OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team" • Hacker News Board

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#191

Post by jrockway » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 1:56 AM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #166

haberman wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your dig at Google here is astonishingly out of place. Even if what you say is true, you're comparing fraud and serious ethical violations with... being bureaucratic and having bad legacy systems? I don't even know what to say. Also, what you say isn't true. Google has the shallowest management structure and the most aggressive attitude towards refactoring (both in the large and small) of any company I've ever worked…

Google has a lot of really stupid policies that are unethical and hurt peoples' careers. For example, Perf. Five percent of employees end up on PIPs for no other reason than getting shat on in Neutron-Jack-style stack-ranking. People on PIPs can't transfer. They rarely actually get fired (most quit, most PIPs on people who stay are inconclusive; rare is for a person to get fired and even rarer is for a person to actu…

I like Perf. I've worked at a lot of big companies, and promotions were correlated to whether or not they thought you would quit or not. Perf is a lot of work, but it seems perfectly capable of promoting the best employees. Everyone with a title above or equal to Senior Software Engineer has seemed worthy, which has not been the case at other companies.

I think your problem is: you can't work at Google if you want ego-inflating titles for doing nothing. When I was at Bank of America, the lowest title you could have (if you weren't hired straight out of college, that is) was "Vice President". It inflated your ego but meant nothing.

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#192

Post by joncooper » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 12:52 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #191

michaelochurch wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has a lot of really stupid policies that are unethical and hurt peoples' careers. For example, Perf. Five percent of employees end up on PIPs for no other reason than getting shat on in Neutron-Jack-style stack-ranking. People on PIPs can't transfer. They rarely actually get fired (most quit, most PIPs on people who stay are inconclusive; rare is for a person to get fired and even rarer is for a person to actu…

I like Perf. I've worked at a lot of big companies, and promotions were correlated to whether or not they thought you would quit or not. Perf is a lot of work, but it seems perfectly capable of promoting the best employees. Everyone with a title above or equal to Senior Software Engineer has seemed worthy, which has not been the case at other companies. I think your problem is: you can't work at Google if you want eg…

B of A doesn't have analysts or associates?

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#193

Post by jrockway » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 6:06 PM UTC

joncooper wrote: post #192

jrockway wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Perf. I've worked at a lot of big companies, and promotions were correlated to whether or not they thought you would quit or not. Perf is a lot of work, but it seems perfectly capable of promoting the best employees. Everyone with a title above or equal to Senior Software Engineer has seemed worthy, which has not been the case at other companies. I think your problem is: you can't work at Google if you want eg…

B of A doesn't have analysts or associates?

They do, and they were supposedly in the process of redoing titles as I left, but my guess is that it didn't go very well. Nobody likes to give up an important-sounding title.

Re: OMGPOP CEO tweets: "Shay Pierce was the weakest employee on the team"

#194

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 07, 2012, 4:51 PM UTC

tlogan wrote: post #147

michaelochurch wrote: post #135

Warning: this is going to get very long and ranty. I worked on Wall Street 2006 to 2008, and I had friends on the Street before that. I went into "tech" in 2008, saw the mini-crash and read the Sequoia ScareDoc, and now I'm watching this bubble. Wall Street has a bad reputation, but I've seen far worse ethics and much less professionalism in technology, which is supposed to be above that garbage. On Wall Street, peop…

I agree with you in general but I think that only three classes of Silicon Valley companies attract jerks like that: 1) gaming, 2) social networks (glorified dating), 3) market place / "new business model" companies.

[deleted]