15 ms·

Tldr politics, glass ceilings, re-orgs, purposeless/abandoned projects. As a former Googler, I can see why people post these: internally Google is hyper-evangel

by y3sh 9y ago

Tldr politics, glass ceilings, re-orgs, purposeless/abandoned projects. As a former Googler, I can see why people post these: internally Google is hyper-evangelized as the best place to work ever (why would you work anywhere else). When leaving, its a necessary step to form a good argument for yourself as to why you've decided to go against the culture. The personal spin makes it an interesting read.

b4lancesh33t 9y ago
Yeah I've been at Google a decade and I strongly don't agree with the notion that it's hyper evangelized as the best place to work. In official communications, yes, but I think most people here are aware of the drawbacks and problems. Maybe even a little too aware. Internal lists are rife with the discussions of even the slightest deviation from perfect execution on the part of management, product teams, the culture, etc. That's not to say there's no one here with rose tinted goggles, but I think most people have their eyes open.
- rleigh 9y ago
  When I interviewed with Google, the over-the-top "Google is the best place to work evaaar" attitudes I got from the majority of people I interacted with gave me the distinct impression that it was like some bizarre cult. Most of them were so green they likely hadn't had any other job, so were unlikely to be able to know how silly they appeared to me (having worked for several companies in very different fields).
  - puzzle 9y ago
    When I was at Google, some of us actually noticed that employees for which it was their first job sometimes complained more than the others ("zeroth world problems": they switched to smaller plates and trays) and had no idea how much worse it was elsewhere. You'll probably find a mix of everything.
  - davidcbc 9y ago
    What recruiter has ever said "This is just an ok place to work?" Every job I've had the people I've interacted with in recruiting/interviews have all been very positive about the company.
    - rleigh 9y ago
      There are degrees of enthusiasm and positivity. Everywhere else I've interviewed, people have been relatively positive since they want to sell the company to you and give you a good impression. At Google, it was way beyond that. I think cult-like is a good take on it; it was frankly a bit creepy and weird. And as for the "recruiters", they didn't really try to sell Google at all. I think they assumed that the Google name was sufficient reason to want to work for them. (It isn't, or at least was not for me.)
- y3sh 9y ago
  Of course not, you're still there :D Jokes aside, its a big company with many offices and tens of thousands of employees. YMMV.
  - b4lancesh33t 9y ago
    Hah. I'm not sure it would matter that much to me if I were the only person who saw the flaws. Comp, work-life balance, interesting problems, and a minimum of local bullshit are what matter to me. My coworkers' attitude toward the company, be it positive or negative, or dysfunctions in another organization ten thousand people away from me, are much less influential on my well-being. That's just my take, obviously everyone else is entitled to their own priorities and I wouldn't look down on anyone for caring about the stance of the company as a whole. It's just not me.
- rifung 9y ago
  > Yeah I've been at Google a decade and I strongly don't agree with the notion that it's hyper evangelized as the best place to work This is my experience too. I've only been here for a year but what surprised me was how negative non-official internal communications about the company seem to be.. Note I don't necessarily disagree with their points but the lack of civility.
- komali2 9y ago
  If there's that much internal criticism of mistakes, how are the mistakes made? I.e. multiple chat apps, terrible hardware design decisions (wtf Pixel buds?), etc?
raister 9y ago
you need to convince yourself that you made the best career move ever
utellme 9y ago
I think such situation exists in almost all high-salary sectors. Financial - why I left Golman/Merrill Lynch/Wall Street stories, etc. People will try to explain everything from moral side. It's permanent dilemma.
- jdmichal 9y ago
  Is it really "trying to explain everything from a moral side", or just that main non-moral reason for leaving -- better pay -- is not in play?
  - utellme 9y ago
    For sure, when it's gonna be another 5th wave of financial crisis employees just move between sectors - from private to state (more secure). I'm not sure it's somehow related to IT at all or Google in particular, but this migration type really exists.
stochastic_monk 9y ago
Yes, one needs a reason for leaving a company. But at the same time, one leaves a company or a religion or a relationship for a reason. The argument and reasoning necessitate the departure; they're not developed post hoc. Of course, additional supporting reasons become clear as one looks for and finds the door, and the understanding for why a person or institution is wrong for you evolves as you separate. I'd be interested in hearing more about how that understanding/perspective changes over time.
- utellme 9y ago
  Some people just can't say personally and openly to their boss that there is some problem in policy or system if they think it exists. So they trying to inform this way. But it's not every case, some experienced specialists can just write story as summary to give some experience to young newcomers, to arouse interest, maybe answer possible questions.
  - TallGuyShort 9y ago
    Side note with nothing to do with the original discussion: My father decided to be honest and give constructive feedback during his exit interview when leaving a company similar in size and importance to Google. Then most of his peers retired and they asked him to come back and offered pretty massive incentives for a pretty small commitment. When he decided to accept? HR got involved and insisted he not be hired because he was "disgruntled" in his exit interview. So now when I leave a company my exit interview is 100% peachy with a vague cliche about why I'm leaving, and I might tell one or two very close friends who work there why I'm leaving. If I trust a company to value my feedback honestly enough, I probably won't be leaving for a while.
    - compiler-guy 9y ago
      The reasons one supplies about leaving a company should always be about where you are going, rather than where you are leaving. It almost never makes sense to burn a bridge.
hinkley 9y ago
If you have to evangelize about how awesome it is to work there, that sounds like a cult and not culture. It also sounds like Microsoft in the 90’s, when they were stepping on necks and didn’t give a shit about anybody else. Because they were better than everybody else and why should you worry about inferior people? Although in MS’s case they took it a step further: we are the best people in the world.
- pinewurst 9y ago
  How is that Microsoft "best people in the world" any different from what Google projects to the world?
  - hinkley 9y ago
    Maybe not enough to matter. But MS was known to use a lot of ugly PR tactics to weaken and purchase or obliterate competition. Google may or may not be doing the same thing but they don’t have a reputation of being cold blooded about it.
- FlyingSideKick 9y ago
  That sounds a lot like Amazon today
- alexeiz 9y ago
  Microsoft in the 90's was actually a pretty cool place to work.
  - draw_down 9y ago
    Depends who you were.
- y3sh 9y ago
  Oh one one _has_ to evangelize. Google has norms, and talking more positively about things is one of them. Going outside of the norms is risky for your career in any political meritocracy.
collyw 9y ago
I always find the "best places to work" type lists a lot of crap. Usually its just a case of biggest and best known companies. I have worked for a real mix of places and the biggest companies haven't been any better than the smaller ones. Usually a good manager makes a far bigger difference.
- mgkimsal 9y ago
  I worked at a 'best place to work', and... the pay/benefits for many of the 'regular' folks was pretty good - above average for sure. and overall it was nice to work there, but the politics in the IT dept were difficult for me to deal with. I asked for a transfer to another project or another area and was declined so... there wasn't much option except to leave. I had one guy telling me to 'chill out' and relax some - he was dating the niece of the dept manager, so, there wasn't much chance of him having issues there. there was very much a culture of "person X has worked here longer, listen to them" regardless of how much experience they had with respect to the actual domain or technology on the project, which was frustrating. The managers I had were, most of them, nice people - I liked them. But it didn't seem they noticed or cared about the inefficiencies and politics going on. More than a few people said - "if you want to move up here, it's going to take 5-10 years of just 'being around'" and... I didn't care to wait that long (especially not when the gospel preached was about merit and ability being the measuring sticks).
- klenwell 9y ago
  I don't know the exact dynamics of how those Best Places to Work lists are compiled but I always got the feeling they were a form of vanity publishing used to keep local business journals and newspapers afloat. Funny story: after a couple years at last big corp I worked for, I guess there was a decision made to join the ranks of the area's Best Places to Work. So memos were circulated, surveys were sent out and lo and behold, a year later the announcement was made: we had made the list of Best Places to Work, Large Company category. There was even a company-wide ceremony with a big cake to celebrate the feat. So a few weeks later, I come across the actual dead-tree journal touting that year's Best Places to Work laying around in our breakroom. I open it up to find out where we actually ranked. Out of 44 companies in our category, #44. We improved over the next couple years. Banners appeared around campus celebrating our achievement. The cakes got bigger. Things got worse for me personally at the company. As you can probably guess, the impression I and others got was that the ranking was actually more important than actual employee sentiment. And I got the distinct sense that HR was motivated even moreso than previously for the sake of their Best Places ranking to push out employees that were critical (even legitimately, perhaps especially legitimately) of the way the company operated than deal constructively with their concerns.
drewg123 9y ago
For me, it was easy. In 2015, we really wanted to move back to our east coast flyover-city home from the Bay Area. Google would not let me work remotely, but Netflix would. So it was a no-brainer. It turned out to be a great move. In my experience, just about everything is better about Netflix as compared to Google: impact, pay, freedom, culture. The only thing that's worse is that I really miss the on-campus food at Google. And TGIF, eng-misc, etc.
- kevingadd 9y ago
  Remote work was a medical requirement for me and even in those circumstances Google refused to consider it. They also insisted part-time work wasn't an option (there were official policies for it that were kept secret!). So likewise, that was really all it took. It baffles me that companies can't be remotely flexible on these things - over 50% of the Google employees I interacted with daily were in other offices (or overseas, for that matter), so the cost of remote workers was already being paid.
  - electrograv 9y ago
    > Remote work was a medical requirement for me and even in those circumstances Google refused to consider it. Certainly that must be illegal under the ADA, or something similar?
    - bspn 9y ago
      IANAL but I don't think it's necessarily illegal by default under the ADA. The first thing the employee has to do is establish that their condition falls under a protected class and then they can request an accommodation. If the employer can demonstrate that there's no way to reasonably accommodate the employee then I believe they're off the hook - that is a much higher burden for a large company to satisfy than say for a small 10 person start-up.
      - prepend 9y ago
        Depending on the position working remotely is reasonable or unreasonable as determined by the company. I think it’s pretty typical to say coming into the office is a requirement so full time remote would not be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA. I think the reason why many companies don’t allow as a rule is that by selectively allowing remote work, they are vulnerable to ADA suits.
ataturk 9y ago
e.g. turned 30, realized life was going outside Google's walls and the perks weren't that cool anymore. I remember when I was in my 20s and a foosball table and some worthless stock options were chic. It's all bullshit, the sooner you realize it, the better off you will be in life.
Romanulus 9y ago
This hearkens very closely to how it is/was working for a provincial government (in Canada). It's stifling.
scarecrowbob 9y ago
I'm not ever wanting to work at Google, but that process resonates loudly with my experience of leaving academia. From the inside you're dealing with a lot of people who have internalized the job as part of their identity and it's very difficult to just up and leave without formulating a narrative about why it's okay.
- nora4 9y ago
  Very much second that; one prof I worked for at MIT as TA kept insisting that s/he (and we) have the best job in the world. Quite ridiculous, as s/he later was denied tenure and had to move and their research was quite stuck and un-impactful. It was part of the personal narrative of the person (their identity) to keep telling that to themselves.
bradyo 9y ago
> As a former Googler, I can see why people post these: internally Google is hyper-evangelized as the best place to work ever (why would you work anywhere else). When leaving, its a necessary step to form a good argument for yourself as to why you've decided to go against the culture. As another former Googler, this was one of the most concerning things about my experience at Google. The pressure I put on myself and received from others when I was debating whether to leave was enormous, especially because it was my first job. Nevermind the rampant imposter syndrome while you still work there. In hindsight, it was super toxic and led me to stay there even longer than was good for me and burning out harder. I've talked to a few current Googlers and Xooglers who also felt that way.
- danieldk 9y ago
  As another former Googler, this was one of the most concerning things about my experience at Google. The pressure I put on myself and received from others when I was debating whether to leave was enormous, especially because it was my first job. This was one of the reasons I decided to bail out after the first phone interview. I had some serious concerns, such as: - I am not interested in working as an SRE when I just finished a PhD in Computational Linguistics. - I am not really interested in living in London or Silicon Valley. But any such question were all waved away with an air of 'such concerns are all irrelevant if you can work for the greatest company in existence'. The interviewer was really a nice person, but there seemed to be an immense groupthink. (I now also have strong moral objections to working for Google, but that's another story.)
  - SemiEarlyGoogle 9y ago
    Yet another ex-Googler here. "Working for the greatest company in existence" was the mindset since Google's earliest days, well before reaching that pedestal in the public eye. They made tough offers to candidates back then, too, e.g., job titles taken down 1-2 levels, even when the job market was hot. Though practice started when job market was cold. Many stories have been written about how their early hiring practices made for Google's huge success. I largely agree. And related to your comment, groupthink or not, they do overall look pretty happy, even if you dial back for the social media factor: https://gxjam.com/ig-gallery/googler-instagrams-by-googlers-xooglers/ https://gxjam.com/ig-gallery/googler-instagrams-by-googlers-...
pron 9y ago
This is one of the scariest things about Google, and indicative of its public face, too. People in the US often compare the government to Big Brother in 1984, but the government can't be Big Brother if people think that, as one of the most important qualities of Big Brother was that people actually loved him. The entire system rested on the idea that people believe in it out of love, not out of fear. Google seems to be the same. Only when you insist on having both power and the love of those you have power over can you truly be Big Brother.
- metiscus 9y ago
  While I risk being pedantic, I question the notion that the people in 1984 "love" big brother with the usual denotation. I believe that "love" in context implies more of a unity of being / complete submission to rather than any sort of romance. A key point in the book is the control over truth effected through the control of knowledge and history. A government in a totalitarian state like North Korea effectively is, for its own people, the government from 1984. Complete power over information will inevitably lead to the kind of "love" expressed by Winston in room 101. If the power of the US government to monitor and censor information grows, it is unlikely but not completely impossible for a similar situation to eventually arise.
  - pron 9y ago
    But this is already happening with Google, and as recent events show, Google, Facebook and Twitter have more control over information than the US government.
johan_larson 9y ago
In fairness, you really should have a good reason for leaving a company like Google. The pluses of working there are substantial. If you're leaving lightly, you are almost certainly making a mistake.
- nugi 9y ago
  Thats the false narrative being debated here.
- utellme 9y ago
  When you completely paid all your debts and solved financial problems (not just nowadays, but future too), you start thinking some different way.
- uiri 9y ago
  Considering compensation definitely drops in your 4th/5th year (because your on hire grant is fully vested and it doesn't get refreshed properly), you're almost certainly a sucker if stay longer than that rather than leave for a little while and then go back.

by y3sh 9y ago

b4lancesh33t 9y ago

Yeah I've been at Google a decade and I strongly don't agree with the notion that it's hyper evangelized as the best place to work. In official communications, yes, but I think most people here are aware of the drawbacks and problems. Maybe even a little too aware. Internal lists are rife with the discussions of even the slightest deviation from perfect execution on the part of management, product teams, the culture, etc. That's not to say there's no one here with rose tinted goggles, but I think most people have their eyes open.

rleigh 9y ago
When I interviewed with Google, the over-the-top "Google is the best place to work evaaar" attitudes I got from the majority of people I interacted with gave me the distinct impression that it was like some bizarre cult. Most of them were so green they likely hadn't had any other job, so were unlikely to be able to know how silly they appeared to me (having worked for several companies in very different fields).
- puzzle 9y ago
  When I was at Google, some of us actually noticed that employees for which it was their first job sometimes complained more than the others ("zeroth world problems": they switched to smaller plates and trays) and had no idea how much worse it was elsewhere. You'll probably find a mix of everything.
- davidcbc 9y ago
  What recruiter has ever said "This is just an ok place to work?" Every job I've had the people I've interacted with in recruiting/interviews have all been very positive about the company.
  - rleigh 9y ago
    There are degrees of enthusiasm and positivity. Everywhere else I've interviewed, people have been relatively positive since they want to sell the company to you and give you a good impression. At Google, it was way beyond that. I think cult-like is a good take on it; it was frankly a bit creepy and weird. And as for the "recruiters", they didn't really try to sell Google at all. I think they assumed that the Google name was sufficient reason to want to work for them. (It isn't, or at least was not for me.)
y3sh 9y ago
Of course not, you're still there :D Jokes aside, its a big company with many offices and tens of thousands of employees. YMMV.
- b4lancesh33t 9y ago
  Hah. I'm not sure it would matter that much to me if I were the only person who saw the flaws. Comp, work-life balance, interesting problems, and a minimum of local bullshit are what matter to me. My coworkers' attitude toward the company, be it positive or negative, or dysfunctions in another organization ten thousand people away from me, are much less influential on my well-being. That's just my take, obviously everyone else is entitled to their own priorities and I wouldn't look down on anyone for caring about the stance of the company as a whole. It's just not me.
rifung 9y ago
> Yeah I've been at Google a decade and I strongly don't agree with the notion that it's hyper evangelized as the best place to work This is my experience too. I've only been here for a year but what surprised me was how negative non-official internal communications about the company seem to be.. Note I don't necessarily disagree with their points but the lack of civility.
komali2 9y ago
If there's that much internal criticism of mistakes, how are the mistakes made? I.e. multiple chat apps, terrible hardware design decisions (wtf Pixel buds?), etc?

raister 9y ago

you need to convince yourself that you made the best career move ever

utellme 9y ago

I think such situation exists in almost all high-salary sectors. Financial - why I left Golman/Merrill Lynch/Wall Street stories, etc. People will try to explain everything from moral side. It's permanent dilemma.

jdmichal 9y ago
Is it really "trying to explain everything from a moral side", or just that main non-moral reason for leaving -- better pay -- is not in play?
- utellme 9y ago
  For sure, when it's gonna be another 5th wave of financial crisis employees just move between sectors - from private to state (more secure). I'm not sure it's somehow related to IT at all or Google in particular, but this migration type really exists.

stochastic_monk 9y ago

Yes, one needs a reason for leaving a company. But at the same time, one leaves a company or a religion or a relationship for a reason. The argument and reasoning necessitate the departure; they're not developed post hoc. Of course, additional supporting reasons become clear as one looks for and finds the door, and the understanding for why a person or institution is wrong for you evolves as you separate. I'd be interested in hearing more about how that understanding/perspective changes over time.

utellme 9y ago
Some people just can't say personally and openly to their boss that there is some problem in policy or system if they think it exists. So they trying to inform this way. But it's not every case, some experienced specialists can just write story as summary to give some experience to young newcomers, to arouse interest, maybe answer possible questions.
- TallGuyShort 9y ago
  Side note with nothing to do with the original discussion: My father decided to be honest and give constructive feedback during his exit interview when leaving a company similar in size and importance to Google. Then most of his peers retired and they asked him to come back and offered pretty massive incentives for a pretty small commitment. When he decided to accept? HR got involved and insisted he not be hired because he was "disgruntled" in his exit interview. So now when I leave a company my exit interview is 100% peachy with a vague cliche about why I'm leaving, and I might tell one or two very close friends who work there why I'm leaving. If I trust a company to value my feedback honestly enough, I probably won't be leaving for a while.
  - compiler-guy 9y ago
    The reasons one supplies about leaving a company should always be about where you are going, rather than where you are leaving. It almost never makes sense to burn a bridge.

hinkley 9y ago

If you have to evangelize about how awesome it is to work there, that sounds like a cult and not culture. It also sounds like Microsoft in the 90’s, when they were stepping on necks and didn’t give a shit about anybody else. Because they were better than everybody else and why should you worry about inferior people? Although in MS’s case they took it a step further: we are the best people in the world.

pinewurst 9y ago
How is that Microsoft "best people in the world" any different from what Google projects to the world?
- hinkley 9y ago
  Maybe not enough to matter. But MS was known to use a lot of ugly PR tactics to weaken and purchase or obliterate competition. Google may or may not be doing the same thing but they don’t have a reputation of being cold blooded about it.
FlyingSideKick 9y ago
That sounds a lot like Amazon today
alexeiz 9y ago
Microsoft in the 90's was actually a pretty cool place to work.
- draw_down 9y ago
  Depends who you were.
y3sh 9y ago
Oh one one _has_ to evangelize. Google has norms, and talking more positively about things is one of them. Going outside of the norms is risky for your career in any political meritocracy.

collyw 9y ago

I always find the "best places to work" type lists a lot of crap. Usually its just a case of biggest and best known companies. I have worked for a real mix of places and the biggest companies haven't been any better than the smaller ones. Usually a good manager makes a far bigger difference.

mgkimsal 9y ago
I worked at a 'best place to work', and... the pay/benefits for many of the 'regular' folks was pretty good - above average for sure. and overall it was nice to work there, but the politics in the IT dept were difficult for me to deal with. I asked for a transfer to another project or another area and was declined so... there wasn't much option except to leave. I had one guy telling me to 'chill out' and relax some - he was dating the niece of the dept manager, so, there wasn't much chance of him having issues there. there was very much a culture of "person X has worked here longer, listen to them" regardless of how much experience they had with respect to the actual domain or technology on the project, which was frustrating. The managers I had were, most of them, nice people - I liked them. But it didn't seem they noticed or cared about the inefficiencies and politics going on. More than a few people said - "if you want to move up here, it's going to take 5-10 years of just 'being around'" and... I didn't care to wait that long (especially not when the gospel preached was about merit and ability being the measuring sticks).
klenwell 9y ago
I don't know the exact dynamics of how those Best Places to Work lists are compiled but I always got the feeling they were a form of vanity publishing used to keep local business journals and newspapers afloat. Funny story: after a couple years at last big corp I worked for, I guess there was a decision made to join the ranks of the area's Best Places to Work. So memos were circulated, surveys were sent out and lo and behold, a year later the announcement was made: we had made the list of Best Places to Work, Large Company category. There was even a company-wide ceremony with a big cake to celebrate the feat. So a few weeks later, I come across the actual dead-tree journal touting that year's Best Places to Work laying around in our breakroom. I open it up to find out where we actually ranked. Out of 44 companies in our category, #44. We improved over the next couple years. Banners appeared around campus celebrating our achievement. The cakes got bigger. Things got worse for me personally at the company. As you can probably guess, the impression I and others got was that the ranking was actually more important than actual employee sentiment. And I got the distinct sense that HR was motivated even moreso than previously for the sake of their Best Places ranking to push out employees that were critical (even legitimately, perhaps especially legitimately) of the way the company operated than deal constructively with their concerns.

drewg123 9y ago

For me, it was easy. In 2015, we really wanted to move back to our east coast flyover-city home from the Bay Area. Google would not let me work remotely, but Netflix would. So it was a no-brainer. It turned out to be a great move. In my experience, just about everything is better about Netflix as compared to Google: impact, pay, freedom, culture. The only thing that's worse is that I really miss the on-campus food at Google. And TGIF, eng-misc, etc.

kevingadd 9y ago
Remote work was a medical requirement for me and even in those circumstances Google refused to consider it. They also insisted part-time work wasn't an option (there were official policies for it that were kept secret!). So likewise, that was really all it took. It baffles me that companies can't be remotely flexible on these things - over 50% of the Google employees I interacted with daily were in other offices (or overseas, for that matter), so the cost of remote workers was already being paid.
- electrograv 9y ago
  > Remote work was a medical requirement for me and even in those circumstances Google refused to consider it. Certainly that must be illegal under the ADA, or something similar?
  - bspn 9y ago
    IANAL but I don't think it's necessarily illegal by default under the ADA. The first thing the employee has to do is establish that their condition falls under a protected class and then they can request an accommodation. If the employer can demonstrate that there's no way to reasonably accommodate the employee then I believe they're off the hook - that is a much higher burden for a large company to satisfy than say for a small 10 person start-up.
    - prepend 9y ago
      Depending on the position working remotely is reasonable or unreasonable as determined by the company. I think it’s pretty typical to say coming into the office is a requirement so full time remote would not be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA. I think the reason why many companies don’t allow as a rule is that by selectively allowing remote work, they are vulnerable to ADA suits.

ataturk 9y ago

e.g. turned 30, realized life was going outside Google's walls and the perks weren't that cool anymore. I remember when I was in my 20s and a foosball table and some worthless stock options were chic. It's all bullshit, the sooner you realize it, the better off you will be in life.

Romanulus 9y ago

This hearkens very closely to how it is/was working for a provincial government (in Canada). It's stifling.

scarecrowbob 9y ago

I'm not ever wanting to work at Google, but that process resonates loudly with my experience of leaving academia. From the inside you're dealing with a lot of people who have internalized the job as part of their identity and it's very difficult to just up and leave without formulating a narrative about why it's okay.

nora4 9y ago
Very much second that; one prof I worked for at MIT as TA kept insisting that s/he (and we) have the best job in the world. Quite ridiculous, as s/he later was denied tenure and had to move and their research was quite stuck and un-impactful. It was part of the personal narrative of the person (their identity) to keep telling that to themselves.

bradyo 9y ago

> As a former Googler, I can see why people post these: internally Google is hyper-evangelized as the best place to work ever (why would you work anywhere else). When leaving, its a necessary step to form a good argument for yourself as to why you've decided to go against the culture. As another former Googler, this was one of the most concerning things about my experience at Google. The pressure I put on myself and received from others when I was debating whether to leave was enormous, especially because it was my first job. Nevermind the rampant imposter syndrome while you still work there. In hindsight, it was super toxic and led me to stay there even longer than was good for me and burning out harder. I've talked to a few current Googlers and Xooglers who also felt that way.

danieldk 9y ago
As another former Googler, this was one of the most concerning things about my experience at Google. The pressure I put on myself and received from others when I was debating whether to leave was enormous, especially because it was my first job. This was one of the reasons I decided to bail out after the first phone interview. I had some serious concerns, such as: - I am not interested in working as an SRE when I just finished a PhD in Computational Linguistics. - I am not really interested in living in London or Silicon Valley. But any such question were all waved away with an air of 'such concerns are all irrelevant if you can work for the greatest company in existence'. The interviewer was really a nice person, but there seemed to be an immense groupthink. (I now also have strong moral objections to working for Google, but that's another story.)
- SemiEarlyGoogle 9y ago
  Yet another ex-Googler here. "Working for the greatest company in existence" was the mindset since Google's earliest days, well before reaching that pedestal in the public eye. They made tough offers to candidates back then, too, e.g., job titles taken down 1-2 levels, even when the job market was hot. Though practice started when job market was cold. Many stories have been written about how their early hiring practices made for Google's huge success. I largely agree. And related to your comment, groupthink or not, they do overall look pretty happy, even if you dial back for the social media factor: https://gxjam.com/ig-gallery/googler-instagrams-by-googlers-xooglers/ https://gxjam.com/ig-gallery/googler-instagrams-by-googlers-...

pron 9y ago

This is one of the scariest things about Google, and indicative of its public face, too. People in the US often compare the government to Big Brother in 1984, but the government can't be Big Brother if people think that, as one of the most important qualities of Big Brother was that people actually loved him. The entire system rested on the idea that people believe in it out of love, not out of fear. Google seems to be the same. Only when you insist on having both power and the love of those you have power over can you truly be Big Brother.

metiscus 9y ago
While I risk being pedantic, I question the notion that the people in 1984 "love" big brother with the usual denotation. I believe that "love" in context implies more of a unity of being / complete submission to rather than any sort of romance. A key point in the book is the control over truth effected through the control of knowledge and history. A government in a totalitarian state like North Korea effectively is, for its own people, the government from 1984. Complete power over information will inevitably lead to the kind of "love" expressed by Winston in room 101. If the power of the US government to monitor and censor information grows, it is unlikely but not completely impossible for a similar situation to eventually arise.
- pron 9y ago
  But this is already happening with Google, and as recent events show, Google, Facebook and Twitter have more control over information than the US government.

johan_larson 9y ago

In fairness, you really should have a good reason for leaving a company like Google. The pluses of working there are substantial. If you're leaving lightly, you are almost certainly making a mistake.

nugi 9y ago
Thats the false narrative being debated here.
utellme 9y ago
When you completely paid all your debts and solved financial problems (not just nowadays, but future too), you start thinking some different way.
uiri 9y ago
Considering compensation definitely drops in your 4th/5th year (because your on hire grant is fully vested and it doesn't get refreshed properly), you're almost certainly a sucker if stay longer than that rather than leave for a little while and then go back.