Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

This irks of an entitled Googler.

I reported up to Noam and he's an admirable leader to me. In fact, I will be excited to learn about and join his next project if it has a culture distinct from this Google "work life balance" and the false pretense that "work life balance" == happiness.

I was the lowest of low level bricklayers, on the opposite end of the pecking order, but his comments on The Corporation and its entitled / PC constituent members resonated with me. If it didn't resonate with you, that's why you'd probably stick around at Google for a long time. Sure, many Googlers may be happy he left, but that doesn't disprove his points. If anything, it kind of supports Noam's argument.

In case someone says "if you don't like it, then leave". I just did.

Google is barely the most innovative place for an engineer to work nowadays, nor is compensation "top of market". The rest of the tech world has caught up. Actual top of market pay would at least made me ignorant, for a little bit longer, to the fact that work was unfulfilling. Yeah, we had great work life balance, so what? I'm still expected to be there 9-5, and spending 1/3rd of your life expanding work to fill the time allocated to it doesn't equate happiness. In fact, for me it was outright depression. I'm in a more intense work environment now, pays a fraction of Google, but I am happier on so many fronts. There's much less "abstraction" and needless complexity. Some of us would rather have real work to do than coast or work on projects/problems that simpler do not need to exist.

The state of limbo induced by "work life balance" isn't the fault of Noam, because as I interpretted in his blog, the Googleplex Twilight Zone inhibits fully realizing the culture in the executive team's vision. Maybe the vision is a trainwreck or maybe it's brilliant, but I don't believe the "autonomy" afforded by Google allows realizing these extremes. There's so many layers/indirection between me, the bricklayer, and the person at the helm. Combine that with the misaligned incentives in a corporation where resume projects are being advanced, I wasn't even building the great pyramid of Giza as much as I was building some offshoot resort home for one of the scribes that reported up to the priest who reported up to the pharoah.

It definitely does not! And clearly we are different people! I would love nothing more than to grab a drink with you sometime and learn from each other though!

I worked for 2 hours this past weekend because doing so would save about a weeks worth of work due to various reasons.

I will also leave work early to pick up a few things on my daughter's birthday later this month.

I think this is reasonable. I don't know if it's the sort of thing the author is talking about, but I think my work/life balance is fine.

I've worked as a freelancer, founder, and employee (for start-ups, scale-ups and now FAANG).

The one constant has been my daily exercise session, whether that has been a workout, yoga session or swim. My daily schedule (pre-Covid) usually involves 45 mins at home checking email/chat and addressing anything urgent and modifying my to-do list for the day. Then it's to the gym for 90 minutes, and in the office by 10:30am. It's what I need to do and it keeps me sane.

Building a startup in my early 20's was easily the most stressful period of my life. Going for a swim each day was probably the single most important thing that got me through it in one piece.

I have a lot of respect for what the author has accomplished; building one of the top tech products and brands in America is ridiculously hard. However, this article shows a lack of empathy for how people work and what they need.

I doubt it, since I believe recognition and impact on outcomes are highly relevant to someone feeling motivated to go above and beyond in a corporation. When a team scales, the hierarchy becomes dithered and camaraderie decreases overall, resulting in the "mission" meaning different things to different people. This ultimately results in an 80% of people who do as much work as they need to so they don't get fired, a 10% on one end that does a crapton of work, and 10% who work as little as possible. Even the former 10% can only work so hard before their performance is perceived as a threat to the rest of the team whom simply can't keep up their pace.