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Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

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Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#311

Post by enraged_camel »

asidiali wrote: post #299
enraged_camel wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> We have it AMAZINGLY WELL being in tech, and we have luxuries that are unique to tech and bewildering to folks in other fields. Yep, even other highly paid fields! Can you imagine a surgeon scheduling their surgeries around yoga classes?

I have news for you buddy... That’s exactly what they do.

Nah. My parents are doctors and I know quite a few surgeons. They might schedule their work around kids and family and whatnot, but none of them will opt to go to yoga or whatever when there is a pending surgery.

I know of only one guy who is a plastic surgeon and he is like that, but he’s also one of the best in his field and a bit of a prima donna...

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#312

Post by serverholic »

slibhb wrote: post #280
serverholic wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If google provides food for employees then that's essentially indirect compensation. Employees can now use the money they would have spent on food to buy other things. So now that they're remote and have to buy their own food they have effectively received a pay decrease. How is it entitled to complain about a decrease in compensation for the same work?

I find this legalistic perspective horrifying. It's as if you think every aspect of the relationship between you and your employer has to be written down as part of a contract and endlessly scrutinized. For me, and I expect for most humans, the ideal employer-employee relationship is much more tacit. It's like being part of a sports team. There are bounds of duty and privilege that are mutual, acceptable to all parti…

You just pulled that argument out of your ass. I wasn't implying that everything needs to be written down in a legal document.

Also I can't help but feel that your perspective is coming from a place of privilege. If I had to guess I'd say you either A) Haven't been screwed by an employer before or B) Are the employer.

I guarantee that if your employer fucked you over you'd be paying a lot more attention in the future.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#313

Post by watwut »

kleiba wrote: post #126
Kototama wrote: post #96

"As I had kids, I learned the importance of being at home for them and that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a balance, sometimes you need to work weekends and nights, sometimes you can head out early or work from home - we balance the needs of the employee and the company." sometimes you need to work weekends and nights while your wife take care of the kids alone so that your career progress and her's not.…

Baloney. Who's to say that the wife isn't doing the same to further her own career on other nights and weekends?

Because then he would have to say no to overtime or weekend work once in a while.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#314

Post by scrose »

wombat-man wrote: post #246
scrose wrote: post #196

If you’re a new engineer reading this article: Startups are talked about as if work-life balance doesn’t or shouldn’t exist. It only doesn’t exist if you (1) choose for that to be the case or (2) Have a manager like this who holds things like firing you if ‘someone better comes along’ over your head. There are plenty of startups where you can put in your ~8 hours and call it a day 99% of the time and the business wil…

Yeah, a lot of startups are under resourced in terms of people though. Maybe nobody is threatening you, but as you settle into the role you kind of realize that working a bit more could actually be the difference success and failure. I do agree that it's better if you're making that call on your own. If management is trying to squeeze you like this by threatening to fire you, it's usually an empty/foolish threat. Hir…

> Yeah, a lot of startups are under resourced in terms of people though. Maybe nobody is threatening you, but as you settle into the role you kind of realize that working a bit more could actually be the difference success and failure.

This is completely my opinion and shaped from my own experience. But if you're working at an understaffed startup, the bottleneck for 'success' is usually not the engineering team, and also almost definitely not correlated with butt-in-seat time and amount of code contributed. Not saying that's what you were implying, but just want to clarify that's the direction I'm coming from.

It's up to the business's leaders to determine what should be prioritized with the resources they have and take risks on building out those ideas accordingly. If you, as an engineer, begin working nights and weekends to have the company 'succeed', you're now communicating to management there's all this untapped engineering capacity. You give the illusion that more can consistently be done than is actually sustainable and no one wins when the engineering team burns out 6-12 months later. Well, maybe the company does somewhat when you leave and forfeit all your stock options back to the pool...

In my opinion, the biggest impact you can make as an engineer at any level is by stepping away at the end of the day, doing your own thing, and every now and then just think holistically about what you're doing at work and the direction the product you're working on is going in. Your butt-in-seat time will become far more productive as a result.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#316

Post by asidiali »

enraged_camel wrote: post #311
asidiali wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have news for you buddy... That’s exactly what they do.

Nah. My parents are doctors and I know quite a few surgeons. They might schedule their work around kids and family and whatnot, but none of them will opt to go to yoga or whatever when there is a pending surgery. I know of only one guy who is a plastic surgeon and he is like that, but he’s also one of the best in his field and a bit of a prima donna...

Ok, I hear you. However, I cofounded a medical startup with 3 surgeons, seeing their day to day routine pretty closely, at their offices, at home, etc...

And they definitely worked around their own schedule. They either owned their own practice, or worked at a larger one, and controlled their own scheduling via their team. Surgeries are scheduled weeks or months in advanced. Only when an emergency came in they needed to shuffle things around - basically the same thing with engineers and planned deployments vs random outages.

> none of them will go to yoga with a pending surgery

Ok, yeah, of course they are not going to just up and leave when there is an appointment or deadline. That has nothing to do with whether or not they chose the time of that appointment in the first place.

> They might schedule their work around kids and family and whatnot

s/kids/exercise/g

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#317

Post by jolux »

Does anyone else take it as a red flag that somebody had lots of HR complaints and is unwilling to say what, exactly, prompted them? The implication is that they weren't warranted but without knowing what he said it's kind of hard to say. If he was dropping N-bombs left and right, I would find it hard to be sympathetic.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#318

Post by nx7487 »

People offended here are exactly the bubble of entitled morons in Silicon Valley that this guy is talking about. I totally agree with everything he said, companies where you have to work long hours and don't receive lots of weird benefits like yoga and sushi are the places I want to work. I would much prefer to have my compensation include more equity in the company, and for my performance to actually be related to the value provided to customers and the fundamental value of the company.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#319

Post by richardwhiuk »

BugWatch wrote: post #176
pacificat0r wrote: post #36

It was so hard for him to act like an adult and be considerate about the way he speaks. Such a tragedy requiring immense sacrifice from this poor soul.

Maybe others could consider growing "thicker skins", not applying their personal standard to everyone equally, and not getting offended at every single (and/or little) opportunity. Exposure therapy is a wonderful thing.

If every presentation insulted you, or implied you didn't get exist, maybe you'd get pissed off at it as well.

Re: Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?

#320

Post by serverholic »

freeone3000 wrote: post #293
serverholic wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) So you're saying that giving people $1000/month would open up zero new possibilities for people? 2) It's not that simple because different goods will respond differently. Certain goods will get cheaper because the increased sales will allow for more economies of scale.

Housing is the big one mentioned, and it does not allow for any further economies of scale than already exist. Rent rises based on the prevailing salary of the area -- house prices as well, since they represent the years of rental income. It's not even necessarily a supply issue, since Seattle has more empty houses than it has homeless people! Prices simply rise to whatever the market can bear. So under the current s…

The implication in his argument was that prices will increase in general.

My argument is that we don't know what the overall effect will be.

Edit: In other words, if housing increases by $10 but the cost of other stuff decreases by $20 then you still come out ahead.

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