Leaving Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaving Google

#341

Post by mbesto » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 2:33 PM UTC

discordance wrote: post #330

mbesto wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what people seem to forget. A company that doesn't grow for all intents and purposes is a dead company. Or in the M&A world we call it "distressed". It doesn't matter how profitable you are if you don't get grow there are serious implications - employee motivation, loss of talent, erosion of customer services, etc.

I don't see how employee motivation, loss of talent, erosion of customer services are related to the need for unyielding year on year growth. There are companies out there, private ones, where their customers are happy, their employees are happy (most of the time) and their retention is high.

> There are companies out there, private ones, where their customers are happy, their employees are happy (most of the time) and their retention is high.

Companies that aren't growing? I meet A LOT of companies (about ~50 or so a year) and I can tell you there is massive difference between the distressed ones and the ones who are growing. btw - even 2~5% growth is fine, it doesn't need to be 25% google scale growth...but flat or declining is bad.

Re: Leaving Google

#342

Post by im3w1l » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 2:34 PM UTC

burntoutfire wrote: post #335

capableweb wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> and no market is really a "winner takes it all" Market for OSes for PCs (not Macs) is a great example. Windows has what, 98% market share there? It got there thanks to the dynamics of this particular market, which is totally a "winner takes all" one. In particular, if Microsoft were more relaxed in 80ties and 90ties, there likely would not be Microsoft or Windows at all today, and everybody'd be using Os/2 Warp or…

> OSes for PCs (not Macs)

If you slice the market thin enough anything can be a monopoly. This particular distinction seems pretty arbitrary to me.

Re: Leaving Google

#343

Post by UncleMeat » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

bogomipz wrote: post #329

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…

For those of us without direct knowledge what are IC, TL and TLM?

Individual Contributor, Tech Lead, and Combo Tech Lead / Manager.

Re: Leaving Google

#344

Post by aiisjustanif » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

throwawaylinux wrote: post #201

hintymad wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timnit is unethical as hell. She's also the worst kind of being unethical: being unethical in the name of doing good. She second guessed the motives of her coworkers. She attributed every difference to her paper or claim to racism or white supremacy or oppression or any combination out of the three. For all I know, only a true racist would view everything through a racial lens. She's a disgrace to the research commun…

> She attributed every difference to her paper or claim to racism or white supremacy or oppression or any combination out of the three. This is basically mainstream teaching now (see critical race theory). It's like witch burning, if you don't agree with their claims and accusations then that only proves you are a sinner. And if you do confess, then Lord help you. I must say though, it is a bit rich that Google sudde…

> This is basically mainstream teaching now (see critical race theory). It's like witch burning…

>> She attributed every difference to her paper or claim to racism or white supremacy or oppression or any combination out of the three.

Critical race theory is not yelling to claim every problem is due to racism or oppression. While I don’t agree with all tenants of the recent evolution of critical race theory, I do with the historical purpose of it.

> A collection of critical stances against the existing legal order from a race-based point of view — Roy L. Brooks

Fast forward to today and you have a more broad and insistent approach developing with Critical Race Theory. Primarily due to all of the push back on having legitimate societal conversations and decisions about systemic discrimination since the civil right movement in the US (even going back to the 1968 Kerner Commission).

> The secular high priests of this ideology do and are.

While the focus now on structural determinism, the critiques of liberalism or the use of narratives and lived experiences of CRT might upset you. CRT is not at all simply what you described.

Re: Leaving Google

#345

Post by jefftk » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

ashtonkem wrote: post #104

amha wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My direct supervisor has 75 direct reports. (Not a tech company––an elite private school in the Bay––but still...)

Fuck that. Nobody is being served by that arrangement. Nobody.

I don't know, I think that's pretty normal in education? For example, you have a large number of teachers that report up to the head of middle school or something?

Re: Leaving Google

#346

Post by dasil003 » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 2:36 PM UTC

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #328

lotsofpulp wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not a tax advantage. It is simply paying long term capital gains tax rate on long term capital gains. Companies are not paying with RSUs because of a tax advantage, they are paying because it is cheaper than paying with cash.

While it's unclear whether grandparent was referring to tax advantages for the company vs. the individual, I'm not sure I understand your comment about lack of tax advantage in the context of individual awards. Scenario A: Company X gives me a sign-on bonus of $10,000 and an agreement to bonus me $100 * y%, where y is the increase in value of the company. Scenario B: Company X awards me $10,000 of RSU that vests afte…

RSUs are cash equivalent from tax purposes. They are taxed at market rate at vest time. If you sell at that moment and buy other stock it has the exact same LTCG treatment. It’s also the same as if you are compensated in all cash and go buy stock with that.

Re: Leaving Google

#347

Post by lotsofpulp » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #328

lotsofpulp wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not a tax advantage. It is simply paying long term capital gains tax rate on long term capital gains. Companies are not paying with RSUs because of a tax advantage, they are paying because it is cheaper than paying with cash.

While it's unclear whether grandparent was referring to tax advantages for the company vs. the individual, I'm not sure I understand your comment about lack of tax advantage in the context of individual awards. Scenario A: Company X gives me a sign-on bonus of $10,000 and an agreement to bonus me $100 * y%, where y is the increase in value of the company. Scenario B: Company X awards me $10,000 of RSU that vests afte…

There is no tax advantage for the employer or the employee. Your scenario A is incorrect because you pay income tax at time of vesting, as the other comments pointed out.

Re: Leaving Google

#348

Post by infinitezest » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

rurban wrote: post #209

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…

I don't really buy that argument, because google is still the only IT company which supports long term R&D, like dart, flutter or fuchsia. Of course they can afford such boutique projects, but the good thing is they do. My idea is still the wrong PM incentive structure, which is harming the work culture and projects.

Can you shed some light on what the right and wrong incentive structure looks like?

Re: Leaving Google

#349

Post by lotsofpulp » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 2:42 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #333

lotsofpulp wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd far rather live in a country where the rulers choose not to start wars for territory, especially if we were the richest country in the World. I'd have guessed that would be common. Indeed as one of the richest countries, with global climate change, the responsibility is to lower consumption (which many would see as reduce the standard of living). But maybe the analogy doesn't stretch that far.

>I'd far rather live in a country where the rulers choose not to start wars for territory, especially if we were the richest country in the World. I'd have guessed that would be common.

If it was common, then they would not have gotten to be the richest country in the world in the first place. The same game plays out over and over in nature where the one that fights for resources gets more of it, and while they can choose to stop fighting for it, in the long run they will not be the survivors.

Cooperation works best if the goal is maximizing the average return over all participants in the game, but inevitably, tribes will split off and start prioritizing their own populations over others. On a global, national, and even familial scale.

Re: Leaving Google

#350

Post by sulam » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

topkai22 wrote: post #93

ashtonkem wrote: post #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 le…

Not a Googler, but I’m my experience 25 person managers can work (barely) if they are just their to keep the HR stuff in line and people actually transactional work with other teams or if there is an informal team structure beneath the manager. Think a team where there are 4 tech leads that actually run the teams, but where the “manager” deals with career and hr issues. While working in consulting I spent about 4 mon…

Speaking as a Google manager of a reasonably sized org, 25 direct reports is too many. Twice a year you have to do Perf for them, if nothing else, and doing that well for 25 people would likely be the only thing you get done. I think it’d be possible, but it would be at the expense of your own career. “Did Perf for my team of 25” is not a next level accomplishment. “Organized my team so that I didn’t have 25 directs” is much more of an accomplishment (next level or not depends on the level, it’s something my group would evaluate as “meeting expectations” of an L7).

The rule of thumb at Google is 10 directs in an engineering management role, less if you’re a TLM (an IC with some management responsibilities) since you’re still evaluated on the IC ladder. There are exceptions, but they usually involve “managing” a number of contractors where you have significant program management support for coordinating their day to day activities.