31 ms·

Leaving Google

462 points by dcu 5y ago

cube00 5y ago
> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence. This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.
- neatze 5y ago
  seems like this is most relevant video: https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4 https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4
  - monkeywork 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing that - I had never seen that before and it rings incredibly true
    - cube00 5y ago
      Check out "Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview" which is long form footage from the clips used in "Triumph of the Nerds" and "Revenge of the Nerds". Two fantastic documentaries that chronicle the history of personal computing.
  - nbzso 5y ago
    It is not only relevant for Google. Apple is exactly IBM from the past + some design and marketing sprinkled over.
- spicyramen 5y ago
  Still depends on the org. Many orgs still engineering driven. This happens when engineers are more familiar with tech and business than PM, which surprisingly is not that uncommon (GCP)
- Icathian 5y ago
  You either die a hero, etc etc. I wonder if there's any "big, established" company where IC engineers have more weight than the PHB types. I'd be genuinely curious if anyone knows of some good examples, I suppose HN would be the place where people might. It seems like that's one of the natural equilibrating factors that offer some small amount of competitive grace to Davids competing against Goliaths. Google hasn't been David for a long time now, I think.
  - surajrmal 5y ago
    I guess it depends on which organization you're part of. I've never really been told what to do in my 5+ years at Google. I usually just have an idea, say I'm going to work on it, and then do it. Most of my peers also work this way, and while more junior ones usually need some assistance with coming up with ideas which align with priorities, it's not like management is telling them what to do - usually a senior team member helps them. PMs help set higher level goals and priorities, but not unilaterally. Managers provide incentives to align to org level goals and priorities but balance that with bottom up driven ones. This has been true for both teams I've been on in two separate orgs, but I'm sure it's not universally true throughout Google. Prior experience at companies previous to Google gave me almost no autonomy.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    That can happen when corporate leadership is dominated by a technical founder. Once MBAs and sales/marketing alums run the show it always turns into a grindhouse. They don't fundamentally understand the work that goes into the product and so they rule by metrics to make their dev factory "more efficient".
- technion 5y ago
  As a complete outsider, I have an impression at least that Google PMs have some level of technical knowledge. Which would make them far more "engineer led" than is common.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Well there's no grand strategy and it's too big and settled for engineering to have much impact. It's inertia-led. I bet most googlers hate ads so it's a big state of cognitive dissonance too.
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  - jart 5y ago
    If they hate ads then wouldn't that make them the best people to control them?
    - downrightmike 5y ago
      no, that'd hurt shareholders.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        If they are paid with RSUs, they are also shareholders.
        downrightmike 5y ago
        good, now the next logical steps is?...
    - gremIin 5y ago
      Turns out love of large paychecks is stronger than hatred of ads.
- s09dfhks 5y ago
  Snowflake is this way too. Its so depressing
- slimsag 5y ago
  You left out the best part: > We were expected to hit precise deadlines on multi-quarter projects (within two weeks), and when that inevitably didn't happen, we had to track all the time we spent on anything in 30 minute increments. It felt very cog-in-the-machine.
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    This is absurd. I haven't been asked to file timesheets (other than for days off) as a sweng in over a decade, including when I was at Google. Management on that team has completely lost it.
    - cube00 5y ago
      I read that as the "30 minute increment" tracking is used as a short term punishment for not meeting the deadline.
      - catillac 5y ago
        Wow I think you’re right upon reread. I read it as having to account for all that time over the previous period to show how they couldn’t have done a better job/
      - ornornor 5y ago
        The beatings will continue until morale improves.
      - pa7ch 5y ago
        That mindset towards workers I think should be considered pretty gross in most contexts. Punishment for not meeting a software deadline? This sounds like highschools with conservative leadership.
  - downrightmike 5y ago
    Some of the best minds in generations, all focused on selling us things we really don't want.
  - deleted 5y ago
- nostrebored 5y ago
  The idea that products at large tech companies are going to be lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people or understand the cross functional relationships and strategies is absurd. This isn't a future engineers want either -- I hear complaints about meetings from nearly every engineer I know. The idea that you should have low level knowledge of the system you're working on and high level knowledge of all the cross functional team's responsibilities along with the responsibility for cultivating those relationships is ridiculous. People say this without having any idea what PMs do.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - Jensson 5y ago
    > lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people Do you think the engineer who leads a 1000 man org is not talking to people? I talked to the engineer leading our 500 man org, he talked to a lot of people and wanted their input and tried to understand the whole to make decisions. He had technical expertise so he could talk to low level engineers as well, but also to business people etc.
    - nostrebored 5y ago
      Yes -- within engineering typically! That is a the role of a PE/Staff Eng.
      - Jensson 5y ago
        Right, and in an engineering lead organization the PM etc are subordinate to engineers. Their job is to research the market and present the results to engineers so engineers can better understand what to build. This is opposite to non-engineers leading and hiring engineers to build the product they want. Ultimately the end result is the same, its just creates a different perspective. So it is easy to evaluate companies like this. Did technical people hire business people to do those tasks for them? Or did business people hire technical people to create a product for them? The first is engineering lead, the second is the standard enterprise.
- mavelikara 5y ago
  Product Management, in many orgs, is the old wine of Taylorism in a new bottle, where there is a "thinking class," and there is a separate "doing class." The stereotype of an engineer with poor social skills who can't grasp the "high-level cross functional relationships and strategies" (from nostrebored's sibling comment) is not very different from Taylor's idea of workers: One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. It is sad to see this happen at places like Google, where engineers had a lot more autonomy. Most knowledge workers who have the mental capacity to grasp deep technical topics will find the "cross functional relationships and strategies" discussed in garden variety business books a light stroll in the park.
  - geodel 5y ago
    I think you have made excellent point here. I absolutely see this behavior at workplaces. The Architects/PMs one side and developers who are mainly Jira/Daily standup chumps on other side.
    - deleted 5y ago
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  - lordnacho 5y ago
    This is exactly right. I studied both engineering and management, so I have experienced both schools. Actually understanding science and manipulating the world is hard. Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves, or how a web request happens. They can never understand it on the required level to fix things. Now try to explain to an engineer how a bond works, or how industrial strategy works. He can do both his own work and the manager's work. I sound pretty bitter for a guy who's managed to dodge most of the BS things in large corporations his while career, but that's because I really think this aspect of the world needs fixing. It seems like just about every human endeavour is encumbered by MBA people who pretend to understand something hard, who get paid at least as well as those people who can both solve the technical and the strategic problems. This might be more of a problem in the Anglo world. Engineers getting promoted is more common in Europe according to rumor.
- achow 5y ago
  This could be Cloud Org characteristic. Enterprise applications cannot be engineering led as tech does not matter but 'checkboxes' do (features). For checkboxes one needs to be constantly in touch with customers, sales, pre-sales, need to be full time demo giver, etc. These are not the job of engineers and even if it is made so, it is setting them and the team/org/company up for failure on both fronts - frontend and backend.
  - RNCTX 5y ago
    Do you think checkboxes magically spring from the aether just to support sales demos?
    - achow 5y ago
      Don't get your point. I was referring to this statement from OP: Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time. In enterprise applications (which solves for workflows - business, IT etc.) one needs lot of PM thinking for feature identifications, what to prioritize, gathering requirements etc. In Search defined Google one did not need PMs as requirement is pretty straight forward from feature perspective, but one needs deep engineering and computing science knowledge for making the best search algorithm. Whereas in Cloud IT world the focus shifts more towards product & roadmap planning.
      - RNCTX 5y ago
        I think you're over-inflating the value of people fetching specs back and forth between a pool of customers and design / engineering. If you're a software or hardware company, ultimately the people who design and build the software / hardware have to design and build the thing, everything else is ancillary to those tasks.
- SantiagoQ 5y ago
  I can see this as a result from too many employees going from college to Google with nothing in between. They lack real-world experience and ability to grasp non-technical concepts. As a founder, and having worked in multiple startups is hard for me to communicate with their relative worldview. Despite how brilliant they are.
sharmin123 5y ago
The Best And Easiest Ways To Protect Yourself From Hackers: https://www.hackerslist.co/the-best-and-easiest-ways-to-protect-yourself-from-hackers/ https://www.hackerslist.co/the-best-and-easiest-ways-to-prot...
Waterluvian 5y ago
I think it’s interesting that the good things about working there had nothing to do with the employer and the bad things had everything to do with the employer. Indeed, this line is the takeaway, in my opinion: “…is because we've been at least a little brainwashed into thinking a job at Google is the pinnacle of employment.” I haven’t worked for one so this take might be quite hot, but I get the sense that big tech companies do a great job selling you on the idea that they’re elite and therefore you must be elite too if you get the job. But then you’re really just another fungible developer in a pool of tens of thousands. There’s exceptions of course.
- hyperpallium2 5y ago
  I think that changed about 15 years ago.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    It’s kind of incredible how fast the shine has come off of most of the FAANG companies.
    - echelon 5y ago
      They're no longer about breadth, limitless innovation, and moonshots, but rather extraction of platform economic control. They're the new Oracles, except they own mobile, social, and web instead of databases. Start new companies and push them over. Fight their ability to land grab more.
      - systemvoltage 5y ago
        This is the most optimistic thing I've read in a long time here. Much needed, thanks.
      - Waterluvian 5y ago
        I really like this optimistic sentiment. And I think it’s true. I work for a company that’s a unicorn this year. About five years ago it didn’t exist until Amazon decided to drop customer support for their warehouse robots, forcing a warehouse company to build its own replacements. There is still plenty of room for new players to emerge.
its_bbq 5y ago
I am in the middle of the same sort of sabbatical from Google. It was my first job out of college and I joined the same time as Jay. In fact for a time sat right across the aisle from the Go team when I was working on Abseil (abseil.io) and I can confirm that Alan Donovan is a really kind, friendly guy. The company got progressively more and more "corporate" and felt less and less dynamic as time wore on. Most of the people I know who are still there are burnt out. It's a company filled with people who tend to put a lot of pressure on themselves and I felt, at least on my last team, a rising sense of anxiety and isolation from what was already a very high level before the pandemic. That all being said, the quality of humans there is pretty amazing. I count almost all of my old managers as friends and I felt privileged constantly to be surrounded by such intelligent people and to work on such huge ranging vastly impactful projects as I did. But I'm happy I left. The self-direction feels too good after being in such a behemoth to start my career. On to new adventures!
- catillac 5y ago
  Thank you for Abseil, if nothing else. It’s been my go-to for years now.
jeffbee 5y ago
Is this just long form "calling in rich"? With an L5 RSU package and the share price tripling, a few hundred thousand turns into a few million and you can afford to leave. Nice problem to have.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  > To summarize, <why I left> He didn't like working enough to make himself happy, I guess. It's a person who is at a different point in their life than when they started. Notably with enough money that they question their own motivations to continue. These blog posts seem devoid of anything interesting or actionable.
freyir 5y ago
“Quite a few activists and researchers were fired for asking Google to be a bit more ethical” In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond “asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn’t seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they’re on the right side of an ethical (and sometimes just political) issue.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  I'm not sure this is true. Normally I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the Timnit situation was handled badly. Objectively, there was nothing wrong with her paper. You may have a point about the other researchers. I'm not familiar enough with their situations. But I dug into Timnit's pretty thoroughly. Their recent behavior isn't too encouraging either: https://archive.md/7jCQY https://archive.md/7jCQY (Related Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1451273190974660612 https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1451273190974660612) Hopefully everyone will just chill out and focus on research.
  - freyir 5y ago
    From what I read at the time, she wasn’t fired for the content of the paper (though she initially made it sound like this before more details became public). She gave the company an ultimatum to reveal the name of an anonymous reviewer or she would quit, and they took her threat seriously.
    - srvmshr 5y ago
      I have a feeling her continuous rants on Twitter is because her overall demands and feeling of entitlement were stood down. She demanded things which would have been just another kind of shit show and targeted harassment. A social-justice themed charade is being made out of just being salty at getting fired.
    - sillysaurusx 5y ago
      She was subjected to a process that wasn't the norm at Google. I'd be pretty upset too. The details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313994 Discussion about whether the review process was normal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308847
sillysaurusx 5y ago
A few months ago, I considered applying to Google to join the JAX team. It turns out that you can't apply to Google's JAX team. You have to apply to Google, and then managers at various teams select whether they want you. The thing is, JAX is amazing. So I'm now faced with the uncomfortable idea that this process must make sense, because it clearly works. Yet I profoundly dislike it. Perhaps my ideas are the problem, and Google is four steps ahead. I don't know. It just seemed like you should be able to apply to specific teams at Google, and that the team should be able to choose whether you'd be a valuable teammate.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  If the team wants you bad enough, they can hire you. It has to come from the inside, which I'm sure has no impact on whether nepotism happens.
- thanhhaimai 5y ago
  I don't think it's true that "you can't apply directly to a team". I've seen many people got interviewed/hired for exactly one position. The manager of the team will need to be in the loop though. If they don't know you and don't agree with you applying directly, then it's most likely you're going to the normal pipeline.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Ah, interesting. Thank you. My info about the hiring process came from a friend at Google. But in hindsight, they were probably relaying what their own path had been like, rather than making a statement about the process in general.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Well your friend is correct in theory, you never apply to a particular team, you always apply to Google. However you are free to choose what team you'd like to work for as long as that teams manager agrees to let you join, meaning if you already know the manager you can guarantee a spot at that team if you pass the regular Google interview. But if for some reason that team disappears etc, you have still passed the Google hiring bar and is therefore free to join another team.
cletus 5y ago
Why did he leave? The tl'dr is the L6 glass ceiling and the remote pay cut. I can speak to both of those: First, for those that don't know, new grads get hired at L3, PhDs at L4 (which IMHO is actually a mistake but that's another issue) and there is an expectation of getting promoted to L5 (Senior Software Engineer). There's no set time frame for this. I've known people who stayed L4 for many years and were quite happy. L6+ start to require increasingly extraordinary influence and technical contribution. > It's hard to get promoted beyond L5 for open source work I'll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it's hard to get promoted to L6 for anything. This is by design. It's how the company controls costs and maintain retention (by dangling that L6 promotion, possibly for years). One of the things that Ruth Porat did when she became CFO is lowered the promotion target percentage. This meant less people got promoted at each cycle. How promotions work is a committee of higher-level engineers (eg L7s consider promotions to L6) and will have 10-15 packets to assess. These will get stack ranked by the committee. If you're above the line you'll get promoted. If you're not, you won't. Ruth's change just made that line a little higher. As for the pay cut, this requires some context. By the time you reach L5+ the majority of your total compensation comes from equity, both your initial grant (for the first 4 years) and annual refreshes and discretionary grants you get along the way. So less than 50% of your income comes from salary plus bonus. For those employees who go permanent remote, there is a location-based pay adjustment. SF and NYC are at 100% rate. Other areas at 85-95% of that. That only applies to the salary plus bonus (since bonus is derived from salary) part of your total compensation. So a 10% cut for L5+ is in reality <5%. You don't save on taxes by moving to San Diego but it is cheaper than the Bay Area. If you move to a no-state income tax state however your net pay can in fact be higher. So, the argument for no pay cut is you're saving the company money by not having to pay for office space, a desk (etc), free food and so on, all while doing the same job. This seems to be the author's position and I'm certainly sympathetic. The argument for a pay cut is that your compensation isn't really associated with your output at all and is entirely market-based. For many people not going into the office and being able to live somewhere that isn't the Bay Area is a huge plus so people are willing to give up something for that. Plus you could argue the company doesn't want people going remote who don't really want to by offering the same pay. By lowering your pay slightly it creates a psychological barrier such that only people who really want to do it do so. I'm sympathetic to that argument too.
chem83 5y ago
Relevant perhaps is the fact that Google folks just came out of a promo cycle, which is run by a committee. Folks I talked to seem to agree the process is utterly broken, so this is about the time many will decide to jump ship.
deeblering4 5y ago
This website seems to have switched to stoplang, because it’s down.
bmitc 5y ago
Google has 140,000 employees, the size of a size-able city in the U.S. Does anyone really care when someone leaves Google?
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I guess people do in the "why would you ever leave such a great job?!" sense, but people can get bored of any job after enough time.
  - ergocoder 5y ago
    Outsiders also don't grasp how high a lowly senior engineer earns. Compensation in tech is so insane. Other high earning occupation just doesn't even come close. It would take doctors years to earn 250k a year. In tech with stock growth + RSU, you might get that as a junior eng. I earned 450k as a junior per year with pre-ipo company. This is why engineers can just leave and others are surprised.
    - kgwgk 5y ago
      To many people the high pay makes it more surprising, not less.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Many people have the causation backwards. The high pay is because the engineers are able to leave the job.
    - midasuni 5y ago
      Get a google job straight of of college and it seems you can retire very comfortably in your mid 30s
      - emodendroket 5y ago
        Seems like the big problem with early retirement scenarios is if you get sick you're fucked. Maybe if you leave the country.
a-dub 5y ago
i miss google+, the world's preeminent social network for google employees to announce to the world their intentions to leave google.
ashtonkem 5y ago
> Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would let it get that bad. 10 reports is “you put this off a bit too long” territory, 25 is in the “someone up the chain should be fired” territory.
- amha 5y ago
  My direct supervisor has 75 direct reports. (Not a tech company––an elite private school in the Bay––but still...)
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Fuck that. Nobody is being served by that arrangement. Nobody.
    - willhinsa 5y ago
      Short term capital returns are!
      - RNCTX 5y ago
        Which is to say, everyone who matters
    - jefftk 5y ago
      I don't know, I think that's pretty normal in education? For example, you have a large number of teachers that report up to the head of middle school or something?
    - zerocount 5y ago
      I would, because I wouldn't be bothered by a useless manager running around calling meetings and doing other useless activites. They're saving a bunch of money just having one useless person.
yxhuvud 5y ago
That resonated a lot more than I expected it to do. Not the Google parts but the burnout parts. I exited my job during summer and am still not looking for something new and this article and the one by Maya linked in it really helped me put words on it
titzer 5y ago
I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue growth. That is Google's true mission. Eat the world. It's now $180 billion in revenue. In five years, that will need to be $400 billion. And five years after that, it will need to be pulling close to a trillion.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.
  - bsedlm 5y ago
    collective systemic greed
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - 3grdlurker 5y ago
    Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing YoY revenue growth other than greed.
    - xyzelement 5y ago
      // See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses Are these business in industries with fierce large competitors? If not, it's an unreasonable comparison - they are only not getting eaten because nobody's trying to eat them. I love small and medium businesses but just making a game theoretical point - you can only chose to limit your competitive effort to the extent that nobody is increasing theirs.
softwaredoug 5y ago
I will say as companies grow the appetite for huge ambition shrinks. It’s natural for a few reasons. - you’re established, no longer a startup, you prioritize the momentum in the current cash cow. - your hiring pool changes. Instead of people who want to come build the “next big thing” you tend to attract folks who value the security of a big name. And they will tend to hire folks like them, and so on.. - you’re publicly traded. Holding an asset that reliably produces steady growth, creates very different incentives than trying to hit some kind of hockey stick unicorn growth
mikesabbagh 5y ago
> I couldn't work anymore, and it was time for an extended break. From speaking with other people that have gone through this, it seems like the only thing that really helps. Maybe changing teams or company can get you working again. 1 year seems too long to me
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Nah, 1 year is pretty much the minimum burnout recovery period. I've seen it happen several times now. Work isn't worth doing just for work's sake. You have to feel aligned.
geodel 5y ago
Seems takeaway is if Google didn't cut this person's pay by 10 per cent then all their "shitty behavior" like Project Maven and so on would have been just fine.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Another article on the site expands on this: > I still feel uncertain about everything though. Google approved my remote work application last week, but I haven't gotten a new offer letter yet, and I've been told to expect a pay cut of at least 10% because the market rate for software engineers is supposedly lower in southern California. This feels like a shitty thing to do. My work is not less valuable. It's a reminder that this is nothing more than a business relationship, and the company is not interested in loyalty to workers or support in a difficult time. I'm not sure what, if anything, I'm going to do yet, but it has me thinking harder about my career and future. Not sure why _this_ is what it took to get to that revelation, but better late than never. But on the point about value vs. cost of living... I mean how do you work as a developer in the United States and not notice you get paid a lot more to do this work than people in other places?
  - DannyBee 5y ago
    I always find it interesting that lots of tech folks I meet are strongly in favor of more income equality except when it would cause them to earn less money. Then it's a shitty thing to do.
  - geodel 5y ago
    I don't know maybe it is the thing with top level engineers hired at FAANG who deserve absolute truth, justice and equality. To me earning nowhere at level as these folks, still it embarasses me to whine about pay/promotion when so many hard working folks doing important work in society are paid pittance.
    - abdabab 5y ago
      It depends on the market. If someone wants to pay you between 1.5x to 2x for the same work you’re doing right now with same work/life balance, will you take it? People generally don’t whine about pay or promotions, they interview and get better offers.
justicezyx 5y ago
I never realized how deeply the promotion mindset is damaging my personal happiness and growth, until I left Google in 2019... Most things promoted in Google about growth boils down to promotion, which is just a cover word of getting your hands on promising project without proactively doing much by yourself. Self motivated ideas actually get me into various trouble. In hindsight, I can see that many coworkers are silently watching this guy getting burnt without offering much helping hands. In the end, I learned the googely way of working at Google, and find it not worthwhile to stay...
emodendroket 5y ago
I mean, nothing wrong with anything the guy says here. But this says more about the author than Google, really. No shame in having had enough of a job and wanting to move on after nearly a decade, but I don't think the fact that they wouldn't let him move far away from the office without a pay cut or the unlikelihood of a promotion indicates that the job radically changed on him, exactly.
AlbertCory 5y ago
2005-2017 for me. On the "20% project" stuff, which everyone seemed to have heard of: I think it was 2008 or so when I was sitting at a table with about eight other people, and somehow or other the question came up "who has a 20% project?" Only one of us did. The main utility of a 20% was that you could try out a new group before transferring to it, and they could try you out. Other than that, very few people actually had one, even then.
- sulam 5y ago
  I can only speak for myself and my org of 300 or so, but it’s surprising how few people are actually interested in a 20% project. I’m sure there are factors at play here: * we have a lot of work to do, the poster in this thread who is bored and only has 5 hours of real work a week is definitely not in my BU * they may be concerned how such a project will reflect on them in perf. it may seem better to go all in on one thing vs splitting your attention * we’re relatively new (acquisition) so perhaps the 20% ethos hasn’t percolated over to us yet But at any rate, I think I’ve gotten exactly 2 requests for 20% projects, which I approved after confirming the person wasn’t going to be doing the dreaded 120% project.
ehershey 5y ago
While the original site isn’t feeling well: https://archive.md/YV9AQ https://archive.md/YV9AQ
- reilly3000 5y ago
  I wasn’t able to view the content with this link. I tried using the captcha but it kept unchecking itself. I’m on mobile so I couldn’t debug.
deleted 5y ago
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bobsil1 5y ago
Cached: https://web.archive.org/web/20211023032551/https://jayconrod.com/posts/122/leaving-google https://web.archive.org/web/20211023032551/https://jayconrod...
nont 5y ago
I'm sad... I used like their slogan Don't be evil. Now it's like when Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm relabels it to 4 legs are good, but 2 legs are better.
known 5y ago
Purpose of life in http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/maslow/ http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/maslow/
kkcorps 5y ago
Although I appreciate the honesty about the company in this blog, my issue is almost every big company behaves in the same way. FAANG is not the absolute best, it is just best option among the worst. The only other option is to work at a small startup or start your own company but that is a different ballgame and requires extreme levels of grind.
natch 5y ago
I’ve come to suspect the reason (ex) Google people write these is basically humblebragging. There just isn’t enough interesting material presented to have any other explanation make much sense. Just an opinion; ymmv.
- gremIin 5y ago
  Everyone wants to feel special.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Personally I’m quite happy with every blog post that someone claims to be burned out in. Al least I feel like I’m not alone.
- wjamesg 5y ago
  My thoughts as well
sologoub 5y ago
Reading these always makes me a bit sad. There is a lot in here and people have their reasons, but levels are not everything and various “cuts” aren’t that meaningful when you consider TC of faang. Where else are you going to have a chance to make things better for billions of people? Maybe not life changing but at least slightly better? A small improvement for billions adds up. Though burnout and pain are real, there’s more to all this. Hope OP finds what he’s looking for!
RNCTX 5y ago
> If a great new opportunity comes up, take it, but drop something else. If the dropped thing was important, it'll get staffed. If not... why work on it? The above seems to explain how a thing that fills a gaping functionality hole in one google product via another just gets deleted without any consideration for the interaction between the two.
m0zg 5y ago
> I started losing a lot of sleep, and I got a lot of headaches and back pain. I got a lot of "brain fog": inability to concentrate or make decisions. I started forgetting words and names and losing the thread of a conversation mid-sentence. I felt like I had no energy left for anything other than work, and I could barely manage that. Other than back pain these symptoms match mine exactly, except I hadn't worked full time for the past 2 years and I wouldn't say I'm stressed or anything. I'm not sure what it is - maybe cabin fever? Yesterday I nearly lost consciousness when I got up too quickly. I'm also losing weight (12kg so far, which would be great if I knew _why_ I'm losing weight). Did a blood test about a month ago - everything is fine. I did wonder if these are vaccine side effects, but that seems very implausible - the second dose was in May. But I digress. I totally get what Jay is saying in his writeup. I largely felt the same way except in the opposite direction in one aspect - the number and shrillness of "activists" has become overbearing to the point where it was severely impeding work and morale. Seeing that he has pronouns in his twitter bio he might have been more sympathetic, but I bet this stuff distracted even him. Contrary to belief popular on the outside, Google is indeed a fairly stressful and thankless place unless you're skilled at self promotion, which I'm not, or you don't care about working on cool things and getting promoted. This is why every time their recruiters ping me I tell them I'm not interested "at this time". No matter how much they pay me, I can't imagine subjecting myself to such treatment again. And I was pretty successful there - high profile projects, wrote lots of code, shipped impressive stuff, and I still felt like shit most of the time. I can only imagine what less "forceful" folks feel if I felt like a gnat on this elephant's ass. Contrary to belief popular inside Google, life is great on the outside. Freedom is a thing folks, and without moving around you aren't experiencing it. I know when you're on the inside it feels like you're "changing the world", but of all Google products nowadays I only use Gmail and YouTube. If everything else disappeared completely I wouldn't even notice. Heck, if Gmail disappeared I'd switch to Proton Mail in a day, and if YouTube disappeared there's BitChute and Rumble which are modest, but adequate. So whatever you're "changing" there impacts me very little, and mostly in negative ways. I certainly do not regret leaving. If anything I should have left much sooner than I did.
- dekkers 5y ago
  I don't really want to give anything that seems like medical advice in HN comments. I just want to give a bit of information that might be useful to you or others. Obviously you should do your own research, talk with a doctor about it, etc. Brain fog and headache are also one of the most common symptoms of long covid. Losing consciousness when getting up sounds like POTS[1] and is also common in long covid. Research is showing that people who are asymptomatic during infection can also develop long covid[2]. In general things like brain fog and headache are also symptoms of burnout and probably lots of other things, so I think it would be pretty difficult to clearly distinguish between them. There also isn't a test for it and it won't show up in standard blood tests. And of course it's also possible to have both. Some form of long covid, even if it is just "light" compared to other people who have long covid, could easily push someone who is already on the brink of burnout over the edge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postural_orthostatic_tachycardia_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postural_orthostatic_tachycard... [2] https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/study-many-long-haul-covid-19-patients-were-asymptomatic-during-initial-infection https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/study-many-long-haul-covi...
ir193 5y ago
> Google doesn't use the go command or modules, and since there's no direct measurable benefit to Google, it's very difficult to make the case. i'm curious. What exactly they don't use internally?
- thethethethe 5y ago
  I'm guessing they are referring to how Google uses Blaze (internal version of Bazel) to build Go binaries, not the 'go' command and it's modules. The first time I went to work on a personal project using Go after I joined Google, tried using Bazel because I was so used to Blaze and I liked it a lot. I was very disappointed to find that the integration between Bazel and Go was severely lacking and required me to use third party extensions to get things working as expected, which was quite disappointing. That was a few years ago so things might better now
knorker 5y ago
All these people talking about "Google changed, man" seem like they need to consider two points: 1) So did you. E.g. the commenter who was at Google for 9 years. Do you not think you changed? You changed. It reminds me of right wing commentators who say "everything was so great in the 50s!". Sure it was, because you were a child! 2) Selection bias. You left. Of course if you take the people leaving, they'll be less happy with Google than the people who stay. Oh, and the "Of course, when you leave Google you have to write some kind of letter or rant". Ugh. So childish. No, you do not need an exit rant. And joke or not, this was an exit rant. > A 10% cut is pretty damn unfavorable, considering I was doing the same work on the same team So were all your colleagues working in offices outside the bay area. That was literally your "bay area bonus". You're being super spoiled and disrespectful.
kerng 5y ago
Interesting that the person moved to San Diego (not a cheap place by any means), and Google cuts the salary. There is some strange fixation Google currently has, especially towards getting people into their New York offices - must be some tax incentives or other deals with the city.... A friend just recently wanted to work from google office in another tech hub city (not remote/from home by any means) and during offer negotiation it was denied, so she didn't join - as she didn't wanna move to NYC. Odd things happening at Google lately - I mean even Amazon is more remote friendly these days. Lol
- ido 5y ago
  Surely NYC/SFBA are even more expensive?
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    It’s probably SFBA >Manhattan/some parts of Brooklyn > San Diego > NYC Metro.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      It isn't. Bay Area and NYC Metro are both in the highest paying bracket.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Proportionally, a greater area of San Diego can still be more expensive than a similarly proportional area of NYC Metro. For example, NYC Metro would have cheaper housing 60min from work than San Diego. I generally find land in coastal CA to be more expensive than everywhere else in the US.
        UncleMeat 5y ago
        It is also quite expensive in Hawaii, yet Google pays less well there. Similarly, it is quite expensive in London, yet Google pays less well there too. This is based on Google's model of paying by local market rather than CoL. There are a few regions where this ends up being quite frustrating. No doubt it is difficult to look at a nontrivial pay cut if your housing costs aren't much lower. It has even been frustrating for me to look at my pay cut despite moving to a much cheaper region. But the pay cuts are weird. Salaries are adjusted down, but since so much of pay is in RSUs, the effect is limited. My 15% pay cut is actually more like 6% after considering RSUs. A 10% pay cut will be even smaller. That will ratchet down over time as refreshes are scaled, but it is just hard to see that as an urgent reason to look for alternatives.
melomal 5y ago
These posts almost feel like a Scientology style exodus and moment of clarity.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
transitory_pce 5y ago
Larry, from his lair in Fiji: “I should sell some shares”
brap 5y ago
I’ve been at Google for a little less than OP, and while I’m also considering leaving, my main reason is sort of the opposite: I’m bored. The whole team is bored. It feels like we’re doing nothing, and have been doing nothing for years. I work under 25 hours a week, and the vast majority of time is spent in useless meetings or reading useless docs. My actual work is maybe 5 hours a week. What are we even getting paid for? No one knows. We just keep working on new projects nobody needs, then a few months later upper management shifts priorities and repeat. Seems like the only reason we have projects is to keep us busy. And oh, we’re always hiring. Apparently we’re understaffed. Some secretly call it a pyramid scheme.
- ren_engineer 5y ago
  plenty of people have suggested that it's better for Google and other big tech companies to pay talented engineers to do nothing rather than risk them founding a company that could disrupt them
- yla92 5y ago
  Is is not possible for you to transfer to another team/org internally?
- knuthsat 5y ago
  Sounds like a job in a bank. Or any other monopolistic entity.
  - _arthur_ 5y ago
    There are other 'monopolistic entities' who don't give their employees a cushy life.
    - knuthsat 5y ago
      Highly doubt it. It's the nature of monopolies that do not have an army (real guns and blood). There are employees that will create pressure out of nothing and will ruin the cushy possibilities just out of their own boredom and misery due to not being able to progress the hierarchy of the monopoly (most old monopolies don't really give big raises and it's very hard to reward employees because most don't really have any impact). (managers that start micromanaging employees that somehow do something productive, regular workers that overdo it at the task managing platforms and then stress over the backlog, etc.) But it's not the monopoly that's taking the cushy from them.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
test1235 5y ago
site is currently down: https://archive.md/YV9AQ https://archive.md/YV9AQ
bla3 5y ago
Down for me. Mirror: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:glQF_0OknwEJ:https://jayconrod.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:glQF_0...
bla3 5y ago
> Why I left [...] Burnout [...] I wish I'd done more to fight those things, beyond signing petitions and walkouts. I'm not much of an activist though, especially with burnout. It's interesting that the author mentions this, but doesn't make a connection between feeling burned out and feeling that they have to be personally responsible for everything the company does. I don't even disagree with many of the demands of internal "activist", but the strategies they use (walkouts, trying to keep everyone outraged as much as possible) seem ineffectual to me: The main effect seems to be that it makes ordinary employees feel more burned out since they're made aware of many things that they're suppose to be angry about but at the same time they're powerless to change them. That's a recipe for burnout. I get that the thinking is that ordinary employees are not powerless due to collective action, but for that to work you have to be a lot better at picking your battles. You can affect one to two larger things per year, so getting up in arms over every (comparatively) little thing just has the effect that your activism achieves nothing but burn out the people who want to have on your side.
- apohn 5y ago
  I just wanted to let you know I found this comment very insightful. I've never really thought about all tiny ways feeling responsible for stuff in a company can creep into your mind and fester there without you realizing it. It's easier to attribute burn-out directly to a bad manager, unrealistic deadlines, not getting a promotion, etc - it's harder realize there there are so many other tangential things you think you should engage in and feel guilty about not having the time or mental space to engage with. All of which adds up into a overwhelming mental load.
borroka 5y ago
A few days ago I got the usual call from the Google recruiter, after being rejected a year ago with feedback of 2 sure hire, one lean, two no hire. A strange collection, isn't it? Well, I would have “fired" two of them plus the recruiter, one who wasn't paying attention to my interview and one who turned off the video and whose accent and questions were basically incomprehensible (I am non-US myself, btw). Maybe the two no-hire? I make 75% of what a Google would make for the (high) position they would hire me for, but I work 1/5 of what I would work at Google and with little overhead such as performance review, promotion packages, and excuse my French, other assorted bs I have zero interest for at my age and with my experience. If the hiring process were more reasonable, i.e., not dependent on the mood, accent, question of the day of interviewers whom I will (probably) never meet again after they nonchalantly determine my future employment, I might agree to interview again and then evaluate their proposal, but otherwise I think Google will continue to bleed talent and hire little uninteresting robots (mine is a salty-fish generalization of course) who have the patience for nonsense that I, and people like me, do not have.
- digianarchist 5y ago
  Why did you pursue the position? You seem content where you are?
  - borroka 5y ago
    There are definitely some advantages in working for Google, like 25% more money and Google on the resume (I already had another FAANG), which can open other lucrative doors down the road. I am not a hardcore tech guy, in the sense that I could switch tomorrow to selling bicycles (for the same money, of course), and not miss tech one bit, so my north stars are money conditional on time spent working and stress (assuming the job itself if not terrible). I would guess that my current position, given zero stress, little time at work, and good salary, is on par with the Google position I was interviewing for. But I am not willing to go through those ridiculous interviews again, then waiting for weeks for a the committee decision, then the recruiter cannot say what happened, are you kidding me.
- lolpython 5y ago
otikik 5y ago
We live in a finite planet with finite resources. I think every argument for growth (on the scale FAANG companies operate) should also mention that part. I also want to say that it's completely acceptable to work on a place without exorbitant pay, stocks, or promotions every 6 months. A job can be many other things. Different people want different things at different phases of their life. For some of them, a job is just a job.
- owenversteeg 5y ago
  While I agree that we should be mindful of our finite resources, it’s worth noting that you can have sustained growth and still consume fewer resources. For example, US per-capita CO2 emissions have declined 30% since 1970, while per-capita GDP has grown more than twelvefold. In recent years, technology has been by far the largest contributor to that widening gap between GDP growth and emissions. That’s not to ignore the impact technology has on the environment from e.x. rare earth mining, but if you look at the big picture I think you’ll be positively surprised.
GauntletWizard 5y ago
I'm sad to see Jay go, I've interacted with him in his role as bazel-go maintainer. It's clear that project wasn't getting the resources it needs. As a former Googler myself, I understand his frustration all too well. Google used to be run like a university, a place of learning and scientific advancement. It's not anymore. Many of my former coworkers have quit. All of them tell the same story of it feeling like a big corporation. Note that Google was a huge, profitable, publicly traded company before this happened - it was possible to be an institution and be publicly traded, but for how long? Can we build long term focused companies that are subject to the whims of the stock markets? I'm not sure. Truthfully, I think it's a social problem.
jppope 5y ago
I believe "scale" should probably be "growth"
bschwindHN 5y ago
From the outside, this paints google as a bunch of engineers moving around, dropping projects, trying to get promoted. Obsession with promotions instead of product quality won't lead anywhere nice.
Fnoord 5y ago
> My wife also works in tech and can comfortably support us both. I hope in a year, I'll be rested and ready to jump back into tech with a better sense of purpose and direction. If you have this luxury, use your precious time to work less.
toblbg 5y ago
An interesting look into the reality of working at Google. Thanks for sharing!

462 points by dcu 5y ago

> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence. This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.

neatze 5y ago
seems like this is most relevant video: https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4 https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4
- monkeywork 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing that - I had never seen that before and it rings incredibly true
  - cube00 5y ago
    Check out "Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview" which is long form footage from the clips used in "Triumph of the Nerds" and "Revenge of the Nerds". Two fantastic documentaries that chronicle the history of personal computing.
- nbzso 5y ago
  It is not only relevant for Google. Apple is exactly IBM from the past + some design and marketing sprinkled over.
spicyramen 5y ago
Still depends on the org. Many orgs still engineering driven. This happens when engineers are more familiar with tech and business than PM, which surprisingly is not that uncommon (GCP)
Icathian 5y ago
You either die a hero, etc etc. I wonder if there's any "big, established" company where IC engineers have more weight than the PHB types. I'd be genuinely curious if anyone knows of some good examples, I suppose HN would be the place where people might. It seems like that's one of the natural equilibrating factors that offer some small amount of competitive grace to Davids competing against Goliaths. Google hasn't been David for a long time now, I think.
- surajrmal 5y ago
  I guess it depends on which organization you're part of. I've never really been told what to do in my 5+ years at Google. I usually just have an idea, say I'm going to work on it, and then do it. Most of my peers also work this way, and while more junior ones usually need some assistance with coming up with ideas which align with priorities, it's not like management is telling them what to do - usually a senior team member helps them. PMs help set higher level goals and priorities, but not unilaterally. Managers provide incentives to align to org level goals and priorities but balance that with bottom up driven ones. This has been true for both teams I've been on in two separate orgs, but I'm sure it's not universally true throughout Google. Prior experience at companies previous to Google gave me almost no autonomy.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  That can happen when corporate leadership is dominated by a technical founder. Once MBAs and sales/marketing alums run the show it always turns into a grindhouse. They don't fundamentally understand the work that goes into the product and so they rule by metrics to make their dev factory "more efficient".
technion 5y ago
As a complete outsider, I have an impression at least that Google PMs have some level of technical knowledge. Which would make them far more "engineer led" than is common.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Well there's no grand strategy and it's too big and settled for engineering to have much impact. It's inertia-led. I bet most googlers hate ads so it's a big state of cognitive dissonance too.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jart 5y ago
  If they hate ads then wouldn't that make them the best people to control them?
  - downrightmike 5y ago
    no, that'd hurt shareholders.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      If they are paid with RSUs, they are also shareholders.
      - downrightmike 5y ago
        good, now the next logical steps is?...
  - gremIin 5y ago
    Turns out love of large paychecks is stronger than hatred of ads.
s09dfhks 5y ago
Snowflake is this way too. Its so depressing
slimsag 5y ago
You left out the best part: > We were expected to hit precise deadlines on multi-quarter projects (within two weeks), and when that inevitably didn't happen, we had to track all the time we spent on anything in 30 minute increments. It felt very cog-in-the-machine.
- kevingadd 5y ago
  This is absurd. I haven't been asked to file timesheets (other than for days off) as a sweng in over a decade, including when I was at Google. Management on that team has completely lost it.
  - cube00 5y ago
    I read that as the "30 minute increment" tracking is used as a short term punishment for not meeting the deadline.
    - catillac 5y ago
      Wow I think you’re right upon reread. I read it as having to account for all that time over the previous period to show how they couldn’t have done a better job/
    - ornornor 5y ago
      The beatings will continue until morale improves.
    - pa7ch 5y ago
      That mindset towards workers I think should be considered pretty gross in most contexts. Punishment for not meeting a software deadline? This sounds like highschools with conservative leadership.
- downrightmike 5y ago
  Some of the best minds in generations, all focused on selling us things we really don't want.
- deleted 5y ago
nostrebored 5y ago
The idea that products at large tech companies are going to be lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people or understand the cross functional relationships and strategies is absurd. This isn't a future engineers want either -- I hear complaints about meetings from nearly every engineer I know. The idea that you should have low level knowledge of the system you're working on and high level knowledge of all the cross functional team's responsibilities along with the responsibility for cultivating those relationships is ridiculous. People say this without having any idea what PMs do.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Jensson 5y ago
  > lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people Do you think the engineer who leads a 1000 man org is not talking to people? I talked to the engineer leading our 500 man org, he talked to a lot of people and wanted their input and tried to understand the whole to make decisions. He had technical expertise so he could talk to low level engineers as well, but also to business people etc.
  - nostrebored 5y ago
    Yes -- within engineering typically! That is a the role of a PE/Staff Eng.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Right, and in an engineering lead organization the PM etc are subordinate to engineers. Their job is to research the market and present the results to engineers so engineers can better understand what to build. This is opposite to non-engineers leading and hiring engineers to build the product they want. Ultimately the end result is the same, its just creates a different perspective. So it is easy to evaluate companies like this. Did technical people hire business people to do those tasks for them? Or did business people hire technical people to create a product for them? The first is engineering lead, the second is the standard enterprise.
mavelikara 5y ago
Product Management, in many orgs, is the old wine of Taylorism in a new bottle, where there is a "thinking class," and there is a separate "doing class." The stereotype of an engineer with poor social skills who can't grasp the "high-level cross functional relationships and strategies" (from nostrebored's sibling comment) is not very different from Taylor's idea of workers: One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. It is sad to see this happen at places like Google, where engineers had a lot more autonomy. Most knowledge workers who have the mental capacity to grasp deep technical topics will find the "cross functional relationships and strategies" discussed in garden variety business books a light stroll in the park.
- geodel 5y ago
  I think you have made excellent point here. I absolutely see this behavior at workplaces. The Architects/PMs one side and developers who are mainly Jira/Daily standup chumps on other side.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
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- lordnacho 5y ago
  This is exactly right. I studied both engineering and management, so I have experienced both schools. Actually understanding science and manipulating the world is hard. Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves, or how a web request happens. They can never understand it on the required level to fix things. Now try to explain to an engineer how a bond works, or how industrial strategy works. He can do both his own work and the manager's work. I sound pretty bitter for a guy who's managed to dodge most of the BS things in large corporations his while career, but that's because I really think this aspect of the world needs fixing. It seems like just about every human endeavour is encumbered by MBA people who pretend to understand something hard, who get paid at least as well as those people who can both solve the technical and the strategic problems. This might be more of a problem in the Anglo world. Engineers getting promoted is more common in Europe according to rumor.
achow 5y ago
This could be Cloud Org characteristic. Enterprise applications cannot be engineering led as tech does not matter but 'checkboxes' do (features). For checkboxes one needs to be constantly in touch with customers, sales, pre-sales, need to be full time demo giver, etc. These are not the job of engineers and even if it is made so, it is setting them and the team/org/company up for failure on both fronts - frontend and backend.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  Do you think checkboxes magically spring from the aether just to support sales demos?
  - achow 5y ago
    Don't get your point. I was referring to this statement from OP: Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time. In enterprise applications (which solves for workflows - business, IT etc.) one needs lot of PM thinking for feature identifications, what to prioritize, gathering requirements etc. In Search defined Google one did not need PMs as requirement is pretty straight forward from feature perspective, but one needs deep engineering and computing science knowledge for making the best search algorithm. Whereas in Cloud IT world the focus shifts more towards product & roadmap planning.
    - RNCTX 5y ago
      I think you're over-inflating the value of people fetching specs back and forth between a pool of customers and design / engineering. If you're a software or hardware company, ultimately the people who design and build the software / hardware have to design and build the thing, everything else is ancillary to those tasks.
SantiagoQ 5y ago
I can see this as a result from too many employees going from college to Google with nothing in between. They lack real-world experience and ability to grasp non-technical concepts. As a founder, and having worked in multiple startups is hard for me to communicate with their relative worldview. Despite how brilliant they are.

sharmin123 5y ago

The Best And Easiest Ways To Protect Yourself From Hackers: https://www.hackerslist.co/the-best-and-easiest-ways-to-protect-yourself-from-hackers/ https://www.hackerslist.co/the-best-and-easiest-ways-to-prot...

Waterluvian 5y ago

I think it’s interesting that the good things about working there had nothing to do with the employer and the bad things had everything to do with the employer. Indeed, this line is the takeaway, in my opinion: “…is because we've been at least a little brainwashed into thinking a job at Google is the pinnacle of employment.” I haven’t worked for one so this take might be quite hot, but I get the sense that big tech companies do a great job selling you on the idea that they’re elite and therefore you must be elite too if you get the job. But then you’re really just another fungible developer in a pool of tens of thousands. There’s exceptions of course.

hyperpallium2 5y ago
I think that changed about 15 years ago.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It’s kind of incredible how fast the shine has come off of most of the FAANG companies.
  - echelon 5y ago
    They're no longer about breadth, limitless innovation, and moonshots, but rather extraction of platform economic control. They're the new Oracles, except they own mobile, social, and web instead of databases. Start new companies and push them over. Fight their ability to land grab more.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      This is the most optimistic thing I've read in a long time here. Much needed, thanks.
    - Waterluvian 5y ago
      I really like this optimistic sentiment. And I think it’s true. I work for a company that’s a unicorn this year. About five years ago it didn’t exist until Amazon decided to drop customer support for their warehouse robots, forcing a warehouse company to build its own replacements. There is still plenty of room for new players to emerge.

its_bbq 5y ago

I am in the middle of the same sort of sabbatical from Google. It was my first job out of college and I joined the same time as Jay. In fact for a time sat right across the aisle from the Go team when I was working on Abseil (abseil.io) and I can confirm that Alan Donovan is a really kind, friendly guy. The company got progressively more and more "corporate" and felt less and less dynamic as time wore on. Most of the people I know who are still there are burnt out. It's a company filled with people who tend to put a lot of pressure on themselves and I felt, at least on my last team, a rising sense of anxiety and isolation from what was already a very high level before the pandemic. That all being said, the quality of humans there is pretty amazing. I count almost all of my old managers as friends and I felt privileged constantly to be surrounded by such intelligent people and to work on such huge ranging vastly impactful projects as I did. But I'm happy I left. The self-direction feels too good after being in such a behemoth to start my career. On to new adventures!

catillac 5y ago
Thank you for Abseil, if nothing else. It’s been my go-to for years now.

jeffbee 5y ago

Is this just long form "calling in rich"? With an L5 RSU package and the share price tripling, a few hundred thousand turns into a few million and you can afford to leave. Nice problem to have.

Supermancho 5y ago
> To summarize, <why I left> He didn't like working enough to make himself happy, I guess. It's a person who is at a different point in their life than when they started. Notably with enough money that they question their own motivations to continue. These blog posts seem devoid of anything interesting or actionable.

freyir 5y ago

“Quite a few activists and researchers were fired for asking Google to be a bit more ethical” In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond “asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn’t seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they’re on the right side of an ethical (and sometimes just political) issue.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
I'm not sure this is true. Normally I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the Timnit situation was handled badly. Objectively, there was nothing wrong with her paper. You may have a point about the other researchers. I'm not familiar enough with their situations. But I dug into Timnit's pretty thoroughly. Their recent behavior isn't too encouraging either: https://archive.md/7jCQY https://archive.md/7jCQY (Related Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1451273190974660612 https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1451273190974660612) Hopefully everyone will just chill out and focus on research.
- freyir 5y ago
  From what I read at the time, she wasn’t fired for the content of the paper (though she initially made it sound like this before more details became public). She gave the company an ultimatum to reveal the name of an anonymous reviewer or she would quit, and they took her threat seriously.
  - srvmshr 5y ago
    I have a feeling her continuous rants on Twitter is because her overall demands and feeling of entitlement were stood down. She demanded things which would have been just another kind of shit show and targeted harassment. A social-justice themed charade is being made out of just being salty at getting fired.
  - sillysaurusx 5y ago
    She was subjected to a process that wasn't the norm at Google. I'd be pretty upset too. The details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313994 Discussion about whether the review process was normal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308847

sillysaurusx 5y ago

A few months ago, I considered applying to Google to join the JAX team. It turns out that you can't apply to Google's JAX team. You have to apply to Google, and then managers at various teams select whether they want you. The thing is, JAX is amazing. So I'm now faced with the uncomfortable idea that this process must make sense, because it clearly works. Yet I profoundly dislike it. Perhaps my ideas are the problem, and Google is four steps ahead. I don't know. It just seemed like you should be able to apply to specific teams at Google, and that the team should be able to choose whether you'd be a valuable teammate.

kevingadd 5y ago
If the team wants you bad enough, they can hire you. It has to come from the inside, which I'm sure has no impact on whether nepotism happens.
thanhhaimai 5y ago
I don't think it's true that "you can't apply directly to a team". I've seen many people got interviewed/hired for exactly one position. The manager of the team will need to be in the loop though. If they don't know you and don't agree with you applying directly, then it's most likely you're going to the normal pipeline.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Ah, interesting. Thank you. My info about the hiring process came from a friend at Google. But in hindsight, they were probably relaying what their own path had been like, rather than making a statement about the process in general.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Well your friend is correct in theory, you never apply to a particular team, you always apply to Google. However you are free to choose what team you'd like to work for as long as that teams manager agrees to let you join, meaning if you already know the manager you can guarantee a spot at that team if you pass the regular Google interview. But if for some reason that team disappears etc, you have still passed the Google hiring bar and is therefore free to join another team.

cletus 5y ago

Why did he leave? The tl'dr is the L6 glass ceiling and the remote pay cut. I can speak to both of those: First, for those that don't know, new grads get hired at L3, PhDs at L4 (which IMHO is actually a mistake but that's another issue) and there is an expectation of getting promoted to L5 (Senior Software Engineer). There's no set time frame for this. I've known people who stayed L4 for many years and were quite happy. L6+ start to require increasingly extraordinary influence and technical contribution. > It's hard to get promoted beyond L5 for open source work I'll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it's hard to get promoted to L6 for anything. This is by design. It's how the company controls costs and maintain retention (by dangling that L6 promotion, possibly for years). One of the things that Ruth Porat did when she became CFO is lowered the promotion target percentage. This meant less people got promoted at each cycle. How promotions work is a committee of higher-level engineers (eg L7s consider promotions to L6) and will have 10-15 packets to assess. These will get stack ranked by the committee. If you're above the line you'll get promoted. If you're not, you won't. Ruth's change just made that line a little higher. As for the pay cut, this requires some context. By the time you reach L5+ the majority of your total compensation comes from equity, both your initial grant (for the first 4 years) and annual refreshes and discretionary grants you get along the way. So less than 50% of your income comes from salary plus bonus. For those employees who go permanent remote, there is a location-based pay adjustment. SF and NYC are at 100% rate. Other areas at 85-95% of that. That only applies to the salary plus bonus (since bonus is derived from salary) part of your total compensation. So a 10% cut for L5+ is in reality <5%. You don't save on taxes by moving to San Diego but it is cheaper than the Bay Area. If you move to a no-state income tax state however your net pay can in fact be higher. So, the argument for no pay cut is you're saving the company money by not having to pay for office space, a desk (etc), free food and so on, all while doing the same job. This seems to be the author's position and I'm certainly sympathetic. The argument for a pay cut is that your compensation isn't really associated with your output at all and is entirely market-based. For many people not going into the office and being able to live somewhere that isn't the Bay Area is a huge plus so people are willing to give up something for that. Plus you could argue the company doesn't want people going remote who don't really want to by offering the same pay. By lowering your pay slightly it creates a psychological barrier such that only people who really want to do it do so. I'm sympathetic to that argument too.

chem83 5y ago

Relevant perhaps is the fact that Google folks just came out of a promo cycle, which is run by a committee. Folks I talked to seem to agree the process is utterly broken, so this is about the time many will decide to jump ship.

deeblering4 5y ago

This website seems to have switched to stoplang, because it’s down.

bmitc 5y ago

Google has 140,000 employees, the size of a size-able city in the U.S. Does anyone really care when someone leaves Google?

emodendroket 5y ago
I guess people do in the "why would you ever leave such a great job?!" sense, but people can get bored of any job after enough time.
- ergocoder 5y ago
  Outsiders also don't grasp how high a lowly senior engineer earns. Compensation in tech is so insane. Other high earning occupation just doesn't even come close. It would take doctors years to earn 250k a year. In tech with stock growth + RSU, you might get that as a junior eng. I earned 450k as a junior per year with pre-ipo company. This is why engineers can just leave and others are surprised.
  - kgwgk 5y ago
    To many people the high pay makes it more surprising, not less.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Many people have the causation backwards. The high pay is because the engineers are able to leave the job.
  - midasuni 5y ago
    Get a google job straight of of college and it seems you can retire very comfortably in your mid 30s
    - emodendroket 5y ago
      Seems like the big problem with early retirement scenarios is if you get sick you're fucked. Maybe if you leave the country.

a-dub 5y ago

i miss google+, the world's preeminent social network for google employees to announce to the world their intentions to leave google.

ashtonkem 5y ago

> Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would let it get that bad. 10 reports is “you put this off a bit too long” territory, 25 is in the “someone up the chain should be fired” territory.

amha 5y ago
My direct supervisor has 75 direct reports. (Not a tech company––an elite private school in the Bay––but still...)
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Fuck that. Nobody is being served by that arrangement. Nobody.
  - willhinsa 5y ago
    Short term capital returns are!
    - RNCTX 5y ago
      Which is to say, everyone who matters
  - jefftk 5y ago
    I don't know, I think that's pretty normal in education? For example, you have a large number of teachers that report up to the head of middle school or something?
  - zerocount 5y ago
    I would, because I wouldn't be bothered by a useless manager running around calling meetings and doing other useless activites. They're saving a bunch of money just having one useless person.

yxhuvud 5y ago

That resonated a lot more than I expected it to do. Not the Google parts but the burnout parts. I exited my job during summer and am still not looking for something new and this article and the one by Maya linked in it really helped me put words on it

titzer 5y ago

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue growth. That is Google's true mission. Eat the world. It's now $180 billion in revenue. In five years, that will need to be $400 billion. And five years after that, it will need to be pulling close to a trillion.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
> And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.
- bsedlm 5y ago
  collective systemic greed
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 3grdlurker 5y ago
  Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing YoY revenue growth other than greed.
  - xyzelement 5y ago
    // See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses Are these business in industries with fierce large competitors? If not, it's an unreasonable comparison - they are only not getting eaten because nobody's trying to eat them. I love small and medium businesses but just making a game theoretical point - you can only chose to limit your competitive effort to the extent that nobody is increasing theirs.

softwaredoug 5y ago

I will say as companies grow the appetite for huge ambition shrinks. It’s natural for a few reasons. - you’re established, no longer a startup, you prioritize the momentum in the current cash cow. - your hiring pool changes. Instead of people who want to come build the “next big thing” you tend to attract folks who value the security of a big name. And they will tend to hire folks like them, and so on.. - you’re publicly traded. Holding an asset that reliably produces steady growth, creates very different incentives than trying to hit some kind of hockey stick unicorn growth

mikesabbagh 5y ago

> I couldn't work anymore, and it was time for an extended break. From speaking with other people that have gone through this, it seems like the only thing that really helps. Maybe changing teams or company can get you working again. 1 year seems too long to me

sillysaurusx 5y ago
Nah, 1 year is pretty much the minimum burnout recovery period. I've seen it happen several times now. Work isn't worth doing just for work's sake. You have to feel aligned.

geodel 5y ago

Seems takeaway is if Google didn't cut this person's pay by 10 per cent then all their "shitty behavior" like Project Maven and so on would have been just fine.

emodendroket 5y ago
Another article on the site expands on this: > I still feel uncertain about everything though. Google approved my remote work application last week, but I haven't gotten a new offer letter yet, and I've been told to expect a pay cut of at least 10% because the market rate for software engineers is supposedly lower in southern California. This feels like a shitty thing to do. My work is not less valuable. It's a reminder that this is nothing more than a business relationship, and the company is not interested in loyalty to workers or support in a difficult time. I'm not sure what, if anything, I'm going to do yet, but it has me thinking harder about my career and future. Not sure why _this_ is what it took to get to that revelation, but better late than never. But on the point about value vs. cost of living... I mean how do you work as a developer in the United States and not notice you get paid a lot more to do this work than people in other places?
- DannyBee 5y ago
  I always find it interesting that lots of tech folks I meet are strongly in favor of more income equality except when it would cause them to earn less money. Then it's a shitty thing to do.
- geodel 5y ago
  I don't know maybe it is the thing with top level engineers hired at FAANG who deserve absolute truth, justice and equality. To me earning nowhere at level as these folks, still it embarasses me to whine about pay/promotion when so many hard working folks doing important work in society are paid pittance.
  - abdabab 5y ago
    It depends on the market. If someone wants to pay you between 1.5x to 2x for the same work you’re doing right now with same work/life balance, will you take it? People generally don’t whine about pay or promotions, they interview and get better offers.

justicezyx 5y ago

I never realized how deeply the promotion mindset is damaging my personal happiness and growth, until I left Google in 2019... Most things promoted in Google about growth boils down to promotion, which is just a cover word of getting your hands on promising project without proactively doing much by yourself. Self motivated ideas actually get me into various trouble. In hindsight, I can see that many coworkers are silently watching this guy getting burnt without offering much helping hands. In the end, I learned the googely way of working at Google, and find it not worthwhile to stay...

emodendroket 5y ago

I mean, nothing wrong with anything the guy says here. But this says more about the author than Google, really. No shame in having had enough of a job and wanting to move on after nearly a decade, but I don't think the fact that they wouldn't let him move far away from the office without a pay cut or the unlikelihood of a promotion indicates that the job radically changed on him, exactly.

AlbertCory 5y ago

2005-2017 for me. On the "20% project" stuff, which everyone seemed to have heard of: I think it was 2008 or so when I was sitting at a table with about eight other people, and somehow or other the question came up "who has a 20% project?" Only one of us did. The main utility of a 20% was that you could try out a new group before transferring to it, and they could try you out. Other than that, very few people actually had one, even then.

sulam 5y ago
I can only speak for myself and my org of 300 or so, but it’s surprising how few people are actually interested in a 20% project. I’m sure there are factors at play here: * we have a lot of work to do, the poster in this thread who is bored and only has 5 hours of real work a week is definitely not in my BU * they may be concerned how such a project will reflect on them in perf. it may seem better to go all in on one thing vs splitting your attention * we’re relatively new (acquisition) so perhaps the 20% ethos hasn’t percolated over to us yet But at any rate, I think I’ve gotten exactly 2 requests for 20% projects, which I approved after confirming the person wasn’t going to be doing the dreaded 120% project.

ehershey 5y ago

While the original site isn’t feeling well: https://archive.md/YV9AQ https://archive.md/YV9AQ

reilly3000 5y ago
I wasn’t able to view the content with this link. I tried using the captcha but it kept unchecking itself. I’m on mobile so I couldn’t debug.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bobsil1 5y ago

Cached: https://web.archive.org/web/20211023032551/https://jayconrod.com/posts/122/leaving-google https://web.archive.org/web/20211023032551/https://jayconrod...

nont 5y ago

I'm sad... I used like their slogan Don't be evil. Now it's like when Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm relabels it to 4 legs are good, but 2 legs are better.

known 5y ago

Purpose of life in http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/maslow/ http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/maslow/

kkcorps 5y ago

Although I appreciate the honesty about the company in this blog, my issue is almost every big company behaves in the same way. FAANG is not the absolute best, it is just best option among the worst. The only other option is to work at a small startup or start your own company but that is a different ballgame and requires extreme levels of grind.

natch 5y ago

I’ve come to suspect the reason (ex) Google people write these is basically humblebragging. There just isn’t enough interesting material presented to have any other explanation make much sense. Just an opinion; ymmv.

gremIin 5y ago
Everyone wants to feel special.
Aeolun 5y ago
Personally I’m quite happy with every blog post that someone claims to be burned out in. Al least I feel like I’m not alone.
wjamesg 5y ago
My thoughts as well

sologoub 5y ago

Reading these always makes me a bit sad. There is a lot in here and people have their reasons, but levels are not everything and various “cuts” aren’t that meaningful when you consider TC of faang. Where else are you going to have a chance to make things better for billions of people? Maybe not life changing but at least slightly better? A small improvement for billions adds up. Though burnout and pain are real, there’s more to all this. Hope OP finds what he’s looking for!

RNCTX 5y ago

> If a great new opportunity comes up, take it, but drop something else. If the dropped thing was important, it'll get staffed. If not... why work on it? The above seems to explain how a thing that fills a gaping functionality hole in one google product via another just gets deleted without any consideration for the interaction between the two.

m0zg 5y ago

> I started losing a lot of sleep, and I got a lot of headaches and back pain. I got a lot of "brain fog": inability to concentrate or make decisions. I started forgetting words and names and losing the thread of a conversation mid-sentence. I felt like I had no energy left for anything other than work, and I could barely manage that. Other than back pain these symptoms match mine exactly, except I hadn't worked full time for the past 2 years and I wouldn't say I'm stressed or anything. I'm not sure what it is - maybe cabin fever? Yesterday I nearly lost consciousness when I got up too quickly. I'm also losing weight (12kg so far, which would be great if I knew _why_ I'm losing weight). Did a blood test about a month ago - everything is fine. I did wonder if these are vaccine side effects, but that seems very implausible - the second dose was in May. But I digress. I totally get what Jay is saying in his writeup. I largely felt the same way except in the opposite direction in one aspect - the number and shrillness of "activists" has become overbearing to the point where it was severely impeding work and morale. Seeing that he has pronouns in his twitter bio he might have been more sympathetic, but I bet this stuff distracted even him. Contrary to belief popular on the outside, Google is indeed a fairly stressful and thankless place unless you're skilled at self promotion, which I'm not, or you don't care about working on cool things and getting promoted. This is why every time their recruiters ping me I tell them I'm not interested "at this time". No matter how much they pay me, I can't imagine subjecting myself to such treatment again. And I was pretty successful there - high profile projects, wrote lots of code, shipped impressive stuff, and I still felt like shit most of the time. I can only imagine what less "forceful" folks feel if I felt like a gnat on this elephant's ass. Contrary to belief popular inside Google, life is great on the outside. Freedom is a thing folks, and without moving around you aren't experiencing it. I know when you're on the inside it feels like you're "changing the world", but of all Google products nowadays I only use Gmail and YouTube. If everything else disappeared completely I wouldn't even notice. Heck, if Gmail disappeared I'd switch to Proton Mail in a day, and if YouTube disappeared there's BitChute and Rumble which are modest, but adequate. So whatever you're "changing" there impacts me very little, and mostly in negative ways. I certainly do not regret leaving. If anything I should have left much sooner than I did.

dekkers 5y ago
I don't really want to give anything that seems like medical advice in HN comments. I just want to give a bit of information that might be useful to you or others. Obviously you should do your own research, talk with a doctor about it, etc. Brain fog and headache are also one of the most common symptoms of long covid. Losing consciousness when getting up sounds like POTS[1] and is also common in long covid. Research is showing that people who are asymptomatic during infection can also develop long covid[2]. In general things like brain fog and headache are also symptoms of burnout and probably lots of other things, so I think it would be pretty difficult to clearly distinguish between them. There also isn't a test for it and it won't show up in standard blood tests. And of course it's also possible to have both. Some form of long covid, even if it is just "light" compared to other people who have long covid, could easily push someone who is already on the brink of burnout over the edge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postural_orthostatic_tachycardia_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postural_orthostatic_tachycard... [2] https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/study-many-long-haul-covid-19-patients-were-asymptomatic-during-initial-infection https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/study-many-long-haul-covi...

ir193 5y ago

> Google doesn't use the go command or modules, and since there's no direct measurable benefit to Google, it's very difficult to make the case. i'm curious. What exactly they don't use internally?

thethethethe 5y ago
I'm guessing they are referring to how Google uses Blaze (internal version of Bazel) to build Go binaries, not the 'go' command and it's modules. The first time I went to work on a personal project using Go after I joined Google, tried using Bazel because I was so used to Blaze and I liked it a lot. I was very disappointed to find that the integration between Bazel and Go was severely lacking and required me to use third party extensions to get things working as expected, which was quite disappointing. That was a few years ago so things might better now

knorker 5y ago

All these people talking about "Google changed, man" seem like they need to consider two points: 1) So did you. E.g. the commenter who was at Google for 9 years. Do you not think you changed? You changed. It reminds me of right wing commentators who say "everything was so great in the 50s!". Sure it was, because you were a child! 2) Selection bias. You left. Of course if you take the people leaving, they'll be less happy with Google than the people who stay. Oh, and the "Of course, when you leave Google you have to write some kind of letter or rant". Ugh. So childish. No, you do not need an exit rant. And joke or not, this was an exit rant. > A 10% cut is pretty damn unfavorable, considering I was doing the same work on the same team So were all your colleagues working in offices outside the bay area. That was literally your "bay area bonus". You're being super spoiled and disrespectful.

kerng 5y ago

Interesting that the person moved to San Diego (not a cheap place by any means), and Google cuts the salary. There is some strange fixation Google currently has, especially towards getting people into their New York offices - must be some tax incentives or other deals with the city.... A friend just recently wanted to work from google office in another tech hub city (not remote/from home by any means) and during offer negotiation it was denied, so she didn't join - as she didn't wanna move to NYC. Odd things happening at Google lately - I mean even Amazon is more remote friendly these days. Lol

ido 5y ago
Surely NYC/SFBA are even more expensive?
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  It’s probably SFBA >Manhattan/some parts of Brooklyn > San Diego > NYC Metro.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    It isn't. Bay Area and NYC Metro are both in the highest paying bracket.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Proportionally, a greater area of San Diego can still be more expensive than a similarly proportional area of NYC Metro. For example, NYC Metro would have cheaper housing 60min from work than San Diego. I generally find land in coastal CA to be more expensive than everywhere else in the US.
      - UncleMeat 5y ago
        It is also quite expensive in Hawaii, yet Google pays less well there. Similarly, it is quite expensive in London, yet Google pays less well there too. This is based on Google's model of paying by local market rather than CoL. There are a few regions where this ends up being quite frustrating. No doubt it is difficult to look at a nontrivial pay cut if your housing costs aren't much lower. It has even been frustrating for me to look at my pay cut despite moving to a much cheaper region. But the pay cuts are weird. Salaries are adjusted down, but since so much of pay is in RSUs, the effect is limited. My 15% pay cut is actually more like 6% after considering RSUs. A 10% pay cut will be even smaller. That will ratchet down over time as refreshes are scaled, but it is just hard to see that as an urgent reason to look for alternatives.

melomal 5y ago

These posts almost feel like a Scientology style exodus and moment of clarity.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

transitory_pce 5y ago

Larry, from his lair in Fiji: “I should sell some shares”

brap 5y ago

I’ve been at Google for a little less than OP, and while I’m also considering leaving, my main reason is sort of the opposite: I’m bored. The whole team is bored. It feels like we’re doing nothing, and have been doing nothing for years. I work under 25 hours a week, and the vast majority of time is spent in useless meetings or reading useless docs. My actual work is maybe 5 hours a week. What are we even getting paid for? No one knows. We just keep working on new projects nobody needs, then a few months later upper management shifts priorities and repeat. Seems like the only reason we have projects is to keep us busy. And oh, we’re always hiring. Apparently we’re understaffed. Some secretly call it a pyramid scheme.

ren_engineer 5y ago
plenty of people have suggested that it's better for Google and other big tech companies to pay talented engineers to do nothing rather than risk them founding a company that could disrupt them
yla92 5y ago
Is is not possible for you to transfer to another team/org internally?
knuthsat 5y ago
Sounds like a job in a bank. Or any other monopolistic entity.
- _arthur_ 5y ago
  There are other 'monopolistic entities' who don't give their employees a cushy life.
  - knuthsat 5y ago
    Highly doubt it. It's the nature of monopolies that do not have an army (real guns and blood). There are employees that will create pressure out of nothing and will ruin the cushy possibilities just out of their own boredom and misery due to not being able to progress the hierarchy of the monopoly (most old monopolies don't really give big raises and it's very hard to reward employees because most don't really have any impact). (managers that start micromanaging employees that somehow do something productive, regular workers that overdo it at the task managing platforms and then stress over the backlog, etc.) But it's not the monopoly that's taking the cushy from them.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

test1235 5y ago

site is currently down: https://archive.md/YV9AQ https://archive.md/YV9AQ

bla3 5y ago

Down for me. Mirror: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:glQF_0OknwEJ:https://jayconrod.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:glQF_0...

bla3 5y ago

> Why I left [...] Burnout [...] I wish I'd done more to fight those things, beyond signing petitions and walkouts. I'm not much of an activist though, especially with burnout. It's interesting that the author mentions this, but doesn't make a connection between feeling burned out and feeling that they have to be personally responsible for everything the company does. I don't even disagree with many of the demands of internal "activist", but the strategies they use (walkouts, trying to keep everyone outraged as much as possible) seem ineffectual to me: The main effect seems to be that it makes ordinary employees feel more burned out since they're made aware of many things that they're suppose to be angry about but at the same time they're powerless to change them. That's a recipe for burnout. I get that the thinking is that ordinary employees are not powerless due to collective action, but for that to work you have to be a lot better at picking your battles. You can affect one to two larger things per year, so getting up in arms over every (comparatively) little thing just has the effect that your activism achieves nothing but burn out the people who want to have on your side.

apohn 5y ago
I just wanted to let you know I found this comment very insightful. I've never really thought about all tiny ways feeling responsible for stuff in a company can creep into your mind and fester there without you realizing it. It's easier to attribute burn-out directly to a bad manager, unrealistic deadlines, not getting a promotion, etc - it's harder realize there there are so many other tangential things you think you should engage in and feel guilty about not having the time or mental space to engage with. All of which adds up into a overwhelming mental load.

borroka 5y ago

A few days ago I got the usual call from the Google recruiter, after being rejected a year ago with feedback of 2 sure hire, one lean, two no hire. A strange collection, isn't it? Well, I would have “fired" two of them plus the recruiter, one who wasn't paying attention to my interview and one who turned off the video and whose accent and questions were basically incomprehensible (I am non-US myself, btw). Maybe the two no-hire? I make 75% of what a Google would make for the (high) position they would hire me for, but I work 1/5 of what I would work at Google and with little overhead such as performance review, promotion packages, and excuse my French, other assorted bs I have zero interest for at my age and with my experience. If the hiring process were more reasonable, i.e., not dependent on the mood, accent, question of the day of interviewers whom I will (probably) never meet again after they nonchalantly determine my future employment, I might agree to interview again and then evaluate their proposal, but otherwise I think Google will continue to bleed talent and hire little uninteresting robots (mine is a salty-fish generalization of course) who have the patience for nonsense that I, and people like me, do not have.

digianarchist 5y ago
Why did you pursue the position? You seem content where you are?
- borroka 5y ago
  There are definitely some advantages in working for Google, like 25% more money and Google on the resume (I already had another FAANG), which can open other lucrative doors down the road. I am not a hardcore tech guy, in the sense that I could switch tomorrow to selling bicycles (for the same money, of course), and not miss tech one bit, so my north stars are money conditional on time spent working and stress (assuming the job itself if not terrible). I would guess that my current position, given zero stress, little time at work, and good salary, is on par with the Google position I was interviewing for. But I am not willing to go through those ridiculous interviews again, then waiting for weeks for a the committee decision, then the recruiter cannot say what happened, are you kidding me.
lolpython 5y ago

otikik 5y ago

We live in a finite planet with finite resources. I think every argument for growth (on the scale FAANG companies operate) should also mention that part. I also want to say that it's completely acceptable to work on a place without exorbitant pay, stocks, or promotions every 6 months. A job can be many other things. Different people want different things at different phases of their life. For some of them, a job is just a job.

owenversteeg 5y ago
While I agree that we should be mindful of our finite resources, it’s worth noting that you can have sustained growth and still consume fewer resources. For example, US per-capita CO2 emissions have declined 30% since 1970, while per-capita GDP has grown more than twelvefold. In recent years, technology has been by far the largest contributor to that widening gap between GDP growth and emissions. That’s not to ignore the impact technology has on the environment from e.x. rare earth mining, but if you look at the big picture I think you’ll be positively surprised.

GauntletWizard 5y ago

I'm sad to see Jay go, I've interacted with him in his role as bazel-go maintainer. It's clear that project wasn't getting the resources it needs. As a former Googler myself, I understand his frustration all too well. Google used to be run like a university, a place of learning and scientific advancement. It's not anymore. Many of my former coworkers have quit. All of them tell the same story of it feeling like a big corporation. Note that Google was a huge, profitable, publicly traded company before this happened - it was possible to be an institution and be publicly traded, but for how long? Can we build long term focused companies that are subject to the whims of the stock markets? I'm not sure. Truthfully, I think it's a social problem.

jppope 5y ago

I believe "scale" should probably be "growth"

bschwindHN 5y ago

From the outside, this paints google as a bunch of engineers moving around, dropping projects, trying to get promoted. Obsession with promotions instead of product quality won't lead anywhere nice.

Fnoord 5y ago

> My wife also works in tech and can comfortably support us both. I hope in a year, I'll be rested and ready to jump back into tech with a better sense of purpose and direction. If you have this luxury, use your precious time to work less.

toblbg 5y ago

An interesting look into the reality of working at Google. Thanks for sharing!