Leaving Google

https://jayconrod.com/posts/122/leaving-google

by dcu • 5 years ago

462 435 5 years ago

cube003• 5 years ago

PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence.

This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.

spicyramen• 5 years ago

Still depends on the org. Many orgs still engineering driven. This happens when engineers are more familiar with tech and business than PM, which surprisingly is not that uncommon (GCP)

neatze• 5 years ago

seems like this is most relevant video:

https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4

monkeywork• 5 years ago

Thanks for sharing that - I had never seen that before and it rings incredibly true

nbzso• 5 years ago

It is not only relevant for Google. Apple is exactly IBM from the past + some design and marketing sprinkled over.

Icathian• 5 years ago

You either die a hero, etc etc.

I wonder if there's any "big, established" company where IC engineers have more weight than the PHB types. I'd be genuinely curious if anyone knows of some good examples, I suppose HN would be the place where people might.

It seems like that's one of the natural equilibrating factors that offer some small amount of competitive grace to Davids competing against Goliaths. Google hasn't been David for a long time now, I think.

surajrmal• 5 years ago

I guess it depends on which organization you're part of. I've never really been told what to do in my 5+ years at Google. I usually just have an idea, say I'm going to work on it, and then do it. Most of my peers also work this way, and while more junior ones usually need some assistance with coming up with ideas which align with priorities, it's not like management is telling them what to do - usually a senior team member helps them. PMs help set higher level goals and priorities, but not unilaterally. Managers provide incentives to align to org level goals and priorities but balance that with bottom up driven ones. This has been true for both teams I've been on in two separate orgs, but I'm sure it's not universally true throughout Google. Prior experience at companies previous to Google gave me almost no autonomy.

kevin_thibedeau• 5 years ago

That can happen when corporate leadership is dominated by a technical founder. Once MBAs and sales/marketing alums run the show it always turns into a grindhouse. They don't fundamentally understand the work that goes into the product and so they rule by metrics to make their dev factory "more efficient".

technion• 5 years ago

As a complete outsider, I have an impression at least that Google PMs have some level of technical knowledge. Which would make them far more "engineer led" than is common.

Ericson2314• 5 years ago

Well there's no grand strategy and it's too big and settled for engineering to have much impact.

It's inertia-led.

I bet most googlers hate ads so it's a big state of cognitive dissonance too.

jart• 5 years ago

If they hate ads then wouldn't that make them the best people to control them?

s09dfhks• 5 years ago

Snowflake is this way too. Its so depressing

slimsag• 5 years ago

You left out the best part:

We were expected to hit precise deadlines on multi-quarter projects (within two weeks), and when that inevitably didn't happen, we had to track all the time we spent on anything in 30 minute increments. It felt very cog-in-the-machine.

kevingadd2• 5 years ago

This is absurd. I haven't been asked to file timesheets (other than for days off) as a sweng in over a decade, including when I was at Google. Management on that team has completely lost it.

downrightmike3• 5 years ago

Some of the best minds in generations, all focused on selling us things we really don't want.

onion2k• 5 years ago

I find it amusingly ironic that Google employees don't like the idea of being tracked.

nostrebored3• 5 years ago

The idea that products at large tech companies are going to be lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people or understand the cross functional relationships and strategies is absurd.

This isn't a future engineers want either -- I hear complaints about meetings from nearly every engineer I know. The idea that you should have low level knowledge of the system you're working on and high level knowledge of all the cross functional team's responsibilities along with the responsibility for cultivating those relationships is ridiculous.

People say this without having any idea what PMs do.

Jensson11• 5 years ago

lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people

Do you think the engineer who leads a 1000 man org is not talking to people? I talked to the engineer leading our 500 man org, he talked to a lot of people and wanted their input and tried to understand the whole to make decisions. He had technical expertise so he could talk to low level engineers as well, but also to business people etc.

ricardobeat• 5 years ago

who by and large do not talk to people or understand the cross functional relationships and strategies

The idea that (good) engineers are somehow not able to understand cross-functional relationships, business strategies, or don’t know what PMs do, is absurd. You’re digging your own grave there.

wly_cdgr• 5 years ago

I don't often downvote, but when I do, it's dumb shit like this

mavelikara• 5 years ago

Product Management, in many orgs, is the old wine of Taylorism in a new bottle, where there is a "thinking class," and there is a separate "doing class." The stereotype of an engineer with poor social skills who can't grasp the "high-level cross functional relationships and strategies" (from nostrebored's sibling comment) is not very different from Taylor's idea of workers:

    One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit 
    to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he 
    shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more 
    nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than 
    any other type. The man who is mentally alert and 
    intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to 
    what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work 
    of this character.

It is sad to see this happen at places like Google, where engineers had a lot more autonomy.

Most knowledge workers who have the mental capacity to grasp deep technical topics will find the "cross functional relationships and strategies" discussed in garden variety business books a light stroll in the park.

geodel4• 5 years ago

I think you have made excellent point here. I absolutely see this behavior at workplaces. The Architects/PMs one side and developers who are mainly Jira/Daily standup chumps on other side.

lordnacho2• 5 years ago

This is exactly right. I studied both engineering and management, so I have experienced both schools.

Actually understanding science and manipulating the world is hard. Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves, or how a web request happens. They can never understand it on the required level to fix things.

Now try to explain to an engineer how a bond works, or how industrial strategy works. He can do both his own work and the manager's work.

I sound pretty bitter for a guy who's managed to dodge most of the BS things in large corporations his while career, but that's because I really think this aspect of the world needs fixing.

It seems like just about every human endeavour is encumbered by MBA people who pretend to understand something hard, who get paid at least as well as those people who can both solve the technical and the strategic problems.

This might be more of a problem in the Anglo world. Engineers getting promoted is more common in Europe according to rumor.

achow2• 5 years ago

This could be Cloud Org characteristic. Enterprise applications cannot be engineering led as tech does not matter but 'checkboxes' do (features).

For checkboxes one needs to be constantly in touch with customers, sales, pre-sales, need to be full time demo giver, etc. These are not the job of engineers and even if it is made so, it is setting them and the team/org/company up for failure on both fronts - frontend and backend.

RNCTX5• 5 years ago

Do you think checkboxes magically spring from the aether just to support sales demos?

SantiagoQ• 5 years ago

I can see this as a result from too many employees going from college to Google with nothing in between.

They lack real-world experience and ability to grasp non-technical concepts.

As a founder, and having worked in multiple startups is hard for me to communicate with their relative worldview. Despite how brilliant they are.

Waterluvian2• 5 years ago

I think it’s interesting that the good things about working there had nothing to do with the employer and the bad things had everything to do with the employer.

Indeed, this line is the takeaway, in my opinion: “…is because we've been at least a little brainwashed into thinking a job at Google is the pinnacle of employment.”

I haven’t worked for one so this take might be quite hot, but I get the sense that big tech companies do a great job selling you on the idea that they’re elite and therefore you must be elite too if you get the job. But then you’re really just another fungible developer in a pool of tens of thousands. There’s exceptions of course.

hyperpallium22• 5 years ago

I think that changed about 15 years ago.

ashtonkem9• 5 years ago

It’s kind of incredible how fast the shine has come off of most of the FAANG companies.

oppositelock• 5 years ago

I worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, seeing it grow from 4,000 to 50,000 employees during this time.

In 2005, it was a wonderful, prestigious place to work with many great people and a startup vibe, the place was vibrant. By 2013, Larry and Sergey were put out to pasture, and the company took on a much more bureaucratic, compartmentalized feel.

I was working hard, most of my work was fighting bureaucracy and optimizing what I did for the horrific perf process, and going through constant re-orgs so that I had no consistent manager, and no chance of promotion (this is a big deal at Google). Joining in 2005 was the best thing I've done for my career, and leaving in 2013 was again the best thing I've done for my career. I value the time there, but the Google that I remember no longer exists.

vishnugupta• 5 years ago

This is eerily similar to my experience at Amazon including how I feel when I look back. Even the years are same :-). I somehow feel joining and leaving Amazon when I did (2005-2012) was the best thing to have happened.

What makes it more special was the stellar team that I got to be a part of with whom I’m still in touch with. It’s like being part of a secret club.

The only thing we used to discuss among colleagues most of the time was solving some hairy interesting engineering problem. That changed as years wore on, it became more gossip and internal politics and who got promoted how and when etc.

BurningFrog2• 5 years ago

I was there 2006-2009. Each year a new level of management appeared above me, and things got ever more "political" and perf centric.

Just as people are different at age 10, 20 and 40, companies are different in different stages and sizes. Know what you want and look for it.

I realized I want to be at small companies, and have not worked at a company larger than 25 people since.

gerash4• 5 years ago

The perf process sounds good on paper. It's just like peer reviews in the academia they said.

However its outcome in practice can't be any worse. To this day, people "cook up" a project that doesn't need to exist and won't share the credit or their territory with anyone (or else the committee will doubt their ownership) and abandon the project less than six months after their promotion and switch to a new team.

MertsA• 5 years ago

Q: What's the fastest way to go from L4->L5 at Google?

A: Get a job at Facebook at E4, get promoted to E5, and get hired back at Google L5.

https://youtu.be/8DYje57V_BY

ashtonkem9• 5 years ago

It’s been a while since I’ve considered Google a pinnacle of anything. I think the executives of google might be a bit delusional about how far that propaganda is effective.

tdfx• 5 years ago

It's still a major selling point if you're raising money for your company. "Ex-Google engineer" somehow still makes rich people want to throw money at you, deservedly or not.

emodendroket5• 5 years ago

Yeah you might be. But they also have way more resources for you to build your talents. There's still a lot there if you have realistic expectations.

coffeefirst• 5 years ago

...selling you on the idea that they’re elite and therefore you must be elite too if you get the job

Also true of Ivy League Schools, movie studios, and certain neighborhoods. Prestige is weird, and if you value it, that's totally fine, but it's probably better the separate the myth from the real-world entity that's made up of people doing stuff.

01100011• 5 years ago

There are teams at Google and other big tech companies that are working on groundbreaking things. Working at these companies gives you a chance to do very "impactful" things. Is that sense of purpose sometimes abused to exploit workers? Sure. But there are some really smart folks doing amazing things that they'd never have a chance to do working anywhere else.

Do you have to be elite to work there? In some roles you absolutely do. In other roles you just need to do the work. You're often working alongside people who care a great deal(and some unknowingly toxic people whose self-worth seems to come solely from their career achievements), and that can raise the bar for what you and/or the company expect from yourself.

The "toxic" thing in my experience often just comes from rapid, unmanaged growth. The company is literally morphing into something new with every passing day. People are being sucked up the management chain without merit. Systems aren't yet in place to deal with the changes. New employees are flooding in faster than they can assimilate the old culture.

I'm not saying I love the valley or anything, but I'm glad I got to spend a couple years of my life here and contribute 0.0001% to some of the greatest discoveries in the last few decades. I hope more engineers get a chance to have that feeling.

its_bbq• 5 years ago

I am in the middle of the same sort of sabbatical from Google. It was my first job out of college and I joined the same time as Jay. In fact for a time sat right across the aisle from the Go team when I was working on Abseil (abseil.io) and I can confirm that Alan Donovan is a really kind, friendly guy. The company got progressively more and more "corporate" and felt less and less dynamic as time wore on. Most of the people I know who are still there are burnt out. It's a company filled with people who tend to put a lot of pressure on themselves and I felt, at least on my last team, a rising sense of anxiety and isolation from what was already a very high level before the pandemic.

That all being said, the quality of humans there is pretty amazing. I count almost all of my old managers as friends and I felt privileged constantly to be surrounded by such intelligent people and to work on such huge ranging vastly impactful projects as I did. But I'm happy I left. The self-direction feels too good after being in such a behemoth to start my career.

On to new adventures!

catillac2• 5 years ago

Thank you for Abseil, if nothing else. It’s been my go-to for years now.

jeffbee2• 5 years ago

Is this just long form "calling in rich"? With an L5 RSU package and the share price tripling, a few hundred thousand turns into a few million and you can afford to leave. Nice problem to have.

Supermancho• 5 years ago

To summarize, <why I left>

He didn't like working enough to make himself happy, I guess. It's a person who is at a different point in their life than when they started. Notably with enough money that they question their own motivations to continue.

These blog posts seem devoid of anything interesting or actionable.

freyir9• 5 years ago

“Quite a few activists and researchers were fired for asking Google to be a bit more ethical”

In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond “asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn’t seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they’re on the right side of an ethical (and sometimes just political) issue.

sillysaurusx10• 5 years ago

I'm not sure this is true. Normally I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the Timnit situation was handled badly.

Objectively, there was nothing wrong with her paper.

You may have a point about the other researchers. I'm not familiar enough with their situations. But I dug into Timnit's pretty thoroughly.

Their recent behavior isn't too encouraging either: https://archive.md/7jCQY

(Related Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1451273190974660612)

Hopefully everyone will just chill out and focus on research.

freyir9• 5 years ago

From what I read at the time, she wasn’t fired for the content of the paper (though she initially made it sound like this before more details became public). She gave the company an ultimatum to reveal the name of an anonymous reviewer or she would quit, and they took her threat seriously.

onphonenow2• 5 years ago

Um - she wasn’t fired because of her paper - she required they out an anonymous reviewer or she wouldn’t be able to work there.

It’s pretty likely the reviewer would have been harassed - a good thing perhaps if you have one view of thing - but a bad thing from another perspective.

Google refused and accepted that she writing be able to continue working there

srvmshr3• 5 years ago

I have mentioned this long time ago and would do so again: No matter how righteous be the cause, threatening your employers and instigating a mutinous conduct with fellow employees doesn't go down too well. Both sides could have done better. Both sides includes Timnit's subsequent conduct as well.

hintymad2• 5 years ago

Timnit is unethical as hell. She's also the worst kind of being unethical: being unethical in the name of doing good. She second guessed the motives of her coworkers. She attributed every difference to her paper or claim to racism or white supremacy or oppression or any combination out of the three. For all I know, only a true racist would view everything through a racial lens.

She's a disgrace to the research community.

random31410• 5 years ago

I have read the paper. There were several things wrong with it. The most glaring example was comparing the power consumption of training a machine learning NLP model with a gas guzzling jet.

Not once in the paper does she mention that Google has been carbon neutral since 2008, because that would trash half her paper. The paper seemed of desperation to make non existent arguments.

justicezyx3• 5 years ago

If the now died down Timnit reporting did not convince you that Timnit didn't apply the right tactic, if we agree to set aside the legitimacy of her cause in the first place (which itself was and still is under intense debate), then there does not seem any good way to unify our views.

choppaface5• 5 years ago

Dr. Gebru was fired for having approached a lawyer about workplace issues. (She told Jeff Dean and others that she was doing so in an email made public). That triggers Legal to retaliate and look for a reason to fire the employee, immediately. Jeff Dean let the conflict drag out 6+ months because he thought he had control of the situation (and he was wrong). Without Jeff Dean’s persistence, Dr. Gebru would probably have been retaliated upon as swiftly as those in the Alphabet Workers Union. That’s how Legal and HR work—- they retaliate if litigation looks imminent. (Levandowski lasted so long because he was dealing with not Jeff Dean but Larry Page).

Google handled Dr Gebru’s exit differently than that of Anthony Levandowski, Andy Rubin, David Drummond, etc etc because Jeff Dean made the call in timing and he was really that clueless about public optics, especially with Tensorflow’s huge following. Moreover, Dr Gebru didn’t have the bankroll to fund a legal team like any of the others listed.

A lot of the posts here suggest Google is struggling with scale. Dr Gebru’s case definitely would have been handled differently were Google a smaller company. Also if there wasn’t COVID—- keep in mind she was fired a couple days before Thanksgiving during COVID. The whole country was a mess then.

ergocoder3• 5 years ago

Dr. Gebru was fired for having approached a lawyer about workplace issues.

That is just very dishonest. She gave an ultimatum. Execs accepted the ultimatum. You are gaslighting other people on this topic. At the very least, you should've acknowledged that this is up to an interpretation.

Regardless whether she was fired or quit, she was toxic as hell. She dragged Jeff Dean into an unrelated matter in public and implied Jeff Dean supported personal attack.

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1278569638532530177 -- this happened a few months before she left or was fired from google

If a direct report did this to me, I would've wanted them to leave. In this case, Gebru wanted to leave (according to her ultimatum). Jeff Dean wanted her to leave (I don't doubt this. nobody wanted to work with a colleage who attacked them on twitter). I see a happy ending for both.

Gebru and her supporters have been dishonest about the whole thing.

freyir9• 5 years ago

Did she threaten litigation before or after she posted an angry rant telling her coworkers to stop working?

Before or after she demanded that the company release the name of an anonymous reviewer?

Before or after she told them to schedule her last day if they didn’t meet her demands?

gerash4• 5 years ago

Exactly, perhaps people read too many comic book with these one dimensional villains to think that an employee asked Google to be more ethical and then they fired them right there and you could hear an evil laugh in the background.

I've looked at some of the correspondence between Timnit and others and it's fairly unprofessional on her part if you ask me and it has this self righteousness tone to it too.

Another very funny thing people believe is that Google wanted to do "evil" things but their perfectly crafted plan fell apart at the last second when they realized that they have "do no evil" in their code of conduct. After much scrambling the order came from the top to quickly remove it to unblock the evil plans.

That said, there sure are jerks at Google like any other company but I've realized most these dramatic stories regurgitated by the media is BS

burnished• 5 years ago

Do you think she got fired for those reasons? Citing her as sounding self righteous or unprofessional seems weak.

Sebb7673• 5 years ago

Another very funny thing people believe is that Google wanted to do "evil" things but their perfectly crafted plan fell apart at the last second when they realized that they have "do no evil" in their code of conduct.

Of course the CoC is not binding, but having that in there was a statement, which meant, roughly interpreted, "the impact of our work should not be net negative". The removal of the line itself did not change anything, of course, but it was a clear statement that this priority had been dropped. I think it's quite obvious why this is seen as not great.

cruano• 5 years ago

After much scrambling the order came from the top to quickly remove it to unblock the evil plans.

Well otherwise it would be considered securities fraud

sillysaurusx10• 5 years ago

A few months ago, I considered applying to Google to join the JAX team.

It turns out that you can't apply to Google's JAX team. You have to apply to Google, and then managers at various teams select whether they want you.

The thing is, JAX is amazing. So I'm now faced with the uncomfortable idea that this process must make sense, because it clearly works. Yet I profoundly dislike it.

Perhaps my ideas are the problem, and Google is four steps ahead. I don't know. It just seemed like you should be able to apply to specific teams at Google, and that the team should be able to choose whether you'd be a valuable teammate.

kevingadd2• 5 years ago

If the team wants you bad enough, they can hire you. It has to come from the inside, which I'm sure has no impact on whether nepotism happens.

thanhhaimai• 5 years ago

I don't think it's true that "you can't apply directly to a team". I've seen many people got interviewed/hired for exactly one position. The manager of the team will need to be in the loop though. If they don't know you and don't agree with you applying directly, then it's most likely you're going to the normal pipeline.

sillysaurusx10• 5 years ago

Ah, interesting. Thank you. My info about the hiring process came from a friend at Google. But in hindsight, they were probably relaying what their own path had been like, rather than making a statement about the process in general.

jimsimmons• 5 years ago

What about JAX is so amazing? It takes the worst of functional programming and tensor programming and gives you yet another half baked lib with 12 edge cases at every API call

UncleMeat7• 5 years ago

This is mostly not true. If you know a hiring manager on the JAX team and they have headcount and they want to hire you if you pass the interviews, they can walk you through the process and hire you.

This is what I do. Every single person on my team applied directly to my team.

bigmanwalter• 5 years ago

The most desirable teams are filled by internal transfers. External hires get the teams that have trouble hiring internally.

cletus• 5 years ago

Why did he leave? The tl'dr is the L6 glass ceiling and the remote pay cut. I can speak to both of those:

First, for those that don't know, new grads get hired at L3, PhDs at L4 (which IMHO is actually a mistake but that's another issue) and there is an expectation of getting promoted to L5 (Senior Software Engineer). There's no set time frame for this. I've known people who stayed L4 for many years and were quite happy. L6+ start to require increasingly extraordinary influence and technical contribution.

It's hard to get promoted beyond L5 for open source work

I'll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it's hard to get promoted to L6 for anything. This is by design. It's how the company controls costs and maintain retention (by dangling that L6 promotion, possibly for years).

One of the things that Ruth Porat did when she became CFO is lowered the promotion target percentage. This meant less people got promoted at each cycle.

How promotions work is a committee of higher-level engineers (eg L7s consider promotions to L6) and will have 10-15 packets to assess. These will get stack ranked by the committee. If you're above the line you'll get promoted. If you're not, you won't. Ruth's change just made that line a little higher.

As for the pay cut, this requires some context. By the time you reach L5+ the majority of your total compensation comes from equity, both your initial grant (for the first 4 years) and annual refreshes and discretionary grants you get along the way. So less than 50% of your income comes from salary plus bonus.

For those employees who go permanent remote, there is a location-based pay adjustment. SF and NYC are at 100% rate. Other areas at 85-95% of that.

That only applies to the salary plus bonus (since bonus is derived from salary) part of your total compensation. So a 10% cut for L5+ is in reality <5%. You don't save on taxes by moving to San Diego but it is cheaper than the Bay Area. If you move to a no-state income tax state however your net pay can in fact be higher.

So, the argument for no pay cut is you're saving the company money by not having to pay for office space, a desk (etc), free food and so on, all while doing the same job. This seems to be the author's position and I'm certainly sympathetic.

The argument for a pay cut is that your compensation isn't really associated with your output at all and is entirely market-based. For many people not going into the office and being able to live somewhere that isn't the Bay Area is a huge plus so people are willing to give up something for that. Plus you could argue the company doesn't want people going remote who don't really want to by offering the same pay. By lowering your pay slightly it creates a psychological barrier such that only people who really want to do it do so. I'm sympathetic to that argument too.

jeffbee2• 5 years ago

10% of the company is at L6 or higher so it can't be that hard.

Jensson11• 5 years ago

Most of those got promoted by going into management and lucking out that the product they worked on grew and therefore needed to hire a lot, and you easily get promoted as you start to manage more people. Getting promoted on technical merit on the other hand is really hard.

titzer3• 5 years ago

I'll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it's hard to get promoted to L6 for anything.

It's hard if you're on the wrong project (read: low impact and/or low visibility). There are different routes to L6 at Google, but by far the most successful was to become TLM or just M of a medium impact project. It's hard to make the case as an IC for L6, but colleagues did it multiple times. Large enough, long-running projects also reach a critical mass of L6+ people and then getting high-level support becomes much easier.

Having been through the process, seeing the process from an IC, TL, TLM, and promotion committee member, if you think that L6 is unachievable, there is either a problem with your project or your expectations.

DannyBee7• 5 years ago

"Having been through the process, seeing the process from an IC, TL, TLM, and promotion committee member, if you think that L6 is unachievable, there is either a problem with your project or your expectations."

Lots of managers are also not good at talent management (and not just at Google). Which is sad. So they tell people it's a promo committee's fault, or .. Realistically, it's also the manager's fault. If they don't have scope/work that can help someone grow to L6, the right move is to help the person find a place that does, rather than string them along. Stringing them along ends up with them leaving or unhappy or ... Helping them grow elsewhere ends up with people who will likely want to come back to your org at some point when you have the need/scope/role for them.

Zababa2• 5 years ago

I know that IC is Individual Contributor, but what are TL, M, and TLM?

bogomipz• 5 years ago

For those of us without direct knowledge what are IC, TL and TLM?

mdwelsh• 5 years ago

Long-time former Googler here, author of go/l6talk (internal presentation on getting promoted to L6). While there I coached a lot of people on the L5-to-L6 promotion process. It seems a lot of Googlers get disillusioned about getting promoted above L5. Broadly speaking Google's culture is heavily focused on levels and promotions, which is too bad, since many L5's are doing just great and getting paid extremely well.

If it weren't for the fact that Google makes level information public within the company, I doubt there would be quite so much emphasis on getting a promotion. Most people want to get L6 for the recognition and the fact that it elevates you above other engineers in terms of status and influence. When I worked at Apple, levels were private, so you had to treat everyone the same -- a person's influence was not dictated by what level they had on their company profile (there is no company profile at Apple). In my opinion this approach was much better, and significantly lessened the internal competition for promotions.

DannyBee7• 5 years ago

"The argument for a pay cut" ...

Another argument is that if tech paid everyone the same, everywhere, it would greatly exacerbate income equality issues in a lot of places.

Tech is certainly not altruistic, as you point out, and generally wants to pay market rate rather than output rate or whatever. But it doesn't make less true that it would worsen a whole bunch of social problems by paying people the same everywhere.

RNCTX5• 5 years ago

Another another argument would be that income inequality is not the fault of employees but rather the fault of management, whether politically, culturally, socially or all of the above.

lotsofpulp24• 5 years ago

That is a ludicrous argument. The whole income/wealth inequality is not about working people earning more, it is about capital owners earning vastly more due to various reasons.

Some businesses do earn more due to ease of access to additional capital, and hence can pay employees more, but the root of the income/wealth divide is certainly not employers paying employees more. It is certain employers (capital owners) getting disproportionately more in the first place.

Tech employees are simply in sufficiently high demand relative to supply that they can demand a piece of the pie. But there is no point in trying to address a problem by addressing its symptoms rather than causes.

Specifically, in this case, paying Alphabet employees less in the name of helping the income/wealth divide only helps other owners of Alphabet stock be even richer.

joshuamorton6• 5 years ago

There's a few things here that are subtly wrong.

How promotions work is a committee of higher-level engineers (eg L7s consider promotions to L6) and will have 10-15 packets to assess. These will get stack ranked by the committee. If you're above the line you'll get promoted. If you're not, you won't. Ruth's change just made that line a little higher.

FWIW this is no longer true for a lot of orgs, and will likely soon be untrue for all orgs. Also fairly sure that stack ranking within a single promo committee was never how it worked.

That only applies to the salary plus bonus (since bonus is derived from salary)

Currently, however management is on record stating that this will change in the future, since I don't know exactly how, I'm not going to speculate, but the intent is for equity to reflect the compensation regions in the US eventually.

chem83• 5 years ago

Relevant perhaps is the fact that Google folks just came out of a promo cycle, which is run by a committee. Folks I talked to seem to agree the process is utterly broken, so this is about the time many will decide to jump ship.

deeblering4• 5 years ago

This website seems to have switched to stoplang, because it’s down.

bmitc• 5 years ago

Google has 140,000 employees, the size of a size-able city in the U.S. Does anyone really care when someone leaves Google?

emodendroket5• 5 years ago

I guess people do in the "why would you ever leave such a great job?!" sense, but people can get bored of any job after enough time.

ergocoder3• 5 years ago

Outsiders also don't grasp how high a lowly senior engineer earns.

Compensation in tech is so insane.

Other high earning occupation just doesn't even come close.

It would take doctors years to earn 250k a year. In tech with stock growth + RSU, you might get that as a junior eng. I earned 450k as a junior per year with pre-ipo company.

This is why engineers can just leave and others are surprised.

UncleMeat7• 5 years ago

It makes for flawless blogspam. There are enough people leaving Google that some of them will publish criticisms that align with the community's preconceived notions and will let them all feel superior to Googlers. Further, because Google is so big there will almost necessarily be pockets that really are truly bad to work in. Readers can therefore extrapolate and assume the entire company functions this way.

dilyevsky5• 5 years ago

There are entire companies built around OP’s and his teammates’ oss contributions - relatively small group of people. You can’t say that about 99.9% of others in that 140K

a-dub2• 5 years ago

i miss google+, the world's preeminent social network for google employees to announce to the world their intentions to leave google.

ashtonkem9• 5 years ago

Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports

It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would let it get that bad. 10 reports is “you put this off a bit too long” territory, 25 is in the “someone up the chain should be fired” territory.

amha• 5 years ago

My direct supervisor has 75 direct reports. (Not a tech company––an elite private school in the Bay––but still...)

ashtonkem9• 5 years ago

Fuck that. Nobody is being served by that arrangement. Nobody.

sulam4• 5 years ago

Education is a completely different animal. You’re not comparing apples to oranges here, you’re comparing leptons to gorillas.

I’m good friends with one of the high school teachers at “an elite private school in the Bay” (HRS) and it’s fun comparing and contrasting our jobs, but they are not at all the same job.

topkai22• 5 years ago

Not a Googler, but I’m my experience 25 person managers can work (barely) if they are just their to keep the HR stuff in line and people actually transactional work with other teams or if there is an informal team structure beneath the manager. Think a team where there are 4 tech leads that actually run the teams, but where the “manager” deals with career and hr issues.

While working in consulting I spent about 4 months with a manager who had 60 direct employees. That was a disaster, but I got to spend 3 /4 months with no responsibilities :)

antognini• 5 years ago

I remember hearing a story (maybe apocryphal) that after Larry and Sergey abandoned their "no managers" experiment, they decided to give each manager a minimum of 10 direct reports and preferably closer to 20 so that the manager wouldn't have time to micromanage any of them.

sulam4• 5 years ago

Speaking as a Google manager of a reasonably sized org, 25 direct reports is too many. Twice a year you have to do Perf for them, if nothing else, and doing that well for 25 people would likely be the only thing you get done. I think it’d be possible, but it would be at the expense of your own career. “Did Perf for my team of 25” is not a next level accomplishment. “Organized my team so that I didn’t have 25 directs” is much more of an accomplishment (next level or not depends on the level, it’s something my group would evaluate as “meeting expectations” of an L7).

The rule of thumb at Google is 10 directs in an engineering management role, less if you’re a TLM (an IC with some management responsibilities) since you’re still evaluated on the IC ladder. There are exceptions, but they usually involve “managing” a number of contractors where you have significant program management support for coordinating their day to day activities.

ashtonkem9• 5 years ago

I think the only way 25 comes anywhere close to working is by creating an informal team structure under the manager who has 25 “directs”, as you said. But at that point you’re informally creating the team structure that should formally exist, which in and of itself is a management failure. Either the org should hire some managers to manage those people, or some of the ICs in that informal structure are functionally performing management duties, and deserve the recognition, comp, and training opportunities that a formal promotion into management comes with.

wdr1• 5 years ago

You're partly right: With a significant number of reports, you can't keep juggling all the balls yourself. But what varies is how that handled?

A micromanager will be absolutely crushed by a high number of reports. In fact 10+ years at Google, managers intentionally had a large number of directs so they couldn't micromanage.

If you have a pretty autonomous team, strong tech leads, can delegate, ~20 still isn't great, but it's not horrible. It's not the steady state you want, but it's doable for a few quarters.

ashtonkem9• 5 years ago

I agree that micromanagers can’t micromanage at 20, but good managers also can’t give the attention and mentorship their directs deserve either. In my experience teams want a good manager, and being under managed by an overworked or absentee manager can be a problem for morale and team cohesion.

I think the real solution here is to find the micromanagers and train them or fire them, rather than hampering all the managers in order to cut the micromanagers off at the metaphorical pass.

Personally I’d quit in such a situation. If I’m going to be managing 20 people and creating informal team structures under me, then some of my directs deserve a management title and I would want a title befitting a manager of managers. The whole thing has a whiff of “how can we avoid promoting a bunch of people” to me.

xyzelement2• 5 years ago

Counter anecdot - I managed about 20 directs for a few years and it was fine. Of course in reality I was grooming a bunch of them to become team leads (which eventually happened) so I was leaning on them to take care of and lead others day to day. It was fine - everyone grew through the experience. No idea if this type of thing is common but bottom line it doesn't have to be awful.

benhurmarcel• 5 years ago

Or you might have been under the impression that it was fine, because nobody tells his management that their organization isn't working.

My manager has about 25 reports and he thinks it's ok, because we're all organized in smaller teams that manage daily work themselves. That's true, but the effect is that the person who should care about people aspects has no idea about you (how you're doing, how you want to evolve, whether you're performing, what you need to improve, whether you deserve a raise or a promotion, whether you're burnt out, whether you're looking for a new position...).

And nobody tells him, because he's the manager and you don't go to your manager with problems, especially if he doesn't maintain a close relationship with you.

saagarjha4• 5 years ago

Due to various internal reorgs my manager currently has a number of reports approaching that number. It's mostly gone fine for now, because there are multiple teams under her that are mostly self-sufficient in deciding their product direction. We have a team lead who isn't a "manager" but is providing input on what we do and we go to her when we have problems or need administrative work done. It's not horrible.

sulam4• 5 years ago

Your manager’s manager should be working with her to help her address the issue, because it’s not sustainable. It may be okay for now, not disputing that at all, but what to you may look like relative calm is much more likely her giving her best imitation of a duck (calm on the surface, but paddling furiously).

For instance, has she had to reduce the frequency, duration, and/or quality of her 1:1s? I’m guessing the answer is “of course” and maybe some ameliorating fact like having more 1:1 time with the team lead. The “so what?” here is that 1:1s are how you head off problems before they get serious. So either the tech lead is picking up that slack and is your de facto manager or you’re simply coasting on the strength of past 1:1s, but inertia will only get you so far.

Also, this tech lead you mention is likely doing less actual technical work because they are picking up slack left by your manager not having enough time in the day. This might not be a problem right now, but the first question I would be asking in your manager’s shoes is: “is my TL happy? Is this sustainable for them?” The second would be something like “What long term technical objectives are being sacrificed to deal with this management issue?”

It’s often the case in the situation you’re describing that the TL is interested in moving into management, and this is a “try out” effectively. Personally I like to be open about situations like this, although there are valid arguments against that. In any event, I think most people would agree that it’s best do such “try outs” when the stakes are relatively low, and the TL can have an easy escape if they need it. The situation you’re describing doesn’t fit my definition of low risk, although ymmv — maybe conditions are such that this is a very temporary state and the machinery to fix it is already in motion.

yxhuvud• 5 years ago

That resonated a lot more than I expected it to do. Not the Google parts but the burnout parts. I exited my job during summer and am still not looking for something new and this article and the one by Maya linked in it really helped me put words on it

titzer3• 5 years ago

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue growth. That is Google's true mission. Eat the world. It's now $180 billion in revenue. In five years, that will need to be $400 billion. And five years after that, it will need to be pulling close to a trillion.

lotsofpulp24• 5 years ago

And scale is simply because greed.

Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.

bsedlm• 5 years ago

collective systemic greed

3grdlurker• 5 years ago

Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing YoY revenue growth other than greed.

icelancer3• 5 years ago

Also due to wanting to keep your employees. You can't make the same amount of money year over year and retain employees who never get raises above CPI or promotions into management/ownership. That's just not going to work.

benzible• 5 years ago

Survival for executives at publicly traded companies has led to a maniacal focus on quarterly results, discouraging R&D without near-term payout and disincentivizing minimization of negative externalities that will eventually impact everyone, including the company and its employees. The Long Term Stock Exchange was recently launched as an alternative and Asana and Twilio recently listed there (dual-listed along with existing NYSE listings) [1]. It's far too early to say if it will have any wider impact but I think the larger point is that what's necessary for "survival" is dependent on the context, and it may be possible to change the underlying conditions.

[1] https://medium.com/hps-insight/on-short-termism-8e28fbe4ccc6

capableweb6• 5 years ago

No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing.

Most businesses in the world survive with their piece of the pie and remaining having the same profits or slightly lower/higher than previous years. You don't disappear over night, and no market is really a "winner takes it all", it's just what management wants you to believe so you fight the good fight for your company.

lifeformed• 5 years ago

Call it greed if you want, but this is just the emergent result of the economic system we have in our society. Corporations are optimization algorithms to maximize revenue. Not because they have to, but because its comprised of rational individuals who are incentivized to maximize their own revenue. The natural result is an ever-growing entity, adaptive to dangers and emergently intelligent. It's possible to run a corporation differently but it actively takes energy to resist the natural gravity of every individual's interests.

Aeolun6• 5 years ago

That’s only true if you are currently under threat of not being at the head of the pack. Google still very clearly leading search, which is their main income provider.

matheusmoreira• 5 years ago

The trillion dollar companies won't be able to survive? They're in danger? I simply cannot muster any sympathy.

Actually I think they're not in enough danger. They take things for granted, our attention and private information for example. Denying Google, Facebook those should put some real fear in them.

huma• 5 years ago

When you live long enough it becomes evident that scale in tech is a pandemic. At a certain point greed inevitably takes over. I believe there's some kind of a threshold beyond which a company has no choice, but to turn evil.

greatgib2• 5 years ago

It is just my personal opinion, but I think that it is what is going on with gitlab now.

ultrasounder• 5 years ago

As a normie I sometimes wonder what happens to FAANGlers(googlers + other FAANG). You are used doing things the FAANG way and been doing it for a while and now it’s too late for you to learn how the “rest of the world” does so how does one adapt? Just curious. I find it hard to believe that one has transferable skills after doing time at FAANG.

Jensson11• 5 years ago

Well paying jobs typically don't look for people with experience in specific technologies, rather they look for people with experience in relevant domains. And the domain experience you learn at FAANG is worth a ton, lots of companies wants to be more like FAANG.

Example: You are making a search engine, you use technology X. Would you rather hire a person who worked on Google search but didn't work with technology X, or would you want an expert on technology X?

dilyevsky5• 5 years ago

HTTP requests work exactly the same on the other side. If anything some ex-faang have an edge as they generally see many trends years before they permeate the wider industry

hintymad2• 5 years ago

And scale is simply because greed.

This seems over simplified. A large company is a complex system that is shaped by all kinds of forces. I'm not sure we can attribute Google's scale to a single heinous factor

shoto_io2• 5 years ago

Scale kills them all except for Apple? There is a comment somewhere here saying that levels at Apple are private.

This seems to be an interesting concept to keep a somewhat flat hierarchy.

dilyevsky5• 5 years ago

There’re private in a sense that there isn’t internal registry where you can just look up anyone like at google. From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US

jsemrau• 5 years ago

Well, the state of the Internet has changed fundamentally over the last years where now most traffic is going through a small number of portals. Also, we were not that thoroughly tracked 10 years ago. Fundamentally, I believe that the ad-tracking economy of the current version of the Internet is the wrong direction. And, I hope (and work actively on) that we will find more effective ways to earn money on the Internet.

lotsofpulp24• 5 years ago

In the US, the vast, vast majority of people have effectively no upload capacity and are behind huge CGNATs. I do not see any alternative future until the vast majority of residential dwellings have quality internet connections providing symmetric up and down bandwidth (i.e. fiber to the home) and ipv6.

Only then would people be able to roll out peer to peer solutions that bypass the big tech companies.

zaptheimpaler• 5 years ago

If they don't grow revenue the stock won't go up. Most big companies are organized around "STONK MUST GO UP". I could justify this with smarter sounding words and more detail but in essence thats all it is. We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane.

lotsofpulp24• 5 years ago

We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane.

The alternative is to not borrow from the future. Then your country/tribe is at a severe competitive disadvantage on the global playing field.

rurban• 5 years ago

I don't really buy that argument, because google is still the only IT company which supports long term R&D, like dart, flutter or fuchsia. Of course they can afford such boutique projects, but the good thing is they do.

My idea is still the wrong PM incentive structure, which is harming the work culture and projects.

azornathogron• 5 years ago

Microsoft has a pretty good reputation for investing in research too.

infinitezest• 5 years ago

Can you shed some light on what the right and wrong incentive structure looks like?

simonh4• 5 years ago

If Google doesn't take that next $200bn share in ad revenue over the next 5 years, where else will that revenue go? What about the additional $400bn of potential growth 5 years after that?

Somebody in the online ad space is going to eat that conventional ad revenue, or "build that value", or whatever we want to call it. If it isn't Google it will be Facebook, or Twitter, or Apple, or Tiktok, etc.

What happens to Google if Facebook has a $1tn online ad business in 10 years time, and Google's ad business is still 'only' worth their current $200bn?

This is absolutely about survival. In a super high-growth industry, you grow or you die.

capableweb6• 5 years ago

This is absolutely about survival. You grow or you die.

How? With that argument, neither Facebook nor any other ad networks would already be dead since Google basically owns the space already, but they are not, they are also pulling in huge profits, just not as huge as Google, but they are still well off.

andi999• 5 years ago

Let's pray they don't start to manufacture paperclips.

CheezeIt• 5 years ago

Revenue growth means customer growth which means more people benefit from google’s product (advertising). This is not some sort of bad thing.

softwaredoug• 5 years ago

I will say as companies grow the appetite for huge ambition shrinks. It’s natural for a few reasons.

- you’re established, no longer a startup, you prioritize the momentum in the current cash cow.

- your hiring pool changes. Instead of people who want to come build the “next big thing” you tend to attract folks who value the security of a big name. And they will tend to hire folks like them, and so on..

- you’re publicly traded. Holding an asset that reliably produces steady growth, creates very different incentives than trying to hit some kind of hockey stick unicorn growth

mikesabbagh• 5 years ago

I couldn't work anymore, and it was time for an extended break. From speaking with other people that have gone through this, it seems like the only thing that really helps.

Maybe changing teams or company can get you working again. 1 year seems too long to me

sillysaurusx10• 5 years ago

Nah, 1 year is pretty much the minimum burnout recovery period. I've seen it happen several times now.

Work isn't worth doing just for work's sake. You have to feel aligned.

justicezyx3• 5 years ago

I never realized how deeply the promotion mindset is damaging my personal happiness and growth, until I left Google in 2019...

Most things promoted in Google about growth boils down to promotion, which is just a cover word of getting your hands on promising project without proactively doing much by yourself.

Self motivated ideas actually get me into various trouble. In hindsight, I can see that many coworkers are silently watching this guy getting burnt without offering much helping hands.

In the end, I learned the googely way of working at Google, and find it not worthwhile to stay...

emodendroket5• 5 years ago

I mean, nothing wrong with anything the guy says here. But this says more about the author than Google, really. No shame in having had enough of a job and wanting to move on after nearly a decade, but I don't think the fact that they wouldn't let him move far away from the office without a pay cut or the unlikelihood of a promotion indicates that the job radically changed on him, exactly.

AlbertCory• 5 years ago

2005-2017 for me. On the "20% project" stuff, which everyone seemed to have heard of:

I think it was 2008 or so when I was sitting at a table with about eight other people, and somehow or other the question came up "who has a 20% project?" Only one of us did.

The main utility of a 20% was that you could try out a new group before transferring to it, and they could try you out. Other than that, very few people actually had one, even then.

sulam4• 5 years ago

I can only speak for myself and my org of 300 or so, but it’s surprising how few people are actually interested in a 20% project. I’m sure there are factors at play here:

* we have a lot of work to do, the poster in this thread who is bored and only has 5 hours of real work a week is definitely not in my BU

* they may be concerned how such a project will reflect on them in perf. it may seem better to go all in on one thing vs splitting your attention

* we’re relatively new (acquisition) so perhaps the 20% ethos hasn’t percolated over to us yet

But at any rate, I think I’ve gotten exactly 2 requests for 20% projects, which I approved after confirming the person wasn’t going to be doing the dreaded 120% project.

ehershey• 5 years ago

While the original site isn’t feeling well: https://archive.md/YV9AQ

reilly3000• 5 years ago

I wasn’t able to view the content with this link. I tried using the captcha but it kept unchecking itself. I’m on mobile so I couldn’t debug.

geodel4• 5 years ago

Seems takeaway is if Google didn't cut this person's pay by 10 per cent then all their "shitty behavior" like Project Maven and so on would have been just fine.

emodendroket5• 5 years ago

Another article on the site expands on this:

I still feel uncertain about everything though. Google approved my remote work application last week, but I haven't gotten a new offer letter yet, and I've been told to expect a pay cut of at least 10% because the market rate for software engineers is supposedly lower in southern California. This feels like a shitty thing to do. My work is not less valuable. It's a reminder that this is nothing more than a business relationship, and the company is not interested in loyalty to workers or support in a difficult time. I'm not sure what, if anything, I'm going to do yet, but it has me thinking harder about my career and future.

Not sure why _this_ is what it took to get to that revelation, but better late than never. But on the point about value vs. cost of living... I mean how do you work as a developer in the United States and not notice you get paid a lot more to do this work than people in other places?

DannyBee7• 5 years ago

I always find it interesting that lots of tech folks I meet are strongly in favor of more income equality except when it would cause them to earn less money. Then it's a shitty thing to do.

geodel4• 5 years ago

I don't know maybe it is the thing with top level engineers hired at FAANG who deserve absolute truth, justice and equality.

To me earning nowhere at level as these folks, still it embarasses me to whine about pay/promotion when so many hard working folks doing important work in society are paid pittance.

bobsil1• 5 years ago

Cached: https://web.archive.org/web/20211023032551/https://jayconrod...

nont• 5 years ago

I'm sad... I used like their slogan Don't be evil. Now it's like when Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm relabels it to 4 legs are good, but 2 legs are better.

kkcorps• 5 years ago

Although I appreciate the honesty about the company in this blog, my issue is almost every big company behaves in the same way. FAANG is not the absolute best, it is just best option among the worst. The only other option is to work at a small startup or start your own company but that is a different ballgame and requires extreme levels of grind.

natch• 5 years ago

I’ve come to suspect the reason (ex) Google people write these is basically humblebragging. There just isn’t enough interesting material presented to have any other explanation make much sense. Just an opinion; ymmv.

gremIin2• 5 years ago

Everyone wants to feel special.

Aeolun6• 5 years ago

Personally I’m quite happy with every blog post that someone claims to be burned out in. Al least I feel like I’m not alone.

wjamesg• 5 years ago

My thoughts as well

sologoub• 5 years ago

Reading these always makes me a bit sad. There is a lot in here and people have their reasons, but levels are not everything and various “cuts” aren’t that meaningful when you consider TC of faang. Where else are you going to have a chance to make things better for billions of people? Maybe not life changing but at least slightly better?

A small improvement for billions adds up. Though burnout and pain are real, there’s more to all this. Hope OP finds what he’s looking for!

RNCTX5• 5 years ago

If a great new opportunity comes up, take it, but drop something else. If the dropped thing was important, it'll get staffed. If not... why work on it?

The above seems to explain how a thing that fills a gaping functionality hole in one google product via another just gets deleted without any consideration for the interaction between the two.

m0zg2• 5 years ago

I started losing a lot of sleep, and I got a lot of headaches and back pain. I got a lot of "brain fog": inability to concentrate or make decisions. I started forgetting words and names and losing the thread of a conversation mid-sentence. I felt like I had no energy left for anything other than work, and I could barely manage that.

Other than back pain these symptoms match mine exactly, except I hadn't worked full time for the past 2 years and I wouldn't say I'm stressed or anything. I'm not sure what it is - maybe cabin fever? Yesterday I nearly lost consciousness when I got up too quickly. I'm also losing weight (12kg so far, which would be great if I knew _why_ I'm losing weight). Did a blood test about a month ago - everything is fine. I did wonder if these are vaccine side effects, but that seems very implausible - the second dose was in May. But I digress.

I totally get what Jay is saying in his writeup. I largely felt the same way except in the opposite direction in one aspect - the number and shrillness of "activists" has become overbearing to the point where it was severely impeding work and morale. Seeing that he has pronouns in his twitter bio he might have been more sympathetic, but I bet this stuff distracted even him.

Contrary to belief popular on the outside, Google is indeed a fairly stressful and thankless place unless you're skilled at self promotion, which I'm not, or you don't care about working on cool things and getting promoted. This is why every time their recruiters ping me I tell them I'm not interested "at this time". No matter how much they pay me, I can't imagine subjecting myself to such treatment again. And I was pretty successful there - high profile projects, wrote lots of code, shipped impressive stuff, and I still felt like shit most of the time. I can only imagine what less "forceful" folks feel if I felt like a gnat on this elephant's ass.

Contrary to belief popular inside Google, life is great on the outside. Freedom is a thing folks, and without moving around you aren't experiencing it. I know when you're on the inside it feels like you're "changing the world", but of all Google products nowadays I only use Gmail and YouTube. If everything else disappeared completely I wouldn't even notice. Heck, if Gmail disappeared I'd switch to Proton Mail in a day, and if YouTube disappeared there's BitChute and Rumble which are modest, but adequate. So whatever you're "changing" there impacts me very little, and mostly in negative ways.

I certainly do not regret leaving. If anything I should have left much sooner than I did.

dekkers• 5 years ago

I don't really want to give anything that seems like medical advice in HN comments. I just want to give a bit of information that might be useful to you or others. Obviously you should do your own research, talk with a doctor about it, etc.

Brain fog and headache are also one of the most common symptoms of long covid. Losing consciousness when getting up sounds like POTS[1] and is also common in long covid. Research is showing that people who are asymptomatic during infection can also develop long covid[2].

In general things like brain fog and headache are also symptoms of burnout and probably lots of other things, so I think it would be pretty difficult to clearly distinguish between them. There also isn't a test for it and it won't show up in standard blood tests. And of course it's also possible to have both. Some form of long covid, even if it is just "light" compared to other people who have long covid, could easily push someone who is already on the brink of burnout over the edge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postural_orthostatic_tachycard... [2] https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/study-many-long-haul-covi...

m0zg2• 5 years ago

Something I intend to check on with my doctor, thanks for caring enough to provide references. Who knows, maybe I had covid and didn't even know.

ir193• 5 years ago

Google doesn't use the go command or modules, and since there's no direct measurable benefit to Google, it's very difficult to make the case.

i'm curious. What exactly they don't use internally?

thethethethe• 5 years ago

I'm guessing they are referring to how Google uses Blaze (internal version of Bazel) to build Go binaries, not the 'go' command and it's modules.

The first time I went to work on a personal project using Go after I joined Google, tried using Bazel because I was so used to Blaze and I liked it a lot. I was very disappointed to find that the integration between Bazel and Go was severely lacking and required me to use third party extensions to get things working as expected, which was quite disappointing. That was a few years ago so things might better now

knorker• 5 years ago

All these people talking about "Google changed, man" seem like they need to consider two points:

1) So did you. E.g. the commenter who was at Google for 9 years. Do you not think you changed? You changed. It reminds me of right wing commentators who say "everything was so great in the 50s!". Sure it was, because you were a child!

2) Selection bias. You left. Of course if you take the people leaving, they'll be less happy with Google than the people who stay.

Oh, and the "Of course, when you leave Google you have to write some kind of letter or rant". Ugh. So childish. No, you do not need an exit rant. And joke or not, this was an exit rant.

A 10% cut is pretty damn unfavorable, considering I was doing the same work on the same team

So were all your colleagues working in offices outside the bay area. That was literally your "bay area bonus". You're being super spoiled and disrespectful.

kerng2• 5 years ago

Interesting that the person moved to San Diego (not a cheap place by any means), and Google cuts the salary.

There is some strange fixation Google currently has, especially towards getting people into their New York offices - must be some tax incentives or other deals with the city....

A friend just recently wanted to work from google office in another tech hub city (not remote/from home by any means) and during offer negotiation it was denied, so she didn't join - as she didn't wanna move to NYC.

Odd things happening at Google lately - I mean even Amazon is more remote friendly these days. Lol

ido6• 5 years ago

Surely NYC/SFBA are even more expensive?

lotsofpulp24• 5 years ago

It’s probably SFBA >Manhattan/some parts of Brooklyn > San Diego > NYC Metro.

melomal• 5 years ago

These posts almost feel like a Scientology style exodus and moment of clarity.

transitory_pce• 5 years ago

Larry, from his lair in Fiji: “I should sell some shares”

brap• 5 years ago

I’ve been at Google for a little less than OP, and while I’m also considering leaving, my main reason is sort of the opposite: I’m bored. The whole team is bored. It feels like we’re doing nothing, and have been doing nothing for years. I work under 25 hours a week, and the vast majority of time is spent in useless meetings or reading useless docs. My actual work is maybe 5 hours a week. What are we even getting paid for? No one knows. We just keep working on new projects nobody needs, then a few months later upper management shifts priorities and repeat. Seems like the only reason we have projects is to keep us busy. And oh, we’re always hiring. Apparently we’re understaffed. Some secretly call it a pyramid scheme.

yla92• 5 years ago

Is is not possible for you to transfer to another team/org internally?

knuthsat2• 5 years ago

Sounds like a job in a bank. Or any other monopolistic entity.

_arthur_• 5 years ago

There are other 'monopolistic entities' who don't give their employees a cushy life.

ren_engineer• 5 years ago

plenty of people have suggested that it's better for Google and other big tech companies to pay talented engineers to do nothing rather than risk them founding a company that could disrupt them

da39a3ee3• 5 years ago

If I were in that position I would consider studying while on the job. Is there anything in the realm of computer science or adjacent areas that appeals to you to study? Maybe get a serious ramp-up in an area that you'd like to work in next?

folmar• 5 years ago

Seems like a day in a lot of big corps; embrace it or switch.

endtime• 5 years ago

Also a Googler, opinions are my own. My current experience is very different (I work on Assistant and there are plenty of problems to solve, a mix of interesting technical ones and some organizational ones), but I have been on teams where I've seen what you're talking about. I strongly suggest changing teams!

test1235• 5 years ago

site is currently down: https://archive.md/YV9AQ

bla32• 5 years ago

Down for me. Mirror: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:glQF_0...

bla32• 5 years ago

Why I left [...] Burnout [...] I wish I'd done more to fight those things, beyond signing petitions and walkouts. I'm not much of an activist though, especially with burnout.

It's interesting that the author mentions this, but doesn't make a connection between feeling burned out and feeling that they have to be personally responsible for everything the company does.

I don't even disagree with many of the demands of internal "activist", but the strategies they use (walkouts, trying to keep everyone outraged as much as possible) seem ineffectual to me: The main effect seems to be that it makes ordinary employees feel more burned out since they're made aware of many things that they're suppose to be angry about but at the same time they're powerless to change them. That's a recipe for burnout.

I get that the thinking is that ordinary employees are not powerless due to collective action, but for that to work you have to be a lot better at picking your battles. You can affect one to two larger things per year, so getting up in arms over every (comparatively) little thing just has the effect that your activism achieves nothing but burn out the people who want to have on your side.

apohn• 5 years ago

I just wanted to let you know I found this comment very insightful. I've never really thought about all tiny ways feeling responsible for stuff in a company can creep into your mind and fester there without you realizing it. It's easier to attribute burn-out directly to a bad manager, unrealistic deadlines, not getting a promotion, etc - it's harder realize there there are so many other tangential things you think you should engage in and feel guilty about not having the time or mental space to engage with. All of which adds up into a overwhelming mental load.

borroka3• 5 years ago

A few days ago I got the usual call from the Google recruiter, after being rejected a year ago with feedback of 2 sure hire, one lean, two no hire. A strange collection, isn't it? Well, I would have “fired" two of them plus the recruiter, one who wasn't paying attention to my interview and one who turned off the video and whose accent and questions were basically incomprehensible (I am non-US myself, btw). Maybe the two no-hire?

I make 75% of what a Google would make for the (high) position they would hire me for, but I work 1/5 of what I would work at Google and with little overhead such as performance review, promotion packages, and excuse my French, other assorted bs I have zero interest for at my age and with my experience.

If the hiring process were more reasonable, i.e., not dependent on the mood, accent, question of the day of interviewers whom I will (probably) never meet again after they nonchalantly determine my future employment, I might agree to interview again and then evaluate their proposal, but otherwise I think Google will continue to bleed talent and hire little uninteresting robots (mine is a salty-fish generalization of course) who have the patience for nonsense that I, and people like me, do not have.

digianarchist• 5 years ago

Why did you pursue the position? You seem content where you are?

borroka3• 5 years ago

There are definitely some advantages in working for Google, like 25% more money and Google on the resume (I already had another FAANG), which can open other lucrative doors down the road.

I am not a hardcore tech guy, in the sense that I could switch tomorrow to selling bicycles (for the same money, of course), and not miss tech one bit, so my north stars are money conditional on time spent working and stress (assuming the job itself if not terrible).

I would guess that my current position, given zero stress, little time at work, and good salary, is on par with the Google position I was interviewing for.

But I am not willing to go through those ridiculous interviews again, then waiting for weeks for a the committee decision, then the recruiter cannot say what happened, are you kidding me.

lolpython• 5 years ago

salty-fish generalization

What does this mean?

borroka3• 5 years ago

Salty-ish (autocorrection got it wrong). I am a bit salty because I was rejected and my tone may reflect that, although it is true that people at Google are in my experience (that is, the one I met professionally or outside work, or saw at events, giving lectures etc.) not very interesting (on average!), in part because that's what the interview process, maybe inadvertently, screens for.

otikik• 5 years ago

We live in a finite planet with finite resources. I think every argument for growth (on the scale FAANG companies operate) should also mention that part.

I also want to say that it's completely acceptable to work on a place without exorbitant pay, stocks, or promotions every 6 months. A job can be many other things. Different people want different things at different phases of their life. For some of them, a job is just a job.

owenversteeg• 5 years ago

While I agree that we should be mindful of our finite resources, it’s worth noting that you can have sustained growth and still consume fewer resources. For example, US per-capita CO2 emissions have declined 30% since 1970, while per-capita GDP has grown more than twelvefold. In recent years, technology has been by far the largest contributor to that widening gap between GDP growth and emissions. That’s not to ignore the impact technology has on the environment from e.x. rare earth mining, but if you look at the big picture I think you’ll be positively surprised.

GauntletWizard• 5 years ago

I'm sad to see Jay go, I've interacted with him in his role as bazel-go maintainer. It's clear that project wasn't getting the resources it needs. As a former Googler myself, I understand his frustration all too well. Google used to be run like a university, a place of learning and scientific advancement. It's not anymore. Many of my former coworkers have quit. All of them tell the same story of it feeling like a big corporation.

Note that Google was a huge, profitable, publicly traded company before this happened - it was possible to be an institution and be publicly traded, but for how long? Can we build long term focused companies that are subject to the whims of the stock markets? I'm not sure. Truthfully, I think it's a social problem.

jppope• 5 years ago

I believe "scale" should probably be "growth"

bschwindHN• 5 years ago

From the outside, this paints google as a bunch of engineers moving around, dropping projects, trying to get promoted.

Obsession with promotions instead of product quality won't lead anywhere nice.

Fnoord• 5 years ago

My wife also works in tech and can comfortably support us both. I hope in a year, I'll be rested and ready to jump back into tech with a better sense of purpose and direction.

If you have this luxury, use your precious time to work less.

toblbg• 5 years ago

An interesting look into the reality of working at Google. Thanks for sharing!

Leaving Google

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