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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?

#801

Post by nrp »

frakkingcylons wrote: post #708
projectileboy wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But as someone who recently bought a Quest 2, it really is an amazing product, so some things there must have been very right. In retrospect, do you know what those things were?

Honestly, I doubt the Quest line of products would have launched when they did with such a low price if FB was not running the show. Quest 1/2 might not even exist at all. The original founders were mostly focused on PC VR. Carmack was the odd one out in that respect in pushing for standalone VR (as can be seen with the Samsung GearVR).

For what it it’s worth, I was part of the founding team and led the hardware development of Rift, but also kicked off the hardware architecture of Quest 2 (and the original Quest). As much as many of us were and are PC people, by the time we started Quest 2, everyone who was left had come around to standalone.

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

#802

Post by deminature »

laurent92 wrote: post #739
choppaface wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I totally agree with your Really Care and Just A Job characterization, I think that money does play a significant role in overall picture. People behave very differently after they run into six, seven, eight figures. And that behavior isn’t perfectly correlated with how much they put into the job. There’s a fair place for the “entitled” narrative, and when these people have outsized leverage on the company or p…

“For a million dollars, anything is your passion” Joel on Software used to explain that rich entrepreneurs always sound passionate, but it is useless to try to emulate passion, because a big success can make someone passionate for anything. (...and I confirm – since we make 70k€ a month per cofounder, I became more passionate).

A million dollars or some other significant sum of money doesn't nourish the soul the same way something you're actually passionate about does. You can fake it for a long time, but it's never quite the same, at least that I've found.

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

#803

Post by apsurd »

laurent92 wrote: post #739
choppaface wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I totally agree with your Really Care and Just A Job characterization, I think that money does play a significant role in overall picture. People behave very differently after they run into six, seven, eight figures. And that behavior isn’t perfectly correlated with how much they put into the job. There’s a fair place for the “entitled” narrative, and when these people have outsized leverage on the company or p…

“For a million dollars, anything is your passion” Joel on Software used to explain that rich entrepreneurs always sound passionate, but it is useless to try to emulate passion, because a big success can make someone passionate for anything. (...and I confirm – since we make 70k€ a month per cofounder, I became more passionate).

sorry, downvote, that just so viscerally doesn’t ring true. the sibling comment speaks of soul nourishment. yes. at the level of 400k, 1M, 4M it’s a fucking digit on a screen in your bank’s app. come on now...

my experience is the absolute reverse direction. money is so very numbing

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

#804

Post by dmayle »

thethought wrote: post #773
dmayle wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*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…

>>> employees need to be fired... but sometimes management also needs restructuring Don’t get the asymmetry. Why no firing for mgmt?

As I was writing that statement, I was sure that someone would ask this very same question, but I think explaining it in the middle of that paragraph would have distracted from the overall point I was making, so here it is apart:

Yes, sometimes management needs firing as well, but in the context of my comment above, we were talking about a case where one employee's performance doesn't match up with the expectations of their manager.

To put it in the context of software engineering, if you have an engineer responsible for ten features in a year, and nine of them are coming along just fine, but the tenth was completely bungled, it would be incredibly rare to think that it was time to fire the engineer over the tenth. You're more likely to restructure things so that the engineer has less of a workload, or has help on the tenth, or maybe even just give them a bad review and make it clear that their performance needs to improve.

Firing a manager has an even greater cost for a company and team than firing an employee because the manager is a representative of the relationship between their employees and the company, so firing a manager also damages that relationship for each of their employees.

This is not exclusive to managers. Other roles like engineering team leads and senior architects also have a greater cost, because they're the employees whose roles have a connection to more people than just themselves.

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

#805

Post by randomswede »

joshuamorton wrote: post #777
strken wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes. I was provisioning a new service last week and it took me half an hour of clicking buttons in AWS. Without knowing anything about Google, I would have assumed they'd overprovison compute capacity to save developer time at least for smallish requests, since they literally run their own data centres.

They do. When GP says stuff about not having flex in a cell, that essentially means "has not provisioned any quota whatsoever in that zone". Once you do the baseline work to provision some quota, generally speaking you have a somewhat over-provisioned pool to use for whatever. The need to run in a particular cell is unusual.

More usual is "I need to run in at least three cells in region R". Thankfully, I never faced the "you need to turn up in cell EX tomorrow" without TPM support.

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

#806

Post by Chyzwar »

JohnCarmack wrote: post #586

I can certainly see a lot of parallels with Oculus / Facebook. Perhaps unusually, I actually wanted FB to impress itself more strongly on Oculus post acquisition because, frankly, Oculus was a bit of a mess. Instead, Oculus was given an enormous amount of freedom for many years. Personally, nobody ever told me what to do, even though I was willing to "shut up and soldier" if necessary -- they bought that capability!…

There is a third group. Programmer as Artisan/Craftsman they recognize that it is a just a job, but they care about quality and their work most. People that would invest countless hours into their craft and would build applications that provide high value for both users and employer. They are mostly immune to corporate bullshit and have great IC careers.

People that have worse are "Just a Job" crowd that lack real programming skill. They would be quickly hit by ageism and their careers stuck very quickly on Senior Developer position because they do not care enough to be promoted into management.

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

#807

Post by konschubert »

sangnoir wrote: post #546
gonehome wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ I think that article gets most of it. There's some MSFT narrative that comes up here a lot where people say Ballmer was doing great and Nadella just continued his plans, I don't buy it. MSFT had a lot of strategic failures as well as product failures under Ballmer. Nadella shifted strategy and made them a serious competitor again.

> There's some MSFT narrative that comes up here a lot where people say Ballmer was doing great and Nadella just continued his plans, I don't buy it. Then it should be easy to say which green-field projects Nadella launched then. I can't think of any, but I'm open to learning.

Sometimes shifting the priority is all it takes.

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

#808

Post by ElectricMind »

tudelo wrote: post #87
ElectricMind wrote: post #66

What is so special about "Why did I leave Google" posts? Any one else sick of these overlords/ superhuman / apex people outcries?

I assume you don't really believe getting a job at google qualifies you as superhuman, but just want to reiterate, getting a job at google does not make you superhuman and IMO has a lot more to do with time and place than raw ability...

//I assume you don't really believe getting a job at google qualifies you as superhuman// - No

//just want to reiterate, getting a job at google does not make you superhuman// Agree

I am just tired of people whose entire self image is based on "I work/worked at Google". I know value of getting job there but it is time they stop "why I leave Google" and start "What am I contributing to humanity as an individual?"

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