501–510 of 618 posts
It’s a terrible place to work but not for the reasons people think. Being green and fresh is priceless, you can take on any challenge because you don’t yet know the reality of it, and once you get in it, your only way is out, which can be really powerful if put to the right uses. Amazon puts a good price on that to juice the best years of your life. Please don’t squander your best years to go from L4 -> L5 or L6 -> L…
One underlying problem with these PIP type programs at FAANG seems to be that they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like 30% of the company is underperforming and subject to an annual 6% cull. There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat. If you have a very competitive interview process and hig…
I was put on a PIP at Red Hat that was quite farcical and very much about personality disconnects between myself and my manager (and made much more annoying by the fact that he had told me before the PIP that multiple other managers had let him know that they would be interested in me being on their team if I was looking for something different - instead he went the PIP route). There was room for improvement (isn't t…
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Sure, some people interview better than they work, and vice versa. But do a huge flood of bad employees really make it through these very difficult gates and merit 30% of employees being marked underperformers every year?
Obviously this depends on the company, but after 15 years at multiple FAANG, I'm leaning towards no. It might have been true at 2010-era Microsoft but the painful transition where they fired all the SDETs got rid of most of the people who "made it through" and after that I never felt this to be the case. Google, for instance, has a slow tedious hiring process with a lot of false negatives, but in my experience those…
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> So the employer has a financial inventive program to encourage people to stay in the organization long term That's not correct. The financial incentive program of vesting is designed to keep the cost of actually paying people down, plain and simple. If you're interviewing, I would encourage you to pretend the stock compensation doesn't exist. I've had offers of $60k actual cash with $300k stock with a five year cli…
Do you mean a five year vesting schedule or a five year cliff before you start vesting. The former is...bad, but I don't think I've seen the latter. That's just...no, absolutely not.
One underlying problem with these PIP type programs at FAANG seems to be that they have very high barriers to entry in the interview process, and then act like 30% of the company is underperforming and subject to an annual 6% cull. There are industries & companies that have grown fat & lazy and could use a few annual 6% culls, but you eventually run out of fat. If you have a very competitive interview process and hig…
High barriers to entry on the interview process don't mean as much as you may think. Even with the best interview process in the world, you're only going to have a small number of hours to try to evaluate a lot of complex factors about a human you know nothing about. You're going to hire people you shouldn't - and lots of them. You're also going to miss hiring people you should. It sucks, but that's life. With that i…
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I know you are sharing some interesting observations, but can we all stop talking about employees as the "fat" of companies and firing of employees as "culls". > underperformers lying about to cull is not just bad wording. By definition, there will always be underperformers. A profitable company only has "too many" employees if you think it has to pay a larger dividend to its owners / shareholders or that future grow…
> Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees? Because this ignores reality. Especially at FAANG companies, growth is expected and the majority of compensation is stock. If you stop growing, and stop having a profit, your stock tanks, and future compensation - as well as compensation from years prior that is still in the form of company stock - becomes wor…
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I know you are sharing some interesting observations, but can we all stop talking about employees as the "fat" of companies and firing of employees as "culls". > underperformers lying about to cull is not just bad wording. By definition, there will always be underperformers. A profitable company only has "too many" employees if you think it has to pay a larger dividend to its owners / shareholders or that future grow…
> " Why is it not fine when a company is more or less breaking even but paying good salaries to its employees? " Do you have a retirement plan that contains stock or get any options/stock grants as part of your compensation? Those shares are your ownership stake in corporations and your retirement quite directly depends on those shares increasing in price faster than inflation.
A certain Y Combinator startup (two-sided labor marketplace in healthcare and nursing homes) requires that its frontline managers PIP or fire at least half of their team each year and sometimes more frequently. "If you're average, why are you here." And the managers do because they are terrified about losing their jobs. It has one of the worst cultures, and code bases, in the world, because nobody knows how things wo…
edit: can we just say the company names, this site is anonymous lmao
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Obviously this depends on the company, but after 15 years at multiple FAANG, I'm leaning towards no. It might have been true at 2010-era Microsoft but the painful transition where they fired all the SDETs got rid of most of the people who "made it through" and after that I never felt this to be the case. Google, for instance, has a slow tedious hiring process with a lot of false negatives, but in my experience those…
I mean looking at Googles abysmal track record compared to its peers when it comes to creating and sustaining new products and product categories over the last two decades is not exactly an argument for their hiring process.