This is interesting for its notes on Google's organizational history and what it got right/wrong, but the bits about other companies don't seem to make sense to me, particularly Facebook:
> Facebook is kind of nothing. It’s a product company and I (personally) don’t think the product is very compelling. I think they hit a moment and will see the fate of MySpace in time. I can’t pick out product innovations that were particularly awesome (other than incubating on college campuses and exploiting sex more or less tastefully). And, their infrastructure is pretty crude which means they’ll run into the problem, eventually, hiring the kind of people who can do the kind of scaling they’re going to need.
Surely a company that services billions of users (the kind of scale only rivaled by companies like Google) and worth $500b+ got something right when it comes to scaling organizationally/technically. They're Google's arch nemesis when it comes to recruiting, for one. Strange to see such dismissal from someone who purports to be a high level manager at Google. Anecdotally, I've heard that Facebook is less bureaucratic than Google, particularly during promotions.
The issue is that there isn't a great deal of talent around and talent does not scale easily. Once you get a critical mass of average people drowning out the talented engineers, it's a slippery slope to the bottom.
You're right Facebook is worth a lot of money today and so was Yahoo!
I wonder how much talent is turned away at HR or decides to not even pursue for cultural reasons. The brightest I know are mostly in business for themselves. The only reason I want a job is to work on massive scale problems again, but being an SF city gardener would pay $65k plus benefits and I’d just do that if I weren’t on the hook paying for student loans for my CS degree. Cultural reasons being that IME across 5 jobs in SF that I am not welcome in the profitable tech scene (recent lawsuits and news are vindicating) and also it turns out a lot of people at the top have lied to get and stay there like the truth is a sickness which is antithetical to creative talent.
“Cultural reasons” isn’t very helpful to you or the HN audience in assessing. If you ever want to do a mock interview I’ll gladly do it. There’s probably a few spots where you’re going wrong.
services billions of users (the kind of scale only rivaled by companies like Google) and worth $500b+
A lot of people, not necessarily including the author, don't realize the niche challenges involved in running really high-scale services. They present hard problems, which just aren't there at low scale.
They're Google's arch nemesis when it comes to recruiting, for one.
And advertising. Facebook's advertising business is huge, probably only 2nd to Google's. Now, it is possible that Facebook's extreme focus on advertising and user engagement will drive off many of its users, in which case the advertising model won't sustain long-term. However, today it is big.
Remaining challenges in tech industry: scaling and incentives (and incentives at scale :). I also see a major extrovert bias, which might seem a little funny for tech. But, again, product managers (or, God forbid, Sales people) are all really subject to the “let’s just get some people in a room” style of planning and problem resolution. I firmly believe some massive amount of productivity is squandered from people choosing the wrong communication paradigm — I think it’s often chosen for the convenience or advantage of someone who is either in an extrovert role or who is just following extrovert tendencies. Massive problem at Google, which is ironic given their composition. Amazon had some obvious nods to avoiding these sorts of things (e.g., “reading time”) but I don’t know how pervasive they were or how effective people believed them to be.
Oftentimes you will have even engineering managers (usually ones who can't engineer their way out of a paper bag) fall back onto this tactic.
I do this as a developer, although not because I have an extrovert bias (I think). I'd generally rather not, but when there are so many disparate stakeholders for a particular issue then asynchronous planning and decision making just gets drawn out and stalls. The process keeps getting blocked by someone or other who is not responding or isn't available.
This problem of actually having too many stakeholders for different problems I think tends to crop up because the organization or its systems are tightly coupled - 'spaghetti organizations' and 'spaghetti systems architecture'.
If you don't have this you're lucky, I guess. Small startups obviously won't, some big orgs with talented and ruthless architects will stop it (Amazon seems pretty good at this). If you do, well, you need to deal with the problem somehow or you'll keep stalling.
I've long suspected that Google, in spite of their reputation for having the creme de la creme of engineers, has a massive spaghetti code and spaghetti organizational problem, but this is just based upon bits and pieces I overhear. It's hard to know for sure.
>I've long suspected that Google...has a massive spaghetti code...problem
It’s worse, it’s cold congealed spaghetti. Warm spaghetti you can insert and remove noodles easily, but when it congeals, removing or inserting an individual noodle gets problematic. They can get away with this because they have a huge number of engineer brains that are used to locally heat the spaghetti.
I do miss the Amazon design reviews; where we’d all ready the design in silence and then discuss. In the few jobs I’ve had since then, people are less engaged in reviews and often unprepared- asking basic questions to earn their participation badges.
> influx of people responding primarily to financial rewards (related).
This is surprising. Based on the relative success of the financial industry, I would have guessed that it's easier to organize a company when people are motivated by (and responsive to) money.
People who aren't motivated by money are much harder to organize/control and in a corporate structure that seems like a weakness not a strength.
But early Google's results speak for themselves. Not much to argue with...
Perhaps the difficulty of success/failure attribution in complex engineering projects makes it hard to motivate people properly with money as the primary means. One might be able to hide bad hacks/technical debts in a product for a long time after one is promoted or has received bonuses. It might not always be clear why the decisions were made and who others helped shape the decisions as well.
The financial industry tends to have clearer attribution and shorter feedback cycle, in some way similar to sales, and this allows tangible rewards to be given out more objectively.
The equivalent of bad hacks / technical debts exist in the financial industry, it's just when they blow up the cost gets socialized onto the rest of society. This is basically what happened in the financial crisis.
There are a lot of hacks in finance that play out and cost only the company making the errors dearly. It’s probably 99+% of them, but you hear about the half-dozen that got larger than that.
I’m not minimizing the problem of the latter, but there’s plenty of the former.
> ...I would have guessed that it's easier to organize a company when people are motivated by (and responsive to) money
I'm thinking it goes the other way. It's hard, once you get larger than Dunbar's number, it's very hard for organizations to understand what everyone is up to and what they think about it. The straightforward financial rewards are to keep things simple for the people in charge of strategy and organizational health in general.
> People who aren't motivated by money are much harder to organize/control and in a corporate structure that seems like a weakness not a strength.
The issue I've seen at Google with people who are money, or more likely promotion, obsessed is that they start prioritizing work which will help them get promoted or a good review. This probably works well when it's easy to objectively identify work performance like in sales and I imagine in finance, so perhaps that's why it works well there, but for SWEs it's often difficult to objectively measure impact in my opinion.
So then this misalignment in what's rewarded and what is good for the team will cause issues because people who just focus on the team's well being might end up always doing the work that is not financially rewarded while those who want to be promoted fight for the projects that matter for promotion.
An interesting thing to note is that even though the compensation has decreased recently as far as I know, we all still get paid extremely well so while I would have thought that would prevent people from caring so much about promotion, that seems to not be the case.
If you’re not a homeowner yet, you need raises at least as fast as real estate is appreciating to feel like you have a fighting chance (or even to maintain your standard of living under rising rent).
Depending on the role, I find it hard to believe that people being motivated by money is a bad thing as the company grows. Sure, at a start up it’s easy to connect the dots with what you work on and your end-customers, so it’s good to care about and empathize with them. But if your job is to keep the lights on, that passion for the cause isn’t going to feel vindicated too often.
Not to say that keeping the lights on can’t be a rewarding problem to work on, good plumbers will take pride in there work and find it interesting. But do you care if your plumbers are passionate about the building they are working on? No.
The problem with money motivation is that it lasts short term. I speak for myself but whenever I was given a raise it kept me going for 6 months at the most. Post that it felt like normal but good and challenging (yes they are different) work kept me going for much longer (1-2 yrs).
Now the problem with 6 months is that the engineers typically leave after launch once their target of raise and promotion is met and the company suffers to varying degree. In the long run this may or may not matter depending upon external factors - for ex. cloud services kick-off helped Amazon a lot so even if there are significant number of engineers pulling up 60-80% it won't matter that much. Or if you are already a leader by long distance (Google, Microsoft and IBM earlier).
> Now the problem with 6 months is that the engineers typically leave after launch once their target of raise and promotion is met and the company suffers to varying degree.
I think the article has it right when it referenced the importance of "the ability to reward engineering work that had little visible outcome". Rewarding mostly shipping (or launching) seems to be broken in particular, I'm not sure rewards themselves are entirely ineffective.
> Rewarding mostly shipping (or launching) seems to be broken in particular
I've fallen into this kitchen-sink trap in the past. Though I think it's tough for stakeholders to appreciate the invisibles like security or reliably until those get bad enough to cross a critical threshold.
Agreed. Though in my experience they appreciate it in general terms. They just have a hard time prioritizing and rewarding particular behavior. The concrete tradeoffs like "she decided not to ship three months ago in order to do the security audit" still need to be evaluated.
I’m sick of this. I came here ready to elevate my career (network=net worth) but all I have to show for it is a resume full of craters and a black book full of people who wish me unwell (emptying). A few good connections in tech, but I mostly stay for general BA life and my community is nice.
My resume would be fine if I “played ball” aka. was an opportunistic smiling liar. Back in my old market we could give 4 week notice and say we were interviewing around, here they treat you like shit and terminate when you express need for rest/thoughts of change. I understand it from a fear/risk point of view, unsure how to change that besides refusing to play (eg. starting the next unicorn out of pocket as a B corp, making investors take a whiteboard exam before having a phone call with leadership :).
Money isn’t a motivator, contrary it makes the treadmill go faster if we aren’t anticipating how to make it work for us rather than help us consume ourselves in desire and lust. A steady business with an understandable revenue stream, imagine the anxieties we wouldn’t have.
> making investors take a whiteboard exam before having a phone call with leadership :)
Are you saying that an investor who can, say, write out FizzBuzz in JS would be a better partner? Or are we talking about a different set of whiteboard-able skills?
>Later, there was a tragicomic story of when they changed bus schedules so that people couldn’t exploit the kitchens by getting meals for themselves [and family…seen that with my own eyes!] “to go” and take them home with them on the Google Bus — someone actually complained in a company meeting that the new schedules…meant they couldn’t get their meals to go. And they changed the bus schedule back, even though their intent was to reduce the abuse of the free food.
company made mistake and self-corrected. A stage in the lifecycle where company has already got bean counters who can't see beyond a penny in front of their nose (food, even with "to go" is such a penny expense, especially compare with the hit such change took upon the engineers' morale), yet still had the ability to self-correct. From what i hear today they have reached the stage where bean counters have overtook and the ability to self-correct is pretty much gone.
significantly decreasing the power that managers hold treating organization problems
While the article gave examples of this in Google, I haven't seen this happening in Amazon. Engineering Managers here hold a lot of power on the business side of their product (in addition to the usual career growth of their reportees and project management). For e.g., a PM (product manager) can suggest what we should build next, but the final call is very much, if not all, up to the EM. Another example is annual planning- EMs play an important role in deciding, around the end of each year, what their team will build next year.
Microsoft — the epitome of high pressure big software, abuse of market dominance, decline, and then pivot into new relevance. IBM II. I don’t know that there’s much about their culture or current business that’s particularly admirable.
I recently read Satya Nadella's book, Hit Refresh, where he talks at length about the culture change he is driving at Microsoft. I gathered that his intentions are good, but the book felt like a hotch-potch of ideas without any clear direction. I'd assume that to change the core culture of a company as big as Microsoft, you'd have to start with some basic themes or ideas and build a more detailed plan on top of them. What I found was a long unstructured list of things he wants to do that didn't seem practical at Microsoft-scale.
Not sure why you're downvoted here, this is a very fair concern. Microsoft is as impressive as it gets - they've been around for over 40 years, and are still extremely relevant. Tech has a graveyard full of impressive companies that no longer exist - Google and Facebook are sitting on campuses of two such examples. Whatever Microsoft is or isn't doing admirably, they've stuck and that itself is impressive in this industry.
> Facebook is kind of nothing. It’s a product company and I (personally) don’t think the product is very compelling. I think they hit a moment and will see the fate of MySpace in time. I can’t pick out product innovations that were particularly awesome (other than incubating on college campuses and exploiting sex more or less tastefully). And, their infrastructure is pretty crude which means they’ll run into the problem, eventually, hiring the kind of people who can do the kind of scaling they’re going to need.
Surely a company that services billions of users (the kind of scale only rivaled by companies like Google) and worth $500b+ got something right when it comes to scaling organizationally/technically. They're Google's arch nemesis when it comes to recruiting, for one. Strange to see such dismissal from someone who purports to be a high level manager at Google. Anecdotally, I've heard that Facebook is less bureaucratic than Google, particularly during promotions.