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Google has turned into the "new IBM" for years now. I've worked with Google engineers and managers from different "generations". It's shocking how the newer eng

Google has turned into the "new IBM" for years now. I've worked with Google engineers and managers from different "generations". It's shocking how the newer engineers are just your average consultancy engineer with leet code practice. They have little abstracting capabilities and would be pissed-off if you use some tool/workflow that's not "The Google Way™" (and that includes things like Github for code reviews (instead of Gerrit or a Gerrit-clone), multirepos or monorepos without Bazel, anything else than gRPC...). And the managers... Oh, the managers... They just act for the sake of their own promotion even if that means damaging someone's else career or the company in the long term. And will complain about things not being done the "Google Way", even if the proposed Google Way failed multiple times in that context (startups and scaleups, in my case). But what's really shocking is how they have no interpersonal skills, to the point of making you constantly question yourself: how, why, did this person ended up in a management track in a supposedly Y-career company? How not only did they got there but also promoted multiple times for this role? Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays.

Osiris 3y ago
I worked at a startup with just 2 other engineers. They hired a guy from Google with a decade less experience than me. When I arrived I was taking my time to understand the culture, company, needs, etc. before making any suggestions. One example, they did Agile with sprints and I think KANBAN works better. But, I didn’t see it as an important issue to spend time on. So the Google guy comes in and from day 1 began making suggestions for big changes to both process and the software architecture. He often started by saying, “At Google we…” I was let go, in part, because the CEO thought I was not contributing to certain technical discussions. I told him I thought the proposed change wouldn’t bring any value to potential customers because it was a purely internal architectural change. We had a lot of actual customer facing work to do and this was a distraction. So… a guy with only 5 years of professional experience all at Google won over the 26 year old CEO more than someone with 20 years of experience across multiple companies and having built a very similar product just a year before.
- sharts 3y ago
  That's why they say having "Google" on your resume sets you up forever (˃̣̣̥‿˂̣̣̥)
- lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  If the CEO thought process used in a megacorp was appropriate for a four engineer startup, then he is a fucking idiot and you are better off out of that impending cluster fuck.
  - bushbaba 3y ago
    Often those who’ve only worked at small companies don’t grock how much organizational bloat is needed to run a large enterprise. Alignment cannot be done in a 50k employee company by having everyone hash it out over beers. Large companies also tend to have sociopaths become the VPs, who only care about their career progression and not the actual company direction.
    - prepend 3y ago
      > grock “Grok” is from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It was a super important word to me as a kid. I’ve recently started hearing it again used by people who never read the book and find it interesting. Do you remember where you first heard this word? I assume you heard it as it’s such a memorable word and difficult to misspell.
      - alephnerd 3y ago
        Not OP but I use the word Grok a bunch without having read Heinlein. I heard about it from graybeards and HN, hence why there might be a resurgence now that HN is mainstream.
    - lowbloodsugar 3y ago
      The failure begins at around 150 employees, from what I've seen in startups I joined when smaller and grew to that point.
u801e 3y ago
> that includes things like Github for code reviews I've never worked at Google, but if you want a clean set of commits to implement a feature (think Linux kernel/subsystem, git, etc), Github makes it unnecessarily hard to do that. The best they have is squash and merge which basically makes one mega commit and a merge commit that references a branch with a single commit.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bottom999mottob 3y ago
  You think Gerrit is any better? The way I've seen Gerrit used essentially erases the commit history with an amend, and its configured so only one person can work on a branch at a time, locking out vertical, parallel work. Maybe that's just been my experience however.
- baq 3y ago
  I’ve just reviewed ‘spr’, ‘git-spr’ and ‘git-grok’ which supposedly make it easier to submit a stack of prs for review. They all kinda work, I didn’t like any though. GitHub really makes it more difficult than it should be. I think ‘stg’ with a GitHub publish/stack sync option would be a winner.
voytec 3y ago
> Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays. Feeling rather uncomfortable as Devil's advocate in this case but I was testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a cost-saving replacement for Google Cloud Platform recently and they are worlds apart. GCP is a cloud service where you can issue a command or click on a web panel to get your resources up. Oracle, on the other hand, will set up multiple meetings with various "specialists" to teach you how a cloud should be used. Unproductive meeting after meeting after meeting and no work gets done. I felt like an unpaid QA engineer when going over all the unpleasantries of their Terraform provider with them. Documentation is garbage and no variables are are explained[1]? No problem, we've got 5 specialists who will train you how you should use the cloud. Here's a generous free tier so you can test everything. Oh, want to set up resources using it? Raise a support ticket. Want GPU VMs? No problem, request the hardware for a specific region days in advance and we hope it'll work. Oh, not working? Please share your screen and open a support ticket. Want a second VM instance or a node pool for your cluster? Request limit increase. Want more RAM? Request limit increase. Don't worry, we have a team granting these very quickly. Absolute shitshow. Oracle Cloud is as frustrating as Digital Ocean when you try to treat it as a cloud and not a VPS vendor. GCP more or less "just works". [1] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/oracle/oci/latest/docs/resources/database_autonomous_database https://registry.terraform.io/providers/oracle/oci/latest/do...
deleted 3y ago
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whiplash451 3y ago
Not a Googler, but the point about gerrit vs gitlab is totally valid. The tools you use are culture-defining.

Osiris 3y ago

I worked at a startup with just 2 other engineers. They hired a guy from Google with a decade less experience than me. When I arrived I was taking my time to understand the culture, company, needs, etc. before making any suggestions. One example, they did Agile with sprints and I think KANBAN works better. But, I didn’t see it as an important issue to spend time on. So the Google guy comes in and from day 1 began making suggestions for big changes to both process and the software architecture. He often started by saying, “At Google we…” I was let go, in part, because the CEO thought I was not contributing to certain technical discussions. I told him I thought the proposed change wouldn’t bring any value to potential customers because it was a purely internal architectural change. We had a lot of actual customer facing work to do and this was a distraction. So… a guy with only 5 years of professional experience all at Google won over the 26 year old CEO more than someone with 20 years of experience across multiple companies and having built a very similar product just a year before.

sharts 3y ago
That's why they say having "Google" on your resume sets you up forever (˃̣̣̥‿˂̣̣̥)
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
If the CEO thought process used in a megacorp was appropriate for a four engineer startup, then he is a fucking idiot and you are better off out of that impending cluster fuck.
- bushbaba 3y ago
  Often those who’ve only worked at small companies don’t grock how much organizational bloat is needed to run a large enterprise. Alignment cannot be done in a 50k employee company by having everyone hash it out over beers. Large companies also tend to have sociopaths become the VPs, who only care about their career progression and not the actual company direction.
  - prepend 3y ago
    > grock “Grok” is from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It was a super important word to me as a kid. I’ve recently started hearing it again used by people who never read the book and find it interesting. Do you remember where you first heard this word? I assume you heard it as it’s such a memorable word and difficult to misspell.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Not OP but I use the word Grok a bunch without having read Heinlein. I heard about it from graybeards and HN, hence why there might be a resurgence now that HN is mainstream.
  - lowbloodsugar 3y ago
    The failure begins at around 150 employees, from what I've seen in startups I joined when smaller and grew to that point.

u801e 3y ago

> that includes things like Github for code reviews I've never worked at Google, but if you want a clean set of commits to implement a feature (think Linux kernel/subsystem, git, etc), Github makes it unnecessarily hard to do that. The best they have is squash and merge which basically makes one mega commit and a merge commit that references a branch with a single commit.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bottom999mottob 3y ago
You think Gerrit is any better? The way I've seen Gerrit used essentially erases the commit history with an amend, and its configured so only one person can work on a branch at a time, locking out vertical, parallel work. Maybe that's just been my experience however.
baq 3y ago
I’ve just reviewed ‘spr’, ‘git-spr’ and ‘git-grok’ which supposedly make it easier to submit a stack of prs for review. They all kinda work, I didn’t like any though. GitHub really makes it more difficult than it should be. I think ‘stg’ with a GitHub publish/stack sync option would be a winner.

voytec 3y ago

> Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays. Feeling rather uncomfortable as Devil's advocate in this case but I was testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a cost-saving replacement for Google Cloud Platform recently and they are worlds apart. GCP is a cloud service where you can issue a command or click on a web panel to get your resources up. Oracle, on the other hand, will set up multiple meetings with various "specialists" to teach you how a cloud should be used. Unproductive meeting after meeting after meeting and no work gets done. I felt like an unpaid QA engineer when going over all the unpleasantries of their Terraform provider with them. Documentation is garbage and no variables are are explained[1]? No problem, we've got 5 specialists who will train you how you should use the cloud. Here's a generous free tier so you can test everything. Oh, want to set up resources using it? Raise a support ticket. Want GPU VMs? No problem, request the hardware for a specific region days in advance and we hope it'll work. Oh, not working? Please share your screen and open a support ticket. Want a second VM instance or a node pool for your cluster? Request limit increase. Want more RAM? Request limit increase. Don't worry, we have a team granting these very quickly. Absolute shitshow. Oracle Cloud is as frustrating as Digital Ocean when you try to treat it as a cloud and not a VPS vendor. GCP more or less "just works". [1] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/oracle/oci/latest/docs/resources/database_autonomous_database https://registry.terraform.io/providers/oracle/oci/latest/do...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

whiplash451 3y ago

Not a Googler, but the point about gerrit vs gitlab is totally valid. The tools you use are culture-defining.