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Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

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Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#291

Post by cbarrick »

adrianb wrote: post #139
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author is correct that some big tech companies create a culture where going to 11am yoga is more important that crunching out a few more lines of code. He's correct that if your focus is on building and scaling product, this culture reduces the velocity of change. However, I see a couple of things the author is missing: 1) Work life balance is about employee long term retention and places like Google spen…

He's giving a few examples for work-life balance and I have completely different feelings about - from the 11 AM Yoga class (pretty ridiculous IMO) to taking a personal day (reasonable, people need their day off, maybe the personal day is for an urgent medical check-up?) to working during the weekend (unless the entire service is down and I'm the oncall, it can wait).

The 11 AM Yoga class does not sound ridiculous to me precisely because of the nature of tech work: we don't need to all be working together at the exact same time, as opposed to most other jobs.

Want to trade an hour in the middle of the day on a Tuesday with showing up an hour early Wednesday? Do it. What's the problem?

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#292

Post by duxup »

xyzelement wrote: post #192
duxup wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a weird dynamic. I remember visiting the valley for the first time for a big company I worked for at another location. The scale of work life balance was unbalanced so many strange ways... The tech support team I worked with was in 'building 3'. Nobody ever left that building through out the day. I went to the big cafeteria and the options were amazing. I managed to get some of my peers to go with me, sever…

A few reactions to that. First, there's always a self selecting thing there. For some reason folks from building 3 never bothered to go explore, and it sounds like they didn't keep going to the caf even once you showed them. Nothing was holding them at their desk, they just didn't care/bother. Second, some jobs are different than others. Some jobs you have to "be there" for. Tech support may be like that - you have t…

I think it is self selecting ... by every individual. Each makes their choices.

The real challenge is when you value work life balance and ... it starts to hit other people's work.

Like in my case, getting hassled by security every day, multiple times a day ... IMO that should supersede someone's gym class if it was their job to schedule getting me a photo and a proper badge, but it is super easy for those kinda "well we value work life balance" kinda decisions to push important work aside.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#293

Post by freeone3000 »

serverholic wrote: post #253
JKCalhoun wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just a more lax unemployment policy. I worry that if you give everyone $1000/month: 1) you cannot live on $1000/month so it is an empty gesture 2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even emptier gesture

1) So you're saying that giving people $1000/month would open up zero new possibilities for people? 2) It's not that simple because different goods will respond differently. Certain goods will get cheaper because the increased sales will allow for more economies of scale.

Housing is the big one mentioned, and it does not allow for any further economies of scale than already exist. Rent rises based on the prevailing salary of the area -- house prices as well, since they represent the years of rental income. It's not even necessarily a supply issue, since Seattle has more empty houses than it has homeless people! Prices simply rise to whatever the market can bear. So under the current system, any absolute increase in money will likely simply be swallowed by landlords.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#294

Post by yardie »

andrew_ wrote: post #272
yardie wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in union shops as well while not being in the union. Union overtime is highly coveted because it's a 2x-3x bonus that a lot of my union friends used towards a downpayment, kids' college tuition, retiring earlier, or starting a business. No one had to step up because everyone was stepping up. And the shop chief usually decided who got that overtime (i.e. young worker trying to buy a house might get higher…

I disagree only in that I worked salaried positions in the trades for some time. While most trades are hourly, there does exist a salaried contingent. The thinking that extra asks from your employer is an intrusion into your life is inherently, entitlement. Solid companies and management will repay that extra effort, in one form or another.

> The thinking that extra asks from your employer is an intrusion into your life is inherently, entitlement.

Let's get this straight an entitlement is something that is owed. If I buy health insurance and go to the hospital I am entitled to use it. If I pay for unemployment in my salary and become unemployed I am entitled to it.

> in one form or another.

Banking and housing unfortunately does not work this way. I can only present a paystub or W4 when applying for a loan or renting a flat, any other form of compensation is disregarded. My dedication to the job should be remitted through my salary, a employee pizza/ice cream party doesn't mean a thing to me.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#295

Post by Traster »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #48

> “ It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a great job. This neuters managers and does not lead to great teams, driven by mission, pushing each other to do better.” Ugh, this refuted myth again? The “insecure, bad leader who blames subordinates for their own failures” meter is…

I would like to hear the refutation because I've witnessed this myself in corporate environments. Corporate HR are difficult to deal with, they're very process orientated and risk averse, getting rid of someone reflects poorly on you and your management structure basically doesn't care if there's 1 useless person in your team. You have to put a huge amount of work in to document and justify why the person is not qualified for the job and (in my country) you've got to make a reasonable effort to find another role for them, and if you do start this process with HR it creates documentation that means no one will ever take them if they do want to transfer.

Start to end you're probably talking about ~6 months to get rid of someone and over that time you need an intense process of setting them targets and documenting failing to meet expectations. The result is that most managers are more likely to try and shuffle their bad engineers into other teams than to actually give up a big chunk of their time doing this process. Not to mention the fact it puts you in a very awkward positioning having a working relationship with the person you're getting rid of.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#296

Post by groby_b »

ramraj07 wrote: post #90
madeofpalk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend." lmao what a terrible, horrible manager. I would hate working for them, and I would not miss them leaving. Maybe I'm just playing into their "young people don't want to work" stereotype, but if that's what working means, I don't want to do it with them.

A different way of putting it would be whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work. It's not incongruent with a balanced life. To me It just means occasdinally you might stay late at work, once in awhile an interesting problem gets you working on the company laptop all Saturday, and if something breaks you're not able to log off until you fix it. Doesn't mean you cant take Friday's off of or…

"whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work."

This is an incredibly important factor. It really matters to getting a team that gels and gets things done.

But here's the thing: That has to be a two-way street, or it won't work. The company needs to show responsibility towards their employees too. And that isn't yoga classes & cafeterias, that is basic respect, and a willingness to work with the employees, instead of seeing them as "resources".

This seems to be, as far as I can tell, an approach that's correlated with manager skills & inversely correlated with company size. I've done both manual & "white collar" work in small companies, and the ones where the leaders did right by their employees had employees who would go to great lengths for them.

I've done manual & "white collar" work in large companies, too. None of them had CEOs that cared that much. But some had managers who cared a lot, and were willing to bend rules if it meant doing the right thing - those teams excelled. The ones with the managers who didn't care about their people got teams who didn't care about their work.

And I know the kind of manager who's terribly upset about your 11am yoga class. Without fail, that yoga class was on your calendar, but they wanted the meeting when they wanted it, without a care about you. They could've done 1pm, they could've done 10am, but that would've inconvenienced them, and that's not in their playbooks.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#297

Post by asidiali »

yardie wrote: post #260
andrew_ wrote: post #225

It's astounding in so far as how unique this conversation is to tech. I've worked as a pipefitter, electrician's apprentice, and general construction hand in the past - I could only imagine how it would go telling my former foreman that I'd like to head off to yoga in the morning for an hour. Big jobs that require overtime to complete get folks to work that overtime - even within a union. If it's not you, it's someon…

I've worked in union shops as well while not being in the union. Union overtime is highly coveted because it's a 2x-3x bonus that a lot of my union friends used towards a downpayment, kids' college tuition, retiring earlier, or starting a business. No one had to step up because everyone was stepping up. And the shop chief usually decided who got that overtime (i.e. young worker trying to buy a house might get higher…

This - the mental overhead of a software job is not something that is easily turned off during non work hours - especially with a pushy employer or coworkers with no work life balance themselves.

You can’t cut steel at home after dinner no matter how hard you try if you don’t have the tools. Conversely, I’m sure you have a computer, can you just login to GitHub for two seconds to review this PR I submitted at 9pm...

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#298

Post by asidiali »

andrew_ wrote: post #225

It's astounding in so far as how unique this conversation is to tech. I've worked as a pipefitter, electrician's apprentice, and general construction hand in the past - I could only imagine how it would go telling my former foreman that I'd like to head off to yoga in the morning for an hour. Big jobs that require overtime to complete get folks to work that overtime - even within a union. If it's not you, it's someon…

You can’t commit a fitted pipe to the company repo at 2am on a weekend. You also can’t be pressured to. Well you can - but we would instantly recognize that one for what it is - ludicrous!

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#299

Post by asidiali »

enraged_camel wrote: post #263
andrew_ wrote: post #225

It's astounding in so far as how unique this conversation is to tech. I've worked as a pipefitter, electrician's apprentice, and general construction hand in the past - I could only imagine how it would go telling my former foreman that I'd like to head off to yoga in the morning for an hour. Big jobs that require overtime to complete get folks to work that overtime - even within a union. If it's not you, it's someon…

>> We have it AMAZINGLY WELL being in tech, and we have luxuries that are unique to tech and bewildering to folks in other fields. Yep, even other highly paid fields! Can you imagine a surgeon scheduling their surgeries around yoga classes?

I have news for you buddy...

That’s exactly what they do.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#300

Post by watwut »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #142
bagacrap wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's important for all the Google bashers out there to note this example of a high profile employee leaving because Google cared too much about privacy (or "noise" as he terms it).

I read that as "legal got involved and we had a ton of meetings that achieved nothing for our users" rather than "privacy did nothing for our users". I don't think Google "cares about" user privacy. I think they care about minimising any legal risk. These are two very different attitudes.

"we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google"

The only way a big company can somehow ensure that all teams are going to follow the privacy or any other policy is to force the teams to "align our data retention policies and tools to Google".

This is literally Google having process to ensure some privacy policy and op having issue with that.

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