What in God's Holy Name Are You Blathering About! - my reaction to most of the ideas coming from SRE like 'class SRE implements interface DevOps'
Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
91–100 of 255 posts
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#92All 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…
In case of Google, it's not just the size of company. It's the fact that the company makes it's money from selling ads. No matter how well you do your job, the end result is only that more ads were sold.
Programming is a superpower that can change the world. Yet the best paying jobs for programmers are at FAANGs building systems to peddle ads. .
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's easy to be underleveled at a BigCo job, and to not even realize what that means because the leveling system is obtuse from the outside. You can spend many years fighting the bureaucracy just getting your title/comp to catch up to your skills.
One nice thing about being <= L5 is that your vacations are actual vacations. I can disappear for months, totally ignore my email, and have nothing be on fire when I come back.
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#94The 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?
Comp is higher at L6 and lower in London, so I don't know how that balances but…
If you spent the last 9y at Google in SF/NYC (the top comp regions), you'd have a million dollars in stock alone. It doesn't go as far as it did 9 years ago, but it's still ahead of a whole lot of people in this economy.
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#95If you don't enjoy waking up at 4am, work on mobile. Once a new app release is on the phone, nothing is going to make it suddenly break and there is no hurry to send the new release to all users advance, go through internal employee testing and then roll out slowly so that any breakage doesn't affect a lot of users.
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#96> USA centric culture, if you are not in USA at Google and don’t have a big presence in a location it’s a bit like swimming upstream, it’s easy to feel isolated, sidelined or on the flipside overwhelmed with late meetings It's like the fourth time I read/hear this. I understand that it's a tricky one to adress.
This is US companies in general! Never work for one in another country; if you can help it. All decisions will be centralized to the US head office and require face to face. Communication is generally terrible. I’ve worked for European and Asian owned companies, and they seem to be able to handle distributed authority much better. For the “land of the free”, it sure seems like US companies run on a feudal system.
REALLY? Japanese companies are an example of non-hierarchical culture with distributed decision making?
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#97I'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…
And for anyone still considering SRE: when interviewing, ask how incentives/bonuses/promotions work for software engineers and how does that compare to SREs. A lot of promotable activities for SWE (shipping new things constantly) have negative value for an SRE role, since continually changing infrastructure ensures on-call never develops mastery of those systems.
I had to blink a few times because I could've written this myself.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/1cg14pk/comment/l1sutn...
Back to the OP, I raise a glass to your sabbatical. Most SREs end up needing a healing period from repetitive stress injury (AKA burnout).
If I may offer some completely unsolicited advice, don't put too much pressure on yourself in the next few months. People who gravitate towards SRE work tend to thrive under short-term ambiguity and emergency/urgency. However, long/medium term ambiguity without a clear productive goal can quickly feel like a crisis. OP mentions this in closing, so I'm rooting for them to rest and "sit still" for a bit.
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#98There 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…
> 10 years ago if you were operating at scale you still racked your own servers
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#99L6 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.
Principal Engineer is L7 at a Amazon. So if that's the same as a Google L6 I guess the scales are a bit different.
As for L10, that's Distinguished Engineer. I think if they're managers they're also called VPs? I'm not exactly sure what the deal is there; but I know plenty of Amazon L10s who are fantastic engineers.
Re: Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
#100Earlier 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…
Google was the company that kept making the web better in every way. Amazing search, endless services each with solid json APIs, a fast multi-process web-browser, & investment in the web as a whole.
Google killed the king, and the king was the desktop. The king was apps. Microsoft seemed omnipotent & in total control, and the rise of the web isn't totally Google's but they sure did a lot and they sure rode that wave.
My personal feeling is that Google lost the ball in the g+ era. Up until then, it felt like Google understood their role was to help others create value, that they had to offer APIs and platforms to let other developers onto the platform, let other people expand the value proposition. G+ was an about face, a totalizing product push, and one that offered nothing to the world. Essentially no API offered. Google wanted to make g+, they wanted to run itz and if you wanted to use it, you needed to use their client and your account with them.
Where-as in the past, with efforts like Buzz, they we're trying to expand the protocols & value of the web as a whole. Once they gave up on platform & tried to be a product company, it was much harder to believe in the futures they were trying to sell.