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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

#131

Post by scaramanga »

snek_case wrote: post #44
deadmutex wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps... but I think companies like FB also get (total guess) thousands of resumes per day. So, for every engineer that walks away, many more are knocking at the door. So, I think in management's eyes, very very very few people are irreplaceable.

That's not true at all where I am. Yes, I can post on twitter and get tons of CVs, but most applicants aren't that good. I may only want to interview 40% of the candidates I get, and I would really only want to hire about 1 in 5 people I interview. Interviewing takes time. Then after that, onboarding people on the job takes time too, it can take people several months to become effective on the job. Skilled, effective…

Never underestimate the effectiveness of total denial. You can hire in people who are barely competent to hold a pair of scissors. Sure they'll erode and ultimately destroy whatever technical edifice you've built this far. But by the time your ability, as a manager, to put a positive spin on the most abject of failure comes to an end, you'll have moved on to an even higher paying job at another FAANG, or retired.

Look at any failed multi-decade war waged by any unbeatable superpower past or present to see the highest levels of military and civilian command employ these exact same methods to build careers so successful that they'll be immortalized in statues for centuries after their deaths :)

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#133

Post by jjav »

mathgladiator wrote: post #2

So, recently I achieved happiness because I just don't care about the job anymore. I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most, and I've never been happier. I'm writing my final proposal as one final swing at the bat and the title is "XYZ or Bust" where either I get buy-in or I'm leaving. I've never felt better in my entire career. This is made possible because I'm old…

> I didn't even do my performance self review, and I wrote a poem instead. I got a Meets-Most, and I've never been happier.

Can't recommend this enough. I've nearly always opted-out of performance review dance. Just don't do it. In most companies I get pushback to do it but then they give up and it doesn't matter at all. Still get my promotions.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#134

Post by jamal-kumar »

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…

Big Tech? Try a friend of mine who quit a management position at wal-mart (vastly overqualified immigrant in a country not in north america) during the pandemic. Everything shifted to this horrible whatsapp group that kept on pestering everyone on and off shift and then he quit and found a way better job because this was hell.

I think it's important to realize that it is not limited to this industry; It's something that's actually also happening outside of bounds where people even might be used to this kind of remote work standards and practices, and it might be considered one even shittier to deal with when it comes to being new to this.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#135

Post by throw48738 »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #101
acituan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

Yeah or the companies get sued like French telecom company Orange because of proper news coverage and labor laws.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#136

Post by deadmutex »

exBarrelSpoiler wrote: post #121
deadmutex wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple may be worse than others.. but also know that people move around, and bring a part of their old culture to the new team. If they're in a senior position, and they have a bias towards people from their old employer while hiring, they could start hiring people from the ex-employer. Mix that in with a fast growing team, and now there is a risk of a subset of the company acting like they're at the old company. FWIW…

Well, after Google purchased Nest, there were all of those tales about the difficulties of integrating that startup into the parent company. Tony Fadell founded Nest, and he brought Apple's culture into it, and that style definitely did not gel with Google's more laidback environment.

FWIW, the people at Nest have been the nicest people I have worked with during my career. Many of them were ex-Apple. I did not work under Tony though, so can't comment on that. I also remember the comments from the ex-Dropcam team... And I tried to find out what happened there, but never fully found out.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#137

Post by jjav »

To me the industry has become so extremely toxic to mental health since agile became a thing. Must "sprint" 100% of the time, keep that velocity up at the maximum sustainable in short periods but forever.

A marathon runner can't have the pace of a 100m sprinter but software engineers are expected to maintain sprint pace for perpetuity.

And give detailed status reports Every.Single.Day. So there's no possibility of a breather, ever.

This is not at all what it used to be like pre-agile. There was time to think deeply about solutions. It was ok to slack off a day (or three) and make it up later when you got into The Zone.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#138

Post by shadowdev »

Don't you hate it when people have some anecdata to really whet your appetite and then they just say... "I work on a very important service/thing at some large megacap tech". If you're SWE navigating the very important choice of selecting one of these elusive "good teams with good managers" so you don't accidentally step into one of these abusive teams then you need to know information. You're only doing a disservice to your peers by hiding the information. It's like salary. When SWE salaries became public, it put tremendous pressure on tech to provide massive bumps , bennies, and YoY growth.

I think if we can name names to shame the bad teams it really helps the industry improve conditions and expectations. And if you really are on a good team you should get the word out so it's easier for you to hire.

I'd help if I could but I'm just a student.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#139

Post by lrem »

> It’s an unwritten rule that as a salaried employee in Big Tech, you are effectively on call all the time.

This, right here, is where OP lost. It takes some discipline from management to admit there are only three options:

- There is a formal oncall rotation of people properly equipped to solve all problems.

- Everyone is oncall all the time.

- Whatever you make can only be expected to work in core office hours AND your users understand this is not production level.

In my seven years in Google I've only been in the first and third category. Nobody ever suggested I should do overtime. But I know there are teams in the middle category and people there eventually end up miserable just like OP.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#140

Post by throw55 »

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…

Why is a coworker referred to as 'they'? Is this a non binary individual or is this newspeak where normal pronoun of a known individual is replaced for some reason?
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