Why I left Google: work-life balance

https://www.scottkennedy.us/balance.html

by rmason • 4 years ago

453 239 4 years ago

scottkennedy.us

rattray• 4 years ago

tl;dr, working reasonable hours that are no fun is worse than working more hours that are fun/rewarding/meaningful.

I very much agree.

stormbrew• 4 years ago

I think this is probably approximately true, at least if everyone involved is ok with it (I hope the author's family is), but it's a bit weird to describe it as fulfilling work-life balance which isn't usually used in a way that's neutral about how they should be balanced (ie. even if all of the above is true, it would still usually be described as a "bad balance").

kadenwolff• 4 years ago

Pg shared this post earlier as well:

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1524166696461864962?s=20&t=...

endisneigh2• 4 years ago

Strange, could’ve switched teams and had 1 and 2 without the hassle. Given what’s happening with the markets I doubt the equity will end up turning up much.

goldenchrome• 4 years ago

Switching teams doesn’t solve the problem. It’s company-wide culture. No one has fire in their bellies because of the infinite ads revenue firehose.

jcims3• 4 years ago

I worked at Google for about six months. Met some amazing folks and saw some amazing stuff, but the intro to Beverly Hillbillies kept intruding into my thoughts. Search felt like the bubbling crude that fueled everything, it was interesting.

killjoywashere• 4 years ago

The last footnote got my attention:

This sounds simple, but expenses for a family of three with a house in the Bay Area are no joke. It wound up being ~85% of my Google salary.

I live in the Bay area, but under exotic conditions. I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college. Am I don't the math wrong?

tshaddox• 4 years ago

I think you could probably make it work with half that salary, but you won’t feel particularly comfortable or financially secure.

PragmaticPulp3• 4 years ago

It's not entirely clear, but I suspect the author is referring to their base salary at Google. The fact that Replit, a startup, provided a salary capable of covering his expenses (which were equal to 85% of his salary) is another clue that he's not included RSUs in the calculation.

I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college.

Bay Area is definitely livable on far below $500K.

The "2 kids in college" makes your math impossible to guess because that could be anywhere from a minor footnote to the entirety of your budget if you're trying to pay full sticker price tuition in real-time with no prior savings (which almost nobody does, but it would make the math look terrifying). That's not really a feature of the Bay Area, though, because you'd carry that college line item on your personal budget wherever you moved.

coredog64• 4 years ago

California makes it more difficult in that the salary required for a home pushes you past thresholds for financial aid. You might be what’s known as “house poor” but the university sees the house as an asset that counts towards a high net worth. There are even some prestigious private universities offering “no tuition for families making less than $150k (or thereabouts)”.

stkenned4• 4 years ago

(OP here)

Correct about not including RSUs in that footnote. Since I've always budgeted to live off salary and not bonus/RSUs, they weren't part of that particular calculation.

Obviously my W2 will look very different in 2022, since RSUs essentially get treated as cash grants and startup options are illiquid.

hadlock2• 4 years ago

House (or medium/large condo): bought in last 3 years $1.5mm usd Mortgage (20% down): $105,000/year Property taxes: $17,000/year Maintenance: between $3600-11,000/year (including capital things like AC, roof, flooring, repainting interior, foundation amortized) Total: $133,000/year

Family: Grocery: $20,000/yr Daycare 2 kids: $48,000/yr (yes daycare is $2000/mo in SF... to START) Transportation: $8,000/yr (car payment + insurance + gas) Annual one week "really nice" vacation: $10,000 (4 round trip tickets, 2 hotel rooms, food, transport, entertainment etc) Misc costs: $10,000 Total: $96,000

Comes out to about $230k/year in raw expenses. These are pretty accurate for 2021 San Francisco 40 minutes walking distance from FiDi. Of course there's no way you'd qualify for an $8500/mo mortgage on that salary (19k/mo) so instead you'd have to settle for a 2 bedroom condo ($960,000? maybe? can you squeeze 2 adults and 2 kids into 1050 sq feet? long term?) for the four of you, sharing one car.

You might be able to pull this off on $300,000 with substantial help from family if they are local, but after taxes etc you will be struggling to save 1% of your income and not really building/maintaining an emergency fund or building savings for other projects/hobbies.

tmpz22• 4 years ago

Am I doing the math wrong?

You’d need to show your estimated incomes and expenses and explain your retirement goals.

As a Bay Area native it seems high unless you’re paying $50k/yr for expensive colleges.

I’d expect the same to be doable with a reasonable social life and vacations for 300k (still a lot).

Many make do in the same situation for far far far less.

Brystephor• 4 years ago

How long have the people doing it now on far far far less been doing it for? eg if they bought a house 10 years ago, their expenses are less. Could they do it now on the same amount?

I have no reference for the bay area living expenses, but it isn't correct to say that just because something was once doable that it still is.

refurb2• 4 years ago

If you're trying to recreate the mid-west lifestyle of a 3-bedroom, 2,500 sq ft house with a big yard, new cars, in an excellent school district, then yeah, it's going to be expensive as hell.

opportune2• 4 years ago

This, if your lifestyle is completely inelastic you're gonna have a bad time. Even with double the pay you're not going to come close to the midwest in terms of house-size (without living in a really bad area/with a huge commute). If you are OK with not living in as large of a place, but having more money for physical goods (e.g. nice groceries/restaurants, gadgets and devices) and stuff that is mostly location-agnostic (vacations, investments) you might be substantially better off.

You definitely don't need $500k to rent a 3bed apartment in the South Bay. I think market rate is probably around $5.5k/mo? Call it an even $6k to include parking and utilities. Should be comfortably affordable on $200k with breathing room ($200k for a married couple with claimable dependents being roughly $146k after tax, $72k going to housing, $74k post-tax for whatever else), though not sure about kids' tuition.

Right now is a terrible time to buy a home in the South Bay (rising interest rates + RTO) so don't take all-in home ownership costs at face value.

kilbuz2• 4 years ago

The math depends largely on what sort of housing situation you are assuming. As you probably know. $1.5-$1.8MM is a small (1200-1500 sq ft.) 3bd/2bth ranch house in a San Jose suburb with mediocre schools and strip mall culture. (e.g., https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1995-Majestic-Way-San-Jos...)

It goes up from there. Townhouses are getting close to $1.5MM now in the same area. I haven't followed prices in SF recently, but they are no better I assume. I think you'd be priced out of a small house on the peninsula at $500k/year.

If you're paying for college times 2, I don't know, $500k sounds kind of minimal with 7-10k a month mortgage if you want any sort of ability to save a meaningful amount of money.

Keep in mind you'll be paying $30k+ a year in property taxes every single year for the privilege of that house.

opportune2• 4 years ago

You're almost certainly doing the math wrong unless you are doing a comparison like "I live in a 3k square foot house with top schools and a 10m commute and need the exact same in the bay area".

nicolas_• 4 years ago

FYI, clicking on the About liink while being already on the about page leads to a 404 page.

stkenned4• 4 years ago

Thanks, fixed. That's what I get for using this as my toy "learn Go" project :)

sdo72• 4 years ago

I really don't understand the author's points. The main point is "work-life balance", but these don't seem to make sense:

+ enough salary to pay my bills

+ I work more hours" and even "on the weekend now"

+ enough equity

All of these are actually worse or much lower chance of being better compared to a job at Google.

adra• 4 years ago

Agreed, author seems deluded and kool-aid enduced. I'm all for change when it makes sense to you. Sticking with a company you're not charged up for often feels like torture, but any semblance of what they said in the article and "work-life balance" feels way off the mark.

pradn2• 4 years ago

His main point is that he feels like he's making more progress and being more productive at ReplIt than at Google, which leads to higher satisfaction. He considers satisfaction more important than just pure hours / compensation.

I'm inclined to agree. Working uphill in a complexity jungle (organization or technical) can drain the soul.

chii3• 4 years ago

working at a lower-paying job (and doing more hours) is a poor way to satisfy the upper end of the Maslow pyramid of needs (ala, self actualization).

The most important metric is consistent and passive income from wealth. Once you have "enough" of such passive income, you can spend your time on self actualization.

Most people don't reach the level of passive income required for their chosen lifestyle quality, and so cannot expend time for self actualization. So instead, they double up their career and make that the mode for self actualization (after all, two birds one stone and all that). But i do believe that it mostly does not work, unless the job is somehow a 1:1 mapping to that particular person's method of self actualization. Unfortunately, a lot of people kid themselves and pretend that it does match.

constantlm• 4 years ago

Work life balance not in hours spent, but rather in the sense of satisfaction and energy to do things (including the work itself)

boardwaalk• 4 years ago

One could just call that work satisfaction or some such thing. No need to overload words.

MomoXenosaga• 4 years ago

Like I told someone: what is the point of having a family if you never get to see them?

xqcgrek2• 4 years ago

Some people like that arrangement. In fact, it has been the norm in certain cultures.

9530jh9054ven• 4 years ago

Financial or political benefit. Bragging rights. Someone that won't fight back or leave when you use them as a literal punching bag to vent.

Not necessarily good reasons to have a family. But reasons that do exist, unfortunately.

nnoitra3• 4 years ago

political benefit you say... hmmm

ilrwbwrkhv• 4 years ago

Left for work life balance and then this:

I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. But what I do makes a difference that I can see. Progress feels 10x faster

Might feel more satisfaction but the work life balance is still missing and eventually will come back to make him write "Why I left Repl.it"

Eastern traditions have solved this a long time back. You have to break the cycle.

JohnL4• 4 years ago

Honestly, "left Google for 40-person startup for work-life balance reasons" brought me up short.

throwawayboise• 4 years ago

"Balance" can mean "all things equal" but when talking about work-life balance I think it means that your work and non-work time combine to produce optimal satisfaction. For some people, if they derive a large amount of satisfaction from their work, that may mean that a more demanding job provides better "balance" in their life.

nnoitra3• 4 years ago

What cycle at the end of the day he has to work and idk how with that salary he didnt make enough to retire already.

thfuran• 4 years ago

Eastern traditions have solved this a long time back

Have they? I don't think I've ever heard anything sane, let alone good regarding Japan when it comes to work life balance.

redisman• 4 years ago

Japan, China, Korea.. all major “eastern” economies are known for way worse academic and professional work life balance

joyeuse6701• 4 years ago

I don't think he's referring to work-life balance in the standard way. His work-life balance issue wasn't because of too much work, it was because it was uninspiring somehow. He compensated heavily with 'life' as per his water bucket analogy. He played basketball and he hung out with friends, but when that was taken away, he clearly saw that he disliked his work and over relied on 'life'. So he eased the stress caused by work by finding something more inspiring. He may have found a better balance with work he actually likes.

As for the Eastern traditions I think you're implying, the solution is simple, but not easy. Clearly there aren't many Buddhas roaming around in continuous states of bliss, and it isn't for a lack of trying. Having said that, the insight he gained when he was stripped of his 'life' balancing activities is precisely the sort of realizations people can make on their path through some of these traditions.

PragmaticPulp3• 4 years ago

In 2020, the pandemic destroyed bucket #3 for most people. We were no different. Friends from back home in Canada couldn’t visit us. Even meeting up with local friends became hard. In January 2021 I tore my achilles tendon playing pick-up basketball. There goes bucket #2.
Only then did I realize bucket #1 had been running low for a while.

I'm somewhat puzzled. If the author is struggling to socialize with friends (bucket #3) and struggling to pay attention to physical health (bucket #2) then why does he think that this is going to help improve work-life balance:

I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now.

I can empathize with the desire to get caught up in a high-energy startup (it's fun!) but this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Filling your days with extra work can fill the "bucket #1" (career) but it seems like a nail in the coffin for the author's problems with bucket #2 (physical health) and bucket #3 (social life).

Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.

bronxbomber92• 4 years ago

The author states it wasn't actually work-life balance that was making him happy and tired. Rather, he discovered:

By mid-2021 I was tired all the time. I know I wasn’t alone, because it was an ongoing meme inside Google2. It’s only now that I realize what was wrong: I missed the satisfaction of building things and finishing projects.

PragmaticPulp3• 4 years ago

This is the classic justification that leads people to self-defeating workaholism: The idea that you can fill the voids in your life by just working harder.

The false dichotomy is the idea that the alternative to Google is to work more hours + evenings + weekends at a startup. He's replacing one problem with another, but this new problem feels fresh and new and like turning over a new leaf. At least for now.

nnoitra3• 4 years ago

This is a bizarre non sequitur.

krat0sprakhar• 4 years ago

+1 I'm finding this post a bit confusing as well. TBH, Google seems to be an ideal place to have work-life balance. Things move slowly and everyone expects that projects never get delivered on time (as the author points out). People generally are not expected to work outside of working hours and definitely not on weekends.

I believe a better title for the blog post could be "Why I left Google: unsatisfying work" and seems more inline with what the author experienced.

ocdtrekkie• 4 years ago

Google's culture is built to replace your out of work time with time on Google campuses and ensuring your friends are other Googlers. Work-life balance for Google is just living at Google.

Add that everything you say probably means your work life is also unsatisfying... I mean, nothing makes me happier about my work than when I get something done.

imgabe• 4 years ago

The author mentioned that the level in the bucket represented satisfaction, not necessarily time.

throwawayamz27• 4 years ago

The subtlety is that its not about projects not being delivered on time, its about them never being delivered (either cancelled or scoped down until no one has to actually do anything).

In an environment like this the incentive is to become a bottleneck for a lot of projects (so you get at least some that get delivered) and then a) do nothing on most to outwait the inevitable cancellation b) do the minimum possible work on the remainder, but make it seem as complex as possible.

Even with low hours of work this becomes a very stressful environment as if you are trying to get something done, you have to be constantly convincing people you are depending on that the project is worthy of category b). While doing the exact thing to the people depending on you. Turnover makes this hard also as a small percentage of coworkers are very valuable to you (you can trust them to prioritize your project).

From my experience this stress stretches into your out of work time, making the WLB worse even with a reasonable amount of "in office" hours.

femiagbabiaka• 4 years ago

I can only speak for myself but I personally find jobs like that to be very stressful. Every review period a coin flip. Periodic severe swings in work output expectations because the thing you thought wasn’t important is now on some executives quarterly goals. Etc. Spending 40 hours a week doing effectively nothing but pushing a rock up a hill can be exhausting. This is a phenomenon that exists outside of my single anecdote: http://www.garlikov.com/philosophy/Sisyphus.html.

Having clear and achievable targets (that are achieved!) and consistent expectations is much preferable.

sl9dmk2• 4 years ago

Don't think author is replacing unhappy personal life with workaholism. He's saying that when you have low energy in some parts of your life, it drains into other parts.

Now that he enjoys his work more, he's finding that he also has more energy for gym / social situations etc.

I had the same experience in big tech. Lack of work progress made me depressed and bled into other parts of my life.

Startups have their own issues, but at least there's more momentum on most days. Important to go with well-funded ones in this environment though, preferably by the top VCs: https://topstartups.io/

Varqu• 4 years ago

They would have an ideal work-life balance IF they enabled full remote work.

Their hybrid you-have-to-come-to-the-office approach basically means that you still need to live in an area near to the office, which basically means no real benefits from remote setting.

roland35• 4 years ago

I had a similar experience - when I felt like things were moving too slow and I didn't deliver a lot I was much more stressed out. My manager and team was satisfied with my output but I couldn't shake the anxiety that I wasn't doing enough!

Ironically for me I went the opposite direction, now working at a large tech company I have more than enough work to fill my plate. I am no longer worried about not doing enough:D

pm906• 4 years ago

I think they meant that once they realized their work was unsatisfying they wanted to change it. The “working late and on weekends” was a way of showing their new excitement for the role.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But I do agree the conclusion for leaving being work life balance seems incorrect.

d3nj4l4• 4 years ago

Exactly my thoughts. It is, in fact, darkly funny that this post is titled around "work-life balance", because the author is basically saying "My life stuff wasn't working out so I tilted the scales towards work."

I completely understand finding it unsatisfying to work in a situation where you're not making any progress. It's something that I think is the worst thing about my current role, and the lack of progress contributes to burnout in its own way. But working weekends and nights regularly is another, faster way to burnout, especially for someone who has a family.

hnfong• 4 years ago

Pedantically, a lack of "work-life balance" can be due to "lack of work" (as opposed to the much more common "lack of life").

Agree that the title could be better worded though.

systemvoltage• 4 years ago

This is overly cynical post by otherwise great comments from you, PragmaticPulp.

I personally find working harder is the only way I can survive. Being unproductive is depressing because it brings lackluster mediocre life/rewards with it. With life that is less rewarding and dull, my mental health suffers. Spiraling downwards. It has happened twice.

On the other hand, I never get burned out no matter hours or effort. Building stuff is too much fun. Building stuff with super cool people is even more fun.

Early Googler's were the happiest bunch when it was in a startup stage.

So, I can relate with the author more than your cynical take on this.

ehnto2• 4 years ago

They did explain why they had lost job satisfaction, big companies all over the place are struggling to hold on to people as they restructure and fail to deliver due to the pandemic's impact. The morale and human cost of this organizational faltering is driving people out.

Because buckets #2 and #3 are low, people are having a harder time accepting a bad hand in bucket #1. If you have a good life outside of work you can push through bad work environments for a while.

Gatsky• 4 years ago

Think you missed the point. Burn out can come from working in a sclerotic organisation where you fail to achieve your goals (despite doing fine professionally and financially and going home at 4pm). This became obvious to the author when other aspects of life were diminished. It also seems procrustean to assume everyone should conform to your notion of work life balance. Working hard on a problem of perceived importance may be exactly what someone wants from life.

I mean sure, the author is in a somewhat luxurious position. But then, why does anyone leave Google if not for some version of this.

drawkbox2• 4 years ago

Ultimately people like to have some ownership in direction of projects and products.

Many times that is taken from you on larger teams.

It is odd that HBS and value extractors (business/finance/project/marketing) have taken so much power from value creators (creatives/developers/product people) in terms of the power balance, most people know that makes bad products and was really the basis of capitalism starting, ownership of direction.

In his landmark 1776 work The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith showed that a clever division of labor could make a commercial enterprise vastly more productive than if each worker took personal charge of constructing a finished product. [1]

The project managers and finance want to make the product now, from a value extraction viewpoint over a value creation one. It ultimately leads many value creators to go do their own thing.

No matter how hard they try to remove the creative element of product creation, it is actually a key input to successful projects.

Products are like creative works, they should be built with depth, deep dives and aim to be a fun experience and friend of the user.

Bottom up processes can create great products with polish and love, they are value creation processes.

Top down processes and deadlines create shallow features and products, they are value extraction processes.

The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors.

[1] https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-high-price-of-efficiency

BatteryMountain• 4 years ago

Thank you for teaching me two new words and their expressions. English not a first language for me so it is nice to encounter new expressions, which actually isn't that often. Thanks

watwut• 4 years ago

Wouldn't that be "work-satisfaction" problem rather then "work-life balance" problem?

gumby• 4 years ago

Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.

This has been the key pitch since Intel at least, perhaps even Fairchild.

spoonjim• 4 years ago

Some people genuinely believe in their work. Jonas Salk worked hard because he believed his work mattered. This guy works hard at Replit because he believes his work matters. My family friend with Down Syndrome works hard at his menial job because he believes his work matters. If people didn’t work hard to accomplish hard things we would still be living in mud huts with 50% infant mortality.

hericium• 4 years ago

this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism.

Agree. Some rationalizations in this post reminded me of a recent "Mourning loss as a remote team"[1] entry.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30811187

ano88888• 4 years ago

"The work life balance " is extremely confusing or misleading. He absolutely will get more work life balance at Google than at a startup. What he meant is that he got more excited because he could make more impact despite sacrificing work life balance. It is the opposite of what he claims. People should seriously stop redefining words to make themselves sound smart. And chances are he is gonna get pretty much nothing from the startup equity than from Google. (it is a bet with odds against him , statistically speaking)

terryf• 4 years ago

Because being miserable for 8 hours a day at work will leave you drained and depressed for the other 16. That makes socializing hard.

Being exited and happy for 9 hours a day at work abd coming home with a sense of accomplishment can actually give you energy to do more for the othe 15 hours.

Based on personal experience.

sdevonoes• 4 years ago

Think the same. In my case, though it is "Being excited and happy for 4-5 hours a day at work". More than that and my brain is just too tired to enjoy the rest of the day. My schedule is 40h/week, though, but I'm still productive doing half of that.

TimPC• 4 years ago

Yes, but you have to be very careful about the slippery slope here and how you measure things. I personally find that I sleep about the same regardless of how miserable I am at work, which means I get no quality change from roughly eight hours a day. My commute doesn't change in quality either and four many people that commute is 1 hour each way. Some people will find some other numbers that are important to subtract here. In the extreme, you'll find that an extra hour a day of work but reducing the misery of your work can result in 1 good hour of free time instead of 2 mediocre hours of free time. For most people things aren't quite that extreme but it's certainly not anything resembling 15 vs 16.

gamerDude• 4 years ago

I think it's because it's because his buckets are not around time management, but energy management.

And it works both ways. If you are drained by your job, you get home exhausted and want to just lay on the couch. If you are energized by your job, you get home excited. You feel like you can take on the world and then might be up to go to dinner with friends instead of drained and depressed and want to stay home and eat ice cream to console yourself (my personal go to).

The same goes in the other directions. If you are healthy, you will have more energy for other things. If you are unhealthy, your body will drag you down, it will be harder to do other things. Think of having a broken leg or a lot of pain. You just don't feel well and will bring that feeling into other parts of life.

Energy management isn't a zero sum game.

However, I think you do point out something else. Throwing yourself into work because you want to avoid dealing with issues in your other buckets is not an energy gain. But there is a key difference between working more to avoid painful things and reigniting a spark of joy in your work.

masterof0• 4 years ago

I never though I would agree with PragmaticPulp ;) , I also have seen this pattern before, as someone who works at Google (SDE) and worked at Amazon previously, and also worked at unknown small/medium size companies, most team WLB at Google is pretty pretty good, you set your own rhythm of work and goals.At Amazon in the other hand is quite different, you will get PIPed for sure if your team is sweaty and you go on a normal pace, but at Google you have to be really awful to get fired. Startups use the "mission" and "family" non-sense to hustle people to work hard, while most of the times are the founders(and the VCs) the only ones that benefit.

AlwaysRock• 4 years ago

The idea is that is one has a fulfilling social life and physical health its easy to deal with, or even be unaware of, less fulfilling work.

reverseblade2• 4 years ago

If you are not happy with what you do, you can't make others happy even if you have time to do so.

NonNefarious• 4 years ago

Some colleagues of mine worked at Google, and their reports do not reflect well on the management style there. People are pitted against each other and forced to downrate one vs. the other in periodic reviews, using a graphical tool built for the purpose (seriously).

It's "work/life" balance, BTW.

endisneigh2• 4 years ago

They’re not forced to down rate, in any case it’s not a thing anymore anyways

hstan42• 4 years ago

Anytime I hear repl.it I get annoyed by the time their CEO was threatened by and shut down an ex-employee’s weekend project

alephnan• 4 years ago

Please link.

pm906• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195

It sounds like a shady org and the CEO sounds like a total jerk. I too remember having a really poor impression after reading this.

d3nj4l4• 4 years ago

It's a shame that that incident seems to dog them around on HN so much. I don't like what the CEO did in that case either, but I don't think their entire company should sink due to that one incident

ionforce• 4 years ago

What have they done since to repair their image?

marktolson• 4 years ago

Same here. However it did point me in the direction of the ex-interns awesome project which I use often for technical interviews: https://riju.codes/

alexyz12• 4 years ago

He also uses the word alpha un-ironically in his tweets

pm906• 4 years ago

but middle managers are clever enough to word OKRs in a way that makes them all think they’re getting what they want.

I chuckled at this one. Middle managers gonna middle manage.

I know a lot of this behavior is simply due to the position in which they are where senior managers and execs wont take no for an answer. But you have to make tough choices: If you don’t believe deep down that you can deliver, push back hard rather than playing games.

robocat• 4 years ago

Enough equity that if I’m right about what Replit can become, I’ll come out ahead of staying at Google.

This is why it is so hard to financially justify working for a startup. To cover the risk requires large outsized gains. And financially the 15 percentage points drop in salary could easily be say a 50% drop in disposable income.

Yet the pleasure is worth the price.

And the above ignores any longer hours (I personally struggle to value my time or satisfaction, in either dollars or opportunity costs).

thinkharderdev2• 4 years ago

I think it's also important to take into account the diminishing marginal utility of money. It's one thing to leave a FAANG job making 300k a year to work at a non-profit for 50k a year. But going to a startup making 150-200k a year can be a great trade if it genuinely brings more satisfaction. After all it's not like your family is going to starve making only 4x the median salary in the US. If you also get a lottery ticket in the form of startup equity then great, but it could still make total sense to make the move even if you assume (probably correctly) that your equity will be approximately worthless.

asiachick• 4 years ago

it depends on where you live. Can you afford to buy an apartment/condo/house in the bay area on $150-200k a year? Replit is in SF

corobo• 4 years ago

Haha, sometimes I’m too British for this site

I’d be over the moon with that 50k job, never mind the 300k one. Even with currency conversion I’d be up 10k/y

America, fancy outsourcing to the UK?

ambivalents• 4 years ago

This kinda just reads like a post hoc rationalization for a career decision. 'Leaving Google' is supposed to mean something momentous, but it isn't. It's a career decision, like many of us make at least several times through out life.

praptak• 4 years ago

First point - even if, so what? The value of the article is in the thoughts, regardless of motivation.

Second point - maybe 5 years and hundreds of "leaving Google" posts ago. And the author doesn't seem to try to make it bigger than it is. TFA is exactly that - an explanation of a career decisions which HN found good/resonating.

jackblemming• 4 years ago

I hadn’t been coding regularly for about 5 years. But thankfully their interviews were practical. I spent evenings and weekends refreshing my skills enough to pass.

Can we agree how screwed up our joke interview culture is when a Google engineer with 10 years experience has to brush up interview skills? Come on.

aeyes• 4 years ago

Reading the blog I would say he hasn't been working in a true engineering position for a very long time, probably some sort of engineering manager.

stkenned4• 4 years ago

(OP here)

Yeah, I was in a role where I was full time managing for the second half of my Google tenure. Hence the rusty coding skills.

Yes, this also means I'm ridiculing myself on the whole OKR framing thing.

gniv• 4 years ago

It's partly a reflection on Google culture. They use so many in-house libraries that you forget what it's like to code without them.

ehnto2• 4 years ago

I decided the best fix would be to work somewhere so small that this entire class of problems couldn’t exist.

You found the secret. Small companies rock, no amount of clout or equity can buy you the sanity and clear conscious of not having to deal with the Organizational Mire.

adamredwoods• 4 years ago

Hey Scott, I really liked your post! I, too, rely on the 3-bucket evaluation: career, health, family / friends.

Oddly, I also really enjoy repls in general. Repl.it has always been a big way for me to learn quickly and to explore programming language edge-cases, and even think about code-reviews (when trying a simpler code I may want to comment on). I'm interested in Replit, as I've never heard of it before.

Best of luck!

bogomipz6• 4 years ago

This was a confusing piece of writing. The opening paragraph states:

"I left because I needed to fix my work-life balance."

The summary paragraph then states: >"I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. But what I do makes a difference that I can see. Progress feels 10x faster."

It doesn't appear that they fixed their work-life balance at all. It does sound like they may have fixed their work-satisfaction balance however but that wasn't the stated reason for leaving.

vesche• 4 years ago

I like this post a lot and respect the jump. However... Replit? I needed a browser IDE for some work about ~4 years ago and used their product briefly before switching to Cloud9 (now owned by Amazon). Nowadays, GitHub has Codespaces which is really slick. I don't see Replit as a company that is going places. I'd guess that Cloud9 was acquired by Amazon for 50 million? Maybe I'm missing something.

Cwizard• 4 years ago

I agree, like it or hate it, Github is where code lives. They own the platform developers flock to. That is a very big advantage. If the product is even remotely comparable Replit is in for a rough time.

Also for bigger orgs, if there is already a contract with Microsoft, Codespaces will be the likely choice over any alternatives.

lom• 4 years ago

How does working more hours help his work-life balance? Maybe the title should more be “not working a soul-sucking job”

munificent4• 4 years ago

Bias up front: I work at Google.

Something I try to do whenever I read articles like this: Whenever you see the name of the giant corporation that the author worked at, replace it with "my team". Google has over 100,000 employees, so there's no real "here's what it's like to work at Google". At that scale, there is too much variance for any simple neat summary (though there are certainly trends and commonalities).

I've met people who worked at Amazon who described it as a hellscape of misery and others who felt it was incredibly rewarding. There's been times when I worked at EA when I loved my job and times when I hated it.

A single data point is useful, but it's only a single data point. I'm glad the author found a better job that fits what they're looking for. That's all any of us really want in our careers.

CSMastermind• 4 years ago

While I agree with this sentiment, I wouldn't be so quick to completely dismiss pervading company cultures.

I think a better suggestion would be to say that when you read articles like this you should ask if the author has the right perspective to know what the truly common elements of a company's culture are or if they're extrapolating from a single data point.

ozzythecat• 4 years ago

I was at amazon for over 10 years. The burn out hellscape culture, often where you’re managed by some H1B manager who’s afraid of themselves getting fired (and having to leave the US) if they don’t meet their forced attrition quotas: it’s real. I spoke with those managers and heard it directly from them.

Yeah there are teams coasting by. Of course, there are engineers working 60 hours a week who will tell you about their excellent work life balance. Some of it is relative.

esjeon• 4 years ago

Plus, people seek different values from their work, and even those values also change over time. So, yeah, what really matters is the number of data points.

Still, Google is obviously not the hacker-driven company it used to be 10 years ago. Almost all data points suggest that Google lacks internal vision and leadership (likely outside of a few key areas). This sounds like a typical multi-national corpo w/ a lot of money to burn.

nso953• 4 years ago

There are outlier teams, but culture tends to trickle down

Cheezewheel• 4 years ago

If there is a company that is a hellscape for 30% of its employees, and works just fine for most of the rest, then I would describe that company of having a hellscape culture. The existence of positive experiences doesn't change the fact that a lot of these bad experiences, at Amazon, at Google, are directly due to corporate policies, incentives, and the decisions of upper management.

2rsf• 4 years ago

Same for Microsoft. In spite of the top-management-spirit teams were totally different in their stress levels, WLB and daily routines. The same actually implies to those small "Used By X company" when you evaluate products, I have seen those claiming to be used by Microsoft while knowing it was just a short term evaluation that ended with nothing but MS is still paying for a licence.

blagie• 4 years ago

I respectfully disagree. There is a "What it's like to work at Google."

Google has a culture. Large companies have a way of operating. I don't think any of OP's comments are at all off-base for Google. A lot of what OP wrote is fundamental to any organization with tens of thousands of people.

And you know something? That's fine. I know people who are very happy there, and I know people who are miserable there. There are times in my life when /I/ would have been very happy in that sort of place, and there are times in my life when /I/ would have been completely miserable there.

A lot of that comes down to personality, and a lot of that is situational.

For example, I want a very different employer if I don't have kids and can throw my life into work than when I'm dealing with a difficult family situation. I've been in both situations.

I would be completely miserable at Google _right now_. It might have been a dream job out-of-college, and it might be a great job again in just a few years.

munificent4• 4 years ago

There is a "What it's like to work at Google."

That's true, but blog posts written solely by people who left are unlikely to capture it well. There is an implicit selection bias in play. People tend to write most about transitions, but if you want to know what it's like to work somewhere, the people you really want to ask are those right in the middle of it, because that's where you spend the most time.

disambiguation• 4 years ago

This blog is less about dissing Google and more about promoting Replit.

cassac• 4 years ago

I wonder if this article would be the same if the author wasn’t making google money for 10 years. Having all that money let’s you quit to a 40 person startup and be guilt free.

fijiaarone• 4 years ago

Google hasn’t built anything since gmail came out. They’re coasting on a monopoly. And they say they’re killing Gmail in July.

AA-BA-94-2A-56• 4 years ago

And they say they’re killing Gmail in July.

Source?

seattle_spring• 4 years ago

They're likely referring to the GSuite changes [1]. Likening it to "killing Gmail" is kind of disingenuous.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/before-google-kills-...

nso953• 4 years ago

The first six months of a new job is the honey moon phase, give it time.

deepsquirrelnet• 4 years ago

Are there any big companies that excel at innovation? I feel like every large organization goes like this:

- a huge number of people and teams pigeonholed into narrow specializations

- a huge number of corporate interfaces, silos and bottlenecks

- ever increasing bureaucracy to maintain the fragile infrastructure of personnel

- depersonalization of employees as the role they were confined to, rather than the talents they possess

nso953• 4 years ago

Surprisingly Amazon probably gets the closest

BLKNSLVR• 4 years ago

I've recently come to the personal realisation that Bucket #1 is only for people with unused capacity in, or a total lack of, Buckets #2 (physical health) and #3 (social and family) - I'd actually create a Bucket #4 specific to family.

I don't need a lot of social; my bucket is probably a bit smaller than most peoples. I have very few close friends but still too many to catch up with as often as I'd like.

I've had some back issues and so physical health has had an increased priority recently-ish because, as I've been told by my ever-loving, ever-suffering wife, I'm not as happy a person to be around if I'm not regularly playing sport. So, I'm both playing sport as well as increasing core, back, and general physical strength in order to be able to continue to play sport for as long as I freakin' well can. Physical health, done right, is a massive consumer of time and headspace.

I have two kids that I love spending time with, interacting with, and developing into rational, well-balanced humans (hopefully, if there is such a thing). This is also a massive consumer of time and both mental and physical effort.

I've been to a couple of funerals recently, and the shit that people remember, the things that touches and changes the lives of those you love and choose to spend time with, is a million miles away from "work" or "career".

My bucket #1 gets the spill-off from the other buckets, enough that the bucket doesn't go dry.

Note: I'm aware the above is entirely my personal experience, and there are people I know who LOVE their careers and are happy to sacrifice other buckets for it. My wife is a teacher, and wholly committed to educating kids and she gets legitimate life affirmation from seeing past students go on to be successful - and I have great respect for this. I work in IT, it's fucking BS that means nothing and just funds the other buckets. The two roles I've left in my "career" were for work/life balance reasons, and I took a pay cut both times. And don't regret either decision, other than both should have been done earlier.

sydthrowaway• 4 years ago

One of the most privileged and tone deaf posts I have ever seen

travisgriggs• 4 years ago

What will the author blog in 5 years?

I am noticing a (darkish?) pattern in these recurring “I transitioned jobs” reports. Worryingly, they represent many of the words I imagine myself writing if I were again a blogger.

It’s basically the honeymoon/wanderlust cycle. Person gets job. It is a dream job. It is described as a dream job because of reasons a1, b1, and c1. Delta t passes. Things have changed. Because of reasons x1, y1, and z1, job is no longer a good dream job. It’s now a bad dream/nightmare job. Person has awakened now, and for reasons, a2, b2, and c2 is living a new dream. Blink, flinch, repeat.

The nagging suspicion is that while things change, they don’t so much actually. They shift around. What does change is how we come to see things. At one point, we convince ourselves things are awesome. Later we believe it’s not. Which is the real truth we ought to accept? It’s like trying to measure the one way speed of light. You can’t, just the sum of the round trip.

So do we make the assumption that somewhere in the middle of this good-to-bad cycle is the reality? Or suspect it was always that bad, we were just able to initially gaslight ourselves? Or perhaps that it was and still is good, we’ve just let the negatives creep in and take over?

Some would philosophize that all happiness is an illusion. Or a choice. Or whatever.

But what frustrates me about this (having been through this cycle 3-4 times now), is that it is not a universal life experience. I have relationships with family, friends, and various institutions that grow stronger and stronger over time. They do NOT loop like work relationships do. Is there something inherit in work relationships that makes this loop inevitable? Do all experience it, or only a certain mindset of persons? Are there cases where this loop is broken, but they just rare enough, you don’t hear about them? Should I despair or hope?

physicles2• 4 years ago

The question “what is my ideal job?” doesn’t always have to have the same answer. We learn. We react. We have new experiences, which become routine, then we seek novelty again. Or, convince ourselves that it’s a really good deal and stick around.

Relationships are different though. I see work as primarily transactional, whereas personal relationships work best when they aren’t. In a friendship it’s common for both people to grow in the same direction, while a company is inflexible and doesn’t respond to your individual growth so it’s more likely that you’ll “grow apart.”

brokencode• 4 years ago

I think the difference is that work is typically much more stressful and difficult than relationships with friends and family.

I suspect that exposure to constant stress at work causes us to have negative feelings over time (burnout), and the easiest way to reset the emotional clock is to get a different job working on something else.

But some people appear to be highly resistant to burnout, and I’m not sure why. I’d definitely like to learn more about it, though.

emaginniss• 4 years ago

work is typically much more stressful and difficult than relationships with friends and family

You should meet my mother

mnorris• 4 years ago

Here's my story:

I've had 3 "dream jobs." I only regret joining one of them and it basically followed the pattern you describe, and I think I just narrowly avoided entering into this cycle in my most recent job search. In the last year, I had multiple opportunities to continue the cycle and switch jobs to another local maxima, but I think I broke the cycle, but mostly by refusing to keep playing the game.

I had weekly conversations with my friend who ended up hearing about all of my job complaints and this friend was able to see how my feelings about work changed over time. At times this friend was ready to hit me over the head because of how repetitive my complaints were.

Every time I interviewed and got a job offer, I would convince myself that I wanted to switch companies because company Y was offering me more money and responsibilities than company X and I thought company Y would give me growth opportunities beyond what I would have at company X. I would rationalize the decision in a lot of ways and would be thorough in comparing the pros and cons of switching to company Y.

And then I would talk to my friend. And my friend would say "okay, so company Y is offering you more money than company X. What do you want to do?" And I would say something like "I'm not 100% sure if I will be happy at company Y, but they're offering me more money and the company / team / product is cool. If I'm not happy in 1-2 years I can use that money to start my own company and be in a better position."

It didn't seem like I wanted to work at company Y that badly if my answer to "what do you want to do" isn't "work at company Y!" I justified my decision to change jobs by finding the things I didn't like at company X and contrasted them with the things I liked at company Y.

Leaving company X needs to be a separate decision from joining company Y in order to make the best decision. In the past I always considered them as the same decision. Even when I was interviewing at lots of companies which should have given me more choice, it always came down to making decisions about company Y based on company X instead of being about what I wanted to do for the long-term.

I talked to a bunch of other friends and family about switching to company Y and everyone else except this one friend went along with whatever I said. Some people lightly questioned what I said but only to see that I had an answer for their questions, but the human mind can rationalize basically anything and I had already fooled myself into thinking I wanted to switch jobs when I was just unhappy with company X.

I fooled everyone except my one friend, because my friend realized that my decision-making process was fundamentally flawed. That gave my friend the confidence to push-back on what I said. Having a contrary perspective gave me the space to reconsider my decisions.

I quit my job at company X and am currently trying to start my own company since that's what I wanted to do all along.

pronlover7232• 4 years ago

Enough equity that if I’m right about what Replit can become, I’ll come out ahead of staying at Google.

How often is that viable?

For me, I work at a FAANG like company and I kind of hate it. I'm doing work that touches 1-2 billion people but it's just not fun. For me, WFH sucks. My best times were in small companies with small teams where people had to work together to do stuff where as my FAANG job you just pull off of piece of the never ending list of work to do and do it.

I do feel the golden handcuffs though. I need the money to retire. I'd give it up for a job I was sure I'd like, for one that I think has a reasonably okay chance to succeed, and for one where if it succeeds I feel like I got a reasonable %.

To try to be clearer on those last points. I wouldn't need to replicate my FAANG like compensation. I just need to believe that when the company does well I don't feel that all I did was make the boss rich (which can be the case in small companies)

But, I no longer know what kind of job I'd be happy at.

throwaway98797• 4 years ago

gambling is what gives you life

we all end up in the same place—six feet underground

dymk• 4 years ago

Some of us sooner than others if we can’t pay our medical bills

kornish• 4 years ago

Interested in chatting about an opportunity? I feel pretty good about all three of those criteria you mentioned. (email is in my profile)

cmrdporcupine3• 4 years ago

I did 10 years at Google all the time feeling the same way as you, because of the golden handcuffs.

And you know what? That's exactly what Google wants.

Keeping you out of the job market and out of competitors' hands is worth every penny to them.

I don't have the answer for you about what's next, because I quit in December and haven't picked up anything new yet. But, yeah. That's my take.

Rafuino• 4 years ago

The fact that Paul Graham tweets were a factor in considering this company is worrisome, at least to me.

dgs_sgd• 4 years ago

I recently left a company of 1000 employees for one with 20 and my experience has been similar: working more but paradoxically have more energy for the other two buckets.

My colleagues have a greater sense of urgency and are more biased toward action . I do believe the saying (paraphrased) “you are a reflection of the people you spend the most time with”, and I think that’s how the energy and action I get in my work life “trickles” into my social life and fitness goals.

zerr• 4 years ago

It's a false sense of urgency most of the time.

nirui• 4 years ago

Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water.

I'm not agree with this. I think physical health should absolutely be the number one priority.

Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health.

That said, I would not put my health on any kind of trading table, it's the only thing that I actually own, and I can't afford to dis-own it.

Also, I don't think it's a "three buckets problem", someone probably invented it so they can talk about such thing safely in front of their boss.

You work to improve your life, and you need a good life so you can and know how to improve the life of the others (through the product you helped making). It is hard for someone to generate good results if they're living in miserable condition. A good boss should know this.

wildmanx2• 4 years ago

Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health.

You may want to consider rating mental health higher than physical health. They are correlated, but if in doubt and/or if you need to choose, mental health is the one.

And that's where the social/family component comes in. And the work component. Both contribute to mental health. Just as physical health does. But if work and family/friends "buckets" suck, then no matter how tip-top shape you get physically, mental health will suffer.

Therefore, it makes sense to not place the physical health bucket over the other two. All has to contribute to mental health.

dusted• 4 years ago

Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water. One for career, a second for physical health, and a third for social and family life.

click

I've heard about this concept often but this time reading it, I think I finally found out why it's not working for me.. Where's the fourth bucket? Where's the me bucket?

Maybe not everyone is like that, but, even though I enjoy, and find meaning in both career, exercise and family+friends, it all drains me, it exhausts me, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, and the only time I can recharge is during long unstructured stretches of time alone without external responsibilities.

Do people not generally need the fourth bucket or what?

freedom20993• 4 years ago

I totally agree with you! For me some time alone with myself not spent working is essential for my psychological well being! Luckily enough I always manage to get a daily dose of me time!

zemvpferreira• 4 years ago

Totally agreed! Unstructured downtime is crucial. For many people you might also add a fifth bucket for their spiritual life (or maybe that overlaps enough with what you're describing).

radiKal07• 4 years ago

This does not make any sense. Give it a few years and the author will find himself in the same place.

ki_• 4 years ago

Good. I think working for big corporations is death for talented people. Unless you have some boss that lets you work out your own vision without having to deal with other people or company procedures. But that's unlikely.

whiddershins2• 4 years ago

I think some comments here are responding to the fact that OP uses work life balance in an odd way.

What I believe is being discussed is something different. It is having meaningful work.

For many people, life just isn’t fulfilling without productive achievement. And for many, career is the space where productive achievement is pursued.

Think about how a single 30 minute video meeting can drain all your energy for the entire day. This can be so much worse than long hours or stressful deadlines.

When people talk about work life balance, they tend to talk about x hours doing A, B, C.

But, even if cliche, the quality of these activities is what determines the level of satisfaction, of fulfillment.

You can spend 4 hours a day with your spouse but if your relationship is terrible and you bicker the whole time, is this good work/life balance?

It won’t feel like it.

I applaud OP for seeing on some level how precious each year of this limited life is, and making a self-aware choice about how to spend some of them.

troelsSteegin• 4 years ago

This puzzled me: "Projects need multi-team cooperation to succeed, so you have to do a lot of work up front to get everybody pulling together. But it makes projects fragile."

The suggestion is that teams are atomic, that projects are scoped larger than what teams can do, and the bag-of-teams for a given project is volatile - because teams are seeking the highest reward projects. What's missing for me is an organizational cadence where projects pitch, teams shop, and then all commit for some period of time and then evaluate in phase.

Maybe that approach is too static. It is interesting to think about teams independently managing their committments as bandit experiments inside the org.

einpoklum• 4 years ago

This sounds to me like "Why I left the paramilitary death-squads: No retirement benefits"

Ok, that is taking it to the extreme, for sure, but Google has been, for a long while now, an evil behemoth. It tries to funnel an increasing chunk of people's activities on the Internet, using that to help commercial companies sell you products and services you probably don't need (already questionable manipulation), and moreover - collecting huge amounts of personal and inter-personal information for the US and other governments to spy on you, and gradually also to more carefully filter and control what information you get access to.

Google was incredibly good to me. I had some incredible teammates and role models. My family’s financial situation is forever changed. I got promoted fairly steadily and was set up well to keep advancing. > So why was I unhappy?

Apparently, not because of what Google does to most people. Which is not "incredibly good". Don't go work there.

cmrdporcupine3• 4 years ago

Everyone is welcome to point out the contradictions in this article and talk about the silliness of walking away from the comfort of FAANG workload and compensation while talking about "work life balance",... that's your right, and you're probably correct in one interpretation...

But Google is terrible for our industry. On the whole. And for many people who are trying to get satisfaction out of their work.

For innovation generally, and a terrible employer for people like TFA writer (and myself). The more people who quit to go to startups or smaller companies, the better, because it will ultimately accelerate technology and innovation. This is precisely why compensation at Google is what it is: to capture a chunk of talent and cordon it off from the potential of creating value elsewhere... to keep the revenue firehose running there but most importantly to make sure none of that revenue firehose ever diverts elsewhere.

All the talk of "innovation" there amounts to: we want your intellectual property, yes, but if we can't get it or it's not worth much, we mostly want you to not create intellectual property elsewhere (or for yourself). And we'll pay absolutely handsomely to make sure that nothing you ever think of or write contributes to the success of anybody else.

That's how a behemoth like Google survives.

I'm surely not the most amazing engineer in the world, but at Google I was a mediocre one. Not technically, mind you, but organizationally: I was terrible at playing the game, writing the design docs and getting the comments, presenting my work to other people, snatching "impactful" projects before others could take them... and showing it all off to perform the promo dance. I sucked at that, and that is primarily what success at Google is about...I failed at it... Except they didn't care, that was all fine, there was plenty of space to just plod along... because they don't need you to succeed. Just not succeed somewhere else.

But before Google I aggressively contributed to the success of some of the companies I was at, including ones competing with Google. Once I was at Google, I was no longer doing that. And, actually, it became clear to me... that was my actual value to Google...

wpeterson• 4 years ago

This resonates with my experience.

You can tell the author is mostly worn out not from long hours or challenging technical work, but from fighting against the overwhelming inertia that faces building/shipping anything. It’s exhausting.

Tade0• 4 years ago

This is precisely why compensation at Google is what it is: to capture a chunk of talent and cordon it off from the potential of creating value elsewhere...

I recall reading a thread on some facebook group where the OP was freshly hired at an (undisclosed) Large Company with amazing compensation only to do... well, nothing in particular for there weeks at the time of writing.

Commenters tried to make sense of it and figured that either no one is in control of the budget or he's essentially "parked" for a project that's supposed to launch at the start of the next quarter.

But perhaps the said company was large enough to engage in such practices.

jatins• 4 years ago

Curious if you worked with smaller companies since your time at Google and how does you experience compare?

My personal experience says most mid-sized startups don't do any better on most fronts either. Contrast the process you described "writing the design docs and getting the comments, presenting my work to other people" to "the SVP engineering feels we should do X by Friday even though it isn't urgent to business" and the former doesn't sound as bad. In fact, you have way more agency in former.

The promo game sucks, no doubt. But there are games at play in companies of all sizes. Promo games in some, authority games in others.

cmrdporcupine3• 4 years ago

Not since, not yet. And for sure I can imagine things going like you say. There's always drama. Small company drama can be even worse sometimes. So far in my search I've been trying to target companies under 100 people, aiming for more a more lead / principal type role. But we'll see how it nets out. I have a few months left of, uh, RSU runway.

zzzbra• 4 years ago

Who else read this and found that the issue had nothing to do with work-life balance, but with Google now being a “bullshit job” company? see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

ciphol• 4 years ago

While the idea that "bullshit jobs" are common may itself be bullshit [1], one can imagine that at companies like Google whose major task is preserving their current market position rather than innovating to enter new markets, and who allegedly employ smart engineers simply to prevent their competitors from employing smart engineers, there is a higher than usual level of bullshitness.

[1] From Wikipedia: Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful."[14] The study also found that while there was some correlation between occupation and feelings of uselessness, they did not correspond neatly with Graeber's analysis; bullshit "taskmasters" and "goons" such as hedge-fund managers or lobbyists were vastly satisfied with their work, while essential workers like refuse collectors and cleaners often felt their jobs were useless.

lifeisstillgood• 4 years ago

> Getting things done at Google can be hard. Projects need multi-team cooperation to succeed, so you have to do a lot of work up front to get everybody pulling together. But it makes projects fragile. When any of those teams changes direction, or even just over-stated their original commitment, the project slows down or fails3.

this hits all big companies - it's fascinating

pmoriarty• 4 years ago

Disappointing that they didn't leave because they realized working for Google was unethical.

LightG• 4 years ago

Note to googlers reading this.

You had Tasks / Save email to tasks / etc for a decade and did nothing with it.

Im being forced to use MS task management and they've caugbt this and actually implemented quite well.

What am in talking about? I gues im just moaning that its a symotom of what this blog post is talking about, amongs many others.

Insanity• 4 years ago

I am an Engineering Manager at a FAANG company and I would hate to see my team work on evenings and weekends and think their work-life balance is good that way. If an IC on my team would do this, I would be concerned about them burning out as well.

It also makes me think that my philosophy about work is probably not compatible with working in a startup. Normalizing excessive working hours is something I don't see myself doing any time soon.

googlr297832• 4 years ago

I would hate to see my team work on evenings and weekends

I've worked at startups and Google. The glacial pace of the latter can mean working late feels necessary to get anything done. And even tiny changes can take forever so the feeling of having accomplished something of value is infrequent at best. Maybe it gets better at higher levels, though the internal memes don't give me much hope.

Some people are suited to big corps while others prefer start-ups. Nothing wrong with a little diversity.

nvarsj• 4 years ago

Wait, they left Google for work life balance, to work more hours at a startup. Whaat?

I think I get what they're saying though - they were fundamentally unhappy with their ability to make an individual impact at Giant Corp. Well, that's pretty normal and probably a reason for a lot of people's unhappiness at big companies.

A startup can help satiate that need, or even a small company.

Arguably a healthier approach is to detach one's self identity and satisfaction from work, and get that from non-work things. Easier said than done though. Inevitably this person is going to burn out hard when the start up they go to fails expectations.

joanfihu• 4 years ago

It looks like Google operates like most big corporation at this point and this seems the main reason why he left.

frays• 4 years ago

Interesting read. Thanks.

bioinformatics• 4 years ago

This post is the best example of this website: crappy. Who cares about this loser? Not even his two dogs.

Why I left Google: work-life balance

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