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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Having joined a large established FAANG, it's become quite apparent that in any large established entity with so much management and meta work, with strong incentives driving more energy towards the meta work than where the rubber meets the road, it's inevitable for product quality to deteriorate.

Internally the prioritized output becomes the meta work, not what reaches customers. What reaches customers is almost some kind of accidental byproduct of what the vast majority of people in the org spend their time on day-to-day.

My past experience is dominated by startups. The fake work I'm incentivized to spend time on would have been fire-able levels of misplaced priorities / waste everywhere else I've worked as an IC developer.

I've never worked for Apple, I'm assuming this pattern plays out everywhere at this scale.

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Matches my brief FAANG experience well: the vast amount of time devoted to performance reviews and the gaming of them versus actual productive work was… something I’d never encountered in my previous 15 years of work.

Well compensated hoop jumping at least!

Interesting observation. I suppose most startups haven't existed for long enough for the meta-optimizing employees to be promoted over work-optimizing employees, yet.

Meta optimizing employees have issues hiding at smaller companies where one person has a vision of what needs to happen and quickly identify someone not pulling in one direction.

Once you get big enough, upper management has tough time figure out who is meta optimizing over work-optimizing. Not to mention there might be multiple meta optimizing employees.

IME, it's around 100-150 employees which lines up with Dunbar's Number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

I've seen high performance organizations at 600-800, thanks to execs that spent quite a bit of time talking across levels: When at that size, some ICs get CEO 1:1s, you have some chances of quality control. After all some execs had been coders. The problem is that none of them had ever been middle managers, which meant they had no idea of how to tell a good one from a bad one.

TAs the company kept growing, and hired middle managers from bigger tech, they that Jira was the way to go, as it allowed for nice reports aggregating "insights"across the organization. In under a year, point-centered management arrived, and with it an exodus of top talent, all of which had massive amounts of equity anyway. Execs then wondered what happened, and why ability to ship features kept declining. I think they still don't know.

I'd also be curious as to how it relates to span of control (~4-15 direct reports) and therefore levels of management for a given org size, as information hiding about actual work performed seems tied to managerial masking.

There is no budget for this kind of stupidity, if a start up employs to many people like this they won’t succeed.

Same. The compensation is substantially better at FAANG, but in terms of actual on the ground work being rewarded, almost never the case.

Meta-work (lots of "cross functional" documents, alignment meetings, sync ups with senior tech leads to brown nose, deliberately creating low quality output to justify hiring more people/growing one's "scope") is 90% of it.

Any actual output is largely accidental, coming from the 20% still naive, or idealistic enough to actually care about what they produce.

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