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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

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Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#41

Post by orev »

rr808 wrote: post #29

I've done the path from SWE to SRE and back to SWE. I was always happy to do production support and diagnose and fix production problems, so I naturally moved to SRE which is always looking for people. It was a real mistake, SRE is hugely stressful and really unrewarding compared to SWE. Yes you learn some skills and get some occasional glory, but year after year of fighting fires really didn't build any long lasting…

Thanks for recognizing what SRE/SysAdmins have to deal with all the time.

I think in general that type of experience would help Developers be more empathetic to the operations side of things. Those fires often come from trade-offs made in development.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#42

Post by lll-o-lll »

lysace wrote: post #37

> USA centric culture, if you are not in USA at Google and don’t have a big presence in a location it’s a bit like swimming upstream, it’s easy to feel isolated, sidelined or on the flipside overwhelmed with late meetings It's like the fourth time I read/hear this. I understand that it's a tricky one to adress.

This is US companies in general! Never work for one in another country; if you can help it. All decisions will be centralized to the US head office and require face to face. Communication is generally terrible.

I’ve worked for European and Asian owned companies, and they seem to be able to handle distributed authority much better. For the “land of the free”, it sure seems like US companies run on a feudal system.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#43

Post by deisteve »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #32

All these things make me envious of people who get to work at Google or any other FAANG company, where they are both paid well and validated for their intelligence.

but the work that Googlers do most of HN can do

its the proximity, pedigree, profile that you have to fit to get in to Google

I'm happy for those that made it. Not everybody gets to work for Google. But the work they do are no less challenging or more important than what the rest of us do.

If anything FAANG has contributed greatly to the American Firewall of Algorithms and have destroyed an entire generation's ability to reason and value common sense.

I remember this quote which I can't remember who said but "if they are paying you a large salary, what they take from you is far greater"

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#44

Post by steelframe »

stonethrowaway wrote: post #6

Light on details and mostly seems to revolve around money.

When I worked at Google I immediately sold my stock and diversified. In hindsight that "cost" me at least $2MM. At a subsequent employer I held the stock, determined not to make the same mistake again. That "cost" me nearly $100k before I realized that the new employer's stock was not going to do what GOOG did.

Anyway, congratulations to those Googlers who "picked" GOOG by not selling their GSUs and who made out like bandits. You certainly got lucky, and nobody should expect their own employers' RSUs to do the same.

Googlers from the past ~15 years are comparatively filthy rich. Imagine having had an opportunity to miss out on 8 figures of stock returns and only be left with 7 figures because you followed sound financial advice. Bruce Willis is no doubt dabbing his eyes on Memegen.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#45

Post by bzhang255 »

redrix wrote: post #20
stonethrowaway wrote: post #6

Light on details and mostly seems to revolve around money.

Isn’t this the whole point of working; particularly at a FAANG? > It’s a shallow post-mortem I respectfully disagree. It’s an 8 minute read. Sure, it’s mostly in dot-point form, but personally I’d rather that than some massive 80,000 word blog post that I’m going to drop 1/8 of the way through. Since when does a personal blog post need to be a well constructed and lengthy document?

I think it's shallow and not because it's short. To me, it just sounds very typical: "I joined Google back when it was fun. Now it's more bureaucratic and less fun. But I made a ton of money on the stock." I think there have been countless blog posts from Ex-Googlers like this. It's fairly shallow.

And it is worth noting that a lot of the bullet point lists do start with "I made a ton of money" in as many words, which is also just not very interesting to most folks, though it is certainly very relevant and important to the writer.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#46

Post by enneff »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #32

All these things make me envious of people who get to work at Google or any other FAANG company, where they are both paid well and validated for their intelligence.

These are great benefits for sure, but one of the reasons I left is a totally ineffective and wasteful management structure that makes it extremely hard to actually do anything. It is very hard to feel like your work means anything at a company of that size, since the chances of having the goals of your work changed (or being laid off) at a moments notice makes it hard to stay motivated.

If I take another software gig it will certainly be at a small company where my daily work contributes directly to the company’s central goals.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#49

Post by keepamovin »

markus_zhang wrote: post #25

The money alone is good enough. I can probably just retire with all those money and stocks. Let alone tons of techs and a shiny CV. Kudos for starting from a height most people can't reach for life. I guess you are going to start another company eventually?

9 years is a long time just for money tho. Too much money focused on that attitude

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#50

Post by hiddencost »

danpalmer wrote: post #24

There are a bunch of comments saying that Google is just like any other big tech company and that the exciting engineering bit has gone. My experience is only from the last 2.5 years, but I've got a slightly different take. Engineering from >10 years ago seems like it was a wild west. Some truly stunning pieces of technology, strung together with duct tape. Everything had its own configuration language, workflow engi…

Oof. I knew it was going to happen, but people thinking boq/pod are good rather than actually killing the company makes me pretty sad.
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