I have no reason to doubt that in the particular corner of your organization that may well have been the case, but you cannot generalize this over the whole field. As stated elsewhere, I never played any game to be promoted, I simply never consciously sought the goal of promotion, and I was promoted anyway just because of the real, substantial job I did.
So, sincere question: for those of us who haven't worked at a FAANG, why should we believe that your experience is the norm while the other people's is the "corner"?
EDIT: What I mean is, you need multiple passionate people across many levels to achieve that. If reward culture wasn't somewhat healthy, I don't believe this could work.
PragmaticPulp specifically said the engineers his team hired were actually rather good, just had bad habits:
> The strange thing was that many of them were actually good programmers when it came down to it.
And I did see other peers who did not play any games that I could see be promoted for merit.
So maybe generalizations over large companies just don't work well.
If there is no somewhat healthy reward culture, the multiple passionate people in the many different levels needed would leave.
I think that this largely depends on how good or bad one's immediate management is. Good managers hold the line to insulate their teams away from this kind of corporate culture to the extent possible. And the proportion of such managers varies from company to company, and even between different units in the same company.
What I am saying is that there are a lot of good engineers don't get promoted, despite doing important work on vital systems, because they don't aggressively self-promote and optimize their careers around the promotion path.
There are also companies that are good at recognizing good yet normally-under-appreciated work, and there are companies that are bad at it. FAANG is bad at it, in my experience, and the experience of people I've worked with. It's an anecdote and not data.
I even stated that I don't doubt this may have been true for you. But if every large company were really so bad in general as is portrayed here, the people who make good stuff, and who need to work with each other a great deal to achieve that, would leave.
I have heard lots of stories about how the only real way to get promotion/real raise was to change company you work for. Because getting raise is harder compared to hiring someone of the street with hefty premium on top.
I have heard lots of stories about how the
only real way to get promotion/real raise
was to change company you work for.
80% of engineering promotions/raises come from switching companies
10% of engineering promotions/raises come from doing greenfield work. If you can find a way to do greenfield work you will look great (because you can move fast) and multiple other people will be dependent on the mess you left behind and they will look bad because they are moving at a fraction of your speed.
10% of engineering promotions/raises come from engineers who show obvious managerial talent and are interested in a managerial role
0% of engineering promotions/raises come from maintaining somebody else's system
YMMV, just like everywhere else.
Each of the 5 is a huge sprawling organization with 1000s of separate teams, working in very different ways.
Anything you can say about "working at FAANG" will be true of some parts and untrue of others.
I’m talking about directors, senior managers of engineering who worked their way up the corporate ladder. The system worked for them, so they think it’s a good system.
It’s essentially a form of survivorship bias.
I agree with what the other commenter is saying. I’ve been in several teams with several managers and xfn partners and you have a lot of different cultures. From the toxic wasteland to the ultra focused get shit done right fast environment engineers love.
To your point about why more people complain than not, it’s the human condition. Haters hate is stronger than non haters happiness and are more than willing to share their salt
I don't see my colleagues self-promote very much at all. I am in a very practical and focused team though, there is certainly a variety of team cultures. I will say that the performance review process is a pain, I feel like it is a lot of work documenting everything I have worked on...
Literally every single company I've worked at has had loads of bullshit to deal with. Some BS was easier to handle than others! Overall I feel like things are interesting and there are good opportunities to grow in a big tech company, so I am happy for now. I've learned more in one year at meta than multiple years at other places.
In my case I just find scale...fun :)
Oh, good lord.
Listen, you're talking about companies with hundreds of thousands of employees scattered all across the globe. Do you really think there's one homogeneous culture across everything? Single orgs can have the population of small towns. "culture" is a local phenomenon.
There are promotion oriented people. There are not promotion oriented people. There are mutants who work 12 hours every day and call into meeting while on vacation because they want to climb the ladder. There are teams which are hyper focused on visibility and self-promotion, and there are teams which just quietly churn out good tech. There are hundreds of thousands of people. You're going to get different experiences. I'm not sure why that's such a crazy idea to you.