681–690 of 1001 posts
I work in Core Eng at google. Woke up this morning and saw my director - who we all loved and had been at Google for 20 years - is gone. One concerning thing that I haven't seen reported is that my leadership chain is almost entirely Indian, all the way up. And they've announced that they are starting to offshore entire core products to India, primarily in bangalore IIUC.
Google is overrated. It's been obvious for over a decade after they built an interview process that is heavily biased towards those who recently took an algorithms class. You had talking heads yammering about how hard it was to get into Google, which to be honest, made the company even less appealing. Is this a software engineering company or some kind of hyped up nightclub? Yeah, maybe it's a hard interview if you'v…
I’m seeing this now through the lens of hiring at a 100 person org, but I’ve done hundreds of interviews as a FAANG employee too. The difference there, I would say, and what GOOG try to do is to shoot for the moon and get hiring nailed at the interview process. This comes at the expense of rejecting nine out of ten candidates because the candidate firehouse is free flowing and plentiful: something I don’t have at my much more normal startup.
My firm made billions last year too and just laid off hundreds of engineers (a decent %) Some of the best engineers, those that I respected the most, went. People who make no sense. After last year's layoffs they told us they were "done" and it was "all behind us". Last year then turned out to a better year financially than 2022 (we have access to the top line numbers) You can't trust anything anyone above you in the…
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IT salaries are high mostly because the people who can do the job well can also do other jobs well, so if salaries go down then people change careers. For example, most people who can do IT could also become an electrician, for which the demand is currently high. > Also ChatGPT and other AIs increasing developers, artists, etc. productivity - so fewer people can do as much work. This is the sort of thing that increas…
II'm fairly certain I could learn the theorethical, physical background required to be an electrician pretty quick but that leaves me with precisely zero practical experience of actually pulling cables or building a switchboard without killing myself/others and/or buring down the building. Besides, im my country a formal education (2-3 years) including an apprenticeship is required by law to practice the trait.
What do you think the learning is meant for you to learn? You have to terminate aluminum conductors differently than copper to prevent corrosion etc. Learning these things is what allows you to wire a building without causing a fire.
> Besides, im my country a formal education (2-3 years) including an apprenticeship is required by law to practice the trait.
Apprenticeship requirements are unfortunate -- basically giving the incumbents in an industry the ability to rate limit new entrants -- but it's not as if no one has ever done it before. So you do the apprenticeship.
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I work remotely for a big US company and I have heard talk of similar plans within the company, offshoring entire products' engineering work to India. Luckily my work is very niche (vuln research). I can only imagine the subpar and vulnerability ridden code we'll be seeing over the next few years from all the offshoring + irresponsible overusage of AI tools.
Why would the code be subpar? Is a google employee in US somehow more competent than the one in India? What you are thinking about was outsourcing which is very different than Google hiring in India. Just because you are paid more you are not a ‘better’ programmer
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Nope. This is laughably out of touch -" I don't understand how certain people don't think like I do so they must be irrational." If unions were structured differently, there would be more incentives. People at large, in group form are much more rationale then academics want to give credit, they are simply following the incentives in their life and attempting to do what's best for themselves. Unions in the US are not…
Obviously all generalizations are wrong but this particular comment was well received. Must have rang some bells.
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I disagree and I am sad that we're teaching each other to be skeptical and cynical. The company is not your friend and not your enemy, I agree. However, people _do_ develop personal relationship with each other. Sometimes even across the different levels in the company hierarchy. Yes, as with any other relationship, circumstances and interests might override this, but relationships still do matter. People have emotio…
I don't think this necessarily holds in the world of remote work. At least for me, relationships are very surface level. Almost no friendly banter, limited 2 second "How was your weekend?" before meetings that no one cares about. Its hard to be friends with little black boxes and white text on a screen. This is compounded when 75% of the team is made up of consultants. I do agree though that its pretty awful but the…
I think after a point, it is up to us to create the culture we want to see in a team. Someone has to start sharing more things, start talking about more things so others will feel like the same. Have a pizza session after every few successful sprints. Share puzzles and other things regularly so people have more things to talk about. It is easy to feel detached when everyone only uses a group channel, but a lot of meaningful connections happen when you do talk 1-1 in private.
I mean I have worked at places where no one even exchanged email ids when they are about to leave the company, and lurked in online places where people whom I have never even met employed me immediately when i mentioned that my day job company was going bankrupt.
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This is kind of silly. You probably chose to work at a company that “made billions”. You probably sought some perks related to doing so, be it remuneration, prestige, whatever. This is in part a game you choose to play, and the company that’s making billions is acting like a company that makes billions. You may in the future choose to make a different trade-off and work elsewhere? And I don’t mean some grow-or-die VC…
I have a hard time believing faang employees won't just drop the company they are working for if they are offered a 15 percent payrise from a competing company. Employees don't have to be loyal to their employers, why do employers have to be loyal to employees?
My firm made billions last year too and just laid off hundreds of engineers (a decent %) Some of the best engineers, those that I respected the most, went. People who make no sense. After last year's layoffs they told us they were "done" and it was "all behind us". Last year then turned out to a better year financially than 2022 (we have access to the top line numbers) You can't trust anything anyone above you in the…
> You can be somewhere for 10 years Our organization has a policy that it hires developers on 3-year contracts, and renews them no more than two times. So when you have reached 9 years in the org; when you have become intimately familiar with the domain, and the codebase, and the way the org works etc., you are out. I am still incredulous that someone has thought that yes, this is exactly how an organization should m…
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Unions make sense if the employers have the ability to exploit the workers. By forming a collective bargaining position the workers can prevent that from happening. With the tight labor market there are very few places where employers are able to exploit anyone, people can just move to another job. And in many European countries there are already strong worker protections in place through legislation. (I would argue…
> Unions make sense if the employers have the ability to exploit the workers. This is an overly narrow definition, so I label it is largely incorrect. Think of it this way: society involves dynamically-shifting power balances. To the extent the goals of a society include: (a) standardizing certain rights and norms (b) providing checks and balances so the powerful have less temptation and ability to exploit the less W…
Unions have the wrong incentives. They represent employees and have no incentive to think about future employees, employers, customers or anyone else. There are simply better ways to organise society.