Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long? • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by 01100011 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

throwmeaway_66 wrote: post #530

01100011 wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get complacent. I've been where you are, and when the party is over you're going to have a hell of a hangover unless you can ride that job to retirement. Relearning how to compete after a few years of coasting is brutal. I was just past 40 when my gravy train derailed. The slack years were fun but they went by fast. Compensation for a job is about more than money. It's about where you end up as a person when th…

That's a good point and that's the drop of fear climbing making his way up to my brain. But I interview around, I got some offers that I have declined so far and I do some work, just a few hours a week. You wrote: "Compensation for a job is about more than money. It's about where you end up as a person when the job is over.". It sounds good in theory, but in practice? Should I switch job, maybe/likely accepting less…

I didn't say you should quit your job. Ride that train as long as you can. I'm saying you should manage yourself. If you only work half the day, spend the other half of the day:

- Look for opportunities to contribute more at your job. Don't wait for a manager to tell you what to do. Rewrite some code. Propose a new feature. Improve the documentation. Write more tests.

- Teach yourself new skills. Don't just skim books on new languages/technologies. Develop a personal project and pretend like you're being paid to work on it.

- Take practice coding tests. Stay up to date with relevent skills.

Enjoy the job you have now, but keep yourself ready for the day when that job goes away. I had a very easy job for about 6 years. I automated most of my job and effectively did not have a boss. I made great money and spent most of my time working on hobbies, hiking, or working on my house. When the job ended I suddenly realized all of my skills were rusty. I regret wasting all of that time, and wish I would have used it to better myself.

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

#602

Post by jeffbee » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

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.…

I've worked at 8 different companies and none of them could even hold a candle to Google's pace of work. Everything just works. The quota system works, the identity and authorization system works, observability works, the build and release system works. You can be a productive engineer at Google on day 2 if you read the codelabs on day 1. Nobody at Google has ever needed to have their manager email the Jira admin to get them added to the right group to edit tickets. Nobody at Google has a need to raise a ticket with some ops group in Bengaluru to partition a Kafka topic, renew a certificate, bridge two VPCs, or any of that type of thing. It's almost frictionless. I don't get people who say that Google's pace is slow. I've definitely worked in startups where some kid thought they were ultra-productive with their late-night merges of 20000 lines of untested code, but on longer time scales those startups inevitably ground to a complete standstill under the weight of that debt.

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

#603

Post by ZephyrBlu » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

thethethethe wrote: post #587

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's reasonable to assume that not everyone is going to like everything that you say. I don't think this is an issue. If there's a specific demographic that is consistently affected by what you're saying, there might be an issue though.

> I think it's reasonable to assume that not everyone is going to like everything that you say. Sure but it's really not that hard to keep things under control in the work place. I have my own opinions, sometimes I share them at work, sometimes people may disagree, however, I don't "rack up multiple HR complaints" like this guy did.

"After the acquisition, I was invited to speak on many different Google panels and events and very quickly, I began racking up my HR complaints. I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG"

Firstly, these came from events he was _invited_ to speak at. If you invite someone to speak and then don't let them speak their mind what was the point in inviting them?

Secondly, as a non-american none of the things he mentions are egregious. A bit unprofessional? Yeah, probably. But not worthy of being reported to HR.

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

#604

Post by dwohnitmok » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:12 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #588

dwohnitmok wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Employees with passion often perform better That sounds really weird to me to bring up, regardless of whether it's true or not. As in this makes sense when you're thinking of trying to hire folks trying to gauge passion as a proxy for their performance when you can't directly observe it, but when they're working for you, you don't need proxies! You can directly observe performance! So passion seems pretty irrelevan…

The thing you quoted literally said it was "unfair" for employers to expect passion from their at-will employees. I guess you're saying it's fine for employers to "desire" passion but not to "expect" it? OK, sure.

> I guess you're saying it's fine for employers to "desire" passion but not to "expect" it?

I'm personally saying it isn't really the business of the employer to talk about employee passion to begin with. In the same way that the employer may desire an employee to keep a clean home and healthy living habits, because of the various signaling benefits it has for their job duties, but it isn't really the employer's business to care.

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

#605

Post by Viliam1234 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

PNWChris wrote: post #447

nicoburns wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if you're a software developer with a few years experience then pretty much any job is going to cover that.

I generally agree with you here, the sun is shining and we software engineers can make some hay! But...I have words of caution. I grew up in Southeastern Michigan. My dad is a Stanford grad mechanical engineer who worked for a Big 3 auto manufacturer, my wife's parents work in auto, and many of my friends families directly or indirectly worked in automotive. Everything about that seemed secure and stable until our en…

There is also a risk of health problems. If at some moment my spine decides it is no more acceptable for me to spend so much time sitting by the computer, or my eyes decide it is no more acceptable to spend so much time looking at the screen... I won't be able to work as a full-time software developer anymore.

I want to make sure that when that happens, my family will be economically okay during the following years.

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

#606

Post by navbaker » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

guytv wrote: post #552

navbaker wrote: post #354

This mention of "yoga at 11am" seems to be rubbing some folks the wrong way, but what if it was "lunch for an hour at 11am"? In all the jobs I've held (including now) where working hours are not dictated by external forces, such as customer service expectations, our teams make sure we get in our hours and are more or less available during a reasonable window, say 8am-5/6pm. It is pretty much understood that there wil…

And I had fellow googles spend all their day between PlayStation, gym, restaurants, cafe's, hairdresser etc... without getting any work done.

Wow, that's insane! My point of view is working at an east coast large research lab, that behavior here would for sure be noticed quickly and eliminated!

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

#607

Post by chad_strategic » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

hundchenkatze wrote: post #485

ghaff wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I somewhat sympathize with those living in a small apartment who used to walk, take a shuttle bus, take the subway, etc. to work where they were fed 5 days a week or more--and now they're stuck in their small apartments with most restaurants closed and facing the prospect of maybe having to move to a bigger place. So one can choose to interpret complaints about meal expensing in that vein. That said, in general, at l…

That's still a ton of entitlement... "Oh no! I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and I have to live in my tiny apartment, buy food, and I might have to get a bigger apartment." vs "Oh no! I don't have a job, and I'm about to lose my apartment because I can't pay rent."

Out of ~600 or some comments, this wins the award!

Thank you for really getting to the point of this article.

But I would add...

I left my job etc, but now I going to stand on soap box and write an article about and make myself sound so self righteous.

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

#608

Post by devchix » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #523

devchix wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See also SUNW. McNealy imported the 6Sigma thing from GE, at one time it infected even teams not involved in manufacturing. MSFT had the best outcome for giants of the aughts. It is too bad OpenSolaris was left for dead, otherwise we'd have some choices and competition in *nix OS. AIX, dead. HP-UX, dead. Can't recall the DEC, Ultrix? Who runs that anymore. The last time I saw BSD commercially used was at a telco.

A lot of my early jobs were porting various Unix things to Linux. I spent time writing cross platform C++, perl, and bash on Solaris, IRIX, HP-UNIX, and DEC Tru46, but mostly Solaris and IRIX. I gotta say, all those Unices fucking sucked. The userland tools were abysmal, with missing flags or bugs in their getopts, the compilers and their sockets libraries were extremely finicky, and their man pages were anemic. GNU/…

Agree with you that tooling was abysmal but all of those *nix had their bright flowering that subsequently pollinated other *nixes. AIX service management (SRC I think?) eventually saw life in Solaris as SMF. BSD jails reborn as containers. The HP-UX had batch job management that was very good. Solaris ABI/API compat between versions was exemplary, you can count on the OS upgrade not breaking your application. When the compiler was still being sold (thousands of dollars by the seat license), it was optimized for the SPARC processor and outperformed same code compiled by the GNU compiler. I wish we had all of that still.

Apropos of the "curated App Store" or "free-for-all" discussion currently active, I remember talking to a colleague in the early 2000s that Apple with its curated BSD-derivative OS was exactly what open sourced OSes needed. Users don't want to do more work than necessary; in retrospect, the selling point that users can do anything+everything with *nix OS was the wrong message.

You didn't mention package management and network booting to be pain points. They were nightmares, which Linux eventually solved. I think that's where the race was lost.

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

#609

Post by gonehome » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

jariel wrote: post #550

gonehome wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous and is itself probably an interesting story. I wouldn’t bet on that as the norm. I’d expect the norm to be more like IBM, RIM, or Nokia. I agree with most of the article, but one line stuck out to me as particularly wrong: >”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consum…

"Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous " This is definitely not true. Ballmer increased revenues massively, and launched a slew of new products (XBox, MS Live, cloud etc.) and realigned the company. Have a look [1] Nadella has done nothing approaching that level of importance yet, so far, he is riding the wave that was handed to…

Arguably the stock price is a prediction of future success, not current revenue.

The fact that it sagged under Ballmer and is now up under Nadella aligns with how I'm framing things. I suppose you could argue that's entirely PR, but I don't think that's the case.

People thought MSFT under Ballmer was trending down, now they think it's trending up. I'd argue that's due to strategic shifts that happened once Ballmer left.

I've mentioned in other comments that revenue (while good) isn't the whole story.

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

#610

Post by chad_strategic » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

second--shift wrote: post #585

One question i have about working at Google - a bit embarrassing to ask, but does one's Google account/search history come into play during the application/interview process? I'd rather not be grilled about why I was Googling how to hack Wi-Fi passwords in 2012.

Wow! That's the worst you were googling?

You make me look like a saint. :)