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Leaving Google

478 points by edward 5y ago

josteink 5y ago
What an incredibly level-headed write-up. Imagine working somewhere for 17 years and then facing this: > The full story is complex but effectively a bureaucratic mistake led to my position falling into question, despite plenty of support for keeping me around from my immediate management chain. I’ll just go ahead and admit that had this happened to me, I would certainly act a bit more salty over it.
- nly 5y ago
  What is he implying here? He was told he could work remotely and then they went back on it?
  - vishnugupta 5y ago
    > my position falling into question I interpreted it as the powers that be began to question the value of his role/position.
    - paganel 5y ago
      That was my interpretation, too. One would think that after 17 years at a company like Google one wouldn't need to have "to prove" himself/herself anymore, crazy.
      - vishnugupta 5y ago
        Unfortunately this is not an isolated case. I have seen it play out way too often with individual contributors (ICs). I have been in enough promo committees to recognise a pattern. You have an IC performing perfectly fine, year after year, producing high quality work. After 3rd or 4th year of them staying in a position some senior director raises the inevitable question; "why is this person not being put up for promotion?" which then leads to "why are they not growing". The person in question is just not interested in growth-treadmill anymore but no, our system won't let them work peacefully. ICs have to either grow or move out. All the while the management layer who create train wreck after train wreck ("bureaucratic mistake" as the author charitably puts it) will seamlessly glide within and between companies. ICs have to prove relentlessly whereas managers coast along.
        oblio 5y ago
        Is that the case for seniors, though? I got the impression that once you do move up a bit, the expectation that you have to be growing forever kind of goes away.
      - dblohm7 5y ago
        In this industry, it never ends.
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      Having worked at Microsoft, I can confidently tell you that a surprising number of people with long (10+) year tenures are sitting around collecting huge salaries and barely contributing. Tenure alone doesn’t make for value, and in fact can sometimes go the other way. There was a principal engineer on my team who literally played video games all day. I know the author isn’t in that category at all, but I can imagine that these companies are using the post pandemic time to prune some leeches.
      - dunkelheit 5y ago
        Mirrors my experience. It is almost painful to watch some of these washed-up OG engineers. I worked at a company that followed a similar trajectory to Google (scaled down quite a bit, of course) and there was a special team reserved for those people where they were working on strange and irrelevant problems of their own devising. Presumably to avoid irking any of the hard-driving execs, they reported directly to the CEO. At one point I sat next to them in the office and couldn't help but notice that on any given day there barely was half of them present. I remember thinking that despite them all being filthy rich it was a very unappealing position to end up in. Another guy I worked directly with. He had at some point a couple hundred reports, but downshifted to an ordinary engineer. I was struck by how profoundly chill and unambitious he was, how indifferent to flaws in his code (entirely lacking any kind of engineer's pride). But at least he was doing honest and useful work. The stories they tell are golden though. As an aside, isn't it a strange quirk in our capitalist society that we perceive workers that were vital for early success but then stopped contributing much as "leeches" but early investors who do the same are totally OK and rightfully own their share of the later pie?
        thehappypm 5y ago
        “ As an aside, isn't it a strange quirk in our capitalist society that we perceive workers that were vital for early success but then stopped contributing much as "leeches" but early investors who do the same are totally OK and rightfully own their share of the later pie?” The distinction here is equity vs payroll. Early investors are paid handsomely in equity. Early employees, typically, are as well, having accumulated stock for a decade plus. However, having early contributors hugely over-impact your payroll isn’t really fair.
  - thrwawayxoogler 5y ago
    Xoogler in a throwaway account. If you look at the linked "my move away from California" post, you'll see that he moved to the Portland, Oregon area during the pandemic. * EDIT * He says that he was working out of the Portland office, but the majority of open engineering roles there (not many in total) are very specialized. My guess is that post-pandemic, now that Google offices will be re-opening, they don't want people spread all over the place, and he wasn't willing to move back to California. While his managers were most likely supportive of him working fully remote, Google isn't very flexible when it comes to fully remote work.
    - bruckie 5y ago
      I work at Google's Portland office (well, at least when there's not a pandemic). We're a pretty normal engineering office—although smaller than many, so there are fewer team choices than in larger offices. Google has become remarkably flexible over the past few months when it comes to fully remote work (see press from May, e.g. https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/05/tech/google-office-remote-work-pandemic/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/05/tech/google-office-remote-wor...). Not quite as flexible as some companies, but it's night-and-day compared to a couple of years ago. The "now that Google offices will be re-opening, they don't want people spread all over the place" conjecture doesn't match what I'm seeing internally; in fact, quite the opposite: there's a much higher acceptance of remote work / "spreading all over the place" than in the past.
reedf1 5y ago
I'm sure this is the sort of person that made google what it is - it's probably a nightmare if they lose enough of these clear-thinking problem solvers with a history of long-term success. When I think "big google salary" I want to think it's going to someone like this, but in reality it's probably going to someone else.
yeuxardents 5y ago
>feelings I have towards the US as a US citizen: it's a place that I know is filled with brilliant, kind, interesting people, and it's a place that has given me nearly everything in my life, including the money to buy the home I now live in and even the health insurance responsible for the birth of my son — but it's also ultimately not something to be anthropomorphized, but rather a faceless machine that makes often bad decisions that I don't have any real influence over. The country that gave me millions sucks. You are not MEANT to have ultimate decision making over anything, thats why you are a cog, in a machine, making 500k$ per year. and you get to complain about it from your mansion SECOND house in arizona, while transiting from palo alto first mansion.
- fake-name 5y ago
  Do you not understand that both of the things can be true?
  - yeuxardents 5y ago
    Could you be more specific about both things that may be true?
    - strken 5y ago
      A country or company can give you nice things personally, and be a good force in the world overall, while still crushing people between the gears of its massive impersonal bureaucracy when they hit an edge case.
      - rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
        Google also pushes ads everywhere, 24/7, and try to get people to read/watch anything provided that the user remains attentive/addicted and that some advertiser pay them top dollar for that. Google search and YouTube (and Android and the rest) may be nice and free) but it's certainly too early to call then 'a good force in the world overall'. I understand that it wasn't your point but I'm surprised Facebook is always presented as the bad guy (doing exactly the same things in different place) but we usually compare 'the good of Google' vs some little mishap (having a single person leaves the mastodonte).
renewiltord 5y ago
Haha what a colossal fuck up from the HR or whatever clown. Imagine losing a top engineer over a bureaucratic error. Well, a win for Figma at least.
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  > over a bureaucratic error Doesn't sound like an error to me. Getting rid of "legacy employees" is always a huge pain in the ass, sounds like his management found a solution. (Even though, frankly, a cowardly one.)
  - katbyte 5y ago
    Guess that all depends on your view of legacy employees who took a company to where it is today
    - higeorge13 5y ago
      At this scale i think nobody cares, and eventually google will continue existing without them.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Honestly, didn’t really consider this, but based on what I know, Google isn’t one to stop people from resting and vesting so it’s a bit strange to interpret this as an attempt from them to offload someone. They don’t usually care. I know a couple of people who do very little every day.
  - finjo 5y ago
    "Legacy employees" sounds like code for "employees we could replace with cheaper new grads".
    - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
      Sometimes, yes. But really there's all kinds, from "we don't want this guy who insists on keeping the old C++ codebase alive" to straight-up people who engage in fraud because they think the company owes them. That said, my personal view is that you should keep "legacy employees" unless they explicitly refuse to work.
raverbashing 5y ago
> The full story is complex but effectively a bureaucratic mistake led to my position falling into question, despite plenty of support for keeping me around from my immediate management chain. So Google fails again at have an actual thinking person do some thinking. Sounds like their customer support. sigh And the end paragraph is on point.
joering2 5y ago
google became such a numb bureaucratic monolith, its really sad, thinking my adventure with internet started around the time Altavista stopped being a think (now mostly using Duck). I used to have gSuite account until I tried to cancel it. There was simply no way! Someone would ask bunch of verification questions via ticket, got them all answered including CNAME domain verification and 2 weeks of silence when I would email them again, a new person would take over the ticket and the whole process of providing the same answers (sometimes previous CS person didn't even wiped out my answers when he hit "reply to") over and over again. I gave up after 2 months and started with chargeback disputes. Since its a corporate account there is too many things attached to my cards so I won't be canceling it. But sure as hell every months for 11 months now, I get charged $6, call my bank and week later got it back through a chargeback dispute. I figured by now its cost them close to $300. And nothing. Just this morning I called my card and sure as every month I disputed the transaction again, explaining that the customer support is non existent. Of course they can bleed billions and I'm not even statistical noise, but goes to show that even the most sophisticated company on the face of Earth can be screwing up pretty easily.
- amelius 5y ago
  > google became such a numb bureaucratic monolith, its really sad It's the same with all those other FAANG companies. Working for them must be very close to being a public servant.
  - borkt 5y ago
    As a public servant the op’s post basically describes my past year as well. People with no long term view on an institution completely misread a situation and refused to do any investigation into what was actually going on. The difference in public service is I got sent on the road to forced resignation specifically because I was working 2-4 hours unpaid each day against policy (without saying a word) to cover for others and keep our departments role in the agency together, which i don’t think would ever Be an issue at google.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    In my experience public servants got way more autonomy in their decisions then any private worker. Saying no is like ... a no. And then there is a formal paper trail to turn it over if anyone wants to.
kylehotchkiss 5y ago
Really nice to hear from somebody who stuck with a company for the long haul. I'm trying to do the same thing, and in my agency I've gotten about half as far as you with interesting and challenging projects while maintaining a unique personal life. All the best at Figma and I hope that if you enjoy it enough to stick around you get another great 17 year run :)
DoreenMichele 5y ago
At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me. Because of the TypeScript work I was also one of ~30 "global approvers", with the access to to approve code changes to any project at the company. Oof. Google will regret this snafu. I hope he's happy at his new job.
cairo140 5y ago
I worked on the infra team for a TypeScript-based product downstream of the author. His and his team's approach and writings influenced at a lot of my thinking about core development, and I'll always be grateful for having had the opportunity to learn from them by osmosis. The success or failure with which any companies hires and retains folks like these is a mystery to me. As the evidence shows, Google (and I suspect almost any >100-person company) is far too much an amorphous glob/slime mold to even have a single coherent approach to this problem. But what are the successful strategies here? How important is it even to retain this kind of talent? How do we know how a company is even doing in this regard? In my meager-in-comparison 6.5 years at Google, while I certainly saw many amazing SWEs come and many go, I'm far from knowing what the real trajectory was. But I can imagine that for many folks, the perceived trajectory would be a major motivating or demotivating factor to stay or to leave themselves.
- HappyTypist 5y ago
  Any large corporation needs to eliminate the bus factor of individual contributors (those who don't pay the management and politics game). You can't have an universally respected engineering legend contradict the board of directors; and the CEO it installs and influences. Thus, you could argue that faceless, kafkaesque, "out of anyone's control" systems for talent management are a feature with trade-offs, not a bug. While I have not worked at Google, simply being a user of its products for the past two decades has taught me that so much of its company culture and values have changed; and rarely for the better.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Of course, you don't want a bus factor with executives either although it generally becomes more complicated as you get higher up at a company. You're not going to casually replace a CEO though you're not going to just shut down the company if they get hit with a bus either.
- varispeed 5y ago
  This is quite simple: - pay. These companies may be paying more than average and amazing if you compare to non-technical jobs, but as an engineer committing your best years to become great at what you do, you find yourself still not being able to afford even a small flat in the area where you work. Meanwhile you hear your company boasting about another record year and billions flowing in. Unfortunately they won't share those with you. That's demotivating and you feel being taken advantage of. - lack of flexibility. For example managers pushing for pairing at all cost and with disregard to neurodivergent people. At the same messaging about equality, support for various social issues and so on. That creates dishonest image of the company and makes you think this is all bs and cheap PR rather than genuine care. - Exploitation. Some companies expect you to do unpaid overtime or that you'll answer your phone outside of work hours. If you want me to work, you pay - I am not a charity. - Rules designed to appease insecure managers, like having to be in person in the office so the manager can "watch you" and be "hands-on" with his or hers team. Again, company is boasting how great they are for the environment and at the same time they drag hundreds of people each day to the office for no reason. We have great tools to do work remotely, there is no longer a need to be in the office. Sell the office and give employees a bonus. - open plan office. I just can't focus in those. There is only so long I can stand wearing noise cancelling headphones and I don't want to hear people behind me chatting loudly what they had for lunch, with occasional bursts of laughter that is piercing my ears. I found that often I actually done the work in the evening at home, whereas the whole time in the office I had to pretend I am busy. One time when I was offered a promotion I asked for private office. The CTO said it's only for him and the board. Well, I quit next month.
xoogler2004 5y ago
As a xoogler who interviewed way back in 2004, let me say that this post sums up my feelings exactly. The people I worked with at Google back then weren’t necessarily there for high six figure salaries. We were there to work with other people like us. We were there to be part of something larger than ourselves. In some sense I felt alone most of the time, and when I interviewed I felt as if I had found my tribe. These are people who made me feel dumb, but also astutely aware that I could improve. I learned so much during my tenure there, and I regret none of it. Perhaps I do regret taking so long to realize the sense of purpose and mission died when Emerald Sea started and good projects (reader, google talk, code search) were being canabalized to prop up a pipe dream that was never going to work. That’s the nexus event in Google’s time line… where things went askew and never came back to normal. Now people only care about perf, OKRs, and levels. Being a poor new grad with no savings and intentionally picking projects that would not get you promoted (but were fun) was frequent back then. The courage to do new things is rewarded in ways different than titles and symbols. Perhaps no “one” is more cognizant of that than the anthropomorphic Google of today.
- mlvljr 5y ago
  "canabalized to prop up a pipe dream" -- nice weed pun there :)
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > The people I worked with at Google back then weren’t necessarily there for high six figure salaries. We were there to work with other people like us. I wonder how much this used to apply to the Valley as a whole.
  - xoogler2004 5y ago
    More than we want to admit and not enough to get us to stay.
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Probably a lot, especially before the money came flooding in.
  - 5y ago
apples_oranges 5y ago
Sigh.. 17 years of Google in the US. I am sure you can easily retire. With style, too. Being in Europe, I envy silicon valley engineers.
- AndrewDucker 5y ago
  He mentions moving to a new company.
  - ionwake 5y ago
    What would the net worth be of someone who has been at google for 10 years?
    - valleyer 5y ago
      1 to 10 million dollars, depending on compensation and money management skills.
    - filoleg 5y ago
      Impossible to answer such a broad question without knowing specifics of that particular situation, as it is heavily dependent on the person's pay/career trajectory at Google (which, from my experience, can differ wildly even for the same levels), spending habits, how they invested what they haven't spent, their family situation (single? married with 2 kids? supporting parents?), how much debt they had prior to joining and how fast they paid it off, etc. It can be anything from "multiple houses, cars, quickly growing investment portfolio, and etc." to "barely anything aside from a few months worth of salary in the savings account". The latter seems extremely unlikely though, most people hover somewhere in-between those two extremes. For example, look at some engineers who worked at Google's self-driving division/Waymo. From the court papers (from that trial where the lead was accused of taking the proprietary info to Uber's self-driving division), it was mentioned that some of them got paid like $10mil/yr. This is in a completely different ballpark, compared to what most of engineers at Google make. Just goes to show the wild variation in pay, which makes it difficult to estimate without knowing the details.
- 5y ago
allyourhorses 5y ago
> At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me. This one really stuck out for me, I don't think that stat has ever been public before. This probably means most (if not all) of the folk who built Google's most successful services are no longer with the company. Like a successful open source project where the originators have aged out, and all that's left are hundreds of folk making incremental changes spanning years
- xoogler2004 5y ago
  Yes. A handful remain. But the next big thing will come from those who yearn to be what Google had and lost. Jeff Dean jokes aside, no one person or group made Google great. It was the combined optimism and output of thousands of brilliant and supportive Googlers with imperfect but good enough leadership. Don’t deify any one person or leader, but if you can see the potential in any company’s ambition, thinking, and culture - it’s going to be worth the ride.
  - vl 5y ago
    But this is the problem, it’s not this place anymore. Unlimited money corrupt absolutely. At some moment you just look at all these projects and they are moat to defend ads/search and napalm any even remote competition. With such priorities comes different kind of moral. On top of that Google sucks at efficient organization management and product management and just masks it with money.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      It could be again though. Microsoft has already been through this hell and come out the other side. Google could too, although I suspect that it will require a similar change of leadership.
      - enumjorge 5y ago
        It wasn’t just a change in leadership, Microsoft also had an existential crisis. Apple, Google and Amazon threatened to make Microsoft irrelevant and the leadership at the time didn’t seem to know how to respond. I don’t think Google has reached that level of desperation yet, and it might need to before it can turn things around.
jakecopp 5y ago
> ...including the money to buy the home I now live in and even the health insurance responsible for the birth of my son... Interesting example. Being grateful to your country for giving you the opportunity to work to pay insurance bills to have a child, because there's no universal healthcare? I'm assuming this is sarcasm?
- visarga 5y ago
  or conditioning
- roenxi 5y ago
  Software engineers working at Google are pretty wealthy and are probably pushing into the salary levels that pay for most of societies upkeep. They're going to be paying less under a private health system than a universal one and getting very similar levels of care.
  - jakecopp 5y ago
    Good point. I still do find the original sentiment odd and confusing.
  - oblio 5y ago
    So, in short: screw you, got mine? :-)
    - roenxi 5y ago
      In short, whether or not the US has universal healthcare, he would feel the same feelings towards the same entities and it would have cost him about the same amount of labour to get assistance for the birth of his son.
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harry8 5y ago
> At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me. This is why it is insane to accept the "I know the people involved in developing that and they wouldn't let a terrible thing happen." Defense of it being ok for the co. to have massive unchecked power. The company is its people. The people /will/ change. Give a company serious power you cannot expect the staff to keep it reigned in. It's completely unrealistic and also unfair to the staff for them to have that moral responsibility forced on them. Ultimately 99.9% of the time the only thing they can do is resign, which reduces the impediments to bad things happening.
GistNoesis 5y ago
It seems that the app ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.paidtasks&hl=en_US&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... ) has taken a plunge recently. Extract of a June 26, 2021 review by Marcia Jenkins that got more than a thousand up-votes : "WHATS HAPPENED? I was getting a survey, if not daily, every other day, now, well, I've got one survey in the past month" So there may be some correlation.
cyri 5y ago
MPVL also left Google (Zurich) last month after being nearly 18 years at Google.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jozvolskyef 5y ago
  That might explain why cuelang got a new home[1], moving from the google-managed github/cuelang to an independent github/cue-lang. [1]: https://github.com/cue-lang/cue https://github.com/cue-lang/cue
ur-whale 5y ago
"it's also ultimately not something to be anthropomorphized, but rather a faceless machine that makes often bad decisions that I don't have any real influence over." Best comment in the article. I feel that this is a very recurrent problem on HN in particular and on the internet in general: people anthropomorphizing companies and assigning them human-like intents ("Google is evil", "Exxon is reckless"). We all forget that: a) companies are nothing but a bunch of people doing things together within some sort of hierarchical structure. b) the emergent behavior of said group has got precious little to do with the parts that compose it and certainly can't be assigned things like desire, morals, feelings, ethos. c) as much as we'd *love* to believe b) above or even try to actually implement it (the whole "company culture" kool-aid), the truth is *no one* can get an org as large as Google to do anything, even its CEO. Once the thing is large enough, it basically becomes autonomous. Large corps are large doomsday machines with basically no one at the wheel.
- vl 5y ago
  It’s interesting that Google had a built-in mechanism to combat bad decisions called “being Googly”. Basically default mode of operation and decision making was to “be Googly”. So this cultural pressure created culture of collaboration and helping out. The problem is that with high growth rate and relatively high churn you can’t indoctrinate this (or really, any) culture fast enough, and so it eroded. On top of that when third wave of management new-hires doesn’t embrace it (and why would they?), it disintegrates rather quickly.
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    It also doesn't account for folks that are manipulative and ambitious enough to: 1. Not believe a word of the "being Googly" thing 2. Understand how big of a lever it is to get others to do things. 3. Are very good at pretending. They usually make it to the top in quick order and get a tiny bit more influence on the cultural direction taken by the giant combine harvester.
lolive 5y ago
Be sure to also read this link he mentions: http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2018/09/typescript-at-google.html http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2018/09/typescript-at-goo... There you will get a clear view of why you DO NOT want to become a frontend developper at Google. (plus the dilemna of maintaining internal tools).
- jefftk 5y ago
  Note that things are a lot better now than they were in 2018, in large part due to his work and his team's. The typescript migration has gone well, with good automatic migration tooling, and I mostly only use TS now. This means good error messages, and good editor support. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
  - lolive 5y ago
    How did you do the work to type all your existing JS libs, so they have a clear TS contract?
    - jefftk 5y ago
      All of our existing JavaScript libraries were already typed, but with the awkward "types in comments" system: https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/Types-in-the-Closure-Type-System https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/Types-in-the... Their team only (though it's a big "only") needed to do the work to make this existing type info available to TS
      - lolive 5y ago
        I am rather new with JS, TS and all that. But did not IntelliJ have some JSDoc support to help it autocomplete JS, a long time ago?
transitory_pce 5y ago
Sounds like someone pissed off a senior manager by speaking the truth in an email with a sensitive cc list. Hey OP shed light on the truth. Don’t shy away from doing the right thing on the way out. Buy some shares and now you’re a shareholder.
- gundmc 5y ago
  > Sounds like someone pissed off a senior manager by speaking the truth in an email with a sensitive cc list. > Hey OP shed light on the truth. Don’t shy away from doing the right thing on the way out. Uhh...what? Did we read the same blog post? This is an oddly specific fantasy you've conjured.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Probably they have direct experience of it? Google has a variety of mechanisms that can be used to effectively get rid of people without them understanding why. For instance they allow anyone to give feedback on anyone else during promo cases which can sink promotions or entire careers, and which isn't merely anonymous but completely confidential. That's been mentioned elsewhere on this thread. The result is that people can appear to be doing very well with glowing feedback, happy managers, successful projects and then their career suddenly goes off the rails without that person ever being told why, for no better reason than a single person didn't like them. This blog post gives off strong vibes of this sort of thing, given the vagueness about why he had to leave. This problem interacts badly with another problem Google has: it started with a culture of extreme internal openness compared to most organizations. For example almost all internal mailing lists were open, almost all internal code was open to all engineers, people were encouraged to send feedback and resolve problems directly across teams instead of always going through management and so on. Hence the mono-repo so large they had to reimplement Perforce to keep it running. In an environment where everyone is culturally very similar, has a lot of experience of the world outside of Google to keep them grounded, a clear and motivating goal and minimal politics, this can just about work. It worked OK for the first 6-7 years or so I was there. It ... stopped working. The combination of very open communication, an increasingly radicalized workforce (due to their heavy dependence post 2010 on recruiting new grads to keep the hiring pipelines full), and formal systems for secretly sinking people's careers = a lot of very messy problems in which loyal workers get screwed. The vast majority never talk about it in public, at least not under their own name, but there are a lot of Evans out there.
evouga 5y ago
Google used to be one of those companies, like Valve or Blizzard, who could be trusted to always ship a home run. Search, gmail, maps, chrome… I’m not sure what happened, but the contrast of Google then vs Google now is stark. Even Google search barely works anymore. Google image search is completely broken, and I’ve found recently that I’ve been appending “site:reddit.com” to all of my text search queries to actually get useful results. I’m not sure what this says about the future of Google, or the web in general. Nothing good.
- Kelteseth 5y ago
  > or Blizzard, This so much. 10 years ago, I would have bought every single Blizzard game. Back then, I explained to my parents that Blizzard was like Mercedes ("The best or nothing") for video games. Now all known talents have already left Blizzard and none of their games interest me any longer...
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    Isn't this what inevitably happens to all companies eventually? You have a group of enthusiastic founders who make it big through smarts, passion and dedication and after a couple of decades, they retire, and the company is now mostly formed of people who are in just to cash in on the money and fame from having that brand name on their resume as people who are as smart, passionate and dedicated as the original founders were would most likely work on their own idea rather than said famous company. On the tech circles online Google is known for being the place where you grind leet-code to get in so you can make big $ and coast (rest and vest), not break your back working on fancy world changing ideas. The latter is for start-ups. Apple was ahead of the game too as they had the visionary Steve Jobs at the helm, while now, sure their stock is as high as ever and their M1 macs are great but you don't really see people queuing up for days in front of their shops anymore since their post-Jobs strategy has been less about disruptive innovation and more about entrenching and expanding their existing positions by leveraging their supply chain prowess.
    - oblio 5y ago
H8crilA 5y ago
> but it's also ultimately not something to be anthropomorphized, but rather a faceless machine that makes often bad decisions that I don't have any real influence over. Shocking how it can take 17 years to realize that. And it's for a smart person! One really has to congratulate early Google execs for creating this super pervasive myth of genius around what's just another corporation. Related - Systemantics is not a joke, it's an honest attempt at describing reality: https://mobile.twitter.com/SysQuotes https://mobile.twitter.com/SysQuotes
- HappyTypist 5y ago
  Boiling frog syndrome. Change can be harder to recognise when you are in it.
  - H8crilA 5y ago
    The water was always hot. There's no there there, never has been, never will be. > SYSTEMS DON'T WORK FOR YOU OR FOR ME. THEY WORK FOR THEIR OWN GOALS. Though you can be sure that in the future many new execs will spin the veil of uniqueness, genius, coolness around something new, something that in reality is as benign as Google - an internet advertising company, a company that maxed out the craft of selling ads. Over and over again. It's a fascinating thing to watch.
swiftcoder 5y ago
> a bureaucratic mistake led to my position falling into question, despite plenty of support for keeping me around from my immediate management chain That's a hell of a way to lose a 17-year veteran. Wish I could say I'm surprised, but having exited FB due also to a short-sighted bureaucratic decision... such are the policies of a FAANG
smitty1e 5y ago
> the same complex and uncomfortable feelings I have towards the US as a US citizen I love the ideals upon which the country is founded; I acknowledge the spectrum of shortcomings found therein; but cannot warm to the nihilists bent on destroying it in the name of a bogus utopianism.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
crawsome 5y ago
Xoogler, left only after 2 years working in IT. The “different corners” comment hit real hard. Some jobs are great, some are grind work where you have no control over your job, and your opinion matters little. No stock, and ever-reducing our perks to increase support service availability /harder not smarter kind of team (grinding tickets out). Yes, i’m talking about THE google in mountain view, ca.
bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
Well thank you Mr. Curious at least for ninja - fastest build system in the West :) I hope your new job lets you build fun but useful stuff there too.
donalhunt 5y ago
Another xoogler here that started around 2004. Thank you for epitaphs. It was a great resource and ensured relationships were maintained even after people left the company.
rdel 5y ago
Evan is one of the best people I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Google. As his coworker on the TypeScript team he taught us all valuable lessons for dealing with the type of large-scale development needed to maintain the monorepo. Truly a treasure and a sad loss for the team. I wish him nothing but the best wherever he ends up!
esprehn 5y ago
It's interesting this made the front page but no comments talk about Evan or his many accomplishments, just Google. I suppose that's a reflection of the recent sentiment where old timers leaving Google is a sign of something. In any case, I had the pleasure of interacting with Evan a couple times while on Chrome, and he was this amazing slice of Google engineering culture. I have a vivid memory of him and some friends discussing how to optimize IO perf on Windows late on a Fri at the office. In my time at Google I learned so much from just sitting and listening in on things like that. Figma's lucky to have Evan. While it's unfortunate to see old timers leave Google, it's good for the industry for them to be joining the next batch of up and coming companies.
hintymad 5y ago
The fact that a post about leaving Google still makes it HN means that Google still commands attention and respect, especially given that such posts came up once every few months. In contrast, people are not so keen on "Leaving Oracle", "Leaving IBM", or "Leaving Amazon". Sadly, though, every company will eventually get into the latter group, no matter how great it once was.

478 points by edward 5y ago

What an incredibly level-headed write-up. Imagine working somewhere for 17 years and then facing this: > The full story is complex but effectively a bureaucratic mistake led to my position falling into question, despite plenty of support for keeping me around from my immediate management chain. I’ll just go ahead and admit that had this happened to me, I would certainly act a bit more salty over it.

nly 5y ago
What is he implying here? He was told he could work remotely and then they went back on it?
- vishnugupta 5y ago
  > my position falling into question I interpreted it as the powers that be began to question the value of his role/position.
  - paganel 5y ago
    That was my interpretation, too. One would think that after 17 years at a company like Google one wouldn't need to have "to prove" himself/herself anymore, crazy.
    - vishnugupta 5y ago
      Unfortunately this is not an isolated case. I have seen it play out way too often with individual contributors (ICs). I have been in enough promo committees to recognise a pattern. You have an IC performing perfectly fine, year after year, producing high quality work. After 3rd or 4th year of them staying in a position some senior director raises the inevitable question; "why is this person not being put up for promotion?" which then leads to "why are they not growing". The person in question is just not interested in growth-treadmill anymore but no, our system won't let them work peacefully. ICs have to either grow or move out. All the while the management layer who create train wreck after train wreck ("bureaucratic mistake" as the author charitably puts it) will seamlessly glide within and between companies. ICs have to prove relentlessly whereas managers coast along.
      - oblio 5y ago
        Is that the case for seniors, though? I got the impression that once you do move up a bit, the expectation that you have to be growing forever kind of goes away.
    - dblohm7 5y ago
      In this industry, it never ends.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    Having worked at Microsoft, I can confidently tell you that a surprising number of people with long (10+) year tenures are sitting around collecting huge salaries and barely contributing. Tenure alone doesn’t make for value, and in fact can sometimes go the other way. There was a principal engineer on my team who literally played video games all day. I know the author isn’t in that category at all, but I can imagine that these companies are using the post pandemic time to prune some leeches.
    - dunkelheit 5y ago
      Mirrors my experience. It is almost painful to watch some of these washed-up OG engineers. I worked at a company that followed a similar trajectory to Google (scaled down quite a bit, of course) and there was a special team reserved for those people where they were working on strange and irrelevant problems of their own devising. Presumably to avoid irking any of the hard-driving execs, they reported directly to the CEO. At one point I sat next to them in the office and couldn't help but notice that on any given day there barely was half of them present. I remember thinking that despite them all being filthy rich it was a very unappealing position to end up in. Another guy I worked directly with. He had at some point a couple hundred reports, but downshifted to an ordinary engineer. I was struck by how profoundly chill and unambitious he was, how indifferent to flaws in his code (entirely lacking any kind of engineer's pride). But at least he was doing honest and useful work. The stories they tell are golden though. As an aside, isn't it a strange quirk in our capitalist society that we perceive workers that were vital for early success but then stopped contributing much as "leeches" but early investors who do the same are totally OK and rightfully own their share of the later pie?
      - thehappypm 5y ago
        “ As an aside, isn't it a strange quirk in our capitalist society that we perceive workers that were vital for early success but then stopped contributing much as "leeches" but early investors who do the same are totally OK and rightfully own their share of the later pie?” The distinction here is equity vs payroll. Early investors are paid handsomely in equity. Early employees, typically, are as well, having accumulated stock for a decade plus. However, having early contributors hugely over-impact your payroll isn’t really fair.
- thrwawayxoogler 5y ago
  Xoogler in a throwaway account. If you look at the linked "my move away from California" post, you'll see that he moved to the Portland, Oregon area during the pandemic. * EDIT * He says that he was working out of the Portland office, but the majority of open engineering roles there (not many in total) are very specialized. My guess is that post-pandemic, now that Google offices will be re-opening, they don't want people spread all over the place, and he wasn't willing to move back to California. While his managers were most likely supportive of him working fully remote, Google isn't very flexible when it comes to fully remote work.
  - bruckie 5y ago
    I work at Google's Portland office (well, at least when there's not a pandemic). We're a pretty normal engineering office—although smaller than many, so there are fewer team choices than in larger offices. Google has become remarkably flexible over the past few months when it comes to fully remote work (see press from May, e.g. https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/05/tech/google-office-remote-work-pandemic/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/05/tech/google-office-remote-wor...). Not quite as flexible as some companies, but it's night-and-day compared to a couple of years ago. The "now that Google offices will be re-opening, they don't want people spread all over the place" conjecture doesn't match what I'm seeing internally; in fact, quite the opposite: there's a much higher acceptance of remote work / "spreading all over the place" than in the past.

reedf1 5y ago

I'm sure this is the sort of person that made google what it is - it's probably a nightmare if they lose enough of these clear-thinking problem solvers with a history of long-term success. When I think "big google salary" I want to think it's going to someone like this, but in reality it's probably going to someone else.

yeuxardents 5y ago

>feelings I have towards the US as a US citizen: it's a place that I know is filled with brilliant, kind, interesting people, and it's a place that has given me nearly everything in my life, including the money to buy the home I now live in and even the health insurance responsible for the birth of my son — but it's also ultimately not something to be anthropomorphized, but rather a faceless machine that makes often bad decisions that I don't have any real influence over. The country that gave me millions sucks. You are not MEANT to have ultimate decision making over anything, thats why you are a cog, in a machine, making 500k$ per year. and you get to complain about it from your mansion SECOND house in arizona, while transiting from palo alto first mansion.

fake-name 5y ago
Do you not understand that both of the things can be true?
- yeuxardents 5y ago
  Could you be more specific about both things that may be true?
  - strken 5y ago
    A country or company can give you nice things personally, and be a good force in the world overall, while still crushing people between the gears of its massive impersonal bureaucracy when they hit an edge case.
    - rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
      Google also pushes ads everywhere, 24/7, and try to get people to read/watch anything provided that the user remains attentive/addicted and that some advertiser pay them top dollar for that. Google search and YouTube (and Android and the rest) may be nice and free) but it's certainly too early to call then 'a good force in the world overall'. I understand that it wasn't your point but I'm surprised Facebook is always presented as the bad guy (doing exactly the same things in different place) but we usually compare 'the good of Google' vs some little mishap (having a single person leaves the mastodonte).

renewiltord 5y ago

Haha what a colossal fuck up from the HR or whatever clown. Imagine losing a top engineer over a bureaucratic error. Well, a win for Figma at least.

otabdeveloper4 5y ago
> over a bureaucratic error Doesn't sound like an error to me. Getting rid of "legacy employees" is always a huge pain in the ass, sounds like his management found a solution. (Even though, frankly, a cowardly one.)
- katbyte 5y ago
  Guess that all depends on your view of legacy employees who took a company to where it is today
  - higeorge13 5y ago
    At this scale i think nobody cares, and eventually google will continue existing without them.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Honestly, didn’t really consider this, but based on what I know, Google isn’t one to stop people from resting and vesting so it’s a bit strange to interpret this as an attempt from them to offload someone. They don’t usually care. I know a couple of people who do very little every day.
- finjo 5y ago
  "Legacy employees" sounds like code for "employees we could replace with cheaper new grads".
  - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    Sometimes, yes. But really there's all kinds, from "we don't want this guy who insists on keeping the old C++ codebase alive" to straight-up people who engage in fraud because they think the company owes them. That said, my personal view is that you should keep "legacy employees" unless they explicitly refuse to work.

raverbashing 5y ago

> The full story is complex but effectively a bureaucratic mistake led to my position falling into question, despite plenty of support for keeping me around from my immediate management chain. So Google fails again at have an actual thinking person do some thinking. Sounds like their customer support. sigh And the end paragraph is on point.

joering2 5y ago

google became such a numb bureaucratic monolith, its really sad, thinking my adventure with internet started around the time Altavista stopped being a think (now mostly using Duck). I used to have gSuite account until I tried to cancel it. There was simply no way! Someone would ask bunch of verification questions via ticket, got them all answered including CNAME domain verification and 2 weeks of silence when I would email them again, a new person would take over the ticket and the whole process of providing the same answers (sometimes previous CS person didn't even wiped out my answers when he hit "reply to") over and over again. I gave up after 2 months and started with chargeback disputes. Since its a corporate account there is too many things attached to my cards so I won't be canceling it. But sure as hell every months for 11 months now, I get charged $6, call my bank and week later got it back through a chargeback dispute. I figured by now its cost them close to $300. And nothing. Just this morning I called my card and sure as every month I disputed the transaction again, explaining that the customer support is non existent. Of course they can bleed billions and I'm not even statistical noise, but goes to show that even the most sophisticated company on the face of Earth can be screwing up pretty easily.

amelius 5y ago
> google became such a numb bureaucratic monolith, its really sad It's the same with all those other FAANG companies. Working for them must be very close to being a public servant.
- borkt 5y ago
  As a public servant the op’s post basically describes my past year as well. People with no long term view on an institution completely misread a situation and refused to do any investigation into what was actually going on. The difference in public service is I got sent on the road to forced resignation specifically because I was working 2-4 hours unpaid each day against policy (without saying a word) to cover for others and keep our departments role in the agency together, which i don’t think would ever Be an issue at google.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  In my experience public servants got way more autonomy in their decisions then any private worker. Saying no is like ... a no. And then there is a formal paper trail to turn it over if anyone wants to.

kylehotchkiss 5y ago

Really nice to hear from somebody who stuck with a company for the long haul. I'm trying to do the same thing, and in my agency I've gotten about half as far as you with interesting and challenging projects while maintaining a unique personal life. All the best at Figma and I hope that if you enjoy it enough to stick around you get another great 17 year run :)

DoreenMichele 5y ago

At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me. Because of the TypeScript work I was also one of ~30 "global approvers", with the access to to approve code changes to any project at the company. Oof. Google will regret this snafu. I hope he's happy at his new job.

cairo140 5y ago

I worked on the infra team for a TypeScript-based product downstream of the author. His and his team's approach and writings influenced at a lot of my thinking about core development, and I'll always be grateful for having had the opportunity to learn from them by osmosis. The success or failure with which any companies hires and retains folks like these is a mystery to me. As the evidence shows, Google (and I suspect almost any >100-person company) is far too much an amorphous glob/slime mold to even have a single coherent approach to this problem. But what are the successful strategies here? How important is it even to retain this kind of talent? How do we know how a company is even doing in this regard? In my meager-in-comparison 6.5 years at Google, while I certainly saw many amazing SWEs come and many go, I'm far from knowing what the real trajectory was. But I can imagine that for many folks, the perceived trajectory would be a major motivating or demotivating factor to stay or to leave themselves.

HappyTypist 5y ago
Any large corporation needs to eliminate the bus factor of individual contributors (those who don't pay the management and politics game). You can't have an universally respected engineering legend contradict the board of directors; and the CEO it installs and influences. Thus, you could argue that faceless, kafkaesque, "out of anyone's control" systems for talent management are a feature with trade-offs, not a bug. While I have not worked at Google, simply being a user of its products for the past two decades has taught me that so much of its company culture and values have changed; and rarely for the better.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Of course, you don't want a bus factor with executives either although it generally becomes more complicated as you get higher up at a company. You're not going to casually replace a CEO though you're not going to just shut down the company if they get hit with a bus either.
varispeed 5y ago
This is quite simple: - pay. These companies may be paying more than average and amazing if you compare to non-technical jobs, but as an engineer committing your best years to become great at what you do, you find yourself still not being able to afford even a small flat in the area where you work. Meanwhile you hear your company boasting about another record year and billions flowing in. Unfortunately they won't share those with you. That's demotivating and you feel being taken advantage of. - lack of flexibility. For example managers pushing for pairing at all cost and with disregard to neurodivergent people. At the same messaging about equality, support for various social issues and so on. That creates dishonest image of the company and makes you think this is all bs and cheap PR rather than genuine care. - Exploitation. Some companies expect you to do unpaid overtime or that you'll answer your phone outside of work hours. If you want me to work, you pay - I am not a charity. - Rules designed to appease insecure managers, like having to be in person in the office so the manager can "watch you" and be "hands-on" with his or hers team. Again, company is boasting how great they are for the environment and at the same time they drag hundreds of people each day to the office for no reason. We have great tools to do work remotely, there is no longer a need to be in the office. Sell the office and give employees a bonus. - open plan office. I just can't focus in those. There is only so long I can stand wearing noise cancelling headphones and I don't want to hear people behind me chatting loudly what they had for lunch, with occasional bursts of laughter that is piercing my ears. I found that often I actually done the work in the evening at home, whereas the whole time in the office I had to pretend I am busy. One time when I was offered a promotion I asked for private office. The CTO said it's only for him and the board. Well, I quit next month.

xoogler2004 5y ago

As a xoogler who interviewed way back in 2004, let me say that this post sums up my feelings exactly. The people I worked with at Google back then weren’t necessarily there for high six figure salaries. We were there to work with other people like us. We were there to be part of something larger than ourselves. In some sense I felt alone most of the time, and when I interviewed I felt as if I had found my tribe. These are people who made me feel dumb, but also astutely aware that I could improve. I learned so much during my tenure there, and I regret none of it. Perhaps I do regret taking so long to realize the sense of purpose and mission died when Emerald Sea started and good projects (reader, google talk, code search) were being canabalized to prop up a pipe dream that was never going to work. That’s the nexus event in Google’s time line… where things went askew and never came back to normal. Now people only care about perf, OKRs, and levels. Being a poor new grad with no savings and intentionally picking projects that would not get you promoted (but were fun) was frequent back then. The courage to do new things is rewarded in ways different than titles and symbols. Perhaps no “one” is more cognizant of that than the anthropomorphic Google of today.

mlvljr 5y ago
"canabalized to prop up a pipe dream" -- nice weed pun there :)
dehrmann 5y ago
> The people I worked with at Google back then weren’t necessarily there for high six figure salaries. We were there to work with other people like us. I wonder how much this used to apply to the Valley as a whole.
- xoogler2004 5y ago
  More than we want to admit and not enough to get us to stay.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Probably a lot, especially before the money came flooding in.
- 5y ago

apples_oranges 5y ago

Sigh.. 17 years of Google in the US. I am sure you can easily retire. With style, too. Being in Europe, I envy silicon valley engineers.

AndrewDucker 5y ago
He mentions moving to a new company.
- ionwake 5y ago
  What would the net worth be of someone who has been at google for 10 years?
  - valleyer 5y ago
    1 to 10 million dollars, depending on compensation and money management skills.
  - filoleg 5y ago
    Impossible to answer such a broad question without knowing specifics of that particular situation, as it is heavily dependent on the person's pay/career trajectory at Google (which, from my experience, can differ wildly even for the same levels), spending habits, how they invested what they haven't spent, their family situation (single? married with 2 kids? supporting parents?), how much debt they had prior to joining and how fast they paid it off, etc. It can be anything from "multiple houses, cars, quickly growing investment portfolio, and etc." to "barely anything aside from a few months worth of salary in the savings account". The latter seems extremely unlikely though, most people hover somewhere in-between those two extremes. For example, look at some engineers who worked at Google's self-driving division/Waymo. From the court papers (from that trial where the lead was accused of taking the proprietary info to Uber's self-driving division), it was mentioned that some of them got paid like $10mil/yr. This is in a completely different ballpark, compared to what most of engineers at Google make. Just goes to show the wild variation in pay, which makes it difficult to estimate without knowing the details.
5y ago

allyourhorses 5y ago

> At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me. This one really stuck out for me, I don't think that stat has ever been public before. This probably means most (if not all) of the folk who built Google's most successful services are no longer with the company. Like a successful open source project where the originators have aged out, and all that's left are hundreds of folk making incremental changes spanning years

xoogler2004 5y ago
Yes. A handful remain. But the next big thing will come from those who yearn to be what Google had and lost. Jeff Dean jokes aside, no one person or group made Google great. It was the combined optimism and output of thousands of brilliant and supportive Googlers with imperfect but good enough leadership. Don’t deify any one person or leader, but if you can see the potential in any company’s ambition, thinking, and culture - it’s going to be worth the ride.
- vl 5y ago
  But this is the problem, it’s not this place anymore. Unlimited money corrupt absolutely. At some moment you just look at all these projects and they are moat to defend ads/search and napalm any even remote competition. With such priorities comes different kind of moral. On top of that Google sucks at efficient organization management and product management and just masks it with money.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    It could be again though. Microsoft has already been through this hell and come out the other side. Google could too, although I suspect that it will require a similar change of leadership.
    - enumjorge 5y ago
      It wasn’t just a change in leadership, Microsoft also had an existential crisis. Apple, Google and Amazon threatened to make Microsoft irrelevant and the leadership at the time didn’t seem to know how to respond. I don’t think Google has reached that level of desperation yet, and it might need to before it can turn things around.

jakecopp 5y ago

> ...including the money to buy the home I now live in and even the health insurance responsible for the birth of my son... Interesting example. Being grateful to your country for giving you the opportunity to work to pay insurance bills to have a child, because there's no universal healthcare? I'm assuming this is sarcasm?

visarga 5y ago
or conditioning
roenxi 5y ago
Software engineers working at Google are pretty wealthy and are probably pushing into the salary levels that pay for most of societies upkeep. They're going to be paying less under a private health system than a universal one and getting very similar levels of care.
- jakecopp 5y ago
  Good point. I still do find the original sentiment odd and confusing.
- oblio 5y ago
  So, in short: screw you, got mine? :-)
  - roenxi 5y ago
    In short, whether or not the US has universal healthcare, he would feel the same feelings towards the same entities and it would have cost him about the same amount of labour to get assistance for the birth of his son.
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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5y ago

harry8 5y ago

> At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me. This is why it is insane to accept the "I know the people involved in developing that and they wouldn't let a terrible thing happen." Defense of it being ok for the co. to have massive unchecked power. The company is its people. The people /will/ change. Give a company serious power you cannot expect the staff to keep it reigned in. It's completely unrealistic and also unfair to the staff for them to have that moral responsibility forced on them. Ultimately 99.9% of the time the only thing they can do is resign, which reduces the impediments to bad things happening.

GistNoesis 5y ago

It seems that the app ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.paidtasks&hl=en_US&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... ) has taken a plunge recently. Extract of a June 26, 2021 review by Marcia Jenkins that got more than a thousand up-votes : "WHATS HAPPENED? I was getting a survey, if not daily, every other day, now, well, I've got one survey in the past month" So there may be some correlation.

cyri 5y ago

MPVL also left Google (Zurich) last month after being nearly 18 years at Google.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jozvolskyef 5y ago
That might explain why cuelang got a new home[1], moving from the google-managed github/cuelang to an independent github/cue-lang. [1]: https://github.com/cue-lang/cue https://github.com/cue-lang/cue

ur-whale 5y ago

"it's also ultimately not something to be anthropomorphized, but rather a faceless machine that makes often bad decisions that I don't have any real influence over." Best comment in the article. I feel that this is a very recurrent problem on HN in particular and on the internet in general: people anthropomorphizing companies and assigning them human-like intents ("Google is evil", "Exxon is reckless"). We all forget that: a) companies are nothing but a bunch of people doing things together within some sort of hierarchical structure. b) the emergent behavior of said group has got precious little to do with the parts that compose it and certainly can't be assigned things like desire, morals, feelings, ethos. c) as much as we'd *love* to believe b) above or even try to actually implement it (the whole "company culture" kool-aid), the truth is *no one* can get an org as large as Google to do anything, even its CEO. Once the thing is large enough, it basically becomes autonomous. Large corps are large doomsday machines with basically no one at the wheel.

vl 5y ago
It’s interesting that Google had a built-in mechanism to combat bad decisions called “being Googly”. Basically default mode of operation and decision making was to “be Googly”. So this cultural pressure created culture of collaboration and helping out. The problem is that with high growth rate and relatively high churn you can’t indoctrinate this (or really, any) culture fast enough, and so it eroded. On top of that when third wave of management new-hires doesn’t embrace it (and why would they?), it disintegrates rather quickly.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  It also doesn't account for folks that are manipulative and ambitious enough to: 1. Not believe a word of the "being Googly" thing 2. Understand how big of a lever it is to get others to do things. 3. Are very good at pretending. They usually make it to the top in quick order and get a tiny bit more influence on the cultural direction taken by the giant combine harvester.

lolive 5y ago

Be sure to also read this link he mentions: http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2018/09/typescript-at-google.html http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2018/09/typescript-at-goo... There you will get a clear view of why you DO NOT want to become a frontend developper at Google. (plus the dilemna of maintaining internal tools).

jefftk 5y ago
Note that things are a lot better now than they were in 2018, in large part due to his work and his team's. The typescript migration has gone well, with good automatic migration tooling, and I mostly only use TS now. This means good error messages, and good editor support. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)
- lolive 5y ago
  How did you do the work to type all your existing JS libs, so they have a clear TS contract?
  - jefftk 5y ago
    All of our existing JavaScript libraries were already typed, but with the awkward "types in comments" system: https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/Types-in-the-Closure-Type-System https://github.com/google/closure-compiler/wiki/Types-in-the... Their team only (though it's a big "only") needed to do the work to make this existing type info available to TS
    - lolive 5y ago
      I am rather new with JS, TS and all that. But did not IntelliJ have some JSDoc support to help it autocomplete JS, a long time ago?

transitory_pce 5y ago

Sounds like someone pissed off a senior manager by speaking the truth in an email with a sensitive cc list. Hey OP shed light on the truth. Don’t shy away from doing the right thing on the way out. Buy some shares and now you’re a shareholder.

gundmc 5y ago
> Sounds like someone pissed off a senior manager by speaking the truth in an email with a sensitive cc list. > Hey OP shed light on the truth. Don’t shy away from doing the right thing on the way out. Uhh...what? Did we read the same blog post? This is an oddly specific fantasy you've conjured.
- native_samples 5y ago
  Probably they have direct experience of it? Google has a variety of mechanisms that can be used to effectively get rid of people without them understanding why. For instance they allow anyone to give feedback on anyone else during promo cases which can sink promotions or entire careers, and which isn't merely anonymous but completely confidential. That's been mentioned elsewhere on this thread. The result is that people can appear to be doing very well with glowing feedback, happy managers, successful projects and then their career suddenly goes off the rails without that person ever being told why, for no better reason than a single person didn't like them. This blog post gives off strong vibes of this sort of thing, given the vagueness about why he had to leave. This problem interacts badly with another problem Google has: it started with a culture of extreme internal openness compared to most organizations. For example almost all internal mailing lists were open, almost all internal code was open to all engineers, people were encouraged to send feedback and resolve problems directly across teams instead of always going through management and so on. Hence the mono-repo so large they had to reimplement Perforce to keep it running. In an environment where everyone is culturally very similar, has a lot of experience of the world outside of Google to keep them grounded, a clear and motivating goal and minimal politics, this can just about work. It worked OK for the first 6-7 years or so I was there. It ... stopped working. The combination of very open communication, an increasingly radicalized workforce (due to their heavy dependence post 2010 on recruiting new grads to keep the hiring pipelines full), and formal systems for secretly sinking people's careers = a lot of very messy problems in which loyal workers get screwed. The vast majority never talk about it in public, at least not under their own name, but there are a lot of Evans out there.

evouga 5y ago

Google used to be one of those companies, like Valve or Blizzard, who could be trusted to always ship a home run. Search, gmail, maps, chrome… I’m not sure what happened, but the contrast of Google then vs Google now is stark. Even Google search barely works anymore. Google image search is completely broken, and I’ve found recently that I’ve been appending “site:reddit.com” to all of my text search queries to actually get useful results. I’m not sure what this says about the future of Google, or the web in general. Nothing good.

Kelteseth 5y ago
> or Blizzard, This so much. 10 years ago, I would have bought every single Blizzard game. Back then, I explained to my parents that Blizzard was like Mercedes ("The best or nothing") for video games. Now all known talents have already left Blizzard and none of their games interest me any longer...
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Isn't this what inevitably happens to all companies eventually? You have a group of enthusiastic founders who make it big through smarts, passion and dedication and after a couple of decades, they retire, and the company is now mostly formed of people who are in just to cash in on the money and fame from having that brand name on their resume as people who are as smart, passionate and dedicated as the original founders were would most likely work on their own idea rather than said famous company. On the tech circles online Google is known for being the place where you grind leet-code to get in so you can make big $ and coast (rest and vest), not break your back working on fancy world changing ideas. The latter is for start-ups. Apple was ahead of the game too as they had the visionary Steve Jobs at the helm, while now, sure their stock is as high as ever and their M1 macs are great but you don't really see people queuing up for days in front of their shops anymore since their post-Jobs strategy has been less about disruptive innovation and more about entrenching and expanding their existing positions by leveraging their supply chain prowess.
  - oblio 5y ago

H8crilA 5y ago

> but it's also ultimately not something to be anthropomorphized, but rather a faceless machine that makes often bad decisions that I don't have any real influence over. Shocking how it can take 17 years to realize that. And it's for a smart person! One really has to congratulate early Google execs for creating this super pervasive myth of genius around what's just another corporation. Related - Systemantics is not a joke, it's an honest attempt at describing reality: https://mobile.twitter.com/SysQuotes https://mobile.twitter.com/SysQuotes

HappyTypist 5y ago
Boiling frog syndrome. Change can be harder to recognise when you are in it.
- H8crilA 5y ago
  The water was always hot. There's no there there, never has been, never will be. > SYSTEMS DON'T WORK FOR YOU OR FOR ME. THEY WORK FOR THEIR OWN GOALS. Though you can be sure that in the future many new execs will spin the veil of uniqueness, genius, coolness around something new, something that in reality is as benign as Google - an internet advertising company, a company that maxed out the craft of selling ads. Over and over again. It's a fascinating thing to watch.

swiftcoder 5y ago

> a bureaucratic mistake led to my position falling into question, despite plenty of support for keeping me around from my immediate management chain That's a hell of a way to lose a 17-year veteran. Wish I could say I'm surprised, but having exited FB due also to a short-sighted bureaucratic decision... such are the policies of a FAANG

smitty1e 5y ago

> the same complex and uncomfortable feelings I have towards the US as a US citizen I love the ideals upon which the country is founded; I acknowledge the spectrum of shortcomings found therein; but cannot warm to the nihilists bent on destroying it in the name of a bogus utopianism.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

crawsome 5y ago

Xoogler, left only after 2 years working in IT. The “different corners” comment hit real hard. Some jobs are great, some are grind work where you have no control over your job, and your opinion matters little. No stock, and ever-reducing our perks to increase support service availability /harder not smarter kind of team (grinding tickets out). Yes, i’m talking about THE google in mountain view, ca.

bigbizisverywyz 5y ago

Well thank you Mr. Curious at least for ninja - fastest build system in the West :) I hope your new job lets you build fun but useful stuff there too.

donalhunt 5y ago

Another xoogler here that started around 2004. Thank you for epitaphs. It was a great resource and ensured relationships were maintained even after people left the company.

rdel 5y ago

Evan is one of the best people I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Google. As his coworker on the TypeScript team he taught us all valuable lessons for dealing with the type of large-scale development needed to maintain the monorepo. Truly a treasure and a sad loss for the team. I wish him nothing but the best wherever he ends up!

esprehn 5y ago

It's interesting this made the front page but no comments talk about Evan or his many accomplishments, just Google. I suppose that's a reflection of the recent sentiment where old timers leaving Google is a sign of something. In any case, I had the pleasure of interacting with Evan a couple times while on Chrome, and he was this amazing slice of Google engineering culture. I have a vivid memory of him and some friends discussing how to optimize IO perf on Windows late on a Fri at the office. In my time at Google I learned so much from just sitting and listening in on things like that. Figma's lucky to have Evan. While it's unfortunate to see old timers leave Google, it's good for the industry for them to be joining the next batch of up and coming companies.

hintymad 5y ago

The fact that a post about leaving Google still makes it HN means that Google still commands attention and respect, especially given that such posts came up once every few months. In contrast, people are not so keen on "Leaving Oracle", "Leaving IBM", or "Leaving Amazon". Sadly, though, every company will eventually get into the latter group, no matter how great it once was.