Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 464 posts

Re: Leaving Google

#271

Post by DannyBee »

Jensson wrote: post #126
DannyBee wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 didn't say you get promoted for growing a team, I said you easily get promoted when you manage a lot of people.

This is also, in my experience, wrong.

But you also started with "lucking out that the product grew" as your view for how that happens too.

Re: Leaving Google

#272

Post by lotsofpulp »

kgwgk wrote: post #210
ergocoder wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To many people the high pay makes it more surprising, not less.

Many people have the causation backwards. The high pay is because the engineers are able to leave the job.

Re: Leaving Google

#273

Post by saagarjha »

jw_mc wrote: post #262
gregorygoc wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not only baseless but also flies in the face of reality, as other tech companies, including other FAANGs, barely offer any stock and still manage to attract top talent. Which one?

Netflix is known for having all-cash offers.

Netflix is pretty much the only FAANG that does that. Every other large tech company has generous stock grants, and as you pass a couple years of experience your stock will generally be larger than your cash compensation.

Re: Leaving Google

#274

Post by WoahNoun »

capableweb wrote: post #238
simonh wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The others are surviving because they are growing too. If they stall out and stop growing, they will become a smaller and smaller slice of the pie as the rest of it grows around them. They would become less and less relevant, and therefore find it harder to get new business. In a high growth business there is no stable static strategy. Staying the same is functionally equivalent to shrinking, in terms of scale effect…

Do you have sort of research/statistics that backs up your statements or are you just echoing what you've heard others say about these "high growth businesses"?

It's basic math. If you are 20% of the industry right now and stay the same size while the industry grows 10x, you become 2% of the industry and a essentially a non-factor. You've yahoo'd yourself.

Re: Leaving Google

#275

Post by lotsofpulp »

ido wrote: post #221
kerng wrote: post #220

Interesting that the person moved to San Diego (not a cheap place by any means), and Google cuts the salary. There is some strange fixation Google currently has, especially towards getting people into their New York offices - must be some tax incentives or other deals with the city.... A friend just recently wanted to work from google office in another tech hub city (not remote/from home by any means) and during offe…

Surely NYC/SFBA are even more expensive?

It’s probably SFBA >Manhattan/some parts of Brooklyn > San Diego > NYC Metro.

Re: Leaving Google

#276

Post by lifeformed »

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.

Call it greed if you want, but this is just the emergent result of the economic system we have in our society. Corporations are optimization algorithms to maximize revenue. Not because they have to, but because its comprised of rational individuals who are incentivized to maximize their own revenue. The natural result is an ever-growing entity, adaptive to dangers and emergently intelligent. It's possible to run a corporation differently but it actively takes energy to resist the natural gravity of every individual's interests.

Re: Leaving Google

#277

Post by DannyBee »

akomtu wrote: post #198
DannyBee wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google doesn't matches levels based on title when hiring.

The main cases of "title inflation" of this kind are related to M&A rather than hiring. That's obviously much rarer.

In hiring, the only thing the title/size of org buys you is an initial guess at level.

(IE i get asked to interview the person for a potential director position).

Re: Leaving Google

#278

Post by lotsofpulp »

DannyBee wrote: post #109
cletus wrote: post #19

Why did he leave? The tl'dr is the L6 glass ceiling and the remote pay cut. I can speak to both of those: First, for those that don't know, new grads get hired at L3, PhDs at L4 (which IMHO is actually a mistake but that's another issue) and there is an expectation of getting promoted to L5 (Senior Software Engineer). There's no set time frame for this. I've known people who stayed L4 for many years and were quite ha…

"The argument for a pay cut" ... Another argument is that if tech paid everyone the same, everywhere, it would greatly exacerbate income equality issues in a lot of places. Tech is certainly not altruistic, as you point out, and generally wants to pay market rate rather than output rate or whatever. But it doesn't make less true that it would worsen a whole bunch of social problems by paying people the same everywher…

That is a ludicrous argument. The whole income/wealth inequality is not about working people earning more, it is about capital owners earning vastly more due to various reasons.

Some businesses do earn more due to ease of access to additional capital, and hence can pay employees more, but the root of the income/wealth divide is certainly not employers paying employees more. It is certain employers (capital owners) getting disproportionately more in the first place.

Tech employees are simply in sufficiently high demand relative to supply that they can demand a piece of the pie. But there is no point in trying to address a problem by addressing its symptoms rather than causes.

Specifically, in this case, paying Alphabet employees less in the name of helping the income/wealth divide only helps other owners of Alphabet stock be even richer.

Re: Leaving Google

#279

Post by UncleMeat »

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?

It makes for flawless blogspam. There are enough people leaving Google that some of them will publish criticisms that align with the community's preconceived notions and will let them all feel superior to Googlers. Further, because Google is so big there will almost necessarily be pockets that really are truly bad to work in. Readers can therefore extrapolate and assume the entire company functions this way.

Re: Leaving Google

#280

Post by superdude12 »

hadlock wrote: post #240
mehrdada wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral. I am not sure if that is called survival. And no, most businesses in the world do not survive that long. Lifetime of businesses are often much shorter than lifetime of humans. Even many of them that look like have survived may share the name only and are e…

If the stock price went down, they would just pay employees in cash, which is a slightly less tax-advantaged solution.

How are RSUs tax advantaged?
Post reply on HN