[BeefDinnerPurge]

Former L8 there. Terrible culture, full of fungible engineers and leaders that suffocate everyone else with endless meetings and pointless process, with occasional patches of brilliance that keep it from collapsing into a quantum singularity of suck.

But TBF, any company squeezing the last few drops of blood from their stones is going to behave similarly. It's a great time to be paid a pile of money to hate your job.

[amzn-throw]

If you were L8 then the responsibility for setting the culture is 100% on you.

L10s don't micromanage, and L7s take their cues from L8s.

If you want to have fewer meetings, you can set that culture.

If you want less fungible engineers, reinforce specialization in your OLR process.

If you don't like a process, kill it.

This is worse than than the "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic." This is "you're not stuck in traffic, you are the accident creating the bottleneck".

[ActorNightly]

L8s don't have the power that you think they do.

In pretty much any big enough company with enough people, the issue is that you have a general sense of direction at higher levels, and if you go against the grain, it makes other people criticize you because they want to be seen as going with the grain for their career paths. If you want to see the biggest example of effect in action, go work for the US government.

So at certain point, you just stop caring to do anything because the paychecks are worth more to you.

[BeefDinnerPurge]

Nah, I hired specialists and caught no end of trouble for doing so. All of them that are still in tech make $1M+ annually these days because they stand out among the lovable but mostly ineffective fungibles that are the cannon fodder for rounds of layoffs there.

But advocating for my direct reports instead of happily figuring out which one to fire next is what made the experience so dreadful and career-limiting when the L8 and L10 herd's jobs depend on continually hiring and firing to look busy.

Pro-tip: if it's an abusive culture, leave ASAP.

[ActorNightly]

There isn't a single large company the size of Amazon where upper management isn't a complete shitshow btw.

Between high paying job, stability, and culture, you can only pick 2.

[BeefDinnerPurge]

In my 3 decades in tech, something happens around 10K employees and it's irreversible. Amazon was amazing in evading that for so long in exchange for a brutal cheapskate internal culture they slapped the label "FRUGALITY!" upon to make it seem legit. There's probably a doctoral thesis or two in analyzing how it was both broken and working at the same time.