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by tetromino_ 1082 days ago
Can you give some examples? What was the job function and approximate level of the characters in your examples?

In my experience, ordinary lowly FAANG software engineers are expected to treat each other with respect and kindness that is simply unimaginable in average companies. But I have zero insight into what happens at the managerial or director levels.

2 comments

> In my experience, ordinary lowly FAANG software engineers are expected to treat each other with respect and kindness that is simply unimaginable in average companies.

Strongly disagree. Yes, there are fairly good standards about how you communicate with other people. But competition between peers is higher in these companies, and you can see it. It's hard to form friendships in a SV company for this reason. Less-competitive industries are different. Most people don't really want to be in this kind of competition, and will be friendlier in other situations. But they'll endure these environments for the money.

One of my concerns is that, if this is the only kind of environment you experience as an adult, you're going to start to carry this kind of competitive behavior out into the larger world. And as this corporate culture starts to eat larger and larger parts of the economy, this increasingly will be the only thing people know. This seems deeply corrosive to society as a whole.

It's one of the reasons I like to get out of upper-middle-class professional milieus when I can. People act differently. They're friendlier.

Stack ranking and Pip culture means every director needs to PIP a certain percentage of their reports. This leads to unhealthy competition among engineers and competition among managers.

The system is BS because a lot of projects work better when more than one engineer/team is involved. But by making it a zero sum game, most engineers (and their managers) spend more time backstabbing others to save themselves. Zero productive work gets done. It is all about backstabbing and BS optics to make themselves look good to the director.