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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 bor
by 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 agoplenty 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 agoIs is not possible for you to transfer to another team/org internally?
- knuthsat 5y agoSounds like a job in a bank. Or any other monopolistic entity.
- _arthur_ 5y agoThere are other 'monopolistic entities' who don't give their employees a cushy life.
- knuthsat 5y agoHighly 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.
- da39a3ee 5y agoIf I were in that position I would consider studying while on the job. Is there anything in the realm of computer science or adjacent areas that appeals to you to study? Maybe get a serious ramp-up in an area that you'd like to work in next?
- folmar 5y agoSeems like a day in a lot of big corps; embrace it or switch.
- endtime 5y agoAlso a Googler, opinions are my own. My current experience is very different (I work on Assistant and there are plenty of problems to solve, a mix of interesting technical ones and some organizational ones), but I have been on teams where I've seen what you're talking about. I strongly suggest changing teams!