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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?

#521

Post by gonehome »

rapsey wrote: post #493
gonehome wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit is a lagging indicator that often leads companies astray with short-term decision making at the expense of long-term relevance. Look at Apple before the return of Jobs (though at that point, they were having profit issues too - but what lead to that was arguably short-term thinking). Today, I'd argue Intel has made similar decisions that put them on a bad long term path. MS would have stayed alive for a while,…

Enterprises are the slowest to change of all and this is MS bread and butter. I completely disagree MS was ever close to becoming irrelevant. Silicon valley is in it's own little world. The rest of the planet is firmly a MS customer. MS can take all the good ideas, implement them and sell them worldwide before a startup can get out of silicon valley. Case in point: slack vs. teams.

Arguably that focus on O365 and Azure - the strategy that enabled Teams success was due to Nadella.

You're right though - 'irrelevant' is too provocative and strongly worded.

I'm more focused on future bets and trends. I think that trend shifted at Microsoft from trending towards future irrelevance back in the other direction, to being a competitive threat again.

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

#522

Post by modeless »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #446
theptip wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP is 100% right here. Sometimes the needs of the company change as the company grows, and people can’t keep up. Or people change and they can’t give what the company needs from them any more. This is one of the hard aspects of being a manager in a startup that’s growing quickly. The easiest example to grok would be if you had hired a VP of sales who is an expert in B2C selling, then you pivot your product to a B…

> That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary. This still seems to hold no?

> when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary

Talk about entitlement. You think that when a company hires you, that should be a commitment to employ you forever regardless of need?

Passion can come from your own investment in the success of the business, through equity and through the opportunities that come to productive employees at growing companies, both before and after they leave. Or it can come from a belief in the mission, distinct from faith in the company. You can pursue the same mission at a different company. But I guarantee you one thing: passion does not come from a guarantee of continued employment.

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

#523

Post by CoolGuySteve »

devchix wrote: post #438
freebee16 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that happened after nadella changed course from the balmer years. It is not always the case that a new CEO can turn around the company (for example see GE).

See also SUNW. McNealy imported the 6Sigma thing from GE, at one time it infected even teams not involved in manufacturing. MSFT had the best outcome for giants of the aughts. It is too bad OpenSolaris was left for dead, otherwise we'd have some choices and competition in *nix OS. AIX, dead. HP-UX, dead. Can't recall the DEC, Ultrix? Who runs that anymore. The last time I saw BSD commercially used was at a telco.

A lot of my early jobs were porting various Unix things to Linux. I spent time writing cross platform C++, perl, and bash on Solaris, IRIX, HP-UNIX, and DEC Tru46, but mostly Solaris and IRIX.

I gotta say, all those Unices fucking sucked. The userland tools were abysmal, with missing flags or bugs in their getopts, the compilers and their sockets libraries were extremely finicky, and their man pages were anemic.

GNU/Linux won because if something sucked, somebody somewhere would fix it. By the early 2000s, and especially after Linux 2.6, it was obvious closed-source UNIX was both worse and overpriced.

Even now it seems like the best part of the closed source MacOS Unix stack is the open source homebrew/macports stuff.

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

#524

Post by apohn »

dmayle wrote: post #468
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.…

*This I came here to say something similar. I'm a founder, I've been a manager and a software engineer, I did 5 years @ Google. When I hear someone in "upper management / founder / in a position of power over employee's lives" say that what they really needed for their own success was a way to threaten/risk the livelihood of their employees so that they would work harder, it just makes me sad for anyone affected by t…

I wish I could give you more than one upvote for this.

I work for a huge company. For every person I've worked with who I thought needed to go, there at at least 10 (probably more) who have become ineffective because of management,politics, and bureaucracy.

I had a very different view of "who should be fired" when I joined this company, but I think I've grown up a bit.

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

#526

Post by anticristi »

I had a similar experience when I worked as a contractor in a big corporations coming from a start-up background. You could tell that the corporation had a different risk appetite than a start-up. At a start-up, your highest risk is running out of runway. At a corporation, your income is rather safe, so your biggest risk is getting sued. No point launching a product one year early, if it costs 4% of your total annual income.

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

#527

Post by ZephyrBlu »

DC1350 wrote: post #499
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He seems like the kind of CEO I would love to work for. It seems like he tries to care about his users a lot, and wants his team to as well. Also, the "offensive things" in his talks were only offensive to a small vocal minority by his own account.

Why would you ever prioritize your users over yourself? They have no idea who you are and they don't care. Don't you have your own goals to worry about?

Where does he say to prioritize users over yourself?

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

#528

Post by dwohnitmok »

theptip wrote: post #449
dwohnitmok wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary. This still seems to hold no?

Maybe to some extent, but I’m not certain. If you are passionate about what you do, then you are probably not enjoying the job which shifted into not being a fit for your skill set, so the need to find someone else can be a mutual/positive conversation. It’s also really fraught with ego and self-worth landmines so it doesn’t always go that way.

There's a significant difference between being passionate about what you do and being passionate about the company/mission. A software developer might care immensely about the craft of software and the intricacies of tooling, programming languages, etc. but none at all about the company or mission, or a developer might care only about the company and view the craft of software as just the thing that happens to be most helpful for the company at the moment. Most people probably fall somewhere in the middle.

I suspect employers would like both, but would prefer to subordinate the former to the latter, because otherwise that employee is easily going to jump ship to a competitor or potentially not be an effective employee at all and get lost in the weeds of their craft rather than the mission. This sort of passion for the mission/company itself is also the impression I get from the article.

And that's a pretty big ask if as an employer you also want the ability to discard people who are no longer good skill fits for the company.

I mean you can ask it and you may well succeed, but I would expect quite a few burned bridges along the way.

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

#529

Post by chubot »

We had lunch in the cafeteria and a Googler online ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement

Back in 2006 I referred a former co-worker to Google. He quit after a year or so, and this was one of his complaints.

Our joke was "This foie gras is TERRIBLE. Just terrible".

Yes they literally served foie gras!

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

#530

Post by throwmeaway_66 »

01100011 wrote: post #495
throwmeaway_66 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something that was unknown to me until a few years ago and I believe it's unknown to many in the tech industry. I make a close to Google-level salary in my position (say, 85% of it) in a tech company and I barely do any work (or better, I do some work for some hours a week). Little accountability, zero stress. And when I say "I barely do any work", I mean that when I hear start-up people ridiculing the typica…

Don't get complacent. I've been where you are, and when the party is over you're going to have a hell of a hangover unless you can ride that job to retirement. Relearning how to compete after a few years of coasting is brutal. I was just past 40 when my gravy train derailed. The slack years were fun but they went by fast. Compensation for a job is about more than money. It's about where you end up as a person when th…

That's a good point and that's the drop of fear climbing making his way up to my brain. But I interview around, I got some offers that I have declined so far and I do some work, just a few hours a week.

You wrote: "Compensation for a job is about more than money. It's about where you end up as a person when the job is over.". It sounds good in theory, but in practice? Should I switch job, maybe/likely accepting less money and more stress in the coal train now because when the luxury train stops I will be in a better place (I am exaggerating for conversation purposes)? I have my doubts. This is specific to my situation and I don't want to explain too much (and that's why I use a throwaway account), but outside of the US that would sound bizarre. Switching from a cushy well-payed job to a demanding, paying-less job because in a few months/years it will be over? Yes, maybe I will get rusty here and there, but I can move to Tulum for 3 months and get ready for interviews, no?

EDIT: typo

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