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Comment by lclarkmichalek | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, having worked for startups for three years, joining FB was a breath of fresh air. I know my level, I know what is expected of me. When I say to my manager 'I want to get promoted' he says 'ok looks like you're on course' (or not). My compensation is no longer based on how much my manager likes me, it's based on my work and how I present it.

Startups were a mess of failed products, misguided work, and managers who showed no interest in managing, let alone investing in the growth of their reports. Good management is awesome.

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Exactly this. Also you get paid real cash money. And really proper healthcare. Which is handy if you want to have kids.

I often see criticisms of bigtech as overpaying... or perhaps it is everyone else who is underpaying? Quit making the argument you should be underpaid!

Not to mention that at the big companies (FAANG) you get to work with some really awesome smart people. And work on hard problems that matter with products people actually use.

In the best case small startups are awesome. But there are many mediocre cases out there. Crazy crazy stuff. Every small startup I’ve been part of has had huge drama. Including extortion, sociopaths, bad senior hires, funding gone weird, and sheer embezzlement/misspending.

...extortion, sociopaths, bad senior hires, funding gone weird, and sheer embezzlement/misspending.

I've been contracting at a startup for a year, and seen all this happen during my tenure. We've managed to strip most of the deadwood now, but I'm unsure whether it was done in time. It'll be a pity if the company folds, because they have some quite cool tech.

Everytime I see something like this, I'm glad I chose the life of a contractor.

> My compensation is no longer based on how much my manager likes me, it's based on my work and how I present it.

"and how I present it" sounds suspiciously like 'how much my manager likes me' (or whoever you present it to). Seems more like "same thing, different name" to me than a real difference here.

Not really. If you can't communicate what value your work had, you're going to have a worse time than people who can. The manager liking you thing is more countered by the crazy number of mashups and calibrations go through before being finalised. Yes a bad manager can still hurt you, but the effect is greatly reduced by the process of the performance review and the ease of internal mobility.

It's not. For example, up until recently, you didn't need manager approval to get promoted at Google. Obviously feedback from your manager was considered, but if you could demonstrate your growth and your manager didn't like you, it was possible to be promoted anyway.

The people who made this decision we're specifically selected to not be familiar with you or your work. So it couldn't have anything to do with how anyone liked you.

But even beyond that, larger companies more commonly have codified ladders and clear rubrics or criteria for advancement and performance. This means that a manager must justify their rating against a set of objective criteria. Managerial bias can still creep in, but only on borderline cases. (And elsewhere in the workplace, but that's mostly unavoidable)

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