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Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires. I think that’s much too strong of a reaction. The FAANGs I’ve been at, and especially where I’ve managed,

by harles 3y ago

Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires. I think that’s much too strong of a reaction. The FAANGs I’ve been at, and especially where I’ve managed, high impact work is rarely passed over when it comes to both comp and promo. The problem is the opposite of that: there simply isn’t enough high impact work to go around. It’s a common problem in pure engineering, and one that’s becoming more obvious in management as the article alludes to.

28304283409234 3y ago
This system leans towards certain types of people becoming managers. Which crates a monoculture. Never a good thing.
notyourwork 3y ago
I agree. Promotion oriented architecture becomes a real thing because of this.
- tcbawo 3y ago
  I saw the term Resume Driven Development on here once, and I’ve been using it ever since. I like this term a lot, also.
bigpeopleareold 3y ago
I think it is better to just justify if a task has a high impact to one's self, particularly in well-established companies. If I can get paid decently and learn new stuff to keep my knowledge fresh, that's good enough for me. However, that's something I had to train myself, because high-impact work doesn't come along well but there is a strong social component to it; it's great to talk about, at least. I left my last company because there was simply nothing to gain from, unless I wanted to spend the next few years trying to maybe become a manager, which felt like a distant possibility there anyway.
djur 3y ago
Most tech companies do not make ICs millionaires.
- tylerhou 3y ago
  Google and Meta do.
- bonzini 3y ago
  At levels comparable to Facebook's E7/E8 they absolutely do. Most tech companies do not have an IC ladder that reaches that level. https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook&track...
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Most FAANG ICs never reach those levels.
  - oblio 3y ago
    We're talking about several hundreds of people, 99% of which are located in a few high cost of living locations. Considering the fact that we're talking about millions of individual contributors, these people are statistically insignificant.
    - adrianbordinc 3y ago
      You don't need to make 1M a year to become a millionaire. Becoming millionaire doesn't mean having a 1M paycheck a year. You can get there in a couple of years with 0.X * 1M paychecks. For example can be E5 for 5 years at 350K/year, and that gets you there too. And there's not several hundreds E5s or equivalent, there's thousands+ of them.
      - TimPC 3y ago
        $350k paycheck takes a fair amount of time to make a millionaire. You could be paying $72k/year in rent and $130k/year in taxes. If transit food and other expenses are $25k/year you pretty much need an 8 year run to save $1Mil. I’m also not sure $1M should be the standard for making people rich when the typical house where they live is $1.8M-$2.5M
laserlight 3y ago
> Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires. A “victim” of a pyramid scheme can become a millionaire, if they entered early enough. Those people play a very important role for the scammers. They will be used as examples of how well the scheme works to those entering the bottom of the pyramid.
- cjrp 3y ago
  I'd say they're less of a victim, more of a co-conspirator
  - b112 3y ago
    Not sure on this one. Before the Internet, and before Amway in the US, many average folk did not know what a pyramid scheme was. So some of the earlies, in a pyramid, might not even understand. If this promotion method is a scam (I'd say no, but...), and those trapped inside benefit, they may not think it is, too. So maybe not a victim, but also not a conspirator?
- dahwolf 3y ago
  So now it's a pyramid scheme? A scam and a pyramid scheme are not synonyms. Toxic promotion culture is neither a scam nor a pyramid scheme. A scam is where you pay for something yet do not receive the promised item. Nobody promised you a promotion at Google so it's not a scam. A pyramid scheme is where an ever growing amount of low level newcomers pay for the returns of those on the top. When you're a low level newcomer at Google, you don't pay for the higher level employees. Google does. Nor does it require an exponentially growing amount of newcomers for the system to not collapse.
piva00 3y ago
The problem is that it doesn't foster a culture of collaboration, it becomes a competition around who is leading the high impact projects; to the point where people start to not communicate, and entrench themselves when working on high impact work just to avoid others getting jealous (and/or greedy) and stealing their projects to pad their promotion package. As far as I know this is common in most of FAANG and other big tech corps. A friend just left Meta last week due to this bickering, everyone is protective of their work, everyone is paranoid their high impact work will be taken by someone else looking for a promotion. It's perverse incentives all around, over my career I found I prefer to work in a collaborative environment than in one where I need to be distrustful of my peers due to systemically bad incentives. I'm lucky my current employer is a large-ish corp that fosters collaboration over competition, makes me much happier.
- Karrot_Kream 3y ago
  Yeah I'm leaving a Big Tech company for exactly this reason. Ultimately, staff needs to be thinned. If too many folks are competing for too little work then you either have too much staff or too little work. In this economy, probably the former.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Give me an example of a large (10k+) company that uses a better approach and has better business metrics than FAANG. Otherwise you're talking hypotheticals while FAANG has continuing growth and 20+% profit margins.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Most of the letters in FAANG hardly have their "continuing growth" or their "20+% profit margins" through the software development they do. Early capture, network effects, and coasting is more like it. So the quality of their layers of managers hardly matters, in G, for example, comically so (as has been relayed by insiders time and again).
    - marcinzm 3y ago
coldtea 3y ago
>Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires. They do, if the non-scam course would have made them richer millionaires.
hgsgm 3y ago
The scam is the owner getting tens of $billions.
shepardrtc 3y ago
> Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires The people at the bottom? No. The people at the top? Yes. > The problem is the opposite of that: there simply isn’t enough high impact work to go around. You're leaving out the amount of duplicated work, or rather, the amount of teams that are working on the same thing.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by harles 3y ago

28304283409234 3y ago

This system leans towards certain types of people becoming managers. Which crates a monoculture. Never a good thing.

notyourwork 3y ago

I agree. Promotion oriented architecture becomes a real thing because of this.

tcbawo 3y ago
I saw the term Resume Driven Development on here once, and I’ve been using it ever since. I like this term a lot, also.

bigpeopleareold 3y ago

I think it is better to just justify if a task has a high impact to one's self, particularly in well-established companies. If I can get paid decently and learn new stuff to keep my knowledge fresh, that's good enough for me. However, that's something I had to train myself, because high-impact work doesn't come along well but there is a strong social component to it; it's great to talk about, at least. I left my last company because there was simply nothing to gain from, unless I wanted to spend the next few years trying to maybe become a manager, which felt like a distant possibility there anyway.

djur 3y ago

Most tech companies do not make ICs millionaires.

tylerhou 3y ago
Google and Meta do.
bonzini 3y ago
At levels comparable to Facebook's E7/E8 they absolutely do. Most tech companies do not have an IC ladder that reaches that level. https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook&track...
- coldtea 3y ago
  Most FAANG ICs never reach those levels.
- oblio 3y ago
  We're talking about several hundreds of people, 99% of which are located in a few high cost of living locations. Considering the fact that we're talking about millions of individual contributors, these people are statistically insignificant.
  - adrianbordinc 3y ago
    You don't need to make 1M a year to become a millionaire. Becoming millionaire doesn't mean having a 1M paycheck a year. You can get there in a couple of years with 0.X * 1M paychecks. For example can be E5 for 5 years at 350K/year, and that gets you there too. And there's not several hundreds E5s or equivalent, there's thousands+ of them.
    - TimPC 3y ago
      $350k paycheck takes a fair amount of time to make a millionaire. You could be paying $72k/year in rent and $130k/year in taxes. If transit food and other expenses are $25k/year you pretty much need an 8 year run to save $1Mil. I’m also not sure $1M should be the standard for making people rich when the typical house where they live is $1.8M-$2.5M

laserlight 3y ago

> Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires. A “victim” of a pyramid scheme can become a millionaire, if they entered early enough. Those people play a very important role for the scammers. They will be used as examples of how well the scheme works to those entering the bottom of the pyramid.

cjrp 3y ago
I'd say they're less of a victim, more of a co-conspirator
- b112 3y ago
  Not sure on this one. Before the Internet, and before Amway in the US, many average folk did not know what a pyramid scheme was. So some of the earlies, in a pyramid, might not even understand. If this promotion method is a scam (I'd say no, but...), and those trapped inside benefit, they may not think it is, too. So maybe not a victim, but also not a conspirator?
dahwolf 3y ago
So now it's a pyramid scheme? A scam and a pyramid scheme are not synonyms. Toxic promotion culture is neither a scam nor a pyramid scheme. A scam is where you pay for something yet do not receive the promised item. Nobody promised you a promotion at Google so it's not a scam. A pyramid scheme is where an ever growing amount of low level newcomers pay for the returns of those on the top. When you're a low level newcomer at Google, you don't pay for the higher level employees. Google does. Nor does it require an exponentially growing amount of newcomers for the system to not collapse.

piva00 3y ago

The problem is that it doesn't foster a culture of collaboration, it becomes a competition around who is leading the high impact projects; to the point where people start to not communicate, and entrench themselves when working on high impact work just to avoid others getting jealous (and/or greedy) and stealing their projects to pad their promotion package. As far as I know this is common in most of FAANG and other big tech corps. A friend just left Meta last week due to this bickering, everyone is protective of their work, everyone is paranoid their high impact work will be taken by someone else looking for a promotion. It's perverse incentives all around, over my career I found I prefer to work in a collaborative environment than in one where I need to be distrustful of my peers due to systemically bad incentives. I'm lucky my current employer is a large-ish corp that fosters collaboration over competition, makes me much happier.

Karrot_Kream 3y ago
Yeah I'm leaving a Big Tech company for exactly this reason. Ultimately, staff needs to be thinned. If too many folks are competing for too little work then you either have too much staff or too little work. In this economy, probably the former.
marcinzm 3y ago
Give me an example of a large (10k+) company that uses a better approach and has better business metrics than FAANG. Otherwise you're talking hypotheticals while FAANG has continuing growth and 20+% profit margins.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Most of the letters in FAANG hardly have their "continuing growth" or their "20+% profit margins" through the software development they do. Early capture, network effects, and coasting is more like it. So the quality of their layers of managers hardly matters, in G, for example, comically so (as has been relayed by insiders time and again).
  - marcinzm 3y ago

coldtea 3y ago

>Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires. They do, if the non-scam course would have made them richer millionaires.

hgsgm 3y ago

The scam is the owner getting tens of $billions.

shepardrtc 3y ago

> Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires The people at the bottom? No. The people at the top? Yes. > The problem is the opposite of that: there simply isn’t enough high impact work to go around. You're leaving out the amount of duplicated work, or rather, the amount of teams that are working on the same thing.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]