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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

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Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#71

Post by tombert »

enneff wrote: post #46
atleastoptimal wrote: post #32

All these things make me envious of people who get to work at Google or any other FAANG company, where they are both paid well and validated for their intelligence.

These are great benefits for sure, but one of the reasons I left is a totally ineffective and wasteful management structure that makes it extremely hard to actually do anything. It is very hard to feel like your work means anything at a company of that size, since the chances of having the goals of your work changed (or being laid off) at a moments notice makes it hard to stay motivated. If I take another software gi…

There are so many middle managers at Apple that feel the need to justify their existence within the company, and as such they schedule endless meetings and/or send "urgent" emails that they expect you to respond to immediately.

It got to a point of being almost farcical, where they were scheduling meetings at 9:30pm multiple times a week. After two years of it I had to leave, I was coming home catatonic and depressed, to a point where my wife was getting concerned.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#72

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

tiffanyh wrote: post #55

Since this post is about SRE… Slight OT: what do people recommended for simple server & db monitoring (for a small saas business)? monit, nagios, victoria metrics, etc?

Is nagios still a thing? I used it 10 years ago and loved it. I feel like people would look at me funny if I suggested it now. Datadog is all the rage.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#73

Post by tdb7893 »

zeroCalories wrote: post #53
incognito124 wrote: post #16

L3 to L4 in 9months is crazy fast, kudos

That doesn't sound too unusual. I'm more impressed that they made L6 in 9 years. I've known Googlers 10+ years forever stuck in L5. The easiest way to promo at these companies is to leave and come back at a higher level.

My experience was L5 always seemed like the happiest engineers. It has often the most interesting technical work, still great pay, and low stress (compared to higher levels at least). It seemed like when people got promoted to L6 their overall quality of life would go down. I knew a lot of people sticking at L5 on purpose (I once even talked to a CTO at a small company who said they had wished they never were promoted above technical lead).

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#74

Post by cperciva »

L6 ICs are pretty rare - it already is a top tier of seniority in engineering

Is Google really different from other companies? I talk to a lot of Amazonians (AWS Hero, FreeBSD/EC2 maintainer) and my general impression is that developers below L7 ought to be classified as "Junior" -- my mapping is basically L4-L6 = Junior Developer, L7/L8 = Developer, and L10 = Senior Developer. Anything which doesn't have L7+ involvement gives me major "these kids need adult supervision" vibes for all the newbie mistakes they make.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#75

Post by j0hnyl »

keepamovin wrote: post #49
markus_zhang wrote: post #25

The money alone is good enough. I can probably just retire with all those money and stocks. Let alone tons of techs and a shiny CV. Kudos for starting from a height most people can't reach for life. I guess you are going to start another company eventually?

9 years is a long time just for money tho. Too much money focused on that attitude

I don't think so, in fact, now that I'm a little "older", I regret not chasing money earlier.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#76

Post by miki123211 »

danpalmer wrote: post #24

There are a bunch of comments saying that Google is just like any other big tech company and that the exciting engineering bit has gone. My experience is only from the last 2.5 years, but I've got a slightly different take. Engineering from >10 years ago seems like it was a wild west. Some truly stunning pieces of technology, strung together with duct tape. Everything had its own configuration language, workflow engi…

> Nowadays we've got Boq/Pod, the P2020 suite, Rollouts, the automated job sizing technologies, even BCID

Could you elaborate on what these are for a non-googler? Ironically enough, Google isn't very helpful.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#77

Post by alienchow »

hiddencost wrote: post #50
danpalmer wrote: post #24

There are a bunch of comments saying that Google is just like any other big tech company and that the exciting engineering bit has gone. My experience is only from the last 2.5 years, but I've got a slightly different take. Engineering from >10 years ago seems like it was a wild west. Some truly stunning pieces of technology, strung together with duct tape. Everything had its own configuration language, workflow engi…

Oof. I knew it was going to happen, but people thinking boq/pod are good rather than actually killing the company makes me pretty sad.

Boq/PoD merely standardizes production deployments. You can choose to not do it, and end up having to redo everything yourself. The vast majority of all services uses it perfectly fine.

Unified rollouts, unified versioning, universal dashboards, security compliance, standardized quota management, standard alert configs. It's opinionated, but I can drop into any team and hit the ground running. I don't want to learn your custom dashboards doing the exact same thing with different names.

The issue with PoD is that it's a great concept and implementation that's tight on resources, and doesn't have much of a plan to expand beyond its current paradigm. The P2020 team deserves way more recognition for all the work they have done.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#78

Post by [deleted] »

rr808 wrote: post #29

I've done the path from SWE to SRE and back to SWE. I was always happy to do production support and diagnose and fix production problems, so I naturally moved to SRE which is always looking for people. It was a real mistake, SRE is hugely stressful and really unrewarding compared to SWE. Yes you learn some skills and get some occasional glory, but year after year of fighting fires really didn't build any long lasting…

[deleted]

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#79

Post by deisteve »

jjeaff wrote: post #65
deisteve wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but the work that Googlers do most of HN can do its the proximity, pedigree, profile that you have to fit to get in to Google I'm happy for those that made it. Not everybody gets to work for Google. But the work they do are no less challenging or more important than what the rest of us do. If anything FAANG has contributed greatly to the American Firewall of Algorithms and have destroyed an entire generation's abilit…

sometimes if they pay you a large salary, the only thing they are taking from you is your ability to work for a competitor.

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