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Mental health impacts of a big tech job

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Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#101

Post by jazzyjackson »

acituan wrote: post #54
jefftk wrote: post #42

Big Tech is hundreds of thousands of employees across thousands of teams with a wide variety of work environments. The author's experience sounds really rough, but it also doesn't make sense to generalize from there to this whole piece of the industry. To give another data point, I've worked at a different Big Tech company since 2012, on two different teams, and haven't experienced anything like this. There's no pres…

> what I'm trying to say is that Big Tech is a big place, and if you find yourself somewhere with bad culture don't take that to mean there aren't other places you would like. Tell that to an H1B holder. You're not wrong to point out that we can't generalize from a single data point, but you're wrong to bring your positive experience as if there is an equivalence between the two. They don't have the same weighing; we…

if you start measuring suicides it could just push companies to weed out depressed people from their hiring pool, possibly increasing suicides overall by trying to avoid being painted as the cause (I tend to think the most ironic outcome is the most likely)

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#102

Post by actually_a_dog »

reilly3000 wrote: post #64

I’ll add that the content of the work, especially around the but not-limited-to the advertising business, can be soul-grinding on its own. As a young person it’s easy to buy into almost any business model, but when you find yourself an instrument of exploitation it can create cognitive dissonance and anxiety. Whether it’s deceiving users, getting them to spend more than they can afford, or creating a wake of environm…

Yeah, getting people to click on ads is definitely not what I want to do with my life. At my most recent company, I remember when the ads team had run an A/B test that showed a pretty significant lift in the number of ads clicked. Guess what the change was? They just put more ads on the page. I was floored when I heard that.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#103

Post by random314 »

ikiris wrote: post #99
random314 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not true. Big Tech is struggling to hire - which is why the offer packages are so fat now.

Big tech is struggling to hire in a situation of its own making, by making the interview process so awful, and not caring about retention.

Maybe. But my point is that the fat pay packages are not because big tech has a lot of money. Rather, they are running out of supply for the kind of engineers they would like to hire. It's a demand supply thing. If big tech found it easy to hire, they would pay half of what they do now. Their primary expense is salary for software engineers.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#104

Post by kyralis »

georgeburdell wrote: post #43

This seems like mostly an Apple problem. I have not heard similar issues with Google and Facebook (I don't know anyone in the other "A" or the "N")

No, this is a "specific team within FAANG" problem. It absolutely happens at some teams in all of them; it also absolutely does not happen in others. That's the problem with having very large companies; the experience is not homogenous.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#105

Post by kyralis »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #72

> The build server needed to be rebooted, but this was during the pandemic when no one was in the office. Furthermore, it was a Friday making it even more unlikely someone was around to do something as simple as press a button to reboot a machine. WTF? Why is a company like Apple using one off machines for release builds? That should all be on a VM and a server with a management interface. I made that mistake once an…

They're not. Some random team within Apple is. Just like any other company, there are definitely teams that have a terrible culture along with teams that don't.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#107

Post by sg47 »

acituan wrote: post #54
jefftk wrote: post #42

Big Tech is hundreds of thousands of employees across thousands of teams with a wide variety of work environments. The author's experience sounds really rough, but it also doesn't make sense to generalize from there to this whole piece of the industry. To give another data point, I've worked at a different Big Tech company since 2012, on two different teams, and haven't experienced anything like this. There's no pres…

> what I'm trying to say is that Big Tech is a big place, and if you find yourself somewhere with bad culture don't take that to mean there aren't other places you would like. Tell that to an H1B holder. You're not wrong to point out that we can't generalize from a single data point, but you're wrong to bring your positive experience as if there is an equivalence between the two. They don't have the same weighing; we…

As a H1B holder who's also a cancer survivor and suffering from severe health issues, I can tell you it's hell. I cry at least once a week at the fact that I cannot take a break without having to destroy my life and my family's life and 20+ years of life built up here. Everything this person said is absolutely true. The high compensation comes at a very high cost. It's not just mental or physical but also moral. You follow some arbitrary process since some higher up decided that it's the best way to measure productivity or performance. You underlevel people because you have to have a high bar. So someone with 20+ years of experience with subject matter expertise (not me) is a 'developing' Principal engineer. You have to hit arbitrary dates with moving goal posts and convince your team that they are doing God's work.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#108

Post by noir_lord »

The bit about the crush to get something out at all costs which wasn't then looked at for days hits home hard.

I've seen that trick pulled many times over my career and I've learnt to just shrug and let it roll.

Unless you can explain to me why it is so absolutely critical that it needs to go today in a form I can understand then I'm not going remotely above and beyond to make it work out that way.

Stressing out my entire team to make an arbitrary deadline imposed from outside for invisible reasons is the definition of me not doing my job as a leader.

It takes experience and practice to learn to manage upwards but it's an intensely useful skill.

Start not with explaining what you can't/won't do but instead with what you can/will do - most people are reasonable most of the time and if they are unreasonable anyway then whatever you do will not be right/enough.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#109

Post by jbay808 »

random314 wrote: post #103
ikiris wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big tech is struggling to hire in a situation of its own making, by making the interview process so awful, and not caring about retention.

Maybe. But my point is that the fat pay packages are not because big tech has a lot of money. Rather, they are running out of supply for the kind of engineers they would like to hire. It's a demand supply thing. If big tech found it easy to hire, they would pay half of what they do now. Their primary expense is salary for software engineers.

It's also because big tech has a lot of money. Many other companies can't afford to pay those salaries, and they would if they could.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#110

Post by nbm »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #93
Ocerge wrote: post #7

> This may seem outrageous to someone that hasn’t experienced this type of situation, but in the Big Tech world this expectation is normal. I work at a FAANG, and it's probably a team-by-team thing, but that is absolutely not normal in my experience. That's a particularly shitty circumstance, and it's a bummer your management didn't stick up for you.

I keep hearing people say this ("it's all team based"), and I don't doubt that it's true. Suppose I don't want to end up on one of those pressure cooker teams. How can you avoid that? I just don't see how it's possible, unless you know someone inside the company who can give you some insight as to which teams to avoid.

At FB, most ICs are not hired for a specific team in advance, and instead choose between (for SWE, a long list of) teams during the Bootcamp process. You can chat to future team mates (not just manager or lead) and ask them straight out about that. (Some people also ask for the half-ly survey results for that team as well.)

If you’re being hired for a team specifically (at another company, say), ask for a “follow-up” meeting with future team mates after offer as a condition for accept. You have a lot of power at that point.

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