8 ms·

The Google+ project and exec team

308 points by seapunk 8y ago

wdr1 8y ago
I'm sure Google+ is a dumpster fire, but reading this my only takeaway was... fuck, I hope I never work with anyone this toxic. The hate, the vitorial, the attacks, the arrogance, the lack of accountability, paranoid, passive aggressive, complaining intensely about event trivial things... This is the type of person I would leave a project over, no matter how exciting the work.
- randycupertino 8y ago
  Yes. Probably why they forced him out of Google... because he was horrible to work with and the entire team was complaining about his lack of social awareness and poor interpersonal skills.
misterkola 8y ago
Fuck google man!
Waterluvian 8y ago
The big tech companies are really really good at making you feel like you're exceptional and special and destined for greatness because you're good enough to work for them. But then there's the risk that they just say that then dump you in with thousands of others to churn out product. I'm increasingly convinced that there's a ton of life experience and wisdom to be gained by working for big tech in your early 20s when you have a lot of flexibility. But when you've figured out what kind of life you want to lead, they're probably not the right fit for you. I think it boils down to: money is easily quantifiable, happiness and freedom aren't. So people make bad life decisions based on an incomplete assessment of what will really suit them best.
- mc32 8y ago
  Yeah that’s the biggest take from this. Lots of nice smart people mostly doing routine boring things made a little more palatable because it comes with a big name company and decent perks. And we may have some inkling as to why Vic left (if the anecdotes are representative of behavior).
ggm 8y ago
Never write in anger. writing in sadness is ok, but writing in anger generally clouds the message. Some of this stuff is about how you work, and how others work. Its not about google, you could "feel" this way in almost any enterprise with more than 1 tier of management.
- rightbyte 8y ago
  The writer seems unbalanced and I can't tell if he or the workplace is the problem, or both. The thing that cought my eye is that he was telling his boss his coworker was home hung over, becouse he worked while his grandma died instead of visiting her. Like, who is being inconsiderate here really?
  - AtlasBarfed 8y ago
    Well, he's passionate. He just didn't realize google is so big it's justanotherjob. Full of middle management machiavellis, and political deck chair shuffling.
    - vezycash 8y ago
      This! Is the author immature? Yes but not out of malice. He's simply a novice to the world of people. Labeling this guy as mental, dysfunctional or having a Everest sized ego is just petty. The key to understanding the author is at the top of the article. He skipped college, freelanced for much of his life and worked for non-profits (whose lofty goals transcend internal politics.) As someone who recently worked to make the world a better place, he genuinely tried to help his teammates and naively believe they appreciated his help. (I bet he doesn't know how to read body language and fake smiles). They on the other hand felt he was trying to make them look bad, and use them as promotion stepping stones. People who work with compilers for a long time have no qualms being wrong. They take feedback and improve. But for Straight A - straight out of college students and political types, being wrong is a personal insult. Here's what I think: Most of his co-workers had been complaining about his well meaning meddling. He couldn't be fired for making things better. The email was the excuse his boss had been looking for to get rid of him. If he joined Google 10 years ago, he would have been a rock star. My advice: He should find a way to make freelancing work. He should join a startup but freelance / consult on the side to augment his pay. Going to business school - or some management training might also do him a lot of good. Most of all, if he gets another big job, he shouldn't help anyone unless they ask for it. Wish him good luck.
thelastidiot 8y ago
Your story is exactly why I see many capable people leaving the Valley putting all that BS behind. FAANG, those are where you find a bunch of incompetent managers, who never got to learn leadership, stealing your ideas to look good in front of their boss, draining your energy with stupid decisions a donkey wouldn't take, and unable to understand how to work with smart people. Move on and get a new life. And before you get your next gig, go spend 10 days in a vipasanna center.
brettaaron 8y ago
Interesting insight, but I can't help but wonder if this guy is going to regret some of the shots he took in this article. I also stumbled upon his Twitter at the end of the article and it does more to show really how much this experience has affected him (https://twitter.com/morganknutson https://twitter.com/morganknutson). Very sad.
tjoff 8y ago
If your team, say on Gmail or Android, was to integrate Google+’s features then your team would be awarded a 1.5-3x multiplier on top of your yearly bonus. Your bonus was already something like 15% of your salary. Suddenly it makes sense why we can't use + to force a word in google searches anymore.
- brianberns 8y ago
  Is that why they got rid of it? I liked using + more than putting the word in quotes, which is what you have to do now.
  - bambax 8y ago
    > Is that why they got rid of it? Yes. "Plus" is a dumb and lame product name. When Jean-Marie Messier was trying to make Vivendi an important Internet company, he decided he wanted to make some kind of portal (copying Yahoo) that would be named "Vivendi Plus". He announced it at a press conference before having even secured the vivendiplus.com domain. That was in Sept. '99. It failed miserably (didn't even launch). Ten years later when Google wanted to copy Facebook they came up with the exact same name. It failed. I think just naming a product myBigCompany--Plus is a symptom you don't know what you're doing or where you're going. It's bad form and then it's bad luck.
    - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
      It also implies that regular Google is Google-, some kind of inferior good. Never a good thing to do to your principle revenue stream.
  - rizwan 8y ago
    A while back they added it again, so you can use + in your searches now.
the-dude 8y ago
Unhinged guy does not like Google, his boss or his collegues. Why is this at the top?
- aorav 8y ago
  Because anything negative about Google gets voted to the top, both on HN and Reddit. I’m pretty sure there is some coordinated effort behind it.
whack 8y ago
Controversial opinion here. I know that exaggerating and complaining is a surefire way to get clicks, but it's hard to take the author's criticisms seriously when he complains about so many different things. Some as minor as the noogler orientation. Others as petty as putting down colleagues who haven't worked as designers before. Regarding the main event in question: I like that Google allows people to party in the evenings with whoever they want to party with. I like that Google allows people to reschedule meetings if they aren't feeling well, for whatever reason. It sucks that the author's grandmother died and that he felt the need to work through the night while that happened, but it's unfair to take that out on your colleagues. Nobody would have blamed him if he asked to reschedule the meeting because of his grandmother's health. Heck, they probably wouldn't even have minded if he asked for a different day/time, just so he wouldn't have to work through the night. I have no idea who the author is. He might be a fantastic person, and Jim/Greg might be total dicks, for all I know. But just from the volume of different complaints mentioned, and his reaction to a meeting reschedule, I get the impression that he isn't the easiest person to work with, and that there are other sides to this story.
- brianberns 8y ago
  Seriously. When Jim schedules a meeting for 9am the next day, just tell him that you need more time than that. Instead, this guy goes home and works through the night so he can prove Jim wrong. Way too much ego tied up in petty disagreements here.
  - fuoggler 8y ago
    The sheer number of Googlers posting here is amazing. We get it, you love the Gorg, but every single criticism he lists is real. Frankly, it has been a long time, too long, since we had a real voice air the realities of life in Goolag.
  - sealjam 8y ago
    Agreed. The thing it took me a long time to realise about stuff like that is that you're not winning by breaking your neck to get something done for an unrealistic deadline, they are!
ordinaryperson 8y ago
To summarize some of his major complaints: 1) He accepted a salary (115K) lowered than what he thought was fair 2) Design occurred in silos, there was no unity or cohesion 3) His 2nd manager was "political" and "in love with bureaucracy" 4) An exec on a rival team tried to quash his idea 5) Managers often just wanted to slap their name on his work 6) He worked all night to satisfy an angry coworker the night his grandmother died, while coworker partied then rescheduled mtg For No 1: if you don't think a salary is fair, don't accept it. Nos 2-5: these happen at almost every medium-large sized company I've ever worked at. If you know a place that isn't political, bureaucratic, siloed and filled with rivals and petty managers, let me know so I can give you my resume. For No. 6, if you feel a deadline or meeting time is unfair, say so. If you have a sick family member, say so. He sent this email to his boss: > "Greg, I had to work most of the night because of Jim, and he canceled our meeting because he was partying with our competitors. In my book, this is totally unacceptable. What am I supposed to do?" It's never a good idea to send this. It's not going to help you, even if you're in the right. Canceling a meeting is not a gross injustice and if an employee parties afterhours that's his or her business. I sympathize with the author. Sounds like a good dude. But you have to try to roll with the punches, no workplace will be perfect, I promise you.
- ot8 8y ago
  > If you know a place that isn't political, bureaucratic, siloed and filled with rivals and petty managers, let me know so I can give you my resume. Red Hat. It is siloed and can be (increasingly) bureaucratic, but I have never experienced rivals or petty managers and it's the least political place I've ever worked.
  - ordinaryperson 8y ago
    Could be. But just as a counter-example, here's a Glassdoor review from just 9 days ago that describes Red Hat as a "bloated company with an abusive culture": https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Red-Hat-RVW22811286.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Red-Hat-RV... Even if Red Hat is amazing for you it might not be for other people. No company is immune to human nature. Again I feel for the author. Sounds like "Greg" was jerk. But it's not cosmic injustice, it's more a feature of humans working in collectives, IMHO.
ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
This is really ungrateful. The author is not happy because he got to work on Google+ not chrome? Google+ for all it's short comings were business failures not tech or ux or design failure. I worked on far stupider projects at big companies and I am utterly grateful for the opportunities given to me. Absurd blog and no matter how muchi hate Google posts like these makes me realize how ungrateful some people can be.
- brianberns 8y ago
  If I showed up at a new job to work on Project X, and they assigned me to Project Y on my first day instead, I might be pretty upset too. The problem isn't the reassignment itself. It's the lack of communication.
  - ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
    It's extremely common to get project reassigned especially since he was recruited three months later. What i guess happened was that Google found candidates for their chrome project and put him in their backlog. Later when they had one more vacancy they went thru this backlog and made offers
    - brianberns 8y ago
      I agree. They just need to make this clear to him before he agrees to the job.
      - ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
        Job offers don't come with project guarantees. What next? A guaranteed table spot next to the window?
        robkop 8y ago
        Just a personal anecdote but yep, I've seen that one for real.
jesusthatsgreat 8y ago
Publicly criticizing people & companies you've worked with because you haven't seen eye to eye with them... Is this the sort of person you'd want to work with or hire to work for you? If it were a company that didn't pay you or were doing something unethical etc then fair enough - blow that whistle... but as far as I can see this is just someone with a chip on their shoulder and a bruised ego who can't move on.
- AtlasBarfed 8y ago
  Plus sucked and dropped the ball. It's obviously an account from his perspective and ego, but it fundamentally shows dysfunction and poor vision, if some middle level dude is actually doing fundamental redesign and is the only one concerned with cross-app experience.
- shanusmagnus 8y ago
  I would never, ever hire someone who went on a giant public character assassination of his colleagues and dumped all the day-to-day insider baseball to the world. Call-outs to people who didn't hire him. Jesus, wtf? I don't care how dysfunctional his experience was, I don't care how much of a star he might be, I don't need that kind of worry in my life, and it's hard to imagine someone who would. Be interested to know how his career goes after this.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    The run-down of companies that didn't hire him and name-checking the people involved put me off the whole damn thing before I even got to the stuff at Google. Who does that?
- joe_momma 8y ago
  This is the type of person I would want to work with, and if he had an issue with me I'm pretty sure it wouldn't show up in a twitter rant because I'm the type of person that would work it out in house. There is some responsibility on those managers that they did not consider and should be held accountable for.
- 8y ago
allenu 8y ago
I tried reading this, but it is just stream of consciousness writing and littered with unnecessary details. It comes across as petty and the author doesn't seem to be good at communicating what he wants. For instance, he's whining about a 9am meeting with a coworker. If it's such a big deal, why didn't you ask for a later meeting?
- raydev 8y ago
  The "coworker" seemed more like a superior. I'd also be wary of cancelling meetings with a hostile superior.
  - allenu 8y ago
    Was he? He was just mentioned as "one of the other designers on the team". Anyway, most superiors I've dealt with are open to feedback about a meeting time. If a time doesn't work for me, it's not out of the question to request an adjustment. The author sounds like the kind of person who will just passively accept a situation instead of saying what he really thinks, leading to internalized anger and bitterness.
  - throwaway080383 8y ago
    To me, it sounded like they all reported to Greg.
    - raydev 8y ago
      Jim had seniority and apparently more clout. Just because OP wasn't directly reporting to Jim doesn't mean Jim wasn't a superior.
      - throwaway080383 8y ago
        Hm, odd definition of superior, but I work at a place where levels are secret and titles only reflect function.
    - lern_too_spel 8y ago
didibus 8y ago
That's what people say when they say the team and product you're on matters most. In big tech companies, your experiences can vary greatly from one team to another. This is where the companies could do a better job with HR of making sure each employee fits well in their team and enjoys themselves, and if not, to relocate them to another team. This is also a great lesson to learn for yourself: Don't stay on a shitty team, don't work for a failing product. Get out as soon as you can, transfer to another team, or even quit and leave the company if that's not possible.
chris_wot 8y ago
Hmmm this is interesting, but too much anger. I’m taking it with a grain of salt. This is definitely no rachelbythebay.
pi-squared 8y ago
The Googleyness is weak with this one. Inferiority complex. Work-life balance problems (work over xmas break, late night after work). Not being able to stand for oneself (salary, reschedule meeting). Wanting everyone to like him (literally said it). Seems to dismiss other people's jobs and even names as being less important than his. Nobody's perfect, we all have some bad things in our personalities. But it's impossible to read this and extract the value that he tries to convey that Google as a company didn't accommodate him (dismissing the design of buildings or noogler's orientation) rather than he tried too hard to be liked and perceived as valuable member.
- ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
  Unfortunately in big companies no one is valuable. If someone is, the company has a problem.
  - pi-squared 8y ago
    That's the point of companies to de-risk relying on a single person. You can still be a valuable member within your team, among peers, some of which you may even call friends.
  - adrianmonk 8y ago
    I don't think valuable should be seen as black and white, although companies and employees both make that mistake in different ways. Irreplaceable is an extreme version of valuable. Companies are right to avoid that extreme. But they shouldn't take it so far that they are allergic to admitting that employees have value. Any current employee who is right in the middle of the bell curve has value because, while they could be replaced, they are a known quantity. From the employee side, there can be a temptation to believe that because you're not exceptional, you're not valuable. Even if you're merely average, that is OK, and you need to accept that you are a worthwhile member of the team. If mentally you can't claim the position you rightfully deserve as your own, then you believe something wrong about the world, and like any wrong information, that will corrupt your decisions about how to act.
  - tschwimmer 8y ago
CoolGuySteve 8y ago
There’s a special kind of rottenness in big orgs when the only thing they can produce is “like X but by us”. I understand why it happens, I’ve been on a few projects like that. The problem is that it’s hard to come up with a genuine new idea that a stack of middle managers will agree on and execute. But if you say: “Let’s make Twitter/facebook/App Store”, then the middle managers can’t really disagree with you since there’s already a successful example of that thing on the market. There’s also no room for miscommunication, everyone already knows what Facebook looks like, we just have to copy it. The problem is that this work is dull, uninspired, and likely to be unsuccessful. What’s the point? Why not just kill this shit before spending millions of dollars on it?
- BareNakedCoder 8y ago
  Like VisiCalc but by us. Hmmmm, sometimes it works out okay.
jVinc 8y ago
This isn't a story about Google+, it's a story about a disgruntled employees failing at a job as told through his own glasses filled with illusions of grandjour and sense of superiority. That said it's still an incredibly interesting story, and I have the feeling that many managers could gain some insight into what's going on in some of those "I am gods gift to development"-type individuals who can be both a huge benefit to a project yet at the same time be toxic to work with.
acconrad 8y ago
It's one thing to not be happy at Google+, which is the center of this rant. But to put targets on all of the companies you interviewed at along the way with their founders Twitter names? Incredibly bitter and salty. It's no way to strengthen your argument or to live.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
It's a sad story. His tweets provide the background for why he decided to write all this.
otabdeveloper2 8y ago
Megacorps don't work to make products. They work to keep their top-dog status perpetual. One way to do this is to hire smart people and keep them locked away wasting time. Two benefits: them not working productively at a competitor's place is one, and them losing the skills and drive to make real-world useful things after a few years is another.
- goliatone 8y ago
  Ive read other post basically making the same claim, Google is happy to create, fund, and hire for projects just to capture/retain talent and remove it from the hiring pool. Is that HN folks reading too much between lines or is it a thing?
  - otabdeveloper2 8y ago
    It's not a Google thing. Every single large, successful company does this. It is a no-brainer decision from a game theoretic point of view: these companies already have a top-of-the-line, best in the world product. Working on more products requires lots of inspiration, time and luck, and even in the best case all you get is just another amazing product. (I.e., just more of the stuff you already got.) Using your money and fame to neutralize talent that could be used against you requires no effort or thinking at all, only money. These companies don't know what to do with their profits anyways.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    I don't think it's true. I'm more inclined to believe that as companies become large the amount of politics and bureaucracy takes over to the point where the company constantly self-sabotages.
hibikir 8y ago
Some have written about the problems of the piece. I agree with most of the criticisms, but what is useful for the rest of us is not the problems, but figuring out what useful things we can get out of the piece. The author's biggest work-related mistake was to sit tight when given a managed he had a bad relationship with. In most large organizations (500+ employees), your success and your failure will have a lot to do with a good relationship with your manager. It's not just performance reviews, but your technical influence that will be influenced by this. This matters with sibling teams too, as a political manager (and most bad managers are very political) will not want a report they don't like to have more influence than they do. I have seen people go from being seen as extremely productive to being called very low performers, and vice versa, in 2 months and a manager change. This kind of match, and caring about making teams cohesive, is something that most large valley companies do not really care about, and hurts them greatly, as a lot of talent is underused or downright shoved out the door. We can learn the some things as managers too: A report we really dislike could really help the company a whole lot if they were in an environment that matches them better, and ultimately that's what we should be caring about, not making people we don't like leave, and helping people we like get promoted. Whether it is by knowing them better, or helping them move somewhere else, is far more work than just undermining them, but its ultimately the right thing to do. What we should foster instead is teamwork, and the minimization of political behavior among reports. The sly report that is always telling me what I like to hear, but playing politics all day is the bad manager of tomorrow. Companies work better when people are aligned with building the best product the company can, not maximizing the credit they get. The more energy is spent on political fights, the worse the product gets.
codingdave 8y ago
> ... I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was. No, this is never true. Airing dirty laundry almost never produces a real change in the world. It just burns bridges and often makes you look petty.
- joe_momma 8y ago
  Possibly, but sometimes things do need to be said and he changed the names of the actual people he did not like so much, so maybe consider this "dry cleaned"? It definitely is useful to other people in similar circumstances and pretty much raises a point about all the pettiness that occurs in all industries. This is a human condition that needs to be addressed or this world will continue to be built by people who shouldn't be in charge.
rocky1138 8y ago
This is one of the most unprofessional things I've ever read. Giving callouts to people who passed you up for a hire is just... unacceptable.
- kylnew 8y ago
  Yes, very odd. I suppose it’s an attempt to suggest the employer made a mistake passing on them, but the act of calling out itself demonstrates they might have made a good call.
  - randycupertino 8y ago
    So true! The whole post is just completely offputting and strange. What strikes me as the most odd is that the author thinks this makes him look good. imo it just discloses that he's a nightmare coworker.
- VikingCoder 8y ago
  You should read what Michael O'Church wrote about Google. Wow.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pxtail 8y ago
  This was my impression as well , just wow, this guy seems to be so full of himself. He just constantly wants to belittle other people's work and all that snarky mentions of other companies... just wow! :O
- klohto 8y ago
  Finish reading the article. He explains it at the end.
NelsonMinar 8y ago
Just wanted to highlight this bit of the article about Vic Gundotra: "I remember him frequently flirting with the women on the team." Don't be that guy.
- tyingq 8y ago
  The shot he took on Twitter is even harsher. https://twitter.com/morganknutson/status/1050609480033951744 https://twitter.com/morganknutson/status/1050609480033951744
natecavanaugh 8y ago
The one thing he did, which is admirable, is that he didn't call out most people by their real names, but some of the remarks do seem a little petty. But this hopefully was a learning experience for him to not sacrifice what he wants in order to make people like him (it's a struggle I fight with). This does sound like a failure of leadership WRT the product and internal management, but, I think we should all try to read past the memory coloring, because I'm sure other members might have a different experience. But I think the main point still holds. Google+ was created as a reaction to FB, and while there were a couple of half decent features, but I can't remember anything they created that was enough to overcome FB's network advantage and draw people away. Either way, this article is fascinating to hear internals and understand the dynamics behind the scenes.
pavlov 8y ago
It’s just a side note, but this mention of his brief tenure at a “failing startup” rubs me the wrong way: ”In a couple of months I knocked out more work than they could have built in a year with their eng team.” No startup deserves a designer with this kind of attitude. Your job isn’t to produce pie-in-the-sky concepts for your portfolio but to work on the product together with the engineers.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mynegation 8y ago
Wow, on one hand - pretty interesting read in a sense that tabloids are interesting, but boy, you should never do that. It’s not just burning the bridges, it is not a very good signal to your potential employers, partners, acquirers, employees... Imagine public outcry if it went the other way: if managers hung out dirty laundry on employees who were not up to snuff. Also, about contractors in pivotal roles. The author was relatively new to for-profit industry and it happens way more often than one may think. People who go the contractor route are usually senior and experienced enough to be confident in getting and keeping the gigs, as the barrier to getting rid of a contractor is very low.
jlengrand 8y ago
I'm s bit sad at the end of the article. Sounds to me like a great designer, with good ideas and some genuine leadership skills. But the article itself is so full of anger and resentment that I really wonder what it would be like to work with the author. Looks like nobody has taken the time or given him the opportunity to learn how to navigate trough BS and handle it. Saying NO, being political, negotiating. . . Not very surprising if he indeed had such bad managers. Still, feels like wasted time and resources for everybody. I hope he is doing OK now.
joe_momma 8y ago
"They just wanted THEIR work to be used, or to be able to take credit for it. I hate that weak ass shit." My favorite part, it sucks he lost someone in the whole process...
jiveturkey 8y ago
auto-bio: a very serious person doing very serious and important things that’s all you need to know. can stop reading right there
jiveturkey 8y ago
i especially like how he has nothing but disdain for jack dorsey but is perfectly happy to tweet the day away
yuhong 8y ago
I was complaining about some of the problems in a few HN posts back then.
RichardCA 8y ago
It's a real shame, because I can definitely see a way for Google to do social networking in a way that would pull me away from Facebook. Basically I could connect with people and put their feeds into channels sort of like Slack (one for family, one for work, one for recruiters so I could get rid of Linkedin). But I'd have control over each channel and (this is important) people could message me in a way that worked like Gmail, but I wouldn't have to fork over my Gmail address. For me that was the critical omission, the idea that we can be "friends" on Google+ but you have no way to message me. It never made any sense. And I'm not even that smart.
peatfreak 8y ago
Yeah..... I'm not buying into this 100%...... it sounds like typical corporate BS that he is complaining about, and it was his choice to work instead of being with his family during a serious time of ill health. Like others have mentioned, I get the impression there are many sides to this this story, just like any other story. And yes, it does come across as extremely whiny. And also somewhat naive. Yaaaawwwwwwn.... I'm not exactly sitting on the edge of my seat for part II.
cromwellian 8y ago
Reading this I got the immediate impresssion that his temperament isn’t very Googley and was a cultural mismatch from the beginning. His ego is really big and doesn’t seem be able to deal with being a small fish in a big sea.
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rdiddly 8y ago
The best bit was his take on the famed Google "adult daycare" workplace theme - essentially saying it's a clutter problem. But this guy is a dumpster fire.
1ae8-4846-8e9c 8y ago
Engineer here. I wasn't around for G+, but it seems to be an open secret internally that G+ was one of the most poorly managed projects ever. This isn't the first time I've heard about the poorly designed incentive structures or terrible senior management described here. I'm not going to say anything about all the other obvious caveats here, I think the other comments cover that pretty well. But because this one actually pisses me off: who cares about "partying with our competitors"? Does working at Google mean I shouldn't have friends at other companies? And above all, why the shit is your manager supposed to care about that? For what it's worth, I've also seen people transfer in less than 3-6 months on the team they were hired into. But if you don't do anything to make it happen, it's not going to happen.
wizdumb 8y ago
For anyone interested, "Emerald Sea" was the project code name for G+.
brown9-2 8y ago
He’s a timid and generally kind person (running theme). But also not sure of himself. Not confident in his work. Also understandable considering it wasn’t the best. Often times he seemed anxiety stricken. This is the point at which you begin to realize the author is a bit of a jerk.
- graysonk 8y ago
  Really? My turning point was when he called out companies for not hiring him and then said he did more work than the engineering team in 3 months
asveikau 8y ago
People are being too hard on this guy here. It's true that big companies are full of politicians and jerks, and that this can be frustrating if you just want to get good work done. There are some things you can say about the style of writing but... There is stuff here that resonates and accurately describes downsides of SV life. Just because "it's like that everywhere" doesn't mean we shouldn't aspire to better. Just because we don't like some aspect of this guy's communication style doesn't mean we should dismiss him. If you're reading, Morgan, don't despair at all the people displaying needless aggression in this thread.
Grue3 8y ago
This sounds so much like how things are done at Yandex. I guess we really copy Google at everything. I also disagree with people attacking the author, these sorts of things need to be aired out, in fact names should be named as well. Public callouts is the only way we can defeat toxic workplace culture.
jstewartmobile 8y ago
I have never read a corporate butthurt story with this kind of flow--not on Medium anyway. @morganknutson, your writing style is on point.
sizzle 8y ago
His criticisms come off as seriously naive and green if he was expecting to upend the design practice of a behemoth tech company with many competing business units and products, each with their own leaders, legacy code dependencies, and teams of designers who would poke holes in his design decisions from a UX perspective (e.g. didn't test designs with users, just made it up) and see him as a 'graphic designer' who is a glorified pixel pusher and lacks a fundamental understanding of the field of HCI and user centered design. This is clearly evident from when he mentioned his outrage that he: "Never would’ve imagined that I was joining a team of 50+ designers where a bunch of them had never designed before. And I was “evaluated” at about their level? These weren’t interns, these were designers in their very first roles ever...at Google." From any UX design professional's perspective, he comes into their world, lacking any background in UX or basic understanding of user centered design methods, and just does the visual design portion of the work, not the actual hard work that goes into understanding human behavior, being curious and testing hypotheses and validating designs with quantitative and qualitative data via UX research methods. Dude needs to check his ego in my opinion, design is a team sport and anyone can mock up random dribbble worthy interfaces in an afternoon and think they deserve the title of designer then diss others who have a 4 year degree in fields related to understanding human behavior, not just art or graphic design (although art degrees are good if you solely focus on visual design due to color theory, typography, understanding design aesthetics, design critiquing etc.) tl;dr UI designer ≠ UX designer
phyller 8y ago
I feel like I understand the author's experience, and his bitterness, I had a very similar situation myself when I was a new engineer, creating an amazing project that was really useful for everyone that got completely shot down for political reasons. For a while after, the more I stuck out with better work the more I was punished. I learned a lot from this. It was very demotivating, painful, even humiliating, and it took me a long time to get over it (mostly). What I didn't learn is that all the people who were to blame for this were the bad guys. Here's what I did learn: - People are people and will do the things that people do, despite your high expectations. - You can often not change other people. But you can change yourself. Think of what *you* can do to improve relationships. - You'll rarely change someone's thinking by using logic. This, sadly, is not human nature in a political environment. - Work is a political environment. Even engineering. - You must learn what motivates, frustrates, encourages, shames and honors the people you work with. - Protect the people you work with, do not cause them to raise their defenses. - If you want something to move forward in a team you must win people over. - You don't win people over by making them feel threatened that you will take power from them or make them look bad. - If you truly care about something, having another person claim that idea as their own isn't bad, it's a great victory. If you don't really care what gets done in your organization and are just interested in being the most well respected and successful person, and want to get there in the quickest and not deal with everyone's crap, then do what a lot of others do and just flatter and lie and job-hop around before things catch up to you and you'll be C-level in no time. You can also get there (but not for sure) through long difficult years of doing everything right. Make your choices.

308 points by seapunk 8y ago

wdr1 8y ago

I'm sure Google+ is a dumpster fire, but reading this my only takeaway was... fuck, I hope I never work with anyone this toxic. The hate, the vitorial, the attacks, the arrogance, the lack of accountability, paranoid, passive aggressive, complaining intensely about event trivial things... This is the type of person I would leave a project over, no matter how exciting the work.

randycupertino 8y ago
Yes. Probably why they forced him out of Google... because he was horrible to work with and the entire team was complaining about his lack of social awareness and poor interpersonal skills.

misterkola 8y ago

Fuck google man!

Waterluvian 8y ago

The big tech companies are really really good at making you feel like you're exceptional and special and destined for greatness because you're good enough to work for them. But then there's the risk that they just say that then dump you in with thousands of others to churn out product. I'm increasingly convinced that there's a ton of life experience and wisdom to be gained by working for big tech in your early 20s when you have a lot of flexibility. But when you've figured out what kind of life you want to lead, they're probably not the right fit for you. I think it boils down to: money is easily quantifiable, happiness and freedom aren't. So people make bad life decisions based on an incomplete assessment of what will really suit them best.

mc32 8y ago
Yeah that’s the biggest take from this. Lots of nice smart people mostly doing routine boring things made a little more palatable because it comes with a big name company and decent perks. And we may have some inkling as to why Vic left (if the anecdotes are representative of behavior).

ggm 8y ago

Never write in anger. writing in sadness is ok, but writing in anger generally clouds the message. Some of this stuff is about how you work, and how others work. Its not about google, you could "feel" this way in almost any enterprise with more than 1 tier of management.

rightbyte 8y ago
The writer seems unbalanced and I can't tell if he or the workplace is the problem, or both. The thing that cought my eye is that he was telling his boss his coworker was home hung over, becouse he worked while his grandma died instead of visiting her. Like, who is being inconsiderate here really?
- AtlasBarfed 8y ago
  Well, he's passionate. He just didn't realize google is so big it's justanotherjob. Full of middle management machiavellis, and political deck chair shuffling.
  - vezycash 8y ago
    This! Is the author immature? Yes but not out of malice. He's simply a novice to the world of people. Labeling this guy as mental, dysfunctional or having a Everest sized ego is just petty. The key to understanding the author is at the top of the article. He skipped college, freelanced for much of his life and worked for non-profits (whose lofty goals transcend internal politics.) As someone who recently worked to make the world a better place, he genuinely tried to help his teammates and naively believe they appreciated his help. (I bet he doesn't know how to read body language and fake smiles). They on the other hand felt he was trying to make them look bad, and use them as promotion stepping stones. People who work with compilers for a long time have no qualms being wrong. They take feedback and improve. But for Straight A - straight out of college students and political types, being wrong is a personal insult. Here's what I think: Most of his co-workers had been complaining about his well meaning meddling. He couldn't be fired for making things better. The email was the excuse his boss had been looking for to get rid of him. If he joined Google 10 years ago, he would have been a rock star. My advice: He should find a way to make freelancing work. He should join a startup but freelance / consult on the side to augment his pay. Going to business school - or some management training might also do him a lot of good. Most of all, if he gets another big job, he shouldn't help anyone unless they ask for it. Wish him good luck.

thelastidiot 8y ago

Your story is exactly why I see many capable people leaving the Valley putting all that BS behind. FAANG, those are where you find a bunch of incompetent managers, who never got to learn leadership, stealing your ideas to look good in front of their boss, draining your energy with stupid decisions a donkey wouldn't take, and unable to understand how to work with smart people. Move on and get a new life. And before you get your next gig, go spend 10 days in a vipasanna center.

brettaaron 8y ago

Interesting insight, but I can't help but wonder if this guy is going to regret some of the shots he took in this article. I also stumbled upon his Twitter at the end of the article and it does more to show really how much this experience has affected him (https://twitter.com/morganknutson https://twitter.com/morganknutson). Very sad.

tjoff 8y ago

If your team, say on Gmail or Android, was to integrate Google+’s features then your team would be awarded a 1.5-3x multiplier on top of your yearly bonus. Your bonus was already something like 15% of your salary. Suddenly it makes sense why we can't use + to force a word in google searches anymore.

brianberns 8y ago
Is that why they got rid of it? I liked using + more than putting the word in quotes, which is what you have to do now.
- bambax 8y ago
  > Is that why they got rid of it? Yes. "Plus" is a dumb and lame product name. When Jean-Marie Messier was trying to make Vivendi an important Internet company, he decided he wanted to make some kind of portal (copying Yahoo) that would be named "Vivendi Plus". He announced it at a press conference before having even secured the vivendiplus.com domain. That was in Sept. '99. It failed miserably (didn't even launch). Ten years later when Google wanted to copy Facebook they came up with the exact same name. It failed. I think just naming a product myBigCompany--Plus is a symptom you don't know what you're doing or where you're going. It's bad form and then it's bad luck.
  - CoolGuySteve 8y ago
    It also implies that regular Google is Google-, some kind of inferior good. Never a good thing to do to your principle revenue stream.
- rizwan 8y ago
  A while back they added it again, so you can use + in your searches now.

the-dude 8y ago

Unhinged guy does not like Google, his boss or his collegues. Why is this at the top?

aorav 8y ago
Because anything negative about Google gets voted to the top, both on HN and Reddit. I’m pretty sure there is some coordinated effort behind it.

whack 8y ago

Controversial opinion here. I know that exaggerating and complaining is a surefire way to get clicks, but it's hard to take the author's criticisms seriously when he complains about so many different things. Some as minor as the noogler orientation. Others as petty as putting down colleagues who haven't worked as designers before. Regarding the main event in question: I like that Google allows people to party in the evenings with whoever they want to party with. I like that Google allows people to reschedule meetings if they aren't feeling well, for whatever reason. It sucks that the author's grandmother died and that he felt the need to work through the night while that happened, but it's unfair to take that out on your colleagues. Nobody would have blamed him if he asked to reschedule the meeting because of his grandmother's health. Heck, they probably wouldn't even have minded if he asked for a different day/time, just so he wouldn't have to work through the night. I have no idea who the author is. He might be a fantastic person, and Jim/Greg might be total dicks, for all I know. But just from the volume of different complaints mentioned, and his reaction to a meeting reschedule, I get the impression that he isn't the easiest person to work with, and that there are other sides to this story.

brianberns 8y ago
Seriously. When Jim schedules a meeting for 9am the next day, just tell him that you need more time than that. Instead, this guy goes home and works through the night so he can prove Jim wrong. Way too much ego tied up in petty disagreements here.
- fuoggler 8y ago
  The sheer number of Googlers posting here is amazing. We get it, you love the Gorg, but every single criticism he lists is real. Frankly, it has been a long time, too long, since we had a real voice air the realities of life in Goolag.
- sealjam 8y ago
  Agreed. The thing it took me a long time to realise about stuff like that is that you're not winning by breaking your neck to get something done for an unrealistic deadline, they are!

ordinaryperson 8y ago

To summarize some of his major complaints: 1) He accepted a salary (115K) lowered than what he thought was fair 2) Design occurred in silos, there was no unity or cohesion 3) His 2nd manager was "political" and "in love with bureaucracy" 4) An exec on a rival team tried to quash his idea 5) Managers often just wanted to slap their name on his work 6) He worked all night to satisfy an angry coworker the night his grandmother died, while coworker partied then rescheduled mtg For No 1: if you don't think a salary is fair, don't accept it. Nos 2-5: these happen at almost every medium-large sized company I've ever worked at. If you know a place that isn't political, bureaucratic, siloed and filled with rivals and petty managers, let me know so I can give you my resume. For No. 6, if you feel a deadline or meeting time is unfair, say so. If you have a sick family member, say so. He sent this email to his boss: > "Greg, I had to work most of the night because of Jim, and he canceled our meeting because he was partying with our competitors. In my book, this is totally unacceptable. What am I supposed to do?" It's never a good idea to send this. It's not going to help you, even if you're in the right. Canceling a meeting is not a gross injustice and if an employee parties afterhours that's his or her business. I sympathize with the author. Sounds like a good dude. But you have to try to roll with the punches, no workplace will be perfect, I promise you.

ot8 8y ago
> If you know a place that isn't political, bureaucratic, siloed and filled with rivals and petty managers, let me know so I can give you my resume. Red Hat. It is siloed and can be (increasingly) bureaucratic, but I have never experienced rivals or petty managers and it's the least political place I've ever worked.
- ordinaryperson 8y ago
  Could be. But just as a counter-example, here's a Glassdoor review from just 9 days ago that describes Red Hat as a "bloated company with an abusive culture": https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Red-Hat-RVW22811286.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Red-Hat-RV... Even if Red Hat is amazing for you it might not be for other people. No company is immune to human nature. Again I feel for the author. Sounds like "Greg" was jerk. But it's not cosmic injustice, it's more a feature of humans working in collectives, IMHO.

ganeshkrishnan 8y ago

This is really ungrateful. The author is not happy because he got to work on Google+ not chrome? Google+ for all it's short comings were business failures not tech or ux or design failure. I worked on far stupider projects at big companies and I am utterly grateful for the opportunities given to me. Absurd blog and no matter how muchi hate Google posts like these makes me realize how ungrateful some people can be.

brianberns 8y ago
If I showed up at a new job to work on Project X, and they assigned me to Project Y on my first day instead, I might be pretty upset too. The problem isn't the reassignment itself. It's the lack of communication.
- ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
  It's extremely common to get project reassigned especially since he was recruited three months later. What i guess happened was that Google found candidates for their chrome project and put him in their backlog. Later when they had one more vacancy they went thru this backlog and made offers
  - brianberns 8y ago
    I agree. They just need to make this clear to him before he agrees to the job.
    - ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
      Job offers don't come with project guarantees. What next? A guaranteed table spot next to the window?
      - robkop 8y ago
        Just a personal anecdote but yep, I've seen that one for real.

jesusthatsgreat 8y ago

Publicly criticizing people & companies you've worked with because you haven't seen eye to eye with them... Is this the sort of person you'd want to work with or hire to work for you? If it were a company that didn't pay you or were doing something unethical etc then fair enough - blow that whistle... but as far as I can see this is just someone with a chip on their shoulder and a bruised ego who can't move on.

AtlasBarfed 8y ago
Plus sucked and dropped the ball. It's obviously an account from his perspective and ego, but it fundamentally shows dysfunction and poor vision, if some middle level dude is actually doing fundamental redesign and is the only one concerned with cross-app experience.
shanusmagnus 8y ago
I would never, ever hire someone who went on a giant public character assassination of his colleagues and dumped all the day-to-day insider baseball to the world. Call-outs to people who didn't hire him. Jesus, wtf? I don't care how dysfunctional his experience was, I don't care how much of a star he might be, I don't need that kind of worry in my life, and it's hard to imagine someone who would. Be interested to know how his career goes after this.
- cwyers 8y ago
  The run-down of companies that didn't hire him and name-checking the people involved put me off the whole damn thing before I even got to the stuff at Google. Who does that?
joe_momma 8y ago
This is the type of person I would want to work with, and if he had an issue with me I'm pretty sure it wouldn't show up in a twitter rant because I'm the type of person that would work it out in house. There is some responsibility on those managers that they did not consider and should be held accountable for.
8y ago

allenu 8y ago

I tried reading this, but it is just stream of consciousness writing and littered with unnecessary details. It comes across as petty and the author doesn't seem to be good at communicating what he wants. For instance, he's whining about a 9am meeting with a coworker. If it's such a big deal, why didn't you ask for a later meeting?

raydev 8y ago
The "coworker" seemed more like a superior. I'd also be wary of cancelling meetings with a hostile superior.
- allenu 8y ago
  Was he? He was just mentioned as "one of the other designers on the team". Anyway, most superiors I've dealt with are open to feedback about a meeting time. If a time doesn't work for me, it's not out of the question to request an adjustment. The author sounds like the kind of person who will just passively accept a situation instead of saying what he really thinks, leading to internalized anger and bitterness.
- throwaway080383 8y ago
  To me, it sounded like they all reported to Greg.
  - raydev 8y ago
    Jim had seniority and apparently more clout. Just because OP wasn't directly reporting to Jim doesn't mean Jim wasn't a superior.
    - throwaway080383 8y ago
      Hm, odd definition of superior, but I work at a place where levels are secret and titles only reflect function.
  - lern_too_spel 8y ago

didibus 8y ago

That's what people say when they say the team and product you're on matters most. In big tech companies, your experiences can vary greatly from one team to another. This is where the companies could do a better job with HR of making sure each employee fits well in their team and enjoys themselves, and if not, to relocate them to another team. This is also a great lesson to learn for yourself: Don't stay on a shitty team, don't work for a failing product. Get out as soon as you can, transfer to another team, or even quit and leave the company if that's not possible.

chris_wot 8y ago

Hmmm this is interesting, but too much anger. I’m taking it with a grain of salt. This is definitely no rachelbythebay.

pi-squared 8y ago

The Googleyness is weak with this one. Inferiority complex. Work-life balance problems (work over xmas break, late night after work). Not being able to stand for oneself (salary, reschedule meeting). Wanting everyone to like him (literally said it). Seems to dismiss other people's jobs and even names as being less important than his. Nobody's perfect, we all have some bad things in our personalities. But it's impossible to read this and extract the value that he tries to convey that Google as a company didn't accommodate him (dismissing the design of buildings or noogler's orientation) rather than he tried too hard to be liked and perceived as valuable member.

ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
Unfortunately in big companies no one is valuable. If someone is, the company has a problem.
- pi-squared 8y ago
  That's the point of companies to de-risk relying on a single person. You can still be a valuable member within your team, among peers, some of which you may even call friends.
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  I don't think valuable should be seen as black and white, although companies and employees both make that mistake in different ways. Irreplaceable is an extreme version of valuable. Companies are right to avoid that extreme. But they shouldn't take it so far that they are allergic to admitting that employees have value. Any current employee who is right in the middle of the bell curve has value because, while they could be replaced, they are a known quantity. From the employee side, there can be a temptation to believe that because you're not exceptional, you're not valuable. Even if you're merely average, that is OK, and you need to accept that you are a worthwhile member of the team. If mentally you can't claim the position you rightfully deserve as your own, then you believe something wrong about the world, and like any wrong information, that will corrupt your decisions about how to act.
- tschwimmer 8y ago

CoolGuySteve 8y ago

There’s a special kind of rottenness in big orgs when the only thing they can produce is “like X but by us”. I understand why it happens, I’ve been on a few projects like that. The problem is that it’s hard to come up with a genuine new idea that a stack of middle managers will agree on and execute. But if you say: “Let’s make Twitter/facebook/App Store”, then the middle managers can’t really disagree with you since there’s already a successful example of that thing on the market. There’s also no room for miscommunication, everyone already knows what Facebook looks like, we just have to copy it. The problem is that this work is dull, uninspired, and likely to be unsuccessful. What’s the point? Why not just kill this shit before spending millions of dollars on it?

BareNakedCoder 8y ago
Like VisiCalc but by us. Hmmmm, sometimes it works out okay.

jVinc 8y ago

This isn't a story about Google+, it's a story about a disgruntled employees failing at a job as told through his own glasses filled with illusions of grandjour and sense of superiority. That said it's still an incredibly interesting story, and I have the feeling that many managers could gain some insight into what's going on in some of those "I am gods gift to development"-type individuals who can be both a huge benefit to a project yet at the same time be toxic to work with.

acconrad 8y ago

It's one thing to not be happy at Google+, which is the center of this rant. But to put targets on all of the companies you interviewed at along the way with their founders Twitter names? Incredibly bitter and salty. It's no way to strengthen your argument or to live.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

It's a sad story. His tweets provide the background for why he decided to write all this.

otabdeveloper2 8y ago

Megacorps don't work to make products. They work to keep their top-dog status perpetual. One way to do this is to hire smart people and keep them locked away wasting time. Two benefits: them not working productively at a competitor's place is one, and them losing the skills and drive to make real-world useful things after a few years is another.

goliatone 8y ago
Ive read other post basically making the same claim, Google is happy to create, fund, and hire for projects just to capture/retain talent and remove it from the hiring pool. Is that HN folks reading too much between lines or is it a thing?
- otabdeveloper2 8y ago
  It's not a Google thing. Every single large, successful company does this. It is a no-brainer decision from a game theoretic point of view: these companies already have a top-of-the-line, best in the world product. Working on more products requires lots of inspiration, time and luck, and even in the best case all you get is just another amazing product. (I.e., just more of the stuff you already got.) Using your money and fame to neutralize talent that could be used against you requires no effort or thinking at all, only money. These companies don't know what to do with their profits anyways.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  I don't think it's true. I'm more inclined to believe that as companies become large the amount of politics and bureaucracy takes over to the point where the company constantly self-sabotages.

hibikir 8y ago

Some have written about the problems of the piece. I agree with most of the criticisms, but what is useful for the rest of us is not the problems, but figuring out what useful things we can get out of the piece. The author's biggest work-related mistake was to sit tight when given a managed he had a bad relationship with. In most large organizations (500+ employees), your success and your failure will have a lot to do with a good relationship with your manager. It's not just performance reviews, but your technical influence that will be influenced by this. This matters with sibling teams too, as a political manager (and most bad managers are very political) will not want a report they don't like to have more influence than they do. I have seen people go from being seen as extremely productive to being called very low performers, and vice versa, in 2 months and a manager change. This kind of match, and caring about making teams cohesive, is something that most large valley companies do not really care about, and hurts them greatly, as a lot of talent is underused or downright shoved out the door. We can learn the some things as managers too: A report we really dislike could really help the company a whole lot if they were in an environment that matches them better, and ultimately that's what we should be caring about, not making people we don't like leave, and helping people we like get promoted. Whether it is by knowing them better, or helping them move somewhere else, is far more work than just undermining them, but its ultimately the right thing to do. What we should foster instead is teamwork, and the minimization of political behavior among reports. The sly report that is always telling me what I like to hear, but playing politics all day is the bad manager of tomorrow. Companies work better when people are aligned with building the best product the company can, not maximizing the credit they get. The more energy is spent on political fights, the worse the product gets.

codingdave 8y ago

> ... I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was. No, this is never true. Airing dirty laundry almost never produces a real change in the world. It just burns bridges and often makes you look petty.

joe_momma 8y ago
Possibly, but sometimes things do need to be said and he changed the names of the actual people he did not like so much, so maybe consider this "dry cleaned"? It definitely is useful to other people in similar circumstances and pretty much raises a point about all the pettiness that occurs in all industries. This is a human condition that needs to be addressed or this world will continue to be built by people who shouldn't be in charge.

rocky1138 8y ago

This is one of the most unprofessional things I've ever read. Giving callouts to people who passed you up for a hire is just... unacceptable.

kylnew 8y ago
Yes, very odd. I suppose it’s an attempt to suggest the employer made a mistake passing on them, but the act of calling out itself demonstrates they might have made a good call.
- randycupertino 8y ago
  So true! The whole post is just completely offputting and strange. What strikes me as the most odd is that the author thinks this makes him look good. imo it just discloses that he's a nightmare coworker.
VikingCoder 8y ago
You should read what Michael O'Church wrote about Google. Wow.
deleted 8y ago
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pxtail 8y ago
This was my impression as well , just wow, this guy seems to be so full of himself. He just constantly wants to belittle other people's work and all that snarky mentions of other companies... just wow! :O
klohto 8y ago
Finish reading the article. He explains it at the end.

NelsonMinar 8y ago

Just wanted to highlight this bit of the article about Vic Gundotra: "I remember him frequently flirting with the women on the team." Don't be that guy.

tyingq 8y ago
The shot he took on Twitter is even harsher. https://twitter.com/morganknutson/status/1050609480033951744 https://twitter.com/morganknutson/status/1050609480033951744

natecavanaugh 8y ago

The one thing he did, which is admirable, is that he didn't call out most people by their real names, but some of the remarks do seem a little petty. But this hopefully was a learning experience for him to not sacrifice what he wants in order to make people like him (it's a struggle I fight with). This does sound like a failure of leadership WRT the product and internal management, but, I think we should all try to read past the memory coloring, because I'm sure other members might have a different experience. But I think the main point still holds. Google+ was created as a reaction to FB, and while there were a couple of half decent features, but I can't remember anything they created that was enough to overcome FB's network advantage and draw people away. Either way, this article is fascinating to hear internals and understand the dynamics behind the scenes.

pavlov 8y ago

It’s just a side note, but this mention of his brief tenure at a “failing startup” rubs me the wrong way: ”In a couple of months I knocked out more work than they could have built in a year with their eng team.” No startup deserves a designer with this kind of attitude. Your job isn’t to produce pie-in-the-sky concepts for your portfolio but to work on the product together with the engineers.

deleted 8y ago
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mynegation 8y ago

Wow, on one hand - pretty interesting read in a sense that tabloids are interesting, but boy, you should never do that. It’s not just burning the bridges, it is not a very good signal to your potential employers, partners, acquirers, employees... Imagine public outcry if it went the other way: if managers hung out dirty laundry on employees who were not up to snuff. Also, about contractors in pivotal roles. The author was relatively new to for-profit industry and it happens way more often than one may think. People who go the contractor route are usually senior and experienced enough to be confident in getting and keeping the gigs, as the barrier to getting rid of a contractor is very low.

jlengrand 8y ago

I'm s bit sad at the end of the article. Sounds to me like a great designer, with good ideas and some genuine leadership skills. But the article itself is so full of anger and resentment that I really wonder what it would be like to work with the author. Looks like nobody has taken the time or given him the opportunity to learn how to navigate trough BS and handle it. Saying NO, being political, negotiating. . . Not very surprising if he indeed had such bad managers. Still, feels like wasted time and resources for everybody. I hope he is doing OK now.

joe_momma 8y ago

"They just wanted THEIR work to be used, or to be able to take credit for it. I hate that weak ass shit." My favorite part, it sucks he lost someone in the whole process...

jiveturkey 8y ago

auto-bio: a very serious person doing very serious and important things that’s all you need to know. can stop reading right there

jiveturkey 8y ago

i especially like how he has nothing but disdain for jack dorsey but is perfectly happy to tweet the day away

yuhong 8y ago

I was complaining about some of the problems in a few HN posts back then.

RichardCA 8y ago

It's a real shame, because I can definitely see a way for Google to do social networking in a way that would pull me away from Facebook. Basically I could connect with people and put their feeds into channels sort of like Slack (one for family, one for work, one for recruiters so I could get rid of Linkedin). But I'd have control over each channel and (this is important) people could message me in a way that worked like Gmail, but I wouldn't have to fork over my Gmail address. For me that was the critical omission, the idea that we can be "friends" on Google+ but you have no way to message me. It never made any sense. And I'm not even that smart.

peatfreak 8y ago

Yeah..... I'm not buying into this 100%...... it sounds like typical corporate BS that he is complaining about, and it was his choice to work instead of being with his family during a serious time of ill health. Like others have mentioned, I get the impression there are many sides to this this story, just like any other story. And yes, it does come across as extremely whiny. And also somewhat naive. Yaaaawwwwwwn.... I'm not exactly sitting on the edge of my seat for part II.

cromwellian 8y ago

Reading this I got the immediate impresssion that his temperament isn’t very Googley and was a cultural mismatch from the beginning. His ego is really big and doesn’t seem be able to deal with being a small fish in a big sea.

OUTLANDISH04 8y ago

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rdiddly 8y ago

The best bit was his take on the famed Google "adult daycare" workplace theme - essentially saying it's a clutter problem. But this guy is a dumpster fire.

1ae8-4846-8e9c 8y ago

Engineer here. I wasn't around for G+, but it seems to be an open secret internally that G+ was one of the most poorly managed projects ever. This isn't the first time I've heard about the poorly designed incentive structures or terrible senior management described here. I'm not going to say anything about all the other obvious caveats here, I think the other comments cover that pretty well. But because this one actually pisses me off: who cares about "partying with our competitors"? Does working at Google mean I shouldn't have friends at other companies? And above all, why the shit is your manager supposed to care about that? For what it's worth, I've also seen people transfer in less than 3-6 months on the team they were hired into. But if you don't do anything to make it happen, it's not going to happen.

wizdumb 8y ago

For anyone interested, "Emerald Sea" was the project code name for G+.

brown9-2 8y ago

He’s a timid and generally kind person (running theme). But also not sure of himself. Not confident in his work. Also understandable considering it wasn’t the best. Often times he seemed anxiety stricken. This is the point at which you begin to realize the author is a bit of a jerk.

graysonk 8y ago
Really? My turning point was when he called out companies for not hiring him and then said he did more work than the engineering team in 3 months

asveikau 8y ago

People are being too hard on this guy here. It's true that big companies are full of politicians and jerks, and that this can be frustrating if you just want to get good work done. There are some things you can say about the style of writing but... There is stuff here that resonates and accurately describes downsides of SV life. Just because "it's like that everywhere" doesn't mean we shouldn't aspire to better. Just because we don't like some aspect of this guy's communication style doesn't mean we should dismiss him. If you're reading, Morgan, don't despair at all the people displaying needless aggression in this thread.

Grue3 8y ago

This sounds so much like how things are done at Yandex. I guess we really copy Google at everything. I also disagree with people attacking the author, these sorts of things need to be aired out, in fact names should be named as well. Public callouts is the only way we can defeat toxic workplace culture.

jstewartmobile 8y ago

I have never read a corporate butthurt story with this kind of flow--not on Medium anyway. @morganknutson, your writing style is on point.

sizzle 8y ago

His criticisms come off as seriously naive and green if he was expecting to upend the design practice of a behemoth tech company with many competing business units and products, each with their own leaders, legacy code dependencies, and teams of designers who would poke holes in his design decisions from a UX perspective (e.g. didn't test designs with users, just made it up) and see him as a 'graphic designer' who is a glorified pixel pusher and lacks a fundamental understanding of the field of HCI and user centered design. This is clearly evident from when he mentioned his outrage that he: "Never would’ve imagined that I was joining a team of 50+ designers where a bunch of them had never designed before. And I was “evaluated” at about their level? These weren’t interns, these were designers in their very first roles ever...at Google." From any UX design professional's perspective, he comes into their world, lacking any background in UX or basic understanding of user centered design methods, and just does the visual design portion of the work, not the actual hard work that goes into understanding human behavior, being curious and testing hypotheses and validating designs with quantitative and qualitative data via UX research methods. Dude needs to check his ego in my opinion, design is a team sport and anyone can mock up random dribbble worthy interfaces in an afternoon and think they deserve the title of designer then diss others who have a 4 year degree in fields related to understanding human behavior, not just art or graphic design (although art degrees are good if you solely focus on visual design due to color theory, typography, understanding design aesthetics, design critiquing etc.) tl;dr UI designer ≠ UX designer

phyller 8y ago

I feel like I understand the author's experience, and his bitterness, I had a very similar situation myself when I was a new engineer, creating an amazing project that was really useful for everyone that got completely shot down for political reasons. For a while after, the more I stuck out with better work the more I was punished. I learned a lot from this. It was very demotivating, painful, even humiliating, and it took me a long time to get over it (mostly). What I didn't learn is that all the people who were to blame for this were the bad guys. Here's what I did learn: - People are people and will do the things that people do, despite your high expectations. - You can often not change other people. But you can change yourself. Think of what *you* can do to improve relationships. - You'll rarely change someone's thinking by using logic. This, sadly, is not human nature in a political environment. - Work is a political environment. Even engineering. - You must learn what motivates, frustrates, encourages, shames and honors the people you work with. - Protect the people you work with, do not cause them to raise their defenses. - If you want something to move forward in a team you must win people over. - You don't win people over by making them feel threatened that you will take power from them or make them look bad. - If you truly care about something, having another person claim that idea as their own isn't bad, it's a great victory. If you don't really care what gets done in your organization and are just interested in being the most well respected and successful person, and want to get there in the quickest and not deal with everyone's crap, then do what a lot of others do and just flatter and lie and job-hop around before things catch up to you and you'll be C-level in no time. You can also get there (but not for sure) through long difficult years of doing everything right. Make your choices.