Having worked at Microsoft, I can confidently tell you that a surprising number of people with long (10+) year tenures are sitting around collecting huge salaries and barely contributing. Tenure alone doesn’t make for value, and in fact can sometimes go the other way.

There was a principal engineer on my team who literally played video games all day.

I know the author isn’t in that category at all, but I can imagine that these companies are using the post pandemic time to prune some leeches.

Mirrors my experience. It is almost painful to watch some of these washed-up OG engineers. I worked at a company that followed a similar trajectory to Google (scaled down quite a bit, of course) and there was a special team reserved for those people where they were working on strange and irrelevant problems of their own devising. Presumably to avoid irking any of the hard-driving execs, they reported directly to the CEO. At one point I sat next to them in the office and couldn't help but notice that on any given day there barely was half of them present. I remember thinking that despite them all being filthy rich it was a very unappealing position to end up in.

Another guy I worked directly with. He had at some point a couple hundred reports, but downshifted to an ordinary engineer. I was struck by how profoundly chill and unambitious he was, how indifferent to flaws in his code (entirely lacking any kind of engineer's pride). But at least he was doing honest and useful work.

The stories they tell are golden though.

As an aside, isn't it a strange quirk in our capitalist society that we perceive workers that were vital for early success but then stopped contributing much as "leeches" but early investors who do the same are totally OK and rightfully own their share of the later pie?

> despite them all being filthy rich it was a very unappealing position to end up in

Maybe I am missing something but this sounds quite appealing to me. Sounds like one can chase moonshots , try out crazy ideas without the pressure, scrutiny and inevitable stress of working with the hard-driving execs

It is a strange thing, in theory what you say should be true, but in practice things were quite different. They could chase moonshots and try out crazy ideas but in practice they were working on small inconsequential problems with almost complete lack of energy. In part it was the result of a selection process - those who had energy and ambition had left long ago and those who remained lacked those things. Also I think it is important not to checkout of society (even if it means occasionally dealing with unpleasant people) because very few people can maintain energy and relevance without constant contact with others.

“ As an aside, isn't it a strange quirk in our capitalist society that we perceive workers that were vital for early success but then stopped contributing much as "leeches" but early investors who do the same are totally OK and rightfully own their share of the later pie?”

The distinction here is equity vs payroll. Early investors are paid handsomely in equity. Early employees, typically, are as well, having accumulated stock for a decade plus. However, having early contributors hugely over-impact your payroll isn’t really fair.

That was my interpretation, too. One would think that after 17 years at a company like Google one wouldn't need to have "to prove" himself/herself anymore, crazy.

Unfortunately this is not an isolated case. I have seen it play out way too often with individual contributors (ICs).

I have been in enough promo committees to recognise a pattern.

You have an IC performing perfectly fine, year after year, producing high quality work. After 3rd or 4th year of them staying in a position some senior director raises the inevitable question; "why is this person not being put up for promotion?" which then leads to "why are they not growing".

The person in question is just not interested in growth-treadmill anymore but no, our system won't let them work peacefully. ICs have to either grow or move out. All the while the management layer who create train wreck after train wreck ("bureaucratic mistake" as the author charitably puts it) will seamlessly glide within and between companies.

ICs have to prove relentlessly whereas managers coast along.

Is that the case for seniors, though? I got the impression that once you do move up a bit, the expectation that you have to be growing forever kind of goes away.

In this industry, it never ends.