Every job lately seems to have been infected by Meta/google “data driven” leadership. Its so painful and wasteful sometimes.

It's cargo cult mentality. They look at FANGs and see them as success stories, and thus they try to be successful by mimicking visible aspects of FANG's way of doing things, regardless of having the same context or even making sense.

I once interviewed for a big name non-FANG web-scale service provider whose recruiter bragged about their 7-round interview process. When I asked why on earth they need 7 rounds of interviews, the recruiter said they optimized the process down from the 12 rounds of interviews they did in the past, and they do it because that's what FANGs do. Except FANGs do typically 4, with the last being an on-site.

But they did 7, because FANGs. Disregard "why".

20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.

Yeah. I, like most leaders, spent some time learning all that crap. It was awful and worse than useless.

Google and Meta's secrets are recruiting top talent to for top dollars, and then buying every start up that threatens their empire. There's no secrets to great management to be had there.

I just threw out my copy of "product engineering at Google".