It turned out to be a great move. In my experience, just about everything is better about Netflix as compared to Google: impact, pay, freedom, culture. The only thing that's worse is that I really miss the on-campus food at Google. And TGIF, eng-misc, etc.
If it is a deal-breaker and you are senior or otherwise considered a key team member they can't let leave, going remote can sometimes work out.
Certainly that must be illegal under the ADA, or something similar?
I think it’s pretty typical to say coming into the office is a requirement so full time remote would not be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA.
I think the reason why many companies don’t allow as a rule is that by selectively allowing remote work, they are vulnerable to ADA suits.
Hmm, where can I find out more about remote roles there? Is it worldwide or US-only?
As another former Googler, this was one of the most concerning things about my experience at Google. The pressure I put on myself and received from others when I was debating whether to leave was enormous, especially because it was my first job. Nevermind the rampant imposter syndrome while you still work there. In hindsight, it was super toxic and led me to stay there even longer than was good for me and burning out harder. I've talked to a few current Googlers and Xooglers who also felt that way.
This was one of the reasons I decided to bail out after the first phone interview. I had some serious concerns, such as:
- I am not interested in working as an SRE when I just finished a PhD in Computational Linguistics.
- I am not really interested in living in London or Silicon Valley.
But any such question were all waved away with an air of 'such concerns are all irrelevant if you can work for the greatest company in existence'. The interviewer was really a nice person, but there seemed to be an immense groupthink.
(I now also have strong moral objections to working for Google, but that's another story.)
Many stories have been written about how their early hiring practices made for Google's huge success. I largely agree.
And related to your comment, groupthink or not, they do overall look pretty happy, even if you dial back for the social media factor: https://gxjam.com/ig-gallery/googler-instagrams-by-googlers-...
Funny story: after a couple years at last big corp I worked for, I guess there was a decision made to join the ranks of the area's Best Places to Work. So memos were circulated, surveys were sent out and lo and behold, a year later the announcement was made: we had made the list of Best Places to Work, Large Company category. There was even a company-wide ceremony with a big cake to celebrate the feat.
So a few weeks later, I come across the actual dead-tree journal touting that year's Best Places to Work laying around in our breakroom. I open it up to find out where we actually ranked. Out of 44 companies in our category, #44.
We improved over the next couple years. Banners appeared around campus celebrating our achievement. The cakes got bigger. Things got worse for me personally at the company.
As you can probably guess, the impression I and others got was that the ranking was actually more important than actual employee sentiment. And I got the distinct sense that HR was motivated even moreso than previously for the sake of their Best Places ranking to push out employees that were critical (even legitimately, perhaps especially legitimately) of the way the company operated than deal constructively with their concerns.
So yes, if you work in a very profitable company under a crappy manager then it will be a very crappy life. If you work in a non-profitable company under a great manager it will be a better life than the former but not matter how great your manager is he/she won't be able to help you with things like benefits, compensation, additional hardware/software to make your work easier. The size of the company also gives a lot more options to find different projects to work on.
I would say statistically speaking you are likely to end up with an average manager and if you are then it's better to be at a largely profitable company while under such a manager. :)
Every job I've had the people I've interacted with in recruiting/interviews have all been very positive about the company.
And as for the "recruiters", they didn't really try to sell Google at all. I think they assumed that the Google name was sufficient reason to want to work for them. (It isn't, or at least was not for me.)
This is my experience too. I've only been here for a year but what surprised me was how negative non-official internal communications about the company seem to be..
Note I don't necessarily disagree with their points but the lack of civility.
From the inside you're dealing with a lot of people who have internalized the job as part of their identity and it's very difficult to just up and leave without formulating a narrative about why it's okay.
It was part of the personal narrative of the person (their identity) to keep telling that to themselves.
It also sounds like Microsoft in the 90’s, when they were stepping on necks and didn’t give a shit about anybody else. Because they were better than everybody else and why should you worry about inferior people?
Although in MS’s case they took it a step further: we are the best people in the world.
But MS was known to use a lot of ugly PR tactics to weaken and purchase or obliterate competition. Google may or may not be doing the same thing but they don’t have a reputation of being cold blooded about it.
Of course, additional supporting reasons become clear as one looks for and finds the door, and the understanding for why a person or institution is wrong for you evolves as you separate.
I'd be interested in hearing more about how that understanding/perspective changes over time.
But it's not every case, some experienced specialists can just write story as summary to give some experience to young newcomers, to arouse interest, maybe answer possible questions.
It actually seems like this is frequently the case to me. A lot of people get to the point where they simply don't like coming into work everyday, and have to come up for a reason why they feel that way.
Since they "don't like coming into work", the reason already exists, they just (maybe) don't know it yet. As such, it isn't so much inventing a reason as it is discovering it.
Eventually, there's a event that is enough standard deviations larger than the typical crap that the person just breaks. The veil of happiness is irrevocably pierced. And when that happens, all the other crap that they've been putting up with kind of comes crashing down. This is your "additional supporting reasons": they really existed the whole time, but they were at least tolerable before the veil was broken.
In my experience, it's rare that it's more like a dam that eventually breaks under pressure. There's usually that one event that finally breaks the person's will to continue. But then all the stuff that was being held back behind the dam is loosed and there's no coming back from that.