Mental health impacts of a big tech job • Hacker News Board

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#121

Post by exBarrelSpoiler » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 6:28 AM UTC

deadmutex wrote: post #116

georgeburdell wrote: post #43

This seems like mostly an Apple problem. I have not heard similar issues with Google and Facebook (I don't know anyone in the other "A" or the "N")

Apple may be worse than others.. but also know that people move around, and bring a part of their old culture to the new team. If they're in a senior position, and they have a bias towards people from their old employer while hiring, they could start hiring people from the ex-employer. Mix that in with a fast growing team, and now there is a risk of a subset of the company acting like they're at the old company. FWIW…

Well, after Google purchased Nest, there were all of those tales about the difficulties of integrating that startup into the parent company. Tony Fadell founded Nest, and he brought Apple's culture into it, and that style definitely did not gel with Google's more laidback environment.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#122

Post by onion2k » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 6:37 AM UTC

snek_case wrote: post #44

deadmutex wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps... but I think companies like FB also get (total guess) thousands of resumes per day. So, for every engineer that walks away, many more are knocking at the door. So, I think in management's eyes, very very very few people are irreplaceable.

That's not true at all where I am. Yes, I can post on twitter and get tons of CVs, but most applicants aren't that good. I may only want to interview 40% of the candidates I get, and I would really only want to hire about 1 in 5 people I interview. Interviewing takes time. Then after that, onboarding people on the job takes time too, it can take people several months to become effective on the job. Skilled, effective…

If you're hiring in tech and 40% of applicants are worthy of an interview then that's amazing. It's closer to 10% in my experience.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#123

Post by sershe » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 6:40 AM UTC

That is actually one thing I refuse to compromise, and I think the current state of tech gives most developers this luxury, possibly if you are willing to trade off some compensation. Even if that changes, this would be the last thing to go, for me :)

If I'm on call, I'm 100% on call. If something important is late (not endemically but as a one off), I'm fine with working late or on the weekend. Even if someone "unfairly" drags me into their on-call issue I will stay up late and help them.

But once I check out, I check out. I refuse to install work stuff on my phone, and have most notifications off by default... on a rare occasion that someone from work texts me in off hours and off call, I would "miss" the notification unless they describe the problem, and it's actually somewhat urgent. If something is on fire (again, it's very rare and not endemic in the teams I worked in), sure, I'll be there if I'm near a computer. Otherwise I might as well be out in the mountains ;)

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#124

Post by onion2k » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 6:41 AM UTC

thethethethe wrote: post #16

Not really my experience at Google tbh. I've been at Google for a little under 4 years and been promoted twice but only work about 4 hours a day. Sometimes I don't do shit for weeks at a time and things seem to pan out ok. I'm not trying to humble brag that I'm 10x or anything--im not, I'm a B grade engineer at best. Sure it can be stressful sometimes, but I'd say that 80% of the time it's really chill.

Being on-call but having no tickets come in is not the same as "not working".

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#125

Post by exBarrelSpoiler » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 6:43 AM UTC

> When you’re a new employee at Apple you’re pretty much thrown into the deep end. There’s no orientation for projects on how to contribute to them or requirements to work within a certain set of guidelines. For the most part I was expected to learn things along the way. On top of that, generally there wasn’t any strict rules on things like code review or pull request requirements. I was given some tasks to complete, but from there it was up to me to learn how to integrate my changes into a massive project I had never seen before. I had to find the right people to talk to and learn a lot by trial and error. I had to do all of this while other teams were expecting my work to be done at a certain time, and even though a valid excuse of mine was “I have no idea what I’m doing,” you can imagine that wasn’t always acceptable to someone dependent on me completing my tasks.

> Furthermore, when issues really started to occur where someone was unable to do any work until you completed a task, it was often threatened that things would need to be escalated to upper management. It was never put this way directly, but to me when people would say this it could be interpreted as “we are going to tell your director about your poor performance.” Because of that, individual contributors (i.e. non-management) would often do everything possible just to get the job done and avoid that escalation. This meant late nights, weekends, skipping lunch, or whatever it takes. Pulling in upper management was bad and should be avoided at all cost. While that wasn’t a written rule, I certainly observed it a lot during my time there.

Seems about right.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#126

Post by black_13 » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 6:44 AM UTC

Dealing with very young people who have not failed or lost something or someone consequential. And who don’t understand stand that there actions have consequences and its just a fucking job.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#127

Post by rhinoceraptor » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 6:51 AM UTC

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #72

> The build server needed to be rebooted, but this was during the pandemic when no one was in the office. Furthermore, it was a Friday making it even more unlikely someone was around to do something as simple as press a button to reboot a machine. WTF? Why is a company like Apple using one off machines for release builds? That should all be on a VM and a server with a management interface. I made that mistake once an…

> That should all be on a VM and a server with a management interface.

I guess when you have a bespoke OS that can't really be virtualized and needs to run on your own (non-server grade) hardware, you need to do stuff like this. I imagine the 'build server' is actually just a Mac Mini.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#128

Post by iamevn » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 6:53 AM UTC

ffggvv wrote: post #98

inlined wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on what division you’re in and what role you have. I was TL of a team in Cloud and I ran myself ragged. I was getting anxiety attacks every day and felt a literal weight sinking into me as the bus approached the building. I took a 6mo medical leave and still haven’t really recovered.

yeah cloud is a differnt beast. basically amazon within google

same here in cloud, y'all are making me wonder if maybe I shouldn't have given my 2 weeks the other day and instead tried to do an internal transfer

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#129

Post by burntoutfire » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 7:04 AM UTC

sg47 wrote: post #107

acituan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what I'm trying to say is that Big Tech is a big place, and if you find yourself somewhere with bad culture don't take that to mean there aren't other places you would like. Tell that to an H1B holder. You're not wrong to point out that we can't generalize from a single data point, but you're wrong to bring your positive experience as if there is an equivalence between the two. They don't have the same weighing; we…

As a H1B holder who's also a cancer survivor and suffering from severe health issues, I can tell you it's hell. I cry at least once a week at the fact that I cannot take a break without having to destroy my life and my family's life and 20+ years of life built up here. Everything this person said is absolutely true. The high compensation comes at a very high cost. It's not just mental or physical but also moral. You…

> You underlevel people because you have to have a high bar.

> So someone with 20+ years of experience with subject matter expertise (not me) is a 'developing' Principal engineer.

If one of your major complaints about work is that some other employees only make $300k while some arbitrary table made by the company says they should be making $400k-$500k, then perhaps you're in a pretty good position overall?

In other words - it's a huge organization, of course it's not far from perfect. But, pretty much nothing in life is.

Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job

#130

Post by jatins » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 7:10 AM UTC

Very relatable.

My biggest gripe is that despite knowing that we don't really know what we are doing, that there are lots of unknowns, that something like this is being done for the first time in team the management often expects deadlines set in stone. All the "agile"ity goes out of the window.

Or worse, like in Uber's case, the CEO will announce something on a whim and you have to scramble to get it done because of no fault of your own.