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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?

#451

Post by guyzero »

jrockway wrote: post #290

He sounds kind of toxic and out of touch, and didn't really mention why he stayed so long despite that being the title of the article. You know someone is Up To Something when they rant about HR restricting their speech. It's weird to me that he's now a free agent, rants about how people complained that "I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG", and yet doesn't indulge in his blog pos…

At the risk of being not politically correct myself, I think there are significant cultural gaps between the west coast American standard and people from Israel (Bardin is Isralei).

With the caveat that this is my experience only, Israelis are more blunt, direct and often openly critical vs Americans, especially Californians. They're often right and all the ones I've worked with have been very smart, but the way a message is communicated is sometimes more important than the message itself.

I think that in this global age people think that the notion of intercultural communication issues has gone away, but IMO it still exists.

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

#452

Post by titanomachy »

627467 wrote: post #396
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #363

9 years @ Google, and I too came from a company acquired by Google. (In my case, Google did not keep our product or tech stack around, so.) And yes, I can say many Googlers are entitled. It's a fair descriptor. And the pace of work is slower than a startup. In general. And I too have many criticisms of Google. But. Google has entirely different revenue constraints. It can afford an entirely different way of working.…

Isn't there a place for this kind of fetish? It doesn't need to be in today's Google (but maybe in 5 year old Google). > Google can on the whole accomplish its revenue goals without being a meat grinder. So why be one? I too hope Google can prove that this state can be maintained after certain quasi-monopolies it holds start to vanish...

I agree that there's a place (probably not Google) for this attitude, and my impression is that this is the realization that the author eventually arrived at: he wouldn't change Google, or change his nature, so he had to leave. Even though his frustration was clear, the message that came through for me was not simply "Google is bad" but more "Google and I are too different to work together". A lot of what he dislikes about Google is true of any large company.

Although, he was very critical of Googlers' entitlement in particular. This is a real issue, especially among those who have never worked elsewhere, but IME people are more self-aware about it than he implies.

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

#453

Post by Nimitz14 »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #385
nx7487 wrote: post #318

People offended here are exactly the bubble of entitled morons in Silicon Valley that this guy is talking about. I totally agree with everything he said, companies where you have to work long hours and don't receive lots of weird benefits like yoga and sushi are the places I want to work. I would much prefer to have my compensation include more equity in the company, and for my performance to actually be related to t…

Feel free. Just be aware, those aren't the most profitable companies in the world, (i.e. FAANGM) and at some point, you might want to work out why that is.

As if their work culture has anything to do with it! Thanks for the laugh.

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

#455

Post by [deleted] »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #363

9 years @ Google, and I too came from a company acquired by Google. (In my case, Google did not keep our product or tech stack around, so.) And yes, I can say many Googlers are entitled. It's a fair descriptor. And the pace of work is slower than a startup. In general. And I too have many criticisms of Google. But. Google has entirely different revenue constraints. It can afford an entirely different way of working.…

[deleted]

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

#456

Post by ZephyrBlu »

viklove wrote: post #440
tinyhouse wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misinterpreting what he's saying. I didn't get the impression that he claims that employees growth doesn't matter. He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. Not being able to fire people is indeed a big disadvantage. Bad employees are much worse than just not contributing. They make the peo…

> He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. If you want them to optimize for building a better product, give them more equity. Most people don't want to work during the best 40 years of their lives. Give them a way out or they will try to find one themselves.

In the article he says this doesn't work because people effectively view equity as salary.

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

#458

Post by moreranchplease »

izacus wrote: post #99

This is an amazing post - it describes exactly how bad manager looks like and what kind of expectations does he have from his employees. No emergency PTO (despite being a benefit), ability to just get rid of people who don't suit him, cursing at people, not having a proper work/life balance. It just keeps on giving. And all for what? A mapping application having features which really don't save lives 99% of the time.

This guy is something else. That entitlement section was an eye opener. That stuff should be the norm. Felt like guilt tripping people at one of the most wealthy companies in the world because they don't have a job that treats them poorly. Companies make a lot of money it should be spent on the people that make that money for the company.

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

#459

Post by ghaff »

gonehome wrote: post #426
lhorie wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall watching a news report as a teen about how things used to be pretty chill at Microsoft at its heyday. These days it doesn't seem to have a monopoly on much of anything, but it can still crank out interesting projects. It doesn't have to be a black-and-white do-or-die.

Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous and is itself probably an interesting story. I wouldn’t bet on that as the norm. I’d expect the norm to be more like IBM, RIM, or Nokia. I agree with most of the article, but one line stuck out to me as particularly wrong: >”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consum…

I somewhat sympathize with those living in a small apartment who used to walk, take a shuttle bus, take the subway, etc. to work where they were fed 5 days a week or more--and now they're stuck in their small apartments with most restaurants closed and facing the prospect of maybe having to move to a bigger place. So one can choose to interpret complaints about meal expensing in that vein.

That said, in general, at least for the well-paid workers at these companies, complaints about insufficient expense reimbursement like that come across as pretty whiny.

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

#460

Post by cmrdporcupine »

tinyhouse wrote: post #347
justapassenger wrote: post #309

While he has valid points of how corp life is different from startup, he seems like a horrible, entitled person to work for. General attitude that comes out of it to me, is that your employees growth doesn’t matter, only his vision of product matters. He complains about people being entitled, and at the same time he complains that as CEO of subsidiary of one of the biggest company in the world, he cannot say offensiv…

I think you misinterpreting what he's saying. I didn't get the impression that he claims that employees growth doesn't matter. He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. Not being able to fire people is indeed a big disadvantage. Bad employees are much worse than just not contributing. They make the peo…

While optimizing for promotion is definitely a corossive aspect of large company culture, it's simply not true that you can't "fire" people in Google. There is a bi-annual perf cycle, and there are ratings, and they mean things, your peers are involved, ratings are discussed among managers, results are callibrated, and there are "needs improvement" flags and "performance improvment" processes.

No you can't fire a person on the spot, but the assumption is that if they got into Google in the first place there's something of value there, so the company has a commitment to fix the problem before jettisoning the person.

What this guy seems to be complaining about is his inability to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority and only his.

Yeah, you for sure can't do that at Google. Thank god. It's not a feudal kingdom.

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