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Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

#111

Post by michaelochurch »

daave wrote: post #108
MaysonL wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we've almost all seen what's happened to Gmail, Google Reader, Google Labs and 20% time.

Mayson, can you be more specific? What has happened to them? Gmail: I can't think of anything negative that's happened to Gmail in recent times (unless you didn't like the UI redesign - there are certainly mixed opinions on that), and certainly the performance and uptake of Gmail has only improved. Google Reader: Not much new happening, but it's still running. Are you referring to the changes in the sharing model? Wh…

Despite what some people have claimed on HN, your manager can't deny you from having a 20% project if you want one.

Theoretically, managers can't block you from having 20% time, and there's no official permission process you need to go through to take it, but if your manager says, "I'll fuck you over in Perf if you do a 20% project", then you don't have 20%-time.

What I'm told is that, before 2007 or so, Google actively worked to avoid manager-as-SPOF, and that this is what made Google great. But then they hired a bunch of executives from mainstream large companies and didn't tell them to wipe their fucking feet off before coming inside.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

#112

Post by vagrant »

michaelochurch wrote: post #109
vagrant wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it has something to do with the way you say it. Maybe you meant to say, "I had a shitty experience at Google", but you accidentally typed, "most of the work is shitty legacy maintenance". Maybe you meant to say that you were not satisfied to start out with the other Nooglers in intro jobs and prove yourself by working your way up, but instead you said that most people start out in shitty jobs and never escape.

What I've observed is that most people at Google are working on shitty legacy maintenance. I was in New York, which is generally considered to be slightly above other satellites on the project-allocation heap but far below Mountain View, because that's where all the players are. Most people I knew were on uninspiring work, although there were exceptions, but you generally had to be Senior SWE or higher before you wer…

You are maligning my company.

You could not figure out how things worked at Google, and expected people to start following the new guy who had only been there a few months and hadn't actually accomplished anything yet, and when people didn't drop the 100,000 engineering years of accumulated wisdom to listen to you, you started believing that it must be the system that was broken and not you.

And that was fine; you can believe whatever you need to believe. But when you start spreading this delusion outside of Google, you are hurting Google.

Most nooglers get a legacy job to start out. When you prove yourself, and people like your ideas, you will be asked to join other projects. You were only there for a very short time. In order for you to transfer to another project, that project has to want you. Without any accomplishments...

And you quickly developed a reputation as the new guy who was publicly lecturing everyone about how things should be. You told them that their languages of choice were all crap, when they were the ones actually getting work done. Despite how talented you think you are, can you see how that might be a turn-off for any team thinking of taking you in?

All these things you claim are you projecting: 1) Most work is shitty legacy maintenance. (You didn't like your first assignment.) 2) Google doesn't listen to reason. (Google does not give carte blanche to nooglers.) 3) There is no way out of a shitty first job. (You couldn't hack your first assignment.) 4) There is a glass ceiling. (You were alienating people.)

When you present your paranoid beliefs as objective facts, people who don't know any better might believe them. That is why I have a problem with what you post.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

#113

Post by michaelochurch »

vagrant wrote: post #112
michaelochurch wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've observed is that most people at Google are working on shitty legacy maintenance. I was in New York, which is generally considered to be slightly above other satellites on the project-allocation heap but far below Mountain View, because that's where all the players are. Most people I knew were on uninspiring work, although there were exceptions, but you generally had to be Senior SWE or higher before you wer…

You are maligning my company. You could not figure out how things worked at Google, and expected people to start following the new guy who had only been there a few months and hadn't actually accomplished anything yet, and when people didn't drop the 100,000 engineering years of accumulated wisdom to listen to you, you started believing that it must be the system that was broken and not you. And that was fine; you ca…

You, sir, are deeply wrong.

You are maligning my company.

YOUR company? You're telling me you get your pick of the best projects, and that you have at least one of triumvirate on speed dial any time you want to hash out an idea? You think those SVPs and VPs and managers-of-managers-of-managers you're putting yourself out there to defend give a shit about you? Ha!

But when you start spreading this delusion outside of Google, you are hurting Google.

Google is chock-full of high-ranking people making bad decisions. They are hurting Google. I want Google to succeed. It had a great run and a really great culture... for a while. It would be good for the world if it went back to such a state.

Without any accomplishments...

Google's problem is that there are a lot of influential but underqualified people who think that if you didn't do it At Google, it doesn't count; you didn't do it at all, and you don't know what you're talking about. Now that is the epitome of corporate arrogance. And it led to some absolutely stupid product decisions, which I won't name but they're relevant to this discussion.

You told them that their languages of choice were all crap

Google's limited language white-list (C++ and Java only, with Python deprecated in production) is a bad decision. C and C++ are the right tool for the job in some cases. I like Go, but I haven't done much with it. My problem is more with the short white-list and the bad justification for it than with the languages themselves. (Although there is no justification for Java over Scala in 2012.)

I disliked C++ then more than I do now. The quality of C++ code I fell into was pretty bad (object-oriented spaghetti) but that kind of code can be written in any language, and so can good code.

You couldn't hack your first assignment.

Wrong. I didn't get into what happened or why I left, but it wasn't a performance issue. My manager was unethical and lied to me and it caused a lot of hardship. Among other things, he promised a 3.4 rating to prevent me from seeking transfer (I agreed to stay on his project in exchange for a decent number) and then gave me something lower (making transfer impossible). If he had been a decent person and kept his word, I'd have stayed on the project for 18 months and things would have been fine. But I lost all faith in him after he openly lied to me in order to keep me on his project. (He also bait-and-switched me into joining his project, promising work on the new system but putting me on the old one. I gave him the benefit of the doubt on that one. Priorities shift unpredictably and it's often not the manager's fault. Lying about the Perf number was unforgivable.)

There is a glass ceiling.

I never made that claim.

That is why I have a problem with what you post.

I doubt that's all of it.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

#114

Post by pg »

michaelochurch wrote: post #113
vagrant wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are maligning my company. You could not figure out how things worked at Google, and expected people to start following the new guy who had only been there a few months and hadn't actually accomplished anything yet, and when people didn't drop the 100,000 engineering years of accumulated wisdom to listen to you, you started believing that it must be the system that was broken and not you. And that was fine; you ca…

You, sir, are deeply wrong. You are maligning my company. YOUR company? You're telling me you get your pick of the best projects, and that you have at least one of triumvirate on speed dial any time you want to hash out an idea? You think those SVPs and VPs and managers-of-managers-of-managers you're putting yourself out there to defend give a shit about you? Ha! But when you start spreading this delusion outside of…

Will you two please just stop this?

Re: Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

#115

Post by akldfgj »

googler2 wrote: post #32

I've been at Google for about 7 years now and i really dislike what it is today compared to what it was back then. But that said, i still haven't quit because it's so much better than so many other places. Most people i know who quit either went to Facebook (either for the pre-ipo options or because it's apparently easier to launch things there) or to do their own thing. If you have to have a boss and work in a large…

7 years now? Hard to beat that:

https://www.google.com/finance?&chdet=1170450000000&...

Re: Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

#116

Post by tytso »

michaelochurch wrote: post #101
tazzy531 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for some context. I started a couple months after this former Googler and our work backgrounds prior to Google are pretty similar. In that time, I started out on an underappreciated starter project, did a hackathon for Hangout, filed some patents for that work, did 20% work for an yet to be announced project, and now building out a completely new yet to be announced product. Google is a place that really allows…

Much of the issues with this former Googler is that he may have had some good/interesting ideas but he failed at garnering support. I had widespread engineering support, actually. The problem was that (a) the people managing that product didn't understand the importance of quality in content, and (b) they were under obscene deadlines (which almost certainly wasn;'t their fault). What really kicked me in the shins was…

I had widespread engineering support, actually

From what I saw on the engineering-wide mailing list, where you told people who had many more years of engineering experience than you that they were full of sh*t, I'm sorry to say, no sir, you didn't have widespread engineering support.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

#117

Post by archangel_one »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #21
archangel_one wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple have 60,000 employees now. They are not a micro company any more - why would they be able to feel like one? Obviously some engineers would have worked on the original x86 Macs, just as plenty of engineers at Google worked on the original Android software - that doesn't make it feel like a small company.

"They are not a micro company any more - why would they be able to feel like one?" It can be done, but it takes a lot of work (and by "work" I mean "the pointy-hairs leaving the engineers the hell alone". That seems to require a huge effort in some companies. The old-school name for this is "skunk works". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Skunkworks

Noted on the skunkworks thing. I do think in general though that managers do fairly well at leaving engineers alone at Google; the big company feel seems to come from engineering inertia a lot - inflexible coding standards, groupthink on which technologies to use, etc.

Mostly though I was hoping for a little clarification from the parent poster of why Apple should feel like a small company more than Google does - both would seem to be great places to work, but I wouldn't expect either to feel small.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

#118

Post by jrockway »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #58

Sigh. How do I answer this with new content? Let's try this: throw out anything you may have heard about the company prior to 2012. Don't believe any of the marketing. It's all changed, and I'll let you figure out whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. You need current assessments of what it's really like. Then you have to determine whether to believe them. Finding those assessments should not be particularly di…

Now it seems like any post about the company brings out the Astroturfers. They all seem to be recent hires and so are probably still in the "honeymoon" phase where everything is sparkly and shiny and nothing could possibly be wrong.

Holy strawman, Batman!

You might also consider that others are quite simply stuck there, and are not going to jeopardize that relationship. Maybe they have one of the Valley's infamous sky-high mortgages, or perhaps they have one of those work visas which amount to legalized slavery keeping them bound to their current master.

Two thoughts. One, having Google on your resume typically results in an offer that is greater than what Google pays you, so anyone that has a "sky-high mortgage" can probably leave Google safely at their leisure. (This is not specific to Google, of course. Job + 1 always offers you more money than Job + 0, otherwise you would reject their offer.) Secondly, Google lets people on visas pick the type of visa they want, so there is no need to bind your employment status to your immigration status. (Also, it's tech: prove you have even the most minimal ability to click shit in Eclipse, and all the money and visas you can ever want are yours. If you feel trapped in a tech job, you're doing something wrong.)

Anyway, it's clear from your comment history that you didn't have a good time at Google. Everyone is unhappy with their exes: that's why they're exes. But it's silly to assume that everyone that does like it is mentally defective in some way or that they're all working at Google enslaved by financial or legal obligations. I may have only worked at Google for 8 months, but I still like it as much as I did when I started.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

#119

Post by jrockway »

michaelochurch wrote: post #59
vagrant wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hired at Google at nearly the same time as a certain famous ex-Googler. Both of us were given difficult intro jobs with legacy systems, the sort of projects that chew up engineers and spit them out. It's a chance to prove your mettle. One of us attacked the problem head on, taking on tasks that would normally be "below" us. In the end, the bad project taught him what he needed to know about Google engineering.…

That's radically inaccurate but I don't have the time to set you right.

As the author of more centithreads than God himself, you don't have time to reply to a comment on the Internet?

I'm kind of impressed with your restraint, actually.

Re: Ask HN: Is Google still a cool place to work?

#120

Post by pja »

sadga wrote: post #92
alexgartrell wrote: post #38

A little under two years ago I got offers from both Facebook and Google. The Google offer was a lot bigger (including in stock, the break even point was a valuation of 50 bln), but I accepted the Facebook offer instead, because I knew I'd only get to work on the kind of infrastructure projects I wanted to work on at Facebook. Bootcamp beats the hell out of preallocation for things like this.

> The Google offer was a lot bigger (including in stock, the break even point was a valuation of 50 bln) That is close to FB's valuation (40bn today) now....

The break even point for buying the stock options was a $50bn valuation. Current Google market cap is $225bn. That's a big upside.

The market cap of FB is irrelevant to the valuation of Google stock options.

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