This has gotta be tied to some monster Azure spend commit from Zip, or whatever company owns Zip. That is the only logical explanation for such a trash feature.
It’s a huge organization, so very much a situation where YMMV. It really all comes down to the team you land on. With that being said, teams constantly reorg / reshuffle, so that can change very quickly… which is a good and bad thing. Depending on where you are coming from, the work life balance isn’t nearly as bad as it is made out to be. Figure out what what metric YOU are being assessed on and optimize / document for that. Also pick 2-3 leadership principles to develop your brand around(hint one of them better be “earns trust”) Biggest suggestion is to document your accomplishments, since teams reorg, institutional memory is very short which is a double edged sword. Also keep in mind most of your co-workers will have less than 2 years of tenure and are also “figuring” it out, so if you feel like you are on your own.. it’s probably because everyone has no idea what they are doing yet. Stay positive, take feedback well, and things will be okay.
As someone who had run 200 person offshore development teams, the biggest issues are time differences visas & norming\forming teams.
Time difference: this can be mitigated for North America by using teams in South America, but scale is typically limited, The time difference in India is brutal for everyone, you end up having small windows of time to communicate synchronously either early or late, people are typically tired when this communication happens, either just waking up and trying to get their kids to school/ family going or trying to go to sleep so they can wake up early for another call… which leads to sleep deprivation!
One way around this is key individuals who have strong people + technical skills spend significant amounts to of time at the start of projects in North America(assuming it is a NA centric project) this allows them to fully immerse and absorb the nuances of the people, product, requirements and politics of the program, this is expensive and can be challenging from a visa perspective, any project I’ve worked on that has succeeded started with this.
Yes, this there are many campuses that have luxury dorm buildings, personally I’ve experienced this at BU and North Eastern in some of the newer residential high rises, they aren’t necessarily “pent houses” but the point is tiered luxury housing at different price points does exist on campuses. I think his general point is that the space is the most desirable location and his design derives the most utility for the most people. It comes at the expense of individual freedom. It’s an interesting statement from someone like Munger. It’s equitable housing, if this hasn’t been done/studied at scale anywhere else I don’t understand the pushback to try something novel to solve a real problem. While the cost may seem high for this project, if it succeeds it could have huge benefits for future generations. If it fails, it will also provide valuable data points that can be used towards solving the problem, seems like a win/win especially with a private donor like Munger footing a large portion of the bill.
If unionization takes hold for tech / software engineering type jobs, I’m curious what this will do to the ability of companies to effectively compete and attract talent. The best people I know are aware of their value and typically want to work with like minded motivated people. How many pro-union people here have actually put in time at union shops in more traditional industries to understand the perverse incentive structure unions can have on individual productivity.
“Company Culture” - We think you will accept less in compensation because working here is so pleasant and our open office space with snacks and a ping pong table are cool!