[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.