46 ms·

Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

• _0o6v 6y ago
  "You need to be able to answer the "what have you done for our users lately" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech." Good quote. Although you can extend the lawyers theme out to the rest of the bureaucratic corp too.
  • kevingadd 6y ago
    I think like 1/3 of the people I knew there who got promotions got it purely off of visibility and not actual customer impact. In one case they literally dumped an unfinished API on Chrome users before it was finished and then after collecting their promotion, abandoned it to let other people clean up the mess. In other cases schedules were compressed or important features were cut so that we could "ship" in time for the next promo round. So frustrating.
  • mirthflat83 6y ago
    > at the end of every day, I always ask myself "what did I do for our users today". This simple exercise helps keep priorities straight. When I found myself avoiding this question because I was embarrassed by the answer, I knew my time was up. I agree. Good quote
  • amelius 6y ago
    The problem with that question: who are the real users?
    • ethbr0 6y ago
      If the only user you can identify for the majority of your day-to-day tasks is "my boss" or "my boss's boss", then there's probably something wrong. Everyone gets mandates from on high, but that shouldn't be all of one's work.
    • Person5478 6y ago
      If it's an app and the answer to that question isn't clearly the people who download and install the app, your priorities are fucked.
  • agumonkey 6y ago
    Parts if society will pressure you to stay on the ladder rather than seeking meaning or utility.
  • treis 6y ago
    I think this guy missed the memo that Google bought Waze to put them out to pasture. They were the only real competition to Google Maps and were acquired to ensure Google Maps monopoly. Waze shipping features and winning in the marketplace would be a bad thing. I think a lot of his post stems from missing this.
    • bagacrap 6y ago
      You must not be a Waze user.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      Hard to align that perspective with his acknowledgement that Waze was allowed to operate independently, and the fact that Waze has been launching lots of new features for the last few years.
      • treis 6y ago
        Straight from the horse's mouth: >All of our growth at Waze post acquisition was from work we did, not support from the mothership. Looking back, we could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently had we stayed independent. He also details the constraints and additional burdens imposed by corporate as well the overall lack of support.
        • asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
          In that section of the article, he was talking about marketing and partnership limitations that are imposed by being a part of a larger conglomerate. This has little to do with feature development.
        • Arainach 6y ago
          That doesn't support any claims of "putting them out to pasture". Is Microsoft "putting Github out to pasture" by taking a hands off approach and letting them keep doing their own thing?
• pyb 6y ago
  A lot of interesting things here, but also the usual "billionaire complaining about all these entitled employees" vibes.
  • paulcole 6y ago
    The whole thing is one red flag after another, but the biggest standout to me is the author being annoyed coworkers are taking personal days. That’s what they’re there for! When I don’t want to work, I use the benefit that lets me not work.
    • jpm_sd 6y ago
      Try managing a team where people take last minute personal days all the time, without having to give advance notice or a reason.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • compscistd 6y ago
        Unless they interfere with scheduled meetings, I can’t see why this would bug you as a manager. Pair programming, counting hours for clients, or sprint planning are the only other things that could possibly conflict with last minute personal days. It doesn’t really seem to bug the managers at my organization if there are no calendar conflicts. If there are calendar items that have to be rescheduled, I think the onus is on them to find an alternative time
      • willcipriano 6y ago
        > Try managing a team where people take last minute personal days all the time, without having to give advance notice or a reason. Try getting a job where they advertise a benefit, then complain when you use it.
        • tester34 6y ago
          Never heard of benefit called "taking free days last min is no problem"
• joshgoldman 6y ago
  Stockholm syndrome maybe
• waheoo 6y ago
  > This was the moment I realized what had happened and that we were part of a corporation Took you a while to notice the hazing hats huh bud?
  • kevingadd 6y ago
    This is overstated. As a new hire, sure they put one on my desk but there was 0 pressure to wear it. They didn't even pressure me to attend the TGIF that week (I didn't)
• monoideism 6y ago
  [removing my remark because I was likely wrong about his meaning]
  • high_derivative 6y ago
    Im fairly certain he means 'plain old not doing a great job'.
  • HiJon89 6y ago
    I had to read that sentence a couple of times but I think it’s just poorly worded. He’s not saying that the person is old, he’s saying that the reason for wanting to fire them “you are not doing a great job”, is a “plain old” reason
    • monoideism 6y ago
      I think you're right, but why put the dash in there? It made it really hard to parse.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • igvadaimon 6y ago
    You read the comment wrong. What he meant wasnt age. "or just plain old [saying] 'you arent doing great job'"
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • JosephRedfern 6y ago
    I'm 99.9% sure OP the author didn't mean that people should be fired for being old. I agree that the phrasing is open to misinterpretation, but I read it as "plain-old not doing a great job"
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• chrisseaton 6y ago
  Do you really have to wear those hats when you join Google? How long do you have to wear them for?
  • badlucklottery 6y ago
    >Do you really have to wear those hats when you join Google? Nope. Most people put them on for a selfie or two then throw them on a shelf.
    • eru 6y ago
      I gave mine to some relatives.
  • bjarneh 6y ago
    My first question as well. I guess they pay quite well...
  • mortehu 6y ago
    You don't have to participate in the Noogler orientation week at all. You can just get straight to work if that's what floats your boat.
  • darkwizard42 6y ago
    Truly optional, just a fun thing they give out on the first day.
• itg 6y ago
  Another "leader" who complains about employees wanting work life balance and they are extremely entitled. These are the type of managers you want to avoid. I'm sure many Googlers are happy you left.
  • _coveredInBees 6y ago
    It's a good article with a lot of solid points, but that section had me rolling my eyes. Sure reads like someone pining for exploitative "startup" culture to get more than what they are paying for out of their employees. If you consistently feel the need to impinge on your employees weekends or PTO, that's a management failure, not an entitled employee problem.
    • isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
      There's also this lovely comment in the "focus" session where he plainly asserted that "privacy has no value to his users".
      • bagacrap 6y ago
        I think it's important for all the Google bashers out there to note this example of a high profile employee leaving because Google cared too much about privacy (or "noise" as he terms it).
        • marcus_holmes 6y ago
          I read that as "legal got involved and we had a ton of meetings that achieved nothing for our users" rather than "privacy did nothing for our users". I don't think Google "cares about" user privacy. I think they care about minimising any legal risk. These are two very different attitudes.
          • watwut 6y ago
            "we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google" The only way a big company can somehow ensure that all teams are going to follow the privacy or any other policy is to force the teams to "align our data retention policies and tools to Google". This is literally Google having process to ensure some privacy policy and op having issue with that.
• leroman 6y ago
  Known Waze practically since inception (I'm from Israel) always carry a grudge for mis-advertise themselves as "open data" and eventually go on to privatize the platform (which was originally built on OSS) and hijack and delete OSM Israel data.
  • toyg 6y ago
    > hijack and delete OSM Israel data What? How did they do that? I'm not an OpenStreetMap but I thought that sort of "privatization / removal of crowdsourced data" could not be done if not globally...
    • leroman 6y ago
      This was a long time ago, maybe my wording is off, probably along the lines of stopped contributing data to OSM and changed it's license for the data after a certain point..
• pacificat0r 6y ago
  It was so hard for him to act like an adult and be considerate about the way he speaks. Such a tragedy requiring immense sacrifice from this poor soul.
  • BugWatch 6y ago
    Maybe others could consider growing "thicker skins", not applying their personal standard to everyone equally, and not getting offended at every single (and/or little) opportunity. Exposure therapy is a wonderful thing.
    • richardwhiuk 6y ago
      If every presentation insulted you, or implied you didn't get exist, maybe you'd get pissed off at it as well.
• waheoo 6y ago
  > Entitlement - everyone working in the tech space is SUPER LUCKY. Few good things in this but I found the remark about weekends a bit much. I chose a career in a space I don't need to work weekends. And none of it is luck. It's careful planning 20 years in the making.
  • typon 6y ago
    "None"? Really? At the very least you can't control where you are born and what language you learn as a child...two extremely important factors in deciding whether you end up in a cushy tech job.
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  Do companies actually find themselves tons of employees that care so deeply about their mission that they sacrifice pay, equity, promotions, life interests, weekends, and benefits for "the cause"? I get having a team of 20 that is like this, but it does not seem like a concept that scales unless you are SpaceX.
  • toyg 6y ago
    > Do companies actually find themselves tons of employees that care so deeply No, but they find tons of employees who really need a job and hate job-hunting, so once they get in they'll do what it takes to keep the paycheck going. This is particularly common in sectors where the median hire can be young, like... the software industry.
  • ravenstine 6y ago
    I doubt it, since I believe recognition and impact on outcomes are highly relevant to someone feeling motivated to go above and beyond in a corporation. When a team scales, the hierarchy becomes dithered and camaraderie decreases overall, resulting in the "mission" meaning different things to different people. This ultimately results in an 80% of people who do as much work as they need to so they don't get fired, a 10% on one end that does a crapton of work, and 10% who work as little as possible. Even the former 10% can only work so hard before their performance is perceived as a threat to the rest of the team whom simply can't keep up their pace.
  • izacus 6y ago
    Well this guy quit because Googlers wouldn't work weekends on his command so the answer might be... "no" ?
  • ativzzz 6y ago
    There will be a few people, but companies like this will look for "passionate" people, or people who are good at pretending to be passionate to get paid.
  • hashingroll 6y ago
    Video game industries kinda get away with lower salaries, longer hours than rest of the "tech standard".
• alexashka 6y ago
  The author has a hard time telling apart what works, vs what aligns with his personality and energy levels. Not everyone who is an excellent contributor needs to be willing to work on weekends or have that 'go-getter' energy. The optimal path is one of optimizing for the path of least resistance, while this fella seems intent on rushing ahead, head first, until something breaks, or as he calls it, gets 'worn down'. Of course if you lack the brains to be able to comprehend what the path of least resistance is, the next best thing is to be extra energetic and try everything until something sticks. That's this guy in a nutshell. This type of approach to life is often destructive and abusive, what the author calls having a 'short fuse'. These extra energetic folks need to be reigned in by people who have a working brain, then the extra energetic people can be excellent. This can be seen in sports, where a group of intelligent people take extra energetic maniacs and mold them into championship teams.
  • Macha 6y ago
    Yeah, my contract stipulates my working hours are monday to friday. This is what we agreed to when I started working. I will make an exception if the system is on fire (but don't expect me at 9am on Monday after it), but not for a management imposed deadline looking like it will be missed. That just encourages setting tighter deadlines to get more work out of employees.
• mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  > “ It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a great job. This neuters managers and does not lead to great teams, driven by mission, pushing each other to do better.” Ugh, this refuted myth again? The “insecure, bad leader who blames subordinates for their own failures” meter is going off the charts with this one.
  • Traster 6y ago
    I would like to hear the refutation because I've witnessed this myself in corporate environments. Corporate HR are difficult to deal with, they're very process orientated and risk averse, getting rid of someone reflects poorly on you and your management structure basically doesn't care if there's 1 useless person in your team. You have to put a huge amount of work in to document and justify why the person is not qualified for the job and (in my country) you've got to make a reasonable effort to find another role for them, and if you do start this process with HR it creates documentation that means no one will ever take them if they do want to transfer. Start to end you're probably talking about ~6 months to get rid of someone and over that time you need an intense process of setting them targets and documenting failing to meet expectations. The result is that most managers are more likely to try and shuffle their bad engineers into other teams than to actually give up a big chunk of their time doing this process. Not to mention the fact it puts you in a very awkward positioning having a working relationship with the person you're getting rid of.
    • mlthoughts2018 6y ago
      “Putting effort into helping low performers improve or find better fitting roles” is called “leadership.” It’s mind-blowing that you see a 6 month investment in just doing basic leadership 101 as a massive bureaucratic hassle. I think it’s safe to say that the low performer you’re referring to is not actually the real problem.
• tejohnso 6y ago
  > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a better person I found this surprising. I thought this was primarily a problem in union / government positions.
  • Eridrus 6y ago
    It's both true and not. It's certainly a lot harder to fire people than at a startup. You need multiple review cycles with poor ratings, a Performance Improvement Plan, more review cycles of bad ratings, etc. But most people don't want to hang on through that, so they leave since it just sucks to be on a team where you are not valued. But you can definitely hang on for 18 months pretty easily with everyone unhappy with your work if you want to. So it's not really the same as government jobs where you really can't be fired, but it's very different from a startup where everything can be going fine, you lose a big customer and a week later 10% of the company is gone to keep the burn rate low.
  • sct202 6y ago
    It's how it works at most big companies. There's a very big impact to morale if people think they'll get sacked at the end of a big project or if VP's best friend needs a job. The normal way to onboard a new better person is to open up a new position, like repurposing an open headcount from somewhere else, and then shift responsibilities between the new person and old person.
    • selimthegrim 6y ago
      EA apparently hasn’t gotten this memo
  • izacus 6y ago
    Considering his other values, the question here might be if he couldn't fire people for reasons the rest of the corporation considers normal - like taking time off, not working on weekends or similar. For someone trying to do that, it might look like its "impossible for fire someone".
• strken 6y ago
  There's a pervasive belief by managers that involuntarily working weekends for an extended period of time will increase rather than decrease the total work done, and that engineering output can be measured in "hours", that I find absolutely ridiculous. If I think back over the times when I've been most productive, I've had the kind of trusted flexibility that allows me to work 14 hours one day to get a feature in before the big demo, but also leave an hour early the next day to go catch up on all the real life stuff I didn't do. Reading the article, I get the impression the author is praising the 14 hour day while condemning the leaving early, which is failing to see that they're two sides of the same coin. I'm not going to work myself to exhaustion unless my manager helps facilitate it.
  • BugWatch 6y ago
    I guess you probably heard that classic joke that the (project) manager is the person who thinks that a baby can be produced and delivered in a single month given nine women to do it.
    • not2b 6y ago
      It's from Frederick Brooks' book, "The Mythical Man-Month", the earliest good book on management of software projects. "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned."
• ElectricMind 6y ago
  What is so special about "Why did I leave Google" posts? Any one else sick of these overlords/ superhuman / apex people outcries?
  • tudelo 6y ago
    I assume you don't really believe getting a job at google qualifies you as superhuman, but just want to reiterate, getting a job at google does not make you superhuman and IMO has a lot more to do with time and place than raw ability...
    • ElectricMind 6y ago
      //I assume you don't really believe getting a job at google qualifies you as superhuman// - No //just want to reiterate, getting a job at google does not make you superhuman// Agree I am just tired of people whose entire self image is based on "I work/worked at Google". I know value of getting job there but it is time they stop "why I leave Google" and start "What am I contributing to humanity as an individual?"
• einpoklum 6y ago
  > This counted on the fact that Google had promised us autonomy to continue to act as Waze and we more or less believed them. Read: The promise wasn't spelled out in the contract. And whoever has experience in organizational politics knows that if it's not put in writing, it effectively wasn't said. > Distribution - we quickly learned, the hard way, that we could get no distribution from Google. Any idea we had was quickly co-opted by Google Maps. I know that "hindsight is 20/20", but if you have certain expectations from the purchase, why didn't you put the key items in the contract? This is not some minor loophole that you missed. --------------- > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more I very much doubt this. But: > or there is a better person out there or just plain old. This neuters managers So, the guy basically wanted to totally lord over people and be able to fire them essentially at will, or worse. Can't say that I'm very sympathetic here. --------------- > The only control you have to increase your economic returns are whether you get promoted since that drives your equity and salary payments. ... this breaks the traditional tech model of risk reward. I thought you wanted people who were focused on the product and what helps users, not on maximizing their already-quite-high compensation? --------------- > I ... began wearing a corporate persona Now, this I can very much identify with and commiserate. Of course, for me, I need a corporate persona the moment I'm hired anywhere, since unlike you, I'm not high-up in the hierarchy.
  • ido 6y ago
    So, the guy basically wanted to totally lord over people and be able to fire them essentially at will, or worse. Can't say that I'm very sympathetic here. I've spent some time working for Israeli tech companies (both in Israel and remote) and this guy's attitude does not surprise me at all.
  • Person5478 6y ago
    > So, the guy basically wanted to totally lord over people and be able to fire them essentially at will, or worse. Can't say that I'm very sympathetic here. That seems like an unfair interpretation to me. The guy wants to be able to do what's best for the team. We've all worked with that one guy who shouldn't be there, but is.
• iliekcomputers 6y ago
  >After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users. If it prevented a data leak or a security incident, I'd argue that it did actually provide value to your users. At some point, you have to do the non-trendy infrastructure work, skyscrapers aren't built with bricks.
• darig 6y ago
  It been 4 word since I make mistake. Probably good thing I not there now.
• Kototama 6y ago
  "As I had kids, I learned the importance of being at home for them and that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a balance, sometimes you need to work weekends and nights, sometimes you can head out early or work from home - we balance the needs of the employee and the company." sometimes you need to work weekends and nights while your wife take care of the kids alone so that your career progress and her's not. Here, fixed for you.
  • ramraj07 6y ago
    Contrary to popular belief, kids are not some tamagotchi pet that needs constant attention and helicoptering after they're babies. You can perfectly be a good parent and raise independent well minded kids without needing two parents always present every moment of every weekend.
    • rkangel 6y ago
      No, but until they're mid-teens, they do need one parent most of the time. If one of them is working weekends a lot, then that assumes the other one is available to parent.
      • ramraj07 6y ago
        Sounds exorbitant tbh. After they're seven or eight it's not clear why they need constant direct supervision (as opposed to being in another room minding ones business). What are we afraid of?
      • aidenn0 6y ago
        Mid teens? My 8 year old can read a book in my office while I get a couple of hours of work in.
    • i_haz_rabies 6y ago
      And this is a good enough reason to expect people to work on the weekend? Kids are not some tamagotchi pet that exists as it is for a long time... kids are constantly growing and if you blink, you miss it. Some people would rather spend their weekends with their kids for purposes other than just keeping them alive.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  https://archive.is/ujrka https://archive.is/ujrka
• izacus 6y ago
  This is an amazing post - it describes exactly how bad manager looks like and what kind of expectations does he have from his employees. No emergency PTO (despite being a benefit), ability to just get rid of people who don't suit him, cursing at people, not having a proper work/life balance. It just keeps on giving. And all for what? A mapping application having features which really don't save lives 99% of the time.
  • Demoneeri 6y ago
    I came exactly to say that, the guy is a nut job manager. Working weekend and probably being belittled by this guy while doing that, for what? A driving app, wow.
  • throwaway98797 6y ago
    He made money tho... Maybe bad for mental health of the average employee but not for everyone.
  • ck425 6y ago
    I agree with all of that except the swearing part. Is swearing in work a big deal in US? I'm Scottish (even worse Glaswegian) so perhaps have a skewed view.
    • izacus 6y ago
      No idea about US (I'd guess - yeah), but it's certainly a big deal here in continental Europe. I've also not seen anyone casually swear in London either. It's considered quite unprofessional and aggressive.
      • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
        In the US it’s not uncommon to hear f** or sh*. I don’t personally like it when people do it but it’s not uncommon.
      • ck425 6y ago
        Really? I've went to London office a couple of times and have had many colleagues there and they didn't seem notable different to Scots in terms of swearing.
• blodkorv 6y ago
  He is right on almost all of what he is saying regarding work life balance and such. But if you have the oportunity to not have to work under a guy like that. Why would you? At most you will get a salary raise but ultimatley you would be working very hard under his wip to realize his dreams and goals. The mind set he has can be really benefitial for certain companies and it is really helpful for start-ups to work like this because you establish an base line of dicipline in the company culture that is valuable. But he obviously is not capable to reflect back on himself and see who he are. These sort of people rarely are capable of that and if they do they dont really care.
• screye 6y ago
  > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a great job This is a rather dangerous thought process that reflects the skewed view that some Americans have of employment: that anything less than 'Great' should be considered fire-worthy. Employment security is pushed to its exploitative limit. In such cases, employees react commensurately. Employee and employers end up in relationship that encourages churn & hopping jobs the second that your value exceeds your compensation. > fast moving and changing needs I find it hard to believe that a behemoth like Google has that many of these. In new product teams, sure. But, there is a shit load of maintence / upkeep / feature-iteration work that mostly requires sufficiently competent and experienced engineers. But, not much more. > traditional tech model of risk reward I am not sure if this was ever true for big tech. The second a company was is big enough to be in S&P 500, no low level IC is ever going to have visible impact to the company's stock bottom line. The idea that a foot soldier's compensation was ever reflective of their impact is and has always been a lie. > That tolerance is gone at Google and “words” > “content” is the new Silicon Valley mantra of political correctness. You can say terrible things as long as your pronouns are correct or can say super important things but use one wrong word and it's off to HR for you That's a shame. I was hoping that the media outburst on these matters were that of a minority. But, it appears that this dogma has taken over Google culture at large. > When I was growing up in Tech in the ‘90’s - there was no such thing as work life balance. We loved what we did and wanted to succeed so we worked like crazy to achieve great things. As I had kids, I learned the importance of being at home for them and that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a balance, sometimes you need to work weekends and nights, sometimes you can head out early or work from home I am not sure I can take this serious. This is not what Work Life balance means AT ALL. Maybe that's because I am one of the younger folk. > the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. Soon, Lawyers > Builders and the builders will need to go elsewhere to start new companies. This appears to be well recognized cycle for big companies in every sector. I would characterize the Ballmer era of MSFT as a somewhat similar time too. Good points and a good read. But, if you want start up culture, work at a startup...I guess.
  • Nimitz14 6y ago
    At will employment is the correct method. Otherwise you end up with stagnant economies with low pay like in Germany and France.
• dtoznayxvf 6y ago
  Many people simply can't hack startup culture. Corp 'culture' created by worthless (damaging) HR dept isn't even that -- its innovation poison. Perfect for hack and hangers on -- u know... people who call themselves 'thought leaders'. Yoga has zero place at a serious busines. It's not a daycare!
  • b3kart 6y ago
    > Yoga has zero place at a serious busines It's "business", and why? Are you paying your (say) coders to write code? Unlikely, otherwise you'd measure their productivity in lines-of-code written, which I hope you realize is a bad idea. More likely you're paying your coders to solve problems. Is sitting in a chair always the best way to solve problems/think? Not necessarily. If physical activity (like yoga) is conducive to better thinking/problem solving, and the company has the resources (Google does) -- I don't see why not.
  • jimmaswell 6y ago
    > Yoga has zero place at a serious busines. The free market seems to say it's worth the boost to employee retention or PR or whatever.
• Shaddox 6y ago
  I'm aware that, as a founder, he's obviously very interested in the success of his product. His mentality however carried over the acquisition and past inertia. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I think his problem is that he's passionate. And I don't mean the corporate lingo 'passionate', I mean the actual passionate. I strongly advise any passionate people to not seek to turn their passion into a job. Because it's a long journey full of suffering. Your bosses will drive you insane. Your clients will drive you insane. Your coworkers will drive you especially mad. You will feel pain every time you will be asked to cut corners. No one will appreciate the finer details of your work. You will become the office insufferable twat. Passed every promotion. The sweet spot is somewhere between "I don't hate it" and "I kind of like it". You can learn to like something if you do it long enough.
  • izacus 6y ago
    Except that this guy IS a boss and he's been demanding that his employees copy his "passion" against their contractual benefits. Or wellbeing.
    • microtherion 6y ago
      And he is also demanding that the second those employees burn out (possibly due to too much passion, and too little attention paid to their wellbeing), he be allowed to put them out to pasture.
  • mattm 6y ago
    Completely agree. My motto for work is that you want to care the right amount. It's hopefully obvious that caring too little is bad. But caring too much can also be a bad thing.
  • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    Well this is depressing to read, especially this bit: "The sweet spot is somewhere between "I don't hate it" and "I kind of like it". You can learn to like something if you do it long enough." It seems like a great way to waste 40 hours of your life every week.
• iandanforth 6y ago
  I think his derision of entitled ladder-climbing employees is valid from the perspective of someone who sees "building something valuable" as the point of employment. There is a whole community however that sees wealth acquisition as the point of employment. Even if it's "merely" joining the ranks of the top 5% this is lauded as success by many. Lawyers, doctors, consultants, stock traders, all the high paying professions have people who subscribe to this philosophy. "I want to provide the best life possible for my family" might be the primary goal. Lower status/pay professions might describe this as what a "job" is as opposed to a "career". Something you do for money. Many hackers want to both provide the best possible life for their families and participate in a grand adventure of changing the world by creating something people want. I am infected with this mentality. But this might be considered a delusion of grandeur by many, or egotism. It's hard to empathize with a group who doesn't share a drive you see as essential for good character, but that lack of empathy is what is drawing people's scorn here.
  • dd36 6y ago
    Same. I can live in a hut in Guatemala if I feel challenged and am enjoying my work. Wealth is fun but so long as my family and I are good, it’s not a motivating factor. Solving problems is.
    • noisy_boy 6y ago
      "so long as my family and I are good" - wealth goes a long way to ensure exactly that.
      • nicoburns 6y ago
        Sure, but if you're a software developer with a few years experience then pretty much any job is going to cover that.
        • bradlys 6y ago
          Really varies on the company and where you live. Where I am, unless you’re at a select few companies, you’ll barely make ends meet or have to choose to live a particularly subpar lifestyle for a professional.
• tomerbd 6y ago
  I think it's ok to put additional effort when needed even weekends, as long as when it's possible you get it back as days off, no problem with it. Same for oncall responsibility, need to get back days off after your shift, even if nothing happened due to psychological tension. If you go to a company where you need to do oncall shifts ask for an additional day off for each week you are oncall during a typical year that's it.
• pratio 6y ago
  Life is different for me than it was 5 years ago, I have colleagues with kids and some are expecting. You start to realize how important it is to have a well rested team. When I say well-rested, I don't mean just physically but also emotionally. People wishing for a work-life balance aren't wrong and calling them entitled is definitely wrong.
• callmeal 6y ago
  >minority that was offended by something (words and not content) made it a pain We're not mind readers: Words _are_ content. And if there were people misunderstanding what he was saying, then it's pretty clear that he was either deliberately provoking in his speech or just clueless about the impact words have on people who are not him.
  • jldugger 6y ago
    > And if there were people misunderstanding what he was saying, then it's pretty clear that he was either deliberately provoking in his speech or just clueless about the impact words have on people who are not him. I mean, I've heard stories of someone reported to HR for using the word 'baller' (as in 'That new car is so baller, David.') who clearly did not understand the meaning of the word and I can only speculate as to why they thought it was a vulgarity. That said we can always strive to communicate more clearly, and someone publicly blogging about how they quit because of it probably doesn't get the same benefit of the doubt.
    • system16 6y ago
      > I began racking up my HR complaints Doesn't sound like it was an isolated incident in his case.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway98797 6y ago
  Most great things are built out of love. There is no balance when you love.
• SamuelAdams 6y ago
  > These realities lead to extreme focus on promotion vs product success --Me > We > Product/Users. I feel that the risk reward model in Corp-Tech is broken due to ever rising stock prices and lack of personal impact on your returns. Perhaps Corp-Tech should move to employee share buy back where employees must sacrifice some of their salary for equity or change equity to vest by a product related metric to connect the teams performance with the employee returns. No. Fuck you, pay me, as the saying goes [1]. As a manager / VP, it is your responsibility to set the product vision and goals. Engineers can't build / sales can't sell a great product if prospective clients are not interested, like putting an art gallery online [2]. Additionally, having no personal stake in the product allows developers / engineers to be more objective and professional. This is a problem that most junior engineers will face at some point, and most senior engineers will easily recognize. You put so many hours and so much work into a new project that you start to make it part of your identity. You can see this in a few consumer products like the Xbox One launch, where Microsoft employees received special Xboxs that had "I MADE THIS" branded on the device [3]. But for most companies engineers and developers have very little influence over the product's specifications - they're simply asked to build a thing already specc'd to hell by PM's, VP's, legal, ADA, and other groups within your organization. So if the joint effort of all those groups results in the product failing before it even hits a developers' desk, why should their compensation be impacted? The best way to tie development teams to the product is by offering bonuses when the product succeeds. But for some odd reason many companies don't want to do that. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U [2]: http://paulgraham.com/worked.html http://paulgraham.com/worked.html [3]: https://www.neowin.net/news/heres-the-best-look-yet-at-the-white-xbox-one-launch-team-console/ https://www.neowin.net/news/heres-the-best-look-yet-at-the-w...
• asidiali 6y ago
  If your engineers are working on weekends, for normal projects and deadlines, then you have a serious culture and process problem. On-call engineers for high risk projects and deployments are another situation and not the norm. The only leaders and teams I have seen push back on this, are the ones who 1) have no kids or 2) have their entire social life wrapped up with their work life. Why would they ever stop working when they can just play video games together at the office and say they are “working late”?
• unnouinceput 6y ago
  Seeing the "top 50 brands picture" - is it bad or is it good that, as freelancer, I have horror stories (and some of them are multiple stories for same brand) for each and every one of them?
• gok 6y ago
  I feel like I need a follow up article from Google along the lines of "Why did we let this guy stay so long?"
• mabbo 6y ago
  > Being promoted has more impact on the individuals economic success than the product growth. The decision which product to work on stems from the odds of getting promoted and thus we began onboarding people with the wrong state of mind - seeing Waze as a stepping stone and not as a calling. Their ability to maximize their own income before the acquisition was based on how successful your product was- they had stock options! Their ability to maximize their income after the acquisition was based on getting their next promotion. They were never actually in love with your product. The passion was not passion for what you did. Their passion was for money. Waze was always a stepping stone. All the while, here you are complaining that you can't arbitrarily fire people, that you can't "speak your mind" for fear of HR complaints, just generally wishing you could continue to abuse your employees. These are things you only did because those employees were just a stepping stone for your success, not people. What a whiny hypocrite.
• jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y ago
  Golden handcuffs.
• OakNinja 6y ago
  Wow. I’m curious what previous colleagues, employers and board members would say about this guy.
• watwut 6y ago
  > online ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement. Yeah, I dont like Sushi either. Not sure why not liking Sushi is entitlement, but as I said, normal food tastes better.
  • toyg 6y ago
    ... implying that sushi is abnormal...?
    • watwut 6y ago
      In here it definitely is. It is more expensive for same amount of food and you have to go to sushi bar to get it. When you go to restaurant, then you don't get sushi. It is not something canteen would give you, ever. Also, the "Sushi AGAIN" complain can be entitlement only is Sushi is something special where you live. If sushi is ordinary food, then it is no more entitled then "chicken wings again" - perfectly normal thing to overhear if your local cafeteria is giving chicken wings every other day.
• system16 6y ago
  > The product is a tool to advance the employees career, not a passion, mission or economic game changer. Of course it is. With the exception of the founders and possibly the first few, other employees rarely reap the benefits of product success, and if they do it's a promotion. I.e. advancing their career. It's pretty naive and selfish to expect employees to sacrifice and emotionally invest as much in a product as the founders since they will not benefit nearly as much should it succeed.
• scrose 6y ago
  If you’re a new engineer reading this article: Startups are talked about as if work-life balance doesn’t or shouldn’t exist. It only doesn’t exist if you (1) choose for that to be the case or (2) Have a manager like this who holds things like firing you if ‘someone better comes along’ over your head. There are plenty of startups where you can put in your ~8 hours and call it a day 99% of the time and the business will still be thriving. Having seen the work some engineers put into cranking out code nonstop, a bit less time coding and a bit more time thinking would have likely done way more good for the code base and the company anyway. Managers who don’t value your personal time and are willing to fire you anytime ‘someone better’ comes along are toxic and should be avoided.
  • wombat-man 6y ago
    Yeah, a lot of startups are under resourced in terms of people though. Maybe nobody is threatening you, but as you settle into the role you kind of realize that working a bit more could actually be the difference success and failure. I do agree that it's better if you're making that call on your own. If management is trying to squeeze you like this by threatening to fire you, it's usually an empty/foolish threat. Hiring a proper replacement takes time.
    • scrose 6y ago
      > Yeah, a lot of startups are under resourced in terms of people though. Maybe nobody is threatening you, but as you settle into the role you kind of realize that working a bit more could actually be the difference success and failure. This is completely my opinion and shaped from my own experience. But if you're working at an understaffed startup, the bottleneck for 'success' is usually not the engineering team, and also almost definitely not correlated with butt-in-seat time and amount of code contributed. Not saying that's what you were implying, but just want to clarify that's the direction I'm coming from. It's up to the business's leaders to determine what should be prioritized with the resources they have and take risks on building out those ideas accordingly. If you, as an engineer, begin working nights and weekends to have the company 'succeed', you're now communicating to management there's all this untapped engineering capacity. You give the illusion that more can consistently be done than is actually sustainable and no one wins when the engineering team burns out 6-12 months later. Well, maybe the company does somewhat when you leave and forfeit all your stock options back to the pool... In my opinion, the biggest impact you can make as an engineer at any level is by stepping away at the end of the day, doing your own thing, and every now and then just think holistically about what you're doing at work and the direction the product you're working on is going in. Your butt-in-seat time will become far more productive as a result.
• ionwake 6y ago
  A man who feels he was both needed, and thinks the way forward is to fire members of his team. The trouble is, the problem is in my life I always see a person getting fired and the solution remaining, the problem being a process and an inability to both see and be able to resolve said issue. The horror here being both the problem remains and youve been unethical to fire someone who did not deserve it. Which will only create problems down the line. I believe this is why I feel if I was ever in the position where someone I hire is not right, I continue trying to make it work until I have tried many different solutions. If it still fails, I tell them they are great in they ways they were and explain I want to part ways, and I make sure expectations are made. My only experience has been with short contracts, but if I wanted to part with someone who I was sure was a problem I would not even consider trying to within a 2 year period, its just unethical. If I cant make it work within 2 years, well then we all tried. I dont know if this is the right approach but I believe it would both help in giving time to find and fixing the right problem, the right way. tldr; firing is not cool
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I sincerely wish him luck. It was a blunt, forthright essay. Lots of self-revelation, and he didn't sugarcoat anything. I don't know the chap, but, from what I read, the essay seems to fit his personality. I might not enjoy working for him (but I could be wrong -I often am), but I completely sympathize with him, and his essay gave me a good window into the current SV mindset. I am glad to read his empathy for folks that don't have it as good as he does, and I suspect he has it pretty good. I don't encounter that kind of awareness too often, and it's nice to hear, from a C-level. He seems to have both feet planted firmly on the ground. I worked for some fairly "stolid" corporations, for most of my career. It was not a particularly enjoyable experience, the whole time, but it taught me a lot of things about Integrity, Loyalty, personal Honor and Consistency. I was never paid FAANG wages, but was, nevertheless, able to build up enough of a "nest egg" to get to the point where I don't need to work, if I don't want to. I'm currently working with a 501(c)(3) startup, not making a dime, and working harder than I ever have in my life. And loving it. I currently feel as if it has all been worth it. The thing that really bothers me, is that the entire tech industry is now built around engineers remaining at a company for 18 months. I was talking to a Facebook manager, some time ago, and he was boasting about being at FB for longer than he had ever worked anywhere. "How long was that?" I asked. "27 months." I worked at my last company for 27 years. It has drawn a lot of sneers from current SV denizens, but I'm proud of my record. I went places that people have no concept of. I worked at a level of trust, for a conservative, classic Japanese corporation, that few Americans ever experience, and my tenacity and Integrity had a lot to do with it. When high turnover is endemic, it has a huge impact on architecture, corporate culture, productivity, hiring, and, at the end of it all, product quality. I tend to design fairly large, heterodox, infrastructure systems. They take months and years to develop and refine, and I expect them to last for years. I have written software architectures that are still in use after 25 years (albeit greatly changed). In my experience, "letting go" is vital. I spent ten years developing and refining a project that I turned over to a new team, about three years ago, and walked away completely, so they don't have the "Grandpa can't let go" thing happening. They have done very, very well. My being there would have destroyed a decade's worth of work. Instead, they built out my infrastructure into something amazing. Walking away also gave me the luxury of working on new stuff. I'm in the middle of refactoring a server system that I wrote two years ago. It lay fallow until the project I'm working on now, and it has aged very, very well. I look forward to, one day, turning it all over to someone else, and walking away to new horizons.
• tinyhouse 6y ago
  I work in big tech. Not Google. This is one of the best blog posts I have read about big tech. I agree with most things. The most important one is the wrong optimization for promotion. People would happily push something complicated and unnecessary to production just because it can help them to get promoted later on (by showing fake impact). The other thing I strongly agree with is working on things that don't add value to users but rather to follow company guidelines. But it's hard to avoid this one. Finally, moving very slowly due to complex systems and so many teams that need to get involved in making change. In the end most employees end up exactly as described in the post - staying because of the amazing salary and benefits, contributing less and less as time goes by. Regarding firing people. From my experience it's doable but takes a long time. That's why offloading an employee to another team is usually easier. With all that being said, I still think for most people who work for someone else, big tech is better than startups once you're experienced. If you don't work for yourself than optimizing for money is a reasonable thing to do.
  • foobarian 6y ago
    > That's why offloading an employee to another team is usually easier. At one point I noticed that our team kept getting these incompetent engineers transferred from other parts of the company. At first I was puzzled, especially because my director was completely unphased by this. Then I realized he kept asking a lot of questions in our 1-1s about how X is doing, what X could do to improve, etc. And finally after a few months X would be gone. I think this guy got a reputation as a "cleaner" so our team would get the garbage to get taken out. I always wondered if/what kind of special favors he got in exchange for doing this from his peers...
  • UncleMeat 6y ago
    > The most important one is the wrong optimization for promotion. As a CEO, it is literally his job to ensure that promotions are aligned with company goals. At Google, VPs have final say on every single promotion. If there were people who were getting promoted under his command for stupid reasons, he was literally the person who could stop it.
    • 6y ago
• bregma 6y ago
  Yeah. sips coffee I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too.
• andrew_ 6y ago
  It's astounding in so far as how unique this conversation is to tech. I've worked as a pipefitter, electrician's apprentice, and general construction hand in the past - I could only imagine how it would go telling my former foreman that I'd like to head off to yoga in the morning for an hour. Big jobs that require overtime to complete get folks to work that overtime - even within a union. If it's not you, it's someone else, and they'll be remembered for stepping up. Bringing experience in other fields, namely the trades, to the conversation here might make it more clear why these things outlined in the article are seen as extreme entitlement. It's not a lack of work-life balance - something I see and hear about in most industries now - it's about caring deeply about your career, your work, and perhaps the project at hand, while not allowing that work to define your life. Pride and dedication to work can be balanced with family. It's not a zero sum game. What the author is trying to explain, in my mind, is that there is large priority on only one side of the equation (life), while indifference towards the other (work). We have it AMAZINGLY WELL being in tech, and we have luxuries that are unique to tech and bewildering to folks in other fields.
  • yardie 6y ago
    I've worked in union shops as well while not being in the union. Union overtime is highly coveted because it's a 2x-3x bonus that a lot of my union friends used towards a downpayment, kids' college tuition, retiring earlier, or starting a business. No one had to step up because everyone was stepping up. And the shop chief usually decided who got that overtime (i.e. young worker trying to buy a house might get higher priority over a senior.) Also, shops had extremely good work life balance. You were at the timeclock 4:59 on the dot. No one is asking you to stay late, or be on call uncompensated. Your time was your time from 5pm-8am. By their virtue of being always online, tech companies intrude into that worklife balance and it's not unreasonable to ask for some of it back.
    • andrew_ 6y ago
      I disagree only in that I worked salaried positions in the trades for some time. While most trades are hourly, there does exist a salaried contingent. The thinking that extra asks from your employer is an intrusion into your life is inherently, entitlement. Solid companies and management will repay that extra effort, in one form or another.
• toyg 6y ago
  On some level, I feel for people like him, I really do. They have this massive drive and just cannot understand why others (like me) don't share it. It drives them fundamentally insane, and pushes them towards sociopathic tendencies. Sometimes they "wake up" after decades and have well-documented breakdowns, if they realize their passion was fundamentally pointless. Sometimes they do move the needle. On other levels, though, just fuck him. His mindset is the typical rationalization of normalizing employee exploitation. If you want cult-like devotion to the cause, build a coop; the minute you take away real ownership of the fruits of one's labour, it is unreasonable to ask for personal sacrifice to any significant degree. You tell me how much you pay me for what, and I'll do "the what", not "the what but something extra too, just because". As for Google, they now look a lot like early-2000s Microsoft (both inside and outside), but this we kinda knew already.
  • izacus 6y ago
    No idea why your post is downvoted because it really mirrors my thoughts. I can see that he doesn't understand why he's percieved as overbearing and disliked. We also have way too many people like that floating around making people miserable.
• rvn1045 6y ago
  Another post about some Faang employee quitting their jobs and giving their rational for it. It’s thoroughly uninteresting when said employee has already spent years working there and potentially saved millions of dollars. They stuck around long enough to never worry about money and then they write a post about philosophizing their quitting.
• gurumeditations 6y ago
  Yet another person learns what millions of everyday people have learned throughout history: your relationship as an employee with a large corporation is one of minimal give and maximum take. People like the author are the types that give far more than they should and ironically make the situation worse because they hide the failure of the incentive setup through their voluntary overworking (money coming out of their pocket instead of the company’s). If the company was exposed to the true cost of their incentive structure, unwarped by the guy or gal found in every department that pointlessly kills themselves for the company, then the company would be forced to adjust itself, and thus make this guy less disgruntled.
• seaman1921 6y ago
  "Having trouble scheduling meetings because “it's the new Yoga instructor lesson I cannot miss” or “I’m taking a personal day” drove me crazy. The worst thing is that this was inline with the policies and norms - I was the weirdo who wanted to push things fast and expected that some level of personal sacrifice when needed. I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend." ASSHOLE - Waze employees are probably saying good riddance.
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  My take-away from this is: When you sell your startup to Big Tech, your employees have "made it". They won't work so hard. They're set for life. That's the reality. Move on. Especially don't begrudge them their success. Start something new.
• curiousllama 6y ago
  > Any idea we had was quickly co-opted by Google Maps ... Looking back, we could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently had we stayed independent. This is a great example of the difference between startup people and big company people. A big-company exec would have known to (how to?) fight that battle. Waze was a superior product, while Maps just had superior resources: they should have built support. But there's no mention of other execs. As a big company guy, I read this and think "oh man..." - I can only _imagine_ how frustrated this guy must be
• lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  >>> Perhaps Corp-Tech should move to employee share buy back where employees must sacrifice some of their salary for equity or change equity to vest by a product related metric to connect the teams performance with the employee returns. Wow. It would have to tie into making upper management Pay-for-performance linked to similar metrics ;-)
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• known 6y ago
  Reminds me lack of self-actualization in http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/maslow/ http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/maslow/
• jrockway 6y ago
  He sounds kind of toxic and out of touch, and didn't really mention why he stayed so long despite that being the title of the article. You know someone is Up To Something when they rant about HR restricting their speech. It's weird to me that he's now a free agent, rants about how people complained that "I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG", and yet doesn't indulge in his blog post. Maybe he learned something about communicating effectively through discussions with HR? He mentions not getting free distribution on Android phones. It baffles me that he couldn't negotiate some sort of deal. I am sure someone's end goal was to put all of Waze in Maps, and I don't think anyone would have prevented him from doing that. I feel like there was some emotional attachment to his baby that he couldn't get over, and it hurt the distribution of the product. You aren't acquired by a big tech company to be nurtured and grow -- you're there to be assimilated, for better or for worse. I'm surprised that he's surprised. (You can get bought by Google and grow your brand, of course. Android is still called Android, not Google Phone. Maybe Andy Rubin was just a better CEO? Though quite a piece of human garbage, as I understand it.) Finally, the rest of the rant is about how those dang employees don't work hard enough and want too much money. I can see why that irritates the CEO type -- they risked everything to get where they are today. But, that's not the game the employees are playing. They took a more conservative course and ended up at the top of their field, they're there to make your ideas come to life efficiently and effectively. If you want naive worker bees who will work 80 hours a week for $20,000 a year, you got acquired by the wrong company, plain and simple. For someone who claims to be savvy, he seems to have a lot of blind spots. I guess it's nice to get it all out into the open, as a warning to people who might choose to work with him on his next adventure.
  • guyzero 6y ago
    At the risk of being not politically correct myself, I think there are significant cultural gaps between the west coast American standard and people from Israel (Bardin is Isralei). With the caveat that this is my experience only, Israelis are more blunt, direct and often openly critical vs Americans, especially Californians. They're often right and all the ones I've worked with have been very smart, but the way a message is communicated is sometimes more important than the message itself. I think that in this global age people think that the notion of intercultural communication issues has gone away, but IMO it still exists.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > we began onboarding people with the wrong state of mind - seeing Waze as a stepping stone and not as a calling. > There are people who are great for a stage of the company and later, do not have the right skills as the company grows. It is not their fault, it is reality. But not being able to replace them with people that do have the right skills means that people are constantly trying to “offload” an employee on a different team rather than fire them - something that is not conducive with fast moving and changing needs. One thing that really irritates me is one way commitment. The author wants people who will see their work for the company as a calling, while at the same time having no loyalty to the employee and seeing them as just a stepping stone, to be used when needed and then discarded. In Japan, the work culture historically was one of crazy dedication to the company. However, it was reciprocated. The company was expected to take care of your whole life, even to the point of coming up with a sinecure for you in your old age. They didn’t just use you and discard you when they thought you were no longer needed. Every time I see a company talking about how they want employees to see the company as their mission and calling, I look at how they treat employees to see if they plan on reciprocating that loyalty. The answer if pretty much always no. They plan on using your loyalty when it is useful to them, often burning you out, and discarding you when they think you don’t provide value.
  • darkwizard42 6y ago
    Your point is spot on... and Google might be one of the places where I have heard they will do just nearly anything to keep you at the company. Internal mobility is exceptional, perks and compensation are exceptional (regardless of if you are single, young, married, old, disabled, male, female, gay, straight, <other qualifications I've missed> etc. there are GREAT perks available to you), scope of impact is huge (billions of users use your work), and a high bar of employment (though some lament the bar has been lowered) means you work with people who are generally quite smart/on your level
• cbushko 6y ago
  Ooof. I think people are picking and choosing too many points to make it seem like this guy is an asshole and a toxic manager. I read that he wants people to: - Do their work - Provide value for their users - Get stuff done. vs - Work on flashy stuff to only get promotions - Be stuck with BAD employees that do very little - Have employees spend all day doing recreation Work/life is important to stay healthy but at the same time employees need to get their work done. He is saying that the pendulum has swung too far towards the recreation side of things. I think I am biased as I worked at a startup that was chasing Google level of perks. They were fantastic but caused a huge divide between the people that abused them and the people that worked their butts off. All I want is for people to be reasonable and get their stuff done...
  • EricE 6y ago
    >I read that he wants people to: Yes! Most insightful post in this entire thread. Talk about shallow interpretations of what someone wrote from most of the other commenters.
  • Arainach 6y ago
    As the head of Waze, the author was the one responsible for setting the OKRs that people were judged against. He also had final say in promotions. If people were getting promoted for the wrong things, it was directly their fault. >They were fantastic but caused a huge divide between the people that abused them and the people that worked their butts off. Who was forcing these people to "work their butts off"? There are some people who seem to always feel that nothing is good enough and who put in unreasonable amounts of hours. If that's demanded by management (say, by a CEO who things that working weekends is OK), that's a cultural problem. On the other hand, there's a uniquely American problem with fetishizing long hours and no perks. People in general aren't "abusing" perks, they're taking advantage of them. If people are having to "work their butts off" on a regular basis, then teams need to be better at setting cadence and expectations. Once in a great while some crunch time will happen, but in general people shouldn't be having to work more than 40 hours.
    • cbushko 6y ago
• justapassenger 6y ago
  While he has valid points of how corp life is different from startup, he seems like a horrible, entitled person to work for. General attitude that comes out of it to me, is that your employees growth doesn’t matter, only his vision of product matters. He complains about people being entitled, and at the same time he complains that as CEO of subsidiary of one of the biggest company in the world, he cannot say offensive things in his talks. And most entitled one - he’s sold his company (that he actually didn’t own, from the beginning, like with most startups) and he cannot control it fully anymore? And complaining that he cannot fire people on the spot? He should check his entitlement before complaining about other being entitled by not wanting to put his product vision above their wellbeing.
  • tinyhouse 6y ago
    I think you misinterpreting what he's saying. I didn't get the impression that he claims that employees growth doesn't matter. He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. Not being able to fire people is indeed a big disadvantage. Bad employees are much worse than just not contributing. They make the people around them worse and have a negative impact on the morale. As a manager you want to be able to get rid of such people as quickly as possible. I'm not saying firing on the spot is a good thing. But it should be reasonable to fire someone within 6 months and it shouldn't come as a surprise to the employee. Good managers communicate to their employees when they are not performing.
    • the_local_host 6y ago
      But he's not strictly talking about "bad employees"; he explicitly mentions firing people for "the basic reason that you don't need this role any more". That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary.
      • tinyhouse 6y ago
• tomerbd 6y ago
  When you get a new job, check if you need to be OnCall if yes then ask for 1 day off after every session of being OnCall to recover, even if no event happened, the psychological burdon.
• jolux 6y ago
  Does anyone else take it as a red flag that somebody had lots of HR complaints and is unwilling to say what, exactly, prompted them? The implication is that they weren't warranted but without knowing what he said it's kind of hard to say. If he was dropping N-bombs left and right, I would find it hard to be sympathetic.
• nx7487 6y ago
  People offended here are exactly the bubble of entitled morons in Silicon Valley that this guy is talking about. I totally agree with everything he said, companies where you have to work long hours and don't receive lots of weird benefits like yoga and sushi are the places I want to work. I would much prefer to have my compensation include more equity in the company, and for my performance to actually be related to the value provided to customers and the fundamental value of the company.
  • richardwhiuk 6y ago
    Feel free. Just be aware, those aren't the most profitable companies in the world, (i.e. FAANGM) and at some point, you might want to work out why that is.
    • Nimitz14 6y ago
      As if their work culture has anything to do with it! Thanks for the laugh.
      • pb7 6y ago
        Intelligent, skilled, and well-educated people don't want to spend their lives being treated like garbage so they seek out employment that provides an environment for a healthy balanced life. As a result of attracting this talent, these companies become and continue to be successful. It's not that hard to understand.
        • Nimitz14 6y ago
          You're clearly not very intelligent if you can't conceive of people having a different attitude towards life than yours. Basically every big shot entrepreneur ever had opportunity to work at their equivalent of Google, and yet they didn't.
          • pb7 6y ago
            Entrepreneurs set their own hours based on their desired lifestyle, are their own bosses, and have the majority stake in their work. They are not at the mercy of anyone but themselves. I would say that falls under "employment that provides an environment for a healthy balanced life".
• navbaker 6y ago
  This mention of "yoga at 11am" seems to be rubbing some folks the wrong way, but what if it was "lunch for an hour at 11am"? In all the jobs I've held (including now) where working hours are not dictated by external forces, such as customer service expectations, our teams make sure we get in our hours and are more or less available during a reasonable window, say 8am-5/6pm. It is pretty much understood that there will be 45-60 minutes of (unpaid/unbillable) downtime, which most people will use for lunch, but others will use for a workout, then eat lunch at their desk. I've never seen anyone actually work less hours because they went to yoga or for a run, they just use the time they would ordinarily be using for lunch and still hit their full workday, while gaining the benefit of de-stressing mid-day.
  • stonemetal12 6y ago
    Yeah, I don't get the unhealthy interest in other people's private life. As long as your job is to get work done, and not cover duty station at time xyz, complaining about when people choose to take a break is really weird and invasive. In my experience people who are permitted flexible work schedules and take advantage of them tend to be the better employees.
    • throwaway_dcnt 6y ago
      He was complaining about his inability to schedule meetings because of the 11:00am spot. Even in the most flexible of environments, lunch is usually off-limits, 1:00pm is tricky because people can be late due to lunch and this 11:00am yoga essentially means a nearly 3 hour block with difficult scheduling constraints. I don't agree with a lot he has to say but this one kind of makes sense. Routing un-availbility at 9:00am, 11:00am and 3:00pm are, well in my opinion at least slightly uncool (one off's are fine ofcourse).
      • stonemetal12 6y ago
        Sure but there are all kinds of reasons people couldn't make an 11am meeting, even being in other meetings. The only reason it bothered him is because the employee in question was doing something non work related. Mostly don't you sit down with your team and figure out good meeting times and bad meeting times? Did employee say 11am is a great time for meetings then go get an 11am hobby? Then sure employee is a jackass.
• whycombagator 6y ago
  > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a great job. This neuters managers and does not lead to great teams, driven by mission, pushing each other to do better. > I was the weirdo who wanted to push things fast and expected that some level of personal sacrifice when needed. I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend. > So, why did I leave? > I did not leave in a confrontational disagreement (which is what anyone who knows me thought would happen, as I have a short fuse...) From Twitter: > Noam Bardin, former Waze CEO (2009-21) He’s clearly a smart guy and I don’t disagree with all his points, but in general it’s sad that there are CEOs/managers out there with short fuses that want to fire old people. Also he wants personal sacrifice & things delivered no matter what. I understand the viewpoint but would likely despise it as an employee.
  • harryposner 6y ago
    I didn’t read it as firing old people, but rather firing people for the plain old reason that they’re not doing a good job.
  • aikinai 6y ago
    That sentence is very poorly written and I also read it wrong the first time, but he’s not advocating to fire old people. He’s saying the “plain old” reason for firing people, “you are not doing a great job.”
  • ativzzz 6y ago
    He didn't say he wanted to fire old people, "plain old - you are not doing a great job" is just a colloquialism and can be replaced with the word "standard reason" or something similar. This is probably how he got in trouble for some of the HR things he mentioned, where he says a word and people take it like you did and report him.
  • mslack616 6y ago
    I was thinking the exact same, obviously a very smart guy but damn I don't really agree/align with most of what he expressed.
• Siecje 6y ago
  Why does Google want two map apps? Why not just integrate into Google Maps?
• cmrdporcupine 6y ago
  9 years @ Google, and I too came from a company acquired by Google. (In my case, Google did not keep our product or tech stack around, so.) And yes, I can say many Googlers are entitled. It's a fair descriptor. And the pace of work is slower than a startup. In general. And I too have many criticisms of Google. But. Google has entirely different revenue constraints. It can afford an entirely different way of working. That pace allows a more sustainable cadence of development. It can be a more humane place to work, in general. Google can on the whole accomplish its revenue goals without being a meat grinder. So why be one? I think there is a bit of a problem with this guy's POV where he's come to fetishize the actual process of the making of the sausage versus the sausage itself. Projects need not be run under insane stress if there's a steady supply of talent and money to make things happen. Google can afford that. Pace will be slower. Perhaps less competitive. But the core business continues to do excellently. For many of us Google is not an "exciting" place to work. But it's a pretty good job to have and it pays well and gives access to both great benefits and to interesting technology. And that compensation in _most_ people does yield a sense of responsibility for delivery. But maybe not the survival-of-the-fittest-meat-grinder panic that this guy somehow seems to love.
  • 627467 6y ago
    Isn't there a place for this kind of fetish? It doesn't need to be in today's Google (but maybe in 5 year old Google). > Google can on the whole accomplish its revenue goals without being a meat grinder. So why be one? I too hope Google can prove that this state can be maintained after certain quasi-monopolies it holds start to vanish...
    • titanomachy 6y ago
      I agree that there's a place (probably not Google) for this attitude, and my impression is that this is the realization that the author eventually arrived at: he wouldn't change Google, or change his nature, so he had to leave. Even though his frustration was clear, the message that came through for me was not simply "Google is bad" but more "Google and I are too different to work together". A lot of what he dislikes about Google is true of any large company. Although, he was very critical of Googlers' entitlement in particular. This is a real issue, especially among those who have never worked elsewhere, but IME people are more self-aware about it than he implies.
• carapace 6y ago
  I worked at the Google campus in MV as a TVC for a while, and one of my first thoughts was "Yeah, this is a baseline for quality of life. If we can get to the point where people live this well, that's a win." I mean, we will still have to contend with the human condition, but at least the reasonable problems are all solved. To me complaining about "entitlement" just sounds like a kind of mild "Stockholm Syndrome" for primitive conditions. Googlers may have some issues but I don't feel that their expectations around baseline quality of life are among them. We should all be so fortunate. No really, we should. Let's work on that together.
• 627467 6y ago
  As seen from many comments this posts would be polemic to say the least. Obviously the author is from a different time where tech/SV abundance did not exist and had to be created through huge personal sacrifice. He speaks as such person and is judged as any "nasty uncle on dinner table". But in my view, there's certainly truth in the entitlement he describes. I'm not saying that WBL (as represented as yoga at 11AM) is not alright to aim for. But it's incompatible with many endeavours. And it's certainly incompatible with competitive/low-growth industries, markets and jobs. The tech sector (still) enjoys high growth and large demand for HR, that's why such entitlement exists. But as growth plateaus I think entitled people will find it hard to find certain WLB perks
  • pyb 6y ago
    Noam is not one of the Waze founders.
• adsharma 6y ago
  So much discussion about about work life balance and toxic managers, but not enough about exactly what you've accomplished by working all these hours? Did you write another object relational manager or another functional programming is great, stop using C++ post? I wish the conversation was more about how technology was moved forward and how it benefited people using the products based on that tech. Some of this I think is caused by power imbalances in the employee-employer relationship, prevailing attitudes in SV about acceptable limits of speech and the inability to discuss this freely at workplace due to the lack of trust. So it spills over into anonymous HN and Blind.
• nfRfqX5n 6y ago
  > I began racking up my HR complaints is this common at FAANG? i've never had anything close to an HR complaint in 8 years
• good_sir_ant 6y ago
  I always enjoy posts like this. When the comments flow in, you can identify the steadfast obliviousness the urbanites have around how the other 99% of the world approaches work. Just the reactions to a different opinion (which more aligns to one formed outside of silicon valley) illustrate a built-in intolerance to anything resembling reality, difficult as it may be.
  • Arainach 6y ago
    What "reality" are you referring to? Statistically speaking, just about everyone who isn't self-employed (and many of those who are) are in it for the money. A boss complaining that their employees have no passion for their job and won't work overtime sounds like an out of touch awful boss regardless if those employees' lack of passion is for a software product, making pizzas, teaching, driving a truck, or whatever. Are there awful bosses in every industry? Probably. That doesn't mean that has to be "reality" - it just means that such opinions need pushback wherever they're found.
• phonebucket 6y ago
  > ...in a start-up there is complete alignment between the product, the company and the brand. The employees, management and investors are aligned as well - product does well, company does well, investors do well, employees do well. Perhaps this can be true for founders/founding employees with significant stock. Do employees 15 onwards (i.e. the majority of employees working in successful startups) really have so much stock so as to pour their hearts into the company?
• cube2222 6y ago
  Regular overtime is nothing else than organisational and management failure to me. It means you have more work than you have people for, and should just hire more of them. I understand having to work late a day or two because there's an outage, or a feature needs to be done ASAP, but I'm taking those hours back the next day. Also, not sure about others, but I'm wildly productive when working up to 8 hours daily, and my productivity goes out the window if I work more than that for prolonged periods of time, because I get burned out real quick. (Actually, even with up to 8 hours I need regular vacations) And being passionate about my work has absolutely nothing to do with that. (I try to work at places where I'm very passionate about it)
• DC1350 6y ago
  Still cannot begin to understand the mindset of people who believe their employees actually care about their boring projects. Give people a reason to care and they will. I gain nothing if my manager or CEO succeeds.
• freewilly1040 6y ago
  Of the author's many entitlements, the funniest one to me is that he feels entitled his employee's drive and passion for his product, the second most important mapping app at his own company. He couldn't perceive that Google was buying him out to neutralize a competitor? He was surprised that the distribution priority of Waze was lower than Google Maps?
• kgog 6y ago
  > Today, in Silicon Valley, work life balance has become sacrificing Work for Life - not a balance. Young people want it all - they want to get promoted quickly, achieve economic independence, feel fulfilled at Work, be home early, not miss the Yoga class at 11:00am etc. He lost me here. Grouping "young people" -- an entirely arbitrary delineation -- and calling them entitled is typical agist bullshit. Just because one person wants to work like a dog, doesn't mean others who don't are entitled. Check yourself jerk. > I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend. This is the reason why I refuse to work for managers who work outside of business hours AND expect others to be available then too. Working like a dog permeates a toxic work environment where everything is a competition and zero-sum. For the vast majority of people, work is an avenue to a better work. It's just a job. I think generally the people we consider "successful" worked themselves out. However, there is survivor bias here as well that needs to be called out. For every 1 burned out "successful" workers, there's 99 that failed, and many that probably have some form of trauma. In reality, in large-corp you can cruise and still be in the top <5% by income and wealth. I have nothing against people who want that as long as they recognize their privilege. I don't call them entitled, I just call them people. Lastly, I'm glad Noam Bardin wrote this post because it's very indicative of the kind of person he is. I will run far and fast away from every working with him.
• jonahrd 6y ago
  Sorry to nitpick, but this "Top 50 Brands" graphic... Where does this data come from? Where on earth is Coca-Cola??
• alcover 6y ago
  18 scripts, 3 webfonts. For a short text. Didn't allow, didn't read.
• jmull 6y ago
  Is that top 50 brands graphic real? I recognize every brand on there and know at least a little bit what their consumer-facing products are... except waze (until now). I realize it might just be me, but I wonder if this is some kind of vanity graphic? (I have been at a company that would periodically pay for brand surveys, that would always tell us how great our brand was doing. I don’t think there was anything explicitly untoward going on, but I think the consultants were finding a way to tell us what we wanted to hear. I wonder if they same is going on here?)
• caturopath 6y ago
  I agree with almost every point Noam makes, but I feel he could have done a better job steelmanning the counterpoint. There are upsides of having managers not have the level of control over their reports' futures that they do at most companies. (It accomplishes goals of reducing discrimination and it makes people less vulnerable and thus boosts retention.) There are reasons that the process overhead to accomplish anything at Google is more than at a company like pre-acquisition Waze. (It simply gets 100x more backlash when Google makes a misstep on some of this stuff than any company, in part because they have a responsibility as stewards of so many experiences and so much data. There's also a culture of doing a really crappy job in a first pass -- I think this might be fostered by the process overhead, but it certainly makes removing it very dangerous.) There are benefits to a comp model that doesn't actually reward you for what you accomplish. (You can get some of your best people to focus long-term.) There are OBVIOUS benefits to a culture that values political correctness. The author didn't make it clear that he wasn't just being an asshole. I think, on balance, that Google is unhealthy and could use some more Noam in it, but I think it's not intuitive to everyone why these things are done.
  • throwaway3699 6y ago
    No, political correctness creates a stranglehold on ideas, the very last thing those in SV need when they are regulating their own monopolies of ideas online.
    • titanomachy 6y ago
      Excessive political correctness does that. A good amount of political correctness means that you never have to work for a manager who openly respects you less because of your race or gender.
      • TeaDrunk 6y ago
        Or also you never have to work for a manager who openly respects others more because of their race or gender. A wide variety of things apply this way. A sane amount of political correctness allows the meritocracy I want in a workplace.
• Diederich 6y ago
  A quick story about "entitlement" at some of the most 'employee benefit focused' tech companies. I haven't worked at Google, but I've worked at two of the other so-called FAANG companies. The soft benefits and perks were amazing, no doubt about it. For a time, a certain (popular) subset of the free snacks became unavailable. My immediate team and I made some jokes about it. A week or so later, word got around that somebody had opened a medium grade internal incident over the 'outage'. So we looked up and sure enough, there it was, an actual filed incident, status ongoing. Ok so that's fine; things were generally pretty 'loose' at the company, so maybe that was a joke. Nope; not only had many hundreds of people marked themselves as impacted, but the discussion was quite serious. Mixed in of course were many people making comments about how silly/absurd/outrageous it was that OTHER PEOPLE were taking this snack outage so seriously. The whole thing turned into quite a kerfuffle. There were now hundreds of comments under the incident, and the associated chat channel was getting pretty heated. Word came down from my area's management, unofficially, in a friendly way, suggesting that we just stay clear of the whole thing, which was sound advice in my opinion. To be clear: the vast majority of the heat was about whether this thing should be an incident at all, and the size of the 'sides' were to my eye roughly even. I'm not trying to make a statement here about entitlement one way or another, but simply recounting a story from a few years ago as I best recall it.
  • titanomachy 6y ago
    Lines up with my experience. For every person having an entitled fit, there's two or three people pointing out how silly the whole thing is.
    • ryandrake 6y ago
      I don't know if it's an entitled fit. Getting rid of a small perk can sometimes just be that little thing that causes an employee to briefly put his head up and start thinking about why he's still working there. It's not something I'd quit over, but maybe something that might remind me to check the job boards this month rather than ignore them like usual. Steve Blank wrote [1] about this. 1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-–-soda’s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  Interesting article all around. I have to raise one minor quibble with the author's points: "No one buys technology, you buy a team and a way of doing things." If the author means in the sense of what a big company like Google is purchasing, that's kind of correct (though there's no guarantee the company sees it as in their best interest to keep that team or way of doing things together). If the author means in terms of why a company like Google purchases another company... That's only one reason. Here's a short list of additional reasons I'm aware of Google has bought a company: - To acquire the data (and agreements to share data) a company has built up over the years - To acquire a company's customers (big in the ad space; traditional advertising is a trust network, and the easiest way to get into the inner circle of big client service is to buy someone who's already serving big clients) - To remove a competitor from the field of companies in a space - To acquire the team that built something Google wants to build fast (this is a gamble; Google's in-house, NIH-ist software stack is an absolute space alien, and teams that built something Google wants will likely have to rebuild it atop that stack while simultaneously limping along their existing tech stack that already does the thing but that Google has immediately labeled "DEPRECATED DO NOT EXPAND UNTRUSTED SOFTWARE WE DIDN'T BUILD THE KERNEL THIS IS RUNNING ON"). As an owner thinking of selling to Google, I have no idea if you know which of these they're thinking of your company as. But it's worth noting that many of those reasons don't imply your company will stick around as an independent coherent entity in Google (or even that Google intends to hire all your employees).
• buildbot 6y ago
  Echoing many others here, this is a perfect example of an incredibly toxic manager. Notice how all things lead back to them and their success, trying to guilt you into not working harder for them. And if you don’t? You get fired right away. Also, this post completely destroyed my desire to use Waze, and makes me question if they are really good stewards of our location data given how much time was spent complaining about policies.
• didibus 6y ago
  Not going to lie, it just sounds like he failed to adapt and be a good CEO in this new system. What did he say about needing to do with people who can't adapt and don't have the skills needed at a new stage of company growth? Fire them? Well him leaving might give Waze a new life, if they find a CEO with more experience working in bigger companies, who knows better how to navigate the political landscape of a place like that. Also, my personal issue is that, being part of Google, he seemed to still only focus on the success of Waze, not on the success of Google. And that's contradictory to his own statement of needing to align with company success and investors success. I mean, even his "does nothing for users" argument fails for me, when Waze was acquired I dreamed of all its features just rolling up into Google Maps and Waze going away, so that the best of Maps and Waze would combine into a better Map app. The only thing I can agree with, but honestly that's really not new insight at this point, is promotion driven development. Though I think he undermines a little how that favors new ventures and moonshots over continued refinement of existing products. Yes this is a common criticism of Google, but it's also how Gmail, Maps, and a lot of the really big money maker success of Google happened. It's not that the promotion process is "bad", but it optimises for people to always try and grow brand new products and enter new markets. Which arguably could be best for Google investors.
• raclage 6y ago
  > I began racking up my HR complaints. I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG… I actually stopped speaking at events where the majority appreciated what I was saying but the minority that was offended by something (words and not content) made it a pain. I began watching what I said, what I discussed and began wearing a corporate persona (I was still probably one of the less PC characters at Google but this was my cleaned up act…). At this point I can't help but be extremely skeptical of people that talk about how they've been oppressed by PC censorship and don't provide any examples as if it's not the case that there aren't lots of people who say widely unacceptable things and use this as a shield. > Having trouble scheduling meetings because “it's the new Yoga instructor lesson I cannot miss” Yeah that's a pretty lame excuse. > or “I’m taking a personal day” drove me crazy. Are you kidding me? Days off is the evidence of poor commitment to the job? That seems extremely telling about the author, not the company.
• 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
  > Google had promised us autonomy Of the many lies in business, the most blatant is when a company tells you they'll give you autonomy that they aren't required to give you.
• anticristi 6y ago
  I had a similar experience when I worked as a contractor in a big corporations coming from a start-up background. You could tell that the corporation had a different risk appetite than a start-up. At a start-up, your highest risk is running out of runway. At a corporation, your income is rather safe, so your biggest risk is getting sued. No point launching a product one year early, if it costs 4% of your total annual income.
• chubot 6y ago
  We had lunch in the cafeteria and a Googler online ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement Back in 2006 I referred a former co-worker to Google. He quit after a year or so, and this was one of his complaints. Our joke was "This foie gras is TERRIBLE. Just terrible". Yes they literally served foie gras!
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• Pulcinella 6y ago
  > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a great job. Wow I didn’t think I would ever see anyone openly state in writing that it is too hard to fire people for being old. (Age discrimination against those 40 and older is against federal law. It’s also morally wrong. I would also personally argue that the age cutoff should be a lot lower, but that is directly relevant to this article). Edit: ahh that makes sense. He likely meant it as “or just plain ol’ ‘you’re not doing a great job.’ “
  • 48271e 6y ago
    You're misreading the sentence, he's not saying people should be fired for being old. He's saying at Google you can not fire someone for the "plain old reason" of "they're not doing a good job". Having worked at Google, it is extremely difficult to fire a low performer. It takes about 6-12 months, many visits with HR, and a ton of documentation. So there is a common practice of managers trying to offload their low performers onto other teams, as mentioned in the post.
  • itsovermyhead 6y ago
    I think you're misinterpreting the sentence, I did too when I first read it. He's using plain old, as a reference to normal or regular. Like, I just wore a plain old shirt to the concert. Meaning, I just wore a regular shirt to the concert. In this sentence, it means, "or just the regular reason of 'you're not doing a great job'."
• campl3r 6y ago
  This sounds like a manager I would love to work for. I think the entitlement of these employees are eventually going to bring down FANG
• enos_feedler 6y ago
  "We start companies to build products that serve people, not to sit in meetings with lawyers. You need to be able to answer the "what have you done for our users lately" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech." The only thing worse than not putting the user first when you build consumer products is having a core attribute of your Googley culture be "put the user first" and not do it.
• second--shift 6y ago
  One question i have about working at Google - a bit embarrassing to ask, but does one's Google account/search history come into play during the application/interview process? I'd rather not be grilled about why I was Googling how to hack Wi-Fi passwords in 2012.
  • chad_strategic 6y ago
    Wow! That's the worst you were googling? You make me look like a saint. :)
    • second--shift 6y ago
      This is one of the more presentable of the questionable topics ;)
  • xdavidliu 6y ago
    Can't tell if serious, but there's not a snowball's chance in hell that happens.
• JohnCarmack 6y ago
  I can certainly see a lot of parallels with Oculus / Facebook. Perhaps unusually, I actually wanted FB to impress itself more strongly on Oculus post acquisition because, frankly, Oculus was a bit of a mess. Instead, Oculus was given an enormous amount of freedom for many years. Personally, nobody ever told me what to do, even though I was willing to "shut up and soldier" if necessary -- they bought that capability! Conversely, I couldn't tell anyone what to do from my position; the important shots were always called when I wasn't around. Some of that was on me for not being willing to relocate to HQ, but a lot of it was built into early Oculus DNA. I could only lead by example and argument, and the arguments only took on weight after years of evidence accumulated. I could have taken a more traditional management position, but I would have hated it, so that's also on me. The political dynamics never quite aligned with an optimal set of leadership personalities and beliefs where I would have had the best leverage, but there was progress, and I am reasonably happy and effective as a part time consultant today, seven years later. Talking about "entitled workers" almost certainly derails the conversation. Perhaps a less charged framing that still captures some of the matter is the mixing of people who Really Care about their work with the Just A Job crowd. The wealth of the mega corps does allow most goals to be accomplished, at great expense, with Just A Job workers, but people that have experienced being embedded with Really Care workers are going to be appalled at the relative effectiveness. The communication culture does tend a bit passive-aggressive for my taste, but I can see why it evolves that way in large organizations. I've only been officially dinged by HR once for insensitive language in a post, but a few people have reached out privately with some gentle suggestions about better communication. All in all, not a perfect fairy tale outcome, but I still consider taking the acquisition offer as the correct thing for the company in hindsight.
  • yks 6y ago
    Often workers are perfectly capable and eager of Really Caring but then the company incentives and politics force them into Just A Job category. Especially when joining Big Tech not via acquihire.
  • choppaface 6y ago
    While I totally agree with your Really Care and Just A Job characterization, I think that money does play a significant role in overall picture. People behave very differently after they run into six, seven, eight figures. And that behavior isn’t perfectly correlated with how much they put into the job. There’s a fair place for the “entitled” narrative, and when these people have outsized leverage on the company or product, it can create outsized problems.
• choppaface 6y ago
  It’s telling that the author now wants to hold a discussion on Clubhouse to discuss the post. Lots of different takes on Clubhouse, but today it’s a much more “entitled” venue than Twitter or a Reddit AMA. Holding the talk on Clubhouse shows how much the author values filtering his audience. Whether the blogpost says that or not.
• Jabbles 6y ago
  The Android app store treated us as a 3rd party, there was no pre-installation option and no additional distribution. We did have a lot more marketing dollars to spend but had to spend them like any other company, except we were constrained in what we could do and which 3rd parties we could work with due to corporate policies. All of our growth at Waze post acquisition was from work we did, not support from the mothership. Look for this blogpost to be quoted by Google in one of their antitrust defences.
• draw_down 6y ago
  The entitlement is all over; talking about entitled employees keeps us from turning our attentions elsewhere. Because then we'd have to ask bigger questions and oh boy, our heads may begin to hurt. Let us not forget that industry heads have colluded to suppress pay for engineers. Let us not forget that in general, executives act as though we should be grateful for our pay, rather than being remunerated for building the systems that pour money into their bank accounts. Their compensation is a fact of life, just the way it is. Ours is a handout from the generous leadership team to the undeserving peons. Even the "just a job" framing is a form of entitlement; I should not have employees who simply do a job for a wage, they should really care about that job. And if they have moved from a place of really caring to simply "doing a job", that isn't the fault of leadership or a symptom of the organization. Those people are just, you know, entitled.
  • deckard1 6y ago
    There is definitely more to be said about this dichotomy between the Really Care vs. Doing A Job. The large tech companies are looking for young blood that also happens to be incredibly naive. They are the clueless, in the Gervais Principle[1]. Basically, idiot savants. In addition to colluding to suppress pay, here are ways they optimize for youth and naivety: - They call their HQs a "campus". They create an environment that emulates a university setting. Tourists flock to these "campuses" much like university prospects touring a university. Foosball tables, beanbag chairs, hip decor, etc. It's Peter Pan never-grow-up bullshit. - Leet code interviews. If you're already in your career or have a family (or even a social life), you don't have the hundreds of hours to study. This prevents people from job hopping (salary suppression) and filters out people of a certain age and seniority or those that aren't willing to die for the company. - Company "culture". Netflix has an entire document on this. It's practically a cult. I've had conversations with senior and director-level Facebook employees and the way they light up when talking about things Zuckerberg says or does is, frankly, creeping me out. There is an indocrination program in just about every startup today, that mimics what the FAANGs do. I think it's time someone said it: your trendy corporate "culture" is a soul-sucking vampire on the surface of your rent-seeking, data-hoarding, privacy-invading ad company pretending to be anything but an ad company. If you ask me, if someone "Really Cares" about working at either Facebook or Google, then something is fundamentally off with that person. Like someone gleefully working at Philip Morris. If a person works at Facebook and admits they are a mercenary, that's at least an understandable position. I might not like you any more, but at least I know you're not totally insane. [1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
• autoditype 6y ago
  > When COVID hit and we moved to work from home - a huge amount of complaints began around why cant employees expense food since they are not in the office. While most "real" people were worried about keeping their jobs or finding one, many employees were complaining about expensing their food on top of their salaries/stocks/bonuses. This entitlement continued everywhere - while Google is BY FAR the most employee centric company giving tremendous hard and soft value to its employees, they keep creating imaginary problems to complain about, instead of appreciating the hand they have been dealt. That level of entitlement is incredible. I feel very fortunate to make a well above average salary, and I keep reminding myself that it's unusual, and that I should increase my savings for when the faucet is eventually turned off
  • notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    As much as I felt this guy had some unreasonable thoughts (how hard is it to not swear at work?), This really hit me. Many of tech employees are entitled, same with University students. I don't know why people are like this but it always rubs me wrong.
• CompensatedGrnt 6y ago
  When highly compensated people moan about the less compensated people not putting in the same kind of hours I wonder what kind of blinders they have on. Anyone who has even a little bit of smarts realizes that they generally shouldn't work as hard as their boss, because they will not be compensated the same. Early on in my career I believed the mantra that managers shoulder more risk, so that is why they deserve higher compensation. But in my 30 year career I have never seen anyone in my management chain face legal trouble. At most managers were fired, same as regular employees. Very high level position hiring tends to be slower than lower positions, so you could argue that that is the reason the VP salary should be higher. But the compensation is so out of whack that this doesn't hold water either. Companies could save a lot of money if they paid employees more uniform compensation, and when firing someone, the compensation package would be proportional to how long a person in that position typically takes to find the next job. So maybe an engineer would get a month, and a VP 6 months equivalent of salary.
• danans 6y ago
  I have to wonder who is more entitled, the person who expects to do the 11AM yoga class, or the person who expects his employees' weekend time? To me, the yoga class example is the kind that people can see and point judging fingers at (i.e. images of youthful people in yoga clothes stretching in a nicely lit yoga studio). Expecting your employees to work weekends to meet your vision (especially if without a clear reward system for doing so) sounds like a much more profound form of entitlement. Disclosure: Long time Googler, and my experience with managers at Google has rarely been like the author of the article. When it has, I've voted with my feet and changed projects, or avoided projects like that altogether.
• rkagerer 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. It correlates with what I've (subjectively) experienced from the outside, i.e. my user experience across Google's products has steadily deteriorated over the last decade. This quote really hit home: at the end of every day, I always ask myself "what did I do for our users today". This simple exercise helps keep priorities straight. When I found myself avoiding this question because I was embarrassed by the answer, I knew my time was up.
• shmageggy 6y ago
  On top of the many other points raised in this thread, this bit struck me as really odd > After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users. What? Respecting the privacy and info-rights of your users provides zero value? BigCorp's data policies exist for a reason, one important of which is the law. People (aka his users) clearly valued these things enough to make them the law, so how does complying with what they want provide zero value. This perspective (along with the others pointed out in this thread) betrays what I suspect is a disconnect between what the author defines as "value" and what I and I hope most reasonable people believe makes for a better world. If things like privacy, the ability to take personal days, not having to listen to biased or offensive speech from a superior, etc don't have value, then what does? At a deeper level, it's sad that we have to fight against this all the time. Somehow our society has come to so highly reward these sorts of narrow-minded "value-creators"to the detriment of everything that they don't consider "value".
• dodobirdlord 6y ago
  > The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a significant waste of resources and focus. After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users. So what he is saying is that he wouldn’t have done it if he wasn’t forced to. Perhaps there’s a lesson here about what sort of organizations are trustworthy custodians of data and what sort of organizations are not.
• arduinomancer 6y ago
  So much of the discussion here is superfluous. Why should the employee care about "users" if their equity doesn't increase in value based on those users? Like--its as simple as that, don't blame the employees for being entitled here. If my equity isn't related to my job then they're not "my users", and I'm not a true owner of the product.
• toss1 6y ago
  >> All of our growth at Waze post acquisition was from work we did, not support from the mothership. Looking back, we could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently had we stayed independent. Pretty quickly debunks the idea of being better able to grow with a bigger budget from a 'mothership'. The constraints from the mothership create more drag than the extra budget creates lift.
• spondyl 6y ago
  > Having trouble scheduling meetings because “it's the new Yoga instructor lesson I cannot miss” or “I’m taking a personal day” drove me crazy. The worst thing is that this was inline with the policies and norms - I was the weirdo who wanted to push things fast and expected some level of personal sacrifice when needed. As someone who originally worked 3 years of retail, I can relate to this feeling. To be clear, I don't (and did not) advocate for working on weekends or any crap like that but I had that feeling of looking over my shoulder in fear for quite a long time. As a bit of context, retail has slow creep to it where it can slowly consume your life if you're not careful. Everything is always understaffed so "Can you please just work another day" starts out as a feel good "I want to help" but quickly turns into an implicit expectation. If you start turning it down, nothing happens but socially, you feel like you're letting the team down. A lot of it comes from the feeling of "We're the underdogs", even if it's intra-store such as the storemen (people who work in the loading bays) being understaffed and feeling like the underdogs compared to the grocery/longlife department. Anyway, when I started out in tech, I was arguably pretty paranoid and couldn't understand why everyone seemed so nice (in comparison). What do you mean there's a gym? How can you just wander upstairs to the vending machine or to go for a nap without restrictions? I never outright asked these things and I understood it on a business and social level but I could never overcome the feeling that I'd get caught out one day and held up as letting everyone down in some way. I suppose it helps to point out that at the bottom end, a night shift worker had doused themselves in petrol only to not have it in them to follow through. My manager (23 at the time as was I) told me the story in the morning, he ended his recount by chuckling and saying "I guess he couldn't even do that right". While my current employer is more traditional (read: corporate) to some extent, I sort of wish I had taken more advantage of those opportunities, even if I didn't understand them. I'm sure having a nap every so often would probably help. I can confirm that, as someone who is simply an average developer, that not taking breaks doesn't really seem to be very effective, haha. Beats me if this comment is insightgul in anyway but I guess something something work life balance is good? One last thing: Something I found fascinating recently is that Dave Cutler (the NT kernel architect) always took his holidays religiously. That surprised me given my false assumption is that someone who churns out that much work (and is considered a craftsman) must surely be going all out. Personally I hate the idea of hustle culture but it's hard not to be affected by it. If anyone can speak to the philosophy behind people who also religiously take holidays, I mean, on one hand it's clearly obvious that rest is good but I feel like it'd be helpful to read more about it anyway as someone who has struggled greatly actually relaxing :)
• deanCommie 6y ago
  > > That tolerance is gone at Google and “words” > “content” is the new Silicon Valley mantra of political correctness. You can say terrible things as long as your pronouns are correct or can say super important things but use one wrong word and it's off to HR for you I find that people who make this comparison are usually highly un-empathetic, and are not as decent in their hearts as they their own self-image suggests. #1: Words matter. I used to think they didn't either. "It's just words". But they matter. That "slur" that you absentmindedly threw out as a joke or a throwaway line in a non-serious context? Someone had that used against them in the past in a threatening, hurtful, aggressive manner. It's not a joke to them. So why should they be forced to endure reliving a past trauma just because you didn't bother updating your slang since the 90's? #2: When you get down deep enough, you find a lot of time these folks have worse things going on in their hearts than they let on. Even in this example. "So long as your pronouns are correct" makes me think this person thinks preferred pronouns are a ridiculous waste of time, and are irrelevant. Just what I can infer from their analogy. Which makes me think that this person is not an ally or a supporter of trans/non-binary folks, and his problems go far deeper than just using the "wrong words".
• zuhayeer 6y ago
  Regarding the compensation section, at a large company you're either underpaid or overpaid. The ones who overwhelmingly create the stock growth through their work are drastically underpaid. Everyone else feeds off of it and is basically overpaid. That's why its a great place to rest and vest.
• jonny_eh 6y ago
  > everyone working in the tech space is SUPER LUCKY Proceeds to continue complaining about working at Google.
• voidhorse 6y ago
  Nice read. While the entitlement and firing philosophy definitely are hot-button topics, what struck me was the implication that things like data/tech regulation are “noise”. I disagree. Having well thought out, auditable processes around how you handle data and user privacy is also part of focusing on the user and also part of delivering a good product. Sure you might want to focus on shipping “value” with bells, whistles, and features, but the old-school mentality that one can ignore these other aspects of technology and move quickly and cavalierly is arguably exactly why the push for regulation is so hard right now—the pendulum is swinging the other way precisely because this myopic view of things is so dangerous.
• teawrecks 6y ago
  "All of our growth at Waze post acquisition was from work we did, not support from the mothership. Looking back, we could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently had we stayed independent." Their support was not crushing you. How many serious Waze competitors are there these days?
• OOPMan 6y ago
  yet another blog post describing in depth why my decision to turn down companies larger than a certain size seems to be correct (for me)
• nr2x 6y ago
  "The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a significant waste of resources and focus." ...yet I imagine verifying a feature is not actually illegal is a fairly good use of time.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  The real question is how can Google get away with such poor cultural and managerial practices that would be certain death for any startup or small business. And the answer of course is that they are a monopoly. And I don’t mean this in a “meets the current legal definition in America” sense but in the fuzzy “relatively immune to market forces” / “in equilibrium with a few other incumbents” / “not realistically challenge-able by new small companies” sense. We need new anti trust regulation that is updated for the reality of these giant megacorps. Solving the problem of competition will also help with greater distribution of wealth, but in a meritocratic way. But to get there we need the market to work, and it can’t if you have entities with infinite capital, the ability to starve the market of talent, the profit margin to loss lead, and massive network effects.
• jain9rajat 6y ago
  Its amazing how the author talks about Google employees being "entitled" but he himself was showing entitlement after being acquired. Entitled in the sense they can continue to operate as before, with no accountability and involvement from Google, and start getting perks and paychecks from them and hire and fire at will. While not understanding (beforehand) You are getting acquired, for God's sake. You are under Google's scrutiny and Google will be accountable for what you do - even legally. So yes, there are going to be legal issues. Yes, Google is going to involve itself and it is going to follow those policies. Basically such startup founders want to have the cake and eat it as well. Want to get all the economic benefits of the acquisition, then leverage google in customer acquisition perks etc. but still want google to leave them alone. NO matter how much promise is there pre-acquisition, it is just not going to happen. And that is the way it should be. If they want money with independence, ask google to fund them like a VC instead of asking for an acquisition.
• millified 6y ago
  What a load of shit. Your libertarian preening sure coughs up blood when faced with stacks of cash.
• millified 6y ago
  What a load of shit. Your libertarian preening sure coughs up blood when confronted with stacks of cash.
• Godislove4u 6y ago
  Jesus is mankind’s sole hope. Confess Him as Lord to be saved.