281–290 of 464 posts
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Any tech company would toss a limb for those "iterations". Aluminium unibody, stacked battery tech, MagSafe, ECG for watch, and much more.
Not sure I'd call taking existing technologies and putting them in laptops/watches innovation rather than iteration on existing stuff, but we're all different so it's all good.
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.
A few months ago, I considered applying to Google to join the JAX team. It turns out that you can't apply to Google's JAX team. You have to apply to Google, and then managers at various teams select whether they want you. The thing is, JAX is amazing. So I'm now faced with the uncomfortable idea that this process must make sense, because it clearly works. Yet I profoundly dislike it. Perhaps my ideas are the problem,…
This is what I do. Every single person on my team applied directly to my team.
I’ve been at Google for a little less than OP, and while I’m also considering leaving, my main reason is sort of the opposite: I’m bored. The whole team is bored. It feels like we’re doing nothing, and have been doing nothing for years. I work under 25 hours a week, and the vast majority of time is spent in useless meetings or reading useless docs. My actual work is maybe 5 hours a week. What are we even getting paid…
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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.
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It’s probably SFBA >Manhattan/some parts of Brooklyn > San Diego > NYC Metro.
It isn't. Bay Area and NYC Metro are both in the highest paying bracket.
For example, NYC Metro would have cheaper housing 60min from work than San Diego. I generally find land in coastal CA to be more expensive than everywhere else in the US.
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> 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.
That’s only true if you are currently under threat of not being at the head of the pack. Google still very clearly leading search, which is their main income provider.
A common sentiment on this forum is that companies who fail to keep challenging themselves and get complacent on rent seeking from one product/service will eventually lose to an upstart.
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I was there 2006-2009. Each year a new level of management appeared above me, and things got ever more "political" and perf centric. Just as people are different at age 10, 20 and 40, companies are different in different stages and sizes. Know what you want and look for it. I realized I want to be at small companies, and have not worked at a company larger than 25 people since.
I've found the sweet spot to be around 50-200. I've always worked at smaller companies, and the 10-person company I worked at was the only terrible experience of the bunch. It sounds weird to say, but... I'm really glad to have an HR department again. I'm sure it varies widely. I just feel like a tiny company leaves too much room for unhealthy and unprofessional dynamics, even though I'm sure it can be perfectly fine…
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10% of the company is at L6 or higher so it can't be that hard.
Most of those got promoted by going into management and lucking out that the product they worked on grew and therefore needed to hire a lot, and you easily get promoted as you start to manage more people. Getting promoted on technical merit on the other hand is really hard.