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> 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 are not trying to have a 50:50 split between bad and good experiences. Even a single workplace-driven mental health incident is too many. And unlike other workplace related injuries, mental health injuries are elusive to tracking.

One hard metric would be the percentage of FAANG employees that are lost to suicide each year. It would be morbid but telling if some companies have an overrepresentation (I have my doubts but won't voice it here).

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-death-idUSKCN0XP383

> 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.

I don't think this is how statistics work. Both are one piece of data. In order to make meaningful conclusions, we need more data. It seems to me that all of a sudden we have a mental health epidemic and I am peppered by mental health stories left and right in the media including HN. I'd love to know more if what changed, some hard data, happiness surveys even if they have flaws, it is better than arguing like this.

I'll throw one more anedote - I've worked in large tech company and my experience was it was just super chill. No issues with a team of 24 engineers. Everyone left at 4pm everyday and at 2pm on Friday. In fact, people were frustratingly lazy.

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)

> it could just push companies to weed out depressed people from their hiring pool

I’m not saying this is the best metric but they would find that sort of treatment to be highly ineffective. Lifetime prevalence of depression and the depression at any given time are different things; it would be like trying to weed out all future cases of flu based on symptoms at hire time. Either way it wouldn’t make a dent on flu caused by the work environment itself.

How would they do that? Hiring seems like such a ritualized practice anyway, I'm not sure how you'd even determine something like that.

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

I've heard (and agree with) a similar argument about guns and mental illness. Taking away people's guns (or ability to buy guns) because of mental illness is a perverse disincentive for them to seek help.

It's a simple solution, but a bad one. The alternative is to overwhelm people with complete availability and encouragement of help, and while helping them, convince them that it's not in their best interest to own guns (ideally to agree to give up their right to own guns.) Actually effective change is expensive, so will not be done.

That being said, tracking tech suicides doesn't have to track the companies they work for in order to indicate if there's something wrong with the culture. Theoretically, identification of companies would certainly help to figure out what that wrong thing is, though the metric would immediately be gamed in the way you describe and exacerbate the situation.

As a H1B holder who's also a cancer survivor and suffering from severe health issues, I can tell you it's hell. I cry at least once a week at the fact that I cannot take a break without having to destroy my life and my family's life and 20+ years of life built up here. Everything this person said is absolutely true. The high compensation comes at a very high cost. It's not just mental or physical but also moral. You follow some arbitrary process since some higher up decided that it's the best way to measure productivity or performance. You underlevel people because you have to have a high bar. So someone with 20+ years of experience with subject matter expertise (not me) is a 'developing' Principal engineer. You have to hit arbitrary dates with moving goal posts and convince your team that they are doing God's work.

> You underlevel people because you have to have a high bar.

> So someone with 20+ years of experience with subject matter expertise (not me) is a 'developing' Principal engineer.

If one of your major complaints about work is that some other employees only make $300k while some arbitrary table made by the company says they should be making $400k-$500k, then perhaps you're in a pretty good position overall?

In other words - it's a huge organization, of course it's not far from perfect. But, pretty much nothing in life is.

Underleveling people with 20+ years of experience depending on their origin or location is a real thing, and one that HR gets away with too often. My experience is that it contributes to so much pain and churn that it ought to be a legal and compliance offense, but there are no liability factors associated with it, so they keep doing it.

It sounds like they are stringing them along with golden handcuffs, also. I always feared losing my job on my L1B (visa with no job mobility), and now that I was rendered redundant, living my greatest fear, I am genuinely happier than before.

Golden handcuffs are a living hell.

Just curious - how come you haven't got a green card or citizenship if you've been there for 20+ years?

Possible if you are from India. I am on the same boat

Unknown to Americans, the US is still a country run on immigrant "modern slavery". Especially tech companies (most H1B visas)

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.

Of course we should not generalize, but these experiences should not be brushed off either - I suspect a bias towards Apple due to their fanbase.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/kpgs1x/my_experience...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605211

I doubt it's a bias toward apple so much as Apple's a large company with a diverse set of teams. There are definitely some teams at Apple that I would never want to work for; there are also some teams at Apple that are pretty awesome.

I suspect it's the same at all of the FAANGs, frankly. (Setting aside companies you may not wish to work for because of general company policy/work reasons)

No, to some degree it is Apple. No doubt any larger corporation has its share of worse offenders. But some of the toxicity that exists within Apple is specific to its DNA. The secrecy, siloing across departments and teams, obsession towards not just customer satisfaction but ironclad schedules, middle managers allowed to act like warlords, maybe even the legacy of Jobs' abusive behavior baked into the corporate DNA- that's all uniquely Apple.

I work at Microsoft and am old enough to have long-term friends and acquaintances at Apple, AWS, Facebook, Google, and IBM. The only ones whom I never hear from regarding corporate infighting between teams work at Oracle, and I suspect they keep changing the subject because it’s too traumatic…

It’s not merely politics or teams in-fighting. It’s straight up unprofessional, abusive, insulting behavior that goes unchallenged. It’s belittling, bullying, traumatic environments that everyone accepts as is or are completely oblivious to because of an organization-wide code of silence. Mentally damaging.

I currently work in a unicorn which recently IPOed and can confirm that I have the same experience as the author of this article.

I also had a very similiar experience at my previous employer which was also a valley based company which IPOed.

I have multiple colleagues who are in the same boat, both current and former, and while I realize this data is anecdotal, from my perspective, work culture in the valley is just plain broken.

People are not robots, they need time to rest and adjust.