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How I Left YouTube

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Re: How I Left YouTube

#151

Post by djmips »

zhach wrote: post #123
omoikane wrote: post #37

> I was leaving because I had outgrown the pot I was planted in I wonder if the author had attempted to transfer to a different part of the company first, since a different organization might have more room to grow. It might not be possible to do a transfer plus a promotion simultaneously, but it's likely a less stressful option than leaving the company.

Author here. I debated this, but the state of Google and YouTube together and certain things internally led me to just look for external opportunities. Probably would've been less stressful. Lol.

I wonder why 7 of your comments have been killed (dead)

maybe it's the new HN account or something?

Re: How I Left YouTube

#152

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

neilv wrote: post #149

> The strain comes from context switching. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability. Then, from 6:00 PM to midnight, I had to care about inverting binary trees and system architecture design. We really need to stop the tech interview nonsense. Here is an experienced, practicing software engineer, who can't get a job without drilling for and performing frat hazin…

So exactly what kind of interviews do you suggest that a company do at scale to hire people who will make $300K+ a year? Just talk them?

Re: How I Left YouTube

#153

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

aeyes wrote: post #93

I have seen this from the manager side at these kinds of companies, explaining to your manager that you are quitting because your level does not match your work is a waste of energy. Their hands are usually tied. Promotion decisions are made by committees which are 1-2 levels above your manager, your manager presents the candidates. They round up a pot of multiple teams which are discussed at once and there are usual…

Honestly, I’ve worked at everything from small to medium lifestyle companies, startups, Big Enterprise, BigTech, and now Í am a staff consultant at a third party AWS consulting firm across 10 jobs.

In all of those jobs, I have found line level managers absolutely useless and powerless.

At the jobs where I was responsible for strategy, one of my conditions for employment was I would be reporting directly to a director or CTO.

Re: How I Left YouTube

#154

Post by cyberax »

gen220 wrote: post #146
cyberax wrote: post #33

> Do say: "I optimized a high-throughput distributed system to prioritize user retention metrics, reducing latency by 150ms through a custom caching layer." Ugh. Pain. I'm hiring, and I've been filtering out resumes that are heavy on these kinds of metrics. Because I literally get thousands of entries with these kinds of wording. Often with excessively precise numbers, like "by 23.5%". My problem is that it's hard to…

FWIW, I agree that less ink on a resume is usually a higher signal, and I also find that indicators for “ownership”, social trust, autonomy, and proxies thereof are more valuable than number go up narratives. But sometimes people feel like they must play this game to get past the pre-interview loop screen; I’ve interviewed plenty of people with number go up narratives who’ve done exceptionally well. It’s challenging…

Yeah, I get that.

But I'm not joking about thousands of resumes. I have 2210 resumes in the "reviewed" folder now. And they are _very_ heavy on the "number goes up" signal. I think there might be some spam service that sends them out.

I interviewed several candidates, and they are completely bad. Like, totally. Not being able to write simple recursive graph traversal ("you have a list of jobs with dependencies on each other, walk through them in a topological order"). Some can't even write simple "while" loops.

Re: How I Left YouTube

#155

Post by stack_framer »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #152
neilv wrote: post #149

> The strain comes from context switching. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability. Then, from 6:00 PM to midnight, I had to care about inverting binary trees and system architecture design. We really need to stop the tech interview nonsense. Here is an experienced, practicing software engineer, who can't get a job without drilling for and performing frat hazin…

So exactly what kind of interviews do you suggest that a company do at scale to hire people who will make $300K+ a year? Just talk them?

Why not? People can't fake their way through a deeply technical, probing, 2-hour conversation.

You'd be amazed just how much you can learn about someone's actual skills and experience (or lack thereof) through long-form discussion. I think we don't truly talk enough in our currently broken interview process.

Re: How I Left YouTube

#156

Post by qingcharles »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #152
neilv wrote: post #149

> The strain comes from context switching. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability. Then, from 6:00 PM to midnight, I had to care about inverting binary trees and system architecture design. We really need to stop the tech interview nonsense. Here is an experienced, practicing software engineer, who can't get a job without drilling for and performing frat hazin…

So exactly what kind of interviews do you suggest that a company do at scale to hire people who will make $300K+ a year? Just talk them?

Hiring developers is half lottery, half dark art. Best guy I ever hired was when I was tech lead for a large streamer. I hired a guy at essentially minimum wage to write some very basic HTML pages. Within weeks he was writing code. Within a couple of years he was a much better dev than I'll ever be.

I'd almost be down by literally hiring devs by picking resumes out of a hat and just having them on probation. The sheer amount of time and energy wasted having good devs doing interviews instead of doing code is horrible.

Re: How I Left YouTube

#157

Post by squigz »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #152
neilv wrote: post #149

> The strain comes from context switching. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability. Then, from 6:00 PM to midnight, I had to care about inverting binary trees and system architecture design. We really need to stop the tech interview nonsense. Here is an experienced, practicing software engineer, who can't get a job without drilling for and performing frat hazin…

So exactly what kind of interviews do you suggest that a company do at scale to hire people who will make $300K+ a year? Just talk them?

Do CEOs and other executives have to go through leetcode-style interviews to be considered for their jobs?

Re: How I Left YouTube

#158

Post by saghm »

dkasper wrote: post #131
tamimio wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, that’s why I feel pity for the people who destroy their lives to get paid extra 5% and having a pizza party with good boy remarks, and of course making someone else wealthier too. It’s not a flex to sleep in a tent at work, while neglecting your health, family, friends, maybe kids, this “grind” culture is pushed by corporations for obvious reasons.

Except at big tech the next level might be 500k more not 5%

And yet, how many people are actually happier with that extra $500k? It's one thing if you're not making enough to allow you and whoever else you might need to support to be happy and comfortable and be able to save enough for emergencies and retirement, but I'm dubious that someone only one other away from a half million dollar raise is in that position.

Re: How I Left YouTube

#159

Post by qingcharles »

nyjah wrote: post #135
shevy-java wrote: post #114

Youtube is getting problematic. I write this as someone who basically has some videos running in the background all the time, mostly just DJ music in the background. First, searching for videos sucks. Yes, the first few results can be useful, then more and more crap shows up. This just wastes my time. But, more importantly - more and more AI videos means I am being bombarded with more time wasters. I have about zero…

I’m a YouTube premium subscriber. Just yesterday I found myself opening a private window to watch a video with ads, rather than letting the algorithm know I was watching the video on my account. Even if I remove the video from my watch history, YouTube can’t help itself. You make a great point on stale content and the overall enshittification is becoming intolerable.

Pay a little extra for YouTube Premium Family and you can silo your interests to different Google profiles. I have work and home like this basically. Coding, AI, etc on one, cars, retro games on another. No ads.

Re: How I Left YouTube

#160

Post by NetOpWibby »

I'm in a similar situation but I also have a direct report who is clearly displeased at the lack of leveling available to us. All I can do is empathize with them.

Anyone have ideas on how to improve morale when decisions are out of your control?

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