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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?

#691

Post by skirmish »

navbaker wrote: post #606
guytv wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I had fellow googles spend all their day between PlayStation, gym, restaurants, cafe's, hairdresser etc... without getting any work done.

Wow, that's insane! My point of view is working at an east coast large research lab, that behavior here would for sure be noticed quickly and eliminated!

In my experience, jammed in an open office in a FAANG, shoulder to shoulder, with people talking loud for hours all around (not enough conference rooms, most do VC meetings from their desks), regular office hours were just for reading email, meetings, looong lunch breaks, loong coffee breaks and BSing with coworkers. Nothing of note got done 9-5 (well, perhaps "team building" did).

Any coding, debugging, thinking had to be done either after 6pm or on weekends, or WFH. Now perhaps you can see why people coast; not everybody is willing to sacrifice nights and weekends to be productive.

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

#692

Post by CodeMage »

lelele wrote: post #619
CodeMage wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think his derision of entitled ladder-climbing employees is valid from the perspective of someone who sees "building something valuable" as the point of employment. Call me cynical and jaded, but I don't believe "building something valuable" is the point of employment . "Building something valuable" is the point of my vocation . I used to believe that the employment and vocation should align. Over the course of m…

> I used to believe that the employment and vocation should align. > If your employment and your vocation align, it's a nice bonus. That is the meaning of "should", isn't it? And even if they don't align 100%, you can always strive for a maximum.

> That is the meaning of "should", isn't it?

Not really. It's a difference between "should have" and "nice to have".

If you go in with the expectation that your job and your vocation should align, then you're setting yourself up for a negative experience. Maybe not immediately, but definitely down the road, because that alignment won't last forever.

I prefer to go in with the idea that it's a desirable, but entirely optional bonus.

I guess it depends on how "risk averse" you are in this context. It's kinda like salary negotiations. I prefer to put most of the weight on the base salary. Equity and bonuses are nice, but if the base salary isn't enough to live comfortably, then you're setting yourself up for a big risk: you're one management decision away from coming up short. Yes, I know that most US employers can fire you at will in theory, but in practice getting laid off doesn't happen as often as the myriad of stuff that can adversely affect your bonus or equity.

Different people have different outlooks. Mine puts the "job-passion balance" in the same category as "bonus" and "equity". It comes from my own, personal experience. YMMV.

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

#693

Post by whymauri »

sangnoir wrote: post #482
gonehome wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way I'm not Ballmer's biggest fan, but I think he's often sold short (to Nadella's benefit), you'd almost believe Microsoft was tanking, but it grew a lot under Ballmer (mobile failures notwithstanding). As far as I can tell, Nadella just reprioritized projects that Ballmer launched or shepherded in his boring-but-efficient way: what new…

>The "post-pc" world suggested by Apple/Jobs never materialized.

This is a very US/EU centric evaluation of computing. It might not even be accurate for Gen Z, overall.

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

#694

Post by triceratops »

ramraj07 wrote: post #104
Kototama wrote: post #96

"As I had kids, I learned the importance of being at home for them and that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a balance, sometimes you need to work weekends and nights, sometimes you can head out early or work from home - we balance the needs of the employee and the company." sometimes you need to work weekends and nights while your wife take care of the kids alone so that your career progress and her's not.…

Contrary to popular belief, kids are not some tamagotchi pet that needs constant attention and helicoptering after they're babies. You can perfectly be a good parent and raise independent well minded kids without needing two parents always present every moment of every weekend.

There are other things to spend one's weekends on besides kids and work.

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

#695

Post by oblio »

Diederich wrote: post #497

A quick story about "entitlement" at some of the most 'employee benefit focused' tech companies. I haven't worked at Google, but I've worked at two of the other so-called FAANG companies. The soft benefits and perks were amazing, no doubt about it. For a time, a certain (popular) subset of the free snacks became unavailable. My immediate team and I made some jokes about it. A week or so later, word got around that so…

Had a similar thing about the placement of a Coca-Cola vending machine:-))

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

#696

Post by sincerely »

raverbashing wrote: post #659
guytv wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I had fellow googles spend all their day between PlayStation, gym, restaurants, cafe's, hairdresser etc... without getting any work done.

The actual problem is not them doing those things, the problem is them not doing their job That's where the demands should lie, not on "bottoms on seats"

Surely being available for work meetings during working hours is part of "doing their job"

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

#697

Post by marcus_holmes »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #381
marcus_holmes wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're violently agreeing with the author. In a startup it's easy to see what value you added for the user every day. In a megacorp it's impossible. In a startup having the managers ask "what did we do for the users today?" helps the whole team stay on track. In a megacorp it's a useless platitude.

No, I’m not agreeing at all. The author is asserting that you should always be in the start-up situation of not having incremental work where your ultimate impact on customers comes through long chained sequences of tiny tweaks or accumulated effects. It’s perfectly fine (good even) to work in a large company where your value add is not immediately clarified and is just part of a large agglomerated process. Most net…

I didn't read it like that. I think the author knows that that's impossible in a megacorp, but he wanted to continue thinking like that even though he'd become part of a megacorp. He seemed to understand the reality of megacorp politics - the whole spiel about "this is how you get promoted" - but didn't want that for himself, or his team (which I agree is unrealistic).

It's very difficult to change perspective once you've worked in one paradigm for a while (at least I find it so - I'm a terrible employee because I've been a freelancer and co-founder for so long). I agree, one is not objectively "better" or "more correct", but that can be a subjective opinion of a blog article author.

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

#698

Post by toss1 »

>> All of our growth at Waze post acquisition was from work we did, not support from the mothership. Looking back, we could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently had we stayed independent.

Pretty quickly debunks the idea of being better able to grow with a bigger budget from a 'mothership'. The constraints from the mothership create more drag than the extra budget creates lift.

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

#699

Post by deckard1 »

draw_down wrote: post #626

The entitlement is all over; talking about entitled employees keeps us from turning our attentions elsewhere. Because then we'd have to ask bigger questions and oh boy, our heads may begin to hurt. Let us not forget that industry heads have colluded to suppress pay for engineers. Let us not forget that in general, executives act as though we should be grateful for our pay, rather than being remunerated for building t…

There is definitely more to be said about this dichotomy between the Really Care vs. Doing A Job.

The large tech companies are looking for young blood that also happens to be incredibly naive. They are the clueless, in the Gervais Principle[1]. Basically, idiot savants.

In addition to colluding to suppress pay, here are ways they optimize for youth and naivety:

- They call their HQs a "campus". They create an environment that emulates a university setting. Tourists flock to these "campuses" much like university prospects touring a university. Foosball tables, beanbag chairs, hip decor, etc. It's Peter Pan never-grow-up bullshit.

- Leet code interviews. If you're already in your career or have a family (or even a social life), you don't have the hundreds of hours to study. This prevents people from job hopping (salary suppression) and filters out people of a certain age and seniority or those that aren't willing to die for the company.

- Company "culture". Netflix has an entire document on this. It's practically a cult. I've had conversations with senior and director-level Facebook employees and the way they light up when talking about things Zuckerberg says or does is, frankly, creeping me out. There is an indocrination program in just about every startup today, that mimics what the FAANGs do. I think it's time someone said it: your trendy corporate "culture" is a soul-sucking vampire on the surface of your rent-seeking, data-hoarding, privacy-invading ad company pretending to be anything but an ad company.

If you ask me, if someone "Really Cares" about working at either Facebook or Google, then something is fundamentally off with that person. Like someone gleefully working at Philip Morris. If a person works at Facebook and admits they are a mercenary, that's at least an understandable position. I might not like you any more, but at least I know you're not totally insane.

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

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

#700

Post by munificent »

hundchenkatze wrote: post #485
ghaff wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

That's still a ton of entitlement... "Oh no! I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and I have to live in my tiny apartment, buy food, and I might have to get a bigger apartment." vs "Oh no! I don't have a job, and I'm about to lose my apartment because I can't pay rent."

"I have an apartment and a bank account right now."

vs

"I live in a tent encampment."

vs

"I live in a shantytown in a third-world country."

vs

"I am on death row."

vs

"I am on death row for a crime I didn't commit."

vs...

It's important to try to maintain perspective about our own good fortunes. But it's also human nature to feel our own pain as relative to our previous experience. Someone's always got it worse than you but that doesn't mean it's fair to expect everyone else to wander around farting rainbows with grins plastered to their faces.

All of the Googlers I know are well aware of the many ways in which we're fortunate and privileged. But we're also, you know, human, and occasionally whining about stuff is just part of the human experience.

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