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

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

#731

Post by igorstellar »

mathattack wrote: post #716
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is disastrously to Care when you are surrounded by an army that doesn’t.

Why so? I think this is the way to be promoted/lead things. You don't have to live and die with your project but there are definitely a few opportunities that are opening up if "you care and army that doesn't". I believe calling your colleagues "army that doesn't care" is a bit disrespectful and this is what is wrong with "I care so much" people at big companies.

upd: I did generalize "I care so much" people as well; but I do consider myself one.

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

#732

Post by kazen44 »

sorisos wrote: post #542
bsaul wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in my personnal experience, the only kind of companies that are really comfortable to employees (in terms of perks) and adopt a slow rythm, are benefiting from some kind of monopolistic, regulatory situation. Either public sector companies, or banks & insurance whose business model can't be disrupted that easily because of regulatory pressures. Giant IT companies from the valley that successfully built a way to lock…

could also be a niche market product created a decade ago that some other large company depends on. money keeps rolling in with little effort. source: personal experience. the company is no longer in operation but it lasted for a god 30 years.

another example is a company which is highly specialised in making a certain thing. (for instance some kind of widget for a specific kind of industrial machine). usually demand is stable enough to keep the company healthy for a long time, but scale up is not necessary because the demand isn't there.

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

#733

Post by igorstellar »

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…

You're really referring to these generalization structures like Gervais principle which should be considered at least as a sarcasm? There is nothing wrong with people who care to work for companies Google, I know many and I'm one of them. Your comparison with Philip Morris is way off, Google produces so many things at once serving so many people and communities every day. Honestly, your comment reads as if it was written by burnt out corporate worker – very negative and arrogant.

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

#734

Post by thethethethe »

dshpala wrote: post #711
thethethethe wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> offensive to a small vocal minority I really don't see how this is an excuse. it's like saying "black people are a minority in the US so who cares if they say they are oppressed"

This analogy is a bit careless. You can't just throw BLM around, or we'll end up with stuff like: "So yeah, this code is bad and I'm the only one who thinks so, but not caring about my opinion is like not caring about oppression of black people!".

> This analogy is a bit careless.

I disagree. The OP was essentially arguing that being offensive to a group of people is okay if that group is a minority. I was simply demonstrating how absurd that argument is when directly applied to a specific group of people.

I honestly don't even understand your analogy, it isn't similar to what I was saying at all. It is pretty safe to assume the author of the article was saying offensive things to a group of people, not having an unpopular opinion about something in general. These are two very different things that any sensible person with empathy would be able to differentiate. So, because of these inherent differences, your slippery slope argument makes no sense and is not be reflected in actual social interactions

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

#735

Post by igorstellar »

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'm actually surprised by amount of hate to FAANG people here at HN. It's like each and every one of them contributed to each and every worst case that happened to the company. Many of us are actually doing things to change for better inside of the company. If you leave you can't fix things any more.

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

#736

Post by tasuki »

nonameiguess wrote: post #625
iandanforth wrote: post #108

I think his derision of entitled ladder-climbing employees is valid from the perspective of someone who sees "building something valuable" as the point of employment. There is a whole community however that sees wealth acquisition as the point of employment. Even if it's "merely" joining the ranks of the top 5% this is lauded as success by many. Lawyers, doctors, consultants, stock traders, all the high paying profes…

This guy is deluded about the meaning of his product. I was a Waze user. It saved me a few minutes here and there getting to work, and that was worth the $0 it cost me. If he ever forced an employee to miss even a single kid's soccer game to save me two minutes getting to work, though, I no longer feel that is worth it. I spent most of the past five years working on projects for the US geointelligence enterprise wher…

> I was in the Army for 8 years fighting wars.

Was that worth it? Do you consider that superior to working on trifling conveniences?

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

#738

Post by kazen44 »

guytv wrote: post #549
guyzero wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the risk of being not politically correct myself, I think there are significant cultural gaps between the west coast American standard and people from Israel (Bardin is Isralei). With the caveat that this is my experience only, Israelis are more blunt, direct and often openly critical vs Americans, especially Californians. They're often right and all the ones I've worked with have been very smart, but the way a me…

Israeli here. cultural gaps are very much alive and kicking During my career I've worked with people around the world, all in the Tech industry. Israeli-Californian cultural gap is huge. It is made worse by the fact that Israelis usually have a good English level, some even have an okay accent - which makes their US counterpart expect them to use the same communication etiquette they are used to. Californians will go…

an old coworker of mine used to see conflict as a good thing because it means people are invested in whatever is being discussed. I tend to agree with him.

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

#739

Post by laurent92 »

choppaface wrote: post #598
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!…

While I totally agree with your Really Care and Just A Job characterization, I think that money does play a significant role in overall picture. People behave very differently after they run into six, seven, eight figures. And that behavior isn’t perfectly correlated with how much they put into the job. There’s a fair place for the “entitled” narrative, and when these people have outsized leverage on the company or p…

“For a million dollars, anything is your passion”

Joel on Software used to explain that rich entrepreneurs always sound passionate, but it is useless to try to emulate passion, because a big success can make someone passionate for anything. (...and I confirm – since we make 70k€ a month per cofounder, I became more passionate).

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

#740

Post by hnick »

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…

Naive usually, but sometimes they just have more energy and less accumulated mental clutter (bills and life concerns).

I cared more when I started work because I had my hands on the code and logs and could fix things quickly. This kind of agency was empowering even in an industry I didn't care about. Solving problems was fun.

Now we have layers of bureaucracy, helpdesk tickets take weeks to return basic information that I no longer have access to, I don't know the names of anyone there because we must work with The System and not individuals, and we have frequent outages which seem to result in no fundamental fixes or changes. It's a culture of mediocrity and I can't see extra effort being rewarded (intrinsically and extrinsically) anymore.

The issue of course is that I now have a lot of experience in one place with older tools and that doesn't transfer well. So keep this in mind, kids.

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