20 ms·

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. I worked at a medium-size

> This pattern—massive outlays followed by poor, possibly-rushed possibly-underpowered workmanship—sounds remarkably like corruption. I worked at a medium-sized company that went through a phase of hiring ex-FAANG people, thinking we'd improve our quality by implementing FAANG practices. It did the opposite: The ex-FAANG people were absolutely masterful at self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for themselves while shifting blame for anything that didn't work. The strange thing was that many of them were actually good programmers when it came down to it. It seemed like they had been conditioned by their FAANG employers to put self-promotion and survival above everything else, which turned into an extremely toxic trait once they were removed from FAANG managers who were playing the same game. The company had to steadily ratchet down the levels of trust and independence granted to teams, while steadily increasing the amount of management oversight and process to keep them within bounds. Now whenever I see famous builders and founders leave FAANG companies out of frustration, I get it. The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution.

DantesKite 4y ago
Man that's such a common story in big organizations. I wonder if there's any way of creating a culture that fights against this.
wpietri 4y ago
> self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for themselves A pal who was a manager at a FAANG said, "If you give people one game to play, they're going to play it very energetically." He was speaking of the promotion game, of course.
- koudelka 4y ago
  "You show loyalty, they learn loyalty. You show them it’s about the work, it’ll be about the work. You show them some other kind of game, and that’s the game they’ll play." -- The Wire
  - Anthony-G 4y ago
    Great quote and I think Daniels’ advice really had an impact on Carver. His character development over the course of the five seasons was one of the many excellent aspects of the show.
  - operatingthetan 4y ago
    I often find it interesting how many people think the game is just whichever one they learned first, and don't grasp that the actual game is recognizing and learning how to play new ones.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  My impression when I was there was that most people hated the game. But one still had to play it. Well, I didn't, but that wasn't to my advantage at all.
sublinear 4y ago
For what it's worth this also happens at smaller tech companies where the product is highly profitable and every department is siloed.
- alostpuppy 4y ago
  This is an interesting thought.
bravetraveler 4y ago
Just here to echo a similar experience - FAANG competitor that is (thankfully) left out of the acronym
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
madaxe_again 4y ago
This isn’t something limited to big tech companies - this is ubiquitous. Humans automatically optimise for the greatest reward for the least effort. It turns out, office politics and self-promotion are a lot better for your career than being good at what you do. Therefore, everywhere you go, people are usually where they are not because of competence in their professional domain, but due to competence in the social arts. You see true creativity, throughout history, from tiny enterprises (a fistful of people, no hierarchy to compete for, an actual shared goal) and from individuals. Never corporations. They just do more of the same, at scale, which makes up for their aching inefficiencies. I watched my business grow from a fistful of coders to a political hellscape. Even no hierarchy has a hierarchy. Us apes just can’t be without it. Many labour under the misapprehension that hard work will be noticed and rewarded. This is not so, and never will be, as long as humans are involved.
jackosdev 4y ago
I worked for the three largest mining companies in the world, and a much smaller miner before that. The small company had 1 geologist, 1 mining engineer, 1 general manager and an office admin person. The next place I went to was a similar sized mine with about 200 people in the office, and many more support people in the city. The resource was 1:1 coal to dirt and much higher quality, compared to the previous place which was 1:13 coal to dirt and way harder to mine. The large miners have the best resources in the world so they can afford to over-hire, those people don't actually do anything but make things worse doing "improvement projects", and then use bullshit charts to show why it's better. We had a huge downturn in mining about 15 years ago and they fired about 15,000 people across Australia, and overall production improved! I only work for startups now where I can be a core engineer, I had a role before where I knew I wasn't doing anything valuable and it's soul crushing, I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  Sure they can. They choose not to do so.
  - JohnBooty 4y ago
    Ultimately, yes - nobody should feel bad for FAANG employees or anybody else who has chosen the golden handcuffs of the "cushy IT salary life." It was a choice and we are all responsible for our own choices... and in a world where people are starving, we shouldn't feel bad for somebody making a cushy living. But it gets complicated. A typical scenario is somebody choosing that life and after X years realizing it's not for them. But by then it's too late. You've got a partner, mortgage, pets, kids, whatever. And even if you haven't chosen any of that baggage, maybe you have a few hundred grand in student debt. Yes, these were all choices. But it's awfully tough to know how you'll feel X years later when you are making those choices and by then there's no escape. (FWIW, I have not worked at a FAANG. Just your average HN engineer type in a less glamorous part of the country.)
- zx8080 4y ago
  > I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time. Maybe they just don't want to? Anyway. Don't be sorry. They get lots of money for almost nothing (in an engineering sense). And they have free time, so some of them they can do something valuable (incognito, of course. Otherwise faang lawyers come). It's the big enterprise management who creates all these broken incentives leading to increase in politics instead of engineering.
mrtksn 4y ago
IMHO, that’s almost natural in large organizations, it’s just a function of the structure and worker KPI.
kentm 4y ago
I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. Woe be unto you if you worked on a "leaf" system -- something that consumed internal services but did not expose services to other engineering teams. You would have no internal engineers willing to vouch for your promotion because they weren't using your service or codebase. I really wanted to just execute and be rewarded without having to invest excess energy in marketing myself internally in the company.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Their counter-argument is that leaf services like that without measurable impact aren't things the company should be investing in and it is up to the individual to recognize that and re-allocate themselves onto something that's actually aligned with the company's goals. You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project. You get promoted and compensated more if your work aligns with the company, and less (or none) if it doesn't. It's your job to figure it out. Just as it's the company's job to figure out what the market needs. Yeah, projects that are most valuable to a company will be competitive. If you don't want to compete, you'll have to figure something out on your own that isn't as sexy but still provides value. This becomes especially true as you become more senior at this kind of company. If you don't want to work in that environment that's fine, maybe that's not the right corporate culture for you. I hope you found somewhere that was a better fit!
  - thomasahle 4y ago
    Are you saying that people should only focus on building infrastructure for other engineers and never actually make a product? Because it sounds like OP was doing that: making something useful for the customers, just not for the other engineers. Hence the engineers couldn't vouch for the system and secure OP a promotion. That being said, bad projects definitely exist within big companies, and it's not always easy for (junior in particular) people to know if they are working on something useful or not.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
giantrobot 4y ago
I think a lot of that is the unofficial stack ranking all the FAANGs are using. It always pays to self-promote since the marginal difference between you and another person on the team might be zero. But if you've been promoting yourself to your manager and the other team member hasn't, you get RSUs/bonus while they get a PIP. You can even have lower actual performance but if your self-promotion is better than their output you get rewards while they get a PIP.
yawnxyz 4y ago
it's so wild to me that FAANG has these hiring walls set up — like crazy coding challenges — only for the best engineers to then do work equivalent to what you see at gov't or consulting jobs. Why do they make it so hard to work for them, just for their employees to play status games?
- neilv 4y ago
- carabiner 4y ago
  If they are so bad, why are they so successful? Why hasn't anyone disrupted them with superior business practices and a better product?
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    They do get disrupted. All the time. And so then they turn around and buy the companies that disrupted them, and take them apart. Also they have a firehose of revenue which makes it possible to hire hire hire, push compensation levels up, and suck the air out of any other interesting companies.
- nobodyandproud 4y ago
  So FAANG has set themselves up to hire retain sharp STEM grads who are savvy at politics. That’s a very small subset of the STEM population. Small anecdote : I’ve noticed that Ivy leaguers tend to be very polished and particularly good at the game.
  - theGnuMe 4y ago
    And ivy league liberal arts majors run the country..
  - glial 4y ago
    I've always thought that learning how to play the game was the primary value proposition of an Ivy League education. You can learn mechanical engineering or whatever just as well elsewhere.
chubot 4y ago
I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea I fantasized about someone buying Google and slimming it down too, because it used to be a great place to work (I worked there for over a decade). There were lots of great builders but they got drowned out by careerists In fact I worked in the SF office around "fail whale" times at Twitter (2009), and there was a steady trickle of coworkers over to Twitter. Though from what I hear the leadership there was the real problem, and allowed the other problem to fester
- rhaps0dy 4y ago
  > fail whale do you mean "whale fall"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall
  - diab0lic 4y ago
    The commenter likely meant “fail whale”[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Outages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Outages
  - borkt 4y ago
    No, op didnt
  - vedran 4y ago
    https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1987/fail-whale https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1987/fail-whale > The fail whale is a graphic that appears when the social networking website Twitter.com is experiencing technical difficulties. The image is of a whale being lifted by 8 orange birds and was created by Yiying Lu.
  - chrisbaker98 4y ago
    Back in the day, Twitter's error page showed a cartoon picture of a whale, which became nicknamed "the fail whale". The fail whale was a common sight on Twitter circa 2009 because the site couldn't scale fast enough to match the demand and errors were frequent - that's the era GP is referring to by the fail whale times.
zrail 4y ago
The entire incentive structure and cycle at FAANG and FAANG-like companies requires relentless self-promotion and buck-passing not just to move up but to _not get fired_. Many of these companies have levels with a clock attached, where if too many quarters pass while you're at that level you're automatically managed out. If you don't get promoted you get fired, and the way to get promoted is to get relentlessly good at the perf cycle metagame.
- skirmish 4y ago
  Only entry levels are "up or out". Once you are a senior, there is no expectation to get promoted to staff.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    In fact Google got rid of the 'up and out' for L4. And from L3 (many new hires) to L4 is a pretty easy jump. Promo at Google was still toxic AF when I left, but it wasn't as bad as when I started when there was a clear 'L4 -> L5 within 3-4 years or bye' thing going on. When you read the job description for L4 it's absolutely baffling that they figured people had to 'move up' from that. It's basically "solid and competent individual contributor." You'd think companies would want to fill their benches with that.
ablatt89 4y ago
Working for 2x FAANGs, management incentives engineers to work on new features and not on integration testing and optimization. Quality, testing, automation are highly looked down upon and generally don't give huge refreshers come review time. However QA, automation, and testing are not only looked down in FAANG, but the majority of companies and engineers. How often do you see engineers in any company call themselves test engineers? How often do you find a software engineer who wants to work as a test engineer? There's a hidden snobbery in the industry against quality, testing, and automation engineering.
- kentm 4y ago
  You see it on Hacker News quite frequently too. Quite a lot of people here silo people into "builders" and "maintainers". They then exalt the builders and talk down the maintainers.
- schrodinger 4y ago
  I work for a European unicorn and that's definitely not the case. We explicitly reward quality, testing, automation, etc—partially it's on your manager to explain the value of non-product work. We are literally having a pause on feature work right now to focus 100% on QA, automation and testing!
- monksy 4y ago
  It's amazing how some engineers will try to politic their way out of doing unit tests and will do as much as they can to avoid testing. It feels like any process that requires discipline, they'll run away from. Theres even tribes of people who will intentionally group all tests as "unit tests." There are other tribes who will try to write all integration or feature tests as "their unit tests". It's pretty frustrating to see a ridged and very well defined group of tests get ignored.
- Matthias247 4y ago
  I've worked as a principal engineer at Amazon before, and I can tell that testing and quality there isn't looked down upon. You can definitely get promoted just for improving products and never building any new feature. However it will matter a lot on where you spend your effort on, and whether your environment understands why it matters. If you just mention "I'm writing integration tests" - and nobody knows why it's important to do that right now - it will likely not go too far. However if it's along "we have this regular operational issue that everyone in my org including the director was aware about, I fixed it, added integration tests, and made sure I added automation that will catch further regressions before our customers will observe them" - it will go a long way.
throwabayhay 4y ago
That is a bit too much of a generalization. I mean, sure, what you describe does in all likelihood exist somewhere in some capacity in any company that is large enough (and likely many smaller ones as well), because "humans", but to pretend that this trait is so endemic to work in a large organization is just wrong. Because meanwhile, HN thread after HN thread was, for example, fawning over (very real) gains that some new technology brings (be it, say, the monitor you're staring at), while generally using a staggering amount of products coming out of large organizations. And before you think that there is a lot to complain about those products sometimes, there is also a very large amount of stuff that you don't complain about, that just works, and so you don't consciously think about it very much. This work is put together by many passionate people at those organizations. Some of them are very passionate, and some of them feel that a small company would not have the resources to do the same level of work with the same impact. Incidentally, I never cared about promotion at all, I just did the work that I wanted to held up to my own standards and those formed by my peers, and I got promoted because of the outcomes. I am honest when I say that it came as a pleasant surprise each time. And I do have quite a number of peers who seem to think and work similarly around me.
time_to_smile 4y ago
> The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution. This is yet another reason why I'm certain the whole metaverse project will fail. If this moonshot had any chance of succeeding, the only way is to give this project entirely over to a someone who is passionate about the vision and has an incredible track record of execution. Even if it where the case that Carmack where being ignored I would feel like that's a bad sign, but him being driven out by the culture means that nothing of substance will really happen. Certainly not the industry changing break through they're hoping for. In the last decade Meta has had no impressive, game changing releases (unlike say Apple that has several), clearly the current culture is not great at solving hard problems. Sticking with that culture to see something like the metaverse through is hopeless.
jmacd 4y ago
That's a lesson we all learn, and most of us learn it the hard way.
mesozoic 4y ago
I wonder if I work at the same company you describe.
carabiner 4y ago
There's a strong bias for "just world hypothesis" stories like this one. Someone wealthy has to be poor in other areas. Someone smart must also be dumb. In fairness, to strive for anything you must have faith in a just world, that your efforts won't just be dashed by bad luck or a cheater. That doesn't mean it reflects reality though. It's just a story to help us sleep at night.
numpad0 4y ago
It's just infinitely more profitable to build up social capitals and leverage network effects and stage wins in this world, where economic utility is determined purely by subjective judgements and payments are autonomously collected. It makes no sense to construct a municipal road bridge when $15 gratuity transaction for 5% conversion from a social media post with million Likes pays more. Fortunately we are not there yet, but not far away either.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I did Google for ten years and I'd say this: SRE culture at Google is solid, with excellent skills and knowledge about how to build and run services at scale. Unfortunately it's mostly their own custom bespoke stuff, so those skills don't immediately translate into a new org. But they can. SWE is more of a mixed bag. There are obviously incredibly bright people doing cutting edge software development at Google. But on the whole must of us were just doing very modest and incremental changes on protobuf shuffling super yak-shaved services that someone else had built the foundation of. The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process. The workplace culture stuff, again, mixed bag. Certainly to survive and thrive there, you needed to be thinking what to write about in perf twice a year, and it's such a constant that there were seminars and "how to get promoted" sessions where the whole self-promotional side of things was discussed in depth.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process. That’s why I mentioned that their development skills were actually quite good. The issue was that they were playing a full-time workplace game of not only self-promotion, but of elevating themselves over peers. This would manifest as things like campaigning for total rewrites of other people’s code because they all but refused to participate in anyone else’s projects. We couldn’t get them to do anything unless they thought it was going to be a good line item on their resume.
- lukasb 4y ago
  Underrated comment.
philwelch 4y ago
It makes a certain kind of sense. Many FAANG companies are in such a dominating business position due to network effects and the like that they capture a massive economic surplus, and when organization capture huge economic surpluses, the employees are less incentivized to help the company succeed (since that’s going to happen anyway) and more incentivized to extract what they can personally.
musha68k 4y ago
I always wonder how "old silicon valley" work culture would compare to the current one? How was it like working for Sun Microsystems in the 90s? Digital in the 80s?
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
Dang, man. Where do you work that this ruthless self promotion (and denigration of all else) is not the norm? That’s been my experience throughout my 27 years, in 3 Fortune 250’s AND 2 mom-and-pop’s.
- doktorhladnjak 4y ago
  Same. I’ve been at companies that paid really well and ones that only paid ok. We still had to go through all these hoops. All things equal, I might as well get paid better. Moreover, it wasn’t better than the smaller startups I’ve worked at either. There was little self promotion because your connections mattered more than what you did or your impact. If you weren’t in the club with founders and other early employees, you were a have-not.
- eternalban 4y ago
  This closely matches my experience as well.
mhh__ 4y ago
There's a very real "We used to do xyz at Facebook" issue sometimes. Just because it worked for them (if that even) doesn't mean it's automatically a good idea.

DantesKite 4y ago

Man that's such a common story in big organizations. I wonder if there's any way of creating a culture that fights against this.

wpietri 4y ago

> self-promotion, office politics, and collecting wins for themselves A pal who was a manager at a FAANG said, "If you give people one game to play, they're going to play it very energetically." He was speaking of the promotion game, of course.

koudelka 4y ago
"You show loyalty, they learn loyalty. You show them it’s about the work, it’ll be about the work. You show them some other kind of game, and that’s the game they’ll play." -- The Wire
- Anthony-G 4y ago
  Great quote and I think Daniels’ advice really had an impact on Carver. His character development over the course of the five seasons was one of the many excellent aspects of the show.
- operatingthetan 4y ago
  I often find it interesting how many people think the game is just whichever one they learned first, and don't grasp that the actual game is recognizing and learning how to play new ones.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
My impression when I was there was that most people hated the game. But one still had to play it. Well, I didn't, but that wasn't to my advantage at all.

sublinear 4y ago

For what it's worth this also happens at smaller tech companies where the product is highly profitable and every department is siloed.

alostpuppy 4y ago
This is an interesting thought.

bravetraveler 4y ago

Just here to echo a similar experience - FAANG competitor that is (thankfully) left out of the acronym

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

madaxe_again 4y ago

This isn’t something limited to big tech companies - this is ubiquitous. Humans automatically optimise for the greatest reward for the least effort. It turns out, office politics and self-promotion are a lot better for your career than being good at what you do. Therefore, everywhere you go, people are usually where they are not because of competence in their professional domain, but due to competence in the social arts. You see true creativity, throughout history, from tiny enterprises (a fistful of people, no hierarchy to compete for, an actual shared goal) and from individuals. Never corporations. They just do more of the same, at scale, which makes up for their aching inefficiencies. I watched my business grow from a fistful of coders to a political hellscape. Even no hierarchy has a hierarchy. Us apes just can’t be without it. Many labour under the misapprehension that hard work will be noticed and rewarded. This is not so, and never will be, as long as humans are involved.

jackosdev 4y ago

I worked for the three largest mining companies in the world, and a much smaller miner before that. The small company had 1 geologist, 1 mining engineer, 1 general manager and an office admin person. The next place I went to was a similar sized mine with about 200 people in the office, and many more support people in the city. The resource was 1:1 coal to dirt and much higher quality, compared to the previous place which was 1:13 coal to dirt and way harder to mine. The large miners have the best resources in the world so they can afford to over-hire, those people don't actually do anything but make things worse doing "improvement projects", and then use bullshit charts to show why it's better. We had a huge downturn in mining about 15 years ago and they fired about 15,000 people across Australia, and overall production improved! I only work for startups now where I can be a core engineer, I had a role before where I knew I wasn't doing anything valuable and it's soul crushing, I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time.

germinalphrase 4y ago
Sure they can. They choose not to do so.
- JohnBooty 4y ago
  Ultimately, yes - nobody should feel bad for FAANG employees or anybody else who has chosen the golden handcuffs of the "cushy IT salary life." It was a choice and we are all responsible for our own choices... and in a world where people are starving, we shouldn't feel bad for somebody making a cushy living. But it gets complicated. A typical scenario is somebody choosing that life and after X years realizing it's not for them. But by then it's too late. You've got a partner, mortgage, pets, kids, whatever. And even if you haven't chosen any of that baggage, maybe you have a few hundred grand in student debt. Yes, these were all choices. But it's awfully tough to know how you'll feel X years later when you are making those choices and by then there's no escape. (FWIW, I have not worked at a FAANG. Just your average HN engineer type in a less glamorous part of the country.)
zx8080 4y ago
> I feel sorry for those FAANG engineers who can't break free from the golden handcuffs and actually do something valuable with their time. Maybe they just don't want to? Anyway. Don't be sorry. They get lots of money for almost nothing (in an engineering sense). And they have free time, so some of them they can do something valuable (incognito, of course. Otherwise faang lawyers come). It's the big enterprise management who creates all these broken incentives leading to increase in politics instead of engineering.

mrtksn 4y ago

IMHO, that’s almost natural in large organizations, it’s just a function of the structure and worker KPI.

kentm 4y ago

I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. Woe be unto you if you worked on a "leaf" system -- something that consumed internal services but did not expose services to other engineering teams. You would have no internal engineers willing to vouch for your promotion because they weren't using your service or codebase. I really wanted to just execute and be rewarded without having to invest excess energy in marketing myself internally in the company.

arcticbull 4y ago
Their counter-argument is that leaf services like that without measurable impact aren't things the company should be investing in and it is up to the individual to recognize that and re-allocate themselves onto something that's actually aligned with the company's goals. You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project. You get promoted and compensated more if your work aligns with the company, and less (or none) if it doesn't. It's your job to figure it out. Just as it's the company's job to figure out what the market needs. Yeah, projects that are most valuable to a company will be competitive. If you don't want to compete, you'll have to figure something out on your own that isn't as sexy but still provides value. This becomes especially true as you become more senior at this kind of company. If you don't want to work in that environment that's fine, maybe that's not the right corporate culture for you. I hope you found somewhere that was a better fit!
- thomasahle 4y ago
  Are you saying that people should only focus on building infrastructure for other engineers and never actually make a product? Because it sounds like OP was doing that: making something useful for the customers, just not for the other engineers. Hence the engineers couldn't vouch for the system and secure OP a promotion. That being said, bad projects definitely exist within big companies, and it's not always easy for (junior in particular) people to know if they are working on something useful or not.
  - arcticbull 4y ago

giantrobot 4y ago

I think a lot of that is the unofficial stack ranking all the FAANGs are using. It always pays to self-promote since the marginal difference between you and another person on the team might be zero. But if you've been promoting yourself to your manager and the other team member hasn't, you get RSUs/bonus while they get a PIP. You can even have lower actual performance but if your self-promotion is better than their output you get rewards while they get a PIP.

yawnxyz 4y ago

it's so wild to me that FAANG has these hiring walls set up — like crazy coding challenges — only for the best engineers to then do work equivalent to what you see at gov't or consulting jobs. Why do they make it so hard to work for them, just for their employees to play status games?

neilv 4y ago
carabiner 4y ago
If they are so bad, why are they so successful? Why hasn't anyone disrupted them with superior business practices and a better product?
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  They do get disrupted. All the time. And so then they turn around and buy the companies that disrupted them, and take them apart. Also they have a firehose of revenue which makes it possible to hire hire hire, push compensation levels up, and suck the air out of any other interesting companies.
nobodyandproud 4y ago
So FAANG has set themselves up to hire retain sharp STEM grads who are savvy at politics. That’s a very small subset of the STEM population. Small anecdote : I’ve noticed that Ivy leaguers tend to be very polished and particularly good at the game.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  And ivy league liberal arts majors run the country..
- glial 4y ago
  I've always thought that learning how to play the game was the primary value proposition of an Ivy League education. You can learn mechanical engineering or whatever just as well elsewhere.

chubot 4y ago

I wish Elon didn't get sucked into culture wars, because slimming down Twitter's workforce wasn't a bad idea I fantasized about someone buying Google and slimming it down too, because it used to be a great place to work (I worked there for over a decade). There were lots of great builders but they got drowned out by careerists In fact I worked in the SF office around "fail whale" times at Twitter (2009), and there was a steady trickle of coworkers over to Twitter. Though from what I hear the leadership there was the real problem, and allowed the other problem to fester

rhaps0dy 4y ago
> fail whale do you mean "whale fall"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall
- diab0lic 4y ago
  The commenter likely meant “fail whale”[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Outages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#Outages
- borkt 4y ago
  No, op didnt
- vedran 4y ago
  https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1987/fail-whale https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1987/fail-whale > The fail whale is a graphic that appears when the social networking website Twitter.com is experiencing technical difficulties. The image is of a whale being lifted by 8 orange birds and was created by Yiying Lu.
- chrisbaker98 4y ago
  Back in the day, Twitter's error page showed a cartoon picture of a whale, which became nicknamed "the fail whale". The fail whale was a common sight on Twitter circa 2009 because the site couldn't scale fast enough to match the demand and errors were frequent - that's the era GP is referring to by the fail whale times.

zrail 4y ago

The entire incentive structure and cycle at FAANG and FAANG-like companies requires relentless self-promotion and buck-passing not just to move up but to _not get fired_. Many of these companies have levels with a clock attached, where if too many quarters pass while you're at that level you're automatically managed out. If you don't get promoted you get fired, and the way to get promoted is to get relentlessly good at the perf cycle metagame.

skirmish 4y ago
Only entry levels are "up or out". Once you are a senior, there is no expectation to get promoted to staff.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  In fact Google got rid of the 'up and out' for L4. And from L3 (many new hires) to L4 is a pretty easy jump. Promo at Google was still toxic AF when I left, but it wasn't as bad as when I started when there was a clear 'L4 -> L5 within 3-4 years or bye' thing going on. When you read the job description for L4 it's absolutely baffling that they figured people had to 'move up' from that. It's basically "solid and competent individual contributor." You'd think companies would want to fill their benches with that.

ablatt89 4y ago

Working for 2x FAANGs, management incentives engineers to work on new features and not on integration testing and optimization. Quality, testing, automation are highly looked down upon and generally don't give huge refreshers come review time. However QA, automation, and testing are not only looked down in FAANG, but the majority of companies and engineers. How often do you see engineers in any company call themselves test engineers? How often do you find a software engineer who wants to work as a test engineer? There's a hidden snobbery in the industry against quality, testing, and automation engineering.

kentm 4y ago
You see it on Hacker News quite frequently too. Quite a lot of people here silo people into "builders" and "maintainers". They then exalt the builders and talk down the maintainers.
schrodinger 4y ago
I work for a European unicorn and that's definitely not the case. We explicitly reward quality, testing, automation, etc—partially it's on your manager to explain the value of non-product work. We are literally having a pause on feature work right now to focus 100% on QA, automation and testing!
monksy 4y ago
It's amazing how some engineers will try to politic their way out of doing unit tests and will do as much as they can to avoid testing. It feels like any process that requires discipline, they'll run away from. Theres even tribes of people who will intentionally group all tests as "unit tests." There are other tribes who will try to write all integration or feature tests as "their unit tests". It's pretty frustrating to see a ridged and very well defined group of tests get ignored.
Matthias247 4y ago
I've worked as a principal engineer at Amazon before, and I can tell that testing and quality there isn't looked down upon. You can definitely get promoted just for improving products and never building any new feature. However it will matter a lot on where you spend your effort on, and whether your environment understands why it matters. If you just mention "I'm writing integration tests" - and nobody knows why it's important to do that right now - it will likely not go too far. However if it's along "we have this regular operational issue that everyone in my org including the director was aware about, I fixed it, added integration tests, and made sure I added automation that will catch further regressions before our customers will observe them" - it will go a long way.

throwabayhay 4y ago

That is a bit too much of a generalization. I mean, sure, what you describe does in all likelihood exist somewhere in some capacity in any company that is large enough (and likely many smaller ones as well), because "humans", but to pretend that this trait is so endemic to work in a large organization is just wrong. Because meanwhile, HN thread after HN thread was, for example, fawning over (very real) gains that some new technology brings (be it, say, the monitor you're staring at), while generally using a staggering amount of products coming out of large organizations. And before you think that there is a lot to complain about those products sometimes, there is also a very large amount of stuff that you don't complain about, that just works, and so you don't consciously think about it very much. This work is put together by many passionate people at those organizations. Some of them are very passionate, and some of them feel that a small company would not have the resources to do the same level of work with the same impact. Incidentally, I never cared about promotion at all, I just did the work that I wanted to held up to my own standards and those formed by my peers, and I got promoted because of the outcomes. I am honest when I say that it came as a pleasant surprise each time. And I do have quite a number of peers who seem to think and work similarly around me.

time_to_smile 4y ago

> The big tech company game has deviated very far from execution. This is yet another reason why I'm certain the whole metaverse project will fail. If this moonshot had any chance of succeeding, the only way is to give this project entirely over to a someone who is passionate about the vision and has an incredible track record of execution. Even if it where the case that Carmack where being ignored I would feel like that's a bad sign, but him being driven out by the culture means that nothing of substance will really happen. Certainly not the industry changing break through they're hoping for. In the last decade Meta has had no impressive, game changing releases (unlike say Apple that has several), clearly the current culture is not great at solving hard problems. Sticking with that culture to see something like the metaverse through is hopeless.

jmacd 4y ago

That's a lesson we all learn, and most of us learn it the hard way.

mesozoic 4y ago

I wonder if I work at the same company you describe.

carabiner 4y ago

There's a strong bias for "just world hypothesis" stories like this one. Someone wealthy has to be poor in other areas. Someone smart must also be dumb. In fairness, to strive for anything you must have faith in a just world, that your efforts won't just be dashed by bad luck or a cheater. That doesn't mean it reflects reality though. It's just a story to help us sleep at night.

numpad0 4y ago

It's just infinitely more profitable to build up social capitals and leverage network effects and stage wins in this world, where economic utility is determined purely by subjective judgements and payments are autonomously collected. It makes no sense to construct a municipal road bridge when $15 gratuity transaction for 5% conversion from a social media post with million Likes pays more. Fortunately we are not there yet, but not far away either.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

I did Google for ten years and I'd say this: SRE culture at Google is solid, with excellent skills and knowledge about how to build and run services at scale. Unfortunately it's mostly their own custom bespoke stuff, so those skills don't immediately translate into a new org. But they can. SWE is more of a mixed bag. There are obviously incredibly bright people doing cutting edge software development at Google. But on the whole must of us were just doing very modest and incremental changes on protobuf shuffling super yak-shaved services that someone else had built the foundation of. The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process. The workplace culture stuff, again, mixed bag. Certainly to survive and thrive there, you needed to be thinking what to write about in perf twice a year, and it's such a constant that there were seminars and "how to get promoted" sessions where the whole self-promotional side of things was discussed in depth.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process. That’s why I mentioned that their development skills were actually quite good. The issue was that they were playing a full-time workplace game of not only self-promotion, but of elevating themselves over peers. This would manifest as things like campaigning for total rewrites of other people’s code because they all but refused to participate in anyone else’s projects. We couldn’t get them to do anything unless they thought it was going to be a good line item on their resume.
lukasb 4y ago
Underrated comment.

philwelch 4y ago

It makes a certain kind of sense. Many FAANG companies are in such a dominating business position due to network effects and the like that they capture a massive economic surplus, and when organization capture huge economic surpluses, the employees are less incentivized to help the company succeed (since that’s going to happen anyway) and more incentivized to extract what they can personally.

musha68k 4y ago

I always wonder how "old silicon valley" work culture would compare to the current one? How was it like working for Sun Microsystems in the 90s? Digital in the 80s?

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago

Dang, man. Where do you work that this ruthless self promotion (and denigration of all else) is not the norm? That’s been my experience throughout my 27 years, in 3 Fortune 250’s AND 2 mom-and-pop’s.

doktorhladnjak 4y ago
Same. I’ve been at companies that paid really well and ones that only paid ok. We still had to go through all these hoops. All things equal, I might as well get paid better. Moreover, it wasn’t better than the smaller startups I’ve worked at either. There was little self promotion because your connections mattered more than what you did or your impact. If you weren’t in the club with founders and other early employees, you were a have-not.
eternalban 4y ago
This closely matches my experience as well.

mhh__ 4y ago

There's a very real "We used to do xyz at Facebook" issue sometimes. Just because it worked for them (if that even) doesn't mean it's automatically a good idea.