E.g. Amazon, Meta etc. have terrible work cultures. Their terribleness got exposed via whiney digital watering holes, at scale. This is useful information for anyone considering jobs at these places. Without these insights, you wouldn't know that you are merely being hired to be fired.
Avoid whiney watering holes but after collecting required information.
This is like saying "Switzerland has a terrible work culture". These companies are literally the size of a small country - culture ends up being much more fine grained.
Anecdotally - most people I know at Meta love working there - fewer people love their jobs at Amazon, but many of them enjoy it. I've enjoyed all of my own big tech jobs despite much public griping about what it's like to work at these companies.
I'm not saying my network is represnative - but my experience strongly suggest the following:
- the way you experience work culture at a company is much more determined by your director/vp (e.g. the 50-200 person group you're most closely tied to) than the overall company culture.
- many reports of a toxic work culture are really just cultural mismatches. At scale, this means it's easy to read 100 stories of a bad match and treat it as toxicity.
As for director/vp, I barely know mine. I think this guy just wants to keep his cushion job and deliver whatever BS his managers ask him. Just like the rest of us really...
they do - and they fail!
A truism is that your manager is the biggest determiner of your work environment. This is just as true for your manager as for you. To that end, your director/vp has a really outsized influence on the people you interact with the most (and thus define the experience of working at the company for you).
If you're like me and love talking to people you'll find a huge variation in the lived experience of people working these jobs.
> many reports of a toxic work culture are really just cultural mismatches. At scale, this means it's easy to read 100 stories of a bad match and treat it as toxicity.
And you get both of these nuggets of actionable info in watering holes - which was the original point.
Every VC backed company sucks even worse, they work you to death, promise you “equity” that will statistically be worthless and they pay less.
I’m not negative. I know the deal - I give a company labor and expertise for 40 hours a week and they give me money. It’s a transaction it’s just that simple - I don’t care about “your mission” and they aren’t my “family”.
When that transaction of money for labor isn’t agreeable for either party, it’s time to move on like I’ve done 9x in my career.
No government or enterprise exp tho.
I was at an insurance company that made a big deal about offering rsus to engineers. We were like is this a joke?
One of them took money out of each paycheck for a quarter and then gave you the better of the price of the stock at the start or end of the quarter. So you got a chance at risk free profits if the stock jumped. I was told that some people put their entire paychecks into it until they put a limit on the percentage of the paycheck you could put in.
The other one was a 15% discount off the stock price, again, done quarterly. Which doesn't sound huge until you calculate the annualized return. The annualized return on the first paycheck of the quarter was around 80%, the annualized return on the last paycheck of the quarter was around 3,000%. No lock up period and the smart thing to do would be to sell immediately and pay the short term capital gains tax.
I'm not smart, I still have the stock from that one. It keeps going up but it could also go to zero at any time. I don't want to pay the capital gains tax though. I should probably look at put options. First world problems.
The company where people were supposedly putting their whole paycheck in was before that. Some people have to ruin things for everyone. Both of the ones I participated in limited withholding to 10% of your net pay.
Being broke sucks
Massive improvement 10x once you save 10k
20k ain't much better. 30k.. until you get to a home deposit another nonlinear jump.
Then with a home 100k gives you equity buffer.
Next million does fuck all!
Until you get to X million to not need to work.
Based on this no one should go all in on something. But if you are secure holding a 1M position in one company you believe in may not be mad.
For most people that is why a pension makes sense. You can accumulate a lot over 40 years there but paying into it will make zero difference to your happiness, but it might make a big difference once you hit an age where you can't earn as much.
Living frugal also helps there. Like calories in calories out there are two ends of the stick.
I like your comment!
That has been exactly the opposite of my experience with VC-backed companies. Great culture and support. Companies that stand by their employees and their words when it counts.
I worked at a company which ran out of runway once. Not the first, not the last time I was in this situation. But before it actually did, CEO decided to close doors sooner so he could give everybody effectively a three-month severance. We were all contractors, not employees. He didn't have to do it at all, and I think that if he wished to, he would have found a dozen ways to safely pocket this VC money himself. But he made a choice to do a solid for his employees instead.
This was just the most striking example, but overall it is pretty typical of my experience with VC-backed startups. I'm a cynical, pessimistic person from Russia and Israel, so every time I encounter another super-positive American, my first thought is that they're just phony. But in this particular industry, it just so happens that a lot of them are actually genuinely like that.
https://medium.com/@kazeemibrahim18/the-post-ipo-performance...
YC doesn’t care about the long term value of the companies it invest in. All VC companies want to extract the maximum value out of the company before they get sold to the bigger fool - either acquisitions or an IPO.
Your employer is beholden to its investors.
He wasn't selling his company. Just finding a home for the employees.
Who ended up hiring them?
Jensen Huang. This was at a time Nvidia's survival was at stake. He personally traveled to the site (not Bay Area), gave a presentation to the engineers, and tried to convince them to join. Treated them well - it wasn't a case of "Hey, you've got no options other than me" but "Please consider joining me."