valley is better than average. A Silicon Valley manager knows that if they mistreat their underlings too much, those underlings will quit and go somewhere else. A manager, at say, a manufacturing plant in a Rust Belt city faces no such restrictions. If they fire a worker, that worker has nowhere else to go, and as a result, the line workers in those locations and industries put up and shut up.
- sigsergv 6y ago
  Unless those underlings are H-1B visa holders and cannot leave.
vanusa 6y ago
Are managers at a pizza shop / drywall contractor / design studio better than the average startup? We can safely leave out "design studio" as these are much closer conceptually to programming shops. But going by my own experience working jobs closer the former two categories - I would say "yes, and by a wide margin". The reasons for this are very straightforward: (1) Both the customer needs, and the performance metrics in business in the "pizza-drywall" camp are generally much more "pure" (dare we say 10x as pure) as those in SD. As in: "Can you make a pizza so good that not only you would would want to eat it as often as you could - but your friends would brag to their friends and neighbors about it as well? Or at least be good enough for the market / price range we're after? And can you make X per day, every day? And like not be a dick or show up hungover and stuff." Versus: Are you a "culture fit"? Can you stay on top of the latest buzzwords? Can you spend all your available time for several weeks or months cramming for our ridiculous interview process - and put up with all the whiteboarding, ghosting and other gratuitous humiliations that we expect you to eat, eat, eat, and eat some more of in return for the exquisite pleasure of working with us? And once we deign to let you in - will you go along with our various brainwashing rituals (standups, agile, "DevOps culture", etc)? Or at least pretend to? BTW if you're kind of a dick that's actually okay being as many of us are, as you'll find out eventually. (2) Infinitely less emphasis on what might loosely be called "theoretical" management techniques (see above) versus, again, nuts-and-bolts: "Can you do the work? Will you be happy doing it? Can we get along?" Hands-down - while it would never be sustainable economically - I was infinitely happier at many of the food service / delivery / random construction jobs than at at least 50 percent of the tech industry jobs I've had.

jevanish 6y ago

The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business. In Silicon Valley, you can hide it behind more recruiters and funding. I've talked to multiple companies with first hand accounts of that level of turnover, which is rare in other industries because they'd go out of business losing that many people.

quanticle 6y ago
>The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business Really depends on the business. Walmart and Amazon have considerably greater than 35% turnover. Yes, 35% turnover is fatal if you're trying to do specialized, high-skill work. However, most businesses are not doing specialized, high-skill work. They're doing the routine work of delivering the goods and services that people need every day to live their lives. 35% turnover in that situation is arguably an advantage because it prevents bonds from forming between employees. It's a lot harder to organize and form a union to demand rights when you don't even know if that person you're talking to is going to still be there a month from now.

quanticle 6y ago

If anything, I would argue that management in Silicon Valley is better than average. A Silicon Valley manager knows that if they mistreat their underlings too much, those underlings will quit and go somewhere else. A manager, at say, a manufacturing plant in a Rust Belt city faces no such restrictions. If they fire a worker, that worker has nowhere else to go, and as a result, the line workers in those locations and industries put up and shut up.

sigsergv 6y ago
Unless those underlings are H-1B visa holders and cannot leave.

vanusa 6y ago

Are managers at a pizza shop / drywall contractor / design studio better than the average startup? We can safely leave out "design studio" as these are much closer conceptually to programming shops. But going by my own experience working jobs closer the former two categories - I would say "yes, and by a wide margin". The reasons for this are very straightforward: (1) Both the customer needs, and the performance metrics in business in the "pizza-drywall" camp are generally much more "pure" (dare we say 10x as pure) as those in SD. As in: "Can you make a pizza so good that not only you would would want to eat it as often as you could - but your friends would brag to their friends and neighbors about it as well? Or at least be good enough for the market / price range we're after? And can you make X per day, every day? And like not be a dick or show up hungover and stuff." Versus: Are you a "culture fit"? Can you stay on top of the latest buzzwords? Can you spend all your available time for several weeks or months cramming for our ridiculous interview process - and put up with all the whiteboarding, ghosting and other gratuitous humiliations that we expect you to eat, eat, eat, and eat some more of in return for the exquisite pleasure of working with us? And once we deign to let you in - will you go along with our various brainwashing rituals (standups, agile, "DevOps culture", etc)? Or at least pretend to? BTW if you're kind of a dick that's actually okay being as many of us are, as you'll find out eventually. (2) Infinitely less emphasis on what might loosely be called "theoretical" management techniques (see above) versus, again, nuts-and-bolts: "Can you do the work? Will you be happy doing it? Can we get along?" Hands-down - while it would never be sustainable economically - I was infinitely happier at many of the food service / delivery / random construction jobs than at at least 50 percent of the tech industry jobs I've had.