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Why I left Google: work-life balance

453 points by rmason 5y ago

ki_ 5y ago
Good. I think working for big corporations is death for talented people. Unless you have some boss that lets you work out your own vision without having to deal with other people or company procedures. But that's unlikely.
radiKal07 5y ago
This does not make any sense. Give it a few years and the author will find himself in the same place.
hstan4 5y ago
Anytime I hear repl.it I get annoyed by the time their CEO was threatened by and shut down an ex-employee’s weekend project
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  It's a shame that that incident seems to dog them around on HN so much. I don't like what the CEO did in that case either, but I don't think their entire company should sink due to that one incident
  - ionforce 5y ago
    What have they done since to repair their image?
    - d3nj4l 5y ago
      They apologized in that very thread? What else do you want them to do?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- alephnan 5y ago
  Please link.
  - pm90 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 It sounds like a shady org and the CEO sounds like a total jerk. I too remember having a really poor impression after reading this.
    - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
      Did you read the bottom of the blog post? The CEO apologized and told him he could put his project back up.
      - jahewson 5y ago
        Sure. What’s a little threatening with layers between friends? He also publicly slandered said employee and never corrected himself. It’s a big thumbs down from me.
      - hstan4 5y ago
        I don’t need to add much more commentary than the original post already has, but this is hardly considered an apology in my eyes: > While I still think that the totality of the design decisions was a clear a privileged copy, I don't think it warranted my reaction. I'm sorry for that, and I give you permission to publish Riju. Like thanks for giving me permission to publish MY weekend project that you have 0 say over what I do with, and blame the project as being a copy over “design decisions”. Meaning, a square box with the name of the language overlaying it? Instead of owning his mistake as he should he basically claims “I have to remember I’m not the struggling kid from Jordan anymore” to avoid taking responsibility and shifts the blame to this ex-intern anyways.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        5y ago
- marktolson 5y ago
  Same here. However it did point me in the direction of the ex-interns awesome project which I use often for technical interviews: https://riju.codes/ https://riju.codes/
- alexyz12 5y ago
  He also uses the word alpha un-ironically in his tweets
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
>> Getting things done at Google can be hard. Projects need multi-team cooperation to succeed, so you have to do a lot of work up front to get everybody pulling together. But it makes projects fragile. When any of those teams changes direction, or even just over-stated their original commitment, the project slows down or fails3. this hits all big companies - it's fascinating
pmoriarty 5y ago
Disappointing that they didn't leave because they realized working for Google was unethical.
LightG 5y ago
Note to googlers reading this. You had Tasks / Save email to tasks / etc for a decade and did nothing with it. Im being forced to use MS task management and they've caugbt this and actually implemented quite well. What am in talking about? I gues im just moaning that its a symotom of what this blog post is talking about, amongs many others.
Insanity 5y ago
I am an Engineering Manager at a FAANG company and I would hate to see my team work on evenings and weekends and think their work-life balance is good that way. If an IC on my team would do this, I would be concerned about them burning out as well. It also makes me think that my philosophy about work is probably not compatible with working in a startup. Normalizing excessive working hours is something I don't see myself doing any time soon.
- googlr29783 5y ago
  > I would hate to see my team work on evenings and weekends I've worked at startups and Google. The glacial pace of the latter can mean working late feels necessary to get anything done. And even tiny changes can take forever so the feeling of having accomplished something of value is infrequent at best. Maybe it gets better at higher levels, though the internal memes don't give me much hope. Some people are suited to big corps while others prefer start-ups. Nothing wrong with a little diversity.
nvarsj 5y ago
Wait, they left Google for work life balance, to work more hours at a startup. Whaat? I think I get what they're saying though - they were fundamentally unhappy with their ability to make an individual impact at Giant Corp. Well, that's pretty normal and probably a reason for a lot of people's unhappiness at big companies. A startup can help satiate that need, or even a small company. Arguably a healthier approach is to detach one's self identity and satisfaction from work, and get that from non-work things. Easier said than done though. Inevitably this person is going to burn out hard when the start up they go to fails expectations.
joanfihu 5y ago
It looks like Google operates like most big corporation at this point and this seems the main reason why he left.
frays 5y ago
Interesting read. Thanks.
bioinformatics 5y ago
This post is the best example of this website: crappy. Who cares about this loser? Not even his two dogs.
rattray 5y ago
tl;dr, working reasonable hours that are no fun is worse than working more hours that are fun/rewarding/meaningful. I very much agree.
- stormbrew 5y ago
  I think this is probably approximately true, at least if everyone involved is ok with it (I hope the author's family is), but it's a bit weird to describe it as fulfilling work-life balance which isn't usually used in a way that's neutral about how they should be balanced (ie. even if all of the above is true, it would still usually be described as a "bad balance").
kadenwolff 5y ago
Pg shared this post earlier as well: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1524166696461864962?s=20&t=hUNNeRVbNFZ8Rgv3g9RxvQ https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1524166696461864962?s=20&t=...
endisneigh 5y ago
Strange, could’ve switched teams and had 1 and 2 without the hassle. Given what’s happening with the markets I doubt the equity will end up turning up much.
- goldenchrome 5y ago
  Switching teams doesn’t solve the problem. It’s company-wide culture. No one has fire in their bellies because of the infinite ads revenue firehose.
  - jcims 5y ago
    I worked at Google for about six months. Met some amazing folks and saw some amazing stuff, but the intro to Beverly Hillbillies kept intruding into my thoughts. Search felt like the bubbling crude that fueled everything, it was interesting.
    - bogomipz 5y ago
      >"Met some amazing folks and saw some amazing stuff, but the intro to Beverly Hillbillies kept intruding into my thoughts." I thought this was laugh out loud funny. I was in need of a good laugh so thanks for that. I'm curious though did you just walk away because it wasn't for you or something else? Isn't just getting in there a colossal months-long interview affair?
      - jcims 5y ago
        It was an experiment to see if we could relocate the family out west. It truly was a dream job, i got to work with some true phenoms and trailblazers in my industry and had many options to grow despite being much older than the average Googler. Family circumstances just changed and it wasn’t going to work out. It was a heartbreaker but i was glad to have done it. For that role i think i did ten interviews. The previous attempt was 14 and i didn’t get an offer. Its a bit shorter loop for xooglers and in the past six years I’ve had two other offers but there was always a confounding factor. One was comp, I’m not SWE and in every case i did or would have taken a pay cut.
killjoywashere 5y ago
The last footnote got my attention: > This sounds simple, but expenses for a family of three with a house in the Bay Area are no joke. It wound up being ~85% of my Google salary. I live in the Bay area, but under exotic conditions. I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college. Am I don't the math wrong?
- tshaddox 5y ago
  I think you could probably make it work with half that salary, but you won’t feel particularly comfortable or financially secure.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  It's not entirely clear, but I suspect the author is referring to their base salary at Google. The fact that Replit, a startup, provided a salary capable of covering his expenses (which were equal to 85% of his salary) is another clue that he's not included RSUs in the calculation. > I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college. Bay Area is definitely livable on far below $500K. The "2 kids in college" makes your math impossible to guess because that could be anywhere from a minor footnote to the entirety of your budget if you're trying to pay full sticker price tuition in real-time with no prior savings (which almost nobody does, but it would make the math look terrifying). That's not really a feature of the Bay Area, though, because you'd carry that college line item on your personal budget wherever you moved.
  - coredog64 5y ago
    California makes it more difficult in that the salary required for a home pushes you past thresholds for financial aid. You might be what’s known as “house poor” but the university sees the house as an asset that counts towards a high net worth. There are even some prestigious private universities offering “no tuition for families making less than $150k (or thereabouts)”.
  - 5y ago
nicolas_ 5y ago
FYI, clicking on the About liink while being already on the about page leads to a 404 page.
- stkenned 5y ago
  Thanks, fixed. That's what I get for using this as my toy "learn Go" project :)
sdo72 5y ago
I really don't understand the author's points. The main point is "work-life balance", but these don't seem to make sense: + enough salary to pay my bills + I work more hours" and even "on the weekend now" + enough equity All of these are actually worse or much lower chance of being better compared to a job at Google.
- adra 5y ago
  Agreed, author seems deluded and kool-aid enduced. I'm all for change when it makes sense to you. Sticking with a company you're not charged up for often feels like torture, but any semblance of what they said in the article and "work-life balance" feels way off the mark.
- pradn 5y ago
  His main point is that he feels like he's making more progress and being more productive at ReplIt than at Google, which leads to higher satisfaction. He considers satisfaction more important than just pure hours / compensation. I'm inclined to agree. Working uphill in a complexity jungle (organization or technical) can drain the soul.
  - chii 5y ago
    working at a lower-paying job (and doing more hours) is a poor way to satisfy the upper end of the Maslow pyramid of needs (ala, self actualization). The most important metric is consistent and passive income from wealth. Once you have "enough" of such passive income, you can spend your time on self actualization. Most people don't reach the level of passive income required for their chosen lifestyle quality, and so cannot expend time for self actualization. So instead, they double up their career and make that the mode for self actualization (after all, two birds one stone and all that). But i do believe that it mostly does not work, unless the job is somehow a 1:1 mapping to that particular person's method of self actualization. Unfortunately, a lot of people kid themselves and pretend that it does match.
    - pradn 5y ago
      It looks like he just prioritizes and is satisfied by different things than you.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Like I told someone: what is the point of having a family if you never get to see them?
- 9530jh9054ven 5y ago
  Financial or political benefit. Bragging rights. Someone that won't fight back or leave when you use them as a literal punching bag to vent. Not necessarily good reasons to have a family. But reasons that do exist, unfortunately.
  - nnoitra 5y ago
    political benefit you say... hmmm
- xqcgrek2 5y ago
  Some people like that arrangement. In fact, it has been the norm in certain cultures.
ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
Left for work life balance and then this: I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. But what I do makes a difference that I can see. Progress feels 10x faster Might feel more satisfaction but the work life balance is still missing and eventually will come back to make him write "Why I left Repl.it" Eastern traditions have solved this a long time back. You have to break the cycle.
- nnoitra 5y ago
  What cycle at the end of the day he has to work and idk how with that salary he didnt make enough to retire already.
- JohnL4 5y ago
  Honestly, "left Google for 40-person startup for work-life balance reasons" brought me up short.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    "Balance" can mean "all things equal" but when talking about work-life balance I think it means that your work and non-work time combine to produce optimal satisfaction. For some people, if they derive a large amount of satisfaction from their work, that may mean that a more demanding job provides better "balance" in their life.
- thfuran 5y ago
  >Eastern traditions have solved this a long time back Have they? I don't think I've ever heard anything sane, let alone good regarding Japan when it comes to work life balance.
  - redisman 5y ago
    Japan, China, Korea.. all major “eastern” economies are known for way worse academic and professional work life balance
- joyeuse6701 5y ago
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> In 2020, the pandemic destroyed bucket #3 for most people. We were no different. Friends from back home in Canada couldn’t visit us. Even meeting up with local friends became hard. In January 2021 I tore my achilles tendon playing pick-up basketball. There goes bucket #2. > Only then did I realize bucket #1 had been running low for a while. I'm somewhat puzzled. If the author is struggling to socialize with friends (bucket #3) and struggling to pay attention to physical health (bucket #2) then why does he think that this is going to help improve work-life balance: > I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. I can empathize with the desire to get caught up in a high-energy startup (it's fun!) but this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Filling your days with extra work can fill the "bucket #1" (career) but it seems like a nail in the coffin for the author's problems with bucket #2 (physical health) and bucket #3 (social life). Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.
- gamerDude 5y ago
  I think it's because it's because his buckets are not around time management, but energy management. And it works both ways. If you are drained by your job, you get home exhausted and want to just lay on the couch. If you are energized by your job, you get home excited. You feel like you can take on the world and then might be up to go to dinner with friends instead of drained and depressed and want to stay home and eat ice cream to console yourself (my personal go to). The same goes in the other directions. If you are healthy, you will have more energy for other things. If you are unhealthy, your body will drag you down, it will be harder to do other things. Think of having a broken leg or a lot of pain. You just don't feel well and will bring that feeling into other parts of life. Energy management isn't a zero sum game. However, I think you do point out something else. Throwing yourself into work because you want to avoid dealing with issues in your other buckets is not an energy gain. But there is a key difference between working more to avoid painful things and reigniting a spark of joy in your work.
- 5y ago
reverseblade2 5y ago
If you are not happy with what you do, you can't make others happy even if you have time to do so.
NonNefarious 5y ago
Some colleagues of mine worked at Google, and their reports do not reflect well on the management style there. People are pitted against each other and forced to downrate one vs. the other in periodic reviews, using a graphical tool built for the purpose (seriously). It's "work/life" balance, BTW.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  They’re not forced to down rate, in any case it’s not a thing anymore anyways
pm90 5y ago
> but middle managers are clever enough to word OKRs in a way that makes them all think they’re getting what they want. I chuckled at this one. Middle managers gonna middle manage. I know a lot of this behavior is simply due to the position in which they are where senior managers and execs wont take no for an answer. But you have to make tough choices: If you don’t believe deep down that you can deliver, push back hard rather than playing games.
robocat 5y ago
> Enough equity that if I’m right about what Replit can become, I’ll come out ahead of staying at Google. This is why it is so hard to financially justify working for a startup. To cover the risk requires large outsized gains. And financially the 15 percentage points drop in salary could easily be say a 50% drop in disposable income. Yet the pleasure is worth the price. And the above ignores any longer hours (I personally struggle to value my time or satisfaction, in either dollars or opportunity costs).
- thinkharderdev 5y ago
  I think it's also important to take into account the diminishing marginal utility of money. It's one thing to leave a FAANG job making 300k a year to work at a non-profit for 50k a year. But going to a startup making 150-200k a year can be a great trade if it genuinely brings more satisfaction. After all it's not like your family is going to starve making only 4x the median salary in the US. If you also get a lottery ticket in the form of startup equity then great, but it could still make total sense to make the move even if you assume (probably correctly) that your equity will be approximately worthless.
  - asiachick 5y ago
    it depends on where you live. Can you afford to buy an apartment/condo/house in the bay area on $150-200k a year? Replit is in SF
    - sulam 5y ago
      $200K/yr and a family of 3 like the author, assuming he takes advantage of public school and lives relatively frugally, you can afford a 4-bedroom house in a not-bad part of the Bay Area in 10 years in the best case. And you need your salary to keep up with the real estate market. So yeah, it definitely depends! Hope your wife works, too…
    - thinkharderdev 5y ago
      The median income in San Francisco is ~70K per year, so even just looking at SF this is more than double the median. The median household income is ~120k per year in SF. No idea what the author's family situation is but assuming their spouse works then the household income is probably 3-4x the median income of SF households. Everybody's financial situation is different and you certainly have to take that into account, but my only point is that if you are looking at a job change that involves a pay cut but to a level where you can still be financially secure then it makes total sense to evaluate it based on other factors like job satisfaction.
tibyat 5y ago
ambivalents 5y ago
This kinda just reads like a post hoc rationalization for a career decision. 'Leaving Google' is supposed to mean something momentous, but it isn't. It's a career decision, like many of us make at least several times through out life.
- praptak 5y ago
  First point - even if, so what? The value of the article is in the thoughts, regardless of motivation. Second point - maybe 5 years and hundreds of "leaving Google" posts ago. And the author doesn't seem to try to make it bigger than it is. TFA is exactly that - an explanation of a career decisions which HN found good/resonating.
jackblemming 5y ago
>I hadn’t been coding regularly for about 5 years. But thankfully their interviews were practical. I spent evenings and weekends refreshing my skills enough to pass. Can we agree how screwed up our joke interview culture is when a Google engineer with 10 years experience has to brush up interview skills? Come on.
- gniv 5y ago
  It's partly a reflection on Google culture. They use so many in-house libraries that you forget what it's like to code without them.
- aeyes 5y ago
  Reading the blog I would say he hasn't been working in a true engineering position for a very long time, probably some sort of engineering manager.
  - stkenned 5y ago
    (OP here) Yeah, I was in a role where I was full time managing for the second half of my Google tenure. Hence the rusty coding skills. Yes, this also means I'm ridiculing myself on the whole OKR framing thing.
ehnto 5y ago
> I decided the best fix would be to work somewhere so small that this entire class of problems couldn’t exist. You found the secret. Small companies rock, no amount of clout or equity can buy you the sanity and clear conscious of not having to deal with the Organizational Mire.
adamredwoods 5y ago
Hey Scott, I really liked your post! I, too, rely on the 3-bucket evaluation: career, health, family / friends. Oddly, I also really enjoy repls in general. Repl.it has always been a big way for me to learn quickly and to explore programming language edge-cases, and even think about code-reviews (when trying a simpler code I may want to comment on). I'm interested in Replit, as I've never heard of it before. Best of luck!
bogomipz 5y ago
This was a confusing piece of writing. The opening paragraph states: >"I left because I needed to fix my work-life balance." The summary paragraph then states: >"I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. But what I do makes a difference that I can see. Progress feels 10x faster." It doesn't appear that they fixed their work-life balance at all. It does sound like they may have fixed their work-satisfaction balance however but that wasn't the stated reason for leaving.
vesche 5y ago
I like this post a lot and respect the jump. However... Replit? I needed a browser IDE for some work about ~4 years ago and used their product briefly before switching to Cloud9 (now owned by Amazon). Nowadays, GitHub has Codespaces which is really slick. I don't see Replit as a company that is going places. I'd guess that Cloud9 was acquired by Amazon for 50 million? Maybe I'm missing something.
- Cwizard 5y ago
  I agree, like it or hate it, Github is where code lives. They own the platform developers flock to. That is a very big advantage. If the product is even remotely comparable Replit is in for a rough time. Also for bigger orgs, if there is already a contract with Microsoft, Codespaces will be the likely choice over any alternatives.
lom 5y ago
How does working more hours help his work-life balance? Maybe the title should more be “not working a soul-sucking job”
munificent 5y ago
Bias up front: I work at Google. Something I try to do whenever I read articles like this: Whenever you see the name of the giant corporation that the author worked at, replace it with "my team". Google has over 100,000 employees, so there's no real "here's what it's like to work at Google". At that scale, there is too much variance for any simple neat summary (though there are certainly trends and commonalities). I've met people who worked at Amazon who described it as a hellscape of misery and others who felt it was incredibly rewarding. There's been times when I worked at EA when I loved my job and times when I hated it. A single data point is useful, but it's only a single data point. I'm glad the author found a better job that fits what they're looking for. That's all any of us really want in our careers.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- disambiguation 5y ago
  This blog is less about dissing Google and more about promoting Replit.
- CSMastermind 5y ago
  While I agree with this sentiment, I wouldn't be so quick to completely dismiss pervading company cultures. I think a better suggestion would be to say that when you read articles like this you should ask if the author has the right perspective to know what the truly common elements of a company's culture are or if they're extrapolating from a single data point.
- ozzythecat 5y ago
  I was at amazon for over 10 years. The burn out hellscape culture, often where you’re managed by some H1B manager who’s afraid of themselves getting fired (and having to leave the US) if they don’t meet their forced attrition quotas: it’s real. I spoke with those managers and heard it directly from them. Yeah there are teams coasting by. Of course, there are engineers working 60 hours a week who will tell you about their excellent work life balance. Some of it is relative.
- esjeon 5y ago
cassac 5y ago
I wonder if this article would be the same if the author wasn’t making google money for 10 years. Having all that money let’s you quit to a 40 person startup and be guilt free.
fijiaarone 5y ago
Google hasn’t built anything since gmail came out. They’re coasting on a monopoly. And they say they’re killing Gmail in July.
- AA-BA-94-2A-56 5y ago
  > And they say they’re killing Gmail in July. Source?
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    They're likely referring to the GSuite changes [1]. Likening it to "killing Gmail" is kind of disingenuous. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/before-google-kills-free-gsuite-accounts-why-not-offer-a-family-email-plan/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/before-google-kills-...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nso95 5y ago
The first six months of a new job is the honey moon phase, give it time.
deepsquirrelnet 5y ago
Are there any big companies that excel at innovation? I feel like every large organization goes like this: - a huge number of people and teams pigeonholed into narrow specializations - a huge number of corporate interfaces, silos and bottlenecks - ever increasing bureaucracy to maintain the fragile infrastructure of personnel - depersonalization of employees as the role they were confined to, rather than the talents they possess
- nso95 5y ago
  Surprisingly Amazon probably gets the closest
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
I've recently come to the personal realisation that Bucket #1 is only for people with unused capacity in, or a total lack of, Buckets #2 (physical health) and #3 (social and family) - I'd actually create a Bucket #4 specific to family. I don't need a lot of social; my bucket is probably a bit smaller than most peoples. I have very few close friends but still too many to catch up with as often as I'd like. I've had some back issues and so physical health has had an increased priority recently-ish because, as I've been told by my ever-loving, ever-suffering wife, I'm not as happy a person to be around if I'm not regularly playing sport. So, I'm both playing sport as well as increasing core, back, and general physical strength in order to be able to continue to play sport for as long as I freakin' well can. Physical health, done right, is a massive consumer of time and headspace. I have two kids that I love spending time with, interacting with, and developing into rational, well-balanced humans (hopefully, if there is such a thing). This is also a massive consumer of time and both mental and physical effort. I've been to a couple of funerals recently, and the shit that people remember, the things that touches and changes the lives of those you love and choose to spend time with, is a million miles away from "work" or "career". My bucket #1 gets the spill-off from the other buckets, enough that the bucket doesn't go dry. Note: I'm aware the above is entirely my personal experience, and there are people I know who LOVE their careers and are happy to sacrifice other buckets for it. My wife is a teacher, and wholly committed to educating kids and she gets legitimate life affirmation from seeing past students go on to be successful - and I have great respect for this. I work in IT, it's fucking BS that means nothing and just funds the other buckets. The two roles I've left in my "career" were for work/life balance reasons, and I took a pay cut both times. And don't regret either decision, other than both should have been done earlier.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
One of the most privileged and tone deaf posts I have ever seen
travisgriggs 5y ago
What will the author blog in 5 years? I am noticing a (darkish?) pattern in these recurring “I transitioned jobs” reports. Worryingly, they represent many of the words I imagine myself writing if I were again a blogger. It’s basically the honeymoon/wanderlust cycle. Person gets job. It is a dream job. It is described as a dream job because of reasons a1, b1, and c1. Delta t passes. Things have changed. Because of reasons x1, y1, and z1, job is no longer a good dream job. It’s now a bad dream/nightmare job. Person has awakened now, and for reasons, a2, b2, and c2 is living a new dream. Blink, flinch, repeat. The nagging suspicion is that while things change, they don’t so much actually. They shift around. What does change is how we come to see things. At one point, we convince ourselves things are awesome. Later we believe it’s not. Which is the real truth we ought to accept? It’s like trying to measure the one way speed of light. You can’t, just the sum of the round trip. So do we make the assumption that somewhere in the middle of this good-to-bad cycle is the reality? Or suspect it was always that bad, we were just able to initially gaslight ourselves? Or perhaps that it was and still is good, we’ve just let the negatives creep in and take over? Some would philosophize that all happiness is an illusion. Or a choice. Or whatever. But what frustrates me about this (having been through this cycle 3-4 times now), is that it is not a universal life experience. I have relationships with family, friends, and various institutions that grow stronger and stronger over time. They do NOT loop like work relationships do. Is there something inherit in work relationships that makes this loop inevitable? Do all experience it, or only a certain mindset of persons? Are there cases where this loop is broken, but they just rare enough, you don’t hear about them? Should I despair or hope?
- brokencode 5y ago
  I think the difference is that work is typically much more stressful and difficult than relationships with friends and family. I suspect that exposure to constant stress at work causes us to have negative feelings over time (burnout), and the easiest way to reset the emotional clock is to get a different job working on something else. But some people appear to be highly resistant to burnout, and I’m not sure why. I’d definitely like to learn more about it, though.
  - emaginniss 5y ago
pronlover723 5y ago
> Enough equity that if I’m right about what Replit can become, I’ll come out ahead of staying at Google. How often is that viable? For me, I work at a FAANG like company and I kind of hate it. I'm doing work that touches 1-2 billion people but it's just not fun. For me, WFH sucks. My best times were in small companies with small teams where people had to work together to do stuff where as my FAANG job you just pull off of piece of the never ending list of work to do and do it. I do feel the golden handcuffs though. I need the money to retire. I'd give it up for a job I was sure I'd like, for one that I think has a reasonably okay chance to succeed, and for one where if it succeeds I feel like I got a reasonable %. To try to be clearer on those last points. I wouldn't need to replicate my FAANG like compensation. I just need to believe that when the company does well I don't feel that all I did was make the boss rich (which can be the case in small companies) But, I no longer know what kind of job I'd be happy at.
- throwaway98797 5y ago
  gambling is what gives you life we all end up in the same place—six feet underground
  - dymk 5y ago
    Some of us sooner than others if we can’t pay our medical bills
- kornish 5y ago
  Interested in chatting about an opportunity? I feel pretty good about all three of those criteria you mentioned. (email is in my profile)
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  I did 10 years at Google all the time feeling the same way as you, because of the golden handcuffs. And you know what? That's exactly what Google wants. Keeping you out of the job market and out of competitors' hands is worth every penny to them. I don't have the answer for you about what's next, because I quit in December and haven't picked up anything new yet. But, yeah. That's my take.
Rafuino 5y ago
The fact that Paul Graham tweets were a factor in considering this company is worrisome, at least to me.
dgs_sgd 5y ago
I recently left a company of 1000 employees for one with 20 and my experience has been similar: working more but paradoxically have more energy for the other two buckets. My colleagues have a greater sense of urgency and are more biased toward action . I do believe the saying (paraphrased) “you are a reflection of the people you spend the most time with”, and I think that’s how the energy and action I get in my work life “trickles” into my social life and fitness goals.
- zerr 5y ago
  It's a false sense of urgency most of the time.
nirui 5y ago
> Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water. I'm not agree with this. I think physical health should absolutely be the number one priority. Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health. That said, I would not put my health on any kind of trading table, it's the only thing that I actually own, and I can't afford to dis-own it. Also, I don't think it's a "three buckets problem", someone probably invented it so they can talk about such thing safely in front of their boss. You work to improve your life, and you need a good life so you can and know how to improve the life of the others (through the product you helped making). It is hard for someone to generate good results if they're living in miserable condition. A good boss should know this.
- wildmanx 5y ago
  > Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health. You may want to consider rating mental health higher than physical health. They are correlated, but if in doubt and/or if you need to choose, mental health is the one. And that's where the social/family component comes in. And the work component. Both contribute to mental health. Just as physical health does. But if work and family/friends "buckets" suck, then no matter how tip-top shape you get physically, mental health will suffer. Therefore, it makes sense to not place the physical health bucket over the other two. All has to contribute to mental health.
dusted 5y ago
> Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water. One for career, a second for physical health, and a third for social and family life. click I've heard about this concept often but this time reading it, I think I finally found out why it's not working for me.. Where's the fourth bucket? Where's the me bucket? Maybe not everyone is like that, but, even though I enjoy, and find meaning in both career, exercise and family+friends, it all drains me, it exhausts me, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, and the only time I can recharge is during long unstructured stretches of time alone without external responsibilities. Do people not generally need the fourth bucket or what?
- freedom2099 5y ago
  I totally agree with you! For me some time alone with myself not spent working is essential for my psychological well being! Luckily enough I always manage to get a daily dose of me time!
- zemvpferreira 5y ago
  Totally agreed! Unstructured downtime is crucial. For many people you might also add a fifth bucket for their spiritual life (or maybe that overlaps enough with what you're describing).
truthwhisperer 5y ago
whiddershins 5y ago
I think some comments here are responding to the fact that OP uses work life balance in an odd way. What I believe is being discussed is something different. It is having meaningful work. For many people, life just isn’t fulfilling without productive achievement. And for many, career is the space where productive achievement is pursued. Think about how a single 30 minute video meeting can drain all your energy for the entire day. This can be so much worse than long hours or stressful deadlines. When people talk about work life balance, they tend to talk about x hours doing A, B, C. But, even if cliche, the quality of these activities is what determines the level of satisfaction, of fulfillment. You can spend 4 hours a day with your spouse but if your relationship is terrible and you bicker the whole time, is this good work/life balance? It won’t feel like it. I applaud OP for seeing on some level how precious each year of this limited life is, and making a self-aware choice about how to spend some of them.
troelsSteegin 5y ago
This puzzled me: "Projects need multi-team cooperation to succeed, so you have to do a lot of work up front to get everybody pulling together. But it makes projects fragile." The suggestion is that teams are atomic, that projects are scoped larger than what teams can do, and the bag-of-teams for a given project is volatile - because teams are seeking the highest reward projects. What's missing for me is an organizational cadence where projects pitch, teams shop, and then all commit for some period of time and then evaluate in phase. Maybe that approach is too static. It is interesting to think about teams independently managing their committments as bandit experiments inside the org.
einpoklum 5y ago
This sounds to me like "Why I left the paramilitary death-squads: No retirement benefits" Ok, that is taking it to the extreme, for sure, but Google has been, for a long while now, an evil behemoth. It tries to funnel an increasing chunk of people's activities on the Internet, using that to help commercial companies sell you products and services you probably don't need (already questionable manipulation), and moreover - collecting huge amounts of personal and inter-personal information for the US and other governments to spy on you, and gradually also to more carefully filter and control what information you get access to. > Google was incredibly good to me. I had some incredible teammates and role models. My family’s financial situation is forever changed. I got promoted fairly steadily and was set up well to keep advancing. > > So why was I unhappy? Apparently, not because of what Google does to most people. Which is not "incredibly good". Don't go work there.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Everyone is welcome to point out the contradictions in this article and talk about the silliness of walking away from the comfort of FAANG workload and compensation while talking about "work life balance",... that's your right, and you're probably correct in one interpretation... But Google is terrible for our industry. On the whole. And for many people who are trying to get satisfaction out of their work. For innovation generally, and a terrible employer for people like TFA writer (and myself). The more people who quit to go to startups or smaller companies, the better, because it will ultimately accelerate technology and innovation. This is precisely why compensation at Google is what it is: to capture a chunk of talent and cordon it off from the potential of creating value elsewhere... to keep the revenue firehose running there but most importantly to make sure none of that revenue firehose ever diverts elsewhere. All the talk of "innovation" there amounts to: we want your intellectual property, yes, but if we can't get it or it's not worth much, we mostly want you to not create intellectual property elsewhere (or for yourself). And we'll pay absolutely handsomely to make sure that nothing you ever think of or write contributes to the success of anybody else. That's how a behemoth like Google survives. I'm surely not the most amazing engineer in the world, but at Google I was a mediocre one. Not technically, mind you, but organizationally: I was terrible at playing the game, writing the design docs and getting the comments, presenting my work to other people, snatching "impactful" projects before others could take them... and showing it all off to perform the promo dance. I sucked at that, and that is primarily what success at Google is about...I failed at it... Except they didn't care, that was all fine, there was plenty of space to just plod along... because they don't need you to succeed. Just not succeed somewhere else. But before Google I aggressively contributed to the success of some of the companies I was at, including ones competing with Google. Once I was at Google, I was no longer doing that. And, actually, it became clear to me... that was my actual value to Google...
- wpeterson 5y ago
  This resonates with my experience. You can tell the author is mostly worn out not from long hours or challenging technical work, but from fighting against the overwhelming inertia that faces building/shipping anything. It’s exhausting.
- Tade0 5y ago
zzzbra 5y ago
Who else read this and found that the issue had nothing to do with work-life balance, but with Google now being a “bullshit job” company? see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
- ciphol 4y ago
  While the idea that "bullshit jobs" are common may itself be bullshit [1], one can imagine that at companies like Google whose major task is preserving their current market position rather than innovating to enter new markets, and who allegedly employ smart engineers simply to prevent their competitors from employing smart engineers, there is a higher than usual level of bullshitness. [1] From Wikipedia: Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful."[14] The study also found that while there was some correlation between occupation and feelings of uselessness, they did not correspond neatly with Graeber's analysis; bullshit "taskmasters" and "goons" such as hedge-fund managers or lobbyists were vastly satisfied with their work, while essential workers like refuse collectors and cleaners often felt their jobs were useless.

453 points by rmason 5y ago

ki_ 5y ago

Good. I think working for big corporations is death for talented people. Unless you have some boss that lets you work out your own vision without having to deal with other people or company procedures. But that's unlikely.

radiKal07 5y ago

This does not make any sense. Give it a few years and the author will find himself in the same place.

hstan4 5y ago

Anytime I hear repl.it I get annoyed by the time their CEO was threatened by and shut down an ex-employee’s weekend project

d3nj4l 5y ago
It's a shame that that incident seems to dog them around on HN so much. I don't like what the CEO did in that case either, but I don't think their entire company should sink due to that one incident
- ionforce 5y ago
  What have they done since to repair their image?
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    They apologized in that very thread? What else do you want them to do?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
alephnan 5y ago
Please link.
- pm90 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 It sounds like a shady org and the CEO sounds like a total jerk. I too remember having a really poor impression after reading this.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    Did you read the bottom of the blog post? The CEO apologized and told him he could put his project back up.
    - jahewson 5y ago
      Sure. What’s a little threatening with layers between friends? He also publicly slandered said employee and never corrected himself. It’s a big thumbs down from me.
    - hstan4 5y ago
      I don’t need to add much more commentary than the original post already has, but this is hardly considered an apology in my eyes: > While I still think that the totality of the design decisions was a clear a privileged copy, I don't think it warranted my reaction. I'm sorry for that, and I give you permission to publish Riju. Like thanks for giving me permission to publish MY weekend project that you have 0 say over what I do with, and blame the project as being a copy over “design decisions”. Meaning, a square box with the name of the language overlaying it? Instead of owning his mistake as he should he basically claims “I have to remember I’m not the struggling kid from Jordan anymore” to avoid taking responsibility and shifts the blame to this ex-intern anyways.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - 5y ago
marktolson 5y ago
Same here. However it did point me in the direction of the ex-interns awesome project which I use often for technical interviews: https://riju.codes/ https://riju.codes/
alexyz12 5y ago
He also uses the word alpha un-ironically in his tweets

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

>> Getting things done at Google can be hard. Projects need multi-team cooperation to succeed, so you have to do a lot of work up front to get everybody pulling together. But it makes projects fragile. When any of those teams changes direction, or even just over-stated their original commitment, the project slows down or fails3. this hits all big companies - it's fascinating

pmoriarty 5y ago

Disappointing that they didn't leave because they realized working for Google was unethical.

LightG 5y ago

Note to googlers reading this. You had Tasks / Save email to tasks / etc for a decade and did nothing with it. Im being forced to use MS task management and they've caugbt this and actually implemented quite well. What am in talking about? I gues im just moaning that its a symotom of what this blog post is talking about, amongs many others.

Insanity 5y ago

I am an Engineering Manager at a FAANG company and I would hate to see my team work on evenings and weekends and think their work-life balance is good that way. If an IC on my team would do this, I would be concerned about them burning out as well. It also makes me think that my philosophy about work is probably not compatible with working in a startup. Normalizing excessive working hours is something I don't see myself doing any time soon.

googlr29783 5y ago
> I would hate to see my team work on evenings and weekends I've worked at startups and Google. The glacial pace of the latter can mean working late feels necessary to get anything done. And even tiny changes can take forever so the feeling of having accomplished something of value is infrequent at best. Maybe it gets better at higher levels, though the internal memes don't give me much hope. Some people are suited to big corps while others prefer start-ups. Nothing wrong with a little diversity.

nvarsj 5y ago

Wait, they left Google for work life balance, to work more hours at a startup. Whaat? I think I get what they're saying though - they were fundamentally unhappy with their ability to make an individual impact at Giant Corp. Well, that's pretty normal and probably a reason for a lot of people's unhappiness at big companies. A startup can help satiate that need, or even a small company. Arguably a healthier approach is to detach one's self identity and satisfaction from work, and get that from non-work things. Easier said than done though. Inevitably this person is going to burn out hard when the start up they go to fails expectations.

joanfihu 5y ago

It looks like Google operates like most big corporation at this point and this seems the main reason why he left.

frays 5y ago

Interesting read. Thanks.

bioinformatics 5y ago

This post is the best example of this website: crappy. Who cares about this loser? Not even his two dogs.

rattray 5y ago

tl;dr, working reasonable hours that are no fun is worse than working more hours that are fun/rewarding/meaningful. I very much agree.

stormbrew 5y ago
I think this is probably approximately true, at least if everyone involved is ok with it (I hope the author's family is), but it's a bit weird to describe it as fulfilling work-life balance which isn't usually used in a way that's neutral about how they should be balanced (ie. even if all of the above is true, it would still usually be described as a "bad balance").

kadenwolff 5y ago

Pg shared this post earlier as well: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1524166696461864962?s=20&t=hUNNeRVbNFZ8Rgv3g9RxvQ https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1524166696461864962?s=20&t=...

endisneigh 5y ago

Strange, could’ve switched teams and had 1 and 2 without the hassle. Given what’s happening with the markets I doubt the equity will end up turning up much.

goldenchrome 5y ago
Switching teams doesn’t solve the problem. It’s company-wide culture. No one has fire in their bellies because of the infinite ads revenue firehose.
- jcims 5y ago
  I worked at Google for about six months. Met some amazing folks and saw some amazing stuff, but the intro to Beverly Hillbillies kept intruding into my thoughts. Search felt like the bubbling crude that fueled everything, it was interesting.
  - bogomipz 5y ago
    >"Met some amazing folks and saw some amazing stuff, but the intro to Beverly Hillbillies kept intruding into my thoughts." I thought this was laugh out loud funny. I was in need of a good laugh so thanks for that. I'm curious though did you just walk away because it wasn't for you or something else? Isn't just getting in there a colossal months-long interview affair?
    - jcims 5y ago
      It was an experiment to see if we could relocate the family out west. It truly was a dream job, i got to work with some true phenoms and trailblazers in my industry and had many options to grow despite being much older than the average Googler. Family circumstances just changed and it wasn’t going to work out. It was a heartbreaker but i was glad to have done it. For that role i think i did ten interviews. The previous attempt was 14 and i didn’t get an offer. Its a bit shorter loop for xooglers and in the past six years I’ve had two other offers but there was always a confounding factor. One was comp, I’m not SWE and in every case i did or would have taken a pay cut.

killjoywashere 5y ago

The last footnote got my attention: > This sounds simple, but expenses for a family of three with a house in the Bay Area are no joke. It wound up being ~85% of my Google salary. I live in the Bay area, but under exotic conditions. I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college. Am I don't the math wrong?

tshaddox 5y ago
I think you could probably make it work with half that salary, but you won’t feel particularly comfortable or financially secure.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
It's not entirely clear, but I suspect the author is referring to their base salary at Google. The fact that Replit, a startup, provided a salary capable of covering his expenses (which were equal to 85% of his salary) is another clue that he's not included RSUs in the calculation. > I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college. Bay Area is definitely livable on far below $500K. The "2 kids in college" makes your math impossible to guess because that could be anywhere from a minor footnote to the entirety of your budget if you're trying to pay full sticker price tuition in real-time with no prior savings (which almost nobody does, but it would make the math look terrifying). That's not really a feature of the Bay Area, though, because you'd carry that college line item on your personal budget wherever you moved.
- coredog64 5y ago
  California makes it more difficult in that the salary required for a home pushes you past thresholds for financial aid. You might be what’s known as “house poor” but the university sees the house as an asset that counts towards a high net worth. There are even some prestigious private universities offering “no tuition for families making less than $150k (or thereabouts)”.
- 5y ago

nicolas_ 5y ago

FYI, clicking on the About liink while being already on the about page leads to a 404 page.

stkenned 5y ago
Thanks, fixed. That's what I get for using this as my toy "learn Go" project :)

sdo72 5y ago

I really don't understand the author's points. The main point is "work-life balance", but these don't seem to make sense: + enough salary to pay my bills + I work more hours" and even "on the weekend now" + enough equity All of these are actually worse or much lower chance of being better compared to a job at Google.

adra 5y ago
Agreed, author seems deluded and kool-aid enduced. I'm all for change when it makes sense to you. Sticking with a company you're not charged up for often feels like torture, but any semblance of what they said in the article and "work-life balance" feels way off the mark.
pradn 5y ago
His main point is that he feels like he's making more progress and being more productive at ReplIt than at Google, which leads to higher satisfaction. He considers satisfaction more important than just pure hours / compensation. I'm inclined to agree. Working uphill in a complexity jungle (organization or technical) can drain the soul.
- chii 5y ago
  working at a lower-paying job (and doing more hours) is a poor way to satisfy the upper end of the Maslow pyramid of needs (ala, self actualization). The most important metric is consistent and passive income from wealth. Once you have "enough" of such passive income, you can spend your time on self actualization. Most people don't reach the level of passive income required for their chosen lifestyle quality, and so cannot expend time for self actualization. So instead, they double up their career and make that the mode for self actualization (after all, two birds one stone and all that). But i do believe that it mostly does not work, unless the job is somehow a 1:1 mapping to that particular person's method of self actualization. Unfortunately, a lot of people kid themselves and pretend that it does match.
  - pradn 5y ago
    It looks like he just prioritizes and is satisfied by different things than you.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Like I told someone: what is the point of having a family if you never get to see them?

9530jh9054ven 5y ago
Financial or political benefit. Bragging rights. Someone that won't fight back or leave when you use them as a literal punching bag to vent. Not necessarily good reasons to have a family. But reasons that do exist, unfortunately.
- nnoitra 5y ago
  political benefit you say... hmmm
xqcgrek2 5y ago
Some people like that arrangement. In fact, it has been the norm in certain cultures.

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago

Left for work life balance and then this: I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. But what I do makes a difference that I can see. Progress feels 10x faster Might feel more satisfaction but the work life balance is still missing and eventually will come back to make him write "Why I left Repl.it" Eastern traditions have solved this a long time back. You have to break the cycle.

nnoitra 5y ago
What cycle at the end of the day he has to work and idk how with that salary he didnt make enough to retire already.
JohnL4 5y ago
Honestly, "left Google for 40-person startup for work-life balance reasons" brought me up short.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  "Balance" can mean "all things equal" but when talking about work-life balance I think it means that your work and non-work time combine to produce optimal satisfaction. For some people, if they derive a large amount of satisfaction from their work, that may mean that a more demanding job provides better "balance" in their life.
thfuran 5y ago
>Eastern traditions have solved this a long time back Have they? I don't think I've ever heard anything sane, let alone good regarding Japan when it comes to work life balance.
- redisman 5y ago
  Japan, China, Korea.. all major “eastern” economies are known for way worse academic and professional work life balance
joyeuse6701 5y ago

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> In 2020, the pandemic destroyed bucket #3 for most people. We were no different. Friends from back home in Canada couldn’t visit us. Even meeting up with local friends became hard. In January 2021 I tore my achilles tendon playing pick-up basketball. There goes bucket #2. > Only then did I realize bucket #1 had been running low for a while. I'm somewhat puzzled. If the author is struggling to socialize with friends (bucket #3) and struggling to pay attention to physical health (bucket #2) then why does he think that this is going to help improve work-life balance: > I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. I can empathize with the desire to get caught up in a high-energy startup (it's fun!) but this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Filling your days with extra work can fill the "bucket #1" (career) but it seems like a nail in the coffin for the author's problems with bucket #2 (physical health) and bucket #3 (social life). Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.

gamerDude 5y ago
I think it's because it's because his buckets are not around time management, but energy management. And it works both ways. If you are drained by your job, you get home exhausted and want to just lay on the couch. If you are energized by your job, you get home excited. You feel like you can take on the world and then might be up to go to dinner with friends instead of drained and depressed and want to stay home and eat ice cream to console yourself (my personal go to). The same goes in the other directions. If you are healthy, you will have more energy for other things. If you are unhealthy, your body will drag you down, it will be harder to do other things. Think of having a broken leg or a lot of pain. You just don't feel well and will bring that feeling into other parts of life. Energy management isn't a zero sum game. However, I think you do point out something else. Throwing yourself into work because you want to avoid dealing with issues in your other buckets is not an energy gain. But there is a key difference between working more to avoid painful things and reigniting a spark of joy in your work.
5y ago

reverseblade2 5y ago

If you are not happy with what you do, you can't make others happy even if you have time to do so.

NonNefarious 5y ago

Some colleagues of mine worked at Google, and their reports do not reflect well on the management style there. People are pitted against each other and forced to downrate one vs. the other in periodic reviews, using a graphical tool built for the purpose (seriously). It's "work/life" balance, BTW.

endisneigh 5y ago
They’re not forced to down rate, in any case it’s not a thing anymore anyways

pm90 5y ago

> but middle managers are clever enough to word OKRs in a way that makes them all think they’re getting what they want. I chuckled at this one. Middle managers gonna middle manage. I know a lot of this behavior is simply due to the position in which they are where senior managers and execs wont take no for an answer. But you have to make tough choices: If you don’t believe deep down that you can deliver, push back hard rather than playing games.

robocat 5y ago

> Enough equity that if I’m right about what Replit can become, I’ll come out ahead of staying at Google. This is why it is so hard to financially justify working for a startup. To cover the risk requires large outsized gains. And financially the 15 percentage points drop in salary could easily be say a 50% drop in disposable income. Yet the pleasure is worth the price. And the above ignores any longer hours (I personally struggle to value my time or satisfaction, in either dollars or opportunity costs).

thinkharderdev 5y ago
I think it's also important to take into account the diminishing marginal utility of money. It's one thing to leave a FAANG job making 300k a year to work at a non-profit for 50k a year. But going to a startup making 150-200k a year can be a great trade if it genuinely brings more satisfaction. After all it's not like your family is going to starve making only 4x the median salary in the US. If you also get a lottery ticket in the form of startup equity then great, but it could still make total sense to make the move even if you assume (probably correctly) that your equity will be approximately worthless.
- asiachick 5y ago
  it depends on where you live. Can you afford to buy an apartment/condo/house in the bay area on $150-200k a year? Replit is in SF
  - sulam 5y ago
    $200K/yr and a family of 3 like the author, assuming he takes advantage of public school and lives relatively frugally, you can afford a 4-bedroom house in a not-bad part of the Bay Area in 10 years in the best case. And you need your salary to keep up with the real estate market. So yeah, it definitely depends! Hope your wife works, too…
  - thinkharderdev 5y ago
    The median income in San Francisco is ~70K per year, so even just looking at SF this is more than double the median. The median household income is ~120k per year in SF. No idea what the author's family situation is but assuming their spouse works then the household income is probably 3-4x the median income of SF households. Everybody's financial situation is different and you certainly have to take that into account, but my only point is that if you are looking at a job change that involves a pay cut but to a level where you can still be financially secure then it makes total sense to evaluate it based on other factors like job satisfaction.

tibyat 5y ago

ambivalents 5y ago

This kinda just reads like a post hoc rationalization for a career decision. 'Leaving Google' is supposed to mean something momentous, but it isn't. It's a career decision, like many of us make at least several times through out life.

praptak 5y ago
First point - even if, so what? The value of the article is in the thoughts, regardless of motivation. Second point - maybe 5 years and hundreds of "leaving Google" posts ago. And the author doesn't seem to try to make it bigger than it is. TFA is exactly that - an explanation of a career decisions which HN found good/resonating.

jackblemming 5y ago

>I hadn’t been coding regularly for about 5 years. But thankfully their interviews were practical. I spent evenings and weekends refreshing my skills enough to pass. Can we agree how screwed up our joke interview culture is when a Google engineer with 10 years experience has to brush up interview skills? Come on.

gniv 5y ago
It's partly a reflection on Google culture. They use so many in-house libraries that you forget what it's like to code without them.
aeyes 5y ago
Reading the blog I would say he hasn't been working in a true engineering position for a very long time, probably some sort of engineering manager.
- stkenned 5y ago
  (OP here) Yeah, I was in a role where I was full time managing for the second half of my Google tenure. Hence the rusty coding skills. Yes, this also means I'm ridiculing myself on the whole OKR framing thing.

ehnto 5y ago

> I decided the best fix would be to work somewhere so small that this entire class of problems couldn’t exist. You found the secret. Small companies rock, no amount of clout or equity can buy you the sanity and clear conscious of not having to deal with the Organizational Mire.

adamredwoods 5y ago

Hey Scott, I really liked your post! I, too, rely on the 3-bucket evaluation: career, health, family / friends. Oddly, I also really enjoy repls in general. Repl.it has always been a big way for me to learn quickly and to explore programming language edge-cases, and even think about code-reviews (when trying a simpler code I may want to comment on). I'm interested in Replit, as I've never heard of it before. Best of luck!

bogomipz 5y ago

This was a confusing piece of writing. The opening paragraph states: >"I left because I needed to fix my work-life balance." The summary paragraph then states: >"I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. But what I do makes a difference that I can see. Progress feels 10x faster." It doesn't appear that they fixed their work-life balance at all. It does sound like they may have fixed their work-satisfaction balance however but that wasn't the stated reason for leaving.

vesche 5y ago

I like this post a lot and respect the jump. However... Replit? I needed a browser IDE for some work about ~4 years ago and used their product briefly before switching to Cloud9 (now owned by Amazon). Nowadays, GitHub has Codespaces which is really slick. I don't see Replit as a company that is going places. I'd guess that Cloud9 was acquired by Amazon for 50 million? Maybe I'm missing something.

Cwizard 5y ago
I agree, like it or hate it, Github is where code lives. They own the platform developers flock to. That is a very big advantage. If the product is even remotely comparable Replit is in for a rough time. Also for bigger orgs, if there is already a contract with Microsoft, Codespaces will be the likely choice over any alternatives.

lom 5y ago

How does working more hours help his work-life balance? Maybe the title should more be “not working a soul-sucking job”

munificent 5y ago

Bias up front: I work at Google. Something I try to do whenever I read articles like this: Whenever you see the name of the giant corporation that the author worked at, replace it with "my team". Google has over 100,000 employees, so there's no real "here's what it's like to work at Google". At that scale, there is too much variance for any simple neat summary (though there are certainly trends and commonalities). I've met people who worked at Amazon who described it as a hellscape of misery and others who felt it was incredibly rewarding. There's been times when I worked at EA when I loved my job and times when I hated it. A single data point is useful, but it's only a single data point. I'm glad the author found a better job that fits what they're looking for. That's all any of us really want in our careers.

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disambiguation 5y ago
This blog is less about dissing Google and more about promoting Replit.
CSMastermind 5y ago
While I agree with this sentiment, I wouldn't be so quick to completely dismiss pervading company cultures. I think a better suggestion would be to say that when you read articles like this you should ask if the author has the right perspective to know what the truly common elements of a company's culture are or if they're extrapolating from a single data point.
ozzythecat 5y ago
I was at amazon for over 10 years. The burn out hellscape culture, often where you’re managed by some H1B manager who’s afraid of themselves getting fired (and having to leave the US) if they don’t meet their forced attrition quotas: it’s real. I spoke with those managers and heard it directly from them. Yeah there are teams coasting by. Of course, there are engineers working 60 hours a week who will tell you about their excellent work life balance. Some of it is relative.
esjeon 5y ago

cassac 5y ago

I wonder if this article would be the same if the author wasn’t making google money for 10 years. Having all that money let’s you quit to a 40 person startup and be guilt free.

fijiaarone 5y ago

Google hasn’t built anything since gmail came out. They’re coasting on a monopoly. And they say they’re killing Gmail in July.

AA-BA-94-2A-56 5y ago
> And they say they’re killing Gmail in July. Source?
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  They're likely referring to the GSuite changes [1]. Likening it to "killing Gmail" is kind of disingenuous. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/before-google-kills-free-gsuite-accounts-why-not-offer-a-family-email-plan/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/before-google-kills-...
deleted 5y ago
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nso95 5y ago

The first six months of a new job is the honey moon phase, give it time.

deepsquirrelnet 5y ago

Are there any big companies that excel at innovation? I feel like every large organization goes like this: - a huge number of people and teams pigeonholed into narrow specializations - a huge number of corporate interfaces, silos and bottlenecks - ever increasing bureaucracy to maintain the fragile infrastructure of personnel - depersonalization of employees as the role they were confined to, rather than the talents they possess

nso95 5y ago
Surprisingly Amazon probably gets the closest

BLKNSLVR 5y ago

I've recently come to the personal realisation that Bucket #1 is only for people with unused capacity in, or a total lack of, Buckets #2 (physical health) and #3 (social and family) - I'd actually create a Bucket #4 specific to family. I don't need a lot of social; my bucket is probably a bit smaller than most peoples. I have very few close friends but still too many to catch up with as often as I'd like. I've had some back issues and so physical health has had an increased priority recently-ish because, as I've been told by my ever-loving, ever-suffering wife, I'm not as happy a person to be around if I'm not regularly playing sport. So, I'm both playing sport as well as increasing core, back, and general physical strength in order to be able to continue to play sport for as long as I freakin' well can. Physical health, done right, is a massive consumer of time and headspace. I have two kids that I love spending time with, interacting with, and developing into rational, well-balanced humans (hopefully, if there is such a thing). This is also a massive consumer of time and both mental and physical effort. I've been to a couple of funerals recently, and the shit that people remember, the things that touches and changes the lives of those you love and choose to spend time with, is a million miles away from "work" or "career". My bucket #1 gets the spill-off from the other buckets, enough that the bucket doesn't go dry. Note: I'm aware the above is entirely my personal experience, and there are people I know who LOVE their careers and are happy to sacrifice other buckets for it. My wife is a teacher, and wholly committed to educating kids and she gets legitimate life affirmation from seeing past students go on to be successful - and I have great respect for this. I work in IT, it's fucking BS that means nothing and just funds the other buckets. The two roles I've left in my "career" were for work/life balance reasons, and I took a pay cut both times. And don't regret either decision, other than both should have been done earlier.

sydthrowaway 5y ago

One of the most privileged and tone deaf posts I have ever seen

travisgriggs 5y ago

What will the author blog in 5 years? I am noticing a (darkish?) pattern in these recurring “I transitioned jobs” reports. Worryingly, they represent many of the words I imagine myself writing if I were again a blogger. It’s basically the honeymoon/wanderlust cycle. Person gets job. It is a dream job. It is described as a dream job because of reasons a1, b1, and c1. Delta t passes. Things have changed. Because of reasons x1, y1, and z1, job is no longer a good dream job. It’s now a bad dream/nightmare job. Person has awakened now, and for reasons, a2, b2, and c2 is living a new dream. Blink, flinch, repeat. The nagging suspicion is that while things change, they don’t so much actually. They shift around. What does change is how we come to see things. At one point, we convince ourselves things are awesome. Later we believe it’s not. Which is the real truth we ought to accept? It’s like trying to measure the one way speed of light. You can’t, just the sum of the round trip. So do we make the assumption that somewhere in the middle of this good-to-bad cycle is the reality? Or suspect it was always that bad, we were just able to initially gaslight ourselves? Or perhaps that it was and still is good, we’ve just let the negatives creep in and take over? Some would philosophize that all happiness is an illusion. Or a choice. Or whatever. But what frustrates me about this (having been through this cycle 3-4 times now), is that it is not a universal life experience. I have relationships with family, friends, and various institutions that grow stronger and stronger over time. They do NOT loop like work relationships do. Is there something inherit in work relationships that makes this loop inevitable? Do all experience it, or only a certain mindset of persons? Are there cases where this loop is broken, but they just rare enough, you don’t hear about them? Should I despair or hope?

brokencode 5y ago
I think the difference is that work is typically much more stressful and difficult than relationships with friends and family. I suspect that exposure to constant stress at work causes us to have negative feelings over time (burnout), and the easiest way to reset the emotional clock is to get a different job working on something else. But some people appear to be highly resistant to burnout, and I’m not sure why. I’d definitely like to learn more about it, though.
- emaginniss 5y ago

pronlover723 5y ago

> Enough equity that if I’m right about what Replit can become, I’ll come out ahead of staying at Google. How often is that viable? For me, I work at a FAANG like company and I kind of hate it. I'm doing work that touches 1-2 billion people but it's just not fun. For me, WFH sucks. My best times were in small companies with small teams where people had to work together to do stuff where as my FAANG job you just pull off of piece of the never ending list of work to do and do it. I do feel the golden handcuffs though. I need the money to retire. I'd give it up for a job I was sure I'd like, for one that I think has a reasonably okay chance to succeed, and for one where if it succeeds I feel like I got a reasonable %. To try to be clearer on those last points. I wouldn't need to replicate my FAANG like compensation. I just need to believe that when the company does well I don't feel that all I did was make the boss rich (which can be the case in small companies) But, I no longer know what kind of job I'd be happy at.

throwaway98797 5y ago
gambling is what gives you life we all end up in the same place—six feet underground
- dymk 5y ago
  Some of us sooner than others if we can’t pay our medical bills
kornish 5y ago
Interested in chatting about an opportunity? I feel pretty good about all three of those criteria you mentioned. (email is in my profile)
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
I did 10 years at Google all the time feeling the same way as you, because of the golden handcuffs. And you know what? That's exactly what Google wants. Keeping you out of the job market and out of competitors' hands is worth every penny to them. I don't have the answer for you about what's next, because I quit in December and haven't picked up anything new yet. But, yeah. That's my take.

Rafuino 5y ago

The fact that Paul Graham tweets were a factor in considering this company is worrisome, at least to me.

dgs_sgd 5y ago

I recently left a company of 1000 employees for one with 20 and my experience has been similar: working more but paradoxically have more energy for the other two buckets. My colleagues have a greater sense of urgency and are more biased toward action . I do believe the saying (paraphrased) “you are a reflection of the people you spend the most time with”, and I think that’s how the energy and action I get in my work life “trickles” into my social life and fitness goals.

zerr 5y ago
It's a false sense of urgency most of the time.

nirui 5y ago

> Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water. I'm not agree with this. I think physical health should absolutely be the number one priority. Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health. That said, I would not put my health on any kind of trading table, it's the only thing that I actually own, and I can't afford to dis-own it. Also, I don't think it's a "three buckets problem", someone probably invented it so they can talk about such thing safely in front of their boss. You work to improve your life, and you need a good life so you can and know how to improve the life of the others (through the product you helped making). It is hard for someone to generate good results if they're living in miserable condition. A good boss should know this.

wildmanx 5y ago
> Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health. You may want to consider rating mental health higher than physical health. They are correlated, but if in doubt and/or if you need to choose, mental health is the one. And that's where the social/family component comes in. And the work component. Both contribute to mental health. Just as physical health does. But if work and family/friends "buckets" suck, then no matter how tip-top shape you get physically, mental health will suffer. Therefore, it makes sense to not place the physical health bucket over the other two. All has to contribute to mental health.

dusted 5y ago

> Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water. One for career, a second for physical health, and a third for social and family life. click I've heard about this concept often but this time reading it, I think I finally found out why it's not working for me.. Where's the fourth bucket? Where's the me bucket? Maybe not everyone is like that, but, even though I enjoy, and find meaning in both career, exercise and family+friends, it all drains me, it exhausts me, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, and the only time I can recharge is during long unstructured stretches of time alone without external responsibilities. Do people not generally need the fourth bucket or what?

freedom2099 5y ago
I totally agree with you! For me some time alone with myself not spent working is essential for my psychological well being! Luckily enough I always manage to get a daily dose of me time!
zemvpferreira 5y ago
Totally agreed! Unstructured downtime is crucial. For many people you might also add a fifth bucket for their spiritual life (or maybe that overlaps enough with what you're describing).

truthwhisperer 5y ago

whiddershins 5y ago

I think some comments here are responding to the fact that OP uses work life balance in an odd way. What I believe is being discussed is something different. It is having meaningful work. For many people, life just isn’t fulfilling without productive achievement. And for many, career is the space where productive achievement is pursued. Think about how a single 30 minute video meeting can drain all your energy for the entire day. This can be so much worse than long hours or stressful deadlines. When people talk about work life balance, they tend to talk about x hours doing A, B, C. But, even if cliche, the quality of these activities is what determines the level of satisfaction, of fulfillment. You can spend 4 hours a day with your spouse but if your relationship is terrible and you bicker the whole time, is this good work/life balance? It won’t feel like it. I applaud OP for seeing on some level how precious each year of this limited life is, and making a self-aware choice about how to spend some of them.

troelsSteegin 5y ago

This puzzled me: "Projects need multi-team cooperation to succeed, so you have to do a lot of work up front to get everybody pulling together. But it makes projects fragile." The suggestion is that teams are atomic, that projects are scoped larger than what teams can do, and the bag-of-teams for a given project is volatile - because teams are seeking the highest reward projects. What's missing for me is an organizational cadence where projects pitch, teams shop, and then all commit for some period of time and then evaluate in phase. Maybe that approach is too static. It is interesting to think about teams independently managing their committments as bandit experiments inside the org.

einpoklum 5y ago

This sounds to me like "Why I left the paramilitary death-squads: No retirement benefits" Ok, that is taking it to the extreme, for sure, but Google has been, for a long while now, an evil behemoth. It tries to funnel an increasing chunk of people's activities on the Internet, using that to help commercial companies sell you products and services you probably don't need (already questionable manipulation), and moreover - collecting huge amounts of personal and inter-personal information for the US and other governments to spy on you, and gradually also to more carefully filter and control what information you get access to. > Google was incredibly good to me. I had some incredible teammates and role models. My family’s financial situation is forever changed. I got promoted fairly steadily and was set up well to keep advancing. > > So why was I unhappy? Apparently, not because of what Google does to most people. Which is not "incredibly good". Don't go work there.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Everyone is welcome to point out the contradictions in this article and talk about the silliness of walking away from the comfort of FAANG workload and compensation while talking about "work life balance",... that's your right, and you're probably correct in one interpretation... But Google is terrible for our industry. On the whole. And for many people who are trying to get satisfaction out of their work. For innovation generally, and a terrible employer for people like TFA writer (and myself). The more people who quit to go to startups or smaller companies, the better, because it will ultimately accelerate technology and innovation. This is precisely why compensation at Google is what it is: to capture a chunk of talent and cordon it off from the potential of creating value elsewhere... to keep the revenue firehose running there but most importantly to make sure none of that revenue firehose ever diverts elsewhere. All the talk of "innovation" there amounts to: we want your intellectual property, yes, but if we can't get it or it's not worth much, we mostly want you to not create intellectual property elsewhere (or for yourself). And we'll pay absolutely handsomely to make sure that nothing you ever think of or write contributes to the success of anybody else. That's how a behemoth like Google survives. I'm surely not the most amazing engineer in the world, but at Google I was a mediocre one. Not technically, mind you, but organizationally: I was terrible at playing the game, writing the design docs and getting the comments, presenting my work to other people, snatching "impactful" projects before others could take them... and showing it all off to perform the promo dance. I sucked at that, and that is primarily what success at Google is about...I failed at it... Except they didn't care, that was all fine, there was plenty of space to just plod along... because they don't need you to succeed. Just not succeed somewhere else. But before Google I aggressively contributed to the success of some of the companies I was at, including ones competing with Google. Once I was at Google, I was no longer doing that. And, actually, it became clear to me... that was my actual value to Google...

wpeterson 5y ago
This resonates with my experience. You can tell the author is mostly worn out not from long hours or challenging technical work, but from fighting against the overwhelming inertia that faces building/shipping anything. It’s exhausting.
Tade0 5y ago

zzzbra 5y ago

Who else read this and found that the issue had nothing to do with work-life balance, but with Google now being a “bullshit job” company? see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

ciphol 4y ago
While the idea that "bullshit jobs" are common may itself be bullshit [1], one can imagine that at companies like Google whose major task is preserving their current market position rather than innovating to enter new markets, and who allegedly employ smart engineers simply to prevent their competitors from employing smart engineers, there is a higher than usual level of bullshitness. [1] From Wikipedia: Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful."[14] The study also found that while there was some correlation between occupation and feelings of uselessness, they did not correspond neatly with Graeber's analysis; bullshit "taskmasters" and "goons" such as hedge-fund managers or lobbyists were vastly satisfied with their work, while essential workers like refuse collectors and cleaners often felt their jobs were useless.