My Google job was tedious and pointless
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The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stale way that felt like death.
I don't think that stuff has any place at work. It's a red-flag to me if that kind of thing is commonplace in the office. Not only is it distracting, but it's insulting to employees who may have an opposite position politically.
If you're emotionally affected by something to the point where you're unable to hide it, then you shouldn't come into work.
Companies are often intensely political; artificially pretending neutrality internally while actively working externally to influence the political landscape to me is more bizarre than being open about politics in the office.
If a corporation actually is solidly neutral and inactive politically in it's external actions, then, sure, the internal environment should reflect that.
> it's insulting to employees who may have an opposite position politically.
I don't see how that's any less true of a company's external political activism.
Personally I would not work at a place which did so, and would consider reporting it to the anti-discrimination department in my country.
We (in the US), rather emphatically, do.
(There are some protections against religious discrimination in employment that apply to most employers, but those protections do not extend to prohibiting employers from all internal expression of religious views, or even substantive policy based on religious views. And, in fact, writing additional affirmative protection for employers’ internal expressiom of religious views, even to the extent of making that a basis for exempting them from generally-applicable legal requirements, is a popular trend in the US right now.)
Accommodating employees and their religious practices is another matter, within reasonable limits.
Most Silicon valley companies depend heavily on immigrant talent and resource pool to keep the perpetual billion dollar start ups coming every year.
If your political sentiments are in deep opposition to what brings in your salary, you already have a very broken view of your life in general. And a company executive expressing any sentiment isn't going matter much, if at all.
When I worked in the South, but in a liberal area, you might talk about it with coworkers you trust, privately, but no one of any authority would get up and say anything.
The 100+ person company I worked at during the last election, there were statements by the senior executives as well as emails. Yes, the office had people openly crying, or absent, and the mood was like a funeral but I also don't think it's the place for especially C-level people to make those type of statements even if 99% of the office felt the same way.
There was also much hubbub around the (one) Women's March, solicitations, emails, etc. I'm happy for the women and men that marched for themselves but I wonder if they might've done some actual justice by asking the higher ups if internally women and men were being treated the same in terms of pay and opportunities, a conversation that I had with more than one female colleague in private.
Working in NYC nobody ever mentions politics. I haven't even heard so much as an unkind word about Trump.
The Democratic Republic of California is a liberal shithole.
If I were an employee, I would assume the grief is primarily about increased costs to the employer.
Cultures dies as a company grows to a certain size. Feels like the best way to combat that would be to have teams that are small within the company and operate independently and with autonomy, especially when it comes to hiring. That probably isn't realistic though within a large company. Am keen on what ideas people have or if they've had experience with something that works with regards to retaining a good culture.
My take: bad things are bad, and other people overstating their badness does not make them good.
I don't know how much more hyperbolic you can get than saying Trump is literally going to end the world. There is plenty of real things to criticize him about, you gain nothing by overstating things to the state of idiocy.
Trump might be president, but in the Valley tech bubble, Anti-Trump is status quo. And politics in a bubble isn't like doing math homework, you only have to show how you got your answer if you want to disagree with the "obviously" correct positions.
The anti-Trump rhetoric is stronger than the old anti-Republician rhetoric. So the people annoyed by empty arguments are going to be louder too.
I'm anti-Trump but I'm also anti-politics-at-work. There's no contradiction there.
Handing my resignation felt great every time. It's addictive in fact. Just seeing the disappointment in my boss' face and the jealousy in the eyes of my colleagues brings me profound life satisfaction.
If I ship a product this year, next year I can reflect back on how the requirements change, how I didn't anticipate a customer use case and learn from this for future design.
Delivering some code for 6 months won't get you anywhere past a code monkey in my opinion.
Job Hopping every six months translates to 'cant be trusted with any serious work'.
In India its more or less a given, that your resume won't even make it past the screening stage.
When you job hop a lot, you become very adaptable. I can start contributing high quality code after the first week. I can internalise the coding conventions and all the nuances of the code base straight away because I've seen it all and I understand the different team mindsets and dynamics really well.
Being adaptable and delivering a few one off features is junior engineering which senior engineers can coach through. Coding conventions differ from team to team, package to package adapting to these also doesn't mean you are a robust engineer. It means you are competent. Solid engineer are expected to adapt. All big software projects that stand the test of time have nuances and even possibly anti-patterns because the initial design missed something.
I'm not sure what you mean by "saw the kinds of companies I worked for" but if you worked at Google for 6 months, Facebook for 6 months and Amazon for 6 months it still wouldn't mean much to me. All it means is you are smart enough to get your foot in the door but not successful enough to succeed.
99.9% of the time, the single-company mindset that you're suggesting just gets people stuck in a rut (I've seen it). If you've had a different experience then you're one of the lucky ones.
I bet this gem didn't make the cut: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/tripp...
You meet a lot of different people when you switch companies often. I think you build many more bridges than you burn.
I've quit my job probably about 10 times now. Employers don't care at all how often you change jobs; they all think they're special and so you'll stick around for them... They all think that they're the next unicorn... Funny thing is that if they were actually a unicorn, I would stay.
If my employer is a visionary genius, I make money.
If my employer is a delusional fool, I make money.
6 months is a good amount of time to figure out which one it is.
It would probably be more accurate to say that it's a yellow flag, requiring a bit of explanation but not necessarily a bad thing. I find the pattern of switching every 6 months for (presumably) ~10 years to be pretty extreme and difficult to explain, though. Not to mention exhausting! How many job interviews must that have taken?
Your coworkers probably aren't jealous of your inability to stay at a job for more than 6 months.
I can't imagine wanting to leave just 6 months after starting somewhere.
But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their coworkers verbally over the coals.
This kind of thing breaks the HN guidelines, which ask you to "please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
Your interpretation was far from the strongest plausible. As a result, we got a weak and ranty subthread terminating in such hellpoints as "Your America bashing is completely uncalled for". Avoiding that is why we have the guidelines, so would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them more carefully from now on?
Ooh, steelmanning as official policy. Excellent.
You're definitely positing a false dichotomy here and I'm not even sure how you came up with "either people are crying over Trump xor they are assholes to each other every day".
Cali/SV/Google all lean one way because they've been benefiting from the way things have been going. The thought that large swaths of the country have been experiencing a declining quality of life just doesn't register to them. That doesn't make them "insane," just uninformed.
Your America bashing is completely uncalled for and unwarranted.
It's pretty sad that you don't realize that executives getting on stage and crying in front of employees the day after an election is a complete aberration. This was was not and is not commonplace.
And as someone who quite frequently rolls his eyes at the inevitable "As a European.." comments on every American politics or healthcare article posted on HN, I didn't see the GP as America bashing at all.
That's unduly personal, and therefore uncivil, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Unfortunately this kind of thing appears frequently in your comment history. Would you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when commenting here?
More especially so when "X" is a second-hand anecdote and that second-hand anecdote stems from a company that is in no way representative of the average American work place.
The idea that as long as you aren't yelling, swearing, or actively insulting someone you are not treating them poorly is one of the biggest failures of Google (and other Bay Area companies') internal culture.
Verbal abuse is not ok, but even polite disagreement can be a career limiting move in such an environment.
And let me be clear: I'm not talking James Damore "I'm just expressing an alternative opinion" low boil misogyny. That kind of thing is unacceptable.
But it's really easy to slip into an echo chamber, especially when a lot of what Bay Area companies work on is qualitative. (E.g. pretty much anything related to UX, policy)
Why is his cultural questioning of potential causes for gender disparities bad, yet we're supposed to avoid falling into an echo chamber for other issues? If issues can't be questioned, doesn't that itself form an echo chamber?
>Why is his cultural questioning of potential causes for gender disparities bad, yet we're supposed to avoid falling into an echo chamber for other issues? If issues can't be questioned, doesn't that itself form an echo chamber?
Because he's wrong, and not even the sources he himself selected say what he says the say?
https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
Allowing someone to express these misogynistic wrong opinions using company resources during company time creates a hostile work environment and opens Google up to liability.
The choice isn't b/w being an echo chamber and expressing views which make coworkers uncomfortable for their gender.
On the contrary, I think that alone is sufficient reason.
Its hard for me to go into detail about this right now. But as an employee working with other people, one must be aware of the effect one's actions and words have on fellow coworkers. In this case, the correct approach would have been for him to perhaps engage with a smaller group of people, not post a manifesto where it could be accessed by everyone at Google, which is a large number of people. Depending on the feedback, he could have change the wording to be perhaps more appropriate, and engaged in an honest conversation with HR.
There is no evidence that he did any of these things. Again, its common decency to be aware of one's words on fellow coworkers. With social issues, its not just facts, but also how you chose to express those facts that matter.
You could say: but why shouldn't anyone be allowed to express anything? Why place so much burden on someone to express their true thoughts? Its because we choose to live in a society that doesn't censor the views of its members but also places reasonable restrictions on what/how they can be expressed. So its not that his views shouldn't be expressed, but they weren't done appropriately.
So. You're saying that Google is pretty much like every gig I've ever had.
What I think you're finding is people used to majority privilege, suddenly finding their viewpoints in the minority, becoming obsessively sensitive and claiming victimhood for which there is paltry evidence.
Why is it that when a majority of people hold progressive views, it's an "echo chamber", but if you're a minority growing up in the Midwest, or a liberal in a Red State, it's not an 'echo chamber'? There's some kind of weird assumption going on that somehow, conservatives should be able to expouse views and not feel like they're an outlier minority opinion.
Most of the egregious cases (including the Google Memo) involve liberals who are censored, harassed, or assaulted by progressives for openly inquiring or pointing to inconsistencies in the progressive narrative. Based solely on the frequency of these starkest of cases, I don't know how anyone could reasonably conclude that the evidence is paltry. Everyone should be allowed to ask questions and express (at least moderate) political ideas without fearing for their safety or income. This has nothing to do with privilege, and it shouldn't be a right conferred only to the extreme left.
> Why is it that when a majority of people hold progressive views, it's an "echo chamber", but if you're a minority growing up in the Midwest, or a liberal in a Red State, it's not an 'echo chamber'? There's some kind of weird assumption going on that somehow, conservatives should be able to expouse views and not feel like they're an outlier minority opinion.
Prior to the last few years, I've only ever heard the term applied to conservatives, who ostensibly failed to live up to the formerly-progressive value of open-mindedness. Conservatives have always been taken to task for failing to abide by progressive values (tolerance, free speech, open-mindedness, etc). Now progressives are under the same gun and it's all "poor progressives! why aren't conservatives faulted for failing to live up to progressive values?"; at any rate, the term is still widely (and justifiably) applied to conservatives.
And considering public did not see those old internal debates (there was not even a quote or reference to them in official statement about the firing), google now looks from the outside like that echo chamber.
My point is that Google is not particularly tolerant of dissent, or at least a specific type of dissent. Even back then (it seems worse now).
Did it ever occur to you that in a company with a huge immigrant population, or 2nd generation immigrants with family, many of whom were impacted by this wave of xenophobia and nationalism in this last election, that they felt under attack? That people who immigrated here and fell in love with America, suddenly were shocked into reality when they discover that so many of their fellow Americans were easily manipulated by the politics of Steve Bannon into voting for xenophobia and scapegoating?
Damn right people were legitimately upset at the social fabric coming undone.
1. Complaints about the president, racial slurs included, for "working with the Saudis" to "tank oil prices locally."
2. Complaints about the president, racial slurs included, for "forcing premiums up for the contractor's insurance."
3. Complaints about liberals in general for "forcing us to have men in our girls restrooms" despite the fact that this never happened. General complaints about how it'll be impossible to get an oil platform bathroom in line with "retarded liberal standards."
4. Complaints from engineers making 250/k/year untaxed in the UAE about all the "damn Indians" taking jobs from hardworking Americans. General blaming of the Democrats.
5. Directions from management to not submit resumes with "foreign" last names.
6. Refusal on the part of a major EPC engineering manager to hire the perfect candidate for the job because he was Mexican origin (US citizen via green card route), despite the fact that he had unsuccessfully searched for a good candidate for 3 months.
So let's not pretend that politics don't invade business.
I think there is a fair debate to be had about where the line should be drawn, but pretending that politics doesn't exist if you don't talk about it is deluded.
For example, Google employs a good number of immigrants. After the election many of them would have been worried about their future in the country. Wouldn't a good workplace try to address those concerns?
Yes, you are now facing some additional hardships in your job of creating a good workplace where employees can succeed. Those concerns should be addressed within the scope of what the company can or cannot do.
It seems like priorities would shift into protecting immigrant employees and that's okay - that is a hardship that the position entails and is something that should've been addressed long in advance as immigration reform was and probably always will be a controversial topic in the USA.
In the meeting in question, employees were asking Google how they're going to help stranded employees, how Google is going to protect them, how they can still travel outside the US if their job requires it (e.g. You're a British/Iranian citizen)
Google executives did not get up on stage and given an anti-Trump rant. In fact, as far as I recall, they've never directly insulted Trump the way you can see in major news media, because who wants to make an enemy of the US government and what use would it be to give a political speech? What they did is respond to the concerns of employees, and some of them are immigrants, and got a little choked up with emotion in their voice, because they were shocked too.
My extended family has a lot of first generation immigrants. None of them understand American racism and xenophobia like a native, and they thought it was just focused on Mexicans. The travel bans were the first hammer, the attacks on legal immigration (greencards and bringing family members), Bannon's "There's too many Asian CEOS" hail back to the attitudes of the Chinese exclusion act, and finally Charlottesville, all show the danger of playing around with xenophobia. It doesn't stay contained the way you think, and many educated, elite immigrants were suddenly shocked that they might be affected too.
https://googletransparencyproject.org/articles/googles-white...
(Also, it's interesting that you separate politics and meritocratic structure. It is by politics that the things that are merit-worthy are decided---you can be the best developer in the world, but if you're developing the wrong thing, you're not adding value).
I'd hazard a guess it wasn't the fact a Republican won, rather than who won. However that is total conjecture on my part.
What people dislike, beyond the sheer incompetence and pathological lying and bragging, is a tendency to play to the worst aspects of the crowd, for narcissistic reasons. That is, people are upset because they believe Trump is a person who will stoke up division for no reason other than it gets applause and attention, and often, the "heel" in WWE Wrestling parlance that Trump uses turns out to be the least powerful.
the whole point of google is that its an incredibly complicated piece of technology simplified into a search bar. a simple, fun brand - makes sense to have a playful work enviornment.
(Sources: Various internal G+ leaks during the Damore thing, Breitbart[0] interviewed a bunch of current/former Googlers, etc.) [0]Yes, I know Breitbart sucks and is massively biased, though AFAIK, nobody has even suggested those interviews are fictional or even factually inaccurate.
I previously worked at IBM and Oracle for years and I can tell you, that kind of behavior is exponentially worse, complete with engineered backstabbing and deliberate sabotage against coworkes. So if that's Kindergarten behavior, Google is college by comparison.
My kids are half-Chinese. If one of my coworkers said "these half-breed children are polluting our race", I'm pretty sure I'd shy away from working with them. Damore basically implied that Google lowers the bar for female engineers (which it does not), and therefore immediately cast doubt on the quality and merit of his female coworkers.
If I was a woman, I might decide I don't want to work with someone who feels I'm not really supposed to be there.
Damore didn't say or imply what you're claiming either. I wonder how carefully you read what he wrote, if at all. He talked about interest at the population level. He didn't claim female Googlers weren't as good as male Googlers. That was a strawman thrown about by people who couldn't argue with his actual points and so preferred to argue with something else.
So - lots of assumptions on your part, all wrong. Not the type of data driven analysis I remember Google exalting, back in the day.
These dynamics are common in any system where you have a pyramid structure and resources are limited.
Dead giveaway that you are on one :P
Lots of denial in this thread about the contents of those interviews, as they're pretty damning. But it's all true ...
And kindergarteners are kind and pleasant while mature people are frustrated, abusive and cruel? (From experience I'd say if mature people are frustrated it's from dealing with the tyrannical outsized self-centeredness of the kindergarteners, but I digress.)
Good guys don't always wear white hats, and there's no reliable correlation between Google-style trappings, and a good place to work. I don't have a citation for you, but I've seen great creativity in grey Dilbert cubicles, and I've seen rank despair in brightly-colored factories of the happy-happy.
A shiny thing could be a nugget of true gold, or it could've been placed there to distract you from the fact that you're standing in a bucket of shit. And to contradict and invalidate your true realization that standing in shit makes you feel shitty. And that -- in and of itself, and totally aside from your co-workers' behavior -- is a subtle way of being a jerk to you.
A workplace should be neutral. Let me put the life there, like paint on a canvas.
Its called losing, thats what it feels like, you are missing that there are A LOT of winners.
Your sentiment is reinforced by presidential faux pas but thats a total sideshow to how people are successfully navigating this political environment, using it as a catalyst even for trade and commerce outcomes that will long outlast this administration.
And yes this administration looks to make huge changes that will severely disadvantage the US energy sector for decades while they try to prop up the failing coal industry while trying to kick the ladder out from under energy sources like solar and wind.
The point is that the feelings aren't justified for everyone. So for the parent poster to present that as a canonical reinforcement of how one should feel, or how one's executives should feel, or how all the employees at a multinational company might feel, is completely disingenuous.
Never mind that he ran on a platform of throwing a significant portion of the company out of the country. Step into the shoes of someone holding an H1B for one moment, please.
I'm well aware this isn't how H1Bs are supposed to work, and that many H1Bs (particularly in the Valley) are properly used, but there's definitely some other shoes you can step into on the H1B issue.
Yes, and given Trump's demonstrated understanding of nuanced issues, nobody was expecting him to magically come up with a solution that deals with the abuse, without collateral damage.
That is exactly the time when you want your boss to say that yes, they will have your back.
Step into the shoes of the person who was demanding a fair market wage until the company used an H1B visa to bring in someone who accepts far worse conditions because the threat of deportation is always present.
You might say that it is overly emotional, or too reactionary, or that the tone isn't appropriate, but think - really think! - what it would be like to wake up one morning to the unexpected shock that a President has been elected on the very possible platform of kicking you out of the country and ruining the life you built for yourself.
"No politics" is a fine ideal to aim for, but you can't expect anyone to leave stress like that at the door when they turn up to work.
Immigration is a political issue that hasn't been properly addressed in decades. H1B visas are good in theory, but companies exploit the system to import cheap foreign labor, hurting American wages and job prospects in the process. Illegal immigrants concentrate to pockets of the country, displacing American workers and lowering wages for those who have been hurt the most by globalization.
Should these political issues be ignored just to avoid hurt feelings? I don't think they should.
Of course you wouldn't! It's silly to expect or demand that of a person. Especially in the 24 hours since their life was turned upside down.
"Nothing has changed" is such an absurdly wrong way of looking at the issue. Say you're stood in the street alone. That's normal. Now there's a man stood in front of you with a knife, and he's looking at you threateningly. But he hasn't stabbed you! Nothing has changed. Your body is still unpunctured, so why are you worrying?
Throughout his campaign, Trump made overt threats to immigrants and the lives they live in the US. The fact that your entire future becomes incredibly uncertain within the space of 24 hours is absolutely something to get emotional about. To pretend otherwise is silly.
As is the idea that turning up to the office without being overtly emotional would somehow mean you're absolutely fine. That stress is going to come out one way or another, personally I think that expressing it (yes, including crying!) is a lot better than the alternatives.
I empathize with those on DACA or other immigrant situations; however on average I would argue reporting of the issues, the emotions, and reactions are over the top.
The news cycle every two weeks is - "immigrants getting kicked out, DACA is over" - three days later "president goes back on his word w/ EO" or "congress not in sync with president; won't change legislation." (not literally, but you get the point).
You missed the "::cough:: illegal ::cough::"
Otherwise, please cite a video/audio source of him actually saying he wants to kick out all the legal immigrants.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12...
Trump's threats were far from contained to illegal immigrants.
Except is has, and continues to change. These changes are affect real people, people in my family, in profoundly negative ways. That you choose to ignore others doesn't mean nothing has changed. Only that you are ignorant of what is happening.
Moreover, if you were a legal immigrant on an H1-B, and you happened to have dual nationality with one of the "bad" countries on Trump's list, you quickly found out that you could no longer risk travel outside the country. A large number of Canadian-Iranian/British-Iranian immigrants found they were suddenly capable of being banned.
Acting like the election campaign was no cause for concern is completely ignoring the obvious warning signs, like "We need a TOTAL SHUTDOWN OF MUSLIMS ENTERING THE COUNTRY".
If this had been "We need a total shutdown of JEWS", would you be so flippant with people's concerns about the campaign talk?
So what? They don't have some sort of magical automatic right to be here just because one of their relatives is.
>If this had been "We need a total shutdown of JEWS", would you be so flippant with people's concerns about the campaign talk?
If Jewish immigrants had been engaging in the amount of terrorism we've seen in Europe recently...yes, I would be just as flippant.
Do you think that white people in America engage in too much mass shooting, and consequently should have additional regulations applied to them regarding gun ownership?
/s
If you can't be professional in the workplace, take a damn day off. If you can't be professional in front of a crowd, then don't take the stage.
Crying is for funerals. And national politics is for soapboxes, not for corporate presentations.
If you feel like crying, but hold back, does that feeling just immediately disappear and you get on with your day? Of course not. You just bury the stress, and sooner or later it bubbles back up again in weird and unpredictable ways. Is crying at work more or less professional than having a panic attack at work and ending up hospitalised?
Crying is just an expression of stress. If your actual statement is that people shouldn't be stressed about non-work issues at work, then good luck, that's not how human beings are engineered.
Anything else is likely to be disruptive to your coworkers.
I have a lot of empathy for people experiencing emotional distress, whatever the reason. I would never complain about them and would do my best to offer sympathy when appropriate. But I really shouldn't be put in that position at work, and if I was emotionally disturbed I would not come into work so as to avoid putting my coworkers in that position.
I think this is all doubly true if we're talking about the results of an election. Some of your coworkers may be happy for the same reason you're upset.
I mean, shit, if they took that advice, he never would have been elected.
But, it's tough to have that conversation from the position of privilege one sits in when one gets paid even more to do an interesting job, because of the scarcity of people capable of performing in that role. Presumably the kid understands this harsh reality, and the complaint is more reflective of a general disillusionment that the situation is as it is, rather than an aversion to the particularities of this role at Google.
What I got was that the requirement for overt enthusiasm over a mundane job became too much. I don't think Mike Row would see it the same way if a sewage technician was forced to pretend their job was "making a better world one bowel movement at a time" or face being ostracized.
Sometimes it's hard to feel like you're doing great things and making a difference when what you do is a drop of water in a great sea that is Google, vs the same drop in a smaller bucket of water.
Maybe this wouldn't have been published otherwise, but I definitely believe it to be genuine.
Quite what the author thinks he'll gain by publishing this story is a little beyond me though. It doesn't sound like he was mistreated or anything.
If I were the manager of that department, I'd up-title them all to "sourcerers". :)
> Google HR uses the TextExpander program, which populates email templates with salutations, job description links and questions.
If it's any consolation, gmail's reply suggestions were frequently sufficient on the candidate's side.
But that's not what these Google recruiters are doing. They are trying to find any vaguely qualified people they can who are willing to dive head-first into the meat-grinder that is the Google interview process. And their job is mostly futile because that process will ultimately reject 90-95% of the candidates.
1. No arbitrary process numbers. Job and cost numbers fine, but "10 calls a day" "5 BD calls a day" "20 resume sends a week" is stupid - would rather have a manager helping me make strategic decisions, using my time intelligently.
2. Automated bullshit. No more downloading resumes to upload to our system. We either pay linkedin and use that exclusively, or outsource somebody to fill out our own CRM (actually good CRM that has functional searching, not that Bullhorn bullshit that barely worked).
That's all it would take. If a recruiter annoys you, it's probably because you're Candidate Call #9 of the day and she has to get to 10 or she'll lose her job.
I see this as a problem with HR and recruiting in general, not a Google problem.
The only reason this is news at all is because Google is in the title. Replace that with any other company name and it just describes another position that could either be automated or outsourced.
New projects are rare, so very few are writing a lot of code from scratch.
Check Google's stock price.
While I definitely wouldn't want to do that for all 40 hours of work I wouldn't classify refactoring as "remedial".
What percent of software engineers' time do you think is spent doing green-field development with no refactoring, writing tests, documentation, etc.?
The interview process was a few generic, form-filled emails to schedule the interview time. Then during the interview call the interviewer read off a few pre-determined questions that were read directly from a questionnaire, and the interviewer recorded my answers. They didn't ask any follow-ups, only asked what was on the questionnaire. When we were done, I tried to ask them questions about the position and they told me "I can't answer those questions for you because I'm just a recruiter and I don't know details about the specific position. Hold onto those until you talk to the next person."
He might as well have just put on a robotic tone and said "My responses are limited. Please wait to talk to a real person if you have other questions."
I get that having a "human element" makes the process seem slightly more personal, and I would hate to be a part of a recruiting process that literally is just robots, but in the case where your job can literally be completely replaced by nothing more than an online HTML form or a robocall, what are you even doing?
They've been at it for a few years, they started with a focus on candidates for sales positions. I don't know if it's generalised or not.
Your job is tedious and pointless, end of story.
This step should have been 100% automated and I don't understand why it wasn't. As a recruiter this shit was my least favorite part of the job. The next step - the candidate calls - was my favorite part.
Knowing that of 20 people the recruiter knows that are a good fit, only 2 might be available, what would your preferred method be of them going about their job?
Be upfront and honest is another one. I see lots of recruiters try and be sneaky and play phishing games. There's a reason why my current employer isn't listed by name on my resume. Plenty of times recruiters have contacted me, promising a job, but it's only to grill me about my current position to find other people there they can hit up, or contacts within HR, etc. Or it's just a plain ol' resume-sending event and they want nothing more than me to bulk up their database.
With that upfront and honesty in place, be willing to provide key information to the candidate upon initial contact -- it'll save you and them a lot of time. I want, as a minimum (and usually no more), the client, the location (may need specifics depending upon the city, for example "Dallas" isn't very descriptive as Dallas is huge), and the employment type/term.
The same could be said to the person writing this article. You work at Google.. your recruiting job might be awful but get your earbuds out during lunch and see if you might work at another team internally that is more in line with what you wanted to do.
Take some ownership of what you'd like to do.
From that standpoint, it seems like #firstworldproblems. Someone who lacks the skills to be a SWE gets hired at one of the most prestigious companies, most likely has awesome benefits and a comfortable job, but boring and unfulfilling. Contrast that with the millions of people in who work for far less salary and benefits, in low end service sector jobs, and it just seems tone deaf to me.
I understand the feelings of not having a good fit for your work and wanting to do other things, but there's a huge difference between "I need a change cause I find what I'm doing boring, even if the pay and benefits is good" and "This is the WORST! Clearly, I was owed an interesting job at a candy unicorn factory, and since I didn't get the toys I thought I would, I'm suffering worse than a Soviet gulag here."
Not everybody wants to be a SWE.
In this specific case - was it even possible to find fulfilling work in HR in the first place? It's hard to sympathize with the author holding Google to an impossible standard.
You are largely limited by what scope your professions ecosystem has to offer. If you are an accountant, the last time you have learned anything exciting or read something serious about your area of academic training is way back in college. Beyond this your job essentially is a ritual, much of which is automated incrementally every few months.
Programmers are in many ways lucky, that we are in an ecosystem that offers chances for continuous learning, making incremental steps in success and failures, and by the sheer volume of it offering a degree of success. All rapidly growing fields are that way. At one point it was Electronics, and before that and for a few centuries it was mechanical engineering. Tomorrow it might be something else, the trick is to know in time and move on.
You will be surprised that even professions like Medicine get very boring, monotonous and don't pay well over time. I know a doctor among my extended family, who was a very brilliant dynamic man, also very creative. But over years has seems to seen enormous erosion in overall perception in life. It gets very hard to keep your spark alive if for several hours per day in your life you have to be in an ecosystem that tries to purge it.
By comparison, this HR job was orders of magnitude better. My mom didn't have healthcare provided by her job when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, she had almost no vacation, we lived paycheck to paycheck.
There's no voice given to these people, the truly suffering masses, in the news media. Instead, we hear the suffering of the upper middle class, who has a cushy deskjob, free gourmet food, massages, vacations, bonuses, stock, but finds their job boring. Why are we reading this story in the Washington Post and not the story of the person working 60 hours a week and living at the poverty line?
It's a question of priorities for me, not who deserves what. Every human deserves a fulfilling life, but in the grand scheme of things, the suffering visited on the author of that editorial is one of angst, not basic survival, and he's being given a microphone for grievances of being pampered with benefits.
If a trust fund baby complained he's bored with life because he still has to show up for boring meetings with his trustees, I'm sure we can find some sympathy for his ennui, but first I have to work my way through all the headlines of Puerto Ricans suffering, or those who make my iPhone.
It would be no different than if I went to work at a Hospital, I'd end up in claims processing or administration probably, and someone could say "he's not a doctor or nurse or medically trained, so of course, he's pushing paper"
To some extent, it's up to you to make your job interesting and fulfilling. If this guy spent 2 years doing HR and it was a grind, then he knew all the pain points and probably how to improve the workflow. Why didn't he take the initiative, get some coworkers together, and try to design a better system rather than wear earplugs eating alone in the cafe?
Google expects and depends on people to take initiative. If my project is not interesting, either I find another team that has a more interesting project, or I invent a project for myself and shop it to cosigners. I'm not supposed to sit here stewing in unhappiness for years waiting for my manager to say "oh, I noticed you aren't being fulfilled. Here's a new project to fulfill you."
It's not that only SWEs matter. Most startups have a technical founder and a non-technical founder. Non-technical skills often matter more than technical ones.
But Ok, I'll buy the author's point that the job sucked. What's the news here? The cynic in me says this is Bezos using WaPo as proxy for the Amazon/Google fight.
I understand the pain of this person, but this has literally nothing to do with Google, and everything to do with: Recruitment Sucks.
It's a fucking annoying, mind boggling job. If you're external, there's a couple highs when you negotiate a salary or are selling a candidate on a position or in a business development meeting with some bigshot at an engineering firm. But mostly, it's calling 10 candidates a day (at least) even if you have nothing to pitch, because you're fishing for information but really because your boss told you you have to make 10 candidate calls a day or you're fired.
It's 5 business development calls a day, even if there really isn't anybody new to talk to, and if you already contacted you entire network that month, because... reasons? Because your boss said so. Hit your numbers, 5am hit the phones! Coffee is for closers ABC ALWAYS BE CLOSING
"I gotta stay late and make these calls," he says as he sucks the recruitment/sales koolaid, despite knowing that extra calls will literally lead to no extra money for himself or the company.
"I make 25 candidate calls a day because you never know what juicy tidbits of information a candidate might have," she says despite the fact that we all in the city know the same story - the oil and gas market is dead, everybody's losing their job, and any new project already has 5,000 applicants before the recruiters can touch "9" to dial out.
Browsing linkedin - copy paste name into the name field of Bullhorn, then email, hmm do they have a resume? Download, upload to Bullhorn. Skip the "create candidate from resume" option because it sucks. Do this 20 times a day - "we need to build out our system with good candidates so we're ready when a position opens," despite the fact that linkedin and oilandgasjobsearch.com search function are 10x better than Bullhorn's so I'll just be using that anyway.
God, sorry, rant, but this kid joined a job where you feel useless, where you know you'll be automated away, where you barely understand the field you're working in ("oh you're static tank mech E uh this position is looking for rotating"), where that super weird American/British "sales" culture has totally infiltrated and everyone gets their rocks off to Wolf of Wallstreet and glengarry glen ross.
So, long story short, I was in this kid's shoes a little over 2 years ago, and I fucked off to San Francisco, went to a bootcamp, now I'm frontend and it rates among the top 3 decisions I have ever made in my life, and I'm sure that so far it's the most significant and far-reaching decision in terms of longterm happiness.
In the bootcamp, I saw 2 projects come out from 3-month-trained frontend devs automate a large portion of my recruitment job. It's going.
Nachos and beer, or food in general, doesn't show anything special, since the cost to the company is negligible (compare it to your salary). One could even argue the opposite - that such conditions are part of a precise PR strategy targeted towards a certain demographic.
Yes.
>living in the Bay Area sucks
Where'd you move to? I'm at the "trying out South Bay" stage, next I'm going to try downtown SF but after that I'm curious where people generally go. I was considering Vietnam and doing the remote work thing.
The piece's author holds a humanities degree in Psych/Neuroscience.
I point that out because while we've accepted that blue collar jobs are/were "going to be automated" or "going overseas", there's still a pervasive trope that an undergraduate degree provides some protection and is of value unto itself in the workforce.
But - as evidenced by his systematic experience of key-pressing - his position @ Google is a stop gap, in the same way that the humans in Uber's vehicles are a tolerated inconvenience.
This while the people the company ACTUALLY values, at present, are the engineers - tasked with devising new ways to automate, regulate, and systematically eliminate human fallibility from the equation.
Solving the problem of what to do with the millions of us that take steps to educate ourselves, want to contribute, but realize that we're a poor facsimile of the machine that will eventually eliminate our jobs, is the central question of our generation.
The author may have realized a bit late that he doesn't enjoy HR, but he still deserves a chance to pivot. That's getting harder in our economic system and with automation and outsourcing.
No one suffers from lack of vital resources. Yet it is still possible to get rich via a combination of luck, skill, and tenacity. Seems fair to me.
Of course, this leads to bickering about how to calculate the numbers, so....
This is a blind-spot I see in a lot of technically-minded folks: politics as an evil to be avoided via technological solutions, as opposed to politics as the natural side-effect of needing two or more people to come to consensus on combined action. You can definitely improve the space of possible solutions if you have technology at your disposal, but you can't remove the human from the equation if you're solving human problems.
That said everytime I watch Sunder Pichai doing his pseudo Steve Jobs routine I get a headache at how superficial and unimaginative Google is. I am not at all surprised at the shallow culture.
Does anyone seriously listen to that kind of talk? It's a job - in this case helping to sell advertising - why try to pretend it's some kind of religious calling? Why do so many companies insist on spewing that claptrap?
Now if you think that a narrative is being pushed here then I have a Rorschach test I'd like you to take.
Anyone can make the claim that there job sucks, or the company they work for tries to brainwash them, or maybe they feel overqualified for what they are doing. If you have an issue with your job you change it. I applaud the author for making the change, but I find it terribly unprofessional and kind of childish that he would rant about his previous employer when they didnt do anything wrong to him...