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> Don't get me wrong. Google is still the best workplace with top notch pay, but as it's got big, it's also morphed into a typical big corporation with typical

> Don't get me wrong. Google is still the best workplace with top notch pay, but as it's got big, it's also morphed into a typical big corporation with typical corporate politics. Sorry but I cannot stand that level of internal koolaid. I guess you also think that Google got the "smartest" people? There are literally thousands of companies working on problems way more interesting and with more stakes and upsides for humanity than Google and the adtech industry. I would qualify all of those companies as "better place to work" than Google. It is maybe the best place to work if you have no sense of ethics, want to take it easy, work 9 to 5 and maximize your money.

hgytr 7y ago
If you know names of those better workplaces, I'm all ears.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- OneMoreGoogler 7y ago
  Over 16 years I've worked at only four companies, but one of them was Google, and it was honestly my least favorite. Creature comforts: I have an actual cubicle with >2x the space. Excellent meals are still provided, but now lines are <1 min. I can always find a parking space. I can always find a bathroom stall. Engineering culture: No more promo or perf review nonsense. There's none of the internal competition / pressure that I felt every day at Google. The org and leadership has vastly less churn. The place is dead at 5:15pm. And the people I work with are incredibly smart. In terms of company: my new employer is not creepy. My grandmother understands what I work on. Do follow your heart, but I'm so happy I left.
  - mav3rick 7y ago
    What "pressure" you feel is entirely up to you. Most managers at Google don't micro manage you.
    - nine_k 7y ago
      But are you expected to exceed expectations? :)
      - mav3rick 7y ago
        You do your best on your projects. No one thinks day to day how their perf will be. What a stupid way to live.
        arcticbull 7y ago
        Definitely happens at other FAANGs.
  - seraphsf 7y ago
    I won’t ask what company you’re at, but have you noticed a correlation between size of company and your happiness? Is this new Valhalla a significant smaller organization than Google?
    - mehrdada 7y ago
      Sounds like Netflix and I think you’re on point that the model might be great but won’t scale to anything resembling google size
  - JDiculous 7y ago
    Always interesting to hear these counterpoints. I've never worked at Google, but reading internet comments and such you get the impression that most people consider it some ideal workplace (though to be fair, many people selling you this fantasy are also trying to sell you their Google interview prep courses). Yet when I meet Googlers/ex-Googlers in real life, I never got that same impression. Seems like any other corporate job (I'm personally pretty jaded from corporate), just more prestige and maybe more pay. Also it seems like one's experience will vary drastically depending on what team they get placed on (eg. Google X vs. some internal tool).
- wardnath 7y ago
  "The best" is pretty subjective based on what one is looking for in a job. Not everyone gels with all company cultures. It's great that you like working for Google and have found a good fit. Some features I like in workplace culture: - Empowering the "builders" and developers to have autonomy and guide how product development cycles are defined. - Top cover provided by managers - managing expectations from stake holders - Overall non-toxic environment - Quality work and product vision
PavlovsCat 7y ago
I automatically replace that with "the best place to work (for me) I know of". Someone who isn't into software or hardware but loves dancing might be very bored at Google, someone who loves animals might be happier as a vet, and people who enjoy organizing information and making it accessible to humans will probably be better off as a librarian, and so on.
scarmig 7y ago
Google throws away obscene amounts of money on non-adtech things. Some of those are pretty interesting and useful for humanity. You can say, well, those don't count, because Google isn't making money from them! But if you take that route, you also have to exclude all the startups working on "interesting" problems that don't and won't make money. You're left with a very small set of companies. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the null set. I'd say a fair assessment is a random team at Google is as likely to be doing something interesting and beneficial as a team at a random startup (which is to say, unlikely but possible). At Google, though, you're going to have both better average financial outcomes and lower risk.
- ColanR 7y ago
  Google is an ad company with delusions of grandure. It's nothing more, until it finds a way to turn a profit on its other ventures. (Just like those startups - realistically, until they turn a profit, they're just in the exploratory stage.)
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Bell labs? Xerox PARC?
  - pmart123 7y ago
    In some ways, they could be not only a driver of innovation, but profit off of it. For instance, the initial idea of spearheading Waymo makes sense to me: self-driving cars lead to more search queries and YouTube video views when someone is in transit. They didn’t need to own this technology though and should have sold most of the equity last year to GM or Ford as the OEMs moved into the space. Verily makes more sense to me, but it’s goal should be specialized cloud infrastructure for healthcare.
  - notatoad 7y ago
    I was under the impression that Youtube, G-suite, Cloud Platform, and hardware were all quite profitable. Not to the same degree as ads maybe, but they would all be considered successful if they were standalone businesses. Calling google just an ad company is ignoring a large amount of reality.
buzzkillington 7y ago
> It is maybe the best place to work if you have no sense of ethics, want to take it easy, work 9 to 5 and maximize your money. Hey, that's me to a t. Google is not actually that great for that. The pay is average and they make too much of a song and dance about helping people, even if you're working on ML used to ferret out dissidents in China. The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which require security clearance to work at.
- somatic 7y ago
  >The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which require security clearance to work at. Where do I sign up? (Edit: this is a serious question.) (Second edit: Mencius.)
  - buzzkillington 7y ago
    You need to know a guy, I met mine when I was running a 3d printing course for an astronomy group of all things.
    - somatic 7y ago
      I'll be on the lookout, but quite frankly I despair. I've always wanted to be in a spooky line of work. Oh well.
      - smsm42 7y ago
        If I were in a spooky business, I'd never hire somebody who's too eager to work in this line of work. Too easy to hire a Snowden this way. And I have no idea how they solve this problem... must be tough to be a spook.
        somatic 7y ago
        Valid point. To clarify, it was hyperbole, as I got (rightly or wrongly) a more "military" vibe. And in my highly uninformed opinion, I'd feel much less comfortable in close quarters with actual spook-dom than I would around high-end military establishment people. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd probably take upper six figures to warm a seat for either, though. Shake the hand of the devil, sell your soul on the dotted line.
djohnston 7y ago
Woahhhh there, don't fall off that horse! You might hurt yourself from a height so high. Your qualification of what makes a company's problems more interesting or beneficial to humanity is certainly debatable, but if you think people at Google are "taking it easy" talentless slobs you are quite objectively wrong
smsm42 7y ago
So somebody likes the workplace they work at. No need to be all up in arms against it. There are certainly places as good or better than google, and there are certainly people that like it at Google anyway. There's tons of ethical work you can do at Google, not everybody works for Project Dragonfly. Before you ask, no, I don't work for Google, don't want work for Google, never interviewed to work for Google, and don't particularly like Google. But that's not the reason to hate all people for whom it works.
zzsd 7y ago
Well said. I worked at Google on Adtech. I have decades of experience and it was the most meaningless, uninteresting job I ever had. All everyone cared about was perf/promotion and their gsus. I also took a pay cut (total comp, yes) to join, thinking the work would be interesting and people worth it. The last year their was miserable Sure there are great people and projects but anybody claiming any of them would exist without the drudgery and 90% revenue stream of “adtech” have their blinders on. And fwiw, if all one cares about us pay, Facebook pays MUCH much more.

hgytr 7y ago

If you know names of those better workplaces, I'm all ears.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
OneMoreGoogler 7y ago
Over 16 years I've worked at only four companies, but one of them was Google, and it was honestly my least favorite. Creature comforts: I have an actual cubicle with >2x the space. Excellent meals are still provided, but now lines are <1 min. I can always find a parking space. I can always find a bathroom stall. Engineering culture: No more promo or perf review nonsense. There's none of the internal competition / pressure that I felt every day at Google. The org and leadership has vastly less churn. The place is dead at 5:15pm. And the people I work with are incredibly smart. In terms of company: my new employer is not creepy. My grandmother understands what I work on. Do follow your heart, but I'm so happy I left.
- mav3rick 7y ago
  What "pressure" you feel is entirely up to you. Most managers at Google don't micro manage you.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    But are you expected to exceed expectations? :)
    - mav3rick 7y ago
      You do your best on your projects. No one thinks day to day how their perf will be. What a stupid way to live.
      - arcticbull 7y ago
        Definitely happens at other FAANGs.
- seraphsf 7y ago
  I won’t ask what company you’re at, but have you noticed a correlation between size of company and your happiness? Is this new Valhalla a significant smaller organization than Google?
  - mehrdada 7y ago
    Sounds like Netflix and I think you’re on point that the model might be great but won’t scale to anything resembling google size
- JDiculous 7y ago
  Always interesting to hear these counterpoints. I've never worked at Google, but reading internet comments and such you get the impression that most people consider it some ideal workplace (though to be fair, many people selling you this fantasy are also trying to sell you their Google interview prep courses). Yet when I meet Googlers/ex-Googlers in real life, I never got that same impression. Seems like any other corporate job (I'm personally pretty jaded from corporate), just more prestige and maybe more pay. Also it seems like one's experience will vary drastically depending on what team they get placed on (eg. Google X vs. some internal tool).
wardnath 7y ago
"The best" is pretty subjective based on what one is looking for in a job. Not everyone gels with all company cultures. It's great that you like working for Google and have found a good fit. Some features I like in workplace culture: - Empowering the "builders" and developers to have autonomy and guide how product development cycles are defined. - Top cover provided by managers - managing expectations from stake holders - Overall non-toxic environment - Quality work and product vision

PavlovsCat 7y ago

I automatically replace that with "the best place to work (for me) I know of". Someone who isn't into software or hardware but loves dancing might be very bored at Google, someone who loves animals might be happier as a vet, and people who enjoy organizing information and making it accessible to humans will probably be better off as a librarian, and so on.

scarmig 7y ago

Google throws away obscene amounts of money on non-adtech things. Some of those are pretty interesting and useful for humanity. You can say, well, those don't count, because Google isn't making money from them! But if you take that route, you also have to exclude all the startups working on "interesting" problems that don't and won't make money. You're left with a very small set of companies. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the null set. I'd say a fair assessment is a random team at Google is as likely to be doing something interesting and beneficial as a team at a random startup (which is to say, unlikely but possible). At Google, though, you're going to have both better average financial outcomes and lower risk.

ColanR 7y ago
Google is an ad company with delusions of grandure. It's nothing more, until it finds a way to turn a profit on its other ventures. (Just like those startups - realistically, until they turn a profit, they're just in the exploratory stage.)
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Bell labs? Xerox PARC?
- pmart123 7y ago
  In some ways, they could be not only a driver of innovation, but profit off of it. For instance, the initial idea of spearheading Waymo makes sense to me: self-driving cars lead to more search queries and YouTube video views when someone is in transit. They didn’t need to own this technology though and should have sold most of the equity last year to GM or Ford as the OEMs moved into the space. Verily makes more sense to me, but it’s goal should be specialized cloud infrastructure for healthcare.
- notatoad 7y ago
  I was under the impression that Youtube, G-suite, Cloud Platform, and hardware were all quite profitable. Not to the same degree as ads maybe, but they would all be considered successful if they were standalone businesses. Calling google just an ad company is ignoring a large amount of reality.

buzzkillington 7y ago

> It is maybe the best place to work if you have no sense of ethics, want to take it easy, work 9 to 5 and maximize your money. Hey, that's me to a t. Google is not actually that great for that. The pay is average and they make too much of a song and dance about helping people, even if you're working on ML used to ferret out dissidents in China. The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which require security clearance to work at.

somatic 7y ago
>The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which require security clearance to work at. Where do I sign up? (Edit: this is a serious question.) (Second edit: Mencius.)
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  You need to know a guy, I met mine when I was running a 3d printing course for an astronomy group of all things.
  - somatic 7y ago
    I'll be on the lookout, but quite frankly I despair. I've always wanted to be in a spooky line of work. Oh well.
    - smsm42 7y ago
      If I were in a spooky business, I'd never hire somebody who's too eager to work in this line of work. Too easy to hire a Snowden this way. And I have no idea how they solve this problem... must be tough to be a spook.
      - somatic 7y ago
        Valid point. To clarify, it was hyperbole, as I got (rightly or wrongly) a more "military" vibe. And in my highly uninformed opinion, I'd feel much less comfortable in close quarters with actual spook-dom than I would around high-end military establishment people. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd probably take upper six figures to warm a seat for either, though. Shake the hand of the devil, sell your soul on the dotted line.

djohnston 7y ago

Woahhhh there, don't fall off that horse! You might hurt yourself from a height so high. Your qualification of what makes a company's problems more interesting or beneficial to humanity is certainly debatable, but if you think people at Google are "taking it easy" talentless slobs you are quite objectively wrong

smsm42 7y ago

So somebody likes the workplace they work at. No need to be all up in arms against it. There are certainly places as good or better than google, and there are certainly people that like it at Google anyway. There's tons of ethical work you can do at Google, not everybody works for Project Dragonfly. Before you ask, no, I don't work for Google, don't want work for Google, never interviewed to work for Google, and don't particularly like Google. But that's not the reason to hate all people for whom it works.

zzsd 7y ago

Well said. I worked at Google on Adtech. I have decades of experience and it was the most meaningless, uninteresting job I ever had. All everyone cared about was perf/promotion and their gsus. I also took a pay cut (total comp, yes) to join, thinking the work would be interesting and people worth it. The last year their was miserable Sure there are great people and projects but anybody claiming any of them would exist without the drudgery and 90% revenue stream of “adtech” have their blinders on. And fwiw, if all one cares about us pay, Facebook pays MUCH much more.