[pknomad]

I've experienced something similar at Peloton where a C-level kept bringing former reports at Uber for key roles and started to push out the existing employees. It's business at the end of the day but I do think there's a graceful way of bringing people in from former companies.

[dave78]

Same thing at my company, only it was a former Microsoft employee who brought along all his buddies. They screwed up a bunch of stuff because they didn't understand our market or customers, and then all slowly got let go before having to contend with the full consequences of their bad decisions.

We're now in a multi year recovery process.

[tsunamifury]

This hits so hard and so painfully. Had a VP from Amazon come into google Cloud and he seemed to have no clue about the ladder or discipline he was executive over. We had to explain his job to him several times.

He was an absolute incompetent in every sense of the word and fired high quality workers the entire time until he himself was fired.

[tortue0]

Felt this too with MSFT folks.

I never want to hear "rhythm of the business" again.

[justinclift]

You don't happen to work at Nokia do you? ;)

[fuzztester]

This practice of bringing in former reports or buddies is very common in the industry, both in startups and established companies.

You just have to look at the About us / Management/ Leadership page on the company web site and correlate a few names, current positions and positions in former companies, to get it.

[pknomad]

I feel conflicted about the matter. I understand the appeal of bringing in people you know; they are a known quantity and involve less risk-taking than hiring an unknown person.

I can see it going super well if the new people brought in are liked and the culture from the older company is good. In our case, it was the opposite and tanked the team morale.

[beachy]

I've only seen it work poorly.

In my experience, the new top guy brings in his old lackeys because they complemented him, and made him look good, in the context of the top guy's previous company.

Hence they often turn out to be one dimensional, rather than rounded contributors - e.g great at bringing in projects on time even though everyone hates working with them, or great at technical due diligence/sniffing out skunk projects even though the new company's best work is in skunk projects.

[midoridensha]

>In my experience, the new top guy brings in his old lackeys because they complemented him

I think you mean they complimented him. If they had complemented him, things would have gone well.

[fuzztester]

I just meant that you can detect the practice by the bios on corp websites, not whether it was good or bad.

[jahewson]

This is not business, it’s loyalty and empire building, at the expense of the business.

[justinclift]

Yeah, sounds like pretty standard nepotism.

[smugma]

One division where I work brought in a bunch of ex-Cisco folks. It’s odd but for some reason, they did really well here, even though Cisco is quite different than FAANG.

[duxup]

I had a similar experience.

I was told “Hey they’re all from <big company>!” as if it was a positive.

I wondered “How is it everyone of these guys buddies worked there and big company didn’t keep them?”

Learned pretty fast why they left / the other company didn’t keep them… (they were all smoke and mirrors and no results).

[moneywoes]

Seeing the same thing first hand with an ex-amazon exec