161–170 of 187 posts
There’s a special kind of rottenness in big orgs when the only thing they can produce is “like X but by us”. I understand why it happens, I’ve been on a few projects like that. The problem is that it’s hard to come up with a genuine new idea that a stack of middle managers will agree on and execute. But if you say: “Let’s make Twitter/facebook/App Store”, then the middle managers can’t really disagree with you since…
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I agree. They just need to make this clear to him before he agrees to the job.
Job offers don't come with project guarantees. What next? A guaranteed table spot next to the window?
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At places like Google, where peer reviews determine your bonuses and your career advancement, senior people on your team have to be handled politically. For a person coming in at a level 2, this means nearly everyone.
I've worked at a large software company with a similar review system in place and I think this attitude makes it sound like everyone is walking on egg shells and can't state what they really think for fear of offending someone in power. That's hardly the case. If someone "below" me had a problem with my scheduling or some things I was doing, I'd like them to tell me and not just act angry later on. People work togeth…
The company has to explicitly foster an egoless culture to make fair peer reviews work, but egoless employees aren't going to present themselves well enough to get promotions. The system incentivizes politics. If you didn't see it in your team, your teammates hadn't learned to play the game yet.
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It was a hard lesson for me to learn in the past: if you care wildly more than the people around you -- so much that you work late into the night while your grandmother is dying and your coworkers are pounding drinks with their counterparts at a competitor -- you'll just end up really hurt and frustrated and they'll all think that you are the problem. The author seems like the kind of person that I'd love to do a 3-p…
His criticisms come off as seriously naive and green if he was expecting to upend the design practice of a behemoth tech company with many competing business units and products, each with their own leaders, legacy code dependencies, and teams of designers who would poke holes in his design decisions from a UX perspective (e.g. didn't test designs with users, just made it up) and see him as a 'graphic designer' who is…
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You've heard that, huh? HC doesn't pick your job, they decide whether or not to hire you. Hence the name. At Google it's typically trivially simple to switch teams (this article notwithstanding), so teams don't recruit and hire independently like happens in many companies. So after a hire is approved, they have to be matched up with a team. Teams decide whether or not a hire is appropriate for their team, and candida…
Good, I assume you have first-hand knowledge of Google's hiring practices. So, what number of teams can a typical candidate choose from? Compared to the total number of teams hiring? I guess the typical scenario is that a few teams express interest and then you can choose one of them, which is not much different from just "congratulations, this is your new team". > At Google it's typically trivially simple to switch…
Depends on a variety of factors (candidate skills, season, other people, what projects are being worked on etc.). I've seen everything from between 1, and like 8-10.
>How simple is trivially simple?
There's an internal hiring board that people post openings on. You can apply. AFAIK, the manager can pick between people. Basically all of your other questions come down to "does the hiring manager want to allow it".
>What do you do with your responsibilities at the current project?
Depends, I'd hope people handle it like reasonable humans. In my case at least, I told my manager I was interested in transferring out in the next couple months, and he told me to stick around a bit longer so that he could make sure I got promoted. I ended up not transferring out as my work got more interesting.
In general, its easier to transfer with the blessing of your current manager, but from what I've seen its not required. And there are probably long tail cases where transferring is difficult, or people do unethical things, but I'm not directly familiar with any, and I don't think they're the norm. So for most cases, transferring is trivial.
Edit: And actually, if you read the entire story (more was posted on twitter after this article went up), he was able to transfer off of the team with almost no issues, to a team he found much more interesting, but instead left to go to Dropbox. The whole transferring this was literally a nonissue once he actually tried to do it.
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You've got that backwards. Attitude can be adjusted, but only if the person is willing. Talent can't be learned--at least not by most people, and not on the timescale of an actual job to be performed.
You are entitled to your opinion but in my life as tech recruiter or even for my startup my priority has always been culture fit aka don't be an asshole. The rest is negotiable.
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Unfortunately in big companies no one is valuable. If someone is, the company has a problem.
In 2014 Google paid a guy named Neal Mohan $100 to refuse the head of product job at Twitter.[0] [0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/neal-mo...
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Yep. Seems like a smart guy, but overwhelmed with bitterness. Also a fair amount of irony from someone complaining about fair treatment, like: "Let’s call him Greg because his real name is just as vanilla"
The author of this article sounds insufferable to work with. Sounds like the google team all couldn't stand working with him, so while they didn't specifically fire him, they orchestrated to force him out so he would resign. After reading his self-indulgent, whiny, bitter grandstanding tirade, can't say I blame them. Also shows a complete lack of introspection or self awareness that he'd post and promote this drivel…
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You've got that backwards. Attitude can be adjusted, but only if the person is willing. Talent can't be learned--at least not by most people, and not on the timescale of an actual job to be performed.
Talent only even begins to matter when you're at levels roughly 4-5 standard deviations away from the mean.
I learned a lot from this. It was very demotivating, painful, even humiliating, and it took me a long time to get over it (mostly). What I didn't learn is that all the people who were to blame for this were the bad guys. Here's what I did learn:
- People are people and will do the things that people do, despite your high expectations.
- You can often not change other people. But you can change yourself. Think of what *you* can do to improve relationships.
- You'll rarely change someone's thinking by using logic. This, sadly, is not human nature in a political environment.
- Work is a political environment. Even engineering.
- You must learn what motivates, frustrates, encourages, shames and honors the people you work with.
- Protect the people you work with, do not cause them to raise their defenses.
- If you want something to move forward in a team you must win people over.
- You don't win people over by making them feel threatened that you will take power from them or make them look bad.
- If you truly care about something, having another person claim that idea as their own isn't bad, it's a great victory.