![]() ![]() My boss and my bosses's boss and all the HR people I'd give an F. Still do, but bad design can still make for a good product financially (and it has gotten better.) ![]() (not that I had any say in the matter) I thought it looked like it was designed in the USSR. I saw the Kindle at Amazon about a year(?) before it was announced and wanted to kill it on the spot. In fairness I can compare myself to gates. (Maybe google is better than both, but I've not worked there.) If you're a talented engineer, work for a startup, but if you need a big company and you're in the northwest, pick Microsoft before you pick Amazon. And that's in comparison to Microsoft (where I also worked) where this "metrics" religion was completely accepted as well. But HR and Management at were absolutely atrocious. Of course generalizations like this will have exceptions and I knew some groups who were lead by software developers who got promoted, and the AWS group seemed to be insulated from the amazon culture. It isn't really scientific when, in advance, you decide that %10 should be on a firing track, %70 should be warned and %20 should be promoted- without regard to actual performance.īezos likes to run around claiming he only hires "A players", but what it ended up being was C & D players who didn't know how to program or understand technology, ranking their teams, almost completely based on office politics and ones ability to hype their work, rather than the actual technical quality of the work. Microsoft and Amazon both seem to think it is "scientific". Do you use stack ranking? If the answer is yes then you know they aren't performance based. However, with pressure mounting on the company to execute layoffs and cut costs with employees, Google, after all, might be trading its crown as the best place to work in the world.As someone who has seen stack ranking in action at Amazon and Microsoft both, this is an excellent interview question at any company you consider, especially one founded by ex-Amazon or ex-Microsoft employees. The reason that many went through this grueling process was the promise of being hired in one of the world’s best and most stable workplaces. Moreover, the company has an acceptance rate of only 0.2%, making it more exclusive than certain Ivy League colleges in the US. It is common knowledge that Google is one of the most difficult companies to get into, with most aspirants reporting that the process takes 6-9 months and involves multiple rounds of interviews. An analysis by S&P Global found that Google’s compensation is a whopping 153% higher than the 20 largest listed tech companies in the United States, prompting another easy pain point for investors to target. Known for hoarding talent by offering substantial pay packages, the tech giant might be facing heat from investors over this approach. Google has long been one of the best places in Silicon Valley to work. He remarked, “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have.” Google already seemed to be facing the heat back in August, as evidenced by Sundar Pichai’s all-hands meeting where he asked employees to scale up their productivity. The letter from Hohn brings up the point that the company can be run effectively with far fewer employees – a sentiment echoed by prominent VCs and Alphabet ex-executives alike. Since 2017, the company has almost doubled its workforce, with hiring increasing by 15% in 2020 alone. In addition to pressure from the hedge fund manager, the company is reeling under the effect of excessive hiring over the past few years. In this letter, he stated, “We are writing to express our view that the cost base of Alphabet is too high and management needs to take aggressive action.” This comes after Christopher Hohn, the owner of a UK-based hedge fund holding around $6 billion worth of Alphabet stock, wrote a letter to the company late last week. Through a combination of the stack ranking system and performance improvement plans, employees will be identified as poor performers and shown the door. The tech giant has been asked to identify 6% of its employees – close to 10,000 people - as poor performers, or ‘noob-lers’. Google has been a notable exception to this trend, but that might change soon. From Twitter to Meta and Amazon, all tech giants have been exploring cost-cutting measures and taking to “trimming the fat”, so to speak, from their workforces. November has been pockmarked with companies laying off thousands of employees. ![]()
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