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Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

Theres generally no room for "high performance" in large corporations like Amazon and Google. There is room for getting work done quickly and to spec, but that's different than high output creative problem solving. The value in many businesses is that they have compartmentalized employees into high output replaceable cogs. High performing employees outside of startups and "innovation teams" are a risk to a business

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It's also a lot harder to recognize high performance at these companies because of the natural impediments to getting anything done. If you aren't on the right project, or if your leadership doesn't understand/advocate for your work, or if you're just constantly churning through reorgs, etc. Large complex systems breed large complex bureaucracies to manage them and the skills to understand and manipulate one don't necessarily translate to the other.

yeah its a total crapshoot whether things play out correctly or not

I’m at a FAANG right now and this couldn’t be further from the truth.

We basically bought out a ton of A- to A+ players from the rest of the industry and there are many high performers developing entire modules of core functionality themselves with a team of juniors and contractors supporting them. I also have a hunch they make $350-$750k.

Didn't they make John Carmack leave? Obviously I do not know Meta's internal projects, but the open source ones often have a poor quality and the main metric appears to be LOC (or KLOC in the case of those geniuses).

“High performers” in this article mean, to me, something like the 5% best.

John Carmack is not a “high performer.” He’s in the vanishly small <0.001%. We all know his name, and what he did and where he works.

Have you ever worked in faang? I disagree

Any company with bigger than three people will end up with compartments that have different internal cultures.

I worked there much longer than you and 100% agree.

Most people here just confuse high output with actual high performers.

Google no longer is able to place high performers because the current elite class of execs either see them as a threat or narrative disruptors.

Likely you never climbed high enough to see this.

It can even be seen from the outside if you observe the actual output of high ranking Googlers in open source projects and compare that with their status at Google.

Some are just nasty politicians that produce neither quality nor quantity.

People lower down on the ranks never realize that this is going on. They also have no exposure to what people are like higher up, and how much of it is bullshit politics

You’ve criticized me twice (wrongly on both counts) with only speculation as your source. This typically reveals confidence issues

Huh. Worked for two decades at a very high level in the final years at Google. I’m almost entirely positive you never did either.

Sounds like a problem at google then, now that they’re on their “final years”. Why didn’t you fix it at your “high level”?

Is English not your first language? You seem to be repeatedly misunderstanding.

Also you sound new to the company. Also just naive.

In that case, say no more.

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