911–920 of 1001 posts
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I found this comment rather funny.
I'm aware I don't contribute anything valuable yet. No hard feelings :). On the contrary, I'm trying to get to the point I can sustain my own small projects and stop worrying about Corporate America once and for all.
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Have you written anywhere about your product creation? I would like to create a product and it seems like there's a lot of unique things to get past. I'm looking for resources.
I have written about technical things (how I choose technologies, what to avoid, reasons I went from language X to Y, etc). I never had any interesting social interactions from the blog/writing and the internal pressure to keep it updated eventually wore me out, so I got rid of the blog. I have considered distilling everything into a book, complete with a working application. I'm more interested in the technical aspe…
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Funny how they're bad at this from start to end. Most of these comments talk about the "end" part, but don't forget: Google has a notoriously laggy hiring process with extreme delays and an unacceptably high level of silence on important issues from recruiters. I have been ghosted so heavily from recruiters TWICE at Google when I was literally telling them "Hey I have offers from $x and $y and I need to decide in 2 w…
Totally unrelated, but I was once contacted by an Amazon recruiter and sent him my resume. He called me to discuss my experience, one of which mentioned that I worked in an environment where my team managed "30,000+ servers". He took the opportunity to say something along the lines of "that's irrelevant, that's smaller than one datacenter in one of our regions". I honestly have no idea why the recruiters from these p…
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Tech is always boom/bust. We’re lucky to have had a long boom. I’m personally well acquainted with many people in tech, especially big tech. Many of them are doing little or nothing, certainly not justifying $300k+ salaries. What you do has risk but is fundamentally more honest - your skills are around technology and output, not navigating corporate bureaucracy.
During the first “bust” in 2000 I had four years of experience and living and working in Atlanta - far away from a tech hub. Boring old enterprise dev jobs at banks, insurance companies, etc weren’t affected and I was easily able to get offers. I worked at a company where utility companies sent us data files and we created, printed and mailed bills. In 2008 during the financial crisis the next time I looked for a job…
That was painful to read. I had a very similar experience at Google about a year ago, and the worst part of it was that they did it 2 weeks before I was set to receive a 6-figure retention bonus for sticking around for 2 years after an acquisition. Several other members of my team got the boot at the same time. All of us had come in via that acquisition and were set to receive that bonus, and because of the layoffs,…
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If anyone here has only worked in the EU and wants to see what the US layoff process is supposed to be on a good day, just watch the movie Margin Call and the scene where Eric Dale is called into the office by HR to be fired. There's a scene where they put a folder in front of him with a brightly-coloured sailboat on the cover labelled "LOOKING AHEAD." It's exactly as grim as it sounds.
Up in the Air was another great depiction of the most cynical mode of doing layoffs. And, of course, Office Space.
"I'm told this comes as a shock to my managers and other Chrome team leaders. I'm told it's not based on merit" If your manager is shocked by one of their team being laid off, the manager is probably next. Of course the OP was told it wasn't based on merit, or any other arguable-in-court characteristic. But it was. Someone decided Google was better off this way, or that OP was better off working somewhere else.
Eh - having had to do these myself at Google for large orgs over the past few years, i would not assume it was based on merit. The cost disparities can be huge between team members and locations, and a lot of time it's being done to hit some EOY or mid-year budget number. They are also slowly trying to clean up location strategy. So it's entirely possible it was based on cost and location, and not merit. It would sti…
If I got paid 5x someone else, shouldn't I be producing 5x?
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Government jobs are safe because rarely if ever people get fired.
This comment is hilarious. Like someone was placed in a time machine and missed the last few months.
Layoffs are a difficult thing for employees and their managers. I have seen people (one was a VP of Engineering) escorted out of the building, sent in a cab to home along with a security guard (this was in India), not allowed access to computer or talk with other employees. But, recently have had a very different experience. The current company I work for announced 30% layoffs. The list was made public within one hou…
For anyone not from India — India does layoffs in every way. From “cut on zoom in 90 sec” to “please know that you have to resign and serve your two months notice and then go”; to also “if you want you can serve the notice period, or you can just leave today and still get the pay for two months”. I have experienced the first and last and in the case of last for some reason I had chosen to serve the notice.