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Leaving Google
31–40 of 464 posts
Re: Leaving Google
#32> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence. This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.
The idea that products at large tech companies are going to be lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people or understand the cross functional relationships and strategies is absurd. This isn't a future engineers want either -- I hear complaints about meetings from nearly every engineer I know. The idea that you should have low level knowledge of the system you're working on and high level knowledge of al…
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Re: Leaving Google
#33Google has 140,000 employees, the size of a size-able city in the U.S. Does anyone really care when someone leaves Google?
Re: Leaving Google
#34Why 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…
10% of the company is at L6 or higher so it can't be that hard.
Re: Leaving Google
#35i miss google+, the world's preeminent social network for google employees to announce to the world their intentions to leave google.
Re: Leaving Google
#36A 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,…
I don't think it's true that "you can't apply directly to a team". I've seen many people got interviewed/hired for exactly one position. The manager of the team will need to be in the loop though. If they don't know you and don't agree with you applying directly, then it's most likely you're going to the normal pipeline.
Ah, interesting. Thank you. My info about the hiring process came from a friend at Google. But in hindsight, they were probably relaying what their own path had been like, rather than making a statement about the process in general.
Re: Leaving Google
#37> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence. This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.
Well there's no grand strategy and it's too big and settled for engineering to have much impact. It's inertia-led. I bet most googlers hate ads so it's a big state of cognitive dissonance too.
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Re: Leaving Google
#38> Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports
It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would let it get that bad. 10 reports is “you put this off a bit too long” territory, 25 is in the “someone up the chain should be fired” territory.
Re: Leaving Google
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
seems like this is most relevant video: https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4
Thanks for sharing that - I had never seen that before and it rings incredibly true
Check out "Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview" which is long form footage from the clips used in "Triumph of the Nerds" and "Revenge of the Nerds". Two fantastic documentaries that chronicle the history of personal computing.
Re: Leaving Google
#40That resonated a lot more than I expected it to do. Not the Google parts but the burnout parts. I exited my job during summer and am still not looking for something new and this article and the one by Maya linked in it really helped me put words on it