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.
I applied for a position as a software dev there a few years ago through a friend. I hated every single moment of it.
It was like they exported the very worse from Silicon Valley's bullshit start-ups attitude. They just couldn't shut the fuck up about how they were really changing the world (yeah right), how awesome it was to work 60 hours a week for such a great Vision, how sick their (mandatory) team-holidays were, how everything and everyone was so siiiick here, mate.
I did all the rounds up to the one with the VP of Engineering who asked me to code FizzBuzz on a whiteboard (no kidding) and then spent the rest of the hour bragging about how last week he had turned down an "amazing engineer" (his words) because he wasn't "cool enough" to be one of them. You know, he was a bit of a loser, mate.
It really felt like a cult of ego-obsessed people with some narcissistic disorder; even worse, it felt like everyone was lying.
That said I'm sure there are a lot of nice people who work there, this is just my experience so take it with a grain of salt. The product is also good, I used it a few times myself.
The absolute hubris of SV people thinking that they can individually perform the jobs of 2-3 competent teams of people at literally any company outside of SV is why a lot of talented people want nothing to do with SV.
It's probably not a terrible business model in some regards. However, as a software engineer there - it was miserable. Compensation was crap too. I wouldn't recommend it as a place to work unless you're high up. I think those people got $$$.
There are a lot of places like this. If you've never seen office space, it's a great movie about this. And that was before the agilists took over our industry. They are not to blame for this. But you could say that kind of thing thrives in environments like that.
Of course not all places are like this. People self select to the type of jobs best suited to them. People with ambition don't tend to want to be hired in soulless environments that are obviously not getting much done. I kind of work my ass off because I like being engaged in doing something technically challenging. It's a way of life. And since technical skills are in demand, finding places to apply them is not an issue.
But there are a lot of people employed in what I would label vanity projects where the whole purpose of the project is to make those that initiated it look good. It's not about the outcome but about being associated with some grand initiative that obviously requires big budgets, a lot of smart looking people, expensive consultants. Big organizations are especially vulnerable to this. Part of the corporate rat race is making yourself look good. And a well proven strategy for that is hoarding a lot of resources for some ambitious sounding project. The bigger the better.
The more soul crushing the environment, the bigger the need for the powers that be in such organizations to assert themselves like this. That's why fintech projects are so boring and lucrative at the same time. Lots of money and thus lots of incentive for people to get some of that. Most of those projects are complete and utter bullshit. Very few banks manage to innovate anything and limit their creativity to how they do accounting. Which obviously went terribly wrong for SVB recently.
Otherwise it's just team after team going through the moves of reinventing wheels endlessly. And usually quite poorly. Most bank software is kind of awful. Government projects are even worse. And since they are so tedious to deal with, consultancies that deal with them, tend to squeeze hard.
It's fairly normal for a big company these days: extremely slow pace, red tape all over the place, your level matters more than your skill. It's an engineering-led culture so there's a lot of focus on code nitpicking and purity (arguments over whether mocks are evil, etc).
Great place to work if you're high level (5+) and land on a good team with a good manager. Mind numbingly boring if not.
I hated my life when I worked at this style of company.
When I worked at (a beverage company), one of the unfortunate realities was that the company did not really compete to make their money. The profit at the entity I worked at was completely based on the price of ingredients that was set by a parent company. We could have reduced complexity and improved efficiency by large margins easily, but it didn't matter because the parent company would have clawed back a larger share and pumped their profits, while our efforts were of no benefit.
In this aimless zombie corporate mode, they hired people without much thought, and everyone was busy looking busy (8 hour meetings were common for "developers"). However, if you are doing something for real, people don't see any point in helping you out; so even if you really do want to improve things (in my case, I wanted to help the poor souls on 2ch who had to work on the weekend because of poor internal communication that prevented hand-offs), no one wanted to lend a hand.
Since profit is not a big deal, and everyone simulates being busy, no winds up in charge, and the inmates run the asylum. If you are the guy in the unimportant job, you suddenly realize it is a bullshit job and are constantly in fear of your job vanishing. Moreover, since you cannot accomplish anything, it is nearly impossible to find a new job when the company inevitably encounters reality.
I don’t work there but have heard from people who used to be there... that team is full of program managers who call themselves designers and live in delusion that Steve Jobs have possessed them. This is why you see funcky UX which pretends to be minimal, different and at the same time horrible to use. To complement these deluded people, there are highly paid architects (“partner” levels) who can’t code but make stupid decisions on how someone should code. Top brass there are usual managers/VPs who can’t code, can’t design and rarely depends on their own products. This is how bad software is made. Teams is perfect antithesis of old Microsoft which used to be full of brilliant wiz kids that can pull miracles and where PMs were kept to minimum and instructed to stay out of their way.
I was working at a startup before that had to fold. Luckily in the Bay Area you have many companies that need engineers. I had multiple offers from big corporations. I took up one of them. The code here sucks. There are some talented people but barring them most are "Java developers".
Do all big companies suck? By suck I mean any two out of three of the following are true:
1. Shitty code and a lot of tech debt
2. Lack of hacker types
3. No design work or challenges as everything has already been done
and you just service these parts or reuse them
Sometimes I don't get why do we need so many employees to being with.
Some more things to rant about:
1. How the whole systems works is a mystery
2. May people use Git as the new SVN
3. Code review is a thing that's done at a later point or sprint end
while it may have gone live and broken things in between that
4. There's layers on top of layers on top of layers built
Agree with your points on "old company/conservative industry" and "non-engineering culture"
I'm at a place that is both, and both are huge pains.
On the engineering side, it's a bit different though: technical roles are looked down on, and there is no engineering culture, eg, for data. Data is just a bunch of flat files everywhere, across many silos. No leadership to put it together into logical buckets for easy access and interoperability
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.
These rarely are "software companies". They're companies in other industries, that happen to need some software. Sometimes it's a pretty plumb gig: Good, but not great, pay, often in relatively lower cost-of-living areas, a relatively light workload, a good amount of autonomy as one of a maybe a handful of software devs, and in their blindness to good practices (like source control), they're also untouched by common bad practices in software, like whatever bastardized version of agile/scrum that your bosses heard through an extremely lossy telephone game.
But there's also the bad: Software isn't the company's focus, so you aren't the company's focus. That means no "Senior FAANG" salaries, no best practices to keep things sane, and often you find yourself working on a codebase that was originally hacked together in a week by a chemist who may or may not have been deliberating huffing reagent fumes.
Totally agree. I've worked for several big corporations and they are extremely inefficient; as a software dev you could do nothing all day and nobody would say anything... I think sometimes it's actually better FOR THEM if you do nothing all day than add more code to the growing pile of over-engineered garbage that they're building (and which will need to be rewritten)...
Big companies are so entrenched in their over-engineered ways that they develop very low expectations about productivity.
I mean, if you look at Facebook; does anything actually change? No, it looks pretty much the same as last year - 5000 Facebook engineers working on it full time for a year and there is no noticeable, meaningful improvement.
I don't know if these big tech companies are hiring all these unnecessary software developers out of duty, for competitive advantage (just draining the talent pool) or what else but it definitely looks like a bubble.
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.
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.
It's like these companies live in a totally separate universe where none of the normal software engineering principles apply any more. The micro services cargo cult permeates everything.
Yup. I find the 'our-whole-office-is-staffed-by-fun-people-who-love-(office-admin|client-management|sales|.+)' trope really grating. These are people going to an office to do their jobs. Maybe they're good at their jobs, and maybe it's a nice place to work, but it's not summer camp, it's not a four-year liberal arts college, and it's not a heist movie in which a crack team of experts come together for one last big score. It's a software company. Get a grip.
This comment is like a Fox News parody of what tech companies are like.
I've worked for a few and there definitely wasn't 1000s of people in the Legal & Compliance departments constantly getting sued and harassing managers and engineers about travel expenses or diversity training.
Instead, it is the exact same problems you see at every large company i.e. excess of middle managers each trying to grow their own fiefdom and duplicating capabilities across the organisation.
Or it's too many poorly conceived and managed product and R&D adventures.
I once worked on a project for one of the largest corporations in the world. First part of my career I only ever worked on smaller teams.
I was excited for the move to a large corporation where there would be amazing room for growth and learning.
I have to say that almost a year into my work on this project, I was absolutely stunned how inept this company was at coordinating a technology project.
Something a small team could accomplish in a matter of months was taking 100's of developers and 100's more in supporting / operational roles years to accomplish. My guess is the developers on this project would gladly trade places with Sisyphus.
I work in a fortune 500 that sees itself explicitly as not a software company. The devs are only viewed as a nuisance by everybody else. The CTO reports to a finance guy. And it's a shit show. I agree with Humphrey and Nadella here and I assume that every company that doesn't get that leaves something valuable on the table.
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