7 ms·

I think the reporting of his quote overemphasizes on "work from home" piece of his sentence as that fits right into a continuous obsession/bike sheds. Whether

• BossingAround 2y ago
  > almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win Yes, that's why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn't go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a "huge fire or a drive to win". Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career. If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that. If I'm the lead of a Goog project that becomes a hit, do I get $10M bonus? Of course not. I get a pat on the back and something to put in my packet for the next promotion interview. So you're absolutely right, but the problem is not in people. It's in the way the system's designed.
  • fooker 2y ago
    > do I get $10M bonus? Seems like you might want to consider the finance industry. If you make something important 5% faster, you bet you are getting a few years worth of salary as bonus.
    • roncesvalles 2y ago
      The incentives in finance are remarkably well-tuned to rewarding employee effort. Make the company 300k? You get 30k. Make the company 300 million? You get 30 million.
      • c0mbonat0r 2y ago
        how do swe get into finance?
        • nmfisher 2y ago
          I see quite a few SWE jobs here in Singapore in finance, mostly realtime C++ order management. If the advertised salaries are real, they're very well-paid (300-700k USD, plus bonus).
        • throwaway7ahgb 2y ago
          First step, understand what Finance means in the scope of technology work.
          • c0mbonat0r 2y ago
            i dont have a clue
        • fooker 2y ago
          The path of least resistance is to become a well known C++ or systems guru. This can be done by contributing substantially to the language standard, a compiler, etc etc. Or you could learn COBOL!
      • meiraleal 2y ago
        That seems so easy to game. Do some small change that brings short term gain, bag the profit and let the rebound be the failure of another team.
        • arethuza 2y ago
          Doesn't that pretty much describe the 2007-2008 financial crisis?
          • 1over137 2y ago
            And every such crisis before it, and the next one too.
    • RyanHamilton 2y ago
      I think you would have to target the scope even smalller to particular areas of finance probably quant or trading within a hedge fund. The majority of jobs at a large bank are mostly fixed salary with limited bonus. There are many jobs that are essential but don't capture a percentage of the value they generate. For example processing transactions is essential for a bank but typically doesn't pay large bonuses in that area.
      • skyyler 2y ago
        >There are many jobs that are essential but don't capture a percentage of the value they generate. Isn't that strange?
        • RyanHamilton 2y ago
          Unfortunately not. Nurses, doctors, bin men, car mechanics, plumbers can all be essential at times but rarely pay large bonuses.
          • fooker 2y ago
            It's the scale. One important blue collar worker can help a limited number of people at a time, usually one. One line of code can affect what billions of people are doing.
      • fooker 2y ago
        Large banks can pay very well for the right software role, but there's so much more nepotism than big tech that it's pretty much impossible to land these unless you have a godfather in the industry AND you are a recognized prodigy.
  • kamaal 2y ago
    >>but the problem is not in people. It's in the way the system's designed. System was designed by the people, more specifically people with ability to make decisions a.k.a management There might not have been one person making all the wrong decisions. But more like lots of small wrong decisions, but it doesn't reduce the fact that it is management that is always responsible for the state of affairs.
  • bradlys 2y ago
    > Yes, that's why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn't go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a "huge fire or a drive to win". Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career. I agree that many want the stable and low hours career but how many people at these big companies are getting that? I mostly see it as a FOB farm and trying to overwork the overwhelming majority of workers at these companies. For all the stories of people working five hours a day and making $400k/yr - I hear many more working 60 hour weeks. > If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that. I don’t really see startups rewarding that much either. Maybe it’s more rewarding if you’re a founder. I’m speaking as someone who has been an early engineer at startups and gone public with them. I still don’t see them as that rewarding unless you’re a founder. Also, incentives aren’t the same. You might make a great thing but unless you’re near the top - you’re probably not going to get properly rewarded regardless of how good your ideas and whatnot are. People at the top will steal credit because that’s what they do. (“Look at how good I am at hiring/managing/inspiring/etc.”)
    • ryandrake 2y ago
      > For all the stories of people working five hours a day and making $400k/yr - I hear many more working 60 hour weeks. This is absolutely right. For every senior person in a glamorous role at a FAANG making $400k/yr, there are probably five less senior, less glamorous people making $150k/yr, grinding away trying to justify a promotion to the next level. The people posting to HN that their brother's girlfriend's nephew's roommate makes $400k think that's every FAANG developer.
      • bradlys 2y ago
        To be more balanced on this, I don't think that many are making <=$150k/yr if they're in NYC/Seattle/SF and are in engineering. I think many are making $300-400k/yr but have a high workload. Levels gives a clear direction that if you work at big tech as an engineer, you'll usually make decent to good income. Whether it's worth the WLB/PIPing/misery is what you have to figure out. There's a reason a ton of the people at FAANG are all on H1B. It's not a lack of domestic talent - it's a lack of Americans willing to be worked that hard and go through insane hoops to get said jobs. (justifiably so btw) I think a large reason why most of the crowd at FAANG is way more autistic than average is because autists can put up with such insane working conditions/hoops. Either cause they enjoy it or because they just have something about them that allows them to ignore it. I'm not even going to get in on how so many people in SV are also on various stimulants.
  • runeblaze 2y ago
    This is oversimplifying too much IMO. Obviously the potential reward working at startups is much higher than megacorps, and you can very safely say that people working at startups have a higher risk appetite. However, plenty of people work 9h-12h a day (say, at Meta) in wish to get promoted at rocket-speed and play to "win" the higher TC at megacorps, and it happens often enough that very-driven people do join megacorps.
  • s1artibartfast 2y ago
    They are two sides of the same coin, aka culture. System incentives,management,and staff hiring all form a feedback loop which sets culture and performance.
  • tgma 2y ago
    If you're lumping together all the big corporations you're missing my point. Sure size is a parameter but not precisely what I meant to communicate, which is more true about Google than Tesla for example.
  • whatshisface 2y ago
    A lot of people at a megacorp play to win, they've just realized that the company's value is so much higher than the value they could add to it, that for them, winning means capturing part of the company's value for themselves. In a sense the company becomes the market and their friends become the company.
• js8 2y ago
  How can you have "drive to win" if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it? People love to talk about how capitalism (or free market) solves the tragedy of the commons, but it actually doesn't. The only way to solve it is to make people care about commons by giving them a say in managing it, i.e. socialism.
  • tgma 2y ago
    hear hear You can't influence the course of the company (hence the 'beating drive out of you' comment I made). I am not root-causing the issue and putting the blame on leaf-level folks, just describing it. Quite the contrary. I was riding a gBike (single-speed for those who aren't familiar with one) ~10 years ago with my friend and I told him this bike is a perfect representative of Google's culture. No matter how hard you pedal it goes the same speed.
  • TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    Indeed, if I actually felt like the work I was doing was directly benefiting my coworkers and community members I would be really excited about it! Hard to get motivated when all your work goes to making sure your manager gets a kitchen remodel and a third house.
  • rocqua 2y ago
    Capitalism (or rather 'free' in the technical sense markets) solve a coordination problem. They don't solve the tragedy of the commons (unless you start paying people not to polute the commons, but that is very perverse). They are by far our best bet at solving large coordination problems through price signals. Even though they are far from perfect. I do believe that free markets require capitalism (i.e. profits go to the owner of the capital rather than those who do the labour). But nothing there is against strong regulation, collective bargaining, and anti-trust. Nor is there anything about companies being soley beholden to their shareholders. Also, 'free' markets can only exist with a whole bunch of regulation, and even then some markets (e.g. emergency care) can never be free.
  • troad 2y ago
    > People love to talk about how capitalism (or free market) solves the tragedy of the commons, but it actually doesn't. The only way to solve it is to make people care about commons by giving them a say in managing it, i.e. socialism. There do exist worker-managed companies under capitalism, they consistently underperform. There also exist (and have existed) worker-managed companies under various forms of socialism, those were an utter disaster (for the workers themselves, for the environment, for business productivity, for overall societal welfare, for human dignity, the list goes on). > How can you have "drive to win" if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it? Bonuses, raises, equity.
• ggjkvcxddd 2y ago
  It's ludicrous to lay this at the feet of individual employees and assert that they're all just lazy with no drive etc. Google has severe cultural problems and the responsibility for that should be assumed by the leadership.
  • tgma 2y ago
    I did not. That said, it is up to the individual to work at Google or not, so it's not like they are a self-selecting population of maximally driven people. At least not the recently-joined folks. By and large, Google is branded as the company people choose to go and coast maximally recently.
• Juliate 2y ago
  > almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win No one with such a drive would stay in, or even go to Google, neither any GAFAM-like corp. Those have been the establishment for 10+ years now. A large corporation cannot seriously pretend to encourage their employees to "play to win" when it is structuring itself against that precisely. The bigger the corp, the slower, duller and more rigid it becomes _unless_ someone at the CxO level actively fights against it in a opinionated manner (which still doesn't often register well with boards and major shareholders). It may be sad, it's quasi a law of physics for corporations. If you have that kind of fire in you, go first hunt into to the woods, don't go to the factories.
  • tgma 2y ago
    > A large corporation cannot seriously pretend to encourage their employees to "play to win" when it is structuring itself against that precisely. I am not so sure it's that cut and dry. Even among the FANG, the desire to play to win is vastly different. I'd say Apple still has that mojo. Facebook also more than Google although that ship went south post-2018, I'd say. Tesla comparatively underpaid and overworked people but I think they play to win. SpaceX even more so. Folks who work hard there are excited to do so because they feel their work matters. There are non-monetary structural features of large corporations that make them different on that metric. I think the desire at the top to want to win in the first place is critical, plus the autonomy at the lower level to ship cool ideas without much roadblock or dilution of contribution among way too many people.
• anal_reactor 2y ago
  I think what's hilarious to observe is the transition from "the dream nerd company" to yet another tech hedge fund.
• VirusNewbie 2y ago
  >If you are young and you go work at Google, they will beat that fire out of you very quickly. I don't agree, but there are challenges at Google that don't exist in other large companies. Google's monorepo along with the 'bottom up' driven culture means that to enact any non trivial change, you need many sign-offs, which means an iron clad design doc, and either you have to be brave enough to make huge disparate changes across other teams codebasse, OR to wait multiple quarters to have respective teams execute. Sometimes this is awesome, and it means you can do really complex things over the course of a year. Often, it just means experimenting with non trivial changes takes 3x longer than it would at say Amazon or more silo'd companies.