391–400 of 401 posts
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This feels excessive... ? It's Google, not a coal mine.
coal mines are only hellish while you're down. yeah there is the black lung, but you can wear filters. the goog tracks you (and everyone) 24-7, and depending on teams and egos, could be ugly. you spend your whole life tryin to get to FAANG tier, and now it's miserable.
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I have myself found out very confusing that nobody ever seems to suggest that maybe Pichai isn't steering this ship very well...
People have been saying that for years. I left in 2020 and some people were saying that. Having almost no compelling new products and shutting down multiple high profile flops while dismantling the internal culture that many people appreciated is pretty hard to miss.
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I think it also behooves these smart people just to realize that they're not "one company for the long haul" people. I'm one of the people who likes working in startups. My peers who like working in established companies are appalled by my resume, with 1-3 years each in a handful of different places, often separated by 6-12 months of unemployment. But I've never had a hiring manager at the kind of startup I'm applyin…
A bit ironic because oods are the established companies are indeed the ones laying off people (which inevitably targets the 1-3 years more than the 5+ year seniority). If you're not an active detriment to a startup, you're probably not going to get fired unless you get caught in office politics (which can be much more personal and nasty than bigCo politics, admitedly). >But there's not much written for the people who…
For example, I've searched for but never been able to find actual advice about how to think about private company stock options. Everybody ends up writing them off with a, "Well, there's a decent chance they won't be worth anything, so just ignore them and try to operate within the world we do understand." Nobody quantifies the risk. Nobody talks about how to hedge against it prudently. Nobody talks about what to do when the piddly little number of shares the company tossed you as a customer support agent are suddenly worth half a million dollars and are a life-changing amount of money, never mind what to do if you had a real stake. Nobody talks about how to evaluate which early companies do have a strong shot at "making it" and which ones are doomed.
It's not impossible to think these things through and evaluate them. It's just hard, and not mainstream. For those of us for whom "instability" is a feature, not a bug, advice from someone who gets that and thinks it through would be infinitely more valuable than advice from the hordes who tell us we should just try to be different.
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> I saw a team lose its sole TL with a decade+ of tenure on the team, then turn around and hire 4-6 people to try and catch up. My god.. That's pure ineptitude and I'm sorry for anyone at that company right now. This basically sends the message "doesn't matter how good you are, we're going to spin the wheel every so often and if it lands on you you're out"
> This basically sends the message "doesn't matter how good you are, we're going to spin the wheel every so often and if it lands on you you're out" The conspiracy theory that's making the rounds is that these rounds of layoffs from tech firms have zero to do with financial reports or economy downturns, and are instead a coordinated effort, along with RTO policies, to wrestle negotiation power from tech workers and p…
While it sucks for those who get the boot, this has the benefit of raising salaries overall. Because the company that does this usually cuts too much and has to later rehire at market rates which rise over time.
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Anecdotal side-tangent: had a terrible second-hand experience with AWU. I was an employee, and a friend of mine was interviewing at Google. After one of his interviews, he called me up and asked if I heard of AWU. I was not sure what prompted that, but I said I was roughly familiar with AWU, and then my friend elaborated on what went down. Turns out, his interviewer spent half the interview just buzzing my friend’s e…
Many unions have a goal that no one should be hired unless they are already a union member.
I don’t have anything against AWU specifically and am fully in favor of following this tactic for absolutely any group that tries to waste a candidate’s time in similar ways during an interview.
If the candidate asked for more info on this during the informal discussion during first/last 10 mins of the interview, that’s fine. It is also fine if the interviewer decided to disclose the info about their group briefly without being prompted (just like other interviewers might mention being involved in an ERG or some employee club or whatever). But it is imo not fine to shill it without being prompted for half the interview timeslot. Doubly so when you do it using a bunch of half-truths and almost outright lies.
P.S. That experience almost turned away my friend from wanting to work for Google, because he was afraid that this was the “typical Google experience.” I had to assure him that this was an outlier and not representative of how the rest of the people working here were like. Luckily, the rest of his interviewers were great, and he trusted me enough to believe me about this not being normal, so he took the offer once he got it.
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YouTube, Google maps, Gmail ...
Name a single YouTube content creator who is satisfied with that arrangement.
Youtube's main source of revenue is ads which they serve regardless of whether the uploader is taking a cut from the upload or not. Most users have always and will continue to upload to and consume from youtube without the expectation of making money from the process.
So, yes in general users have historically been more or less satisfied with the deal: watch ads, get free video platform.
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You do if you have multiple primadonnas in middle management that can’t come to an agreement otherwise, and if you can’t sack them due to other factors that require years to resolve. The real world is thousands of times more complex then ‘MBA programs’ or theoretical examples from people who haven’t been in the hot seat making such serious decisions.
If your management team can't figure out how to do what you're asking, maybe you should be firing them instead. If _no one_ can figure it out, maybe you should be firing you.
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I think by dehumanizing them, you sacrifice your own influence and humanity. They are humans, with empathy and other human emotions, and can be persuaded. On a slight tangent: A popular technique these days is to aggressively demonstrate amorality, sociopathic lack of compassion, etc. There's a reason they go out of their way to demonstrate it and so aggressively - it's BS. It's a negotiating tactic from the second w…
>I think by dehumanizing them, you sacrifice your own influence and humanity. They are humans, with empathy and other human emotions, and can be persuaded. Sure, but these are humans with no stake in the company. They are not investing in Google because they believe in their mission nor do they even care if Google crashes in 5 years. They believe it's a way to quickly grow their portfolio, and will change as the mark…