The Difference Between Working at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

The Difference Between Working at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft

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39 pointsjgunaratne16 comments

> "I prefer startups because I like to be surrounded by people who are not just working 9-5 but prefer to get things done"

Not a big fan of this attitude. You can get quite a lot done in a standard work day without the same risk of burnout.

I don't get this attitude. It's decently well known that there are diminishing returns once you pass a 6-8 hour workday. Why would anyone want to spend more time working to produce worse results?

The returns are diminishing, but not by much for many people. E.g. a 100 hours work week having 2x the productivity of a 40 hours one (instead of 2.5x).

From my 30+ years of experience in the SW industry, a guy who works 100 hours will far outproduce someone working 37.5 or 40 hours and on top will improve his skills a lot faster.

Quality and scope are different aspects of a result. You can focus your diminishing returns on getting less done at a similar quality level. Meaning the returns may diminish, but your contribution is still a net positive.

Well if you've got to sow your field before the snow comes then it's not real helpful to have the guy next to you telling you that after 8 hours you're producing diminishing returns and should call it quits. That's going to be interesting advice next spring when you don't have a crop.

The diminishing returns only applies to creative work, not physical labor. (Yes there is diminishing returns there too but clearly you're still getting additional useful work done)

When I read ''9 to 5'' in this context I take it to represent a culture and mindset of limited engagement and responsibility, not necessarily the literal physical presence for only those hours of the day.

This is the "I got in today at 8:30 and will leave at 5:30 after taking a one hour lunch" mindset or the "Even if I am inspired at 5:20 I'm out of here at 5:30 and if I get into something right before lunch it doesn't matter because I have lunch plans every day" mentality. I don't think people should be overworked, but clock watchers are productivity killers.

I'm strongly in your camp. However, to play devils advocate, a founder has to make the company the focus of their life. They're gonna be working long hours, 6-7 days a week, with little to no vacation. There's diminishing returns on that time, but the pressure is on and the clock is ticking.

Naturally, founders want to hire people who also make the startup their life. If you're working all day, don't you want to build your company with people who do the same?

But besides founders fervor to work round the clock, some people are just addicted to work. They can't stop thinking about it and no matter what they're doing, if it's not work, they're not satisfied. These people want to work with other people with the same mentality.

Totally understandable for founders who have skin in the game. An engineer hired as employee 10+ with less than half a percent equity, which will get diluted to 0.05% or less before an eventual exit (if ever!) shouldn't feel like he HAS to work 100 hours/week - especially if he's getting maybe 2/3s of his market value in salary.

Yeah. I agree with you. Just saying each side has a valid point. As employee 10+ with 0.5% equity, there's no chance I'm going to work as much as a founder.

But as a founder or a very early employee, I'm going to try to hire people that work as hard/efficiently as I do.

You may be placing a different interpretation on here that the author intends. . Here "9-5" means people who are just working for the sake of working vs startups where there's a tangible goal to hit and people want to hit it and move on. So it's a "I want to work around a constant short term goal oriented culture vs one where goals are measured in years (if at all)"

> ...Korolev spent a couple of years at Google... He then moved on Microsoft... Within a year he decided to shift to Facebook, participated in the company's BootCamp, and worked in spam for a a bit before deciding large corporations were a thing of the past... After a stint with... Public Verification, Korolev decided to move on...

I know I should be judging the story solely based on its merit than its source, but this kind of makes me wonder. He seems to job shift once a year on average. Considering that you spend a month or two settling in and that you usually decide a month or two in advance before you leave, he seems to have had little time to properly experience each company (except perhaps for Google).

According to his linkedin profile he spent 4 years at Google in Zurich, 1 year at Microsoft and less than a year at Facebook:

www.linkedin.com/in/dimakorolev

He doesn't state whether he worked at Facebook's Menlo Park or Seattle office.

The comparisons are interesting, but for some of those companies his information is several years out of date already (especially for the first company he started to work at, way back in 2007, Google). Things can change quite a lot over such time periods.

Never heard of this guy but his startup, Staance, is a really cool, simple idea. Check it out. http://staance.com

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