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

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

#251

Post by ramraj07 »

rkangel wrote: post #153
ramraj07 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to popular belief, kids are not some tamagotchi pet that needs constant attention and helicoptering after they're babies. You can perfectly be a good parent and raise independent well minded kids without needing two parents always present every moment of every weekend.

No, but until they're mid-teens, they do need one parent most of the time. If one of them is working weekends a lot, then that assumes the other one is available to parent.

Sounds exorbitant tbh. After they're seven or eight it's not clear why they need constant direct supervision (as opposed to being in another room minding ones business). What are we afraid of?

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

#252

Post by natchy »

madeofpalk wrote: post #74
itg wrote: post #24

Another "leader" who complains about employees wanting work life balance and they are extremely entitled. These are the type of managers you want to avoid. I'm sure many Googlers are happy you left.

"I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend." lmao what a terrible, horrible manager. I would hate working for them, and I would not miss them leaving. Maybe I'm just playing into their "young people don't want to work" stereotype, but if that's what working means, I don't want to do it with them.

No he’s right. This is vital for a growing company who is vacuuming up market share. It’s not necessary for big corps who just throw more people at a product or use their economies of scale to stay ahead.

The nasty truth is that every big Corp had a phase where it counted on key people being completely plugged in. If that was never you, then you either joined a company late or weren’t one of the key people.

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

#253

Post by serverholic »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #239
serverholic wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also part of the argument for basic income. Having a stable source of income allows people to take risks like starting their own business or joining a small startup.

Or just a more lax unemployment policy. I worry that if you give everyone $1000/month: 1) you cannot live on $1000/month so it is an empty gesture 2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even emptier gesture

1) So you're saying that giving people $1000/month would open up zero new possibilities for people?

2) It's not that simple because different goods will respond differently. Certain goods will get cheaper because the increased sales will allow for more economies of scale.

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

#254

Post by CydeWeys »

itg wrote: post #24

Another "leader" who complains about employees wanting work life balance and they are extremely entitled. These are the type of managers you want to avoid. I'm sure many Googlers are happy you left.

That was my take-away as well. This might be the guy you want to do business with if you're an investor, but that ain't me; I'm just an employee. This is NOT the kind of guy you wanna be doing business with if you're his employee. And it's not just his complaints about employees' supposed entitlement; he's also complaining that a lot of them were making too much money (in his view)! Opt me the fuck out of that!

Also he spends a lot of time defending his "short fuse" and his saying of offensive things; in my experience, when someone's own side of the story is that bad, it's actually much worse even from the other side (i.e. the side anyone not him would be experiencing). You don't want to work for rude assholes. I don't know him well enough to know if he's actually one, but that's how he's coming off in this blog post anyway. Red flags for days.

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

#255

Post by JKCalhoun »

xyzelement wrote: post #192
duxup wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a weird dynamic. I remember visiting the valley for the first time for a big company I worked for at another location. The scale of work life balance was unbalanced so many strange ways... The tech support team I worked with was in 'building 3'. Nobody ever left that building through out the day. I went to the big cafeteria and the options were amazing. I managed to get some of my peers to go with me, sever…

A few reactions to that. First, there's always a self selecting thing there. For some reason folks from building 3 never bothered to go explore, and it sounds like they didn't keep going to the caf even once you showed them. Nothing was holding them at their desk, they just didn't care/bother. Second, some jobs are different than others. Some jobs you have to "be there" for. Tech support may be like that - you have t…

A strange work ethic I must have been born with (weird, I know) kept me mashing keys the full 8 hours while some of my co-workers might see fit to stay home one day because a package was due to arrive.

Or maybe I have always felt like I'm an imposter: if the ax fell on the team I didn't want to be the low hanging fruit they culled. Who knows.

But I confess to having had a difficult time across my career accepting the perks, relaxing. It's been a slow awareness that this industry really truly is on fire, they really make boatloads of cash, they really need me more than they compensate me for.

What a strange time to live in for a blue-collar programmer like me.

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

#257

Post by leroman »

toyg wrote: post #189
leroman wrote: post #32

Known Waze practically since inception (I'm from Israel) always carry a grudge for mis-advertise themselves as "open data" and eventually go on to privatize the platform (which was originally built on OSS) and hijack and delete OSM Israel data.

> hijack and delete OSM Israel data What? How did they do that? I'm not an OpenStreetMap but I thought that sort of "privatization / removal of crowdsourced data" could not be done if not globally...

This was a long time ago, maybe my wording is off, probably along the lines of stopped contributing data to OSM and changed it's license for the data after a certain point..

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

#258

Post by fileyfood500 »

Aromasin wrote: post #229
duxup wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a weird dynamic. I remember visiting the valley for the first time for a big company I worked for at another location. The scale of work life balance was unbalanced so many strange ways... The tech support team I worked with was in 'building 3'. Nobody ever left that building through out the day. I went to the big cafeteria and the options were amazing. I managed to get some of my peers to go with me, sever…

I noticed this when I worked at my first "employee satisfaction" focused company. Half the employees took every perk they could get, seemingly doing as little work as they could under the mantra of "work-life balance". The other half never left their desks. It created a strange dynamic of resentment between the two parties, where one thought the other stupid, and the other thought them lazy. It was hard to know where…

I agree, I think this situation fits in nicely with the discussion of how stock compensation doesn’t directly result from the results of your work. Employees who aren’t passionate about or motivated by their jobs seek out compensation in return for retention. And even then, they scale their efforts at work based on their interest. I like the independence of Amazon teams, but the independence is limited when the teams don’t control their own finances.

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

#259

Post by Cthulhu_ »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #239
serverholic wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also part of the argument for basic income. Having a stable source of income allows people to take risks like starting their own business or joining a small startup.

Or just a more lax unemployment policy. I worry that if you give everyone $1000/month: 1) you cannot live on $1000/month so it is an empty gesture 2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even emptier gesture

It makes more sense in a country that already has a social safety net; I've read somewhere (citation needed, I know, I'm not very deep in the subject) that the cost and overhead of assessing and paying the individual cases of unemployment, long term sickness, disability, homelessness etc is more expensive than just giving everyone a basic income.

But yeah, #2 is what I'm afraid of too. Paraphrasing a cartoon villain, if everyone is wealthy, nobody is.

Besides, in the past decade, cost of living / housing / rent has gone up so much that even a $1000 / month basic income can't give you anywhere decent to live anywhere. In addition to basic income, we need basic housing - which is dangerous, because it invokes the USSR's rows of depressing and substandard apartment buildings. But everybody should be able to live comfortably at a standard of living. Everybody should be able to have access to and afford a two bedroom house or apartment on a single income, or the social safety net if they are not employed.

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

#260

Post by yardie »

andrew_ wrote: post #225

It's astounding in so far as how unique this conversation is to tech. I've worked as a pipefitter, electrician's apprentice, and general construction hand in the past - I could only imagine how it would go telling my former foreman that I'd like to head off to yoga in the morning for an hour. Big jobs that require overtime to complete get folks to work that overtime - even within a union. If it's not you, it's someon…

I've worked in union shops as well while not being in the union. Union overtime is highly coveted because it's a 2x-3x bonus that a lot of my union friends used towards a downpayment, kids' college tuition, retiring earlier, or starting a business. No one had to step up because everyone was stepping up. And the shop chief usually decided who got that overtime (i.e. young worker trying to buy a house might get higher priority over a senior.)

Also, shops had extremely good work life balance. You were at the timeclock 4:59 on the dot. No one is asking you to stay late, or be on call uncompensated. Your time was your time from 5pm-8am. By their virtue of being always online, tech companies intrude into that worklife balance and it's not unreasonable to ask for some of it back.

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