Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it time to leave Google?

51 pointskj6555746 comments

I've been at Google for 2+ years and am pretty happy with the salary/benefits, but I'm really strating to question the overall direction of the company. It's not clear to me that Google is still innovative like it used to be. I'm a bit torn because I don't want to be cavalier and forego the opportunity that was given to me, but it seems like a lot of smaller companies are doing much more interesting work. How do I know when it's time to leave? What sort of criteria should I be looking for in other companies? I've always been interested in aerospace but most of those companies (SpaceX, etc) seem like a stretch.

(Note, I'm new here, let me know if there's anything I can do better when writing textposts)

Edit: It seems like maybe my particular role isn't that interesting. Which orgs within google are good to work for?

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How senior are you? I would first spend some time hunting for innovative teams within Google to transfer to. There are plenty of boring jobs at Google but also plenty of ambitious small teams working on startup-like projects. Even cute experimental features on big established products (search/gmail/maps/drive/etc.) often could plausibly be the basis for an entire startup, but there are also some pie-in-the-sky projects people are working on if you look around a bit.

There might be some possibility for leadership but otherwise it's all CRUD operations and the complexity is in the business, not the tech.

Why aren't you creating something interesting? Good careers don't go to those waiting to be handed a golden egg.. understand the business, understand innovative technology, and connect them, and the world will be your oyster.

If management won't let you understand enough of the business to do so, I sympathize, I've been there. But if you're allowed to understand the business and are expecting someone else to come up with the innovation, you just need to get your shit together and be an engineer.

I see what you mean, but getting approval to make changes is challenging in this particular department.

As Grace Hopper said, it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. That's generally a motto for people who get shit done.

Also, if you're not getting approval, maybe you need to work on connecting your ideas to business value a bit more...

That's true. I'm still new to this org so things might change

That's gonna be hard anywhere. Writing a proposal and convincing stakeholders is a skill to develop. It is never going to be trivial.

> Why aren't you creating something interesting? Good careers don't go to those waiting to be handed a golden egg.

It sounds like you're implying that to work on innonvative projects one has to have the mind of an entrepreneur. While it's not a bad mind to have I don't think utilization of ones skills in a meaningful and interesting way should depend on that?

I think you expose yourself a bit too much. With this information, people would know who you are. At this point, I don't think you would like your boss/colleagues know you are asking this question here.

Fixed, thanks

This is such a personal decision, but to me it seems like you're possibly looking for reasons to leave.

If you like the business but don't like what you're doing, can that change soon? If this is the deciding factor, why not phrase it that way to whoever can make that decision? Nothing to lose ...

If you just want to leave the company in general, than isn't your answer "yes?"

At the risk of stating the obvious- it doesn't matter how innovative a company is as a whole, it matters how innovative what you're doing is. SpaceX does some really cool stuff, say, but you're not a rocket scientist- managing their financial software wouldn't be cooler than it would be for anyone else's. Conversely, Snapchat is just a goofy app for teenagers, but whoever writes the facial tracking system they use in their photo filters is doing some neat science. I don't know what the insides of Google are like, but I would bet that if there's anywhere a mid-career programmer can gain some interesting new skills on the job, it's probably somewhere in there- and that will get you a more interesting position, whether you stay or go elsewhere in the longer run.

I respectfully disagree with this. Doing something cool in your day-to-day work can still be depressing if your personal values are not alligned with the organisation's.

For example, I was once offered the opportunity to work on low-latency software that identifies users as they move between websites (fingerprinting in ad tech speak). There are tons of cool CS problem around this, but in the end I turned it down.

Now I do ostensibly 'boring' CRUD work for a large eCommerce marketplace company. But it's an honest business model that benefits both sides of that market and I feel happier than I would have been in ad tech.

Sure, but company ethic is a different axis from innovative-ness. It sounds like you chose to work at an ethical-but-conventional position over an unethical-but-innovative one, and good on you for it. But you can have both (or neither) at once, too. Where Google falls on the ethics dimension is a good question, but that didn’t seem to be the poster’s complaint.

part of what is interesting in a job is what you do day-to-day, but also part of it is what the company does day-to-day. There are plenty of companies, most of them smaller, that seem much more interesting a place to work on the second quality

If you've been there for 2+ yeara and you're no longer excited about the work you're doing, maybe take advantage of Google's liberal transfer policy, and join a different team.

But it never hurts to interview.

I do not work for Google but know people who do, and did. The ones who are happiest have a high degree of personal autonomy and self actualise to work on things which interest them. Some of them took their 20% cool time to real work.

Some resented being moved interstate or overseas, and sought a path home to where they like to be.

Some say they are burned out and burnt by scale problems but mainly I think it's loss of autonomy at root. Being told to do things you don't believe in is hard.

Only one left in some sense fully vested, and he's a bit bored by the outside world. I don't think google is a 'chocolate factory' but be warned after initial enthusiasm wears off, you need to retain some sense of core role in any job, and few may be as accommodating as Google is said to be.

I generally go with decisions like this with my gut. If you feel like that you aren't happy with where you are then quit or figure out something new to do either within or without the company. Do you want to be filled with regret or not at the end of the day?

Many Googlers I meet/am friends with have no fucking clue about the rest of the industry, especially so if that was their first job. If that applies to you, be careful.

I'd look internally first.

How so?

Couple of things I notice mainly

1. Pushing code and being unaware of the build system that does anything else.

2. Unable to comprehend that there can be teams/companies where some products are written and maintained by one person, and does not have any practical code reviewing. (This is not a good thing, but it is not difficult to imagine how that can be).

3. (and lately), people explaining things that come off to me as SWE/SRE friction, as opposed to the typical google SRE hiring/book propaganda.

I'll add anything I can think of, but obviously it's one persons opinion.

Can you elaborate on #3 a bit? I'm not sure what you mean and m really curious. I've always gotten the vibe that the SRE recruiters were not giving me an honest view of the realities of that job.

Reach out over email, please? I'm not super worried about my friends being identified but got to respect their privacy.

So the way you're describing the situation is "should people leave google", not "should you leave google".

General career advice has been discussed a lot here, but it really depends on your personality and motivation. (E.g. do you want a stable job, can you tolerate a stable job for a long time, are you looking to get into management, can you pull off company hopping every 2 years, are you a SWE and do you have a math background & drive to branch into data science, are you planning to launch a startup and what skills are you still missing to do that, etc)

..and maybe: do you agree with the ethics, moral values and the direction they are trending towards, and your personal contributions to these aspects :)

I think you probably know the answer already. Given the wealth of forums inside Google where you could ask for this advice, you've decided to post anonymously to Hacker News. That probably means there's some underlying issue, like you think your manager is going to punish you if he or she finds out that you aren't happy with your position, or you think future teams you may want to work with will look upon you unfavorably if they read the post. As soon as you stop trusting your coworkers, it's probably game over. (And I'm not saying you're doing the wrong thing, or that your concerns are unwarranted. They are probably legitimate concerns.)

I was extremely happy at Google for many years. I liked my coworkers, I liked my work, I liked my manager. I did get burned out from time to time, but usually there was something interesting to keep me going through the rough patches, and my team, coworkers, and managers were all very supportive of what I needed to do to stay productive and happy (which in a lot of cases was "sleep for 2 days and maybe wake up to have a meeting that would be inconvenient to move"). It was quite wonderful. I had no trouble getting promoted, got "strongly exceeds" performance reviews, and had a lot of fun. Good times.

All good things must come to an end eventually, however. I came into work one day and my project was cancelled (and not like "wind it down over the next 6 months", but literally "might as well delete the CLs you're working on") and I hastily transferred to another interesting-sounding team that, in retrospect, I kind of got the hard-sell to join.

As it turned out, I didn't really care for the other team that I transferred to, and thought to myself "everyone else on my old team got 6 months to sit at home and research other projects to transfer to, so I'll just look for another project." I did not get that option. I was basically told "you just transferred, so you can't leave." And then told, "you really aren't getting enough work done on your own hours, I want you to be here at 9am so I can make sure you're working." That went as well as you'd imagine. A bunch of people advised me "you're depressed, you should take 3 months off and get some antidepressants". I talked with my doctor and did that. In the end, it had no effect. The third-party company that handles paid leave denied my claim, so it was unpaid leave. I decided to take a vacation right at the end of my leave... which the vacation system decided was invalid and silently discarded. When I was on vacation without cell phone service, Google started calling my parents (I'm 32 BTW) looking for me. It was quite a production when I finally got cell phone service back. 3 months of de-stressing, instantly erased.

I got back and started working on a new project under the supervision of my existing manager. He decided that, based on git commit timestamps, I wasn't programming quickly enough. (I got that from another very new manager once, and it was also an App Engine project. I'm not sure if that says more about me or App Engine, but I digress.) To be brutally honest, I'm kind of offended that he didn't consider me to be capable of forging timestamps on git commits. I thought about it, honestly, but in the end decided that experienced managers knows that some things are easy and some things are hard. But in the end, I thought honesty was the best policy.

I was pretty stressed out at this point because my manager and I clearly didn't get along, and the project I wanted to work on didn't have official headcount so I couldn't really get out of a bad situation. At that point I wrote up some email to the relevant concerned parties and realized "I do not want to read the response to this email", so I didn't. Some time passed and someone from HR called me saying "you know if you are gone for 3 days, you're voluntarily resigning, right?" I said, "yup." And that was the end of my experience working for Google. I still have my laptop and badge. They still have a box of my stuff (including my beloved Realforce 87UB keyboard!) Oh well.

My point is, there are other places to work. Google is a huge company and some people are happy and some people aren't. If you're unhappy, maybe you can find happiness elsewhere. I'll tell you one thing, though... antidepressants won't make you happy about a job you don't like.

You did't say what office you're in, but Google is a big place and there are lots of internal job openings, at least at the larger offices. I'd suggest looking around both internally and externally to see if there's something that interests you more. (There are teams doing good work that has little to do with the larger political issues.)

That's awfully generic advice, but to do better you'll need to get an advisor who can get to know you.

And recommendations for advisors?

Not really, but if you decide to look for internal transfers, I think there is an internal advisors program that might help. (I never used it but it seems like a logical place to start.)

Brain. Verily, calico, look at their venture page: hundreds of amazing projects backed by teams of phds in the prime of their careers. You could bring some of that work in house.

Nothing has really changed in the world in the last two+ years. Google did some cool innovated stuff then, and it is doing it now. Small companies were doing cool innovated stuff, as well as boring stuff then... As well as how. I'm not saying you shouldn't leave, but I wouldn't leave because of the reason you gave. There are advantage and disadvantages to worrying for a small company. Look around, but look around Google as well.

Find People and teams you want to work with internally first and interview with them. What is happening in the news has nothing to do with developing your own skills. That fully depends on the people you surround yourself with. And if you haven't learnt how to find those people within a place like Google, it's not going to be easy to learn outside.

A fun, different, but effective way to find creative Googlers and Xooglers to chat with is at https://gxjam.com

GXJam prolly wasn't designed for that purpose in mind, but that's how I use it :)

On the whole, Google is still one of the most innovative places to work. Even if their ingenuity is decreasing, that doesn't necessarily mean some other place is better. Another thing to consider is what about your job specifically? If that is innovative enough for you, why do you care?

I found this to be an interesting discussion on the question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2gidnJyGZA

What is your skillset like?

FlumeJava/Spanner/Stubby Services, mostly in payments

I think financially it might best to stick at Google but change jobs. However, since you mentioned Space-X, remember that your skills set is not the core of their technology so you would not be able to get into one of the critical teams immediately. But sometimes you can make multiple jumps in position with time till you get closer to what you desire. Use your friends and former coworkers to help you lead into new opportunities. I look at what I did 20 years ago and it is quite different that what I'm doing now. And there were many job transitions over that time to get there.

I've wondered about getting a degree in aerospace...

I am (I suspect) a little bit older than you and have been working at a FANG company for nearly seven years. (Before that I was at a company that may as well be included in the list.)

What your comments about aerospace remind me of is something I would myself frequently do: fantasizing about a different industry about which I know very little. (Years ago, I used to imagine going back to school to study law, on the grounds that being a lawyer is a good way to really work for social change.)

Obviously I didn't go back to school, and I certainly can't tell you what the right decision for you is. I think a bit of curiosity about the road not taken is natural--but you also have to be clear-eyed about what the alternatives actually look like.

To your specific question, however, I would strongly recommend interviewing at a few other teams inside the company and a few other companies. Before I came to my current employer, I interviewed here and a few other places. Some of them struck me by how _bad_ the interviewers were; in fact, my interview experience at my current employer (where the interviewers impressed me by their intelligence) convinced me, at the time, that if I didn't get the job I would stay at my then-employer rather than move to a less impressive place.

So interviewing can be clarifying in terms of showing you what else is out there, and helping you make a trade-off between natural wanderlust and, you know, not settling for something shitty just because it's new. ;)

Hear, hear. I am formerly Google Payments too. Don't leave just yet, there's plenty of hope for you staying and transferring to another org.

I have been at Google about 12 years now and had a three year stint in Payments until somewhat recently. Out of all of the organizations, projects, and products I worked on (6 projects, 12 managers, 5 offices, 2 continents), Payments is the least Google-feeling of them all with the worst management and politics (frankly it was fucked). The rest of Google was a dream in comparison. Had I known Payments was in bad shape, I might not have joined it originally.

Before leaving, try somewhere else. I recently founded my own team elsewhere build software for distributed system infrastructure, and I cannot tell you how fun it is. The joy is still at Google, but Payments is a blackhole. I can't believe the rest of the leadership tolerates that hostile black sheep of an org.

Google is largely what you make of it.

What team are you on now?

"Fuck yes or no" lets me see the answer. Nice job using your position to help your name get some bubble. Everything cool is happening outside of silly con valley at this point.

Example of cool stuff?

If you have suggestions for other places to work let me know

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