>there's a whole industry evolved to make us unhappy—it's profitable for us to be unhappy because then we'll go buy “solutions” for our unhappiness.
I like how it's a win-win now for me acting revolutionary by being happy.
Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness
21–30 of 351 posts
Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness
#22> When they sat down with me they said, “we want you to build an email something.”
As I understand Paul began work on Gmail in 2001 at the time Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were market leaders. Interesting Google execs knew they could do better, even though Gmail didn't officially launch until over 3 years later.
Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was at a talk last week given by a startup founder and he said something similar that went along these lines: The bigger the company, the smaller your role's coverage. You get well-compensated and aren't worked too hard, but your job might effectively be "you're responsible for these two screens of this one component of this particular application". The conflict is that the bigger the company, the higher the bar fo…
That's not what's incentivized though. Getting in to a FAANG is just the first step. The next step is to actually show that you can affect more than just your two screens. That's why they work in constant review cycles. People who get frustrated are often the people who don't know how to affect more than their two screens. It's hard, because you're competing with other people who are equally or more brilliant. Althou…
From what I hear it's turning fairly intelligent to asshole
Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, who's the new 'Google' now?
Facebook, Google, Apple, and Netflix still have some of the best talent in the bay. They also push out a lot of amazing projects (PyTorch, React, Go, Chromium, Tensorflow), although Netflix much less so. At the end of the day they have the money, and they do provide ridiculous perks.
> They also push out a lot of amazing projects ... although Netflix much less so.
Actually Netflix much more so, only their projects are not in software. Just sayin.
Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness
#25> Someone who can do that is ridiculous. Talk about 10x engineers. That's more like 1000x. And it's good, clean code too. Literally no number of median engineers can do that. You can give me a million median engineers and they would never be able to do that. They would just make a huge mess.
This is probably one of the most truest thing I've read about our profession.
Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak comes to mind, who else?
Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's highly dependent on your role, and at its current size your chances of getting lost in some piece of noise is quite high. Of course endless performance reviews also suck. Google is still a great place to work, but it's a corporation now, and there are just some things that don't scale.
I suspect it'd mostly depend on your personal standards and ambitions than your role. I can't imagine many below-VP positions being much different on this dimension. Even many VPs and up are getting stuck in life-sucking unimportant activities.
Autonomy is harder and harder to get at larger corporations and play a big role in self identifying work as satisfying or valuable. Even if you manage to get it, it can be taken away by an outsider in a large corp at any point. Startups are safer bets from this perspective.
Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness
#27> Great engineers understand computers all the way from the silicon up through the different layers and protocols and systems. I find this a bit limiting, certainly they should think across multiple layers but some of those layers exist beyond the systems.
What is it limiting? What are you referring to as being existing beyond the systems?
It was probably not made clear but he seems to be talking about systems engineering in particular.
Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness
#28> Overall, the job wasn't exciting to me. I didn't have to work that hard, and one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and all alone): I'm like, “Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap.” I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, “I'm not tired anymore.” Working at Intel was a draining env…
So, who's the new 'Google' now?
Crypto/blockchain and decentralized companies in their various forms. People say it's garbage but they also said that about search engine advertising too.
Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness
#29> When they sat down with me they said, “we want you to build an email something.” As I understand Paul began work on Gmail in 2001 at the time Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were market leaders. Interesting Google execs knew they could do better, even though Gmail didn't officially launch until over 3 years later.
Well part of the story seems to be that they weren't Google "Execs", it was Larry removing (firing?) all of management and having engineers decide what other engineers to work on.
Re: Paul Buchheit on Joining Google, How to Become a Great Engineer, and Happiness
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was at a talk last week given by a startup founder and he said something similar that went along these lines: The bigger the company, the smaller your role's coverage. You get well-compensated and aren't worked too hard, but your job might effectively be "you're responsible for these two screens of this one component of this particular application". The conflict is that the bigger the company, the higher the bar fo…
That's not what's incentivized though. Getting in to a FAANG is just the first step. The next step is to actually show that you can affect more than just your two screens. That's why they work in constant review cycles. People who get frustrated are often the people who don't know how to affect more than their two screens. It's hard, because you're competing with other people who are equally or more brilliant. Althou…
But you're not competing with those brilliant people on technical merit, but in the political game of building a fiefdom in a large company. That takes very different skills, and many people find it distastful.