Ruinous Surprises in Company Culture
I have been working in tech for about 30 years now, in both hobby and professional contexts, on open source and proprietary projects, for myself or companies with 10 or 1000 or 100000 employees. I'm no boomer, but the lessons I learned in the late 1900s are less and less relevant today. My last two FAANG positions have involved more than a few surprises. In particular, there are a couple of major components of company culture that I didn't figure out until far too late. Of course, it seems like no one ever tells new hires about these things, instead just hoping for the best. By writing this, I hope that I can help at least a few people not succumb to the same traps that I did.
Everywhere I had worked in the past, the company organizational chart served as a sort of chain of command. If you wanted to meet with your boss' boss, you got your boss involved first. Doing otherwise would be taboo in most circumstances. If you wanted to plan an effort involving two different departments, the heads of both departments would be involved at the level of setting Objectives and Key Results for the departments for the quarter, and then some manager in each organization would be involved in the ongoing collaboration. Those team / department / organization level plans dictated where effort would be spent and how different groups would work together and depend on each other. Violating this chain of command was more likely to lead to censure than productivity.
Contrast this to Google, where individual contributors are expected to coordinate directly with their peers (including at higher and lower levels) elsewhere in the company. Admittedly, my understanding of this phenomenon is limited, because I didn't figure it out until the very end of my time there. If you need work from someone on another team in order to ship your project, you contact that person and convince them your project is worth their time. One IC might be wrangling parallel contributions from multiple other departments to get a single result out the door. If you fail to do this, the scope of things you can succeed at will be significantly constrained. Attempting to approach managers to coordinate this sort of thing will be seen as a sign of weakness or incompetence.
Amazon takes this a step farther. The unspoken expectation is that if you aren't getting the results you need from someone in another team or department, you need to talk to their manager about their project priorities. When I discovered this, I was aghast. The corporate cultures I had “grown up” in were pretty firm in the norm that the only time you talked directly to someone else's manager was if they did something so egregious as to get them removed from a project or maybe even only to get them fired. It was only in the final months of coaching on my lack of success that anyone thought to mention that I could have and should have been reaching out to managers on other teams. Relying on my manager to interface with other managers was perceived as failure.
It has never made sense to me that these wouldn't be things explained to new hires as part of orientation to the company culture and expectations. If I ever work for this kind of company again, I will ask early and often about these sorts of cultural quirks. I hope this inspires you to ask similar questions.