Google vs Facebook vs Netflix engineering culture
Question for folks who have worked at Google and one of the companies (Facebook/Netflix). How would you compare the culture there? In particular: * amount bureaucracy, how much development slowed down by all the "processes" - meetings, sync-ups, "design discussions" etc... * amount of office politics, co-worker relationships. How supportive your peers/managers? Did you have situations when peers tried to push back your work to avoid you make any progress? * are good and clean engineering solutions valued? Is "solution complexity" considered a good thing for promotion and that is why everyone overcomplicates their work? * How transparent and honest the upper management with engineers? Or put other way how much BS, hypocrisy and misleading information coming from the management. * do you feel that you do "the right thing" that makes your users happy? * ... anything else related to the culture Honest answers with little or no koolaid are very welcome.
Wow Netflix sounds amazing. The only caveat is that every day you go to work unsure if you still have a job (i.e every Netflix thread on blind).
Are there any other mid-large size companies with near zero processes like Netflix?
Almost all my friends who work at Facebook says it pays a lot but sucks, either makes you work too much or bullies you. They have bunch if MBAs as managers so all they do is PUSH. Google seems to be pretty fucking heavenly food and politics is great. However, it is quite team dependent. Everyone recommends working in a team that is close to food source, Ads, Search, Android or Youtube where the real money is made and teams are funded well. Other riskier teams like Google X seems low growth because the products aren’t making any money for the company less chance to increase salary.
There are almost zero processes in Netflix because we feel it slows down innovation. Engineers are trusted to do the work how they see fit. We are hired for our expertise and are allowed to use it. We are transparent, almost to a fault. Therefore, there is very little politics. Feedback culture is real. If peers purposefully tried to hinder progress, they would be weeded out quickly. We also don’t have fucked up processes around promotions. In many places the only way to get a promotion or raise is to only work on certain types of projects. You are promoted based not only on the impact your work has, but on how well you collaborate with other teams. We value people who work on not just big projects, but small ones as well. We don’t have hierarchy here, so raises are given based on market value for your skill set. The more skills you learn and bring to the team, the higher your value. And lastly, everything we do is focused on if it is right for the user. There are a lot of selfless teams here. If you haven’t done so, check out our culture memo. It’s pretty spot on to how things operate here.
Sounds very HRish
How so?