Comment by joenot443
18 hours ago
While at G I was one of three engineers working on a mid-sized iOS app. We shared ownership of the entirety of the codebase. It wasn't dissimilar to some of the other teams I've worked on at orgs of differing sizes.
> The pace of work inside these orgs is, meet for months about a narrowly scoped new feature, take months to build it and run it up the organizational ladder for approval, launch it and then chill for 3 months because nobody does anything big in Q4.
This sounds wonderful, it certainly wasn't the case for us.
I've contracted at several big tech companies and that other commenter is making stuff up. My experience was similar to yours, the engineers were very productive on impactful projects. I'm sure there is some dead weight in every company, but it's the exception not the norm.
It sounds like you have financial incentives motivating your desire to shape opinions on this issue. I already exited big tech so I'm able to be candid. But don't worry, giant companies aren't going to stop your gravy train, they already know you're not highly "productive" and "impactful." That's the point.
If you were actually important to the organization it would be a terrible mismanagement of the company. A well-run big org is designed such that workers are replaceable cogs in generalized salary bands, that's what makes the machine durable.
It's very easy to think you're "productive" and "busy" when your days are filled with meetings and trying to placate various groups of stakeholders. But if you look at your actual work output after a year in big tech, it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
> it's fundamentally low impact, and it's that way by design.
I'd like to keep tugging on this thread, I find it interesting.
In my experience, everyone up my chain of command was motivated to derive as much impact from their reports as they possibly could. If anything, it felt as if the system was designed to reward impact above all else - promotions were given to engineers who could demonstrate their work on _____ increased _____ by x% driving revenue by y%.
Nowhere in the system seemed designed to reward low impact, it really felt the opposite.
When you were at a big tech co, your experience was different?
The bureaucracy at Google has grown and grown. And then grown some more. But it is nowhere near as bad as the GP makes it sound.