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This is a great post, but my experience with Google is that it doesn't empower individual engineers until they reach the Sr. SWE or Staff SWE levels. There's a

This is a great post, but my experience with Google is that it doesn't empower individual engineers until they reach the Sr. SWE or Staff SWE levels. There's a Real Googler Line, which seems to be somewhere in the Senior SWE tier. If you're above it, you have independent credibility and you can change projects and as long as you're not a total flake about it, you get enough opportunities that you can find a place where you shine. If you're below the RGL, you get locked out by headcount limitations and your best hope is, after 18 months, to transfer to a slightly less bad project. What you're discussing is the Credibility Drought. Companies define credibility so that only managers have it, in order to create an artificial scarcity that makes employees easier to control. That's what enables the managerial extortion that forces employees to serve local goals (the manager's own career) rather than the benefit of the company (or the growth of the individual). Very few companies formally allow a manager to unilaterally fire. That's way too much of an HR/lawsuit risk. Instead, these closed-allocation dinosaur companies define credibility in such a limited way that managers can either support or not support the employee, and then if the person is not supported, that person's credibility is zero and the manager isn't firing that person. "The company" does it, after "careful review" of "objective" performance statistics. On top of this, they set tight headcount limits so that for anyone to get a good project requires a special favor, allowing the company to say "no" and appear consistent on the matter. Google is aware enough of this problem to allow engineers at above a certain level to acquire independent credibility. At Staff, you can pull a Yegge (quit your project in public) and be OK. If you're a SWE 3 and you try that, you're fucked. So Google may be different from the full-on closed-allocation nightmare corporation, but you only if you either (a) start at a senior level, or (b) get on visible, desirable projects when you start, so you can get promotions quickly. The only time it isn't difficult to transfer to something better is immediately after a promotion (and there are some managers who withhold promotions to keep people captive; Google, to its credit, has a system that occasionally overrides managerial objections to promo). The sad thing is that I don't doubt that Google is better than 95 percent of large corporations its size in terms of internal mobility, individual autonomy, and engineer-centric culture. It might be better than 98%. It's still pretty awful for a large percentage of people who work there, and the fact that it's so much better than most of what else is out there is a damnation of Corporate America, not an endorsement of Google.

russell 14y ago
This describes my son's experience at Google exactly. He is a computer engineer with strong software and chip level design experience. He sought and was offered a hardware design job at Google. When he got there he was given a job writing python scripts to manage hardware, not the same thing at all. When he tried to change jobs, he was told he had to wait 18 months, so he quit.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  In all fairness, depending on his age, that's kind of how it goes. Hardware design is big money and long product cycles, you can't really just drop into a company and immediately starting masking out a new processor. Plus, computer engineers are (in my experience) pretty rare; you get a lot of electrical, and a lot of software. So they probably have a glut of coders, and a glut of semiconductor guys, but not a lot of 'bridge' people. If you can carve out a niche doing a bit of both, you become pretty valuable. This is speaking as a comp eng. student who has gotten very little hands-on hardware experience. I've now worked two years doing pretty much exclusively software; the closest I got to real design was product verification and manufacturing support.
  - deleted 14y ago
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  - russell 14y ago
    He is the 'bridge' person you speak of. He was only 30 but had about 15 years of professional software development experience. He spent 3 years at a startup developing highly parallel algorithms in C and implementing them in FPGAs resulting in commercial products. He said that in interviewing chip designers for his company that nearly all had no sense of algorithms. He felt that his software experience was a major strength in hardware design.
neurotech1 14y ago
From what I understood from friends who are Googlers, is that 20% projects on other teams, can be rewarded with a transfer, sometimes sooner than later. Google is one of the few companies where the 20% is a real thing for most people branch out, on either their own project, or another teams project. As far as most companies, the side-project with other teams is simply not an option.

russell 14y ago

This describes my son's experience at Google exactly. He is a computer engineer with strong software and chip level design experience. He sought and was offered a hardware design job at Google. When he got there he was given a job writing python scripts to manage hardware, not the same thing at all. When he tried to change jobs, he was told he had to wait 18 months, so he quit.

alanctgardner2 14y ago
In all fairness, depending on his age, that's kind of how it goes. Hardware design is big money and long product cycles, you can't really just drop into a company and immediately starting masking out a new processor. Plus, computer engineers are (in my experience) pretty rare; you get a lot of electrical, and a lot of software. So they probably have a glut of coders, and a glut of semiconductor guys, but not a lot of 'bridge' people. If you can carve out a niche doing a bit of both, you become pretty valuable. This is speaking as a comp eng. student who has gotten very little hands-on hardware experience. I've now worked two years doing pretty much exclusively software; the closest I got to real design was product verification and manufacturing support.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- russell 14y ago
  He is the 'bridge' person you speak of. He was only 30 but had about 15 years of professional software development experience. He spent 3 years at a startup developing highly parallel algorithms in C and implementing them in FPGAs resulting in commercial products. He said that in interviewing chip designers for his company that nearly all had no sense of algorithms. He felt that his software experience was a major strength in hardware design.

neurotech1 14y ago

From what I understood from friends who are Googlers, is that 20% projects on other teams, can be rewarded with a transfer, sometimes sooner than later. Google is one of the few companies where the 20% is a real thing for most people branch out, on either their own project, or another teams project. As far as most companies, the side-project with other teams is simply not an option.