> Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving somebody else to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and violent on-call isn't something to be rewarded IMO.
Sadly you've described precisely the optimal engineering strategy for promotion at my FAANG
And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.
There's a cognitive dissonance that arises when you join a company that is performing extraordinarily well only to perceive dysfunction and incompetence everywhere you look.
It's so hard to reconcile the reality that companies can be embarrassingly wasteful, political, and arbitrary in how they run and yet can still dominate markets and print money hand-over-fist.
By being in the right place and right time once, making it impossible for users to leave, and buying up all their competition before they become a serious threat.
Also, they typically started with much more of a high quality culture when they were small and people's contributions were legible.
Once it turns into a giant bureaucracy with people you've never met judging a promo packet by rubrics, while they're unfamiliar with your whole org.. the incentives get diffierent.
People succeed in spite of these systems. They have resources, tremendous network advantages, and the people at the very top crust of engineers are indeed quite good at their job.
nothing says its the people getting promotions that are making the value.
there's still plenty of people not on that grind trying to make whatever thing nearby them work, or have other career goals than promotion or money
that promo option getting people who want to build a bunch of junk out of the way and into positions where they arent building stuff might be relevant to why those companies are succeeding
Because big companies can crush competition, either via lobbying for government regulations, acquiring the competitors, or driving the competition out of business by offering something comparable but cheaper or free.
It's the old Microsoft playbook of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but with more finesse.
It is also why their acquisitions tend to just die, because once the big company inefficiencies get integrated, the acquired startups just cannot function.
This is my every day, and I’m not at a FAANG. It is horrifying and infuriating at how much could be improved, and how much cost could be cut like that if there wasn’t an absurd amount of internal politics, and we had a high-trust environment.
Sadly you've described precisely the optimal engineering strategy for promotion at my FAANG