Why Good People Leave Large Tech Companies

This post rings eerily true. Recently had a company all-hands where the CEO said basically the exact same lines. The whole &quot;if you don&#x27;t love working here, then you should leave&quot; bit made me cringe. Easy for you to say when you&#x27;ve got a significant equity share in the company.<p>The saddest realization I&#x27;ve had working at companies is how power-hungry people are, how little respect the people in power often have for those &quot;below&quot; them, and how important politics is even in a field like engineering that you&#x27;d expect to be meritocratic. Sweeping decisions are often made in a small room of a few &quot;higher-ups&quot; without any input or regard for those &quot;below&quot; them. Providing counter-arguments that question the decisions of the executive caste is often seen as a threat (how dare you question your leader?). The shy and humble rockstar coder who kicks ass gets little recognition while the smooth-talking sycophant gets accolades and climbs the ladder.<p>Corporations are authoritarian tyrannies with strict hierarchies. America was founded on the principles of democracy, but we tolerate tyranny in our workplace. The only way to change this is to remove the asymmetric dependency of the employee on the employer (eg. UBI).

This is why its always possible to hire great developers - because some companies and hiring managers think that people should be not just great developers, but willing to jump through ridiculous hoops to work there.<p>If you want to hire people, drop the attitude of &quot;we don&#x27;t want people who aren&#x27;t willing to prove how much they want to work here&quot;. Instead, give them every reason to want to work for you.

&quot;But the CEO never noticed that the payoff had ended for the other 95% of his company.&quot;<p>It seems a lot of C*Os forget this after a while. For a lot of rank and file employees the stock price makes no difference.

&gt;&gt; &quot;I was visiting with an ex-student who’s now the CFO of a large public tech company.&quot;<p>&gt;&gt; &quot;(By coincidence, the CEO was an intern at one of my startups more than two decades ago.)&quot;<p>Admittedly, this isn&#x27;t adding to the discussion at hand. Just one amateur writer picking apart another&#x27;s writing style, but...<p>Is it just me, or do those lines serve no purpose except to boost the author&#x27;s own ego and sense of self-importance?<p>I feel like they don&#x27;t serve the reader in taking away the lesson in the least. They really strike me as an attempt to remind the reader of the writer&#x27;s own value and importance.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m being too cynical...

Just another revolution of the wheel of the infamous &quot;How Software Companies Die&quot;[1] which has this balancing note: &quot;The environment that nurtures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa.&quot;<p>When a product innovation company turns to medium size, the process comes in with the executives and soon after innovation dies, but the product market value is realized and efficient. The problem comes if the leadership isn&#x27;t repeating the cycle.<p>A company can thrive if they stay innovative and invest in new products always though, most of those companies are engineer led because it leads to happy development&#x2F;value-creation: Amazon, Google, Microsoft (except for the Ballmer era), Valve&#x2F;Epic in the gaming industry etc.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;~chuck&#x2F;jokepg&#x2F;joke_19970213_01.txt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.cmu.edu&#x2F;~chuck&#x2F;jokepg&#x2F;joke_19970213_01.txt</a>

When I worked for a large multinational energy services firm, one of the bosses I had (they changed every 2-3 years) was a huge bully. One of those &quot;great coworker, bad manager&quot; types. My wife had passed away, and as a result, my performance had dropped.<p>One of his lines (verbal in person, not on paper) was &quot;If you don&#x27;t want to work here, there are plenty of people that do.&quot;<p>He was the only boss I&#x27;ve ever had that made me consider leaving a job I&#x27;d had for 7+ years (at the time) simply because of who my manager was. Needless to say, about a year later when he called a meeting to announce that he was leaving for a competitor, my back popped as my shoulders un-tensed.

My buddy told me a story of what he saw at his company. It was an interaction between a CFO and a new lead developer at a small tech&#x2F;startup company that actually had been around quite a while.<p>It went something like this.<p><i>Dev: Can we get 2 21&quot; monitors for developers?<p>CFO: Why? Laptop LCD and that old 19&quot; monitor seem to work together just fine.<p>Dev: Yeah, but we can be more productive if each dev can get 2 x 21 inch monitors.<p>CFO: Uhh, no. I get more year end bonus for every dollar I save for the company. So maybe we will revisit this later?</i>

Ugh. So much this. Story time.<p>Doing work with a 3rd party firm on some simple dev work (integration into a few partner APIs). We&#x27;re a big Azure customer, 3rd party knows this. Gives us ARM templates for resources needed to deploy.<p>Get on the phone with the IT folks internally, state we need these ARM templates deployed and monitored. Queue two week (plus) process, 100 questions, and department to department costs (all of it is outsourced) which are quite outrageous.<p>The costs are so high that they probably wash any revenue&#x2F;profit from the partnership.<p>You know what? I have access to one of our Azure subscriptions. I&#x27;ll just do it myself guys, to hell with the consequences.<p>Usually this results in noise later, but screw it, I made us money now versus incurring additional cost and made some money later.

This attitude of &quot;you really have to want to work here or you ought to leave&quot; justifies a lot of insanity. I&#x27;ve heard it from companies who make potential employees jump through ridiculous hoops to even get a chance at a job. Here&#x27;s reality for people who suffer from this delusion: most people don&#x27;t give a fuck and are just looking for a job. They&#x27;re applying to dozens or hundreds of jobs (yes, even in software), and expecting them to know everything there is to know about your company just to apply (like providing a detailed cover letter) is downright insane. This is how companies with such an attitude problem attract &quot;yes-people,&quot; suckups and other undesirables and miss out on real talent that isn&#x27;t going to stand on its head just to get a chance at an interview. Likewise, as the article points out, this toxic attitude is just as bad at retaining employees as it is at getting them in the first place. What I&#x27;d like to see is the second part of this story. How these people then hired another 50 software engineers with actual talent in the bay area. Most companies I speak to have trouble finding one or two, let alone 50. And all because of an incredibly naive and stupid attitude of the company&#x27;s execs. This is indeed a case where the founders should have been replaced with proper executives, though I&#x27;m not sure &#x27;proper&#x27; executives would have made a better decision.<p>As an aside, one shortcut to weeding out shitty companies is to simply filter out companies that say shit like, &quot;we are on a mission to change the world.&quot; That&#x27;s a guaranteed bad time.

My first job after my training was at a really small company, about 10 employees plus the CEO&#x2F;owner. And he was just like that CFO, too. The size of the company does not necessarily make a difference.<p>Still, having done my training at a slightly Dilbert-esque multinational corporation, I made a point of working for small-ish companies since.<p>Of course, small-ish companies bring their own share of problems, but all in all, I prefer that smaller companies tend to be less bureaucratic.<p>And I like the personal touch - at one company (~15 people), the CEO&#x2F;co-owner walked up to each employee every morning and greeted them, shaking their hand. He was in some aspects a fairly difficult boss, but that little gesture made up for most of the difficulty.<p>The problem with a company treating employees like they were arbitrarily replaceable is that employees will treat the company the same way. If a company wants employees to identify with the company, to want to work at that specific company, it has to do better than that.

The most important lesson for people in power in big tech companies: FORMAL PROCESS IS THE ENEMY. Don&#x27;t let the accumulation of gatekeepers and approvers and other capital-P Process let things become 100x harder than they need to be.<p>Do not confuse difficulty with prudence. Your organization will become slow and ossified <i>by default</i> unless you take specific steps to maintain flexibility. One of these steps is to install a culture of change. Things that are easily undone should not require approval to be done in the first place.<p>Do not allow long-timers in your organization use &quot;caution&quot; or &quot;good engineering practice&quot; as an excuse to slow everyone else down. Emphasize that the most important part of software development is moving fast. Let new people try new things. Minimize the number of people who can say &quot;no&quot;.<p>Most of all, do not just _believe_ people who talk about best practices and software &quot;quality&quot; and stuff like that. Most of the time, they&#x27;re just finding fancy-sounding ways of saying &quot;nothing should change unless I say so&quot;.

The company I work for at the moment has two values&#x2F;myths that have worked really well at preventing situations like this. Early on, just before I joined at around the 150 person stage, the employees self organized values. One of these was Daytime is Precious. Interestingly it was applied equally to the idea of don&#x27;t waste time (meetings etc) and to the idea that everyone has a life outside of work. The second was the idea that teams are anonymous, and decide themselves what they work on.<p>In reality these are ignored at times when required. But they&#x27;re so embedded in company culture that you need a pretty good reason to do so and more importantly most employees are comfortable challenging management when they do.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how to replicate this but letting employees set the company values once you get to a certain size is likely a good call.

I&#x27;m surprised that Steve is working for such a long time in the start-up industry and seemingly hasn&#x27;t caught on that the in-company politics won&#x27;t evolve, because the meta-company politics of the start-up world are already efficient.<p>If you don&#x27;t consider jobs and companies as something that should live longer than you, it&#x27;s totally fine as it is. Switching jobs is not a big deal, if you have lots of new options and get paid well. When small start-ups get the next innovation loop better than the current set of big companies it&#x27;s fine, because people still make money, just a set of different people.<p>People who want to make money by working, still make money. People who want to make money by investing, still make money. New innovation really happens, no matter if the current people on top get it or not.

Because companies grow not only horizontally but vertically.<p>Vertical structures create encapsulation of individuals and that leaves room to exploit information asymmetries.<p>e.g: stealing credit, favoritism, etc... rigging the game to their favor.<p>At the late stages of this game, people like this can get away with anything: hiring and promoting their friends, openly insulting people, just openly lie knowing nobody can do anything about it, etc.

Anyone have a guess as to what company this was?

At my current company we have an inverted, but similar problem. Startup A got bought by Company B. Company B doubles down on technology from Startup A, which ultimately leads to a big acquisition by private equity for the combined A&#x2F;B.<p>Private equity firm cuts out RSUs and focuses on eeking out high margins without raising salary compensation to offset changes. All the senior people from Startup A and a number of senior people from B all jump ship within 6 months.

Despite the overall theme of this interaction, opening an office in the East Bay seems more employee friendly than keeping them in Palo Alto.

It&#x27;s good that big companies do dumb stuff like this. Otherwise the world would be even more dominated by oligopolies.<p>Hopefully they don&#x27;t wise up.

Siloes is a big reason good people leave; a somewhat corollary is people think that with experience at bigco and an alphabet soup of technologies they can take that to another co and impress.<p>Some do impress but others have limited lateral experience and so don&#x27;t fit very well into any place but at prev bigco. But, but, I have five years of experience in X at bigco Y.

I can&#x27;t entirely follow the article. What I read is a CEO of a 10k+ employee company had to relocate to grow and sustain growth. A team of 70 people was affected. He made the (right|wrong, pick as you like) decision 70 people leaving now is better than 10k+ having to miss out on the future opportunities.<p>That is what I read from this article. Though all is speculation as there is no real information in there apart from a quote you can be for or against.<p>This is not &quot;why good people leave large tech companies&quot;. It a sole example of a very small group in a very specific situation. Relocation loses people yes. But not amass and not as a hidden thing. The company is well aware of it. The quote itself was there for years and it is not why people left.<p>Large tech companies that loose good software people for instance often do so because they apply their hardware processes to software teams as well. In addition they don&#x27;t want to spend money of software, software has to come for free right! The hardware is expensive but the software is a thing we had to add as cheap as possible. That means deny requests for fancy work setups; my hardware guys can work with one 19&quot; monitor why do they need 2 24&quot;?<p>Have no separate career ladder for the technical people, I.e. You can only grow into exec or fellow if you switch to the people&#x27;s route and forget the technical (I.e. General managers, directors etc but no levels above lead software architect of a (smaller) department).<p>Now that loses people.<p>P.s. I work in a large tech company. 100k+. We recently resolved the last part but not yet entirely the former. Coincidence is that I&#x27;m being relocated in January 2018. It brings about 20 minutes additional travel time for me, but for most others it doesn&#x27;t. Like the article. However, I&#x27;m not seeing how losing me (and some others) would outweigh the benefit of having the entire NL software group in a single location.

After years of working at a big tech company, I left primarily because there was no interesting work left to do, and the place had become very political.<p>Another sign its time to leave: when the company starts doing &quot;reorgs&quot;. Get out as soon as you can!

Ah the tail wagging the dog again sounds like facilities and I suspect hr have got to much power.<p>I know that the CEO when facilities where pushing for people to move to some industrial estate near Heathrow with zero pubic transport links &quot;word class Telco&#x27;s don&#x27;t have a head office in a F%^king shed at Heathrow&quot;

Omg this sounds exactly what happened at Uber.

Good people leave their Bad managers;

I left a large tech company for very similar reasons.

Executives: &quot;You should care about the mission, not the money!&quot;<p>(as they keep all the money to themselves)

I&#x27;d like to remind people that large companies are the only ones capable of hiring junior engineers who might not be at full productivity at day 0. This is especially true of the C++ ecosystem.

you did not mention something in this article. check again and re-post.

Hmm. Really?! I worked for various large corporates, studied for a MBA after my IT career; found out about ethics and other ontologically speaking really valuable things in life hence left. But really, besides personal spectives and&#x2F;or ego&#x27;s.<p>:: Henry Mintzberg basically said it all in 2004 already: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.nl&#x2F;books?hl=nl&amp;lr=&amp;id=zsYAeVgwHDQC&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PA1&amp;dq=Mintzberg+managers+not+MBA%27s&amp;ots=nG2VlR0jSj&amp;sig=rjMofuNE8G8ldQWnM96O6phzAaA#v=onepage&amp;q=Mintzberg%20managers%20not%20MBA&#x27;s&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.nl&#x2F;books?hl=nl&amp;lr=&amp;id=zsYAeVgwHDQC&amp;oi=f...</a> ISBN-13: 978-1576753514, ISBN-10: 1576753514 &quot; Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development&quot;