Please consider not working here, if you have other options (which you almost always do)
Many of us have been there, and it is not worth that feeling in your stomach every morning, because it drains the life out of you, can cause all kinds of physical and emotional problems.
Go take a job somewhere else, where you might earn less - but will be less miserable - or maybe even happy.
Get out.
I left Google a few years ago, and I did love working there, but unfortunately my experience was similar. I was on one of the non-software engineering ladders. The group I was part of grew very rapidly the first few years I was there. We were poaching the absolute best people from the best companies to come work on our team. It seemed like there was a new former principal engineer from MegaCo joining us weekly, and it was fantastic to be part of such a team.
But how people got promoted was sometimes a mystery, at least at first. Everyone knew who was the most productive, the most valuable. Yet the promotions too often appeared random. Because we were on a narrower, more specialized engineering ladder the promo committees consisted of the same handful of very senior engineers each time. After a while, it became clear to us that the people that worked with those engineers on the promo committee in their day-to-day ended up having their promotions approved. Those that didn't had far less chance.
This might not sound all that bad - if you're doing high-level work you should be engaged with high-level people. But it ended up becoming a patronage system: people would volunteer their support and time for the pet projects of those on the promo committee and in return they would get promoted. Engineers who weren't comfortable with such an arrangement ended up jaded and underpayed.
I saw one engineer who left a very, very senior position at a well-known company especially hurt by the realization that they would have to participate in this charade to move up. He/she had attempted to get promoted the right way a few times and failed. Under pressure from their significant other, they played the game and it visibly hurt their sense of pride. The promo committee members took turns jerking them around with various tasks for a year or so, but he/she got their promotion. The rest of us took notice.
I got the sense that this system was more comfortable to those who came to us from academia. I barely have a college degree myself so maybe I can't relate.
The process took a long time -- much longer than the first interview or any of my other friends. And every time I talked to the recruiter I could tell something was up. At the end the recruiter confessed there was issues at the hiring committee and a unusual event of a manager getting involved. They seemed to indicate there was a fight about me being accepted. I have a unique skill set and am very qualified to work at google. I have over 15 years working the full stack. I write drivers for Linux, and design big cloud deployments -- I have the history and the background, so I would not be a gamble on any front. So I thought it odd that there would be an issue at this level, it was only later that I figured I was not diverse enough when a intern I helped train -- who happens to be diverse did get into google.
Anyways, with all the politics going on I am wondering if it is even worth responding to a current recurrent request.
My questions for you xxcode are the folllowing --
It sucks, but are there teams I can try and get on that would not suck? Somebody at google has to be doing good things and just be excited about working on the project they are working on.
I have a good job in Texas. It pays me $150k a year. I sometimes get bonuses and have a fairly good thing going with stock (not options, but stock). Is the money good enough at google to make it worth while?
Will living in CA/MV negate any gains in pay and benefits?
Is there any way to work at this company and avoid the entire diversity thing? I just want to write code and build awesome software that people enjoy using. Diversity -- while I care about it -- is not something I want to actively take cycles out of my life to solve -- there are fare more passionate people who are better equipped to think about these issues, I would rather write software.
Please don't think I am a horrible person. We here on this planet once, and writing code what I want to do with my life -- not everybody has to be a warrior for social justice.
https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/
it seems luck (as in being the right person on the right project) plays a large factor (not the only factor, of course).
Google already suffers from a lack of junior people (see the post from a few days ago from a Xoogler complaining that the work he was doing was not deemed promo worthy), so it's not necessarily a surprise that the hiring bar for junior engineers would be lower - they're junior engineers.
And this law suit alleges that Google discriminated against non-diverse candidates at the most junior level anyway.
Per a recent news article (don't have it handy, but it was on HN so someone will probably post it), moving from SF -> Austin, holding salary constant, is a de-facto raise of $66,000 per year due to lowered cost of living.
And this is in _Austin_ which, I'm led to believe, has a very high cost of living relative to Texas. If you're somewhere else in Texas making $150k, your de-facto raise relative to California is even higher
Meanwhile, working at Google or another name brand company in SF, your total compensation is going to be anywhere from $200k to $300k. Working at a regular tech company in SF, depending on seniority, it's going to be $100k-$180k. Without giving specific numbers, I was making around $150k as a software engi with 6 years experience in SF, and I took about a 10% pay cut when I moved to Texas.
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In short, if you're making $150k/yr in Texas, anywhere, you are doing better in terms of overall life (money after adjusted for stress/QoL), and if you're making $150k/yr in Texas outside of Austin, you are probably making more money in absolute terms than the typical Google employee. Please, do yourself a favour and stay in Texas
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Edit: To add, a major part of why I moved out of California was because the politics was omnipresent and unavoidable. I have so many horror stories, things I would not believe to be true if I didn't witness them first-hand. And this is at regular normal tech companies. Companies that don't have the budget to spend on politics. Companies that risk their existence by spending money on things outside of their core business (read: the software they're building).
If you're like me, and you just want to do the job you're good at, do it right, and make a good wage, then California is not for you. It's not avoidable, it will drive you crazy. Maybe California will sort itself out five, ten years from now, but right now people are silently leaving in droves over it.
Please, for the love of reasonableness and moderation, stay in Texas and help us keep this place focused on the craft, instead of getting distracted by orthogonal social issues
I would recommend joining a smaller group at google, and also one which has engineers who haven’t all been around at google for 5+ years.
Overall, it can be fun at times but relatively unfulfilling. Google pays above market though. I think if it paid market, almost 50% of tech staff would leave.
Product managers at google are also very political and if they are not, they get pushed out etc. I had one PM who always passionately argued about the user etc, and was eventually pushed out because he was not internally ‘aligned’. The product he was arguing against got cancelled this Friday after 2 years of work
Both factors may make a significant difference in the judgment of "working at Google" (I don't imply anything, either negative or positive).
Working at big companies like Google is not for everyone. Unless you have material reasons for staying--such as funding care of aging parents--wouldn't you be happier and more successful by taking your own advice?
p.s., I don't work at Google and don't ever want to.
Please don't blame employees that are complaining about stressful working environments - their plate is already full.
This isn't a field worker complaining about back-breaking labor conditions and wage theft, this a professional engineer at a top company who I certainly would not want on my team (I'm also a software engineer) if they're as checked out as they say, both for their sake and mine.
I've worked with plenty of checked-out paycheck/stock-vest campers, and their effect on team morale is palpable, and the damage they do during their remaining tenure is usually pretty severe.
That's a normative statement, which I personally agree with, along with the rest of your post, so this is by no means disagreement with anything you said. But it's really easy for people to rationalize away normative statements.
I prefer something a bit more direct: Nobody else is going to save you. Whether or not it "should" be your job to manage your own happiness is an interesting philosophical discussion that happens to have absolutely no bearing on your life, because in your real life, it's on you.
If you are that unhappy with your job, do something. Nobody else will.
I wish you the best.
Generally, I think it's good policy to be very guarded on the internet and/or change accounts often. There are all kinds of awful people out there, and you can't control who you may come across.
Google makes so much money from ads, it doesn’t know what to do. Like Microsoft, so much middle management that from customer pain to engineers, requirements are loaded with a ton of personal agenda and political gain.
Once companies significantly outgrow the Dunbar-number range[1], political processes are the only way to manage things, and it infects everything.
For me, my quality of life is worth the tradeoff[2], and I turn down headhunters from them AmaGoPleBook seemingly constantly. If you want to pursue your actual work, as opposed to refining your skill at signaling games, move to a smaller shop.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
[2] Another reason to keep debt low and personal commitments fluid - turning down a six figure raise because it would make life hell gets harder with both.
If an engineer isn't doing well on their 80% project, a 20% project might be frowned upon, that is true.
Sure if you can get everything expected of you done in 32 hours, you can spend the remaining 8 on something else.
https://www.hrzone.com/lead/culture/why-did-google-abandon-2...:
> Why did Google abandon 20% time for innovation?
> In 2012 the firm began requiring engineers who wished to work on individual projects to run their proposals by their managers first. This was a significant change from the firm’s previous policy.
> In 2013 it was reported that managers had clamped down on staff taking ’20% time’ so as to avoid their teams falling behind in Google’s internal productivity rankings. Managers are judged on the productivity of their teams—Google has a highly developed internal analytics team that constantly measures all employees’ productivity—and so time spent on ’20% time’ projects would impact this.
2013 Google sounds like pretty much every other major company, in this area.
So the question you have to ask yourself is this: Is the difference in pay between these two jobs really worth it?
The times when I asked myself this question, the answer was always really clear.