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Googler... ex-Googler

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Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#921

Post by drewlander »

ssimpson wrote: post #630
spicyusername wrote: post #468

I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp. Yep. One of the most unfortunate realities of modernity. Your managers, or your managers managers, or their managers don't care about you. At all. If you ask them on the weekend, they'll decry that the things they are asked to do are horrible. but they'll still do it. Some gladly. They are themselves cogs in the machine. A machine that goes all the way to the executive c…

I feel like its unfair to say every single direct manager doesn't care about their folks. I care about each and every person on my team, I care if they are engaged and if they can do their job. I care if they get sick and give them the time to make sure they feel better. I care about their career and try to help them along. Maybe I'm the minority, but I think that lots of managers of ICs should and do feel this way.…

Former racker here. When RAX laid me off, I was told there was no other place for me to go (which was not true). I loved my time there and the people I learned so much from and loved working with. It hurt. I had fantastic managers who did care, but the company changed and looking back I shouldn’t have been surprised. Cog in the machine. When I was a manager elsewhere I tried to show the same care my previous managers did. I cared even if those at the top didn’t.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#922

Post by bluecheese452 »

crazygringo wrote: post #725
anal_reactor wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I recommended learning how to separate your value from your employer. This is a very recent development. Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life, which means it was very much worth it to cultivate that relationship, it's only now that we change jobs every two years. A friend of mine has a company in a very small town, and was complaining about an employee…

> Through the entirety of human history you'd keep working for the same employer for your entire life This is... not true. It's so not true I don't even know where to start rebutting it. But for a start, most of human history you were either hunting and gathering for yourself, keeping a flock for yourself, or farming land for yourself. "Employment" even as a concept is a pretty new concept on the scale of human histo…

Heck even farming is a tiny sliver of time. Vast majority has been pre-agriculture.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#923

Post by Tainnor »

selimthegrim wrote: post #905
selimthegrim wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to do one of those for some local government lobbyists association in DC. They ended up hiring some undergrad instead.

And just got asked to do another one for an internship

Sorry to hear that. I feel that tech hiring has become full of weird gatekeepers that probably wouldn't even be able to pass their own weird challenges.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#924

Post by phtrivier »

fragmede wrote: post #894
phtrivier wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose organizing departure in an adult manner (Offer some time to finish task, pass on knowledge, etc... AND let the people leave earlier if they prefer - you know, the whole "think about the team" thing) would also violate someone's meritocratic free speech ?

Do you really need to make it a freedom of speech issue? can't it be recognized as a human as a pile of shit to rug pull someone like that and not let them at least cancel their own talk?

Sorry, sarcasm intended (I was riffing on the idea that anything ugly and unacceptable gets defended as "saving free speech", those days.)

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#925

Post by daqhris »

Sorry for you. The Open Source door is wide open. The flashing red pixels on the screen, seen when visiting the personal website, are a hint of what's known. The knowledge gained in a previous job is valuable to the rest of the world.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#926

Post by skybrian »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #795
DannyBee wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. It's sad since there is no excuse for it - plenty of companies conduct regular layoffs and role eliminations in more compassionate ways, it would not take much to survey and learn from their practices. Hell, IBM was often more compassionate about layoffs than Google. Some of it they've tried to become more formal about in ways that actually m…

> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. That is a very charitable way to look at it, when I worked their I started from that point as well. "Hey, this thing you just did, you did it really badly, can we workshop some ways to not do this so badly in the future?" And yet, again and again they would do something similar again and still do it badly. As the examples piled up, I was ab…

When I was there, someone getting fired was extremely rare, which doesn’t seem to fit well with “you can always replace people” line that you’re talking about?

But Google is a big place and it was long ago, so perhaps it’s a “blind men and the elephant” thing.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#927

Post by lproven »

ithkuil wrote: post #884
lproven wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Weird, as someone from Europe I've never experience anything else. Yeah, no. Also European, and have been marched out without notice, cut off that day with no chance to say goodbye, etc.

It would be interesting to know. 1. Which countries are we talking about? Europe is not homogeneous 2. Which type of business? Are workers unionized?

I have experienced this while working as a journalist in Britain and while working as a technical writer in the Czech Republic.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#928

Post by ChuckMcM »

skybrian wrote: post #926
ChuckMcM wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is just really bad at this, but seems to think it's not bad at this. That is a very charitable way to look at it, when I worked their I started from that point as well. "Hey, this thing you just did, you did it really badly, can we workshop some ways to not do this so badly in the future?" And yet, again and again they would do something similar again and still do it badly. As the examples piled up, I was ab…

When I was there, someone getting fired was extremely rare, which doesn’t seem to fit well with “you can always replace people” line that you’re talking about? But Google is a big place and it was long ago, so perhaps it’s a “blind men and the elephant” thing.

Yeah, I probably should have put firing in quotes since there are a zillion ways to get someone to leave. Being "Laid off" is a form of firing, telling someone all of their multipliers are being zeroed out so that they "quit" is a form of firing. Putting someone on a "performance improvement plan" where the requirements to get off that plan is to do really unpleasant work is a form of "firing." Lots of ways to get someone to walk out the door without having to escort them out. And if you went to the managing within the law class they gave it was clearly explained it was so much better if the employee "chose" to quit than Google "firing" them because involuntary termination carried with it the risks of being sued.

Did you ever run percent when you were there? I started at Google in 2006 and one of the 'fun' things people did was run the 'percent' command that would tell you what percentage of Google employees were 'newer' than you, so if it was 10% you knew that 10% of the people were new. I was curious how it worked and found that it just counted rows in a database that had active employee names and start dates. Pretty simple hack.

The amazing thing was how quickly the number grew! And at TGIF there were the Nooglers in their propeller caps and everyone was like wow look at all those newbies. About 6 months in I noticed two things, first there was like 25% of the company was newer than I was, and that the number of employees being reported in the financial reports was about the same as when I joined. One could do the math. Waves of people would be hired, large chunks of them wouldn't survive the first year, and another chunk wouldn't survive 'slotting'. They were just no longer at the company. After a couple of years, as I remember it there were three of us, out of about 30, from the group that joined when I did, still at the company.

When I looked for it, it was pretty clear there was a tremendous amount of 'churn' in employment. I asked Lazlo Bock about it once, he was heading up 'People Operations' at the time and he assured me there were always plenty of candidates in the pipeline and Google wanted only the best and brightest. The people we had? Well they weren't always a good fit "culturally" with the company, after all Google was unlike any company that had ever existed, right?

It was just one of the more egregious times where the 'actions' and the 'words' didn't actually communicate the same message.

Re: Googler... ex-Googler

#930

Post by codybontecou »

azangru wrote: post #573
whiplash451 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't Google given up on tensorflow for JAX now? It looks like tensorflow is going down the slow legacy/sunset trajectory at this point.

Have they given up on tensorflow.js for the browser as well? Is there any replacement?

Is Transformers.js a replacement?
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