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Comment by mehrdada | Hacker News Reader

> Overall, the job wasn't exciting to me. I didn't have to work that hard, and one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and all alone): I'm like, “Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap.” I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, “I'm not tired anymore.” Working at Intel was a draining environment, and I knew I wanted to leave.

Ironic that's exactly how I felt at Google (minus the cubicle). So did a friend of mine quitting with me.

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I was at a talk last week given by a startup founder and he said something similar that went along these lines:

The bigger the company, the smaller your role's coverage. You get well-compensated and aren't worked too hard, but your job might effectively be "you're responsible for these two screens of this one component of this particular application". The conflict is that the bigger the company, the higher the bar for entry. So you end up with a bunch of really bright, challenge-loving people cooped up working day in day out on very specific cogs of the giant machine, and that's not an ideal lifestyle for all of those people.

"Product Manager, Friend List at Facebook"

That's not what's incentivized though. Getting in to a FAANG is just the first step. The next step is to actually show that you can affect more than just your two screens. That's why they work in constant review cycles. People who get frustrated are often the people who don't know how to affect more than their two screens. It's hard, because you're competing with other people who are equally or more brilliant. Although Google is big enough now that we can demote brilliant to fairly intelligent I think.

From what I hear it's turning fairly intelligent to asshole

Google has been riddled with a--holes since at least 2010.

To be honest our whole industry has more than its fair share.

99% of people within FAANG are the most friendly people ever. E.g. for Google not being a dick is a hiring criteria (Googleyness).

>for Google not being a dick is a hiring criteria

Wonder what the false negative rate is?

Probably quite high.

Google's culture and hiring process is so well documented at this point, I suspect any suitably talented individual could appropriate some cultural fit.

Of the (current and former) googlers I know personally, they are a mixed bag but there are some traits that are more common. Self assurance and the uncanny ability to never be seen to be demonstrably incorrect are prevalent tbh - but that applies equally to most of the industry.

> the uncanny ability to never be seen to be demonstrably incorrect

I think that may be very easy to do, just state that everything you say is just a theory or your opinion... but this is just a theory.

I'm an interview at a FAANG company, and I did and will reject people if I have the feeling that they are not a cultural fit. (e.g. being a dick, arrogant, ...)

> 99% of people within FAANG are the most friendly people ever

I worked at one the FAANG and I found in my team and some of the neighboring teams the most insecure, unfriendly, back-stabbing, conspiratorial bunch of technically semi-competent losers I ever had the displeasure of working with. Other people were competent, trustworthy, confident in themselves and thus enjoyable.

I also interviewed at other FAANGs and maybe the interviewers were all wonderful people, but I had a mixed experience. Some appeared to be ok, some definitely not. Very different experience from the parent's.

> I worked at one the FAANG and I found in my team and some of the neighboring teams the most insecure, unfriendly, back-stabbing, conspiratorial bunch of technically semi-competent losers I ever had the displeasure of working with.

I think a lot of people would enjoy a blog post elaborating on that experience (possibly under a pseudonym to protect you from vengeance).

I will, anonymously, in a few months. It's going to be good fun, both for the readers and for me.

But you're not competing with those brilliant people on technical merit, but in the political game of building a fiefdom in a large company. That takes very different skills, and many people find it distastful.

Some might be surprised at what are the most effective strategies in fifedom building and rising in a large org. It very often has much more about making deliberate choices to help those around you succeed, to actively recognize others and help others arond you sieze opportunities. And that kind of demonstrated leadership is what will propel your own rise in status within an organization. It’s a mistake, and will set you back to think of politics as a zero-sum game.

Advancing at Google (as a Software Engineer) involved getting lucky. In order to be promoted in 2010, you needed to be responsible for a relevant part of a valuable project (in the eyes of executives and other Engineers) that succeeds. During many cycles, it was clear if a promotion or raise would be possible before work even began. As loyalty is rewarded, it also tended to be wiser to stick with one project/manager until leveled up.

Yes, people are rewarded for being successful, and there is an element of luck in landing a good opportunity -- withing a company or at a different company. If you are on a bad project, move; don't expect to be rewarded for wasting your and everyone else's time and money. That's necessarily how it must be, or else everyone would get promoted for hiding out in a corner making beautiful useless things no one cares about, and there's be no money to pay for those promotions.

It's still building a fiefdom based on loyalty. You'll be competing with people who build loyalty in other, more negative ways - good doesn't always triumph, and I'd contend that in large orgs it rarely does. The pressures that come to bear as you rise will not push you to be good to those under you.

Politics does not have to be a zero sum game but often those who view it that way and are absolutely ruthless rise to the top. Perhaps that's just the human condition.

>It’s a mistake, and will set you back to think of politics as a zero-sum game.

It's a mistake to think that it's not a zero sum game.

If there are 5 people and one available spot for promotion, you can get selected by bolstering your appearance or by tearing the other 4 down. Either one works.

And yeah, the best tactic is usually "make my boss look good".

> And yeah, the best tactic is usually "make my boss look good".

You say this like it's a bad thing. You should be making your boss, your team, and your teammates look good. If you are doing those things, you are probably also making the company look good.

It's thinking about the long vs. short term. Focusing only on your own optics may work okay in the short term, but they cap out fairly quickly.

Think about how it looks from the outside. Employee A is only focused on themselves. It is recognized that A is good, but any team A is on still struggles. Employee B makes the whole team look good. It becomes recognized that B not only does well, but any team B ends up on does well. Who do you think advances the farthest long term?

And just like that, the just world fallacy kicks in :)

I certainly don't think it's a bad thing to make your teammates look good, but in general it's more effective to give the lion's share of the credit to the boss rather than them. And credit is a limited resource.

I say that like it's a bad thing because it kind of is.

I believe there are some companies where coworkers rather than management decide promotions and this tactic would not work but they are few and far between.

Google, as far as I know, is still one of those places where your coworkers provide the feedback that goes into your promotion.

Since you're talking about 'credit' you have completely missed the point. I'm talking about making the whole team look good by making them better. That means helping team members get better. That means helping your boss get better. If the whole team looks good, guess who benefits the most from that? Your boss. And, who cares who decides promotions. If every team you end up on becomes great, you will end up where you want to be.

This also has nothing to do with a just world fallacy. This is thinking long term. Rarely can someone politic all the way to the top. In order to lead, you need the support of your team. You get that by being a great team member yourself.

/rant

Finally, I'm tired of hearing how awesome people are, but their team sucks or their boss sucks (doubly so for people working at FAANG, because the low bar is so much higher). If they are so awesome, then get out there and help the team improve. Instead it's I'm so smart, but everyone is holding me back. I'm stuck on a crappy team, etc... Grow up.

/rant over

>It’s a mistake, and will set you back to think of politics as a zero-sum game.

I think we have a bit of a meta-false-dichotomy here. I agree it's a mistake to think of it as a zero-sum game. I also would say it's a mistake to think your advice will reliably work.

I've often sat in career advice talks and they often give the same advice you gave. Invariably during Q/A someone will point out they followed that exact advice and got screwed. The responses by the panelist fall into two categories:

1. I don't believe it and there must be more to the story.

2. You're in a poor organization. I suggest you find a better place to work.

So yes, the advice is good, but only when it works :-)

As a company gets bigger, the likelihood of faulty incentives existing goes up. The likelihood that what's good for my team + boss is bad for the company goes up.

Personally, I don't have illusions. I've worked in jobs where the advice you gave won't work. And I side with the second answer. Instead of playing bad politics, it's just a lot better to find an organization that is worthy of me/you. The advice people who had been in the org gave me was consistently "Forget about what's good for the bigger picture and the company. Make your boss look good even if it's a bad solution and will waste others' time and money." I didn't follow that advice and I paid for it. At the same time, my time and effort is valuable - I'd rather use it for something better than this. Either I work to change the organization's culture, or I leave.

That might be true for a small percentage of projects/teams.

If you want to succeed as a SWE at a FAANG company you'll have to be an exceptional engineer, or have other skills (leadership, pm, ...). You can't just weasle up the ladder by playing "political games".

Though, most of my colleagues don't even care about their career - most of us just want to work on cool projects which immediately affect billions of people.

You can weasel up the ladder by getting help but not giving help, taking credit for other people's work, and mortgaging other people's future to get your product launched today.

One of my colleagues complained a while ago to management that "you hire brain surgeons and put them to work to peel potatoes". Quite a poetic way to express the same idea, I'd say :D

I had a colleague of mine complain to management that their hiring process looked for Ferraris but once someone joined the company they would bolt on a plow to that Ferrari and expected it to deliver acres of plowed fields.

More a task for a Lamborghini than a Ferrari I would think.

There literally are Ferrari tractors :)

Lamborghini began as a tractor company, so I think the joke is pointing towards history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini_Trattori

>One of my colleagues complained a while ago to management that "you hire brain surgeons and put them to work to peel potatoes".

I work in one of the top tech companies that is not FAANG, and the sentiment is the same. They hire only PhDs for a big chunk of the company and they pay relatively well - most of the people who complain about this cannot get a better paying job.

A friend of mine even said to his boss 6 months after he was hired "Why did you hire a PhD like me for this job? This work is not even close to requiring a PhD".

While I feel for him, my counter is "OK. Where would you rather work where you will do work worthy of a PhD?" They'll usually name the same few places, and not realize that those places are already "full". And they all pay less.

The reality is that there are many more qualified people than positions for the interesting work. If my company decided that yes, you're right, we don't need to hire PhDs for the job and we'll just hire MS folks, then the very people complaining would be in another company, getting paid less, and complaining about the same thing.

"The conflict is that the bigger the company, the higher the bar for entry." is that true? I would think that the bar to get in is lowered as you need more and more people. Of course, some institutions like Google manage to make a good branding effort and attract talent, but becoming an early engineer in a successful small startup requires you to be extremely smart too.

Google can afford to pay better, relocate people from all over the world & is prestigious.

The smartest dude on my team was hired by Google a year ago. On my team, he was a subject matter expert and he routinely contributed to open source projects.

Google hired him to be a salesperson.

I definitely wonder if he could be happy in that role. I understand that it's important to have technically adept salespeople, but I can't see him being happy in that long term.

If you can get commissions then it can be lucrative.

He talks about that later:

> On Leaving Google [...] But when I went in the next day, the energy drained out of me. I suddenly felt like I used to feel working at Intel. Partially I think Google had grown so much in my absence, but it was also partly a “boiling the frog” effect: before I spent time away, I hadn't noticed things slowly changing, but when I got back I realized, “Oh wow, here I am in a meeting with a bunch of people I don't know who are telling me to do stuff that I don't care about.”

I also felt the same. The place was draining, distracting, chaotic, cramped, and noisy (in 2010). A complete waste of time in hindsight that's still with me today (haven't been able to work again since leaving at the end of 2010).

Everyone still says Google is so great. Enough that I still wonder what happened. I also couldn't settle in, didn't like anyone, and was continually interrupted/harassed/followed.

oO you didn't like anyone there? Sounds like a problem with yourself.

Can't imagine that you were sourrounded by assholes.

It didn't matter if they had an off-putting personality or were "OK." Either way, I just wasn't feeling it. On the other hand, the same happens wherever I go. Maybe Google's reputation of attracting certain personalities led me to believe there would be others that were similar or like-minded. Instead, they were mostly unhealthy judger types (though I'm not sure if the source is reliable, a few years ago 23.6% were said to be INTJ and 12.5% ENTJ: https://www.quora.com/Do-most-software-engineers-have-an-INT...).

You seem to mention the Myers Briggs a lot in your posts... I’m not sure how useful it is.

The reduction of individuals to acronyms sounds to me like unhealthy judgment, so maybe Google did a better job than you realized in attracting “like minded” individuals!

It's not that useful, but is another way to help illustrate what I'm trying to say.

> I also couldn't settle in, didn't like anyone, and was continually interrupted/harassed/>>followed<<.

> On the other hand, the same happens wherever I go.

Is that you, mchurch?

No. Someone much less known.

Sounds like any given open office environment to me.

Most places that do "interesting" work do have some elements of distracting and noisy.

At my first job on campus at Cranfield university my shared office was a portacabin which was next to the hardstanding between two of the hangers and they used to test run executive jets after being serviced < 100m away now that is loud.

The work wasn't interesting.

Ah that's a problem but at least you where paid fabulously.

Pay was (industry) median in my case.

At Google? When I worked at a tier 1 RnD org I was paid about 1/3 of the same grade in the Uk Scientific civil service.

Unless you were assaulted there or something, the fact that you haven’t been able to work in 8 years is probably indicative that there’s something you personally need help with rather than something structurally wrong with Google.

Well, I say I became a Targeted Individual. Others would say it's Paranoid Schizophrenia. I was implying sabotage.

Here’s what I suspect. There’s something “off” about you compared to the average person. People lock in on that and basically recoil from you so you see people as having targeted you because they don’t do this to anyone else. The right kind of person can help you ascertain what this thing is that makes you “off” and help you correct or conceal it.

Not really. I'm as "off" as an INTP is off in the world at large. I was generally seen as nice. Though some would say/imply I wasn't, it was consistently shown to be done as part of an attempt to use/screw me. Maybe my tendency toward being introverted/quiet bothered some people (in the world at large).

My use of the term Targeted Individual was more literal (another reason most would say Paranoid Schizophrenia): https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=targeted%20i....

> Everyone still says Google is so great. Enough that I still wonder what happened. I also couldn't settle in, didn't like anyone, and was continually interrupted/harassed/followed.

In Western cultures, people put so much spin on what they say that I wouldn't assign much value to it. "Loving the job" may often literally mean "the job sucks less than the all my other previous jobs, my long-term depression is somewhat better now". Sharing the unpleasant truth is usually seen as career and social suicide, so people put on a face.

Yeah, me too. But Google has more in common with Intel now than when it had 23 employees.

True. I have a new catchphrase that I use: Google does everything at scale. They waste talent at scale.

And it’s such an utter shame with their resources; they could be the next Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

That's like saying Microsoft could be the next Bell Labs. In reality, Microsoft is the next Bell, and Microsoft Research IS the next Bell Labs.

They've already done so much more than either of those.

Bell Labs delivered a fair bit of tech, but Xerox PARC did great demos. Xerox PARC == Magic Leap or something like that.

Don’t know why you were downvoted. Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc. But they got great tech which got ripped off, unlike magic leap maybe ?

The Learning Group at PARK did release Smalltalk, but guess that's not "for the general public".

I was under the idea they never really wanted to release a product for mass consumption.

> Xerox parc did in fact release nothing to the general public iirc.

Right, just because you haven't bothered to look it up, it doesn't exist. Here are just the Xerox PARC work that was commercialized by Xerox I can think of off the top of my head: Ethernet, XNS, Interpress, the Star and D-series workstations, Mesa, Smalltalk, Cedar.

Don't forget the laser printer, postscript, etc

They probably are. There's a ton of interesting research going on at Google that is not being capitalized on economically. They just need a few ambitious visitors or ex-employees to "liberate" it, the way Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did to Xerox. In some cases (eg. TensorFlow, Chromium, protobufs, or LevelDB) it's already been open-sourced.

Note that neither AT&T nor Xerox were the prime beneficiaries of technologies developed at Bell Labs or PARC, respectively.

I think it's highly dependent on your role, and at its current size your chances of getting lost in some piece of noise is quite high. Of course endless performance reviews also suck. Google is still a great place to work, but it's a corporation now, and there are just some things that don't scale.

I suspect it'd mostly depend on your personal standards and ambitions than your role. I can't imagine many below-VP positions being much different on this dimension. Even many VPs and up are getting stuck in life-sucking unimportant activities.

You're not wrong. It's definitely personal ambition. I think we all know that getting in != good reviews, moving up, etc.

Autonomy is harder and harder to get at larger corporations and play a big role in self identifying work as satisfying or valuable. Even if you manage to get it, it can be taken away by an outsider in a large corp at any point. Startups are safer bets from this perspective.

So, who's the new 'Google' now?

One should start their own if they can't identify one, I'd say...

Facebook, Google, Apple, and Netflix still have some of the best talent in the bay. They also push out a lot of amazing projects (PyTorch, React, Go, Chromium, Tensorflow), although Netflix much less so.

At the end of the day they have the money, and they do provide ridiculous perks.

> They also push out a lot of amazing projects ... although Netflix much less so.

Actually Netflix much more so, only their projects are not in software. Just sayin.

Where can I find such non-software projects?

think they mean the movies and things

But you will only ever be a tiny part of those big projects. If you want big challenges or big recognition perhaps a smaller startup will make you happier...

In all likelihood you won't even work on any of those projects.

Not necessarily. You can go to a team that works on a tiny part or you can go to a team that affects the entire company. You'd be surprised how few people want to work on the latter. Especially because the tiny parts are usually new press release type "fancy" stuff and not boring things like build systems, security, etc.

Netflix have Chaos Monkey, Spinnaker and Jaeger. Maybe not industry leading but still better than Apple.

Jaeger is Uber.

You're correct there. My bad.

Google has quite a large team working on Spinnaker as well (sibling to my own team).

Also, Hystrix, Eureka, and other JVM microservicey packages.

Ever use Xcode on a day to day basis? Clearly not the best talent there.

Crypto/blockchain and decentralized companies in their various forms. People say it's garbage but they also said that about search engine advertising too.

People also call garbage garbage. Sometimes they're right.

I was just like you until a few months ago, when i got really interested in the technical aspect of DLT. Don’t let the digital currency scam blind you : there are some really really interesting things going on in that field.

Any example companies or products you'd recommend looking at?

hedera hashgraph papers and founder talks (you should find them on youtube) made me realize some real people were working on solving real world issues, and not just scam people.

I had a job in a company obsessed with DLT. I didn’t see anything useful. In fact I’d go as far to suggest that the only use of a blockchain is in cryptocurrency. What have you seen which suggests otherwise?

Maybe you’ve got more insights on the subject since you’ve actually had a job on the tech, but it seems that « private » DLTs , or « b2b » dlts could have some applications where competitors need to share and persist information.

Another is with all systems taking the roles traditionnally filled with state actors ( registers of some sorts).

But you’re right, so far no « killer app » has been found. That’s what makes it interesting today, imho.

edit : to answer your question more precisely, a talk by one of hedera founder to a university class was eye opening to me ( here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjQkag6VOo0)

> But you’re right, so far no « killer app » has been found. That’s what makes it interesting today, imho.

How long do we have to wait until the lack of a killer app stops being interesting, and simply means the technology is not useful?

Bitcoin is coming up on its 9-year anniversary. The equivalent point in the web's history was 1998.

How many of today's Internet giants were founded in 1998? Amazon. Plenty of defunct also-rans: Netscape, Ebay, Yahoo, AOL, Geocities, Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Pointcast, Monster.com, RealAudio, Pets.com, Kozmo, AllAdvantage.com, Webvan, DoubleClick. Netflix was in its infancy (~1 year old). Apple was a dying hardware company, a few months from bankruptcy and kept alive by Microsoft's cash infusion.

Google's official founding was several months in the future. PayPal was right around then. Napster was a year in the future. Friendster and LiveJournal were 4 years in the future, MySpace 5 years, Facebook almost 6. SomethingAwful.com, Bodybuilding.com, and Fark.com were a year in the future, 4chan 3 years, Digg 6 years, and Reddit 7. Twitter was 8 years in the future. YouTube was 7. Heroku and Weebly were 8-9 years in the future, which was the same time SquareSpace graduated to more than one employee. Dropbox was 8 years in the future. AirBnb was also 8 years, but didn't catch on for a further 5 years or so. Indeed was 6, Etsy was 7, Indiegogo was 9, Kickstarter was 11, GoFundMe was 11, Pinterest was 12, Patreon was 14.

So to answer your question going by the web's example - probably about 7 years. The "killer app" for the web (communication & coordination, IMHO) started becoming apparent to the mainstream around 2005, with Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Etsy, Indeed, and Twitter all being founded within +-1 year of that. Interestingly, analogues of all of them existed in 1998 (Classmates.com, DejaNews, RealVideo, EBay, Monster, and...well, nothing really for Twitter), but it took almost 20 years for the underlying infrastructure to get mature enough to get mass consumer adoption.

If you wrote a book, I would buy it. Great post, very succinct.

Has any technology got a worse hype to practical use ratio than blockchain though?

Within the last 3 years: Magic Leap, AR/VR in general, Theranos, Elon Musk's cave-diving submarine, Juicero, self-driving cars, drone delivery. Smartwatches, smart-home speakers, and IoT are roughly tied with blockchain for hype/use ratio.

I disagree. Smart watches like FitBit or Apple actually do stuff, self driving cars do actually drive, Elon Musk's submarine hyped as much as blockchain, seriously? Blockchain businesses have achieved practically nothing.

> it took almost 20 years for the underlying infrastructure to get mature enough to get mass consumer adoption.

I don't know if you were on the Internet in 1998. I was. The Web was useful, mature, and had tens of millions of paying customers in 1998. In contrast, all the people I have known to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies only do it for speculation.

You bring up PayPal and list eBay as a "defunct also-ran." The only reason people started using PayPal was to shop on eBay, and the only way PayPal got anyone to start using them for payments was to bribe people with $20 referral bonuses, which they could only do due to their VC firehose of money, and a huge spambot campaign where they pestered eBay merchants with messages along the lines of "I'd like to bid, but I can only do PayPal." (see The PayPal Wars)

PayPal is a great historical lesson in explaining why BitCoin and other libertarian hash chain schemes will fail as a currency, because PayPal was founded on the same deluded libertarian fantasy:

"“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” Thiel predicted. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”"

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/who-killed-payp...

The real value of PayPal turned out to be fraud prevention and consumer protection, something that hash chain schemes lack by design.

Bitcoin is for speculation. That's its use-case: it's fundamentally a financial system. It's made a few million people rich and several more million people poor, and started several thousand businesses. That's not a bad track record for something 9 years old; it beats out YCombinator (whose use-case is also "making people rich"), which is almost 14.

I've been on the web since 1994. I certainly found it useful in 1998, but the things it was useful for included:

1.) Looking up Geocities pages for my favorite bands.

2.) Reading rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan.

3.) Playing DragonRealms, an early MMORPG.

4.) Instant-messaging my friends.

5.) Earning money through AllAdvantage.com. Think I made about $40 from them off referral fees.

6.) Looking up information for school papers.

7.) Amusing myself with the HampsterDance.

Streaming video existed but was far too slow and glitchy to be worth watching. Amazon.com existed, but my parents refused to buy anything online. My sister was an avid user of Kozmo.com when she went to college, but then they went bankrupt a year later. MapQuest existed, but took too long to load and still required that you print out directions, since you couldn't exactly bring a computer in the car.

By contrast, I've spent over $5K at about 2 dozen different AirBnBs in the last 5 years (and stayed at a hotel...erm, twice, maybe?). I just booked a haircut online, after reading the Yelp reviews and looking up the location on Google Maps. I spent 15 minutes typing up this comment on Hacker News, which I guess is the spiritual successor to Usenet. I don't own a TV, but I watch a bunch of YouTube and my wife's an avid Netflix user. We get almost all our packages delivered via Amazon.

In terms of how much the Internet changed behavior, a lot more happened in the 10 years between 1999-2009 than the 10 years between 1989-1999, and arguably even more happened between 2009-2018 than 1999-2009.

Why is Git with signed commits so uninteresting yet a "private blockchain" is?

A DLT is just a database. You can't build a business peddling an open source database in 2018.

i don’t know a lot of database that you can share between any number of parties with write priviledges and yet be sure none of them can destroy, alter, falsify data or even make them unavailable , and which you don’t even need to host yourself.

There are some very peculiar properties of a dlt, that makes them special.

You mean a merkle tree

Isn't that essentially Github?

‘Google’ when?

The game done changed.

Not in a exciting place although probably better than rest of the big 5. The main issue is focus moving off from engineering to quarterly results and lot more non-technical people telling engineers what they need to do. Projects gets cut or severely underfunded until they die. No new ambition moonshots (they are all supposed to happen in other Alphabet company). People have learned to game the interviews so real quality is downhill. Also CEO-of-CEO is basically all but checked out and other “CEOs” are not as visionaries, bold, risk takers and obviously not as empowered.

In my opinion, the market must crash before we'll know who "the next Google" is.

For instance, Amazon and Google became huge between 2000 and 2005. That was a stretch of time when great engineers were a dime a dozen. Tons of dot coms had cratered, and Sun Microsystems was circling the drain.

That created a huge pool of educated talent, eager to be hired.

That situation doesn't exist any longer.

If you feel this way at the most elite and prestigious employer in the world then I'm afraid for what you would you would think about working at a "average" company like Amazon, Cisco, or IBM these days.

Isn't it easy to change teams at Google?

Haha, "the most elite and prestigious employer in the world" has around 100k current full-time employees (and many more if you count the de facto employees hired as contractors). That fact alone contradicts the dictionary definition of elite.

The world does not begin and end with mega-cap companies you listed. There are many many many more companies at far smaller scale.

This is apropos but, what I wouldn't give for a cubicle....

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