What's your mission?
There used to be a recruiting poster on the wall in the Google London MK which said "do cool things that matter." I think that poster really sums up one of my biggest gripes with - and personal failings in - big tech.
Tapping into our need for purpose and meaning is a powerful tool to recruit, and then motivate employees. It worked well for a time - when double digit growth was easy, and 20% time was an actual thing. It worked well because it was real. Even if you were writing ad serving code, you could feel good that the experience for the end user was going to be decidedly better than the alternative ad platforms, because it was.
This focus on mission above all else is IMO the best way to get a group of people to work together to achieve some goal. Nothing else lets you converge and move forwards as quickly when facing disagreement or interpersonal conflict. A well defined, well understood mission is the gold standard.
And that is also it's downfall. If you want to truly have the mission be the glue that keeps the team on track, it has to be well defined - which is much harder than it sounds, and it has to be well understood by everyone who is contributing to it. Every time you encounter a difference in understanding of the mission, you need to stop and reconcile this through discussion. This takes a lot of time, forever.
This works great for startups who are able to pick a simple, well-defined mission, and which have teams small enough that everyone can truly be on the same page. I'd venture that the time spent discussing the mission and keeping everyone aligned ends up being less than the time that would be required to manage conflict and disagreement the "traditional" way. Not to mention that discussing the mission is often a positive and engaging experience which boosts motivation and buy-in; the alternatives are generally a neutral or negative experience for the team.
Focusing on the mission does not work, at all, for companies with thousands of employees. I'd say it's a True Statement that by the time you have a recruiting poster on your office wall, your company is too big to truly be mission-driven. That's not to say the the company can't focus on some mission (or likely, missions) - it can - but the mission can no longer be the glue that keeps everyone moving in the same direction. By that point your business will be too complicated to sum up in a single, well-defined mission statement (and if you try, you'll get something that is useless in practise like "organise the world's information"). Even if you do manage to come up with a well-defined mission, it'll be impossible to ensure that your thousands of employees truly share the same understanding of it.
Big companies are not stupid of course, and they know this. It's why job ladders and performance reviews are a thing. "do some things that might get you promoted" is not a very catchy recruitment slogan though. And this is where the dissonance starts.
The layoffs shattered what was left of the illusion, but for a long time there was a somewhat disingenuous duality to the way big tech companies were run. All the words were about being "Googley", putting the user first, having enough community contributions, etc. All the incentives were about putting yourself first. That is your true mission: get promoted.
Those like me who were naive enough to believe the words, saw the incentives set up by levels and promo as a bug - a necessary and inefficient overhead, but something that should be secondary to the mission. Those who did well saw through the words to what was actually being asked of them, and worked the system. And they were right to do so.
Whether the company was focused on generating shareholder value or a specific mission-based outcome, to try and act in the company's best interests was wildly naive. It was behaviour that was in many ways encouraged, but in practise, simply wrong. In retrospect, the thought that a single person could even be capable of understanding the intricacies of such a company's objectives, let alone effectively prioritise their work against them, seems embarrassingly naive.
"Put the user first!" they said, so I complained when we objectively (I had receipts!) were not. Wrong. "Do no evil!" they said, so I was indignant when we broke out every trick in the book to optimise acceptance of new T&Cs (without drawing attention to the fundamental changes to user privacy!). Wrong.
It was only during a conversation with one of the HR team who worked on the perf system that all of this finally dawned on me. The levels, promotions, equity refreshes, all of it, was exactly what the company wanted me to focus on. It's what they expected me to focus on. Pulling those incentive levers was how they steered the thousands-strong teams that the company was made of. The aspirational mission stuff was left over from the company's previous life. It still helped to get people through the door so nobody had cleaned it up.
That duality is what I struggled with. In fantasy mission-driven land, I was indignant that peers got promoted for projects that delivered questionable value to users or the company. Once I'd graduated to reality, I was irked by what I perceived as dishonesty in how the company spoke to it's employees.
Ultimately though, the reason I left is that I need to care about the mission. I'm lucky enough to not have to worry about the bottom segments of Maslow's hierarchy, and the only mission truly on offer in big tech - more stock, more reports, level++ - is not one that ever motivated me.
So why am I writing this now? Well, honestly, putting these aspirational missions first hasn't got me very far - either personally, or in achieving the purported goals of those missions. Meanwhile, the number of peers and ex-colleagues who chose the career mission - and whose comp is ticking over into 7 digits - is only increasing.
Anyway, I thought that now - as I make the same decision again - would be a good time to remind myself of what I truly value: working as part of a well-aligned team, with a mission to create value for someone other than us.