641–650 of 840 posts
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.
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"we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google" The only way a big company can somehow ensure that all teams are going to follow the privacy or any other policy is to force the teams to "align our data retention policies and tools to Google". This is literally Google having process to ensure some privacy policy and op having issue w…
Again, I read it differently. It sounded more like a pedantic insistence on company-wide protocol rather than a genuine desire to be careful with user data. But I may be being uncharitable.
Otherwise, the pressure from people who want to do other things will ensure that privacy or rules will be ignored.
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!…
These aren't discrete categories.
There are a lot of people who care about their work and also recognize that at the end of the day, it is a job, and the reality is that they can only play a role in shaping the outcome, not dictate it per their vision.
Also, depending on the job, the team, the project, and the product, people can go from one of those perspectives to the other. There are a lot of people whose current job/role situations aren't intrinsically motivating, but then find incredible motivation due to a change in project or role (I've experienced this multiple times).
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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…
> 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. Except when your team wanted to initially onboard with GOOPS and your request sat in Buganizer for 2 weeks waiting for someone to triage. Uh oh — we're turning down this service next quarter, you will need to go start this onboarding process a…
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!…
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!…
This is an amazing post - it describes exactly how bad manager looks like and what kind of expectations does he have from his employees. No emergency PTO (despite being a benefit), ability to just get rid of people who don't suit him, cursing at people, not having a proper work/life balance. It just keeps on giving. And all for what? A mapping application having features which really don't save lives 99% of the time.
Are you saying you aren't willing to sacrifice your well-being to increase the value of this manager's portfolio? /s
A quick story about "entitlement" at some of the most 'employee benefit focused' tech companies. I haven't worked at Google, but I've worked at two of the other so-called FAANG companies. The soft benefits and perks were amazing, no doubt about it. For a time, a certain (popular) subset of the free snacks became unavailable. My immediate team and I made some jokes about it. A week or so later, word got around that so…
Lines up with my experience. For every person having an entitled fit, there's two or three people pointing out how silly the whole thing is.
1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
That level of entitlement is incredible. I feel very fortunate to make a well above average salary, and I keep reminding myself that it's unusual, and that I should increase my savings for when the faucet is eventually turned off
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A different way of putting it would be whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work. It's not incongruent with a balanced life. To me It just means occasdinally you might stay late at work, once in awhile an interesting problem gets you working on the company laptop all Saturday, and if something breaks you're not able to log off until you fix it. Doesn't mean you cant take Friday's off of or…
> whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work. This is a good take. Something that's perhaps overlooked: those rare occasions where you need to stay late to deliver are very memorable. Isn't it true that strong bonds are often built from intense experiences? I think those few times that you stay late earn you massive respect from those who stuck around, and builds a relationship beyond your c…
I think with people holed up in their homes doing the same thing, the experience is diminished somewhat.