"This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase"

So true. Family members have seen it in pharma. It's endemic in retail banking. Large parts of media/entertainment have gone this way, too. The core ideas of being your own PR department -- and hopping from one short-horizon metric to another are just how these places hand out recognition, promotions, etc. At the better ones, innovative work will be tolerated, too. But the easiest path is pretty much what OP describes.

> I thought we were past the employer loyalty era and more accepting of the harsh reality that everything is profit-driven these days

I think this is my biggest disappointment working for a big tech company. I don't feel I'm "part of the family" at all. Very high turnover, people come and go, some are fired, burn out, or move to another job. I'd love to feel I'm part of something, but it's not the case. Plus most products are very questionable. Very few people do work on something meaningful anyway.

It's all about optimising some metrics. The same way you need to leetcode to get recruited, you're expected to check some boxes once you're in if you want to stay.

Having worked at a few mid-sized (50-120) startups for a while, the disappointment there is that many of those same problems exist, just in smaller contexts, and is more personal.

I think it's not so much company size as it is operating in a hot industry during a boom time.

your work is never your family, the sooner in life you figure that out the better off you will be. No matter what employer you have, they will fire you the first instance it is profitable for them to do so. Its a contract, you can take pride in your work, but at the end of the day its a business deal and its about money.

The work is your family if it's a family business. But that presents a whole set of different scenarios.

I disagree. even if you are the owner of the business, or working for someone in your family's business, its still business. full stop.

If you're the owner of the business none of your conditions above would apply; they can't fire you and you're not contracted to it. You can of course have disagreements with the other owners, and it's not good to put your whole life into your personal business as if you were a subsistence farmer.

On the other hand, telling employees they should own part of the business is bad investing advice; if you get shares of a company and you're not already a millionaire you should sell them and buy an index fund. Even if you work there.

when I say 'if you are the owner', I mean if you are the owner, the people who work for you (even if family) are employees, and anything you do in regards to the business should be with that scope. And that should be their scope as well. in terms of the business, its an employee company relationship.

Obviously if you own a business, you are much more vested in its success

If you feel like a family working for a company, but does not have significant ownership stake, you're being conned.

I'd disagree with that - what's wrong with working for a company that has a good culture, even if you don't have shares?

i.e. shares or not, I'd prefer to work for a company where I felt I was part of it as opposed to one that's just time served.

I think parent is alluding to the fact that "part of the family" is a framing that often serves the interests of the employer. No matter how close you feel to the people managing you, chances are they will not hesitate to lay you off for financial/profitabilty reasons. This is in contrast to how an actual family (whether biological or "found") works where support and belonging is to some extent unconditional.

I wouldn’t say like a family but small teams and companies tend to generate a feeling of being part of an actual social group which is genuine. It’s more about knowing who you are working with and having the feeling you are going in the same direction in a way which is not ephemeral. Large companies tend to feel more disconnected unless you work for a small team.

a half-decent startup will get rid of low performers faster than a bad habit. You are a part of the family only as long as you keep up, how else can it be?

> This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase

I heard someone smart (maybe Naval Ravikant) say on a podcast that this becomes prevalent in orgs which have two or more layers of management between real customer-facing work and business ownership (CEO, co-founder, CTO, etc). Having worked in several startups as well as F500 FAANG-ish valley tech companies, I agree. When a manager reports to a manager who's reporting to someone else degradation begins to occur. Another tip is to look at the org chart. If your manager's manager has more than six (maybe up to 8) direct reports, that's a bad sign.

However, there are exceptions to be found in specific sub-groups in some orgs. I've been witness to it more than once.

> If your manager's manager has more than six (maybe up to 8) direct reports, that's a bad sign.

A bad sign of what? A bad sign that the company is too large to be innovating?

Span of control. As you get above that number of reports, the manager is splitting their attention to the point that hot/cold spots are inevitable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control

So, many layers are bad, but large span is also. This means you are limiting both width and depth of the management tree, effectively limiting the total size of the workforce to ... a few hundred? That doesn't sound right.

> That doesn't sound right.

IMHO, it's correct but that doesn't mean it's good or desirable that things tend to bog down in wider / deeper org structures. Maintaining high efficiency and effectiveness in large org structures is hard to do and that's why the exceptions are notable and worth studying.

Separation of concerns also applies to organizations. You may see huge companies, but where business areas, divisions, product lines etc. work in isolation just fine. At the strategic level, things are steered like a mix of governmental and portfolio management, effectively abstracting the differences between the lower layers away.

To study single-mission mega projects, the classics are the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions and the first ICBM systems. The management of these projects were awe inspiring.

I don’t understand. Literally every company I’ve ever worked for, successful startup included, had at least an engineering manager reporting to a director reporting to a VP reporting to a senior VP reporting to a CTO. Is this not a normal or good way of doing things?

In AWS, many orgs have manger to senior manager to director to VP to SVP to CEO. It looks AWS is really well managed if startups have the same structure.

I work for a company of ~200 total employees with ~30 in engineering and the org chart for an engineer goes Individual Contributor -> Manager -> VP Engineering -> CEO. 4 total layers, 2 of managers.

I think the difference is not in the amount of layers between an IC and the top - but the amount of layers between the customers and users and the top. As long as c-level still keeps on touch with reality outside the org and doesn't depend on truth being filtered through four layers you might have a chance

Startup with 6 levels of management? What kind of a startup is this? In my experience, working in startups for a couple of decades, this is nothing like normal.

Yup, this is all big companies. And if the metrics are wrong, that's not your responsibility. The PM's and VP's that come up with them know that metrics are imperfect and have tradeoffs. Let them handle the tradeoffs. If you're impacting the metrics, then you're doing the job assigned to you.

They 'know they are imperfect' if you bring it up, but they act like they are perfect. That is why it's better to move metrics than do anything actually beneficial, everyone is justifying their high performance review. If you hit your metrics your manager looks good, that means their manager is hitting their metrics, and so on. The people that suffer are the shareholders and users, but management is always optimizing to transfer as much wealth as possible from shareholders to themselves and you ride the coattails of that if you just chase metrics.

I'm pretty convinced that there's no set of metrics that can effectively capture productivity and business goals without being gamed. It seems to me that the only effective management system is a "web of trust" style system where middle managers have a lot more autonomy to make decisions based on their own judgement. Unfortunately it's hard to legally CYA if something goes wrong with that kind of setup and it has other vulnerabilities like being manipulated by sociopaths.

Overall, managing people at scale is always going to be a hard problem and it seems unlikely that technology will ever offer a satisfactory solution.

Self destructing measurement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

All else equal, easy to capture proxies make good metrics; however, the point is that all else will not be equal.

Also, the CYAed version of web of trust is a “360 review”. Going all in on 360s is a good way to unleashing reality tv dynamics in a previously banal workplace.

The blind community is solely concerned with TC.

> This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase

I just call that the "monopoly phase." There is no natural post-innovation phase, you either have to compete for business, or you don't.

I mean more charitably it's the "maintenance" phase except that our fucked up economic system punishes companies that are happy at their current size and so must do ever more ridiculous or desperate things to make the numbers keep going up.

A bakery that's been happily serving its community for 25 years isn't a monopoly just because it doesn't feel pressure to grow.

> except that our fucked up economic system

A company decides whether it's publicly traded or not. It also decides whether it makes an offer to buy the competition or not. I think people forget just how many entities Google has purchased over the years, and how often the FTC has just let them get away with it.

> A bakery that's been happily serving its community for 25 years isn't a monopoly just because it doesn't feel pressure to grow.

Are we really going to compare a single locally owned bakery with a naturally limited consumer market to a corporation like Google?

Wouldn't you agree that bakery would be a monopoly if it let it's standards slip for a few years, and an ex-employee of that bakery opened a new shop, and the existing bakery just decided to buy them out and then close their business instead of starting to compete with them for customers?

Now multiply that by like 250 times. I hardly think it's uncharitable to call this "strategy" out for what it is.

> There's nothing wrong in working at a FAANG for the money....

That's assuming you have no problem working for FAANG period. I have serious ethical concerns with 4 of the 5 and probably would never work for them for that reason alone.

> To top it off, most of these companies are on some shitlist for abusing their work-force or slave labor in developing countries.

What is the dirt on Meta? I'm guessing abuse content moderators in the Philippines or something?

yeah, probably more of the "not everyone is in it for the money" bs. A good excuse to short-change and lowball nerdy people. TC matters more than recruiters like to pretend, even more so going into a recession!

> not everyone is in it for the money

ok, but... it is true that not everyone is in it for the money, or at least, not for the money primarily.

so, people join meta in droves to selflessly pursue Zuck's legless pipe dream? or maybe libra, the future of blockchain? oh wait, that got canned. Or what's The mission du jour? of course it's the money, what else.

I bet people have joined in droves for all of those things. I used to be that kind of person, thinking all the ideas the business types talked about were amazing and world-changing. Not so much now that I've seen so many fail, but I used to be.

> There's nothing wrong in working at a FAANG for the money

Sure, if you believe that making more money is the only thing that matters in this world. If you take this logic to its extreme you can justify anything if it makes you rich. You're simultaneously criticizing a system while defending your participation in it.

There are lots of things wrong with working at a FAANG for the money. If you don't like how Amazon treats their warehouse workers, don't work at Amazon. If you don't like how Facebook perpetuates fake news, don't work at Facebook. If you don't like Google's search monopoly, don't work at Google. Just because the world is a shitty place doesn't mean you can excuse yourself for being a shitty person.

Not only don't work for them, but surely also don't even use their product/services.

If you believe Facebook is terrible, isn't taking a high-paid position there and gamifying their internal processes in your favor while not helping a floundering business plug the holes in its sinking ship the real way to take direct action? If several hundred people independently did this on their own (and perhaps not even intentionally), it could have a meaningful impact in taking down one of the worst corporations in human history.

You're essentially promoting the old "bringing them down from the inside" defense, which next to "I was only following orders" is the biggest lie we tell ourselves in order to sleep better

That feels like the wrong model to me.

I don't want to work for FAANG for various reasons, but their negative externalities are either things I'd have no connection with or be in a position to push back against.

Sure, the bosses may say "do it anyway" and my only counter would then be to leave, but I expect most people in FAANG aren't actually connected to $relevant_controversy.

At least, that's my impression from (mostly) the outside.

That sounds like a rather depressing, unfulfilled existence to me. It's like someone getting a job with a military defence contractor, then sitting at their desk doing crossword puzzles for a decade.

You're touching on a very complex topic spanning across areas of social life, ethics and morality, economy, family, etc. Lumping that all into "well they're evil and if you work for them so are you" is an easy out. Believe me, I know where you're coming from, but that's not how it is in the real world. It should be, but it's not.

There are too many variables and that line between right and wrong is not well-defined in this matter. Using an extreme version of your logic, you should strip yourself of all currency and material possessions. Yet you're on here, possibly even while you're supposed to be working. Do you think the companies hosting ycombinator.com are clean? Maybe they're using AWS resources. You're using devices from those very companies you despise right? You're probably using electricity from a power company that is exploiting people in some way or maybe you bought solar panels from a company that exploited people to fabricate those panels. You see, that moral line can be shifted all over the place.

I grew up on food-stamps and I was in debt for a very very long time in my adult life. Poverty can be very traumatic (and very motivating to never go into it again). Money is certainly not the only thing that matters in this world and that's not what I said in my post. It is very important in living a sustainable life in America (and elsewhere). A single ER visit can ruin your life-savings for example. I work for a FAANG because I'm uncertain about the future and that scares the hell out of me. I have a family. I have several chronic medical problems. There's a realistic possibility I might be too disabled to work next year or the following year. Layoffs are starting to ramp up. I don't want that money, I need it to ensure my family can survive the problems that are surely to come in the not too distant future. I don't want them to endure the hell that I went through. I don't think I can bare it mentally. So yeah, I'm working at a FAANG for the "TC". I don't give a shit about innovating some new UI library or whatever else people think is cool in tech. I'm not even sure I have that ability if we're being honest. Even if I did, this whole thread is about a post that highlights exactly why it's hard to do that now. I work here so I can survive and that's it.

Total comp and work life balance are all I care about for my job. I put in my 40 hours so that I have money to pay the bills, support my family, and have some fun hobbies. The only reason I wouldn’t work for FB is the poor work life balance.

At the end of the day my family loves me and they have a comfortable, happy life, so I’m fine with internet commenters calling me a shitty person because of my employer.

You're making a similar argument rich people make to defend their wealth: they earned it, they're comfortable, and they don't care what other people think. Not caring about anyone besides your immediate circle is the problem, so you bragging about it just means we'll never agree.

Sounds stupid to you but I really have ethics.

I will not work for a company like Facebook.

And I don't throw Facebook in the same bucket as companies like Google, Microsoft.

And sure Amazon and apple are more evil than the others but they are also so far away from Facebook.

What makes FB exceptionally bad? Jw.

For me, TikTok even though they probably don't hire SDEs like FB and there's prob enough people to fill those roles anyways.

I truly think its an awful invention. It's bad for the same reason I feel most social media is bad... just turned all up to 10. You thought people doom scrolling mindless posts in 2014 was bad? Here, have 10 second bits of unscrubbable nonsense for 5 hours a day.

TikTok is also shit. But TikTok is not faang.

Anyway fb purposefully pushed people to addiction.

Did not take any actions against spreading missinformation

And for the people needing to check illegal stuff like snuff or pedo stuff, they are not good to them either.

Everything fb does is for making more money out of screentime and addiction.

If you have a moment, what is “TC” here? Technical Contributions?

Total compensation

aka the sum of salary, RSUs/Options, bonus, and other cash like benefits (such as 401k match).

Always remember to state TC as the offer/granted value (amortized per year, often divide by 4) not the present value of equity, that's how it stays relatively comparable across time.

I left big corporate tech a decade ago, and it was true then too. You'd get bonuses and stellar performance reviews for fixing big, high-visibility problems, or many small ones that amounted to little more than clients asking us to look things up in the docs for them. If you tried to help someone who was unhappy and at risk of leaving for another vendor, but not someone who plays golf with your boss's boss, you risk getting a DSAT from them, but no credit if you retain that client. If you fix the thing that prevents big problems, or many small questions, from coming in in the first place, you also get no credit. More likely, if you do something that brings 100 problems down to 5, you're blamed for those 5 that come in.

Worked at AMZ as EAM admin, this describes their metric fixation. You spent more time chasing metrics than actually performing work, it was exhausting. Metrics for everything too, many of which would require intervention in the relational database by other team members several states away that didn't reply to emails or wouldn't prioritize your requests.