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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?

#591

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

knuthsat wrote: post #432
gonehome wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take would be Google can afford it for now because they have a web ad monopoly and don’t have to compete. If they ever lose that, the culture they’ve built will cause them to be destroyed and irrelevant in not that much time. For now, it’s summer.

You're assuming the rest of the world is different but it isn't. There's a massive amount of companies where working pace is very slow. A large percentage of employees do barely anything and these companies exist forever.

This is mostly because at (a lot of) these places - there is no reward for doing any work. You don't get promoted if you do a good job. If you get a raise, it's like an extra $1k a year.

You get little more than a pat on the back.

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

#592

Post by Viliam1234 »

modeless wrote: post #522
dwohnitmok wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary. This still seems to hold no?

> when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary Talk about entitlement. You think that when a company hires you, that should be a commitment to employ you forever regardless of need? Passion can come from your own investment in the success of the business, through equity and through the opportunities that come to productive employees at growing companies, both…

> passion does not come from a guarantee of continued employment.

Then why do founders work harder than hired managers?

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

#593

Post by choppaface »

It’s telling that the author now wants to hold a discussion on Clubhouse to discuss the post. Lots of different takes on Clubhouse, but today it’s a much more “entitled” venue than Twitter or a Reddit AMA. Holding the talk on Clubhouse shows how much the author values filtering his audience. Whether the blogpost says that or not.

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

#594

Post by yters »

titanomachy wrote: post #512
throwaway3699 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, political correctness creates a stranglehold on ideas, the very last thing those in SV need when they are regulating their own monopolies of ideas online.

Excessive political correctness does that. A good amount of political correctness means that you never have to work for a manager who openly respects you less because of your race or gender.

On the other hand, if one is not of the viewpoint labeled as politically correct, then prepare to be ostracized in a very passive aggressive way. Not that I mind much, but passive aggressiveness is annoying. E.g. mentioning anything that smacks of religion, or discussing guns, or expressing skepticism that we modern people are the smartest thing since sliced bread.

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

#595

Post by jstrong »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #460
tinyhouse wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misinterpreting what he's saying. I didn't get the impression that he claims that employees growth doesn't matter. He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to optimize for, esp for the company. Not being able to fire people is indeed a big disadvantage. Bad employees are much worse than just not contributing. They make the peo…

While optimizing for promotion is definitely a corossive aspect of large company culture, it's simply not true that you can't "fire" people in Google. There is a bi-annual perf cycle, and there are ratings, and they mean things, your peers are involved, ratings are discussed among managers, results are callibrated, and there are "needs improvement" flags and "performance improvment" processes. No you can't fire a per…

you make him sound like Uhtred in Last Kingdom season 1, returning home to find his chief servant pilfering from his land, prompting him to leap off from his horse and plunge a sword through his heart ("now THAT ... is justice!" Uhtred boasts to his horrified wife). perhaps 'feudal kingdom' was a bit over the top?

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

#596

Post by nixish »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #363

9 years @ Google, and I too came from a company acquired by Google. (In my case, Google did not keep our product or tech stack around, so.) And yes, I can say many Googlers are entitled. It's a fair descriptor. And the pace of work is slower than a startup. In general. And I too have many criticisms of Google. But. Google has entirely different revenue constraints. It can afford an entirely different way of working.…

Great dissection and incision of the OP's "fetishizing of the actual process of the making of the sausage vs the sausage itself."

Creativity requires space. Space between work and space to think, be it on a yoga mat at 12 PM or a 4 PM refresher.

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

#597

Post by Viliam1234 »

johncessna wrote: post #568
apozem wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it shows a lack of self-awareness to complain about employees' entitlement and then wish they'd work more, without any talk of extra compensation. Seems a bit entitled to expect other human beings to sacrifice their weekends and happiness to bump the value of your shares.

That's a bit unfair. He's clearly passionate about the product and its customers. The ask to sacrifice for your customers is a reasonable position to take, especially in weird one of situations. It also ties into his risk/reward compensation section. I didn't get any indications that he expected 80 hour work weeks 52 weeks a year from everyone. To paraphrase, I think he was frustrated with his employees going to the…

A charitable explanation is that he would like to motivate his workers by equity... but in the company as big as Google, equity doesn't work that way anymore, and there is no good substitute.

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

#598

Post by choppaface »

JohnCarmack wrote: post #586

I can certainly see a lot of parallels with Oculus / Facebook. Perhaps unusually, I actually wanted FB to impress itself more strongly on Oculus post acquisition because, frankly, Oculus was a bit of a mess. Instead, Oculus was given an enormous amount of freedom for many years. Personally, nobody ever told me what to do, even though I was willing to "shut up and soldier" if necessary -- they bought that capability!…

While I totally agree with your Really Care and Just A Job characterization, I think that money does play a significant role in overall picture. People behave very differently after they run into six, seven, eight figures. And that behavior isn’t perfectly correlated with how much they put into the job. There’s a fair place for the “entitled” narrative, and when these people have outsized leverage on the company or product, it can create outsized problems.

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

#599

Post by modeless »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #592
modeless wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary Talk about entitlement. You think that when a company hires you, that should be a commitment to employ you forever regardless of need? Passion can come from your own investment in the success of the business, through equity and through the opportunities that come to productive employees at growing companies, both…

> passion does not come from a guarantee of continued employment. Then why do founders work harder than hired managers?

Because founders are the most invested, and often have the most passion for the mission. But founders do not have a guarantee of continued employment anyway. There is always the threat of the business failing, and in some cases there's a threat of being ousted by investors or the board.

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

#600

Post by thethethethe »

caturopath wrote: post #569
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that "political correctness" is a phrase created to lampoon/insult the irrational political groupthink of Communism, and was later converted into an indictment of progressive liberal values. Saying "some political correctness okay" is equivalent to saying either "some irrational groupthink is okay", or "some cultural marxism is okay". What's worse than this general confusion, is then implying that it's t…

Etymology isn't definition. "Politically correct" has enjoyed non-pejorative use for decades.

I still think it is worth pointing out the origin of the term. Whether the term is being used as pejorative or not, its use still plays into a narrative manufactured by the right to suppress and discredit leftist progress
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