This is the third and last instalment of the interview with my friend about how big tech companies work and how the bureaucracy in these places can really grind someone down. We share these experiences to call attention to mental health safety issues in the tech industry.
Getting Into Big Tech
After I got fired from my previous workplace for not wanting to work 60+ hours a week, I wanted to show that I still had it in me. That’s why getting this job at one of the Big Tech companies became important. I prepared and practised a lot and finally got the job.
During this time, my self-confidence was still very low. So low that I went to a therapist to work on it. The therapist listened to me for an hour and then said, “I am very empathetic, and your story affected me: it lowered my own self-esteem as well, so I'm unsure how to help you.” and then proceeded to charge me without any takeaways. 😅 It was quite a shock, and I didn’t try going to therapy for many years afterwards.
But eventually, I arrived at my new team and stayed there for 6 years.
Who Owns This Button? The Detective Work. 🔍
At this company not all teams own a codebase. In my team, theoretically, we coded half the time and did consultancy the other half. In my case, I only coded about 10-20% of the time because I enjoyed client work more. (Plus, people tended to chase me for things, while my longer-term coding projects didn’t; they were only important for my own long-term goals…)
Often, clients would ask a question obvious from their side: “If I turn on these 2 options, why don’t we have the desired result?”. Those 2 options might be the work of 2 different teams in 2 different repositories with 2 different coding conventions, who might not be aware of each other’s work and might have created incompatible features… It was quite frustrating and time-consuming detective work to dig to the bottom of these requests.
Another goal of the client-facing work was coming up with ideas for new features or necessary improvements that the product teams missed: so basically keeping an eye out for unmet needs and low-hanging fruit. You then supposedly fleshed out your own projects with a proof-of-concept attitude, then handed over the long-term support to a “real” product team. This sounded excellent in theory, but in reality, it was a constant uphill battle. After figuring out which team owned the feature you wanted to change (if any), you had to convince this much bigger team (consisting of many members from product marketing to data science) to allow us to make these changes while the team had their own - often conflicting - priorities.
There was a lot of opportunity for friction: either the team was extremely busy with other things and did not have time to help us get familiar with their code base and coding conventions, or, on the contrary, they really liked the idea, but they wanted to do it themselves (but later…). Even if they agreed to let us do the project, they often did not have the capacity or motivation to understand our changes properly and take them over from us for long-term support. So, our new features were often deprecated soon after they shipped. Once, a product team scolded me over a broken feature we shipped for them, but it turned out that it worked great until they made a change and forgot to regression-test our feature. Since nobody has spent real time getting familiar with our work, this was bound to happen.
This huge barrier of entry and the constant struggle for approval was chipping away at me slowly, and I felt bumbling about complying with each team’s definition of high-quality code.
The Bureaucracy of a Meritocracy
In this company, we always had to find objective-looking, measurable metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) to prove our existence, both individually and team-wise.
It was rubbing against my soul stronger and stronger when I instinctively knew what really mattered and what would be of great help to our clients, yet it was impossible to find a good metric to make it measurable.
For example, who wants to invest time in measuring having detailed and up-to-date documentation? Yet, it’s a task I felt was very important to do.
Therefore, before any action, there was this block we had to overcome; let’s say if the task took an hour to deliver, then finding a relevant metric and justification took over 2-3 hours. Or at least this is how it felt. And abandoning an idea because of a lack of a good metric wasted so much mental and emotional energy. Plus, normally, you couldn’t just come up with a new metric unless we were in a planning phase; you had to ensure that it would positively affect your team's already agreed metrics.
Disillusionment also crept up when I started doubting our metrics: were they really meaningful?
The goals and KPIs tended to be very forward-looking, and the features actually used by our real-world users at the present time were often neglected and deprioritised.
Some other metrics were brainchildren of stressed-out leaders made up during the beginning-of-year planning. I hated participating in brainstorming sessions where we wanted to develop ideas on moving these KPIs; it seemed so forced and selfish. Yet this was what senior team members like me were supposed to do; this was the path towards further promotion. I felt that if I stayed true to my values, I would never get promoted to the next level.
The same was required individually: there was this very US American end-of-year “ritual” of stepping up and talking about your achievements. Your promotions or just the fact you can stay at the company depended on your “merits” and how you presented them. This was a social game, and
I am not kidding. People spent weeks before the end of the year to prepare and collect all their yearly achievements to ensure they were received well!
Writing about successful collaborations and selling our work internally took a lot of time that could have been spent instead during actual work. To me, it felt like there was no real value to the end users in this. And in order not to forget what you have worked on - which I frequently did - you had to take meticulous notes each day so later you would be able to demonstrate your value. I now realise that my bad memory and my inconsistent ability to do this bureaucracy were symptoms of my ADHD as well.
This also meant that selfish, narcissistic people had a way better chance of moving upward in the ranks, and there were quite a few people like that in management positions. It also heavily favoured people with great communication skills, even in positions which didn’t need communication skills otherwise; for example, being a native speaker gave a huge unfair advantage.
The “No Blame Culture”
On the positive side, I actually appreciated that the impact of our work was important and not the circumstances that counted, e.g. how many hours you have spent in the office. I also loved the “No Blame Culture”: whenever something broke, everyone worked side by side to fix the problem and ensure it would not happen again. Punishing the “culprit” was not a goal.
It felt liberating that everyone always assumed the best of intentions, especially compared to the previous companies I worked at. At the investment bank where I worked previously, if you didn’t reply to an email the next day, they would CC the boss and their boss to make sure you followed up on the email… While here, people understood you might have been busy and only sent a friendly reminder to you instead. I will really miss this solution-oriented culture.
And Then… The Burnout
Slowly but surely, this constant fear of “what if I can’t sell our achievements”, combined with the high effort required just to start anything, chipped away at my motivation.
Looking back, there were signs of the coming crash: for example, I was losing interest and excitement during the above-mentioned KPI brainstorming sessions. I saw excited people around me, but my face gave away that I just could not give a f*** about it, and I could not come up with anything.
Yet another sign was the guilt of procrastination: I had spent a lot of time at the computer, yet I was not working on the important things, and I knew it.
As it was impossible to know the whole feature offering of the company in depth, in my team, we each became experts in 1-2 aspects and helped each other out when relevant client questions popped up. Unfortunately, my speciality eventually got deprioritised within the company and wasn’t actively worked on or even properly supported any more. I wasn’t selfish or wise enough to abandon this sinking ship on time because I truly believed in it. (Plus, I put so much effort into it; I have shipped various projects around it and onboarded some of the biggest clients.) So I was constantly fighting for the importance of this particular product, not just within my team but with the product team as well, which was supposed to own it. The owning team didn’t even properly understand the intricacies of their own product anymore, so I often ended up training their new team members on how it works. This situation was very unmotivating and wasn’t recognised by most people, including my manager (which is understandable as this shouldn’t have been my job). It was a great example of something that didn’t align with the team’s and company’s KPIs any more but was still important for our clients.
Only positive personal interactions slowed the burnout process: if I could help somebody, if we had a good meeting, etc.
How Burnout Kept Me in Harm’s Way
During this time, I had this menacing feeling that “they are about to discover I work very little!”. However, at the last performance review, I received an above-expectations rating, which was quite baffling. Counterintuitively, it became demotivating as I now could not reach out for help and be open internally about the fact that I was struggling because my review praised me. About a year later, it started to become noticeable, unfortunately, just as the economic crisis and layoffs came.
I knew I had problems, and I knew I really needed a change, yet I did not have the energy to make the change. Changing teams or roles within the company required good performance ratings and internal interviews to the same high standard as for external candidates. Plus, my mood was so low I couldn’t even imagine what change would make me more fulfilled.
It’s hard to think about your future when you are in survival mode!
Making the decision to pull the plug and leave the company was also hard as some people call BigTech companies the “Golden Cage”: you are paid well, you have great benefits, flexible working arrangements and motivated, bright colleagues. I’ve worked so hard to be here, and I couldn’t imagine where I could be happy if I’m suffering even under such - on the surface, at least - good circumstances.
Personally, I think I got quite unlucky with the layoffs coming at the worst moment possible. Under normal circumstances, I would have probably eventually gotten the mental health help I needed and gotten out of the hole. It was pretty normal to have a bad performance rating from time to time and given that I had worked there for more than six years, my managers knew what I was capable of when I was not burnt out, so probably they would have given me some leeway. Even if they had put me on a performance improvement plan, that process would have given me months to get my sh*t together, which I probably would have done under pressure. (ADHD people work much better under pressure, at least for a short period of time…)
But all in all, I think this was a blessing in disguise, so I’m grateful that this happened to me. It gave me the necessary kick in the butt to make the changes I needed. And the severance payout gave me the means to take some time off work and really think about my future. It took about six months for me to figure out that I have a passion for psychology and counselling, which is a much better way of helping people than client-facing tech jobs, so that is probably where my career change is leading me. It’s not a happy end just yet, as I’m still in training and not making a living off it yet, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel.
— END OF THE LAST INSTALMENT —
Summary
Hi, this is András again. One of the key topics of this interview was “self-surveillance” (I just made this term up): as companies go bigger, it is getting increasingly harder to figure out if things are going in the right direction. The inability to confidently monitor and understand where things go is then pushed as a “tax” onto the teams: time for coding is now converted into time for holding the hand of the management. The metrics are at least pointing to a more scientific method compared to how it was done previously.
“Weak Ownership” was yet another topic with which I am also personally familiar, and I think it is still in its infancy. Usually, during team formation, a strong sense of “in-group” and “out-group” is formed (see also [“in-group/out-group bias"])(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism)), which means that outsiders’ moves are watched with suspicion. Especially when bonuses or headcount depend on reaching goals. I have yet to see a team that is not incredibly busy with a backlog worthy of years of work, and I also never saw a company where it was OK just to sit and wait to see if anything comes up. (Note on idleness: it is absolutely necessary for, say, transportation, as if all maintenance crew are out doing busy work all the time, and then you have nobody to respond to emergencies. Yes, it’s inherently ineffective, yet it is a requirement if you want a quick response.)
Thanks for reading the interview! This was the last part. If you have any questions, for me or my friend, just ask away in the comments below!
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