Definitely non-faang companies, that lean more towards being rational and steady. Faangs are a nightmare to work at in this decade.
do you have examples of companies that are rational and steady?
Readit NewsI think it depends. Because I used to think larger companies would have better work life balance but I have experienced and seen awesome and shitty at larger companies and so at startups.
Also, unless it's a decidedly shitty work life balance company like Amazon's (or few others which might be in general good), there usually no such things as "company's work life balance" but as I said above - team's.
I wish it was not this non-straightforward but it really depends on your team and especially on your lead/manager who actually set that tone and ensure that people work in or around that tone. A shitty manager fucks up the work life balance of the entire team which in some cases might have been awesome for years and often leads to exodus of people who preferred and more often those voids get filled by people who manager prefers and of course sings the same tune manager sings.
Also, some people say "work life balance" is personal. Fuck no. Just like there are generic health and medicine guidelines for populace in general (even though there are some exceptions) there are generic work life balance (which DIRECTLY leads and relates to mental and physical health and well being) - hours, timing, leaves, breaks, clear demarcation of "after office hours", availability expectations esp. after office hours and its frequency, stress, pressure, atmosphere etc etc - and how much agency an employee has in these or deciding on these!
So in short - my experience says manager is the decider of work-life balance in a team.
I'm curious, if you're interviewing at a company, what's the best way to figure out of the lead/team has this balance? What kind of questions could you ask without sounding like you're trying to be lazy?
Work-life balance describes personal and situational priorities, a property of your needs and circumstances. It does not describe a property of a company.
Figure out what you need, specifically, to get to the work-life balance you want. With a child that may mean work from home, flexible schedule, good insurance, day care subsidies.
From my own experience as a parent working in the software field, I found that companies that employed many other parents in my age range helped. If no one else on your team has a family they may not sympathize with the demands on your time you face.
That's a fair point. I have coworkers with kids but I've noticed the lead is a workaholic (with a child) and that reflects on the rest of the team.
I escaped a FAANG to a small company of about 22 people and that was awesome. I’ve been working for a state org that’s considerably larger for over a year with great results. Forget about working someplace that brings you glory or prestige. It makes life a lot better when your life matters more than your career.
Love this. Can you clarify what a state org is? Do you mean like a tech department within your state government?
smaug7 commented on Healthcare companies are yanking info from their leadership pages old.reddit.com/r/redscare... · Posted by u/paganel
Out of curiosity I looked up how much other companies pay to protect their CEOs. Aprox:
Andy Jassy: $986,164 2023 - Tim Apple: $820,309 2023 (plus 1.6mill in jet use) - Jensen: 2.4ish mill 2024 - Doug McMillon (Wal-Mart) 1.5MM 2022 - Sundar Pichai: 6.7MM 2024
FWIW, I saw Tim Cook in Pac Heights a few months back just walking around. There were two "guys" in plain clothes in front and behind him on that Saturday morning. I was able to say "hello" and he was nice. I imagine there are probably others monitoring his security that I couldn't see also.
Orthogonally related to the article, I think it gets to the deeper issue at hand with regulating technology:
The internet connects everyone and allows for free-flow of information, free-flow information is eroding people's trust.
We want free speech, but people use words to deceive and coerce. You can't make rules to stop this - people will always find ways around them.
Ken Thompson wrote "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in 1984 (fitting as it may be). The conclusion being that we can't rely on computers to build trust. But we need trust to live in a society.
It's human instinct trust one another. But falsehoods spread fast online, and after being fooled so many times, people are losing their natural trust in others.
What's the way forward? I'm curious what this crowd thinks.
I don't have a specific answer to this as I'm not a trained historian. However, didn't we see this with the invention of the printing press back 500+ years ago? That also dramatically increased knowledge distribution and probably lies and mistruths. How did society handle that?
Enron didn't kill Arthur Anderson. Nothing is going to kill McKinsey. They're too intertwined with powerful people.
This is fundamentally different. Arthur Anderson was an auditing firm and did accounting. Their selling point was to be the "source of truth" for their client's books. What's that confidence is lost, then no one would hire them for their work. McKinsey, as a management consultancy, doesn't have to be a "source of truth" and offers perspective, which can be neither right or wrong. Management makes decisions on if they want to take McKinsey's advice or not.
I used to work for Twitch and built the Custom Live notifications for streamers. It was a relatively straightforward change where we just changed the payload of what the streamers wanted the iOS, Android, email notifications to show. There were some behind-the-scenes work where there is actually a language/curse word check and decisions on if we needed to translate the copy to the receivers local language.
The measurable change was a 30-60% increase in the notification CTR and resulted in hundreds of millions of incremental hours watched.
I'm not saying China is right in wanting to invade Taiwan. But that's closer to their real motivations than anything having to do with economics or technology. And its important to understand your potential adversaries motivations because that will inform their decisions and tactics.