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Your view was completely my view until 7 years at Google. When I joined, I was shocked how high the turnover was. And not anecdotally! there were stats you cou

Your view was completely my view until 7 years at Google. When I joined, I was shocked how high the turnover was. And not anecdotally! there were stats you could slice and dice every which way, and...it was shocking. How!? This was paradise. After clearing enough years, and getting enough advice from people at 50+ who stayed at BigCo, once you got a pile o' money, it looks more like: $170K/yr + $30K bonus + $100K/yr RSUs at Google - $150K/yr existential dread. vs. startup: $150K/yr + $15K bonus + $2.5K/yr (1% chance of $250K/year) Increasing the money pile becomes not worth it once you've stacked Google RSUs, and the choking existential dread of what goes on inside BigCo is worth the pay difference. I know that sounds nuts. Hell, when I was doing my big "Where do I go now that I've sold my startup?" interview rounds, I also interviewed for positions with a couple ex-Googlers who told me it'd be awful to join there. I thought a lot about it and decided they were wrong, they didn't understand how little savings I had. And they were wrong: it was totally worth building the money pile so I could move on like they did, to more productive areas where there's room to grow. aside: I'm not sure anyone would get $220K/year base then only get $100K/year base. I usually see roughly the same base, frankly, its usually a bit higher than Google's. another aside: stereotypes are stereotypes, from what you characterize startups vs. BigCo as, I think you'd be very surprised how many Googlers feel about workload

DanielHB 2y ago
Could you elaborate on the existential dread? What causes it exactly?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Gosh this is hard. Excellent question. "Existential dread" was a cheap handwave. This is a random collection of thoughts. First thing I should say is none of what I'm going to say matters if you are the world's most well-adjusted person. i.e. you have 0 inherent desire to do anything other than A) get a paycheck B) do what boss says. The ex-Googlers I interviewed with put is as "you can't get anything done", which I took as a challenge. And succeeded. Then failed. But not because that's not what leadership wanted, it was the opposite, they had been asking for years: because I was low enough on the totem pole, and in engineering, in a way people could screw around and have 0 consequences. Hyperbole: every single job I've worked at was better managed than what Google had become at the end, including food service ones. There's a professionalism-as-don't-speak-up authoritarianism in play. Another handwave I've used to describe it is "humans are humans, everywhere.", This was the first time I was with a group of really, really smart people. Ivy Leaguers, etc. I dropped out from the #116 ranked university. I expected that meant the level of shitty behavior would be lower, but, it was higher. Much higher. There's much more training data accumulated in smart people. Making it easier to construct internal narratives for why somethings a bad idea, but, this was usually lazy and slotting into some stereotype. One lesson I learned quickly is there's a parable for every possible decision. Another problem was you had a ton of people who were just Ivy Leaguers who said "ehhh I guess finance is more evil?", ended up in tech, and really could not fundamentally understand at all why you'd do anything, or talk about anything, or think about anything, other than what someone in authority explicitly said to do and documented and had 0 ambiguity at all. This actually played well with the authoritarianism I mentioned, despite "thriving in ambiguity" being a catchphrase used in perf a lot. Last thing I'll mention: there were two major decision points that ended up causes an exponential increase in issues: #1 in...2018?...moving promotion review into the local team, instead of a panel of reviewers from throughout Google. Won't belabor the point too much, TL;DR: that's an excellent way to enable authoritarianism and adjacent issues, because no one can be good enough to just do an end-around. #2 in late 2022, moving performance reviews from a variety of feedback from collaborators to your manager and whoever your manager bothered picking. Anyone, if you've made it this far and are very curious, feel free to reach out to jp0hhhh@gmail for deeper conversation (replace the 0 with an o). I'm offering just to pay it forward, i.e. give what I didn't have before Google, someone with a direct sense of tradeoffs.
fragmede 2y ago
Speaking as someone that's worked at a startup and also in FAANG, if you're the type that's predisposed to existential dread, the sense of dread in a startup is differently but equally existential when the startup may not be able to cut paychecks or even be around in 30 days, and you have to scramble to find a new job. At the startup, there's not even the $150k to subtract out.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  You're right, 'existential dread' was a lazy handwave on my part, I don't know how to expand un-briefly :/ "The stuff that drives people away from BigCo", which is a tautology, so perhaps not useful. I'll try to reply with more specifics to the sibling
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Sometimes the quick short quip has more truth to it than the long verbose answer. It's a different dread working for a startup, but really believing that you're helping its mission to save the world, or at least, not making it worse is it's own form of payment. Some people work at a Fang only do after convincing themselves that to do so would be wrong, but the pay is just so good, and so they hate themselves for working there. They haven't drunk the Kool aid and have bought into a narrative that the company they're working for is eeeeevil. Other people just buy that BMW and provide a better life for their kids than they had, and the thought doesn't even register.

DanielHB 2y ago

Could you elaborate on the existential dread? What causes it exactly?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
refulgentis 2y ago
Gosh this is hard. Excellent question. "Existential dread" was a cheap handwave. This is a random collection of thoughts. First thing I should say is none of what I'm going to say matters if you are the world's most well-adjusted person. i.e. you have 0 inherent desire to do anything other than A) get a paycheck B) do what boss says. The ex-Googlers I interviewed with put is as "you can't get anything done", which I took as a challenge. And succeeded. Then failed. But not because that's not what leadership wanted, it was the opposite, they had been asking for years: because I was low enough on the totem pole, and in engineering, in a way people could screw around and have 0 consequences. Hyperbole: every single job I've worked at was better managed than what Google had become at the end, including food service ones. There's a professionalism-as-don't-speak-up authoritarianism in play. Another handwave I've used to describe it is "humans are humans, everywhere.", This was the first time I was with a group of really, really smart people. Ivy Leaguers, etc. I dropped out from the #116 ranked university. I expected that meant the level of shitty behavior would be lower, but, it was higher. Much higher. There's much more training data accumulated in smart people. Making it easier to construct internal narratives for why somethings a bad idea, but, this was usually lazy and slotting into some stereotype. One lesson I learned quickly is there's a parable for every possible decision. Another problem was you had a ton of people who were just Ivy Leaguers who said "ehhh I guess finance is more evil?", ended up in tech, and really could not fundamentally understand at all why you'd do anything, or talk about anything, or think about anything, other than what someone in authority explicitly said to do and documented and had 0 ambiguity at all. This actually played well with the authoritarianism I mentioned, despite "thriving in ambiguity" being a catchphrase used in perf a lot. Last thing I'll mention: there were two major decision points that ended up causes an exponential increase in issues: #1 in...2018?...moving promotion review into the local team, instead of a panel of reviewers from throughout Google. Won't belabor the point too much, TL;DR: that's an excellent way to enable authoritarianism and adjacent issues, because no one can be good enough to just do an end-around. #2 in late 2022, moving performance reviews from a variety of feedback from collaborators to your manager and whoever your manager bothered picking. Anyone, if you've made it this far and are very curious, feel free to reach out to jp0hhhh@gmail for deeper conversation (replace the 0 with an o). I'm offering just to pay it forward, i.e. give what I didn't have before Google, someone with a direct sense of tradeoffs.

fragmede 2y ago

Speaking as someone that's worked at a startup and also in FAANG, if you're the type that's predisposed to existential dread, the sense of dread in a startup is differently but equally existential when the startup may not be able to cut paychecks or even be around in 30 days, and you have to scramble to find a new job. At the startup, there's not even the $150k to subtract out.

refulgentis 2y ago
You're right, 'existential dread' was a lazy handwave on my part, I don't know how to expand un-briefly :/ "The stuff that drives people away from BigCo", which is a tautology, so perhaps not useful. I'll try to reply with more specifics to the sibling
- fragmede 2y ago
  Sometimes the quick short quip has more truth to it than the long verbose answer. It's a different dread working for a startup, but really believing that you're helping its mission to save the world, or at least, not making it worse is it's own form of payment. Some people work at a Fang only do after convincing themselves that to do so would be wrong, but the pay is just so good, and so they hate themselves for working there. They haven't drunk the Kool aid and have bought into a narrative that the company they're working for is eeeeevil. Other people just buy that BMW and provide a better life for their kids than they had, and the thought doesn't even register.