Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 464 posts

Re: Leaving Google

#121

Post by geodel »

emodendroket wrote: post #80
geodel wrote: post #72

Seems takeaway is if Google didn't cut this person's pay by 10 per cent then all their "shitty behavior" like Project Maven and so on would have been just fine.

Another article on the site expands on this: > I still feel uncertain about everything though. Google approved my remote work application last week, but I haven't gotten a new offer letter yet, and I've been told to expect a pay cut of at least 10% because the market rate for software engineers is supposedly lower in southern California. This feels like a shitty thing to do. My work is not less valuable. It's a remin…

I don't know maybe it is the thing with top level engineers hired at FAANG who deserve absolute truth, justice and equality.

To me earning nowhere at level as these folks, still it embarasses me to whine about pay/promotion when so many hard working folks doing important work in society are paid pittance.

Re: Leaving Google

#122

Post by antognini »

topkai22 wrote: post #93
ashtonkem wrote: post #38

> Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would le…

Not a Googler, but I’m my experience 25 person managers can work (barely) if they are just their to keep the HR stuff in line and people actually transactional work with other teams or if there is an informal team structure beneath the manager. Think a team where there are 4 tech leads that actually run the teams, but where the “manager” deals with career and hr issues. While working in consulting I spent about 4 mon…

I remember hearing a story (maybe apocryphal) that after Larry and Sergey abandoned their "no managers" experiment, they decided to give each manager a minimum of 10 direct reports and preferably closer to 20 so that the manager wouldn't have time to micromanage any of them.

Re: Leaving Google

#123

Post by DannyBee »

Jensson wrote: post #59
jeffbee wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10% of the company is at L6 or higher so it can't be that hard.

Most of those got promoted by going into management and lucking out that the product they worked on grew and therefore needed to hire a lot, and you easily get promoted as you start to manage more people. Getting promoted on technical merit on the other hand is really hard.

This seems like a super-biased view, and having sat on tons of promo committees for IC, ICTLM, and EngMgr for many years, i'd suggest to you it could not be more wrong.

Managers don't get promoted for growing teams. I've watched lots and lots of people who write "grew team from x to y" get feedback on their promo packet that this isn't, by itself, a valuable thing.

Re: Leaving Google

#124

Post by icelancer »

icelancer wrote: post #120
mikepurvis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about that. There are plenty of examples of "boutique" companies who pay well and have insanely good retention over the long term— 37signals/basecamp as one example, at least until that dustup earlier this year. Valve is probably another. It's not hard to imagine a Google that had taken this path, just focused indefinitely on search & search ads, run itself with <1000 highly skilled, highly paid employee…

It's not just engineers this applies to. Sure, if everyone makes $400k + benefits and profit share with good work-life balance and such, I guess that might fly. But most companies have customer support, IT, and other cost centers where you have entry-level employees who need to progress, and that necessarily means increasing wages over time to retain and advance good employees. Besides, junior developers / interns ar…

Besides, you run the real existential risk of getting your margin cannibalized by another startup or Amazon if you don't grow enough. In a world where you pay everyone a lot of money, the product is awesome, and there's no growth, there's a lot of margin in your product that someone is going to target - some subset of customers you aren't serving, or customers who aren't that loyal and willing to switch for 20-50% lower costs.

I'm not saying VC funding is a good thing; I largely think what we are seeing due to massive QE is malinvestment on a grand scale and is why you see dumb shit like Juicero.

But natural, bootstrapped growth is a good thing - and necessary, if you want to survive. Trending sideways is waiting for death on many fronts - your labor force being the largest one.

Re: Leaving Google

#125

Post by ido »

mikepurvis wrote: post #96
icelancer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also due to wanting to keep your employees. You can't make the same amount of money year over year and retain employees who never get raises above CPI or promotions into management/ownership. That's just not going to work.

I don't know about that. There are plenty of examples of "boutique" companies who pay well and have insanely good retention over the long term— 37signals/basecamp as one example, at least until that dustup earlier this year. Valve is probably another. It's not hard to imagine a Google that had taken this path, just focused indefinitely on search & search ads, run itself with <1000 highly skilled, highly paid employee…

Valve doesn’t have as many employees but they definitely grow in both revenue and product line (vr, deck, they had other hardware products before - steam itself was a “side project” to distribute half life 2!)

Re: Leaving Google

#126

Post by Jensson »

DannyBee wrote: post #123
Jensson wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those got promoted by going into management and lucking out that the product they worked on grew and therefore needed to hire a lot, and you easily get promoted as you start to manage more people. Getting promoted on technical merit on the other hand is really hard.

This seems like a super-biased view, and having sat on tons of promo committees for IC, ICTLM, and EngMgr for many years, i'd suggest to you it could not be more wrong. Managers don't get promoted for growing teams. I've watched lots and lots of people who write "grew team from x to y" get feedback on their promo packet that this isn't, by itself, a valuable thing.

I didn't say you get promoted for growing a team, I said you easily get promoted when you manage a lot of people.

Re: Leaving Google

#127

Post by nont »

I'm sad... I used like their slogan Don't be evil. Now it's like when Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm relabels it to 4 legs are good, but 2 legs are better.

Re: Leaving Google

#128

Post by ido »

googthrow234 wrote: post #112
mikepurvis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about that. There are plenty of examples of "boutique" companies who pay well and have insanely good retention over the long term— 37signals/basecamp as one example, at least until that dustup earlier this year. Valve is probably another. It's not hard to imagine a Google that had taken this path, just focused indefinitely on search & search ads, run itself with <1000 highly skilled, highly paid employee…

I think they could have even done most of those things and remained small and lean. Most of the bloat isn't that they've entered these spaces, but that there are a million little sub-projects within each one chasing marginal (at best) improvements.

Didn’t Craigslist did basically that? I’m not familiar with recent developments but for decades they stayed small and focused and seemed to have done well.

Re: Leaving Google

#129

Post by wdr1 »

ashtonkem wrote: post #38

> Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would le…

You're partly right: With a significant number of reports, you can't keep juggling all the balls yourself. But what varies is how that handled?

A micromanager will be absolutely crushed by a high number of reports. In fact 10+ years at Google, managers intentionally had a large number of directs so they couldn't micromanage.

If you have a pretty autonomous team, strong tech leads, can delegate, ~20 still isn't great, but it's not horrible. It's not the steady state you want, but it's doable for a few quarters.

Re: Leaving Google

#130

Post by jart »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #12
cube00 wrote: post #2

> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence. This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.

Well there's no grand strategy and it's too big and settled for engineering to have much impact. It's inertia-led. I bet most googlers hate ads so it's a big state of cognitive dissonance too.

If they hate ads then wouldn't that make them the best people to control them?
Post reply on HN