6 ms·

My dream job wasn't worth it: Former employees (Meta, McKinsey, JP Morgan) share

28 points by pg_1234 3y ago

gumby 3y ago
I’m surprised that places with terrible reputations (e.g. Amazon) still manage to recruit at all. Then again, companies like that also have long-timers who like it there so perhaps the reputations are overwrought?
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  You hear from the people who like to complain. You never hear from the many others who would say it's a good or OK job, or even those who think it's not great but just aren't the type to get on twitter or write blogs about it. Most people aren't ecstatic about their jobs. It's a means to pay the bills, and they suck it up because they have responsibilities.
  - Mc91 3y ago
    This may be true, but there tends to be more complaining about Amazon in the FAANGs than the others.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > You never hear from the many others who would say it's a good or OK job, or even those who think it's not great but just aren't the type to get on twitter or write blogs about it. Places like Amazon have a high regretted attrition rate. I think the average tenure is 3 years. Some teams see their team members rotated out in a span of a year. The number of people that stayed is eclipsed by the number of people who got up and left.
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      Across all jobs the average tenure is about 4 years. So on that basis they sound like not a great employer but probably not among the worst. But in tech, where some advise changing jobs every year or two to "advance," a three-year tenure might be more typical if not pretty good. I've left "good" jobs in less time than that, just because a better opportunity came along or outside factors changed. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf
- alistairSH 3y ago
  1. Big company, bound to be some good teams and some bad. 2. Money will make people do all kinds of things.
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  When I worked at Groupon a decade ago, there were a lot of ex-Amazon people and I heard comments a few times about Microsoft being “a place to go retire”. The implication was that they liked the intensity of Amazon (or in Groupon’s case, a fast growing startup). I'm somewhat in that camp myself, though I’ve never been at Amazon. I like to work very intensely for a few years and then unplug and go into a learning phase.
  - gardenhedge 3y ago
    How was working at Groupon? It's a discount website that is heavy on sales. What's the tech there?
    - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
      It was definitely a very sales-driven company. There were maybe 250 devs in Palo Alto, maybe a similar number in Chicago and Seattle and over 10,000 sales reps just in Chicago. When I was there, they had recently finished acquiring several Groupon clones from other regions and were in a painful process of trying to integrate all the various infrastructure. The main company had started on WP, I believe, and then migrated to Rails. Most of the clones were written in Java AFIK. I was hired as a front-end dev, so for me the tech stack was CoffeeScript, Node.js and Backbone.js. It was frustrating feeling siloed into a pure front-end role, since I was eager to learn other things, but I really liked the colleagues I was working with. All in all, it was a positive experience.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hibikir 3y ago
  Teams that have very poor work-life balance lose more people than are actually high performance. This means they get more openings, and more people bounce out, continuing the pattern. Unless there is money and glory in landing in a badly performing team and turning it around, or the cost of managing a team with high attrition that doesn't get better is a pink slip, anyone that is career minded will not do anything to fix the problem areas that give a company a bad reputation. Even more so when said company uses stack ranking. Thus, almost every bad experience is worse than average, but if you are joining a company, it's much easier to land in those bad teams than in those where nobody ever wants to quit.
  - chasd00 3y ago
    Yeah anytime you apply for a job make sure you find out why there’s an opening to begin with. Is a good team expanding or did the last 5 people quit in the first 90 days?
- neilv 3y ago
  It's been my guess that parts of Amazon can be good if you have a great manager who somehow shields you sufficiently from corporate. That aside, I speculate that job-hopping culture means many people don't have to care much about corporate culture. In 12 months, they've gotten a lot of Amazon TC, added Amazon to their resume, and are ready to hop to the next place, before they're likely to get stack-ranking culled, or metricsed in a way they actually have to care about, etc. (Well, there is being on-call, which is one unpleasantness you can't just disregard because you don't care.)
grepfru_it 3y ago
All my life I wanted to work at Microsoft. I read a book in 91 about Bill Gates and how he hacked DOS together and the introduction of Windows. I was just a kid but I was dead set on following his footsteps. Well after several rejections throughout my career, I finally got into Microsoft via acquisition. Started working my way into the Microsoft org and met some horribly, horribly biased individuals and managers. One team I encountered expected 60 hour weeks to be the norm, prioritized metrics over delivering features, and treated me as an outsider. Completely opened my eyes to how Microsoft was so ruthless over the past 3 decades and immediately made me nope out of there. Someone on HN said it best: don’t meet your idols. (FWIW another person told me their team wasn’t so toxic, but the damage has been done)
- wenc 3y ago
  I've learned to take anecdotes as data points but also recognize that in a large enough company, there is a huge variance. A large company is like a country. Different people will have different experiences. Take America for instance. Some people say America sucks, the healthcare is broken, there's too many guns, Europe is better. Others say there's more jobs that pay better in America, America gives people a chance to be on the leading edge (through various tech/cultural hubs) and to do something that would never be possible in their own country. A company -- like America -- is a bunch of people united by a set of constraints. If you don't like those constraints, then it's worst place in the world. But if you like those constraints, it's not bad. The former group though tends to be more vocal about it. This is why I discount HN opinions that are super emotional and embellished and one-sided. Chances are OP had a really bad experience and the sample is really biased.
- betterprojects 3y ago
  Perhaps a better lesson we all can learn from should be “don’t idolize” rather than “don’t meet your idols”. Learn from the good and the bad and grow from the experience. Reminds me of the famous quote from The Dark Knight, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain”. No one, companies included, is perfect. You stick around long enough, you’ll find the bad.
  - 3y ago
Reubend 3y ago
> In November 2019, I experienced my first panic attack while I was working from home. It was around 4 p.m., and my left pinky went completely numb. At first, I ignored it, but it got worse: An hour in, my ears were ringing, and my heart was beating really fast. > One day, she experienced intense stress at work, which brought on a severe migraine that sent her to the emergency room. She knew she had to make changes and ultimately quit her agency job. These people made the right move. It's not worth sacrificing your health if you're able to get a decent job in a more relaxed environment elsewhere. With that said though, some people handle stressful situations really well, and others handle stressful situations poorly. One of the reasons these jobs pay so well is that they're stressful, and they need people who can handle that.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  I think real world stress is something that academic institutions don't prepare you for. Unless you're doing unique research, there is always a solution, always a reasonable way forward. In the real world you'll be tasked with solving some bullshit problem where there is no good solution. What I notice with successful people, especially management, is that they are able to take control of the situation and reframe the problem into something tractable. In school you would be punished for doing something like that. In real life it's often necessary. I think it's a learnable skill, but some people just burn themselves out instead of adapting. Usually a mentor is someone that can help you with that.
  - Reubend 3y ago
    I agree. Real world job performance often rewards you for bending the rules or reframing the problems you face, whereas academia rewards you for following a path set for you.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > I think real world stress is something that academic institutions don't prepare you for. Should it, though? Stress results from abuse and abusive working conditions, and a workforce should not be conditioned to take abusive relationships as normal or acceptable. I argue the opposite and go as far as to claim that software developers are in a dire need of a union. Having to work nights and weekends should not be tolerated in any industry, which includes also FANG jobs.
whatilearned 3y ago
[dead]
jackcosgrove 3y ago
This article seemed... weak. Of the five people profiled, two went on to become content creators selling advice or whatever the term for that is now, one went into real estate, and one went to work for a startup. I get it, it's hard to get off the treadmill, especially when you have the opportunity to make money in a not miserable way. But these changes don't seem all that radical. Those four are all playing different games now, but they're still grinding.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  Sounds like grinding with more ownership
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  Grind isn't always bad, infact if you're the type that gets into fancy companies you probably did a lot of grinding beforehand. It's the psychological environment of these prestigious companies that make them torture for some people.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >two went on to become content creators selling advice or whatever the term for that is now Influencers, aka Snake Oil Salesmen. There definitely are worthwhile content creators out there, to be clear, but the signal-to-noise ratio is so astronomically terrible that it's probably better to throw out the entire bathtub including the stillborn baby.
  - ecshafer 3y ago
    I hate the terms "content creators" and "influencers" both. Scorsese isn't a content creator, he is a film maker. The idea of a content creator is just so... dystopian. What they make doesn't matter, its not art, its just content.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      Most movies aren't shot on reels of film ("What's a 'film'?") anymore, nor do most people know what the "tube" in Youtube means. I wager terms like "content creator" came about as an attempt by younger generations to detach concepts they know from concepts they don't or can't understand. Note how a similar thing has happened to Saving something (it's "in the cloud" now, nobody knows what a floppy disk is), Private Messages are now Direct Messages (there is no privacy), and files and folders have straight up ceased to exist because paperless is the modern trend. "Influencer" is probably mostly just snake oil peddlers trying to figure out a more palatable name for themselves, though; not that it's any more palatable.
tayo42 3y ago
> But in his role, he saw that every new person was trying to outwork the other person at his company. "Once one person started building that kind of workplace culture, another person would follow suit because they didn't want to be left behind. Everyone was trying to impress their respective bosses to try to get a raise or get that promotion." This really messed with me. Idk how you are suppsed to deal with it. I had a pretty chill job, then we started to grow and this behavior started after hiring. It's funny to see this article, when there is a front page hiring post atm talking about working weekends and extended hours as an expectation lol
GreedClarifies 3y ago
I've been both an IC and a manager at FANG. In some cases the work is terrible, an example is CloudFront at Amazon. It is a weirdly badly run organization which causes heavy operational stress on the teams that support the service and which is not sufficiently staffed to deal with the load. I don't know how it got into such a large hole. More commonly, at least in big tech, is that the person has reached their Peter Principle in software (they may have other traits, like being a creator or whatever was in the article that allow them to succeed in other fields) and that is causing them tremendous stress, usually without them knowing the root cause.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  I find what happens is that people are promoted and expected to do the new job at the same level as the old one without additional training.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
  I spent some time on core services within amazon. I think theres just no upside in major rewrites when the system is working. Any major outage with cloudfront is a huge liability for the company, and so AWS decides to just pay their engineers a ton of money to sit there and hammer out operational issues day by day. This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility. On some teams, the work is actually not SWE work, even though people think it is. Its really an on call rotation, with some product related work to keep people busy while they recover from on-call. Managers will never admit it though. There will be good SWE work, but some guy who has been in that same org for 6+ years will quickly snatch the best parts. Less tenured engineers will slog
  - jwestbury 3y ago
    > This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility. After working there for >5 years (premium support at AWS, then EC2), I've found myself missing Amazon's operations culture and observability stack (as well as CI/CD toolchain) at every other job. Carnaval in particular is hugely missed.
olliecornelia 3y ago
Y'all dreams weak af breh
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
JSON (text-only), no Javascript https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1j2kLG https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1j2kLG #!/bin/sh exec sed 's,.*\/ar-,url=https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/,'|curl -K- usage: echo https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/topstories/my-dream-job-wasn-t-worth-it-former-employees-at-meta-mckinsey-and-jp-morgan-share-how-they-burned-out-and-left/ar-AA1j2kLG \ |1.sh > 1.json yy059 < 1.json (or use jq or whatever favourite software) The "sourceHref" key reveals the article is actually taken from https://www.businessinsider.in/careers/news/my-dream-job-wasnt-worth-it-former-employees-at-meta-mckinsey-and-jp-morgan-share-how-they-burned-out-and-left/articleshow/104802602.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/careers/news/my-dream-job-was...

28 points by pg_1234 3y ago

I’m surprised that places with terrible reputations (e.g. Amazon) still manage to recruit at all. Then again, companies like that also have long-timers who like it there so perhaps the reputations are overwrought?

SoftTalker 3y ago
You hear from the people who like to complain. You never hear from the many others who would say it's a good or OK job, or even those who think it's not great but just aren't the type to get on twitter or write blogs about it. Most people aren't ecstatic about their jobs. It's a means to pay the bills, and they suck it up because they have responsibilities.
- Mc91 3y ago
  This may be true, but there tends to be more complaining about Amazon in the FAANGs than the others.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > You never hear from the many others who would say it's a good or OK job, or even those who think it's not great but just aren't the type to get on twitter or write blogs about it. Places like Amazon have a high regretted attrition rate. I think the average tenure is 3 years. Some teams see their team members rotated out in a span of a year. The number of people that stayed is eclipsed by the number of people who got up and left.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Across all jobs the average tenure is about 4 years. So on that basis they sound like not a great employer but probably not among the worst. But in tech, where some advise changing jobs every year or two to "advance," a three-year tenure might be more typical if not pretty good. I've left "good" jobs in less time than that, just because a better opportunity came along or outside factors changed. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf
alistairSH 3y ago
1. Big company, bound to be some good teams and some bad. 2. Money will make people do all kinds of things.
AlchemistCamp 3y ago
When I worked at Groupon a decade ago, there were a lot of ex-Amazon people and I heard comments a few times about Microsoft being “a place to go retire”. The implication was that they liked the intensity of Amazon (or in Groupon’s case, a fast growing startup). I'm somewhat in that camp myself, though I’ve never been at Amazon. I like to work very intensely for a few years and then unplug and go into a learning phase.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  How was working at Groupon? It's a discount website that is heavy on sales. What's the tech there?
  - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
    It was definitely a very sales-driven company. There were maybe 250 devs in Palo Alto, maybe a similar number in Chicago and Seattle and over 10,000 sales reps just in Chicago. When I was there, they had recently finished acquiring several Groupon clones from other regions and were in a painful process of trying to integrate all the various infrastructure. The main company had started on WP, I believe, and then migrated to Rails. Most of the clones were written in Java AFIK. I was hired as a front-end dev, so for me the tech stack was CoffeeScript, Node.js and Backbone.js. It was frustrating feeling siloed into a pure front-end role, since I was eager to learn other things, but I really liked the colleagues I was working with. All in all, it was a positive experience.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hibikir 3y ago
Teams that have very poor work-life balance lose more people than are actually high performance. This means they get more openings, and more people bounce out, continuing the pattern. Unless there is money and glory in landing in a badly performing team and turning it around, or the cost of managing a team with high attrition that doesn't get better is a pink slip, anyone that is career minded will not do anything to fix the problem areas that give a company a bad reputation. Even more so when said company uses stack ranking. Thus, almost every bad experience is worse than average, but if you are joining a company, it's much easier to land in those bad teams than in those where nobody ever wants to quit.
- chasd00 3y ago
  Yeah anytime you apply for a job make sure you find out why there’s an opening to begin with. Is a good team expanding or did the last 5 people quit in the first 90 days?
neilv 3y ago
It's been my guess that parts of Amazon can be good if you have a great manager who somehow shields you sufficiently from corporate. That aside, I speculate that job-hopping culture means many people don't have to care much about corporate culture. In 12 months, they've gotten a lot of Amazon TC, added Amazon to their resume, and are ready to hop to the next place, before they're likely to get stack-ranking culled, or metricsed in a way they actually have to care about, etc. (Well, there is being on-call, which is one unpleasantness you can't just disregard because you don't care.)

grepfru_it 3y ago

All my life I wanted to work at Microsoft. I read a book in 91 about Bill Gates and how he hacked DOS together and the introduction of Windows. I was just a kid but I was dead set on following his footsteps. Well after several rejections throughout my career, I finally got into Microsoft via acquisition. Started working my way into the Microsoft org and met some horribly, horribly biased individuals and managers. One team I encountered expected 60 hour weeks to be the norm, prioritized metrics over delivering features, and treated me as an outsider. Completely opened my eyes to how Microsoft was so ruthless over the past 3 decades and immediately made me nope out of there. Someone on HN said it best: don’t meet your idols. (FWIW another person told me their team wasn’t so toxic, but the damage has been done)

wenc 3y ago
I've learned to take anecdotes as data points but also recognize that in a large enough company, there is a huge variance. A large company is like a country. Different people will have different experiences. Take America for instance. Some people say America sucks, the healthcare is broken, there's too many guns, Europe is better. Others say there's more jobs that pay better in America, America gives people a chance to be on the leading edge (through various tech/cultural hubs) and to do something that would never be possible in their own country. A company -- like America -- is a bunch of people united by a set of constraints. If you don't like those constraints, then it's worst place in the world. But if you like those constraints, it's not bad. The former group though tends to be more vocal about it. This is why I discount HN opinions that are super emotional and embellished and one-sided. Chances are OP had a really bad experience and the sample is really biased.
betterprojects 3y ago
Perhaps a better lesson we all can learn from should be “don’t idolize” rather than “don’t meet your idols”. Learn from the good and the bad and grow from the experience. Reminds me of the famous quote from The Dark Knight, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain”. No one, companies included, is perfect. You stick around long enough, you’ll find the bad.
- 3y ago

Reubend 3y ago

> In November 2019, I experienced my first panic attack while I was working from home. It was around 4 p.m., and my left pinky went completely numb. At first, I ignored it, but it got worse: An hour in, my ears were ringing, and my heart was beating really fast. > One day, she experienced intense stress at work, which brought on a severe migraine that sent her to the emergency room. She knew she had to make changes and ultimately quit her agency job. These people made the right move. It's not worth sacrificing your health if you're able to get a decent job in a more relaxed environment elsewhere. With that said though, some people handle stressful situations really well, and others handle stressful situations poorly. One of the reasons these jobs pay so well is that they're stressful, and they need people who can handle that.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
zeroCalories 3y ago
I think real world stress is something that academic institutions don't prepare you for. Unless you're doing unique research, there is always a solution, always a reasonable way forward. In the real world you'll be tasked with solving some bullshit problem where there is no good solution. What I notice with successful people, especially management, is that they are able to take control of the situation and reframe the problem into something tractable. In school you would be punished for doing something like that. In real life it's often necessary. I think it's a learnable skill, but some people just burn themselves out instead of adapting. Usually a mentor is someone that can help you with that.
- Reubend 3y ago
  I agree. Real world job performance often rewards you for bending the rules or reframing the problems you face, whereas academia rewards you for following a path set for you.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > I think real world stress is something that academic institutions don't prepare you for. Should it, though? Stress results from abuse and abusive working conditions, and a workforce should not be conditioned to take abusive relationships as normal or acceptable. I argue the opposite and go as far as to claim that software developers are in a dire need of a union. Having to work nights and weekends should not be tolerated in any industry, which includes also FANG jobs.

whatilearned 3y ago

[dead]

jackcosgrove 3y ago

This article seemed... weak. Of the five people profiled, two went on to become content creators selling advice or whatever the term for that is now, one went into real estate, and one went to work for a startup. I get it, it's hard to get off the treadmill, especially when you have the opportunity to make money in a not miserable way. But these changes don't seem all that radical. Those four are all playing different games now, but they're still grinding.

Apocryphon 3y ago
Sounds like grinding with more ownership
zeroCalories 3y ago
Grind isn't always bad, infact if you're the type that gets into fancy companies you probably did a lot of grinding beforehand. It's the psychological environment of these prestigious companies that make them torture for some people.
Dalewyn 3y ago
>two went on to become content creators selling advice or whatever the term for that is now Influencers, aka Snake Oil Salesmen. There definitely are worthwhile content creators out there, to be clear, but the signal-to-noise ratio is so astronomically terrible that it's probably better to throw out the entire bathtub including the stillborn baby.
- ecshafer 3y ago
  I hate the terms "content creators" and "influencers" both. Scorsese isn't a content creator, he is a film maker. The idea of a content creator is just so... dystopian. What they make doesn't matter, its not art, its just content.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Most movies aren't shot on reels of film ("What's a 'film'?") anymore, nor do most people know what the "tube" in Youtube means. I wager terms like "content creator" came about as an attempt by younger generations to detach concepts they know from concepts they don't or can't understand. Note how a similar thing has happened to Saving something (it's "in the cloud" now, nobody knows what a floppy disk is), Private Messages are now Direct Messages (there is no privacy), and files and folders have straight up ceased to exist because paperless is the modern trend. "Influencer" is probably mostly just snake oil peddlers trying to figure out a more palatable name for themselves, though; not that it's any more palatable.

tayo42 3y ago

> But in his role, he saw that every new person was trying to outwork the other person at his company. "Once one person started building that kind of workplace culture, another person would follow suit because they didn't want to be left behind. Everyone was trying to impress their respective bosses to try to get a raise or get that promotion." This really messed with me. Idk how you are suppsed to deal with it. I had a pretty chill job, then we started to grow and this behavior started after hiring. It's funny to see this article, when there is a front page hiring post atm talking about working weekends and extended hours as an expectation lol

GreedClarifies 3y ago

I've been both an IC and a manager at FANG. In some cases the work is terrible, an example is CloudFront at Amazon. It is a weirdly badly run organization which causes heavy operational stress on the teams that support the service and which is not sufficiently staffed to deal with the load. I don't know how it got into such a large hole. More commonly, at least in big tech, is that the person has reached their Peter Principle in software (they may have other traits, like being a creator or whatever was in the article that allow them to succeed in other fields) and that is causing them tremendous stress, usually without them knowing the root cause.

gardenhedge 3y ago
I find what happens is that people are promoted and expected to do the new job at the same level as the old one without additional training.
ldjkfkdsjnv 3y ago
I spent some time on core services within amazon. I think theres just no upside in major rewrites when the system is working. Any major outage with cloudfront is a huge liability for the company, and so AWS decides to just pay their engineers a ton of money to sit there and hammer out operational issues day by day. This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility. On some teams, the work is actually not SWE work, even though people think it is. Its really an on call rotation, with some product related work to keep people busy while they recover from on-call. Managers will never admit it though. There will be good SWE work, but some guy who has been in that same org for 6+ years will quickly snatch the best parts. Less tenured engineers will slog
- jwestbury 3y ago
  > This is really the secret sauce of AWS, industry leading operations/stability/backward compatibility. After working there for >5 years (premium support at AWS, then EC2), I've found myself missing Amazon's operations culture and observability stack (as well as CI/CD toolchain) at every other job. Carnaval in particular is hugely missed.

olliecornelia 3y ago

Y'all dreams weak af breh

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

JSON (text-only), no Javascript https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1j2kLG https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1j2kLG #!/bin/sh exec sed 's,.*\/ar-,url=https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/,'|curl -K- usage: echo https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/topstories/my-dream-job-wasn-t-worth-it-former-employees-at-meta-mckinsey-and-jp-morgan-share-how-they-burned-out-and-left/ar-AA1j2kLG \ |1.sh > 1.json yy059 < 1.json (or use jq or whatever favourite software) The "sourceHref" key reveals the article is actually taken from https://www.businessinsider.in/careers/news/my-dream-job-wasnt-worth-it-former-employees-at-meta-mckinsey-and-jp-morgan-share-how-they-burned-out-and-left/articleshow/104802602.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/careers/news/my-dream-job-was...