Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#361

Post by Infinitesimus » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 1:37 AM UTC

longtimegoogler wrote: post #317

taneq wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you will probably have to work at least 20 years to have enough for retirement A whole 20 years? Cry me a river.

What I gave was a best case estimate if someone was really diligent, saving very aggressively, investing wisely, and contributing the maximum amount to retirement accounts. As someone who has been working for over 20 years and the last 10 at Google, I am not close to retiring and I don't believe the compensation at Google is that much greater than other software jobs, as my previous compensation was comparable. So wh…

> As someone who has been working for over 20 years and the last 10 at Google, I am not close to retiring and I don't believe the compensation at Google is that much greater than other software jobs, as my previous compensation was comparable.

You're probably well above the average comp at your level ( assuming L6+ ) given how much G stock has appreciated over the past decade though.

> So what am I saying, yes, you might be able to retire early if you work at Google a long time and are very diligent, but you probably could do the same at most other software jobs in the region.

The biggest advantage of these large companies is that the stock units + refreshers + stellar stock performance compounds wonderfully over time. Most other workers are chasing 5-10% raises every few years with poor 401k matching, no free food and no stocks so the gap widens over time.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#362

Post by cheeze » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 1:38 AM UTC

dhuyrv wrote: post #130

You 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…

... are you me?

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#363

Post by Infinitesimus » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 1:39 AM UTC

longtimegoogler wrote: post #345

swat535 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish Toronto, Canada would pay such salaries.. Our COL is just as high, yet the median salary range for SWE is ~80k. Buying a house in TO proper is ~1.5M at the moment.. Honestly, folks in SV don't realize how good they have it.

In comparison, The median SWE salary is around ~123K in SV with a median home price in Mountain View of ~1.6m. IMO, there are better options than SV. I would much rather be working in an area like Austin with a much more reasonable COL with a relatively small drop in median salary.

> The median SWE salary is around ~123K

A lot of the wealth is SV isn't from reported base salaries but from the issued company stocks (see levels.fyi for a subset )

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#364

Post by romanovtexas » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 1:39 AM UTC

m0zg wrote: post #343

Galanwe wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 There is so much wrong in this sentence. First, there is no more “meat grinders” in the US than in Europe. I worked at Microsoft and Criteo in Europe, and the slacking there seems to be on par with what OP describes. You mention 40/80k per year being pitiful? This kind of remu…

>> You mention 40/80k per year being pitiful? This kind of remuneration puts you in the top 10%/5% of France population easily. That just means the rest of the population is poor, not that you should accept less. This is called a fallacy of relative privation. So what if you have to subsist on ramen and can't afford a place to live with less than an hour and a half of commute. Think of all those starving children in…

Except plumbing or electrical trade school certification doesn't help you achieve that either

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#365

Post by apohn » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 1:40 AM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #352

apohn wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just my experience, but that isn't true at all. I work in the US for a huge European based Multinational with an HQ is Western Europe, Dev offices in Western and Eastern Europe, US, and Asia. There are plenty of devs all over the world who are slackers, but who know how to play the visibility and politics game well enough that they are perceived as high value. I've worked for two other Multinationals and with…

>but that isn't true at all. I work in the US for a huge European based Multinational That's very specifically anecdotal. Not all cities in Europe are hot markets flooded with big corps like this one. Not that you're wrong, but your experience doesn't apply everywhere.

I was responding to your comment where you said "The behavior of slacker Googlers described here would have gotten them instantly fired in any European company."

There are a lot(!!) of European Multinationals, plenty of which are the typical slow moving bureaucratic mess where people who are good at meetings, presentations, and big talk end up moving up faster than people who just work hard.

In that sense, there are plenty of cities in the US where the software jobs are terrible, the pay is mediocre, and you work for employer who simply tries to squeeze as much from you as possible. That's one of the reasons there are so many people who migrate to parts of the US where they have more job options and better employers.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#366

Post by NeverFade » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 1:40 AM UTC

cantrevealname wrote: post #358

md5wasp wrote: post #162

Hi 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…

> But the typical clean cut, well-spoken, hard working, respectful, male SWE in the Bay Area making $120K+ a year in his 20s or 30s, who should be a magnet for women, turns out to be living in one of worst places because of male-female ratios among singles (and some other cultural factors).

Yes, it's quite simple: there are many more men in the Bay than women, so women have their pick, and they can afford to raise the bar far higher than $120k.

Also, $120k can be a nice annual salary in much of the US, but doesn't go far in the Bay where median house price is over $1m.

Consider just FAANGs in the Bay. There's probably not enough available single women just for every straight FAANG male employee (who would be making more than $120k/yr).

Anecdotally, 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.

Fair or not, your "male SWE making $120K+ a year" has become the "common guy" of the Bay. The number of women is small enough that most of them can aim higher.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#367

Post by JimboOmega » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 1:40 AM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #152

dhuyrv wrote: post #130

You 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…

>I've become a professional slacker who knows all these psychological tricks, knows what body language to use to make the desired impression, what to say and what not to say. My managers think I'm a high performer who also makes valuable social contributions to our team and this is reflected in pay rises. i.e. the Gervais principle [0] [0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Real question - is this possible to do as a woman? I often feel like the games of the office, especially the engineering office, are much more naturally suited (and familiar to) men.

I've known people who seem to coast to leadership positions (showing no aptitude, and often, even interest in them!), people who are automatically first pick whenever a promotion becomes available almost from the moment they walk in the door... and they've always been men.

Although I've never been on a team led by a woman, in practice it feels like when I'm on sub-teams with other women they function quite differently; the style is "cooperative dyadic relationships that are more emotion-focused and characterized by unstable hierarchies and strong egalitarian norms" is a pretty accurate description and empirically observed to quote[1].

It's also something I've observed directly - for instance, the women's communities I'm part of (be it WomEng, or outside of work) have a very large number of leads, who each lead a small aspect of things, e.g., there might be one person who is in charge of scheduling; another who sets the agenda, and a third who runs the meeting itself. Hierarchies come and go on an as needed basis, it just... operates very differently overall. A recent reorganization of communities requested that the communities all have 2 clear leads, and it was only WomEng that had a problem with that (one that almost dissolved the community as a result)

It often feels that my biggest secret to continued employment is that I'm very good at talking to HR, which has been, again in practice, entirely women. Women view me as a strong contributor and highly capable; men view me as "untrustworthy" and lazy. At my previous job, I basically had to have HR in my one on ones to "translate", for instance.

It's like two very different games; playing the men's one is unnatural and surprisingly difficult. My gut feeling is that this has more to do with personality differences that tend to exist between men and women, and not, say, sexism directly.

Anyway... have you seen women play this game well? If so, how? Where did they learn, and what?

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/taking-...

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#368

Post by austenallred » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 1:41 AM UTC

StandardFuture wrote: post #264

angarg12 wrote: post #233

Humblebrag much? I spent the first 7 years of my career in the public sector. Talk about a career killer. If you are concerned about getting a job elsewhere, just study and do online coding exercises like crazy. That should land you a job at most companies with whiteboard interview at your seniority level. If you are concerned about actual learning, most of my professional growth has been on the job. I spent a long w…

> just study and do online coding exercises like crazy Is this really the new go-to for the software industry? Which "online exercises" and "study" tools do you recommend the most? I would love to visualize what this new canonical basis looks like. Since it will apparently define the software of the 2020s.

Not new, unfortunately

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#369

Post by mpmpmpmp » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 1:41 AM UTC

polishdude20 wrote: post #313

sweetheart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This blows my mind. I make 120k as a young person in SWE, and I feel like a fraud often for making that money, and being able to work from basically anywhere I want in the world. How do you justify it to yourself? Do other things fulfill you? I’m already feeling pangs of doubt about my life, and I work more and earn less than you. I’m passing no judgement at all, I’m just curious about how that dynamic effects you an…

Yeah this is crazy to me too. I don't work in software, I teach engineering at a local tech institute and I make like 55k Canadian. I'm fairly autonomous in that as long as I fulfill my class hours and workload I'm free to work from home and all that. I have a great work life balance and I love it but the pay is abysmally if I want to start a family in the future and save for retirement. I've started getting into sof…

30 year old dad of a 2 year old. I did software dev fulltime for 3 years then a consultant for the last 5. Having the flexibility to be at my kid's doctor appointments and go to the park on a weekday is cool. But I pay for it with either not getting things done or staying up way too late and killing myself. I'm just now starting a more traditional 9-5 schedule (still as a consultant) and I'm hoping that will translate into less stress with being able to work and be a parent and take care of myself. There's hopefully always a happy medium for anybody but it depends on what your priorities are. I definitely noticed a change in my childs behavior when I stopped spending every night in the basement working and learning. Even if it was only for 30 minutes at a time. But obviously my ability to be "in the zone" for hours after billing time was over changed too. But it matters to me, so that's why I do it.

Re: Ask HN: I've been slacking off at Google for 6 years. How can I stop this?

#370

Post by jedberg » Mon, Jan 06, 2020, 1:41 AM UTC

djcapelis wrote: post #312

jedberg wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably depends on the team. I know some that work really hard, but I know others who really coast along, even more than at Google.

For the engineers who want to have an impact on stuff, if you’re skilled and your ideas are good and you can convince others about that, you can be given as much impact as you can eat. There’s a huge spectrum of how much impact people opt to go for. Apple is a good place to come if you want to change something about how a billion people use some technology. And generally Apple is cool with people shipping those ideas…

Right, to be clear what I'm not saying is that all Apple engineers are slackers -- far from it.

Just that from what I can tell talking to many FAANG workers (and working with a bunch of them who came from other FAANGS), Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to, Google also being an easy place to do it.

It's why most of the people I worked with left those places -- they got tired of the slackers.

I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon. And I never saw anyone get away with slacking at Netflix.