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Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

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Re: Leaving Google

#291

Post by Aeolun »

jollybean wrote: post #254
burnished wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think she got fired for those reasons? Citing her as sounding self righteous or unprofessional seems weak.

She was not fired, she quit. She was publishing studies critical of Google, Google wanted at least the right to have studies of the company reviewed and to include more updated information etc. which is extremely gracious on the part of Google. She gave the company an ultimatum i.e. 'Change the Terms or I Quit' so they said 'We're not changing the terms, we accept your resignation'. It's galling how many people (and…

That’s true for academics getting grants (being able to publicly critizise the one that gave them). Why would it not be true for academics being directly bankrolled by a company?

Re: Leaving Google

#292

Post by lotsofpulp »

lifeformed wrote: post #276
lotsofpulp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

This does not seem too dissimilar to a country or tribe’s leader promising their constituents a better life in the future. And I cannot imagine a country/tribe selecting a leader that does not promise progress and growth over one that does.

Re: Leaving Google

#293

Post by Aeolun »

freyir wrote: post #136
joshuamorton wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're factually wrong. I was literally able to view her paper, and it's approved status, in the internal tool where papers are approved for publication.

This directly contradicts what Jeff Dean wrote: “A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication” (emphasis mine).

Because he wrote it it’s the truth? How are we supposed to take that any more seriously than her own claims?

Re: Leaving Google

#294

Post by lotsofpulp »

tsimionescu wrote: post #149
icelancer wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just engineers this applies to. Sure, if everyone makes $400k + benefits and profit share with good work-life balance and such, I guess that might fly. But most companies have customer support, IT, and other cost centers where you have entry-level employees who need to progress, and that necessarily means increasing wages over time to retain and advance good employees. Besides, junior developers / interns ar…

If your workforce is improving, you might have a kind of natural growth where they either deliver better products or more efficient services and you can acquire more customers (or charge more) without expanding your operations. Besides, if you are paying a good wage, have a good work/life balance, a good environment and so on, people will be content and just work there. It's like farming or factory work - you're doin…

> Besides, if you are paying a good wage, have a good work/life balance, a good environment and so on, people will be content and just work there.

How does this work when your competitor is offering half of compensation via RSUs skyrocketing in value?

>It's like farming or factory work - you're doing what you expect to be doing for the rest of your life, or at least the next 10-20 years.

This describes no one I know that earns a lot of income. I imagine a person that expects little change over 10 to 20 years will probably not be in position to grab opportunities when they present themselves.

Re: Leaving Google

#295

Post by UncleMeat »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #287
UncleMeat wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't. Bay Area and NYC Metro are both in the highest paying bracket.

Proportionally, a greater area of San Diego can still be more expensive than a similarly proportional area of NYC Metro. 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.

It is also quite expensive in Hawaii, yet Google pays less well there. Similarly, it is quite expensive in London, yet Google pays less well there too. This is based on Google's model of paying by local market rather than CoL.

There are a few regions where this ends up being quite frustrating. No doubt it is difficult to look at a nontrivial pay cut if your housing costs aren't much lower. It has even been frustrating for me to look at my pay cut despite moving to a much cheaper region.

But the pay cuts are weird. Salaries are adjusted down, but since so much of pay is in RSUs, the effect is limited. My 15% pay cut is actually more like 6% after considering RSUs. A 10% pay cut will be even smaller. That will ratchet down over time as refreshes are scaled, but it is just hard to see that as an urgent reason to look for alternatives.

Re: Leaving Google

#296

Post by emsy »

capableweb wrote: post #207
lotsofpulp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing. Most businesses in the world survive with their piece of the pie and remaining having the same profits or slightly lower/higher than previous years. You don't disappear over night, and no market is really a "winner takes it all", it's just what management wants you to believe so you fi…

According to Peter Thiel, Google is a de-facto monopoly in search-engines and online advertising (apart from social media). I think that's an accurate take. They are in this position because of their "winner takes it all" attitude. So to say they would "easily survive" is short sighted as well as ignoring where Google came from.

Re: Leaving Google

#297

Post by Zababa »

titzer wrote: post #53
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…

> I'll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it's hard to get promoted to L6 for anything. It's hard if you're on the wrong project (read: low impact and/or low visibility). There are different routes to L6 at Google, but by far the most successful was to become TLM or just M of a medium impact project. It's hard to make the case as an IC for L6, but colleagues did it multiple times. Large enough, long-running projec…

I know that IC is Individual Contributor, but what are TL, M, and TLM?

Re: Leaving Google

#298

Post by pridkett »

Aeolun wrote: post #291
jollybean wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was not fired, she quit. She was publishing studies critical of Google, Google wanted at least the right to have studies of the company reviewed and to include more updated information etc. which is extremely gracious on the part of Google. She gave the company an ultimatum i.e. 'Change the Terms or I Quit' so they said 'We're not changing the terms, we accept your resignation'. It's galling how many people (and…

That’s true for academics getting grants (being able to publicly critizise the one that gave them). Why would it not be true for academics being directly bankrolled by a company?

No - the foundation of your question is a bit misaligned. The major difference is that as much as corporate research likes to pretend they’re academics, they’re not. In corporate research you’re not after some unalienable absolute truth that benefits society - you’re doing research that can benefit the company that is paying your salary. Sometimes those two align and that’s great. But anyone that thinks that an experienced researcher at a corporation will have the seem freedom as a tenured professor is missing something.

In exchange for this tradeoff you get a lot better salary and don’t have to feel like all of your time is spent chasing grants.

Re: Leaving Google

#299

Post by titzer »

Zababa wrote: post #297
titzer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it's hard to get promoted to L6 for anything. It's hard if you're on the wrong project (read: low impact and/or low visibility). There are different routes to L6 at Google, but by far the most successful was to become TLM or just M of a medium impact project. It's hard to make the case as an IC for L6, but colleagues did it multiple times. Large enough, long-running projec…

I know that IC is Individual Contributor, but what are TL, M, and TLM?

Techlead, manager, and techlead-manager.

Re: Leaving Google

#300

Post by thethethethe »

ir193 wrote: post #214

> Google doesn't use the go command or modules, and since there's no direct measurable benefit to Google, it's very difficult to make the case. i'm curious. What exactly they don't use internally?

I'm guessing they are referring to how Google uses Blaze (internal version of Bazel) to build Go binaries, not the 'go' command and it's modules.

The first time I went to work on a personal project using Go after I joined Google, tried using Bazel because I was so used to Blaze and I liked it a lot. I was very disappointed to find that the integration between Bazel and Go was severely lacking and required me to use third party extensions to get things working as expected, which was quite disappointing. That was a few years ago so things might better now

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