Google Employees Confess The Worst Things About Working At Google

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Google-Employees-Confess-The-Worst-Things-About-4951481.php

by rosser • 13 years ago

43 15 13 years ago

sfgate.com

ojbyrne• 13 years ago

This reads like a list of 50 random complaints that got crowdsourced down to the best 13. I.e. actually interesting.

gtz58• 13 years ago

I think 13 is being a little generous, I counted one.

z92• 13 years ago

"It's like never-never land - people never grow up. They drink at all hours, socialize constantly, play games, and do little to no work."

I was wondering how Google make their programmers work. Looks like Google haven't found a solution to this problem either.

pestaa2• 13 years ago

It's the easiest problem for a company to solve, but unfortunately it requires the management to also do their work.

Kiro• 13 years ago

How do you solve it?

patio11• 13 years ago

Somebody please do a panel about The Future of Journalism analyzing how you can use an established newspaper brand to market whitelabeled content from an Internet publisher which is itself content-farm levels of editing applied to crowdsourced posts from a Q&A site, and profit from the CPM advertising sold to brand advertisers which cannot appear on the Q&A site itself because stooping to pick up those pennies would murder their implied valuations.

Here's the Quora thread which Business Insider added 25 words of synopsis to:

http://www.quora.com/Working-at-Google-1/Whats-the-worst-par...

randomhunt• 13 years ago

Wouldn't it be ironic if both the established newspaper brand and the Q&A site both used Google advertising...

sz4kerto• 13 years ago

Business Insider is a tabloid, despite its name.

greenyoda• 13 years ago

And that Quora thread was already posted on HN a number of times over the last few days:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=workin...

ewzimm• 13 years ago

Not saying it isn't true, but it reads like a giant humblebrag. "Everyone is awesome" is the number one complaint.

tmister• 13 years ago

Reddit had a discussion about it a while ago http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1pto3b/google_e.... Also the comment posted at this context http://www.reddit.com/r/firstworldproblems/comments/1pvgjx/g... comparing about environments of Google and Microsoft is now at top of r/bestof.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

Ignoring everything else, now I have a young family I want to work somewhere that I can do awesome work, and still get home in time to read bedtime stories.

I can live without free sodas.

The obvious next step however is remote working for all - making free sodas a little redundant.

1g00gler• 13 years ago

Disclaimer: I work for Google

A lot of those comments seem to come from people who had a bad experience and I don't think necessarily reflect the average.

The arrogance part is very true, though. Just take a quick glance at mailing lists like industry-info or eng-misc and you'll see a bunch of condescending assholes looking down on past co-workers and competing companies.

Sometimes I wonder if those people get any work done at all as I always see the same names.

Even during internal presentations we are constantly reminded about how Apple is bad and inferior and Google products are awesome, even if they end up being a buggy pile of shit because internal feedback was ignored.

A lot of managers at Google are great engineers and piss-poor managers with no people skills at all.

Among the young crowd who joined the company straight from college you see the ones who think of Google as a religion and will not accept any criticism at all. There's also the ones who think they're still in college and don't understand simple things such as being mature and respectful with your fellow Googlers.

The latter you can see spending a lot of time posting passive aggressive memes on memegen.googleplex.com

I've been here 3 years and have noticed a big change, for the worst. It got so bad at one point that Urs Holzle had to write a 'No Jerks' manifesto calling out the childish and disrespectful behavior that has, sadly, become so prominent.

Sales are considered second class citizens and a substantial part of engineering despises Social and Android product areas and their leaders.

Despite all that it's still the best place to work, way better then your average corporation.

James

arcticfox• 13 years ago

While these are almost certainly true, #1 seems like it would be a complaint of the subjects mentioned in #2.

"Everyone is awesome."

"Many of the engineers are arrogant."

Google Employees Confess The Worst Things About Working At Google

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