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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 overworke

by 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.

by dekhn 4y ago

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.