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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

#171

Post by tuwtuwtuwtuw »

aikinai wrote: post #168
tuwtuwtuwtuw wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is a monopoly. Of course you can complain over such a company even if you use their products.

Google is not even close to that kind of monopoly. Every one of their products has viable alternative, and plenty of anti-Google people get by without using them.

No idea what you mean by "that kind of monopoly". Google is a company which performs illegal acts to preserve its monopoly. Of course that will limit the viability of competitive products and services. That's why it's illega.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#172

Post by boringg »

eddyfromtheblok wrote: post #111
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was the company that kept making the web better in every way. Amazing search, endless services each with solid json APIs, a fast multi-process web-browser, & investment in the web as a whole. Google killed the king, and the king was the desktop. The king was apps. Microsoft seemed omnipotent & in total control, and the rise of the web isn't totally Google's but they sure did a lot and they sure rode that wave.…

Wasn’t the G+ push a response to Facebook’s popularity, that they feared losing out on ad revenue?

That was circles

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#173

Post by cudgy »

KorematsuFredt wrote: post #149

Having spent some time with Google as SWE, I think Google was by far the best engineering company I have worked with. Even Amazon, Microsoft were terrible when it comes to software engineering. I am one of those engineers who do not care about culture as long as I am getting paid for the efforts I put in. Google in that sense beat others by HUGE margin. The engineering work was however very different. We focused on r…

“I am one of those engineers who do not care about culture as long as I am getting paid for the efforts I put in.”

Then large companies are not for you. Navigating the culture is key to advancement and long-term satisfaction. Otherwise you will feel like an outcast and likely let go during layoff rounds or kept around at lower compensation rates.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#174

Post by googler_thrwy »

p4bl0 wrote: post #155

I've always wondered if privacy conscious engineers who work at Google do actually use Google's services for their personal lives (Google Drive, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Docs, etc.)? And if so, do they continue to use them when after leaving the company? I ask this question here because there seem to be quite some (ex-)Google employees in this thread.

Google is large enough that you will hear plenty of opinions on this. In my bubble (Zurich, Security) the overall sentiment seems to be "I trust Google handling my data way more now compared to before I joined".

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#175

Post by Aardwolf »

> drastically improved my soft skills

I'd love to know how in a fast paced office environment you can improve those, none of the trainings or anything are about this (even the leadership like ones feel like just standardized template stuff rather than actually have an environment where you can practice social skills and get the correct timely feedback to improve it)

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#176

Post by commandersaki »

I try not to be jaded having never cleared the dreaded google interview multiple times, but I'm very envious of the high compensation, amenities (which their recruiters argue is compensation), and probably getting paid doing very technically challenging work. For me in Australia, it seems to be a case of choose one.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#177

Post by rolisz »

anon990 wrote: post #141
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…

Maybe you should clarify what company you worked in, because that's clearly not Google. In Google, SREs do 12 hour shifts. Night shifts (or rather 24 hour shifts) are (ironically enough) usually done by SWE teams. Almost every SWE team in Cloud has a 24 hour shift, and I agree, they are quite terrible.

I've had 12 hour shifts at Google with 200 pages over a week (shitty monitoring, shitty capacity constraints, shitty management). That was quite terrible.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#178

Post by makerofthings »

p4bl0 wrote: post #155

I've always wondered if privacy conscious engineers who work at Google do actually use Google's services for their personal lives (Google Drive, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Docs, etc.)? And if so, do they continue to use them when after leaving the company? I ask this question here because there seem to be quite some (ex-)Google employees in this thread.

I work at google and I use google products. Sure, some giant automated heap of code is processing your data and deciding how many grammerly adverts to show you, but your data is about as safe as it can be from loss or from humans. There are so many controls and checks in place when working with user data it's difficult to get things done some times (and quite rightly too).

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#179

Post by teractiveodular »

cat_plus_plus wrote: post #96
lll-o-lll wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is US companies in general! Never work for one in another country; if you can help it. All decisions will be centralized to the US head office and require face to face. Communication is generally terrible. I’ve worked for European and Asian owned companies, and they seem to be able to handle distributed authority much better. For the “land of the free”, it sure seems like US companies run on a feudal system.

REALLY? Japanese companies are an example of non-hierarchical culture with distributed decision making?

As a matter of fact, yes, Japanese companies operate largely on a bottom-up consensus model. Approval from the top is still required, but they rarely refuse it if everybody in the ranks is aligned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_management_culture#Ma...

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#180

Post by commandersaki »

mike_hearn wrote: post #147
atleastoptimal wrote: post #32

All these things make me envious of people who get to work at Google or any other FAANG company, where they are both paid well and validated for their intelligence.

The validated for their intelligence thing is a problem. Googlers in the early days constantly told each other that they were the "smartest people in the world". I noticed this immediately after joining and found it quietly troubling, because there's all kinds of smart and the interview processes were really only selecting for skill with computers or maths. A lot of Googlers wouldn't survive long on the streets or al…

I think when you're hiring people like Russ Cox, Rob Pike, Van Jacobson, Jeffrey Mogul, Jennifer Rexford, Bram Moolenar, Vint Cerf, etc. (and that's just a tiny fraction of their well known amazing talent) it's hard not to think they're hiring the smartest & brightest.
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