A Person With Boring Job Is Bored At Work.
My Google job was tedious and pointless
221–230 of 348 posts
Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't realize Google employed illegal immigrants.
Trump campaigned on far more that illegal immigrants. Muslims and LGBT people were also targets of his.
But deporting Muslims? He definitely didn't campaign on that. And that he targeted LGBT people is a real stretch. Even Obama was more anti-LGBT in 2008.
Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless
#223Just proves ... its not the company: it is the job that counts.
that's exactly right! I tell my younger mentees that you can work for companies that are doing cutting edge stuff, but watch what you are actually doing and contributing to that. Are you growing and being challenged as a productive individual. At best one would have to be content playing an indirect role that aides the development of cutting edge research or whatever. I guess the fallacy for the author was assuming a few degrees of indirection in a supporting role was going to be life changing and doing things that mattered. I like seeing his honesty in reporting that things from him vantage point from all the action was in the end not all that meaningful for him.
Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless
#224As someone who has worked at a large corp. for a bunch of years I can say the job you have may feel awful but you're at a company where you can network with people who do anything you are curious about.
The same could be said to the person writing this article. You work at Google.. your recruiting job might be awful but get your earbuds out during lunch and see if you might work at another team internally that is more in line with what you wanted to do.
Take some ownership of what you'd like to do.
Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless
#225I worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener. The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stal…
It's disturbing to me how many people here seem to be okay with executives and higher-ups expressing grief over the results of an election, in the office. I don't think that stuff has any place at work. It's a red-flag to me if that kind of thing is commonplace in the office. Not only is it distracting, but it's insulting to employees who may have an opposite position politically. If you're emotionally affected by so…
Google is all about emotions. Their PR&ads feel like they're trying to humanise the AI behemoth the company is.
Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was my reaction too. Mike Rowe would probably look dimly upon the author's complaints. Sometimes, companies hire people to do unpleasant jobs, and convince them to do these jobs by paying them. But, it's tough to have that conversation from the position of privilege one sits in when one gets paid even more to do an interesting job, because of the scarcity of people capable of performing in that role. Presumably…
> Sometimes, companies hire people to do unpleasant jobs, and convince them to do these jobs by paying them. What I got was that the requirement for overt enthusiasm over a mundane job became too much. I don't think Mike Row would see it the same way if a sewage technician was forced to pretend their job was "making a better world one bowel movement at a time" or face being ostracized.
I did not get the sense that the author was ostracized. Rather, they were put off by other people's enthusiasm. "Am I the only one here who can see this job is crap?" I can totally understand that feeling being crazy-making, but it's different than being ostracized.
Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless
#227I worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener. The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stal…
It's disturbing to me how many people here seem to be okay with executives and higher-ups expressing grief over the results of an election, in the office. I don't think that stuff has any place at work. It's a red-flag to me if that kind of thing is commonplace in the office. Not only is it distracting, but it's insulting to employees who may have an opposite position politically. If you're emotionally affected by so…
I totally agree. Regardless of how you personally feel, your employees likely include people on all sides of the political spectrum.
If I were an employee, I would assume the grief is primarily about increased costs to the employer.
Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the majority of the country doesn't want you in, then tough titty. I would not stay somewhere where I'm not welcome.
Wow. Seems like you completely lack the ability to empathize.
I witnessed first hand an entire mobile engineering department at a major US company dissolved. Managers, QA, software engineers, a total of 20 hardworking, dependable people, were shown the door in favor of Chinese contractors who would do their job for a quarter of the price.
Empathy, it seems, is often a cherry picked virtue.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who sees their country selling out to the highest bidder. Can you not understand their fear?
Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless
#229I worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener. The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stal…
I've worked for big tech corporations a few times before, no matter how much they pay, I can never stay there longer than 6 months. There is so much inefficiency. It's good for 6 months but after that I feel myself getting dumber by the day. Not all corporations are like this but most of them are. Handing my resignation felt great every time. It's addictive in fact. Just seeing the disappointment in my boss' face and…
I feel that 6 months isn't enough time to conclude much. Also, I don't see how you are able to mature your technical skillset in 6 months because a large portion of maturation in software design is reflecting back on how your deliverable performs in future.
If I ship a product this year, next year I can reflect back on how the requirements change, how I didn't anticipate a customer use case and learn from this for future design.
Delivering some code for 6 months won't get you anywhere past a code monkey in my opinion.
Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"As a non-American I'm so glad I don't work in an country where politics seems to create such hysteria in the workplace." Your America bashing is completely uncalled for and unwarranted. It's pretty sad that you don't realize that executives getting on stage and crying in front of employees the day after an election is a complete aberration. This was was not and is not commonplace.
> Your [...] you That's unduly personal, and therefore uncivil, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Unfortunately this kind of thing appears frequently in your comment history. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when commenting here?
I'm confused, my use of possessive pronouns is uncivil? I've read the guidelines, specifically the "In Comments" section. I'm failing to see where my comment runs afoul of the guidelines. It's not snark, its not something you wouldn't say face to face etc. Can you you elaborate?