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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't, this kind of language policing is all about control and power.
A friend of mine worked as consultant with a big bank in London. They would get weekly emails about what kind of "newspeak" is allowed or not.
They seriously banned terms such as an "all hands meeting".
Woke 1 was absolutely crazy.
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.
I remember reading about some similar thing with French and the French president’s wife responding that the language was beautiful the way it was and they don’t need outsiders telling them how to gender (or not) their words.
I feel like the affluent just love to invent new words to show the “others” that aren’t using it how backwards they are, and how the affluent are truly enlightened.
And no it's not just privileged white people. My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.
It often leaks information the speaker didn’t intend to share. e.g., “I met a friend. She was late.”
Did the speaker mean or care to share to gender of this friend? Is it relevant? I don’t think so.
And I find it especially interesting when people argue for gender-neutral plurals, but then happily use gendered noun. It sort of feels like “everyone must stay in their lane” type of expectation.
Even the patriarchy argument is weird. The patriarchy - along with religion - wanted this gender line and specification in every context. Wanna stick it to patriarchy? Nix the gender from all languages!
Did they? English used to be gendered but lost it ~1000 years ago.
Languages evolve in odd ways and don’t think the patriarchy or religion have much to do with it.
I’ve also seen people argue that we should learn to not see vocabulary gender as gender at all, just start associating some words as “la” and some as “el” with no boy/girl idea behind it.
Grammatical gender is not intrinsically sexist and doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you try to analyze it to tease out what patriarchs were thinking when they added these forms, because largely they never thought about it at all. The forms evolved over hundreds of years.
If you look up the list of exceptions to the whole "-a = feminine, -o = masculine" in Spanish, it's incredibly long (and covers many of the most common words). Similarly there are a whole bunch where the gender is correct, but the article is swapped because it sounds better. The gender of specific words is also arbitrary, and doesn't agree between the various Romance languages.
This whole thing is just the leftover pieces of Latin's 3x linguistic genders hanging around in our languages, and ceased to be related to actual gender centuries ago.
Nonetheless I appreciate a perspective from someone who has an affiliation with the culture term refers to.
Was the eye roll part of the sarcasm or...? Colombian and other related Spanish speaking cultures do the same things, so what's her point, to feel like she's sticking it to the invisible spanish dude?
I'd recommend getting out a bit more or reading a bit more:
> According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,[7][21][22] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language."[20][23] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.[24][25] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.[21] A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.[10]
> Despite the increase in awareness, use of the term to describe oneself has not greatly increased over time.[4] As of 2018, use of the term Latinx was limited nearly exclusively to the United States.[29] Manuel Vargas writes that people from Latin America ordinarily would not think of themselves using the term unless they reside in the United States.[29]
Maybe it didn't technically originate in privileged English speakers but it certainly seems to have arisen in popularity among them.
As someone who lives in a 99% hispanic region in the US, I've never heard anyone use this term to identify themselves. We're right on the border and that sort of thing seems to mainly happen in larger cities north of here.
To the extent that the term has become widespread, it seems to have piggybacked on other diversity and inclusion efforts. People who identify as Latino/Latina seem overwhelmingly to dislike the term.
> Among Hispanic and Latino Americans, knowledge of the term is not widespread, and reception to the term as a potential classifier for the entire Hispanic/Latino population has been overwhelmingly negative. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly half of U.S. Hispanics were not aware of the term Latinx; of those aware of it, 75% said it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, preferring instead the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" by large margins.
Ironically, the also relatively uncommon “Latine” is in decline but still more popular than Latinx for all of recorded Google trends history. Except in the US. Of course.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=latinx,L...
9/10 Latinos would roll their eyes and get back to doing actual work, they don't have time to be offended.
It's all a performance to them anyway, and I'm not playing the game.
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.
People get lumped into "guys" and feel excluded. That's such a different bar than feeling offended.
It's ok for you to say, "I'm sorry my language makes you feel excluded, but I'm not going to change" and it's ok for someone to think less of you as a result.
Why does everyone jump to the idea that people who want more inclusive language are offended? Or that the critique being offered here is that the language is offensive?
(Granted, sometimes that is the critique. Plenty of casual racism or ableism is offensive. But that's not the case with "guys".)
As a woman in this industry, being told that using “guys” to address mixed groups is non-inclusive/insufficiently considerate/worth thinking less of me for (just wow) is much worse than being addressed by “guys” when I’m in a mixed group.
Like… we have real problems with equality in tech, right?
People deliberately choosing not to try to honor those preferences are making a choice with a small impact. No one is claiming it's a big deal. But honoring preferences can make people feel unhappy.
As can honoring a preference that you find silly.
It turns out, this is pretty simple human negotiation stuff -- we can all express a preference and we can all choose to not honor it. And we have to be comfortable with the idea someone might think less of someone else a little bit as a result.
"I interpret a commonly used word or phrase as meaning something other than what the dictionary says that it means, and differently from what pretty much everyone, for hundreds of years, has intended it to mean when they say it, and so every time I hear it used by anyone that makes me unhappy so please stop using that word or phrase around me" is a pretty strange request that some people might find a bit unreasonable. At least it might not be too hard for some to constantly remember to alter their vocabulary around specific people.
In terms of human negotiation, part of working in a professional environment, or any large group of mixed company, involves understanding that you may not have your every preference catered to and that for some preferences it can even be impolite to impose on the group by asking them to take your weird hang up into account. The strength/impact of the preference, the size of the group and how well you all know each other will have to factor into that though.
I suspect that "I'll just try to remember and understand that people who say 'you guys' use it to mean what the dictionary says that it means" is a more reasonable position than "Every one of the 200,000+ people who work for the same company that I work for should alter their vocabulary to accommodate my personal preference because I want to cling to a non-standard definition of that particular phrase and I'll judge anyone who refuses to comply"
You are free to consider my request unreasonable. The consequence is a minor one -- I'll know I asked and you declined, and you'll lose some fractional amount of social capital with me.
Where in that does it say I expect my preferences to be catered to?
The whole interaction goes like this: "I feel excluded by 'guys', any chance we could settle on something else?" "No" "Ok" (-1 reputation with me)
Why do you make this out like it's some major thing to have someone ask, and then decline? You have agency, you are allowed to say no. I genuinely don't understand the intensity with which you and others respond with.
> "I feel excluded by 'guys', any chance we could settle on something else?"
In agreeing to your preference this person can no longer use the word 'guys' at all, ever? Or they can, but before doing so must first scan the faces of everyone in the group and if they see you then use an alternate?
This is the problem with personal preferences. They are personal to you, not to anyone else.
If your company orders pizza for lunch and your personal preference is for no pepperoni, then expect that the person placing the order asks for a cheese pizza and several pepperoni pizzas. Don't expect that everyone gets cheese pizza.
I'll try to explain. I think it's a very strange request to make, especially to people you aren't close to like random co-workers. Imposing on others can put them in an uncomfortable position. It would be easier for them to say "No, if you choose to feel excluded by an explicitly and objectively inclusive phrase with full knowledge that it isn't being used with any intention to exclude you, that's 100% a 'you' problem. Please handle your shit and don't make your problem into everyone else's problem.", but most people probably won't want to be rude, so many will just agree. Depending on the power dynamic in play, some people may feel that they have little choice at all, or that the consequences of non-compliance could be career limiting.
For you the whole interaction is the request, followed by their response, followed by your judgement, but for the polite others it involves making an active effort to be conscious of every moment where you're within earshot, remembering the common and innocuous phrase that upsets you for some strange reason, and then actively changing the way they'd normally express themselves to others in order to accommodate you. In addition to having to constantly remember to self-censor, it also means risking feeling like shit if they happen to slip up, or worse, worrying about the impacts their mistake might have on their career or the work.
It's absolutely not the most demanding demand you could place on another person, but it isn't nothing either, and when the reasons for that demand don't make a lot of sense, having to actively make and continuously maintain that effort can feel like a larger imposition than it might otherwise, especially in a busy environment where there's work to be done and people's heads are already filled with other concerns.
A request like that could easily be seen as rude, self-centered, or off-putting in a professional environment even when the same request made to your friends and family would likely be better received. Being able to clearly explain why you have the issue you do in a relatable way might help avoid some of those negative feelings. If it isn't a deliberate choice on your part to twist other people's innocently spoken words by willfully ignoring the very definition of them and turning them into something that makes you feel bad inside, and you find that even if you try you can't help but feel that way about it, in all sincerity, I'd recommend finding and speaking with a therapist about it.
Another way to think about this is as a parallel to microaggressions. Little things that may seem innocuous or not that big a deal on their own, but that add a little bit of emotional or cognitive load to someone's day.
Notice how in China, which has its shit together and is gradually outpacing the West, no one is asking others if they could avoid using a common term that makes them, individually, uncomfortable. That is one reason your behaviour seems a "major thing": it shows from your part a disrespect of social harmony, which is an important thing for a productive society.
China is outpacing the West but it's not all on the good metrics.
“I’m not going to do that. Moving on.”
Everyone is out here thinking I'm policing, correcting, eradicating, or some other verbing. When really I'm asking you to inconvenience yourself to stop inconveniencing me.
You are well within your rights to be like, "no". I don't understand this compulsion to make either party into some villain.
Yes.
> solve
No that's not solving anything.
Other folks, myself included, do feel excluded by "guys" as a gender neutral term. I'm not offended, but I do appreciate when people offer something else.
But to your later point, I don't think it's either/or. We can do both.
I’m sorry that you find it exclusionary. What I find exclusionary is people telling me that it’s justifiable to think less of me for using that term, or comparing continuing to use the term to their grandmother who still uses the N word.
For what it’s worth I have stopped using “you guys” at work except for in “safe spaces” because I don’t want to deal with this sort of judgement. But I find the “it costs you nothing!” defense of word policing to be completely unconvincing.
The scenario here is, "I feel excluded by 'guys', would you all feel ok using something else?"
You are a grown up, you can just say "No".
The consequences will be me having a slightly lower opinion of you as a person.
There's no eradication. I'm not asking you to stop using the word guys.
On the flip side, someone unwilling to do even the “small stuff” pretty much already lost the goodwill that they would be willing to do the “big stuff.”
Put another way, if you ask someone to take a small step for you, and they refuse, would you feel like they are more or less likely to take a big step?
You are, in essence, saying, "I want you to think differently."
I made no claim that it costs nothing. Changing language use is non trivial. Which is why I never demand it. I make a preference known, you can act on it or not.
I made the claim that: a) it does not offend me and b) I prefer others not use it and c) if I've expressed my preference and you choose not to honor that preference, it will diminish my opinions towards you.
This is how preferences work. We communicate them. Others find the request reasonable or not and act accordingly. If my preference was no music playing in desk areas, and you played music in the desk area, I'd think less of you as a result. If you gave me a nickname and I asked you not to use it, and you still used it, I'd think less of you.
I try my best not to offend anyone at work, but policing my language to match the preferences of everyone around me would be exhausting. I grew up speaking a non-prestige dialect. I have a lifetime of experience policing my words. It can be exhausting. It’s easy to underestimate the mental cost if you speak a prestige dialect.
I spent a few decades being made fun of for saying y’all. I now find it a bit weird people who would have made fun of me for using it 20 years ago now use it themselves. I’m not offended by it, but my preference would be that non-southerners don’t use it.
However, I realize that it would be a bit much to ask that of everyone I interact with. And if I did it would be insane to label people who didn’t comply assholes.
I prefer that people that people don’t use learnings instead of lessons. I prefer not to be referred to as a USian. But I don’t expect people to follow my preferences.
This is both trivially true (I recognize that everyone has the right to form their own opinions of everything) and still counter to things I assume you believe (such as: people shouldn’t make assumptions about others based on their gender or skin color).
I do want you to think differently. I want you to think that people who continue to use a phrase widely considered to be gender neutral are not in fact your enemies. Some of them probably are your allies.
For what it’s worth, if I knew you in real life and you made that preference known to me, I would try to respect it, but that respect would depend on the closeness of our relationship. It’s hard to remember every preference of someone you meet once every two months, but I don’t like to be an asshole and try to respect the preferences of people I interact with.
The problem though is that somewhere along the line, continuing to use “you guys” became a sort of reverse shibboleth among a certain set of people who try to use things like whether someone uses “you guys” or whether they have their pronouns set on their profile to determine whether they are allies or, presumably, enemies. And yeah, I do object to that sort of mindset.
From there, if I only see you once every few months I don't expect you to remember flawlessly. The only time I judge someone is if they say no.
As for pronouns, they are a useful signal, but not the entire signal. Like, their presence indicates "this person might be safer", their absence indicates nothing.
I would also take issue with reasonableness of the request. You concede it does not offend you, and that it's merely a preference. I also have a myriad of preferences about speech: the intonation, accent, the grammatical constructions, the words, etc. To ask of other people, whom I don't even know intimately, to match my preferences is something else altogether. It's to impose my preferences over that person's dialect or ideolect, which is also rightly frowned upon.
And it's never couched as a correction. It's always an expression of the impact on me, "Hey all, I know this is a bit of a hang up, but the use of 'guys' feels exclusionary to me, any chance folks would try alternatives? Folks, peeps, y'all, etc?"
You are reading into the words a message that was never intended, and that is on you, not the speaker.
There are words we use because they are familiar that are nevertheless hard to hear for some groups.
When that happens, one absolutely can share the impact of the words AND acknowledge no malicious intent. When I was a kid, "gay" meant bad. Tell you what, didn't feel good to hear it. "Hey, I'm gay" was met with, "Oh I didn't mean it like that". Like, sure, but also can we find another word for bad?
If this level of pedantry can be considered acceptable, how on earth do these folks justify/cope with terminology used in "empowerment" initiatives who often use very non-inclusive wording more so than "guys".
I've also worked with a woman who was extremely displeased to be greeted with "you guys". I found her absolutely insufferable.
The reason it feels bad to people who use "you guys" in a gender neutral way is what it says about the offended person. The offended person has a pet peeve, and if you don't accommodate it, it will be a problem. That's pretty much the definition of an insufferable person.
A person who is well-regulated wouldn't make a stink over something so trivial. Which then tells you that the person is going to make a similar stink over other trivial things. Ad infinitum.
Now you make him think twice about what he’s saying, of course he’s going to nitpick everything.
anyway I have always considered Hey guys as gender neutral.
Merriam Webster seems to agree by listing this as a secondary meaning.
used in plural to refer to the members of a group regardless of sex saw her and the rest of the guys.
and then
Somehow you missed: They did deal with it. The one they criticized did not.
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.
I think it's all just normal evolution of language. I actually think it's kinda neat how different English-speaking subcultures found different ways to reintroduce the pronoun.
> All y'all is used in the Southern United States when a speaker wishes to include everyone being addressed. Y'all may refer to an indefinite set of members of a group, but all y'all definitively includes everyone in the group.
Also, is it just me or does that Wikipedia entry have zero citations? I thought Wikipedia was allergic to citation-free claims..
I'm guessing it's regional and/or group specific.
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.
I'm sceptical of this alleged Australian connection. As far as I'm aware, the term started in England, spread to the US, and it is in the US that its usage really took off. In Australia, "guy"/"guys" as a term for a male or gender-neutral person was imported from the US in the second half of the 20th century.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The other big issue is density is expensive; it costs much more to build an apartment at the 10th floor than a detached house. Combine that with density being inherently a bit shit, you get less quality and less housing for the money spent.
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.
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...
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!
"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).
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/50u77r/douglas_...
Personally I was not aware of that and I feel like something like that should have come up during the entire time he was being deplatformed.
But, was he referencing actual testicles or did he just use the term "balls" in a tongue in cheek manner (to mean like, chutzpah or something?)
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.
The people who are loyal to the company, and believe in the mission, and obedient to the leadership, they are the ones most likely to amend their language and adopt the new terms. They will apologize for their mistakes and correct themselves. This will be looked upon with widespread favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair
Others will not comply. Perhaps they are too old and set in their ways, or they just don't care about other people's feelings, or they are disobedient to the leadership already, and disloyal to the company. For whatever reason, they are the ones who will begin to distinguish themselves with language. When the rest of the company has adopted the acceptable terms, the Missing Stair people will be left behind. Then, they can simply be treated as Missing Stairs.
The bad apples don't necessarily need to be fired or exiled. Simply having a way to distinguish them in a crowd is very helpful in any organization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Andy Rubin, the founder of Android had already made a name for himself in mobile technology. In 1999, he co-founded Danger Inc. Microsoft bought Danger in 2008.
Google acquired Android in 2005, before the iPhone was unveiled in January 2007.
The rumor here is Eric was shown an early iPhone product, and saw how much better it was than the then-current beta builds of Android. https://betawiki.net/wiki/Android_1.0_April_2007_build
Chrome was based on WebKit, which was based on KHTML, the browser engine from KDE. The only reason we have WebKit as an open source engine is because Apple had to open source it. https://blogs.kde.org/2007/10/26/web-diplomacy/
They released "just" enough of it that WebKit could be replaced in Safari. That's it. Their patch would not compile or run on Linux. It would be _years_ before KDE had a WebKit browser. KDE took months to implement many changed from WebKit into KHTML.
Sequoia Capital introduced the Where2 team to Google. https://www.smartcompany.com.au/technology/neural-notes-how-...
Sequoia were freaking out. They had signed a term sheet with the Where2 team, and backed out because Yahoo! just released a map product. Yahoo was involved in both Google's early history and the events that led to Google Maps. Yahoo had an early opportunity to license Google's search technology, rather than acquire Google outright. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were introduced to Sequoia investor Michael Moritz through Yahoo co-founder David Filo.
Yahoo CEO Terry Semel reportedly offered around US$3 billion to buy Google, but Page and Brin declined.
Sequoia withdrew its proposed investment in Where 2 in 2008. Thinking Yahoo would dominate the market, and it was not a safe investment.
Sequoia then introduced Where 2 to Google. CIA, Keyhole, it's all a fun little rabbit hole :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
For example, the software industry. It's pretty much completely unregulated. Prices for software have gone to zero. Software engineers routinely become millionaires, and some billionaires.
Ad infinitum? No it doesn’t.
> Prices for software have gone to zero.
On earth?
> Software engineers routinely become millionaires, and some billionaires.
They don’t but if they did, this could mean the opposite of what you think it means.
I didn't pay a cent for any of the software on my Linux machine. Free Open Source software is everywhere.
In the 1990s, the Seattle Times wrote that there were 10,000 Microsoft millionaires in the Seattle area, excluding the value of their homes.
Charles Simonyi became a billionaire as a Microsoft employee.
Lack of regulation in tech causes real harm, like addiction, social issues and misinformation,not to mention issues with cyber bullying and suicide in teens.
Do some people make out like bandits with billions or millions of dollars, sure but I don't think that's a good barometer for progress or prosperity.
To paraphrase Doctor Who "Human progress isn't measured by industry, it's measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life. A life without privilege"
And by that measure we are still cavemen.
None of those had effective regulation.
Regulation against fraud does work, but the job of government is to prevent crime, enforce contracts, and stop fraud, in a free market.
> And by that measure we are still cavemen.
Government is not going to fix that.
> Do some people make out like bandits with billions or millions of dollars, sure but I don't think that's a good barometer for progress or prosperity.
In the 1800s the US lifted scores of millions of people out of poverty into the middle class.
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.
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.
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.
Why are the biggest companies of recent origin?
They never had a chance to expand in the post-computer era. GE was really close, but they switched to the "do everything" model a bit too early. Before computers, your only option was to have a financial stake in other companies, and this doesn't provide enough control.
As for IBM, I think it just lacks the ambition to do anything drastic. You don't get _automatic_ world takeover, you need to work for it. But others are giving a good run for it, just look at the recent acquisitions by Oracle.
If you want to study the history of bureaucracy and business (an exciting topic!), it took about 20 years for companies to adapt their business processes to be typewriter-friendly. The key invention: short memos rather than long-form letters.
So yeah, my answer is that prior to the modern computer era, companies had a natural maximum limit on their complexity*size metric. This naturally limited the scope of world takeovers and made monopolies self-limiting in the long run.
These limits have now increased, and we're seeing companies taking advantage of that.
Some numbers: the largest unregulated (i.e. not AT&T) company in the pre-computer era was GM, peaking around 600k employees in the 80-s. Amazon has 1.5 million employees now. Walmart is about 2.1 million, Alphabet is at ~250k.
And these companies are not showing any signs of slowing their growth down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe they were L3s? Maybe it's EU?
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.
People who communicate like this are overrepresented in upper management and they are the exact people who shouldn't be allowed to be in any kind of management role. :/
Post mid-2025, there were mandates to use it wherever we could.
And yet nobody has time to do anything except to tell everyone they don't have time to do anything.
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.