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As someone who worked at Google for 15 yrs, who also worked at Oracle and IBM, I can confidently say that Google was the least toxic, least overworked place I'v

As someone who worked at Google for 15 yrs, who also worked at Oracle and IBM, I can confidently say that Google was the least toxic, least overworked place I've ever been. That's not to say there aren't management problems, especially around the erratic way they launch new projects and kill others with no real rhyme or reason, but working environment was never one of the complaints. At IBM and Oracle, I'd regularly be in meetings with shouting matches. People were tear down others. There was excessive territorialism. Googley culture, although it changed over time, did promote cooperation and constructive criticism. Post-Mortems emphasized what went wrong and what could be done better, not who went wrong. Other teams were often, if not always, eager to partner or share their work. Work location flexibility, the cafes, all of it was very good. Now, I did perceive a cultural decline, I think it was sometime around the launch of Google Hangouts, I started sensing a more bean-counting approach, I think because the Seattle office brought in a bunch of MS managers in too short a period of time for them to absorb Googley culture. At one point, the initial launch of Hangouts didn't have presence indicators, and when employees brought it up, one response was "You are not the audience". As if presence indicators are something only elite engineers want, and not regular folks. This was totally antithetical to way products like Gmail were built, out of personal desire and need. I didn't work in Cloud, but I suspect Thomas Kurian brought a more Oracle "Sales Engineer" driven approach, and that too can change culture. Might be bad for culture, but good for external customers. One of the issues over the years that I feel an acute sense of now that I'm looking for a job again, is that Google invented a lot of technology early internally, from Borg to Map/Reduce/etc. Eventually, the outside world cloned these, and when they became on-par and standardized, at that point I really think Google should have switched their internal stack to the OSS equivalents. For example, Google still builds products on the internal Borg system, rather than using GCP/Kubernetes/Terraform/etc. If GCP/Kube is missing functionality to run say, Maps or Gmail, then perfect, that indicates a good driver for improving the external facing product. Working on some of Google's tech stack feels like an alien world compared to working on stuff outside. In ML at least, there's synergy, as Tensorflow and JAX are used internally and externally. But in terms of major systems, there needs to be a lot more of this. Blaze was opened as Bazel way too late for example, should have been done years ago.

dekhn 4y ago
I worked for Google for 10 years- at first in a great but intense (overworked) SRE team, then later as a SWE running my own project (again intense and overworked, but totally self-imposed) and then on various ML and 3D printing teams. By and large it was great, but it got worse over time (increasingly clueless managers with night-school MBAs) and more toxic. Occasionally I'd see memes or posts from other teams that described business practices I couldn't believe (like, "I have to stay at the office until my manager leaves or I'll be fired, and he doesn't leave until 8PM so I dont' see my family much") which didn't make sense until I learned that entire teams were H1-B visas reporting to managers who applied caste in their jobs in the US. Absolutely nothing I've seen compares to borg or a full TPUv4 cluster.
- cromwellian 4y ago
  Wow, I'm shocked to hear that. Was this at a US office? I know some overseas offices have different culture. I guess it's not unprecedented. My wife (eng manager) resigned from Google around 2015 I think, in part because Google Cloud had brought on a new boss in a re-org who was a McKinsey-and-associates person, and her boss tasked her mostly with making spreadsheets of business processes, because that's the format she was used to doing all her work in (spreadsheets). She went from managing Chrome engineers and sitting in on meetings to discuss features, to doing spreadsheets. :( There was definitely a decline over the years, I was probably lucky in that the teams I joined (Infra, Gmail, AI) were run mostly by engineers and pretty cool people.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Mountain View. In fact during the nest debacle there was a whole office building of people doing nothing with a clock on the wall which was "how long until Tony Fadell no longer controls you" counting down the days.
eitally 4y ago
I worked in Cloud from 2015-2023. I was personally hired by Amit Singh, who was the first "CEO" of "Cloud", back when it was just "Google Apps" + GCS/GCE/GAE. About 8 months later Diane Greene was brought in to scale the business because the org under Amit was too googley. Literally. Google's legacy culture of engineering meritocracy and ICs who vote with their feet on the "best" projects was not conducive to becoming an enterprise technology company. Diane brought in Diane Bryant as COO (from Intel) and PH Ferrand as sales president (from Dell), and while PH gave it a good try on the GTM side, Diane left after barely 6 months and there just wasn't enough enterprise experience across the org to make things work. Diane was likely brought in at least partly because she is googley, and her VMWare history probably looked like enterprise software success, but she was too googley to turn the ship and he org flailed for a couple more years. Then the board appointed TK, who absolutely knows 100% how to sell to enterprise. He spent 2 years almost exclusively hiring senior staff from outside: Microsoft, SAP, AWS, IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, etc, and rebuilding something that looks roughly like if Microsoft went back in time 20 years. The upsides are that the business has grown mightily and Cloud is now almost exclusively market driven, at least on core products/services. The downside is that he broke the culture and alienated thousands of googlers whose advancement opportunities were essentially eliminated. Because of the hiring needs, the bar is much lower now, cronyism is prevalent, and politics+bureaucracy get in the way of progress. During my years at Google, I sat in The Quad, Tech Corners, Moffett Park, and then back at Tech Corners, and spent time in many of the rest of the bay area offices. I will state with confidence that the Cloud offices do not feel "googley" when you walk around the cube spaces. There are few decorations, no buzz, not many people who appear to be enjoying themselves, very few tech talks, guest speakers or events, etc. Just taking a walk around the MP, Matilda or TC campuses and then visiting YT in San Bruno or one of the Android teams in MTV is a stark difference. Cloud is not googley. Let's see if the consumer-oriented PAs can keep that alive.

dekhn 4y ago

I worked for Google for 10 years- at first in a great but intense (overworked) SRE team, then later as a SWE running my own project (again intense and overworked, but totally self-imposed) and then on various ML and 3D printing teams. By and large it was great, but it got worse over time (increasingly clueless managers with night-school MBAs) and more toxic. Occasionally I'd see memes or posts from other teams that described business practices I couldn't believe (like, "I have to stay at the office until my manager leaves or I'll be fired, and he doesn't leave until 8PM so I dont' see my family much") which didn't make sense until I learned that entire teams were H1-B visas reporting to managers who applied caste in their jobs in the US. Absolutely nothing I've seen compares to borg or a full TPUv4 cluster.

cromwellian 4y ago
Wow, I'm shocked to hear that. Was this at a US office? I know some overseas offices have different culture. I guess it's not unprecedented. My wife (eng manager) resigned from Google around 2015 I think, in part because Google Cloud had brought on a new boss in a re-org who was a McKinsey-and-associates person, and her boss tasked her mostly with making spreadsheets of business processes, because that's the format she was used to doing all her work in (spreadsheets). She went from managing Chrome engineers and sitting in on meetings to discuss features, to doing spreadsheets. :( There was definitely a decline over the years, I was probably lucky in that the teams I joined (Infra, Gmail, AI) were run mostly by engineers and pretty cool people.
- dekhn 4y ago
  Mountain View. In fact during the nest debacle there was a whole office building of people doing nothing with a clock on the wall which was "how long until Tony Fadell no longer controls you" counting down the days.

eitally 4y ago

I worked in Cloud from 2015-2023. I was personally hired by Amit Singh, who was the first "CEO" of "Cloud", back when it was just "Google Apps" + GCS/GCE/GAE. About 8 months later Diane Greene was brought in to scale the business because the org under Amit was too googley. Literally. Google's legacy culture of engineering meritocracy and ICs who vote with their feet on the "best" projects was not conducive to becoming an enterprise technology company. Diane brought in Diane Bryant as COO (from Intel) and PH Ferrand as sales president (from Dell), and while PH gave it a good try on the GTM side, Diane left after barely 6 months and there just wasn't enough enterprise experience across the org to make things work. Diane was likely brought in at least partly because she is googley, and her VMWare history probably looked like enterprise software success, but she was too googley to turn the ship and he org flailed for a couple more years. Then the board appointed TK, who absolutely knows 100% how to sell to enterprise. He spent 2 years almost exclusively hiring senior staff from outside: Microsoft, SAP, AWS, IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, etc, and rebuilding something that looks roughly like if Microsoft went back in time 20 years. The upsides are that the business has grown mightily and Cloud is now almost exclusively market driven, at least on core products/services. The downside is that he broke the culture and alienated thousands of googlers whose advancement opportunities were essentially eliminated. Because of the hiring needs, the bar is much lower now, cronyism is prevalent, and politics+bureaucracy get in the way of progress. During my years at Google, I sat in The Quad, Tech Corners, Moffett Park, and then back at Tech Corners, and spent time in many of the rest of the bay area offices. I will state with confidence that the Cloud offices do not feel "googley" when you walk around the cube spaces. There are few decorations, no buzz, not many people who appear to be enjoying themselves, very few tech talks, guest speakers or events, etc. Just taking a walk around the MP, Matilda or TC campuses and then visiting YT in San Bruno or one of the Android teams in MTV is a stark difference. Cloud is not googley. Let's see if the consumer-oriented PAs can keep that alive.