26 ms·

Developer Tropes: “Google Does It”

160 points by mothsonasloth 7y ago

duxup 7y ago
Certainly what environment you have should be a sort of organic / self developed / self serving kinda system. Make it your own. I do think when folks talk about little perks and the environment they're not talking about how having the right kind of cake, or three kinds of cake vs two kinds of cake available (just a generic example) is important. What they are really saying is "I see this company has put some resources into making this environment better, and that reflects their values and makes ME feel valued." Heck even if you don't eat the cake it is a sign. It's akin to the story (I can't find it) where a company stopped providing free soda (or maybe they stopped subsidizing the price, I forget). The engineers were very upset, but it was just soda and god knows they could afford it.... but really it wasn't soda, the fact that management thought it was worth their time to pull resources from soda of all things was a very worrisome sign that indicated the company's values and possibly their future. Soda was the canary in the coal mine.
- deleted 7y ago
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- VBprogrammer 7y ago
  I used to work at a company where each team member got a budget of ~£15 a month towards a team lunch which was typically saved up and spent once every 3 months. The bright spark who thought they could cut some costs by removing that perk probably cost the company 10x that just in the time people spent grumbling about it (it was eventually reinstated). While I think the reactions are a bit OTT (see my comment down thread); it's certainly true that companies do a very poor job of evaluating this kind of decision. One of my key indicators for when it's time to start brushing up my CV is when people spend an inordinate amount of effort trying to save a few quid on stationary when these things are rounding errors on the companies bottom line.
  - paulryanrogers 7y ago
    Actually I rejoice when companies cut bad, frivolous things like soda that negatively impact health and use aluminum; which is sometimes not recycled. Plus it's difficult to resist temptation when constantly working around food that's unhealthy yet very sweet and 'free'.
    - cruano 7y ago
      Yeah but you cut sodas and get fresh fruit, I absolutely agree that you shouldn't aid bad habits but just cutting that stuff hints at something else than "helping you be healthy"
- eanzenberg 7y ago
  More realistically, if the company is cutting little bits here and there (soda, coffee, etc.) then it usually means tough times ahead. If a ~$1k monthly expense will make or break the budget, it's time to jump ship.
  - duxup 7y ago
    That and / or you've got penny pinching management and if penny pinching is what they think of as valuable use of their time ... you don't want to work with those folks.
    - snoman 7y ago
      Precisely because they're spending mental energy on how to cut $1,000/mo instead of spending that energy on how to bring in $1,000/mo. Then you get both.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  I've seen perks in place because the boss liked it, didn't have to pay for it personally, and almost certainly wrote it off as a business expense. That's also a sign.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Yeah I worked at a place where the leadership team would go out and golf in the afternoon ... often enough that you notice it. Generally I don't think much about those things, but it was often enough after awhile that it was "Yeah I'm stuck here and they...." Pretty easy for everyone in the office to sort of "check out" when it becomes a visible issue.
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  a colleague told me of a 'remote-only' company which ... cut mobile hotspots for 'on call' engineers. "no no no, this isn't a cost cutting measure". But the 5 people who were expected to rotate being 'on call' 24/7 - who had previously been able to schedule some 'away' time knowing they had hotspots - suddenly couldn't. The hotspots were ~$60/month, maybe? So, cutting $300/month, but still requiring the 24/7 rotation - this was a big morale hit. Oh, and later they gave every - (60+ people) a half-day 'off' to spend 'reducing your monthly bills' - they all got an email detailing how to call your cable company to save $10/month on your cable, and scripts to use to reduce your cell phone bill, etc.
- lwb 7y ago
  > It's akin to the story (I can't find it) where a company stopped providing free soda https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
  - duxup 7y ago
    Thank you! HN users are so good at remembering these things for me ;)
- gopalv 7y ago
  > It's akin to the story (I can't find it) where a company stopped providing free soda It's a memorable one, because it was "soda is now 50 cents". https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%e2%80%93-soda%e2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear... Though free soda at work-place will probably sound like a cigarette tin at the receptionist, when a company switches from growth to cut-costs, it is a clear indication that there's a transition towards "dead wood" clearing layoffs. And the more successful the first round of layoffs are (and they should be, because the hiring process isn't perfect), the more likely there will be more ... etc.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  I remember joining a major company right after it went public. I was shocked at how little oversight there was at spending. There were also a lot of people who just weren't pulling their weight in the company and soaking up the freebies. About a year later, the CEO was fired and we had a less than AWESOME quarter. We needed to do some cost trimming, like all well-run businesses need to do. (The obvious thing to do was to scrutinize costs, and offer a few people a generous severance.) I was shocked that a bunch of employees (and my manager) rallied around getting rid of free soda. It was like they just wanted to extend the free ride for everyone, so they suggested the most obvious way to feel pain instead of finding something to get rid of that we didn't need.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Cost cutting is such a weird thing as it is often so superficially measured. I worked at a company that slowly but surely cut travel options in order to limit travel costs. Except for the sales group.... the group the traveled the most. After a couple quarters they hilariously sent out an email noting that travel costs were not going down fast enough, insinuated that people weren't watching their expenses close enough, and if everyone didn't do a better job that they'd have to limit the sales travel budget too. I suspect the person who sent the email couldn't / didn't think critically about what message they sent everyone else in the company. Needless to say the costs didn't drop. Even more amusing they decided that car rentals were too expensive, so they banned car rentals (but not for sales). I was to take a taxi or public transit wherever I went. The results was that it cost about 3x as much in local travel costs when I traveled. I actually accounted for it all, wrote up a report with charts about how a car saves the company money on my trips. I was told not to tell the travel team anymore as their management didn't want to hear it.
    - dtech 7y ago
      Cost cutting is the source of the most ludicrous penny wise pound foolish decisions in the world. Spend $25k year on a SaaS? Throw it out and create an internal system. Nevermind that 4 people spend a month building it and you now 0.8FTE maintaining an inferior and buggy system. Employee costs are going on the big pile and aren't as directly measured.
- deleted 7y ago
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- JohnFen 7y ago
  On the other hand, there are companies that decide to put effort into little employee "perks" like that rather than putting effort into improving the things that really matter, because it's cheaper and easier to stock a soda machine than to solve institutional problems. For this reason, I don't consider the existence of stuff like that to be a reliable indicator of anything at all. When a company does this, it neither impresses me nor puts me off.
  - duxup 7y ago
    I think institutional problems are really another issue entirely.
  - rightbyte 7y ago
    Not really, I belive it's important. I worked as a teacher and we had to the handle coffee machine ourselfs. Every week there was a coffee teacher and we put money in a jar. Alot of energy and frustration was caused by this and most likely no money saved for the school.
  - HelloNurse 7y ago
    The comparison is with companies that put effort into actively annoying employees with cost-cutting measures and general disregard. For example, if you aren't impressed by free snacks you would be impressed by a strict policy of no food in the office with no place to eat.
- wpietri 7y ago
  I totally agree on the make-it-your-own bit being important. An awful lot of places are unable/unwilling to think about their environment holistically and from first principles. So execs cargo-cult the visible things from successful companies. The classic example for me is the ping-pong table. Can they be a useful way to get cross-team interaction and bonding that increases the company's ability to solve cross-cutting problems? Sure. But they are often bought because that's what startups do. E.g., the photo recently going around Twitter of the ping-pong table marked with "NO PLAYING BEFORE 6 PM".
  - duxup 7y ago
    > the photo recently going around Twitter of the ping-pong table marked with "NO PLAYING BEFORE 6 PM" I love how that completely sends the opposite message. It is convenient though, it makes it clear that the management team (as a team, maybe some are ok) has no ability, or can't be bothered to imagine how other people think / respond / feel.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    Oh God, my previous employer did that. We had a ping-pong table, because it was trendy. We had an open plan office, because it was trendy. And, because the person making decisions wasn't thinking of actual development, we had the ping-pong table in the open plan office. Open warfare broke out between the people who liked playing it and the people who were driven mad by the noise while trying to get work done. It was the most successful team destroying exercise I've ever seen. It was banned and reinstated at the whim of conflicting managers. Eventually someone discovered silent ping-pong balls and order and harmony was restored. A few months later I quit for a 15% pay rise.
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  A former colleague of mine worked at Time Magazine in the late 1990s, before and after the AOL Time Warner merger. He said, “when AOL got rid of our Snapple, we knew it was all over.” (And for context, the salary/job stability for someone at Time Magazine in 2000 is very different than in 2019. As in, the pay was very good and there was job stability.) Similar to the soda story — it’s not that the employees can’t afford it themselves, it’s what it represents about not just the changing culture at the company, but of the financial realities. I once worked at a place where they suddenly started to decrease the snack budget (but didn’t say anything —- we just got fewer snacks and in fewer quantities each week). In hindsight, it was an indicator of some of the financial issues happening at the company. Ironically, after some layoffs (followed by the voluntary exodus of ~20% of the company), the snacks came back full blast as an attempt to raise morale, but by then it was too late.
VBprogrammer 7y ago
I'm constantly amazed by how self-entitled my fellow developers can be when it comes to anything offered as a perk. The coffee machine on a floor breaks and you'd think someone had asked them to take a 20% pay cut by their reaction. Maybe I'm just getting old.
- jayd16 7y ago
  Certainly don't be a jerk to your office manager about it but every perk is compensation. Why shouldn't you take it seriously?
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  I don't think that developers, that's every office ever. It's an office full of smeagols anytime any privilege is taken away.
- baud147258 7y ago
  A coffee machine breakage would be treated as a work-stopping issue where I work, considering our consumption. But I don't think it would be treated like a 20% cut (which would most likely impossible here), it would be just a big annoyance.
  - bcrosby95 7y ago
    Its weird how it's socially acceptable to admit you're reliant upon this specific drug to get work done. But any others and it's bad.
    - baud147258 7y ago
      I don't think we're that reliant here (even excluding those who don't drink coffee), it's rather closer to an annoyance (a big one, like dealing with slow computer/bad network), but we could still get work done. It's just that since the coffee is free (and good), we're drinking a lot of it.
    - aesh2Xa1 7y ago
      After reading "Why We Sleep" I've been led to believe it really ought to be just socially acceptable to consume this drug. Unless we challenge the culture of working early then it seems to be the case that many of us are physiologically dependent on caffeine because our work culture demands it. Or we could fix the culture problem.
lostmymind66 7y ago
I interviewed for a position last year where the company had a very successful product and was growing, but still small. They wanted to restructure everything (the way they code, teams, management style) to be more like Google. I made it to the last interview stage, which would have been a 4 hour remote white-boarding session, where they would give me something to code and a team of developers would watch me. I turned it turned it down and found a much better position the next day. The first stage of the interview was light technical and almost all a psychological test to see if I would be a good 'culture' fit. The interviewer was a first-time 20-something manager that wanted to make a name for himself and had read a few silicon valley books about technical interviews. He actually told me this. Most companies aren't Google and shouldn't be emulating much of anything there.
- la_barba 7y ago
  I don't think its any different than devs thinking they need to "future proof" (a silly idea anyway) their database design for millions of transactions , or needlessly fretting about scale problems that their tiny company is never going to see for YEARS. Or people who copy $famous_dev's coding environment, or coding style or whatever. All people do this in various ways. The only truth here is that it's far easier to point out someone else's flaws. To take your interview example, you can't really convince a company (or anyone for that matter) they are doing something wrong, if what they're doing is making them money/success. It is a very powerful form of feedback that gets ingrained and is almost impossible to shakeoff.
- lacampbell 7y ago
  > The interviewer was a first-time 20-something manager that wanted to make a name for himself and had read a few silicon valley books about technical interviews. He actually told me this. Haha what a champ. I respect the hell out of that.
  - lostmymind66 7y ago
    yeah, well, I didn't want to be managed by this person.
mothsonasloth 7y ago
Here's an archive link http://archive.fo/TcUsg http://archive.fo/TcUsg
CoolGuySteve 7y ago
> "We are going to make this environment more like a Google office" > "I saw this presentation by a Google developer and I think we need to copy their release process" One of these is very different from the other. Fancy coffee and whatnot affects your environment but release processes, frameworks, interview methods, etc, change your productivity and are all made to fit an organization of Google's size and bureaucracy. They're a terrible fit for most small/medium sized companies. I also always find it weird how nobody picks other giant companies to emulate, nobody's like "Well JP Morgan has great employee mortgage rates!" or whatever.
- stcredzero 7y ago
  The latter is rarely effective for a small company imo and is way more of a dangerous cargo cult in my experience. It's like trying to swim while wearing shackles. One principle I think about when refactoring, is reversibility. If something turns out to be wrong, can you change your mind with minimal cost? To generalize, when trying something, can it be tried and backed out for minimal cost, while providing good information? I also always find it weird how nobody picks other giant companies to emulate, nobody's like "Well JP Morgan has great employee mortgage rates!" or whatever. For the answer, I think one can analyze their marketing and how the culture once perceived SV and the startup scene.
- tudelo 7y ago
  > "Well JP Morgan has great employee mortgage rates!" Any details on this? :)
stcredzero 7y ago
I'm surprised no one else has said it yet, but isn't, "We are going to make this environment more like a Google office," just the 20-teens version of, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM?" It was also what the article terms, "Lazy management thinking." It's imitating the surface level of big company success, without analyzing the how and why, and seeing if the cost/benefit factors also work out for yourself.
GiorgioG 7y ago
Microservices...because scalability...that you'll never need.
- nailer 7y ago
  The amount of otherwise-sane developers that have created their own cloud provider on top of an existing cloud provider 'because Docker/k8s' scares me.
rolltiide 7y ago
so are we finally going to retire OKRs or not because that it the most mindnumbingly ridiculous and timewasting fad I've ever put up with on a development team or company "because Google does it" maybe C-level management should just do it amongst themselves and just put their results on a list and it would be the same as a random directive coming down from high that nobody questions. most of your startup's "passionate team members" are lying about it and do not care if they the understood the direction the OKR process went or if they just did what was told, skipping the whole thing.
draw_down 7y ago
Funny that you never see "Google does it" as a justification to raise salaries...
helmsb 7y ago
I’m always wary of the hip companies that offer all the perks and try and seem cool. It’s not altruistic. They expect in return to work you like crazy. I would much rather work somewhere boring where I work a solid day and go home, don’t have to think about work on the weekends with solid monetary compensation. Free donuts and coffee can’t make up for lost personal time nor can it pay for a mortgage. I’m a professional, treat me like one.
- liberte82 7y ago
  That's why they're always looking for fresh college grads, many of the older people wise up eventually.
- deleted 7y ago
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- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Different strokes for different folks. Some people (by which I mean me) honestly don't like the "work a solid day and go home" model; I don't have the kind of mental switches to stop thinking about personal stuff at 9 am and stop thinking about work stuff at 5 pm. My current company gets 50+ hours a week out of me, but nobody complains when I watch a Youtube video and I don't need permission to leave early when it's necessary - I consider that a fair trade.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Do you get to work at 4am or do you still follow office hours?
  - wil421 7y ago
    Are you married? Do you have kids? Do you have a dog? Do you have hobbies that require you to be away from computers? If you don’t answer yes to one of my questions I suggest you try one or more. I’ve gone through lots of hobbies outside my house (preferably outdoors) over the years including running, working out, walking my dog, and now kayaking. If your able to get your work done you should swap the YouTube time for someone else outside work.
ppod 7y ago
>It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all
- HillaryBriss 7y ago
  When I see the Google employee walkouts I begin to wonder what it takes to govern good people. Sundar Pichai must feel like the walkouts are a real headache sometimes.
  - a1369209993 7y ago
    It requires very little. The catch is that it requires specifically very little: not nothing, and also not more than very little.
bluedino 7y ago
Way back in 2007/2008, Google did a study on HDD failures not increasing when they had 80+ degree server rooms. Someone at a company I used to work for, read that study in 2013, and removed the air conditioners from our server rooms. We ran at almost 90 degrees from that point on, inside the racks it was much hotter. We lost a couple battery backups, internal fans, and power supplies before I could convince them to turn the air back on.
- AceJohnny2 7y ago
  Was the person/process that led to that decision corrected ?
  - bluedino 7y ago
    It was the owners son. He's been promoted and continues making ill-advised decisions to this day.
tylerl 7y ago
Having worked at a few places that aren't Google as well as a few places that are Google, here's what I think the meaningful difference is that makes the Google offices more productive. 1: The people are smarter. It's sort of cheating I suppose; better inputs make better outputs. Google doesn't have all the smartest people, but it's one of the few companies that get top-tier talent in a way that is meaningful. Everything else hinges on this. 2: Your manager (and their manager) cares a lot about you. That's a pretty broad statement and definitely not universal, but it's more often true than not. Managers are explicitly trained to focus on the needs of their employees, and the ones who don't are largely viewed as failures. No other success compensates for poor treatment of your reports. Again, there are plenty of bad managers, but they're widely seen as bad managers; justification like "demanding but fair" or "knows how to get results" or "evil genius" have little effect. 3: It's easy to move. There is no pay difference no matter what project you work on and internal mobility is encouraged and supported. People do what they want to do, and they tend to be extremely motivated as a result. It also helps remove bad managers: sinking ships get abandoned really, really fast. This is arguably the company's greatest weakness as well as it's hard to get people to work on something soul-consuming. But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation.
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  > There is no pay difference no matter what project you work on I've heard that you'll get raises for working on new things. That's why Google launches so many new projects (and closes so many of those projects) and that's why old projects are constantly rewritten/redesigned instead of just imprpoving and bugfixing. I don't like it as a user, I want to use the same interface for 50 years and I want all bugs to be removed, rather than learning new interface and new bugs every few years.
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    You get promoted by shipping stuff (at least, when I was there). You get a raise by getting promoted. So there's an indirect connection between launching things and getting more money. I think that the OP's referring to a phenomena at different big companies where certain divisions get paid more because management deems that division more important. That creates a dynamic where everybody tries to get into that division, and the ones that can't end up bitter, demoralized, and resentful (and hence unproductive). Connecting pay to tangible accomplishments rather than where you are in the company avoids that dynamic, though it does create the one you've observed where everyone is hunting for tangible accomplishments.
HillaryBriss 7y ago
These companies should be much more skeptical of the desire to make code quality similar to that of Google. It must have been different in Google's early years, but now there's reason to suspect that Google succeeds in spite of their code/product quality, not because of it.
pbreit 7y ago
No exactly what I expected. I was thinking it would be more technical. Either way, there is very little, possibly nothing, that a company not named Google can borrow from Google. The scale and venue that Google operates in too different.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  Nah, there's plenty of things that would be cool to borrow. Generous (by US standards) parental leave, lots of holidays, excellent 401k plan, work flexibility, ease of job transfers, open/critical internal culture, blameless post-mortems as a standard thing, and of course, free food and gym.
  - pbreit 7y ago
    I probably should have left out the "either way" since I mainly meant technical topics. Since you mention them though, many are not Google things. And others I would reject (ex: free food & gym).
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      > Since you mention them though, many are not Google things. What does this even mean? Most of the technical process stuff Google does isn't completely unique to Google either. > And others I would reject (ex: free food & gym). Why though? Honestly, having worked here, it'd be hard for me to go to a place that didn't have these things. It's just so convenient and awesome!
outworlder 7y ago
> "I saw this presentation by a Google developer and I think we need to copy their release process" I heard exactly the opposite from some Googlers. That you DON'T want to copy their release process. At least, not without a good reason.
JohnFen 7y ago
If my employer were to decide that we needed to be more like Google, my only thought would be "if I wanted to work for a company that resembles Google, I'd be working for Google."
OliverJones 7y ago
Policies like "one-click deploy and one-click rollback" or "no long meetings" are the result of years of hard work. An executive can't just decree "no long meetings" and have it stick. Avoiding long meetings takes a culture of preparation and transparency. It takes clear agendas. It takes people showing up to the meeting knowing the agenda and the material, and being ready to approve, review, brainstorm, or do whatever the agenda calls for. It's hard--and worthwhile--to work on developing that culture. An executive can't decree "one-click deploy" either. Obviously. It too takes a particular culture and a lot of time. As for the perks: it takes a "no magic" culture. If the coffee runs out, some real human has to get more. In a big company, maybe that work can be outsourced. In a pre-revenue startup, there's no magic. You want coffee? Go get some. (They sell it at Starbucks and Costco, you know.) If you have an intern who will tolerate being asked to go fer coffee, send the intern. Dirty bathroom, small company? No magic. Clean the bathroom.
w0mbat 7y ago
I can tell you that this line does not work at Apple. If I ever questioned Apple's weirdly bureaucratic ways of doing things my manager would yell at me "I don't give a fuck what you did at Google!".
vipbababd 7y ago
For domain specific roles I ought to think that the members of the current team would be more than happy to provide insight/advice/coaching to someone looking to skill up and get involved. This is typically how I've seen lateral moves done at other companies that encourage mobility. For example, moving from a primarily DBA job to devops/operations/wahetever.
vipbababd 7y ago
Certainly what environment you have should be a sort of organic / self developed / self serving kinda system. Make it your own. I do think when folks talk about little perks and the environment they're not talking about how having the right kind of cake, or three kinds of cake vs two kinds of cake available (just a generic example) is important. What they are really saying is "I see this company has put some resources into making this environment better, and that reflects their values and makes ME feel valued." Heck even if you don't eat the cake it is a sign. It's akin to the story (I can't find it) where a company stopped providing free soda (or maybe they stopped subsidizing the price, I forget). The engineers were very upset, but it was just soda and god knows they could afford it.... but really it wasn't soda, the fact that management thought it was worth their time to pull resources from soda of all things was a very worrisome sign that indicated the company's values and possibly their future. Soda was the canary in the coal mine.
AceJohnny2 7y ago
The author's insight of viewing a company/office as an ecosystem is really useful. (I was ready to dismiss this article based on the title being too tropey, ironically)
fapjacks 7y ago
This is why I'm bearish on Kubernetes for most organizations. Not because it doesn't work great, but because its complexity is so high. I have this adage about not solving problems you don't have, but it's the same concept in the article. Kubernetes is for Google. And I guess Netflix could use kube. Amazon. Facebook, sure. But the complexity overhead is so enormous that you are probably causing more problems than you're solving, especially if you're already using something that works (since this is the same exact thing as rewriting the software from scratch, but for sysops). Alas. New and shiny is a powerful temptation.

160 points by mothsonasloth 7y ago

Certainly what environment you have should be a sort of organic / self developed / self serving kinda system. Make it your own. I do think when folks talk about little perks and the environment they're not talking about how having the right kind of cake, or three kinds of cake vs two kinds of cake available (just a generic example) is important. What they are really saying is "I see this company has put some resources into making this environment better, and that reflects their values and makes ME feel valued." Heck even if you don't eat the cake it is a sign. It's akin to the story (I can't find it) where a company stopped providing free soda (or maybe they stopped subsidizing the price, I forget). The engineers were very upset, but it was just soda and god knows they could afford it.... but really it wasn't soda, the fact that management thought it was worth their time to pull resources from soda of all things was a very worrisome sign that indicated the company's values and possibly their future. Soda was the canary in the coal mine.

deleted 7y ago
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VBprogrammer 7y ago
I used to work at a company where each team member got a budget of ~£15 a month towards a team lunch which was typically saved up and spent once every 3 months. The bright spark who thought they could cut some costs by removing that perk probably cost the company 10x that just in the time people spent grumbling about it (it was eventually reinstated). While I think the reactions are a bit OTT (see my comment down thread); it's certainly true that companies do a very poor job of evaluating this kind of decision. One of my key indicators for when it's time to start brushing up my CV is when people spend an inordinate amount of effort trying to save a few quid on stationary when these things are rounding errors on the companies bottom line.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  Actually I rejoice when companies cut bad, frivolous things like soda that negatively impact health and use aluminum; which is sometimes not recycled. Plus it's difficult to resist temptation when constantly working around food that's unhealthy yet very sweet and 'free'.
  - cruano 7y ago
    Yeah but you cut sodas and get fresh fruit, I absolutely agree that you shouldn't aid bad habits but just cutting that stuff hints at something else than "helping you be healthy"
eanzenberg 7y ago
More realistically, if the company is cutting little bits here and there (soda, coffee, etc.) then it usually means tough times ahead. If a ~$1k monthly expense will make or break the budget, it's time to jump ship.
- duxup 7y ago
  That and / or you've got penny pinching management and if penny pinching is what they think of as valuable use of their time ... you don't want to work with those folks.
  - snoman 7y ago
    Precisely because they're spending mental energy on how to cut $1,000/mo instead of spending that energy on how to bring in $1,000/mo. Then you get both.
cgriswald 7y ago
I've seen perks in place because the boss liked it, didn't have to pay for it personally, and almost certainly wrote it off as a business expense. That's also a sign.
- duxup 7y ago
  Yeah I worked at a place where the leadership team would go out and golf in the afternoon ... often enough that you notice it. Generally I don't think much about those things, but it was often enough after awhile that it was "Yeah I'm stuck here and they...." Pretty easy for everyone in the office to sort of "check out" when it becomes a visible issue.
mgkimsal 7y ago
a colleague told me of a 'remote-only' company which ... cut mobile hotspots for 'on call' engineers. "no no no, this isn't a cost cutting measure". But the 5 people who were expected to rotate being 'on call' 24/7 - who had previously been able to schedule some 'away' time knowing they had hotspots - suddenly couldn't. The hotspots were ~$60/month, maybe? So, cutting $300/month, but still requiring the 24/7 rotation - this was a big morale hit. Oh, and later they gave every - (60+ people) a half-day 'off' to spend 'reducing your monthly bills' - they all got an email detailing how to call your cable company to save $10/month on your cable, and scripts to use to reduce your cell phone bill, etc.
lwb 7y ago
> It's akin to the story (I can't find it) where a company stopped providing free soda https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
- duxup 7y ago
  Thank you! HN users are so good at remembering these things for me ;)
gopalv 7y ago
> It's akin to the story (I can't find it) where a company stopped providing free soda It's a memorable one, because it was "soda is now 50 cents". https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%e2%80%93-soda%e2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear... Though free soda at work-place will probably sound like a cigarette tin at the receptionist, when a company switches from growth to cut-costs, it is a clear indication that there's a transition towards "dead wood" clearing layoffs. And the more successful the first round of layoffs are (and they should be, because the hiring process isn't perfect), the more likely there will be more ... etc.
gwbas1c 7y ago
I remember joining a major company right after it went public. I was shocked at how little oversight there was at spending. There were also a lot of people who just weren't pulling their weight in the company and soaking up the freebies. About a year later, the CEO was fired and we had a less than AWESOME quarter. We needed to do some cost trimming, like all well-run businesses need to do. (The obvious thing to do was to scrutinize costs, and offer a few people a generous severance.) I was shocked that a bunch of employees (and my manager) rallied around getting rid of free soda. It was like they just wanted to extend the free ride for everyone, so they suggested the most obvious way to feel pain instead of finding something to get rid of that we didn't need.
- duxup 7y ago
  Cost cutting is such a weird thing as it is often so superficially measured. I worked at a company that slowly but surely cut travel options in order to limit travel costs. Except for the sales group.... the group the traveled the most. After a couple quarters they hilariously sent out an email noting that travel costs were not going down fast enough, insinuated that people weren't watching their expenses close enough, and if everyone didn't do a better job that they'd have to limit the sales travel budget too. I suspect the person who sent the email couldn't / didn't think critically about what message they sent everyone else in the company. Needless to say the costs didn't drop. Even more amusing they decided that car rentals were too expensive, so they banned car rentals (but not for sales). I was to take a taxi or public transit wherever I went. The results was that it cost about 3x as much in local travel costs when I traveled. I actually accounted for it all, wrote up a report with charts about how a car saves the company money on my trips. I was told not to tell the travel team anymore as their management didn't want to hear it.
  - dtech 7y ago
    Cost cutting is the source of the most ludicrous penny wise pound foolish decisions in the world. Spend $25k year on a SaaS? Throw it out and create an internal system. Nevermind that 4 people spend a month building it and you now 0.8FTE maintaining an inferior and buggy system. Employee costs are going on the big pile and aren't as directly measured.
deleted 7y ago
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JohnFen 7y ago
On the other hand, there are companies that decide to put effort into little employee "perks" like that rather than putting effort into improving the things that really matter, because it's cheaper and easier to stock a soda machine than to solve institutional problems. For this reason, I don't consider the existence of stuff like that to be a reliable indicator of anything at all. When a company does this, it neither impresses me nor puts me off.
- duxup 7y ago
  I think institutional problems are really another issue entirely.
- rightbyte 7y ago
  Not really, I belive it's important. I worked as a teacher and we had to the handle coffee machine ourselfs. Every week there was a coffee teacher and we put money in a jar. Alot of energy and frustration was caused by this and most likely no money saved for the school.
- HelloNurse 7y ago
  The comparison is with companies that put effort into actively annoying employees with cost-cutting measures and general disregard. For example, if you aren't impressed by free snacks you would be impressed by a strict policy of no food in the office with no place to eat.
wpietri 7y ago
I totally agree on the make-it-your-own bit being important. An awful lot of places are unable/unwilling to think about their environment holistically and from first principles. So execs cargo-cult the visible things from successful companies. The classic example for me is the ping-pong table. Can they be a useful way to get cross-team interaction and bonding that increases the company's ability to solve cross-cutting problems? Sure. But they are often bought because that's what startups do. E.g., the photo recently going around Twitter of the ping-pong table marked with "NO PLAYING BEFORE 6 PM".
- duxup 7y ago
  > the photo recently going around Twitter of the ping-pong table marked with "NO PLAYING BEFORE 6 PM" I love how that completely sends the opposite message. It is convenient though, it makes it clear that the management team (as a team, maybe some are ok) has no ability, or can't be bothered to imagine how other people think / respond / feel.
- pjc50 7y ago
  Oh God, my previous employer did that. We had a ping-pong table, because it was trendy. We had an open plan office, because it was trendy. And, because the person making decisions wasn't thinking of actual development, we had the ping-pong table in the open plan office. Open warfare broke out between the people who liked playing it and the people who were driven mad by the noise while trying to get work done. It was the most successful team destroying exercise I've ever seen. It was banned and reinstated at the whim of conflicting managers. Eventually someone discovered silent ping-pong balls and order and harmony was restored. A few months later I quit for a 15% pay rise.
filmgirlcw 7y ago
A former colleague of mine worked at Time Magazine in the late 1990s, before and after the AOL Time Warner merger. He said, “when AOL got rid of our Snapple, we knew it was all over.” (And for context, the salary/job stability for someone at Time Magazine in 2000 is very different than in 2019. As in, the pay was very good and there was job stability.) Similar to the soda story — it’s not that the employees can’t afford it themselves, it’s what it represents about not just the changing culture at the company, but of the financial realities. I once worked at a place where they suddenly started to decrease the snack budget (but didn’t say anything —- we just got fewer snacks and in fewer quantities each week). In hindsight, it was an indicator of some of the financial issues happening at the company. Ironically, after some layoffs (followed by the voluntary exodus of ~20% of the company), the snacks came back full blast as an attempt to raise morale, but by then it was too late.

VBprogrammer 7y ago

I'm constantly amazed by how self-entitled my fellow developers can be when it comes to anything offered as a perk. The coffee machine on a floor breaks and you'd think someone had asked them to take a 20% pay cut by their reaction. Maybe I'm just getting old.

jayd16 7y ago
Certainly don't be a jerk to your office manager about it but every perk is compensation. Why shouldn't you take it seriously?
SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
I don't think that developers, that's every office ever. It's an office full of smeagols anytime any privilege is taken away.
baud147258 7y ago
A coffee machine breakage would be treated as a work-stopping issue where I work, considering our consumption. But I don't think it would be treated like a 20% cut (which would most likely impossible here), it would be just a big annoyance.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  Its weird how it's socially acceptable to admit you're reliant upon this specific drug to get work done. But any others and it's bad.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    I don't think we're that reliant here (even excluding those who don't drink coffee), it's rather closer to an annoyance (a big one, like dealing with slow computer/bad network), but we could still get work done. It's just that since the coffee is free (and good), we're drinking a lot of it.
  - aesh2Xa1 7y ago
    After reading "Why We Sleep" I've been led to believe it really ought to be just socially acceptable to consume this drug. Unless we challenge the culture of working early then it seems to be the case that many of us are physiologically dependent on caffeine because our work culture demands it. Or we could fix the culture problem.

lostmymind66 7y ago

I interviewed for a position last year where the company had a very successful product and was growing, but still small. They wanted to restructure everything (the way they code, teams, management style) to be more like Google. I made it to the last interview stage, which would have been a 4 hour remote white-boarding session, where they would give me something to code and a team of developers would watch me. I turned it turned it down and found a much better position the next day. The first stage of the interview was light technical and almost all a psychological test to see if I would be a good 'culture' fit. The interviewer was a first-time 20-something manager that wanted to make a name for himself and had read a few silicon valley books about technical interviews. He actually told me this. Most companies aren't Google and shouldn't be emulating much of anything there.

la_barba 7y ago
I don't think its any different than devs thinking they need to "future proof" (a silly idea anyway) their database design for millions of transactions , or needlessly fretting about scale problems that their tiny company is never going to see for YEARS. Or people who copy $famous_dev's coding environment, or coding style or whatever. All people do this in various ways. The only truth here is that it's far easier to point out someone else's flaws. To take your interview example, you can't really convince a company (or anyone for that matter) they are doing something wrong, if what they're doing is making them money/success. It is a very powerful form of feedback that gets ingrained and is almost impossible to shakeoff.
lacampbell 7y ago
> The interviewer was a first-time 20-something manager that wanted to make a name for himself and had read a few silicon valley books about technical interviews. He actually told me this. Haha what a champ. I respect the hell out of that.
- lostmymind66 7y ago
  yeah, well, I didn't want to be managed by this person.

mothsonasloth 7y ago

Here's an archive link http://archive.fo/TcUsg http://archive.fo/TcUsg

CoolGuySteve 7y ago

> "We are going to make this environment more like a Google office" > "I saw this presentation by a Google developer and I think we need to copy their release process" One of these is very different from the other. Fancy coffee and whatnot affects your environment but release processes, frameworks, interview methods, etc, change your productivity and are all made to fit an organization of Google's size and bureaucracy. They're a terrible fit for most small/medium sized companies. I also always find it weird how nobody picks other giant companies to emulate, nobody's like "Well JP Morgan has great employee mortgage rates!" or whatever.

stcredzero 7y ago
The latter is rarely effective for a small company imo and is way more of a dangerous cargo cult in my experience. It's like trying to swim while wearing shackles. One principle I think about when refactoring, is reversibility. If something turns out to be wrong, can you change your mind with minimal cost? To generalize, when trying something, can it be tried and backed out for minimal cost, while providing good information? I also always find it weird how nobody picks other giant companies to emulate, nobody's like "Well JP Morgan has great employee mortgage rates!" or whatever. For the answer, I think one can analyze their marketing and how the culture once perceived SV and the startup scene.
tudelo 7y ago
> "Well JP Morgan has great employee mortgage rates!" Any details on this? :)

stcredzero 7y ago

I'm surprised no one else has said it yet, but isn't, "We are going to make this environment more like a Google office," just the 20-teens version of, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM?" It was also what the article terms, "Lazy management thinking." It's imitating the surface level of big company success, without analyzing the how and why, and seeing if the cost/benefit factors also work out for yourself.

GiorgioG 7y ago

Microservices...because scalability...that you'll never need.

nailer 7y ago
The amount of otherwise-sane developers that have created their own cloud provider on top of an existing cloud provider 'because Docker/k8s' scares me.

rolltiide 7y ago

so are we finally going to retire OKRs or not because that it the most mindnumbingly ridiculous and timewasting fad I've ever put up with on a development team or company "because Google does it" maybe C-level management should just do it amongst themselves and just put their results on a list and it would be the same as a random directive coming down from high that nobody questions. most of your startup's "passionate team members" are lying about it and do not care if they the understood the direction the OKR process went or if they just did what was told, skipping the whole thing.

draw_down 7y ago

Funny that you never see "Google does it" as a justification to raise salaries...

helmsb 7y ago

I’m always wary of the hip companies that offer all the perks and try and seem cool. It’s not altruistic. They expect in return to work you like crazy. I would much rather work somewhere boring where I work a solid day and go home, don’t have to think about work on the weekends with solid monetary compensation. Free donuts and coffee can’t make up for lost personal time nor can it pay for a mortgage. I’m a professional, treat me like one.

liberte82 7y ago
That's why they're always looking for fresh college grads, many of the older people wise up eventually.
deleted 7y ago
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SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
Different strokes for different folks. Some people (by which I mean me) honestly don't like the "work a solid day and go home" model; I don't have the kind of mental switches to stop thinking about personal stuff at 9 am and stop thinking about work stuff at 5 pm. My current company gets 50+ hours a week out of me, but nobody complains when I watch a Youtube video and I don't need permission to leave early when it's necessary - I consider that a fair trade.
- wolco 7y ago
  Do you get to work at 4am or do you still follow office hours?
- wil421 7y ago
  Are you married? Do you have kids? Do you have a dog? Do you have hobbies that require you to be away from computers? If you don’t answer yes to one of my questions I suggest you try one or more. I’ve gone through lots of hobbies outside my house (preferably outdoors) over the years including running, working out, walking my dog, and now kayaking. If your able to get your work done you should swap the YouTube time for someone else outside work.

ppod 7y ago

>It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all

HillaryBriss 7y ago
When I see the Google employee walkouts I begin to wonder what it takes to govern good people. Sundar Pichai must feel like the walkouts are a real headache sometimes.
- a1369209993 7y ago
  It requires very little. The catch is that it requires specifically very little: not nothing, and also not more than very little.

bluedino 7y ago

Way back in 2007/2008, Google did a study on HDD failures not increasing when they had 80+ degree server rooms. Someone at a company I used to work for, read that study in 2013, and removed the air conditioners from our server rooms. We ran at almost 90 degrees from that point on, inside the racks it was much hotter. We lost a couple battery backups, internal fans, and power supplies before I could convince them to turn the air back on.

AceJohnny2 7y ago
Was the person/process that led to that decision corrected ?
- bluedino 7y ago
  It was the owners son. He's been promoted and continues making ill-advised decisions to this day.

tylerl 7y ago

Having worked at a few places that aren't Google as well as a few places that are Google, here's what I think the meaningful difference is that makes the Google offices more productive. 1: The people are smarter. It's sort of cheating I suppose; better inputs make better outputs. Google doesn't have all the smartest people, but it's one of the few companies that get top-tier talent in a way that is meaningful. Everything else hinges on this. 2: Your manager (and their manager) cares a lot about you. That's a pretty broad statement and definitely not universal, but it's more often true than not. Managers are explicitly trained to focus on the needs of their employees, and the ones who don't are largely viewed as failures. No other success compensates for poor treatment of your reports. Again, there are plenty of bad managers, but they're widely seen as bad managers; justification like "demanding but fair" or "knows how to get results" or "evil genius" have little effect. 3: It's easy to move. There is no pay difference no matter what project you work on and internal mobility is encouraged and supported. People do what they want to do, and they tend to be extremely motivated as a result. It also helps remove bad managers: sinking ships get abandoned really, really fast. This is arguably the company's greatest weakness as well as it's hard to get people to work on something soul-consuming. But it's great for the employees and it's great for innovation.

vbezhenar 7y ago
> There is no pay difference no matter what project you work on I've heard that you'll get raises for working on new things. That's why Google launches so many new projects (and closes so many of those projects) and that's why old projects are constantly rewritten/redesigned instead of just imprpoving and bugfixing. I don't like it as a user, I want to use the same interface for 50 years and I want all bugs to be removed, rather than learning new interface and new bugs every few years.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  You get promoted by shipping stuff (at least, when I was there). You get a raise by getting promoted. So there's an indirect connection between launching things and getting more money. I think that the OP's referring to a phenomena at different big companies where certain divisions get paid more because management deems that division more important. That creates a dynamic where everybody tries to get into that division, and the ones that can't end up bitter, demoralized, and resentful (and hence unproductive). Connecting pay to tangible accomplishments rather than where you are in the company avoids that dynamic, though it does create the one you've observed where everyone is hunting for tangible accomplishments.

HillaryBriss 7y ago

These companies should be much more skeptical of the desire to make code quality similar to that of Google. It must have been different in Google's early years, but now there's reason to suspect that Google succeeds in spite of their code/product quality, not because of it.

pbreit 7y ago

No exactly what I expected. I was thinking it would be more technical. Either way, there is very little, possibly nothing, that a company not named Google can borrow from Google. The scale and venue that Google operates in too different.

TulliusCicero 7y ago
Nah, there's plenty of things that would be cool to borrow. Generous (by US standards) parental leave, lots of holidays, excellent 401k plan, work flexibility, ease of job transfers, open/critical internal culture, blameless post-mortems as a standard thing, and of course, free food and gym.
- pbreit 7y ago
  I probably should have left out the "either way" since I mainly meant technical topics. Since you mention them though, many are not Google things. And others I would reject (ex: free food & gym).
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    > Since you mention them though, many are not Google things. What does this even mean? Most of the technical process stuff Google does isn't completely unique to Google either. > And others I would reject (ex: free food & gym). Why though? Honestly, having worked here, it'd be hard for me to go to a place that didn't have these things. It's just so convenient and awesome!

outworlder 7y ago

> "I saw this presentation by a Google developer and I think we need to copy their release process" I heard exactly the opposite from some Googlers. That you DON'T want to copy their release process. At least, not without a good reason.

JohnFen 7y ago

If my employer were to decide that we needed to be more like Google, my only thought would be "if I wanted to work for a company that resembles Google, I'd be working for Google."

OliverJones 7y ago

Policies like "one-click deploy and one-click rollback" or "no long meetings" are the result of years of hard work. An executive can't just decree "no long meetings" and have it stick. Avoiding long meetings takes a culture of preparation and transparency. It takes clear agendas. It takes people showing up to the meeting knowing the agenda and the material, and being ready to approve, review, brainstorm, or do whatever the agenda calls for. It's hard--and worthwhile--to work on developing that culture. An executive can't decree "one-click deploy" either. Obviously. It too takes a particular culture and a lot of time. As for the perks: it takes a "no magic" culture. If the coffee runs out, some real human has to get more. In a big company, maybe that work can be outsourced. In a pre-revenue startup, there's no magic. You want coffee? Go get some. (They sell it at Starbucks and Costco, you know.) If you have an intern who will tolerate being asked to go fer coffee, send the intern. Dirty bathroom, small company? No magic. Clean the bathroom.

w0mbat 7y ago

I can tell you that this line does not work at Apple. If I ever questioned Apple's weirdly bureaucratic ways of doing things my manager would yell at me "I don't give a fuck what you did at Google!".

vipbababd 7y ago

For domain specific roles I ought to think that the members of the current team would be more than happy to provide insight/advice/coaching to someone looking to skill up and get involved. This is typically how I've seen lateral moves done at other companies that encourage mobility. For example, moving from a primarily DBA job to devops/operations/wahetever.

vipbababd 7y ago

AceJohnny2 7y ago

The author's insight of viewing a company/office as an ecosystem is really useful. (I was ready to dismiss this article based on the title being too tropey, ironically)

fapjacks 7y ago

This is why I'm bearish on Kubernetes for most organizations. Not because it doesn't work great, but because its complexity is so high. I have this adage about not solving problems you don't have, but it's the same concept in the article. Kubernetes is for Google. And I guess Netflix could use kube. Amazon. Facebook, sure. But the complexity overhead is so enormous that you are probably causing more problems than you're solving, especially if you're already using something that works (since this is the same exact thing as rewriting the software from scratch, but for sysops). Alas. New and shiny is a powerful temptation.