I may be a very basic software engineer with neither high YOE or high quality skills but what would I get excited about from a FAANG job nowadays? These companies that I've used everyday for nearing 2 decades from even a user perspective have become stale. Mountains of money and the best talent and even simple issues that have lingered for years are not fixed in favor of big ideas that no one wants.
Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
21–30 of 142 posts
Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
#22Was Google really a beloved employer? I feel like that was vapor marketing hype most real people saw through as bs, you'd pretty much see constant stories of overwork and toxic teams run by incompetent "project managers" just like every other overvalued Silicon Valley FAANG shop
At Google, developers were the product, not overhead. As such, they were supported lavishly, with meals and massages, at a level not previously seen, at least not in career available to people who weren't fifth-generation Ivy grads. And the pay, total comp is still trumpeted here at HN as among the highest around. Sure, a lot of people saw those perks as being aimed a particular demographic: young people without atta…
Yup. I was at Google for over a decade, I should have left years ago for a startup, I had offers, but I loved what I did, I loved my fellow coworkers, and I was well compensated. There was little reason to leave, and a lot of reasons to stay.
Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
#23Not sure what the author expected Google to do. Are they supposed to have individual meetings and a farewell party with 10K (ex) employees? My dad worked for the same company for 35 years then retired. In my 20 year career I have worked for at least half a dozen companies. There's no such thing as job security anymore, as long as you are employed by someone else you are disposable, no matter how hard you work and how…
> Are they supposed to have individual meetings
Yes?
Surely they have managers proportional to their employees - I certainly don't expect the CEO to have the meetings but having their direct or skip level manager meet with them is the right way to do it.
Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
#24Was Google really a beloved employer? I feel like that was vapor marketing hype most real people saw through as bs, you'd pretty much see constant stories of overwork and toxic teams run by incompetent "project managers" just like every other overvalued Silicon Valley FAANG shop
I was there 2013->2015. It was not viewed as "beloved" in my eyes; more like a benevolent, paternalistic overlord. There were certainly negatives. It was nearly impossible to concentrate at work, due to being in a large open space with many teams, and they would not let me be full-time remote (even as an L6 "staff" SWE), crowded bathrooms, crowded cafes, etc. However, they put a lot of effort into the endless perks,…
If you remember, there was the great "de-frag" at one point, where they wanted to reduce # of satellite offices, and tried to move everyone into a few big HQ, this resulted in overcrowding, and one aspect of that was "no remote work". (post-pandemic, this sounds bizarre now).
The closing of some of the satellite offices resulted in some of the first shocking "layoffs", for example, the Google Atlanta office was shuttered, most of the former couldn't move, and so left for other companies. (technically not a layoff, but if you can't relocate, it's basically the same) :(
Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
#25Not sure what the author expected Google to do. Are they supposed to have individual meetings and a farewell party with 10K (ex) employees? My dad worked for the same company for 35 years then retired. In my 20 year career I have worked for at least half a dozen companies. There's no such thing as job security anymore, as long as you are employed by someone else you are disposable, no matter how hard you work and how…
> Not sure what the author expected Google to do.
Don't get that either. The company is not my mother or my wife, it's just a professional relationship; they buy my hours to produce what they want me to. If they don't want my services anymore, of if I don't want to provide my services to them, it's fine, life goes on.
Now, there's this sad article, with a sad lady framed like she has just cried, like if it's the end of world. Yeah, Google was the best company once, Rome was the most powerful nation once, things change and get over it.
Sorry for the rant.
Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
#26I may be a very basic software engineer with neither high YOE or high quality skills but what would I get excited about from a FAANG job nowadays? These companies that I've used everyday for nearing 2 decades from even a user perspective have become stale. Mountains of money and the best talent and even simple issues that have lingered for years are not fixed in favor of big ideas that no one wants.
You get excited for one reason and one reason only - the money. FAANG jobs pay between double and triple of normal software gigs. Some folks want to optimize for interesting work, or groundbreaking products or autonomy. Thats cool - you might not find that at a FAANG. Some folks optimize for the biggest paycheck. For that its basically two options - FAANG (and adjacent) or High Frequency Trading. To each their own!
Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
#27I may be a very basic software engineer with neither high YOE or high quality skills but what would I get excited about from a FAANG job nowadays? These companies that I've used everyday for nearing 2 decades from even a user perspective have become stale. Mountains of money and the best talent and even simple issues that have lingered for years are not fixed in favor of big ideas that no one wants.
Prestige
Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
#28Was Google really a beloved employer? I feel like that was vapor marketing hype most real people saw through as bs, you'd pretty much see constant stories of overwork and toxic teams run by incompetent "project managers" just like every other overvalued Silicon Valley FAANG shop
As someone who worked at Google for 15 yrs, who also worked at Oracle and IBM, I can confidently say that Google was the least toxic, least overworked place I've ever been. That's not to say there aren't management problems, especially around the erratic way they launch new projects and kill others with no real rhyme or reason, but working environment was never one of the complaints. At IBM and Oracle, I'd regularly…
I worked for Google for 10 years- at first in a great but intense (overworked) SRE team, then later as a SWE running my own project (again intense and overworked, but totally self-imposed) and then on various ML and 3D printing teams. By and large it was great, but it got worse over time (increasingly clueless managers with night-school MBAs) and more toxic.
Occasionally I'd see memes or posts from other teams that described business practices I couldn't believe (like, "I have to stay at the office until my manager leaves or I'll be fired, and he doesn't leave until 8PM so I dont' see my family much") which didn't make sense until I learned that entire teams were H1-B visas reporting to managers who applied caste in their jobs in the US.
Absolutely nothing I've seen compares to borg or a full TPUv4 cluster.
Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
#29Not sure what the author expected Google to do. Are they supposed to have individual meetings and a farewell party with 10K (ex) employees? My dad worked for the same company for 35 years then retired. In my 20 year career I have worked for at least half a dozen companies. There's no such thing as job security anymore, as long as you are employed by someone else you are disposable, no matter how hard you work and how…
"How do you maximize talent preservation and minimize morale loss when firing employees from a tree structure with height O(15), where each level under SVP (2) may have layoffs?"
Feels like the execs didn't answer this interview question well. There were better ways to accomplish this.
Re: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was there 2013->2015. It was not viewed as "beloved" in my eyes; more like a benevolent, paternalistic overlord. There were certainly negatives. It was nearly impossible to concentrate at work, due to being in a large open space with many teams, and they would not let me be full-time remote (even as an L6 "staff" SWE), crowded bathrooms, crowded cafes, etc. However, they put a lot of effort into the endless perks,…
If you remember, there was the great "de-frag" at one point, where they wanted to reduce # of satellite offices, and tried to move everyone into a few big HQ, this resulted in overcrowding, and one aspect of that was "no remote work". (post-pandemic, this sounds bizarre now). The closing of some of the satellite offices resulted in some of the first shocking "layoffs", for example, the Google Atlanta office was shutt…
The defrag was a year or two before I joined, as I recall.
The remote work policy seemed to go by org. I worked in platforms, and our VP was old-school, adamantly opposed to remote work. He'd proudly walk around the office, surveying his domain. He was rather like a proctor in an exam. Meanwhile, I worked closely with several folks in the kernel team who were allowed to work remotely. One of them was very interested in what we were doing, was a luminary in his field, and wanted to transfer to our group, but worked remotely, and didn't want to give that up. Similarly, I left for Netflix because they allowed remote work in the Open Connect kernel group.