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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 pe

by 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
    Amazon has had very strong competition that they mostly beat. Meta has faced strong competition which they beat through scaling out acquisitions. Apple has gone from nothing to the world's richest company. Microsoft was a joke and now it's not. Google I agree with you on.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      Apple and (to a lesser degree) Amazon are the two exceptions. Google, Meta, and co...
- ethanbond 3y ago
  It’s a little silly to ascribe that entirely to their management practices and not at least a little to the fundamentals of the industry. In reality it is probably almost 100% due to fundamentals and almost 0% due to management practices (Amazon perhaps an exception). It was destined to be ultra high margin and destined to have a few huge winners due to facts well outside of the control of the FAANGs themselves.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    Then it should be easy to find companies with different management practices that did just as well. We can talk hypotheticals all day and get nowhere.
    - dopidopHN 3y ago
      How is management at Zappos for instance ?
      - marcinzm 3y ago
        You mean the Amazon subsidiary that was bought out in 2009?
        piva00 3y ago
        That only means that Amazon had money enough in the bank for acquiring a potential future competitor, just like most of FAANG has been doing since they became behemoths. When you have enough money to stamp out any potential competition by simply buying them out I think we can't really rely on comparing management approaches anymore, it's just a finance game: I got more money than you, I will make you go away.
        marcinzm 3y ago
        That's not my point. My point is that Zappos is not a company anymore and hasn't been for almost 15 years. If it had survived during that time and grown to 5k+ employees then it would be a good example. People keep bringing up hypotheticals but not a single large company with a good culture and good business metrics.
- piva00 3y ago
  I want to flip this: give me an example of large companies in other engineering-adjacent industries who fostered an atmosphere of hyper-competition, breeding into a lack of internal collaboration and extreme distrust and which have been extremely successful due to that practice. I ask that because you are conflating that there's a causality between internal politics vs business metrics success, which is definitely not that directly correlated, even less in tech which is an outlier in almost every aspect: compensation, growth, scale, etc. There are many more parameters to consider than simply a direct relationship between internal politics for promotions to business success, the whole environment of tech is conducive to create profitable behemoths after a market is captured through hypergrowth. I think the only outlier to this in FAANG is Apple. In tech if we take the example of Google you can't say that it's because they apply this approach that they're successful. After decades the Google branding is extremely damaged for adoption of their new products, we all expect the new shiny product to die in 1-3 years. The new shiny product was definitely someone's (or multiple someones) promotion package capstone, it doesn't help the company long-term, Google's profits don't come from whatever new product someone created for a promotion, it comes from ads while relying on search to support the ads business, both are some of the earliest products Google ever released. > Otherwise you're talking hypotheticals while FAANG has continuing growth and 20+% profit margins. This is not directly related to management incentives to internal competition, show me how it can be directly attributed to it.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    My point is that without examples we cannot have a conversation except in meaningless hypotheticals. As you said there's a ton of factors that influence company success. Having positive and negative examples of companies with different cultures would allow for a nuanced discussion. You'd expect that in most situations unless there was a strong selection bias against a certain culture. >I want to flip this: give me an example of large companies in other engineering-adjacent industries who fostered an atmosphere of hyper-competition, breeding into a lack of internal collaboration and extreme distrust and which have been extremely successful due to that practice. Off the top of my head, hedge funds and banks. Not familiar enough with other industries to say so personally.
  - deleted 3y ago
- bedobi 3y ago
  Facebook has money because it's Facebook. That doesn't mean how the company is run is good, efficient or worthy of emulating. Everyone I know who's worked there says it's not well run. There are constant articles like this proving it is not, and has not been, well run.
- dahwolf 3y ago
  FAANG has money printing machines based on ad monopolies, with the exception of Apple. All their engineers could do nothing for a year and nobody could tell as it comes to metrics. There's no evidence I know of that suggests that promotion culture is the factor responsible for FAANG success.
pg_1234 3y ago
On the up side, if managers get desperate and turn to in-fighting ICs can play them off against each other ... as opposed to being treated like cattle.
moneywoes 3y ago
Does your current place have a URA quota?
- piva00 3y ago
  No, not at all.
scarface_74 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 That’s definitely not true in my org and I haven’t seen that when reaching out to other departments. Anyone who has been in corporate America for awhile knows that you can’t get anything done without building relationships

by piva00 3y ago

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
  Amazon has had very strong competition that they mostly beat. Meta has faced strong competition which they beat through scaling out acquisitions. Apple has gone from nothing to the world's richest company. Microsoft was a joke and now it's not. Google I agree with you on.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Apple and (to a lesser degree) Amazon are the two exceptions. Google, Meta, and co...
ethanbond 3y ago
It’s a little silly to ascribe that entirely to their management practices and not at least a little to the fundamentals of the industry. In reality it is probably almost 100% due to fundamentals and almost 0% due to management practices (Amazon perhaps an exception). It was destined to be ultra high margin and destined to have a few huge winners due to facts well outside of the control of the FAANGs themselves.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Then it should be easy to find companies with different management practices that did just as well. We can talk hypotheticals all day and get nowhere.
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    How is management at Zappos for instance ?
    - marcinzm 3y ago
      You mean the Amazon subsidiary that was bought out in 2009?
      - piva00 3y ago
        That only means that Amazon had money enough in the bank for acquiring a potential future competitor, just like most of FAANG has been doing since they became behemoths. When you have enough money to stamp out any potential competition by simply buying them out I think we can't really rely on comparing management approaches anymore, it's just a finance game: I got more money than you, I will make you go away.
        marcinzm 3y ago
        That's not my point. My point is that Zappos is not a company anymore and hasn't been for almost 15 years. If it had survived during that time and grown to 5k+ employees then it would be a good example. People keep bringing up hypotheticals but not a single large company with a good culture and good business metrics.
piva00 3y ago
I want to flip this: give me an example of large companies in other engineering-adjacent industries who fostered an atmosphere of hyper-competition, breeding into a lack of internal collaboration and extreme distrust and which have been extremely successful due to that practice. I ask that because you are conflating that there's a causality between internal politics vs business metrics success, which is definitely not that directly correlated, even less in tech which is an outlier in almost every aspect: compensation, growth, scale, etc. There are many more parameters to consider than simply a direct relationship between internal politics for promotions to business success, the whole environment of tech is conducive to create profitable behemoths after a market is captured through hypergrowth. I think the only outlier to this in FAANG is Apple. In tech if we take the example of Google you can't say that it's because they apply this approach that they're successful. After decades the Google branding is extremely damaged for adoption of their new products, we all expect the new shiny product to die in 1-3 years. The new shiny product was definitely someone's (or multiple someones) promotion package capstone, it doesn't help the company long-term, Google's profits don't come from whatever new product someone created for a promotion, it comes from ads while relying on search to support the ads business, both are some of the earliest products Google ever released. > Otherwise you're talking hypotheticals while FAANG has continuing growth and 20+% profit margins. This is not directly related to management incentives to internal competition, show me how it can be directly attributed to it.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  My point is that without examples we cannot have a conversation except in meaningless hypotheticals. As you said there's a ton of factors that influence company success. Having positive and negative examples of companies with different cultures would allow for a nuanced discussion. You'd expect that in most situations unless there was a strong selection bias against a certain culture. >I want to flip this: give me an example of large companies in other engineering-adjacent industries who fostered an atmosphere of hyper-competition, breeding into a lack of internal collaboration and extreme distrust and which have been extremely successful due to that practice. Off the top of my head, hedge funds and banks. Not familiar enough with other industries to say so personally.
- deleted 3y ago
bedobi 3y ago
Facebook has money because it's Facebook. That doesn't mean how the company is run is good, efficient or worthy of emulating. Everyone I know who's worked there says it's not well run. There are constant articles like this proving it is not, and has not been, well run.
dahwolf 3y ago
FAANG has money printing machines based on ad monopolies, with the exception of Apple. All their engineers could do nothing for a year and nobody could tell as it comes to metrics. There's no evidence I know of that suggests that promotion culture is the factor responsible for FAANG success.

pg_1234 3y ago

On the up side, if managers get desperate and turn to in-fighting ICs can play them off against each other ... as opposed to being treated like cattle.

moneywoes 3y ago

Does your current place have a URA quota?

piva00 3y ago
No, not at all.

scarface_74 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 That’s definitely not true in my org and I haven’t seen that when reaching out to other departments. Anyone who has been in corporate America for awhile knows that you can’t get anything done without building relationships