10 ms·

The answer to why this is, I’m beginning to realize after talking to dozens of Googlers working at Google as acquaintances, friends, former coworkers, HN commen

The answer to why this is, I’m beginning to realize after talking to dozens of Googlers working at Google as acquaintances, friends, former coworkers, HN comments and twitter personalities is - Google has an active disrespect if you’re not part of their in group. If you haven’t passed their tests, you’re basically an object of derision - a mark, an object just used for incrementing a CPM metric, or an incompetent, low-class buffoon who doesn’t deserve to have their jet setting luxury lifestyles. And unfortunately, everything trickles down from that.

QuinnyPig 6y ago
I want to argue with this but I don’t think I can.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rawgabbit 6y ago
Sad. I want to like Google but the author is right.
- chillfox 6y ago
  Yep, Googles stuff looks nice, but I can’t afford to use their stuff. The time budget simply doesn’t allow for rewriting things more than once a decade, and even that’s a pain.
mdrabla 6y ago
This hasn't been my experience, and I've worked there. There might've been a couple dicks like that but definitely not the norm
- lowiqengineer 6y ago
  A "couple dicks"? It's endemic, dude. You can't be given everything you could ever dream of and _not_ end up like this. By comparison, I have nothing. zilch, for my hard work. Neither do most people working on core tech at AWS. That's why they empathize with their customers (I'm guessing).
  - mdrabla 6y ago
    It is not endemic. I think you've met a few people you didn't like, read some tweets, and extrapolated poorly. And I don't think people working on GCP are really treated that much better than their counterparts at AWS. The fact that you think the difference in product depreciation policy between them is caused by people getting "everything they could dream of" is funny though
    - lowiqengineer 6y ago
      Trips to Europe or to random conferences in first class? Trips to _any office_ for "face time"? Massages? Bonuses of any sort, including peer bonuses and holiday gifts? Refreshers? Society thinking that you're "smart" for passing the loop? You're rewarded just for being alive at Google, but I get nothing but scorn and condescension. Fun fact for you - if I get promoted this year at Amazon to L5, I'll _still_ make less than a new grad at Google. It's extremely depressing to the extent that I can't get out of bed in the morning, but I'd wager that inferiority complex probably helps on the product side to empathize with customers.
      - gundmc 6y ago
        > Fun fact for you - if I get promoted this year at Amazon to L5, I'll _still_ make less than a new grad at Google. This doesn't appear to be close to true based on levels.fyi, unless you're severely underpaid for an Amazon L5.
        lowiqengineer 6y ago
        Levels.fyi is good, but it's still polluted with TC's from multiple regions in the US (California + NYC have higher base and higher TC by 15% due to taxes). In addition, promos always happen at the low-band and aren't negotiated. There's very likely some intersection between high-band L4 and low-band L5, and I'd be there when/if I promo. The only way to get out of the band is to get a high raise during evaluation season, but this maxes out at 10% or so for "top tier" performance evaluated only once a year. *The net effect is "pay for performance" isn't really a thing. The only way for me to do a significant compensation bump is to do what's called a "dive and save", but this is very rarely done for L5's and is significantly more common for L6's. I got an offer for about $200k a year ago at a hedge fund, but that wasn't eligible for dive and save because of my level and I'm (clearly) too mentally defective to pass a Facebook or Google loop.
- mips_avatar 6y ago
  I don’t know about other locations, but in Seattle the googlers and SpaceX people walk around with a lot of swagger. And you don’t have to talk to them long until workplaces get brought up and a small jab at Amazon or Microsoft is made. Which idk maybe is fair if they used to work at Amazon/Microsoft. But still I wish we weren’t so intent on maintaining a hierarchy. Maybe we just all need to develop more of a life outside of work.
  - username90 6y ago
    Maybe you just don't notice the googlers who don't go around with a lot of swagger?
    - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
      The counter-case would be, "Do you also notice people from other companies who walk around with swagger?" Not living in that area anymore, I can't say. I haven't lived there for 10 years.
      - ikiris 6y ago
        its worth noting the size differences of the various companies in terms of employee count. Part of this is simple statistics.
    - mips_avatar 6y ago
      Good point, I’m only noticing the people wearing workplace swag/bringing up their workplace. I don’t notice people who don’t bring it up.
  - non-entity 6y ago
    This sounds so tiring. I don't care who you work for, tell me what you're working on and I may be impressed.
nmfisher 6y ago
Including the most critical group of all - customers. It’s astonishing how little Google cares about its paying customers, at least when it comes to AdWords and GSuite, and GCP. I think the Pixel division is the only exception, though I don’t own one so I can’t comment personally.
- foepys 6y ago
  After 3 years of updates, Google drops Pixel support like a hot potato. As far as I'm informed every Pixel version so far had battery degradation issues. After year or so the battery seems to have only a fraction of the previous capacity.
  - murgindrag 6y ago
    So does every cell phone maker. I have a pile of old-but-working cell phones without security updates anymore in a drawer somewhere.
abcdef99 6y ago
It inherits primarily from the idiotic interview loop, and an entire cottage industry which has grown up around it. I am reminded of this funny Feynman quote (paraphrasing): "The whole purpose of the existence of the Mensa club was to decide who else was eligible to join the club". Now, in all fairness, this is true of all the big tech companies to varying degrees, but boy does Google Cloud in particular take the cake on this one! Of course, Big Tech does produce very good products, and at scale, but that is being built by about 10% of their engineers. The rest of them work there just to keep the interview loop as exclusive as possible. :-) After all, otherwise, one of them would have actually solved long runningcustomer problems. Plus the rest of the world is now coming to an agreement that a lot of Big Tech's growth is coming from a lot of unfair advantages - such as massive data collection before it was understood as a bad thing, ability to lobby local politicians at a much bigger scale, ability to influence regulations that hurt them somewhat but entirely kill the competition (GDPR for example), complete lack of accountability for past malpractices (e.g. Facebook's friendly fraud case, for which no one went to jail) because they are now too powerful to actually be sent to jail.
wh-uws 6y ago
(warning rambling rant) I feel like this was super true in the pre Facebook days but they were humbled A LOT by the massive flop of Google plus. I honestly don't feel like I get the my s * doesn't stink vibe from them anymore. Especially because everyone knows their Achilles heel now. But for their ad revenue what would they be? Everything else material from came from an acquisition or is infra stuff. It's cool but they also had to learn the hard lesson of Hadoop too. Yeah they built big table... But the rest of the industry standardized on Hadoop (at the time) because they never released an implementation and so they started losing out on good hires because they didn't want to get locked into proprietary Google infra. I think you see them recognizing this with intiatives like all of the stuff around kubernetes. But hey I wouldn't build anything on their (non open) stuff and get more scared by the day over my dependence on El Goog because they've shown time an again how little they care for us common plebs. But I feel like they get better when they lose but they've only started losing more recently (Rant over)
- thethethethe 6y ago
  > Yeah they built big table... But the rest of the industry standardized on Hadoop (at the time) because they never released an implementation and so they started losing out on good hires because they didn't want to get locked into proprietary Google infra. Hadoop and Bigtable are not the same thing. Bigtable is a noSQL database. Hadoop is a big data processing framework. Hadoop is actually an open source implementation of MapReduce, which was developed at Google and which has since been replaced by Flume
  - atombender 6y ago
    On the other hand, Hadoop does have HBase, which is their version of Bigtable. It was, for a number of years, a very popular columnar K/V store.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    Hadoop is a collection of things: HDFS (filesystem), Hbase (keyvalue database), MapReduce (data processing), and YARN (resource scheduling and job management). Hbase was open-source implementation of Bigtable while HDFS was a copy of Google File System. The divergence appeared with other processing frameworks like Spark but now there's Apache Beam to unify it all.
tassl 6y ago
I have worked at a few orgs and I've heard so many time the "because we are Google" to explain why a product will be used. I've never understood that mentality; I've never understood people being proud basically about a product somebody else built 20 years ago. I do believe leadership is failing Google, and their lack of vision is starting to affect the company. There was quite a bit of inertia, but I fear search might drop in the next 5 years and there will be nothing ready to replace ads.
- logicslave12 6y ago
  NLP is rapidly improving, a time may come when someone else can create good search just because nlp tech has gotten so good
dylan604 6y ago
I wonder if this is a result of Google not having users/customers but data points?
perl4ever 6y ago
On the other hand, when someone expresses an opinion like this, you never know if they were contacted at some point by a Google recruiter and ended up with a case of sour grapes. I had a phone conversation with a hiring manager once, and obviously I was not the right type or class or caste or something, but it wasn't a technical screen at all, so it's a mystery to me forever what exactly determined the "in group" as you put it. As such, I know I'm biased towards them, but I can't really assess the overall company.
- lowiqengineer 6y ago
  Of course. I'm well aware that I'm considered mentally defective (or maybe just garden variety low IQ) by the hiring committee. That doesn't really change my observation here.
  - albacur 6y ago
    You pop up in every post about Google or Facebook and make the conversation about yourself, wallowing in self pity because you didn't land a job there straight out of college. This might sound harsh, but you need to get over it and move on.
    - typest 6y ago
      ^^ what this guy said. You named yourself lowiqengineer because your SAT score was “only” 2200. That’s in the 98th percentile —- if it were an IQ test, it would get you into Mensa, the organization for high IQ people! You talk as if people from FANG (your invented acronym to exclude Amazon) look down on all others, but it seems that you are the one looking down on all others, everyone who wasn’t lucky enough to get into G/FB straight out of college while also building up not just 1, but 2 or 300k or net worth. These companies you aspire to do behavioral interviews, and I’m guessing you’re failing them. Take a step back. You won’t “fail” life because you “only” got a job at one FAANG and not another, or because your net worth is only 100k straight out of college....even the sentence I just wrote sounds completely ridiculous. Your problems are stemming from how you view yourself and the world, which is full of false assumptions. A lot of smart people on HN have told you this —- you should listen to them.
logicslave 6y ago
I think this is really common. I've met quite a few Google engineers whose whole identity is defined by their employer. Its striking, and a testament to the malleability of the human mind, even if the individual is "smart".
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  The joke that I always used to have when I worked near their Dublin office was How do you know someone is a Googler? Don't worry, they'll tell you :) This was prompted by me noticing that most of the people who still had their badges visible after work appeared to have Google badges.
  - rgblambda 6y ago
    From a brief look at job openings at Google Dublin, this mentality would be particularly mind boggling as it looks like the Dublin office houses the support staff (not that there's anything wrong with working support).
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      So, in general, Dublin Big Tech jobs are in: - customer support - sales - finance (explains itself really) - SRE (mostly because of favourable time zones) Most of the core engineering is in London/Zurich. Dunno what's gonna happen post Brexit, but anecdotally, the FAANG which I am most familiar with has had real problems hiring in London post-2016.

QuinnyPig 6y ago

I want to argue with this but I don’t think I can.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rawgabbit 6y ago

Sad. I want to like Google but the author is right.

chillfox 6y ago
Yep, Googles stuff looks nice, but I can’t afford to use their stuff. The time budget simply doesn’t allow for rewriting things more than once a decade, and even that’s a pain.

mdrabla 6y ago

This hasn't been my experience, and I've worked there. There might've been a couple dicks like that but definitely not the norm

lowiqengineer 6y ago
A "couple dicks"? It's endemic, dude. You can't be given everything you could ever dream of and _not_ end up like this. By comparison, I have nothing. zilch, for my hard work. Neither do most people working on core tech at AWS. That's why they empathize with their customers (I'm guessing).
- mdrabla 6y ago
  It is not endemic. I think you've met a few people you didn't like, read some tweets, and extrapolated poorly. And I don't think people working on GCP are really treated that much better than their counterparts at AWS. The fact that you think the difference in product depreciation policy between them is caused by people getting "everything they could dream of" is funny though
  - lowiqengineer 6y ago
    Trips to Europe or to random conferences in first class? Trips to _any office_ for "face time"? Massages? Bonuses of any sort, including peer bonuses and holiday gifts? Refreshers? Society thinking that you're "smart" for passing the loop? You're rewarded just for being alive at Google, but I get nothing but scorn and condescension. Fun fact for you - if I get promoted this year at Amazon to L5, I'll _still_ make less than a new grad at Google. It's extremely depressing to the extent that I can't get out of bed in the morning, but I'd wager that inferiority complex probably helps on the product side to empathize with customers.
    - gundmc 6y ago
      > Fun fact for you - if I get promoted this year at Amazon to L5, I'll _still_ make less than a new grad at Google. This doesn't appear to be close to true based on levels.fyi, unless you're severely underpaid for an Amazon L5.
      - lowiqengineer 6y ago
        Levels.fyi is good, but it's still polluted with TC's from multiple regions in the US (California + NYC have higher base and higher TC by 15% due to taxes). In addition, promos always happen at the low-band and aren't negotiated. There's very likely some intersection between high-band L4 and low-band L5, and I'd be there when/if I promo. The only way to get out of the band is to get a high raise during evaluation season, but this maxes out at 10% or so for "top tier" performance evaluated only once a year. *The net effect is "pay for performance" isn't really a thing. The only way for me to do a significant compensation bump is to do what's called a "dive and save", but this is very rarely done for L5's and is significantly more common for L6's. I got an offer for about $200k a year ago at a hedge fund, but that wasn't eligible for dive and save because of my level and I'm (clearly) too mentally defective to pass a Facebook or Google loop.
mips_avatar 6y ago
I don’t know about other locations, but in Seattle the googlers and SpaceX people walk around with a lot of swagger. And you don’t have to talk to them long until workplaces get brought up and a small jab at Amazon or Microsoft is made. Which idk maybe is fair if they used to work at Amazon/Microsoft. But still I wish we weren’t so intent on maintaining a hierarchy. Maybe we just all need to develop more of a life outside of work.
- username90 6y ago
  Maybe you just don't notice the googlers who don't go around with a lot of swagger?
  - RonanTheGrey 6y ago
    The counter-case would be, "Do you also notice people from other companies who walk around with swagger?" Not living in that area anymore, I can't say. I haven't lived there for 10 years.
    - ikiris 6y ago
      its worth noting the size differences of the various companies in terms of employee count. Part of this is simple statistics.
  - mips_avatar 6y ago
    Good point, I’m only noticing the people wearing workplace swag/bringing up their workplace. I don’t notice people who don’t bring it up.
- non-entity 6y ago
  This sounds so tiring. I don't care who you work for, tell me what you're working on and I may be impressed.

nmfisher 6y ago

Including the most critical group of all - customers. It’s astonishing how little Google cares about its paying customers, at least when it comes to AdWords and GSuite, and GCP. I think the Pixel division is the only exception, though I don’t own one so I can’t comment personally.

foepys 6y ago
After 3 years of updates, Google drops Pixel support like a hot potato. As far as I'm informed every Pixel version so far had battery degradation issues. After year or so the battery seems to have only a fraction of the previous capacity.
- murgindrag 6y ago
  So does every cell phone maker. I have a pile of old-but-working cell phones without security updates anymore in a drawer somewhere.

abcdef99 6y ago

It inherits primarily from the idiotic interview loop, and an entire cottage industry which has grown up around it. I am reminded of this funny Feynman quote (paraphrasing): "The whole purpose of the existence of the Mensa club was to decide who else was eligible to join the club". Now, in all fairness, this is true of all the big tech companies to varying degrees, but boy does Google Cloud in particular take the cake on this one! Of course, Big Tech does produce very good products, and at scale, but that is being built by about 10% of their engineers. The rest of them work there just to keep the interview loop as exclusive as possible. :-) After all, otherwise, one of them would have actually solved long runningcustomer problems. Plus the rest of the world is now coming to an agreement that a lot of Big Tech's growth is coming from a lot of unfair advantages - such as massive data collection before it was understood as a bad thing, ability to lobby local politicians at a much bigger scale, ability to influence regulations that hurt them somewhat but entirely kill the competition (GDPR for example), complete lack of accountability for past malpractices (e.g. Facebook's friendly fraud case, for which no one went to jail) because they are now too powerful to actually be sent to jail.

wh-uws 6y ago

(warning rambling rant) I feel like this was super true in the pre Facebook days but they were humbled A LOT by the massive flop of Google plus. I honestly don't feel like I get the my s * doesn't stink vibe from them anymore. Especially because everyone knows their Achilles heel now. But for their ad revenue what would they be? Everything else material from came from an acquisition or is infra stuff. It's cool but they also had to learn the hard lesson of Hadoop too. Yeah they built big table... But the rest of the industry standardized on Hadoop (at the time) because they never released an implementation and so they started losing out on good hires because they didn't want to get locked into proprietary Google infra. I think you see them recognizing this with intiatives like all of the stuff around kubernetes. But hey I wouldn't build anything on their (non open) stuff and get more scared by the day over my dependence on El Goog because they've shown time an again how little they care for us common plebs. But I feel like they get better when they lose but they've only started losing more recently (Rant over)

thethethethe 6y ago
> Yeah they built big table... But the rest of the industry standardized on Hadoop (at the time) because they never released an implementation and so they started losing out on good hires because they didn't want to get locked into proprietary Google infra. Hadoop and Bigtable are not the same thing. Bigtable is a noSQL database. Hadoop is a big data processing framework. Hadoop is actually an open source implementation of MapReduce, which was developed at Google and which has since been replaced by Flume
- atombender 6y ago
  On the other hand, Hadoop does have HBase, which is their version of Bigtable. It was, for a number of years, a very popular columnar K/V store.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Hadoop is a collection of things: HDFS (filesystem), Hbase (keyvalue database), MapReduce (data processing), and YARN (resource scheduling and job management). Hbase was open-source implementation of Bigtable while HDFS was a copy of Google File System. The divergence appeared with other processing frameworks like Spark but now there's Apache Beam to unify it all.

tassl 6y ago

I have worked at a few orgs and I've heard so many time the "because we are Google" to explain why a product will be used. I've never understood that mentality; I've never understood people being proud basically about a product somebody else built 20 years ago. I do believe leadership is failing Google, and their lack of vision is starting to affect the company. There was quite a bit of inertia, but I fear search might drop in the next 5 years and there will be nothing ready to replace ads.

logicslave12 6y ago
NLP is rapidly improving, a time may come when someone else can create good search just because nlp tech has gotten so good

dylan604 6y ago

I wonder if this is a result of Google not having users/customers but data points?

perl4ever 6y ago

On the other hand, when someone expresses an opinion like this, you never know if they were contacted at some point by a Google recruiter and ended up with a case of sour grapes. I had a phone conversation with a hiring manager once, and obviously I was not the right type or class or caste or something, but it wasn't a technical screen at all, so it's a mystery to me forever what exactly determined the "in group" as you put it. As such, I know I'm biased towards them, but I can't really assess the overall company.

lowiqengineer 6y ago
Of course. I'm well aware that I'm considered mentally defective (or maybe just garden variety low IQ) by the hiring committee. That doesn't really change my observation here.
- albacur 6y ago
  You pop up in every post about Google or Facebook and make the conversation about yourself, wallowing in self pity because you didn't land a job there straight out of college. This might sound harsh, but you need to get over it and move on.
  - typest 6y ago
    ^^ what this guy said. You named yourself lowiqengineer because your SAT score was “only” 2200. That’s in the 98th percentile —- if it were an IQ test, it would get you into Mensa, the organization for high IQ people! You talk as if people from FANG (your invented acronym to exclude Amazon) look down on all others, but it seems that you are the one looking down on all others, everyone who wasn’t lucky enough to get into G/FB straight out of college while also building up not just 1, but 2 or 300k or net worth. These companies you aspire to do behavioral interviews, and I’m guessing you’re failing them. Take a step back. You won’t “fail” life because you “only” got a job at one FAANG and not another, or because your net worth is only 100k straight out of college....even the sentence I just wrote sounds completely ridiculous. Your problems are stemming from how you view yourself and the world, which is full of false assumptions. A lot of smart people on HN have told you this —- you should listen to them.

logicslave 6y ago

I think this is really common. I've met quite a few Google engineers whose whole identity is defined by their employer. Its striking, and a testament to the malleability of the human mind, even if the individual is "smart".

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
The joke that I always used to have when I worked near their Dublin office was How do you know someone is a Googler? Don't worry, they'll tell you :) This was prompted by me noticing that most of the people who still had their badges visible after work appeared to have Google badges.
- rgblambda 6y ago
  From a brief look at job openings at Google Dublin, this mentality would be particularly mind boggling as it looks like the Dublin office houses the support staff (not that there's anything wrong with working support).
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    So, in general, Dublin Big Tech jobs are in: - customer support - sales - finance (explains itself really) - SRE (mostly because of favourable time zones) Most of the core engineering is in London/Zurich. Dunno what's gonna happen post Brexit, but anecdotally, the FAANG which I am most familiar with has had real problems hiring in London post-2016.