5 ms·

Google's once happy offices feel the chill of layoffs

74 points by reaperducer 3y ago

jpm_sd 3y ago
Xoogler here, left in 2015. I don't think Google's offices have been "happy" or "exuberant" for a long time. The big cultural shift was already underway when I left.
- asah 3y ago
  Xoogler as well - arguably, you could see this coming in the late 2000s. but also: it depends a LOT on which division/group you're in and especially who your manager is - I know a lot of happy googlers who continue to knock-out kickass stuff.
  - francisofascii 3y ago
    > it depends a LOT on which division/group you're in Yep, that seems to be the takeaway message and applies to any large organization you find yourself in. Applies to not just companies, but country locations and city locations.
  - iainmerrick 3y ago
    I was thinking about this when reading John Calhoun's post about Tom Dowdy, which has been doing the rounds recently (probably via Daring Fireball): https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/dowdy/dowdy.html https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/dowdy/dowdy.html This was the 2nd half of the 90's and Apple was at that point in its history when it was circlng the drain. It was another lesson that would be reinforced over and over in my three-decade career as a programmer: if you work very long in this field, know that everything will eventually change. It was the supposed "dark times" to be at Apple: whole teams would be suddenly let go (the rest of us that lingered still might go through the abandoned offices of once co-workers looking to pull RAM out of their hardware for our own development machines). Some engineers like Tom, could see the writing on the wall early enough and knew when to switch teams. Tom ended up moving to the QuickTime team where he was able to continue to use his graphics talents. Later he worked on the iTunes visualizer if I recall correctly. It's possible to join a company at a bad time and still have a good experience there. (I don't know if everyone is aware how bad things got for Apple back then. IIRC they tried to sell the company to Sony, but Sony turned them down. They only survived due to investment from arch-nemesis Microsoft.)
    - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 3y ago
      I ran the strings command on the iTunes application once. Inside the app somewhere were the words "We miss you, Tom."
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    I think it's really the new open layouts where you might not even sit with your team members. It's definitely a different experience being in a row of desks with a lot of random people versus being in a cube-farm with your team.
- hiddencost 3y ago
  Yeah :| my problem right now is that I haven't been outside in a very long time, am paid incredibly well, and really have hyper specialized in getting stuff done at Google. The things I've done I can only really explain well to googlers. So it's been quite challenging finding a role outside that pays me as well.
  - jpm_sd 3y ago
    <Woody Harrelson wiping tears with money.gif>
cpursley 3y ago
It was pretty clear that Google was in trouble after trying Bard.
anotherhue 3y ago
Thoughts and prayers and all that but honestly this is for the best. As an economy we can finally reassign the massive investment of talent into something other than advertising. And maybe we can be honest with ourselves that Wall Street always wins in the long run.
- BoxFour 3y ago
  Be careful what you wish for: Many of those highly talented individuals will likely end up channeling their skills into areas that one could view as equally negative societally, such as hedge funds or defense contracting (like Palantir). This isn't to justify the current state of advertising, but rather to express skepticism that dismantling an industry will lead talented individuals to willingly accept a significant reduction in their salary to go work on unlucrative-but-exciting frontiers.
  - Sirizarry 3y ago
    Programmers in my experience are some of the least risky people I know. The majority will absolutely take their talents to the next highest bidder regardless of moral or ethical scruples. I don’t blame em, personally, I also see it as the only logical outcome
    - arielweisberg 3y ago
      In a country with not much of a social safety net and runaway medical/elder care costs is there really another option? You need to sock away massive amounts of money as quickly as possible if you want to reduce tail risk and as a side bonus you might get to reach financial freedom earlier. My choices would be very different if I didn't think I was more or less on my own.
      - lapcat 3y ago
        > In a country with not much of a social safety net and runaway medical/elder care costs is there really another option? Yes, there is really another option, because most people don't even have the option of taking Google-level compensation. Indeed, it's very likely that working as a software engineer for less than BigCo compensation will still put you ahead financially of most people. "How is it an option to live like 99% of the people actually do live?" seems like a very strange idea to me.
Jgrubb 3y ago
https://archive.is/McQTl https://archive.is/McQTl
- flanbiscuit 3y ago
  My company started blocking archive.is but web.archive.org still works for me https://web.archive.org/web/20240205135109/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/technology/google-layoffs-work-culture.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240205135109/https://www.nytim...
bfrog 3y ago
Google has been in a decaying orbit for awhile. Plus was dead on arrival. They don’t seem to even be able to steward their money making endeavors that well. Ads are a black hole of money, money goes in and it’s unclear what you get out.
willj 3y ago
Where are the happy offices these days? Which companies are the new “Google” who people are very eager to work for?
- BossingAround 3y ago
  It's a depressing era with post-covid sugar crash, new wars, getting over inflation, job market being in the trash, etc. etc. I'd argue there are no "happy offices" as a whole, and won't be for another ~10 years until everything settles and we're on an upwards trajectory (and sugar rush) again.
  - jplusequalt 3y ago
    Why we as a society put up with this yoyo-ing economic model will never make sense to me. Nobody likes recessions, or layoffs, yet we're all complicit with them.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      Everyone likes bubbles and hiring sprees though. If people didn't apply for jobs during hiring sprees these bubbles wouldn't happen either.
    - fullshark 3y ago
      Economic shocks are simply unavoidable. Supposedly the goal is to avoid the yo-yo effect of them, e.g. try to control the rate of inflation and unemployment so it doesn't feel so chaotic. The COVID shutdown and money print to deal with it kind of worked on that front if you consider just how disruptive it all was and how people are still going about their lives, contributing to GDP.
      - Jensson 3y ago
        The covid money injection caused this bubble though, these companies hired like crazy during that time and now did layoffs to a more normal level. It might have been a necessary stimulus for other sectors, but the tech sector really didn't need it so there it just caused a bubble.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
All this stuff listed: Google News, Voice Assistant, Street View in maps like at best it's thing that were once great but are weirdly worse than they were years ago or things you're questioning if it even still existed. End of the day the time for Google pushing things forward are is long over and only huge reshuffles, restructures and firings will give it a chance of still being relevant at all 10 years from now. I mean that top to bottom, Sundar is a joke and just a Ballmer style numbers guy with no vision. Google's AI teams need to start being forced to work towards products that ship and make money not just work towards papers under their names. Rest of the products sometimes the less done the better look how badly Search, Image Search and Maps have regressed since launch. Image search is now inferior to Yandex, Maps can't even find a store you type the name of when zoomed in on the street it's on, instead it zooms out and shows you a different store across town. YouTube is fighting ad blockers when it should be building to fight the inevitable TikTok long-form attack that will be it's Facebook moment. Only thing I can say still works pretty well is probably Docs and Android in the sense that it's the only option for building devices above a certain complexity on.
- perardi 3y ago
  Google News has been going bad for a long time. But that’s probably not entirely on Google. The news business has been going bad for a long time, and has gotten even worse in the past year as a lot of legacy news organizations completely fold, or operate on an absolute skeleton crew. The meaningful content is behind paywalls. (Yes, I know, that’s a broad generalization, but between the NYTimes, the Economist, WSJ…that’s a lot of paywalled content.) Voice Assistant is a somewhat surprise flop. For a while there, voice assistants were The Big Thing that you had to have. Maybe they saw the metrics and realized everybody eventually gave up in frustration once you realized that outside of setting timers, the interaction model doesn’t scale well.
game_the0ry 3y ago
Wondering if anyone can confirm this, but.... I saw somewhere that part of the problem at google is how their mono repo code base is so cumbersome that they are more likely and willing to kill services just because of the maintenance overhead of maintaining the code. Any insight from Xooglers? I feel like I read this somewhere on here or reddit, but can't recall the specifics.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Am Googler. I do a lot of work on google3 code health and maintenance. I do not think that this is the primary cause of product turndowns. Messy product design, left-hand/right-hand problems, internal politics, unfunded regulatory mandates, and other organizational complexity seem like much more direct causes. People like to add promotion-focus to this list but I don't actually buy that since there are tons of Googlers who are happy at their current level and want to maintain stuff even we if take it as a given that maintenance can't get people promoted. VPs showing up and changing org priorities so that various products no longer match the priorities and then get their funding cut is way more common. I do think that there is something to the fact that the monorepo and single-version rule means that sometimes a team says "we are changing how you do X with our system, everybody needs to update by Date Y" and then the bulk of teams upgrade but there's some project with a skeleton crew doing maintenance and it is not possible to fund the upgrade and so the entire project gets deleted instead. However, I also think that the monorepo is a superpower. What I describe above is a problem but there are so many incredible benefits (under the assumption that you've got tooling as good as Google's) that I feel that the benefits dramatically outweigh the costs. Comparing the code quality of the stuff in google3 vs the stuff in various isolated git repos is night and day.
  - game_the0ry 3y ago
    > I do think that there is something to the fact that the monorepo and single-version rule means that sometimes a team says "we are changing how you do X with our system, everybody needs to update by Date Y" and then the bulk of teams upgrade but there's some project with a skeleton crew doing maintenance and it is not possible to fund the upgrade and so the entire project gets deleted instead Yeah that sounds familiar and sort of makes sense.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
AbstractAirways 3y ago
> "From an H.R. standpoint, this is a nightmare... It completely reverses their image as a desirable employer." Good. I mentor early career and nontraditional-background engineers, and among this set, Google has acquired a certain reputation. To paraphrase, if you can just pass the interview bar, you'll find yourself in an organization where the pay is amazing, the oversight is minimal, the visa/greencard policy is generous, and the HR processes rarely fire anyone. I routinely got to see people who I would never want to work with get hired there. If Google becomes less of a target for barely-qualified people who want to rest and vest, I'm all for it.
- gambiting 3y ago
  >> I routinely got to see people who I would never want to work with get hired there. Can you expland on this? It doesn't really mesh with the preview sentence for me. >>If Google becomes less of a target for barely-qualified people who want to rest and vest It's always been my impression that people who actually manage to get a job at Google are extremely competent(so by definition - qualified) - is that not true?
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Or able to spend six months studying for coding interviews…
    - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
      If you mean to actually learn to code for a job that obviously requires coding skills... While we are at it, also spend another year learning technology and design patterns to prep for a design interview. Listen, nobody gets a job at Google because they studied for coding interview. Coding is a precondition of getting the job, but it is far from enough to secure it.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        There is a huge difference between “learning how to code” and “learning how to pass coding interviews”. What you actually do at any job - BigTech or not - is completely different from what you learn “grinding leetCode”. If there is more of a prerequisite than “learning how to pass coding interviews” to get into Google, how do juniors with no real world experience get in?
laidoffamazon 3y ago
I don't recall a similar story when Amazon went through their first major layoffs in 2022 (which heavily hit their office on the same street as the Google Cambridge office mentioned in the first sentence), but I do recall stories about Google's layoffs including glossy photos of ex-Googlers and members of the Alphabet Workers Union. None when my current company did layoffs last year. At what point do non-Googlers matter enough to get a New York Times article?
- verteu 3y ago
  I'd guess it's because Amazon doesn't have a reputation as a happy place to work.
  - laidoffamazon 3y ago
    Perhaps, but neither does Facebook and I’ve seen reporting about their layoffs that’s similar. I think it’s because Amazon engineers are seen as lesser/lower class. The people that write for the NYT know their classmates from Yale and Penn that work in non tech and tech roles at Google, but they don’t know any UTenn grads that work at Amazon as SDE3s. Thus, they’re seen as people that don’t matter.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      Facebook copies Googles culture, except the hard to fire part. Facebook do fire people much more than Google does, so there everyone already lived under fear of getting fired. At Google very few feared getting fired, I remember the big outcry because a guy was fired after having stayed for 10 years at a level where Google expected him to get promoted, so it took a decade of being far below mediocre to get fired, not something to worry about for most people since most people will get promoted to the expected levels or leave on their own long before they would get fired. But after that outcry they did reduce the expected level to where basically nobody would get fired unless they were absolutely incompetent, so there really never were any significant amount of people getting fired for being mediocre.
maxehmookau 3y ago
I spend a lot of time mentoring coding bootcampers and the number who's "dream" it is to work for Google has decreased _significantly_ in the last few years.
1a_user 3y ago
[dead]
JohnnyD10 3y ago
I have worked for a company similar in size to Google for a long time. During covid I experienced the highest high of my 18 years here. Flexibility was suddenly rampant (it was forced, but still) in a company that had been stodgy and inflexible since its founding. They began hiring just like Google and every other company did, so jobs were plentiful. This had a 'rising tide' effect on everyone (I got a promotion without asking for it, which is basically unheard of). Suddenly, I was able to define my work pretty much universally, and I was appreciated for doing do. It created an environment where I and my colleagues all wanted to contribute more than ever before. We put in tons of extra hours, many even unpaid. Side note: it was RTO mandates that killed this. But I digress. It made me wonder: is this fun, experimenting, creative, flexible environment one that pops up in general when all companies first form and the business realities of non-unlimited funding haven't caught up with the leadership yet? Is it something that hits all companies for a while when the economy is on an upward trend (as I attested to in my own company)? Have people found pockets of this kind of environment, even in the worst of times? I'm trying to figure out when and where it exists so I can find it again. I'd never experienced it until covid, and now that I have, I want it back, and for the first time, I'm willing to do something major to get it because I know now what it feels like. It feels like Star Trek Generations, where that guy is trying to do whatever he can to get back on the nexus (except I'm not trying to destroy a planet).
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  The Nexus comparison is interesting since Picard chose to leave it because he knew it wasn't real and convinced Kirk of the same.
- rocky1138 3y ago
  Your story reminds me a bit of what the working environment of Atari was like according to those who were there during it's heyday.
- nradov 3y ago
  When an organization is growing there's enough cake for everyone. It's a positive environment which naturally encourages collaboration. But mathematically speaking, no organization can grow forever. Eventually they reach a stable size or even shrink. At that point it becomes a zero-sum game and the only way to advance your career is at the expense of your colleagues, so you have to shift focus towards politics and managing upwards. If you find yourself in such an environment then unless you've been given the nod from senior leaders as someone on the fast track, you should start looking around for a new job. Realistically the situation is unlikely to improve. Some static size organizations such as militaries or professional partnerships try to escape this trap with an "up or out" policy that systematically terminates the lowest performers at each level every year in order to open up more opportunities for promotion. This works to an extent, but causes other dysfunctions and probably wouldn't work in most tech companies.
javier_e06 3y ago
Maybe the new coveted jobs will the wants where you don't have to bow to people that make x amount your salary because they are our your admired your so-called leaders. (grumpy in the morning)
dekhn 3y ago
They should just shutter Google News. The product quality is abysmal. I get shown articles about astrology because I have shown an interest in astronomy. I often see recommended articles about the "Bay Area" which turns out to be the Chesapeake (or any number of other) Bay Area. It's clear whoever is working on recommendation quality has been asleep at the switch (or fired, or working to make money for crappy clickbait news sites like iflscience). I'd like to see Sundar gone too but I don't know who they could find to replace him.
- infotainment 3y ago
  > I'd like to see Sundar gone too but I don't know who they could find to replace him. I think a piece of slowly rotting cheese could probably do a better job. You could use the mold growth as a random seed for making decisions, and you’d have about the same hit rate as Sundar.
belter 3y ago
https://archive.is/oRFic https://archive.is/oRFic
belter 3y ago
Comments from an employee mentioned in the article: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dhtheriault_my-hot-take-google-does-not-have-one-single-activity-7153269568893775872-9xzp https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dhtheriault_my-hot-take-googl...
- alecco 3y ago
  From that thread, a related post from last year: Reflecting on 18 years at Google (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38381573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38381573 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1

74 points by reaperducer 3y ago

Xoogler here, left in 2015. I don't think Google's offices have been "happy" or "exuberant" for a long time. The big cultural shift was already underway when I left.

asah 3y ago
Xoogler as well - arguably, you could see this coming in the late 2000s. but also: it depends a LOT on which division/group you're in and especially who your manager is - I know a lot of happy googlers who continue to knock-out kickass stuff.
- francisofascii 3y ago
  > it depends a LOT on which division/group you're in Yep, that seems to be the takeaway message and applies to any large organization you find yourself in. Applies to not just companies, but country locations and city locations.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  I was thinking about this when reading John Calhoun's post about Tom Dowdy, which has been doing the rounds recently (probably via Daring Fireball): https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/dowdy/dowdy.html https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/dowdy/dowdy.html This was the 2nd half of the 90's and Apple was at that point in its history when it was circlng the drain. It was another lesson that would be reinforced over and over in my three-decade career as a programmer: if you work very long in this field, know that everything will eventually change. It was the supposed "dark times" to be at Apple: whole teams would be suddenly let go (the rest of us that lingered still might go through the abandoned offices of once co-workers looking to pull RAM out of their hardware for our own development machines). Some engineers like Tom, could see the writing on the wall early enough and knew when to switch teams. Tom ended up moving to the QuickTime team where he was able to continue to use his graphics talents. Later he worked on the iTunes visualizer if I recall correctly. It's possible to join a company at a bad time and still have a good experience there. (I don't know if everyone is aware how bad things got for Apple back then. IIRC they tried to sell the company to Sony, but Sony turned them down. They only survived due to investment from arch-nemesis Microsoft.)
  - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 3y ago
    I ran the strings command on the iTunes application once. Inside the app somewhere were the words "We miss you, Tom."
- lesuorac 3y ago
  I think it's really the new open layouts where you might not even sit with your team members. It's definitely a different experience being in a row of desks with a lot of random people versus being in a cube-farm with your team.
hiddencost 3y ago
Yeah :| my problem right now is that I haven't been outside in a very long time, am paid incredibly well, and really have hyper specialized in getting stuff done at Google. The things I've done I can only really explain well to googlers. So it's been quite challenging finding a role outside that pays me as well.
- jpm_sd 3y ago
  <Woody Harrelson wiping tears with money.gif>

cpursley 3y ago

It was pretty clear that Google was in trouble after trying Bard.

anotherhue 3y ago

Thoughts and prayers and all that but honestly this is for the best. As an economy we can finally reassign the massive investment of talent into something other than advertising. And maybe we can be honest with ourselves that Wall Street always wins in the long run.

BoxFour 3y ago
Be careful what you wish for: Many of those highly talented individuals will likely end up channeling their skills into areas that one could view as equally negative societally, such as hedge funds or defense contracting (like Palantir). This isn't to justify the current state of advertising, but rather to express skepticism that dismantling an industry will lead talented individuals to willingly accept a significant reduction in their salary to go work on unlucrative-but-exciting frontiers.
- Sirizarry 3y ago
  Programmers in my experience are some of the least risky people I know. The majority will absolutely take their talents to the next highest bidder regardless of moral or ethical scruples. I don’t blame em, personally, I also see it as the only logical outcome
  - arielweisberg 3y ago
    In a country with not much of a social safety net and runaway medical/elder care costs is there really another option? You need to sock away massive amounts of money as quickly as possible if you want to reduce tail risk and as a side bonus you might get to reach financial freedom earlier. My choices would be very different if I didn't think I was more or less on my own.
    - lapcat 3y ago
      > In a country with not much of a social safety net and runaway medical/elder care costs is there really another option? Yes, there is really another option, because most people don't even have the option of taking Google-level compensation. Indeed, it's very likely that working as a software engineer for less than BigCo compensation will still put you ahead financially of most people. "How is it an option to live like 99% of the people actually do live?" seems like a very strange idea to me.

Jgrubb 3y ago

https://archive.is/McQTl https://archive.is/McQTl

flanbiscuit 3y ago
My company started blocking archive.is but web.archive.org still works for me https://web.archive.org/web/20240205135109/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/technology/google-layoffs-work-culture.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240205135109/https://www.nytim...

bfrog 3y ago

Google has been in a decaying orbit for awhile. Plus was dead on arrival. They don’t seem to even be able to steward their money making endeavors that well. Ads are a black hole of money, money goes in and it’s unclear what you get out.

willj 3y ago

Where are the happy offices these days? Which companies are the new “Google” who people are very eager to work for?

BossingAround 3y ago
It's a depressing era with post-covid sugar crash, new wars, getting over inflation, job market being in the trash, etc. etc. I'd argue there are no "happy offices" as a whole, and won't be for another ~10 years until everything settles and we're on an upwards trajectory (and sugar rush) again.
- jplusequalt 3y ago
  Why we as a society put up with this yoyo-ing economic model will never make sense to me. Nobody likes recessions, or layoffs, yet we're all complicit with them.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Everyone likes bubbles and hiring sprees though. If people didn't apply for jobs during hiring sprees these bubbles wouldn't happen either.
  - fullshark 3y ago
    Economic shocks are simply unavoidable. Supposedly the goal is to avoid the yo-yo effect of them, e.g. try to control the rate of inflation and unemployment so it doesn't feel so chaotic. The COVID shutdown and money print to deal with it kind of worked on that front if you consider just how disruptive it all was and how people are still going about their lives, contributing to GDP.
    - Jensson 3y ago
      The covid money injection caused this bubble though, these companies hired like crazy during that time and now did layoffs to a more normal level. It might have been a necessary stimulus for other sectors, but the tech sector really didn't need it so there it just caused a bubble.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

All this stuff listed: Google News, Voice Assistant, Street View in maps like at best it's thing that were once great but are weirdly worse than they were years ago or things you're questioning if it even still existed. End of the day the time for Google pushing things forward are is long over and only huge reshuffles, restructures and firings will give it a chance of still being relevant at all 10 years from now. I mean that top to bottom, Sundar is a joke and just a Ballmer style numbers guy with no vision. Google's AI teams need to start being forced to work towards products that ship and make money not just work towards papers under their names. Rest of the products sometimes the less done the better look how badly Search, Image Search and Maps have regressed since launch. Image search is now inferior to Yandex, Maps can't even find a store you type the name of when zoomed in on the street it's on, instead it zooms out and shows you a different store across town. YouTube is fighting ad blockers when it should be building to fight the inevitable TikTok long-form attack that will be it's Facebook moment. Only thing I can say still works pretty well is probably Docs and Android in the sense that it's the only option for building devices above a certain complexity on.

perardi 3y ago
Google News has been going bad for a long time. But that’s probably not entirely on Google. The news business has been going bad for a long time, and has gotten even worse in the past year as a lot of legacy news organizations completely fold, or operate on an absolute skeleton crew. The meaningful content is behind paywalls. (Yes, I know, that’s a broad generalization, but between the NYTimes, the Economist, WSJ…that’s a lot of paywalled content.) Voice Assistant is a somewhat surprise flop. For a while there, voice assistants were The Big Thing that you had to have. Maybe they saw the metrics and realized everybody eventually gave up in frustration once you realized that outside of setting timers, the interaction model doesn’t scale well.

game_the0ry 3y ago

Wondering if anyone can confirm this, but.... I saw somewhere that part of the problem at google is how their mono repo code base is so cumbersome that they are more likely and willing to kill services just because of the maintenance overhead of maintaining the code. Any insight from Xooglers? I feel like I read this somewhere on here or reddit, but can't recall the specifics.

UncleMeat 3y ago
Am Googler. I do a lot of work on google3 code health and maintenance. I do not think that this is the primary cause of product turndowns. Messy product design, left-hand/right-hand problems, internal politics, unfunded regulatory mandates, and other organizational complexity seem like much more direct causes. People like to add promotion-focus to this list but I don't actually buy that since there are tons of Googlers who are happy at their current level and want to maintain stuff even we if take it as a given that maintenance can't get people promoted. VPs showing up and changing org priorities so that various products no longer match the priorities and then get their funding cut is way more common. I do think that there is something to the fact that the monorepo and single-version rule means that sometimes a team says "we are changing how you do X with our system, everybody needs to update by Date Y" and then the bulk of teams upgrade but there's some project with a skeleton crew doing maintenance and it is not possible to fund the upgrade and so the entire project gets deleted instead. However, I also think that the monorepo is a superpower. What I describe above is a problem but there are so many incredible benefits (under the assumption that you've got tooling as good as Google's) that I feel that the benefits dramatically outweigh the costs. Comparing the code quality of the stuff in google3 vs the stuff in various isolated git repos is night and day.
- game_the0ry 3y ago
  > I do think that there is something to the fact that the monorepo and single-version rule means that sometimes a team says "we are changing how you do X with our system, everybody needs to update by Date Y" and then the bulk of teams upgrade but there's some project with a skeleton crew doing maintenance and it is not possible to fund the upgrade and so the entire project gets deleted instead Yeah that sounds familiar and sort of makes sense.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

AbstractAirways 3y ago

> "From an H.R. standpoint, this is a nightmare... It completely reverses their image as a desirable employer." Good. I mentor early career and nontraditional-background engineers, and among this set, Google has acquired a certain reputation. To paraphrase, if you can just pass the interview bar, you'll find yourself in an organization where the pay is amazing, the oversight is minimal, the visa/greencard policy is generous, and the HR processes rarely fire anyone. I routinely got to see people who I would never want to work with get hired there. If Google becomes less of a target for barely-qualified people who want to rest and vest, I'm all for it.

gambiting 3y ago
>> I routinely got to see people who I would never want to work with get hired there. Can you expland on this? It doesn't really mesh with the preview sentence for me. >>If Google becomes less of a target for barely-qualified people who want to rest and vest It's always been my impression that people who actually manage to get a job at Google are extremely competent(so by definition - qualified) - is that not true?
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Or able to spend six months studying for coding interviews…
  - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
    If you mean to actually learn to code for a job that obviously requires coding skills... While we are at it, also spend another year learning technology and design patterns to prep for a design interview. Listen, nobody gets a job at Google because they studied for coding interview. Coding is a precondition of getting the job, but it is far from enough to secure it.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      There is a huge difference between “learning how to code” and “learning how to pass coding interviews”. What you actually do at any job - BigTech or not - is completely different from what you learn “grinding leetCode”. If there is more of a prerequisite than “learning how to pass coding interviews” to get into Google, how do juniors with no real world experience get in?

laidoffamazon 3y ago

I don't recall a similar story when Amazon went through their first major layoffs in 2022 (which heavily hit their office on the same street as the Google Cambridge office mentioned in the first sentence), but I do recall stories about Google's layoffs including glossy photos of ex-Googlers and members of the Alphabet Workers Union. None when my current company did layoffs last year. At what point do non-Googlers matter enough to get a New York Times article?

verteu 3y ago
I'd guess it's because Amazon doesn't have a reputation as a happy place to work.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  Perhaps, but neither does Facebook and I’ve seen reporting about their layoffs that’s similar. I think it’s because Amazon engineers are seen as lesser/lower class. The people that write for the NYT know their classmates from Yale and Penn that work in non tech and tech roles at Google, but they don’t know any UTenn grads that work at Amazon as SDE3s. Thus, they’re seen as people that don’t matter.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Facebook copies Googles culture, except the hard to fire part. Facebook do fire people much more than Google does, so there everyone already lived under fear of getting fired. At Google very few feared getting fired, I remember the big outcry because a guy was fired after having stayed for 10 years at a level where Google expected him to get promoted, so it took a decade of being far below mediocre to get fired, not something to worry about for most people since most people will get promoted to the expected levels or leave on their own long before they would get fired. But after that outcry they did reduce the expected level to where basically nobody would get fired unless they were absolutely incompetent, so there really never were any significant amount of people getting fired for being mediocre.

maxehmookau 3y ago

I spend a lot of time mentoring coding bootcampers and the number who's "dream" it is to work for Google has decreased _significantly_ in the last few years.

1a_user 3y ago

[dead]

JohnnyD10 3y ago

I have worked for a company similar in size to Google for a long time. During covid I experienced the highest high of my 18 years here. Flexibility was suddenly rampant (it was forced, but still) in a company that had been stodgy and inflexible since its founding. They began hiring just like Google and every other company did, so jobs were plentiful. This had a 'rising tide' effect on everyone (I got a promotion without asking for it, which is basically unheard of). Suddenly, I was able to define my work pretty much universally, and I was appreciated for doing do. It created an environment where I and my colleagues all wanted to contribute more than ever before. We put in tons of extra hours, many even unpaid. Side note: it was RTO mandates that killed this. But I digress. It made me wonder: is this fun, experimenting, creative, flexible environment one that pops up in general when all companies first form and the business realities of non-unlimited funding haven't caught up with the leadership yet? Is it something that hits all companies for a while when the economy is on an upward trend (as I attested to in my own company)? Have people found pockets of this kind of environment, even in the worst of times? I'm trying to figure out when and where it exists so I can find it again. I'd never experienced it until covid, and now that I have, I want it back, and for the first time, I'm willing to do something major to get it because I know now what it feels like. It feels like Star Trek Generations, where that guy is trying to do whatever he can to get back on the nexus (except I'm not trying to destroy a planet).

hotpotamus 3y ago
The Nexus comparison is interesting since Picard chose to leave it because he knew it wasn't real and convinced Kirk of the same.
rocky1138 3y ago
Your story reminds me a bit of what the working environment of Atari was like according to those who were there during it's heyday.
nradov 3y ago
When an organization is growing there's enough cake for everyone. It's a positive environment which naturally encourages collaboration. But mathematically speaking, no organization can grow forever. Eventually they reach a stable size or even shrink. At that point it becomes a zero-sum game and the only way to advance your career is at the expense of your colleagues, so you have to shift focus towards politics and managing upwards. If you find yourself in such an environment then unless you've been given the nod from senior leaders as someone on the fast track, you should start looking around for a new job. Realistically the situation is unlikely to improve. Some static size organizations such as militaries or professional partnerships try to escape this trap with an "up or out" policy that systematically terminates the lowest performers at each level every year in order to open up more opportunities for promotion. This works to an extent, but causes other dysfunctions and probably wouldn't work in most tech companies.

javier_e06 3y ago

Maybe the new coveted jobs will the wants where you don't have to bow to people that make x amount your salary because they are our your admired your so-called leaders. (grumpy in the morning)

dekhn 3y ago

They should just shutter Google News. The product quality is abysmal. I get shown articles about astrology because I have shown an interest in astronomy. I often see recommended articles about the "Bay Area" which turns out to be the Chesapeake (or any number of other) Bay Area. It's clear whoever is working on recommendation quality has been asleep at the switch (or fired, or working to make money for crappy clickbait news sites like iflscience). I'd like to see Sundar gone too but I don't know who they could find to replace him.

infotainment 3y ago
> I'd like to see Sundar gone too but I don't know who they could find to replace him. I think a piece of slowly rotting cheese could probably do a better job. You could use the mold growth as a random seed for making decisions, and you’d have about the same hit rate as Sundar.

belter 3y ago

https://archive.is/oRFic https://archive.is/oRFic

belter 3y ago

Comments from an employee mentioned in the article: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dhtheriault_my-hot-take-google-does-not-have-one-single-activity-7153269568893775872-9xzp https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dhtheriault_my-hot-take-googl...

alecco 3y ago
From that thread, a related post from last year: Reflecting on 18 years at Google (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38381573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38381573 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1 https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1