Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech

Then there is a vocal minority who leverage that no individual's performance really affects the money printing machine. They blatantly view the company and its resources as a means to further their political goals.

They come across as incredibly entitled and tone-deaf against the actual working class or people actually suffering from oppression (say, women being incarcerated in Iran for decades for taking off their veils, or protesters in HK). No matter how petty and entitled the request, anything denied is interpreted as some larger act of "violence" against them.

What I didn't/don't understand is why management allowed that to happen. Either they actually believe in the political goals themselves, are afraid of the conflict, or believe it just does not matter for the company.

I think what management fails to understand often is that giving in to a demand is not viewed with gratitude but merely as accepting what's naturally right and good. In other words, giving in to demands 1..n does not give you credit when demand n+1 is posed. The ultimate conflict is just delayed.

It's really sad.

And that is also very unacceptable.

Actually, all of you Westerners[1] are rich entitled whiners. You have consistent access to clean water that comes straight to your house, you even have a house, with insulation and carpets no less. You have a cornucopia of diverse and nutritious foods, and your social institutions will even feed you if you're poor! Not only do you have all these necessities, even your poor people have opulent expensive toys like cars, TVs and cell phones!

1. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/west...

Exactly - and managers would do that to tech workers in a second if they could. Let's make the best of our negotiating position while we can.

Quite common fallacy and useless misdirection. Article is not about minimum wage work struggles but about a struggle of people with particular skill set in particular environment. Not sure how your inappropriate outburst and lack of focus is relevant here?

If worker-boss relationships can't be fixed at a company where the workers are economically valuable and highly educated, how can that be propagated downwards to the rest of the economy? Do people actually want it fixed, or are they more afraid of their fellow workers than their abusive boss?

It's not a valid argumentative tactic to dismiss legitimate concerns as "whining", especially since you haven't addressed the substance of the issue at all, and it's pure what-aboutism and crab mentality to suggest that because somewhere there exist people who have it worse, you shouldn't try to make things better.

Multiple easily findable sources suggest that the median tech salary at Google is well below $150k -- probably more like around $130k.

I get your point about the "whining" -- but while the average Google definitely does better than someone with a non-tech salary -- it most cases they aren't bulge-bracket either, or anywhere near it.

The average tenure at these companies is ~2yrs, so clearly the money isn't worth it for most people. It's interesting to hear why that is without dismissing any possible problem out of hand.

Anyone in Sierra Leone could claim to a US citizen: "Sugar lobbies are meddling with public school meals and making children diabetic? Lucky you, my country doesn't have public schools and children are starving". This of course doesn't invalidate the issue.

Having lived in a third world country it would be very easy for me to dismiss "they refuse to call me by my preferred pronoun" as whining. After immigrating into the first world, it's a clear realization to me that suffering is relative and that's necessary for civilization to continue progressing through time.

Or are you saying that, this kind of article will not win us sympathy from the greater populace, and we should adopt a different strategy in that regard?

Or something else?

  That statement needs to be challenged. 
  The Montessori method might be great at small scale in an educational context, but that doesn't mean it's a great way to run a company worth most of a trillion dollars. 
  Yes, empowering employees is good. Yes, having a few "coddled geniuses" to drive basic science or radical innovation is good too. 
  OTOH, having every single engineer haring off in random directions all the time might not be so great.

That is not true. To bring that kind of potential about in many people who thought they were not geniuses prior to encountering an environment where their skills are fostered is one of the greatest advantages a company could possibly have.

Some might just call this "good HR", or "caring about people". I have worked in companies where there were people who truly cared about their employees and about their strengths (and who could not afford the obvious "geniuses") and who thus almost "created" these geniuses. I know there are many ways in which I am simplifying this and I know that no company should try to employ purely geniuses. I have worked in a small team of six "very, very advanced" people in their respective fields. It was basically impossible to create any kind of cohesion. I would suspect it would be similar with other teams of "geniuses". Maybe not, but I think you are overall right in what you say, but it is so incredibly important to understand that the lines between a "genius" and a "run of the mill" developer may be more blurred than most people expect.

As for retaliation, that's something else.

> “Everyone thought Google had an absolute right to stop you from talking about anything related to Google"

So, safe and open - as long all speech and action is completely controlled by the company.

PS - Google's corporate political line and that of most of its employees, from what it looks like, seems to have been aligned with the corporate/right-wing of the Democratic party, i.e. right of center even of US public opinion.

But I also have a sense that lots of things that were considered positives in the early days of the Internet have become negatives, or are simply taken for granted. For example, growth was once considered good, but now it's bad. Giving services away for free is ho-hum at best and maybe suspicious. Trying to fix Internet problems is greeted with deep suspicion based solely on who is doing it. Personalization was once good, but now it's bad. And so on.

That's inevitably going to result in a different internal culture at an Internet company than back in the days when Google's search engine first appeared on the Internet and got near-universal respect.

I think that. Google employees are at the top of the pyramid, so if the article was true, they would have left for an almost identical salary nearby. The fact that they don't means that either google pays way above its direct competitors (it doesnt) or these people are outright lying, and their actions speak louder than 12k words

The "misery" I think is talking about the company, not the employees per se. None of the employees in the article claimed they were miserable... and as you can see the simple word "misery" has totally allowed the conversation to bypass anything substantive about Google's policies and focus only on feeeeeelings that aren't even in the article.

I think someone could be miserable at Google. Humans have a remarkable capacity for misery in all sorts of circumstances!

Google got to where it is by aspiring to have the best working conditions available, and much of its talent came for that reason. You can build companies other ways--just like Amazon did--but changing that deal out from under the employees who came based on that deal would be quite disruptive and result in turmoil during the transition.

Would things be better for the company coming out the other side of such a transition? Hard to say, but the costs would be quite high.

Shareholder value is more of a pervasive cultural thing. Most people and certainly everyone in charge has stock or stock options, so naturally everyone wants the stock to go up. People are also rewarded for increasing revenue. There are OKR's. And this is all justified as aligning the interests of the employees with the shareholders.

However, just because you have incentives to be pro-business doesn't prevent you from putting other considerations first when that's what's important to you. The pro-business bias is often not that strong, but it's persistent and pervasive.

It would be interesting to compare how this plays out in different companies.

Tonally, it is telling that some personalities had descriptions of their emotional states (from what source?) while others only had their actions and opinions described.

But "the medusa" is also an error at another level, because one should write either "Medusa" or "the gorgon". Medusa was the name of a specific gorgon.

Gmail and Translate are, indeed, not extremely exciting.

Privileged people making lots of of money acting like spoiled kids despite having limitless alternative options.

It's about 12000 words long.

But remember that Google+ was a company-wide initiative intended to compete with Facebook, which is kind of a big deal. Yes, they had lots of money to throw at it, but it was for a purpose.

The internal version was originally for testing. (Also, the business version of Google+ is still a product as part of G suite.)

This is not like the other details. What the hell caused that?

The main point of this meandering article that I'm gathering, and that's being kind since it's basically a 'book' about notable events at Google over the past few years, is the erosion of communication and transparency between the upper echelons of Google and the lower level employees. The amount of doxxing in particular really scared me.

Regardless of what your employer thinks, you don't need a four year degree to make a good living. There are lots of fulfilling careers that don't require you to go to college. On the other hand, if you get a solid engineering degree, you can take on a few tens of thousands of dollars of debt. If you want to study liberal arts, then you should look for ways do it without spending so much money. It can be done.

Figure out what your goals are and what you need to do to achieve them. I'm sure it won't involve staying indefinitely at your current job with the algae in the ice machine.

Googlers are the first to admit we're spoiled. _Most_ of us are conscious of our privileges compared to other workers.

But as others have pointed out that doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to issues of sexism and lack of diversity, attitudes towards minorities, etc. which are issues more _parallel_ to the privileges you're describing than in contradiction to it.

You could buy your own chair for work and I believe you can write it off in tax as a work expense.

Given your long years of work experience you could almost certainly get into a distance learning Master’s degree in the U.K., e.g. the Queen Mary University of London MBA.

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/mba/

If you don’t have managerial experience of any kind I can recommend CeFIMS

https://www.cefims.ac.uk/programmes/ipa/

You can start with an individual professional award and transfer to a Master’s proper and be done in three years for ~£10,000.

Alternatively you can get a US Bachelor’s for far less than tens of thousands of dollars through transfer credit and credit by examination like the community on degreeforum.net. People have done it in under a year.

It sounds like you’re in a bad situation. I hope things get better for you soon.

At the end of the day we're all going up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and as you get closer to the top you start freaking out about existential stuff the same way people working the bottom freak out about physical necessities. If you started out fairly close to the top (i.e. born to the upper middle-class, like many Googlers) then that existential stuff is likely the only type of challenge that's ever consistently existed in your life, which gives it even more weight. So you focus on it and don't appreciate the benefits of being a Googler. That's just expected after a while.

It's not all decadence though, in my experience a lot of people who had to rise from humbler origins are actually held back by their relative conservatism; they stop improving at a certain point because they don't prioritize the existential stuff as much. I work with some engineers hailing from blue-collar backgrounds who give me weird looks when I tell them about my side projects, they're shocked I mess around with tech outside of work. Why would I want to do work when I don't have to? How is it fun? It's like I told them I was mining coal in my backyard. As a result I sometimes know things about their work that, despite their fundamental competence, they never learned.

Plus, we need people to agonize about the existential stuff (although perhaps in a more coherent manner than this article). If everyone was satisfied with basic material needs things like sexism and racial discrimination would never get addressed (What do you care you didn't get that job you wanted? You still have a roof over your head and food in your stomach!)

Misery knows no social class, and everything's a trade-off.

Your situation is awful. In fact, it's so bad that no one should ever have to be in it, and you're absolutely right that ours is eons better.

That doesn't mean this is the way things must be.

All of those benefits you listed—they are things that any decent society would provide. The fact that Google choosing to be decent is not only so rare, but also contempt-inducing in people who are ground down by other companies is a staggering win for every other company that doesn't want to offer good benefits.

The fact that instead of saying "hey, we expect to be treated as well as Google treats its employees, and we're willing to pass laws to that effect if need be", people are saying "man, look at those coddled Googlers" while aware of their own untenable positions—that's a triumph of the soul sucking machinery of modern employment.

I'm not suggesting action. I'm not even asking you to feel sorry for us—you're right, in most cases, there's nothing to feel sorry for, though depending on your sympathies, a kind thought towards those who receive torrents of abuse would be…well, kind.

I would ask that you imagine yourself in our shoes and wonder: is working at Google the be-all and the end-all of a life fulfilled? Is Google really perfect? That's what the internal fights are about. We should make search accessible to billions in China! No, we should never lend support to oppressive regimes! We should increase our reach by hiring across demographisc to make sure we truly understand our global user base! No, we should not mess with the hiring recipe that has given Google this dominant position!

These fights come from a sense of responsibility. We at Google are uniquely privileged to work at a company that has immense influence on the world. The fights are about what our responsibilities are to this world. To the people that come to us expecting truth, to those that come to us expecting safety, to those that entrust us with the details of their daily lives, and those of their children.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: the takeaway from this article isn't that you should feel sorry for us. It's that you should be aware that somewhere where you have little influence, fierce battles are being fought that will affect you in ways great and small. Whoever you back, I'd take away that someone is trying to have your back.

May have been better as a series of articles.

One appeal of the big names is exactly that — name recognition. It does a lot for the ego when everyone you meet knows that your employer provides free massages and a sushi bar for lunch.

Having worked both at Google and at smaller tech startups, this is pretty much the opposite of reality. I wonder where are you getting these ideas from.