Your current behaviour should mark you for fast track promotion. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Forming and subscribing to a world view based on a TV series script does not strike me as a good idea.
Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
491–500 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but this is urban legend to me. No saying it does not happen, but that is definitely a very special case. I manage a team of quantitative developers in a Hedge Fund and do between 50 and 100 interviews per year, at senior level. I have head hunter compensation report on the candidates. I see regularly candidates from Google, Amazon, and finance industry. I very rarely see 6 digit bonus for big techs. My experi…
> head hunter compensation report You should ask for a refund. Senior engineers at FANG in the Bay Area will typically make over $100k/year in stock. Total compensation of $300k-$400k is pretty normal, and includes salary, stock, and bonus. Netflix is an exception; compensation is mostly or all in cash. The flip side is that, even with $350k/year income, you probably still can't comfortably afford a nice 3-bedroom ho…
;_;
You know what sucks? I have to pay ridiculous rent for a house in an LA suburb and I make only a fraction of that lol.
Dang!
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know some women in the Bay, working in areas like recruiting and marketing, who are dating VCs and CEOs exclusively and consider dating "plain engineers" to be beneath them. That sounds more like bullets dodged than a loss (for the engineers that is).
Sure. If that appeals to you, you're welcome to move to the Bay. You'll dodge so many bullets, that you'll forget what a date with a woman is ;-) More seriously, while we'd love to impose moral views on reality, the simple fact is that when people can afford to be picky, they will be. I don't know what you value in a romantic partner, but for simplicity, let's assume it's looks. If you arrived at some magical island…
Maybe. If they were better at fishing than anyone else.
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#494Hi there, I did the exact same thing as you (at Google Sydney), before eventually deciding that I must strike out into the wilderness. In the few years since I left; I worked as a solutions architect managing a team, a team lead, a remote dev, and now in a startup. Front-end, back-end, flip-side, all the ends. So I've been deliberately trying different angles of my career to see what suits. I'd describe this process…
> make the most of it by progressing deliberately in your social life Ironically the Bay Area is among the worst places on Earth for improving your social life if you're straight and male. I noticed that you don't live in the Bay Area, you're married, you probably meant a much broader meaning of "social life", so your experiences are likely very different. But the typical clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respect…
I like how a guy earning a fairly unremarkable-when-we-adjust-for-cost-of-living salary with a bunch of fairly unimpressive table-stakes credentials: "clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful" (whaddaya want? a cookie?) is meant to be a Amazing Pussy Magnet.
One of the major factors - aside from the gender ratio - behind tech guys not finding partners is this weird expectation that if they shave, clip their fingernails, and don't act like an outright dirtbag that women will flock to them, regardless of whether they have any personal appeal or not.
A lot of dudes in tech are just bores with zero interests and a outsized sense of entitlement to the opposite sex (talking about the het guys, don't know how it works on the other side of the fence). Just to top it off, they expect to be magnets to interesting women, too - these guys are the first to sneer at gold-digging women who are, frankly, their appropriate mirror image. That is, if the only thing you can say about yourself that isn't table-stages normal person stuff is that you're "a SWE making $120K+ a year" who exactly do you think you're going to attract?
Bonus points: deciding that the one thing that's missing from the above picture is being swole, and filling in any extra time not spend being a "respectful male SWE" with incessant iron pumping.
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#495You remind me myself a few years ago: a talented, but bored slacker who didn't see any point in investing any energy into that project. Turns out I was right: the project didn't go anywhere after I left and investing any extra time would be a clueless thing to do. So what's changed since then? Have I found meaning in work? No! I've become a professional slacker who knows all these psychological tricks, knows what bod…
This blows my mind that in the US one can make such insane money in tech while still being a slacker and retire early with a dream house bought and paid for while in Europe devs are slaving away through SCRUM powered meat grinders burning themselves out for a 3% salary increase on a pitiful 40-80k/year, no stock options, without any hope of early retirement or owning a decent home without a 30 year loan or financial…
> This blows my mind that in the US one can make such insane money in tech while still being a slacker and retire early with a dream house bought and paid for while in Europe devs are slaving away through SCRUM powered meat grinders burning themselves out for a 3% salary increase on a pitiful 40-80k/year,
I've been in this industry here in America for 20+ years and most software developers don't enjoy such a easy time.
Burnout is common. I personally feel like I have been in a "meat grinder" for about 22 years.
Working at Google is VERY different from working at most companies.
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. We've been fed the narrative of economic success that many folks have forgotten what personal success looks like. You can be successful in your career and still feel like a failure. Therapy is the answer here. You have to un-brainwash yourself from the notion that your job is your life and figure out what really matters to you. Then f…
Software engineering just isn't that hard. Tedious yes, but not remotely difficult. Come back and say this after you’ve had to fix concurrency bugs or had to maintain some overseas contractor’s terrible codebase with no documentation.
Do those once and you’ve done them a hundred times.
Vast majority of software engineering is tedious and boring. Almost no developing cutting edge optimal algorithms. Occasionally interesting design/architecture problems but the majority of the time spent on those is on writing docs, consensus building/communication, and implementation. It’s hard to find the motivation and force yourself to spend week after week chasing down bugs through poorly written code, but almost no task itself is challenging.
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
The max I negotiated in Europe was $125000, an ok start up salary was maybe $80000 and I am currently - with lots of non-money benefits at around $70000. What makes me most sad is that fostering the web tracking industry - tech + marketing - is so lucrative. I have such a hard time understanding this world - it does not make much sense any more. This lying and scheming around collecting all your data and activity for…
> fostering the web tracking industry because consumers don't want to pay for anything. It's easier to extract private data, and sell that to a corporation for a lot of money, than to extract a small premium from each user (which is like squeezing blood from stone).
Yep. This battle was lost way, way back in the 90s when we collectively decided that everything on the Internet should be free.
I think it's one of the great lost opportunities in human history.
I don't know what the "correct" course of action would have been, instead of making everything ad-supported and mostly terrible. Some kind of very very seamless micropayments? Maybe there was no "correct choice." Maybe "free, but awful" always would have won no matter the alternative.
But man, this outcome sucks. The internet turned out to be just one more way to squirt advertisements into our eyeballs.
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#498Hi there, I did the exact same thing as you (at Google Sydney), before eventually deciding that I must strike out into the wilderness. In the few years since I left; I worked as a solutions architect managing a team, a team lead, a remote dev, and now in a startup. Front-end, back-end, flip-side, all the ends. So I've been deliberately trying different angles of my career to see what suits. I'd describe this process…
> make the most of it by progressing deliberately in your social life Ironically the Bay Area is among the worst places on Earth for improving your social life if you're straight and male. I noticed that you don't live in the Bay Area, you're married, you probably meant a much broader meaning of "social life", so your experiences are likely very different. But the typical clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respect…
This applies to males in general in the bay area. Not just the white ones. I got fed up with the loneliness and left the country entirely. Had a girlfriend a month later after picking from several whom were interested.
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#499Why not work for yourself instead of getting hired? After 6 years at Google you probably have some cash in the bank. Also, consider the possibility that maybe you don't enjoy programming just because you're good at it. What do you daydream about? You mention dating/breakups/depression and gaming (arguably a form of escapism), so it sounds very much like you have some unfilled emotional need. If that's family based yo…
It's important to straighten the rest of your life out first before dating. Exercising everyday will help you feel calmer, more confident, and have more energy. Once you exercise for about a month (5+ days per week), you will start feeling stable again and even extroverted. At that point, find a core group of really good friends (probably at work but online works too -- Discord is great).
If all else fails, I can tell you that leaving the Bay Area really helped me re-gain my perspective. I recommend Singapore. Just transfer offices, and don't look back. People here know how to work but not how to live. They also view every social interaction as one that might opportunistically build their own network, almost pathologically transactional in essence. Meanwhile, the resource contention here has everyone stressed out about money (even if they don't outwardly act like it), and long-standing communities don't exist because everyone here has been transplanted elsewhere, so nobody has any firm standing with where they live, nobody has each other's back.
I disagree that gaming is necessarily a form of escapism per se unless it is one of the sole uses of your time. If you use gaming as a social outlet, it is actually great (play games with your IRL friends online, get some friends together, organize/participate in gaming events in real life, etc.).
Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?
#500IMHO, its not that great to work at a IT company than working at a Software Company like Google !!!