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Comment by jankyxenon | Hacker News Reader

Let's say your company has 500 engineers.

Who does what? What's the highest yielding activity/investment/product? Someone needs to make those decisions and others need to execute them.

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I worked for a company with around 750 people, considered better than any FANG, that had no managers. Moreover, everybody thought they wanted to do cool stuff and not do a manager (synonymous with uselessness). Internally ran like a bunch of startups. Extremely profitable. Multiple FANGs wanted to acquire it/destroy it.

Haven't worked in a better environment. Getting calls from recruiters from FB/Google about "exciting leadership opportunities" sounds like moving backwards and is as appealing as accepting a crappy job to survive. Half of the people who left to FB/Goog were back within a year. You have no idea how much better companies can be.

Recently during my university admission interview (3rd master degree) I mentioned to an interviewer that I turned down FB twice in the past 6 months and seeing their brain spinning, unable to understand why, was pretty funny... Not sure why people desire to work in such soulless environments with opaque army-like hierarchy.

What company is unilaterally considered better than FANG? I honestly can't think of one. I hope you're not referring to some banking or crypto startup because, well...

Well they are talking about getting a 3rd master's degree, so their estimation of good and bad might not be in line with widely accepted answers

No, definitely not one of those "get rich via pyramid scheme" companies. Reliable engineering-driven company with nerds at the helm. You might use their products daily. Do your research ;-)

I was going to guess "maybe GitHub or Valve" before seeing this, now it's definitely GitHub.

So that superior cooperative of developers decided to be bought by corporate behemoth with long management ladder (MS)? I don't get it.

Which is owned by MS. So while not FANG, it's only not because the acronym wouldn't be as good.

Within one of those "internal startups" how did engineers make decisions when there were different opinions on the team? Especially when polarizing decisions had to be made?

Was there an implicit power structure if not an explicit one?

Generally, it's difficult to get into, so a strong pre-selection is applied. Second, initiative on what to do, developing own bleeding-edge tech (literally creating frameworks/languages/devices/whatever and making them popular) is strongly encouraged. People joining a team will get a few % of ownership of the resulting business after a long enough cliff (3-6 years) so it's in their best interest to work together; polarizing decisions could take a while to resolve, usually by majority, but losing sides could prototype their ideas to a smaller extent time-wise; conditions that FANGs simply can't match as they don't have such internal flexibility post IPO. The only "safe" approach was to use already winning technology as a base for future products if one didn't want to do whole research themselves (e.g. use whatever best performing ML approach from Kaggle instead of figuring out your own). Wearing multiple hats is encouraged; people collaborate on unrelated activities like making music/videos/performance art together if they like and they are encouraged to showcase themselves. Nobody cares what people do in their own free time, remote work from anywhere in the world is encouraged and financially supported.

Does this company make profit per employee anywhere near FANGs?

What needs most managing is money - not talent.

Not sure about now, though I remember they hit $1B with around 500 people. How is the PPE/RPE comparing to FANGs I have no idea; I might do some study during my 3rd master degree on that topic ;-)

could you kindly share the name of the company?

I'm quite curious kind of this kind of company, this looks like band of .......... happy pirate?

Instead of saying "Go rob some bloody money back", and you can just make money by creating something new?

No, I am sorry, I won't (for doxxing reasons). They don't advertise themselves as aggressively as FANGs, yet can pick up some of the best developers easily due to word of mouth. I am sure the people that tried to acquire them and got denied as well as their employees can identify them easily. You might try to sort all companies on Glassdoor by overall rating and maybe you can spot something interesting there...

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