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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

#81

Post by aoeusnth1 »

miki123211 wrote: post #76
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.

Boq/Pod: canonical service frameworks and configuration automation all-in-one system. Boq and Pod give you blueprints for server configs, deployment, server discovery, environments + release pipelines, monitoring, alerting, canary analysis, functional testing, integration testing, unit testing and presubmit, server throttling, etc etc all for free with automated setup.

P2020 + Rollouts: This is for intent-driven deployment, where deployment configuration for jobs, networks, pubsub topics, and other resources are declaratively checked into source, and the Annealing system automatically finds diffs against production state and resolves those diffs (aka a rollout).

Automated job sizing: load-trend driven automated capacity planning. Separate from autopilot, which is a more time-sensitive autoscaler. This will actually make configuration changes based on trends in traffic, and request quota for you automatically (with your approval).

BCID: this is for verifiable binaries and configs in prod, where it requires two parties to make source changes, two parties to make config changes, two parties to approve non-automated production changes, and only verified check-in binaries and configs can run in prod, not stuff you build on your desktop machine.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#82

Post by yellow_postit »

tdb7893 wrote: post #73
zeroCalories wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 promote…

L5 is a great terminal level (and the equivalent at other companies). you are trusted to walk and chew gum at the same time, can cause meaningful damage (good and bad), and largely “too lowly” to be in the perpetual pissing matches of mid/upper mgmt. sure you won’t control your own destiny in broader projects but it’s a good life you often don’t miss till you’re past it.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#83

Post by zrobotics »

ethbr1 wrote: post #39
skybrian wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although there were some rough areas, Google has been considered to have pretty advanced software engineering for 20 years or more. There was plenty for a new engineer to boggle at even then. On the other hand, someone who started in 2015 missed out on the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt. That’s about when the culture started turning against “big tech” in…

> the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt It's been interesting to see the tech and public zeitgeist shift on this. Lesson: if you're going to be popular for killing a king, be careful how similarly the thing you place on your head starts to look to a crown.

Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business.

I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's possible to avoid Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix, but by 2015 it started to become nearly impossible to avoid Google or their products.

Not sure if that's the reason public opinion shifted, I'd started to get worried about the same time I also dropped my Facebook account, so ~2011. I have successfully managed to avoid Facebook products and tracking, but I had to give up on avoiding Google, it's simply not possible unless one is willing to make extreme sacrifices. So i kinda gave up, it was starting to become digital masochism. There's a very bitter irony in me typing this on a pixel 8,but I've just accepted that there isn't any avoiding Google tracking my online life so I've just stopped caring as much as I used to.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#84

Post by bruce511 »

tombert wrote: post #71
enneff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've spent my career on the opposite side of the fence. I work for a tiny company, and I report to "mostly" no-one.

I add value, I choose (mostly) what value to add, and my division is profitable.

I recently did some consulting for a large company. It reaffirmed for me that my path was right for me. I haven't made as much money as my corporate brethren, but the endless treadmill of meaningless work, manager meetings, measurement-by-jira and so on would have spit me out early.

I enjoy the creativity of my work, the direct interaction with customers (especially when they like me :) - the intuition to see how things could be better, and the freedom yo execute on it.

My path to joy is not for everyone, others get joy from bringing on a large team - that's OK- each person needs to find their own path.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#85

Post by I_AM_A_SMURF »

dave333 wrote: post #34

The traditional view is that young engineers should join startups in hope of a massive payoff if one goes big, but working for 10 years at BigCo with good salary and stock plans can set you up for life without any risk. One path to avoid is the one I took which was to work at a big tech co as a contractor. Good rates but nothing to show for it after 10 years other than the experience and whatever I had put in my 401K…

I don't know that sounds very optimistic. I'm 10 in tech and L6 now. I'm definitely not set for life, like, not even close.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#86

Post by justinclift »

rr808 wrote: post #64
orev wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for recognizing what SRE/SysAdmins have to deal with all the time. I think in general that type of experience would help Developers be more empathetic to the operations side of things. Those fires often come from trade-offs made in development.

Yeah if you're a SRE or admin good luck. I think some companies are much better at looking after you than others so make sure you find somewhere good. I think it made me a better developer because I've seen a lot of what can go wrong. Probably reduces my productivity but ultimate my stuff is more likely to work.

> stuff is more likely to work.

Yeah, that's the essential mechanic of it. When "stuff is more likely to work" then everyone can build upon it.

Though at some point(s) that stable foundation needs updating too, so new stuff can be built upon it. That's where the choosing the right balance for the right pieces needs figuring out.

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#87

Post by [deleted] »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #18
rabbits77 wrote: post #13

I recently left a job at a very different large company with a similar timeframe (a little under ten years). Pretty much everything this author states is related to my experience. There is nothing all that special about Google. Maybe there was twenty years ago, but that ship has long since sailed. It’s just another large US tech company. Like Microsoft and IBM before it.

> It’s just another large US tech company. Like Microsoft and IBM before it. This is just a hyperbolic statement that should not be taken seriously at all. Look, Google isn't some fantasy land that some people might have lauded it as once upon a time, and it isn't unique in terms of pay or talent, but it is certainly at the top echelon. I did an interview loop for high level IC at both Azure and GCP simultaneously an…

[deleted]

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#88

Post by justinclift »

zrobotics wrote: post #83
ethbr1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt It's been interesting to see the tech and public zeitgeist shift on this. Lesson: if you're going to be popular for killing a king, be careful how similarly the thing you place on your head starts to look to a crown.

Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business. I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's po…

> I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten.

I'm personally more of the opinion that Google has caused enough serious issues for enough people - with famously no way to get the issues resolved - that they themselves seeded or caused the negative public opinion.

Combine that with Google behaviour of clearly doing things in their own interest even when not to their user's benefit (manifest v3 proposal is a good example), and many people are like "screw Google". ;)

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#89

Post by nazcan »

miki123211 wrote: post #76
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.

These are well-lit paths, that try to make it easy to take a server you want to run in production, and give you reasonable releases/monitoring/canarying for free (e.g. no one should have to configure something that stops pushes that are causing crashes of the updates tasks).

Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

#90

Post by I_AM_A_SMURF »

cperciva wrote: post #74

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+ involve…

What? Especially at Amazon a Principal engineer (equivalent to Google L6) is a pretty rare beast in some areas of the company. Sure there are some hip orgs with a lot of senior engineers, but in general it's not a common position at all. Isn't L10 a VP at Amazon? Never heard of one doing any real engineering work.
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