Earlier quoted context omitted.
FlumeJava/Spanner/Stubby Services, mostly in payments
I think financially it might best to stick at Google but change jobs. However, since you mentioned Space-X, remember that your skills set is not the core of their technology so you would not be able to get into one of the critical teams immediately. But sometimes you can make multiple jumps in position with time till you get closer to what you desire. Use your friends and former coworkers to help you lead into new op…
Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google?
31–40 of 49 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google?
#32Find People and teams you want to work with internally first and interview with them. What is happening in the news has nothing to do with developing your own skills. That fully depends on the people you surround yourself with. And if you haven't learnt how to find those people within a place like Google, it's not going to be easy to learn outside.
GXJam prolly wasn't designed for that purpose in mind, but that's how I use it :)
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google?
#33Some resented being moved interstate or overseas, and sought a path home to where they like to be.
Some say they are burned out and burnt by scale problems but mainly I think it's loss of autonomy at root. Being told to do things you don't believe in is hard.
Only one left in some sense fully vested, and he's a bit bored by the outside world. I don't think google is a 'chocolate factory' but be warned after initial enthusiasm wears off, you need to retain some sense of core role in any job, and few may be as accommodating as Google is said to be.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google?
#34I was extremely happy at Google for many years. I liked my coworkers, I liked my work, I liked my manager. I did get burned out from time to time, but usually there was something interesting to keep me going through the rough patches, and my team, coworkers, and managers were all very supportive of what I needed to do to stay productive and happy (which in a lot of cases was "sleep for 2 days and maybe wake up to have a meeting that would be inconvenient to move"). It was quite wonderful. I had no trouble getting promoted, got "strongly exceeds" performance reviews, and had a lot of fun. Good times.
All good things must come to an end eventually, however. I came into work one day and my project was cancelled (and not like "wind it down over the next 6 months", but literally "might as well delete the CLs you're working on") and I hastily transferred to another interesting-sounding team that, in retrospect, I kind of got the hard-sell to join.
As it turned out, I didn't really care for the other team that I transferred to, and thought to myself "everyone else on my old team got 6 months to sit at home and research other projects to transfer to, so I'll just look for another project." I did not get that option. I was basically told "you just transferred, so you can't leave." And then told, "you really aren't getting enough work done on your own hours, I want you to be here at 9am so I can make sure you're working." That went as well as you'd imagine. A bunch of people advised me "you're depressed, you should take 3 months off and get some antidepressants". I talked with my doctor and did that. In the end, it had no effect. The third-party company that handles paid leave denied my claim, so it was unpaid leave. I decided to take a vacation right at the end of my leave... which the vacation system decided was invalid and silently discarded. When I was on vacation without cell phone service, Google started calling my parents (I'm 32 BTW) looking for me. It was quite a production when I finally got cell phone service back. 3 months of de-stressing, instantly erased.
I got back and started working on a new project under the supervision of my existing manager. He decided that, based on git commit timestamps, I wasn't programming quickly enough. (I got that from another very new manager once, and it was also an App Engine project. I'm not sure if that says more about me or App Engine, but I digress.) To be brutally honest, I'm kind of offended that he didn't consider me to be capable of forging timestamps on git commits. I thought about it, honestly, but in the end decided that experienced managers knows that some things are easy and some things are hard. But in the end, I thought honesty was the best policy.
I was pretty stressed out at this point because my manager and I clearly didn't get along, and the project I wanted to work on didn't have official headcount so I couldn't really get out of a bad situation. At that point I wrote up some email to the relevant concerned parties and realized "I do not want to read the response to this email", so I didn't. Some time passed and someone from HR called me saying "you know if you are gone for 3 days, you're voluntarily resigning, right?" I said, "yup." And that was the end of my experience working for Google. I still have my laptop and badge. They still have a box of my stuff (including my beloved Realforce 87UB keyboard!) Oh well.
My point is, there are other places to work. Google is a huge company and some people are happy and some people aren't. If you're unhappy, maybe you can find happiness elsewhere. I'll tell you one thing, though... antidepressants won't make you happy about a job you don't like.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google?
#35Re: Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google?
#36So the way you're describing the situation is "should people leave google", not "should you leave google". General career advice has been discussed a lot here, but it really depends on your personality and motivation. (E.g. do you want a stable job, can you tolerate a stable job for a long time, are you looking to get into management, can you pull off company hopping every 2 years, are you a SWE and do you have a mat…
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google?
#37How senior are you? I would first spend some time hunting for innovative teams within Google to transfer to. There are plenty of boring jobs at Google but also plenty of ambitious small teams working on startup-like projects. Even cute experimental features on big established products (search/gmail/maps/drive/etc.) often could plausibly be the basis for an entire startup, but there are also some pie-in-the-sky projec…
There might be some possibility for leadership but otherwise it's all CRUD operations and the complexity is in the business, not the tech.
If you like the business but don't like what you're doing, can that change soon? If this is the deciding factor, why not phrase it that way to whoever can make that decision? Nothing to lose ...
If you just want to leave the company in general, than isn't your answer "yes?"
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why aren't you creating something interesting? Good careers don't go to those waiting to be handed a golden egg.. understand the business, understand innovative technology, and connect them, and the world will be your oyster. If management won't let you understand enough of the business to do so, I sympathize, I've been there. But if you're allowed to understand the business and are expecting someone else to come up…
I see what you mean, but getting approval to make changes is challenging in this particular department.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google?
#39At the risk of stating the obvious- it doesn't matter how innovative a company is as a whole, it matters how innovative what you're doing is. SpaceX does some really cool stuff, say, but you're not a rocket scientist- managing their financial software wouldn't be cooler than it would be for anyone else's. Conversely, Snapchat is just a goofy app for teenagers, but whoever writes the facial tracking system they use in…
For example, I was once offered the opportunity to work on low-latency software that identifies users as they move between websites (fingerprinting in ad tech speak). There are tons of cool CS problem around this, but in the end I turned it down.
Now I do ostensibly 'boring' CRUD work for a large eCommerce marketplace company. But it's an honest business model that benefits both sides of that market and I feel happier than I would have been in ad tech.
Re: Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so?
Couple of things I notice mainly 1. Pushing code and being unaware of the build system that does anything else. 2. Unable to comprehend that there can be teams/companies where some products are written and maintained by one person, and does not have any practical code reviewing. (This is not a good thing, but it is not difficult to imagine how that can be). 3. (and lately), people explaining things that come off to m…