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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 neces

by 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.
- ChrisMarshallNY 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. As an older dev, who isn’t a “cultural fit,” I can vouch for this. It ended up becoming my bane. It forced me into an early retirement (I never made the huge gobs of money that people seem to make, these days, but I lived frugally, and invested fairly well). The end result, for me, is that I am now happier than I have ever been in my life. I’m architecting and constructing software that shames anything I ever worked on, as a younger dev. I’m exploring software development practices that my employers never let me do (and that are working well). I’m not making any money at it, but I’ve never actually done this stuff for the money. “other people like us” has changed, over the years. Folks like me, are now an anachronism. Of course, the thing about grey hair and cultural awkwardness, is that it comes with decades of experience in shipping software. That’s not something that comes in a Cracker Jack box (an example of said “cultural awkwardness”). I wouldn’t have had the guts to make this move, on my own. I had to be forced into it. So, it sucked, and was humiliating and scary, but, in the aggregate, things have turned out OK.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    Which software do you work on now?
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      I’ve done a bunch of stuff. My strengths are device control and UX widgets, but I’m working on an aggregate system that is social-media-ish (for a specific demographic). Not actually the stuff I shine at, but I like challenges. It’s coming along nicely. It is allowing me to play with UX, and that’s something I enjoy.
      - bbkane 5y ago
        Do you have a blog or something?
        ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
- ghaff 5y ago
  Probably quite a bit. Pre-dotcom, Valley salaries mostly didn't scale with higher cost of living. (There are still CoL issues of course, but not as much at the mid/senior FAANG level.) It's one reason I never moved there from the East Coast.
Nican 5y ago
I work at at a large corporation, and that is one balance that I am also constantly fighting and never seem to get it right. Having to provide a "Business justification"/OKRs for every technical feature has been soul draining experience, and while I can still make progress in making the product and drive the business forward, I have a hard time justifying spending the time in the little details that I would consider what makes a product really great. I feel like the cycle turned one of making power point presentations of how the product has all the required features, but the overarching story and experience does not feel quite right. And I have been looking for advice on how to convey the importance to polish up the product.
- xoogler2004 5y ago
  Truthfully? Prioritizing bottom up innovation has to oddly enough happen from the top down. Give middle and front line managers the responsibility and mandate to continually foster such a culture, and that’s what this is, culture. If you’re stuck in a company that doesn’t do this… and if you want to do amazing things, just be honest with yourself - is this the place for you?
  - corobo 5y ago
    No it isn't. But what are the options? Undiagnosed ADHD ruled out education which ruled out degrees which rules out most jobs, especially FAANG Any place where smart people congregate have gatekeepers. Makes sense from their perspective, nobody wants to deal with other peoples problems, but we can't all just fall into early Googles haha Anywhere desperate enough to hire based on skill doesn't have the capacity for fun projects
    - maccard 5y ago
      Smaller companies have far less stringent requirements and often don't require a degree. > Any place where smart people congregate have gatekeepers. Requiring a degree, especially at lower levels, isn't necessarily gatekeeping. I've been on the hiring side at 3 companies and every job listing we've made has had dozens of applicants for one role. Given the choice between two juniors who are otherwise equal(read: no experience), one with a (CS/engineering) degree and one without, why would I ever hire the latter?
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Emerald Sea == Google+ (2011) This is when a Google employee told Wired the company needed to start focusing more on gathering information about people.
paganel 5y ago
> code search After all these years I still miss this, can't explain exactly why. Maybe it is the nostalgia of the 2006-2008 years when everything seemed still open and doable when it came to things on the web.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  In 2021, the new way to do code search is to write your search terms and let Copilot fill in the rest of the code.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Copilot would actually be kind of cool if it automatically inserted comments linking to the original source of the snippets and automatically added the source project's copyright/license notices to your app's legal notices UI.
tdullien 5y ago
Former Googler here, too -- 2011 to 2018. The Google I joined was definitely a different place from the Google I left, and seeing the "phase change" up close was ... interesting. Your sentence about salaries resonates; the Google I joined had a lot of folks for whom the salaries were a nice side-effect for a job they were intrinsically motivated for, the Google I left seemed to have many unhappy people that were fearful of leaving that salary behind.
dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
> the sense of purpose and mission died when Emerald Sea started And when it materialized and they started to shove Google+ down everybody's throats it was a tipping point for many faithful Google users, too - any trust and good faith that was still there was instantly depleted.
zozbot234 5y ago
> 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. Interesting way of putting it. And it also jives with the fact that Google+ always looked half-baked even from a pure UX perspective, and is now dead altogether. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, we can speculate that Google leadership should have tried to move in that direction while still meshing with the existing "sense of mission and purpose", not just suppressing it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zelphirkalt 5y ago
In my experience, one does not need to go to some FANG or other big company to learn, that one has still lots to learn and find areas to improve in. I personally got that from mailing lists, particularly in the free software communities, where sometimes people write stuff, that is waaay over my head and that I have never dealt with, even though I am a professional software developer. I even think, that some of the more theoretical stuff goes beyond most things a normal engineer will hit working for a big company. So at least that bit is available for anyone out there, no need to work for an, in terms of ethics, questionably acting company. The bit about finding ones "tribe". Yes, it happens for us engineers, when there are many smart people in "the room". I would not value it over finding purpose though. Purpose in technical perspective, as well as ethical perspective. There is a lot of feeling alone for many of us, because most of us cannot be around similar minded people a lot. What makes me feel more alone though is, when I meet bright people, who do not care about the ethical aspects of their work or hobbies. So personally, I do not think I would "find my tribe" in a FANG or similar company. I highly doubt it even, no matter how smart people there are.
felixfbecker 5y ago
Curious what you mean by code search being cannibalized?
varispeed 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. You were a perfect specimen to get exploited by a big corporations. You had knowledge and you were willing to work for the sake of it. That's why we need laws that would prevent something like this from happening in the future. It's scary that you don't even realise that.
- ctvo 5y ago
  Hilarious. You act like they were paid minimum wage to do their jobs. They didn’t care about the money is very different from they weren’t paid good money. I don’t disagree that corporations will exploit you given the opportunity, but software engineering is a very low priority on that list.
  - varispeed 5y ago
    Oh so the exploitation is acceptable as long as you are not paid a minimum wage? I can't believe people defend these companies. Stockholm syndrome?
    - blindmute 5y ago
      The exploitation is completely acceptable when you are paid $300k+ and don't even feel exploited, yes. I fail to see how getting paid huge sums to do what you enjoy doing is even close to 'exploitation' for any reasonable definition.
      - varispeed 5y ago
        So company makes a billion out of your work and you are happy with $300k. Okay.
        blindmute 5y ago
        What does that matter? You'd decline $10 if it meant someone else got $20? FAANG pays extremely generously. You're either being paid enough to work or you arent; what someone else gets should be meaningless. When you call being paid some of the highest salaries in the world exploitation, you devalue the word.
quijoteuniv 5y ago
I think we need more great people working on real humanity problems. I am glad they probably do not need the money any more and that “the big money” cannot suck their talent anymore.(for profit) Cheers for all those talented engineers with guts to leave behind the big players
tj-teej 5y ago
For someone on the outside, what was 'the pipe dream that was never going to work'?
sakagami0 5y ago
I worked on Chronicle and remember seeing your name everywhere. Thanks for all the help in the typescript channel, good luck at Figma!
jahller 5y ago
> 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. the day google reader was shut down was probably one of the saddest i had ever been for a piece of software.

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.
ChrisMarshallNY 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. As an older dev, who isn’t a “cultural fit,” I can vouch for this. It ended up becoming my bane. It forced me into an early retirement (I never made the huge gobs of money that people seem to make, these days, but I lived frugally, and invested fairly well). The end result, for me, is that I am now happier than I have ever been in my life. I’m architecting and constructing software that shames anything I ever worked on, as a younger dev. I’m exploring software development practices that my employers never let me do (and that are working well). I’m not making any money at it, but I’ve never actually done this stuff for the money. “other people like us” has changed, over the years. Folks like me, are now an anachronism. Of course, the thing about grey hair and cultural awkwardness, is that it comes with decades of experience in shipping software. That’s not something that comes in a Cracker Jack box (an example of said “cultural awkwardness”). I wouldn’t have had the guts to make this move, on my own. I had to be forced into it. So, it sucked, and was humiliating and scary, but, in the aggregate, things have turned out OK.
- skybrian 5y ago
  Which software do you work on now?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    I’ve done a bunch of stuff. My strengths are device control and UX widgets, but I’m working on an aggregate system that is social-media-ish (for a specific demographic). Not actually the stuff I shine at, but I like challenges. It’s coming along nicely. It is allowing me to play with UX, and that’s something I enjoy.
    - bbkane 5y ago
      Do you have a blog or something?
      - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
ghaff 5y ago
Probably quite a bit. Pre-dotcom, Valley salaries mostly didn't scale with higher cost of living. (There are still CoL issues of course, but not as much at the mid/senior FAANG level.) It's one reason I never moved there from the East Coast.

Nican 5y ago

I work at at a large corporation, and that is one balance that I am also constantly fighting and never seem to get it right. Having to provide a "Business justification"/OKRs for every technical feature has been soul draining experience, and while I can still make progress in making the product and drive the business forward, I have a hard time justifying spending the time in the little details that I would consider what makes a product really great. I feel like the cycle turned one of making power point presentations of how the product has all the required features, but the overarching story and experience does not feel quite right. And I have been looking for advice on how to convey the importance to polish up the product.

xoogler2004 5y ago
Truthfully? Prioritizing bottom up innovation has to oddly enough happen from the top down. Give middle and front line managers the responsibility and mandate to continually foster such a culture, and that’s what this is, culture. If you’re stuck in a company that doesn’t do this… and if you want to do amazing things, just be honest with yourself - is this the place for you?
- corobo 5y ago
  No it isn't. But what are the options? Undiagnosed ADHD ruled out education which ruled out degrees which rules out most jobs, especially FAANG Any place where smart people congregate have gatekeepers. Makes sense from their perspective, nobody wants to deal with other peoples problems, but we can't all just fall into early Googles haha Anywhere desperate enough to hire based on skill doesn't have the capacity for fun projects
  - maccard 5y ago
    Smaller companies have far less stringent requirements and often don't require a degree. > Any place where smart people congregate have gatekeepers. Requiring a degree, especially at lower levels, isn't necessarily gatekeeping. I've been on the hiring side at 3 companies and every job listing we've made has had dozens of applicants for one role. Given the choice between two juniors who are otherwise equal(read: no experience), one with a (CS/engineering) degree and one without, why would I ever hire the latter?

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Emerald Sea == Google+ (2011) This is when a Google employee told Wired the company needed to start focusing more on gathering information about people.

paganel 5y ago

> code search After all these years I still miss this, can't explain exactly why. Maybe it is the nostalgia of the 2006-2008 years when everything seemed still open and doable when it came to things on the web.

zozbot234 5y ago
In 2021, the new way to do code search is to write your search terms and let Copilot fill in the rest of the code.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Copilot would actually be kind of cool if it automatically inserted comments linking to the original source of the snippets and automatically added the source project's copyright/license notices to your app's legal notices UI.

tdullien 5y ago

Former Googler here, too -- 2011 to 2018. The Google I joined was definitely a different place from the Google I left, and seeing the "phase change" up close was ... interesting. Your sentence about salaries resonates; the Google I joined had a lot of folks for whom the salaries were a nice side-effect for a job they were intrinsically motivated for, the Google I left seemed to have many unhappy people that were fearful of leaving that salary behind.

dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago

> the sense of purpose and mission died when Emerald Sea started And when it materialized and they started to shove Google+ down everybody's throats it was a tipping point for many faithful Google users, too - any trust and good faith that was still there was instantly depleted.

zozbot234 5y ago

> 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. Interesting way of putting it. And it also jives with the fact that Google+ always looked half-baked even from a pure UX perspective, and is now dead altogether. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, we can speculate that Google leadership should have tried to move in that direction while still meshing with the existing "sense of mission and purpose", not just suppressing it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

zelphirkalt 5y ago

In my experience, one does not need to go to some FANG or other big company to learn, that one has still lots to learn and find areas to improve in. I personally got that from mailing lists, particularly in the free software communities, where sometimes people write stuff, that is waaay over my head and that I have never dealt with, even though I am a professional software developer. I even think, that some of the more theoretical stuff goes beyond most things a normal engineer will hit working for a big company. So at least that bit is available for anyone out there, no need to work for an, in terms of ethics, questionably acting company. The bit about finding ones "tribe". Yes, it happens for us engineers, when there are many smart people in "the room". I would not value it over finding purpose though. Purpose in technical perspective, as well as ethical perspective. There is a lot of feeling alone for many of us, because most of us cannot be around similar minded people a lot. What makes me feel more alone though is, when I meet bright people, who do not care about the ethical aspects of their work or hobbies. So personally, I do not think I would "find my tribe" in a FANG or similar company. I highly doubt it even, no matter how smart people there are.

felixfbecker 5y ago

Curious what you mean by code search being cannibalized?

varispeed 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. You were a perfect specimen to get exploited by a big corporations. You had knowledge and you were willing to work for the sake of it. That's why we need laws that would prevent something like this from happening in the future. It's scary that you don't even realise that.

ctvo 5y ago
Hilarious. You act like they were paid minimum wage to do their jobs. They didn’t care about the money is very different from they weren’t paid good money. I don’t disagree that corporations will exploit you given the opportunity, but software engineering is a very low priority on that list.
- varispeed 5y ago
  Oh so the exploitation is acceptable as long as you are not paid a minimum wage? I can't believe people defend these companies. Stockholm syndrome?
  - blindmute 5y ago
    The exploitation is completely acceptable when you are paid $300k+ and don't even feel exploited, yes. I fail to see how getting paid huge sums to do what you enjoy doing is even close to 'exploitation' for any reasonable definition.
    - varispeed 5y ago
      So company makes a billion out of your work and you are happy with $300k. Okay.
      - blindmute 5y ago
        What does that matter? You'd decline $10 if it meant someone else got $20? FAANG pays extremely generously. You're either being paid enough to work or you arent; what someone else gets should be meaningless. When you call being paid some of the highest salaries in the world exploitation, you devalue the word.

quijoteuniv 5y ago

I think we need more great people working on real humanity problems. I am glad they probably do not need the money any more and that “the big money” cannot suck their talent anymore.(for profit) Cheers for all those talented engineers with guts to leave behind the big players

tj-teej 5y ago

For someone on the outside, what was 'the pipe dream that was never going to work'?

sakagami0 5y ago

I worked on Chronicle and remember seeing your name everywhere. Thanks for all the help in the typescript channel, good luck at Figma!

jahller 5y ago

> 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. the day google reader was shut down was probably one of the saddest i had ever been for a piece of software.