10 ms·

Why Google Employees Quit

202 points by peter123 18y ago

fallentimes 18y ago
Is there a big company that has solved or at least significantly reduced any or all of these problems? They seem to come with the territory, which is one of the reasons why startups always have a chance.
amobilebiz 18y ago
Everything I read here I can relate to with big companies. It seems once companies reach that 1000 employee mark the culture changes drastically. I can also relate to how going from a private to public company can impact employee "life". Not that money is necessarily tight or the company can not afford the "perks" they once gave to employees as a private company, but with being public comes added scrutiny and greater sense of needing to be responsible with spending. The average Joe investor does not want to hear that employees are enjoying free meals when his stock drops $1.00. On the other hand though, from reading these emails it seems most of these people went to work at Google with a preconceived notion that it was going to be different and that somehow Google was going to be this theme park environment. As with any job at any company it is what you make of it. If you take a job solely because you think you are going to eat/drink free everyday, have daily live entertainment, and going to work is going to be fun then you are taking the job for the wrong reasons. Work should be fun, but you need to make it fun and not rely on the company or the culture to make it fun for you. As for salaries, while I do not know exactly Google's salaries, I would be willing to bet that they are extremely competitive. I do know that a starting salary is most often highly negotiable and the people that tend to complain about receiving a low salary are the ones who go in expecting to be offered some godly amount right from the start. The other thing you have to weigh is the benefits or perks in relation to the salary. For example, if you get to eat lunch and dinner free every day at the office then you are saving around $10-20 a day in food. That adds up to over $200 a month or probably around $3000 a year in extra compensation you are receiving. Just like the one person did comparing the job at Google to buying a luxury car with all the fancy options and extra cup holders, you have to compare the salary plus perks to your current salary with no perks. I have been there, not with Google, but with a startup. I went from government contracting, to a small startup as a very early employee, and then to Microsoft, and back to startup life. I can say that once you are bit by startup life it is tough to move to a big company like Google or Microsoft and be truly happy. The culture is not the same and to expect it to be is ridiculous. That is why I am back in startup life now. It is fun, fast, and everyday is a new adventure.
- anewaccountname 18y ago
  It's actually $3,000 in after-tax (federal, state, and SS) dollars, so it is really closer to a $5-6,000 difference in base salary, as long as you are a glutton.
  - mountain_man 18y ago
    yeah, but it kind of sucks thinking about it as part of your salary, because then you feel like you're throwing money away if you don't stay for dinner every night. Sometimes you just want to eat with your friends and family.
    - amobilebiz 18y ago
      yes, that is definitely a downside when you don't or are unable to take advantage of the perks. That is where negotiating your salary comes into play though. If you know that you are not going to be staying for dinner then negotiate up for that extra $2000-3000 to get it back. i feel the same way about taxes though. I pay them and half the things they go to I never use. I wish I could negotiate them with them government better :)
prakash 18y ago
I think you can substitute google for any other >1000+ company and most of this would ring true. Managing thousands of people in getting things done quickly and where people feel productive is a very hard problem.
- wheels 18y ago
  I think that jives with people's expectations when they go to work for other mega-companies though. It seems people going to Google too often assume that the rules really will be drastically different there.
- ramchip 18y ago
  There were a couple posts a while ago about the Semco management style which felt like a much better solution than the traditional vertical hierarchy. I would have thought Google would be a lot flatter as an organization.
  - wmorein 18y ago
    Google is very flat by reputation, but that is not an unequivocal good. If your manager is also managing 50 other people, to the extent that you would benefit from management you are probably not getting those benefits.
    - mihasya 18y ago
      All of the big silicon valley companies claim to be "flat." When I started at Yahoo!, all I heard about was how flat the organization was. Doesn't mean it's true.
      - joshu 18y ago
        Indeed. The number of times a product idea was sent from an SVP to the divison VP who forwarded it to the group head of product who forwarded this with the note added "SVP wants this done by the end of the day" was more than I'd even like to think about.
angstrom 18y ago
I strongly believe the "sweet zone" for headcount is somewhere around 200-500 employees. You can still make a difference, but at the same time you're not struggling with the day to day nuances of a 5-50 person startup. To sum it up: You will get paid next week, you're no more than 2-3 levels removed from the CEO, and the fiefdoms don't have the coffers to squabble.
- whacked_new 18y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
  - angstrom 18y ago
    Funny, I've heard of that before, but the correlation didn't strike me until I reread it. I remember it from when it was mentioned in the book "The Tipping Point".
  - snprbob86 18y ago
    That article mentions that Dunbar proposed 150, but the real count is probably closer to double that. I think for a company, 150 is probably perfect. If the real number of relationships one person can maintain is 300, that grants an allowance of 50% of their maintainable relationships for both work and play.
    - wallflower 18y ago
      That 150 number made me remember this nice, little compact, too nice story about Gore-Tex which was probably in 'The Tipping Point' (I don't remember): "What is most unique about this company is that each company plant is no larger than 150. When constructing a plant, they put 150 spaces in the parking lot, and when people start parking on the grass, they know it's time for another plant. Each plant works as a group. There are no bosses. No titles. Salaries are determined collectively. No organization charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Wilbert Gore - the late founder of the company, found through trial and error that 150 employees per plant was most ideal. "We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty," he told an interviewer some years ago" http://www.commonsenseadvice.com/human_cortex_dunbar.html http://www.commonsenseadvice.com/human_cortex_dunbar.html
bilbo0s 18y ago
What's really interesting is all of the 'ship jumpers' lamenting how much better it was at Microsoft. That's not a jab at Microsoft. I was just thinking there must be something there with respect to employee benefits, or maybe just employee treatment, that other large companies may want to look at. Out of curiosity, are there any ex-MSFT employees here that could tell us what you like or dislike about MSFT? I guess the most illustrative ideas might come from knowing what you MISSED when you left MSFT. If anything.
- wheels 18y ago
  I think Microsoft has had longer to adjust to the fact that they're not the new hotness and is probably closer to recruiting / compensating accordingly.
  - snprbob86 18y ago
    You NAILED it. I wrote about my internship experiences at Microsoft and Google a while back: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227162> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227162>. What you say pretty much sums it up. Google is just so used to being the hot cool shit and they haven't been large enough for long enough to realize that simply isn't true any more. Don't get me wrong, they are both incredible places to work, but Google needs to adjust to their new count and composition of employees. Luckily, the original article is just one of many bits of proof that Google is aware of problems and is working to resolve them. Microsoft would never show this level of transparency for (the obviously justified) fear of these sorts of forum posts leaking.
  - potatolicious 18y ago
    When I was interning at Amazon a little while back I was quite surprised to hear from Google interns how little they were being paid (in comparison, the salary is still respectable). I'd always imagined Google to be the type that showered you in money/perks simply because of their Googliness. Turns out they rely on the "but we're GOOGLE!" schtick a lot when hiring.
    - 18y ago
mdasen 18y ago
Google could be nothing, but disappointment from the way it's built up. It's seen as this magical place where work does itself and things flow so perfectly. The fact is that at Google, most people are going to have to slog away somewhat tedious things like making context ads match their page content 0.1% better. It's not all fun, change the world Gmail and such. Most of it isn't the interesting stuff that we see. That's not really what makes Google, Google. What makes Google what we see is that relentless pursuit of increasingly tiny increases in efficiency. Sure, they had great theoretical ideas like BigTable, PageRank, etc. but what made something like PageRank work was that they didn't stop - they kept making ever more tiny increases in accuracy in a way that could become quite tedious to program and test. You also tend not to get a full view of things at Google. If you're in backend engineering, that's what you work on. I know that I like seeing the full product and knowing that I've worked on what the users are going to see.
- brandonkm 18y ago
  > What makes Google what we see is that relentless pursuit of increasingly tiny increases in efficiency. Absolutely. This fact is literally in the comapany's dna. A lot of issues that were mentioned in that article are a direct result of this. I'd be curious to know how this affects all of the startups they acquire that remain dormant for so long.
- phenylene 18y ago
  "... most people are going to have to slog away somewhat tedious things like making context ads match their page content 0.1% better." I'm not sure why you think that the 0.1% improvments are assumed to be a tedious slog. They may have required some seriously interesting new ML techniques just to get that extra boost. Recall the Netflix recommendation algorithm improvement contest that had teams working very hard to get those last fractions of a percent. Small adjustments to a huge system can have huge impact: http://norvig.com/speech.html http://norvig.com/speech.html
vaksel 18y ago
Its basically grass is greener on the other side syndrome...people have built up Google in their minds, and it just couldn't live up to their expectations
- brianto2010 18y ago
  > ...people have built up Google in their minds If that was the case, shouldn't the exact opposite happen? The Subject-Expectancy Effect states that a person's expectations directly influences their views. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject-expectancy_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject-expectancy_effect I don't think expectations has much to do with it. Very few people (Issara, Lilly) actually referred to expectations at Google. There is a recurring theme of employees complaining about management/bureaucracy, salary, hiring, and job satisfaction. Even though you said "basically", it seemed to me like you are generalizing too much (sorry if I'm wrong and hypocritical). Some people (search for Aaron on the page) got a job there out of necessity, not purely open choice.
pauljonas 18y ago
I sure wish there was a NH filter that would enable me to /ignore any TechCrunch sourced articles…
- tokenadult 18y ago
  The parenthetical indication of source domain after every submission to HN works pretty well for me. Some sources I ignore regularly, and others (TechCrunch is one) I ignore selectively.
- GHFigs 18y ago
  For Greasemonkey: http://internetducttape.com/2008/05/23/filtering-reddit-and-hacker-news/ http://internetducttape.com/2008/05/23/filtering-reddit-and-...
jderick 18y ago
"You will fail in a boring and project specific way" Corollary: and then you will blame it on something else I mean, who really quits their job because of the copayments on their health insurance?
- Retric 18y ago
  The only reason I am considering leaving my job is compensation. I make around 2/3 of what I could at another companies now the benefits are nice but typical for large companies. For now I think it's reasonable but if they reduced the benefits so I needed to pay more out of pocket I would defiantly leave.
  - jderick 18y ago
    Sounds to me like you are already ready to leave. I'm guessing it's just the poor economy that is keeping you from wanting to search for another job right now.
    - Retric 18y ago
      No so much, I really like my job. I gave up 5k/ year to work here because it was prestigious and good for my career. Now I got a promotion, but not much of a pay raise so I could be making even more. But, I am surrounded by smart people, it's low stress, I work 40 hours a week, and I spend 90% of my time developing so it's nice.
- mattmcknight 18y ago
  I think co-payments are a good thing. There has to be some disincentive to over-treatment.
cdibona 18y ago
So: working for a large company is different than working for a small company. I started at G when it was ~2k people and now we're at ~20k people. I've worked for very small companies and much larger companies than Google and I have to say that Google is a great place to work, when comparing to both and is probably the best large organization for a real , cs focused, software engineer to work for. If you love algorithms, scaling problems and the rest, you are likely to find a group where you can be pretty happy, intellectually speaking. But, if you aren't into that kind of thing, it may not be the place for you. As long as I've been there, Google has been about 1/2 engineer and 1/2 everyone else. That's very atypical for large technical organizations, where if you have 25% engineering you'd feel pretty lucky. This also means that sometimes there is a 'engineers and everyone else' sort of thing going on. This is reflected in the exit stories, as are the very real problems that face globally distributed engineering organizations. I find myself wanting to make excuses for some of the complaints mentioned in the article, but it really comes down to not every company matching every engineer, and if you have a large engineering org, you'll have some people who don't fit the org (the short story writer), and some people treated lamentably or regrettably by thier co-workers or managers. A side note: the hiring process is much better than when I started. I've been sitting on hiring committees for 4 years now, and it is much more efficient than when I interviewed. I was interviewing for an odd position though, so it was even more extreme in my case (for both good and bad). I interviewed with 13 people and was given an offer within a few weeks. but back then a typical interviewer would have 8+ interviews, now we almost never go over 6. That said, hiring is a dark art. I don't pretend to have an answer for that.
- andrewljohnson 18y ago
  Are you kidding me? Are you really saying that the people who didn't like Google are the engineers who aren't as interested in algorithms? That seems both condescending and arrogant. As a San Francisco native with friends that are both at Google and have left Google, I can tell you it's not the dumb engineers that quit. It has absolutely nothing to do with that. Your answer is glib and is totally the wrong take "if you love algorithms, scaling problems and the rest, you are likely to find a group where you can be pretty happy, intellectually speaking. But, if you aren't into that kind of thing, it may not be the place for you." Google attrition is 0% correlated to that. It's totally false, and it says something about you that you think that. It has more to do with cultural fit, not technical fit. For example, at Google you have to be extremely persuasive and political to get anything done as an engineer. You seem like a pretty forward and well-spoken individual, so this environment made you thrive. But if you're not much for that sort of thing, then trying to get anything done in such a flat management hierarchy is going to be impossible. Let me say it again: the engineers who left aren't the dumb ones. EDIT: Another thing. It's not that Google employees can't hack it and quit. A bigger problem is Google has so many smart people, that really great engineers often get trivial programming tasks. Google doesn't have enough interesting work to keep everyone interested.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
vsiva68 18y ago
I'm surprised by the comments about low salaries. From the public records, it certainly looks like Google pays somewhat higher salaries. The difference though is that there is a huge variance. http://envy.appspot.com/?q=microsoft|google&title=software&fav= http://envy.appspot.com/?q=microsoft|google&title=softwa... The issue with reports like these is that it is a biased audience. It could very well be that only the people who had low salaries posted their comments on the website.
mihasya 18y ago
GASP A JOB AT GOOGLE IS A JOB?!!!
- DenisM 18y ago
  Lay off the caps lock and excessive punctuation, no need to yell around here.
  - gjm11 18y ago
    Looks to me like the caps lock and excessive punctuation were intended ironically. Which may or may not justify them, but the problem isn't a failure to realise that there's "no need to yell around here".
    - DenisM 18y ago
      The yelling will turn a polite conversation into digg. And sarcasm doesn't make it any less so, it actually compounds the problem.
sachinag 18y ago
I would really be interested in seeing attrition rates for engineers and non-engineers. Sales guys are the revenue producers almost anywhere else, and as such, are favored in the way that Google stereotypically favors their engineers. I know that this was the Kirkland office, as well, and there's always something about moving from HQ to a satellite office that's probably captured in the sentiment expressed.
dustineichler 18y ago
This could be said for any company. I worked at company "X", where middle managers and coworkers pissed me off too. Desicions would get pushed around and I felt hugely disalussioned and ineffective. It's not surprising Google is the same way. What is striking is how quickly people left Google was. I've heard all the rest about low salary, but there bonus package is awesome if you're an engineer. So I've heard. This makes me feel like I wasn't alone as a few people mentioned in the article. I think if you're ever to work at a large company again, you should set realistic expectations for what it is. It's great otherwise having the security, benefits and other amenities... but it's not for everyone as I suspect it wasn't for these people. Just as being at a startup isn't for the kinda people who find success in large companies.
- illumen 18y ago
  I think most people have realised that there's no security at large corporations. For recent proof, look at the thousands laid off at many large corporations (google, yahoo, ms, etc).
vitaminj 18y ago
It may be just me, but I was continually irked by the thread's subject line: "So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously." I mean, seriously, it doesn't even make sensed!
paul 18y ago
I remember when I initially read these emails (the thread is from last year), my first though was, "I'm glad that I don't have to work with these people." Perhaps this is unfair since they are just venting (and not all of the emails were in this category, some were reasonable), but there's something about their attitude that is just very unappealing. I can't quite put my finger on it though... Something about working at big companies seems to turn many people into whiny children. I think it's because they aren't really responsible for anything. Unfortunately, Google's transition into "yet another big company" is inevitable at this point. If you take the same fundamental structure as every other big company, and hire the same people as the other big companies, then you shouldn't be surprised when you end up looking like every other big company.
- mark_h 18y ago
  Something about working at big companies seems to turn many people into whiny children. I think it's because they aren't really responsible for anything. I think you've just nailed something I've been observing at my own place of employment, thank you! To lack-of-responsibility, I would also add: security in the job. It's comfortable enough and you can get by without too much exertion, so there's little motivation to either leave or work harder. I certainly don't work in an extreme case of that, but your hypothesis resonated.
- prakash 18y ago
  What would you do different in terms of structure of a large company? Also who would you hire for large companies?
- wheels 18y ago
  The other side of things, kind of rounding out the child-like analogy, is that the exposure to opportunity is limited similarly to the exposure to responsibility. Engineering hire number 14,162 might make it to middle management if [s]he sticks around long enough. If you combine this with the trajectory that a lot of smart folks end up on -- home, college, grad-school, large corporation -- I think there's a natural disenfranchisement when kids that thought they were going to change the world and be astronauts when they grew up realize that they're staring down a few decades of project management meetings and internal bureaucracy. Added to a smooth transition from their parents to their company taking care of all of the hard parts of life, it does lead to an odd form of young adulthood where a lot of folks are too afraid of deviating from the prescribed path to break out and do something that's more fulfilling to them.
known 18y ago
Employees normally quit their Managers.
- lacker 18y ago
  This is a good point I think many people are overlooking. (Full disclosure - I work at Google now.) Your project matters too. People working for great managers on things like search algorithms, Android or open source initiatives are much more likely to love their job. People working for managers they hate on things like Orkut, ATS, or cross-browser compatibility testing are much more likely to leave. In a company as big as Google, different employees can have very different experiences. When you read this group set up for employees who quit, you're seeing the least happy segment of the employee population. I know it doesn't work out for everyone, but I think the average Google employee really likes their job, and I would recommend working there to any programmer who was thinking about it. Just my 2 cents.
  - bluishgreen 18y ago
    I would imagine orkut dev is being done by Google India, otherwise it is gonna be frustrating, just like you can't make a shop in India work on Facebook: because none of your friends are using it!
    - mountain_man 18y ago
      Orkut dev in Mountain View had a lot of Indian engineers. They've since moved all dev work to Brazil and India.
    - lacker 18y ago
      Orkut was initially developed in Mountain View and I know for some people it was a frustrating job for exactly the reason you describe. I am not sure but I think it is primarily developed in Brazil now (where Orkut is very popular).
nihilocrat 18y ago
See also: Why Video Game Company Employees Quit A lot of the reasons here are similar: disenfranchisement, low pay, long hours, crappy benefits (though this is not true at all for some companies). Also, unlike Google, there is usually very low job security and you sometimes have to accept a semi-nomadic lifestyle.
cookiecaper 18y ago
>And let me say this: if Larry Page is still reviewing resumes, shareholders should organize a rebellion. That is a scandalous waste of time for someone at that level, and the fact that it’s “quirky” is no mitigation. Regarding this quote, I'm not so sure. Delegation and hands-off management is important and necessary indeed, and I loathe micromanagement no matter which end I'm on, but I think that hiring would be my most closely guarded and reviewed process. Employees are the weakest link, the ultimate valuation; you can have fancy processes or equipment or a lot of hype, but the real value of your company ultimately boils down to the work force -- the capability of yourself and the people backing you up to deliver, maintain, and evolve your money-makers. I actually developed this concept while working at a medium-sized (revenue-wise) niche company. The company was impaired because nobody cared about the bigger picture; we were all just office workers doing our office jobs and trying to push through without killing ourselves. Inter-departmental relationships were tense and there was no cohesion or overarching social glue between the groups, and no understanding managers in between, which led to animosity between obviously less-valued departments and obviously more-valued departments. It was a sad place to work, but it only had about 200 employees. I found this sad. There should be no peons; every employee is an important contributor (or the job shouldn't exist) and every employee should be well-screened and found to be competent for their position and somewhat like-minded with the rest of the force on foundational issues (i.e., no disengaged, uninvolved typical office workers, only people who generally respect but never fear management and direction, ideally someone who thinks the company's revenue generators are enthralling, etc.). You need the kind of people who will push things forward, the kind of people willing to call their managers out, people who will provide mini-revolutions in product and process development for years to come. People who cultivate conviction, respect, and love, and constitute best-in-class performers. Your company is only as good as your people. Your "company" is a company, consisting of the company your entity employs and regularly keeps, not a soulless, faceless, independent, autonomous corporate machine. Any corporation operated at the "machine level" and not the "company level" is just a story in systemic and institutionalized inefficiency, corruption, and incompetence. Companies operated are breeding grounds for corruption and greed and their ugly consequences, and eventually begin to falter, and do so until someone cognizant of this takes over and starts to turn things around by bringing in new, high-caliber, high-vision employees and keeping them motivated in the right ways. In autonomous corporate world, inefficiency and unhappiness are the hallmarks. In good world, employees and employers care about each other and care about their work, contribute and share openly, and push their sector forward, setting new records for morale, efficiency, innovation, and profits. I think if I were Larry Page, I wouldn't waste time with BS like resumes, but I would interview every candidate, and refuse a permanent hire until I was confident that their thought process and personal style was conducive to the overall goals of a non-evil company.

202 points by peter123 18y ago

Is there a big company that has solved or at least significantly reduced any or all of these problems? They seem to come with the territory, which is one of the reasons why startups always have a chance.

amobilebiz 18y ago

Everything I read here I can relate to with big companies. It seems once companies reach that 1000 employee mark the culture changes drastically. I can also relate to how going from a private to public company can impact employee "life". Not that money is necessarily tight or the company can not afford the "perks" they once gave to employees as a private company, but with being public comes added scrutiny and greater sense of needing to be responsible with spending. The average Joe investor does not want to hear that employees are enjoying free meals when his stock drops $1.00. On the other hand though, from reading these emails it seems most of these people went to work at Google with a preconceived notion that it was going to be different and that somehow Google was going to be this theme park environment. As with any job at any company it is what you make of it. If you take a job solely because you think you are going to eat/drink free everyday, have daily live entertainment, and going to work is going to be fun then you are taking the job for the wrong reasons. Work should be fun, but you need to make it fun and not rely on the company or the culture to make it fun for you. As for salaries, while I do not know exactly Google's salaries, I would be willing to bet that they are extremely competitive. I do know that a starting salary is most often highly negotiable and the people that tend to complain about receiving a low salary are the ones who go in expecting to be offered some godly amount right from the start. The other thing you have to weigh is the benefits or perks in relation to the salary. For example, if you get to eat lunch and dinner free every day at the office then you are saving around $10-20 a day in food. That adds up to over $200 a month or probably around $3000 a year in extra compensation you are receiving. Just like the one person did comparing the job at Google to buying a luxury car with all the fancy options and extra cup holders, you have to compare the salary plus perks to your current salary with no perks. I have been there, not with Google, but with a startup. I went from government contracting, to a small startup as a very early employee, and then to Microsoft, and back to startup life. I can say that once you are bit by startup life it is tough to move to a big company like Google or Microsoft and be truly happy. The culture is not the same and to expect it to be is ridiculous. That is why I am back in startup life now. It is fun, fast, and everyday is a new adventure.

anewaccountname 18y ago
It's actually $3,000 in after-tax (federal, state, and SS) dollars, so it is really closer to a $5-6,000 difference in base salary, as long as you are a glutton.
- mountain_man 18y ago
  yeah, but it kind of sucks thinking about it as part of your salary, because then you feel like you're throwing money away if you don't stay for dinner every night. Sometimes you just want to eat with your friends and family.
  - amobilebiz 18y ago
    yes, that is definitely a downside when you don't or are unable to take advantage of the perks. That is where negotiating your salary comes into play though. If you know that you are not going to be staying for dinner then negotiate up for that extra $2000-3000 to get it back. i feel the same way about taxes though. I pay them and half the things they go to I never use. I wish I could negotiate them with them government better :)

prakash 18y ago

I think you can substitute google for any other >1000+ company and most of this would ring true. Managing thousands of people in getting things done quickly and where people feel productive is a very hard problem.

wheels 18y ago
I think that jives with people's expectations when they go to work for other mega-companies though. It seems people going to Google too often assume that the rules really will be drastically different there.
ramchip 18y ago
There were a couple posts a while ago about the Semco management style which felt like a much better solution than the traditional vertical hierarchy. I would have thought Google would be a lot flatter as an organization.
- wmorein 18y ago
  Google is very flat by reputation, but that is not an unequivocal good. If your manager is also managing 50 other people, to the extent that you would benefit from management you are probably not getting those benefits.
  - mihasya 18y ago
    All of the big silicon valley companies claim to be "flat." When I started at Yahoo!, all I heard about was how flat the organization was. Doesn't mean it's true.
    - joshu 18y ago
      Indeed. The number of times a product idea was sent from an SVP to the divison VP who forwarded it to the group head of product who forwarded this with the note added "SVP wants this done by the end of the day" was more than I'd even like to think about.

angstrom 18y ago

I strongly believe the "sweet zone" for headcount is somewhere around 200-500 employees. You can still make a difference, but at the same time you're not struggling with the day to day nuances of a 5-50 person startup. To sum it up: You will get paid next week, you're no more than 2-3 levels removed from the CEO, and the fiefdoms don't have the coffers to squabble.

whacked_new 18y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
- angstrom 18y ago
  Funny, I've heard of that before, but the correlation didn't strike me until I reread it. I remember it from when it was mentioned in the book "The Tipping Point".
- snprbob86 18y ago
  That article mentions that Dunbar proposed 150, but the real count is probably closer to double that. I think for a company, 150 is probably perfect. If the real number of relationships one person can maintain is 300, that grants an allowance of 50% of their maintainable relationships for both work and play.
  - wallflower 18y ago
    That 150 number made me remember this nice, little compact, too nice story about Gore-Tex which was probably in 'The Tipping Point' (I don't remember): "What is most unique about this company is that each company plant is no larger than 150. When constructing a plant, they put 150 spaces in the parking lot, and when people start parking on the grass, they know it's time for another plant. Each plant works as a group. There are no bosses. No titles. Salaries are determined collectively. No organization charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Wilbert Gore - the late founder of the company, found through trial and error that 150 employees per plant was most ideal. "We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty," he told an interviewer some years ago" http://www.commonsenseadvice.com/human_cortex_dunbar.html http://www.commonsenseadvice.com/human_cortex_dunbar.html

bilbo0s 18y ago

What's really interesting is all of the 'ship jumpers' lamenting how much better it was at Microsoft. That's not a jab at Microsoft. I was just thinking there must be something there with respect to employee benefits, or maybe just employee treatment, that other large companies may want to look at. Out of curiosity, are there any ex-MSFT employees here that could tell us what you like or dislike about MSFT? I guess the most illustrative ideas might come from knowing what you MISSED when you left MSFT. If anything.

wheels 18y ago
I think Microsoft has had longer to adjust to the fact that they're not the new hotness and is probably closer to recruiting / compensating accordingly.
- snprbob86 18y ago
  You NAILED it. I wrote about my internship experiences at Microsoft and Google a while back: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227162> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=227162>. What you say pretty much sums it up. Google is just so used to being the hot cool shit and they haven't been large enough for long enough to realize that simply isn't true any more. Don't get me wrong, they are both incredible places to work, but Google needs to adjust to their new count and composition of employees. Luckily, the original article is just one of many bits of proof that Google is aware of problems and is working to resolve them. Microsoft would never show this level of transparency for (the obviously justified) fear of these sorts of forum posts leaking.
- potatolicious 18y ago
  When I was interning at Amazon a little while back I was quite surprised to hear from Google interns how little they were being paid (in comparison, the salary is still respectable). I'd always imagined Google to be the type that showered you in money/perks simply because of their Googliness. Turns out they rely on the "but we're GOOGLE!" schtick a lot when hiring.
  - 18y ago

mdasen 18y ago

Google could be nothing, but disappointment from the way it's built up. It's seen as this magical place where work does itself and things flow so perfectly. The fact is that at Google, most people are going to have to slog away somewhat tedious things like making context ads match their page content 0.1% better. It's not all fun, change the world Gmail and such. Most of it isn't the interesting stuff that we see. That's not really what makes Google, Google. What makes Google what we see is that relentless pursuit of increasingly tiny increases in efficiency. Sure, they had great theoretical ideas like BigTable, PageRank, etc. but what made something like PageRank work was that they didn't stop - they kept making ever more tiny increases in accuracy in a way that could become quite tedious to program and test. You also tend not to get a full view of things at Google. If you're in backend engineering, that's what you work on. I know that I like seeing the full product and knowing that I've worked on what the users are going to see.

brandonkm 18y ago
> What makes Google what we see is that relentless pursuit of increasingly tiny increases in efficiency. Absolutely. This fact is literally in the comapany's dna. A lot of issues that were mentioned in that article are a direct result of this. I'd be curious to know how this affects all of the startups they acquire that remain dormant for so long.
phenylene 18y ago
"... most people are going to have to slog away somewhat tedious things like making context ads match their page content 0.1% better." I'm not sure why you think that the 0.1% improvments are assumed to be a tedious slog. They may have required some seriously interesting new ML techniques just to get that extra boost. Recall the Netflix recommendation algorithm improvement contest that had teams working very hard to get those last fractions of a percent. Small adjustments to a huge system can have huge impact: http://norvig.com/speech.html http://norvig.com/speech.html

vaksel 18y ago

Its basically grass is greener on the other side syndrome...people have built up Google in their minds, and it just couldn't live up to their expectations

brianto2010 18y ago
> ...people have built up Google in their minds If that was the case, shouldn't the exact opposite happen? The Subject-Expectancy Effect states that a person's expectations directly influences their views. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject-expectancy_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject-expectancy_effect I don't think expectations has much to do with it. Very few people (Issara, Lilly) actually referred to expectations at Google. There is a recurring theme of employees complaining about management/bureaucracy, salary, hiring, and job satisfaction. Even though you said "basically", it seemed to me like you are generalizing too much (sorry if I'm wrong and hypocritical). Some people (search for Aaron on the page) got a job there out of necessity, not purely open choice.

pauljonas 18y ago

I sure wish there was a NH filter that would enable me to /ignore any TechCrunch sourced articles…

tokenadult 18y ago
The parenthetical indication of source domain after every submission to HN works pretty well for me. Some sources I ignore regularly, and others (TechCrunch is one) I ignore selectively.
GHFigs 18y ago
For Greasemonkey: http://internetducttape.com/2008/05/23/filtering-reddit-and-hacker-news/ http://internetducttape.com/2008/05/23/filtering-reddit-and-...

jderick 18y ago

"You will fail in a boring and project specific way" Corollary: and then you will blame it on something else I mean, who really quits their job because of the copayments on their health insurance?

Retric 18y ago
The only reason I am considering leaving my job is compensation. I make around 2/3 of what I could at another companies now the benefits are nice but typical for large companies. For now I think it's reasonable but if they reduced the benefits so I needed to pay more out of pocket I would defiantly leave.
- jderick 18y ago
  Sounds to me like you are already ready to leave. I'm guessing it's just the poor economy that is keeping you from wanting to search for another job right now.
  - Retric 18y ago
    No so much, I really like my job. I gave up 5k/ year to work here because it was prestigious and good for my career. Now I got a promotion, but not much of a pay raise so I could be making even more. But, I am surrounded by smart people, it's low stress, I work 40 hours a week, and I spend 90% of my time developing so it's nice.
mattmcknight 18y ago
I think co-payments are a good thing. There has to be some disincentive to over-treatment.

cdibona 18y ago

So: working for a large company is different than working for a small company. I started at G when it was ~2k people and now we're at ~20k people. I've worked for very small companies and much larger companies than Google and I have to say that Google is a great place to work, when comparing to both and is probably the best large organization for a real , cs focused, software engineer to work for. If you love algorithms, scaling problems and the rest, you are likely to find a group where you can be pretty happy, intellectually speaking. But, if you aren't into that kind of thing, it may not be the place for you. As long as I've been there, Google has been about 1/2 engineer and 1/2 everyone else. That's very atypical for large technical organizations, where if you have 25% engineering you'd feel pretty lucky. This also means that sometimes there is a 'engineers and everyone else' sort of thing going on. This is reflected in the exit stories, as are the very real problems that face globally distributed engineering organizations. I find myself wanting to make excuses for some of the complaints mentioned in the article, but it really comes down to not every company matching every engineer, and if you have a large engineering org, you'll have some people who don't fit the org (the short story writer), and some people treated lamentably or regrettably by thier co-workers or managers. A side note: the hiring process is much better than when I started. I've been sitting on hiring committees for 4 years now, and it is much more efficient than when I interviewed. I was interviewing for an odd position though, so it was even more extreme in my case (for both good and bad). I interviewed with 13 people and was given an offer within a few weeks. but back then a typical interviewer would have 8+ interviews, now we almost never go over 6. That said, hiring is a dark art. I don't pretend to have an answer for that.

andrewljohnson 18y ago
Are you kidding me? Are you really saying that the people who didn't like Google are the engineers who aren't as interested in algorithms? That seems both condescending and arrogant. As a San Francisco native with friends that are both at Google and have left Google, I can tell you it's not the dumb engineers that quit. It has absolutely nothing to do with that. Your answer is glib and is totally the wrong take "if you love algorithms, scaling problems and the rest, you are likely to find a group where you can be pretty happy, intellectually speaking. But, if you aren't into that kind of thing, it may not be the place for you." Google attrition is 0% correlated to that. It's totally false, and it says something about you that you think that. It has more to do with cultural fit, not technical fit. For example, at Google you have to be extremely persuasive and political to get anything done as an engineer. You seem like a pretty forward and well-spoken individual, so this environment made you thrive. But if you're not much for that sort of thing, then trying to get anything done in such a flat management hierarchy is going to be impossible. Let me say it again: the engineers who left aren't the dumb ones. EDIT: Another thing. It's not that Google employees can't hack it and quit. A bigger problem is Google has so many smart people, that really great engineers often get trivial programming tasks. Google doesn't have enough interesting work to keep everyone interested.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

vsiva68 18y ago

I'm surprised by the comments about low salaries. From the public records, it certainly looks like Google pays somewhat higher salaries. The difference though is that there is a huge variance. http://envy.appspot.com/?q=microsoft|google&title=software&fav= http://envy.appspot.com/?q=microsoft|google&title=softwa... The issue with reports like these is that it is a biased audience. It could very well be that only the people who had low salaries posted their comments on the website.

mihasya 18y ago

GASP A JOB AT GOOGLE IS A JOB?!!!

DenisM 18y ago
Lay off the caps lock and excessive punctuation, no need to yell around here.
- gjm11 18y ago
  Looks to me like the caps lock and excessive punctuation were intended ironically. Which may or may not justify them, but the problem isn't a failure to realise that there's "no need to yell around here".
  - DenisM 18y ago
    The yelling will turn a polite conversation into digg. And sarcasm doesn't make it any less so, it actually compounds the problem.

sachinag 18y ago

I would really be interested in seeing attrition rates for engineers and non-engineers. Sales guys are the revenue producers almost anywhere else, and as such, are favored in the way that Google stereotypically favors their engineers. I know that this was the Kirkland office, as well, and there's always something about moving from HQ to a satellite office that's probably captured in the sentiment expressed.

dustineichler 18y ago

This could be said for any company. I worked at company "X", where middle managers and coworkers pissed me off too. Desicions would get pushed around and I felt hugely disalussioned and ineffective. It's not surprising Google is the same way. What is striking is how quickly people left Google was. I've heard all the rest about low salary, but there bonus package is awesome if you're an engineer. So I've heard. This makes me feel like I wasn't alone as a few people mentioned in the article. I think if you're ever to work at a large company again, you should set realistic expectations for what it is. It's great otherwise having the security, benefits and other amenities... but it's not for everyone as I suspect it wasn't for these people. Just as being at a startup isn't for the kinda people who find success in large companies.

illumen 18y ago
I think most people have realised that there's no security at large corporations. For recent proof, look at the thousands laid off at many large corporations (google, yahoo, ms, etc).

vitaminj 18y ago

It may be just me, but I was continually irked by the thread's subject line: "So… Why’d you left, guys? I mean, seriously." I mean, seriously, it doesn't even make sensed!

paul 18y ago

I remember when I initially read these emails (the thread is from last year), my first though was, "I'm glad that I don't have to work with these people." Perhaps this is unfair since they are just venting (and not all of the emails were in this category, some were reasonable), but there's something about their attitude that is just very unappealing. I can't quite put my finger on it though... Something about working at big companies seems to turn many people into whiny children. I think it's because they aren't really responsible for anything. Unfortunately, Google's transition into "yet another big company" is inevitable at this point. If you take the same fundamental structure as every other big company, and hire the same people as the other big companies, then you shouldn't be surprised when you end up looking like every other big company.

mark_h 18y ago
Something about working at big companies seems to turn many people into whiny children. I think it's because they aren't really responsible for anything. I think you've just nailed something I've been observing at my own place of employment, thank you! To lack-of-responsibility, I would also add: security in the job. It's comfortable enough and you can get by without too much exertion, so there's little motivation to either leave or work harder. I certainly don't work in an extreme case of that, but your hypothesis resonated.
prakash 18y ago
What would you do different in terms of structure of a large company? Also who would you hire for large companies?
wheels 18y ago
The other side of things, kind of rounding out the child-like analogy, is that the exposure to opportunity is limited similarly to the exposure to responsibility. Engineering hire number 14,162 might make it to middle management if [s]he sticks around long enough. If you combine this with the trajectory that a lot of smart folks end up on -- home, college, grad-school, large corporation -- I think there's a natural disenfranchisement when kids that thought they were going to change the world and be astronauts when they grew up realize that they're staring down a few decades of project management meetings and internal bureaucracy. Added to a smooth transition from their parents to their company taking care of all of the hard parts of life, it does lead to an odd form of young adulthood where a lot of folks are too afraid of deviating from the prescribed path to break out and do something that's more fulfilling to them.

known 18y ago

Employees normally quit their Managers.

lacker 18y ago
This is a good point I think many people are overlooking. (Full disclosure - I work at Google now.) Your project matters too. People working for great managers on things like search algorithms, Android or open source initiatives are much more likely to love their job. People working for managers they hate on things like Orkut, ATS, or cross-browser compatibility testing are much more likely to leave. In a company as big as Google, different employees can have very different experiences. When you read this group set up for employees who quit, you're seeing the least happy segment of the employee population. I know it doesn't work out for everyone, but I think the average Google employee really likes their job, and I would recommend working there to any programmer who was thinking about it. Just my 2 cents.
- bluishgreen 18y ago
  I would imagine orkut dev is being done by Google India, otherwise it is gonna be frustrating, just like you can't make a shop in India work on Facebook: because none of your friends are using it!
  - mountain_man 18y ago
    Orkut dev in Mountain View had a lot of Indian engineers. They've since moved all dev work to Brazil and India.
  - lacker 18y ago
    Orkut was initially developed in Mountain View and I know for some people it was a frustrating job for exactly the reason you describe. I am not sure but I think it is primarily developed in Brazil now (where Orkut is very popular).

nihilocrat 18y ago

See also: Why Video Game Company Employees Quit A lot of the reasons here are similar: disenfranchisement, low pay, long hours, crappy benefits (though this is not true at all for some companies). Also, unlike Google, there is usually very low job security and you sometimes have to accept a semi-nomadic lifestyle.

cookiecaper 18y ago

>And let me say this: if Larry Page is still reviewing resumes, shareholders should organize a rebellion. That is a scandalous waste of time for someone at that level, and the fact that it’s “quirky” is no mitigation. Regarding this quote, I'm not so sure. Delegation and hands-off management is important and necessary indeed, and I loathe micromanagement no matter which end I'm on, but I think that hiring would be my most closely guarded and reviewed process. Employees are the weakest link, the ultimate valuation; you can have fancy processes or equipment or a lot of hype, but the real value of your company ultimately boils down to the work force -- the capability of yourself and the people backing you up to deliver, maintain, and evolve your money-makers. I actually developed this concept while working at a medium-sized (revenue-wise) niche company. The company was impaired because nobody cared about the bigger picture; we were all just office workers doing our office jobs and trying to push through without killing ourselves. Inter-departmental relationships were tense and there was no cohesion or overarching social glue between the groups, and no understanding managers in between, which led to animosity between obviously less-valued departments and obviously more-valued departments. It was a sad place to work, but it only had about 200 employees. I found this sad. There should be no peons; every employee is an important contributor (or the job shouldn't exist) and every employee should be well-screened and found to be competent for their position and somewhat like-minded with the rest of the force on foundational issues (i.e., no disengaged, uninvolved typical office workers, only people who generally respect but never fear management and direction, ideally someone who thinks the company's revenue generators are enthralling, etc.). You need the kind of people who will push things forward, the kind of people willing to call their managers out, people who will provide mini-revolutions in product and process development for years to come. People who cultivate conviction, respect, and love, and constitute best-in-class performers. Your company is only as good as your people. Your "company" is a company, consisting of the company your entity employs and regularly keeps, not a soulless, faceless, independent, autonomous corporate machine. Any corporation operated at the "machine level" and not the "company level" is just a story in systemic and institutionalized inefficiency, corruption, and incompetence. Companies operated are breeding grounds for corruption and greed and their ugly consequences, and eventually begin to falter, and do so until someone cognizant of this takes over and starts to turn things around by bringing in new, high-caliber, high-vision employees and keeping them motivated in the right ways. In autonomous corporate world, inefficiency and unhappiness are the hallmarks. In good world, employees and employers care about each other and care about their work, contribute and share openly, and push their sector forward, setting new records for morale, efficiency, innovation, and profits. I think if I were Larry Page, I wouldn't waste time with BS like resumes, but I would interview every candidate, and refuse a permanent hire until I was confident that their thought process and personal style was conducive to the overall goals of a non-evil company.