24 ms·

FAQ on Leaving Google

462 points by mrled 3y ago

coliveira 3y ago
"Google is not a person"... Google lawyers will tell you completely otherwise! Google is certainly a person in the thinking of the US supreme court.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Right, which is why you should treat it as a person legally, but emotionally and ethically - who cares? It doesn't have feelings! People and corporations are allowed to do all sorts of shitty things to each other by the laws of the U.S, and you shouldn't do them to other people because that's not what being a good person is about, but when it comes to a corporation - its feelings are not going to get hurt.
- Salgat 3y ago
  Definitely a big shift in perspective from the old days when a company was "family" and you had a pension and an expectation to stick with the company for the long haul. Nowadays it's unhealthy to treat a company that way, since that "culture of loyalty" was just a short lived thing around the time boomers worked.
  - jen20 3y ago
    The oldest boomers were mid-career by the time financialization took hold.
SlightlyLeftPad 3y ago
Sigh, if I was making 700k/year for 18 years (plus stock options) I want to believe I’d be “fine” if I was laid off. Unfortunately, That is so certainly not the reality I live in right now.
mvkel 3y ago
If a company's "culture" craters after a single round of layoffs, then the culture wasn't doing well at all. When things are going well, everyone is happy, and the culture feels solid. But culture is also important, arguably more, when things aren't going well. There have been enough accounts like this that it's safe to say Google is beyond just smoke; there is a fire.
- andromeduck 3y ago
  The culture started dying when Sundar took over, layoffs merely accelerated the trajectory.
ggambetta 3y ago
The conflict between “uncomfortable culture” and “golden handcuffs” was becoming intolerable. Amen :_(
- another2another 3y ago
  Oh to be thus conflicted, even for a few years.
- vesinisa 3y ago
  What is he referring to here exactly?
  - dmoy 3y ago
    Google culture is significantly different from 10-15+ years ago. Some of those differences can be uncomfortable for someone used to the earlier times. But also a Director is probably pulling >$1,000,000 / yr (the golden handcuffs).
    - swozey 3y ago
      He mentions that the culture changed a year ago which is when they started doing things like requiring 3 days in, actually checking employee in/out times, etc. IIRC for a long time it was 3 days required but it was on the honor system. Though I'm not even sure someone like him or fitz would need to follow that. My friends who are still at g seemed pretty miserable in 2023. I haven't heard from them this month though, didn't realize another layoff round hit. It's absolutely off my wishlist of companies nowadays.
      - refulgentis 3y ago
        It's not quite that, TL;DR: performance review system was 'de-complexified'. Googlers will say "GRAD", and people outside assume it has something to do with RTO because of timing (which is still ~fake at Google. No one knows the secret # to get a nasty email, but 3 times in 6 weeks doesn't get it). - 80% get average grade. 2% get worst, 6-8% get between worst and average. That covers 90% of the distribution. - The below-average grade is a death sentence to your career there. - The rest, people recently found out, is half-eaten by people who get promoted. - There's now _precious_ little incentive to put in an effort in a culture that was already known for it's rest-and-vest-ness. - The quotas are enforced 3-4 levels up from bottom, and managers are expected to warn anyone who might get below average. In practice, that means 15-20% of people are being told they might get a scarlet letter. - There is ~nowhere to transfer internally since late 2021. 100 applicants for every open role. - The internal orgs all love to do whatever the opposite of "yes, and" is. And each were told to Focus™, so that leads to people having an easy excuse to turning down _any_ request. It's much more efficient to shit all over the other org and not do the work and tell your director it's their fault than it is to enable bottom-up action. - The simplification of performance reviews also meant it shifted from being 80% peer feedback and 20% management to 95% management. And Google, like anywhere, is full of people at their worst, and their best. It's lead to a, frankly, gob-smacking amount of chicanery that I thought I left behind at immature companies. Even your average gossip-y early startup is better, because there's a certain sense of reality, instead of ad dollars that magically convert to paychecks. - Constant, ever-beating drum of firings. There was the huge one last year, and then the sizable one recently in a couple orgs, but it's been near-constant. - The firings are absurdly post-modern sterile. You wake up, locked out of your laptop, locked out of the office, and have an email in your personal inbox telling you they're cutting your team. - They have to "cut teams" instead of do layoffs because of the legal / cost ramifications of just doing layoffs to drive up profits. But that opens up some of that chicanery I mentioned: have it on good authority from 2 sources that the political movers who came into the Assistant org. for Bard would ship people onto "classic" Assistant teams just to fire them. It's really hard to explain concisely, but basically, I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone come close to that place unless they're sub 100K in savings. Nothing makes sense, nothing is real, everyone knows it, and you have a bunch of the world's smartest people optimizing for how to do the least without being the least. A lot of that involves saying no and telling everyone it's someone else's fault, and like any hierarchical organization.........
bitwize 3y ago
Please understand: Google is not a person. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower...
- AceJohnny2 3y ago
  Ref: Bryan Cantrill, speaking of Larry Ellison, in the context of working for Oracle after Sun got acquired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc It's a hilarious rant, starting at 34:00, and the specific quote around 38:35.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Protip: you can link directly to a specific timepoint in a YouTube video with the &t= (or #t=) parameter, measured in seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2060s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2060s
    - iso8859-1 3y ago
      Tenured professor tip: you don't need to convert to seconds, you can use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=38m35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=38m35s
      - furyofantares 3y ago
        Sure, but you get seconds if you right click the time control and select "copy video URL current time" :)
- to11mtm 3y ago
  > . To that end, it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google” I do love the weird qualifier of 'to that end'. Would love to see a follow up in 6-12 months when the culture's flavor-aid is cleared out of their system.
- patrickmay 3y ago
nextos 3y ago
IMHO, these senior people leaving is a good thing for them and for society. Most have enough savings to be able to start up something interesting, fun, and that delivers a lot more societal value than their current Google role. Junior redundancies are more problematic, particularly in the current job market.
- ibejoeb 3y ago
  It's only a matter of time before there a no remaining don't-be-evil googlers. Not particularly looking forward to that.
  - sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
    That boat has sailed. Everybody knows the score or has their head in the sand.
  - acheron 3y ago
    And that time was 2009? Who with any morals would have worked at Google at any time since then?
simonw 3y ago
I knew Ben Collins-Sussman from his work on Subversion and his writing and speaking about engineering management... but I had no idea he'd co-composed two musicals as well! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Collins-Sussman#Musical_compositions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Collins-Sussman#Musical_co...
throw_pm23 3y ago
A nice writeup but "achieving really cool things in the [..] Ads [..] divisions"? Come on, no need to fool anyone now that you are free.. There's nothing cool to be achieved in ads, unless you were working to dismantle the entire industry from the inside.
- cybrox 3y ago
  Morally? Probably not. In terms of challenge and complexity? Sure! It's the same thing as working in military tech. You shouldn't be a huge fan of blowing people to bits but the challenges and solutions are incredible.
  - brap 3y ago
    Also, morally - I would argue that the billions of people who choose to use Google for free every single day because it makes their live better, thanks to ads, might think it’s pretty cool too. Please stop demonizing the very thing you enjoy using. If not you then probably your parents, etc. Google became so valuable because it gives people a lot of value.
    - linkgoron 3y ago
      That's like saying that people should feel thankful for paying their taxes because that's what paves their roads and builds their schools. Yes, ads bring in money, and maybe they do enable Search - but it's at most a necessary evil, not something to celebrate.
      - CydeWeys 3y ago
        This sentiment seems out of place on a site dedicated to startups. Targeted advertising is often an important part of growing a startup and acquiring new customers. You can't just ignore advertising if you want to create a billion dollar company!
      - brap 3y ago
        Even as a staunch capitalist and borderline libertarian, I am thankful for taxes, why shouldn’t I be? I am not going to celebrate it, but I don’t see it as immoral in any way.
throwitaway222 3y ago
Tech is simply maturing. It has had two major meltdowns at this point. The first one it was still getting it's footing. The second one accounts for bloat in an age where half the hiring was done during a pandemic that necessitated positions that are pretty much superfluous now. Zoom competitors, Virtual meetings, 3d environments - all the pandemic related initiatives that "brought people together" are over. We're moving back to the office, we're dropping DEI, migrating things to AI. This is not the end of extremely large paychecks, but it's the end of potentially 30% of them.
- eldavido 3y ago
  I think this portends a larger culture shift in Silicon Valley tech that, in my opinion, cannot come quickly enough. Here you've got a guy, 18 years at Google, probably earning somewhere between 500k-1mil per year, probably $5-10 million in his Schwab account without breaking a sweat. With a little blurb at the top of his blog about "How to Leader", feeling the need to explain whether any of this is "fair" or why it's ok that "Google did this to you". Honestly, as an industry--we need to grow the fuck up. Using the wrong part of speech or talking about what is or isn't "fair" are things I do with my three-year old when she's throwing a tantrum. Not something I expect from an emotionally mature professional in his 40s or 50s who's likely earning a million/year or more. Google is a trillion-dollar, global multinational with shareholders, and a board, and a stock price. If you don't deliver, you will be cut, period. It's not that I even blame this author--I think this post shows a lot of maturity and self-awareness. It's the broader culture of unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    `If you don't deliver, you will be cut, period.` That's not what's happening at Google. I understand the intensity of your position on it in light of that being assumed. Beyond that, I'm wondering if you have any examples of the `unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.`? Generally people seem upset by it turning into a post-modern extremist firing: you show up to work one morning, you're locked out of your laptop, you can't badge into the building, you get an email to your personal email address on file, and that's it.
kagakuninja 3y ago
Step one: dry your tears while counting your giant pile of money...
- ramon156 3y ago
  If you do it for the money, I doubt your productivity is en par
sethops1 3y ago
Two talks given by Ben Collins-Sussman absolutely changed my career path from being a hot headed programmer to thinking like a professional engineer. The Myth of the Genius Programmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ The Art of Organizational Manipulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTCuYzAw31Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTCuYzAw31Y I rewatch these every few years, or before an interview. Puts me back in the right headspace. If you're reading this Ben, thank you.
- laboratorymice 3y ago
  Just watched the second video and I am confused. It starts with some general points one could summarize as defining a "good culture" and how that should pay off for both employer and employees, but then later tramples all over it by excusing or outright endorsing the exact type of political behaviour that was criticized at the beginning: upward perception, the favour economy, finding influential friends, connectors, not burning bridges, and facetime. edit: The mentioned plan B (leaving) is really the only option for what they call a "hostile corporation". I don't agree with many of the plan A "learning to play the game" recommendations. This just changes you for the worse.
  - gowld 3y ago
    It's a version of Might Makes Right or the Economics of the Markets. You can't change the nature of reality, but you can choose to play the game in the service of good moral outcomes, or in servive of selfish greed.
    - alephnan 3y ago
      Ah. The ego of Effective Altruism and Sam-Bankman Fried.
danparsonson 3y ago
> Context: When I was laid off from Google, I knew I'd be deluged with questions. I wrote this FAQ to share with friends and family, to prevent repeated explanation. This is quite sweet in its stereotypical techie approach to life - your friends and family are asking questions about your situation because they care about and want to bond with you, not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying :-)
- caskstrength 3y ago
  Yes, but you know _the_ rule of leaving Google - one must always publish an article about it to ensure that the whole world is aware ;)
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  The other side of it is probably not wanting to bond and spend 30 minutes getting cared about. That might feel like a luxury, but to each their own.
  - Groxx 3y ago
    This plus not everyone wants to talk about it multiple times. Saying "no" can be tough without a fallback.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - palata 3y ago
    Which brings us to the second half of the parent's sentence: "not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying". If you don't want to bond and spend 30 minutes getting cared about, just say "I'm fine, I just don't want to talk about it right now". Maybe follow with "And you, how are you?", but that's optional. Again, they probably don't particularly care about the actual information.
- tysam_and 3y ago
  Well they can find alternative methods then that are less frazzling, there are fewer things worse than not feeling seen due to only answering questions! I know it can be good, but sometimes the questions can legitimately get in the way of connection and spending quality time, and not everyone wants to have the hard conversation while being in the hotseat (especially not over, and over, and over again. I am transgender, for example, and while having 1 mildly hostile family member would be a somewhat-problem, most of my extended family only wants to talk about that thing, and that one thing, with me, to the point where it effectively creates a wall. That at least is my experience of the issue, it's not quite the same, but I've definitely experienced the "questions dynamic" within other, much-more-mild scenarios, and generally, IMPE, I really dislike it unless I'm actively getting something interesting out of it, which I'm oftentimes not! It can be very much isolating, as far as my personal experience goes.) So, not really a terrible solution, I think! <3 :'))))
derfnugget 3y ago
I'm a software engineer with 5 years at a FANG company. In the entirety of your time at Google did you ever identify a high performing contractor and make your mission to make them a full-time employee?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
  I assume you're asking as a contractor wanting to become fulltime? It's probably worth letting people you work with know that you'd take a fulltime role, because IME many contractors had no interest whatsoever in converting. But you should make sure to know about any legal/administrative blockers, like agreements between your contract company and your FAANG workplace.
- guluarte 3y ago
  depends on the contract, some contracts have a clause for non-solicitation
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dekhn 3y ago
  My team did. We had a fantastic test engineer (contractor) and hired him. We got no end of shit from management about it (hiring contractors is a no-no) but it was the right thing to do.
  - schmookeeg 3y ago
    JOOC Why is hiring contractors a no-no? I have the opposite problem right now -- I'm a contractor being pestered to go W2 and I am resisting as politely as I can. It's actually been a common thing in my career. (here's half of the cash and a dental plan -- uhhh thanks but no?) Surprised that someone like G would avoid using this as a culture/work fit litmus test and not want to fast-track great contractors.
camdenlock 3y ago
I keep seeing references to this recent “uncomfortable culture” at Google. Can someone from Google (past or present) explain what this is?
- tetromino_ 3y ago
  Some examples: * Loss of trust, loss of openness. Someone kept leaking TGIF presentations to the media, so TGIF turned into contentless corpspeak and dodging of any hard questions. Someone kept leaking internal docs, so new docs now are locked down to specific teams or divisions instead of being readable company-wide. * Attempts to start some lucrative but morally questionable projects (like the CBP contract or the China reengagement) that many employees felt went against "don't be evil". * Cost cutting everywhere. Putting more work on fewer, burned out people. Desk hoteling in some places. No hardware refreshes. Very limited travel. And of course, cancelling or downsizing some fun but experimental projects. * The pointlessly insulting way the 2023 layoffs were handled - e.g. cutting the laid off people off from all corp network access, even their email, without warning.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mlcrypto 3y ago
  Ever heard of James Damore?
goalonetwo 3y ago
[edit] snark
- swozey 3y ago
  He's been part of some very pivotal oss projects/books/talks so people like to follow him to see where he's going and what he may be working on. I'm sure there are a huge number of engineers he's worked with/mentored who would also be interested. I actually follow fitz all over the place but didn't realize he was part of Subversion so I'm seeing this from the other end and get to trace back to his previous stuff.
charles_f 3y ago
> it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google” Someone decided to handle this situation that way, so one has a perfect right to be angry at them, and generalize that as "being angry at Google". The author takes it with philosophy and pragmatism, that's admirable and I'm certainly not one to tell them how they should feel. But other factors indicate that his situation was also prone for that positiveness (feeling like a relief because of golden handcuffs, long tenure in a stock-distributing tech company + director level meaning that there's likely no concerns regarding money, side career already underway, maybe a relief to have some change). Others might not be in the same situation, and are now jobless in in slow economy, with tenuous savings, rent or mortgage coming up. They might feel outright furious for a layoff that they have neither control on, nor were a reason for, and that shows no face to take responsibility - and they're completely entitled to feel that way, if that helps them cope. I'd say it makes sense to me, and don't feel bad for being angry if that's how you feel.
- cirelli94 3y ago
  > now jobless in in slow economy It really doesn't look like a slow economy! See https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
- AndrewGaspar 3y ago
  > they're completely entitled to feel that way, if that helps them cope This is actually not a productive way to cope and it’s good advice to tell people not to cope this way.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Is it not? Honestly, it wouldn’t help, but ranting at the impersonal machine that is Google (or big tech) would certainly make me feel better.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    Anger at the Kafkaesque ministrations of the neo-feudal lords is a valid emotion. Let's not normalize the passive, defeatist acceptance of abusive corporate culture. One doesn't need to be angry, but that's a privilege of someone who isn't living paycheck to paycheck.
oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]
ProAm 3y ago
> Google is not a person. Citizens United has entered the chat. [1] [1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...
bumbledraven 3y ago
Ben's follow up from Jan 12: "Surprised by the Response" (https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-12-ExitResponse/ https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-12-ExitResp...).
imiric 3y ago
Great. I hope that you now have time to reflect on the impact your products have on humanity.
MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
I met this guy at a Google weekend-gathering in Chicago one winter. Really enjoyed chatting with him and wish him the best.
crossroadsguy 3y ago
I had to pause here for a second > “enormous pride” in “building” a Chicago Engineering office over decades, and achieving really cool things in the Developer, “Ads”, and Search divisions
- zaphar 3y ago
  Why? He and Brian Fitzpatrick were the founding engineers for the Chicago office. I worked with them on Google Code back when there was almost no competition in forges and GitHub had just barely become a thing. Search brings enormous value to all kinds of people and Ads makes it all financially viable. There is plenty to be proud of and without those founding engineers in that office Chicago would not have been a part of it and offered gainful employment to many different engineers in that area. He was a fantastic manager and a great director.
- dekhn 3y ago
  My favorite were his (or fitz's) videos of the building they moved into; it was an old storage facility and they had to defrost something like 30 years of ice and remove 50 years of walls. He basically built svnhub before github existed, but leadership saw little to no value in owning a code site. He knew how to build products for professional hackers who wanted to build interesting things. And he helped fund a generation of gsoc hackers improving open source codes.
thrtythreeforty 3y ago
The author also published [1] an email he wrote at the beginning of his tenure. It is amazing how alien and out of place early Google sounds in today's corporate environment. They have completely eroded the perception that Google is this kind of place: > Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground [...] Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think. Even if this was only half-true back then, there's very little you could do to convince me that it's true at all now. This culture and the public perception of it has been squandered. [1]: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2005-09-25-FirstWeekAtGoogle/ https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2005-09-25-FirstWee...
- roca 3y ago
  This was a terrible way to run a company then and now. It leads to an incoherent product strategy. It doesn't provide the persistence required to pursue strategies that take many years to eventuate. Google succeeded in spite of this culture, not because of it; they found an immensely profitable niche, which enabled them to hire huge amounts of incredible talent, which covered up their cultural problems. [Disclaimer: I work at Google.]
  - roca 3y ago
    Also, this is a great example of a recurring problem: successful organisations venerate their culture, so that every part of it is assumed to be essential to their success until very painful experiences prove otherwise. Another example: Linux developers thinking that managing patches by email is the best approach ever, because Linux is dominant.
- 3y ago
lxe 3y ago
> Please understand: Google is not a person. It’s many groups of people following locally-varying processes, rules, and culture. To that end, it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google”; it’s not a consciousness, and it has no sense of duty nor debt. This isn't right. Behind every decision is still a human (for now). Someone messed up and you were the victim.
- BeetleB 3y ago
  > Someone messed up and you were the victim. That's a giant leap. How do you know his layoff was a "mess up"? He's not entitled to work there. No one is.
AlbertCory 3y ago
best of luck, Ben. I spent a few days visiting the Chicago office (when it was opposite Marina Towers), so maybe we met.
erehweb 3y ago
> Please understand: Google is not a person. Literally true. On the other hand, the founders still have complete voting control of the company, so really the buck stops with them.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  How did this person work here for so long and not understand the function of googles special Executive Board — it’s literally three people that control the entire company. It’s absolutely a person — well 3 to be exact.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    But since about 2017 or so L&S just seemed completely absent. Maybe they're making the choices behind the scenes, that Sundar & Ruth are executing, but it feels like ... not really? Even the last few TGIFs where they properly attended they seemed very much spaced out of things.
    - gowld 3y ago
      The execs are merely the hired minds and hands. They only do what the capital owners want. If you keep a wild dog, you are still responsible for its behavior.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        Well, yes, here I agree. I think that in the earlier days Google could remain insulated from that because the returns it was getting were so high, and Capital didn't know what to do with it, and didn't want to do anything to stop the goose from laying golden eggs. I think now we're seeing a concerted effort across the tech industry to instill labour discipline, and break the relative power that our profession has had. Started with Twitter, then MS, then Google, and it's not going to stop until they get our salaries down, and get these businesses operating like more traditional exploitative organizations where we are disposable "resources". The threat of "AI" is one tool among many to make that happen, along with layoffs, etc.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
_xlxy 3y ago
I wrote something questioning why Google employees should deserve wider news here But if you look at Googler posts here, it's pretty clear how bent out of place a lot of them are. All said, smart as they are, plenty less smart people leave jobs, so what's the news here? It was the same with Twitter. There's no special 'crying place' for other jobs and departures, so why here and now?
- tickerticker 3y ago
  Bc a lot of them read HN?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - _xlxy 3y ago
    Bc what sorry? I didn't realise HN was a big story about people's personal journeys, which the post is. I thought HN was about smart tech folk who like tech stories with something novel about the thing.
    - gniv 3y ago
      I think the comment you're replying to is quite literal. A lot of Googlers and ex-Googlers read this site and they are more likely to upvote these kinds of posts.
    - mhss 3y ago
      The news is Google layoffs and is interesting to many how the culture of such a large and influential tech company has changed. The person laid off is also a known OSS author (Subversion). If you don’t find it interesting you can just move on you know? Many others find these posts interesting and that’s enough according to HN guidelines.
iLoveOncall 3y ago
Very easy FAQ to write for a 55 years old someone who's been a director for close to 6 years and therefore earning more than a million a year for that period. It's another story for a newly hired L3 engineer. I'm lucky that not a single one of my friends has been affected by layoffs at my company, but I find apologism of bad executive management like this is incredibly bad taste if not outright insulting to people that are affected by layoffs.
hakdbha 3y ago
[dead]
blindriver 3y ago
Googles layoff are among the dumbest I’ve ever seen. Laying off randomly and not low performers is par for the course for the management of Google. High performers will leave when the market gets Better and the company will fill itself with more shitty performers. This is not how a top tier company behaves.
- jldugger 3y ago
  > Googles layoff are among the dumbest I’ve ever seen. Hasbro's latest round still tops this though.
- free652 3y ago
  >Laying off randomly and not low performers Low performers? By what metric? And your metric sucks, that's because a single metric is meaningless, even 10 metrics are useless. Did you do over 200 CLs a year? 10000 LoC? 10-20 design docs? 10 product launches? CL comments, reviews, bug fixed, filed? Sure you can identify outliers, but the baseline is not exactly very telling. In my other companies layoffs were always random.
  - blindriver 3y ago
    Striving to cut low performers and sometimes getting it wrong is orders of magnitude better than randomly cutting people, gutting high performers, and ruining confidence to other high performers that working hard will be appreciated. So yes, it doesn't matter which metric you want to use, but use something that is directionally correct with being a low performer, and get rid of those people. You might get some wrong but for the most part, people will be happier that the coasters and stragglers are gone.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tickerticker 3y ago
Gotta ask....do you play the banjo?
aeturnum 3y ago
> This is unfair! After all you’ve done, how could Google do this to you? > Please understand: Google is not a person. It’s many groups of people following locally-varying processes, rules, and culture. To that end, it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google”; it’s not a consciousness, and it has no sense of duty nor debt. This is a such a strange view. You shouldn't be angry at google, because google is just people. No mention of being angry at the people, who maybe it would be unfair to blame for "google"s actions. Conveniently there's no appropriate subject (or object) to feel about. I think the shorthands he attacks, though they're literally untrue, are also really helpful metaphors. Large organizations have a character that no one person is responsible for and personifying them and assessing how we feel about their actions is a useful tool for reflection and assessment. Each member of those "groups of people" should reflect on how they as individuals (and their group) contributes to it. A company isn't "just" an aggregate of all people in it - but it is mostly that. You can't hurt a company's feelings (just the feelings of the people who work there) - but you can be upset at what it does to you and speak about that.
free652 3y ago
IMHO a lot of googlers (especially old timers) believe they were special, here is a news flash. You weren't, Google didn't come with a lot of products. And that's why where Google is right now.
- SadCordDrone 3y ago
  Found the non technical manager
- lokar 3y ago
  Where it is now? 300B revenue with 11% growth and 96B in earnings with 120B in cash. They are fine.
- pb7 3y ago
  A nearly $2T dollar company and growing? A more successful company than nearly all others in the history of humanity? Yeah, must be terrible for them.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  They were and still are special. They fundamentally changed the web with a better search engine. Also, Android. Also, Chrome. Also, infra required to run YouTube... even if you don't like the end product, the infra is incredible (same for FaceMeta and Netflix).
sciencesama 3y ago
All yoir vested unvested stock can give that flexibility !
starchild3001 3y ago
Hey, current Googler here. I joined in 2017. For those who are looking from outside to those who reminisce past Google, I have an update for you: Google is still a f'ing amazing workplace. It's easily the best company I worked for in my 24 yrs of post-college career. Amazing colleagues. Incredible learning opportunity. Super fun projects. Really good pay. Your mileage may vary. This is my N=1 impression as an ML expert currently working on Ads. Best of luck!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bigbuppo 3y ago
  So you implement stalking technology, but it's okay because it's for ads?
  - starchild3001 3y ago
    That's a gross mischaracterization. There's no stalking. It's your data kept in a server that no human eyes can see, and algorithmically matched with the best ads possible. That's the kind of ads I know, served respectfully, where user can choose to turn off their history, and stop this from happening. Opinions are mine. Not that of my employer.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tdb7893 3y ago
  So I agree the pay is good but for me (and most of my friends it really wore me down over time) that place really wore me down over time. I was already planning on leaving but I was shocked at how happy I was to be laid off from there, people kept messaging me concerned and I needed to explain to them that I felt fantastic. I loved the office (I was also in the Chicago office, the best office at Google! Though it might lose that title without Ben Sussman to lead it) and my team was so amazing but the shifting priorities and reorgs really sapped my motivation, especially recently as cost cutting created more organizational churn. Objectively it's a good place to work, I always told Nooglers that this job in this particular location is one of the best jobs to have ever existed and I honestly think in many ways that's true. I think if you're pretty resilient to corporate bullshit (I thought I was but over time it got to me) or if you can get a good project I do sincerely recommend it as a place to work. On the other hand for me it is also true that it was slowly sapping my joy of engineering and leaving me with no motivation besides collecting a paycheck and that really sucked for a bit.
longtimegoogler 3y ago
Jesus. That was kind of tone deaf. Not everyone laid off is an Engineering Director who has worked at Google for 18 years. That guy probably could have retired years ago. There are many who were laid off for whom that isn't true.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
encyclic 3y ago
Having toiled in the Google mines for almost as long a tenure as Ben before my time came in 2021, the words 'The conflict between “uncomfortable culture” and “golden handcuffs” was becoming intolerable.' could not ring any truer.
devwastaken 3y ago
>Please understand: Google is not a person. In both law and culture Google is infact a person in such that they inherit the rights of a person.

462 points by mrled 3y ago

"Google is not a person"... Google lawyers will tell you completely otherwise! Google is certainly a person in the thinking of the US supreme court.

nostrademons 3y ago
Right, which is why you should treat it as a person legally, but emotionally and ethically - who cares? It doesn't have feelings! People and corporations are allowed to do all sorts of shitty things to each other by the laws of the U.S, and you shouldn't do them to other people because that's not what being a good person is about, but when it comes to a corporation - its feelings are not going to get hurt.
Salgat 3y ago
Definitely a big shift in perspective from the old days when a company was "family" and you had a pension and an expectation to stick with the company for the long haul. Nowadays it's unhealthy to treat a company that way, since that "culture of loyalty" was just a short lived thing around the time boomers worked.
- jen20 3y ago
  The oldest boomers were mid-career by the time financialization took hold.

SlightlyLeftPad 3y ago

Sigh, if I was making 700k/year for 18 years (plus stock options) I want to believe I’d be “fine” if I was laid off. Unfortunately, That is so certainly not the reality I live in right now.

mvkel 3y ago

If a company's "culture" craters after a single round of layoffs, then the culture wasn't doing well at all. When things are going well, everyone is happy, and the culture feels solid. But culture is also important, arguably more, when things aren't going well. There have been enough accounts like this that it's safe to say Google is beyond just smoke; there is a fire.

andromeduck 3y ago
The culture started dying when Sundar took over, layoffs merely accelerated the trajectory.

ggambetta 3y ago

The conflict between “uncomfortable culture” and “golden handcuffs” was becoming intolerable. Amen :_(

another2another 3y ago
Oh to be thus conflicted, even for a few years.
vesinisa 3y ago
What is he referring to here exactly?
- dmoy 3y ago
  Google culture is significantly different from 10-15+ years ago. Some of those differences can be uncomfortable for someone used to the earlier times. But also a Director is probably pulling >$1,000,000 / yr (the golden handcuffs).
  - swozey 3y ago
    He mentions that the culture changed a year ago which is when they started doing things like requiring 3 days in, actually checking employee in/out times, etc. IIRC for a long time it was 3 days required but it was on the honor system. Though I'm not even sure someone like him or fitz would need to follow that. My friends who are still at g seemed pretty miserable in 2023. I haven't heard from them this month though, didn't realize another layoff round hit. It's absolutely off my wishlist of companies nowadays.
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      It's not quite that, TL;DR: performance review system was 'de-complexified'. Googlers will say "GRAD", and people outside assume it has something to do with RTO because of timing (which is still ~fake at Google. No one knows the secret # to get a nasty email, but 3 times in 6 weeks doesn't get it). - 80% get average grade. 2% get worst, 6-8% get between worst and average. That covers 90% of the distribution. - The below-average grade is a death sentence to your career there. - The rest, people recently found out, is half-eaten by people who get promoted. - There's now _precious_ little incentive to put in an effort in a culture that was already known for it's rest-and-vest-ness. - The quotas are enforced 3-4 levels up from bottom, and managers are expected to warn anyone who might get below average. In practice, that means 15-20% of people are being told they might get a scarlet letter. - There is ~nowhere to transfer internally since late 2021. 100 applicants for every open role. - The internal orgs all love to do whatever the opposite of "yes, and" is. And each were told to Focus™, so that leads to people having an easy excuse to turning down _any_ request. It's much more efficient to shit all over the other org and not do the work and tell your director it's their fault than it is to enable bottom-up action. - The simplification of performance reviews also meant it shifted from being 80% peer feedback and 20% management to 95% management. And Google, like anywhere, is full of people at their worst, and their best. It's lead to a, frankly, gob-smacking amount of chicanery that I thought I left behind at immature companies. Even your average gossip-y early startup is better, because there's a certain sense of reality, instead of ad dollars that magically convert to paychecks. - Constant, ever-beating drum of firings. There was the huge one last year, and then the sizable one recently in a couple orgs, but it's been near-constant. - The firings are absurdly post-modern sterile. You wake up, locked out of your laptop, locked out of the office, and have an email in your personal inbox telling you they're cutting your team. - They have to "cut teams" instead of do layoffs because of the legal / cost ramifications of just doing layoffs to drive up profits. But that opens up some of that chicanery I mentioned: have it on good authority from 2 sources that the political movers who came into the Assistant org. for Bard would ship people onto "classic" Assistant teams just to fire them. It's really hard to explain concisely, but basically, I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone come close to that place unless they're sub 100K in savings. Nothing makes sense, nothing is real, everyone knows it, and you have a bunch of the world's smartest people optimizing for how to do the least without being the least. A lot of that involves saying no and telling everyone it's someone else's fault, and like any hierarchical organization.........

bitwize 3y ago

Please understand: Google is not a person. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower...

AceJohnny2 3y ago
Ref: Bryan Cantrill, speaking of Larry Ellison, in the context of working for Oracle after Sun got acquired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc It's a hilarious rant, starting at 34:00, and the specific quote around 38:35.
- nostrademons 3y ago
  Protip: you can link directly to a specific timepoint in a YouTube video with the &t= (or #t=) parameter, measured in seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2060s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2060s
  - iso8859-1 3y ago
    Tenured professor tip: you don't need to convert to seconds, you can use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=38m35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=38m35s
    - furyofantares 3y ago
      Sure, but you get seconds if you right click the time control and select "copy video URL current time" :)
to11mtm 3y ago
> . To that end, it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google” I do love the weird qualifier of 'to that end'. Would love to see a follow up in 6-12 months when the culture's flavor-aid is cleared out of their system.
patrickmay 3y ago

nextos 3y ago

IMHO, these senior people leaving is a good thing for them and for society. Most have enough savings to be able to start up something interesting, fun, and that delivers a lot more societal value than their current Google role. Junior redundancies are more problematic, particularly in the current job market.

ibejoeb 3y ago
It's only a matter of time before there a no remaining don't-be-evil googlers. Not particularly looking forward to that.
- sjwhevvvvvsj 3y ago
  That boat has sailed. Everybody knows the score or has their head in the sand.
- acheron 3y ago
  And that time was 2009? Who with any morals would have worked at Google at any time since then?

simonw 3y ago

I knew Ben Collins-Sussman from his work on Subversion and his writing and speaking about engineering management... but I had no idea he'd co-composed two musicals as well! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Collins-Sussman#Musical_compositions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Collins-Sussman#Musical_co...

throw_pm23 3y ago

A nice writeup but "achieving really cool things in the [..] Ads [..] divisions"? Come on, no need to fool anyone now that you are free.. There's nothing cool to be achieved in ads, unless you were working to dismantle the entire industry from the inside.

cybrox 3y ago
Morally? Probably not. In terms of challenge and complexity? Sure! It's the same thing as working in military tech. You shouldn't be a huge fan of blowing people to bits but the challenges and solutions are incredible.
- brap 3y ago
  Also, morally - I would argue that the billions of people who choose to use Google for free every single day because it makes their live better, thanks to ads, might think it’s pretty cool too. Please stop demonizing the very thing you enjoy using. If not you then probably your parents, etc. Google became so valuable because it gives people a lot of value.
  - linkgoron 3y ago
    That's like saying that people should feel thankful for paying their taxes because that's what paves their roads and builds their schools. Yes, ads bring in money, and maybe they do enable Search - but it's at most a necessary evil, not something to celebrate.
    - CydeWeys 3y ago
      This sentiment seems out of place on a site dedicated to startups. Targeted advertising is often an important part of growing a startup and acquiring new customers. You can't just ignore advertising if you want to create a billion dollar company!
    - brap 3y ago
      Even as a staunch capitalist and borderline libertarian, I am thankful for taxes, why shouldn’t I be? I am not going to celebrate it, but I don’t see it as immoral in any way.

throwitaway222 3y ago

Tech is simply maturing. It has had two major meltdowns at this point. The first one it was still getting it's footing. The second one accounts for bloat in an age where half the hiring was done during a pandemic that necessitated positions that are pretty much superfluous now. Zoom competitors, Virtual meetings, 3d environments - all the pandemic related initiatives that "brought people together" are over. We're moving back to the office, we're dropping DEI, migrating things to AI. This is not the end of extremely large paychecks, but it's the end of potentially 30% of them.

eldavido 3y ago
I think this portends a larger culture shift in Silicon Valley tech that, in my opinion, cannot come quickly enough. Here you've got a guy, 18 years at Google, probably earning somewhere between 500k-1mil per year, probably $5-10 million in his Schwab account without breaking a sweat. With a little blurb at the top of his blog about "How to Leader", feeling the need to explain whether any of this is "fair" or why it's ok that "Google did this to you". Honestly, as an industry--we need to grow the fuck up. Using the wrong part of speech or talking about what is or isn't "fair" are things I do with my three-year old when she's throwing a tantrum. Not something I expect from an emotionally mature professional in his 40s or 50s who's likely earning a million/year or more. Google is a trillion-dollar, global multinational with shareholders, and a board, and a stock price. If you don't deliver, you will be cut, period. It's not that I even blame this author--I think this post shows a lot of maturity and self-awareness. It's the broader culture of unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  `If you don't deliver, you will be cut, period.` That's not what's happening at Google. I understand the intensity of your position on it in light of that being assumed. Beyond that, I'm wondering if you have any examples of the `unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.`? Generally people seem upset by it turning into a post-modern extremist firing: you show up to work one morning, you're locked out of your laptop, you can't badge into the building, you get an email to your personal email address on file, and that's it.

kagakuninja 3y ago

Step one: dry your tears while counting your giant pile of money...

ramon156 3y ago
If you do it for the money, I doubt your productivity is en par

sethops1 3y ago

Two talks given by Ben Collins-Sussman absolutely changed my career path from being a hot headed programmer to thinking like a professional engineer. The Myth of the Genius Programmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ The Art of Organizational Manipulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTCuYzAw31Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTCuYzAw31Y I rewatch these every few years, or before an interview. Puts me back in the right headspace. If you're reading this Ben, thank you.

laboratorymice 3y ago
Just watched the second video and I am confused. It starts with some general points one could summarize as defining a "good culture" and how that should pay off for both employer and employees, but then later tramples all over it by excusing or outright endorsing the exact type of political behaviour that was criticized at the beginning: upward perception, the favour economy, finding influential friends, connectors, not burning bridges, and facetime. edit: The mentioned plan B (leaving) is really the only option for what they call a "hostile corporation". I don't agree with many of the plan A "learning to play the game" recommendations. This just changes you for the worse.
- gowld 3y ago
  It's a version of Might Makes Right or the Economics of the Markets. You can't change the nature of reality, but you can choose to play the game in the service of good moral outcomes, or in servive of selfish greed.
  - alephnan 3y ago
    Ah. The ego of Effective Altruism and Sam-Bankman Fried.

danparsonson 3y ago

> Context: When I was laid off from Google, I knew I'd be deluged with questions. I wrote this FAQ to share with friends and family, to prevent repeated explanation. This is quite sweet in its stereotypical techie approach to life - your friends and family are asking questions about your situation because they care about and want to bond with you, not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying :-)

caskstrength 3y ago
Yes, but you know _the_ rule of leaving Google - one must always publish an article about it to ensure that the whole world is aware ;)
makeitdouble 3y ago
The other side of it is probably not wanting to bond and spend 30 minutes getting cared about. That might feel like a luxury, but to each their own.
- Groxx 3y ago
  This plus not everyone wants to talk about it multiple times. Saying "no" can be tough without a fallback.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- palata 3y ago
  Which brings us to the second half of the parent's sentence: "not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying". If you don't want to bond and spend 30 minutes getting cared about, just say "I'm fine, I just don't want to talk about it right now". Maybe follow with "And you, how are you?", but that's optional. Again, they probably don't particularly care about the actual information.
tysam_and 3y ago
Well they can find alternative methods then that are less frazzling, there are fewer things worse than not feeling seen due to only answering questions! I know it can be good, but sometimes the questions can legitimately get in the way of connection and spending quality time, and not everyone wants to have the hard conversation while being in the hotseat (especially not over, and over, and over again. I am transgender, for example, and while having 1 mildly hostile family member would be a somewhat-problem, most of my extended family only wants to talk about that thing, and that one thing, with me, to the point where it effectively creates a wall. That at least is my experience of the issue, it's not quite the same, but I've definitely experienced the "questions dynamic" within other, much-more-mild scenarios, and generally, IMPE, I really dislike it unless I'm actively getting something interesting out of it, which I'm oftentimes not! It can be very much isolating, as far as my personal experience goes.) So, not really a terrible solution, I think! <3 :'))))

derfnugget 3y ago

I'm a software engineer with 5 years at a FANG company. In the entirety of your time at Google did you ever identify a high performing contractor and make your mission to make them a full-time employee?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lazyasciiart 3y ago
I assume you're asking as a contractor wanting to become fulltime? It's probably worth letting people you work with know that you'd take a fulltime role, because IME many contractors had no interest whatsoever in converting. But you should make sure to know about any legal/administrative blockers, like agreements between your contract company and your FAANG workplace.
guluarte 3y ago
depends on the contract, some contracts have a clause for non-solicitation
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dekhn 3y ago
My team did. We had a fantastic test engineer (contractor) and hired him. We got no end of shit from management about it (hiring contractors is a no-no) but it was the right thing to do.
- schmookeeg 3y ago
  JOOC Why is hiring contractors a no-no? I have the opposite problem right now -- I'm a contractor being pestered to go W2 and I am resisting as politely as I can. It's actually been a common thing in my career. (here's half of the cash and a dental plan -- uhhh thanks but no?) Surprised that someone like G would avoid using this as a culture/work fit litmus test and not want to fast-track great contractors.

camdenlock 3y ago

I keep seeing references to this recent “uncomfortable culture” at Google. Can someone from Google (past or present) explain what this is?

tetromino_ 3y ago
Some examples: * Loss of trust, loss of openness. Someone kept leaking TGIF presentations to the media, so TGIF turned into contentless corpspeak and dodging of any hard questions. Someone kept leaking internal docs, so new docs now are locked down to specific teams or divisions instead of being readable company-wide. * Attempts to start some lucrative but morally questionable projects (like the CBP contract or the China reengagement) that many employees felt went against "don't be evil". * Cost cutting everywhere. Putting more work on fewer, burned out people. Desk hoteling in some places. No hardware refreshes. Very limited travel. And of course, cancelling or downsizing some fun but experimental projects. * The pointlessly insulting way the 2023 layoffs were handled - e.g. cutting the laid off people off from all corp network access, even their email, without warning.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mlcrypto 3y ago
Ever heard of James Damore?

goalonetwo 3y ago

[edit] snark

swozey 3y ago
He's been part of some very pivotal oss projects/books/talks so people like to follow him to see where he's going and what he may be working on. I'm sure there are a huge number of engineers he's worked with/mentored who would also be interested. I actually follow fitz all over the place but didn't realize he was part of Subversion so I'm seeing this from the other end and get to trace back to his previous stuff.

charles_f 3y ago

> it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google” Someone decided to handle this situation that way, so one has a perfect right to be angry at them, and generalize that as "being angry at Google". The author takes it with philosophy and pragmatism, that's admirable and I'm certainly not one to tell them how they should feel. But other factors indicate that his situation was also prone for that positiveness (feeling like a relief because of golden handcuffs, long tenure in a stock-distributing tech company + director level meaning that there's likely no concerns regarding money, side career already underway, maybe a relief to have some change). Others might not be in the same situation, and are now jobless in in slow economy, with tenuous savings, rent or mortgage coming up. They might feel outright furious for a layoff that they have neither control on, nor were a reason for, and that shows no face to take responsibility - and they're completely entitled to feel that way, if that helps them cope. I'd say it makes sense to me, and don't feel bad for being angry if that's how you feel.

cirelli94 3y ago
> now jobless in in slow economy It really doesn't look like a slow economy! See https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
AndrewGaspar 3y ago
> they're completely entitled to feel that way, if that helps them cope This is actually not a productive way to cope and it’s good advice to tell people not to cope this way.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Is it not? Honestly, it wouldn’t help, but ranting at the impersonal machine that is Google (or big tech) would certainly make me feel better.
- kibwen 3y ago
  Anger at the Kafkaesque ministrations of the neo-feudal lords is a valid emotion. Let's not normalize the passive, defeatist acceptance of abusive corporate culture. One doesn't need to be angry, but that's a privilege of someone who isn't living paycheck to paycheck.

oldpersonintx 3y ago

[dead]

ProAm 3y ago

> Google is not a person. Citizens United has entered the chat. [1] [1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...

bumbledraven 3y ago

Ben's follow up from Jan 12: "Surprised by the Response" (https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-12-ExitResponse/ https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-12-ExitResp...).

imiric 3y ago

Great. I hope that you now have time to reflect on the impact your products have on humanity.

MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago

I met this guy at a Google weekend-gathering in Chicago one winter. Really enjoyed chatting with him and wish him the best.

crossroadsguy 3y ago

I had to pause here for a second > “enormous pride” in “building” a Chicago Engineering office over decades, and achieving really cool things in the Developer, “Ads”, and Search divisions

zaphar 3y ago
Why? He and Brian Fitzpatrick were the founding engineers for the Chicago office. I worked with them on Google Code back when there was almost no competition in forges and GitHub had just barely become a thing. Search brings enormous value to all kinds of people and Ads makes it all financially viable. There is plenty to be proud of and without those founding engineers in that office Chicago would not have been a part of it and offered gainful employment to many different engineers in that area. He was a fantastic manager and a great director.
dekhn 3y ago
My favorite were his (or fitz's) videos of the building they moved into; it was an old storage facility and they had to defrost something like 30 years of ice and remove 50 years of walls. He basically built svnhub before github existed, but leadership saw little to no value in owning a code site. He knew how to build products for professional hackers who wanted to build interesting things. And he helped fund a generation of gsoc hackers improving open source codes.

thrtythreeforty 3y ago

The author also published [1] an email he wrote at the beginning of his tenure. It is amazing how alien and out of place early Google sounds in today's corporate environment. They have completely eroded the perception that Google is this kind of place: > Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground [...] Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think. Even if this was only half-true back then, there's very little you could do to convince me that it's true at all now. This culture and the public perception of it has been squandered. [1]: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2005-09-25-FirstWeekAtGoogle/ https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2005-09-25-FirstWee...

roca 3y ago
This was a terrible way to run a company then and now. It leads to an incoherent product strategy. It doesn't provide the persistence required to pursue strategies that take many years to eventuate. Google succeeded in spite of this culture, not because of it; they found an immensely profitable niche, which enabled them to hire huge amounts of incredible talent, which covered up their cultural problems. [Disclaimer: I work at Google.]
- roca 3y ago
  Also, this is a great example of a recurring problem: successful organisations venerate their culture, so that every part of it is assumed to be essential to their success until very painful experiences prove otherwise. Another example: Linux developers thinking that managing patches by email is the best approach ever, because Linux is dominant.
3y ago

lxe 3y ago

> Please understand: Google is not a person. It’s many groups of people following locally-varying processes, rules, and culture. To that end, it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google”; it’s not a consciousness, and it has no sense of duty nor debt. This isn't right. Behind every decision is still a human (for now). Someone messed up and you were the victim.

BeetleB 3y ago
> Someone messed up and you were the victim. That's a giant leap. How do you know his layoff was a "mess up"? He's not entitled to work there. No one is.

AlbertCory 3y ago

best of luck, Ben. I spent a few days visiting the Chicago office (when it was opposite Marina Towers), so maybe we met.

erehweb 3y ago

> Please understand: Google is not a person. Literally true. On the other hand, the founders still have complete voting control of the company, so really the buck stops with them.

tsunamifury 3y ago
How did this person work here for so long and not understand the function of googles special Executive Board — it’s literally three people that control the entire company. It’s absolutely a person — well 3 to be exact.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  But since about 2017 or so L&S just seemed completely absent. Maybe they're making the choices behind the scenes, that Sundar & Ruth are executing, but it feels like ... not really? Even the last few TGIFs where they properly attended they seemed very much spaced out of things.
  - gowld 3y ago
    The execs are merely the hired minds and hands. They only do what the capital owners want. If you keep a wild dog, you are still responsible for its behavior.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Well, yes, here I agree. I think that in the earlier days Google could remain insulated from that because the returns it was getting were so high, and Capital didn't know what to do with it, and didn't want to do anything to stop the goose from laying golden eggs. I think now we're seeing a concerted effort across the tech industry to instill labour discipline, and break the relative power that our profession has had. Started with Twitter, then MS, then Google, and it's not going to stop until they get our salaries down, and get these businesses operating like more traditional exploitative organizations where we are disposable "resources". The threat of "AI" is one tool among many to make that happen, along with layoffs, etc.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

_xlxy 3y ago

I wrote something questioning why Google employees should deserve wider news here But if you look at Googler posts here, it's pretty clear how bent out of place a lot of them are. All said, smart as they are, plenty less smart people leave jobs, so what's the news here? It was the same with Twitter. There's no special 'crying place' for other jobs and departures, so why here and now?

tickerticker 3y ago
Bc a lot of them read HN?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- _xlxy 3y ago
  Bc what sorry? I didn't realise HN was a big story about people's personal journeys, which the post is. I thought HN was about smart tech folk who like tech stories with something novel about the thing.
  - gniv 3y ago
    I think the comment you're replying to is quite literal. A lot of Googlers and ex-Googlers read this site and they are more likely to upvote these kinds of posts.
  - mhss 3y ago
    The news is Google layoffs and is interesting to many how the culture of such a large and influential tech company has changed. The person laid off is also a known OSS author (Subversion). If you don’t find it interesting you can just move on you know? Many others find these posts interesting and that’s enough according to HN guidelines.

iLoveOncall 3y ago

Very easy FAQ to write for a 55 years old someone who's been a director for close to 6 years and therefore earning more than a million a year for that period. It's another story for a newly hired L3 engineer. I'm lucky that not a single one of my friends has been affected by layoffs at my company, but I find apologism of bad executive management like this is incredibly bad taste if not outright insulting to people that are affected by layoffs.

hakdbha 3y ago

[dead]

blindriver 3y ago

Googles layoff are among the dumbest I’ve ever seen. Laying off randomly and not low performers is par for the course for the management of Google. High performers will leave when the market gets Better and the company will fill itself with more shitty performers. This is not how a top tier company behaves.

jldugger 3y ago
> Googles layoff are among the dumbest I’ve ever seen. Hasbro's latest round still tops this though.
free652 3y ago
>Laying off randomly and not low performers Low performers? By what metric? And your metric sucks, that's because a single metric is meaningless, even 10 metrics are useless. Did you do over 200 CLs a year? 10000 LoC? 10-20 design docs? 10 product launches? CL comments, reviews, bug fixed, filed? Sure you can identify outliers, but the baseline is not exactly very telling. In my other companies layoffs were always random.
- blindriver 3y ago
  Striving to cut low performers and sometimes getting it wrong is orders of magnitude better than randomly cutting people, gutting high performers, and ruining confidence to other high performers that working hard will be appreciated. So yes, it doesn't matter which metric you want to use, but use something that is directionally correct with being a low performer, and get rid of those people. You might get some wrong but for the most part, people will be happier that the coasters and stragglers are gone.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tickerticker 3y ago

Gotta ask....do you play the banjo?

aeturnum 3y ago

> This is unfair! After all you’ve done, how could Google do this to you? > Please understand: Google is not a person. It’s many groups of people following locally-varying processes, rules, and culture. To that end, it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google”; it’s not a consciousness, and it has no sense of duty nor debt. This is a such a strange view. You shouldn't be angry at google, because google is just people. No mention of being angry at the people, who maybe it would be unfair to blame for "google"s actions. Conveniently there's no appropriate subject (or object) to feel about. I think the shorthands he attacks, though they're literally untrue, are also really helpful metaphors. Large organizations have a character that no one person is responsible for and personifying them and assessing how we feel about their actions is a useful tool for reflection and assessment. Each member of those "groups of people" should reflect on how they as individuals (and their group) contributes to it. A company isn't "just" an aggregate of all people in it - but it is mostly that. You can't hurt a company's feelings (just the feelings of the people who work there) - but you can be upset at what it does to you and speak about that.

free652 3y ago

IMHO a lot of googlers (especially old timers) believe they were special, here is a news flash. You weren't, Google didn't come with a lot of products. And that's why where Google is right now.

SadCordDrone 3y ago
Found the non technical manager
lokar 3y ago
Where it is now? 300B revenue with 11% growth and 96B in earnings with 120B in cash. They are fine.
pb7 3y ago
A nearly $2T dollar company and growing? A more successful company than nearly all others in the history of humanity? Yeah, must be terrible for them.
throwaway2037 3y ago
They were and still are special. They fundamentally changed the web with a better search engine. Also, Android. Also, Chrome. Also, infra required to run YouTube... even if you don't like the end product, the infra is incredible (same for FaceMeta and Netflix).

sciencesama 3y ago

All yoir vested unvested stock can give that flexibility !

starchild3001 3y ago

Hey, current Googler here. I joined in 2017. For those who are looking from outside to those who reminisce past Google, I have an update for you: Google is still a f'ing amazing workplace. It's easily the best company I worked for in my 24 yrs of post-college career. Amazing colleagues. Incredible learning opportunity. Super fun projects. Really good pay. Your mileage may vary. This is my N=1 impression as an ML expert currently working on Ads. Best of luck!

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bigbuppo 3y ago
So you implement stalking technology, but it's okay because it's for ads?
- starchild3001 3y ago
  That's a gross mischaracterization. There's no stalking. It's your data kept in a server that no human eyes can see, and algorithmically matched with the best ads possible. That's the kind of ads I know, served respectfully, where user can choose to turn off their history, and stop this from happening. Opinions are mine. Not that of my employer.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tdb7893 3y ago
So I agree the pay is good but for me (and most of my friends it really wore me down over time) that place really wore me down over time. I was already planning on leaving but I was shocked at how happy I was to be laid off from there, people kept messaging me concerned and I needed to explain to them that I felt fantastic. I loved the office (I was also in the Chicago office, the best office at Google! Though it might lose that title without Ben Sussman to lead it) and my team was so amazing but the shifting priorities and reorgs really sapped my motivation, especially recently as cost cutting created more organizational churn. Objectively it's a good place to work, I always told Nooglers that this job in this particular location is one of the best jobs to have ever existed and I honestly think in many ways that's true. I think if you're pretty resilient to corporate bullshit (I thought I was but over time it got to me) or if you can get a good project I do sincerely recommend it as a place to work. On the other hand for me it is also true that it was slowly sapping my joy of engineering and leaving me with no motivation besides collecting a paycheck and that really sucked for a bit.

longtimegoogler 3y ago

Jesus. That was kind of tone deaf. Not everyone laid off is an Engineering Director who has worked at Google for 18 years. That guy probably could have retired years ago. There are many who were laid off for whom that isn't true.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

encyclic 3y ago

Having toiled in the Google mines for almost as long a tenure as Ben before my time came in 2021, the words 'The conflict between “uncomfortable culture” and “golden handcuffs” was becoming intolerable.' could not ring any truer.

devwastaken 3y ago

>Please understand: Google is not a person. In both law and culture Google is infact a person in such that they inherit the rights of a person.