5 ms·

Leaving Google

112 points by antichaos 15y ago

antichaos 15y ago
Part 1: http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google.html http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google.html Part 2: http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google-part-2.html http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google-part-2.ht...
001 15y ago
Why do people bash so much about the company when they are leaving ? Is it they want to become famous all of sudden ? Why don't people accept that big companies won't be like the same company when it got started.
- DavidSJ 15y ago
  This post did not bash Google.
  - crocowhile 15y ago
    That was the goal, though. At least I think so. After reading is honestly I still don't know why he left.
    - chmike 15y ago
      The end of the second part explains it. It makes perfect sense to me. From google perspective, there are lessons to learn from this, but that is easy to say.
- drhodes 15y ago
  The answer is probably different for everyone. I suspect this individual doesn't feel animosity towards google, rather he would like to share his thoughts about why he left. Maybe it's a warning for other people about to join the company or just a way to commiserate with ex-googlers. Maybe he's showing off. What kind of person has the luxury to quit a job that legions of fellow coders would scramble for? Maybe he's advertising himself as a free agent. These, of course are all speculation. I don't think he's bashing google at all; I think he's telling them exactly what he thinks they need to hear so someone on-high steers the company in direction more attractive to creative engineers. But what do I know? Maybe you should ask him. Then you could write a "Why do people bash companies when leaving" blogpost. After you submit it to hackernews, expect the spanish inquisition!
- nostrademons 15y ago
  I was talking to a friend who works at Yahoo today. She's feeling terribly overworked and unproductive mostly because of some boneheaded organizational practices. I don't know the full story, but it sounds like she has pretty much accepted that management is brain-dead. At Google, there's a culture that if something is broken, call it out so that it can be fixed. At best, you will save thousands of employees hundreds of hours. At worst, you'll learn why it's broken. Many problems are inherent in running a large company, and there is no easy fix for them. But many others have simple solutions that make everyone's lives better. The way I see it (and this is completely my personal opinion here, not speaking for Google), he and other Xooglers who've written posts like this are being Googley. You don't work for seven years at a company without absorbing some of the culture, and that culture doesn't simply leave when you hand in your badge. Posts like this are not all that different from something you would see on internal Buzz or mailing lists, and I think the spirit of them is not to "bash" Google, but to call out things that Google could improve upon even after the Xoogler has left.
  - 001 15y ago
    I don't think Larry/Sergey will check for Why I left Google posts on the web and create taskforce to fix all these things. There is always a better way to give feedback to management without posts like this on the web. I hope Xooglers don't become Google haters and spend their energies on creating the next Google or Facebook and create a culture they dreamed of.
    - nostrademons 15y ago
      Larry and Sergey won't. Many other Googlers will. And if the concerns are real and fixable, then it'll get people talking about ways to fix them, and some of those ideas might bubble up to the top. Or maybe not. Oftentimes, things don't even need to bubble up to the top to have an impact. You've got a very distorted picture of large organizations if you think that Larry suddenly makes a decision and then the whole company immediately does what he says. Large companies are really collections of small independent groups, and nobody really understands everything that's going on, and often times the worst problems are best addressed at the middle-management level. I think most rank-and-file Google employees have the same goals as Larry Page: we want to launch things quickly, we want people to use our stuff, we want to have a big impact on the world, and we want the share price to increase. The problem is translating that big-picture desire into specific practices and processes that'll result in that.
drgath 15y ago
"[Google's culture] has led to many innovations - from the search first homepage, to the NoSql movement, powering webmail by Ajax ..." C'mon now. Outlook Web Access and Oddpost used Ajax-like technologies for webmail long before GMail's first line had been coded. Also, while BigTable certainly has had some influence on NoSQL, I find it difficult to credit Google with the entire movement considering how long these types of DBs have been around. Petabyte-scaled high performance DB storage? Maybe. NoSQL? Nope.
- eropple 15y ago
  This is more common than most folks seem to think. I've noticed the curious delusion in talking to acquaintances where ABMers who stridently complain about Microsoft innovations and tools insist that XHR "doesn't count because Google made it popular." When gently informed (not reminded--most of the ones I know have never touched Outlook in their lives) that Outlook Web Access was the reason XHR was invented, the response so far has invariably been "but that doesn't count, because it's Microsoft." I somewhat chalk it up to the "cool factor" that surrounds Google, but a good part of it may just be ignorance.
  - nostrademons 15y ago
    I think it was actually Google Maps that made XHR popular, not GMail. With GMail, people figured that the AJAX-interactivity was cool, but not groundbreaking. With Maps, it opened up fundamentally new interaction models that didn't exist before. This is somewhat ironic, since Maps didn't use XHR at all, and instead used an iframe transport. For that matter, "AJAX"-enabled Google Search also uses an iframe and contains no XML. Monikers are weird.
    - cousin_it 15y ago
      A draggable tiled map doesn't require XHR or iframes. It's a bunch of img tags next to each other, and some JavaScript that sets their src and position.
      - 15y ago
nandemo 15y ago
This is not news. Google's got 20,000 employees. Statiscally, every day a non-famous googler leaves Google. And that post doesn't tell us anything about Google that we didn't already know.
- bigbang 15y ago
  I believe they had 20,000 employees few years back. Now it should be much more, if not twice that.
  - jordinl 15y ago
    I spoke to a googler and she told me they were 25K at the beginning of the year and looking to hire 20% more...
- mda 15y ago
  I think for an organization with that size, it is normal to see at least 3-4 employee leaving every day.
afterburner 15y ago
I've been following douweosinga's blog since before he joined Google, interesting to see he's moving on. Part 2 is a little more interesting than the first. He linked to this, though, which I didn't know about, and seems at first glance to be very useful and neat: http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/ http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/
iamelgringo 15y ago
Google is indeed a tightly walled garden. Hackers & Founders has been holding events 4 or 5 miles away from Google headquarters in Mountain View for several years. And, out of their 25,000 employees. We only get a handful of engineers that show up. And when they arrive, they quickly realize that H&F involves having a beer or two and geeking out about startups. The Googlers often can't geek out because of heavy NDA's, and are very concerned about loose lips after having a beer or two. So, they often stop showing up. I've also been stunned at how few Googlers I come across are working on startups part time. Those that I find are workign on something on the side are very hush-hush about it, because of non-compete stuff. (It's hard to work on a software startup that doesn't directly compete with your parent company, when your parent companies mission is to organize the world's information). Finally, I stopped by Google Ventures this week for a "Get to know Hackers & Founders" chat, like I've had at dozens of other VC's the past few months. Google Ventures was the _only_ VC that presented me with an NDA on sign in (via kiosk). The kiosk wanted me to sign a "I will never, ever talk about what I might learn about Google inside these walls" before got a name badge or got buzzed in the door. I walked out before my meeting with the VC. If they are that concerned about what I might learn.... I don't want to know. There's a couple hundred VC's in town that I can talk to without having to sign or decline and NDA. So, GOOG, there's reasons you're getting the "Google is the new Evil Empire" meme attached to you. Frankly, Microsoft has been orders of magnitude more helpful to startups at H&F than Google, and we've been meeting within spitting distance of GOOG for 3 years. The BizSpark team has been fantastic to work with, and are helpful to startups whether or not they're on the MicroSoft stack or not.
- ditojim 15y ago
  every single visitor has to sign into a kiosk to enter google. however, you can decline the NDA portion and it prints "nda-declined" on the name badge. this may prevent you from entering some places. but, i do think you are over reacting about the google kiosk NDA. every visitor signs it. you are not special.
  - iamelgringo 15y ago
    I'm not at all suggesting I'm special at all because I was asked to sign an NDA at the kiosk. I'm suggesting that founders have a choice when it comes to investors. If I'm asked to accept or decline an NDA before I have a conversation with a VC, I'd rather go to one of the other hundred VC's to talk to in town where that isn't an issue.
mark_l_watson 15y ago
Wow, who needs to justify leaving a job after 7 years? Good read though and the author's new business looks cool. Although I often repeat and work for the same bosses again, I have always tried to work no more than 1 to 3 years with a group/team/company. Now, with a large company like Google (similar in size to SAIC where I was for 20 years, off and on), switching teams/divisions, etc. helps mix up the work experience but still getting fresh jobs is simply a good life strategy. BTW, It is easy enough to maintain long term friendships even if you don't work with people anymore.
ansy 15y ago
On a side note, Triposo looks pretty good. There are some problems with the wikipedia text sometimes being in the city's native language though. I'm not sure if maybe that's how the page was when you scraped it.

112 points by antichaos 15y ago

Part 1: http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google.html http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google.html Part 2: http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google-part-2.html http://blog.douweosinga.com/2011/05/leaving-google-part-2.ht...

001 15y ago

Why do people bash so much about the company when they are leaving ? Is it they want to become famous all of sudden ? Why don't people accept that big companies won't be like the same company when it got started.

DavidSJ 15y ago
This post did not bash Google.
- crocowhile 15y ago
  That was the goal, though. At least I think so. After reading is honestly I still don't know why he left.
  - chmike 15y ago
    The end of the second part explains it. It makes perfect sense to me. From google perspective, there are lessons to learn from this, but that is easy to say.
drhodes 15y ago
The answer is probably different for everyone. I suspect this individual doesn't feel animosity towards google, rather he would like to share his thoughts about why he left. Maybe it's a warning for other people about to join the company or just a way to commiserate with ex-googlers. Maybe he's showing off. What kind of person has the luxury to quit a job that legions of fellow coders would scramble for? Maybe he's advertising himself as a free agent. These, of course are all speculation. I don't think he's bashing google at all; I think he's telling them exactly what he thinks they need to hear so someone on-high steers the company in direction more attractive to creative engineers. But what do I know? Maybe you should ask him. Then you could write a "Why do people bash companies when leaving" blogpost. After you submit it to hackernews, expect the spanish inquisition!
nostrademons 15y ago
I was talking to a friend who works at Yahoo today. She's feeling terribly overworked and unproductive mostly because of some boneheaded organizational practices. I don't know the full story, but it sounds like she has pretty much accepted that management is brain-dead. At Google, there's a culture that if something is broken, call it out so that it can be fixed. At best, you will save thousands of employees hundreds of hours. At worst, you'll learn why it's broken. Many problems are inherent in running a large company, and there is no easy fix for them. But many others have simple solutions that make everyone's lives better. The way I see it (and this is completely my personal opinion here, not speaking for Google), he and other Xooglers who've written posts like this are being Googley. You don't work for seven years at a company without absorbing some of the culture, and that culture doesn't simply leave when you hand in your badge. Posts like this are not all that different from something you would see on internal Buzz or mailing lists, and I think the spirit of them is not to "bash" Google, but to call out things that Google could improve upon even after the Xoogler has left.
- 001 15y ago
  I don't think Larry/Sergey will check for Why I left Google posts on the web and create taskforce to fix all these things. There is always a better way to give feedback to management without posts like this on the web. I hope Xooglers don't become Google haters and spend their energies on creating the next Google or Facebook and create a culture they dreamed of.
  - nostrademons 15y ago
    Larry and Sergey won't. Many other Googlers will. And if the concerns are real and fixable, then it'll get people talking about ways to fix them, and some of those ideas might bubble up to the top. Or maybe not. Oftentimes, things don't even need to bubble up to the top to have an impact. You've got a very distorted picture of large organizations if you think that Larry suddenly makes a decision and then the whole company immediately does what he says. Large companies are really collections of small independent groups, and nobody really understands everything that's going on, and often times the worst problems are best addressed at the middle-management level. I think most rank-and-file Google employees have the same goals as Larry Page: we want to launch things quickly, we want people to use our stuff, we want to have a big impact on the world, and we want the share price to increase. The problem is translating that big-picture desire into specific practices and processes that'll result in that.

drgath 15y ago

"[Google's culture] has led to many innovations - from the search first homepage, to the NoSql movement, powering webmail by Ajax ..." C'mon now. Outlook Web Access and Oddpost used Ajax-like technologies for webmail long before GMail's first line had been coded. Also, while BigTable certainly has had some influence on NoSQL, I find it difficult to credit Google with the entire movement considering how long these types of DBs have been around. Petabyte-scaled high performance DB storage? Maybe. NoSQL? Nope.

eropple 15y ago
This is more common than most folks seem to think. I've noticed the curious delusion in talking to acquaintances where ABMers who stridently complain about Microsoft innovations and tools insist that XHR "doesn't count because Google made it popular." When gently informed (not reminded--most of the ones I know have never touched Outlook in their lives) that Outlook Web Access was the reason XHR was invented, the response so far has invariably been "but that doesn't count, because it's Microsoft." I somewhat chalk it up to the "cool factor" that surrounds Google, but a good part of it may just be ignorance.
- nostrademons 15y ago
  I think it was actually Google Maps that made XHR popular, not GMail. With GMail, people figured that the AJAX-interactivity was cool, but not groundbreaking. With Maps, it opened up fundamentally new interaction models that didn't exist before. This is somewhat ironic, since Maps didn't use XHR at all, and instead used an iframe transport. For that matter, "AJAX"-enabled Google Search also uses an iframe and contains no XML. Monikers are weird.
  - cousin_it 15y ago
    A draggable tiled map doesn't require XHR or iframes. It's a bunch of img tags next to each other, and some JavaScript that sets their src and position.
    - 15y ago

nandemo 15y ago

This is not news. Google's got 20,000 employees. Statiscally, every day a non-famous googler leaves Google. And that post doesn't tell us anything about Google that we didn't already know.

bigbang 15y ago
I believe they had 20,000 employees few years back. Now it should be much more, if not twice that.
- jordinl 15y ago
  I spoke to a googler and she told me they were 25K at the beginning of the year and looking to hire 20% more...
mda 15y ago
I think for an organization with that size, it is normal to see at least 3-4 employee leaving every day.

afterburner 15y ago

I've been following douweosinga's blog since before he joined Google, interesting to see he's moving on. Part 2 is a little more interesting than the first. He linked to this, though, which I didn't know about, and seems at first glance to be very useful and neat: http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/ http://sharedspaces.googlelabs.com/

iamelgringo 15y ago

Google is indeed a tightly walled garden. Hackers & Founders has been holding events 4 or 5 miles away from Google headquarters in Mountain View for several years. And, out of their 25,000 employees. We only get a handful of engineers that show up. And when they arrive, they quickly realize that H&F involves having a beer or two and geeking out about startups. The Googlers often can't geek out because of heavy NDA's, and are very concerned about loose lips after having a beer or two. So, they often stop showing up. I've also been stunned at how few Googlers I come across are working on startups part time. Those that I find are workign on something on the side are very hush-hush about it, because of non-compete stuff. (It's hard to work on a software startup that doesn't directly compete with your parent company, when your parent companies mission is to organize the world's information). Finally, I stopped by Google Ventures this week for a "Get to know Hackers & Founders" chat, like I've had at dozens of other VC's the past few months. Google Ventures was the _only_ VC that presented me with an NDA on sign in (via kiosk). The kiosk wanted me to sign a "I will never, ever talk about what I might learn about Google inside these walls" before got a name badge or got buzzed in the door. I walked out before my meeting with the VC. If they are that concerned about what I might learn.... I don't want to know. There's a couple hundred VC's in town that I can talk to without having to sign or decline and NDA. So, GOOG, there's reasons you're getting the "Google is the new Evil Empire" meme attached to you. Frankly, Microsoft has been orders of magnitude more helpful to startups at H&F than Google, and we've been meeting within spitting distance of GOOG for 3 years. The BizSpark team has been fantastic to work with, and are helpful to startups whether or not they're on the MicroSoft stack or not.

ditojim 15y ago
every single visitor has to sign into a kiosk to enter google. however, you can decline the NDA portion and it prints "nda-declined" on the name badge. this may prevent you from entering some places. but, i do think you are over reacting about the google kiosk NDA. every visitor signs it. you are not special.
- iamelgringo 15y ago
  I'm not at all suggesting I'm special at all because I was asked to sign an NDA at the kiosk. I'm suggesting that founders have a choice when it comes to investors. If I'm asked to accept or decline an NDA before I have a conversation with a VC, I'd rather go to one of the other hundred VC's to talk to in town where that isn't an issue.

mark_l_watson 15y ago

Wow, who needs to justify leaving a job after 7 years? Good read though and the author's new business looks cool. Although I often repeat and work for the same bosses again, I have always tried to work no more than 1 to 3 years with a group/team/company. Now, with a large company like Google (similar in size to SAIC where I was for 20 years, off and on), switching teams/divisions, etc. helps mix up the work experience but still getting fresh jobs is simply a good life strategy. BTW, It is easy enough to maintain long term friendships even if you don't work with people anymore.

ansy 15y ago

On a side note, Triposo looks pretty good. There are some problems with the wikipedia text sometimes being in the city's native language though. I'm not sure if maybe that's how the page was when you scraped it.