Former Googlers on how they knew it was time to quit | Hacker News Reader

Former Googlers on how they knew it was time to quit

businessinsider.com

76 pointsepall51 comments

>Interviews

One of the people featured is a friend and former coworker at a different company. When I sent him this link, he said they never talked to him. They just pulled info off of his blog.

Par for the course for business insider.

The total misrepresentation by the comment of what the article claims? Par for the course for hn.

I commented to another reply. This formerly said “Interviews...” I didn’t pull that out of thin air. Something changed after my comment.

"Interviews" doesn't actually appear in the text of the article or its title. What does appear in the text is a very clear description of where the information came from.

"We spoke to several former Googlers to find out why they left the company, compiling their responses with those of other former employees who have written about their departures publicly."

I'm am, once again, quite impressed by hn's top comments.

Ok, I know I saw that somewhere when I commented. Did the headline change? It’s clearly not in the article now.

I left my tab open long enough to still have the original title: "Interviews with former Google employees to find out why they decided to leave (businessinsider.com)"

In the era of Sundar it has become harder and harder to recommend Google as a place to work to friends. Trust me, it is quite noticeable on the inside when the company stops being run by the founders, and starts being run by an MBA with no vision.

Posted anonymously to avoid work repercussions.

-Googler of > 5.5years

Can you elaborate for those of us considering Google?

Can you elaborate for those of us working at Google and don't know what you are talking about?

OP said the place is noticeably different inside the company under the new leadership. How?

That's pretty much the destiny of any large corporation. There is almost no way around it.

Microsoft seems like it could be a touch better under Satya than under Bill.

I guess the world is so different now that we can't make that comparison fairly. We can try to extrapolate what Bill Gates would do now based on what he did then, but we can't really know for sure.

The reverse is also true. Could Satya navigate the old Microsoft and deliver it as (still) one of the most valuable companies in the world?

But I digress. The point is, maybe Gates would've done just fine if he had chose to do so. Personally, I'm glad for B&M Gates Foundation's role in the world right now, so I'm kind of glad he didn't

even if nadella is an "MBA", he also have a bachelor's in EE and an M.S in computer science.

as much as he's a business guy, it really feels like he's a coder-first.

Correlation isn't causation. Sundar is an MBA and not a founder - true. He's also the guy who was called to steady the ship when founders got bored and moved on to sexier things.

In my opinion, what you're experiencing is more to do with Google becoming a big, public company with a clearly defined mission statement. Unlike the Google of yesteryears whose mission was everything from self driving cars to domestic fiber internet.

All successful companies eventually find their boring but profitable mission and tool their processes around it

The MBA hate on HN is insane. Engineers aren't magically better than everybody.

Same reasoning can be applied to Magically Better Administrators

Many of us had the experience of working for a nontechnical manager. It's always been surprising that companies think technical work can be managed by an average non-technical manager. I had one great non-technical manager, he just wanted me to explain what was going on and then let me do it, made suggestions, kept me apprised of priorities. It's disastrous for beginning devs.

I’ve been at Google about as long as you, and I’ve heard folks say some variation of this since the day I started. Personally, while there may be political or spiritual changes further up the ladder I’ve noticed no real change in my day-to-day over the last five years.

I left Google because I was working on a crank that was attached to a spindle. It was super boring and what I was learning did not accrue to anything that was valuable outside the company.

Otherwise it was a fine place to work. No better than Microsoft or Netflix or the rest, but no worse either.

That's basically what happened to me. I got bored after a while, working on a small feature on v8 of something. Fixing bugs and not having much testing for my system was a drag. The original leader of my mature product team was good, but he left and then a first time overly confident bro was the leader. We reported issues but new upper level management didn't matter.

These responses seem kind of formulaic and bland. I don't know why but I expected something juicier - these are mostly just people realising they need to move on, for the same reasons most of us do.

Agreed. I expected the reasons for leaving to be way more controversial. Most of them are basically just "I left to do something else". Only 2 of the people in that article left due to conflict, all the others just left for other jobs or hobbies.

Google has this aura about it that makes it seem like the pinnacle of career accomplishment, at least for software engineers. There are plenty of starry-eyed college students who are astonished that people ever leave Google voluntarily (unless they are going to Facebook/Netflix/${UNICORN}).

It's a company with 10s of thousands of people. What did you expect?

>I expected something juicier

What does the quantity of employees have to do with the discussion?

The greater the sample size, the more room for outliers.

Also the smaller chance that a random sample will have outliers in it.

It's a big company. Big company things happen at big companies.

It sounds like they've been severely shortened to keep them "interesting", at the expense of most of the details.

I think they interviewed a biased sample: ex-googlers who want to promote themselves.

Are there other kinds?

(I mean, how many skilled, driven, ambitious people don't want to promote themselves?)

Anyone that has been lucky enough to be able to build and run any organization with 50+ people knows that every month you will have new people joining and at least someone leaving. That has nothing to do with your company culture or how well you can retain good talent, it is just a numbers game.

Obviously any organization with thousands of people will have this happen at a much bigger scale.

Similar thread from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18192534

For people outside Silicon Valley or still studying at the university, Google probably seems like an awesome place.

It's just another Silicon Valley bigco. That's especially true now. In the early 2000s, it was probably a very cool place. But all big companies get more awful as they get bigger. I'm sure the bureaucracy and politics there are stifling, like all bigcos.

I was happy at the other companies I worked at. I selected and targeted all the companies I worked at, and Google wasn't one of them. I never answered the voice mails from Google recruiters and never responded to their LinkedIn messages.

> Everyone wants to work at Google

This circle jerk needs to stop.

Can I upvote this a million times pls

Their recruiters genuinely think this, which is why I decline. They have no interest in finding a good match between you and the company or why you're not interested in one specific detail. They have an opening, and you are privileged to even be contacted about the position.

It’s not just recruiters, so many people working there seem to be legitimately brain washed.

I just remembered this

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/20/occupy-fo...

Like holy shit. It’s a joke I guess but like is it really?

Not far from the truth. Recently started working with a former Googler, and almost every sentence starts with, "well at Google, we..." Well that's great, but you realize we're in an entirely different market and business model, right?

You don't want to work there because they think everyone wants to work there? That seems silly. It's pretty common for all recruiters in the universe to not have the new employees best interests at heart - they mostly want to find people who can get hired.

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my adblocker seems to block that script, I had no issues visiting the site while having adblock enabled.

(uBlock Origin)

Paste the url into outline.com. Works like a charm.

Works fine with Ghostery.

No problem with javascript disabled.

Turn off styling and you can see the text.

Or you can use outline: https://outline.com/6LD6KV

I worked at Google for close to 10 years. I resigned when I had made enough money to retire comfortably (for the next 40 years) in a European city.

The first two years were enjoyable but then it started going downhill, fast. Some close friends and co-workers had major implosions on the job and I was burned out. Once I realized that Google would suck me dry if I let it and that reality was completely different to the expectations I had going in, I found ways to drastically reduce the number of hours I actually worked and spent the rest (company time) doing things that contributed to my self-development (side projects and reading books, mostly).

I spent the last ~5 years doing no more than two hours of actual work per day. Needless to say, these were some of the best, most carefree years of my life. My mind rebounded and it felt great knowing that I was screwing the company that only viewed me as a commodity whilst getting paid top dollar. I am pretty sure I wasn't the only one doing it, either.

Was the burnout Google-specific, or do you think it would have likely happened at other tech companies as well?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com