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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

by 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.
        marcus_holmes 6y ago
        Again, I read it differently. It sounded more like a pedantic insistence on company-wide protocol rather than a genuine desire to be careful with user data. But I may be being uncharitable.
        watwut 6y ago
        If you want to keep a company of hundreds or thousands people following some rule, really the only way is if you create processes that check and force that. There is no way to keep company following privacy rules (as weak as they are) without company wide protocol and insistence on it. Otherwise, the pressure from people who want to do other things will ensure that privacy or rules will be ignored.
  - shadowgovt 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." Oh yeah. That's going to be entirely incompatible with how Google does business. Google's primary concern isn't even that their customers care about those things (although they do)... It's the Google is a giant target and there are significant legal consequences for doing things or failing to do things that a jury outside of Google's control will decide after the fact was something they "should have known better" about. Startup companies end up concerned less about this because they have less to lose. A startup company isn't exactly "judgement-proof..." The wrong decision can certainly get them sued out of existence. but the odds of it happening are lower, because at the end of the day they have fewer assets to seize. There's a much smaller target on their backs and fewer high ticket lawyers for whom the possible compensation would justify taking the case. there's no such reasonable constraint on how much you could sue Google for... a case that a high ticket lawyer wins against Google will definitely pay for itself.
vincnetas 6y ago
For me it was the opposite, i was thinking, wow, this is the guy i would like to be working with. But i'm not the one who fits this description: 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.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  “What did I do for the customer today” is often in principle not answerable within megacorps. If you’re the person who fixes a new employee’s password issues, you have to do mental gymnastics like “I helped X fix their password, then X created a new Jira ticket for Y, Y helped scope and plan the ticket in Z’s sprint, Z gathered requirements and assigned it to A, A paired with B and they wrote code that removed extraneous serifs from the new widget font, C reviewed their code, D took the new deployment to the mobile team who QA tested it, then E stamped approval on a new rollout of the app, and now users of iOS 13.6.9 who also specifically only use Firefox Focus won’t see extraneous serifs in the font on the widget tab in their account page. Let’s crack the champagne everyone!” The degree of behemoth incrementalism is so extreme that outside the immediate blast radius of your work, there is no serious, intellectually honest way to connect the dots between your effort and the user. It’s like shipping a rover to Mars. You do a shitload of work and hope several time units later when it actually lands, that your work has some barely perceptible positive contribution to the sum total outcome. And all this is even worse in companies where it’s not clear to anyone whether the user is the product or the customer. Just imagine that. “How did you help the user today?” should make you freeze like a deer in headlights. Do you mean the ad company who can target Starbucks-drinking soccer moms in Texas better now because of our cool new image filter for posting kid sports pictures? Or do you mean the soccer moms themselves? Or do you mean the NSA we are allowing access to all this data on both the advertiser and the soccer moms? Or do you mean the VCs? Leaders who say platitudes like “what did you do for the customer” are just extremely arrogant know-nothings. They can use the stick of “the customer always comes first” to indiscriminately beat, shame or fire anyone that they conveniently need to attack, no matter how unrealistic it is to demand this kind of direct customer impact accounting. Employees aren’t braindead morons who subscribe to your company like a religion. But that is exactly what this type of thinking is meant to induce.
notRobot 6y ago
Yeah, how dare they think that they're entitled to hobbies or a life outside of their job? How dare they take a day off because they're not feeling well and want to take care of themselves? FFS.
- varjag 6y ago
  His point is a job is not UBI, you supposed to contribute in return and adjust your schedule along other workers (aka a 'workday'). I dunno why is that so controversial.
  - spery 6y ago
    That may apply to yoga class at 11am, but asking for a day off? Come on...
    - varjag 6y ago
      Days off are certainly fine, as long you give enough notice for your coworkers to plan around your absence. Not counting emergencies of course.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      Especially at a company like Google, which tracks vacation days as compensation. When you tell a Googler they can't take a day off, you are basically telling them the company will not honor a piece of the compensation package they signed up for. You'd better come to that table with a damn good alternative offer.
    - PascLeRasc 6y ago
      After reading the article I think his only problem was that the 11am yoga employee was taking care of their health in a way that he didn’t understand, so it was bad.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
    Have you missed the part where he things that working nights and weekends is expected in a job? "we have to do whatever it takes to win"?
mmcconnell1618 6y ago
I think the author is correct that some big tech companies create a culture where going to 11am yoga is more important that crunching out a few more lines of code. He's correct that if your focus is on building and scaling product, this culture reduces the velocity of change. However, I see a couple of things the author is missing: 1) Work life balance is about employee long term retention and places like Google spend a lot of energy in hiring, so they optimize for keeping the people they hire. 2) Sometimes an 11am yoga class frees your mind enough to foster creativity. Raw working hours may be reduced but novel solutions might increase. 3) Some tech workers have figured out the odds of hitting it big in a startup or having the next billion dollar idea are not that likely. Instead, they've optimized for a far above average salary with work life balance. There is nothing wrong with choosing that path and this is where the author is missing empathy for people who didn't choose his path.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  It's the sprint versus marathon mindset. A small startup has a finite amount of time to either become a big company in their own right or do something so noteworthy that a big company sees the need to acquire them. Nothing else matters. There are minimal incentives to invest in the long-term welfare of your employees because in the long term, the company doesn't exist. You can't even guarantee that an acquisition will keep the employees you have invested in. Large corporations like Google are incentivized to give their employees reasons to stick around. They can expect the company will be there in 30 years, and they can expect a good employee to put in a career's worth of work for them (and eventually have peer and mentorship contacts that encourage other good potential employees to join the company). This is painting with a broad brush of how the incentives are structured... Not all big companies see it this way and not all small companies see it this way. But it's the behavior the marketplace appears to reward.
  - steveBK123 6y ago
    Re: It's the sprint versus marathon mindset. As someone who did track in high school, the whole agile nomenclature around "sprint" continues to rub me the wrong way. If you aren't a startup facing a launch-or-fail moment, the approach should be much more that of a marathon. I was joking with my wife that "sprint" to me implies that you go all out and then take a long break before you go again. We should be treating the longterm plan like a marathon and the intermediate steps like "splits". If you are working on a product that's been around for years , the idea that you are an all-star for delivering your 5 points the day before your 2 weeks sprint ends and a lazy jerk if you deliver it the day after sprint ends just incentivizes a lot of shorterm-ism and corner cutting. The model of working "all out" and your "break" for planning is a 2 hour meeting in between sprints where you get praised or scorned for a 10% difference in delivery speed is..
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
znpy 6y ago
I'd like to add... That guy seems to be ignoring the point of view of somebody that is not the boss/former-owner of the startup that got acquired.
secondcoming 6y ago
If I swanned off to do yoga during my contracted core hours I'd be sacked
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  In this case, the company is offering the yoga as something you can do during your work hours. Google doesn't really have "contracted core hours" precisely. They have quarterly goals. If you're accomplishing those goals, the corporate culture doesn't much care how. This offers flexibility that can make it easier to accomplish tasks (I knew people who worked 6AM-2PM because the center-of-mass of their team was in a different timezone).
  - secondcoming 6y ago
    Fair enough. But I'd assume that there's an implicit understanding in that agreement that if you're needed for something work-related you probably shouldn't go to yoga, i.e. they assume you'll be an adult about it.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      Correct. It's pretty loose and varies from team to team, but the generally-applicable rule is "We have OKRs each quarter. If we're not hitting them, that's a problem." How a team goes about hitting them is left as the responsibility of the team. One way that process can break down is if you have a manager that's bad at planning or over-promising for your team without testing the wind of how much work their engineers will actually get done. Google makes it pretty easy for demonstrated high-performers to change teams, so if you do that too much you run the risk of hemorrhaging good team members (who can't get promoted if goals aren't met and therefore will seek out a team that knows how to meet goals) and being left trying to get your tasks accomplished with only the people who, for whatever reason, can't transfer.
madeofpalk 6y ago
"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." lmao what a terrible, horrible manager. I would hate working for them, and I would not miss them leaving. Maybe I'm just playing into their "young people don't want to work" stereotype, but if that's what working means, I don't want to do it with them.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  A different way of putting it would be whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work. It's not incongruent with a balanced life. To me It just means occasdinally you might stay late at work, once in awhile an interesting problem gets you working on the company laptop all Saturday, and if something breaks you're not able to log off until you fix it. Doesn't mean you cant take Friday's off of or that you have to skip your yoga class if that's what powers your mojo.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    Absolutely, 100%. I am hugely against working overtime and work life balance is far more important to me than many other factors. But I have worked 12 hour days and weekends few times in the past, because I felt the personal responsibility to either fix something or make sure a launch goes through smoothly. You know when I absolutely wouldn't do it though? If my manager told me that "they expect a level of sacrifice for the company". Nope. Just absolutely categorically nope. Now I'm a manager myself I would never ever ask someone to do this.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      Same. I put in a lot of extra work on the launches of .app and .dev to ensure that they went smoothly (and they did!), because I personally believed in the product we were launching. I did it with no expectation of compensation, though I did end up being compensated for it in the long run anyway with a promotion. I took pride in that work. But if it hadn't been my idea to do so, if it had just been expected of me to work uncompensated nights/weekends at no personal benefit? Hell no. I'm not a manager but I too would never ask someone to do this either.
throwawayffffas 6y ago
Well he said. > 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. I guess he missed the memo that google had already won.
ramraj07 6y ago
It is not a fake problem. Of course, working hard all the time is not a badge to be worn and is not by itself an end, but it's also true that SV tech community is filled to the brim with people thinking very highly of themselves when the reality is they don't contribute much. What the author is asking for is that employees take a degree of personal responsibility without needing to give up on a concept of personal life. I come from academia that's rife with no work life balance and it was positively jarring how badly the pendulum swings in the tech world. There's surely a middle ground that is not by any means unreasonable. Importantly, this is a personal choice. I don't want to be in a team where members don't take personal responsibility, and I am willing to contribute the same. If Google does not allow such a team to operate with its own norms then the author is justified in saying it's not a good fit. And to be clear, are you seriously saying that any person saying, "what? Sushi again?" Is actually going to have a real empathizable reason for saying so? Honestly Google sounds like it's filled with what can be considered the modern equivalent of upper middle class government administrators of past eras who don't really contribute much, couldn't give a rats ass about much more than what their weekend plans are and what their paycheck is and I will be more than happy that they are happy they don't work with someone like me if that thought process ever came up. Of course, companies like Google have found a way to factory-fy this system of getting "maybe mediocre but never truly bad" engineers and scale a massive software conglomeration that runs the world. But this is only possible because of massive excesses these companies procure through counterproductive and anticompetitive revenue streams like ads and data aggregation, so in some ways people in HN want to complain about how these big tech companies are evil but at the same time draw heinously enormous paychecks from them and act as if they truly deserve them. That seems to be the problem.
- iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
  > Honestly Google sounds like it's filled with what can be considered the modern equivalent of upper middle class government administrators of past eras I like this, I've thought this before too about a lot of big tech companies that are throwing off cash and essentially want to make sure they have a bunch of top people but don't really need them for anything particular day-to-day. So the employees become a kind of aristocracy with a few symbolic duties, but largely a life of leisure, attending company events and reading clubs and pushing paper back and forth, while making salaries high enough they dont have to worry about anything. I know this is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it, and I definitely know environments where one could behave that way.
A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
I think you nailed it. I will admit that there are pieces of this article that I find myself nodding to, but I am not sure I would want to work for this person. "The challenge was that, as Google employees, we were subject to all of the Corporate hiring practices. 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." Good grief. If you had any sense as a manager, you did not do that either in the previous non-google position. The unemployment insurance cost alone is not worth it. Sometimes those corporate practices are guided by some reason. "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 am more sympathetic here, because I agree that we are way too delicate language-wise in corporate land, but even then I don't say whatever comes to mind. Passionate is barely an excuse here. When you speak publicly ( panels, events ), you should know your audience and have a modicum of self-control. "Young people want it all - they want to get promoted quickly, achieve economic independence," Lol. Duh. All of a sudden, I can sort of understand, why 'OK boomer' became a meme.
chovybizzass 6y ago
far too common these days. I haven't been able to find a job in a year (fe/js) due to these people rising up the last couple of years or so.
slibhb 6y ago
If they really complained about not getting compensated for buying their own food during lockdown I think "entitled" is a fair descriptor. This is the first time I've read one of these blogs where the author complains about it being "practically impossible to fire someone". To me, that adds an air of authenticity to the complaining. In my experience too, the inability to fire people for reasons other than "this person is a real jerk" has been a looming problem. As far as work-life balance goes, I think I agree with him there too. I have a lot of privileges and I assume Google employees have even more. But the flipside of that is that, when there's a deadline, I'm very invested in meeting it, even if that means working a lot of hours. To me those two things are related: the privileges are justified by the periods of intense, focused work.
- asidiali 6y ago
  Agree and disagree. Without pushing a point too hard, I will ask you this - what if your employment contract states you are to receive $X,000 per year in food or food stipend? Would you be in favor of employees pushing for subsidized food while remote? Ok, and there’s a deadline at work. There’s also a deadline at your spouses work, your kid is sick, and they took off work to look after them last time. What do you do?
  - etripe 6y ago
    Roll initiative! On a more serious note, that all depends on the type of contract you've got. If you're salaried and get a constant wage, you're not exactly being compensated for going above and beyond, especially in terms of hours worked. Surely, if the work to be done is important, that means the employer is willing to pay for the privilege of having it done during off hours? If not, I would argue the employer, not the employee is feeling entitled.
    - asidiali 6y ago
      Totally agree with what you’ve said. Sure yeah, if you’re getting the equivalent of overtime or time-and-a-half, ok, it may become worth your time and like you said you are getting compensated for the extra effort and sacrifice. But the author of the article is talking about salaried FTE Google employees. I’m a salaried tech employee, I don’t earn extra comp for working weekends. I assume that is the norm. Hence why the authors attitude is indeed entitled, and not the employees, as you’ve stated.
rkangel 6y ago
Yes, that made me want to run a mile from ever working for him. He is right that we are entitled though. As software engineers we are extremely lucky to be in a profession that is in demand by companies that make (a lot of) money. Companies compete for us with salaries, quality of work and other benefits. This puts us in a lucky minority compared to the rest of the population (even if we limit to talking about developed nations). We have expectations based on that. Some things are the norm for us. We should absolutely try to be aware of that and not take it for granted, and we should absolutely understand that for others it is the norm. Everyone feels entitled to what they get all the time. You need to accept reality, even if you don't like it.
andor 6y ago
That's not how I read it. He clearly states that he understands the value of work-life balance, but there are workplaces where work is just not the #1 priority during business hours anymore. And that's totally fine and I'm happy if it works for people and their employers. But it's not viable for startups that need to find product-market-fit before burning through all their cash. Or companies trying to make best-in-class products.
- BikiniPrince 6y ago
  It doesn’t really work long term for large companies either. Unless you are riding the back of some cash cow you do have to worry about profit. I have watched the complete erosion of our tech leads and the incoming hires bear so little responsibility. Management is also quite aware of what they have done, but half of them are on the way out too.
jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y ago
Get your test levels checked.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
I didn't read it as that bad - he states it should be a balance. Balancing work and life means if you get the Yoga session at 11am, then you're also OK with getting paged at 11pm to fix server downtime. When I've managed teams, I always held that it's quid-pro-quo. If I want the team to stay late to meet the deadline, then I'm OK with them leaving early to pick the kids up from school (though not on the same day, obviously). If they need to take the morning off to go to the dentist, that's cool as long as they're OK with getting a call on the weekend if there's a problem. It's a give-and-take. If the give-and-take gets too much, one way or another, then that's something we can talk about at a regular one-to-one and work out.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  At googles scale you would have shift coverage for that shurly
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    good point - at that scale the "team" includes all the people you'd ever need to cover every eventuality
andrew_ 6y ago
The point that's missing here is that there will _always_ be a generational divide. Young will always see Old as antiquated, out-of-touch. Old will always see Young as entitled, perhaps flippant, and out-of-touch. Neither perspective is invalid.
coding123 6y ago
> 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. I 100% get his position here. I definitely want to be surrounded by people that are grateful.
ghoshbishakh 6y ago
I absolutely agree about the fact that us young CS engineers often forget how lucky we are to exist in this space. I also support the point that the author is trying to make about work life balance. If you are passionate about building something, you would always want your team to be as passionate. And that would mean sacrificing other stuff in your life since this product is also a large part of your life. In other words, "work life balance" treats work separate to life. Which often might not be the case. There can definitely be an overlap between work and life.
- cashewchoo 6y ago
  Because unless you have significant equity in a company, your work is literally not your life. Your life consists of things you don't lose instantly if you're fired "for any lawful reason including no reason". The US is potentially one of the worst places to get work and life mixed up without a securitized, legally binding combination of your work and life.
twox2 6y ago
Seriously, and the next point it's followed up with is "entitlement"....
zarkov99 6y ago
Or the people who complain about work-life balance and sushi are the kind of people you would not want to be in the trenches with in any sort of challenge.
tinyhouse 6y ago
Of course, focus on the one thing he said you don't like. Not to mention he didn't really say he's against work life balance. But for some people words are more important than content like he said.
phendrenad2 6y ago
Work-life balance is always available, but you're not entitled to a top-tier salary if you want to 9-to-5 it.
alephnan 6y ago
This irks of an entitled Googler. I reported up to Noam and he's an admirable leader to me. In fact, I will be excited to learn about and join his next project if it has a culture distinct from this Google "work life balance" and the false pretense that "work life balance" == happiness. I was the lowest of low level bricklayers, on the opposite end of the pecking order, but his comments on The Corporation and its entitled / PC constituent members resonated with me. If it didn't resonate with you, that's why you'd probably stick around at Google for a long time. Sure, many Googlers may be happy he left, but that doesn't disprove his points. If anything, it kind of supports Noam's argument. In case someone says "if you don't like it, then leave". I just did. Google is barely the most innovative place for an engineer to work nowadays, nor is compensation "top of market". The rest of the tech world has caught up. Actual top of market pay would at least made me ignorant, for a little bit longer, to the fact that work was unfulfilling. Yeah, we had great work life balance, so what? I'm still expected to be there 9-5, and spending 1/3rd of your life expanding work to fill the time allocated to it doesn't equate happiness. In fact, for me it was outright depression. I'm in a more intense work environment now, pays a fraction of Google, but I am happier on so many fronts. There's much less "abstraction" and needless complexity. Some of us would rather have real work to do than coast or work on projects/problems that simpler do not need to exist. The state of limbo induced by "work life balance" isn't the fault of Noam, because as I interpretted in his blog, the Googleplex Twilight Zone inhibits fully realizing the culture in the executive team's vision. Maybe the vision is a trainwreck or maybe it's brilliant, but I don't believe the "autonomy" afforded by Google allows realizing these extremes. There's so many layers/indirection between me, the bricklayer, and the person at the helm. Combine that with the misaligned incentives in a corporation where resume projects are being advanced, I wasn't even building the great pyramid of Giza as much as I was building some offshoot resort home for one of the scribes that reported up to the priest who reported up to the pharoah.
emdowling 6y ago
I've worked as a freelancer, founder, and employee (for start-ups, scale-ups and now FAANG). The one constant has been my daily exercise session, whether that has been a workout, yoga session or swim. My daily schedule (pre-Covid) usually involves 45 mins at home checking email/chat and addressing anything urgent and modifying my to-do list for the day. Then it's to the gym for 90 minutes, and in the office by 10:30am. It's what I need to do and it keeps me sane. Building a startup in my early 20's was easily the most stressful period of my life. Going for a swim each day was probably the single most important thing that got me through it in one piece. I have a lot of respect for what the author has accomplished; building one of the top tech products and brands in America is ridiculously hard. However, this article shows a lack of empathy for how people work and what they need.
CydeWeys 6y ago
That was my take-away as well. This might be the guy you want to do business with if you're an investor, but that ain't me; I'm just an employee. This is NOT the kind of guy you wanna be doing business with if you're his employee. And it's not just his complaints about employees' supposed entitlement; he's also complaining that a lot of them were making too much money (in his view)! Opt me the fuck out of that! Also he spends a lot of time defending his "short fuse" and his saying of offensive things; in my experience, when someone's own side of the story is that bad, it's actually much worse even from the other side (i.e. the side anyone not him would be experiencing). You don't want to work for rude assholes. I don't know him well enough to know if he's actually one, but that's how he's coming off in this blog post anyway. Red flags for days.
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
Yeh the whine about hiring and firing was a dead give away - given the low level of employee protection in the USA. Sounds like the author a senior leader (presumably) hasn't internalised what it is to lead - I recall a tweet from a serving Army officer about what you must never do is get used to the fact you can send out some one for coffee and become entitled.
kmeisthax 6y ago
Yeah, I was sort of getting what they were saying until they started complaining about political correctness. If you don't explain what you were being censured or censored over, I'm just going to assume it's some vile sexist or racist remark, because 9 times out of 10 that IS the quiet part. I'm starting to think the Bay Area trend of hyperfocusing on identity politics is just the trendy way of deposing shitty managers.
the_local_host 6y ago
Indeed. I'm struck by the contrast between this complaint from the author... > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more and this other complaint... > The product is a tool to advance the employees career, not a passion, mission or economic game changer. The author wants employees who perceive their job as a passion, and a mission, who can be fired as soon as their role is no longer needed? That strikes me as more "entitled" than keeping a Yoga class blocked off in your schedule.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
From the article: > 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. While at the same time wanting to fire the employee as soon as they don’t need the skill. The commitment is entirely a one way street.

by 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.
      - marcus_holmes 6y ago
        Again, I read it differently. It sounded more like a pedantic insistence on company-wide protocol rather than a genuine desire to be careful with user data. But I may be being uncharitable.
        watwut 6y ago
        If you want to keep a company of hundreds or thousands people following some rule, really the only way is if you create processes that check and force that. There is no way to keep company following privacy rules (as weak as they are) without company wide protocol and insistence on it. Otherwise, the pressure from people who want to do other things will ensure that privacy or rules will be ignored.
- shadowgovt 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." Oh yeah. That's going to be entirely incompatible with how Google does business. Google's primary concern isn't even that their customers care about those things (although they do)... It's the Google is a giant target and there are significant legal consequences for doing things or failing to do things that a jury outside of Google's control will decide after the fact was something they "should have known better" about. Startup companies end up concerned less about this because they have less to lose. A startup company isn't exactly "judgement-proof..." The wrong decision can certainly get them sued out of existence. but the odds of it happening are lower, because at the end of the day they have fewer assets to seize. There's a much smaller target on their backs and fewer high ticket lawyers for whom the possible compensation would justify taking the case. there's no such reasonable constraint on how much you could sue Google for... a case that a high ticket lawyer wins against Google will definitely pay for itself.

vincnetas 6y ago

For me it was the opposite, i was thinking, wow, this is the guy i would like to be working with. But i'm not the one who fits this description: 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.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
“What did I do for the customer today” is often in principle not answerable within megacorps. If you’re the person who fixes a new employee’s password issues, you have to do mental gymnastics like “I helped X fix their password, then X created a new Jira ticket for Y, Y helped scope and plan the ticket in Z’s sprint, Z gathered requirements and assigned it to A, A paired with B and they wrote code that removed extraneous serifs from the new widget font, C reviewed their code, D took the new deployment to the mobile team who QA tested it, then E stamped approval on a new rollout of the app, and now users of iOS 13.6.9 who also specifically only use Firefox Focus won’t see extraneous serifs in the font on the widget tab in their account page. Let’s crack the champagne everyone!” The degree of behemoth incrementalism is so extreme that outside the immediate blast radius of your work, there is no serious, intellectually honest way to connect the dots between your effort and the user. It’s like shipping a rover to Mars. You do a shitload of work and hope several time units later when it actually lands, that your work has some barely perceptible positive contribution to the sum total outcome. And all this is even worse in companies where it’s not clear to anyone whether the user is the product or the customer. Just imagine that. “How did you help the user today?” should make you freeze like a deer in headlights. Do you mean the ad company who can target Starbucks-drinking soccer moms in Texas better now because of our cool new image filter for posting kid sports pictures? Or do you mean the soccer moms themselves? Or do you mean the NSA we are allowing access to all this data on both the advertiser and the soccer moms? Or do you mean the VCs? Leaders who say platitudes like “what did you do for the customer” are just extremely arrogant know-nothings. They can use the stick of “the customer always comes first” to indiscriminately beat, shame or fire anyone that they conveniently need to attack, no matter how unrealistic it is to demand this kind of direct customer impact accounting. Employees aren’t braindead morons who subscribe to your company like a religion. But that is exactly what this type of thinking is meant to induce.

notRobot 6y ago

Yeah, how dare they think that they're entitled to hobbies or a life outside of their job? How dare they take a day off because they're not feeling well and want to take care of themselves? FFS.

varjag 6y ago
His point is a job is not UBI, you supposed to contribute in return and adjust your schedule along other workers (aka a 'workday'). I dunno why is that so controversial.
- spery 6y ago
  That may apply to yoga class at 11am, but asking for a day off? Come on...
  - varjag 6y ago
    Days off are certainly fine, as long you give enough notice for your coworkers to plan around your absence. Not counting emergencies of course.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Especially at a company like Google, which tracks vacation days as compensation. When you tell a Googler they can't take a day off, you are basically telling them the company will not honor a piece of the compensation package they signed up for. You'd better come to that table with a damn good alternative offer.
  - PascLeRasc 6y ago
    After reading the article I think his only problem was that the 11am yoga employee was taking care of their health in a way that he didn’t understand, so it was bad.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
  Have you missed the part where he things that working nights and weekends is expected in a job? "we have to do whatever it takes to win"?

mmcconnell1618 6y ago

I think the author is correct that some big tech companies create a culture where going to 11am yoga is more important that crunching out a few more lines of code. He's correct that if your focus is on building and scaling product, this culture reduces the velocity of change. However, I see a couple of things the author is missing: 1) Work life balance is about employee long term retention and places like Google spend a lot of energy in hiring, so they optimize for keeping the people they hire. 2) Sometimes an 11am yoga class frees your mind enough to foster creativity. Raw working hours may be reduced but novel solutions might increase. 3) Some tech workers have figured out the odds of hitting it big in a startup or having the next billion dollar idea are not that likely. Instead, they've optimized for a far above average salary with work life balance. There is nothing wrong with choosing that path and this is where the author is missing empathy for people who didn't choose his path.

shadowgovt 6y ago
It's the sprint versus marathon mindset. A small startup has a finite amount of time to either become a big company in their own right or do something so noteworthy that a big company sees the need to acquire them. Nothing else matters. There are minimal incentives to invest in the long-term welfare of your employees because in the long term, the company doesn't exist. You can't even guarantee that an acquisition will keep the employees you have invested in. Large corporations like Google are incentivized to give their employees reasons to stick around. They can expect the company will be there in 30 years, and they can expect a good employee to put in a career's worth of work for them (and eventually have peer and mentorship contacts that encourage other good potential employees to join the company). This is painting with a broad brush of how the incentives are structured... Not all big companies see it this way and not all small companies see it this way. But it's the behavior the marketplace appears to reward.
- steveBK123 6y ago
  Re: It's the sprint versus marathon mindset. As someone who did track in high school, the whole agile nomenclature around "sprint" continues to rub me the wrong way. If you aren't a startup facing a launch-or-fail moment, the approach should be much more that of a marathon. I was joking with my wife that "sprint" to me implies that you go all out and then take a long break before you go again. We should be treating the longterm plan like a marathon and the intermediate steps like "splits". If you are working on a product that's been around for years , the idea that you are an all-star for delivering your 5 points the day before your 2 weeks sprint ends and a lazy jerk if you deliver it the day after sprint ends just incentivizes a lot of shorterm-ism and corner cutting. The model of working "all out" and your "break" for planning is a 2 hour meeting in between sprints where you get praised or scorned for a 10% difference in delivery speed is..

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

znpy 6y ago

I'd like to add... That guy seems to be ignoring the point of view of somebody that is not the boss/former-owner of the startup that got acquired.

secondcoming 6y ago

If I swanned off to do yoga during my contracted core hours I'd be sacked

shadowgovt 6y ago
In this case, the company is offering the yoga as something you can do during your work hours. Google doesn't really have "contracted core hours" precisely. They have quarterly goals. If you're accomplishing those goals, the corporate culture doesn't much care how. This offers flexibility that can make it easier to accomplish tasks (I knew people who worked 6AM-2PM because the center-of-mass of their team was in a different timezone).
- secondcoming 6y ago
  Fair enough. But I'd assume that there's an implicit understanding in that agreement that if you're needed for something work-related you probably shouldn't go to yoga, i.e. they assume you'll be an adult about it.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Correct. It's pretty loose and varies from team to team, but the generally-applicable rule is "We have OKRs each quarter. If we're not hitting them, that's a problem." How a team goes about hitting them is left as the responsibility of the team. One way that process can break down is if you have a manager that's bad at planning or over-promising for your team without testing the wind of how much work their engineers will actually get done. Google makes it pretty easy for demonstrated high-performers to change teams, so if you do that too much you run the risk of hemorrhaging good team members (who can't get promoted if goals aren't met and therefore will seek out a team that knows how to meet goals) and being left trying to get your tasks accomplished with only the people who, for whatever reason, can't transfer.

madeofpalk 6y ago

"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." lmao what a terrible, horrible manager. I would hate working for them, and I would not miss them leaving. Maybe I'm just playing into their "young people don't want to work" stereotype, but if that's what working means, I don't want to do it with them.

ramraj07 6y ago
A different way of putting it would be whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work. It's not incongruent with a balanced life. To me It just means occasdinally you might stay late at work, once in awhile an interesting problem gets you working on the company laptop all Saturday, and if something breaks you're not able to log off until you fix it. Doesn't mean you cant take Friday's off of or that you have to skip your yoga class if that's what powers your mojo.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Absolutely, 100%. I am hugely against working overtime and work life balance is far more important to me than many other factors. But I have worked 12 hour days and weekends few times in the past, because I felt the personal responsibility to either fix something or make sure a launch goes through smoothly. You know when I absolutely wouldn't do it though? If my manager told me that "they expect a level of sacrifice for the company". Nope. Just absolutely categorically nope. Now I'm a manager myself I would never ever ask someone to do this.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Same. I put in a lot of extra work on the launches of .app and .dev to ensure that they went smoothly (and they did!), because I personally believed in the product we were launching. I did it with no expectation of compensation, though I did end up being compensated for it in the long run anyway with a promotion. I took pride in that work. But if it hadn't been my idea to do so, if it had just been expected of me to work uncompensated nights/weekends at no personal benefit? Hell no. I'm not a manager but I too would never ask someone to do this either.

throwawayffffas 6y ago

Well he said. > 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. I guess he missed the memo that google had already won.

ramraj07 6y ago

It is not a fake problem. Of course, working hard all the time is not a badge to be worn and is not by itself an end, but it's also true that SV tech community is filled to the brim with people thinking very highly of themselves when the reality is they don't contribute much. What the author is asking for is that employees take a degree of personal responsibility without needing to give up on a concept of personal life. I come from academia that's rife with no work life balance and it was positively jarring how badly the pendulum swings in the tech world. There's surely a middle ground that is not by any means unreasonable. Importantly, this is a personal choice. I don't want to be in a team where members don't take personal responsibility, and I am willing to contribute the same. If Google does not allow such a team to operate with its own norms then the author is justified in saying it's not a good fit. And to be clear, are you seriously saying that any person saying, "what? Sushi again?" Is actually going to have a real empathizable reason for saying so? Honestly Google sounds like it's filled with what can be considered the modern equivalent of upper middle class government administrators of past eras who don't really contribute much, couldn't give a rats ass about much more than what their weekend plans are and what their paycheck is and I will be more than happy that they are happy they don't work with someone like me if that thought process ever came up. Of course, companies like Google have found a way to factory-fy this system of getting "maybe mediocre but never truly bad" engineers and scale a massive software conglomeration that runs the world. But this is only possible because of massive excesses these companies procure through counterproductive and anticompetitive revenue streams like ads and data aggregation, so in some ways people in HN want to complain about how these big tech companies are evil but at the same time draw heinously enormous paychecks from them and act as if they truly deserve them. That seems to be the problem.

iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
> Honestly Google sounds like it's filled with what can be considered the modern equivalent of upper middle class government administrators of past eras I like this, I've thought this before too about a lot of big tech companies that are throwing off cash and essentially want to make sure they have a bunch of top people but don't really need them for anything particular day-to-day. So the employees become a kind of aristocracy with a few symbolic duties, but largely a life of leisure, attending company events and reading clubs and pushing paper back and forth, while making salaries high enough they dont have to worry about anything. I know this is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it, and I definitely know environments where one could behave that way.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago

I think you nailed it. I will admit that there are pieces of this article that I find myself nodding to, but I am not sure I would want to work for this person. "The challenge was that, as Google employees, we were subject to all of the Corporate hiring practices. 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." Good grief. If you had any sense as a manager, you did not do that either in the previous non-google position. The unemployment insurance cost alone is not worth it. Sometimes those corporate practices are guided by some reason. "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 am more sympathetic here, because I agree that we are way too delicate language-wise in corporate land, but even then I don't say whatever comes to mind. Passionate is barely an excuse here. When you speak publicly ( panels, events ), you should know your audience and have a modicum of self-control. "Young people want it all - they want to get promoted quickly, achieve economic independence," Lol. Duh. All of a sudden, I can sort of understand, why 'OK boomer' became a meme.

chovybizzass 6y ago

far too common these days. I haven't been able to find a job in a year (fe/js) due to these people rising up the last couple of years or so.

slibhb 6y ago

If they really complained about not getting compensated for buying their own food during lockdown I think "entitled" is a fair descriptor. This is the first time I've read one of these blogs where the author complains about it being "practically impossible to fire someone". To me, that adds an air of authenticity to the complaining. In my experience too, the inability to fire people for reasons other than "this person is a real jerk" has been a looming problem. As far as work-life balance goes, I think I agree with him there too. I have a lot of privileges and I assume Google employees have even more. But the flipside of that is that, when there's a deadline, I'm very invested in meeting it, even if that means working a lot of hours. To me those two things are related: the privileges are justified by the periods of intense, focused work.

asidiali 6y ago
Agree and disagree. Without pushing a point too hard, I will ask you this - what if your employment contract states you are to receive $X,000 per year in food or food stipend? Would you be in favor of employees pushing for subsidized food while remote? Ok, and there’s a deadline at work. There’s also a deadline at your spouses work, your kid is sick, and they took off work to look after them last time. What do you do?
- etripe 6y ago
  Roll initiative! On a more serious note, that all depends on the type of contract you've got. If you're salaried and get a constant wage, you're not exactly being compensated for going above and beyond, especially in terms of hours worked. Surely, if the work to be done is important, that means the employer is willing to pay for the privilege of having it done during off hours? If not, I would argue the employer, not the employee is feeling entitled.
  - asidiali 6y ago
    Totally agree with what you’ve said. Sure yeah, if you’re getting the equivalent of overtime or time-and-a-half, ok, it may become worth your time and like you said you are getting compensated for the extra effort and sacrifice. But the author of the article is talking about salaried FTE Google employees. I’m a salaried tech employee, I don’t earn extra comp for working weekends. I assume that is the norm. Hence why the authors attitude is indeed entitled, and not the employees, as you’ve stated.

rkangel 6y ago

Yes, that made me want to run a mile from ever working for him. He is right that we are entitled though. As software engineers we are extremely lucky to be in a profession that is in demand by companies that make (a lot of) money. Companies compete for us with salaries, quality of work and other benefits. This puts us in a lucky minority compared to the rest of the population (even if we limit to talking about developed nations). We have expectations based on that. Some things are the norm for us. We should absolutely try to be aware of that and not take it for granted, and we should absolutely understand that for others it is the norm. Everyone feels entitled to what they get all the time. You need to accept reality, even if you don't like it.

andor 6y ago

That's not how I read it. He clearly states that he understands the value of work-life balance, but there are workplaces where work is just not the #1 priority during business hours anymore. And that's totally fine and I'm happy if it works for people and their employers. But it's not viable for startups that need to find product-market-fit before burning through all their cash. Or companies trying to make best-in-class products.

BikiniPrince 6y ago
It doesn’t really work long term for large companies either. Unless you are riding the back of some cash cow you do have to worry about profit. I have watched the complete erosion of our tech leads and the incoming hires bear so little responsibility. Management is also quite aware of what they have done, but half of them are on the way out too.

jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 6y ago

Get your test levels checked.

marcus_holmes 6y ago

I didn't read it as that bad - he states it should be a balance. Balancing work and life means if you get the Yoga session at 11am, then you're also OK with getting paged at 11pm to fix server downtime. When I've managed teams, I always held that it's quid-pro-quo. If I want the team to stay late to meet the deadline, then I'm OK with them leaving early to pick the kids up from school (though not on the same day, obviously). If they need to take the morning off to go to the dentist, that's cool as long as they're OK with getting a call on the weekend if there's a problem. It's a give-and-take. If the give-and-take gets too much, one way or another, then that's something we can talk about at a regular one-to-one and work out.

Mauricebranagh 6y ago
At googles scale you would have shift coverage for that shurly
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  good point - at that scale the "team" includes all the people you'd ever need to cover every eventuality

andrew_ 6y ago

The point that's missing here is that there will _always_ be a generational divide. Young will always see Old as antiquated, out-of-touch. Old will always see Young as entitled, perhaps flippant, and out-of-touch. Neither perspective is invalid.

coding123 6y ago

> 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. I 100% get his position here. I definitely want to be surrounded by people that are grateful.

ghoshbishakh 6y ago

I absolutely agree about the fact that us young CS engineers often forget how lucky we are to exist in this space. I also support the point that the author is trying to make about work life balance. If you are passionate about building something, you would always want your team to be as passionate. And that would mean sacrificing other stuff in your life since this product is also a large part of your life. In other words, "work life balance" treats work separate to life. Which often might not be the case. There can definitely be an overlap between work and life.

cashewchoo 6y ago
Because unless you have significant equity in a company, your work is literally not your life. Your life consists of things you don't lose instantly if you're fired "for any lawful reason including no reason". The US is potentially one of the worst places to get work and life mixed up without a securitized, legally binding combination of your work and life.

twox2 6y ago

Seriously, and the next point it's followed up with is "entitlement"....

zarkov99 6y ago

Or the people who complain about work-life balance and sushi are the kind of people you would not want to be in the trenches with in any sort of challenge.

tinyhouse 6y ago

Of course, focus on the one thing he said you don't like. Not to mention he didn't really say he's against work life balance. But for some people words are more important than content like he said.

phendrenad2 6y ago

Work-life balance is always available, but you're not entitled to a top-tier salary if you want to 9-to-5 it.

alephnan 6y ago

This irks of an entitled Googler. I reported up to Noam and he's an admirable leader to me. In fact, I will be excited to learn about and join his next project if it has a culture distinct from this Google "work life balance" and the false pretense that "work life balance" == happiness. I was the lowest of low level bricklayers, on the opposite end of the pecking order, but his comments on The Corporation and its entitled / PC constituent members resonated with me. If it didn't resonate with you, that's why you'd probably stick around at Google for a long time. Sure, many Googlers may be happy he left, but that doesn't disprove his points. If anything, it kind of supports Noam's argument. In case someone says "if you don't like it, then leave". I just did. Google is barely the most innovative place for an engineer to work nowadays, nor is compensation "top of market". The rest of the tech world has caught up. Actual top of market pay would at least made me ignorant, for a little bit longer, to the fact that work was unfulfilling. Yeah, we had great work life balance, so what? I'm still expected to be there 9-5, and spending 1/3rd of your life expanding work to fill the time allocated to it doesn't equate happiness. In fact, for me it was outright depression. I'm in a more intense work environment now, pays a fraction of Google, but I am happier on so many fronts. There's much less "abstraction" and needless complexity. Some of us would rather have real work to do than coast or work on projects/problems that simpler do not need to exist. The state of limbo induced by "work life balance" isn't the fault of Noam, because as I interpretted in his blog, the Googleplex Twilight Zone inhibits fully realizing the culture in the executive team's vision. Maybe the vision is a trainwreck or maybe it's brilliant, but I don't believe the "autonomy" afforded by Google allows realizing these extremes. There's so many layers/indirection between me, the bricklayer, and the person at the helm. Combine that with the misaligned incentives in a corporation where resume projects are being advanced, I wasn't even building the great pyramid of Giza as much as I was building some offshoot resort home for one of the scribes that reported up to the priest who reported up to the pharoah.

emdowling 6y ago

I've worked as a freelancer, founder, and employee (for start-ups, scale-ups and now FAANG). The one constant has been my daily exercise session, whether that has been a workout, yoga session or swim. My daily schedule (pre-Covid) usually involves 45 mins at home checking email/chat and addressing anything urgent and modifying my to-do list for the day. Then it's to the gym for 90 minutes, and in the office by 10:30am. It's what I need to do and it keeps me sane. Building a startup in my early 20's was easily the most stressful period of my life. Going for a swim each day was probably the single most important thing that got me through it in one piece. I have a lot of respect for what the author has accomplished; building one of the top tech products and brands in America is ridiculously hard. However, this article shows a lack of empathy for how people work and what they need.

CydeWeys 6y ago

That was my take-away as well. This might be the guy you want to do business with if you're an investor, but that ain't me; I'm just an employee. This is NOT the kind of guy you wanna be doing business with if you're his employee. And it's not just his complaints about employees' supposed entitlement; he's also complaining that a lot of them were making too much money (in his view)! Opt me the fuck out of that! Also he spends a lot of time defending his "short fuse" and his saying of offensive things; in my experience, when someone's own side of the story is that bad, it's actually much worse even from the other side (i.e. the side anyone not him would be experiencing). You don't want to work for rude assholes. I don't know him well enough to know if he's actually one, but that's how he's coming off in this blog post anyway. Red flags for days.

Mauricebranagh 6y ago

Yeh the whine about hiring and firing was a dead give away - given the low level of employee protection in the USA. Sounds like the author a senior leader (presumably) hasn't internalised what it is to lead - I recall a tweet from a serving Army officer about what you must never do is get used to the fact you can send out some one for coffee and become entitled.

kmeisthax 6y ago

Yeah, I was sort of getting what they were saying until they started complaining about political correctness. If you don't explain what you were being censured or censored over, I'm just going to assume it's some vile sexist or racist remark, because 9 times out of 10 that IS the quiet part. I'm starting to think the Bay Area trend of hyperfocusing on identity politics is just the trendy way of deposing shitty managers.

the_local_host 6y ago

Indeed. I'm struck by the contrast between this complaint from the author... > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more and this other complaint... > The product is a tool to advance the employees career, not a passion, mission or economic game changer. The author wants employees who perceive their job as a passion, and a mission, who can be fired as soon as their role is no longer needed? That strikes me as more "entitled" than keeping a Yoga class blocked off in your schedule.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

From the article: > 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. While at the same time wanting to fire the employee as soon as they don’t need the skill. The commitment is entirely a one way street.