4 ms·

When you have a large company that recruits in large part on comp, perks, security, and prestige, over time that will destroy the company culture no matter how

When you have a large company that recruits in large part on comp, perks, security, and prestige, over time that will destroy the company culture no matter how good it was at the start. Because you're gonna attract bland, boring, competent but mediocre people by recruiting on those things, and their mid-tier mindsets will gradually pollute and dilute everything that might have been remarkable about the place in the early days. At some point it gets bad enough that even the mid-tier people want to leave because the culture and work have gotten too boring even for them, or the prestige/security side has eroded because,...well, because too many people like them have been there for too long. This problem isn't unique to Facebook...all the FAANG type companies share it to various degrees. It is ridiculous and shameful to blame Zuck. Zuck has fed and clothed half this industry for most of two decades

whatshisface 5y ago
For most companies, getting people to care about the mission is impossible due to labor alienation ("we're working on creating fake test data for companies that provide cloud services for payroll automation for cloud service companies that vend fake test data"), and comp, perks, security and prestige are all you can offer.
uejfiweun 5y ago
Let's say you work for one of these companies - how do you tell whether you are one of the good ones or one of the "bland, boring, competent but mediocre" ones? And are there any companies out there right now that are still chock full of good people?
- whatshisface 5y ago
  The test is really simple. Let's imagine that tomorrow you doubled your positive impact on the success of the company as a whole. Will your boss be twice as happy with you? If not, progression is basically political, or maybe in some cases based on the skillful execution of tasks unrelated to anything valuable, and people who are very friendly or are very unconcerned with the company they're working for (and consequently will not be bothered by wasting enormous amounts of brainpower on achieving pointless goals), respectively, will fill out the ranks in very little time. It is not that uncommon for the first step in success to be forgetting about what the company ostensibly exists to do to make room for the misaligned incentives, whatever they may be, that determine what it actually does. That's the essential element of the big company malaise. Anyone can be mediocre if they're not trying, or if they're trying extremely hard to do something that's ultimately pointless.
david38 5y ago
This simply isn’t true. What attracts bad people is things like lack of promotion

whatshisface 5y ago

For most companies, getting people to care about the mission is impossible due to labor alienation ("we're working on creating fake test data for companies that provide cloud services for payroll automation for cloud service companies that vend fake test data"), and comp, perks, security and prestige are all you can offer.

uejfiweun 5y ago

Let's say you work for one of these companies - how do you tell whether you are one of the good ones or one of the "bland, boring, competent but mediocre" ones? And are there any companies out there right now that are still chock full of good people?

whatshisface 5y ago
The test is really simple. Let's imagine that tomorrow you doubled your positive impact on the success of the company as a whole. Will your boss be twice as happy with you? If not, progression is basically political, or maybe in some cases based on the skillful execution of tasks unrelated to anything valuable, and people who are very friendly or are very unconcerned with the company they're working for (and consequently will not be bothered by wasting enormous amounts of brainpower on achieving pointless goals), respectively, will fill out the ranks in very little time. It is not that uncommon for the first step in success to be forgetting about what the company ostensibly exists to do to make room for the misaligned incentives, whatever they may be, that determine what it actually does. That's the essential element of the big company malaise. Anyone can be mediocre if they're not trying, or if they're trying extremely hard to do something that's ultimately pointless.

david38 5y ago

This simply isn’t true. What attracts bad people is things like lack of promotion