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

He is right on almost all of what he is saying regarding work life balance and such.

But if you have the oportunity to not have to work under a guy like that. Why would you? At most you will get a salary raise but ultimatley you would be working very hard under his wip to realize his dreams and goals.

The mind set he has can be really benefitial for certain companies and it is really helpful for start-ups to work like this because you establish an base line of dicipline in the company culture that is valuable.

But he obviously is not capable to reflect back on himself and see who he are. These sort of people rarely are capable of that and if they do they dont really care.

Have you tried using made-up or downgraded curse words? Fracked, frelled, dren, sparks, slontz, gorram, jagweeds, cheese&crackers, crackers&toast, etc?

It will probably make you feel silly, but you can meditate on it being literally no sillier than using actual curse words to pepper your ordinary speech.

> It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a great job

This is a rather dangerous thought process that reflects the skewed view that some Americans have of employment: that anything less than 'Great' should be considered fire-worthy. Employment security is pushed to its exploitative limit. In such cases, employees react commensurately. Employee and employers end up in relationship that encourages churn & hopping jobs the second that your value exceeds your compensation.

> fast moving and changing needs

I find it hard to believe that a behemoth like Google has that many of these. In new product teams, sure. But, there is a shit load of maintence / upkeep / feature-iteration work that mostly requires sufficiently competent and experienced engineers. But, not much more.

> traditional tech model of risk reward

I am not sure if this was ever true for big tech. The second a company was is big enough to be in S&P 500, no low level IC is ever going to have visible impact to the company's stock bottom line.

The idea that a foot soldier's compensation was ever reflective of their impact is and has always been a lie.

> That tolerance is gone at Google and “words” > “content” is the new Silicon Valley mantra of political correctness. You can say terrible things as long as your pronouns are correct or can say super important things but use one wrong word and it's off to HR for you

That's a shame. I was hoping that the media outburst on these matters were that of a minority. But, it appears that this dogma has taken over Google culture at large.

> When I was growing up in Tech in the ‘90’s - there was no such thing as work life balance. We loved what we did and wanted to succeed so we worked like crazy to achieve great things. 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

I am not sure I can take this serious. This is not what Work Life balance means AT ALL. Maybe that's because I am one of the younger folk.

> the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. Soon, Lawyers > Builders and the builders will need to go elsewhere to start new companies.

This appears to be well recognized cycle for big companies in every sector. I would characterize the Ballmer era of MSFT as a somewhat similar time too.

Good points and a good read. But, if you want start up culture, work at a startup...I guess.

I'm aware that, as a founder, he's obviously very interested in the success of his product. His mentality however carried over the acquisition and past inertia. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I think his problem is that he's passionate.

And I don't mean the corporate lingo 'passionate', I mean the actual passionate. I strongly advise any passionate people to not seek to turn their passion into a job. Because it's a long journey full of suffering.

Your bosses will drive you insane. Your clients will drive you insane. Your coworkers will drive you especially mad. You will feel pain every time you will be asked to cut corners. No one will appreciate the finer details of your work. You will become the office insufferable twat. Passed every promotion.

The sweet spot is somewhere between "I don't hate it" and "I kind of like it". You can learn to like something if you do it long enough.

Not sure why everyone is assuming Noam is a billionaire. He mentioned he had little equity, and from what I could find that amounted to single-digit millions out of the acquisition's billion-dollar price tag. Of course, compensation since then and Google's rising market capitalization have surely increased that, but I would bet it's still quite far off from the billion, and even far off from the 9 digits.

Not that it matters — his observations are just as valid regardless of his net worth.