Hacker News Reader

Comment by tgma | Hacker News Reader

I think the reporting of his quote overemphasizes on "work from home" piece of his sentence as that fits right into a continuous obsession/bike sheds.

Whether "work from home" is the cause or not, I think he is absolutely right on the latter part of his sentence, that contrary to startups, almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win. If you are young and you go work at Google, they will beat that fire out of you very quickly. "Work" from home is just one way that nobody-cares attitude is manifesting itself. [BTW, that attitude is by no means exclusive to ICs; definitely leadership has it as well, perhaps more so.]

View on HN

> almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win

Yes, that's why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn't go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a "huge fire or a drive to win". Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career.

If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that.

If I'm the lead of a Goog project that becomes a hit, do I get $10M bonus? Of course not. I get a pat on the back and something to put in my packet for the next promotion interview.

So you're absolutely right, but the problem is not in people. It's in the way the system's designed.

> do I get $10M bonus?

Seems like you might want to consider the finance industry.

If you make something important 5% faster, you bet you are getting a few years worth of salary as bonus.

The incentives in finance are remarkably well-tuned to rewarding employee effort. Make the company 300k? You get 30k. Make the company 300 million? You get 30 million.

how do swe get into finance?

I see quite a few SWE jobs here in Singapore in finance, mostly realtime C++ order management. If the advertised salaries are real, they're very well-paid (300-700k USD, plus bonus).

First step, understand what Finance means in the scope of technology work.

i dont have a clue

The path of least resistance is to become a well known C++ or systems guru.

This can be done by contributing substantially to the language standard, a compiler, etc etc.

Or you could learn COBOL!

That seems so easy to game. Do some small change that brings short term gain, bag the profit and let the rebound be the failure of another team.

Doesn't that pretty much describe the 2007-2008 financial crisis?

And every such crisis before it, and the next one too.

The crisis was 07/08, but the buildup was almost a decade in the making, does that count as short term?

Maybe the profit share is earned out over time? Otherwise I would agree with you..

the law in the UK is that material risk takers bonus pay over a certain amount (couple of hundred thousand) is deferred over 3-5 years and can be clawed back

If you think it's easy to game 30M in short term revenue, please try to do that in a large firm.

The risk/compliance teams would be interested in your strategy.

I'm a socialist/anarchist, they would never give me that opportunity :)

You could try this overall strategy in the stock market and see how it works out ;)

I think you would have to target the scope even smalller to particular areas of finance probably quant or trading within a hedge fund. The majority of jobs at a large bank are mostly fixed salary with limited bonus. There are many jobs that are essential but don't capture a percentage of the value they generate. For example processing transactions is essential for a bank but typically doesn't pay large bonuses in that area.

>There are many jobs that are essential but don't capture a percentage of the value they generate.

Isn't that strange?

Unfortunately not. Nurses, doctors, bin men, car mechanics, plumbers can all be essential at times but rarely pay large bonuses.

It's the scale.

One important blue collar worker can help a limited number of people at a time, usually one.

One line of code can affect what billions of people are doing.

Large banks can pay very well for the right software role, but there's so much more nepotism than big tech that it's pretty much impossible to land these unless you have a godfather in the industry AND you are a recognized prodigy.

>>but the problem is not in people. It's in the way the system's designed.

System was designed by the people, more specifically people with ability to make decisions a.k.a management

There might not have been one person making all the wrong decisions. But more like lots of small wrong decisions, but it doesn't reduce the fact that it is management that is always responsible for the state of affairs.

> Yes, that's why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn't go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a "huge fire or a drive to win". Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career.

I agree that many want the stable and low hours career but how many people at these big companies are getting that? I mostly see it as a FOB farm and trying to overwork the overwhelming majority of workers at these companies. For all the stories of people working five hours a day and making $400k/yr - I hear many more working 60 hour weeks.

> If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that.

I don’t really see startups rewarding that much either. Maybe it’s more rewarding if you’re a founder. I’m speaking as someone who has been an early engineer at startups and gone public with them. I still don’t see them as that rewarding unless you’re a founder.

Also, incentives aren’t the same. You might make a great thing but unless you’re near the top - you’re probably not going to get properly rewarded regardless of how good your ideas and whatnot are. People at the top will steal credit because that’s what they do. (“Look at how good I am at hiring/managing/inspiring/etc.”)

> For all the stories of people working five hours a day and making $400k/yr - I hear many more working 60 hour weeks.

This is absolutely right. For every senior person in a glamorous role at a FAANG making $400k/yr, there are probably five less senior, less glamorous people making $150k/yr, grinding away trying to justify a promotion to the next level. The people posting to HN that their brother's girlfriend's nephew's roommate makes $400k think that's every FAANG developer.

To be more balanced on this, I don't think that many are making <=$150k/yr if they're in NYC/Seattle/SF and are in engineering. I think many are making $300-400k/yr but have a high workload.

Levels gives a clear direction that if you work at big tech as an engineer, you'll usually make decent to good income. Whether it's worth the WLB/PIPing/misery is what you have to figure out.

There's a reason a ton of the people at FAANG are all on H1B. It's not a lack of domestic talent - it's a lack of Americans willing to be worked that hard and go through insane hoops to get said jobs. (justifiably so btw) I think a large reason why most of the crowd at FAANG is way more autistic than average is because autists can put up with such insane working conditions/hoops. Either cause they enjoy it or because they just have something about them that allows them to ignore it. I'm not even going to get in on how so many people in SV are also on various stimulants.

Insane working conditions? At least at Google I'd say you have better working conditions than the sales staff at Anthropologie. They are not mining coal over there. Laptop class is indeed spoiled.

My hard-charging peers are coming out of the FAANG world with hypertension and/or type II diabetes.

So is the rest of America. Any evidence the rate is higher? Free soda and food may contribute I give you that.

This is oversimplifying too much IMO. Obviously the potential reward working at startups is much higher than megacorps, and you can very safely say that people working at startups have a higher risk appetite. However, plenty of people work 9h-12h a day (say, at Meta) in wish to get promoted at rocket-speed and play to "win" the higher TC at megacorps, and it happens often enough that very-driven people do join megacorps.

They are two sides of the same coin, aka culture.

System incentives,management,and staff hiring all form a feedback loop which sets culture and performance.

If you're lumping together all the big corporations you're missing my point. Sure size is a parameter but not precisely what I meant to communicate, which is more true about Google than Tesla for example.

A lot of people at a megacorp play to win, they've just realized that the company's value is so much higher than the value they could add to it, that for them, winning means capturing part of the company's value for themselves. In a sense the company becomes the market and their friends become the company.

It's ludicrous to lay this at the feet of individual employees and assert that they're all just lazy with no drive etc.

Google has severe cultural problems and the responsibility for that should be assumed by the leadership.

I did not.

That said, it is up to the individual to work at Google or not, so it's not like they are a self-selecting population of maximally driven people. At least not the recently-joined folks.

By and large, Google is branded as the company people choose to go and coast maximally recently.

>If you are young and you go work at Google, they will beat that fire out of you very quickly.

I don't agree, but there are challenges at Google that don't exist in other large companies.

Google's monorepo along with the 'bottom up' driven culture means that to enact any non trivial change, you need many sign-offs, which means an iron clad design doc, and either you have to be brave enough to make huge disparate changes across other teams codebasse, OR to wait multiple quarters to have respective teams execute.

Sometimes this is awesome, and it means you can do really complex things over the course of a year.

Often, it just means experimenting with non trivial changes takes 3x longer than it would at say Amazon or more silo'd companies.

> almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win

No one with such a drive would stay in, or even go to Google, neither any GAFAM-like corp. Those have been the establishment for 10+ years now.

A large corporation cannot seriously pretend to encourage their employees to "play to win" when it is structuring itself against that precisely.

The bigger the corp, the slower, duller and more rigid it becomes _unless_ someone at the CxO level actively fights against it in a opinionated manner (which still doesn't often register well with boards and major shareholders).

It may be sad, it's quasi a law of physics for corporations. If you have that kind of fire in you, go first hunt into to the woods, don't go to the factories.

> A large corporation cannot seriously pretend to encourage their employees to "play to win" when it is structuring itself against that precisely.

I am not so sure it's that cut and dry. Even among the FANG, the desire to play to win is vastly different. I'd say Apple still has that mojo. Facebook also more than Google although that ship went south post-2018, I'd say.

Tesla comparatively underpaid and overworked people but I think they play to win.

SpaceX even more so. Folks who work hard there are excited to do so because they feel their work matters.

There are non-monetary structural features of large corporations that make them different on that metric. I think the desire at the top to want to win in the first place is critical, plus the autonomy at the lower level to ship cool ideas without much roadblock or dilution of contribution among way too many people.

I think what's hilarious to observe is the transition from "the dream nerd company" to yet another tech hedge fund.

How can you have "drive to win" if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it?

People love to talk about how capitalism (or free market) solves the tragedy of the commons, but it actually doesn't. The only way to solve it is to make people care about commons by giving them a say in managing it, i.e. socialism.

hear hear

You can't influence the course of the company (hence the 'beating drive out of you' comment I made). I am not root-causing the issue and putting the blame on leaf-level folks, just describing it. Quite the contrary.

I was riding a gBike (single-speed for those who aren't familiar with one) ~10 years ago with my friend and I told him this bike is a perfect representative of Google's culture. No matter how hard you pedal it goes the same speed.

Indeed, if I actually felt like the work I was doing was directly benefiting my coworkers and community members I would be really excited about it! Hard to get motivated when all your work goes to making sure your manager gets a kitchen remodel and a third house.

Capitalism (or rather 'free' in the technical sense markets) solve a coordination problem. They don't solve the tragedy of the commons (unless you start paying people not to polute the commons, but that is very perverse).

They are by far our best bet at solving large coordination problems through price signals. Even though they are far from perfect. I do believe that free markets require capitalism (i.e. profits go to the owner of the capital rather than those who do the labour). But nothing there is against strong regulation, collective bargaining, and anti-trust. Nor is there anything about companies being soley beholden to their shareholders.

Also, 'free' markets can only exist with a whole bunch of regulation, and even then some markets (e.g. emergency care) can never be free.

> People love to talk about how capitalism (or free market) solves the tragedy of the commons, but it actually doesn't. The only way to solve it is to make people care about commons by giving them a say in managing it, i.e. socialism.

There do exist worker-managed companies under capitalism, they consistently underperform. There also exist (and have existed) worker-managed companies under various forms of socialism, those were an utter disaster (for the workers themselves, for the environment, for business productivity, for overall societal welfare, for human dignity, the list goes on).

> How can you have "drive to win" if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it?

Bonuses, raises, equity.

> There do exist worker-managed companies under capitalism, they consistently underperform.

Of course, according to a metric, how much money I can make out of an investment, without having to do any work, they underperform!

> There also exist (and have existed) worker-managed companies under various forms of socialism, those were an utter disaster

This is simply not true. Where it was a disaster, it was for the similar reason, workers didn't have the stake in the company.

> Bonuses, raises, equity.

Possibly but you have no say how these things get distributed, and they still are only a small portion of what the investors get.

Perhaps you could name some worker-managed companies under socialism that did well - for example, East German companies that subsequently managed to compete against their West German peers. I can think of one - Zeiss Jena - though I don't know how truly worker-managed it was. (For some reason, the East Germans were very expert at manufacturing lenses ...)

They do not consistently underperform. Just go to wikipedia:

> According to Virginie Pérotin's research which looked at two decades worth of international data, worker cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses. Another 1987 study of worker cooperatives in Italy, the UK, and France found "positive" relationships with productivity. It also found that worker cooperatives do not become less productive as they get larger. A 1995 study of worker cooperatives in the timber industry in Washington, USA found that "co-ops are more efficient than the principal conventional firms by between 6 and 14 percent".

I wonder why there aren’t more worker co-ops then. Maybe they’re more productive per worker but struggle to grow big enough? Or maybe they’re less likely to survive a downturn because layoffs are harder?

Don’t discount that they’re also seen as a threat to the status quo

No they are not, there are so few co-ops that nobody cares about them. No politician campaigns promising to destroy co-ops, not even Trump, because there is no reason to.

I doubt the demographics of coop participation are even partisan. Urban organic food coops probably skew left, but all those rural infrastructure coops, fuel/etc service for farmers, probably skew right. Attacking coops wouldn't win you votes with many people on either side.

They aren't a threat , which force is stopping coops from starting exactly?

Because it takes capital to start a business. People with capital like to retain control over their capital, so they don’t start cooperatives.

Coops don’t have the same incentive structure as external-investor-beholden corporations, so they don’t pursue “growth at all costs”, but rather survival at all costs (job preservation), and then growth where appropriate (pie expansion).

It’s kind of like the trade off between authoritarian regimes and democratic regimes. One is fast but flimsy, the other is slow but robust.

Banks dont want to lend money to them as often/much/favorably, coops usually don’t want investment.

To start a business you need capital, if you have enough on your own, you do not need a coop, much more difficult to convince a group of people to risk together unless they’ve all had previous experience with one another.

Why would Banks shy away if they are more productive and have better margins?

Banks calculate risk by looking at data, and there is far less of it for coops. And they are often irrational actors.

> > How can you have "drive to win" if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it?

> Bonuses, raises, equity.

And significant ones, too. None of this "Hey, you saved the company $1M, here's a $500 bonus!" bullshit.

I once had a founder privately lament to me the this employees don't play to win, and don't "treat the company as if they owned it," and it took all my willpower not to fire back with: "Dude, you're the sole shareholder with 100% of the equity, what do you expect?"

Socialism, or anarchy. I watched an old Charlie Rose episode with David Graeber. Charlie asked him to define anarchy. It was then that I realized I was a born anarchist. From day one I have validated, questioned, and ignored any authority I could. When people refer to me as their employee, I wretch with disgust. It's really tough to function in our society surrounded by all these sycophants and boot lickers worshiping hierarchy.

See problem, fix problem. Don't bring it to management. They are just going to tell you to fix it and then take the credit. Protesters confuse me, they are appealing to the cause of the problem for help and redress.

It blows me away how people bathe themselves in hierarchy. Its almost like oxygen to them. Of course, many anarchists become authority figures because of their raw affinity for getting shit done without asking for permission to think.

> See problem, fix problem

Great theory when it's just a little quip. Not so great when it comes time to put into practice.

I have a problem, one of my coworkers is being lazy, he isn't cleaning up after himself and his mess is becoming a general hazard (slipping, fire.) I try to tell him to fix it but he's not concerned about the risks and tells me to fuck off. I can clean the mess myself, sometimes, but I have my own work to get done and he can create new mess a lot faster than I can clean it. I could try to organize other workers into a lynch mob.. err... I mean struggle session- wait no... I mean "intervention", but this asshole isn't responsive to social pressure and the people I work with don't have the stomach for violence...

You know what solves this neatly? Going to management. And if that fails, going to government regulators.

The problem exists because of the hierarchy.

Most employees have hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars of stake in the company they work for. Are you completely unfamiliar with how the tech industry actually works?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com