This is a rather dangerous thought process that reflects the skewed view that some Americans have of employment: that anything less than 'Great' should be considered fire-worthy. Employment security is pushed to its exploitative limit. In such cases, employees react commensurately. Employee and employers end up in relationship that encourages churn & hopping jobs the second that your value exceeds your compensation.
> fast moving and changing needs
I find it hard to believe that a behemoth like Google has that many of these. In new product teams, sure. But, there is a shit load of maintence / upkeep / feature-iteration work that mostly requires sufficiently competent and experienced engineers. But, not much more.
> traditional tech model of risk reward
I am not sure if this was ever true for big tech. The second a company was is big enough to be in S&P 500, no low level IC is ever going to have visible impact to the company's stock bottom line.
The idea that a foot soldier's compensation was ever reflective of their impact is and has always been a lie.
> That tolerance is gone at Google and “words” > “content” is the new Silicon Valley mantra of political correctness. You can say terrible things as long as your pronouns are correct or can say super important things but use one wrong word and it's off to HR for you
That's a shame. I was hoping that the media outburst on these matters were that of a minority. But, it appears that this dogma has taken over Google culture at large.
> When I was growing up in Tech in the ‘90’s - there was no such thing as work life balance. We loved what we did and wanted to succeed so we worked like crazy to achieve great things. As I had kids, I learned the importance of being at home for them and that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a balance, sometimes you need to work weekends and nights, sometimes you can head out early or work from home
I am not sure I can take this serious. This is not what Work Life balance means AT ALL. Maybe that's because I am one of the younger folk.
> the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. Soon, Lawyers > Builders and the builders will need to go elsewhere to start new companies.
This appears to be well recognized cycle for big companies in every sector. I would characterize the Ballmer era of MSFT as a somewhat similar time too.
Good points and a good read. But, if you want start up culture, work at a startup...I guess.
