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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

#251

Post by VirusNewbie »

YZF wrote: post #51
VirusNewbie wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s just another large US tech company. Like Microsoft and IBM before it. This is just a hyperbolic statement that should not be taken seriously at all. Look, Google isn't some fantasy land that some people might have lauded it as once upon a time, and it isn't unique in terms of pay or talent, but it is certainly at the top echelon. I did an interview loop for high level IC at both Azure and GCP simultaneously an…

Microsoft and IBM used to have a similar extremely talented teams. IBM ran research centers full of the world's top Ph.D. The innovation that happened at those places easily rivals Google's. It's a similar trajectory is what people are saying. When Google was small and everyone wanted to work there they could take their pick of the top talent. When you run a huge company you inevitably end up with something around th…

>all those huge companies that pay similar wages and do similar work basically end up having similar talent

But IBM and Microsoft don't pay the same as the largest top tech companies.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#252

Post by pas »

tombert wrote: post #235
pas wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not going to pretend that I really understand the psychology of a person that thinks that 4+ hours of meetings a day is a good idea. It started when my team opened up Singapore office. That's fine, but they are 12 hours ahead of New York, and the genius middle managers on my team thought it was very important that we synchronize on a lot of these meetings, and the only times that kind-of-sort-of-not-really "worke…

wow, thanks for the details!

It seems initial impressions in these huge corps are almost everything. If things are great people are willing to put in the hours, money is great after all, so one's trajectory quickly curves upward, promotions, yeey! But if it's bad, it's hard to go anywhere, even laterally, because of the baggage, so there's only down from there :(

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#253

Post by mike_hearn »

danpalmer wrote: post #237
mike_hearn wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left over ten years ago and it's hard to understand that perspective. Back when I was an SRE (~2006 to 2009) there were only one or two monitoring systems (which didn't overlap, so you could argue there was one) and a handful of config languages. Compared to anywhere else Google had military levels of discipline and order. > Deployments were infrequent, unreliable, and sometimes even done from a dev's machine. Depl…

I think the state of the art has moved on quite a way from this. I understand the point of view that someone should be watching a release, but the alternative is not "no one watching a release", but more that binary releases should be no-ops. With feature flagging the binary release should do nothing different so that no one watching it is not a problem. Additionally, rolling out from a dev machine brings so many ris…

Well, to be clear "rollout from a dev machine" meant just that the rollout controller ran locally, the actual software being released was built by a release pipeline, placed into signed packages and so on. So it was all auditable. The people doing the rollouts were those who had production administrator access anyway for on-call troubleshooting and debugging and permissions were enforced, so there was no security impact. And the same process was used for flag flips so just putting everything behind flags didn't make much difference.

It doesn't sound like what's done now is a whole lot different tbh.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#254

Post by munksbeer »

aoeusnth1 wrote: post #81
miki123211 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowadays we've got Boq/Pod, the P2020 suite, Rollouts, the automated job sizing technologies, even BCID Could you elaborate on what these are for a non-googler? Ironically enough, Google isn't very helpful.

Boq/Pod: canonical service frameworks and configuration automation all-in-one system. Boq and Pod give you blueprints for server configs, deployment, server discovery, environments + release pipelines, monitoring, alerting, canary analysis, functional testing, integration testing, unit testing and presubmit, server throttling, etc etc all for free with automated setup. P2020 + Rollouts: This is for intent-driven depl…

> Boq/Pod: canonical service frameworks and configuration automation all-in-one system. Boq and Pod give you blueprints for server configs, deployment, server discovery, environments + release pipelines, monitoring, alerting, canary analysis, functional testing, integration testing, unit testing and presubmit, server throttling, etc etc all for free with automated setup.

That sounds amazing.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#255

Post by nostrademons »

mji wrote: post #231
nostrademons wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like others mentioned, Amazon levels are one level below Google levels, and I think their higher ranks are also compressed. Also IMHO Google IC SWE levels of 2024 are about 1.5 levels below Google IC SWE levels of 2009 (i.e. a mid-L6 today is about as good as someone just promoted to L5 in 2010, an L8 promotee today is about a mid-L6 from 2010, a new L4 today is the equivalent of an intern back then). So with that ma…

> i.e. a mid-L6 today is about as good as someone just promoted to L5 in 2010, an L8 promotee today is about a mid-L6 from 2010, a new L4 today is the equivalent of an intern back then This seems extremely surprising. I can believe that the 2010-engineers were more technically capable, but there was also a lot less non-technical complexity involved in getting things done in 2010 than there is today.

I'm referring solely to technical skills. I think it is actually harder to be an L6 today because of the sheer number of (both political and technical) constraints you face, but L6s and even L5s in 2010 would do large-scale system design of a sort that basically doesn't exist anywhere within the company today.
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