[harles]

Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires. I think that’s much too strong of a reaction.

The FAANGs I’ve been at, and especially where I’ve managed, high impact work is rarely passed over when it comes to both comp and promo. The problem is the opposite of that: there simply isn’t enough high impact work to go around. It’s a common problem in pure engineering, and one that’s becoming more obvious in management as the article alludes to.

[piva00]

The problem is that it doesn't foster a culture of collaboration, it becomes a competition around who is leading the high impact projects; to the point where people start to not communicate, and entrench themselves when working on high impact work just to avoid others getting jealous (and/or greedy) and stealing their projects to pad their promotion package.

As far as I know this is common in most of FAANG and other big tech corps. A friend just left Meta last week due to this bickering, everyone is protective of their work, everyone is paranoid their high impact work will be taken by someone else looking for a promotion.

It's perverse incentives all around, over my career I found I prefer to work in a collaborative environment than in one where I need to be distrustful of my peers due to systemically bad incentives. I'm lucky my current employer is a large-ish corp that fosters collaboration over competition, makes me much happier.

[Karrot_Kream]

Yeah I'm leaving a Big Tech company for exactly this reason. Ultimately, staff needs to be thinned. If too many folks are competing for too little work then you either have too much staff or too little work. In this economy, probably the former.

[pg_1234]

On the up side, if managers get desperate and turn to in-fighting ICs can play them off against each other ... as opposed to being treated like cattle.

[scarface_74]

> The problem is that it doesn't foster a culture of collaboration, it becomes a competition around who is leading the high impact projects

That’s definitely not true in my org and I haven’t seen that when reaching out to other departments.

Anyone who has been in corporate America for awhile knows that you can’t get anything done without building relationships

[marcinzm]

Give me an example of a large (10k+) company that uses a better approach and has better business metrics than FAANG. Otherwise you're talking hypotheticals while FAANG has continuing growth and 20+% profit margins.

[coldtea]

Most of the letters in FAANG hardly have their "continuing growth" or their "20+% profit margins" through the software development they do.

Early capture, network effects, and coasting is more like it.

So the quality of their layers of managers hardly matters, in G, for example, comically so (as has been relayed by insiders time and again).

[marcinzm]

Amazon has had very strong competition that they mostly beat. Meta has faced strong competition which they beat through scaling out acquisitions. Apple has gone from nothing to the world's richest company. Microsoft was a joke and now it's not. Google I agree with you on.

[coldtea]

Apple and (to a lesser degree) Amazon are the two exceptions.

Google, Meta, and co...

[piva00]

I want to flip this: give me an example of large companies in other engineering-adjacent industries who fostered an atmosphere of hyper-competition, breeding into a lack of internal collaboration and extreme distrust and which have been extremely successful due to that practice.

I ask that because you are conflating that there's a causality between internal politics vs business metrics success, which is definitely not that directly correlated, even less in tech which is an outlier in almost every aspect: compensation, growth, scale, etc. There are many more parameters to consider than simply a direct relationship between internal politics for promotions to business success, the whole environment of tech is conducive to create profitable behemoths after a market is captured through hypergrowth. I think the only outlier to this in FAANG is Apple.

In tech if we take the example of Google you can't say that it's because they apply this approach that they're successful. After decades the Google branding is extremely damaged for adoption of their new products, we all expect the new shiny product to die in 1-3 years. The new shiny product was definitely someone's (or multiple someones) promotion package capstone, it doesn't help the company long-term, Google's profits don't come from whatever new product someone created for a promotion, it comes from ads while relying on search to support the ads business, both are some of the earliest products Google ever released.

> Otherwise you're talking hypotheticals while FAANG has continuing growth and 20+% profit margins.

This is not directly related to management incentives to internal competition, show me how it can be directly attributed to it.

[marcinzm]

My point is that without examples we cannot have a conversation except in meaningless hypotheticals. As you said there's a ton of factors that influence company success. Having positive and negative examples of companies with different cultures would allow for a nuanced discussion. You'd expect that in most situations unless there was a strong selection bias against a certain culture.

>I want to flip this: give me an example of large companies in other engineering-adjacent industries who fostered an atmosphere of hyper-competition, breeding into a lack of internal collaboration and extreme distrust and which have been extremely successful due to that practice.

Off the top of my head, hedge funds and banks. Not familiar enough with other industries to say so personally.

[ethanbond]

It’s a little silly to ascribe that entirely to their management practices and not at least a little to the fundamentals of the industry.

In reality it is probably almost 100% due to fundamentals and almost 0% due to management practices (Amazon perhaps an exception).

It was destined to be ultra high margin and destined to have a few huge winners due to facts well outside of the control of the FAANGs themselves.

[marcinzm]

Then it should be easy to find companies with different management practices that did just as well. We can talk hypotheticals all day and get nowhere.

[ethanbond]

It is easy: look to other industries. Koch Industries, KKR, bp, Walmart, JPMC, Saudi Aramco, Volkswagen, etc.

Now why can't you find others inside the same industry who compete with these and behave dramatically differently? First of all, management practices across the FAANGs are not uniform and yet they're all up there with one another, so clearly it isn't because there's one incredible management style.

Perhaps instead their trajectory is primarily defined by their industry, as I stated.

[dopidopHN]

How is management at Zappos for instance ?

[marcinzm]

You mean the Amazon subsidiary that was bought out in 2009?

[itsoktocry]

>In reality it is probably almost 100% due to fundamentals

Can you explain what inherent "fundamentals" are associated with these companies that destined them to be successful despite themselves? I mean, Microsoft was founded almost 50 years ago. Their success was a given? Management practices have had no effect there? We can argue about the ratio, but it sounds like silly post-hoc reasoning to claim that these companies didn't work to get to where they are, one way or another.

[ethanbond]

Microsoft isn't FAANG.

The fundamentals being that they had the most significant bull run in history on top of the lowest interest rates in history on top of the two largest communication-technology transformations in history (Internet then mobile) which happened to produce a near-zero cost distribution channel for a product format (internet-connected software) which has near-zero opex and which has natural network effects.

A very small set of companies were going to win this regardless of anyone's management practices. I think 99.999% of reasonable-sounding conclusions you can draw from their success will be wrong, including "the management style is really really good" or "logos should have blue in them."

> it sounds like silly post-hoc reasoning to claim that these companies didn't work to get to where they are

I am not sure where I made that claim

[TimPC]

Some of the conclusions seem far fetched. But some seem inherently reasonable.

For example, all of the successful tech monopolists paid a premium for engineering and management talent and had processes designed to hire the best (clearly not perfect but effective enough to make lots of good hires). I’m not sure how far we want to stretch the implications of that but at a minimum there is something substantially different between the top 10% of engineers and the bottom 50% of engineers and that difference seems to matter some.

[scarface_74]

> Microsoft isn't FAANG.

This is a horrible well actually. FANG (notice the missing A) was a term coined by Kramer and means absolutely nothing. Apple originally “wasn’t a FAANG” when the term was first coined and it already had a market cap higher than the other four companies.

As far as market cap and impact on the industry, Netflix is a nothingburger. Microsoft has been one of the top five most valuable companies since 2000.

[jmalicki]

Using fundamentals is misunderstanding the term.

When investment analysts say fundamentals, they're talking about things like demonstrated business performance.

You're using the word "fundamentals" to mean what investors call "beta", which is almost the opposite of what it means.

[ethanbond]

Ah, I was not trying to use the finance term of art but I see why that's a confusing word choice here. Can't edit but take fundamentals here as "the base dynamics of the industry."

Thanks for the flag!

[dahwolf]

FAANG has money printing machines based on ad monopolies, with the exception of Apple.

All their engineers could do nothing for a year and nobody could tell as it comes to metrics. There's no evidence I know of that suggests that promotion culture is the factor responsible for FAANG success.

[bedobi]

Facebook has money because it's Facebook. That doesn't mean how the company is run is good, efficient or worthy of emulating. Everyone I know who's worked there says it's not well run. There are constant articles like this proving it is not, and has not been, well run.

[moneywoes]

Does your current place have a URA quota?

[piva00]

No, not at all.

[laserlight]

> Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires.

A “victim” of a pyramid scheme can become a millionaire, if they entered early enough. Those people play a very important role for the scammers. They will be used as examples of how well the scheme works to those entering the bottom of the pyramid.

[dahwolf]

So now it's a pyramid scheme?

A scam and a pyramid scheme are not synonyms. Toxic promotion culture is neither a scam nor a pyramid scheme.

A scam is where you pay for something yet do not receive the promised item. Nobody promised you a promotion at Google so it's not a scam.

A pyramid scheme is where an ever growing amount of low level newcomers pay for the returns of those on the top. When you're a low level newcomer at Google, you don't pay for the higher level employees. Google does. Nor does it require an exponentially growing amount of newcomers for the system to not collapse.

[cjrp]

I'd say they're less of a victim, more of a co-conspirator

[b112]

Not sure on this one.

Before the Internet, and before Amway in the US, many average folk did not know what a pyramid scheme was. So some of the earlies, in a pyramid, might not even understand.

If this promotion method is a scam (I'd say no, but...), and those trapped inside benefit, they may not think it is, too.

So maybe not a victim, but also not a conspirator?

[notyourwork]

I agree. Promotion oriented architecture becomes a real thing because of this.

[tcbawo]

I saw the term Resume Driven Development on here once, and I’ve been using it ever since. I like this term a lot, also.

[djur]

Most tech companies do not make ICs millionaires.

[tylerhou]

Google and Meta do.

[bonzini]

At levels comparable to Facebook's E7/E8 they absolutely do. Most tech companies do not have an IC ladder that reaches that level.

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google,Facebook&track...

[zeroonetwothree]

Even an E5 can become a millionaire pretty quickly. You can definitely save around 100k/yr at that income and with a 6% return (very reasonable) that ends up giving you $4m after 20 years or $8m after 30 years. So you will end up quite well off in retirement.

[coldtea]

Most FAANG ICs never reach those levels.

[oblio]

We're talking about several hundreds of people, 99% of which are located in a few high cost of living locations.

Considering the fact that we're talking about millions of individual contributors, these people are statistically insignificant.

[adrianbordinc]

You don't need to make 1M a year to become a millionaire. Becoming millionaire doesn't mean having a 1M paycheck a year. You can get there in a couple of years with 0.X * 1M paychecks. For example can be E5 for 5 years at 350K/year, and that gets you there too.

And there's not several hundreds E5s or equivalent, there's thousands+ of them.

[TimPC]

$350k paycheck takes a fair amount of time to make a millionaire. You could be paying $72k/year in rent and $130k/year in taxes. If transit food and other expenses are $25k/year you pretty much need an 8 year run to save $1Mil.

I’m also not sure $1M should be the standard for making people rich when the typical house where they live is $1.8M-$2.5M

[scarface_74]

Or you can just not live in a high cost of living area…

[hgsgm]

E5 is millionaire net worth accumulation.

[bigpeopleareold]

I think it is better to just justify if a task has a high impact to one's self, particularly in well-established companies. If I can get paid decently and learn new stuff to keep my knowledge fresh, that's good enough for me. However, that's something I had to train myself, because high-impact work doesn't come along well but there is a strong social component to it; it's great to talk about, at least.

I left my last company because there was simply nothing to gain from, unless I wanted to spend the next few years trying to maybe become a manager, which felt like a distant possibility there anyway.

[28304283409234]

This system leans towards certain types of people becoming managers. Which crates a monoculture. Never a good thing.

[coldtea]

>Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires.

They do, if the non-scam course would have made them richer millionaires.

[shepardrtc]

> Scams usually don’t make their victims millionaires

The people at the bottom? No. The people at the top? Yes.

> The problem is the opposite of that: there simply isn’t enough high impact work to go around.

You're leaving out the amount of duplicated work, or rather, the amount of teams that are working on the same thing.

[hgsgm]

The scam is the owner getting tens of $billions.