Comment by AbbeFaria
16 hours ago
Ex-MSFT here. I resigned in June, I was an L63. I spent 8 years at MSFT across two stints.
My last 18 months at MSFT were deeply unproductive. Constant reorgs, the work not being aligned to my capabilities and unfortunately just the general feeling that I was under worked and had very little opportunity for career advancement.
I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial ? Or how did this person get promoted for doing that work ? I am sure envy played a part in the second question but it was legitimate. Remember, all this was before LLM tools were prevalent.
In the end, I left off my own volition. In my last 6 months, I did very little work, if at all any. I thought why am I being paid so handsomely for such little and trivial work. I did try interviewing in a few different teams but didn’t make it (Azure Files and Hyperscale DB). If I had stayed, I would have been swiftly laid off or if I was lucky enough last long till this buyout.
I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
The big tech companies are getting old. I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time, driven by the fact that a person will more readily hire someone they can understand than someone that is more intelligent/competent/effective. This causes a slow degradation.
I also think there's been a drastic shift in the working culture of tech/engineering spaces, in general, over the last 15 years. From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.
Maybe I'm just lucky but I have a few gen Z coworkers and they are probably more often than not the voice of reason in our org (start up with 8 engineers). I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
I did used to work for a consulting firm about a decade ago, and I was leading a staff augmentation project with another company and I was once chastised for saying "hey guys" in a chat because there were women in the group. I was encouraged to use "y'all" but not wanting to sound like I was from the south, I just used "peeps" which was somehow okay.
I'm all for inclusive language but I thought that was a bridge too far.
A coworker was asked in a meeting how he was holding up after pulling an epic two day sprint to deliver a project that saved our butts. He replied “I felt like jumping out of a window.”
Someone reported him for not warning the room about suicidal ideation before saying it and not considering that it might be triggering. He was actually reprimanded.
Unfortunately typical of the place. I left soon after.
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Reminds me of that one time my partner mentioned "Latino" in a meeting, referring to people from Central and South America in broad terms (this was a marketing meeting, where customers are naturally grouped together along various dimensions).
She was told to not use "Latino"; but to use "LatinX" instead. What hurt more was the implication that she was being insensitive.
When I learned of it, I asked my Mexican friends which one they preferred. None of them had heard of "LatinX" and were as confused as I was.
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> I think if an employee can't handle simple constructive criticism or clarifications maybe they should not be employed.
and then
> I was encouraged to use "y'all" [..] I thought that was a bridge too far.
I wonder if there might be a small bias on your part. The criticism you deem constructive everyone shall endure, but the other criticism you deem a bridge too far you yourself shall not endure.
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Both of these issues come because our ancestors messed up changing the language.
Centuries ago, "thou" was singular second person and "you" was plural second person.
"Thou" got abandoned and "you" lost its original meaning to replace "thou" as the new singular second person.
"You guys" or "y'all" are simply attempts to re-introduce a needed pronoun.
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> I'm all for inclusive language but I thought that was a bridge too far.
Because you haven’t been living on “the other side” for a whole life. Try living decades in environments where you’re constantly devalued in little ways, and you too might grow to become resentful.
Now, maybe you were chastised, or maybe you were just asked politely and interpreted it as a reprimand. I wasn’t there, I can’t say, all I have is your side. But let’s say the person did chastise you. They could probably have been more polite about it, but how many times have they been polite before with no results? That’s maybe not your fault, but you did unwillingly contribute to that person’s exasperation that day.
All I’m saying is let’s have a little empathy towards others, even when they don’t have it towards us, because we all have days when we’re our best and days when we aren’t, and we don’t know what the other person is going through.
I go for “yinz” then, and tell them not to discriminate against my Pittsburgh area heritage
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Odd, the dictionary definition (here: webster's) is literally:
> guy: (...) person —used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex
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If we want to trace back the etymology of the term "guy" we would unearth some interesting facts. The most infamous "Guy" of the 17th century is Guy Fawkes, would-be Catholic terrorist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes
Guy Fawkes is most notorious in the UK today as the progenitor of Guy Fawkes Night, where children solicit "a penny for the Guy?" and the funds raised ostensibly go to construct and burn a large straw effigy of Guy, in order to celebrate his defeat and the survival of the Parliament. He was executed, not by burning but by hanging, but nevertheless Guy Fawkes is the original Burning Man.
Guy Fawkes Night was imported to the United States during our independence, and it became Pope Night, a night of mayhem and anti-Catholic vandalism and hooliganism. George Washington once told his military troops to knock it off with the Pope Night shenanigans, because it was alienating Canadians.
So the term "guy" became genericized, beginning in Australia it seems, to refer to a grubby lower-class Catholic boy. After a few centuries of circulating in this way, it lost most of its derogatory connotation and became a generic way to refer to men or boys, and by extension, girls and women.
I don't take offense at being called "guy", nor would I if I were female, and especially because today in the USA, it is so generic and inoffensive. Nobody recalls its sordid roots, even if Pope Night is making a resurgence around here.
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Just holler
Can you use "hey everyone" or does that offend schizophrenics?
The Gen Z and Alphas will save us. As a late Gen X, most of our cohorts were bogged down eating for boomers to die and are lost causes in big companies.
> From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.
In the last few years, I ended up at a bigtech co through an acquisition, and had been someone who was a go-between for solving issues across teams by having a good understanding of everyone else's codebases, tests, build processes, deployment, infrastructure etc. This papered over the culture of siloed development, refusals to think beyond single services etc. I would submit tests and patches, along with tickets describing the bug, impact statement, fix, test coverage, risk, and make myself on-call or directly supervise deployment, etc.
Attempting to continue that in an org x25 larger was met with people firing off angry emails to executives saying their authority was being undermined and made to look bad, when long standing issues were made trivial and fixed by "someone they had never met before", and wherever they came from can they please go back to. I have no idea what a lot of these people were spending so long doing, their commit history was often full of changes that would make you go think "???". I guess it's lucrative to run out the clock year after year on a 180k package, attending meetings where you argue that things are difficult and lets meet again in 3 months? After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.
> After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.
If we asked your coworkers to tell us what happened, would they say "he was easy to work with and so generous with their time by fixing issues all over the org"?
Or would they say something completely different?
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Getting big is the same as getting old. Getting big means that they lucked into getting a cash cow and a bureaucracy springs up to manage that cash cow, kind of a necessary evil, and also attracts opportunists who think they can make the cash cow bigger (and enrich themselves in the process). So the business starts bloating up with employees.
Professional executives.
I think you are on to something maybe. I also think there is a key part where Microsoft and others would hire people so nobody would. I know cases where people were hired and stayed on irrelevant or useless projects for years. Because of non compete agreements this means a good professional would stay few years out of the hands of the competition.
I think now LLMs might play a part of those dismissals but also I think those companies are embracing for thin cows season.
The record profits and etc are the last few for a while I am guessing. My guess they might have up to a year of positive numbers as consequence of deals and layoffs up to this moment.
I think at some point it will be clearer what are the real productivity gains of LLMs. My opinion is that there is a gain but we are already on the phase where there is a deceleration on the improvements and the costs have not yet caught up. The reason for this is the frequent change in the reporting of results. Now they hide the models, they hide the harnesses, they hide the results. They would not be doing that if they were 100% confident it was working perfectly. Also they have been putting too much effort on blocking other initiatives by hiring important researchers with no clear proposition on what they will be doing. One might argue that when you hire Karpathy you never know what he will might be doing anyway, but I digress. We also see some of the huge investment funds starting to switch strategies.
Unless there is no breakthrough, we might see LLMs results in a couple of years. The company I work for and others from friends I know have all started restrictions on costs. Some even started hiring people back.
My prediction is that the low AI cost per token era will end very soon when investors realise that the market is broken and they want their money back for leverage themselves or other businesses.
I even think this is why Elon Musk is merging all his companies. He might making himself artificially richer, but I think he is focusing his efforts to smart weapons and robots.
I think there will no way back to the inflation of people as in 2020/2021 but probably we are going back to early 2010s number.
Actually, I think there are areas of interest that come up in large companies. Microsoft started the equivalent of an FDE organization about 12 years ago. It was interesting to have the freedom to build and grow an organization from about 20 to 800 people. Working with customers and product teams to help get direct customer feedback to help evolve products was interesting. Now, 12 years later, FDEs are sort of the current buzzy role.
FDE allows execs to covertly circumvent their internal bureaucracy to ship faster. It will be interesting to see what execs make of that data.
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I suspect there is still a good amount of shedding the defensive-hiring going on from the pre-AI, low interest, high growth inflation front-loading era. Now all that is crumbling, interest is rising, growth is contracting due to several factors, and AI is clearly crushing manpower demands. What do you do under these new circumstances with an excess of staff you largely hired as capacity and defensively?
It may be a bit controversial, but I believe the male tectonic shifts going in right now under our feet are also driving much of the shift regarding “immigration” because billionaires don’t need immigrants as much anymore and they’re also causing systemic problems in things like the housing market. In fact from what I’m hearing, there is concern that immigration is now becoming a potential cost due to the major changes in society rather than a profit center by scaling up marginal returns from every immigrant you can import by hook or crook, i.e., the more people you import, the more you can undermine salaries and increase revenues and thus, profits.
> they’re also causing systemic problems in things like the housing market
The rest of your post sounded rational. This part doesn’t.
Failure to build more units (NIMBY) and properties being held as investments (non-US nationals are significant in some markets) are the two causes I would point to. Of course every additional family that needs housing drives up the cost a little, but I really don’t think that can be responsible for the massive increases in housing valuation.
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My ass, latest gen is actually more open to criticism. Old gen people used to be bullies and dogmatic. I call your story bullshit.
> I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy.
Perhaps what you perceived as someone being emotional was actually someone who spent a long time barely functioning due to things that have been happening in their life, and that small event just so happened to be a straw that broke the camel's back.
People around you are going through stuff. Everyone is. Someone's stuff is easy to carry, someone else's stuff isn't. "Back in the day" people also carried their burden with them. This is nothing new. Perhaps you never noticed because so far everyone you dealt with was great at masking, and desperately want to avoid having to see coworkers like you worsen their burden by doing what feels like kicking them while they are down.
I can’t tell if you’re trolling.
Of course we should be compassionate, but anyone needs to be able to function enough so that they can internalise criticism and evolve.
Part of what scares me about hold these companies are is how they've like the Titan Cronus been allowed to keep eating their children. There's so so much missing new blood that should be here, so many interesting medium sized companies that should be adapting, figuring out this new age, but so much of our talent and brainpool is locked up deep inside one of a handful of these massive techno-feudal empires.
The only thing I’m looking for from antitrust is a moratorium of a few companies from buying their competition.
I've worked with a number of people who were like this at MSFT. They've all been laid off.
> I think it's a fundamental rule that the competence and effectiveness of an org must fall, over time
IBM, GE... how many former American giants failed to evolve.
I go back to this article on the failure of US steel: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno...
Most giants in highly technological areas don’t evolve, almost by definition. They get to a point where they’re mature companies just operating an existing business, and that’s diametrically opposed to developing new businesses.
Sure, they can spend money on R&D, but then they’re competing with every other new venture in the world - the only benefit they have is money, but collectively, everyone else has more money than they do.
This is why when private equity takes over a mature business, they almost always shut down any R&D the company is doing. Silly mature business, that’s not the reason for your existence!
>IBM, GE... how many former American giants failed to evolve.
"How many failed to evolve", on its own, is a bad metric for success, because it misses the how many new giants the US economy managed to create, which IMHO is the more important metric of a healthy economy.
Companies are like people, the old ones die out and are replaced by new young ones, as it should be. Worst you can do is be like Europe where all you do is try to keep ancient dying companies on life support for the sake of "stability", instead of creating new ones to replace them, which is also a fitting metaphor for EU demographics where a third of the state's budget goes to keeping boomers pensions higher than the salary of average worker(in France).
> saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy
Was it about displaying the user's birthday?
not being able to find true love is pretty emotional tbf
> and have fun doing it, for better or worse
Like how "the boys" in engineering would made jokes about having sex with the female office manager in the middle of meetings. It was only a great time for certain people.
It feels like tech overcorrected from allowing assholes to be assholes. To now having words and tone policed constantly.
Reminds me of when Douglas Crockford got removed as a keynote speaker because he made other people uncomfortable because he used the term "gonads" and also did a muscle flex when talking about WeakMap vs StrongMap.
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...
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The assholes are still there. Complaining about language does nothing to get rid of the assholes. They're completely orthogonal activities.
If you wanted to get rid of the assholes - incredibly difficult, because they take many forms - you'd have to reinvent corporate culture in the US to make it less extractive and performative and more substance-based and cooperative.
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One person's over-correction is another person's "finally". Norms change; it's as reasonable for that to happen as it is to complain about it.
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I resigned a year ago, L65. The service I worked on was 5 engineers, within a few months’ time it was just me. Was always rated a 140 come connect season.
On call 24/7/365.
My mental health took such a beating that I resigned without giving two weeks.
Multiple reorgs (7 in last three years).
HR moving requirements for what it takes to get rated a 100.
Service security review was just me. Guy asked where the rest of the team was. I shared it was just me and said he’s seeing same thing across all the services he reviews, wondered where everyone was going.
Place ended up being stage four cancer and haven’t regretted my decision at all.
How did this system work?
How do they work after the last person leaves?
> I think same is true for all Big Tech companies. Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
A lot of people has this feeling because the work at a big corporation is different than in starting technologies.
When you start a new technology everything is new, and a lot of stuff is added at the edge.
When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements, following new rules or regulations, incorporating products from merges, maintaining technology up to date with new releases... nothing feels important and nothing feels challenging. At the same time, your company fails if it is not done. Quality is also incredible important, to break a tiny component may send thousands of companies around the world spinning.
Maybe you should work for a startup instead of a stablished company. You can move fast and break things when you have no customers, or just very few of them.
> When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements, following new rules or regulations, incorporating products from merges, maintaining technology up to date with new releases... nothing feels important and nothing feels challenging. At the same time, your company fails if it is not done. Quality is also incredible important, to break a tiny component may send thousands of companies around the world spinning.
This is part of it, but it's also true that in a lot of massive enterprises there is an absurd amount of inefficiency that leads to people effectively having nothing to do.
I had one such role at Splunk, pre-acquisition, which had a mere ~2k or so employees at the time. My entire office was effectively doing nothing; we were the result of another acquisition and management had no idea what to do with us. More hours were logged at the foosball and ping-pong tables than in front of an IDE. I'm not even exaggerating. I left after 9 months because I was bored; I did not write a single line of code that got used in any real application, internal or external.
When I went to AWS, it was closer to what you're describing; it took a lot of work to do seemingly very small changes for the reasons you mention. But I would never say that my team there had too many employees doing not enough work; everyone was busy all the time, it just took a lot of work to do very small changes.
No thank you. I worked in multiple startups and they inherited the worst cancers of big tech: moving slowly, decisions by committees, leveling (in one startup, the founder decided to have six engineering levels in a company with less than 10 engineers). Compound with low pay and erratic behavior of founders, I had seen more than enough.
> When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements
At what point is a company established? I recall that the early years of Google, it produced not only Search but also Gmail, Maps, Translate, Android, and Chrome. That was all between 1998-2008. At what point did most of Google's work become refinements?
My point being, it is a culture issue. Google could have become "established" and focus on "refinements" after Search. Or Gmail. Or Maps. Or Translate. But each of those times, it did not.
In the years since, Google has spun up GCP from nothing, built the foundations of the current AI boom, designed its own chips (TPU), rolled out self-driving cars, etc.
It's possible for both things to be true at once: a huge company can contain pockets of innovation, pockets of people doing nothing, and a lot that's somewhere in between.
Android and Google Maps were both acquisitions, and Chrome was initially based on WebKit. I don't know when exactly Google started focusing on refinements, but I think it was before 2008.
That is not to say that nothing since then has been impressive, but I do think it's fair to call just about all of it incremental.
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When you start hiring former management consultants into leadership positions
I work in oil and gas manufacturing and we are slow dinosaurs when it comes to adapting or using new technology.
Recently we've hired a few startups for PoCs regarding to data analytics and they all get deeply frustrated at the pace it takes us to even agree basic details.
What sucks about these situations is that middle managers want arbitrary things. Their imagination is tainted by existing inefficient processes and systems; they cannot see past these flawed abstractions. So when you ask them what they want, they say stuff like "faster horses" and then spend months debating the color and genders of the horses and what shape the carriage should be... The person who wants to sell them a "car" has no hope.
Yeah, at least in the pre-AI times I was writing way less code than in my startup days. but like 10 to 1000x people actually interacted with them.
OP might have been stuck in a dept that is winding down to prep for a layoff or something. I probably would have stuck around unless I found a different role. Who knows, you might just get some severance.
> following new rules or regulations
I'm ISO27001'ing my company and I wonder if some day, we'll find a better way than written policies, procedures, forms, evidence and audits. To me, it seems like our current world's biggest flaw: We're losing 2/3rd of our workforce to maintaining procedures, they make the work boring and unbearable, and they're not even efficient, even if they do provide upside in systematically organizing things. Standards (when pushed to procedures, forms and audite) are the regression-to-the-mean of collective organizations.
I still don't get why companies like Uber have 34000 employees, Canva 12000, LinkedIn 10000, Dropbox 2000, and so on, not even talking about Oracle with their 140000 or Salesforce with 80000
Are they all publicly traded? I have this theory that publicly traded companies hire people to inflate their stock value.
Because it's a legit question, like if a companye can lay off thousands of people and still run their service, what were they all doing?
There is a massive amount of overhead in any big company. Each person can manage only so many people, and so that really puts limits on how much you can flatten the middle management layer.
Combine that with each company having effectively invented “Not Invented Here” before anyone else in the world had heard of that term, and you have massive amounts of bloat.
Two jobs ago, I was working at AWS on the EC2-Chronos team that was responsible for managing all NTP time sync across all Amazon and AWS regions, availability zones, and data centers. Including the classified and isolated regions. The people I worked with were some of the best I’ve ever known, and I thought we had really good managers. I even liked my skip-level manager. And I knew some of the others as well, and had even spent a fair amount of time listening to Peter DeSantis and other internationally known luminaries on the weekly ops calls.
From Peter on down, I never saw anything or anyone that I would call bloat. If anything, I felt that his organization was too lean.
Problem was, while I had extensive experience with the NTP protocol going back to 2003, it turned out that > 99.999% of the daily job involved dealing with ancient proprietary build and deployment tools that were created twenty years ago, and had done nothing but accumulate cruft since then. And I think that was true for just about everyone who worked at AWS. There are much more modern tools and methods that have been created in the decades since, but people in AWS weren’t allowed to use them, because they weren’t the blessed proprietary tools.
And RTO had to come from somewhere. And after that, it was mandatory co-location with your boss.
And then some person thought it would be a good idea to start measuring performance by lines of code committed per developer per week, and everyone had to commit code. Didn’t we kill that idea like nearly twenty years ago, too?
Anyway, I got out of there as fast as I could.
There are things that are deeply, deeply wrong at Amazon. And AWS. And it doesn’t have anything to do with the low-level technical people.
Senior ICs spend all their time either in meetings or on their way to meetings because there are so many teams to "align". It might be okay in the normal days: organizations grow, and we need people specialized in navigating company dynamics. But as we are facing the tsunami of AI, it is increasingly risky to stay a professional meeting goer and box drawer as an IC. The only way to derisk the situation is to go to a company that moves fast, and learn how to build next generation of software with AI, or building the AI infra.
Disagree. The only part an AI can't do is the people aligning and box drawing. The implementation part is trivial. That's who will get replaced.
I assume that the demand will change. Say, a new generation of companies to replace the old. Besides, those who do have practical experience on building AI-native applications or building AI infra may be in higher demand as well. That is, maybe our experience will become not as valuable as before, therefore we'd need to refresh our experience with a different pace.
arguably the meeting overhead is actually just people trading domain knowledge. an ai agent can go read their whole code base instead of having that meeting. its not clear how all this shakes out
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Thanks for sharing your experience. What you have written resonated deeply with my experience across a range of large companies.
Ironically, every large company I have worked for has chosen Microsoft partially because of their size and a perception that they have an enormous amount of top talent developing best-in-class products.
My reaction to that has been that, if a company is so large, then they can't all be in the top percentiles of talent. And when you look at how many products they have, relative to the number of software engineers they have, their can't be that many software engineers dedicated to any given product.
So I'm curious: how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?
> how many people would work on a typical Microsoft product, and what sort of calibre are they?
There are high talent density orgs at MSFT too. I do not want to give the impression that everyone at MSFT is low calibre. I was at the beginning of the Security org being formed (back then it was a tiny part of E+D). I was a minion who witnessed Security transforming into a 10B+ USD business so there are very qualified people at MSFT. We went from a few hundred devs and PMs to ~10K devs, PMs, Support etc to work on a mature business. There are a host of talented people still at MSFT, also MS continues to publish impactful research in AI, Systems etc. The great Leslie Lamport is still at MSFT. I am not comparing myself to these titans, I am nowhere near that level but just saying that there are oodles of talent at MSFT.
On the other hand, here is an example that is illustrative of the sort of people I encountered towards the end of my tenure. My last manager who was one big reason behind me resigning once told me in my 1-on-1 that I should count myself lucky to be employed at MSFT and that other developers would kill to join MSFT. This was someone who had started his career in TCS, Wipro etc and then worked at a bunch of networking companies who presumably didn't pay that well. Everyone at MSFT is decently paid because the stock is doing well and long may that continue . My last team/org was a 30M$+ business with only one customer, we had maybe ~300 people altogether in the US, UK and India. It felt like we were always support engineers for this one big whale of a customer and we were trying to "pivot" to get more customers but that always seemed fanciful as the product was expressly designed for one customer. MSFT acqui-hired from this customer multiple execs and developers to sell said product to the same customer. I am missing a lot of key details as I wasn't at the inception of this product but the whole org seemed dysfunctional, inefficient and certainly I had low-morale. There just wasn't as much work for that many people.
When I submitted my resignation, they actually tried to retain me! I was befuddled to say the least, I hadn't been that productive at all but I guess they just needed warm bodies to work on some other misguided initiative. Personally, I had enough. I forewent my last tranche of sign-on stocks (a non-trivial amount) but was glad to see the back of this org. It was deleterious to my career, I was so pissed that I didn't even send a farewell email. I don;t blame anyone but myself, I hold myself accountable for my career but this was what I perceived.
Apologies, this felt like a rant and it is partly one. But I never had a frank conversation about this with anyone after I left. My fiance is a Doctor so she can't understand all this but my fellow colleagues in tech will.
In 2025 Microsoft reported $101.8 billion net income for $281.7 billion in revenue[1]. If Microsoft has a profit margin of 36.2% with "too many employees doing not enough or quality work", then it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect profits of 50% without said employees, right? Right?
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar25/index.html
You got it all wrong my friend. In a big dysfunctional org like that the key thing is to focus on the role play and politics.
I didn't get it wrong. I am okay to play politics if there's a prize worth taking, working on impactful products or learning new skills but if all there is to grab is titles or better pay then playing politics is playing the short game.
I am merely 30-years old, hopefully I have a long career or at-least as long as possible but playing politics to play the short game is very short sighted to say the least.
If I want politics, I would rather just re-watch Game of Thrones.
Good luck to you but I don't think playing politics is necessarily a "short game" especially now that AI is used to displace ICs en masse.
I always joked that when a company grows past 20 people it goes from being a table top game or crpg and it morphs into an MMO, but with DoTA/LoL mentality internally.
This is why companies (in a free market) do not grow big enough to take over the world. "The Innovators Dilemma" is a good book on the topic.
That's a good book, but I'd argue that in a pure free market without intervention, monopolies would be disappointingly common (and why some level of regulation should exist).
Absolute free market, like any other idea taken extreme, is cancerous.
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How do you know that it would all evolve to a handful of companies? I hear your sentiment all the time, people just assume it is true.
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I believe the exact opposite: you need collusion with the state to establish a monopoly. And you don’t have a pure free market as long as there is a state that puts its heavy hand on the scale to favour one group over another.
The free market has its flaws, but many blame it for the ills caused by corruption and lobbying of politicians.
There has never been a truly free market anywhere in the world, let alone ‘pure’, so I don’t see why you use this adjective at all.
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> I'd argue that in a pure free market without intervention, monopolies would be disappointingly common
How? If a monopoly were to emerge in what was a pure free market, it would become the government, and its rules would become regulation on the market. And thus the pure free market could no longer exist. Monopolies and free markets cannot coexist.
That's not what we're seeing. Companies grow big enough to take over entire sectors of the economy, the economy of scale works against smaller competitors.
And once you're big enough, you can just offload your inefficiencies onto the consumer (the "enshittification" stage). As long as you're not _terribly_ bad, competitors won't be able to overcome your network effects.
What _really_ held companies from taking over the world was the inherent overheads of distributed corporate structures. Before computers, you couldn't really manage a horizontal company with offices in hundreds of different cities. Network effects were also less pronounced.
Internet-enabled companies like Google (or Yandex, Baidu, etc.) are a really great example. The early Internet was about as close to a perfect free market as possible. And in every case (Google in the US, Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China) the same thing happened: one large company ended up dominating and then gobbling up all the competitors.
So what happened to Sears, IBM, RCA, GE, Kodak, etc.?
Why are the biggest companies of recent origin?
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I strongly agree, I work in big tech right now and I feel almost like a charity case. Before Opus 5.5 my work would involve maybe a few hours of coding per week and pointless meetings. Now it’s few minutes of Opus 5.5 prompting and more pointless meetings. And im being paid very well for this, not gonna complain but this can’t last.
I dont know which Big Tech you work at but at “my” Big Tech we are working crazy hours. And thats with very heavy use of AI.
But it was like this pre-AI, as well. I don't think I spent a significant amount of the work week coding since I was an L3 15 years ago. And even then it was clear that impact (and thus promos and raises) was inversely correlated to the amount of the week spent coding.
What I'm seeing on my teams is everyone being more overworked than ever because the coding part happens SO quickly now that there's no friction to slow down all the nonstop "team alignment and box drawing" work that someone else in this thread alluded to.
The only counter-point here is, I think a lot of larger orgs operated like this before AI. Pointless meetings, a lot of people only really working a few hours a week. It's the classic Office Space portrayal. Or Big Head at Hooli just hanging out on the roof in Silicon Valley. It's real. So I understand the temptation to say "this can't last", but yet...
>Too many employees doing not enough or quality work.
I've worked at Australia largest bank and airline companies, it's insane the amount of people who are either:
* Being paid to do nothing. Manager at the bank would spend whole day going from meeting to coffee then ask you if things are done already to be delivered as "his/her team"
* Are in position without qualification. They couldn't understand the basics of common sense.
The thing is, if you know somebody who knows somebody, that is it.
Now working at one of the telcos here, bro, it's pure circus.
This is why I think communism would make sense in our current reality. If everyone got paid the same, then it would be fairer than what we have now where everyone gets paid a random amount with no correlation with skill or effort.
Capitalism made sense with small companies where each individual had more or less direct exposure to the markets. One bad employee would drag down the company. You couldn't hide or manipulate your way to the top if you weren't good at creating value and skilled people could actually start their own companies and compete. Now with huge corporations which own the economy, the markets don't work to begin with, and also, people within the big corporations are rewarded randomly at best or worse; in a counter-productive manner.
This inefficiency is highly destructive because of how the system compounds wealth. You end up with random people with zero value-creation skills and zero vision having millions or billions of dollars and deciding everyone else's lives.
Honestly the same impression I get. I met with some old coworkers I hadn't seen in a few years two weeks ago and we caught up. I went to a very small company that almost got killed by false rumors that killed a few of our biggest contracts and got us blackballed for a few years that we've only recently come out from under.
Two of them, in contrast, went to Google, and the differences in experience were so drastic. I'm out there almost every single week directly meeting with customers. Our CEO knows me personally. CEOs of other companies know me personally. Whether or not what I'm doing actually matters, I can at least feel the impact. I can give a concrete dollar amount for deals from the past year that would not have closed without my contribution to tackling issues the buyers had.
The guys who went to Google talked of how nice it was to have stock grants appreciate, but they did basically no work at all. It seemed Google was just experimenting with expanding into remote work but had no idea what to actually do with all these people. The strategy seemed to just be hire anyone smart enough whether or not there was work for them. They'd describe periods of weeks doing nothing at all, with no contact from any team members or superiors, no direction being given to them. Then contraction comes and, sure enough, they're the first to get laid off. Not because they did anything wrong, but just because companies that big are constantly experimenting with entire divisions and product lines that existed for no real reason other than they had more money than God and may as well do something with it, but when it turns out a product line with no purpose never actually sells or even gets completed half the time, the entire division gets axed and anyone in it goes, regardless of the quality of their work or their persons or intellect.
I know these guys very well. One of them is pretty good and I'd take him in a heartbeat for anything not super challenging, but the other is a straight up honest to God superstar in the making. He was solving other team's challenges without even being asked within a week of being on the job. I'd put him on any project ever. The fact that a company would even consider losing him is an indictment on their ability to judge ability.
This isn't even really saying anything specifically bad about Google or Microsoft. I just frankly don't think it's possible for any organization that large to have any idea what 90% of their employees are even doing on any given day. Google and Microsoft should each be about 30 different companies, not one, and even those 30 would still be too big to really stand out if you're not Raymond Chen or Jeff Dean.
I work at google and our team has too much work and is expanding constantly. Anyone I meet in GCP is working 45 hours a week minimum. It's not a death march but I've yet to meet the people who just don't do anything.
Maybe they were L3s? Maybe it's EU?
As with any large company, I think it's going to vary, even within the same jurisdictions.
Something a lot of people are bad at is the gradations of "no" that might be allowed in a situation, and learning how to communicate that can ripple up and down.
If upper management tells you "I want 1 million ponies by tomorrow", but what they really mean is "I want to see how far you can get at delivering those ponies by tomorrow", that can be the difference between making a plan for coordinating that transport and going home on time or being up at 2 am calling around to find someone who won't call you expletives for waking them to ask about ponies at 2 am.
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Not a Googler, but from what I've heard from colleagues at GCP, it's is a very different organization than much of the rest of Google.
This makes it sound as if LLM tools weren't prevalent inside MS yet by June. Is this really true? I'd be shocked if so.
I am speaking of the time from 2024 to mid-2025. While upper management was pushing developers to use Copilot, it was still not prevalent.
Post mid-2025, there were mandates to use it wherever we could.
> I would look at my colleagues and sister teams and wonder, why do they need these many people to work on something so trivial
And yet nobody has time to do anything except to tell everyone they don't have time to do anything.
Alot of people with legacy knowledge that pitch in sometimes, but are mostly blocking others work/playing politics all day
Or they wont stop talking in meetings, but produce no real work
So glad we can finally notice this! :)
These big tech companies aren't meritocratic at any level from hiring to promotion. It's all nepotism and funny business going on behind the scenes.
One time I interviewed for a job at a big tech company during COVID/woke era and I had selected a dropdown option under 'Ethnicity' in the application form saying that I was from a "Caribbean ethnic group" which is technically true and I flew through all the interview stages and technical tests until the final interview where I had to meet with the CTO which they said was just a formality... They had dangled the biggest salary package of my life; it was like 2 times what I normally get... But then the CTO didn't show up; I spoke to some senior dev instead; conversation was not technical and I think I was quite pleasant so I don't think I did anything wrong there but I didn't get a job offer.
Unfortunately, the drop-down did not allow me to specify 'White Caribbean ethnic group" - Technically I'm a descendant of white settlers who settled the Caribbeans 500 years ago. My guess is they were not a big fan of the white variety of ethnic Carribbeans.
Middle Management Machivallianism
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I was here before this comment was flagged
what good is that comment if you won't explain what was said?
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I witness you