Career advice, or something like it
42 comments
·June 20, 2025nine_zeros
Magmalgebra
> E.g. Amazon, Meta etc. have terrible work cultures
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.
yodsanklai
I worked only in one big tech company, but my impression is that they try very hard to have a consistent work culture across the company. Everything was super standardized and controlled. There's also a high turnover so even if there's a bunch of senior people that maintain a sane culture, they'll leave eventually.
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...
Magmalgebra
> my impression is that they try very hard to have a consistent work culture across the company
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.
nine_zeros
> - 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.
And you get both of these nuggets of actionable info in watering holes - which was the original point.
scarface_74
Every large company sucks. You are always just a number. They serve a purpose though. They have a lot of money and allow you to exchange your labor for more of that money and publicly traded RSUs than enterprise development or government.
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.
stackskipton
You had a pretty good career if you have gotten RSUs at your jobs, most large companies outside FAANG and types don't give any stock options outside some pitiful purchase plan.
le-mark
If traditional large companies do give stock options they’re at the closing cost of the date of the award (strike price). Not the zero dollar purchase price of big tech, which makes the much less attractive and profitable.
I was at an insurance company that made a big deal about offering rsus to engineers. We were like is this a joke?
rufus_foreman
The stock purchase plans at the two non-FAANG companies I worked for that offered them were amazing.
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.
scarface_74
Just 3.5 years out of close to 30. I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever go back to BigTech. It served its purpose.
bravesoul2
At least YC jobs ads are honest about what you are getting in for. They often spell it out "weekends and nights" plus use every hustle superlative there is and the salary is advertised.
whatshisface
That's one third true. The other two thirds are work experience and networking, which you can't do at a job that's a dead end with a good pay check.
badc0ffee
I worked at a huge, non-FAANG but you all have heard of it, tech company, and it actually had a great, supportive culture and great people. The only issue was that the work itself was soul sucking - everything moved slowly, and the product was a joke compared to newer competitors.
bravesoul2
I can guess which one :)
golergka
> Every VC backed company sucks even worse, they work you to death, promise you “equity” that will statistically be worthless and they pay less.
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.
BeetleB
Indeed. Years ago, someone I know worked at a VC backed HW startup. It failed. The founder personally met with several CEOs of other companies saying "Hey, we're going to fail. I've got great employees. Do you want to hire them en masse?"
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."
scarface_74
Look no further than YC.
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.
volkk
learned this the hard way. got stuck with people in a big company that i thought were "cool" but literally hated tech (this included engineers in the group) and the company which they worked for. Constant complaints, everything bad, etc. I joined a much better company after and made friends with really curious/smart people--my own level of care, curiosity and side projects catapulted. I am a completely different person. Complaining is fun, and super fucking easy. Actually doing something about it is a different beast and I want to be friends with the people that understand the world isn't perfect and want to actively make it better by doing rather than incessantly whining and throwing their hands up in the air.
kixiQu
Generally it behooves one to take Marc Brooker seriously. That said, without invoking my legally protected right to discuss workplace conditions, I think it's fair to say this particular sentiment in this particular moment rings a little hollow.
lazyant
Meh. Be outwardly positive and follow whatever you want to do but the reality is cynical (or you haven't been around much yet).
temp0826
I think these watering holes are just called "the IT department". The toxic BOFH vibe should've never caught on.
</whiny rant>
bigcat12345678
I think the article is exactly opposite in what people should be doing.
My advice: avoid positive echo chamber, unless they reveal genuine behind-scene facts.
Negativity is never a problem, people routinely sacrifice a lot for meaningful objective and reasonable leaders. When they turn negative, it's primarily there isn't a positive feedback loop in the environment.
But what's really happening now is that people are instinctively sugar-coating their meaningless job to lure outsiders for their own ego or whatever.
catchcatchcatch
[dead]
wavemode
> Every organization and industry has watering holes where the whiners hang out. The cynical. The jaded.
I wish. I've worked for startups where I would've killed to have such a space, where people actually felt free to criticize the way things were going.
Toxic positivity is a thing too.
buggy6257
For me in every startup I’ve worked this ended up just being a self selecting group slack DM where we would mock things. We didn’t hate the places but there’s always stuff to have fun with like that. We would just recognize each other and keep adding people.
0x696C6961
In my experience this is the same group who is actually fixing things.
yodsanklai
There's a lot of toxic positivity in my company. Without the whiners, it would feel like a mental asylum. It's great to know that you're not alone.
But I agree, constant negativity doesn't help.
only-one1701
Toxic positivity, you mean the entire tech industry since 2013 or so?
ge96
Blind (a watering hole)?
edit: ehh this is external though
OutOfHere
The article is bad advice because nothing improves without criticism.
The real problem with criticism is that management doesn't like bad news to be advertised, so they punish those who speak out. As such, it's not wise in the short term to illuminate bad truths if one seeks job security. If one seeks firm security, however, then honestly addressing all criticisms is the way to get there.
Another observation about criticism is that it can often be falsely mistaken for cynicism.
BeetleB
> The article is bad advice because nothing improves without criticism.
You're referring to the article that is saying complaining can be helpful?
I'm 100% with the article, BTW. My first job was in a crappy, dysfunctional team (and department, and org). After 4 years, I got out and changed careers.
Every so often, I have lunch with those who stayed. They whine just like they did over a decade ago. And literally nothing has changed. And almost every time I point out "You want to improve your situation? You need to leave."
I'd go the extra mile and say that the reason such watering holes exist is because they are in an environment where criticism usually changes nothing. So the engineers need to find a place to vent. The places I've worked where management is receptive to negative feedback didn't have these negative watering holes.
There is some truth to avoiding whiney echo chambers. But these watering holes also give insights into the dirty.
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.