Yup. I left a decade ago with this exact thought. There are people there who lift mountains to create real working systems, but you're actively discouraged from doing that if you want any sort of career there. And spending two weeks a year on performance reviews just serves as a constant reminder of those values.
It's easily visible from the outside too. The constant stream of one half-baked video chat solution or social network replacing the last one, without any sense of progress or continuity, why would a company do that? Easy, no one gets promoted for fixing anything, but creating the next broken thing? That's vision.
I worked there a few years. The thing is, some systems are so complex it might take 6-9 months to even understand the value add within the org. At which point it comes to light that there is very little value add. And all the meetings you were kept from attending were political gatekeeping.
An example would be a recommendation system who’s recommendations are ignored by downstream systems. And yet, 30 people in an org work on that engine.
Former L8 there. Terrible culture, full of fungible engineers and leaders that suffocate everyone else with endless meetings and pointless process, with occasional patches of brilliance that keep it from collapsing into a quantum singularity of suck.
But TBF, any company squeezing the last few drops of blood from their stones is going to behave similarly. It's a great time to be paid a pile of money to hate your job.
Yep. Software and products at these companies are often a horrific mess. Leaving one and taking a big pay cut just so I can go work with a small team of people who give a shit about software and products again.
Find a midsize company that isn’t a tech company and needs help maintaining a very old but critical system. There’s very little accountability since management doesn’t understand software and it pays well because it’s boring as shit and no one wants to do it
Painful how true this is. When I first joined one of these companies, I was just out of college, and had no basis for this corporate style work. It was a long and painful process of discovering what actually all the people I work with need from me.
It took me a while to get that "figuring out what needs to be done" is just as much work as doing the actual work.
The products are huge. The scale is massive. Big distributed systems. Nobody knows the codebase because the alpha team moved on to greener pastures. So there's no one who can help you and you're all on your own to get stuff done.
The first three years all I could do was push on, deliver and gain the trust and confidence of my management. I learnt a lot about navigating ambiguity and pushing through all kinds of roadblocks. It developed a confidence in me where I'm not shy to tackle any kind of technical issue no matter how complex.
The cost of all this was my mental health. It was a challenging time. Now the trust that I developed allows me to have strict boundaries. I don't work more than I need to.
I work in SV and it's no different from any other big company. You nod your head to the obvious upper management self-ejaculatory "corporate culture", show up to the "strongly recommended" team building events put together by someone who I didn't even know works on my team, and act happy when your work and workmates are scrambled every couple of years by upper management engaged in its little warring fiefdom re-orgs shortly before they award themselves a job well done and leave for the next company. All pointless, meaningless... like most things, the core software engineering is interesting and useful; the corporate, capitalistic wrappings are the problem.
You'll be working with other people who jumped over some arbitrary hurdle.
What kind of team is that? Are you going to be surrounded by mentors? Free of bozos? In a world of competent executioners?
Unlikely. Look at how terrible a lot of the products are that these companies make.
They're fundamentally selecting for the wrong set of attributes. Look at the turnover rate - how many projects go nowhere and collapse, the quality of the output. Nobody ever leaves a job, they leave a team. The evidence is all around us that this process produces total shit results but it's become too much of a cult to change it.
Whenever I'm looking around for potentially better work and I see companies doing that, I don't even bother. It doesn't lead to better teams, more competent execution or better products.
Why on earth would I squander my time with some random ship of people who know how to do a sliding window?
I mean what on earth, fix the fucking process and maybe they'll stop incinerating dumptrucks of money on badly executed technology
This is dead on. When I worked there I summed the culture up as code bureaucracy. Truly awful place to work for someone who likes to build. It taught me what I don't want in a company I work for or run.
Side note, I really enjoyed the interspersed poetry excerpts in this article. Refreshing from normal articles whose call outs just have you reading the same sentence twice.
It's not a good reflection of the actual company practices. I joined ThoughtWorks as a Dev because of their engineering books but the reality is that you work with shitty Devs on most projects
Well I'm not a manager so it is naive but I've been working at these companies for close to a decade now and they produce nothing and there is rampant waste everywhere.
So the current management philosophy just sucks.
Also I'm very good at what I do (developing software), the common thing among the people that produce actual value to companies is that they are high output. Whether it's code or designs or whatever. And I'm talking about quality output obviously.
Most of the problems with product @ today's Google come from "shipping the org chart." You touched on this in your third point.
This was one of the major factors that led to me walking away from there after a decade.
That, and it's just a slow boring place to work most of the time. One spends the bulk of one's time basically seeking permission to do the thing that needs to be done -- by this I mean: get in the right MDB groups, get the right sign off on design docs, be sure to be in the right team, be sure to have gotten the right people on your code reviews, made sure there's visibility to the right stakeholders -- and hope to god the thing you're working on isn't sexy enough that somebody better connected won't just steal it from you when you're halfway through it anyways. Or just take credit for it.
And the perf process and the culture around it produces terrible results on top of that.
Paid well, but was a terrible place to work. Especially once COVID hit and the free gourmet food and subsidized massages were a thing of the past.
Are they really though? I'm nearly ready to call it once and for all, toxic and disruptive industry, after 12+ years in it. Expectations are unfairly high, salaries make absolutely no sense, 60+ hours a week are expected even though contracts talk about 37/40hrs/week on average. Meh.
Over last 4 years I have worked for 2 most talked companies these days ( hint stock is down for both).
I felt that amount of incompetent people at these companies are as large as it can get.
There are managers, analysts who are sitting on their job for 3 or 4 years yet hardly know business functionalities, programming and other stuff that's making news everywhere. Both companies sucked a lot when it came to speed. Amount of approval, mediocre mountainous tasks I had to go through was un-parallel.
I have seen employees at both of these companies playing video games at work hours , people getting drunk during work hour, calling names, closed groups , politics and much more.
There are managers and directors who simply don't know what the fuck is going on. They exist to draw salaries. Most of these managers, directors and people with 3 to 4 years have form closed circles that refuse to let any person ( even acquihires ) to mix with them. All acquihires I know have left company ( including me ).
Another trend I have seen is fake engineers coming out of training academies such as HackBright and many more. In 3 months they claim to know stuff that have taken 4 years of engineering and numbers of years to master for others. I have conducted number of interviews and our suggestions were turned down by hiring committee at both companies for political correctness. I have seen people spending 8+ months on a product launch only to discover that it is not working as it intends to.
Now, worst part of all is these people are getting paid 150K+ to 200K+ per year. Heck, even hackbright graduates are getting paid more than hard working engineers.
Why is that US companies are openly axing their own future ? I feel bad for what is going on.
This is lots of companies I've worked at. Producing vaporware solutions for problems that may or may not be defined via user requirements (if defined at all). I'll just tell you about the worst one I worked at:
Under the hood, the company was down to 4 engineers (we sold the company as a team of 30 engineers). We were basically doing Ponzi-style SOWs promising time to clients over time another had paid for, etc. Lots of our 'solutions' were just white-labeled third-party software bundled up into a shitheap. We didn't have any actual IP because all of the stuff we made was licensed by the hosted providers we used. We actually stopped really acquiring any new tech or updating or methodology maybe a year into me working there. My boss shifted focus onto social media (blog posts about cloud shit, tweeting about cloud shit, facebook about you guessed it--cloud shit.) He even went as far as to spend ~20,000 on high end production and recording/streaming equipement and software to start doing live webinars about more, yes, cloud shit. The content of the webinars was whatever the engineers could manage to scrape together at 2am after finding some time in their massive stack of actual work to do. Our boss never learned how to set up the shit, the webinars barely ever streamed successfully, and the social media best I know never made a mark.
I've been gone a while but last I heard the CEO is still hellbent on being the most widely visible adopter of the cloud in the world.
Companies want to look 'Agile' so they will treat it as though it is a religion. The daily stand-up bullshit gets taken to such an extreme that it becomes counter productive. If you work at such a place, simply get out. There is nothing that spells long term disaster more than rigid adherence to voodoo process.
I used to work in one of the cloud/virt groups there. The management (from the first line to the top) lack vision both technically and otherwise. You have many teams, many directors, managers, and about 200 engineers working on some product, and this product has become so bloated. The engineers don't know what this product is meant for, except doing their part. This lead to resume enhancing technologies, which end up bloating the whole product. I can't provide more details here.
In my thankfully short time at a company that operated this way, there was no upside either.
No decent engineer would stay there because there was nothing to build and management would always just contract out everything. Management, which was promoted internally from bad engineers, couldn't shop a good SaaS product or consulting firm and instead were consistently convinced into buying shitty Oracle products.
In-house products were badly done, which led to contracting out engineering, which led to no engineers, which led to getting screwed in the contracting.
Fixing that company would probably involve firing the whole tech department.
They’re locally known for hiring college grads, using oddly nitpicks levels of GPA filtering regardless of other factors, then overworking them and burning them out in two years.
They still use VB6 and MUMPS (a DB), and will spend six months of that two years training people, knowing how many will leave in two.
They have a “one month all-paid sabbatical” they dangle over your head you get at five years. During COVID they bulk fucked people over, since they couldn’t travel, and we’re like “you can take a couple weeks off and then do it again later”, when it was supposed to be “we’ll pay while you go to Italy or NZ or whatever” for a month.
…never mind this weird little microcosm of themed hallways, buildings, and whatever that more belong in a children’s amusement park than a software engineering and associated support/marketing company’s headquarters. It’s kinda a joke. Just a well-paying joke, where you leave and go consult on their stuff at a third party after you ditch.
Citation needed. Particularly from their operations teams and developers.
Notably a lot of corporations are built on a pile of shit with an immense staff turnover. I know that having worked for multiple Fortune 500 companies...
It's easily visible from the outside too. The constant stream of one half-baked video chat solution or social network replacing the last one, without any sense of progress or continuity, why would a company do that? Easy, no one gets promoted for fixing anything, but creating the next broken thing? That's vision.
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