> Heck, even if you start a project within a company and it gets successful, the company can just slot in people above you, so you become employee #n in a project that you started, and then these people can say you underperform and so on.m
The trouble with these stories is that they’re n=1 anecdotes and we only get one side of the story.
There’s an implicit claim in many comments here that we need to assume that the employee was actually a higher performer, didn’t need managers, didn’t deserve a PEP and so on. That’s understandable given that we tend to put ourselves in the shoes of the person writing a piece and being anti-corporate is always popular on HN.
However, those aren’t safe assumptions in cases like this. I’ve worked at a couple early stage startups that acquired early employees who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) grow with their role and the company. It’s common to keep early employees around out of respect for their past work, a belief that they hold difficult to replace historical knowledge, or simply because they’re well connected to founders and other early employees who have grown into leadership positions.
But in reality, simply being an early employee and being involved with early important projects doesn’t necessarily mean that person is the best person for the job or even a good fit for continuing to do it. Some of the early stage employees I worked with were great at cobbling something together from scraps and keeping it functional with a collection of cron jobs and manual interventions, but their operating style doesn’t work at a bigger company at all. If they can’t adapt and change or they become disgruntled about having to work on things the way you have to at a bigger company, they start to become more detriment than help. That’s just one example of many different potential failure modes of early employees as companies grow that we don’t like to talk about.
> I wanna say this story is pretty standard, and probably a big part of the reason why people in big companies often don't do great things.
It’s “standard” in the sense that every early company has a number of early employees who don’t grow with it, but it’s not the only or even a common fate. GitLab has plenty of employees who have been there for a long time, but you’re not hearing about them from disgruntled blog posts. Consider the selection bias when reading this.
As for the claim that they can’t do “great things”: I’ve used GitLab for a very long time and I disagree. The product continues to evolve. It’s not a stagnant product at all.