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?

#671

Post by throwaway-dos » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:36 PM UTC

brandon wrote: post #637

jeffbee wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Registered account to reply here, because your complaints feel one sided to me.

Most of what you described i felt as well _sometimes_ for security related stuff, like dedicated machines in that one cluster or an ISE review on short notice--but security related is also somewhat out of the norm and considering that is, Google does a great job.

For "normal" services what you described does not match my experience at all. Even for medium sized infrastructure services mostly everything just works (IME).

Never had a GUTS ticket that was not answered within a business day, but obviously just n=1 sample--imo support staff is mostly amazing.

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

#672

Post by dodobirdlord » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:38 PM UTC

> The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a significant waste of resources and focus. After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.

So what he is saying is that he wouldn’t have done it if he wasn’t forced to. Perhaps there’s a lesson here about what sort of organizations are trustworthy custodians of data and what sort of organizations are not.

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

#673

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:39 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #657

brandon wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That was some T7-9 whining right there. Do you think it's easier to get unplanned compute capacity at some other company?

[deleted]

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

#674

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

ska wrote: post #666

DC1350 wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Canadian developers don't get paid enough to live in the tech hub cities.

And yet, they are tech hubs? How does this differ from devs in Montana be California ? More to the point, are other professions doing notably better in those “tech hubs” relative to software developers ? In my experience, no, which suggests your comment really boils down to “there are some high COL places where even professional couples struggle to afford a house” no?

[deleted]

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

#675

Post by nicioan » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:40 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #99

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.

100% this! The work life balance section in particular was an eye opener. I’m sure the Waze employees that were part of the acquisition have a _completely_ different perspective, and I bet they‘ve been much better off after the acquisition.

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

#676

Post by wombat-man » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:44 PM UTC

scrose wrote: post #314

wombat-man wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, a lot of startups are under resourced in terms of people though. Maybe nobody is threatening you, but as you settle into the role you kind of realize that working a bit more could actually be the difference success and failure. I do agree that it's better if you're making that call on your own. If management is trying to squeeze you like this by threatening to fire you, it's usually an empty/foolish threat. Hir…

> Yeah, a lot of startups are under resourced in terms of people though. Maybe nobody is threatening you, but as you settle into the role you kind of realize that working a bit more could actually be the difference success and failure. This is completely my opinion and shaped from my own experience. But if you're working at an understaffed startup, the bottleneck for 'success' is usually not the engineering team, and…

Yeah, I think you're probably right about that, but that's not always easy to see at the time. Especially if it's a little earlier in their career.

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

#677

Post by arduinomancer » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:44 PM UTC

nx7487 wrote: post #318

People offended here are exactly the bubble of entitled morons in Silicon Valley that this guy is talking about. I totally agree with everything he said, companies where you have to work long hours and don't receive lots of weird benefits like yoga and sushi are the places I want to work. I would much prefer to have my compensation include more equity in the company, and for my performance to actually be related to t…

Why would you be surprised that people at a company where working more doesn't increase the stock price don't want to work more?

Do you want them to work more for no benefit?

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

#678

Post by arduinomancer » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:49 PM UTC

So much of the discussion here is superfluous.

Why should the employee care about "users" if their equity doesn't increase in value based on those users?

Like--its as simple as that, don't blame the employees for being entitled here.

If my equity isn't related to my job then they're not "my users", and I'm not a true owner of the product.

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

#679

Post by asmosoinio » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:53 PM UTC

dwohnitmok wrote: post #574

modeless wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I may or may not have passion, but that should be immaterial to the job at hand. Perhaps this is our disagreement. Employees with passion often perform better and there is nothing "unfair" about employers desiring passionate employees for that reason. I agree that passion shouldn't be a requirement per se (whatever that means) if job performance is otherwise good, but passion is very highly correlated with job perf…

> 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…

> You can directly observe performance!

From my experience this can be extremely hard - to be able to know how much one employee is contributing compared to another one.

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

#680

Post by throwmeaway_66 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 8:54 PM UTC

burntengthrw5 wrote: post #632

throwmeaway_66 wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of high-revenue companies looking for people with prestigious backgrounds in a non-explicitly-called-that-way advisory role. It is not difficult to find jobs like those in general, but IMO most FAANG people lack the finesse needed to understand how to position themselves and understand what other people want, which, most of the time, are not the coding skills. Panic attacks are brutal and getting emp…

Very true on the last part. There are some quotes I'd love to share from mentors in the space but that would ID me too tightly. Would you say that any particular background and skill set or credentials/laurels (publishing? writing? speaking? management? management at a certain level?) sets you up most appropriately for getting this sort of role? Basically, how do I take any actionable steps to find those positions or…

Certainly the FAANG-er needs to be in a senior role. To have a less stressful job, you need to look for senior- IC work, not management. Coming from management would be ok, but mostly companies I am talking about are looking for technical guidance or, more likely, reassurance. Publishing is helpful only if in the very specific area they are interested about.

As to how to find those positions, my recommendation would be to look for (1) high-revenue, big companies (they have the money and they have the space), (2) going through some sort of transformation (moving to the cloud, opening a new business area), and (3) need prestige, both internally and externally.

You can find those jobs in job ads, but you need to look at the ad written most of the time by a semi-clueless recruiter through the lens of points (1-3) above.