Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Jobs at elite firms

Work Policies May Be Kinder, but Brutal Competition Isn’t
By NOAM SCHEIBER
New York Times
AUG. 17, 2015
These firms do have many high-IQ employees, but only some gifted people will want to work in them. The long article on Amazon is Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace . Competition to get into elite colleges also causes some aspirants to study and participate in ECs for long hours. The elite firms that prefer students from elite schools are choosing young people who have excelled in prior competitions. I don't think the competition is zero-sum. Amazon, for example, may be a tough place to work, but its employees have created much value for consumers.

Yes, one workplace termed this deep need for competition "work hard, play hard".

I read the NY Times article about Amazon when it first came out. I also read the highly predictable comments, which almost uniformly condemned Amazon. It is very likely that Amazon is a horrible place to work, for most people. But part of me thinks it might be a great place to work for some people, particularly the knowledge workers there, as opposed to the warehouse workers.

Amazon sounds like some of the startups I worked in--an intense and highly focused work atmosphere where laggards are quickly thrown out. If you have a good management team, the employees that remain are mostly quite smart and hard working, and the productivity is very high. In the right company, the opportunities for advancement are incredible. I was in one such startup in my mid-20s, and I was in charge of designing some of the world's largest computer networks simply because we were growing so fast that there was nobody else to do the job.

People who have never worked in such a fast growth atmosphere simply don't understand the incredible high you can get from the intense work. And when you go home, you go home happy. I don't remember anybody getting divorced for example. The right startup environment is like an addictive drug that startup people go back to again and again, typically until they reach their 40s and naturally slow down a bit.

This startup mentality also typically goes away once the company gets beyond a few thousand people. Only a few companies seem to manage to keep it after growing much bigger.

As a follow-up to the Amazon article, the NY Times public editor, Margaret Sullivan, has criticized the Amazon article for several possible flaws:

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/was-portrayal-of-amazons-brutal-workplace-on-target

There was a comment to this article that also resonated with what I wrote above:

"Recent Hire Seattle"'s perspective is based on a short term view of "a few months" employment and may be different than a long term, careerist view of 5+ years.

Based on her shared observations/experiences of "colleagues... never too busy to help me; manager... incredibly flexible with respect to my work schedule... open and responsive when I’ve brought up issues pertaining to race and gender in the workplace", this individual may not yet have experienced competition in the workplace. Competition can call for great sacrifice of personal time and private life. For example, she may not have had vacations cancelled, missed weddings/funerals/birthdays/kids' games and recitals... or been required to stay at the office and work 48-hours straight through to resolve a disaster-recovery issue.

Over time, some individuals may find a measure of challenge, reward, and exhilaration from pursuits in their free time outside of work, such as start-ups, vacations, travel, friends, family, and volunteer causes (paying it forward and/or giving back). There may be something to be said for balance in one's life.

Often in life we get to choose our competitions... as well as the option to sometimes forego competition in favor of collaboration.

Well, I never ran into any of those issues you mentioned, at any of the four startups that I worked in. Once I was forced to miss a class I was taking to help with a sales call, and my boss took the salesperson to task for it. It never happened again.

You make it sound like it is one or the other. Just like people have different levels of intelligence, people also have different levels of energy. In my younger days, I could easily do 60 hours a week of productive work and still have plenty of energy and time left for outside activities. But more than that and my productivity and happiness went down rapidly. The good managers I had understood this. When I had bad ones, I stopped working for them.

Point well taken. Anecdotes will vary. Readers may benefit from success stories of different kinds.

I have a friend who worked at Amazon at a high level for some time and she felt the portrayal was on target. She left the company with a lot of money but many bitter feelings.

Exactly. On one hand, the world needs all kinds of people with various strengths, skills, and talents. On the other hand, what a person is drawn to at one phase of their life may be different than what they seek at another time. As in choosing schools, extracurriculars, colleges, etc, it is about assessing the right "fit".

A few comments coming from person living in the heart (brain?) of Silicon Valley. I've worked at big law firms, a couple start-ups and am now at a huge tech company. And these comments have some broad generalizations not intended to excuse some notably bad behavior by SV execs:

1. The start-up culture, and its translation into a quasi start-up mentality in big tech companies, arose from small groups of individuals who worked ridiculous long hours for minimal to no pay because they wanted to - no HAD to. Most of these guys (yes - almost all guys) are grown-up versions of our own kids - intense, driven and most of all perseverative to the nth degree. You already know what this looks like. Your kid will fall down stairs because she's reading while walking, right? Your kid won't eat, sleep or even go to the bathroom until they absolutely have to. These are the "kids" that are at the base of the startup culture.

It makes no sense to them that their colleagues aren't likewise perseverative. They have "no-limit-on-vacation" policies, because who the heck wants a vacation anyway? In another time and place, they'd be scientists who never make it home from the lab, or writers who can't put down their pens. It's not that they don't love their families, their hobbies, etc. It's just that they honestly can't put down their work.

And competitive? You bet. But mostly not out of an "I'm better than you" thing. Remember - in the start-up culture, most folks are getting minimal pay/promotions anyway. It's about a gut level need to make it right. The merit goes to the one who solves the problems. And that person is the one that finally gets to scratch his brain itch.

And yes - the press has made much of the get glittering possibilities ($$$) a successful start-up presents. But 'round these parts, we've seen that (a) a start-up that isn't driven by somebody who NEEDS to make it work JUST RIGHT is almost certain to fail before anybody gets rich and (b) most start-ups fail even if they do have these sorts of folks. The pets.com style free-flowing millions are far in the past.

The trouble arises when the successful start-up needs to scale up. There simply are not enough of the persevartive people to populate a huge company. But lots of folks want to jump on the pre-IPO start-up bandwagon or into the hot tech company of the year, seeking excitement or $$$ or both. Thus - housing prices around here .... sheesh!

But most of these folks aren't wired the same way. They don't have the same NEED to be at work, the same need to pick at everything until it's JUST RIGHT. So the hours and the competition and the whole workplace environment is awful to them in an incomprehensible way. From their point of view - the culture is needlessly intense. They may try to fake the same level of intensity until they burn out. Or they may demand change, forgetting the source of the company's success in the first place .... The people that rise to the top of these companies have to be that sort of perseverative person, because that's inherent in what makes the company tick.

I'll freely admit that I'm not one of those perseverative start-up founder types. I love going to work with them, and I can hang with the culture for a while. It's exhilarating, but exhausting. After a while I have to step off and catch my breath. But I don't expect them to change to accommodate me. It's their essence, and changing it would kill the company. [Caveat - excepting of course the need for the culture to improve with respect to discrimination issues, and the need to be humane to their employees. But my experience has been that these folks actually want to change this. They just don't have any understanding of what it takes to make it happen.]

2. Does anybody but me think it's funny that Netflix keeps getting listed as one of these "Top Tier" firms. I love Netflix, think they have a brilliant future, realize they are a S&P 500 component, and don't mean to offend anybody who works there. But it seems they are in this discussion just because of their new maternity leave policy, which - see above re "who wants to take vacation anyway?" But anyway - bravo to the Netflix marketing/HR departments. They've surely upped Netflix's recruiting power!

3. I don't know how any of this would translate into the NY/Goldman Sachs/finance part of the world. I don't know a thing about what drives those folks. It must be something more than money, though, right?

Fun philosophizing with you all,
Sue