I worked for large companies all my life and all of them are actually like this.
I wonder how one can find companies with no office politics, and one that rewards real engineering work. Do any of the FAANGs actually qualify for this?
I wonder how one can find companies with no office politics, and one that rewards real engineering work. Do any of the FAANGs actually qualify for this?
“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ’the reality of the ethical idea’, ’the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ’order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state."
Replace state with "management". The answer for "reduced politics" and "real engineering" is smaller organizations. These are often early stage startups.
There are two types of startups:
- Those that will find product market fit and sell things
- Those that are pushing the vanguard of tech
Sometimes, a startup may do both, but it's rare. If you are financially stable and skilled, you can jump to a startup doing "tech advancement" but you won't have job stability. If you want reduced politics but are down to make your 5th a crud app, then a startup that is finding product market fit and selling things should give you less politics.
A "startup within a corporation" can never work because it's not legally a startup. You're still an employee of BigCo, so they can't grant you tons of shares for a penny so the culture will never be the same. And even if they manage to keep the group outside of most corporate politics, you're still ultimately employees so you'll be bound by HR and security policies because they have to.
The way to make it work which is fairly common is for the BigCo to fund a new startup which is a completely separate corporation and let it go its own way. If it fails let it fail or if it succeeds then they can acquihire it back in some future.
But I do think Google rewards good engineering. There are a bunch of other caveats though; if you do great work on something for a year and then it gets canceled before launching, you won't get rewarded for that.
Google is obsessive about engineering quality - and IMO is a good example of why that shouldn't be the core principle of a tech company, even though as engineers we're biased towards it. Google excels at producing a lot of well-designed, scale-hardened, well-tested code... that doesn't do anything useful for the business and is a net drag on the company.
re: customer impact, and if you want to define "real engineering work" as "real engineering work that your users actually use/love", IMO Apple is the way to go in the realm of BigTech. It's the only one of the FAANGs where simply juking metrics isn't enough to get ahead, and you have to deliver customer impact in a reasonably robust way to succeed.
I've been at 3 FAANGs now, and Apple is the only one where a conversation has gone something like "wait, the metrics you're proposing are bad at measuring the actual quality of the user experience and does not account for hard-to-measure factors like (a), (b), or (c)", and that conversation is coming from an executive.
I'm not sure what the path to fixing this is, or if it even needs to be fixed, but I do think that Steve Jobs created a cult of innovation and a beacon to aspire towards creativity-wise, even if he wasn't the most pleasant person to interact with. This aspirational figure forced individuals and companies to be better.
Try tapping the play button and guess what's going to happen. Try getting the passcode screen to actually appear when you want to get into your phone and your face/finger aren't working. You can feel the competing teams shoehorning their thing into a platform that's already overstuffed, with no top-down editor removing the bloat.
Yes I’m also worried of them getting cocky and lazy. But so far they have done good
The point is that there's a thing you're trying to accomplish with a project and the engineering techniques should be a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.
I did so without any job lined up. I wanted a break.
My former colleagues are reaching out to see if I'd be interested in their gigs.
But they're all large companies, and all large companies have the same big company bullshit.
I do think smaller paycheck and smaller company helps, but I'm sure the grass isn't always greener.
Good for you. Here in Eastern Europe, the difference between working for big tech versus working for a local small business appears to be a factor of 5 to 20. I'm not saying money is the most important, but gee an 80% to 95% paycut does seem like a lot...
No need to be sorry. The flip side is that Eastern Europe is actually cheaper than the West (though perhaps less cheap than the West might think). So while a local salary here is not great, getting a Big Tech salary in Eastern Europe is even more of a win than it is in Silicon Valley.