7 ms·

>Both teams on both sides wanted this to come together >It takes apple to make a move for us to break through communication issues and get anything done Imagi

>Both teams on both sides wanted this to come together >It takes apple to make a move for us to break through communication issues and get anything done Imagine paying millions of dollars for "the best" developers, designers, managers, yet they can't even communicate with each other properly to align with common interests. FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I'm not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees. Where I'm from we have an expression - "many grandmas, lazy/spoiled child" - and it's especially rings true in creative work. For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It's extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams. It's one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That's how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design. Recently I had a chance to work at a theatre production that ended up suffering from the same issue - the director had no vision but only an idea, so he delegated different work to everyone, then micromanaged people and intersected into every attempt at collaboration with his own opinions and ideas. As new people were coming in, their ideas were added into the mix, creating a show that ended up being even worse than mediocre.

operatingthetan 4y ago
>FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I'm not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees. In my experience it wasn't the excess employees (everyone seemed to be busy) but that processes in the org didn't match the size and leadership from the top down couldn't see the problem. So no efforts were made to make teams work better together and align their incentives. A great example was API teams would ship incomplete and untested work as "done" because they were overworked and on an insane timeline. My front-end team tested the APIs for implementation and discovered all the missing parts, and then we had to document all of it and ask the team to fix it. The API team would then push back claiming we were wrong. My devs would have to spend hours on calls with them going over each missing piece and the API devs played dumb every time. I would have to escalate to my manager and he felt pushing back on the other leads would burn political capital he didn't have. This wasn't just one API team, it was seven. Somehow the culture of the org caused them all to follow the same strategy to push their QA to other teams and delay completion. It was so crazy that they would get defensive saying "we have the best developers in the world, that is not possible." A true organizational illness.
- Yoric 4y ago
  Is that Microsoft?
  - criddell 4y ago
    Sounds like ESRI to me.
- ecshafer 4y ago
  I've never liked having an API team / Front End Team distinction. I don't think it makes good software in most cases, it creates that combative element between the teams due to different priorities that you saw. A team with a product, needs to have the freedom and ability to work at any level of the stack to get that product out, sure that rarely happens 100% and there is coordination between teams, but Vertical slice teams do it better than Horizontal slice teams in my experience.
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    That's a major reason why graphql was invented, to my knowledge.
  - sibit 4y ago
    I agree with this take. I work on a small team (2 backend devs, 2 frontend). The we are always arguing about the API. The frontend devs want the data for their components pre-formatted in 1 API call. The backend team wants to run a SQL query and return the entire record as JSON.
    - keyle 4y ago
      FWIW here: The backend guys are wrong.
      - operatingthetan 4y ago
        The test is to ask ask a full stack developer responsible for both sides what they would do! (And of course, accommodating the data needs of the UI is the answer.)
duxup 4y ago
I think that's just a typical big company bog that sorta forms at every company. It's a human thing, not a valley thing or anything like that. I work in a small company, 3 or 4 devs, couple business ops guys, sales guy and head of company. Even I decide sometimes "naw I'm just making the call on this so it is consistent and works" and don't bring anyone else in on things because it is time to just make a call. At a big company, I can't imagine the scale of human involvement in every decision... just takes one idiot to gum up the works too. We're working with one company now who is paying through the nose because we keep having meeting after meeting about the same things over and over and this company has a "meeting terrorist" (my term) who is absolutely determined to bring up the decisions from last meeting to start every meeting and re-debate everything for no reason at all. It's madness.
- xigency 4y ago
  > I think that's just a typical big company bog that sorta forms at every company. It’s somewhat intentional. They want the manpower to make big moves, but don’t actually want to shake things up. So you put red tape all over the place and start games of phone tag with a dozen teams.
  - duxup 4y ago
    I think it also happens "because this one time something went wrong" so they establish a policy ... and another ... and it just never ends. And god help you when people establish polices just because they imagine something might happen.
- beachy 4y ago
  > Meeting terrorist. I met a project manager like this on a client implementation a few years ago. The client felt they needed 7 phases (requirements gathering, analysis, design etc. etc.) - this is for a SaaS product but whatever! They also felt there were 8 business areas that each needed to be treated separately (support staff, retail, warehouse, etc. etc.). So the day after we signed the contract I came in to find my inbox bulging with 56 (i.e. 7 x 8) two-hour meeting invites from the meeting terrorist. There was one for each combo of phase and business area - e.g. a two hour meeting for requirements gathering for the support staff area, another for design for the warehouse area, and so on. There were no delays between phases. Untangling that shitfest did not start the project out on a good footing.
dagmx 4y ago
There’s an irony in your post that you’re complaining about FAANG culture , but Microsoft isn’t a FAANG. Meanwhile, Apple which is, did manage to pull it off.
- tpmx 4y ago
  Yeah, this isn't a FAANG culture issue, it's an MSFT culture issue.
  - detourdog 4y ago
    Bill Gates established that a large portion of Microsoft culture is based on the idea that software should be licensed and paid for. This was a radical vision for the Personal Computer market at the time. This vision is very narrow and only tangential touches on the wonders of computing.
- umeshunni 4y ago
  Their ability to move fast and build successful products that bloated big companies couldn't was what made FAANG what they were. Then, they themselves became the big bloated companies they once beat.
- scarface74 4y ago
  This is really a crazy take. 1. During the time in question , Microsoft was by far the dominant tech company, Apple was just coming out of being “beleaguered” and the iPod was just becoming popular. Facebook didn’t exist, Amazon was thought to be a money losing company months away from bankruptcy, Netflix (which shouldn’t have ever been considered BigTech) was worried about being crushed by Blockbuster, and Google was far from dominant. 2. The original acronym coined by Cramer was “FANG” and left out Apple completely 3. By todays standards, when people talk about FAANG they mean BigTech - Microsoft has been one of the top 5 most valuable companies since 2000. As of right now, Netflix ranks 115 in the F500.
  - contextfree 4y ago
    Good post. My simple take is that the FA(A)NG acronym just never made any sense at any time, never understood how some random nonsense coined by Jim Cramer got taken up by so many people who should know better.
lightbendover 4y ago
This is well-aligned with why I am soon leaving my moderately high six figures to work on my own thing for a while completely unpaid. Success to me is building something great and that is something that no longer can be accomplished at a FAANG for the vast, vast majority of engineers at all levels. Sure you can twist some knobs and increase as revenue by 0.01% and be extremely valuable, but that is dead empty work.
_8j50 4y ago
In big companies a winning strategy I found is to avoid communicating with managers and get things done and then show them what you did and let them do their best to manage it to death. Communicate with other technical people you trust as you develop your solution but don't give managers an opportunity to say yes or no as much as possible. In these emails it looks like managers/execs are trying to figure out how they could/can beat apple. My answer: get out of the way of the highly talented people you've hired. The business aspect is only possible with a technical solution people like (not zune!). MS has many products like that that feel like a committee of managers designed them and really smart engineers did their best to overcome those decisions (until the last few years at least). Making the guy who wrote sysinternals (got shit done despite MS) as head of Azure is one if their best decisions. Not that Azure is the best but it is definetly very usable and very popular with enterprise customers.
rco8786 4y ago
> FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective This article is 20 years old.
ranting-moth 4y ago
The IQ for the team equals the lowest member's IQ divided by the number of people on the team.
anuptalwalkar 4y ago
My current experience in FAANG for last decade has been anecdotally similar. I have come to one conclusion about people and I put them in 3 categoties- 1. one who have tons of ideas and just enough motivation to implement them. 2. One who are good at maintaining the existing product and are so scared of breaking the boundaries that they often add roadblocks to first category people. 3. People who don’t know jack, and are effective at management, politics and rest and vest. Often at FAANG, being the beast that they are, the leadership is filled 2nd and 3rd category people. Perhaps that is why you find them good at keeping the lights on, and they satisfy the 1st by buying out the competition. I, not hyping myself consider to be of first category, but I found going down this path of carving out your ideas is extremely hard. The people at leadership, management are extremely good at politics and portraying themselves bigger than they are. As a result, you need either lot of eng and support team to build anything, or find your way out to develop things on your own and get bought back into FAANG.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Or as Steve Job's called it, the 'bozo explosion'.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
That (IMNSHO) is why Linux is such a success. Torvalds may be a tyrant, but he has run a very tight, effective, productive, ship. The same could be said for Steve Jobs. Since he has passed, the company seems to be losing its focus (It was sometimes focused on the wrong things, though, when he was at the helm). I think that a certain other, tyrannical CEO may be a good/awful example...
- RajT88 4y ago
  Erlich Bachman
- detourdog 4y ago
  Technology development is the result of discipline and understanding of materials. To develop technology in a group requires standards.
neximo64 4y ago
> For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It's extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams. It's one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That's how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design. Not to overly critique but the iPhone and iPod were 'top down' and Zune, etc were the way you're describing. So Apple pulled it off

operatingthetan 4y ago

>FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I'm not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees. In my experience it wasn't the excess employees (everyone seemed to be busy) but that processes in the org didn't match the size and leadership from the top down couldn't see the problem. So no efforts were made to make teams work better together and align their incentives. A great example was API teams would ship incomplete and untested work as "done" because they were overworked and on an insane timeline. My front-end team tested the APIs for implementation and discovered all the missing parts, and then we had to document all of it and ask the team to fix it. The API team would then push back claiming we were wrong. My devs would have to spend hours on calls with them going over each missing piece and the API devs played dumb every time. I would have to escalate to my manager and he felt pushing back on the other leads would burn political capital he didn't have. This wasn't just one API team, it was seven. Somehow the culture of the org caused them all to follow the same strategy to push their QA to other teams and delay completion. It was so crazy that they would get defensive saying "we have the best developers in the world, that is not possible." A true organizational illness.

Yoric 4y ago
Is that Microsoft?
- criddell 4y ago
  Sounds like ESRI to me.
ecshafer 4y ago
I've never liked having an API team / Front End Team distinction. I don't think it makes good software in most cases, it creates that combative element between the teams due to different priorities that you saw. A team with a product, needs to have the freedom and ability to work at any level of the stack to get that product out, sure that rarely happens 100% and there is coordination between teams, but Vertical slice teams do it better than Horizontal slice teams in my experience.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  That's a major reason why graphql was invented, to my knowledge.
- sibit 4y ago
  I agree with this take. I work on a small team (2 backend devs, 2 frontend). The we are always arguing about the API. The frontend devs want the data for their components pre-formatted in 1 API call. The backend team wants to run a SQL query and return the entire record as JSON.
  - keyle 4y ago
    FWIW here: The backend guys are wrong.
    - operatingthetan 4y ago
      The test is to ask ask a full stack developer responsible for both sides what they would do! (And of course, accommodating the data needs of the UI is the answer.)

duxup 4y ago

I think that's just a typical big company bog that sorta forms at every company. It's a human thing, not a valley thing or anything like that. I work in a small company, 3 or 4 devs, couple business ops guys, sales guy and head of company. Even I decide sometimes "naw I'm just making the call on this so it is consistent and works" and don't bring anyone else in on things because it is time to just make a call. At a big company, I can't imagine the scale of human involvement in every decision... just takes one idiot to gum up the works too. We're working with one company now who is paying through the nose because we keep having meeting after meeting about the same things over and over and this company has a "meeting terrorist" (my term) who is absolutely determined to bring up the decisions from last meeting to start every meeting and re-debate everything for no reason at all. It's madness.

xigency 4y ago
> I think that's just a typical big company bog that sorta forms at every company. It’s somewhat intentional. They want the manpower to make big moves, but don’t actually want to shake things up. So you put red tape all over the place and start games of phone tag with a dozen teams.
- duxup 4y ago
  I think it also happens "because this one time something went wrong" so they establish a policy ... and another ... and it just never ends. And god help you when people establish polices just because they imagine something might happen.
beachy 4y ago
> Meeting terrorist. I met a project manager like this on a client implementation a few years ago. The client felt they needed 7 phases (requirements gathering, analysis, design etc. etc.) - this is for a SaaS product but whatever! They also felt there were 8 business areas that each needed to be treated separately (support staff, retail, warehouse, etc. etc.). So the day after we signed the contract I came in to find my inbox bulging with 56 (i.e. 7 x 8) two-hour meeting invites from the meeting terrorist. There was one for each combo of phase and business area - e.g. a two hour meeting for requirements gathering for the support staff area, another for design for the warehouse area, and so on. There were no delays between phases. Untangling that shitfest did not start the project out on a good footing.

dagmx 4y ago

There’s an irony in your post that you’re complaining about FAANG culture , but Microsoft isn’t a FAANG. Meanwhile, Apple which is, did manage to pull it off.

tpmx 4y ago
Yeah, this isn't a FAANG culture issue, it's an MSFT culture issue.
- detourdog 4y ago
  Bill Gates established that a large portion of Microsoft culture is based on the idea that software should be licensed and paid for. This was a radical vision for the Personal Computer market at the time. This vision is very narrow and only tangential touches on the wonders of computing.
umeshunni 4y ago
Their ability to move fast and build successful products that bloated big companies couldn't was what made FAANG what they were. Then, they themselves became the big bloated companies they once beat.
scarface74 4y ago
This is really a crazy take. 1. During the time in question , Microsoft was by far the dominant tech company, Apple was just coming out of being “beleaguered” and the iPod was just becoming popular. Facebook didn’t exist, Amazon was thought to be a money losing company months away from bankruptcy, Netflix (which shouldn’t have ever been considered BigTech) was worried about being crushed by Blockbuster, and Google was far from dominant. 2. The original acronym coined by Cramer was “FANG” and left out Apple completely 3. By todays standards, when people talk about FAANG they mean BigTech - Microsoft has been one of the top 5 most valuable companies since 2000. As of right now, Netflix ranks 115 in the F500.
- contextfree 4y ago
  Good post. My simple take is that the FA(A)NG acronym just never made any sense at any time, never understood how some random nonsense coined by Jim Cramer got taken up by so many people who should know better.

lightbendover 4y ago

This is well-aligned with why I am soon leaving my moderately high six figures to work on my own thing for a while completely unpaid. Success to me is building something great and that is something that no longer can be accomplished at a FAANG for the vast, vast majority of engineers at all levels. Sure you can twist some knobs and increase as revenue by 0.01% and be extremely valuable, but that is dead empty work.

_8j50 4y ago

In big companies a winning strategy I found is to avoid communicating with managers and get things done and then show them what you did and let them do their best to manage it to death. Communicate with other technical people you trust as you develop your solution but don't give managers an opportunity to say yes or no as much as possible. In these emails it looks like managers/execs are trying to figure out how they could/can beat apple. My answer: get out of the way of the highly talented people you've hired. The business aspect is only possible with a technical solution people like (not zune!). MS has many products like that that feel like a committee of managers designed them and really smart engineers did their best to overcome those decisions (until the last few years at least). Making the guy who wrote sysinternals (got shit done despite MS) as head of Azure is one if their best decisions. Not that Azure is the best but it is definetly very usable and very popular with enterprise customers.

rco8786 4y ago

> FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective This article is 20 years old.

ranting-moth 4y ago

The IQ for the team equals the lowest member's IQ divided by the number of people on the team.

anuptalwalkar 4y ago

My current experience in FAANG for last decade has been anecdotally similar. I have come to one conclusion about people and I put them in 3 categoties- 1. one who have tons of ideas and just enough motivation to implement them. 2. One who are good at maintaining the existing product and are so scared of breaking the boundaries that they often add roadblocks to first category people. 3. People who don’t know jack, and are effective at management, politics and rest and vest. Often at FAANG, being the beast that they are, the leadership is filled 2nd and 3rd category people. Perhaps that is why you find them good at keeping the lights on, and they satisfy the 1st by buying out the competition. I, not hyping myself consider to be of first category, but I found going down this path of carving out your ideas is extremely hard. The people at leadership, management are extremely good at politics and portraying themselves bigger than they are. As a result, you need either lot of eng and support team to build anything, or find your way out to develop things on your own and get bought back into FAANG.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
Or as Steve Job's called it, the 'bozo explosion'.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

That (IMNSHO) is why Linux is such a success. Torvalds may be a tyrant, but he has run a very tight, effective, productive, ship. The same could be said for Steve Jobs. Since he has passed, the company seems to be losing its focus (It was sometimes focused on the wrong things, though, when he was at the helm). I think that a certain other, tyrannical CEO may be a good/awful example...

RajT88 4y ago
Erlich Bachman
detourdog 4y ago
Technology development is the result of discipline and understanding of materials. To develop technology in a group requires standards.

neximo64 4y ago

> For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It's extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams. It's one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That's how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design. Not to overly critique but the iPhone and iPod were 'top down' and Zune, etc were the way you're describing. So Apple pulled it off