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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

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Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#131

Post by bananapub »

happosai wrote: post #92
enneff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are great benefits for sure, but one of the reasons I left is a totally ineffective and wasteful management structure that makes it extremely hard to actually do anything. It is very hard to feel like your work means anything at a company of that size, since the chances of having the goals of your work changed (or being laid off) at a moments notice makes it hard to stay motivated. If I take another software gi…

In case of Google, it's not just the size of company. It's the fact that the company makes it's money from selling ads. No matter how well you do your job, the end result is only that more ads were sold. Programming is a superpower that can change the world. Yet the best paying jobs for programmers are at FAANGs building systems to peddle ads. .

> It's the fact that the company makes it's money from selling ads.

this is true, but it did not at all affect how 90% of the company worked. the ads teams made money and everyone else did whatever, supported by that infinite firehose of cash.

a large part of the reason google has sucked (internally and externally) for the last few years is that this changed.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#132

Post by bananapub »

georgeburdell wrote: post #69

Perhaps a condescending take but I think the author got a bit of a big head from getting promoted quickly, and the subtext is that it was due to their amazing technical competence. It’s a noteworthy feat to get recruited out of school, but SRE is a godawful position with high attrition, so it’s easier than SWE to get promoted. That they regret not moving to SWE sooner ignores that SRE is a talent sink and considered…

incorrect, this particular engineer was exceptional technically and organisationally, and well deserved that fast rise.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#133

Post by bananapub »

rurban wrote: post #104
cperciva wrote: post #74

L6 ICs are pretty rare - it already is a top tier of seniority in engineering Is Google really different from other companies? I talk to a lot of Amazonians (AWS Hero, FreeBSD/EC2 maintainer) and my general impression is that developers below L7 ought to be classified as "Junior" -- my mapping is basically L4-L6 = Junior Developer, L7/L8 = Developer, and L10 = Senior Developer. Anything which doesn't have L7+ involve…

Look at her github repos. I would call her a L4 for the technical skills there. Good code, but not top seniority at all.

that's an extremely stupid way to judge someone, especially given Google's IP contract.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#134

Post by reaperman »

skybrian wrote: post #103
justinclift wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. I'm personally more of the opinion that Google has caused enough serious issues for enough people - with famously no way to get the issues resolved - that they themselves seeded or caused the negative public opinion. Combine that with Google behaviour of clearly doing things in their own interest even when not…

I don't think people understand what manifest v3 is trying to solve. It's a good example of how a worthwhile effort to make the Internet less terrible can be misinterpreted.

More explanation from you on this could help. I don’t even know where to begin - everything I search just details how v3 greatly limits the efficacy of ad blockers.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#135

Post by underdeserver »

grepLeigh wrote: post #97
adin8mon wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for anyone still considering SRE: when interviewing, ask how incentives/bonuses/promotions work for software engineers and how does that compare to SREs. A lot of promotable activities for SWE (shipping new things constantly) have negative value for an SRE role, since continually changing infrastructure ensures on-call never develops mastery of those systems.

I had to blink a few times because I could've written this myself. https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/1cg14pk/comment/l1sutn... Back to the OP, I raise a glass to your sabbatical. Most SREs end up needing a healing period from repetitive stress injury (AKA burnout). If I may offer some completely unsolicited advice, don't put too much pressure on yourself in the next few months. People who gravitate towards SRE wo…

I... I think you did write that yourself. This is a very odd kind of plagiarism.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#136

Post by m3drano »

rr808 wrote: post #29

I've done the path from SWE to SRE and back to SWE. I was always happy to do production support and diagnose and fix production problems, so I naturally moved to SRE which is always looking for people. It was a real mistake, SRE is hugely stressful and really unrewarding compared to SWE. Yes you learn some skills and get some occasional glory, but year after year of fighting fires really didn't build any long lasting…

I've been running as SRE for the last decade, running critical stuff like authentication (which mostly all services depend on). I'm a software engineer.

I cannot disagree more: our team is healthy, oncall is quite a fine activity to do (and compensated, of course), we have plenty of engineering work to do.

I've had five promotions (and tripled salary) and done so working on plenty rewarding activities over time. I've done from deployment automation, to capacity planning, distributed system design, large data migrations, designing ietf standards for auth protocols, wrote client sdks, now we even do AI for different things (including model development).

I'd recommend to not generalize from "I didn't like it / the experience wasn't a match for me" to "the role is shitty".

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#137

Post by underdeserver »

keepamovin wrote: post #49
markus_zhang wrote: post #25

The money alone is good enough. I can probably just retire with all those money and stocks. Let alone tons of techs and a shiny CV. Kudos for starting from a height most people can't reach for life. I guess you are going to start another company eventually?

9 years is a long time just for money tho. Too much money focused on that attitude

9 years is just about enough time to big a sweet nest egg.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#138

Post by elevatedastalt »

hiddencost wrote: post #50
danpalmer wrote: post #24

There are a bunch of comments saying that Google is just like any other big tech company and that the exciting engineering bit has gone. My experience is only from the last 2.5 years, but I've got a slightly different take. Engineering from >10 years ago seems like it was a wild west. Some truly stunning pieces of technology, strung together with duct tape. Everything had its own configuration language, workflow engi…

Oof. I knew it was going to happen, but people thinking boq/pod are good rather than actually killing the company makes me pretty sad.

Please tell me how you think Boq is killing the company.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#139

Post by underdeserver »

cperciva wrote: post #125
lexlash wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean by "junior" here. L3 is early career, L4 is mid-career, L5 is senior. You can hit L5 on the strength of pure technical contributions regardless of business/org needs, usually. L6+ is staff, and tends to involve a very different skillset. (If you're not looking to lead a team, you're probably not going to have the kind of impact that gets you to L6, let alone L7 or higher at Google.) This is…

My definitions are basically: Junior developers need supervision because left to their own devices they'll screw things up horribly; normal developers can produce good code independently; and Senior developers are able to catch the mistakes the Junior developers are making and set them on the right path.

I would say* under these definitions L3 is junior; what the industry calls senior is somewhere between L4 and L5. L5s at Google are expected to mentor L3s and L4s but also to design systems, break down into tasks, and coordinate tasks between teams and engineers.

If you were a senior engineer at a 50-person startup you would commonly get hired at L4.

* I left Google 18 months ago; also, Google is a large company, and while they strive for uniformity across teams, the levels aren't really quite the same company-wide.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#140

Post by elevatedastalt »

yellow_postit wrote: post #82
tdb7893 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience was L5 always seemed like the happiest engineers. It has often the most interesting technical work, still great pay, and low stress (compared to higher levels at least). It seemed like when people got promoted to L6 their overall quality of life would go down. I knew a lot of people sticking at L5 on purpose (I once even talked to a CTO at a small company who said they had wished they never were promote…

L5 is a great terminal level (and the equivalent at other companies). you are trusted to walk and chew gum at the same time, can cause meaningful damage (good and bad), and largely “too lowly” to be in the perpetual pissing matches of mid/upper mgmt. sure you won’t control your own destiny in broader projects but it’s a good life you often don’t miss till you’re past it.

It's great that it is terminal, but both comp and the respect you get in the company is strongly affected by level, so it's hard to just sit at L5 while you watch your peers rise the ranks
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