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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

#71

Post by geofft »

hkmurakami wrote: post #61
khazhoux wrote: post #37

Executives: "You should care about the mission, not the money!" (as they keep all the money to themselves)

It's fascinating how in the recruitment process, hiring managers who expect potential hires to act logically and methodically all but demand the recruit to suspend his or her logic and mental methods when considering their personal financial interests. The dichotomy would be humorous if it weren't so sad.

I care about the mission. In fact, I care about the mission so much that I know that it'll do the company a disservice to train me and lose me a year later to another company with a similar mission offering me more money. Therefore, it's in the company's interest to pay me a competitive salary!

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#72

Post by quotemstr »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #69
quotemstr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fast+incompetent = cowboy attitude, sure, but the problem there isn't the fast bit. Exactly right. Frequently, in industry, I see people confuse the "slow" and "competent" bits. They think that just because a given change needs to get a bunch of sign-offs that the overall effect of the system requiring the sign-offs is a net benefit to the organization. It's not. It's paralysis, and you won't notice how ungainly an…

You have to be able to take the very demanding step of saying, "No. We're not doing that. I don't care if this change caused a SEV, we're not adding process. Moving fast is important!". The moment that some minor disaster hits, which it inevitably will, whoever is in charge will find themselves no longer in charge. I think this is one of the fatal flaws of a big company. Everyone is terrified of risk. I'm not sure it…

Right. You have to create a culture where it's okay to fail. And it's not enough to just say that: you have to actually practice it. You have to let people make mistakes, then do nothing so that other people don't feel afraid to take risks. Hell, reward people for failing. Highlight them as exemplars of people who do things. If you don't fail once in a while, you're not moving fast enough.

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#73

Post by phonon »

maxxxxx wrote: post #14
throwaway7645 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to fit: 1.) move from Palo alto to east bay 2.) manufacturing company with software engineers 3.) lots of people leaving 4.) CEO changing the world. However, I'm sure many companies meet that.

Wasn't there the story where Musk scolded someone who took off to be at the birth of his child?

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/597982078374817794

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#74

Post by dba7dba »

My buddy told me a story of what he saw at his company. It was an interaction between a CFO and a new lead developer at a small tech/startup company that actually had been around quite a while.

It went something like this.

Dev: Can we get 2 21" monitors for developers?

CFO: Why? Laptop LCD and that old 19" monitor seem to work together just fine.

Dev: Yeah, but we can be more productive if each dev can get 2 x 21 inch monitors.

CFO: Uhh, no. I get more year end bonus for every dollar I save for the company. So maybe we will revisit this later?

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#75

Post by sillysaurus3 »

quotemstr wrote: post #72
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be able to take the very demanding step of saying, "No. We're not doing that. I don't care if this change caused a SEV, we're not adding process. Moving fast is important!". The moment that some minor disaster hits, which it inevitably will, whoever is in charge will find themselves no longer in charge. I think this is one of the fatal flaws of a big company. Everyone is terrified of risk. I'm not sure it…

Right. You have to create a culture where it's okay to fail. And it's not enough to just say that: you have to actually practice it. You have to let people make mistakes, then do nothing so that other people don't feel afraid to take risks. Hell, reward people for failing. Highlight them as exemplars of people who do things. If you don't fail once in a while, you're not moving fast enough.

Yeah, but this is at odds with virtually every big company. No one has the power to affect that kind of change except the CEO, and the CEO is rarely interested or involved enough to do that. Is there any way around this problem?

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#76

Post by anth1988 »

cbanek wrote: post #7
maxxxxx wrote: post #6

"But the CEO never noticed that the payoff had ended for the other 95% of his company." It seems a lot of C*Os forget this after a while. For a lot of rank and file employees the stock price makes no difference.

But the vesting schedules sure make a difference. It's amazing how things change once you've made it past that cliff, and how people jump ship once they've got their first year. Also a year is pretty standard to get a signing bonus and relo package covered.

Oh but they are fixing that by going to Amazon like models where they backload the stock payouts a ton.

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#77

Post by YZF »

frozenport wrote: post #42

I'd like to remind people that large companies are the only ones capable of hiring junior engineers who might not be at full productivity at day 0. This is especially true of the C++ ecosystem.

Good junior engineers can be productive at day 0. They just can't do the stuff a senior engineer can do. They definitely can contribute though. A well balanced team is a good thing for small or large companies.

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#79

Post by hkmurakami »

geofft wrote: post #71
hkmurakami wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fascinating how in the recruitment process, hiring managers who expect potential hires to act logically and methodically all but demand the recruit to suspend his or her logic and mental methods when considering their personal financial interests. The dichotomy would be humorous if it weren't so sad.

I care about the mission. In fact, I care about the mission so much that I know that it'll do the company a disservice to train me and lose me a year later to another company with a similar mission offering me more money. Therefore, it's in the company's interest to pay me a competitive salary!

The best startup CEOs I know overpay their key people BC they know that losing their best people hurts so much more than the same people helping whatever company they might join next

Re: Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

#80

Post by geofft »

quotemstr wrote: post #70
geofft wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emphasize that the most important part of software development is moving fast. This doesn't seem to me to be true. Can you expand on your thoughts here? I'd agree that the ability to move fast is an essential part of effective software development, but I don't think it's the most important (the most important is producing business value accurately and reliably), and I think that moving fast for the sake of moving f…

Unless you take conscious steps to remain flexible and to eliminate barriers to productivity, you're going to find your ability to "produc[e] business value" diminished because effort will get sucked into process instead, and for reasons nobody can identify. Soon enough, you'll find yourself wondering why you have so many developers, all of whom appear to be doing work, yet without getting anything done. By default,…

Well, okay, you and I are agreeing that velocity is nice to have, but why is it the most important goal?

I can make the exact same argument about automated regression tests. As the size of your codebase grows and the number of customers (i.e., people triggering edge cases) grows, unless you take conscious steps to make sure that every build doesn't regress previous bugs, all your effort will get sucked into diagnosing and fixing things that you've fixed before. And all your developers will be fixing bugs but you won't be fixing new bugs and certainly not shipping features.

In particular, if you want to refactor / rewrite parts of your code to improve development velocity, you'll suffer from the well-documented problem (see e.g. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... ) of losing all the knowledge of the weird edge cases you've fixed along the way. So, testing is strictly more important than development velocity!

I can make the same argument about a half-dozen other development best practices, and I'll have actual citations to back them up. Why is development speed the most important goal, why is formal process the enemy of speed (instead of its friend, because it makes sure work doesn't get duplicated or wasted!), and what is your evidence for these claims?

In particular, if your claim is true, we would not expect to see as much feature development / new products from old, large companies (I'm thinking of Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc.) as we do. We would expect to see these companies grind to a halt and perform poorly in the markets (investors really want to see growth, not just continuing to be as good as you were last year), and that's not what's happening.

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