Interesting. I’m wondering how large the company you were in was, and how long it had been large, since this doesn’t match what others seem to report.
Facebook has 60,000 employees, Apple has 132,00, and Alphabet has 100,000 - but Netflix has 12,000, and Amazon has 1.6m. On the other hand, both Amazon and Apple have weird structures where most employees are working in distribution centers or stores, and their core business is far smaller. I also think that mazes take time to develop—Facebook was under 5,000 employees a decade ago, while Apple was already above 70,000, so I’d expect very different experiences.
I keep my work identity(-ies) somewhat separate from my online social discussions, so I won’t go into specifics, but it was on the larger end of the scale, and the company did have a noticeable split between the corporate/retail, software dev, and operations/logistics parts of the business. I can only really speak to the software dev world, which was by itself extremely large.
The thing that’s not easy to see/remember from outside is that there is a very large amount of variance in structure and culture across the overall company, and the variance occurs at multiple levels. Some SVP-level orgs seem more maze-y than others, and some 50-person orgs within a division within an org seem culturally different from others. I suspect the competent engineers self-select to the better-functioning areas, which makes the overall company seem better functioning to them (because their peers are pretty reasonable).
I think my main concern with the Maze framing is that it assumes more homogeneity than is justified. There are absolutely parts of every large company I know of (I have close friends working at many different ones) that sound horrible. But the ones I know well also have pretty reasonable parts as well (not perfect by any means, there are lots of frustrating hindrances that get in the way, but nowhere as one-dimensionally horrific as described in Moral Mazes). As an employee, it’s best to consider the group you’re working in (say, 2-3 levels of management above your job) as somewhat independent in terms of work style of the overall company averages or typical outside reputation.
Thanks—I agree, that all seems correct. I’m not sure if Zvi intended the maze framing to imply every part of every large org was that way, but to the extent he did, yes, that’s going too far.
Interesting. I’m wondering how large the company you were in was, and how long it had been large, since this doesn’t match what others seem to report.
Facebook has 60,000 employees, Apple has 132,00, and Alphabet has 100,000 - but Netflix has 12,000, and Amazon has 1.6m. On the other hand, both Amazon and Apple have weird structures where most employees are working in distribution centers or stores, and their core business is far smaller. I also think that mazes take time to develop—Facebook was under 5,000 employees a decade ago, while Apple was already above 70,000, so I’d expect very different experiences.
I keep my work identity(-ies) somewhat separate from my online social discussions, so I won’t go into specifics, but it was on the larger end of the scale, and the company did have a noticeable split between the corporate/retail, software dev, and operations/logistics parts of the business. I can only really speak to the software dev world, which was by itself extremely large.
The thing that’s not easy to see/remember from outside is that there is a very large amount of variance in structure and culture across the overall company, and the variance occurs at multiple levels. Some SVP-level orgs seem more maze-y than others, and some 50-person orgs within a division within an org seem culturally different from others. I suspect the competent engineers self-select to the better-functioning areas, which makes the overall company seem better functioning to them (because their peers are pretty reasonable).
I think my main concern with the Maze framing is that it assumes more homogeneity than is justified. There are absolutely parts of every large company I know of (I have close friends working at many different ones) that sound horrible. But the ones I know well also have pretty reasonable parts as well (not perfect by any means, there are lots of frustrating hindrances that get in the way, but nowhere as one-dimensionally horrific as described in Moral Mazes). As an employee, it’s best to consider the group you’re working in (say, 2-3 levels of management above your job) as somewhat independent in terms of work style of the overall company averages or typical outside reputation.
Thanks—I agree, that all seems correct. I’m not sure if Zvi intended the maze framing to imply every part of every large org was that way, but to the extent he did, yes, that’s going too far.