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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
221–230 of 255 posts
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
In big tech? One can pocket an avg 100k/year. Less in first few years, more later on. That isn't "quit immediately and coast" money, but several times a juicy down payment in the bank and a guaranteed MINIMUM 200k USD/year for the rest of your life IS set for life IMO.
It is not several times a juicy down payment if you live where near any big campus. And a lifetime salary above 200k in tech is not a thing. Tech is riskier the older you get unfortunately.
Uh, it very much is? Sure, there is age discrimination, but there are plenty of people in their 50s and 60s making well north of that.
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#223If you don't enjoy waking up at 4am, work on mobile. Once a new app release is on the phone, nothing is going to make it suddenly break and there is no hurry to send the new release to all users advance, go through internal employee testing and then roll out slowly so that any breakage doesn't affect a lot of users.
OS updates and server outages :)
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I worked at Google I immediately sold my stock and diversified. In hindsight that "cost" me at least $2MM. At a subsequent employer I held the stock, determined not to make the same mistake again. That "cost" me nearly $100k before I realized that the new employer's stock was not going to do what GOOG did. Anyway, congratulations to those Googlers who "picked" GOOG by not selling their GSUs and who made out like…
> You certainly got lucky I'm pretty sure the luck of being born with sufficient intelligence to work at Google is orders of magnitude greater than the luck of making big ROI on Google stock. > because you followed sound financial advice Most financial advice is there to help the clueless masses to not lose their savings to get-rich-quick schemes and then default on their debt during their next unemployment period. A…
Being halfway decent with computers doesn’t mean you know what to do with money.
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#225Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#226I'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…
where? also Google? can you elaborate on what makes it a "smooth sailing" compared to what you have seen/heard? thanks!
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Changed how?
everything else also now needs to make money.. since it's impossible to directly make really any meaningful revenue compared to ads (and maaaybe cloud) the only thing remaining is to integrate ads, upsell cloud, downside, etc.
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#228Earlier 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…
There are so many middle managers at Apple that feel the need to justify their existence within the company, and as such they schedule endless meetings and/or send "urgent" emails that they expect you to respond to immediately. It got to a point of being almost farcical, where they were scheduling meetings at 9:30pm multiple times a week. After two years of it I had to leave, I was coming home catatonic and depressed…
can you please explain how these meetings got so out of hand? did you attend them? did you decline eventually? why, why not? how does it work? who was your actual boss? is there some kind of resource management? (ie. where your time is allocated?)
thanks in advance!
(I never worked at any FAANG thing, and I never worked for a US company, so this is extremely... interesting and strange.... because I am no stranger to long nights, had the occasional death march, some kind of startup momentum and expectations here or there, small teams and overtime, deadlines, but .. also headcount was less than 20 for us)
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#229> USA centric culture, if you are not in USA at Google and don’t have a big presence in a location it’s a bit like swimming upstream, it’s easy to feel isolated, sidelined or on the flipside overwhelmed with late meetings It's like the fourth time I read/hear this. I understand that it's a tricky one to adress.
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.
On the other hand, it's great to work for a US company with the worker protection rights of a different country.
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t this the whole point of working; particularly at a FAANG? > It’s a shallow post-mortem I respectfully disagree. It’s an 8 minute read. Sure, it’s mostly in dot-point form, but personally I’d rather that than some massive 80,000 word blog post that I’m going to drop 1/8 of the way through. Since when does a personal blog post need to be a well constructed and lengthy document?
I think it's shallow and not because it's short. To me, it just sounds very typical: "I joined Google back when it was fun. Now it's more bureaucratic and less fun. But I made a ton of money on the stock." I think there have been countless blog posts from Ex-Googlers like this. It's fairly shallow. And it is worth noting that a lot of the bullet point lists do start with "I made a ton of money" in as many words, whic…
Level 1: a ton of money.
Level 2: L1 + interesting work
Level 3: L2 + intelligent co-workers
Level 4: L3 + deep skills
Level 5: L4 + mentor
Level 6: L5 + awesome network
Level 7: L6 + personal growth
Level 8: L7 + meaningful contribution
Level 9: L8 + work-life balance
Level 10: L9 + recognized SME
Timing and circumstances influence what you get....not always the same for equally talented ppl.
Making a "ton of money"....it matters because new people want to know what price is paid for exceptional comp.