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Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

thinkgrowth.org

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Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#151

Post by anonisprivacy »

peterwwillis wrote: post #104
RealityNow wrote: post #99

This post rings eerily true. Recently had a company all-hands where the CEO said basically the exact same lines. The whole "if you don't love working here, then you should leave" bit made me cringe. Easy for you to say when you've got a significant equity share in the company. The saddest realization I've had working at companies is how power-hungry people are, how little respect the people in power often have for th…

We tolerate tyranny and imbalanced power structures everywhere in this country. Corporations are a cheerio in our cereal bowl of oppression.

From what I've observed, a lot of people 'tolerate' it because they just aren't willing to take the risk to achieve power in the first place.

For example, very few people are willing to leave their cushy jobs and grind it out a few years at a startup that might fail.

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#152

Post by sgift »

e59d134d wrote: post #144
sanderjd wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take the unpopular position of supporting a small room of a few "higher ups" making decisions. This is exactly what you want: a small number of people with a lot of skin in the game making important decisions. Good leaders gather feedback and counter-arguments beforehand, but then make a firm decision, and it's diminishingly rare for that decision to please everyone. The people who are not pleased should still f…

In my professional experience, every time higher ups made a decision without input from worker bees, the project failed, delayed, or cancelled. I personally love it when higher-ups make a decision without consulting me. Because then I have zero skin in the game. I don't work ridiculous hours. When I am involved in decision making, then I make sure project succeeds. Sometimes that means working late hours, taking pro-…

> But if I am told what to do without consulting me, then I don't care. There is a lot less stress on me. If it appears decision was stupid and project will not meet deadline, I make sure everyone knows and rarely ever put in more than 40 hours on such projects.

I envy people who can change into "I just do what I have to do"-mode when they don't have 'skin in the game' ... I always feel as if I have skin in the game and get stressed even on the most ridiculous projects where I knew (and stated) from day 1 that this just won't work the way it has been envisioned by higher ups.

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#154

Post by watwut »

drawkbox wrote: post #123

Just another revolution of the wheel of the infamous "How Software Companies Die"[1] which has this balancing note: "The environment that nurtures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa." When a product innovation company turns to medium size, the process comes in with the executives and soon after innovation dies, but the product market value is realized and efficient. The problem…

Good management is fundamental to environment that nurtures creative programmers. Such environment does not appear out of nothing - it is result of a managers work.

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#155

Post by hinkley »

RealityNow wrote: post #99

This post rings eerily true. Recently had a company all-hands where the CEO said basically the exact same lines. The whole "if you don't love working here, then you should leave" bit made me cringe. Easy for you to say when you've got a significant equity share in the company. The saddest realization I've had working at companies is how power-hungry people are, how little respect the people in power often have for th…

And the guy who points out the emperor has no clothes gets put on probation.

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#156

Post by krylon »

My first job after my training was at a really small company, about 10 employees plus the CEO/owner. And he was just like that CFO, too. The size of the company does not necessarily make a difference.

Still, having done my training at a slightly Dilbert-esque multinational corporation, I made a point of working for small-ish companies since.

Of course, small-ish companies bring their own share of problems, but all in all, I prefer that smaller companies tend to be less bureaucratic.

And I like the personal touch - at one company (~15 people), the CEO/co-owner walked up to each employee every morning and greeted them, shaking their hand. He was in some aspects a fairly difficult boss, but that little gesture made up for most of the difficulty.

The problem with a company treating employees like they were arbitrarily replaceable is that employees will treat the company the same way. If a company wants employees to identify with the company, to want to work at that specific company, it has to do better than that.

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#157

Post by hinkley »

scdoshi wrote: post #12
maxxxxx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why they don't hand out options on a more continuous base the way executives get them. It seems everything is geared towards staying 1-4 years and then jumping ship.

Many (if not most) companies do stock refreshes annually, don't they?

My memory is fuzzy but the one place I got options that were worth anything, it would have taken me about 8 years to double the stock grant I was given when we were acquired. So I had this big block of initial options of which hundreds of shares vested every quarter, and then dozens of shares of the subsequent grants came due at a slightly different time.

To me, the first rule of rewarding someone is to make sure the recipient did all of the work before the reward. If you make them work afterward then it sours the desserts.

I would end up holding onto those little blocks until the next batch of original stocks vested because I had to push a bunch of buttons like a monkey (in a UI designed by monkeys) for a couple hundred bucks. Which just reminded me that I could be making more money and a bigger impact working just about anywhere else.

And then they cancelled the only project that any of us thought had any strategic value to the company. So my direct manager quit. Then someone else quit. Then I gave about 3 weeks notice, but was the 5th one out the door because 2 other people resigned in the week after I gave mine. In all about 8 people left in something like 12 weeks.

Because we all quit right after the end of the fiscal year, we were all owed a bonus from the previous one. When we got the bonus check (mine was a little over 2 month's pay, but the majority of the others got better reviews so got bigger payouts) we went out for beers. Someone, probably me, asked if it was worth it to stay for the last four+ months when things started going sideways. Only one person said yes, out of eight.

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#158

Post by ThrustVectoring »

kchoudhu wrote: post #111
mrbill wrote: post #108

When I worked for a large multinational energy services firm, one of the bosses I had (they changed every 2-3 years) was a huge bully. One of those "great coworker, bad manager" types. My wife had passed away, and as a result, my performance had dropped. One of his lines (verbal in person, not on paper) was "If you don't want to work here, there are plenty of people that do." He was the only boss I've ever had that m…

I had a manager like this. I scheduled a 1:1 with his boss. Half hour meeting, didn't tell my boss what we talked about beyond "a discussion about my career". My manager didn't even come up in the meeting. Instant improvement in manager's behavior. Assholes know they're assholes, and the appearance of connectedness (along with deliberate efforts to keep them off kilter) is usually enough to keep them in line.

Oh, I like this. When your boss talks to his boss about the meeting, his boss doesn't have any specifics about him, which looks way scarier. If you brought up the manager, it'll more likely wind up looking like something manageable.

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#159

Post by linker3000 »

kbos87 wrote: post #39
quotemstr wrote: post #35

The most important lesson for people in power in big tech companies: FORMAL PROCESS IS THE ENEMY. Don't let the accumulation of gatekeepers and approvers and other capital-P Process let things become 100x harder than they need to be. Do not confuse difficulty with prudence. Your organization will become slow and ossified by default unless you take specific steps to maintain flexibility. One of these steps is to insta…

I have a hunch that you've never worked at a growing mid-sized or large company that is clinging to its startup roots and is averse to any sort of process at all. Being unwilling to adopt a necessary amount of structure and process is just as much of a hindrance once you hit a certain size. That may be a newer or less common problem, but it's a very real one.

I can totally identify with this. I joined a company that had grown from 2-3 people in a shed to 40-50, providing global B2C, B2B and company Intranet design and development (A Drupal house). I was tasked with providing some structure and process to (initially) the support team in order for the company to be in a position to cope with expanding workload and look 'corporate' to chase larger accounts. When I joined, the company was pretty much firefighting all the time and diverting people from project to project according to which customer shouted the loudest at the time.

Every change I proposed was questioned to death and generally dismissed, I was micro-managed within an inch of my life, and I found the two key Directors just could not let-go of any control of their 'baby' (the company), to a point where any tasks I tried to assign to team members were met with pushback because the Directors had already assigned them other things, told them to work on other projects or asked them to report back before accepting any work from me.

One time when I was asked to work on a proposal to take over the migration, management and support of the Intranet for a large local University, I completed the initial RFP document and reported back to the Directors with a plan for a meetup with the potential customer because some key points needed elaboration, and some of the SLA terms could not be met without additional team resource, but they told me they had already phoned the Uni and agreed to go ahead 'as is'.

I left after 9 months.

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#160

Post by ThrustVectoring »

hkmurakami wrote: post #59
mnm1 wrote: post #46

This attitude of "you really have to want to work here or you ought to leave" justifies a lot of insanity. I've heard it from companies who make potential employees jump through ridiculous hoops to even get a chance at a job. Here's reality for people who suffer from this delusion: most people don't give a fuck and are just looking for a job. They're applying to dozens or hundreds of jobs (yes, even in software), and…

As an aside, my 20-something-SF-resident-friends are flabbergasted when I tell them that I, as a person who's spent his whole life is this start up la-la-land that is SV, have absolutely no interest in "changing the world". I just want to work on interesting business problems, just like many others just want to work on interesting technical problems.

Yup. It's called having some goddamn boundaries. My work persona is there to clean up some code, write some features, and make the business processes we support work slightly better. For this, I get money, which I take home and enjoy through hobbies, friends, and loved ones. It's a good enough life, and I'm perfectly happy with it.
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