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?

#721

Post by perl4ever » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:27 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #609

jariel wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 le…

>Arguably the stock price is a prediction of future success

Sure, the stock price is always a prediction of future success. But it can change overnight, and when it does, it's not because reality or the "facts on the ground" changed overnight (usually) it's because perception changed. Often if not always because a catalyst made people aware of something that was building for a fair amount of time.

>strategic shifts that happened once Ballmer left.

I'm not saying this is wrong, but I don't think it's appropriate to treat the stock price as evidence of it.

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

#722

Post by astura » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

tester34 wrote: post #155

willcipriano wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Try managing a team where people take last minute personal days all the time, without having to give advance notice or a reason. Try getting a job where they advertise a benefit, then complain when you use it.

Never heard of benefit called "taking free days last min is no problem"

To be honest, if people are not told they need to give advanced notice for using their time off they often won't - especially when nobody else does.

Obviously, it's not always possible to give advanced notice (illness or other unforseen circumstances), so most employers require a brief explanation when advanced notice isn't possible - "Sick kid," "car trouble," "illness," etc.

These are normal policies, but they must be formal policies and communicated to employees.

If those policies are in place and you have people violating them - then it becomes an HR issue, with formal reprimanded, so a low level manager shouldn't have to complain about it.

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

#723

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #703

danans wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who Really Care about their work with the Just A Job crowd 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…

This point hit home for me: > but people that have experienced being embedded with Really Care workers are going to be appalled at the relative effectiveness. Unless you've experienced the Really Care type of team and situation, it's difficult to understand. I don't mean any disrespect to the Just A Job people. There is nothing wrong with keeping your head down, getting your work done, and checking it at the door whe…

Definitely a spectrum. I think my Level Of Care is directly proportional to how much impact I can actually have, given where I am on the reporting chain totem pole. Where I am on the totem pole often correlates strongly with salary/equity. If I'm down at the bottom, and my impact is limited to moving protobufs from one level in an abstraction stack to another, and my equity's value ebbs and flows with whatever the company is doing, I'm more of a Just A Job person. If I'm CTO of Oculus, I'm probably much more on the Really Care side, because in that case I probably have significant equity and the things I do might actually affect the company's stock price. Want me to care? Let's talk about where I am on the totem pole and how strongly my actions have a direct impact on the company's success and its stock price.

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

#724

Post by cobookman » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #714

cobookman wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consensus Building really sums up the issue. There's no clear decision maker at Google. There is no Tim Cook or Jeff Bezos. Instead it is a collection of teams in a department. It is like a democracy, but differs in that you need every single team leader onboard to get anything done vs say 51% of the "vote".

This is far less true than you make it seem, I think. I can think of executives who are very clear decision makers in particular contexts. But for most engineers, most of the time, you're working well below the level of those executives, and especially if you're engaging with shared infrastructure, the executive who is the final decision maker is Sundar. For example, I am involved in an issue where 3 ICs whose levels…

The executives are still beholden to supporting teams. Want to launch a new feature that depends on GFE. Looks like the current GFE is end-of-life, but the the new one still isn't ready yet. Let's connect with GFE team on if they'll support the older GFE and accept our CL to launch...

Next up is the documentation. That requires the doc team's approval. Oh they require IL8n, lets go to that team and see where in their queue we are .

This same flow occurs across all supporting teams. And it can get complex with Service A depends on Service B, which depends on Service C...and Service C can reject the quota increase delaying your launch...etc.

> I expect the same is true at Amazon or Apple

At amazon you would connect to who everyone reports up to, or whoever has clear decision making authority. You would then provide a written document going over the facts and suggested decisions, and ask they make the call. After that its "disagree and commit".

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

#725

Post by bartread » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:35 PM UTC

JohnCarmack wrote: post #586

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!…

> The wealth of the mega corps does allow most goals to be accomplished, at great expense, with Just A Job workers, but people that have experienced being embedded with Really Care workers are going to be appalled at the relative effectiveness.

I think the problem is actually deeper than that. I've spent much of my career avoiding megacorps, or even just corps, because I find them pretty frustrating. I have though worked at a couple of larger companies - one of them very large - as much to see what I could learn as anything else.

I sit somewhere on the spectrum between "Really Care" and "Just A Job", and it's varied quite a lot depending on what I'm doing and who I'm working with.

The problem with big companies is the "Really Care" gets beaten out of you: if you show any initiative whatsoever to try to get ahead of a situation or help another team you pretty quickly get shut down and told to stay in your lane.

Big companies tend to fragment and specialise responsibilities, if not actual skills.

Related to this hardly anyone has any decision-making power which means that any change requires a combinatorial explosion of interactions between individuals and teams to happen regardless of how competent or committed those individuals are.

It just favours mediocrity and coasting, along with a high tolerance for boredom, because there often isn't a viable alternative course of action for many employees no matter how good (or bad) those employees might be in another context working for another company. Sometimes you're in the right place at the right time, or have a conversation with the right person, to make something happen.

Another related issue: the vast majority of employees at big companies have no concept of the value of time, which manifests itself in all kinds of ways, but ultimately results in the performance of large quantities of BS/non-value adding work. If you're employed by a smaller company working in partnership with a larger company the asymmetry in understanding of time's value becomes particularly stark: you can often find yourself wondering why these people at the larger company feel so free to waste so much of your time asking you to do things that aren't valuable to the partnership or to the success of either company, or asking you to have the same conversation over and over again with different groups of people.

Back on point, the corporation has to "make do" with "Just A Job" workers because, in large part, the corporation creates them regardless of their initial state of motivation.

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

#726

Post by allenu » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #703

danans wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who Really Care about their work with the Just A Job crowd 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…

This point hit home for me: > but people that have experienced being embedded with Really Care workers are going to be appalled at the relative effectiveness. Unless you've experienced the Really Care type of team and situation, it's difficult to understand. I don't mean any disrespect to the Just A Job people. There is nothing wrong with keeping your head down, getting your work done, and checking it at the door whe…

I think one aspect we're not mentioning is the nature of the projects themselves.

This spectrum of Really Care vs Just A Job isn't entirely accurate. A lot of projects are honestly just hard to "really care" about. The technical work is uninteresting or the mission itself isn't interesting. The monetary goal of success could be the most interesting aspect (i.e. your startup makes it big and you're rich), but the day to day could just not be that compelling.

Over enough time, you will naturally go from a Really Care person to a Just A Job person given the right project environment. The novelty of a job will wear off.

There's no nobility in trying to really care about everything you are paid to do.

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

#727

Post by draw_down » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:42 PM UTC

deckard1 wrote: post #699

draw_down wrote: post #626

The entitlement is all over; talking about entitled employees keeps us from turning our attentions elsewhere. Because then we'd have to ask bigger questions and oh boy, our heads may begin to hurt. Let us not forget that industry heads have colluded to suppress pay for engineers. Let us not forget that in general, executives act as though we should be grateful for our pay, rather than being remunerated for building t…

There is definitely more to be said about this dichotomy between the Really Care vs. Doing A Job. The large tech companies are looking for young blood that also happens to be incredibly naive. They are the clueless, in the Gervais Principle[1]. Basically, idiot savants. In addition to colluding to suppress pay, here are ways they optimize for youth and naivety: - They call their HQs a "campus". They create an environ…

I don't really agree with any of this

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

#728

Post by esel2k » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

dmayle wrote: post #468

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.…

*This I came here to say something similar. I'm a founder, I've been a manager and a software engineer, I did 5 years @ Google. When I hear someone in "upper management / founder / in a position of power over employee's lives" say that what they really needed for their own success was a way to threaten/risk the livelihood of their employees so that they would work harder, it just makes me sad for anyone affected by t…

I came specifically to the comments for this. Yes, great comment from your side as I disagreed with the fire mentality of the article.

Even if sometimes people need to get fired, I’d say it is more important to make a good hire upfront and normally these people should be very capable and adapt to these dynamic environments. Just firing on the quickest difficulty says something about beeing rather a bad manager or not knowing how to hire / what to look for.

I’ve seen many incompetent managers firing their tech leader or program leaders just because it did not meet the set arbitrary delivery goals. By firing them it only reinforced the managing-by-fear way of working and lead to a cover-you-a* mentality that things just became even slower...

Thanks for your comment and I wish there were more managers like you!

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

#729

Post by sangnoir » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

greedo wrote: post #640

sangnoir wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way I'm not Ballmer's biggest fan, but I think he's often sold short (to Nadella's benefit), you'd almost believe Microsoft was tanking, but it grew a lot under Ballmer (mobile failures notwithstanding). As far as I can tell, Nadella just reprioritized projects that Ballmer launched or shepherded in his boring-but-efficient way: what new…

"The "post-pc" world suggested by Apple/Jobs never materialized." I think if you could measure the man hours spent using iDevices and Android devices, as a percentage of general computing hours, you'd find that it would dwarf anything. Everyone has a smartphone now. And tablet sales alone outnumber PCs.

You may be right, but the implied threat to Microsoft was that most/all Windows user's interactions would be mediated by iOS/Android apps, which would displace Windows apps and the browser. Fortunately for Microsoft, the latter didn't happen, and what at first appeared to be exponential app downloads turned out to be an S-Curve. It turns out people have a maximum number of apps they are willing to install and put up with, but this was not yet known at the height of the mobile wars when Microsoft was fighting to be #3.

I am sure someone inside Microsoft saw this early, and figured that Azure could be a platform-agnostic backend to mobile apps and browser-based apps, without having to completing with Apple since they lack core-competences there. Pivotally, tablets failed to replace desktops in the enterprise market, as was initially predicted (and feared by Microsoft).

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

#730

Post by kazen44 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 10:51 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #462

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…

It’s always seemed like more of a hassle to expense lunch/dinner etc. given what we’re getting paid. Who the hell wants to deal with concur for every lunch?! Then again, if your only goal is to extract as much money as possible from the corporate machine, it might work.

at my old job (roughly 60 people) the company just got regular lunch ingredients (usually some meats, cheese and just normal bread) for the entire company. culturally it was expected everyone had lunch in the common area from this stockpile. costs for this where deducted from your pay, but because it was bought at suchs a large scale it was very cheap compared to buying your own lunch or making it at home. (roughly 20€ per month I believe).

this system worked pretty nice imo, lunch wasn't anything fancy but it was healthy, cheap and having lunch with coworkers from other departments helped massively in regards to culture.