I think the author had unrealistic expectations from working at a large company.
He expected doing something meaningful that will change the world. He expected to be applauded like a hero for his efforts.
But things don't work like that.
If you work your ass out, don't expect more than a pat on the back. Managers won't care about your efforts, your mental state or your sleepless nights. They care about looking good in front of their superiors.
So it's better to do just that is expected for you, enough to get a good evaluation.
If you come out with a brilliant idea that might help the company a lot don't just do it. Find some allies in the higher hierarchy, explain to them what is their advantage, do a POC or MVP, then let the top management know in a public meeting. That way you get a lot of credits and applause for doing great things for the company and fighting the good fight.
This story of his would have fir just fine in a much smaller Stripe, back when you could actually know everyone, and Patrick interviewed every programmer. A time where making a difference wasn't all that hard, as everyone fit in one cafeteria in the Mission.
It was always a pretty competitive place, with a lot of smart people working a lot of hours, and a culture of attention to detail that left many people with impostor syndrome. There were pretty good expectations of being nice to each other: No infrastructure team giving your request the cold shoulder, because that was just not OK. So people working really hard and burning out to try to meet every growing expectations was common.
The post also had the other weakness of the culture: A lot of management changes, along with a culture of performance among managers that would be fit for Amazon. So a manager might change teams, and the person that used to get exceed expectations would end up with a PIP with the next manager, often by surprise. You can imagine what it does to morale to tell someone how they are the most helpful person they've worked with, and then see them gone two weeks later. It was a great place to work in many ways, but the negative parts took their toll.
So, if anything, the story showed me that even though it's been many years, a lot of Stripe is still recognizable.
The flip side of that is that if companies make "passion" a hiring criterion, they'll end up hiring people who care about making a difference, which may serve them poorly if the position doesn't actually fit that.
Of course not. They got 4 years of fantastic work out of the guy before he burned out. That serves them just fine. The only requirement is that you have no morals.
I don't see it that way. He wanted to work there. They paid him for his time and from his account all of the passion was his own. I'm not speaking against those who just want to do what's required, but is it really wrong to hire someone who is passionate about the work?
Sorta, yeah. Working for a largeish enterprise I actively select against too much passion. Those people will come in, go WTF constantly for about half a year, spend another half year doing less and less, before eventually leaving for greener pastures.
I mean, I get them, as I went through the same thing.
My big company strategy is to troll internal chats/forums for things that seem like interesting problems. Do something to fix them or make them suck a little less.
Always be building solid, interesting things and make sure that if someone, for some reason finds them, that they would say "wow, this is cool, who made this?"
Then I casually share links to those things in the right context. If I get a 10% hit rate then I'm happy.
Do this all day every day between assigned projects 9-5 and you'd be amazed at the network you can build outside your own team. Keeps the options open for lateral movement.
This reminds me of a side project that got me multiple peer bonuses from strangers at Google. At some point the company decided to switch software for the performance eval system, and decided that everyone would have to copy their past review manually, piece by piece, into all the form fields of the new tool. In the FAQ they said that people asked if they could do this automatically and it wasn't practical to automate this process.
So I took a few hours one day and made a Chrome extension that did it for you. Wasn't hard to write. Saved people maybe 5 minutes. Some folks appreciated that so much they spent the 5 minutes nominating me for a peer bonus! I never really capitalized on that in any lasting way though.
> a brilliant idea that might help the company a lot don't just do it.
Never do it. It will never end up benefitting you, even if you find "allies" - who might even stab you in the back and take credit for the idea and then let you go once they get a promotion.
If you have a brilliant idea, keep it to yourself, try to think of a way it could be used outside of the company and if it is strong enough start your own business based on the idea. Otherwise forget it.
It's not "more" work; it's "different" work. I quite enjoy low-level optimizations, and all I have to do to work on that all day instead of coordination, meetings, and drudgery is convince people a few levels up the chain that the cost savings are huge and that the extra speed enables cool new features.
It's corporate America, so I'm going to be unceremoniously fired eventually anyway, but in the meantime I might as well enjoy myself, impress my coworkers, snag a promotion or two, and get a "made a cool new thing increasing profits $XX million/yr" line item on my resume.
> start your own business
Probably eventually, but starting a business is very different from being at a place big enough that I can profit my salary many times over just from faster code. If I start one, I'll write fast code there too, but "fast" isn't a business idea by itself, and I don't see anything wrong with doing a good job for whoever happens to be writing my paycheck.
> the cost savings are huge and that the extra speed enables cool new features.
Been there. The savings were never passed down, but you could always enjoy photos of boss's new sports car or their month's trip to Borneo to "recharge" and think of new challenges. Ah sorry! I got an iPod once as a thank you.
> "made a cool new thing increasing profits $XX million/yr"
That may backfire. Nobody likes a new kid on the block that has tricks up his sleeve that could jeopardise someone senior's career.
Sure, that's the game. I get an extra bonus or raise or something with promotions, and more when I switch jobs, but nearly all the profit goes elsewhere. If you want to leave the upper-middle class you'll need to set out on your own eventually.
If you don't have a solid plan and life circumstances for building your own business yet though, why would you not do things the business likes, especially when it means your day-to-day is more palettable, it doesn't actually require any more work, and it has some moderate career impacts in case you never set out on your own?
> this may backfire
That's the same sort of logic that leads people to have asphalt roofs instead of white roofs in southern climates. You do, absolutely, alienate a significant fraction of buyers (employers). You command a premium at every place that's left though because they want you _because_ of the things that make you different. So long as you don't shrink the pool too much, each individual job is more lucrative.
This has not been my experience. I’ve seen people rewarded for ‘brilliant ideas’ (though really more like brilliant execution, let’s be honest, ideas are worthless in their own). Now could they have more reward starting their own company? Perhaps. But it’s certainly more risky. In a regular job if your idea doesn’t pan out you haven’t lost much, maybe you get a slightly smaller bonus that year or something.
There might be ideas that work only in that particular context and you can't implement on your own outside of that. Otherwise, I agree with you.
>Never do it. It will never end up benefitting you, even if you find "allies" - who might even stab you in the back and take credit for the idea and then let you go once they get a promotion.
That's why I said to get allies from the higher ups. Not your boss or your peers. Preferably business people. And you don't need to give them all the details. Just let them know if would make them look good, have their approval and use them as a shield.
I mean, brilliant ideas can still be fun to work on. Who cares if you don’t get appropriately rewarded for saving the company $50k/month, it was time well spent.
As opposed to working on that pointless crud thing your boss likes.
I agree with you. But not everyone will. Some people have jobs to pay for their lives outside of work, and that's it. And that's fine.
I take the stance of, the job I do for 8 hours 5 days a week might as well be something I actually enjoy doing above and beyond the financial incentive. Working on something I think is really neat is enjoyable, and I'm lucky to work in an industry doing things not so far from what I would spend my time doing anyway if I were retired.
He expected doing something meaningful that will change the world. He expected to be applauded like a hero for his efforts.
But things don't work like that.
If you work your ass out, don't expect more than a pat on the back. Managers won't care about your efforts, your mental state or your sleepless nights. They care about looking good in front of their superiors.
So it's better to do just that is expected for you, enough to get a good evaluation.
If you come out with a brilliant idea that might help the company a lot don't just do it. Find some allies in the higher hierarchy, explain to them what is their advantage, do a POC or MVP, then let the top management know in a public meeting. That way you get a lot of credits and applause for doing great things for the company and fighting the good fight.