6 ms·

> 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 te

> 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.
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    Or: to participate in the cycle you need to be there for at least 6mo (or something like that) Of course, this doesn't mean you're fully off the hook during that time, while it is less informal and laid back, doesn't mean you don't have to deliver Especially in countries that have some kind of labour protections and limits on letting people go, this is important
  - filoleg 3y ago
    > 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. Just a small addition, starting from the beginning of 2023, all new hires get their first rating as OI (aka outstanding impact aka one rating higher than the target "meeting expectations"/"significant impact").
  - yodsanklai 3y ago
    > But if you lift a finger and earn a passing grade Unfortunately, it takes more than lifting a finger to earn a passing grade. These companies are competitive and do fire low performers pretty easily, whether they are new employees or been there for a decade. The word goes that Google is more lenient on that regard though, I'd be curious to see some numbers.
- notpushkin 3y ago
  > how is Google that way, generally speaking? Haven't worked at Google so this is entirely my speculation, but: From the amount [1] of GitHub repos, with some things tangential to any current Google project [2], I think it's not too hard to get approval to do a project on company time. Maybe even contribute to a third-party one, totally unrelated to whatever you're supposed to do at Google. [1]: https://github.com/orgs/google/repositories https://github.com/orgs/google/repositories – 2.6k! [2]: e. g. https://github.com/google/sonic-midi https://github.com/google/sonic-midi, and I've seen a couple outright silly ones, though I can't remember the names right now
- cornel_io 3y ago
  Google generally approves almost any open source work. They're also really generous about approving even for-profit side projects as long as there are no conflicts and you're willing to wait for approval. I was cleared to work on a few side-project games while I was there. Re: do-nothing tolerance, the dirty secret at Google is that there's too little meaty work to satisfy all the people hungry to take it on, and everything takes ages to do anyways because of all the red tape, so it's kinda hard to tell who's phoning it in deliberately and who's getting stuck in the constant muck of cross-team approval and bikeshedding bullshit when they take 4x as long as expected to deliver half of what was promised (which mostly doesn't have any impact anyways). And managers are (were?) rated at least in part based on how many people they manage, not what their teams produce, so dead weight doesn't matter to most managers, if they're trying to get bumped up to director level the last thing they want is the distraction of having to PIP and then fire someone when they could just keep them around as padding and say they hit their staffing target...
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > the dirty secret at Google is that there's too little meaty work to satisfy all the people hungry to take it on I think this is also a good reason behind 20% time. It's not to crowd source ideas, it's to keep smart people with the company.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  The general policy is: ask, if it's not like an obvious competitor and you assign copyright to Google you'll probably get it approved. Trying to own the project is extra work.
mkmk3 3y ago
Working alone for 12 months seems kind of rough to me. It being whatever you want to work on is nice, but I don't think I would find it as fulfilling as just finding a new job where I can actually work with a team. I also haven't worked on open source, not really, I could imagine there being communities that would make it significantly nicer to work on.
- josephg 3y ago
  Plenty of opensource projects are built by communities. If you want to do opensource work with peers, you can always work on llvm, rust, Ruby on Rails, the Linux kernel, wayland, SQLite, postgres, docker, OpenSSL, or all sorts of other high impact, important projects that run the world. Most of the important, high impact opensource projects are built by teams. And if you don’t like your job - well, it’s an open secret that contributing to llvm or chrome is a great way to get hired.
  - dmurray 3y ago
    SQLite doesn't generally take public contributions, you'd need to get hired by them to write code there </nit>.
    - ahoka 3y ago
      And it’s not actually open source, at least definitely not Open Source.
      - goldsteinq 3y ago
        It’s public domain, so open source as defined by OSI.
      - ungamedplayer 3y ago
        There definitely are nuances to licensing vs public perception.. what makes you say it is not adhering to its license? https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html
thih9 3y ago
Realistically "getting away with doing nothing" would mean a lot of going to meetings, monitoring some obscure systems, writing reports, etc.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  Right, it would be more accurate to say "getting away with achieving nothing". You still need to do the busywork. Of course plenty of people don't achieve very much, but it makes a big difference whether you're trying to achieve something, or just coasting. (Edit to cynically add: or does it??)
- eru 3y ago
  Attend the meetings remotely, and turn your camera off. Pretend to monitor the system, but don't actually do anything. Write the reports with Google Bard.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Reminds me of the classic Forgotten Employee[1] story. 1: https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      Then, something strange and wonderful happened. In outlook, an EMail appeared with my name in the "Courtesy Copy" field. It freaks me out to realize that's what most people probably think "Cc:" means nowadays.
      - 9dev 3y ago
        Knowing what an actual carbon copy is, or how telephones used to look like, or that the save icon is a diskette - all of these are becoming Sheldon-esque ”fun facts“, semi-interesting historical tidbits. I’m really curious which effect the digital age will have, long-term. How many other symbols and physical world metaphors will fall into obscurity?
_the_inflator 3y ago
Fantasy. It is still a working relationship and a contract and it can backfire on you. It can even be a trap to lure you into a position where you end up with an instant dismissal. Lines can change as well. If you feel wrong at what you are doing switch places. For your own good.
- rapfaria 3y ago
  Yeah, folks here saying they would dedicate time to open-source probably have not been through these landscapes. "Do nothing for 12 months, you do you" literally means "Don't cause any more trouble, get out of here on your account ASAP, make it easier for me to fire you"
eru 3y ago
> I would absolutely take that “offer”, on the condition that they allow me to work on some open source project in the meantime. The manager could at most offer you a handshake deal.
nkohari 3y ago
Others might feel differently, but to me, there is nothing worse than pretending to be busy when you could be doing something of real value.

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.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Or: to participate in the cycle you need to be there for at least 6mo (or something like that) Of course, this doesn't mean you're fully off the hook during that time, while it is less informal and laid back, doesn't mean you don't have to deliver Especially in countries that have some kind of labour protections and limits on letting people go, this is important
- filoleg 3y ago
  > 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. Just a small addition, starting from the beginning of 2023, all new hires get their first rating as OI (aka outstanding impact aka one rating higher than the target "meeting expectations"/"significant impact").
- yodsanklai 3y ago
  > But if you lift a finger and earn a passing grade Unfortunately, it takes more than lifting a finger to earn a passing grade. These companies are competitive and do fire low performers pretty easily, whether they are new employees or been there for a decade. The word goes that Google is more lenient on that regard though, I'd be curious to see some numbers.
notpushkin 3y ago
> how is Google that way, generally speaking? Haven't worked at Google so this is entirely my speculation, but: From the amount [1] of GitHub repos, with some things tangential to any current Google project [2], I think it's not too hard to get approval to do a project on company time. Maybe even contribute to a third-party one, totally unrelated to whatever you're supposed to do at Google. [1]: https://github.com/orgs/google/repositories https://github.com/orgs/google/repositories – 2.6k! [2]: e. g. https://github.com/google/sonic-midi https://github.com/google/sonic-midi, and I've seen a couple outright silly ones, though I can't remember the names right now
cornel_io 3y ago
Google generally approves almost any open source work. They're also really generous about approving even for-profit side projects as long as there are no conflicts and you're willing to wait for approval. I was cleared to work on a few side-project games while I was there. Re: do-nothing tolerance, the dirty secret at Google is that there's too little meaty work to satisfy all the people hungry to take it on, and everything takes ages to do anyways because of all the red tape, so it's kinda hard to tell who's phoning it in deliberately and who's getting stuck in the constant muck of cross-team approval and bikeshedding bullshit when they take 4x as long as expected to deliver half of what was promised (which mostly doesn't have any impact anyways). And managers are (were?) rated at least in part based on how many people they manage, not what their teams produce, so dead weight doesn't matter to most managers, if they're trying to get bumped up to director level the last thing they want is the distraction of having to PIP and then fire someone when they could just keep them around as padding and say they hit their staffing target...
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > the dirty secret at Google is that there's too little meaty work to satisfy all the people hungry to take it on I think this is also a good reason behind 20% time. It's not to crowd source ideas, it's to keep smart people with the company.
saagarjha 3y ago
The general policy is: ask, if it's not like an obvious competitor and you assign copyright to Google you'll probably get it approved. Trying to own the project is extra work.

mkmk3 3y ago

Working alone for 12 months seems kind of rough to me. It being whatever you want to work on is nice, but I don't think I would find it as fulfilling as just finding a new job where I can actually work with a team. I also haven't worked on open source, not really, I could imagine there being communities that would make it significantly nicer to work on.

josephg 3y ago
Plenty of opensource projects are built by communities. If you want to do opensource work with peers, you can always work on llvm, rust, Ruby on Rails, the Linux kernel, wayland, SQLite, postgres, docker, OpenSSL, or all sorts of other high impact, important projects that run the world. Most of the important, high impact opensource projects are built by teams. And if you don’t like your job - well, it’s an open secret that contributing to llvm or chrome is a great way to get hired.
- dmurray 3y ago
  SQLite doesn't generally take public contributions, you'd need to get hired by them to write code there </nit>.
  - ahoka 3y ago
    And it’s not actually open source, at least definitely not Open Source.
    - goldsteinq 3y ago
      It’s public domain, so open source as defined by OSI.
    - ungamedplayer 3y ago
      There definitely are nuances to licensing vs public perception.. what makes you say it is not adhering to its license? https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

thih9 3y ago

Realistically "getting away with doing nothing" would mean a lot of going to meetings, monitoring some obscure systems, writing reports, etc.

iainmerrick 3y ago
Right, it would be more accurate to say "getting away with achieving nothing". You still need to do the busywork. Of course plenty of people don't achieve very much, but it makes a big difference whether you're trying to achieve something, or just coasting. (Edit to cynically add: or does it??)
eru 3y ago
Attend the meetings remotely, and turn your camera off. Pretend to monitor the system, but don't actually do anything. Write the reports with Google Bard.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Reminds me of the classic Forgotten Employee[1] story. 1: https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/ https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    Then, something strange and wonderful happened. In outlook, an EMail appeared with my name in the "Courtesy Copy" field. It freaks me out to realize that's what most people probably think "Cc:" means nowadays.
    - 9dev 3y ago
      Knowing what an actual carbon copy is, or how telephones used to look like, or that the save icon is a diskette - all of these are becoming Sheldon-esque ”fun facts“, semi-interesting historical tidbits. I’m really curious which effect the digital age will have, long-term. How many other symbols and physical world metaphors will fall into obscurity?

_the_inflator 3y ago

Fantasy. It is still a working relationship and a contract and it can backfire on you. It can even be a trap to lure you into a position where you end up with an instant dismissal. Lines can change as well. If you feel wrong at what you are doing switch places. For your own good.

rapfaria 3y ago
Yeah, folks here saying they would dedicate time to open-source probably have not been through these landscapes. "Do nothing for 12 months, you do you" literally means "Don't cause any more trouble, get out of here on your account ASAP, make it easier for me to fire you"

eru 3y ago

> I would absolutely take that “offer”, on the condition that they allow me to work on some open source project in the meantime. The manager could at most offer you a handshake deal.

nkohari 3y ago

Others might feel differently, but to me, there is nothing worse than pretending to be busy when you could be doing something of real value.