These BigCorps are hiring like mad and paying big $$ to fill seats more for the purpose of starving their competition of brains than actually using the brains they hire.
The work is primarily organizational/drudgery and moves at a slow pace because of all the red tape and walls they've built around their projects in order to manage all the people. Endless incremental code reviews for small changes that get pondered for days and days. Design docs for trivial features written up and then basically entirely reworked by comments from people higher up who have more information but no time to do it because they're too busy being higher up and writing design doc comments all day. Horribly inefficient, painful to get anything done, and demoralizing.
Just left Google after 10 years. I found in that time I spent more time trying to find where I fit in and what work I could even do than actually doing any work. In some parts of the company, any interesting project was like a piece of red meat thrown into a pack of hungry wolves looking for "impact". Any project "given" to you quickly got competed with or downgraded in importance unless you got super self-promotional. There'd be talk about some new exciting thing coming down the pipe and you'd eagerly wait months for it to find out the work was either already parceled out or it didn't really exist.
I ended up seeking our "boring" organizations and projects within the company, in order to avoid the frustration and drama. But then motivation suffered.
Oh, and remote work has made them even more terrible because it's even more asynchronous and ponderous now. Can't tap someone on the shoulder and run something by them really anymore, it's just more "fork many threads of work and then spin on all the blocking issues waiting to make progress on any of them". Which sucks if you are the kind of person who is better at picking one thing at a time and sinking your attention into it, like me.
So yeah, at some point you just start to lose focus out of sheer annoyance/frustration/boredom. And you're just there to
collect the paycheck.
And maybe you feel guilty about it, but then, that was kind of the point. Maybe in your previous job you were a top contributor, potentially competing with BigCorp in some domain. Now you're not. They can push wheelbarrows full of money around to do the thing you were doing before, but at way higher scale and precision... but at the cost of way lower velocity because they've employed PhDs to nitpick over the comments in a protobuf description. (And if you leave and start your own thing and compete, they'll probably just come and buy it and bury it, too.)
They're bad for our industry and not so great for our brains... but good for our wallets. 10 years at Google messed up my passion and skills.... but it sure was good for my mortgage.
(FWIW, I thought in that time that I had lost my passion for coding. But two weeks after leaving to take some time for myself, I found myself firing up CLion and writing a synthesizer from scratch and loving it. Writing code is great.)
Very well put, your comment resonates with my frustrations at a BigCorp.
> These BigCorps are hiring like mad and paying big $$ to fill seats more for the purpose of starving their competition of brains than actually using the brains they hire.
I used to apply Hanlon’s Razor to these types of hypothesis. After spending more time with the decision making class, the amount of psychopathic behavior and analysis I’ve seen has let me to reconsider.
I don't think it's psychopathic or malevolent beyond what's normal for capitalism. It's how you win at making money. In any market you're either disrupting or at risk of being disrupted. There's multiple strategies you could take for the latter. And it certainly helps if you have a firehose of money (ads revenue).
Not speaking from any inside knowledge, BTW. Just my philosophizing.
That may be a legal/valid strategy, but it seems pathological. Instead of spending money on unproductive employees, these companies could just pass their excesses down to share holders. If a specific company is out competed fairly, oh well, companies don’t need to last/grow forever. The share holders will hopefully have allocated the returns more efficiently (maybe in the new competition).
I see it as an invasive vine using all its spare energy to block out the canopy and choke out the forest. Rather than a native tree that uses spare energy to bear fruits, which nourish various critters who in turn contribute to a more efficient and robust ecosystem.
The work is primarily organizational/drudgery and moves at a slow pace because of all the red tape and walls they've built around their projects in order to manage all the people. Endless incremental code reviews for small changes that get pondered for days and days. Design docs for trivial features written up and then basically entirely reworked by comments from people higher up who have more information but no time to do it because they're too busy being higher up and writing design doc comments all day. Horribly inefficient, painful to get anything done, and demoralizing.
Just left Google after 10 years. I found in that time I spent more time trying to find where I fit in and what work I could even do than actually doing any work. In some parts of the company, any interesting project was like a piece of red meat thrown into a pack of hungry wolves looking for "impact". Any project "given" to you quickly got competed with or downgraded in importance unless you got super self-promotional. There'd be talk about some new exciting thing coming down the pipe and you'd eagerly wait months for it to find out the work was either already parceled out or it didn't really exist.
I ended up seeking our "boring" organizations and projects within the company, in order to avoid the frustration and drama. But then motivation suffered.
Oh, and remote work has made them even more terrible because it's even more asynchronous and ponderous now. Can't tap someone on the shoulder and run something by them really anymore, it's just more "fork many threads of work and then spin on all the blocking issues waiting to make progress on any of them". Which sucks if you are the kind of person who is better at picking one thing at a time and sinking your attention into it, like me. So yeah, at some point you just start to lose focus out of sheer annoyance/frustration/boredom. And you're just there to collect the paycheck.
And maybe you feel guilty about it, but then, that was kind of the point. Maybe in your previous job you were a top contributor, potentially competing with BigCorp in some domain. Now you're not. They can push wheelbarrows full of money around to do the thing you were doing before, but at way higher scale and precision... but at the cost of way lower velocity because they've employed PhDs to nitpick over the comments in a protobuf description. (And if you leave and start your own thing and compete, they'll probably just come and buy it and bury it, too.)
They're bad for our industry and not so great for our brains... but good for our wallets. 10 years at Google messed up my passion and skills.... but it sure was good for my mortgage.
(FWIW, I thought in that time that I had lost my passion for coding. But two weeks after leaving to take some time for myself, I found myself firing up CLion and writing a synthesizer from scratch and loving it. Writing code is great.)