11 ms·

I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was

I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. Purposely over-hiring to prevent work being done elsewhere, and then claiming there is not enough work to be done, feels like it shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Hell, Google has created ~18 (I think?) different messenger/chat apps at this point. If you wanted a clue that there wasn't enough work to go around (and that your promotion incentives may not be aligned with the business), this should have been the first clue.

BobbyJo 4y ago
100% this. The clearest basis on which to measure productivity is product, and Google's scattershot approach is obviously not efficient.
api 4y ago
> I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. Wow, I've suspected this for many years and people told me it was nutty.
- smueller1234 4y ago
  That's because it is. It makes no sense whatsoever to think that could be a deliberate strategy. Managers are happy when they get their hands on a new role to hire into because they all have more projects than they (think that they) can deliver at good quality with the people they have.
  - treis 4y ago
    It doesn't even make a little sense. Giving a bunch of money and free time to someone makes it easier for them to start a company. Not harder.
- roflyear 4y ago
  It is insane. If this was a strategy it would not be some top secret thing.
itsdrewmiller 4y ago
>I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. I've heard this claimed but not sourced, and it doesn't really make sense - there are millions of software engineers out there and Google or Meta only employ a tiny fraction of them.
- metadat 4y ago
  You are mistaken. 100,000 of the best out of a pool of approximately 10 million professional software engineers worldwide is a sizeable portion. Additionally, not all 10 million are even close to being up to BigCorps peculiar standards (perhaps the standard is "someone competent enough that they could potentially build a competing product line"). Goog, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle.. all have huge rosters and it adds up to a significant portion of the market. There is also a huge amount of medium sized whales such as SAP and PayPal who in total end up also consuming a lot of the talent.
  - sushid 4y ago
    Arguably that's Google and Meta's strategy (maybe even Apple) but that's certainly not Amazon's. They just mass hire anyone without a care in the world. Not sure if Oracle even belongs in this group.
    - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      It definitely wasn't Meta's strategy when I was there in 2018. They hired a lot of junior software engineers but all other positions had relatively limited headcount (which I mostly think is a good thing).
    - ravenstine 4y ago
      I believe it. Every single day I get emails from various Amazon recruiters. Often it's for positions I'm barely qualified for. As much as I think AWS is a great service, I'd be terrified to learn what lies beneath given how low their recruitment standards are.
amzn-throw 4y ago
That's not a conspiracy theory, I work for Amazon - for a decade. I love it - best job I've ever had. And historically, while it's been a tough place to work, we've always been able to attract top talent. Partially - impactful work. Partially - stock doubles every year. Well guess what happened in 2020/2021? Despite incredible perseverance through the Pandemic, the stock stopped doubling. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Meta, and others figured out that they can poach our engineers with a promise of way more base salary, and a less intense work environment. We've had SDE1s (Juniors) leave Amazon for Meta because they got more money than our SDE3s (Seniors) were getting. SDE2s (Intermediate) looked at their status quo thought "I COULD bust my ass and get promoted to Senior...or I could go to Microsoft TODAY, get a Senior offer for what I'm already doing, and for more money than my raise would be". (No offense to any of my friends at Microsoft, but https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Microsoft&track=Softw... doesn't lie) I've talked to a few acquaintances that have left and the universal responses is: "My job is so boring now. I miss Amazon. But It's not stressful (because there is no pressure on me), and I get paid more money". How can anyone think there is anything wrong with that? You can't. You can speak about Mission and Impact, and some engineers will be attracted to that - I work on building Forever APIs in the AWS Cloud that gets millions of transactions per second. That to me is WAY more interesting than working on Chat app 15/18. But for most people they just want to make money and live their lives. Fair enough! The result? Even though Amazon has adapted somewhat by bumping salaries, they've still lost an ocean of people to nothing particularly ambitious or interesting. They're being parked by Microsoft/Google/Facebook to work on boring unimpactful projects so they can't help Amazon kick their asses. Sometimes one way to make your house nicer is by breaking the windows in the neighbor's house.
- thenightcrawler 4y ago
  I think Amazon would have a better rep if they didn't have a stack ranking system.
  - amzn-throw 4y ago
    Every competitive has a stack ranking system whether they admit it or not. They put lipstick on a pig but everyone's getting ranked and the lowest performers getting weeded out. The whole "People get fired even if they're doing a good job just by being a low performer on a strong team" is an edge case that happens INCREDIBLY rarely but when it does gets all the attention.
fdr 4y ago
I personally don't believe this at all. I think it's almost entirely bureaucratic inertia, and a prisoner's dilemma among the management. One who bloats, floats.
- roflyear 4y ago
  This is the truth. Many managers are valued on how large they can grow their team. Also, if you have 10, 20, 100 direct reports .... how can they fire you?
mytailorisrich 4y ago
That does not make sense. On the other hand, if no-one stops it, there are always incentives to grow your team as much as possible. As leader this increases your status both in absolute terms (100 vs 10 people under you makes a difference on your CV and on the title you can claim) and in relative terms (your team is larger than the teams of your peers and you can get ahead that way). And so every leader at every level tries to expand their team.
mc32 4y ago
Google et al. cargo culted SGI culture -maybe it works for a class of geeks. Anyway they often coddled employees and treated them "like family" as they like to say and tell them they are special and the lucky few. You can bring your pet to work (if no one has allergies to it), you can waltz in late, go get a snack, log in, chat with your friends, play with new gizmos, then go to a meeting, get lunch, then work out, then have another snack and then the last meeting of the day before you cut out early to get in the (Co.)-bus home before traffic gets bad. Where the hell did they think productivity would go?
- crote 4y ago
  Easy: it goes both ways. Keeping employees happy means they are willing to voluntarily spend more time at work. "Chatting with friends" is more often than not informally discussing work projects. Going home before traffic gets bad and working a few hours from home is the sane thing to do. My current employer is very lenient, and as a result I am very happy working here and put in more than I am required to. If they were very strict, I would work _exactly_ 9 to 5 and not a second longer - if I even wanted to work there at all. Fact is, you simply can't be 100% effective 100% of the time. So you either end up with people _pretending_ to be busy, or people who are free to openly de-stress and are way happier employees.
  - mc32 4y ago
    I don't disagree with you there, but also companies that have to be mindful of their cashflows can't afford to have people work for them who think it's a club-med for work. I'm not advocating that employees have to work it to the bone to be productive as we need long term productivity, but at the same time we need conscientious contribution and productivity.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> If you wanted a clue that there wasn't enough work to go around (and that your promotion incentives may not be aligned with the business), this should have been the first clue. There is definitely enough work to go around at Google, Amazon, and Apple. Whether promotion makes any sense, and whether people are working on the things that actually move the needle is a different question.
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
> "I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors." It's widely known among the sort of person who tends to believe in conspiracy theories, I suppose. The oppressive bureaucracy and misaligned incentives that allow senior leaders to destructively compete among themselves is more than enough to explain why ill-conceived and ill-run projects are common at FAANG-level megacorporations without resorting to making things up.
- afiori 4y ago
  Your theory and the theory you are replying to are indistinguishable for an outside observer: big player with hiring power and hubris compete for employees; in one case it is companies and in the other it is managers. Even if I admit yours sounds more likely (companies choosing to spend more of their own money vs managers choosing to waste the company's money)
Ferrotin 4y ago
That’s just something people said on the internet with no sound basis for it.
phendrenad2 4y ago
Then why is their hiring geared toward brain teasers and Bigoh notation? If they want to keep people from building the next Facebook (costing them M&A money, because they'd have to acquire it), why not hire based on ability to get things done?

BobbyJo 4y ago

100% this. The clearest basis on which to measure productivity is product, and Google's scattershot approach is obviously not efficient.

api 4y ago

> I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. Wow, I've suspected this for many years and people told me it was nutty.

smueller1234 4y ago
That's because it is. It makes no sense whatsoever to think that could be a deliberate strategy. Managers are happy when they get their hands on a new role to hire into because they all have more projects than they (think that they) can deliver at good quality with the people they have.
- treis 4y ago
  It doesn't even make a little sense. Giving a bunch of money and free time to someone makes it easier for them to start a company. Not harder.
roflyear 4y ago
It is insane. If this was a strategy it would not be some top secret thing.

itsdrewmiller 4y ago

>I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors. I've heard this claimed but not sourced, and it doesn't really make sense - there are millions of software engineers out there and Google or Meta only employ a tiny fraction of them.

metadat 4y ago
You are mistaken. 100,000 of the best out of a pool of approximately 10 million professional software engineers worldwide is a sizeable portion. Additionally, not all 10 million are even close to being up to BigCorps peculiar standards (perhaps the standard is "someone competent enough that they could potentially build a competing product line"). Goog, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle.. all have huge rosters and it adds up to a significant portion of the market. There is also a huge amount of medium sized whales such as SAP and PayPal who in total end up also consuming a lot of the talent.
- sushid 4y ago
  Arguably that's Google and Meta's strategy (maybe even Apple) but that's certainly not Amazon's. They just mass hire anyone without a care in the world. Not sure if Oracle even belongs in this group.
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    It definitely wasn't Meta's strategy when I was there in 2018. They hired a lot of junior software engineers but all other positions had relatively limited headcount (which I mostly think is a good thing).
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    I believe it. Every single day I get emails from various Amazon recruiters. Often it's for positions I'm barely qualified for. As much as I think AWS is a great service, I'd be terrified to learn what lies beneath given how low their recruitment standards are.

amzn-throw 4y ago

That's not a conspiracy theory, I work for Amazon - for a decade. I love it - best job I've ever had. And historically, while it's been a tough place to work, we've always been able to attract top talent. Partially - impactful work. Partially - stock doubles every year. Well guess what happened in 2020/2021? Despite incredible perseverance through the Pandemic, the stock stopped doubling. Meanwhile, Microsoft, Meta, and others figured out that they can poach our engineers with a promise of way more base salary, and a less intense work environment. We've had SDE1s (Juniors) leave Amazon for Meta because they got more money than our SDE3s (Seniors) were getting. SDE2s (Intermediate) looked at their status quo thought "I COULD bust my ass and get promoted to Senior...or I could go to Microsoft TODAY, get a Senior offer for what I'm already doing, and for more money than my raise would be". (No offense to any of my friends at Microsoft, but https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Microsoft&track=Softw... doesn't lie) I've talked to a few acquaintances that have left and the universal responses is: "My job is so boring now. I miss Amazon. But It's not stressful (because there is no pressure on me), and I get paid more money". How can anyone think there is anything wrong with that? You can't. You can speak about Mission and Impact, and some engineers will be attracted to that - I work on building Forever APIs in the AWS Cloud that gets millions of transactions per second. That to me is WAY more interesting than working on Chat app 15/18. But for most people they just want to make money and live their lives. Fair enough! The result? Even though Amazon has adapted somewhat by bumping salaries, they've still lost an ocean of people to nothing particularly ambitious or interesting. They're being parked by Microsoft/Google/Facebook to work on boring unimpactful projects so they can't help Amazon kick their asses. Sometimes one way to make your house nicer is by breaking the windows in the neighbor's house.

thenightcrawler 4y ago
I think Amazon would have a better rep if they didn't have a stack ranking system.
- amzn-throw 4y ago
  Every competitive has a stack ranking system whether they admit it or not. They put lipstick on a pig but everyone's getting ranked and the lowest performers getting weeded out. The whole "People get fired even if they're doing a good job just by being a low performer on a strong team" is an edge case that happens INCREDIBLY rarely but when it does gets all the attention.

fdr 4y ago

I personally don't believe this at all. I think it's almost entirely bureaucratic inertia, and a prisoner's dilemma among the management. One who bloats, floats.

roflyear 4y ago
This is the truth. Many managers are valued on how large they can grow their team. Also, if you have 10, 20, 100 direct reports .... how can they fire you?

mytailorisrich 4y ago

That does not make sense. On the other hand, if no-one stops it, there are always incentives to grow your team as much as possible. As leader this increases your status both in absolute terms (100 vs 10 people under you makes a difference on your CV and on the title you can claim) and in relative terms (your team is larger than the teams of your peers and you can get ahead that way). And so every leader at every level tries to expand their team.

mc32 4y ago

Google et al. cargo culted SGI culture -maybe it works for a class of geeks. Anyway they often coddled employees and treated them "like family" as they like to say and tell them they are special and the lucky few. You can bring your pet to work (if no one has allergies to it), you can waltz in late, go get a snack, log in, chat with your friends, play with new gizmos, then go to a meeting, get lunch, then work out, then have another snack and then the last meeting of the day before you cut out early to get in the (Co.)-bus home before traffic gets bad. Where the hell did they think productivity would go?

crote 4y ago
Easy: it goes both ways. Keeping employees happy means they are willing to voluntarily spend more time at work. "Chatting with friends" is more often than not informally discussing work projects. Going home before traffic gets bad and working a few hours from home is the sane thing to do. My current employer is very lenient, and as a result I am very happy working here and put in more than I am required to. If they were very strict, I would work _exactly_ 9 to 5 and not a second longer - if I even wanted to work there at all. Fact is, you simply can't be 100% effective 100% of the time. So you either end up with people _pretending_ to be busy, or people who are free to openly de-stress and are way happier employees.
- mc32 4y ago
  I don't disagree with you there, but also companies that have to be mindful of their cashflows can't afford to have people work for them who think it's a club-med for work. I'm not advocating that employees have to work it to the bone to be productive as we need long term productivity, but at the same time we need conscientious contribution and productivity.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

> If you wanted a clue that there wasn't enough work to go around (and that your promotion incentives may not be aligned with the business), this should have been the first clue. There is definitely enough work to go around at Google, Amazon, and Apple. Whether promotion makes any sense, and whether people are working on the things that actually move the needle is a different question.

ThrowawayR2 4y ago

> "I thought it was a widely-known-secret that at least part of the insane hiring of engineers without clear teams, projects, etc for them to work on initially was to prevent individuals working for current-or-potential competitors." It's widely known among the sort of person who tends to believe in conspiracy theories, I suppose. The oppressive bureaucracy and misaligned incentives that allow senior leaders to destructively compete among themselves is more than enough to explain why ill-conceived and ill-run projects are common at FAANG-level megacorporations without resorting to making things up.

afiori 4y ago
Your theory and the theory you are replying to are indistinguishable for an outside observer: big player with hiring power and hubris compete for employees; in one case it is companies and in the other it is managers. Even if I admit yours sounds more likely (companies choosing to spend more of their own money vs managers choosing to waste the company's money)

Ferrotin 4y ago

That’s just something people said on the internet with no sound basis for it.

phendrenad2 4y ago

Then why is their hiring geared toward brain teasers and Bigoh notation? If they want to keep people from building the next Facebook (costing them M&A money, because they'd have to acquire it), why not hire based on ability to get things done?