[Magmalgebra]

> E.g. Amazon, Meta etc. have terrible work cultures

This is like saying "Switzerland has a terrible work culture". These companies are literally the size of a small country - culture ends up being much more fine grained.

Anecdotally - most people I know at Meta love working there - fewer people love their jobs at Amazon, but many of them enjoy it. I've enjoyed all of my own big tech jobs despite much public griping about what it's like to work at these companies.

I'm not saying my network is represnative - but my experience strongly suggest the following:

- the way you experience work culture at a company is much more determined by your director/vp (e.g. the 50-200 person group you're most closely tied to) than the overall company culture.

- many reports of a toxic work culture are really just cultural mismatches. At scale, this means it's easy to read 100 stories of a bad match and treat it as toxicity.

[yodsanklai]

I worked only in one big tech company, but my impression is that they try very hard to have a consistent work culture across the company. Everything was super standardized and controlled. There's also a high turnover so even if there's a bunch of senior people that maintain a sane culture, they'll leave eventually.

As for director/vp, I barely know mine. I think this guy just wants to keep his cushion job and deliver whatever BS his managers ask him. Just like the rest of us really...

[Magmalgebra]

> my impression is that they try very hard to have a consistent work culture across the company

they do - and they fail!

A truism is that your manager is the biggest determiner of your work environment. This is just as true for your manager as for you. To that end, your director/vp has a really outsized influence on the people you interact with the most (and thus define the experience of working at the company for you).

If you're like me and love talking to people you'll find a huge variation in the lived experience of people working these jobs.

[nine_zeros]

> - the way you experience work culture at a company is much more determined by your director/vp (e.g. the 50-200 person group you're most closely tied to) than the overall company culture.

> many reports of a toxic work culture are really just cultural mismatches. At scale, this means it's easy to read 100 stories of a bad match and treat it as toxicity.

And you get both of these nuggets of actionable info in watering holes - which was the original point.