31 ms·

I skipped to the ending

609 points by BHSPitMonkey 3y ago

fennecfoxy 3y ago
Sounds like the general management trend of biz majors ruining everything. inb4 you all get kneejerky salty like jerky from a knee. Ofc I'm not saying all biz majors, but it's certainly a part of biz culture for 'em, esp tech related biz.
quietbritishjim 3y ago
[flagged]
- notpushkin 3y ago
  It's not that important for the story, yeah. Provides some background tho.
  - quietbritishjim 3y ago
    My point isn't really about the first sentence as such. It's that we have no idea what the article is going to be about. That's true even several paragraphs in (at which point they're entertaining the idea of a job but the article could still really be about anything).
    - sho_hn 3y ago
      It's a blog post, not an article. Not every piece of personal expression needs to be structured to spec and optimized for SEO. I think it's refreshing at this point, really. A little clumsy, not written according to "Use This One Trick To Get To Frontpage" rules, just what someone cares about in the order they wanted to tell it.
    - devjab 3y ago
      It’s a personal blog entry that’s tagged with #google and #work. It doesn’t transmit as freely to HN as it does if you enter from the front page or their blog, but unless it was the author who posted it here then I think it’s hard to fault them for the article not being clear enough.
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      Oh, yeah, I see your point now. Agreed, it could be a bit clearer in the beginning, although as others pointed out it's a personal blog and probably wasn't even intended for such a wide audience. (Maybe it's even more like a personal diary rather than some public thing?)
- spacecadet 3y ago
  bro just skip to the end LOL
- yellow_lead 3y ago
  This type of comment might be a reason why people hate when their posts end up on HN. Keep in mind everything isn't written for HN audience or to optimize skim-reading time. In a personal post like this I feel like it's perfectly ok to not include a summary and to start with your backstory to give perspective.
  - jraph 3y ago
    Yeah, it looks like a personal blog post. Feedback is fine but we have to remember that this feedback has likely not been asked for, and we are not entitled to anything. If you don't like the author's writing style, just move on, other people might like the very thing you don't, so… (as someone who has been meaning to write a blog forever - I will definitely like some feedback if it ever actually happens because I will want to improve and please my readers, but I'll probably take ironical feedback somewhat badly. I'll be free to ignore such feedback or silently take what's good in then, but I will appreciate if someone takes some care when sending feedback. Specifically here, "Would it really have hurt to" can easily be phrased as "I would have appreciated")
    - master-lincoln 3y ago
      I am entitled to give my feedback to anybody I think. Feedback is not meant as asking somebody to change, it's there to tell how you felt. If the addressed person agrees/disagrees doesn't matter. I believe the world gets better if everybody is allowed to voice their opinion
      - croo 3y ago
        Feedback is best given when asked.
        master-lincoln 3y ago
        why?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- alias_neo 3y ago
  It's not an article, it's a blog post. Expectations should be vastly different for the two.
- Ambroos 3y ago
  Ah come on, it's good writing. Sets the scene!
notpushkin 3y ago
> He told me (paraphrasing) “Well, you know it’s really a lot of paper-work to fire you. You could just get away with doing nothing for 12 months.” [...] Why tell me this? Presumably for him this was a way to pad his head-count. I would absolutely take that “offer”, on the condition that they allow me to work on some open source project in the meantime. Don't really care if it would have to be © Google instead of in my name. Getting paid to do something you like that would help everybody? Hey, why not.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  I believe it was Apple who is really, really strict about that kind of thing (that is, contributing to open source while employed by Apple) (source is anecdotal, someone in the Go slack got hired by Apple and could no longer participate as actively in the space); how is Google that way, generally speaking? Also, how do people get job offers for these high paid do nothing jobs? I did get a recruiter email from Google the one time, I believe it was for the Google Docs / Workspace team, but it involved relocating to Germany and Docs didn't seem interesting to me, so I didn't take them up on the offer at the time.
  - freeCandy 3y ago
    I've seen tons of very active projects under Google's GitHub org[1] that have the disclaimer "This is not an officially supported Google product" so I would take a guess that they have a much better policy on employees participating in OSS than Apple does. [1] https://github.com/google https://github.com/google
  - PumpkinSpice 3y ago
    Most large tech companies essentially give a pass to new hires on their first eval cycle. Depending on your start date, you might be either outright ineligible for a rating, or the rating defaults to "meeting expectations," because the expectations for the first 1-2 months are for you to just learn the stack and get to know the team. If you hit the ground running, good for you, but your manager might face an uphill battle to justify anything other than "meets." For the next 1-2 months, you can probably keep making excuses. If your manager is paying close attention to new hires, they might object. But many managers are overstretched. Between office politics, planning, and all the ongoing "problem cases," they might simply not have enough cycles to watch your output real close. Even after your manager is fed up, it takes time to fire you. In part to avoid legal risks, HR typically wants to see a written plan first, giving you about three months to prove yourself. If you do nothing, that's usually the end of the road. But if you lift a finger and earn a passing grade, the timer essentially restarts. In fact, you're now your manager's success story, and they might be reluctant to admit they were wrong. And that's on average teams. If you end up on a dysfunctional team or on a project in turmoil, you might not even have to pretend. There's just no one who is close enough to your role and still cares about the result.
spacecadet 3y ago
Hell yeah brother! but as others pointed out, ride that 12 months and start or learn something on their dime! and while we're at it, fuck google! hehe
- spacecadet 3y ago
  Bah! Down votes, sensitive googles afoot.
  - spacecadet 3y ago
    and one more ;) offset back to zero to prevent google bias.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    It's just the low quality of the comment that's getting the downvotes.
    - spacecadet 3y ago
      I know that Im having fun
codeulike 3y ago
almost as if programming is a genuine craft but management is easier to bullshit at than it is to do properly
- unsubstantiated 3y ago
  people bullshit at programming and don't treat it like a genuine craft all the time
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
Basically everything I've read and heard about Google makes it extremely dystopian. I work at a fairly large tech company, and I've very happy that my experience has been nothing like the one the author described. Things move relatively quickly, people care and are earnest, managers are empathetic and actually good, etc. Not all sunshine and rainbows of course, but it's pretty damn good compared to what I hear about other companies.
- PumpkinSpice 3y ago
  Few people write blog posts to say "I worked at Foo Corp and it was okay." There's a strong bias toward horror stories. There's also a HN selection bias: a story about FAANG is a lot more likely to be upvoted than a story about some small startup. I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better. They all have their idiosyncrasies, they all have good teams and terrible ones, they all have a ton of red tape. I think the main problem is that they built their reputation by claiming they invented a new way of doing business and a new way of treating their employees. They were supposed to be the antidote to the corporate culture at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and whatnot. But ultimately, they converged on pretty much the same.
  - eru 3y ago
    I did work at Google between 2014 to 2016. It was ok. I enjoyed my time there (about as much as I enjoyed other jobs I had). > I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better. Amazon had a reputation for working their software people pretty hard. Not sure if that's still the case.
    - programmertote 3y ago
      I know a little about that. Programmers in Amazon have to work harder mainly due to the poorly-designed/thought-out (despite sometimes unnecessary process like writing design docs and "discussing" over your solution with various 'stakeholders' until it gets approved) systems and tools supporting their internal development work. Pipelines is their CI/CD platform and boy, looking at the interface wants me to puke. Every single step you need to implement requires you to look up several internal wiki pages, some of which are outdated and/or poorly written or linking out to another wiki page, and so on. My ex-manager always talk about 'scalability' (because they want to sell it to other teams for visibility) although that tool we are designing is going to be used by like 2-3 people and is processing at most like 500GB-1TB a day (which is not big data in my experience). In the name of scalability and rapid deployment, the manager wants us to use CDK, and we spend probably half of our team's effort maintaining/patching/upgrading that CDK dependencies (like Node.js and others). This is not to mention that when you want to tear down the resources created by CDK, it doesn't do things cleanly, so you are left with lots of CDK-created S3 buckets over time. Oh man, I can recount a few more problems surrounding the tools used within Amazon and how obtuse they are for usability and ease-of-development.
hooby 3y ago
I wonder if it's a function of company size. This sort of thing seems to happen in all large companies - and to be very hard to avoid, if you do grow to that level.
quantumwoke 3y ago
Reading this post in the lens of other articles it seems like google is well into the enshittification phase internally, although this is a limited experience. Was this the average experience 10 years ago?
- spacecadet 3y ago
  Throw in building massive surveillance pieplines and backdoors for NSA.
fragkakis 3y ago
I skipped to the ending of the post and read only the last paragraph. Now I I have no idea what the post is about.
- layer8 3y ago
  From the title, it's about you.
- jjgreen 3y ago
  Very Meta
  - adastra22 3y ago
    No, no this is about Google.
    - jjgreen 3y ago
      The pun was intentional (hence the capitalisation :-)
      - neogodless 3y ago
        The response was an intentional joke!
nine_zeros 3y ago
A lot of folks look at FAANG and other adjacent companies with starry eyed gaze. These places rule the internet, must be teeming with innovation right? Turns out these companies are no different from corporate America, with all the red tape, politics, meaningless toil, dancing to misaligned incentives, and obsession with management-driven work. Everything that makes a job soul sucking is present in these companies, and more. Large companies were great for me when I needed the money. But beyond that, my soul cried at balancing the 7th iteration of nitpicky code review, and a manager who couldn't think beyond head-count and performance reviews.
adrianmsmith 3y ago
> One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you. Yeah this is definitely one of those things that sounds good on paper but has unintended "consequences" shall we say. I worked for one company about a decade ago where the task was to redesign the corporate homepage. The "about us" pages on the homepage, not the actual product the company was selling. These pages got a few hundred hits a month. The decision was made to create two sub-teams, one would create a custom CMS, the other would "render" the data entered into the CMS to the website visitors. So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary. I didn't understand why this was happening. Who gained from this? I couldn't figure it out. I supposed it was just a lack of controls on how long things took, and this was the result, but that didn't really feel right to me. It felt like someone had to really gain from this, but I couldn't work it out. Anyway, during my leaving drinks, after a few pints, my boss told me "yeah I think I'm going to get promoted, the other managers who are applying for this job manage far fewer people so I think I'm well positioned to get it". The penny dropped. The purpose of this project was to occupy people, so that more people could get hired, so his headcount increased, so he could get a promotion, and a payrise.
- leosanchez 3y ago
  > So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary. What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects ?
  - rebolek 3y ago
    drinking Champagne while bathing in the blood of young virgins, mostly
  - adrianmsmith 3y ago
    I can only speculate. But I think that beyond a certain level management probably doesn't have a clear idea of how long things should take. If they've worked in a company for 20 years, and have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is? I mean you may argue it is their job to know such things, and that might be right, but maybe they're just not competent and their managers aren't competent either? Or maybe they don't really care as it's not their money? Or maybe it really doesn't matter and there is higher-impact stuff for that level of manager to focus on? I mean if the company is making $100m a year and they can do something that will drive a 10% increase in that, would foregoing that activity to reduce spending on a website down from $1m be the right call?
solaarphunk 3y ago
As a shareholder, I'm curious why others aren't more furious to hear that this is how things are run at Google. It's common knowledge how bureaucratic and political the company has become; these stories are everywhere. If I were a large pension fund or asset manager, I would be asking questions to the board like, "Given nothing gets done on many teams, what would happen if Google reduced its headcount by 50%?" and "Why is increasing headcount currently an incentive for managers within organizations, especially without any apparent penalty function?"
- dsr_ 3y ago
  If the Goog reduced headcount by 50%: They could not accurately judge productivity, talent or motivation, so some groups would lose their key players. This would demotivate everyone left. They would launch 500-1000 startups with knowledge of how some market of merely a hundred million people is being underserved. A dozen or a hundred of those would become true competitors in those markets. It would be good for everyone except those who lost health insurance and income at the wrong time, and the Goog itself.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    > They would launch 500-1000 startups with knowledge of how some market of merely a hundred million people is being underserved. A dozen or a hundred of those would become true competitors in those markets. So, cut headcount, juice the stock, then have a bunch of possible acquisition targets that have developed viable products in new markets by not being saddled with the intractable corporate inefficiencies you suffer? Sounds like breaking some eggs for a tasty omelette. I'm only mostly kidding.
  - solaarphunk 3y ago
    Wouldn't it mean that their entire organization is broken, if they can't effectively identify productive and talented people? This seems like a huge problem! I agree that Google benefits from monopolizing headcount, even if the employees waste their lives doing nothing, because it reduces competition. I would even Google poisons people's work ethic/priorities permanently when they try to leave and go to other startups (this is my personal experience working with former non-technical google employees who only play politics).
chrismorgan 3y ago
> DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today) No, DHTML meant little snippets that you could add to your page to add effects and widgets, whether arguably useful things like button rollover (many of you will remember the incantation I think it was Adobe Fireworks produced, something along the lines of <img src="button1.jpg" onmouseover="MM_something('button1_rollover.jpg')" onmouseout="MM_something('button1.jpg')">) or widgets like a “scroll to top” link in the bottom right corner that only appeared when you had scrolled down some way, or ridiculous things like drawing an analogue clock around the mouse cursor that followed your movement but as though the digits were connected by pieces of elastic each to the next, or snowflakes falling down the screen. Browse http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ http://www.dynamicdrive.com/, that was DHTML. DHTML mostly meant fripperies, but did definitely include useful functionality like calendar widgets. But that was the scope of it: isolated things here and there that you could add to an existing page. Web apps today are a whole-page affair, where the scripting is woven through the entire thing; they’re essentially unrecognisably different from DHTML.
- brynbryn 3y ago
  And DHTML provides possibly the hardest version of PONG I've ever attempted to play http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex12/phong2.htm http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex12/phong2.htm
  - SkyArrow 3y ago
    Off-topic for this thread but if you can get the ball to ping-pong horizontally while both players are at the top edge then you can stay alive indefinitely - the opponent doesn't seem to move downwards out of this position.
- indeyets 3y ago
  just one word: <layer>
- LeftCorner 3y ago
  The MM_ was an acronym for Macromedia who developed Fireworks prior to being acquired by Adobe
workfromspace 3y ago
Money doesn't matter (or buy happiness) - Rich people. Google isn't important - Ex-Googler. I think I see his point, but I think he's forgetting about the privilege of making good money at Google for a while and becoming an ex-Googler for all his life.
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  "money doesn't matter" I can say that the people who say this DO NOT keep an excel on their desktop where every 1st of the month they go around their accounts, investments, etc. and enter the 'updated values' and they see their net-worth growing month-by-month. Money matters (when you are planning your vacations, when you get seriously ill, when you want to buy a new house/car/laptop), etc. Only naive people say that money don't matter. There are MANY things that matter, money is one of them.
  - marcodave 3y ago
    As someone who just this year started to keep track of the money across the months, I can say that you get some sort of high when you get close to payday and you see the line going up.
  - strken 3y ago
    People who say money doesn't matter aren't naive. They're mostly either trying to make someone feel better about not having any, or trying to get someone to stop placing so much importance on wealth. It's one of those "serious but not literal" statements.
    - closewith 3y ago
      I think in general it's a form of self-justification to allow a person to feel that they are good despite being wealthy in an extremely unequal world.
  - gorjusborg 3y ago
    There's a reason the English saying is 'Money can't buy happiness', not 'money doesn't matter'. The point is that it isn't money that makes you happy, it is the life you build. That can be different for different people, and money can help. The point is that money isn't the goal.
WizardClickBoy 3y ago
This sounds like an absolute nightmare and I see stories like this very frequently. Is this the "normal" experience of working at FAANG in 2023, and how long has it been like that? I have never worked for (or been tempted to apply to) any business remotely approaching that scale (currently in largest ever company, 3-400 employees total, only because my previous much smaller company was acquired) and I can't really understand why anybody would ever want to. Surely the delta in terms of earnings at FAANG vs literally anywhere else is not worth this kind of horror – can anybody explain? Or do people just not find out until it's too late?
- rebolek 3y ago
  I'm applying for a job at 100k+ people company. I was sent test for a different position. After I complained, they send me another test. And next hour they've sent another different test again without me requesting it. I guess they don't care about their job very much.
- wepple 3y ago
  There seems to be 1-2 posts per week about how terrible $FAANG is to work for (google is in the hot seat this month) If google has ~200k (I don’t have exact data) employees, there are surely a significant number of people who either don’t hate it enough to blog, or actually enjoy it. It’s just that nobody writes a blog post saying “I went to work and things were good”, and nobody (especially HN) would upvote it. But remember, if you see a new update about React, Android, ChaosMonkey, or every time a new apple product lands… that’s someone’s work being released, and at least a subset (possibly small, possibly large) are happy with the work and the outcome
  - Etheryte 3y ago
    Honestly I think that would be great content. "Went to work, it was okay. Meeting was boring, had a chat in the coffee corner." Basically the HN equivalent of the local news "local man paints fence".
    - WesleyJohnson 3y ago
neontomo 3y ago
I almost thought I had hallucinated DHTML because I've not seen anyone mentioning it in so many years. It's something I learned about while playing around with building websites as a 9 year old and brings back memories.
t43562 3y ago
Companies are social systems and they develop down some path. I think it can be the case that everyone in them sees some subset of the dysfuntions and cannot stop them and everyone is incentivised not to. This is why startups have a chance, right? If the larger companies were also efficient it would be impossible to beat them at anything.
- passion__desire 3y ago
  Why a mere number like a headcount should matter at all knowing fully well that it can be gamed? Shouldn't the motivation be get "more done with less"? This way the manager would be incentivized to gather only the best in his team and the best will only agree to go with him if he is really good at his job.
  - t43562 3y ago
    I think it truly is harder to manage larger numbers of people - absolutely requires skills that aren't so critical in a small team. There's too much complexity to micromanage so for one thing you need to be good at picking out leaders who can help you keep on top of it all and you need to lead them to solutions without being able to dive into the details like you might have as a developer. I think it's bloody difficult and I'm only one level up now. That said, I also think some people like to make solutions overly complicated which ends up requiring lots of people. In some companies the simple solution (e.g. django and postgres) isn't seen as "enterprise ready" or whatever. So they end up with lots of people on something that could have been done more simply with 2-3. Then maintaining that takes lots of people and then everyone in the team has an interest in keeping things as complicated as possible - in selling the "we will need it one day" idea. That also combines with impossible tasks - like "lets rewrite the complicated slow old system while keeping on adding features to it" and so on. Then there are never enough developers to do the impossible task - especially as the rewrite turns out to be complex and have issues too.
danpalmer 3y ago
Google is a big company, most possible types of tech job probably exist somewhere within it. There are toxic managers, dead end projects, and there are rocketships and places with amazing culture. I'm lucky to be on the good side of this, very much so, but I understand the experiences this person went through. One thing I would say is that some of the takes here suggest that the author missed some interesting learning and development from their experiences. That's not to say it would have changed the final outcome, and they may not have been set up to learn by their manager, but I came in from a similar background and met a few of the same challenges, but had different take-aways from them and feel I have grown as an engineer from my startup roots as a result.
kunley 3y ago
Wow. Sounds almost too surreal to be true. Is it really that demoralized in the management there? That's scary.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  It's a 100,000-person company, so the rule is "variance is high." I saw extremely gelled, competent, high-functioning teams working on key projects with wide impact. I also saw new teams led by inexperienced managers working on fringe / incidental initiatives or keeping the lights on on a system people knew was doomed. These experiences are not the same, though they happen at the same company.
DarkNova6 3y ago
I also skipped to the ending: > So after 15 months I was out of there. I learned that I don’t care about the money Google pays. I don’t care about the high scale of influence your work can have. I skipped from series A startup to mature IPO’d company and cheated myself out of the experiences you get in-between. I want to earn the scale through hard work. For me FAANG was not a place to learn, it was a way to get paid. But I didn’t come to Silicon Valley to get paid.
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
I have nothing against Google, but the slow decline in collective aspiration of hacker culture sucks. It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire. Now everyone seems to believe the ultimate goal of a tech job is to land at a FAANG, and just stay there for life? It’s so tame, so complicit. Hackerdom is now mostly about obscene levels of money and status?
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  There's hackers on the one side, but for the vast majority of developers (myself inclusive) it's just a job. FAANG is some of the best pay you'll ever get, and you're guaranteed for work and minimal income if you have that on your CV. "Hackerdom" whatever that means is separate from "working for a living".
- acuozzo 3y ago
  > It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire. Prior to that the dream was to just make a successful business. Consider Sun Microsystems. But let's be real and invoke NoTrueScotsman: "hackers" are supposed to be more like Bill Joy at UCB than Bill Joy at Sun. I doubt Bill Joy was thinking about business and financial success while hacking on BSD at UCB. Hacking was the end, not a means to an end.
- xwdv 3y ago
  True “hackers” don’t give a fuck about startups. Hackers are interested in how things work and how they can be exploited to do things or grant access to forbidden data. Real hackers back in the late 90s early 00s casually did things that would make a lot of today’s “hackers” blanche in the face and wet themselves at the thought of computer crime, or at least grope around for a downvote button. It was a thrilling era for freaks and geeks. Ever found yourself scrolling down a stolen CSV full of credit card numbers and full billing info? It’s like snorting a line of coke. As a teen I once stole $22k, spent several years looking over my shoulder expecting to be shot or cuffed. At some point the term “hacker” was co-opted to mean anyone writing code. These Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs aren’t really “hackers”: they’re businessmen with some software engineering skills. But that doesn’t sound nearly as edgy or cool as calling yourself a hacker.
eru 3y ago
Google isn't what it used to be. Though I don't know if it ever was?
- javajosh 3y ago
  Scaling up search and inventing the ad business was surely an incredible time at Google. But then they got spoiled by infinite money.
- Kranar 3y ago
  It was an amazing place to work back in 2006, but yeah it's gone downhill since then. It seems like Google is kind of in an internal cultural battle with itself about what exactly it's trying to become.
cmsonger 3y ago
> One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you. I mean ... you get to choose how you play the game. If your goal is money and you are a manager then in any organization (not just Google) it's likely that income is going to be O(number of reports). More reports == more responsibility == more money. But if your goal is to get something done and enjoy your job; you can play that game instead. Perhaps one of the most life improving insights I've discovered about myself over the years is that I like managing engineers more than managing managers of engineers. The conversations in my week are just more interesting. Now if I want to get a thing done that really takes 70 people then I either have to deal with it, or let someone else do it -- but just because "more comp requires more people" does not mean you have to aspire to more people. It's OK to like your work and want to get meaningful things done without aspiring to play the "more people, more money" game.
- jefftk 3y ago
  > If your goal is money and you are a manager then in any organization (not just Google) it's likely that income is going to be O(number of reports). Income linear in the number of reports? Increasing with reports, sure, but way less than linear. Logarithmic is usually a good guess with this sort of thing.
  - cmsonger 3y ago
    Indeed! I suppose I actually meant f(number of reports) because I didn't actually think the scaling through. The broader points remain: This is true everywhere and not unique to Google. People get a choice whether or not they opt in.
mgaunard 3y ago
Big companies offer good money but are ridden with politics and don't allow you to learn or progress. Nothing people didn't already know.
- oneepic 3y ago
  They certainly allow you to learn. I'm able to tell my manager I'll spend a sprint(s) tinkering with build performance or reading stuff that's relevant to our work (i.e. the Goog SRE book).
  - mgaunard 3y ago
    You learn by challenging yourself to build things and solve real problems, and doing something meaningful like this requires a flat structure and business exposure. Tinkering with a build system and reading some corporate groupthink? That's not learning, sorry.
beej71 3y ago
We did contact work for Google around 10 years ago. I visited Mountain View, San Francisco, and YouTube. I've worked in startups and video games, and I was genuinely shocked to find that Google felt more like Hewlett-Packard than any of those. There was a room in the SF office two stories high with an adult playground slide between floors and a free photo booth nearby. No one was there. Super "abandoned amusement park" vibes. Still have the photos, though, somewhere around here. Never did work there as a W2, and certainly never will. No judgment against those who do; to each their own, right?
aubanel 3y ago
Other people with similar experiences at FAANG? About Google, I still cannot yet grasp if the company is just starting to slow down or already declining steeply.
paulsmith 3y ago
If you're reading this, please provide an RSS/Atom feed for your blog - I see you are using Hugo so it shouldn't be too hard to do. I would add your blog to my feed reader. Thanks!
- schemescape 3y ago
  Not affiliated with the blog, but apparently Hugo generates an index.xml feed by default, so try this: https://danangell.com/blog/index.xml https://danangell.com/blog/index.xml (I had the same question with a different site two days ago.)
  - paulsmith 3y ago
    Groovy, thank you!
rideontime 3y ago
My main personal takeaway from this and so many other articles like it is that I need to get my data out of Google ASAP.
Nimitz14 3y ago
As someone who's first job was also for a mature ~20 person start up, I firmly believe those companies are the best to work for as a junior. You will have experienced colleagues who can teach you while also getting to make a significant impact. It's the best.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Maybe Musk should buy Google and fire everyone. Sounds super bloated.
refulgentis 3y ago
This is Google. I'm really glad to see this today. Yesterday, there was a blog from someone else who worked at Google after their company was acquired. The title promised it was describing working at Google, and the length made it feel very in-depth. It wasn't, there was a few dog whistles you'd hear if you worked there, but it had that saccharine and acrid taste of "don't want to be accountable for anything I say here, so I just won't say anything". I left last month after 7 years there. I'm not ready to talk about it in full, succinctly: "people are people everywhere all the time"
gosub100 3y ago
> doing nothing for 12 months Here I am reading this wondering "how do I get in!?!" I've never even applied to FAANG but the stupid DS&A questions pretty much kept me out. Maybe I'll reconsider.
op00to 3y ago
I feel like I would be really good at working at Google. Am I the baddie?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
hcks 3y ago
> I want to earn the scale through hard work How lost in life do you have to be to start valuing things like that. I, as an individual, do not care about your SaaS scale. I’m sorry, it literally isn’t weighted at all in my utility function.
- jackblemming 3y ago
  Hollow people have to fill it with something. Using $BIGNUMBER whether that be money, users, or the like rarely works out in the long term.
mvkel 3y ago
I wouldn't use the Google brush to paint the other FAANG companies. By all accounts I've heard, working at Facebook/Meta is a pretty rewarding experience (if harvesting user data is your thing) in all the ways Google is not. That said, it's strange that the author conflates staying with a Series A company through IPO would have been the preferred alternative. That would have been like experiencing the worst parts of Google on fast forward.
- jokethrowaway 3y ago
  I've heard bad stories from FB, terrible from Amazon. Google is boring but you don't do much. Netflix is the place to be but need to be in Los Gatos. To be honest after factoring in contracting vs being full time, living in a country with much less taxes than the US, low cost of life, higher quality of life, better food I don't think fangs are worth it unless paying 500k+ But then, maybe better try to get to 500k with a solo business than with fang bureaucracy
takinola 3y ago
Incentives at large companies can be weird. I once had a situation where a vendor put in an estimate of close to $100K to, in effect, generate a 40 page PDF for us. I pushed back until they came back with a still high but less outrageous proposal. Upon looking back, I realized that if I had approved the original request nothing bad would have happened. No one, other than myself, was going to look at the bill. The amount involved was a rounding error of a rounding error of that week's revenue. In fact, the only one that got hurt was my team as the work got delayed while we went back and forth on the proposal. The incentives in this case were set up so that the rational course of action for a manager is to be less frugal or responsible with company funds.
krmboya 3y ago
The pre-2010 google sounded like programmer-heaven. I wonder which places would match that now? Something that is neither startup grind nor a stifling bureaucracy, but you still get to work on innovative and influencial projects
goalonetwo 3y ago
Google is successful because they managed to tap into the biggest money milking opportunity of the century. Not because the supposedly superior management or talents there.
neilv 3y ago
So what companies are now the Google of 20(?) years ago? Where they hire strong engineering&product people who want to do beneficial things, and pay and treat them very well, they can afford to do some things well, and there's not a "metagame" of promotion-seeking and org-chart climbing?
- voiceblue 3y ago
  There are no companies that are the “Google” of 20 years ago. Apple comes close in some ways, but it’s not a “young” version of Google, obviously. Google is the internet, and most of its ads. Apple more or less is consumer tech. That is to say, they are the market makers and they decide what these market’s “truth” is. There aren’t that many companies with that much leverage over that big of a market.
ajkjk 3y ago
It has been years since I heard any kind of positive take on working at Google.
trevor-e 3y ago
I worked at a FAANG-adjacent company for a ~year and was also woefully unprepared for the politics. Definitely not as bad an experience as OP, but it still took me by surprise at how cutthroat/scheming the average employee is at these top companies. Lots of empire building for headcount. It also made me realize that the most successful engineers are ones who can market themselves well even for the most mundane of tasks, something I'm not great at and find exhausting. Every task/project was basically "how would this look in my performance packet?" otherwise it wasn't worth doing.
jakub_g 3y ago
> I came to realize that I had joined the wrong version of the team There was another blog post here on HN a few days ago from a different person at G which used very similar phrasing. (Can't find it though)
austinl 3y ago
I think the sweet spot of company size for an IC software engineer is between 50 and 500. It's small enough to have autonomy, learn, and build good relationships with the people around you, while not getting overwhelmed by bureaucratic processes. 50-500 is also large enough to where you, ideally, don't have to worry about the company's runway, have work-life balance, get decent compensation and benefits. There's typically opportunities for upward mobility as the company scales if you want it. I think I've finally come to peace with idea that's it's okay to be in tech and never work for FAANG.
yodsanklai 3y ago
> For me FAANG was not a place to learn He's pretty quick at generalizing his Google experience. Maybe he wasn't lucky with team assignment. AFAIU these companies have very different cultures, and even within the company, it varies a lot.
pknerd 3y ago
This post tells why Google isn't able to produce something good anymore. Google needs a Satya Nadella

609 points by BHSPitMonkey 3y ago

Sounds like the general management trend of biz majors ruining everything. inb4 you all get kneejerky salty like jerky from a knee. Ofc I'm not saying all biz majors, but it's certainly a part of biz culture for 'em, esp tech related biz.

quietbritishjim 3y ago

[flagged]

notpushkin 3y ago
It's not that important for the story, yeah. Provides some background tho.
- quietbritishjim 3y ago
  My point isn't really about the first sentence as such. It's that we have no idea what the article is going to be about. That's true even several paragraphs in (at which point they're entertaining the idea of a job but the article could still really be about anything).
  - sho_hn 3y ago
    It's a blog post, not an article. Not every piece of personal expression needs to be structured to spec and optimized for SEO. I think it's refreshing at this point, really. A little clumsy, not written according to "Use This One Trick To Get To Frontpage" rules, just what someone cares about in the order they wanted to tell it.
  - devjab 3y ago
    It’s a personal blog entry that’s tagged with #google and #work. It doesn’t transmit as freely to HN as it does if you enter from the front page or their blog, but unless it was the author who posted it here then I think it’s hard to fault them for the article not being clear enough.
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    Oh, yeah, I see your point now. Agreed, it could be a bit clearer in the beginning, although as others pointed out it's a personal blog and probably wasn't even intended for such a wide audience. (Maybe it's even more like a personal diary rather than some public thing?)
spacecadet 3y ago
bro just skip to the end LOL
yellow_lead 3y ago
This type of comment might be a reason why people hate when their posts end up on HN. Keep in mind everything isn't written for HN audience or to optimize skim-reading time. In a personal post like this I feel like it's perfectly ok to not include a summary and to start with your backstory to give perspective.
- jraph 3y ago
  Yeah, it looks like a personal blog post. Feedback is fine but we have to remember that this feedback has likely not been asked for, and we are not entitled to anything. If you don't like the author's writing style, just move on, other people might like the very thing you don't, so… (as someone who has been meaning to write a blog forever - I will definitely like some feedback if it ever actually happens because I will want to improve and please my readers, but I'll probably take ironical feedback somewhat badly. I'll be free to ignore such feedback or silently take what's good in then, but I will appreciate if someone takes some care when sending feedback. Specifically here, "Would it really have hurt to" can easily be phrased as "I would have appreciated")
  - master-lincoln 3y ago
    I am entitled to give my feedback to anybody I think. Feedback is not meant as asking somebody to change, it's there to tell how you felt. If the addressed person agrees/disagrees doesn't matter. I believe the world gets better if everybody is allowed to voice their opinion
    - croo 3y ago
      Feedback is best given when asked.
      - master-lincoln 3y ago
        why?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
alias_neo 3y ago
It's not an article, it's a blog post. Expectations should be vastly different for the two.
Ambroos 3y ago
Ah come on, it's good writing. Sets the scene!

notpushkin 3y ago

> He told me (paraphrasing) “Well, you know it’s really a lot of paper-work to fire you. You could just get away with doing nothing for 12 months.” [...] Why tell me this? Presumably for him this was a way to pad his head-count. I would absolutely take that “offer”, on the condition that they allow me to work on some open source project in the meantime. Don't really care if it would have to be © Google instead of in my name. Getting paid to do something you like that would help everybody? Hey, why not.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I believe it was Apple who is really, really strict about that kind of thing (that is, contributing to open source while employed by Apple) (source is anecdotal, someone in the Go slack got hired by Apple and could no longer participate as actively in the space); how is Google that way, generally speaking? Also, how do people get job offers for these high paid do nothing jobs? I did get a recruiter email from Google the one time, I believe it was for the Google Docs / Workspace team, but it involved relocating to Germany and Docs didn't seem interesting to me, so I didn't take them up on the offer at the time.
- freeCandy 3y ago
  I've seen tons of very active projects under Google's GitHub org[1] that have the disclaimer "This is not an officially supported Google product" so I would take a guess that they have a much better policy on employees participating in OSS than Apple does. [1] https://github.com/google https://github.com/google
- PumpkinSpice 3y ago
  Most large tech companies essentially give a pass to new hires on their first eval cycle. Depending on your start date, you might be either outright ineligible for a rating, or the rating defaults to "meeting expectations," because the expectations for the first 1-2 months are for you to just learn the stack and get to know the team. If you hit the ground running, good for you, but your manager might face an uphill battle to justify anything other than "meets." For the next 1-2 months, you can probably keep making excuses. If your manager is paying close attention to new hires, they might object. But many managers are overstretched. Between office politics, planning, and all the ongoing "problem cases," they might simply not have enough cycles to watch your output real close. Even after your manager is fed up, it takes time to fire you. In part to avoid legal risks, HR typically wants to see a written plan first, giving you about three months to prove yourself. If you do nothing, that's usually the end of the road. But if you lift a finger and earn a passing grade, the timer essentially restarts. In fact, you're now your manager's success story, and they might be reluctant to admit they were wrong. And that's on average teams. If you end up on a dysfunctional team or on a project in turmoil, you might not even have to pretend. There's just no one who is close enough to your role and still cares about the result.

spacecadet 3y ago

Hell yeah brother! but as others pointed out, ride that 12 months and start or learn something on their dime! and while we're at it, fuck google! hehe

spacecadet 3y ago
Bah! Down votes, sensitive googles afoot.
- spacecadet 3y ago
  and one more ;) offset back to zero to prevent google bias.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  It's just the low quality of the comment that's getting the downvotes.
  - spacecadet 3y ago
    I know that Im having fun

codeulike 3y ago

almost as if programming is a genuine craft but management is easier to bullshit at than it is to do properly

unsubstantiated 3y ago
people bullshit at programming and don't treat it like a genuine craft all the time

ZephyrBlu 3y ago

Basically everything I've read and heard about Google makes it extremely dystopian. I work at a fairly large tech company, and I've very happy that my experience has been nothing like the one the author described. Things move relatively quickly, people care and are earnest, managers are empathetic and actually good, etc. Not all sunshine and rainbows of course, but it's pretty damn good compared to what I hear about other companies.

PumpkinSpice 3y ago
Few people write blog posts to say "I worked at Foo Corp and it was okay." There's a strong bias toward horror stories. There's also a HN selection bias: a story about FAANG is a lot more likely to be upvoted than a story about some small startup. I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better. They all have their idiosyncrasies, they all have good teams and terrible ones, they all have a ton of red tape. I think the main problem is that they built their reputation by claiming they invented a new way of doing business and a new way of treating their employees. They were supposed to be the antidote to the corporate culture at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and whatnot. But ultimately, they converged on pretty much the same.
- eru 3y ago
  I did work at Google between 2014 to 2016. It was ok. I enjoyed my time there (about as much as I enjoyed other jobs I had). > I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better. Amazon had a reputation for working their software people pretty hard. Not sure if that's still the case.
  - programmertote 3y ago
    I know a little about that. Programmers in Amazon have to work harder mainly due to the poorly-designed/thought-out (despite sometimes unnecessary process like writing design docs and "discussing" over your solution with various 'stakeholders' until it gets approved) systems and tools supporting their internal development work. Pipelines is their CI/CD platform and boy, looking at the interface wants me to puke. Every single step you need to implement requires you to look up several internal wiki pages, some of which are outdated and/or poorly written or linking out to another wiki page, and so on. My ex-manager always talk about 'scalability' (because they want to sell it to other teams for visibility) although that tool we are designing is going to be used by like 2-3 people and is processing at most like 500GB-1TB a day (which is not big data in my experience). In the name of scalability and rapid deployment, the manager wants us to use CDK, and we spend probably half of our team's effort maintaining/patching/upgrading that CDK dependencies (like Node.js and others). This is not to mention that when you want to tear down the resources created by CDK, it doesn't do things cleanly, so you are left with lots of CDK-created S3 buckets over time. Oh man, I can recount a few more problems surrounding the tools used within Amazon and how obtuse they are for usability and ease-of-development.

hooby 3y ago

I wonder if it's a function of company size. This sort of thing seems to happen in all large companies - and to be very hard to avoid, if you do grow to that level.

quantumwoke 3y ago

Reading this post in the lens of other articles it seems like google is well into the enshittification phase internally, although this is a limited experience. Was this the average experience 10 years ago?

spacecadet 3y ago
Throw in building massive surveillance pieplines and backdoors for NSA.

fragkakis 3y ago

I skipped to the ending of the post and read only the last paragraph. Now I I have no idea what the post is about.

layer8 3y ago
From the title, it's about you.
jjgreen 3y ago
Very Meta
- adastra22 3y ago
  No, no this is about Google.
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    The pun was intentional (hence the capitalisation :-)
    - neogodless 3y ago
      The response was an intentional joke!

nine_zeros 3y ago

A lot of folks look at FAANG and other adjacent companies with starry eyed gaze. These places rule the internet, must be teeming with innovation right? Turns out these companies are no different from corporate America, with all the red tape, politics, meaningless toil, dancing to misaligned incentives, and obsession with management-driven work. Everything that makes a job soul sucking is present in these companies, and more. Large companies were great for me when I needed the money. But beyond that, my soul cried at balancing the 7th iteration of nitpicky code review, and a manager who couldn't think beyond head-count and performance reviews.

adrianmsmith 3y ago

> One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you. Yeah this is definitely one of those things that sounds good on paper but has unintended "consequences" shall we say. I worked for one company about a decade ago where the task was to redesign the corporate homepage. The "about us" pages on the homepage, not the actual product the company was selling. These pages got a few hundred hits a month. The decision was made to create two sub-teams, one would create a custom CMS, the other would "render" the data entered into the CMS to the website visitors. So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary. I didn't understand why this was happening. Who gained from this? I couldn't figure it out. I supposed it was just a lack of controls on how long things took, and this was the result, but that didn't really feel right to me. It felt like someone had to really gain from this, but I couldn't work it out. Anyway, during my leaving drinks, after a few pints, my boss told me "yeah I think I'm going to get promoted, the other managers who are applying for this job manage far fewer people so I think I'm well positioned to get it". The penny dropped. The purpose of this project was to occupy people, so that more people could get hired, so his headcount increased, so he could get a promotion, and a payrise.

leosanchez 3y ago
> So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary. What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects ?
- rebolek 3y ago
  drinking Champagne while bathing in the blood of young virgins, mostly
- adrianmsmith 3y ago
  I can only speculate. But I think that beyond a certain level management probably doesn't have a clear idea of how long things should take. If they've worked in a company for 20 years, and have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is? I mean you may argue it is their job to know such things, and that might be right, but maybe they're just not competent and their managers aren't competent either? Or maybe they don't really care as it's not their money? Or maybe it really doesn't matter and there is higher-impact stuff for that level of manager to focus on? I mean if the company is making $100m a year and they can do something that will drive a 10% increase in that, would foregoing that activity to reduce spending on a website down from $1m be the right call?

solaarphunk 3y ago

As a shareholder, I'm curious why others aren't more furious to hear that this is how things are run at Google. It's common knowledge how bureaucratic and political the company has become; these stories are everywhere. If I were a large pension fund or asset manager, I would be asking questions to the board like, "Given nothing gets done on many teams, what would happen if Google reduced its headcount by 50%?" and "Why is increasing headcount currently an incentive for managers within organizations, especially without any apparent penalty function?"

dsr_ 3y ago
If the Goog reduced headcount by 50%: They could not accurately judge productivity, talent or motivation, so some groups would lose their key players. This would demotivate everyone left. They would launch 500-1000 startups with knowledge of how some market of merely a hundred million people is being underserved. A dozen or a hundred of those would become true competitors in those markets. It would be good for everyone except those who lost health insurance and income at the wrong time, and the Goog itself.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  > They would launch 500-1000 startups with knowledge of how some market of merely a hundred million people is being underserved. A dozen or a hundred of those would become true competitors in those markets. So, cut headcount, juice the stock, then have a bunch of possible acquisition targets that have developed viable products in new markets by not being saddled with the intractable corporate inefficiencies you suffer? Sounds like breaking some eggs for a tasty omelette. I'm only mostly kidding.
- solaarphunk 3y ago
  Wouldn't it mean that their entire organization is broken, if they can't effectively identify productive and talented people? This seems like a huge problem! I agree that Google benefits from monopolizing headcount, even if the employees waste their lives doing nothing, because it reduces competition. I would even Google poisons people's work ethic/priorities permanently when they try to leave and go to other startups (this is my personal experience working with former non-technical google employees who only play politics).

chrismorgan 3y ago

> DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today) No, DHTML meant little snippets that you could add to your page to add effects and widgets, whether arguably useful things like button rollover (many of you will remember the incantation I think it was Adobe Fireworks produced, something along the lines of <img src="button1.jpg" onmouseover="MM_something('button1_rollover.jpg')" onmouseout="MM_something('button1.jpg')">) or widgets like a “scroll to top” link in the bottom right corner that only appeared when you had scrolled down some way, or ridiculous things like drawing an analogue clock around the mouse cursor that followed your movement but as though the digits were connected by pieces of elastic each to the next, or snowflakes falling down the screen. Browse http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ http://www.dynamicdrive.com/, that was DHTML. DHTML mostly meant fripperies, but did definitely include useful functionality like calendar widgets. But that was the scope of it: isolated things here and there that you could add to an existing page. Web apps today are a whole-page affair, where the scripting is woven through the entire thing; they’re essentially unrecognisably different from DHTML.

brynbryn 3y ago
And DHTML provides possibly the hardest version of PONG I've ever attempted to play http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex12/phong2.htm http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex12/phong2.htm
- SkyArrow 3y ago
  Off-topic for this thread but if you can get the ball to ping-pong horizontally while both players are at the top edge then you can stay alive indefinitely - the opponent doesn't seem to move downwards out of this position.
indeyets 3y ago
just one word: <layer>
LeftCorner 3y ago
The MM_ was an acronym for Macromedia who developed Fireworks prior to being acquired by Adobe

workfromspace 3y ago

Money doesn't matter (or buy happiness) - Rich people. Google isn't important - Ex-Googler. I think I see his point, but I think he's forgetting about the privilege of making good money at Google for a while and becoming an ex-Googler for all his life.

HenryBemis 3y ago
"money doesn't matter" I can say that the people who say this DO NOT keep an excel on their desktop where every 1st of the month they go around their accounts, investments, etc. and enter the 'updated values' and they see their net-worth growing month-by-month. Money matters (when you are planning your vacations, when you get seriously ill, when you want to buy a new house/car/laptop), etc. Only naive people say that money don't matter. There are MANY things that matter, money is one of them.
- marcodave 3y ago
  As someone who just this year started to keep track of the money across the months, I can say that you get some sort of high when you get close to payday and you see the line going up.
- strken 3y ago
  People who say money doesn't matter aren't naive. They're mostly either trying to make someone feel better about not having any, or trying to get someone to stop placing so much importance on wealth. It's one of those "serious but not literal" statements.
  - closewith 3y ago
    I think in general it's a form of self-justification to allow a person to feel that they are good despite being wealthy in an extremely unequal world.
- gorjusborg 3y ago
  There's a reason the English saying is 'Money can't buy happiness', not 'money doesn't matter'. The point is that it isn't money that makes you happy, it is the life you build. That can be different for different people, and money can help. The point is that money isn't the goal.

WizardClickBoy 3y ago

This sounds like an absolute nightmare and I see stories like this very frequently. Is this the "normal" experience of working at FAANG in 2023, and how long has it been like that? I have never worked for (or been tempted to apply to) any business remotely approaching that scale (currently in largest ever company, 3-400 employees total, only because my previous much smaller company was acquired) and I can't really understand why anybody would ever want to. Surely the delta in terms of earnings at FAANG vs literally anywhere else is not worth this kind of horror – can anybody explain? Or do people just not find out until it's too late?

rebolek 3y ago
I'm applying for a job at 100k+ people company. I was sent test for a different position. After I complained, they send me another test. And next hour they've sent another different test again without me requesting it. I guess they don't care about their job very much.
wepple 3y ago
There seems to be 1-2 posts per week about how terrible $FAANG is to work for (google is in the hot seat this month) If google has ~200k (I don’t have exact data) employees, there are surely a significant number of people who either don’t hate it enough to blog, or actually enjoy it. It’s just that nobody writes a blog post saying “I went to work and things were good”, and nobody (especially HN) would upvote it. But remember, if you see a new update about React, Android, ChaosMonkey, or every time a new apple product lands… that’s someone’s work being released, and at least a subset (possibly small, possibly large) are happy with the work and the outcome
- Etheryte 3y ago
  Honestly I think that would be great content. "Went to work, it was okay. Meeting was boring, had a chat in the coffee corner." Basically the HN equivalent of the local news "local man paints fence".
  - WesleyJohnson 3y ago

neontomo 3y ago

I almost thought I had hallucinated DHTML because I've not seen anyone mentioning it in so many years. It's something I learned about while playing around with building websites as a 9 year old and brings back memories.

t43562 3y ago

Companies are social systems and they develop down some path. I think it can be the case that everyone in them sees some subset of the dysfuntions and cannot stop them and everyone is incentivised not to. This is why startups have a chance, right? If the larger companies were also efficient it would be impossible to beat them at anything.

passion__desire 3y ago
Why a mere number like a headcount should matter at all knowing fully well that it can be gamed? Shouldn't the motivation be get "more done with less"? This way the manager would be incentivized to gather only the best in his team and the best will only agree to go with him if he is really good at his job.
- t43562 3y ago
  I think it truly is harder to manage larger numbers of people - absolutely requires skills that aren't so critical in a small team. There's too much complexity to micromanage so for one thing you need to be good at picking out leaders who can help you keep on top of it all and you need to lead them to solutions without being able to dive into the details like you might have as a developer. I think it's bloody difficult and I'm only one level up now. That said, I also think some people like to make solutions overly complicated which ends up requiring lots of people. In some companies the simple solution (e.g. django and postgres) isn't seen as "enterprise ready" or whatever. So they end up with lots of people on something that could have been done more simply with 2-3. Then maintaining that takes lots of people and then everyone in the team has an interest in keeping things as complicated as possible - in selling the "we will need it one day" idea. That also combines with impossible tasks - like "lets rewrite the complicated slow old system while keeping on adding features to it" and so on. Then there are never enough developers to do the impossible task - especially as the rewrite turns out to be complex and have issues too.

danpalmer 3y ago

Google is a big company, most possible types of tech job probably exist somewhere within it. There are toxic managers, dead end projects, and there are rocketships and places with amazing culture. I'm lucky to be on the good side of this, very much so, but I understand the experiences this person went through. One thing I would say is that some of the takes here suggest that the author missed some interesting learning and development from their experiences. That's not to say it would have changed the final outcome, and they may not have been set up to learn by their manager, but I came in from a similar background and met a few of the same challenges, but had different take-aways from them and feel I have grown as an engineer from my startup roots as a result.

kunley 3y ago

Wow. Sounds almost too surreal to be true. Is it really that demoralized in the management there? That's scary.

shadowgovt 3y ago
It's a 100,000-person company, so the rule is "variance is high." I saw extremely gelled, competent, high-functioning teams working on key projects with wide impact. I also saw new teams led by inexperienced managers working on fringe / incidental initiatives or keeping the lights on on a system people knew was doomed. These experiences are not the same, though they happen at the same company.

DarkNova6 3y ago

I also skipped to the ending: > So after 15 months I was out of there. I learned that I don’t care about the money Google pays. I don’t care about the high scale of influence your work can have. I skipped from series A startup to mature IPO’d company and cheated myself out of the experiences you get in-between. I want to earn the scale through hard work. For me FAANG was not a place to learn, it was a way to get paid. But I didn’t come to Silicon Valley to get paid.

mattgreenrocks 3y ago

I have nothing against Google, but the slow decline in collective aspiration of hacker culture sucks. It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire. Now everyone seems to believe the ultimate goal of a tech job is to land at a FAANG, and just stay there for life? It’s so tame, so complicit. Hackerdom is now mostly about obscene levels of money and status?

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
There's hackers on the one side, but for the vast majority of developers (myself inclusive) it's just a job. FAANG is some of the best pay you'll ever get, and you're guaranteed for work and minimal income if you have that on your CV. "Hackerdom" whatever that means is separate from "working for a living".
acuozzo 3y ago
> It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire. Prior to that the dream was to just make a successful business. Consider Sun Microsystems. But let's be real and invoke NoTrueScotsman: "hackers" are supposed to be more like Bill Joy at UCB than Bill Joy at Sun. I doubt Bill Joy was thinking about business and financial success while hacking on BSD at UCB. Hacking was the end, not a means to an end.
xwdv 3y ago
True “hackers” don’t give a fuck about startups. Hackers are interested in how things work and how they can be exploited to do things or grant access to forbidden data. Real hackers back in the late 90s early 00s casually did things that would make a lot of today’s “hackers” blanche in the face and wet themselves at the thought of computer crime, or at least grope around for a downvote button. It was a thrilling era for freaks and geeks. Ever found yourself scrolling down a stolen CSV full of credit card numbers and full billing info? It’s like snorting a line of coke. As a teen I once stole $22k, spent several years looking over my shoulder expecting to be shot or cuffed. At some point the term “hacker” was co-opted to mean anyone writing code. These Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs aren’t really “hackers”: they’re businessmen with some software engineering skills. But that doesn’t sound nearly as edgy or cool as calling yourself a hacker.

eru 3y ago

Google isn't what it used to be. Though I don't know if it ever was?

javajosh 3y ago
Scaling up search and inventing the ad business was surely an incredible time at Google. But then they got spoiled by infinite money.
Kranar 3y ago
It was an amazing place to work back in 2006, but yeah it's gone downhill since then. It seems like Google is kind of in an internal cultural battle with itself about what exactly it's trying to become.

cmsonger 3y ago

> One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you. I mean ... you get to choose how you play the game. If your goal is money and you are a manager then in any organization (not just Google) it's likely that income is going to be O(number of reports). More reports == more responsibility == more money. But if your goal is to get something done and enjoy your job; you can play that game instead. Perhaps one of the most life improving insights I've discovered about myself over the years is that I like managing engineers more than managing managers of engineers. The conversations in my week are just more interesting. Now if I want to get a thing done that really takes 70 people then I either have to deal with it, or let someone else do it -- but just because "more comp requires more people" does not mean you have to aspire to more people. It's OK to like your work and want to get meaningful things done without aspiring to play the "more people, more money" game.

jefftk 3y ago
> If your goal is money and you are a manager then in any organization (not just Google) it's likely that income is going to be O(number of reports). Income linear in the number of reports? Increasing with reports, sure, but way less than linear. Logarithmic is usually a good guess with this sort of thing.
- cmsonger 3y ago
  Indeed! I suppose I actually meant f(number of reports) because I didn't actually think the scaling through. The broader points remain: This is true everywhere and not unique to Google. People get a choice whether or not they opt in.

mgaunard 3y ago

Big companies offer good money but are ridden with politics and don't allow you to learn or progress. Nothing people didn't already know.

oneepic 3y ago
They certainly allow you to learn. I'm able to tell my manager I'll spend a sprint(s) tinkering with build performance or reading stuff that's relevant to our work (i.e. the Goog SRE book).
- mgaunard 3y ago
  You learn by challenging yourself to build things and solve real problems, and doing something meaningful like this requires a flat structure and business exposure. Tinkering with a build system and reading some corporate groupthink? That's not learning, sorry.

beej71 3y ago

We did contact work for Google around 10 years ago. I visited Mountain View, San Francisco, and YouTube. I've worked in startups and video games, and I was genuinely shocked to find that Google felt more like Hewlett-Packard than any of those. There was a room in the SF office two stories high with an adult playground slide between floors and a free photo booth nearby. No one was there. Super "abandoned amusement park" vibes. Still have the photos, though, somewhere around here. Never did work there as a W2, and certainly never will. No judgment against those who do; to each their own, right?

aubanel 3y ago

Other people with similar experiences at FAANG? About Google, I still cannot yet grasp if the company is just starting to slow down or already declining steeply.

paulsmith 3y ago

If you're reading this, please provide an RSS/Atom feed for your blog - I see you are using Hugo so it shouldn't be too hard to do. I would add your blog to my feed reader. Thanks!

schemescape 3y ago
Not affiliated with the blog, but apparently Hugo generates an index.xml feed by default, so try this: https://danangell.com/blog/index.xml https://danangell.com/blog/index.xml (I had the same question with a different site two days ago.)
- paulsmith 3y ago
  Groovy, thank you!

rideontime 3y ago

My main personal takeaway from this and so many other articles like it is that I need to get my data out of Google ASAP.

Nimitz14 3y ago

As someone who's first job was also for a mature ~20 person start up, I firmly believe those companies are the best to work for as a junior. You will have experienced colleagues who can teach you while also getting to make a significant impact. It's the best.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Maybe Musk should buy Google and fire everyone. Sounds super bloated.

refulgentis 3y ago

This is Google. I'm really glad to see this today. Yesterday, there was a blog from someone else who worked at Google after their company was acquired. The title promised it was describing working at Google, and the length made it feel very in-depth. It wasn't, there was a few dog whistles you'd hear if you worked there, but it had that saccharine and acrid taste of "don't want to be accountable for anything I say here, so I just won't say anything". I left last month after 7 years there. I'm not ready to talk about it in full, succinctly: "people are people everywhere all the time"

gosub100 3y ago

> doing nothing for 12 months Here I am reading this wondering "how do I get in!?!" I've never even applied to FAANG but the stupid DS&A questions pretty much kept me out. Maybe I'll reconsider.

op00to 3y ago

I feel like I would be really good at working at Google. Am I the baddie?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

hcks 3y ago

> I want to earn the scale through hard work How lost in life do you have to be to start valuing things like that. I, as an individual, do not care about your SaaS scale. I’m sorry, it literally isn’t weighted at all in my utility function.

jackblemming 3y ago
Hollow people have to fill it with something. Using $BIGNUMBER whether that be money, users, or the like rarely works out in the long term.

mvkel 3y ago

I wouldn't use the Google brush to paint the other FAANG companies. By all accounts I've heard, working at Facebook/Meta is a pretty rewarding experience (if harvesting user data is your thing) in all the ways Google is not. That said, it's strange that the author conflates staying with a Series A company through IPO would have been the preferred alternative. That would have been like experiencing the worst parts of Google on fast forward.

jokethrowaway 3y ago
I've heard bad stories from FB, terrible from Amazon. Google is boring but you don't do much. Netflix is the place to be but need to be in Los Gatos. To be honest after factoring in contracting vs being full time, living in a country with much less taxes than the US, low cost of life, higher quality of life, better food I don't think fangs are worth it unless paying 500k+ But then, maybe better try to get to 500k with a solo business than with fang bureaucracy

takinola 3y ago

Incentives at large companies can be weird. I once had a situation where a vendor put in an estimate of close to $100K to, in effect, generate a 40 page PDF for us. I pushed back until they came back with a still high but less outrageous proposal. Upon looking back, I realized that if I had approved the original request nothing bad would have happened. No one, other than myself, was going to look at the bill. The amount involved was a rounding error of a rounding error of that week's revenue. In fact, the only one that got hurt was my team as the work got delayed while we went back and forth on the proposal. The incentives in this case were set up so that the rational course of action for a manager is to be less frugal or responsible with company funds.

krmboya 3y ago

The pre-2010 google sounded like programmer-heaven. I wonder which places would match that now? Something that is neither startup grind nor a stifling bureaucracy, but you still get to work on innovative and influencial projects

goalonetwo 3y ago

Google is successful because they managed to tap into the biggest money milking opportunity of the century. Not because the supposedly superior management or talents there.

neilv 3y ago

So what companies are now the Google of 20(?) years ago? Where they hire strong engineering&product people who want to do beneficial things, and pay and treat them very well, they can afford to do some things well, and there's not a "metagame" of promotion-seeking and org-chart climbing?

voiceblue 3y ago
There are no companies that are the “Google” of 20 years ago. Apple comes close in some ways, but it’s not a “young” version of Google, obviously. Google is the internet, and most of its ads. Apple more or less is consumer tech. That is to say, they are the market makers and they decide what these market’s “truth” is. There aren’t that many companies with that much leverage over that big of a market.

ajkjk 3y ago

It has been years since I heard any kind of positive take on working at Google.

trevor-e 3y ago

I worked at a FAANG-adjacent company for a ~year and was also woefully unprepared for the politics. Definitely not as bad an experience as OP, but it still took me by surprise at how cutthroat/scheming the average employee is at these top companies. Lots of empire building for headcount. It also made me realize that the most successful engineers are ones who can market themselves well even for the most mundane of tasks, something I'm not great at and find exhausting. Every task/project was basically "how would this look in my performance packet?" otherwise it wasn't worth doing.

jakub_g 3y ago

> I came to realize that I had joined the wrong version of the team There was another blog post here on HN a few days ago from a different person at G which used very similar phrasing. (Can't find it though)

austinl 3y ago

I think the sweet spot of company size for an IC software engineer is between 50 and 500. It's small enough to have autonomy, learn, and build good relationships with the people around you, while not getting overwhelmed by bureaucratic processes. 50-500 is also large enough to where you, ideally, don't have to worry about the company's runway, have work-life balance, get decent compensation and benefits. There's typically opportunities for upward mobility as the company scales if you want it. I think I've finally come to peace with idea that's it's okay to be in tech and never work for FAANG.

yodsanklai 3y ago

> For me FAANG was not a place to learn He's pretty quick at generalizing his Google experience. Maybe he wasn't lucky with team assignment. AFAIU these companies have very different cultures, and even within the company, it varies a lot.

pknerd 3y ago

This post tells why Google isn't able to produce something good anymore. Google needs a Satya Nadella