Leaving Google

http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2021/07/leaving-google.html

by edward • 5 years ago

478 302 5 years ago

josteink• 5 years ago

What an incredibly level-headed write-up.

Imagine working somewhere for 17 years and then facing this:

The full story is complex but effectively a bureaucratic mistake led to my position falling into question, despite plenty of support for keeping me around from my immediate management chain.

I’ll just go ahead and admit that had this happened to me, I would certainly act a bit more salty over it.

nly• 5 years ago

What is he implying here? He was told he could work remotely and then they went back on it?

vishnugupta2• 5 years ago

my position falling into question

I interpreted it as the powers that be began to question the value of his role/position.

thrwawayxoogler• 5 years ago

Xoogler in a throwaway account.

If you look at the linked "my move away from California" post, you'll see that he moved to the Portland, Oregon area during the pandemic.

* EDIT *

He says that he was working out of the Portland office, but the majority of open engineering roles there (not many in total) are very specialized.

My guess is that post-pandemic, now that Google offices will be re-opening, they don't want people spread all over the place, and he wasn't willing to move back to California. While his managers were most likely supportive of him working fully remote, Google isn't very flexible when it comes to fully remote work.

reedf1• 5 years ago

I'm sure this is the sort of person that made google what it is - it's probably a nightmare if they lose enough of these clear-thinking problem solvers with a history of long-term success. When I think "big google salary" I want to think it's going to someone like this, but in reality it's probably going to someone else.

yeuxardents2• 5 years ago

feelings I have towards the US as a US citizen: it's a place that I know is filled with brilliant, kind, interesting people, and it's a place that has given me nearly everything in my life, including the money to buy the home I now live in and even the health insurance responsible for the birth of my son — but it's also ultimately not something to be anthropomorphized, but rather a faceless machine that makes often bad decisions that I don't have any real influence over.

The country that gave me millions sucks.

You are not MEANT to have ultimate decision making over anything, thats why you are a cog, in a machine, making 500k$ per year. and you get to complain about it from your mansion SECOND house in arizona, while transiting from palo alto first mansion.

fake-name• 5 years ago

Do you not understand that both of the things can be true?

yeuxardents2• 5 years ago

Could you be more specific about both things that may be true?

chalst2• 5 years ago

This is actually a worse take than "Yet you participate in society! Curious!"

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

wydfre• 5 years ago

It is a mindless bureaucracy until Google becomes the first company with an AI as a CEO. Don’t hate management; plan on replacing it. I would be so happy to work for an autonomous corporation.

eitland• 5 years ago

If it is line their other AIs (and most other AIs I see except in games) I really don't want to work with it:

A small collection of fantastic stuff made possible by modern ai from Google and Amazon: https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails

hfern• 5 years ago

A wonderful quote on your line of thinking --

“When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality.”

― Russell Brand

renewiltord2• 5 years ago

Haha what a colossal fuck up from the HR or whatever clown. Imagine losing a top engineer over a bureaucratic error.

Well, a win for Figma at least.

otabdeveloper42• 5 years ago

over a bureaucratic error

Doesn't sound like an error to me.

Getting rid of "legacy employees" is always a huge pain in the ass, sounds like his management found a solution. (Even though, frankly, a cowardly one.)

katbyte• 5 years ago

Guess that all depends on your view of legacy employees who took a company to where it is today

renewiltord2• 5 years ago

Honestly, didn’t really consider this, but based on what I know, Google isn’t one to stop people from resting and vesting so it’s a bit strange to interpret this as an attempt from them to offload someone.

They don’t usually care. I know a couple of people who do very little every day.

finjo• 5 years ago

"Legacy employees" sounds like code for "employees we could replace with cheaper new grads".

thrdbndndn3• 5 years ago

I honestly don't understand what "bureaucratic error" means in this context. Does it imply office politics?

Surely even Google won't let a top engineer leave due to purely administrative issues.

girvo2• 5 years ago

Surely even Google

I think it's _more_ likely to happen at a company the scale of Google, frankly.

high_derivative• 5 years ago

As a FAANG employee, the way this typically happens is this:

There is some sort of team reshuffle, someone moving to a new project and so on. Another team agrees to take on a high level IC (I assume this guy was at least L8-9). At that level, this move is approved by a VP. Person moves, headcount is filled/removed at his old team. Then new VP decides he is not ok with some part of the working arrangement (e.g. remote, scope). Person is now given a few weeks to find a few project/team, but most teams cannot accommodate senior ICs at that level easily.

Boom, out of a job. Basically VP backroom dealings. It's just 'bureaucracy', and seniority almost does not matter. The only way to stop it at that point would be calling other VPs or SVPs for favours.

In fact, seniority works against you here, because it becomes more political, while nobody cares about a low level IC switching around, and almost any org can absorb a solid L5 contributor.

vl8• 5 years ago

Google is notoriously stupid about remote work. While bunch of people did it under the rag or by special arrangements, default policy was “no”. They run infamous “defrags” by trying consolidating projects in fewer location in process fucking up teams, products and making people leave.

Anyway, here probably HR got a sniff of employee relocating, and while they emailed back-and-forth arguing, it pissed him enough that he decided to bug out. Or maybe some manager used this as opportunity to skillfully kick him out presenting it on the outside as “error”.

psyc5• 5 years ago

I really wish he’d explained, because I can’t figure out how that could happen and not be trivial to fix. I have no idea what goes on in Google, but I worked at Microsoft HQ for many years. Sure, it’s overwhelmingly gargantuan in many ways, but if I got ‘accidentally fired’ the most likely thing is my manager would find out about it and fix it before I even found out. In the event that it fell on me to act, I could stroll down the hall to my manager, my skip level, or the general manager. And if the GM didn’t want me gone, somebody above them (and that does not include HR) would have to positively want me gone, or it wouldn’t happen.

Perhaps this person actually wanted to leave, and so decided it was like a sign that it was a good time to go.

raverbashing2• 5 years ago

The full story is complex but effectively a bureaucratic mistake led to my position falling into question, despite plenty of support for keeping me around from my immediate management chain.

So Google fails again at have an actual thinking person do some thinking. Sounds like their customer support. sigh

And the end paragraph is on point.

joering2• 5 years ago

google became such a numb bureaucratic monolith, its really sad, thinking my adventure with internet started around the time Altavista stopped being a think (now mostly using Duck).

I used to have gSuite account until I tried to cancel it. There was simply no way! Someone would ask bunch of verification questions via ticket, got them all answered including CNAME domain verification and 2 weeks of silence when I would email them again, a new person would take over the ticket and the whole process of providing the same answers (sometimes previous CS person didn't even wiped out my answers when he hit "reply to") over and over again. I gave up after 2 months and started with chargeback disputes. Since its a corporate account there is too many things attached to my cards so I won't be canceling it. But sure as hell every months for 11 months now, I get charged $6, call my bank and week later got it back through a chargeback dispute. I figured by now its cost them close to $300. And nothing. Just this morning I called my card and sure as every month I disputed the transaction again, explaining that the customer support is non existent. Of course they can bleed billions and I'm not even statistical noise, but goes to show that even the most sophisticated company on the face of Earth can be screwing up pretty easily.

amelius• 5 years ago

google became such a numb bureaucratic monolith, its really sad

It's the same with all those other FAANG companies. Working for them must be very close to being a public servant.

borkt• 5 years ago

As a public servant the op’s post basically describes my past year as well. People with no long term view on an institution completely misread a situation and refused to do any investigation into what was actually going on. The difference in public service is I got sent on the road to forced resignation specifically because I was working 2-4 hours unpaid each day against policy (without saying a word) to cover for others and keep our departments role in the agency together, which i don’t think would ever Be an issue at google.

rightbyte2• 5 years ago

In my experience public servants got way more autonomy in their decisions then any private worker. Saying no is like ... a no. And then there is a formal paper trail to turn it over if anyone wants to.

kylehotchkiss• 5 years ago

Really nice to hear from somebody who stuck with a company for the long haul. I'm trying to do the same thing, and in my agency I've gotten about half as far as you with interesting and challenging projects while maintaining a unique personal life. All the best at Figma and I hope that if you enjoy it enough to stick around you get another great 17 year run :)

DoreenMichele2• 5 years ago

At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me.

Because of the TypeScript work I was also one of ~30 "global approvers", with the access to to approve code changes to any project at the company.

Oof. Google will regret this snafu.

I hope he's happy at his new job.

cairo1402• 5 years ago

I worked on the infra team for a TypeScript-based product downstream of the author. His and his team's approach and writings influenced at a lot of my thinking about core development, and I'll always be grateful for having had the opportunity to learn from them by osmosis.

The success or failure with which any companies hires and retains folks like these is a mystery to me. As the evidence shows, Google (and I suspect almost any >100-person company) is far too much an amorphous glob/slime mold to even have a single coherent approach to this problem. But what are the successful strategies here? How important is it even to retain this kind of talent? How do we know how a company is even doing in this regard?

In my meager-in-comparison 6.5 years at Google, while I certainly saw many amazing SWEs come and many go, I'm far from knowing what the real trajectory was. But I can imagine that for many folks, the perceived trajectory would be a major motivating or demotivating factor to stay or to leave themselves.

HappyTypist3• 5 years ago

Any large corporation needs to eliminate the bus factor of individual contributors (those who don't pay the management and politics game). You can't have an universally respected engineering legend contradict the board of directors; and the CEO it installs and influences.

Thus, you could argue that faceless, kafkaesque, "out of anyone's control" systems for talent management are a feature with trade-offs, not a bug.

While I have not worked at Google, simply being a user of its products for the past two decades has taught me that so much of its company culture and values have changed; and rarely for the better.

ghaff8• 5 years ago

Of course, you don't want a bus factor with executives either although it generally becomes more complicated as you get higher up at a company. You're not going to casually replace a CEO though you're not going to just shut down the company if they get hit with a bus either.

varispeed7• 5 years ago

This is quite simple:

- pay. These companies may be paying more than average and amazing if you compare to non-technical jobs, but as an engineer committing your best years to become great at what you do, you find yourself still not being able to afford even a small flat in the area where you work. Meanwhile you hear your company boasting about another record year and billions flowing in. Unfortunately they won't share those with you. That's demotivating and you feel being taken advantage of.

- lack of flexibility. For example managers pushing for pairing at all cost and with disregard to neurodivergent people. At the same messaging about equality, support for various social issues and so on. That creates dishonest image of the company and makes you think this is all bs and cheap PR rather than genuine care.

- Exploitation. Some companies expect you to do unpaid overtime or that you'll answer your phone outside of work hours. If you want me to work, you pay - I am not a charity.

- Rules designed to appease insecure managers, like having to be in person in the office so the manager can "watch you" and be "hands-on" with his or hers team. Again, company is boasting how great they are for the environment and at the same time they drag hundreds of people each day to the office for no reason. We have great tools to do work remotely, there is no longer a need to be in the office. Sell the office and give employees a bonus.

- open plan office. I just can't focus in those. There is only so long I can stand wearing noise cancelling headphones and I don't want to hear people behind me chatting loudly what they had for lunch, with occasional bursts of laughter that is piercing my ears. I found that often I actually done the work in the evening at home, whereas the whole time in the office I had to pretend I am busy. One time when I was offered a promotion I asked for private office. The CTO said it's only for him and the board. Well, I quit next month.

bohemian993• 5 years ago

Retention of very senior people really comes down to those people and their personal reasons. I don't think it's a group of people who all want the same thing, so it's impossible to make a general retention plan.

And realistically, the reason you want them to stay is because they are someone who has figured out how to operate and impact the organization without needing too much guidance or direction.

But I think it's why there are all the generic lifestyle perks and competition for titles like "Best Place To Work".

yla92• 5 years ago

His and his team's approach and writings influenced at a lot of my thinking about core development, and I'll always be grateful for having had the opportunity to learn from them by osmosis.

Would you like to share with the rest of us a few wisdom here?

cairo1402• 5 years ago

There's no secret sauce. The typical aphorisms of software development are generally correct and apply here:

* internalize the cost of core changes and don't push them downstream unless you have a really good reason * staff a core team to take care of high ROI horizontal efforts that have high fixed cost to do efficiently, e.g. TypeScript migration of a massive codebase * be careful of what you take on * complexity and code are costs and not end goals

Reading them is one thing but seeing the principles play out in detail amidst the mess of reality was illuminating for me. The author's blog[1] touches on these themes a bit more and I think are a good glimpse into their stewardship of the TS/JS codebase.

[1] http://neugierig.org/software/blog/

xoogler20044• 5 years ago

As a xoogler who interviewed way back in 2004, let me say that this post sums up my feelings exactly. The people I worked with at Google back then weren’t necessarily there for high six figure salaries. We were there to work with other people like us. We were there to be part of something larger than ourselves. In some sense I felt alone most of the time, and when I interviewed I felt as if I had found my tribe. These are people who made me feel dumb, but also astutely aware that I could improve. I learned so much during my tenure there, and I regret none of it. Perhaps I do regret taking so long to realize the sense of purpose and mission died when Emerald Sea started and good projects (reader, google talk, code search) were being canabalized to prop up a pipe dream that was never going to work. That’s the nexus event in Google’s time line… where things went askew and never came back to normal. Now people only care about perf, OKRs, and levels. Being a poor new grad with no savings and intentionally picking projects that would not get you promoted (but were fun) was frequent back then. The courage to do new things is rewarded in ways different than titles and symbols. Perhaps no “one” is more cognizant of that than the anthropomorphic Google of today.

dehrmann• 5 years ago

The people I worked with at Google back then weren’t necessarily there for high six figure salaries. We were there to work with other people like us.

I wonder how much this used to apply to the Valley as a whole.

xoogler20044• 5 years ago

More than we want to admit and not enough to get us to stay.

Aeolun3• 5 years ago

Probably a lot, especially before the money came flooding in.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 5 years ago

The people I worked with at Google back then weren’t necessarily there for high six figure salaries. We were there to work with other people like us.

As an older dev, who isn’t a “cultural fit,” I can vouch for this. It ended up becoming my bane.

It forced me into an early retirement (I never made the huge gobs of money that people seem to make, these days, but I lived frugally, and invested fairly well).

The end result, for me, is that I am now happier than I have ever been in my life. I’m architecting and constructing software that shames anything I ever worked on, as a younger dev. I’m exploring software development practices that my employers never let me do (and that are working well).

I’m not making any money at it, but I’ve never actually done this stuff for the money.

“other people like us” has changed, over the years. Folks like me, are now an anachronism.

Of course, the thing about grey hair and cultural awkwardness, is that it comes with decades of experience in shipping software. That’s not something that comes in a Cracker Jack box (an example of said “cultural awkwardness”).

I wouldn’t have had the guts to make this move, on my own. I had to be forced into it.

So, it sucked, and was humiliating and scary, but, in the aggregate, things have turned out OK.

ghaff8• 5 years ago

Probably quite a bit. Pre-dotcom, Valley salaries mostly didn't scale with higher cost of living. (There are still CoL issues of course, but not as much at the mid/senior FAANG level.) It's one reason I never moved there from the East Coast.

Nican• 5 years ago

I work at at a large corporation, and that is one balance that I am also constantly fighting and never seem to get it right. Having to provide a "Business justification"/OKRs for every technical feature has been soul draining experience, and while I can still make progress in making the product and drive the business forward, I have a hard time justifying spending the time in the little details that I would consider what makes a product really great.

I feel like the cycle turned one of making power point presentations of how the product has all the required features, but the overarching story and experience does not feel quite right. And I have been looking for advice on how to convey the importance to polish up the product.

xoogler20044• 5 years ago

Truthfully? Prioritizing bottom up innovation has to oddly enough happen from the top down. Give middle and front line managers the responsibility and mandate to continually foster such a culture, and that’s what this is, culture. If you’re stuck in a company that doesn’t do this… and if you want to do amazing things, just be honest with yourself - is this the place for you?

atulatul• 5 years ago

Business justifications and soul draining experiences?

We follow SAFe agile and do our innovation work in IP sprint at the end of PI. Of course half of the IP sprint is dedicated to planning for the next PI. :-)

tiborsaas• 5 years ago

That's mind blowing how frustrating it can be. I had to come up with way to justify my product manager that implementing a loading spinner animation is essential. I failed.

linspace• 5 years ago

We have been brainwashed into believing that engineers when left alone will obsess over technical details without business utility, which is something that can happen sometimes but that in my experience is rarely a problem. Quite frankly I think most SW products fail by being an obvious piece of crap, not because resources have been wasted on hard to monetize technical excellence, but the later are more talked about.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 years ago

Emerald Sea == Google+ (2011)

This is when a Google employee told Wired the company needed to start focusing more on gathering information about people.

paganel2• 5 years ago

code search

After all these years I still miss this, can't explain exactly why. Maybe it is the nostalgia of the 2006-2008 years when everything seemed still open and doable when it came to things on the web.

zozbot2342• 5 years ago

In 2021, the new way to do code search is to write your search terms and let Copilot fill in the rest of the code.

tdullien• 5 years ago

Former Googler here, too -- 2011 to 2018. The Google I joined was definitely a different place from the Google I left, and seeing the "phase change" up close was ... interesting.

Your sentence about salaries resonates; the Google I joined had a lot of folks for whom the salaries were a nice side-effect for a job they were intrinsically motivated for, the Google I left seemed to have many unhappy people that were fearful of leaving that salary behind.

dvfjsdhgfv• 5 years ago

the sense of purpose and mission died when Emerald Sea started

And when it materialized and they started to shove Google+ down everybody's throats it was a tipping point for many faithful Google users, too - any trust and good faith that was still there was instantly depleted.

zozbot2342• 5 years ago

the sense of purpose and mission died when Emerald Sea started and good projects (reader, google talk, code search) were being canabalized to prop up a pipe dream that was never going to work.

Interesting way of putting it. And it also jives with the fact that Google+ always looked half-baked even from a pure UX perspective, and is now dead altogether. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, we can speculate that Google leadership should have tried to move in that direction while still meshing with the existing "sense of mission and purpose", not just suppressing it.

zelphirkalt• 5 years ago

In my experience, one does not need to go to some FANG or other big company to learn, that one has still lots to learn and find areas to improve in. I personally got that from mailing lists, particularly in the free software communities, where sometimes people write stuff, that is waaay over my head and that I have never dealt with, even though I am a professional software developer. I even think, that some of the more theoretical stuff goes beyond most things a normal engineer will hit working for a big company. So at least that bit is available for anyone out there, no need to work for an, in terms of ethics, questionably acting company.

The bit about finding ones "tribe". Yes, it happens for us engineers, when there are many smart people in "the room". I would not value it over finding purpose though. Purpose in technical perspective, as well as ethical perspective. There is a lot of feeling alone for many of us, because most of us cannot be around similar minded people a lot. What makes me feel more alone though is, when I meet bright people, who do not care about the ethical aspects of their work or hobbies. So personally, I do not think I would "find my tribe" in a FANG or similar company. I highly doubt it even, no matter how smart people there are.

felixfbecker• 5 years ago

Curious what you mean by code search being cannibalized?

varispeed7• 5 years ago

The people I worked with at Google back then weren’t necessarily there for high six figure salaries. We were there to work with other people like us.

You were a perfect specimen to get exploited by a big corporations. You had knowledge and you were willing to work for the sake of it. That's why we need laws that would prevent something like this from happening in the future. It's scary that you don't even realise that.

ctvo2• 5 years ago

Hilarious. You act like they were paid minimum wage to do their jobs.

They didn’t care about the money is very different from they weren’t paid good money.

I don’t disagree that corporations will exploit you given the opportunity, but software engineering is a very low priority on that list.

quijoteuniv• 5 years ago

I think we need more great people working on real humanity problems. I am glad they probably do not need the money any more and that “the big money” cannot suck their talent anymore.(for profit) Cheers for all those talented engineers with guts to leave behind the big players

tj-teej• 5 years ago

For someone on the outside, what was 'the pipe dream that was never going to work'?

sakagami02• 5 years ago

I worked on Chronicle and remember seeing your name everywhere. Thanks for all the help in the typescript channel, good luck at Figma!

jahller• 5 years ago

Perhaps I do regret taking so long to realize the sense of purpose and mission died when Emerald Sea started and good projects (reader, google talk, code search) were being canabalized to prop up a pipe dream that was never going to work.

the day google reader was shut down was probably one of the saddest i had ever been for a piece of software.

apples_oranges• 5 years ago

Sigh.. 17 years of Google in the US. I am sure you can easily retire. With style, too. Being in Europe, I envy silicon valley engineers.

AndrewDucker• 5 years ago

He mentions moving to a new company.

ionwake• 5 years ago

What would the net worth be of someone who has been at google for 10 years?

nivenkos4• 5 years ago

Yeah, in Europe your only real options are moving to the US, working remotely in a cheaper location in Europe (perhaps even as a contractor to the US), or working for a company/country with a better work balance and just fitting your life around work. I've done the latter two and it's worked out okay, but I still don't own a home even after 7 years working (and some of that for FAANG).

But I think Americans really don't understand how different Europe is. Programming is barely a white-collar job here vs. Law or Real Estate, etc. and the quality of life is just lower (less car ownership, much smaller homes without swimming pools or air conditioning, tiny kitchens without garbage disposal, American fridge-freezers or dishwashers, etc.)

The Tech Bro memes don't apply here.

Aeolun3• 5 years ago

less car ownership, much smaller homes without swimming pools or air conditioning, tiny kitchens without garbage disposal, American fridge-freezers or dishwashers

I’m not sure I’d conflate less material goods with lesser quality of life.

I think the quality of life is objectively better in most of (western) Europe. Maybe for software engineers in specific it’s worse.

raverbashing2• 5 years ago

but I still don't own a home even after 7 years working (and some of that for FAANG).

Even at the inflated SV salary values, very few colleagues I know went to buy a house there. Buying usually means leaving the valley.

quality of life is just lower (less car ownership, much smaller homes without swimming pools or air conditioning, tiny kitchens without garbage disposal, American fridge-freezers or dishwashers, etc.)

I don't see why half of those necessarily mean "lower quality of life"

A car in the US is a necessity. Same for the fridge-freezer where you keep your big perishable purchases (whereas in European cities you can just walk to the grocery store?). And of course, none of these are exclusive to the US

I totally agree with the air-conditioners, though it seems to be changing. Swimming pools are a money pit and to be fair only in few countries it's worth having one at your house.

j_4• 5 years ago

I don't own a car because I inhabit a walkable, dense city instead of enormous urban sprawl, not because I'm destitute.

teruakohatu• 5 years ago

American fridge-freezers

Do Europeans not have fridge-freezers? Or do you mean the really large double door fridges?

monsieurbanana• 5 years ago

Related to quality of life, I'll take cycling to work in a Nordic country over an American life with two cars and a huge dishwasher.

bserge• 5 years ago

The location matters in both, tbh. California's average is much higher than anywhere else it seems. And I can guess where the highest salaries are in the state. Texas seems to have the second highest average.

But yeah, the average is higher than the highest paid positions in Europe, except maybe the top of the top senior ones.

VMG• 5 years ago

the homes are smaller but the build quality is better :)

sam_lowry_3• 5 years ago

You can go freelance, set up company in Lithuania and pay <20% effective tax rate over 100,000€+ yearly income.

Still not as good as Google salaries, but better lifestyle for sure.

polycaster• 5 years ago

Yeah, in Europe your only real options are moving to the US

This sounds overly dramatic. And I feel the urge to express that this isn't my picture of working as a SWE in the EU at all. Nor was it at any point in a very turbulent ~20 years career in tech and with many companies. Quite the contrary.

Perhaps it depends where exactly you're situated. And of course companies with low standards can be found – but that's probably true for both sides of the Atlantic.

berdario• 5 years ago

Programming is barely a white-collar job here vs. Law or Medicine

Programmers routinely earn more than most doctors and healthcare professionals. Also, being "white-collar" is not about having the highest compensation.

Obviously, private practices, big law firms allow for extremely well paid Law and Medicine jobs. But so do big software corporations.

the quality of life is just lower (less car ownership

I enjoy renting out a car for trips to unusual locations (places not well served by trains), but I argue that a society with less car ownership is actually a more pleasant one to live in

much smaller homes without swimming pools

Fair, but is that really common for those who live/commute to work into New York every day?

or air conditioning

You can just install it, it's much more common nowadays than 30 years ago (obviously, more common in the south, and more common when you actually own the property, instead of renting)

kitchens without garbage disposal, American fridge-freezers or dishwashers,

indeed, never saw a garbage disposal unit. Besides some banana peels I barely produce any organic waste in my kitchen, though. I think I'd bin it in the same "nice marginal improvement" category as robo toilets in Japan.

American fridge-freezers or dishwashers

You can just buy them. These kind of items are a small fraction of the cost of a home. If you can afford a home, you can also afford these.

sdevonoes• 5 years ago

and the quality of life is just lower (less car ownership, much smaller homes without swimming pools or air conditioning, tiny kitchens without garbage disposal, American fridge-freezers or dishwashers, etc.)

This made my day. You sir have your priorities in order.

Flow3• 5 years ago

I live in Sweden, the west coast. A friend is from the UK and he described my town as a paradise compared to London.

The ocean is like 10-30 minutes away. The coast line is incredible and free for all to enjoy.

He describes his work in London as strict dress code. 1+h sweaty and crowdy train+metro rides(and the same to get home). Long work days.

Dressing is casual. Work is probably <30 mins by car(I have 15 mins single-way, car and bike take similar times). I even have coworkers who jog to work a few times a week. Showers and sauna are available at work. Work hours are flexible.

He said good food is cheap here. There are excellent restaurants that cost much less than similar ones in London.

Since mid-March, I've been taking 2-3h lunches on the cliffs by the ocean if it's a sunny day. Just laying there listening to the nature. Takes 20 minutes door to ocean for me.

For me this is a high quality of life. How can you put a price on things like this, especially when you(stereotypical US IT worker) have little to no paid vacation, work 8-12h a day, sometimes even on the weekends?

sensanaty• 5 years ago

What a truly strange comment lol

I've lived in both the US and the EU, I'll take the EU 11 times out of 10, even if it means I'll lack the crucial aspect of owning... Garbage disposal systems?

Less cars is also a good thing

maccard4• 5 years ago

It's completely possible to live and retire early comfortably as an engineer in Europe. On a salary of 40k in the UK outside of London/oxford, (which is achievable as a mid level dev pretty much anywhere there are developer jobs), you'll live a pretty comfortable lifestyle.

the quality of life is just lower (less car ownership, much smaller homes without swimming pools or air conditioning, tiny kitchens without garbage disposal, American fridge-freezers or dishwashers, etc.)

All of those things are why I actively choose to live in Europe over the US.

Having an american fridge freezer, a pool and 2 cars wouldn't increase my quality of life, but sacrificing access to quality healthcare, reasonable rights of not being abused by my employer, neighborhoods designed to be walked around, not driven, etc all _would_ dramatically reduce my qol

honzzz• 5 years ago

I just want to point out that quality of life is subjective and depends on what you value. For example I, subjectively, do not want some of the things you mention, like big home with pool... and my kitchen seems big enough to me. I consider NOT having to own a car a good thing (appreciating that our public transportation seems incomparably better than what I have seen in the US) and I value 5 weeks of paid vacation, health insurance for all, free college education... stuff like that. And how are our dishwashers and fridges different that the American ones?

Europe is different than US for many reasons. In some things it might be because we failed to achieve what Americans did. In other things it's just because we prefer it that way.

pelasaco• 5 years ago

being a software developer/CTO/etc myself, I was able to buy a home in Portugal and Germany. You should just look for places out of the big centers but with potential to be developed in the next 5 years.

eloisant• 5 years ago

You can get hired by a Silicon Valley company that have a presence in Europe.

You won't get a salary as high as Silicon Valley itself but it will still be much higher that other companies, and the work will be pretty similar.

However I think you're mistaken about quality of life between US and Europe (I've lived in both) or it really depends what country you're talking about.

First of all you're talking about standard of living - and it's not lower at least in western Europe (Germany, France, UK, etc...) It's similar to US. Regarding quality of life, I'd argue that it's higher in Europe because of health care, better work balance, better town planning, etc.

You're talking about car ownership like it's an indicator of quality of life, on the contrary we have a single car in my family even though we can definitely afford a second car and I couldn't be more happy to be able to live without taking my car for every single trip.

tiagod2• 5 years ago

I live in Portugal and I can't think of any job that can give you better quality of life (without family/party/etc connections) than software development.

I have friends leaving other jobs, that they spent years in university for, and have some years of experience in, for an entry-level frontend development job that pays double after a few months bootcamp.

Maybe you can't get filthy rich as easily, but I don't see that as a bad thing, my life is comfortable and I'm better off at 26 than almost anyone I know in other jobs, even people much older than me.

Sure, if you're a doctor or a lawyer you might be paid a bit more than a dev, but with much more hours per week, a very stressful work environment, and less respect. It's also much harder to quit and switch companies if you don't like what you're doing.

bitL2• 5 years ago

Yeah, remote work for US companies for US non-geocoded salary is the way to go for Europeans. Imagine getting 900k TC as an E7 at FB Menlo Park vs 233GBP TC (150k base) as an E7 at FB London, with approximately the same living expenses.

There is a bunch of US companies that do that and EU devs can get 200-400k while working from some <1500 EUR monthly expenses place in Europe. Not sure who would care about EU/UK/CH-based FAANGs with the salaries they offer in the EU.

ramraj07• 5 years ago

Simple: move to New York, get tech job, rent and live frugally for a decade, save everything and go back to your country. You've effectively drained a fraction of the US economy to enrich your own country's, nothing wrong with that.

Also new York is fun, even when frugal. Even with kids I'd wager it's a great experience to have in ones life. Staying in the same house or city all your life is overrated.

estomagordo• 5 years ago

Quality of life is lower due to less car ownership? Seems counterintuitive in several ways. One being less car ownership should mean less traffic. A bigger one might be societies not built around cars, i.e. more pedestrian and bike friendly, less area occupied by parking lots, better public transport, etc.

pjc50• 5 years ago

Programming is barely a white-collar job here vs. Law or Real Estate, etc

Hardly - programming is very much a white-collar job. It's just that white-collar work in the UK doesn't pay all that much compared to the rewards of capital ownership or being able to dip a finger in the money hose that flows through the financial markets. Seriously, check what chartered professionals are actually paid, and for what hours.

My favourite example is that the Prime Minister was paid more as a Telegraph columnist than his official PM salary: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/oct/03/daily-teleg... ; the current PM salary is £161,401 or about $225,000. How does that compare to SV pay grades?

Programmer pay looks a lot more like that of footballers. The prizes are distributed towards the top. The programmers who enable companies to take over the world - monopolize entire markets - get bid up; everyone else is on far more normal pay. Lionel Messi is paid $130,000,000 to dominate the world. https://www.sportsadda.com/football/news/highest-paid-athlet...

rsynnott3• 5 years ago

Programming is barely a white-collar job here vs. Law or Real Estate, etc.

Hmm, not sure where you are (Europe is a big place). In Ireland, programmers would, I think, earn more on average than lawyers, and certainly than estate agents.

less car ownership

I wouldn't consider that to be inherently a quality of life issue. I don't own a car because I don't really have a use for one. If I did have a use for one, that would imply a long driving commute, which would likely make my quality of life worse.

tiny kitchens without garbage disposal

Easily available, they cost about 200 euro. Though you risk the wrath of Dublin City Council by installing one here; they create undue load on wastewater treatment (I believe this is also the case in some US cities, actually). Never understood the appeal, tbh.

American fridge-freezers

From about 500 euro in my local electrics shop. Again, never understood the appeal vs the conventional fridge-over-freezer designs, but they're there if you want them.

dishwashers

From about 200 euro ditto. Wouldn't be without one.

Again, Europe's a big place.

aqsalose3• 5 years ago

Also, what is special about American fridge-freezers or dishwashers?

Garbage disposal unit sounds like a questionable idea (more unnecessary things in waste water for the water treatment plant to sort out), and not compatible with the dominant paradigm here where we assume everyone sorts and recycles their biowaste, metals, glass, paper, plastic, and cardboard. For the small things now and then one does not intentionally throw into kitchen sink, I'd figure GBU is unnecessary if you have good plumbing in the first place. (I am soon 30-y.o., I have never encountered a plumbing problem anywhere I live.) Old houses built in 1960s / 1970s used to have garbage chutes, but I think they were deemed unhygienic?

Before the recent hot summers, air conditioning was not often needed except for handful of days in a year, but in our climate things that are needed, like three-layer glass windows, central heating, apartments without draft or cold but with uninterrupted hot water have been around for ages.

allyourhorses• 5 years ago

At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me.

This one really stuck out for me, I don't think that stat has ever been public before. This probably means most (if not all) of the folk who built Google's most successful services are no longer with the company. Like a successful open source project where the originators have aged out, and all that's left are hundreds of folk making incremental changes spanning years

xoogler20044• 5 years ago

Yes. A handful remain. But the next big thing will come from those who yearn to be what Google had and lost. Jeff Dean jokes aside, no one person or group made Google great. It was the combined optimism and output of thousands of brilliant and supportive Googlers with imperfect but good enough leadership. Don’t deify any one person or leader, but if you can see the potential in any company’s ambition, thinking, and culture - it’s going to be worth the ride.

vl8• 5 years ago

But this is the problem, it’s not this place anymore. Unlimited money corrupt absolutely. At some moment you just look at all these projects and they are moat to defend ads/search and napalm any even remote competition. With such priorities comes different kind of moral. On top of that Google sucks at efficient organization management and product management and just masks it with money.

vl8• 5 years ago

But on other hand Google grows so fast and has so much churn that it used to be you would be in like 50% percentile in a year and it top percentile in few years. Which it turn means that on any given moment most employees are not veterans.

res0nat0r• 5 years ago

I suspect most IT companies have large turnover. Folks working at a gig for more than 5+ years is likely the exception not the norm.

rightbyte2• 5 years ago

According to CNBC there was 3000 employees 2004 when he began. So 90% of the workers have dropped since then. How is this attrition compared to other companies?

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/02/google-employee-growth-2001-...

habosa• 5 years ago

Most other tech companies that were 6 years old in 2004 are probably long gone today, so in that way they'd have 100% attrition.

ghaff8• 5 years ago

That doesn't seem unusual at all. If anything, I'd say 10%+ retention over 15+ years sounds pretty good. And that's even allowing for survivorship bias in that, as someone else noted, many companies that existed in 2004 aren't even around today.

In terms of anecdata, I know that no one else from my non-SV company new hire class from 10+ years ago is still with the company.

jakecopp4• 5 years ago

...including the money to buy the home I now live in and even the health insurance responsible for the birth of my son...

Interesting example. Being grateful to your country for giving you the opportunity to work to pay insurance bills to have a child, because there's no universal healthcare?

I'm assuming this is sarcasm?

visarga• 5 years ago

or conditioning

roenxi2• 5 years ago

Software engineers working at Google are pretty wealthy and are probably pushing into the salary levels that pay for most of societies upkeep. They're going to be paying less under a private health system than a universal one and getting very similar levels of care.

jakecopp4• 5 years ago

Good point. I still do find the original sentiment odd and confusing.

oblio11• 5 years ago

So, in short: screw you, got mine? :-)

alias_neo2• 5 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, isn't America the same country which makes it illegal to give birth at home or without some sort of doctor/medical involvement?

Yeah I'd be really grateful too. /s

As a Brit though, I'll give credit to my wife for the birth of our child[ren].

detaro2• 5 years ago

You are mistaken.

vl8• 5 years ago

America is many states, laws like this are state-level, so there are 50 different laws in this regard and my guess is that most states don’t have a law covering this scenario due to it’s rarity.

arthurcolle2• 5 years ago

Ignorance is strength

vinay4272• 5 years ago

First of all, this applies to nearly half of the developed world where people work and pay insurance premiums, and the systems in most non-US countries still seem to function relatively equitably. Implying that one can't be grateful in the US because of the existence of insurance premiums feels like yet another example of American exceptionalism because many other countries have figured it out.

Second, it's not that difficult for me to picture a scenario in which someone is grateful for the access to healthcare and health insurance that a typical Googler in the US has. Particularly if you've ever traveled to poorer countries (or just been exposed to more disadvantaged environments) where a lot less is taken for granted, it's often easy to find things in your life for which you are grateful.

Besides, they're likely not paying additional insurance premiums on top of Google's contributions, so the insurance bills are usually copays that aren't ludicrously high.

jakecopp4• 5 years ago

Implying that one can't be grateful in the US because of the existence of insurance premiums feels like yet another example of American exceptionalism because many other countries have figured it out.

I agree with the sentiment of being grateful for access to good healthcare, however being grateful to the US for the privilege to pay for their private healthcare (when less fortunate US citizens are dying because they can't afford treatment [1]) is a strange sentiment from the perspective of a non-US citizen.

The U.S. is almost entirely alone among developed nations in lacking universal healthcare [2], and on a per capita basis, spends more than double the average of all OECD countries [3].

Second, it's not that difficult for me to picture a scenario in which someone is grateful for the access to healthcare and health insurance that a typical Googler in the US has.
Particularly if you've ever traveled to poorer countries (or just been exposed to more disadvantaged environments) where a lot less is taken for granted, it's often easy to find things in your life for which you are grateful.

I agree wholeheartedly with both of these points.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he... [2]: https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/the-us-health-care-syst... [3]: https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/the-us-health-care-syst...

Rebelgecko• 5 years ago

Google's health insurance is pretty good (although not the very best out there). I can't speak to everyone's situation, but at other companies where I've worked I normally had to pay around $1,000/year in mostly pretax dollars for health costs (employee portion of premiums + copays). With my current health insurance at Google, my health plan is typically a net gain financially as long as I have <$10k in medical costs per year (no premiums + employer HSA contribution + HSA tax benefits).

Cyph0n• 5 years ago

Well, no premiums only if you’re single. The premiums are quite standard with a spouse/child/family (relative to other companies).

jozvolskyef2• 5 years ago

You are probably misreading it as referring to a standard medical expense while it probably refers to some advanced treatment that is only available in private healthcare, anywhere in the world.

jakecopp4• 5 years ago

Possibly, that would make sense. Thanks.

closeparen• 5 years ago

Under universal healthcare, a Google employee surely pays many more people’s insurance bills than his own.

These people, with professional jobs at famous companies in California and New York, are the 1% who are meant to pay for all new social spending.

cowsandmilk• 5 years ago

He isn’t saying he’s grateful to his country, he’s saying he’s grateful to Google…

harry8• 5 years ago

At the time I left, out of ~150k employees, only ~300 had worked there longer than me.

This is why it is insane to accept the "I know the people involved in developing that and they wouldn't let a terrible thing happen." Defense of it being ok for the co. to have massive unchecked power.

The company is its people. The people /will/ change. Give a company serious power you cannot expect the staff to keep it reigned in. It's completely unrealistic and also unfair to the staff for them to have that moral responsibility forced on them. Ultimately 99.9% of the time the only thing they can do is resign, which reduces the impediments to bad things happening.

GistNoesis• 5 years ago

It seems that the app ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... ) has taken a plunge recently.

Extract of a June 26, 2021 review by Marcia Jenkins that got more than a thousand up-votes :

"WHATS HAPPENED? I was getting a survey, if not daily, every other day, now, well, I've got one survey in the past month"

So there may be some correlation.

cyri• 5 years ago

MPVL also left Google (Zurich) last month after being nearly 18 years at Google.

jozvolskyef2• 5 years ago

That might explain why cuelang got a new home[1], moving from the google-managed github/cuelang to an independent github/cue-lang.

[1] https://github.com/cue-lang/cue

ur-whale2• 5 years ago

"it's also ultimately not something to be anthropomorphized, but rather a faceless machine that makes often bad decisions that I don't have any real influence over."

Best comment in the article.

I feel that this is a very recurrent problem on HN in particular and on the internet in general: people anthropomorphizing companies and assigning them human-like intents ("Google is evil", "Exxon is reckless").

We all forget that:

    a) companies are nothing but a bunch of people doing things together within some sort of hierarchical structure.

    b) the emergent behavior of said group has got precious little to do with the parts that compose it and certainly can't be assigned things like desire, morals, feelings, ethos.

    c) as much as we'd *love* to believe b) above or even try to actually implement it (the whole "company culture" kool-aid), the truth is *no one* can get an org as large as Google to do anything, even its CEO. Once the thing is large enough, it basically becomes autonomous.

Large corps are large doomsday machines with basically no one at the wheel.

vl8• 5 years ago

It’s interesting that Google had a built-in mechanism to combat bad decisions called “being Googly”. Basically default mode of operation and decision making was to “be Googly”. So this cultural pressure created culture of collaboration and helping out. The problem is that with high growth rate and relatively high churn you can’t indoctrinate this (or really, any) culture fast enough, and so it eroded. On top of that when third wave of management new-hires doesn’t embrace it (and why would they?), it disintegrates rather quickly.

ur-whale2• 5 years ago

It also doesn't account for folks that are manipulative and ambitious enough to:

    1. Not believe a word of the "being Googly" thing

    2. Understand how big of a lever it is to get others to do things.

    3. Are very good at pretending.

They usually make it to the top in quick order and get a tiny bit more influence on the cultural direction taken by the giant combine harvester.

lolive3• 5 years ago

Be sure to also read this link he mentions: http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2018/09/typescript-at-goo...

There you will get a clear view of why you DO NOT want to become a frontend developper at Google. (plus the dilemna of maintaining internal tools).

jefftk2• 5 years ago

Note that things are a lot better now than they were in 2018, in large part due to his work and his team's. The typescript migration has gone well, with good automatic migration tooling, and I mostly only use TS now. This means good error messages, and good editor support.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

lolive3• 5 years ago

How did you do the work to type all your existing JS libs, so they have a clear TS contract?

transitory_pce• 5 years ago

Sounds like someone pissed off a senior manager by speaking the truth in an email with a sensitive cc list.

Hey OP shed light on the truth. Don’t shy away from doing the right thing on the way out.

Buy some shares and now you’re a shareholder.

gundmc• 5 years ago

Sounds like someone pissed off a senior manager by speaking the truth in an email with a sensitive cc list.
Hey OP shed light on the truth. Don’t shy away from doing the right thing on the way out.

Uhh...what? Did we read the same blog post? This is an oddly specific fantasy you've conjured.

native_samples• 5 years ago

Probably they have direct experience of it?

Google has a variety of mechanisms that can be used to effectively get rid of people without them understanding why. For instance they allow anyone to give feedback on anyone else during promo cases which can sink promotions or entire careers, and which isn't merely anonymous but completely confidential. That's been mentioned elsewhere on this thread. The result is that people can appear to be doing very well with glowing feedback, happy managers, successful projects and then their career suddenly goes off the rails without that person ever being told why, for no better reason than a single person didn't like them. This blog post gives off strong vibes of this sort of thing, given the vagueness about why he had to leave.

This problem interacts badly with another problem Google has: it started with a culture of extreme internal openness compared to most organizations. For example almost all internal mailing lists were open, almost all internal code was open to all engineers, people were encouraged to send feedback and resolve problems directly across teams instead of always going through management and so on. Hence the mono-repo so large they had to reimplement Perforce to keep it running.

In an environment where everyone is culturally very similar, has a lot of experience of the world outside of Google to keep them grounded, a clear and motivating goal and minimal politics, this can just about work. It worked OK for the first 6-7 years or so I was there. It ... stopped working. The combination of very open communication, an increasingly radicalized workforce (due to their heavy dependence post 2010 on recruiting new grads to keep the hiring pipelines full), and formal systems for secretly sinking people's careers = a lot of very messy problems in which loyal workers get screwed.

The vast majority never talk about it in public, at least not under their own name, but there are a lot of Evans out there.

evouga• 5 years ago

Google used to be one of those companies, like Valve or Blizzard, who could be trusted to always ship a home run. Search, gmail, maps, chrome… I’m not sure what happened, but the contrast of Google then vs Google now is stark.

Even Google search barely works anymore. Google image search is completely broken, and I’ve found recently that I’ve been appending “site:reddit.com” to all of my text search queries to actually get useful results.

I’m not sure what this says about the future of Google, or the web in general. Nothing good.

Kelteseth• 5 years ago

or Blizzard,

This so much. 10 years ago, I would have bought every single Blizzard game. Back then, I explained to my parents that Blizzard was like Mercedes ("The best or nothing") for video games. Now all known talents have already left Blizzard and none of their games interest me any longer...

ChuckNorris892• 5 years ago

Isn't this what inevitably happens to all companies eventually?

You have a group of enthusiastic founders who make it big through smarts, passion and dedication and after a couple of decades, they retire, and the company is now mostly formed of people who are in just to cash in on the money and fame from having that brand name on their resume as people who are as smart, passionate and dedicated as the original founders were would most likely work on their own idea rather than said famous company.

On the tech circles online Google is known for being the place where you grind leet-code to get in so you can make big $ and coast (rest and vest), not break your back working on fancy world changing ideas. The latter is for start-ups.

Apple was ahead of the game too as they had the visionary Steve Jobs at the helm, while now, sure their stock is as high as ever and their M1 macs are great but you don't really see people queuing up for days in front of their shops anymore since their post-Jobs strategy has been less about disruptive innovation and more about entrenching and expanding their existing positions by leveraging their supply chain prowess.

Yajirobe• 5 years ago

and I’ve found recently that I’ve been appending “site:reddit.com” to all of my text search queries to actually get useful results.

This is a problem with the web, not with Google. The web has become littered with trash content

oblio11• 5 years ago

The web was always full of trash.

The problem is that the new trash is much more hostile: it's actively trying to subvert/cover the good stuff.

b112• 5 years ago

Trash content alway existed. Always.

AltaVista was all spam results when Google came on the scene. From where I sit, Google just doesn't care to work on search any more.

For example:

- pre 2005?, Google search terms were never aliased.

A search for Bob, never returned Robert or Bobby. To make things "easier", alias searching was added. Now, there is all sorts of algorithmic aliasing happening, and it poisons the results further.

- Couple this with the desire for verbal google searching to work, without complex queries, and even more aliasing/approximation of search results happen.

I've seen homonyms aliased as of... 2016? Why? Google voice searching.

- Quotes are only suggestions, only verbatim search forces precise terms (+ used to mean a word must appear as written, but was removed because it was interfereing with Google plus username searches..)

- These days, Google spends more time trying to take content from web pages, and insert the answers at to of page. They want to be wikipedia, with you never leaving their page.

All of the above, and more, show a steady decline in the desire for precise results, and instead, a desire to sacrifice search quality for profit, and pet projects.

As others in this thread have said, Google isn't Google any more.

CodeGlitch2• 5 years ago

This is a problem with the web, not with Google. The web has become littered with trash content

Isn't it the search engine's job to wade through the trash and return the results that are useful?

hintymad2• 5 years ago

My theory is that two things changed: 1. complexity. As time goes by, systems become more complex, leaving less and less room for people to introduce changes swiftly. It's just like George Martin had a hard time shipping his latest A Song of Ice and Fire because there are just too many threads to figure out; 2. Culture. As times goes by, organizations bloat, and average quality of employees starts to decline. Plus, some people get promoted with controversy. Not everyone is Jeff Dean or Sanjay, after all. So, gradually and then suddenly, people create projects for promotion, and long-term vision goes out of the window. The two factors combined, a company transitions from being great to be mediocre.

93po• 5 years ago

I also have to append site:reddit to half of my searches if I'm actually looking for some sort of meaningful feedback or opinion on something. Everything else is blog spam or commercial content trying to sell me something

H8crilA2• 5 years ago

but it's also ultimately not something to be anthropomorphized, but rather a faceless machine that makes often bad decisions that I don't have any real influence over.

Shocking how it can take 17 years to realize that. And it's for a smart person! One really has to congratulate early Google execs for creating this super pervasive myth of genius around what's just another corporation.

Related - Systemantics is not a joke, it's an honest attempt at describing reality: https://mobile.twitter.com/SysQuotes

HappyTypist3• 5 years ago

Boiling frog syndrome. Change can be harder to recognise when you are in it.

H8crilA2• 5 years ago

The water was always hot. There's no there there, never has been, never will be.

SYSTEMS DON'T WORK FOR YOU OR FOR ME. THEY WORK FOR THEIR OWN GOALS.

Though you can be sure that in the future many new execs will spin the veil of uniqueness, genius, coolness around something new, something that in reality is as benign as Google - an internet advertising company, a company that maxed out the craft of selling ads. Over and over again. It's a fascinating thing to watch.

swiftcoder• 5 years ago

a bureaucratic mistake led to my position falling into question, despite plenty of support for keeping me around from my immediate management chain

That's a hell of a way to lose a 17-year veteran. Wish I could say I'm surprised, but having exited FB due also to a short-sighted bureaucratic decision... such are the policies of a FAANG

smitty1e• 5 years ago

the same complex and uncomfortable feelings I have towards the US as a US citizen

I love the ideals upon which the country is founded; I acknowledge the spectrum of shortcomings found therein; but cannot warm to the nihilists bent on destroying it in the name of a bogus utopianism.

footlose_3815• 5 years ago

Xoogler, left only after 2 years working in IT.

The “different corners” comment hit real hard. Some jobs are great, some are grind work where you have no control over your job, and your opinion matters little. No stock, and ever-reducing our perks to increase support service availability /harder not smarter kind of team (grinding tickets out).

Yes, i’m talking about THE google in mountain view, ca.

bigbizisverywyz• 5 years ago

Well thank you Mr. Curious at least for ninja - fastest build system in the West :)

I hope your new job lets you build fun but useful stuff there too.

donalhunt• 5 years ago

Another xoogler here that started around 2004.

Thank you for epitaphs. It was a great resource and ensured relationships were maintained even after people left the company.

rdel• 5 years ago

Evan is one of the best people I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Google. As his coworker on the TypeScript team he taught us all valuable lessons for dealing with the type of large-scale development needed to maintain the monorepo. Truly a treasure and a sad loss for the team. I wish him nothing but the best wherever he ends up!

esprehn• 5 years ago

It's interesting this made the front page but no comments talk about Evan or his many accomplishments, just Google. I suppose that's a reflection of the recent sentiment where old timers leaving Google is a sign of something.

In any case, I had the pleasure of interacting with Evan a couple times while on Chrome, and he was this amazing slice of Google engineering culture. I have a vivid memory of him and some friends discussing how to optimize IO perf on Windows late on a Fri at the office. In my time at Google I learned so much from just sitting and listening in on things like that.

Figma's lucky to have Evan. While it's unfortunate to see old timers leave Google, it's good for the industry for them to be joining the next batch of up and coming companies.

hintymad2• 5 years ago

The fact that a post about leaving Google still makes it HN means that Google still commands attention and respect, especially given that such posts came up once every few months. In contrast, people are not so keen on "Leaving Oracle", "Leaving IBM", or "Leaving Amazon". Sadly, though, every company will eventually get into the latter group, no matter how great it once was.

Leaving Google

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