5 ms·

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

by ggambetta 3y ago

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.........
      - swozey 3y ago
        That's really thorough and unfortunate. I hadn't heard about all of that. I had a committee interview there maybe 8 years ago and already that was such an impersonal feeling that I really disliked my experience and didn't continue, not that they'd have hired me in the end. I had 2 referrals for the team I wanted to join and I thought I'd be interviewing with that teams members who knew me from various foss projects or at least knew of the projects. When I heard it was by committee my anxiety went through the roof. I hope things improve for everyone.
        dmoy 3y ago
        It's more like two committees in fact. There's the not-quite-randomly-selected people who interview you, and write feedback. Then there's the completely separate set of people on the hiring committee who make a decision reading the feedback and other stuff (referrals, resume, etc). The latter group doesn't talk to the former group though, just the written feedback.
        jeffbee 3y ago
        It's not clear that hiring people you know directly into your team is even a good idea. I liked the Google interview system, and since leaving I have only seen worse ones.
        swozey 3y ago
        You like the possibility of someone being placed onto your team without anyone who is part of that team having interviewed them? Maybe that does happen at some point, I forget. Long time. If it doesn't.. I think I would absolutely hate that. I don't interview people I know personally or refer or know from projects but I absolutely want 2-3 from my team to be speak to them and us do the technical tests. But I'm an SRE and not a SWE and there are a lot fewer operation/platform people compared to the 6-10 dev teams of 6-12 people doing various languages one sre team supports so there are usually plenty of SWE specific people to bring on committees. My team is 6 who support 80 SWEs so there are just a lot fewer proficient IAC writers on staff.
    - CydeWeys 3y ago
      My experience with RTO at Google is that the long-term Googlers are the ones who really love the old office experience and bemoan the loss of it since the pandemic, whereas it's the newer people that complain about having to come in and try to get away with doing it as little as possible. He didn't mention coming to the office as a complaint of his so I don't think it is one.
      - andromeduck 3y ago
        My experience has been the opposite - older googlers want to work from Tahoe/Vagas. Younger googlers want to meet other googlerrs or just travel and work a few months s year.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hiddencost 3y ago
  Imagine being paid $1-$2m a year but not liking the how the culture of a company you'd been at for decades was changing. Would you quit? When?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - willsmith72 3y ago
    I only need 100k/year post-tax to be happy. If I can take 4% out per year, that's 2.5m total I need. So give me ~4 years to make that up after tax with some buffer, and then it's a matter of time. If i still enjoy the time spent working, stay. If not, leave.
    - dmoy 3y ago
      Pedantic notes: 1. The 4% number comes from the Trinity study, which found that 95% of the time you have >$0 after 30 years. If you're >30 years from death now, a more appropriate benchmark might be 3% or possibly 3.5%. 2. $100k/yr post tax is more than $100k/yr pretax, even if it's mostly long term capital gains and dividend taxes. 3. Health insurance $$$. So the number for you is probably a little higher maybe $5m to switch to 3% and add an additional $50k for tax and health insurance costs. But yea the general point stands. Someone working as a director probably pulling >$1m/yr, with a long tenure, almost definitely has way over that amount. (I wouldn't be surprised if it was $20m+)
      - kfichter 3y ago
        Don't forget inflation!
        dmoy 3y ago
        iirc all of those already account for inflation
  - anticorporate 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.........
    - swozey 3y ago
      That's really thorough and unfortunate. I hadn't heard about all of that. I had a committee interview there maybe 8 years ago and already that was such an impersonal feeling that I really disliked my experience and didn't continue, not that they'd have hired me in the end. I had 2 referrals for the team I wanted to join and I thought I'd be interviewing with that teams members who knew me from various foss projects or at least knew of the projects. When I heard it was by committee my anxiety went through the roof. I hope things improve for everyone.
      - dmoy 3y ago
        It's more like two committees in fact. There's the not-quite-randomly-selected people who interview you, and write feedback. Then there's the completely separate set of people on the hiring committee who make a decision reading the feedback and other stuff (referrals, resume, etc). The latter group doesn't talk to the former group though, just the written feedback.
        jeffbee 3y ago
        It's not clear that hiring people you know directly into your team is even a good idea. I liked the Google interview system, and since leaving I have only seen worse ones.
        swozey 3y ago
        You like the possibility of someone being placed onto your team without anyone who is part of that team having interviewed them? Maybe that does happen at some point, I forget. Long time. If it doesn't.. I think I would absolutely hate that. I don't interview people I know personally or refer or know from projects but I absolutely want 2-3 from my team to be speak to them and us do the technical tests. But I'm an SRE and not a SWE and there are a lot fewer operation/platform people compared to the 6-10 dev teams of 6-12 people doing various languages one sre team supports so there are usually plenty of SWE specific people to bring on committees. My team is 6 who support 80 SWEs so there are just a lot fewer proficient IAC writers on staff.
  - CydeWeys 3y ago
    My experience with RTO at Google is that the long-term Googlers are the ones who really love the old office experience and bemoan the loss of it since the pandemic, whereas it's the newer people that complain about having to come in and try to get away with doing it as little as possible. He didn't mention coming to the office as a complaint of his so I don't think it is one.
    - andromeduck 3y ago
      My experience has been the opposite - older googlers want to work from Tahoe/Vagas. Younger googlers want to meet other googlerrs or just travel and work a few months s year.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hiddencost 3y ago
Imagine being paid $1-$2m a year but not liking the how the culture of a company you'd been at for decades was changing. Would you quit? When?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- willsmith72 3y ago
  I only need 100k/year post-tax to be happy. If I can take 4% out per year, that's 2.5m total I need. So give me ~4 years to make that up after tax with some buffer, and then it's a matter of time. If i still enjoy the time spent working, stay. If not, leave.
  - dmoy 3y ago
    Pedantic notes: 1. The 4% number comes from the Trinity study, which found that 95% of the time you have >$0 after 30 years. If you're >30 years from death now, a more appropriate benchmark might be 3% or possibly 3.5%. 2. $100k/yr post tax is more than $100k/yr pretax, even if it's mostly long term capital gains and dividend taxes. 3. Health insurance $$$. So the number for you is probably a little higher maybe $5m to switch to 3% and add an additional $50k for tax and health insurance costs. But yea the general point stands. Someone working as a director probably pulling >$1m/yr, with a long tenure, almost definitely has way over that amount. (I wouldn't be surprised if it was $20m+)
    - kfichter 3y ago
      Don't forget inflation!
      - dmoy 3y ago
        iirc all of those already account for inflation
- anticorporate 3y ago