Tell that to an H1B holder.
You're not wrong to point out that we can't generalize from a single data point, but you're wrong to bring your positive experience as if there is an equivalence between the two. They don't have the same weighing; we are not trying to have a 50:50 split between bad and good experiences. Even a single workplace-driven mental health incident is too many. And unlike other workplace related injuries, mental health injuries are elusive to tracking.
One hard metric would be the percentage of FAANG employees that are lost to suicide each year. It would be morbid but telling if some companies have an overrepresentation (I have my doubts but won't voice it here).
> So someone with 20+ years of experience with subject matter expertise (not me) is a 'developing' Principal engineer.
If one of your major complaints about work is that some other employees only make $300k while some arbitrary table made by the company says they should be making $400k-$500k, then perhaps you're in a pretty good position overall?
In other words - it's a huge organization, of course it's not far from perfect. But, pretty much nothing in life is.
Golden handcuffs are a living hell.
I’m not saying this is the best metric but they would find that sort of treatment to be highly ineffective. Lifetime prevalence of depression and the depression at any given time are different things; it would be like trying to weed out all future cases of flu based on symptoms at hire time. Either way it wouldn’t make a dent on flu caused by the work environment itself.
It's a simple solution, but a bad one. The alternative is to overwhelm people with complete availability and encouragement of help, and while helping them, convince them that it's not in their best interest to own guns (ideally to agree to give up their right to own guns.) Actually effective change is expensive, so will not be done.
That being said, tracking tech suicides doesn't have to track the companies they work for in order to indicate if there's something wrong with the culture. Theoretically, identification of companies would certainly help to figure out what that wrong thing is, though the metric would immediately be gamed in the way you describe and exacerbate the situation.
I don't think this is how statistics work. Both are one piece of data. In order to make meaningful conclusions, we need more data. It seems to me that all of a sudden we have a mental health epidemic and I am peppered by mental health stories left and right in the media including HN. I'd love to know more if what changed, some hard data, happiness surveys even if they have flaws, it is better than arguing like this.
I'll throw one more anedote - I've worked in large tech company and my experience was it was just super chill. No issues with a team of 24 engineers. Everyone left at 4pm everyday and at 2pm on Friday. In fact, people were frustratingly lazy.
I think it's important to realize that it is not limited to this industry; It's something that's actually also happening outside of bounds where people even might be used to this kind of remote work standards and practices, and it might be considered one even shittier to deal with when it comes to being new to this.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/kpgs1x/my_experience...
I suspect it's the same at all of the FAANGs, frankly. (Setting aside companies you may not wish to work for because of general company policy/work reasons)
I also had a very similiar experience at my previous employer which was also a valley based company which IPOed.
I have multiple colleagues who are in the same boat, both current and former, and while I realize this data is anecdotal, from my perspective, work culture in the valley is just plain broken.
People are not robots, they need time to rest and adjust.
To give another data point, I've worked at a different Big Tech company since 2012, on two different teams, and haven't experienced anything like this. There's no pressure to work after hours, on weekends, or vacations. Just today I was debugging a release blocker with a coworker, and it got to be 4:30, which was when they had planned to end their day. It wouldn't even have occurred to me to suggest they stay late: we can pick it up on Monday and the release can slip.
I'm sure there are people at my company who have experiences closer to the author's: what I'm trying to say is that Big Tech is a big place, and if you find yourself somewhere with bad culture don't take that to mean there aren't other places you would like.