5 ms·

All these things make me envious of people who get to work at Google or any other FAANG company, where they are both paid well and validated for their intellige

All these things make me envious of people who get to work at Google or any other FAANG company, where they are both paid well and validated for their intelligence.

deisteve 2y ago
but the work that Googlers do most of HN can do its the proximity, pedigree, profile that you have to fit to get in to Google I'm happy for those that made it. Not everybody gets to work for Google. But the work they do are no less challenging or more important than what the rest of us do. If anything FAANG has contributed greatly to the American Firewall of Algorithms and have destroyed an entire generation's ability to reason and value common sense. I remember this quote which I can't remember who said but "if they are paying you a large salary, what they take from you is far greater"
- jjeaff 2y ago
  sometimes if they pay you a large salary, the only thing they are taking from you is your ability to work for a competitor.
  - deisteve 2y ago
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    - mandmandam 2y ago
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      - deisteve 2y ago
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        mandmandam 2y ago
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        deisteve 2y ago
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        mandmandam 2y ago
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        deisteve 2y ago
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        mandmandam 2y ago
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- joenot443 2y ago
  > "if they are paying you a large salary, what they take from you is far greater" Hmm, this seems like a nice thing to tell oneself to avoid feeling underpaid :)
  - deisteve 2y ago
    is that what you tell yourself? mine was aimed at the notion that salaried compensation especially if its very large implies an asymmetrical return for the company. for one, it would buy loyalty. Not many Googlers stood up when they realized their technology was enabling military drone strikes on children.
enneff 2y ago
These are great benefits for sure, but one of the reasons I left is a totally ineffective and wasteful management structure that makes it extremely hard to actually do anything. It is very hard to feel like your work means anything at a company of that size, since the chances of having the goals of your work changed (or being laid off) at a moments notice makes it hard to stay motivated. If I take another software gig it will certainly be at a small company where my daily work contributes directly to the company’s central goals.
- jjeaff 2y ago
  and then, after all that bad leadership and bureaucracy, one of the top executives (Schmidt) blames google's lost lead in AI on the workers who don't want to work anymore and are just concerned with getting all the perks and work life balance.
  - enneff 2y ago
    Yeah he should really stop saying stuff. My opinion of him has really plummeted.
- tombert 2y ago
  There are so many middle managers at Apple that feel the need to justify their existence within the company, and as such they schedule endless meetings and/or send "urgent" emails that they expect you to respond to immediately. It got to a point of being almost farcical, where they were scheduling meetings at 9:30pm multiple times a week. After two years of it I had to leave, I was coming home catatonic and depressed, to a point where my wife was getting concerned.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    I've spent my career on the opposite side of the fence. I work for a tiny company, and I report to "mostly" no-one. I add value, I choose (mostly) what value to add, and my division is profitable. I recently did some consulting for a large company. It reaffirmed for me that my path was right for me. I haven't made as much money as my corporate brethren, but the endless treadmill of meaningless work, manager meetings, measurement-by-jira and so on would have spit me out early. I enjoy the creativity of my work, the direct interaction with customers (especially when they like me :) - the intuition to see how things could be better, and the freedom yo execute on it. My path to joy is not for everyone, others get joy from bringing on a large team - that's OK- each person needs to find their own path.
tombert 2y ago
Never worked at Google, but I did work at Apple and I can say with confidence that they very much do not value intelligence.
mike_hearn 2y ago
The validated for their intelligence thing is a problem. Googlers in the early days constantly told each other that they were the "smartest people in the world". I noticed this immediately after joining and found it quietly troubling, because there's all kinds of smart and the interview processes were really only selecting for skill with computers or maths. A lot of Googlers wouldn't survive long on the streets or alone in the wilderness, as these require different kinds of smart to what they had. Some colleagues were troubled by those statements for other reasons: they didn't personally feel like one of the smartest people in the world, and this led to imposter syndrome. But we said nothing because, hey, the company was doing great and people did seem pretty smart overall back then. Plus nobody wants to call themselves out as an imposter, and Google had a certain degree of institutional humility to it as well. The company was very much about empowering everyone, no matter who or how "smart" they were. What you're seeing from Google in the last ten years is a maybe predictable consequence of that culture, where some Googlers really do seem to think they're generically much smarter than everyone else, about everything. You started to see mass scale social engineering via manipulation of search results and products, driven apparently by the immense faith they have in their own wisdom. Is there any claim Googlers cannot immediately resolve as true or false given nothing more than a few ML models and a team of contractors in LatAm? Apparently some of them think that's all it takes. This quasi-misanthropic culture is miles away from the trusting "make it universally available and useful" culture the company once had, but the seeds of that culture's end were clearly visible even at the start. You can't constantly validate people by telling them they're super smart before some of them come to actually believe it, and that leads naturally to the belief that if they're really the smartest people in the world then surely that means they should be running it.
- commandersaki 2y ago
  I think when you're hiring people like Russ Cox, Rob Pike, Van Jacobson, Jeffrey Mogul, Jennifer Rexford, Bram Moolenar, Vint Cerf, etc. (and that's just a tiny fraction of their well known amazing talent) it's hard not to think they're hiring the smartest & brightest.

All these things make me envious of people who get to work at Google or any other FAANG company, where they are both paid well and validated for their intelligence.

deisteve 2y ago

but the work that Googlers do most of HN can do its the proximity, pedigree, profile that you have to fit to get in to Google I'm happy for those that made it. Not everybody gets to work for Google. But the work they do are no less challenging or more important than what the rest of us do. If anything FAANG has contributed greatly to the American Firewall of Algorithms and have destroyed an entire generation's ability to reason and value common sense. I remember this quote which I can't remember who said but "if they are paying you a large salary, what they take from you is far greater"

jjeaff 2y ago
sometimes if they pay you a large salary, the only thing they are taking from you is your ability to work for a competitor.
- deisteve 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - deisteve 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - mandmandam 2y ago
        [flagged]
        deisteve 2y ago
        [flagged]
        mandmandam 2y ago
        [flagged]
        deisteve 2y ago
        [flagged]
        mandmandam 2y ago
        [flagged]
joenot443 2y ago
> "if they are paying you a large salary, what they take from you is far greater" Hmm, this seems like a nice thing to tell oneself to avoid feeling underpaid :)
- deisteve 2y ago
  is that what you tell yourself? mine was aimed at the notion that salaried compensation especially if its very large implies an asymmetrical return for the company. for one, it would buy loyalty. Not many Googlers stood up when they realized their technology was enabling military drone strikes on children.

enneff 2y ago

These are great benefits for sure, but one of the reasons I left is a totally ineffective and wasteful management structure that makes it extremely hard to actually do anything. It is very hard to feel like your work means anything at a company of that size, since the chances of having the goals of your work changed (or being laid off) at a moments notice makes it hard to stay motivated. If I take another software gig it will certainly be at a small company where my daily work contributes directly to the company’s central goals.

jjeaff 2y ago
and then, after all that bad leadership and bureaucracy, one of the top executives (Schmidt) blames google's lost lead in AI on the workers who don't want to work anymore and are just concerned with getting all the perks and work life balance.
- enneff 2y ago
  Yeah he should really stop saying stuff. My opinion of him has really plummeted.
tombert 2y ago
There are so many middle managers at Apple that feel the need to justify their existence within the company, and as such they schedule endless meetings and/or send "urgent" emails that they expect you to respond to immediately. It got to a point of being almost farcical, where they were scheduling meetings at 9:30pm multiple times a week. After two years of it I had to leave, I was coming home catatonic and depressed, to a point where my wife was getting concerned.
- bruce511 2y ago
  I've spent my career on the opposite side of the fence. I work for a tiny company, and I report to "mostly" no-one. I add value, I choose (mostly) what value to add, and my division is profitable. I recently did some consulting for a large company. It reaffirmed for me that my path was right for me. I haven't made as much money as my corporate brethren, but the endless treadmill of meaningless work, manager meetings, measurement-by-jira and so on would have spit me out early. I enjoy the creativity of my work, the direct interaction with customers (especially when they like me :) - the intuition to see how things could be better, and the freedom yo execute on it. My path to joy is not for everyone, others get joy from bringing on a large team - that's OK- each person needs to find their own path.

tombert 2y ago

Never worked at Google, but I did work at Apple and I can say with confidence that they very much do not value intelligence.

mike_hearn 2y ago

The validated for their intelligence thing is a problem. Googlers in the early days constantly told each other that they were the "smartest people in the world". I noticed this immediately after joining and found it quietly troubling, because there's all kinds of smart and the interview processes were really only selecting for skill with computers or maths. A lot of Googlers wouldn't survive long on the streets or alone in the wilderness, as these require different kinds of smart to what they had. Some colleagues were troubled by those statements for other reasons: they didn't personally feel like one of the smartest people in the world, and this led to imposter syndrome. But we said nothing because, hey, the company was doing great and people did seem pretty smart overall back then. Plus nobody wants to call themselves out as an imposter, and Google had a certain degree of institutional humility to it as well. The company was very much about empowering everyone, no matter who or how "smart" they were. What you're seeing from Google in the last ten years is a maybe predictable consequence of that culture, where some Googlers really do seem to think they're generically much smarter than everyone else, about everything. You started to see mass scale social engineering via manipulation of search results and products, driven apparently by the immense faith they have in their own wisdom. Is there any claim Googlers cannot immediately resolve as true or false given nothing more than a few ML models and a team of contractors in LatAm? Apparently some of them think that's all it takes. This quasi-misanthropic culture is miles away from the trusting "make it universally available and useful" culture the company once had, but the seeds of that culture's end were clearly visible even at the start. You can't constantly validate people by telling them they're super smart before some of them come to actually believe it, and that leads naturally to the belief that if they're really the smartest people in the world then surely that means they should be running it.

commandersaki 2y ago
I think when you're hiring people like Russ Cox, Rob Pike, Van Jacobson, Jeffrey Mogul, Jennifer Rexford, Bram Moolenar, Vint Cerf, etc. (and that's just a tiny fraction of their well known amazing talent) it's hard not to think they're hiring the smartest & brightest.