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Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

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Re: Leaving Google

#191

Post by lordnacho »

mavelikara wrote: post #83
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.

Product Management, in many orgs, is the old wine of Taylorism in a new bottle, where there is a "thinking class," and there is a separate "doing class." The stereotype of an engineer with poor social skills who can't grasp the "high-level cross functional relationships and strategies" (from nostrebored's sibling comment) is not very different from Taylor's idea of workers: One of the very first requirements for a ma…

This is exactly right. I studied both engineering and management, so I have experienced both schools.

Actually understanding science and manipulating the world is hard. Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves, or how a web request happens. They can never understand it on the required level to fix things.

Now try to explain to an engineer how a bond works, or how industrial strategy works. He can do both his own work and the manager's work.

I sound pretty bitter for a guy who's managed to dodge most of the BS things in large corporations his while career, but that's because I really think this aspect of the world needs fixing.

It seems like just about every human endeavour is encumbered by MBA people who pretend to understand something hard, who get paid at least as well as those people who can both solve the technical and the strategic problems.

This might be more of a problem in the Anglo world. Engineers getting promoted is more common in Europe according to rumor.

Re: Leaving Google

#192

Post by gremIin »

natch wrote: post #167

I’ve come to suspect the reason (ex) Google people write these is basically humblebragging. There just isn’t enough interesting material presented to have any other explanation make much sense. Just an opinion; ymmv.

Everyone wants to feel special.

Re: Leaving Google

#193

Post by ergocoder »

emodendroket wrote: post #63
bmitc wrote: post #33

Google has 140,000 employees, the size of a size-able city in the U.S. Does anyone really care when someone leaves Google?

I guess people do in the "why would you ever leave such a great job?!" sense, but people can get bored of any job after enough time.

Outsiders also don't grasp how high a lowly senior engineer earns.

Compensation in tech is so insane.

Other high earning occupation just doesn't even come close.

It would take doctors years to earn 250k a year. In tech with stock growth + RSU, you might get that as a junior eng. I earned 450k as a junior per year with pre-ipo company.

This is why engineers can just leave and others are surprised.

Re: Leaving Google

#194

Post by RNCTX »

> If a great new opportunity comes up, take it, but drop something else. If the dropped thing was important, it'll get staffed. If not... why work on it?

The above seems to explain how a thing that fills a gaping functionality hole in one google product via another just gets deleted without any consideration for the interaction between the two.

Re: Leaving Google

#195

Post by wly_cdgr »

nostrebored wrote: post #21
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.

The idea that products at large tech companies are going to be lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people or understand the cross functional relationships and strategies is absurd. This isn't a future engineers want either -- I hear complaints about meetings from nearly every engineer I know. The idea that you should have low level knowledge of the system you're working on and high level knowledge of al…

I don't often downvote, but when I do, it's dumb shit like this

Re: Leaving Google

#196

Post by zaptheimpaler »

titzer wrote: post #43

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue g…

If they don't grow revenue the stock won't go up. Most big companies are organized around "STONK MUST GO UP". I could justify this with smarter sounding words and more detail but in essence thats all it is. We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane.

Re: Leaving Google

#197

Post by shoto_io »

dilyevsky wrote: post #173
shoto_io wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale kills them all except for Apple? There is a comment somewhere here saying that levels at Apple are private. This seems to be an interesting concept to keep a somewhat flat hierarchy.

There’re private in a sense that there isn’t internal registry where you can just look up anyone like at google. From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis?

Re: Leaving Google

#198

Post by akomtu »

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 guess their real promo is when they interview elsewhere and tell how they've been managing a big hoard of ICs. A few years later they come back and tell the story how they've been a director/VP/etc. and get a matching level which is above the level of that guy who wrote "not a valuable thing" feedback.

Re: Leaving Google

#199

Post by benzible »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #55
titzer wrote: post #43

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue g…

> And scale is simply because greed. Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.

Survival for executives at publicly traded companies has led to a maniacal focus on quarterly results, discouraging R&D without near-term payout and disincentivizing minimization of negative externalities that will eventually impact everyone, including the company and its employees. The Long Term Stock Exchange was recently launched as an alternative and Asana and Twilio recently listed there (dual-listed along with existing NYSE listings) [1]. It's far too early to say if it will have any wider impact but I think the larger point is that what's necessary for "survival" is dependent on the context, and it may be possible to change the underlying conditions.

[1] https://medium.com/hps-insight/on-short-termism-8e28fbe4ccc6

Re: Leaving Google

#200

Post by m0zg »

> I started losing a lot of sleep, and I got a lot of headaches and back pain. I got a lot of "brain fog": inability to concentrate or make decisions. I started forgetting words and names and losing the thread of a conversation mid-sentence. I felt like I had no energy left for anything other than work, and I could barely manage that.

Other than back pain these symptoms match mine exactly, except I hadn't worked full time for the past 2 years and I wouldn't say I'm stressed or anything. I'm not sure what it is - maybe cabin fever? Yesterday I nearly lost consciousness when I got up too quickly. I'm also losing weight (12kg so far, which would be great if I knew _why_ I'm losing weight). Did a blood test about a month ago - everything is fine. I did wonder if these are vaccine side effects, but that seems very implausible - the second dose was in May. But I digress.

I totally get what Jay is saying in his writeup. I largely felt the same way except in the opposite direction in one aspect - the number and shrillness of "activists" has become overbearing to the point where it was severely impeding work and morale. Seeing that he has pronouns in his twitter bio he might have been more sympathetic, but I bet this stuff distracted even him.

Contrary to belief popular on the outside, Google is indeed a fairly stressful and thankless place unless you're skilled at self promotion, which I'm not, or you don't care about working on cool things and getting promoted. This is why every time their recruiters ping me I tell them I'm not interested "at this time". No matter how much they pay me, I can't imagine subjecting myself to such treatment again. And I was pretty successful there - high profile projects, wrote lots of code, shipped impressive stuff, and I still felt like shit most of the time. I can only imagine what less "forceful" folks feel if I felt like a gnat on this elephant's ass.

Contrary to belief popular inside Google, life is great on the outside. Freedom is a thing folks, and without moving around you aren't experiencing it. I know when you're on the inside it feels like you're "changing the world", but of all Google products nowadays I only use Gmail and YouTube. If everything else disappeared completely I wouldn't even notice. Heck, if Gmail disappeared I'd switch to Proton Mail in a day, and if YouTube disappeared there's BitChute and Rumble which are modest, but adequate. So whatever you're "changing" there impacts me very little, and mostly in negative ways.

I certainly do not regret leaving. If anything I should have left much sooner than I did.

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