4 ms·

I've been at Google for 18 years, starting as an L4, I'm now a VP. I've had nothing like the experience described (even while working on lots of non-shiny thing

I've been at Google for 18 years, starting as an L4, I'm now a VP. I've had nothing like the experience described (even while working on lots of non-shiny things). I had previously worked at numerous large tech companies - Microsoft, IBM, etc. Small ones too - redhat when it was quite small, etc It is, by far, the best large tech company i worked at. At the same time I would offer within a company the size of Google, particularly one whose divisions are large and do such different things, you will find remarkably different cultures and experiences.

jdthedisciple 3y ago
Does working at Google for this long make one a millionaire?
- xor25519 3y ago
  not if you are a security guard
- ska 3y ago
  Conservatively, working any job that lets you put 25k/year into a tax shelter like a 401k for 20 years will make you a millionaire, or at least damn close. This covers a large number of tech jobs in the US if you choose to.
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    Well that route is comparatively barely impressive. And you haven't even taken into account inflation. In contrast, I have the impression that some FAANG employees make it within 5 years or less, considering some of the salaries there...
    - ska 3y ago
      The point is it shouldn't be impressive to people in tech, more par for the course if you work 20 years and save. I was responding to the question as written. To your point though, if you do want to amass 1mm liquid quickly without a fancy certification (e.g. neurosurgeon), absolutely FAANG and wall st. are among the most risk free ways to do that. Or you can go the route of pissing a lot of it away because you make "good money" now; your choice.
- underdeserver 3y ago
  In the sense that someone living a reasonable medium class life in the bay area could save more than $1 million, definitely.
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    Not sure if I'm reading your comment correctly. Are you implying it's hard to save up living in the bay area?
- askafriend 3y ago
  VPs at Google make $2-3M+ every year...
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    That is crazy... I just always wonder how many millionaires have been made simply via FAANG employment.
- DannyBee 3y ago
  I mean, working this long anywhere will make you a millionaire, but also keep in mind things often happen in 20 years that can cost a lot: Caring for sick parents/loved ones Your own medical/etc issues Kids Divorce Market changes etc I mean, without getting into my personal life, for example, , google gave options and not equity for years, and there were times those options were underwater, etc. So it's not all just raking in money hand over fist.
crdrost 3y ago
Yeah, "different cultures and experiences" is absolutely right, it's huge, unfathomably huge. To complete the picture I had a kind of "mediocre" story at Google, negative but not the worst possible. I was hired as the pandemic started, before anyone had figured out how to onboard me or ship me a work laptop, then the actual onboarding experience itself was a lot of talks about how "privacy is very important to us, accessibility VERY important to us, oh you can't forget that security is VERRRY important to us." (At orientation we were broken into teams and told to build an app together, but the team met like twice and was undecided about what app to build and at the end someone presented one of the three ideas of apps that we might build, as an app that we had built, and not a line of code was shed.) Working on my team was a little better, although nobody really took me "under their wing" and when I would ping with having trouble with my dev environment my team was not very responsive. For about a year the only person on my team who really cared enough to review my CLs was halfway across the world in Singapore, so day-to-day dev work fixing bugs incurred this really long latency. For feature development, there was a different really long latency: because everyone insisted on design docs that they didn't get around to approving! So after my second perf cycle kicked in and I was told that the volume of the output was not looking great (because, on perf, maintenance work and bugs fixed doesn't really count for anything), it was just like "okay, I cannot wait for my team to actually approve these before starting the work, that'll be just like the Nooglers bickering about which app to start." So I got like 90% of the way through shipping a feature and the key stakeholders still hadn't gotten around to reviewing and approving the design doc. The ridiculous latencies actually led to me going a little "cabin-fever"-crazy and writing stochastic simulations of work at Google so that I could give better estimates to my manager about my deadlines. I was optimized by my whatever-it-was-like-7-years at smaller companies to eliminate multitasking and pursue things with a considerable focus; but the simulations showed that my major problem was that in this high-latency environment you have to multitask as aggressively as possible: you basically need to have "this person is reviewing this for me and that person is doing that for me and I have this design doc when my CLs are waiting to be reviewed and and and...". I was working in the best way possible to get a lot of meaningful work done in a small focused team, but simulations showed it was the worst way possible to work at Google, even though the actual team size was about the same. The cabin fever was a sort of real mental-health decline. I deferred taking my baby-bonding leave to be with my daughter for like a whole year of my wife saying "hey I really need your help here" because every week it was like "oh we'll just finally ship this thing and then I'll be leaving on a high" and it's like nope, things never really shipped. Was so focused on "respecting the opportunity" that I didn't really "respect your own biology and go to the doctor and stuff" -- it never really seemed like my work was successful enough that I was psychologically safe to take time for those basic things. The simulations helped me know that it wasn't "just me" and "here's what you need to do." So I eventually successfully got my work output up, even to the point of doing some honest-to-goodness team leadership: I noticed that we had overcommitted on our OKRs for the upcoming Q1 2023, I had some really productive work with others at the end of Q4 2022, so I developed a design doc on "Hot Potato Agile" for how the team was going to work together like a small-company team to deliver on our ambitious OKRs and we could get everyone's OKRs done if we all worked together, I had a super-excited manager and buy-in for everyone to do this experiment with me... and then like the very next day after everyone was super excited for this thing, I and thousands of colleagues chosen apparently at random suddenly discovered that we were locked out of everything, both social and professional, for two months as we waited to be axed. Nobody knew how to contact me to say goodbye to me, eventually some folks pinged me on LinkedIn. And like it was nice to have Tony's Chocolonely in the microkitchen on the third floor and bidets on the toilets and a barista making me free mochas on the fifth, when I was in the office. Felt very swanky. Although my favorite part, truth be told, was just the GBikes. I love the wind in my hair. And it was especially nice in the US to go to a pharmacy for my maintenance inhaler and to have my card out and the person who handed me the medicine was just like "oh don't worry about that, you owe $0, have a nice day," like "what is this, the UK or something?". But the day-to-day work felt like Sisyphus and a boulder at times, just never-ending grind to end up in the same place you started. That, I didn't like. A real mix of "Great" and "WTF".
ska 3y ago
> you will find remarkably different cultures and experiences. I think people often mistake this. When you join a small early stage startup, you really are joining "the company". When you sign on as ID 25432 at bigcorp, you are (excepting exec roles) joining "a team". Your experience can be wildly different than someone who joins a different team, even at the same time. Depending on the org, this may be basically irreversible, or easily changed.
bronsonkhmai 3y ago
Your point is actually understated with saying "within a company the size of Google". Thinking about it, the same dynamics hold at even the smallest scale. If a company has two divisions of 25 employees in each division, over time they will start to feel like working at two different companies if you work in both divisions. Even the same department can feel like a different company after a management shakeup.

jdthedisciple 3y ago

Does working at Google for this long make one a millionaire?

xor25519 3y ago
not if you are a security guard
ska 3y ago
Conservatively, working any job that lets you put 25k/year into a tax shelter like a 401k for 20 years will make you a millionaire, or at least damn close. This covers a large number of tech jobs in the US if you choose to.
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  Well that route is comparatively barely impressive. And you haven't even taken into account inflation. In contrast, I have the impression that some FAANG employees make it within 5 years or less, considering some of the salaries there...
  - ska 3y ago
    The point is it shouldn't be impressive to people in tech, more par for the course if you work 20 years and save. I was responding to the question as written. To your point though, if you do want to amass 1mm liquid quickly without a fancy certification (e.g. neurosurgeon), absolutely FAANG and wall st. are among the most risk free ways to do that. Or you can go the route of pissing a lot of it away because you make "good money" now; your choice.
underdeserver 3y ago
In the sense that someone living a reasonable medium class life in the bay area could save more than $1 million, definitely.
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  Not sure if I'm reading your comment correctly. Are you implying it's hard to save up living in the bay area?
askafriend 3y ago
VPs at Google make $2-3M+ every year...
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  That is crazy... I just always wonder how many millionaires have been made simply via FAANG employment.
DannyBee 3y ago
I mean, working this long anywhere will make you a millionaire, but also keep in mind things often happen in 20 years that can cost a lot: Caring for sick parents/loved ones Your own medical/etc issues Kids Divorce Market changes etc I mean, without getting into my personal life, for example, , google gave options and not equity for years, and there were times those options were underwater, etc. So it's not all just raking in money hand over fist.

crdrost 3y ago

Yeah, "different cultures and experiences" is absolutely right, it's huge, unfathomably huge. To complete the picture I had a kind of "mediocre" story at Google, negative but not the worst possible. I was hired as the pandemic started, before anyone had figured out how to onboard me or ship me a work laptop, then the actual onboarding experience itself was a lot of talks about how "privacy is very important to us, accessibility VERY important to us, oh you can't forget that security is VERRRY important to us." (At orientation we were broken into teams and told to build an app together, but the team met like twice and was undecided about what app to build and at the end someone presented one of the three ideas of apps that we might build, as an app that we had built, and not a line of code was shed.) Working on my team was a little better, although nobody really took me "under their wing" and when I would ping with having trouble with my dev environment my team was not very responsive. For about a year the only person on my team who really cared enough to review my CLs was halfway across the world in Singapore, so day-to-day dev work fixing bugs incurred this really long latency. For feature development, there was a different really long latency: because everyone insisted on design docs that they didn't get around to approving! So after my second perf cycle kicked in and I was told that the volume of the output was not looking great (because, on perf, maintenance work and bugs fixed doesn't really count for anything), it was just like "okay, I cannot wait for my team to actually approve these before starting the work, that'll be just like the Nooglers bickering about which app to start." So I got like 90% of the way through shipping a feature and the key stakeholders still hadn't gotten around to reviewing and approving the design doc. The ridiculous latencies actually led to me going a little "cabin-fever"-crazy and writing stochastic simulations of work at Google so that I could give better estimates to my manager about my deadlines. I was optimized by my whatever-it-was-like-7-years at smaller companies to eliminate multitasking and pursue things with a considerable focus; but the simulations showed that my major problem was that in this high-latency environment you have to multitask as aggressively as possible: you basically need to have "this person is reviewing this for me and that person is doing that for me and I have this design doc when my CLs are waiting to be reviewed and and and...". I was working in the best way possible to get a lot of meaningful work done in a small focused team, but simulations showed it was the worst way possible to work at Google, even though the actual team size was about the same. The cabin fever was a sort of real mental-health decline. I deferred taking my baby-bonding leave to be with my daughter for like a whole year of my wife saying "hey I really need your help here" because every week it was like "oh we'll just finally ship this thing and then I'll be leaving on a high" and it's like nope, things never really shipped. Was so focused on "respecting the opportunity" that I didn't really "respect your own biology and go to the doctor and stuff" -- it never really seemed like my work was successful enough that I was psychologically safe to take time for those basic things. The simulations helped me know that it wasn't "just me" and "here's what you need to do." So I eventually successfully got my work output up, even to the point of doing some honest-to-goodness team leadership: I noticed that we had overcommitted on our OKRs for the upcoming Q1 2023, I had some really productive work with others at the end of Q4 2022, so I developed a design doc on "Hot Potato Agile" for how the team was going to work together like a small-company team to deliver on our ambitious OKRs and we could get everyone's OKRs done if we all worked together, I had a super-excited manager and buy-in for everyone to do this experiment with me... and then like the very next day after everyone was super excited for this thing, I and thousands of colleagues chosen apparently at random suddenly discovered that we were locked out of everything, both social and professional, for two months as we waited to be axed. Nobody knew how to contact me to say goodbye to me, eventually some folks pinged me on LinkedIn. And like it was nice to have Tony's Chocolonely in the microkitchen on the third floor and bidets on the toilets and a barista making me free mochas on the fifth, when I was in the office. Felt very swanky. Although my favorite part, truth be told, was just the GBikes. I love the wind in my hair. And it was especially nice in the US to go to a pharmacy for my maintenance inhaler and to have my card out and the person who handed me the medicine was just like "oh don't worry about that, you owe $0, have a nice day," like "what is this, the UK or something?". But the day-to-day work felt like Sisyphus and a boulder at times, just never-ending grind to end up in the same place you started. That, I didn't like. A real mix of "Great" and "WTF".

ska 3y ago

> you will find remarkably different cultures and experiences. I think people often mistake this. When you join a small early stage startup, you really are joining "the company". When you sign on as ID 25432 at bigcorp, you are (excepting exec roles) joining "a team". Your experience can be wildly different than someone who joins a different team, even at the same time. Depending on the org, this may be basically irreversible, or easily changed.

bronsonkhmai 3y ago

Your point is actually understated with saying "within a company the size of Google". Thinking about it, the same dynamics hold at even the smallest scale. If a company has two divisions of 25 employees in each division, over time they will start to feel like working at two different companies if you work in both divisions. Even the same department can feel like a different company after a management shakeup.