Leaving Google | Hacker News Reader

Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

462 pointsdcu437 comments

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue growth. That is Google's true mission. Eat the world. It's now $180 billion in revenue. In five years, that will need to be $400 billion. And five years after that, it will need to be pulling close to a trillion.

> And scale is simply because greed.

Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.

collective systemic greed

Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing YoY revenue growth other than greed.

or simple corporate charter. if the company is organized around maximizing shareholder value, that's what they'll do.

that's why we have public benefit corporations.

// See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses

Are these business in industries with fierce large competitors? If not, it's an unreasonable comparison - they are only not getting eaten because nobody's trying to eat them.

I love small and medium businesses but just making a game theoretical point - you can only chose to limit your competitive effort to the extent that nobody is increasing theirs.

There are family owned businesses where others try to beat them, but those businesses are so tied to their space that it is hard for others to step in and as these companies don't try to expand too much, they are free to cooperate with anybody, which gives them a beneficial network.

However that is heavily industry specific and in tech, where scales are very different only works for very small niches.

There are plenty of small family scale business in fields like alcoholic drinks and food, and they have large, fierce competitors.

These businesses have a natural limit to their growth due to the estate tax. If the company grows too large, the taxes on death can be crippling for families that can not plan decades in advance. Public corporations do not have to pay this tax, and therefore have an unnatural advantage in holding valuable assets over long periods of time. The estate tax is well-intentioned, but because it hits only family firms it’s essentially regressive despite being applied only to wealthy families.

The owners of public companies dont have to pay the estate tax when they die, as their children inherit the stock?

I thought it was for the total value exchanged?

The owners of public companies are irrelevant to the large public company’s continued existence. Owners for them come and go and pay their own taxes, but the company never has to pay the estate taxes itself, hence the advantage against those who must.

Also due to wanting to keep your employees. You can't make the same amount of money year over year and retain employees who never get raises above CPI or promotions into management/ownership. That's just not going to work.

I don't know about that. There are plenty of examples of "boutique" companies who pay well and have insanely good retention over the long term— 37signals/basecamp as one example, at least until that dustup earlier this year. Valve is probably another.

It's not hard to imagine a Google that had taken this path, just focused indefinitely on search & search ads, run itself with <1000 highly skilled, highly paid employees, and never done email, maps, docs, payments, mobile phones, video, or and any of the rest of it.

I think they could have even done most of those things and remained small and lean. Most of the bloat isn't that they've entered these spaces, but that there are a million little sub-projects within each one chasing marginal (at best) improvements.

Didn’t Craigslist did basically that? I’m not familiar with recent developments but for decades they stayed small and focused and seemed to have done well.

Yes. They've stayed small and focused but while AFAIK they're still doing OK, the latest numbers I've seen on them listed about 50 employees. And I'm willing to bet most of them aren't unusually well compensated. I'm also not sure when I last heard Craigslist come up in conversation although I expect especially people in urban areas still use them for classified advertising.

Yeah, that was my point - they chose to stay small (this is both in focus of the company as well as number of employees).

I’d personally probably be happier in a small company than in one that is eternally chasing infinite growth (both in goals and in number of employees).

I worked for a very small company for a number of years and it was a pretty good run for the most part. That said, I'm in a significantly better place financially having worked for a reasonably big public company for about the past decade.

And after whoever started the project gets their promotion, the product will be killed off and Google will chase another shiny thing. How much does anyone trust totally new Google things these days?

It's not just engineers this applies to. Sure, if everyone makes $400k + benefits and profit share with good work-life balance and such, I guess that might fly. But most companies have customer support, IT, and other cost centers where you have entry-level employees who need to progress, and that necessarily means increasing wages over time to retain and advance good employees.

Besides, junior developers / interns are supposed to do what exactly if there is no increasing revenue at a company and no one leaves above them? Just hang out until someone quits even though they're not going to?

Retraining a junior developer is costly. Advancing them is as well, but less costly than constantly cycling in new junior developers and interns to do the HTML/CSS + ETL script jobs no one likes doing.

Growth is natural and important towards keeping your staff happy and moving up.

Both Basecamp and Valve were growing massively, so I don't think those are good examples.

Besides, you run the real existential risk of getting your margin cannibalized by another startup or Amazon if you don't grow enough. In a world where you pay everyone a lot of money, the product is awesome, and there's no growth, there's a lot of margin in your product that someone is going to target - some subset of customers you aren't serving, or customers who aren't that loyal and willing to switch for 20-50% lower costs.

I'm not saying VC funding is a good thing; I largely think what we are seeing due to massive QE is malinvestment on a grand scale and is why you see dumb shit like Juicero.

But natural, bootstrapped growth is a good thing - and necessary, if you want to survive. Trending sideways is waiting for death on many fronts - your labor force being the largest one.

If your workforce is improving, you might have a kind of natural growth where they either deliver better products or more efficient services and you can acquire more customers (or charge more) without expanding your operations.

Besides, if you are paying a good wage, have a good work/life balance, a good environment and so on, people will be content and just work there. It's like farming or factory work - you're doing what you expect to be doing for the rest of your life, or at least the next 10-20 years.

> Besides, if you are paying a good wage, have a good work/life balance, a good environment and so on, people will be content and just work there.

How does this work when your competitor is offering half of compensation via RSUs skyrocketing in value?

>It's like farming or factory work - you're doing what you expect to be doing for the rest of your life, or at least the next 10-20 years.

This describes no one I know that earns a lot of income. I imagine a person that expects little change over 10 to 20 years will probably not be in position to grab opportunities when they present themselves.

Valve doesn’t have as many employees but they definitely grow in both revenue and product line (vr, deck, they had other hardware products before - steam itself was a “side project” to distribute half life 2!)

Everyone knows that valve mostly care about steam nowadays, and at most one other core gaming product.

They largely abandoned dota 2, and CS is mostly plowing without any sign of major changes.

If steam were not this successful, it would have to hire more to grow revenue. It was just that steam as a platform is so efficient in utilizing manpower, it makes it less hungry on hiring.

Most organization aspiring growth has to find a way. It could be the market is growing, or better tech, or more employee, or more often, a mix of 2 or more of these or other unmentioned factors.

That’s my dream too, but unfortunately the Google that took that path would have died long ago after being choked off by other large ecosystems from Microsoft, Apple, etc.

First Chrome, then Android were critical, life-or-death maneuvers for Google. Without paving their own path straight to users’ eyeballs, Google would have never survived. But succeeding in that path also required an entire ecosystem to back it up.

Google also does a lot of frivolous stuff to explore, but all of the major expansions are required just to protect their Search and Ad products.

But Google could also have licensed search technology to other companies interested in making the top-to-bottom ecosystem play. I mean, they even tried that, they were just trying to do it in a market that wasn't ready to take search seriously.

Anyway, I'm not saying it's what they should have done. What they have done has obviously been wildly successful. But they could have done this and still given hundreds of people full-career employment and generational wealth.

Survival for executives at publicly traded companies has led to a maniacal focus on quarterly results, discouraging R&D without near-term payout and disincentivizing minimization of negative externalities that will eventually impact everyone, including the company and its employees. The Long Term Stock Exchange was recently launched as an alternative and Asana and Twilio recently listed there (dual-listed along with existing NYSE listings) [1]. It's far too early to say if it will have any wider impact but I think the larger point is that what's necessary for "survival" is dependent on the context, and it may be possible to change the underlying conditions.

[1] https://medium.com/hps-insight/on-short-termism-8e28fbe4ccc6

I thought the tech companies we are talking about do do some very hefty R&D, at least compared to other companies. For example, Amazon plowing all revenue back into expanding for 2 decades, Apple obviously invests quite a bit and just came out with a leap in processors, Google with its many services including Maps and self driving cars, Facebook and VR, etc.

No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing.

Most businesses in the world survive with their piece of the pie and remaining having the same profits or slightly lower/higher than previous years. You don't disappear over night, and no market is really a "winner takes it all", it's just what management wants you to believe so you fight the good fight for your company.

Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral.

I am not sure if that is called survival.

And no, most businesses in the world do not survive that long. Lifetime of businesses are often much shorter than lifetime of humans. Even many of them that look like have survived may share the name only and are effectively new businesses.

> employees would leave due to poor compensation

With a gross profit of 100 billion dollars a year [1] they can easily outbid the market compensation if they want to and stay with current revenue. But again how many Jeff Deans can one company need before it calls itself The Man?

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gros...

Why would gross profit be the relevant metric here and not net profit?

You’re right. 63 billion dollars of net profit per year is a better metric.

If the stock price went down, they would just pay employees in cash, which is a slightly less tax-advantaged solution.

How are RSUs tax advantaged?

The award is taxed at the same rate, but theoretically (in the States, at least) you can hold them for a year after they vest and only pay the much lower long term tax on the appreciation of their value. In order to easily compare apples to apples this assumes that in the alternative to getting RSU's that you would actually get compensated more income instead in proportion to the value increase of the company. An equivalent would probably be to compare a cash bonus that is directly tied to the value of the stock vs the equivalent gain in RSU. All else being equal, the RSU gain is more tax advantageous if you have held the RSU for a year or longer before liquidating the position.

That is not a tax advantage. It is simply paying long term capital gains tax rate on long term capital gains.

Companies are not paying with RSUs because of a tax advantage, they are paying because it is cheaper than paying with cash.

While it's unclear whether grandparent was referring to tax advantages for the company vs. the individual, I'm not sure I understand your comment about lack of tax advantage in the context of individual awards.

Scenario A: Company X gives me a sign-on bonus of $10,000 and an agreement to bonus me $100 * y%, where y is the increase in value of the company.

Scenario B: Company X awards me $10,000 of RSU that vests after 1 year.

Let's say I'm in the highest bracket, $523,601 or more in income. The tax rate for that bracket for 2021 is 37%.

After 1 year, the stock price goes up 100%.

In Scenario A, I have vested RSU's worth $20,000. If I sell $10,000 of that (the gains only), I pay short term capital gains equivalent to my tax bracket, or $3700. If I hold that stock for 1 year after vesting and the stock price stays exact same for the next year, I pay the long term rate of the highest bracket which is currently 20%, or $2,000.

In Scenario B, I get a bonus of $10,000 just the same, but there is no situation where I'm not stuck with paying $3,700 on that $10,000 gain. In Scenario A, I can save almost 50% of the tax bill by holding it for a year.

This isn't how things work - you pay income taxes on RSUs when they vest, not when you sell, and their cost basis is the price at the time of vesting. So it's entirely irrelevant from a tax perspective whether they come in cash or stock. If you want cash, you can sell the stock and if you want stock, you can buy - the tax consequences are exactly the same.

RSUs are cash equivalent from tax purposes. They are taxed at market rate at vest time. If you sell at that moment and buy other stock it has the exact same LTCG treatment. It’s also the same as if you are compensated in all cash and go buy stock with that.

It’s like cash if you got more when the share price is higher.

It can also be a cash flow problem if you have to cover quarterly estimated tax in between trading windows. My day job sells and withholds 22% of my vesting RSUs, because that’s the statutory rate for supplemental wages, but I always owe about 10% more.

There is no tax advantage for the employer or the employee. Your scenario A is incorrect because you pay income tax at time of vesting, as the other comments pointed out.

> Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral.

This assertion presumes that it is impossible to propose any form of compensation that's enticing without involving stock. This is not only baseless but also flies in the face of reality, as other tech companies, including other FAANGs, barely offer any stock and still manage to attract top talent.

> This is not only baseless but also flies in the face of reality, as other tech companies, including other FAANGs, barely offer any stock and still manage to attract top talent.

Which one?

Netflix is known for having all-cash offers.

Netflix is pretty much the only FAANG that does that. Every other large tech company has generous stock grants, and as you pass a couple years of experience your stock will generally be larger than your cash compensation.

> Netflix is pretty much the only FAANG that does that.

Netflix is also 20% of FAANG companies, so that's not as lonely as it sounds.

Right, but they're a strange company that just happens to be in FAANG. Pretty much every other large company, in the FAANG acronym or not, will give you equity.

In the context of this discussion, it is more useful for FAANG to mean any tech company or tech adjacent company employing a lot of software engineers with comparatively high pay, in the form of cash or cash + stock.

Netflix is in FAANG only to make the acronym nicer

You could pay them in other means, but there were constraints there are obvious constraints that I did not spell out. We are assuming a non-growing company that now needs to pay extra cash to you top up employee comp with cash. Your margin will start to shrink, and so does your earnings (the premise was no growth, remember), continuing the downward trend of your stock.

Plus, your competitors are not sitting still. People will go work for the more exciting companies even if you pay them equal amounts anyway (to vary their type of work and grow their careers) rather than staying and watching the thing die and doing the same thing for 30 years.

They could achieve good multiples by paying dividends. The question is whether they're wasting as much money trying to grow as they are saving by keeping their profits offshore (and not paying tax on them). I don't know, but at some point the answer may become obvious.

Owners do not want dividends. I do not want dividends from my tech stocks if I’m simply going to turn around and reinvest in them. That is just paying extra short term capital gains taxes when you do not have to.

Qualified dividends (which represent the vast majority of them) are taxed as long-term capital gains to avoid this concern.

True, but it does not seem like investors are clamoring for dividends either way. Personally, I would just take the dividend money and reinvest it so it’s all the same to me.

This is what people seem to forget. A company that doesn't grow for all intents and purposes is a dead company. Or in the M&A world we call it "distressed". It doesn't matter how profitable you are if you don't get grow there are serious implications - employee motivation, loss of talent, erosion of customer services, etc.

I don't see how employee motivation, loss of talent, erosion of customer services are related to the need for unyielding year on year growth.

There are companies out there, private ones, where their customers are happy, their employees are happy (most of the time) and their retention is high.

Without growth, the only way to get promoted is to get a spot of some higher-up who left the company (or retired/died). Whereas, in growing companies, there are new senior/management positions created all the time, to account for the growth - so, getting promoted is easier.

Ambitious, hard working people like promotions, so they gravitate towards growing companies and not stale companies.

> Ambitious, hard working people like promotions

Ambitious maybe (though that's nearly the definition of ambitious). Hardworking, not necessarily. I know a cement guy that you have never in your life worked a harder day than who has never received a promotion nor even sought one.

So is there anything to be done about it? How to avoid companies being compelled to seek growth always, to the detriment of their internal functioning/culture?

As far as I can tell, don’t go public or be a regulated utility.

Ambition and hard work are hardly the same thing. Many people work hard at their job, are paid a good wage, and are satisfied with their job, rather than constantly seeking a promotion. Constant promotion seeking isn’t admirable, it’s just greed.

Am I the only one who thinks this sounds a lot like how pyramid schemes work?

> There are companies out there, private ones, where their customers are happy, their employees are happy (most of the time) and their retention is high.

Companies that aren't growing? I meet A LOT of companies (about ~50 or so a year) and I can tell you there is massive difference between the distressed ones and the ones who are growing. btw - even 2~5% growth is fine, it doesn't need to be 25% google scale growth...but flat or declining is bad.

There are plenty of small private companies that more or less plod along year after year--small consultancies and the like. You're not going to have the level of compensation and opportunities you have at a large profitable growing public firm but you may be OK with that. Obviously declines are bad and, in any case, compensation will probably be a fraction of Google etc.

I hate how hn top threads usually degenerate into something totally unrelated to the original posts.

This seems like a popular and reflective comment, but this is a very cultural idea in my amateur opinion. It seems like this -needs- to be so, and many do so because of that belief. But in reality it is a self perpetuating hamster wheel of burn out bliss a company is setting itself up for.

It's not cultural at all -- it's economics.

Businesses are valued based on discounted cash flows (DCF). If you're profitable and not growing, your cash flows are very stable & easy to evaluate -- you get a low P/E or P/E/G ratio. But if you're growing quickly with sane unit economics, most of the DCF value is in future years... which then results in much higher multiples relative to today's revenues & earnings.

So is there anything to be done about this? It seems from this thread that the conclusion is that companies cannot avoid constantly seeking growth, and yet that growth ultimately destroys internal social mechanics / culture.

It can only not avoid it because that’s how the deck is stacked. Different rulesets would give different outcomes. Just because we are riding one certain economic theory, does not mean its the only way of value creation.

So? Who needs that?

Not the company, unless selling stock to raise cash.

Not the employees, if paid in cash instead of funny money.

Nobody needs that.

It's cultural.

Politician wins election by promising lower taxes by assuming greater investment returns hence requiring less money to be set aside for defined benefit pensions.

People see other people’s wealth growing quicker because their investments grew more, increasing demand for higher growth investments.

Population growth inherently leads to economic growth assuming a sufficiently stable society and access to resources.

All of these create an environment where people expect certain ROI and make plans according to those ROI.

It's about stock price and bonuses, in public companies. The only metric that a board of directors can use is stockholder welfare. That's their primary fiduciary duty, according to law these days.

So, what to bonus the CEO on? Stock price appreciation. Stock price valuation loves growth. So even though a flat business throwing off 10% profit is a very nice business to be in, the only way you can increase stock price is to grow margin, which is really hard and attracts competition. Ergo, CEO is going to try to grow the company to boost the stock price. That's one reason dubious mergers are pursued, as it at least will goose revenue and profit. Wise investors might use return on equity or capital as well, but the market in general biases towards the revenue and profit metrics. Stock goes up, CEO gets their bonus.

For a private company, slow or flat growth with a nice profit margin is great, and without having to favor growth at all costs for pesky stockholders and analysts, you can pick and choose when a good opportunity comes along, and grow a bit anyway.

You could compensate the employees with things other than stock

> Maintaining existing services

Everything a capitalist market teaches us is against this, if they don't obsolete themselves before somebody else can then they will fall into obscurity and ultimately lose what they've built, just like other companies before it who didn't.

FAANGS companies aren't at fault for when they're winning a game which is rigged from the start.

> if they don't obsolete themselves before somebody else can then they will fall into obscurity and ultimately lose what they've built, just like other companies before it who didn't

And if they do fall into obscurity and ultimately lose what they've built?

- The companies who take their place service the customers/clients they used to have

- The workforce either coast along or move to the (presumably growing) new big boys

- The investors should spot the decline and trade away

The only downside is the company - the brand - slowly dies off. For most of us that is fine; the only parties to all this who will actually lose out are the ultimate beneficiaries/owners, and I can live with that. And presumably they've extracted masses from the company by then anyway.

Its both cultural and economics, but the economics only affect the masters and not the minions (who find alternatives) and the cultural aspect is misguided - individual companies/brands are ephemeral and irrelevant so we the minions should not be invested in protecting them at the destructive (to society) costs of scale.

According to Peter Thiel, Google is a de-facto monopoly in search-engines and online advertising (apart from social media). I think that's an accurate take. They are in this position because of their "winner takes it all" attitude. So to say they would "easily survive" is short sighted as well as ignoring where Google came from.

>most business in the world survive

While this may be the case for capital-intensive businesses (oil, consumer goods, energy), this is usually not the case for intangible-asset businesses (media, tech). In the former, the assets will generate cashflow, whereas in the latter it's a people-centric model

What was the last time you chose yahoo over google or altavista over google?

Google was always greedy, but when it was small it was cool to be the disruptor. Now it's perceived as only greedy. This is typically the case for any successful company (from HP, IBM, to the new 'big tech').

Good (related) book recommendation btw: capitalism without capital

> and no market is really a "winner takes it all"

Market for OSes for PCs (not Macs) is a great example. Windows has what, 98% market share there? It got there thanks to the dynamics of this particular market, which is totally a "winner takes all" one. In particular, if Microsoft were more relaxed in 80ties and 90ties, there likely would not be Microsoft or Windows at all today, and everybody'd be using Os/2 Warp or BeOS or something else on our PCs.

> OSes for PCs (not Macs)

If you slice the market thin enough anything can be a monopoly. This particular distinction seems pretty arbitrary to me.

I agree but even if you throw Macs in there, the Windows marketshare is probably still over 90%. Maybe a bit lower if you include Chromebooks too.

You could buy a computer with MacOS installed. You almost couldn’t buy a computer with OS/2 or BeOS installed, because Microsoft would threaten your OEM with a punitive price hike for Windows licenses the majority expect.

There are billions of PCs in the world, it's hardly a thin slice.

> No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing.

No such thing. In capitalism you are either growing or dying. Stagnation means others will grow around you, and relative to them you are shrinking in the same market. Thus, stagnating == dying.

Call it greed if you want, but this is just the emergent result of the economic system we have in our society. Corporations are optimization algorithms to maximize revenue. Not because they have to, but because its comprised of rational individuals who are incentivized to maximize their own revenue. The natural result is an ever-growing entity, adaptive to dangers and emergently intelligent. It's possible to run a corporation differently but it actively takes energy to resist the natural gravity of every individual's interests.

This does not seem too dissimilar to a country or tribe’s leader promising their constituents a better life in the future. And I cannot imagine a country/tribe selecting a leader that does not promise progress and growth over one that does.

I'd far rather live in a country where the rulers choose not to start wars for territory, especially if we were the richest country in the World. I'd have guessed that would be common.

Indeed as one of the richest countries, with global climate change, the responsibility is to lower consumption (which many would see as reduce the standard of living). But maybe the analogy doesn't stretch that far.

>I'd far rather live in a country where the rulers choose not to start wars for territory, especially if we were the richest country in the World. I'd have guessed that would be common.

If it was common, then they would not have gotten to be the richest country in the world in the first place. The same game plays out over and over in nature where the one that fights for resources gets more of it, and while they can choose to stop fighting for it, in the long run they will not be the survivors.

Cooperation works best if the goal is maximizing the average return over all participants in the game, but inevitably, tribes will split off and start prioritizing their own populations over others. On a global, national, and even familial scale.

That’s only true if you are currently under threat of not being at the head of the pack. Google still very clearly leading search, which is their main income provider.

There are countless examples of companies who used to be at the head of the pack and seemingly not under threat. Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, Sears, IBM, Xerox, etc.

A common sentiment on this forum is that companies who fail to keep challenging themselves and get complacent on rent seeking from one product/service will eventually lose to an upstart.

The trillion dollar companies won't be able to survive? They're in danger? I simply cannot muster any sympathy.

Actually I think they're not in enough danger. They take things for granted, our attention and private information for example. Denying Google, Facebook those should put some real fear in them.

Is there anything significant about a trillion dollars in 2021? Was it not $10B+ in the 1980s and $100B in the 2000s?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z93yWXb9Tb0

I do not know what you mean by sympathy, I am just opining on the economic reasons for why successful businesses keep trying to expand, and that is if they do not, then they risk falling behind.

When you live long enough it becomes evident that scale in tech is a pandemic. At a certain point greed inevitably takes over. I believe there's some kind of a threshold beyond which a company has no choice, but to turn evil.

It is just my personal opinion, but I think that it is what is going on with gitlab now.

Can you elaborate on that? Why do you think is Gitlab turning evil?

It is not necessarily evil, but corporate interest led.

When it was created, gitlab core value was to be the open source alternative to GitHub. Then, it started to add light premium features.

Now, free versions have a lot of frustratingly limited features with nag screens to push you to subscribe. The free core is less and less a priority and less and less sufficient.

After the ipo, things will get even worse. Most of new shareholders (Ie owners) are just profit led. It's an investment for them and they will want the net result to grow at whatever cost.

Management has no choice else than to follow what shareholders require.

So, if it is economically viable, nothing prevent gitlab to stop new versions to be open source if they think that will make them more profitable.

As a normie I sometimes wonder what happens to FAANGlers(googlers + other FAANG). You are used doing things the FAANG way and been doing it for a while and now it’s too late for you to learn how the “rest of the world” does so how does one adapt? Just curious. I find it hard to believe that one has transferable skills after doing time at FAANG.

Well paying jobs typically don't look for people with experience in specific technologies, rather they look for people with experience in relevant domains. And the domain experience you learn at FAANG is worth a ton, lots of companies wants to be more like FAANG.

Example: You are making a search engine, you use technology X. Would you rather hire a person who worked on Google search but didn't work with technology X, or would you want an expert on technology X?

In my recent interviewing cycle I got dinged in most interviews for not being a React expert. Every panel knew going in that my React experience was recent and limited. I have 4+ years of relevant domain experience at a FAANG on my resume. I laughed with interviewers about how every few years the de facto tech stack changes and every team I've ever joined required me to learn completely new (to me) frameworks. Still got dinged.

I wish what you're saying was the truth but I think it's very much the minority.

HTTP requests work exactly the same on the other side. If anything some ex-faang have an edge as they generally see many trends years before they permeate the wider industry

> And scale is simply because greed.

This seems over simplified. A large company is a complex system that is shaped by all kinds of forces. I'm not sure we can attribute Google's scale to a single heinous factor

Scale kills them all except for Apple? There is a comment somewhere here saying that levels at Apple are private.

This seems to be an interesting concept to keep a somewhat flat hierarchy.

There’re private in a sense that there isn’t internal registry where you can just look up anyone like at google. From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis?

> Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis?

Big assumption that Apple is indeed innovating right now. Yeah, M1 was a great innovation, but before that, the iPhone was the previous innovation. Everything between has just been iterations basically, so I disagree with your assumption that Apple is in-fact highly innovative.

Any tech company would toss a limb for those "iterations". Aluminium unibody, stacked battery tech, MagSafe, ECG for watch, and much more.

Not sure I'd call taking existing technologies and putting them in laptops/watches innovation rather than iteration on existing stuff, but we're all different so it's all good.

Can you please list some technologies or products that you think were innovations in the last 15 years?

My recollection of the time window is wrong, but I’d say microprocessors, then smartphones were fundamental. Chips ate both minicomputers and mainframes, and the smartphone totally altered how people interact with computers. Tablets are just big phones and watches are just smaller subsets. Software wise, the web. The net is old but it took the web to make it explode.

What am I missing?

Innovation is literally taking technology and making it practical.

By that logic, the M1 was just packaging an ARM CPU in a laptop and the iPhone was just stuffing a SIM card in a PDA.

If that's all it is, why isn't everyone doing it? And to the extent that they are doing the same sort of things, why are Apple taking on the order of 90% of the profits in multiple market segments? Clearly they are doing something different.

Don't know why you're being downvoted. This is objectively true.

What is the objective definition of highly innovative?

I dunno...

> Yeah, M1 was a great innovation, but before that, the iPhone was the previous innovation.

Watch and AirPods are literally the most popular and profitable products in their market. The iPad dominates, too.

Google has no problems innovating on their ad backend and infrastructure you just don’t get to see it bc you’re not a customer - you’re just part of their product

> From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US

Right, if you look from very far away and put "all large US company" in the same bag.

Otherwise, if you zoom on "Silicon Valley Tech Companies" then Apple and Google's perf process and associated incentives look quite radically different in many aspects.

Well, the state of the Internet has changed fundamentally over the last years where now most traffic is going through a small number of portals. Also, we were not that thoroughly tracked 10 years ago. Fundamentally, I believe that the ad-tracking economy of the current version of the Internet is the wrong direction. And, I hope (and work actively on) that we will find more effective ways to earn money on the Internet.

In the US, the vast, vast majority of people have effectively no upload capacity and are behind huge CGNATs. I do not see any alternative future until the vast majority of residential dwellings have quality internet connections providing symmetric up and down bandwidth (i.e. fiber to the home) and ipv6.

Only then would people be able to roll out peer to peer solutions that bypass the big tech companies.

If they don't grow revenue the stock won't go up. Most big companies are organized around "STONK MUST GO UP". I could justify this with smarter sounding words and more detail but in essence thats all it is. We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane.

> We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane.

The alternative is to not borrow from the future. Then your country/tribe is at a severe competitive disadvantage on the global playing field.

I don't really buy that argument, because google is still the only IT company which supports long term R&D, like dart, flutter or fuchsia. Of course they can afford such boutique projects, but the good thing is they do.

My idea is still the wrong PM incentive structure, which is harming the work culture and projects.

Microsoft has a pretty good reputation for investing in research too.

Can you shed some light on what the right and wrong incentive structure looks like?

If Google doesn't take that next $200bn share in ad revenue over the next 5 years, where else will that revenue go? What about the additional $400bn of potential growth 5 years after that?

Somebody in the online ad space is going to eat that conventional ad revenue, or "build that value", or whatever we want to call it. If it isn't Google it will be Facebook, or Twitter, or Apple, or Tiktok, etc.

What happens to Google if Facebook has a $1tn online ad business in 10 years time, and Google's ad business is still 'only' worth their current $200bn?

This is absolutely about survival. In a super high-growth industry, you grow or you die.

> This is absolutely about survival. You grow or you die.

How? With that argument, neither Facebook nor any other ad networks would already be dead since Google basically owns the space already, but they are not, they are also pulling in huge profits, just not as huge as Google, but they are still well off.

The others are surviving because they are growing too. If they stall out and stop growing, they will become a smaller and smaller slice of the pie as the rest of it grows around them. They would become less and less relevant, and therefore find it harder to get new business.

In a high growth business there is no stable static strategy. Staying the same is functionally equivalent to shrinking, in terms of scale effects and relevance, as the rest of the market dwarfs you. As long as you keep growing, you can keep relevant.

If facebook had a $1tn ad business and Google still had $200bn, would Google's business actually be the same as it is now? Would they still be able to hire the cream of graduates? Would they find it as easy to replace lost business from natural attrition with new clients? Would they find it as easy to launch new ad products and get attention for them?

Do you have sort of research/statistics that backs up your statements or are you just echoing what you've heard others say about these "high growth businesses"?

It's basic math. If you are 20% of the industry right now and stay the same size while the industry grows 10x, you become 2% of the industry and a essentially a non-factor. You've yahoo'd yourself.

Basic math right, so if you're 20% of the industry, earning 20% of the industry profits at that scale, and the industry grows 10x, then you have a smaller piece of the industry but your earnings remain the same as the profits grew as well.

I don't have statistics but it's, frankly, blindingly obvious. In a rapidly growing market, staying still as a business isn't a static situation because the landscape around you is changing. You're shrinking in relevance to customers. Even if your margins stay the same, your competitors margins are going down as they scale up, which means they will undercut you on price and you won't be able to do anything about it.

The premise of this discussion is static revenue, but you can't assume that. You'll have to work harder and harder just to stand still, until it becomes unsustainable. You might be able top sustain a business by focusing on a niche specialist market segment, but at that point you're not recognisably Google anymore. As for greed, that's an incredibly naïve way to view it. Nobody creates a long term business plan that aims for irrelevance.

Let's pray they don't start to manufacture paperclips.

Revenue growth means customer growth which means more people benefit from google’s product (advertising). This is not some sort of bad thing.

“Quite a few activists and researchers were fired for asking Google to be a bit more ethical”

In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond “asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn’t seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they’re on the right side of an ethical (and sometimes just political) issue.

I'm not sure this is true. Normally I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the Timnit situation was handled badly.

Objectively, there was nothing wrong with her paper.

You may have a point about the other researchers. I'm not familiar enough with their situations. But I dug into Timnit's pretty thoroughly.

Their recent behavior isn't too encouraging either: https://archive.md/7jCQY

(Related Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1451273190974660612)

Hopefully everyone will just chill out and focus on research.

From what I read at the time, she wasn’t fired for the content of the paper (though she initially made it sound like this before more details became public). She gave the company an ultimatum to reveal the name of an anonymous reviewer or she would quit, and they took her threat seriously.

She was subjected to a process that wasn't the norm at Google. I'd be pretty upset too.

The details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313994

Discussion about whether the review process was normal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308847

Other people circumventing policy doesn't mean that it is fine for her to do it. It is really hard to judge as you do without more data on the circumstances of the other people circumventing the policy and not getting punished, right now we have to take their word that what she did wasn't worse than what most others did. We can't know that. Similarly one engineer force pushing code to fix an issue might be fine, but another engineer doing the same thing might not be fine and the second gets investigated, is that unfair? We can't tell, there isn't enough information here.

Why do we have to take Google's word and not hers? (Especially in light of corroborating witnesses who say that what she did was completely normal)

Because plenty of other researchers working at Google regularly publish papers critical of Google and are just fine? Even Timnit had already done that many times, she just got into trouble this time but all the other papers she published was fine. If Google really cared about these researchers publishing critical pieces then Google would have shut down that entire group rather than just firing her.

Right but the claim is that Google instituted a new policy, and applied it inconsistently without telling people, until it blew up in their faces when she was fired. Only after that did they formalize the policy, and saying that she was fired for circumventing and then questioning a policy that ostensibly didn't exist when she was fired doesn't have the same ring to it.

But you claim she was fired for being critical of Google. Maybe what you are saying here is right and she was just the first person fired since nobody followed the new guidelines and at some point they will face consequences, it could just as well have been anyone else. But I don't see how that would make Google look bad, it is normal to fire one of the offenders as an example when a group refuses to follow new guidelines, either you do that or you fire everyone.

And hers case was especially easy, since she said she will leave the company if the policy isn't changed. Google didn't want to change the policy. What Google might have been wrong about here is if they reported this as her voluntarily leaving, even if you could argue it is Google firing her. But nobody really cares about that that detail, it isn't important and the story wouldn't blow up if that was the only thing they claimed Google did wrong.

> And hers case was especially easy, since she said she will leave the company if the policy isn't changed. Google didn't want to change the policy.

The policy seemed to be made up specifically for her paper. Her paper already passed the standard internal review, and she alerted them months before the conference that her paper was going to be submitted.

This discussion over whether she was treated differently with respect to review is irrelevant.

If Google, for whatever reason, wanted to have the paper undergo a bit of extra scrutiny, it's entirely within their purview.

She submitted her paper late for internal review when it was too late for revisions. It might be the case that most papers are submitted late for internal review, but most papers don’t expressly criticize the employer’s work. That’s an important distinction, and it was naive to not anticipate that the paper might get extra scrutiny.

Regardless, being upset because you didn’t get your way doesn’t give you carte blanche to do unprofessional things that will get you fired. You can’t say “Give me X or I quit” and not assume there’s a chance your bluff will be called (especially when “X” is a demand for the company to violate its own policies).

But her paper passed the internal review. It failed some additional internal review that wasn't policy at the time.

No, there was only one internal review. It didn’t pass, and it was too late for her to make revisions because it was past the conference deadline.

You're factually wrong. I was literally able to view her paper, and it's approved status, in the internal tool where papers are approved for publication.

This directly contradicts what Jeff Dean wrote: “A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication” (emphasis mine).

That sentence was written after Dean had a lawyer represent him.

Which makes it more likely to be the truth, not less likely. It would be very foolish to write that if it were demonstrably false, as was claimed above. And I have to assume their lawyers aren’t very foolish.

But this is all another deflection. Whether the paper was rejected by a regular process or an irregular process, it doesn’t condone her actions that followed.

> Whether the paper was rejected by a regular process or an irregular process, it doesn’t condone her actions that followed

This is where we'll have to agree to disagree.

As you can see in this thread, she was treated unfairly. Someone confirmed to you that this is the case, and you're still arguing that her subsequent behavior was unjustifiable.

I think her subsequent behavior was a result of the unfair treatment. I'm not sure how I would've reacted in her place, and I have a lot of empathy for a scientist who is being scrutinized outside of normal policies.

Her paper was anodyne. No one would've blinked if it was published. And I think you keep saying that it's okay for a research department to stop publication of scientific work regardless of whether the paper was mistaken or not.

You've said that it needs revisions. I work in ML. It seemed not to need any revisions, as far as I could tell. Google's reaction seemed far out of proportion for what the paper claimed.

You can say "Well, that's life. Google didn't do anything wrong." The former is true, but I'm skeptical of the latter.

"As you can see in this thread, she was treated unfairly. S"

This is not true.

The fact that she may or may not have had extra scrutiny than others, within regular policy or not is completely besides the point.

If a company, for whatever reason, wants to have 'another review' of the paper, it's completely within their purview.

"Her paper was anodyne. No one would've blinked if it was published."

Our view of whether it was notable or not is irrelevant. If the company wanted to put the brakes on it, especially because it related to Google, then that's their choice.

It's hugely arrogant for her to make the claims she did - let alone publicly (!) - by all right she should have been fired for that, she was luckily the conditions enabled her to even try to establish the premise of her own resignation.

A company being legally allowed to do something doesn't implicitly make that thing fair or ethical.

You can simultaneously believe that Google has the right to quash any paper, and believe that doing so arbitrarily is unfair. So yes, she was treated unfairly. And that's absolutely relevant to people's decision making. Like, what do you think it's irrelevant in relation to?

Its not clear what you mean by publicly, nothing was done outside of Google until after she was fired.

Because he wrote it it’s the truth? How are we supposed to take that any more seriously than her own claims?

Other papers were late and didn’t receive the same prejudice.

Which ones? Specifically.

After the, (my words), harrasment of Lacun on Twitter, the sort of belittling of the internal award she was given (you'd have to really think they were evil to give her an award just to gaslight her), plus the short notice ultimatum to a very senior person (one level down from Jeff Dean right?)....no offense but from the outside she seems exhausting to manage.

The abstract came out, and honestly the paper was so so. Obviously it went against googles business model, but it'd be a wayyyy bigger scandal if they burried it.

Maybe Jeff Dean is a liar, but his comment was the paper missed incorporating significant recent research. As head of the group, and just out of respect towards the institution and to science, pondering it for more than 48 hours before bouncing on vacation or heaven forbid presenting at the next conference would have been reasonable.

Biased external view though. YRMV.

I have a feeling her continuous rants on Twitter is because her overall demands and feeling of entitlement were stood down. She demanded things which would have been just another kind of shit show and targeted harassment.

A social-justice themed charade is being made out of just being salty at getting fired.

Um - she wasn’t fired because of her paper - she required they out an anonymous reviewer or she wouldn’t be able to work there.

It’s pretty likely the reviewer would have been harassed - a good thing perhaps if you have one view of thing - but a bad thing from another perspective.

Google refused and accepted that she writing be able to continue working there

This is the common story, yes. But it evaporates when you dig into the details, which I've posted below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965631

I think it's worth reflecting on why we're so quick to believe the corporate version of events. Corporations have an astronomical amount of power and influence. Aren't you at least a little curious whether it's true?

And if there was nothing wrong with her paper, that raises the question of why an anonymous reviewer was grilling her about it.

Do you have sources other than quoting yourself on HN? I'd like to read them

> I think it's worth reflecting on why we're so quick to believe the corporate version of events

I reflected on it and found that it mainly happens when the person affect have their entire work life on basis of their politics as opposed other victims of corporate malfeasance who get plenty of support/ empathy from general community.

It very much does not evaporate.

Her paper got got flagged during internal review. There wasn’t time to revise it because she submitted it late. She then wrote an angry rant to her coworkers that claimed she was oppressed and told them to stop working. And then she demanded the name of the anonymous reviewer and threatened to quit if the company did not meet her demand.

Your defense is that most papers were submitted late without a problem. Perhaps most papers don’t need revisions, but this one did, and there’s no excuse for how she handled it.

I’ve had papers rejected from my company’s internal review process. It sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. You make some revisions and submit to the next conference. You don’t go ballistic and tell your coworkers their work is meaningless and threaten to quit unless you get your way.

(The subthread below contains the refutations, so I won't copy them here. I left a reply at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966286, but you might want to climb it upwards to see why this is mistaken. Suffice to say, her paper passed the internal review, and was subjected to a second review that wasn't policy at the time.)

Nothing I said above was refuted or mistaken. You claim that her paper was internally reviewed twice and you chose to ignore evidence to the contrary.

And somehow you managed throughout to completely disregard Timnit’s own responsibility in the situation.

Right, Timbit sent a public letter of resignation, and Google accepted. Nothing more nothing less.

Can a private company not accept a letter of resignation? Would that be a violation of the 13th amendment?

If the terms of the resignation contradict terms in the employment agreement, I would think so. As long as the employment agreement is legal itself.

Duh, yes of course, good point! Not sure what I was thinking.

If it's in violation of your contract they can reject your resignation, but most people are At Will employees which means either side can terminate employment.

This is generally false. You can’t be forced to work and a specific performance judgement is unlikely. If you resign and had a contract you can’t work elsewhere, may need to pay damages. But slavery, indentures etc mostly illegal these days

I have mentioned this long time ago and would do so again: No matter how righteous be the cause, threatening your employers and instigating a mutinous conduct with fellow employees doesn't go down too well. Both sides could have done better. Both sides includes Timnit's subsequent conduct as well.

> threatening your employers and instigating a mutinous conduct with fellow employees doesn't go down too well.

That sounds to me like what strikes do. Sometimes they do go down well, sometimes they don't.

Right, the one-person strikes tend to be less effective.

I interpreted "with fellow employees" as in cooperation with fellow employees, so that wouldn't be a one-person strike. Although I guess it could be interpreted as against fellow employees.

In this case, I think the initial ultimatum delivered to management was in the vein of “I will quit if you don’t do X” (not “we will quit”), but she was also trying to collaborate/mobilize with others in the company to pressure management. So a bit of both?

Timnit is unethical as hell. She's also the worst kind of being unethical: being unethical in the name of doing good. She second guessed the motives of her coworkers. She attributed every difference to her paper or claim to racism or white supremacy or oppression or any combination out of the three. For all I know, only a true racist would view everything through a racial lens.

She's a disgrace to the research community.

I had some sympathies with her when the initial story broke out. But the continous flaming on Twitter, harping and retweeting her supportive followers and the performative activism for a select set of racial topic makes me feel she cares only about her own set of interests.

I have read the paper. There were several things wrong with it. The most glaring example was comparing the power consumption of training a machine learning NLP model with a gas guzzling jet.

Not once in the paper does she mention that Google has been carbon neutral since 2008, because that would trash half her paper. The paper seemed of desperation to make non existent arguments.

"Carbon neutral" via buying offsets and renewables made electricity is better than nothing but also a half truth. Their energy demand is displacing other consumers of that electricity, and for example, who will then consume eg fossil made electricity instead.

That's not how economics of scale work. This is zero sum thinking.

Google buying green electricity makes green electricity cheaper, not more expensive. More producers are incentivized to produce green electricity as Google's demand increases continuously. Other companies like Microsoft and Facebook go green as well, and the economies of scale kick in. Prices start collapsing. This is actually happening right now.

If I go solar today with my home, it is not a negative action that displaces someone else. It actually expands the solar industry and enables cheaper solar in the future.

Without early customers, green energy would never have taken off.

The fact that there is a learning effect doesn't mean it's good to consume more electricity. If you want to argue positive sum, you would need to show a the consumed green electricity displaces more than the equivalent amount of fossil electricity plus co2 fp of measures used to handle variability of renewables vs nearly flat demand from data centers. Which seems hard.

I mean we might as well shut down electricity to all of our homes if we want to make this argument. And we could argue with each other over snail mail.

But I suspect that will actually be worse from CO2 emissions perspective.

That's strawman, some electricity use is needed because we depend on it for survival and the rest is various levels of nice to have.

But its use has environmental costs and we are in big trouble with climate change. As long as there is fossil made electricity flowing in the grid, marginal changes in demand can be viewed as contributing to its production, because electricity is fungible (modulo transmission considerations).

That's a fat big POV that very few will take seriously. Being carbon neutral absolutely incentivizes green energy. Making up a wall of insurmountable demands that very few people in this world, except hunter gatherers, can possibly meet does not help but hurts efforts towards CO2 reduction.

Carbon neutrality works by subsidizing the costs of reducing carbon emissions at source. Trying to shit on that makes you regressive, not progressive.

Let's not get too emotional about things and keep to the HN guidelines.

I do understand and somewhat agree with the "perfect is the enemy of good" thinking, but it's still good to be aware and keep outselves honest about the difference between them.

The marginal CO2 perspective is in fact an establilished thing in the industry, see eg [1] [2].

Regarding "insurmountable demands", not sure what you're referring to here, the discussion was about whether there are significant indirect co2 & environmental costs to "carbon neutral" electricity as defined by Google, which I argued there are.

[1] https://www.nwcouncil.org/energy/marginal-carbon-dioxide-pro...

[2] https://www.tmrow.com/blog/marginal-carbon-intensity-of-elec...

> Google buying green electricity makes green electricity cheaper, not more expensive.

The marginal cost of puchasing more energy might go down (or it might go up if you are pushing up the demand). But not the total expenditure on energy.

> Prices start collapsing. This is actually happening right now.

Thermal coal prices are at all time record highs right now. It's 4x the price it was a few years ago when we were all hearing about how solar has become cheaper than coal.

It's not that solar generation suddenly became far more expensive for some supernatural reason. It's that demand for electricity outweighs the installed capacity of renewables.

How is the price of thermal coal spiking and solar prices collapsing not a good thing?!

Are you sure that if the situation were inverted you wouldn't still be complaining? Damned if you, damned if you don't.

Coal prices are high because there is a lot of electricity demand not being met by existing renewables. Because everybody bought the green electricity. Which is not only making the green electricity more expensive, it's causing more coal to be burnt to keep up.

Like I said before, that's not how economies of scale work in the long run. Following your recommendations will reduce green energy prices in the short run and promote CO2 emissions in the long run.

The negative externalities of CO2 are long term and not short term. So your complaints are counter productive.

You mean Google bought pieces of paper and pretends that they represent removing co2 from the atmosphere, when in reality they don't.

https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/30/carbon-neutrality-google-s...

You can use the same argument to argue that EVs are a scam, because some electricity is generated by coal.

The point is that electricity can have a green source, liquid carbon fuel can't. You absolutely cannot compare the two. FWIW, Google's data centers are primarily powered by green energy.

> Google's data centers are primarily powered by green energy.

But not since they declared themselves carbon neutral (which they originally accomplished with certificates). Note the original claim was 'carbon neutral since 2008'. Google also uses a large amount of resources besides electrical energy, so claiming to be neutral is a scam unless they actually sequester co2 permanently.

> You can use the same argument to argue that EVs are a scam, because some electricity is generated by coal.

It's not the same argument. But I do argue that EVs are not carbon neutral.

> Google also uses a large amount of resources besides electrical energy, so claiming to be neutral is a scam unless they actually sequester co2 permanently.

I am going to have to ask for a citation for this. They claim to be carbon neutral, not that they don't use any resources at all.

>> > Google's data centers are primarily powered by green energy.

> But not since they declared themselves carbon neutral

Nobody has made this claim

> Note the original claim was 'carbon neutral since 2008'.

Which is true.

> But I do argue that EVs are not carbon neutral.

That is obvious

I wouldn't be surprised if the people who worked on BERT generated more CO2 commuting to work than they did training the model. It seems like a drop in the bucket.

Could you explain in detail why the power consumption calculations were mistaken?

It sounds like you're saying that the calculations weren't mistaken, but that she didn't mention the carbon neutral status of Google as a whole.

Yes, I never said that the power consumption calculations were wrong. The paper wasn't about power consumption, but CO2 emissions leading to global warming. She compared the power consumption of model training to jet fuel exhaust and used jet fuel exhaust to tie the power consumption to CO2 emissions. Of course, she didn't mention that Google is carbon neutral and its data centers are primarily powered by green energy. I have not seen a more dishonest paper in CS.

Electricity from the grid can come from green sources, and in the particular case if Google, it actually does. Comparing electricity consumption for a one time training with jet fuel usage is absurd.

Moreover, the paper doesn't mention any possible benefit of building such nlp models. Increased accessibility of web content across languages and for disabled people.

Google, simply through its search, maps and navigation saves a lot of wasted carbon. Complaining about the power consumption of ML models is absolutely ridiculous.

Her paper reeked of desperation to find something, anything within the AI space that could be posted as an ethical dilemma.

Reading that paper convinced me that Timnit could bring absolutely no value to AI as a field, in terms of ethics or otherwise.

Consider this paragraph

"We first consider environmental risks. Echoing a line of recent work outlining the environmental and financial costs of deep learn- ing systems [129], we encourage the research community to priori- tize these impacts. One way this can be done is by reporting costs and evaluating works based on the amount of resources they con- sume [57]. As we outline in §3, increasing the environmental and financial costs of these models doubly punishes marginalized com- munities that are least likely to benefit from the progress achieved by large LMs and most likely to be harmed by negative environ- mental consequences of its resource consumption. At the scale we are discussing (outlined in §2), the first consideration should be the environmental cost."

This whole paragraph is such a reach, and so absurd that it seems like a parody. Are we supposed to believe that marginalized communities are being harmed by Google training NLP models using green energy? Or will they benefit from better translation from English language content into marginalized languages?

Timnit has zero interest in what actually benefits marginalized communities. She uses them as a prop to build a career in high paying AI field where, apparently, the sub field of ai fairness has a low bar for publication.

If the now died down Timnit reporting did not convince you that Timnit didn't apply the right tactic, if we agree to set aside the legitimacy of her cause in the first place (which itself was and still is under intense debate), then there does not seem any good way to unify our views.

Dr. Gebru was fired for having approached a lawyer about workplace issues. (She told Jeff Dean and others that she was doing so in an email made public). That triggers Legal to retaliate and look for a reason to fire the employee, immediately. Jeff Dean let the conflict drag out 6+ months because he thought he had control of the situation (and he was wrong). Without Jeff Dean’s persistence, Dr. Gebru would probably have been retaliated upon as swiftly as those in the Alphabet Workers Union. That’s how Legal and HR work—- they retaliate if litigation looks imminent. (Levandowski lasted so long because he was dealing with not Jeff Dean but Larry Page).

Google handled Dr Gebru’s exit differently than that of Anthony Levandowski, Andy Rubin, David Drummond, etc etc because Jeff Dean made the call in timing and he was really that clueless about public optics, especially with Tensorflow’s huge following. Moreover, Dr Gebru didn’t have the bankroll to fund a legal team like any of the others listed.

A lot of the posts here suggest Google is struggling with scale. Dr Gebru’s case definitely would have been handled differently were Google a smaller company. Also if there wasn’t COVID—- keep in mind she was fired a couple days before Thanksgiving during COVID. The whole country was a mess then.

> Dr. Gebru was fired for having approached a lawyer about workplace issues.

That is just very dishonest. She gave an ultimatum. Execs accepted the ultimatum. You are gaslighting other people on this topic. At the very least, you should've acknowledged that this is up to an interpretation.

Regardless whether she was fired or quit, she was toxic as hell. She dragged Jeff Dean into an unrelated matter in public and implied Jeff Dean supported personal attack.

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1278569638532530177 -- this happened a few months before she left or was fired from google

If a direct report did this to me, I would've wanted them to leave. In this case, Gebru wanted to leave (according to her ultimatum). Jeff Dean wanted her to leave (I don't doubt this. nobody wanted to work with a colleage who attacked them on twitter). I see a happy ending for both.

Gebru and her supporters have been dishonest about the whole thing.

The email about the lawyers is months before the “ultimatum.”

The reason Dr Gebru’s case is so divisive in tech (especially in this thread) is because so many are agnostic or ignorant of the role of ethics in tech; and almost every employee is ignorant of how Legal/HR execute retaliation. Anthony Levandowski is a literal criminal and yet is still enjoying tens of millions of dollars of Google’s money. Same with Andy Rubin. Even Michael Church is rich. If one percent of the energy spent fighting Dr Gebru was put into fighting the real scumbags in tech… you’d have something more like Google before it got greedy with scale.

Is there any reason to think Michael Church earned more than Dr. Gebru? Michael Church only worked at Google for 6 months, so I would guess none of his stock vested.

Can you explain why you think dragging a low level IC who worked at the company less than year over 10 years ago and afaik never really did anyone any harm into this is appropriate?

What does this have to do with attack Jeff Dean personally on twitter?

Please note that this was months before she left.

The 3 names you mentioned have nothing to do with Jeff Dean.

Handling those 3 people has nothing to do with supporting Gebru or Jeff Dean.

This has nothing to do with Gebru being a toxic person.

Did she threaten litigation before or after she posted an angry rant telling her coworkers to stop working?

Before or after she demanded that the company release the name of an anonymous reviewer?

Before or after she told them to schedule her last day if they didn’t meet her demands?

She said we was consulting a lawyer about discrimination in the workplace. That’s all you need to say to trigger Legal to retaliate. If you’re Anthony Levandowski bartering with Larry Page, though, Legal takes a back seat. It doesn’t even matter when Levandowski instigated a collision on the 101.

Exactly, perhaps people read too many comic book with these one dimensional villains to think that an employee asked Google to be more ethical and then they fired them right there and you could hear an evil laugh in the background.

I've looked at some of the correspondence between Timnit and others and it's fairly unprofessional on her part if you ask me and it has this self righteousness tone to it too.

Another very funny thing people believe is that Google wanted to do "evil" things but their perfectly crafted plan fell apart at the last second when they realized that they have "do no evil" in their code of conduct. After much scrambling the order came from the top to quickly remove it to unblock the evil plans.

That said, there sure are jerks at Google like any other company but I've realized most these dramatic stories regurgitated by the media is BS

Do you think she got fired for those reasons? Citing her as sounding self righteous or unprofessional seems weak.

She was not fired, she quit.

She was publishing studies critical of Google, Google wanted at least the right to have studies of the company reviewed and to include more updated information etc. which is extremely gracious on the part of Google.

She gave the company an ultimatum i.e. 'Change the Terms or I Quit' so they said 'We're not changing the terms, we accept your resignation'.

It's galling how many people (and their supporters) think that they have a right to be employed by a company and then publicly criticize them with misleading information, unmitigated or reviewed by the company.

That’s true for academics getting grants (being able to publicly critizise the one that gave them). Why would it not be true for academics being directly bankrolled by a company?

No - the foundation of your question is a bit misaligned. The major difference is that as much as corporate research likes to pretend they’re academics, they’re not. In corporate research you’re not after some unalienable absolute truth that benefits society - you’re doing research that can benefit the company that is paying your salary. Sometimes those two align and that’s great. But anyone that thinks that an experienced researcher at a corporation will have the seem freedom as a tenured professor is missing something.

In exchange for this tradeoff you get a lot better salary and don’t have to feel like all of your time is spent chasing grants.

> you’re doing research that can benefit the company that is paying your salary

So you are doing research within a slightly more defined scope. If you still call it research then the results are completely separate from your affiliation.

If not, it’s not research, it’s just propaganda.

I'm not privy to the full details so idk but I provided my perspective based on what I'd witnessed which makes me believe she was fired/forced resigned because of how she approached issues at work (giving ultimatums / looking for identities of her reviewers, harassing LeCun on Twitter, etc)

> Another very funny thing people believe is that Google wanted to do "evil" things but their perfectly crafted plan fell apart at the last second when they realized that they have "do no evil" in their code of conduct.

Of course the CoC is not binding, but having that in there was a statement, which meant, roughly interpreted, "the impact of our work should not be net negative". The removal of the line itself did not change anything, of course, but it was a clear statement that this priority had been dropped. I think it's quite obvious why this is seen as not great.

First of all it's still there if you haven't checked for yourself: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

Second, if you were wearing "I'm a good guy" badge on your shirt and later on decided to go rogue and work for the enemy, would you then remove that badge right away? Of course not unless you're truly incompetent at being bad.

I'd understand it if they got rid of the wording because of how much headache it creates for them.

Btw, that's basically why government and business officials often resort to saying the least informative statements. Because every word and sound bite will be used against them.

> After much scrambling the order came from the top to quickly remove it to unblock the evil plans.

Well otherwise it would be considered securities fraud

I think it’s interesting that the good things about working there had nothing to do with the employer and the bad things had everything to do with the employer.

Indeed, this line is the takeaway, in my opinion: “…is because we've been at least a little brainwashed into thinking a job at Google is the pinnacle of employment.”

I haven’t worked for one so this take might be quite hot, but I get the sense that big tech companies do a great job selling you on the idea that they’re elite and therefore you must be elite too if you get the job. But then you’re really just another fungible developer in a pool of tens of thousands. There’s exceptions of course.

I think that changed about 15 years ago.

It’s kind of incredible how fast the shine has come off of most of the FAANG companies.

They're no longer about breadth, limitless innovation, and moonshots, but rather extraction of platform economic control.

They're the new Oracles, except they own mobile, social, and web instead of databases.

Start new companies and push them over. Fight their ability to land grab more.

This is the most optimistic thing I've read in a long time here. Much needed, thanks.

I really like this optimistic sentiment. And I think it’s true.

I work for a company that’s a unicorn this year. About five years ago it didn’t exist until Amazon decided to drop customer support for their warehouse robots, forcing a warehouse company to build its own replacements.

There is still plenty of room for new players to emerge.

This is the best time to be alive, because we can leverage their platforms (ex. google search, YT) to learn anything and everything to ultimately destroy them by building something different.

Just excited to live in a time where we (anyone with basic internet access pretty much) can execute runtime hacks on capitalism by changing the inputs a bit while still creating value where it matters to us.

Given the history of Facebook's acquisitions, I think this is a little optimistic. The sheer disgusting amount of money that FAANGs have allows them to buy or undercut any competitor that looks to gain steam.

Wasn't the same true 20-30 years ago? I feel like you can just choose not to sell or IPO, right?

But can you resist if someone throws 4B in cash at you?

Yeah, that's a fair point. It's hard to evaluate such a decision without being in the spot. The only way I see of resisting such tempation would be to be fulfilled with working on your vision and have substantial amounts of money. I haven't done any of those things so it's hard to empathize and answer honestly.

At least we have warning examples such as Notch's situation. After making probably the most successful game of all time and selling it for billions, his life is (or was, has been, idk) reportedly pretty depressing.

I could say that it's better to not have depression than to have billions, but in reality it's not a zero sum game and you can probably have both. In the end, as always, it all depends on the person and their circumstances.

Why sell though? One can always ignore being acquired if that's aligned with their mission.

Money is so plentiful these days, from personal experience you can just work for a FAANG/eqv. for max 4 years and amass at least 500k to a million bucks easily.

That's plenty money to bootstrap your company, and in some cases more than enough to cut out needing vulture- sorry I mean venture- capital for a good while or ever. Also, you can leverage free resources (like YC's videos, since we're on this site) and find VC related podcasts to understand how they work, so you can learn strategies on how to grow and completely avoid them.

Not to mention, 4 years will give you access to competent like-minded people (networking), a deeper understanding of how these companies operate and what to avoid/adopt, and if you're in a technical position you will most likely level up like crazy to the point you feel confident on learning any new tech and doing everything yourself. Don't know design? Attend some design workshops. Don't understand product marketing? Attend the workshop with the dude who wrote a book on how to do exactly that, and ask him questions. What does operational strategy mean? Attend that workshop.

These companies also have conferences and events where they bring leaders to speak and share their expertise- go to these and learn as much as you can.

The only resource that truly matters is time, so while you're alive, do execute. Just my 2 cents.

How about Tik Tok, Signal, telegram?

The old companies were pushed over by technological or organizational disruptions. A major disruption was paying significant premium money for premium talent, often more than twice the market rate for a given experience level and do that to everyone and not just to poach hires. All of the biggest tech companies do that today, but 20 years ago that was a huge disruption and caused many giants to fall from grace since they could no longer source quality talent. So unless a new similar disruption occurs there wont be something that pushes Google or Microsoft etc from their current positions.

I think it low-key already happening first now talent markets are global so I bet there is companies that are willing to pay premium for premium remote talent. Then there is companies like uniswap which are unicorns and there is like 20 people working that kinda opens situation where they can outbid even google for premium talent.

Then you too can be the rent seeker!

Demoting then removing "Don't be evil" was a pretty good canary clause.

I worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, seeing it grow from 4,000 to 50,000 employees during this time.

In 2005, it was a wonderful, prestigious place to work with many great people and a startup vibe, the place was vibrant. By 2013, Larry and Sergey were put out to pasture, and the company took on a much more bureaucratic, compartmentalized feel.

I was working hard, most of my work was fighting bureaucracy and optimizing what I did for the horrific perf process, and going through constant re-orgs so that I had no consistent manager, and no chance of promotion (this is a big deal at Google). Joining in 2005 was the best thing I've done for my career, and leaving in 2013 was again the best thing I've done for my career. I value the time there, but the Google that I remember no longer exists.

This is eerily similar to my experience at Amazon including how I feel when I look back. Even the years are same :-). I somehow feel joining and leaving Amazon when I did (2005-2012) was the best thing to have happened.

What makes it more special was the stellar team that I got to be a part of with whom I’m still in touch with. It’s like being part of a secret club.

The only thing we used to discuss among colleagues most of the time was solving some hairy interesting engineering problem. That changed as years wore on, it became more gossip and internal politics and who got promoted how and when etc.

The funny thing (to me) is that 4000 people already seems unwieldy to me - I run a company of 5 and can imagine managing maybe 20-30 people, 100 at a stretch but I have no idea how to run a company with anywhere close to 4000 employees (nor what would so many people work on).

I was there 2006-2009. Each year a new level of management appeared above me, and things got ever more "political" and perf centric.

Just as people are different at age 10, 20 and 40, companies are different in different stages and sizes. Know what you want and look for it.

I realized I want to be at small companies, and have not worked at a company larger than 25 people since.

I've found the sweet spot to be around 50-200. I've always worked at smaller companies, and the 10-person company I worked at was the only terrible experience of the bunch. It sounds weird to say, but... I'm really glad to have an HR department again.

I'm sure it varies widely. I just feel like a tiny company leaves too much room for unhealthy and unprofessional dynamics, even though I'm sure it can be perfectly fine in other cases. Just depends on the people.

Mirrors my experience. 50-200 is a sweet spot of possibly knowing just about everyone in the company while also having many perks of BigCo, and the sub-10 person startup folded the week I joined.

At my craziest startup, the charismatic CEO would occasionally yell "under 50 employees, no one has any rights!". It was a joke, but was it really?

Part of the small startup life is that most job don't last. Both because startups die young, but also because they can be crazy. My first dying startup was a disaster. I adapted my expectations, and now I see them as unplanned vacations.

I quit the crazy company above on my 1 year vesting day.

The perf process sounds good on paper. It's just like peer reviews in the academia they said.

However its outcome in practice can't be any worse. To this day, people "cook up" a project that doesn't need to exist and won't share the credit or their territory with anyone (or else the committee will doubt their ownership) and abandon the project less than six months after their promotion and switch to a new team.

So... it's like academia.

Q: What's the fastest way to go from L4->L5 at Google?

A: Get a job at Facebook at E4, get promoted to E5, and get hired back at Google L5.

https://youtu.be/8DYje57V_BY

Google is somewhat famous for downleveling so I'm really not sure that this is actually true.

They can’t downlevel someone from Facebook that easily. They have to match the compensation at least and Facebook pays pretty well at L5 level.

It’s been a while since I’ve considered Google a pinnacle of anything. I think the executives of google might be a bit delusional about how far that propaganda is effective.

It's still a major selling point if you're raising money for your company. "Ex-Google engineer" somehow still makes rich people want to throw money at you, deservedly or not.

I think this speaks to the credulity of VCs more than anything else. Google is huge, a decent chunk of us are ex google pure as a function of the numbers. Never mind how many ex googlers were doing something unique to Google and not something other higher grade tech firms are doing.

Yeah you might be. But they also have way more resources for you to build your talents. There's still a lot there if you have realistic expectations.

> ...selling you on the idea that they’re elite and therefore you must be elite too if you get the job

Also true of Ivy League Schools, movie studios, and certain neighborhoods. Prestige is weird, and if you value it, that's totally fine, but it's probably better the separate the myth from the real-world entity that's made up of people doing stuff.

There are teams at Google and other big tech companies that are working on groundbreaking things. Working at these companies gives you a chance to do very "impactful" things. Is that sense of purpose sometimes abused to exploit workers? Sure. But there are some really smart folks doing amazing things that they'd never have a chance to do working anywhere else.

Do you have to be elite to work there? In some roles you absolutely do. In other roles you just need to do the work. You're often working alongside people who care a great deal(and some unknowingly toxic people whose self-worth seems to come solely from their career achievements), and that can raise the bar for what you and/or the company expect from yourself.

The "toxic" thing in my experience often just comes from rapid, unmanaged growth. The company is literally morphing into something new with every passing day. People are being sucked up the management chain without merit. Systems aren't yet in place to deal with the changes. New employees are flooding in faster than they can assimilate the old culture.

I'm not saying I love the valley or anything, but I'm glad I got to spend a couple years of my life here and contribute 0.0001% to some of the greatest discoveries in the last few decades. I hope more engineers get a chance to have that feeling.

I am in the middle of the same sort of sabbatical from Google. It was my first job out of college and I joined the same time as Jay. In fact for a time sat right across the aisle from the Go team when I was working on Abseil (abseil.io) and I can confirm that Alan Donovan is a really kind, friendly guy. The company got progressively more and more "corporate" and felt less and less dynamic as time wore on. Most of the people I know who are still there are burnt out. It's a company filled with people who tend to put a lot of pressure on themselves and I felt, at least on my last team, a rising sense of anxiety and isolation from what was already a very high level before the pandemic.

That all being said, the quality of humans there is pretty amazing. I count almost all of my old managers as friends and I felt privileged constantly to be surrounded by such intelligent people and to work on such huge ranging vastly impactful projects as I did. But I'm happy I left. The self-direction feels too good after being in such a behemoth to start my career.

On to new adventures!

Thank you for Abseil, if nothing else. It’s been my go-to for years now.

I’ve been at Google for a little less than OP, and while I’m also considering leaving, my main reason is sort of the opposite: I’m bored. The whole team is bored. It feels like we’re doing nothing, and have been doing nothing for years. I work under 25 hours a week, and the vast majority of time is spent in useless meetings or reading useless docs. My actual work is maybe 5 hours a week. What are we even getting paid for? No one knows. We just keep working on new projects nobody needs, then a few months later upper management shifts priorities and repeat. Seems like the only reason we have projects is to keep us busy. And oh, we’re always hiring. Apparently we’re understaffed. Some secretly call it a pyramid scheme.

Is is not possible for you to transfer to another team/org internally?

Sounds like a job in a bank. Or any other monopolistic entity.

There are other 'monopolistic entities' who don't give their employees a cushy life.

Highly doubt it. It's the nature of monopolies that do not have an army (real guns and blood).

There are employees that will create pressure out of nothing and will ruin the cushy possibilities just out of their own boredom and misery due to not being able to progress the hierarchy of the monopoly (most old monopolies don't really give big raises and it's very hard to reward employees because most don't really have any impact). (managers that start micromanaging employees that somehow do something productive, regular workers that overdo it at the task managing platforms and then stress over the backlog, etc.) But it's not the monopoly that's taking the cushy from them.

plenty of people have suggested that it's better for Google and other big tech companies to pay talented engineers to do nothing rather than risk them founding a company that could disrupt them

If I were in that position I would consider studying while on the job. Is there anything in the realm of computer science or adjacent areas that appeals to you to study? Maybe get a serious ramp-up in an area that you'd like to work in next?

Seems like a day in a lot of big corps; embrace it or switch.

Also a Googler, opinions are my own. My current experience is very different (I work on Assistant and there are plenty of problems to solve, a mix of interesting technical ones and some organizational ones), but I have been on teams where I've seen what you're talking about. I strongly suggest changing teams!

> Why I left [...] Burnout [...] I wish I'd done more to fight those things, beyond signing petitions and walkouts. I'm not much of an activist though, especially with burnout.

It's interesting that the author mentions this, but doesn't make a connection between feeling burned out and feeling that they have to be personally responsible for everything the company does.

I don't even disagree with many of the demands of internal "activist", but the strategies they use (walkouts, trying to keep everyone outraged as much as possible) seem ineffectual to me: The main effect seems to be that it makes ordinary employees feel more burned out since they're made aware of many things that they're suppose to be angry about but at the same time they're powerless to change them. That's a recipe for burnout.

I get that the thinking is that ordinary employees are not powerless due to collective action, but for that to work you have to be a lot better at picking your battles. You can affect one to two larger things per year, so getting up in arms over every (comparatively) little thing just has the effect that your activism achieves nothing but burn out the people who want to have on your side.

I just wanted to let you know I found this comment very insightful. I've never really thought about all tiny ways feeling responsible for stuff in a company can creep into your mind and fester there without you realizing it. It's easier to attribute burn-out directly to a bad manager, unrealistic deadlines, not getting a promotion, etc - it's harder realize there there are so many other tangential things you think you should engage in and feel guilty about not having the time or mental space to engage with. All of which adds up into a overwhelming mental load.

> Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports

It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would let it get that bad. 10 reports is “you put this off a bit too long” territory, 25 is in the “someone up the chain should be fired” territory.

My direct supervisor has 75 direct reports. (Not a tech company––an elite private school in the Bay––but still...)

Fuck that. Nobody is being served by that arrangement. Nobody.

Short term capital returns are!

Which is to say, everyone who matters

I don't know, I think that's pretty normal in education? For example, you have a large number of teachers that report up to the head of middle school or something?

I would, because I wouldn't be bothered by a useless manager running around calling meetings and doing other useless activites.

They're saving a bunch of money just having one useless person.

Managers aren’t inherently useless; just the ones you’ve had.

Education is a completely different animal. You’re not comparing apples to oranges here, you’re comparing leptons to gorillas.

I’m good friends with one of the high school teachers at “an elite private school in the Bay” (HRS) and it’s fun comparing and contrasting our jobs, but they are not at all the same job.

Not a Googler, but I’m my experience 25 person managers can work (barely) if they are just their to keep the HR stuff in line and people actually transactional work with other teams or if there is an informal team structure beneath the manager. Think a team where there are 4 tech leads that actually run the teams, but where the “manager” deals with career and hr issues.

While working in consulting I spent about 4 months with a manager who had 60 direct employees. That was a disaster, but I got to spend 3 /4 months with no responsibilities :)

I remember hearing a story (maybe apocryphal) that after Larry and Sergey abandoned their "no managers" experiment, they decided to give each manager a minimum of 10 direct reports and preferably closer to 20 so that the manager wouldn't have time to micromanage any of them.

Speaking as a Google manager of a reasonably sized org, 25 direct reports is too many. Twice a year you have to do Perf for them, if nothing else, and doing that well for 25 people would likely be the only thing you get done. I think it’d be possible, but it would be at the expense of your own career. “Did Perf for my team of 25” is not a next level accomplishment. “Organized my team so that I didn’t have 25 directs” is much more of an accomplishment (next level or not depends on the level, it’s something my group would evaluate as “meeting expectations” of an L7).

The rule of thumb at Google is 10 directs in an engineering management role, less if you’re a TLM (an IC with some management responsibilities) since you’re still evaluated on the IC ladder. There are exceptions, but they usually involve “managing” a number of contractors where you have significant program management support for coordinating their day to day activities.

I think the only way 25 comes anywhere close to working is by creating an informal team structure under the manager who has 25 “directs”, as you said. But at that point you’re informally creating the team structure that should formally exist, which in and of itself is a management failure. Either the org should hire some managers to manage those people, or some of the ICs in that informal structure are functionally performing management duties, and deserve the recognition, comp, and training opportunities that a formal promotion into management comes with.

You're partly right: With a significant number of reports, you can't keep juggling all the balls yourself. But what varies is how that handled?

A micromanager will be absolutely crushed by a high number of reports. In fact 10+ years at Google, managers intentionally had a large number of directs so they couldn't micromanage.

If you have a pretty autonomous team, strong tech leads, can delegate, ~20 still isn't great, but it's not horrible. It's not the steady state you want, but it's doable for a few quarters.

I agree that micromanagers can’t micromanage at 20, but good managers also can’t give the attention and mentorship their directs deserve either. In my experience teams want a good manager, and being under managed by an overworked or absentee manager can be a problem for morale and team cohesion.

I think the real solution here is to find the micromanagers and train them or fire them, rather than hampering all the managers in order to cut the micromanagers off at the metaphorical pass.

Personally I’d quit in such a situation. If I’m going to be managing 20 people and creating informal team structures under me, then some of my directs deserve a management title and I would want a title befitting a manager of managers. The whole thing has a whiff of “how can we avoid promoting a bunch of people” to me.

Counter anecdot - I managed about 20 directs for a few years and it was fine. Of course in reality I was grooming a bunch of them to become team leads (which eventually happened) so I was leaning on them to take care of and lead others day to day. It was fine - everyone grew through the experience. No idea if this type of thing is common but bottom line it doesn't have to be awful.

Or you might have been under the impression that it was fine, because nobody tells his management that their organization isn't working.

My manager has about 25 reports and he thinks it's ok, because we're all organized in smaller teams that manage daily work themselves. That's true, but the effect is that the person who should care about people aspects has no idea about you (how you're doing, how you want to evolve, whether you're performing, what you need to improve, whether you deserve a raise or a promotion, whether you're burnt out, whether you're looking for a new position...).

And nobody tells him, because he's the manager and you don't go to your manager with problems, especially if he doesn't maintain a close relationship with you.

Due to various internal reorgs my manager currently has a number of reports approaching that number. It's mostly gone fine for now, because there are multiple teams under her that are mostly self-sufficient in deciding their product direction. We have a team lead who isn't a "manager" but is providing input on what we do and we go to her when we have problems or need administrative work done. It's not horrible.

Your manager’s manager should be working with her to help her address the issue, because it’s not sustainable. It may be okay for now, not disputing that at all, but what to you may look like relative calm is much more likely her giving her best imitation of a duck (calm on the surface, but paddling furiously).

For instance, has she had to reduce the frequency, duration, and/or quality of her 1:1s? I’m guessing the answer is “of course” and maybe some ameliorating fact like having more 1:1 time with the team lead. The “so what?” here is that 1:1s are how you head off problems before they get serious. So either the tech lead is picking up that slack and is your de facto manager or you’re simply coasting on the strength of past 1:1s, but inertia will only get you so far.

Also, this tech lead you mention is likely doing less actual technical work because they are picking up slack left by your manager not having enough time in the day. This might not be a problem right now, but the first question I would be asking in your manager’s shoes is: “is my TL happy? Is this sustainable for them?” The second would be something like “What long term technical objectives are being sacrificed to deal with this management issue?”

It’s often the case in the situation you’re describing that the TL is interested in moving into management, and this is a “try out” effectively. Personally I like to be open about situations like this, although there are valid arguments against that. In any event, I think most people would agree that it’s best do such “try outs” when the stakes are relatively low, and the TL can have an easy escape if they need it. The situation you’re describing doesn’t fit my definition of low risk, although ymmv — maybe conditions are such that this is a very temporary state and the machinery to fix it is already in motion.

> It’s often the case in the situation you’re describing that the TL is interested in moving into management, and this is a “try out” effectively. Personally I like to be open about situations like this, although there are valid arguments against that. In any event, I think most people would agree that it’s best do such “try outs” when the stakes are relatively low, and the TL can have an easy escape if they need it.

The best way I’ve seen to accomplish this is have a job title that’s purposefully ambiguous. Usually I’ve seen this as a “lead engineer”, which can come with or without direct reports. This lets people try out management while giving them space to change their mind without losing title or status.

2005-2017 for me. On the "20% project" stuff, which everyone seemed to have heard of:

I think it was 2008 or so when I was sitting at a table with about eight other people, and somehow or other the question came up "who has a 20% project?" Only one of us did.

The main utility of a 20% was that you could try out a new group before transferring to it, and they could try you out. Other than that, very few people actually had one, even then.

I can only speak for myself and my org of 300 or so, but it’s surprising how few people are actually interested in a 20% project. I’m sure there are factors at play here:

* we have a lot of work to do, the poster in this thread who is bored and only has 5 hours of real work a week is definitely not in my BU

* they may be concerned how such a project will reflect on them in perf. it may seem better to go all in on one thing vs splitting your attention

* we’re relatively new (acquisition) so perhaps the 20% ethos hasn’t percolated over to us yet

But at any rate, I think I’ve gotten exactly 2 requests for 20% projects, which I approved after confirming the person wasn’t going to be doing the dreaded 120% project.

> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence.

This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.

Still depends on the org. Many orgs still engineering driven. This happens when engineers are more familiar with tech and business than PM, which surprisingly is not that uncommon (GCP)

seems like this is most relevant video:

https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4

Thanks for sharing that - I had never seen that before and it rings incredibly true

Check out "Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview" which is long form footage from the clips used in "Triumph of the Nerds" and "Revenge of the Nerds". Two fantastic documentaries that chronicle the history of personal computing.

It is not only relevant for Google. Apple is exactly IBM from the past + some design and marketing sprinkled over.

You either die a hero, etc etc.

I wonder if there's any "big, established" company where IC engineers have more weight than the PHB types. I'd be genuinely curious if anyone knows of some good examples, I suppose HN would be the place where people might.

It seems like that's one of the natural equilibrating factors that offer some small amount of competitive grace to Davids competing against Goliaths. Google hasn't been David for a long time now, I think.

I guess it depends on which organization you're part of. I've never really been told what to do in my 5+ years at Google. I usually just have an idea, say I'm going to work on it, and then do it. Most of my peers also work this way, and while more junior ones usually need some assistance with coming up with ideas which align with priorities, it's not like management is telling them what to do - usually a senior team member helps them. PMs help set higher level goals and priorities, but not unilaterally. Managers provide incentives to align to org level goals and priorities but balance that with bottom up driven ones. This has been true for both teams I've been on in two separate orgs, but I'm sure it's not universally true throughout Google. Prior experience at companies previous to Google gave me almost no autonomy.

That can happen when corporate leadership is dominated by a technical founder. Once MBAs and sales/marketing alums run the show it always turns into a grindhouse. They don't fundamentally understand the work that goes into the product and so they rule by metrics to make their dev factory "more efficient".

As a complete outsider, I have an impression at least that Google PMs have some level of technical knowledge. Which would make them far more "engineer led" than is common.

Well there's no grand strategy and it's too big and settled for engineering to have much impact.

It's inertia-led.

I bet most googlers hate ads so it's a big state of cognitive dissonance too.

If they hate ads then wouldn't that make them the best people to control them?

no, that'd hurt shareholders.

If they are paid with RSUs, they are also shareholders.

good, now the next logical steps is?...

Turns out love of large paychecks is stronger than hatred of ads.

Snowflake is this way too. Its so depressing

You left out the best part:

> We were expected to hit precise deadlines on multi-quarter projects (within two weeks), and when that inevitably didn't happen, we had to track all the time we spent on anything in 30 minute increments. It felt very cog-in-the-machine.

This is absurd. I haven't been asked to file timesheets (other than for days off) as a sweng in over a decade, including when I was at Google. Management on that team has completely lost it.

I read that as the "30 minute increment" tracking is used as a short term punishment for not meeting the deadline.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Wow I think you’re right upon reread. I read it as having to account for all that time over the previous period to show how they couldn’t have done a better job/

That mindset towards workers I think should be considered pretty gross in most contexts. Punishment for not meeting a software deadline? This sounds like highschools with conservative leadership.

Some of the best minds in generations, all focused on selling us things we really don't want.

I find it amusingly ironic that Google employees don't like the idea of being tracked.

...even when paid handsomely.

The idea that products at large tech companies are going to be lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people or understand the cross functional relationships and strategies is absurd.

This isn't a future engineers want either -- I hear complaints about meetings from nearly every engineer I know. The idea that you should have low level knowledge of the system you're working on and high level knowledge of all the cross functional team's responsibilities along with the responsibility for cultivating those relationships is ridiculous.

People say this without having any idea what PMs do.

> lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people

Do you think the engineer who leads a 1000 man org is not talking to people? I talked to the engineer leading our 500 man org, he talked to a lot of people and wanted their input and tried to understand the whole to make decisions. He had technical expertise so he could talk to low level engineers as well, but also to business people etc.

Yes -- within engineering typically! That is a the role of a PE/Staff Eng.

Right, and in an engineering lead organization the PM etc are subordinate to engineers. Their job is to research the market and present the results to engineers so engineers can better understand what to build. This is opposite to non-engineers leading and hiring engineers to build the product they want. Ultimately the end result is the same, its just creates a different perspective.

So it is easy to evaluate companies like this. Did technical people hire business people to do those tasks for them? Or did business people hire technical people to create a product for them? The first is engineering lead, the second is the standard enterprise.

I have never seen a company operate at scale the way you're suggesting. Making business decisions is not engineering core competency.

The most common reporting line I've seen (working at tech companies that you would know and recognize immediately) is director -> { sdm, pm-t } where the director is typically promoted from one of those roles. There is an insulation layer between product and engineering, and as levels progress the line between pm-t and sdm blurs significantly.

The engineer you describe sounds like an ex-engineer. That engineer sounds a manager.

Becoming a manager doesn't mean that you no longer are an engineer. That is what engineer lead means, engineers leads the organization rather than people with no technical skills.

They no longer code, but they still take part in technical discussions, so being an engineer is absolutely a part of their job.

> who by and large do not talk to people or understand the cross functional relationships and strategies

The idea that (good) engineers are somehow not able to understand cross-functional relationships, business strategies, or don’t know what PMs do, is absurd. You’re digging your own grave there.

I don't often downvote, but when I do, it's dumb shit like this

Product Management, in many orgs, is the old wine of Taylorism in a new bottle, where there is a "thinking class," and there is a separate "doing class." The stereotype of an engineer with poor social skills who can't grasp the "high-level cross functional relationships and strategies" (from nostrebored's sibling comment) is not very different from Taylor's idea of workers:

    One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit 
    to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he 
    shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more 
    nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than 
    any other type. The man who is mentally alert and 
    intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to 
    what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work 
    of this character.

It is sad to see this happen at places like Google, where engineers had a lot more autonomy.

Most knowledge workers who have the mental capacity to grasp deep technical topics will find the "cross functional relationships and strategies" discussed in garden variety business books a light stroll in the park.

I think you have made excellent point here. I absolutely see this behavior at workplaces. The Architects/PMs one side and developers who are mainly Jira/Daily standup chumps on other side.

This is exactly right. I studied both engineering and management, so I have experienced both schools.

Actually understanding science and manipulating the world is hard. Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves, or how a web request happens. They can never understand it on the required level to fix things.

Now try to explain to an engineer how a bond works, or how industrial strategy works. He can do both his own work and the manager's work.

I sound pretty bitter for a guy who's managed to dodge most of the BS things in large corporations his while career, but that's because I really think this aspect of the world needs fixing.

It seems like just about every human endeavour is encumbered by MBA people who pretend to understand something hard, who get paid at least as well as those people who can both solve the technical and the strategic problems.

This might be more of a problem in the Anglo world. Engineers getting promoted is more common in Europe according to rumor.

I think there's a point to make on good PMs. Those are totally worth their weight.

The issue I have with bad PMs is the same issue with bad engineers. They can cause so much damage to a product or codebase, especially when they have free reign and an ear from higher management.

> Actually understanding science and manipulating the world is hard. Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves, or how a web request happens. They can never understand it on the required level to fix things.

I'm pretty sure that being a car mechanic is one of those trades jobs that people are discouraged from pursuing if they're seen as having alternatives.

Also a lot of what comes up on a search for "redneck engineering" is I think not consistent with this assertion.

Guy/gal who can actually fix a car is a techie. And I agree, often people are discouraged from things for no reason other than supposed cultural fit.

> Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves

I always love a classic hacker news take where software engineers are the only people who can understand how things work. It's not like high school dropouts are ever car mechanics.

He’s talking about generally technical people, not software engineers.

I’m pretty sure they were talking about (software) engineers as the comment brings them up directly in the comparison:

> Now try to explain to an engineer how a bond works, or how industrial strategy works.

This could be Cloud Org characteristic. Enterprise applications cannot be engineering led as tech does not matter but 'checkboxes' do (features).

For checkboxes one needs to be constantly in touch with customers, sales, pre-sales, need to be full time demo giver, etc. These are not the job of engineers and even if it is made so, it is setting them and the team/org/company up for failure on both fronts - frontend and backend.

Do you think checkboxes magically spring from the aether just to support sales demos?

Don't get your point. I was referring to this statement from OP: Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.

In enterprise applications (which solves for workflows - business, IT etc.) one needs lot of PM thinking for feature identifications, what to prioritize, gathering requirements etc.

In Search defined Google one did not need PMs as requirement is pretty straight forward from feature perspective, but one needs deep engineering and computing science knowledge for making the best search algorithm. Whereas in Cloud IT world the focus shifts more towards product & roadmap planning.

I think you're over-inflating the value of people fetching specs back and forth between a pool of customers and design / engineering.

If you're a software or hardware company, ultimately the people who design and build the software / hardware have to design and build the thing, everything else is ancillary to those tasks.

I can see this as a result from too many employees going from college to Google with nothing in between.

They lack real-world experience and ability to grasp non-technical concepts.

As a founder, and having worked in multiple startups is hard for me to communicate with their relative worldview. Despite how brilliant they are.

Google has 140,000 employees, the size of a size-able city in the U.S. Does anyone really care when someone leaves Google?

I guess people do in the "why would you ever leave such a great job?!" sense, but people can get bored of any job after enough time.

Outsiders also don't grasp how high a lowly senior engineer earns.

Compensation in tech is so insane.

Other high earning occupation just doesn't even come close.

It would take doctors years to earn 250k a year. In tech with stock growth + RSU, you might get that as a junior eng. I earned 450k as a junior per year with pre-ipo company.

This is why engineers can just leave and others are surprised.

To many people the high pay makes it more surprising, not less.

Many people have the causation backwards. The high pay is because the engineers are able to leave the job.

Get a google job straight of of college and it seems you can retire very comfortably in your mid 30s

Seems like the big problem with early retirement scenarios is if you get sick you're fucked. Maybe if you leave the country.

It makes for flawless blogspam. There are enough people leaving Google that some of them will publish criticisms that align with the community's preconceived notions and will let them all feel superior to Googlers. Further, because Google is so big there will almost necessarily be pockets that really are truly bad to work in. Readers can therefore extrapolate and assume the entire company functions this way.

There are entire companies built around OP’s and his teammates’ oss contributions - relatively small group of people. You can’t say that about 99.9% of others in that 140K

I’ve come to suspect the reason (ex) Google people write these is basically humblebragging. There just isn’t enough interesting material presented to have any other explanation make much sense. Just an opinion; ymmv.

Everyone wants to feel special.

Personally I’m quite happy with every blog post that someone claims to be burned out in. Al least I feel like I’m not alone.

My thoughts as well

i miss google+, the world's preeminent social network for google employees to announce to the world their intentions to leave google.

I never realized how deeply the promotion mindset is damaging my personal happiness and growth, until I left Google in 2019...

Most things promoted in Google about growth boils down to promotion, which is just a cover word of getting your hands on promising project without proactively doing much by yourself.

Self motivated ideas actually get me into various trouble. In hindsight, I can see that many coworkers are silently watching this guy getting burnt without offering much helping hands.

In the end, I learned the googely way of working at Google, and find it not worthwhile to stay...

A few months ago, I considered applying to Google to join the JAX team.

It turns out that you can't apply to Google's JAX team. You have to apply to Google, and then managers at various teams select whether they want you.

The thing is, JAX is amazing. So I'm now faced with the uncomfortable idea that this process must make sense, because it clearly works. Yet I profoundly dislike it.

Perhaps my ideas are the problem, and Google is four steps ahead. I don't know. It just seemed like you should be able to apply to specific teams at Google, and that the team should be able to choose whether you'd be a valuable teammate.

If the team wants you bad enough, they can hire you. It has to come from the inside, which I'm sure has no impact on whether nepotism happens.

I don't think it's true that "you can't apply directly to a team". I've seen many people got interviewed/hired for exactly one position. The manager of the team will need to be in the loop though. If they don't know you and don't agree with you applying directly, then it's most likely you're going to the normal pipeline.

Ah, interesting. Thank you. My info about the hiring process came from a friend at Google. But in hindsight, they were probably relaying what their own path had been like, rather than making a statement about the process in general.

Well your friend is correct in theory, you never apply to a particular team, you always apply to Google. However you are free to choose what team you'd like to work for as long as that teams manager agrees to let you join, meaning if you already know the manager you can guarantee a spot at that team if you pass the regular Google interview. But if for some reason that team disappears etc, you have still passed the Google hiring bar and is therefore free to join another team.

What about JAX is so amazing? It takes the worst of functional programming and tensor programming and gives you yet another half baked lib with 12 edge cases at every API call

This is mostly not true. If you know a hiring manager on the JAX team and they have headcount and they want to hire you if you pass the interviews, they can walk you through the process and hire you.

This is what I do. Every single person on my team applied directly to my team.

The most desirable teams are filled by internal transfers. External hires get the teams that have trouble hiring internally.

Relevant perhaps is the fact that Google folks just came out of a promo cycle, which is run by a committee. Folks I talked to seem to agree the process is utterly broken, so this is about the time many will decide to jump ship.

I will say as companies grow the appetite for huge ambition shrinks. It’s natural for a few reasons.

- you’re established, no longer a startup, you prioritize the momentum in the current cash cow.

- your hiring pool changes. Instead of people who want to come build the “next big thing” you tend to attract folks who value the security of a big name. And they will tend to hire folks like them, and so on..

- you’re publicly traded. Holding an asset that reliably produces steady growth, creates very different incentives than trying to hit some kind of hockey stick unicorn growth

Reading these always makes me a bit sad. There is a lot in here and people have their reasons, but levels are not everything and various “cuts” aren’t that meaningful when you consider TC of faang. Where else are you going to have a chance to make things better for billions of people? Maybe not life changing but at least slightly better?

A small improvement for billions adds up. Though burnout and pain are real, there’s more to all this. Hope OP finds what he’s looking for!

Interesting that the person moved to San Diego (not a cheap place by any means), and Google cuts the salary.

There is some strange fixation Google currently has, especially towards getting people into their New York offices - must be some tax incentives or other deals with the city....

A friend just recently wanted to work from google office in another tech hub city (not remote/from home by any means) and during offer negotiation it was denied, so she didn't join - as she didn't wanna move to NYC.

Odd things happening at Google lately - I mean even Amazon is more remote friendly these days. Lol

Surely NYC/SFBA are even more expensive?

It’s probably SFBA >Manhattan/some parts of Brooklyn > San Diego > NYC Metro.

It isn't. Bay Area and NYC Metro are both in the highest paying bracket.

Proportionally, a greater area of San Diego can still be more expensive than a similarly proportional area of NYC Metro.

For example, NYC Metro would have cheaper housing 60min from work than San Diego. I generally find land in coastal CA to be more expensive than everywhere else in the US.

It is also quite expensive in Hawaii, yet Google pays less well there. Similarly, it is quite expensive in London, yet Google pays less well there too. This is based on Google's model of paying by local market rather than CoL.

There are a few regions where this ends up being quite frustrating. No doubt it is difficult to look at a nontrivial pay cut if your housing costs aren't much lower. It has even been frustrating for me to look at my pay cut despite moving to a much cheaper region.

But the pay cuts are weird. Salaries are adjusted down, but since so much of pay is in RSUs, the effect is limited. My 15% pay cut is actually more like 6% after considering RSUs. A 10% pay cut will be even smaller. That will ratchet down over time as refreshes are scaled, but it is just hard to see that as an urgent reason to look for alternatives.

Yes, I think we are agreement. There is no such thing as a cost of living adjustment. Or rather, it is better to frame it as

“employer offering employee what they think employee will accept because employee will probably have less options to earn more by being in a certain location”

Obviously, a highly in demand programmer or whatnot will be able to live wherever they want and demand whatever they want. That is all it has ever been and always will be, aka a market where buyers try to buy for as low of a price as possible and sellers try to sell for as high of a price as possible.

Good point. Yes, the market (employees) will choose - the posted article highlights this pretty well.

While the original site isn’t feeling well: https://archive.md/YV9AQ

I wasn’t able to view the content with this link. I tried using the captcha but it kept unchecking itself. I’m on mobile so I couldn’t debug.

I mean, nothing wrong with anything the guy says here. But this says more about the author than Google, really. No shame in having had enough of a job and wanting to move on after nearly a decade, but I don't think the fact that they wouldn't let him move far away from the office without a pay cut or the unlikelihood of a promotion indicates that the job radically changed on him, exactly.

I'm sad to see Jay go, I've interacted with him in his role as bazel-go maintainer. It's clear that project wasn't getting the resources it needs. As a former Googler myself, I understand his frustration all too well. Google used to be run like a university, a place of learning and scientific advancement. It's not anymore. Many of my former coworkers have quit. All of them tell the same story of it feeling like a big corporation.

Note that Google was a huge, profitable, publicly traded company before this happened - it was possible to be an institution and be publicly traded, but for how long? Can we build long term focused companies that are subject to the whims of the stock markets? I'm not sure. Truthfully, I think it's a social problem.

A few days ago I got the usual call from the Google recruiter, after being rejected a year ago with feedback of 2 sure hire, one lean, two no hire. A strange collection, isn't it? Well, I would have “fired" two of them plus the recruiter, one who wasn't paying attention to my interview and one who turned off the video and whose accent and questions were basically incomprehensible (I am non-US myself, btw). Maybe the two no-hire?

I make 75% of what a Google would make for the (high) position they would hire me for, but I work 1/5 of what I would work at Google and with little overhead such as performance review, promotion packages, and excuse my French, other assorted bs I have zero interest for at my age and with my experience.

If the hiring process were more reasonable, i.e., not dependent on the mood, accent, question of the day of interviewers whom I will (probably) never meet again after they nonchalantly determine my future employment, I might agree to interview again and then evaluate their proposal, but otherwise I think Google will continue to bleed talent and hire little uninteresting robots (mine is a salty-fish generalization of course) who have the patience for nonsense that I, and people like me, do not have.

Why did you pursue the position? You seem content where you are?

There are definitely some advantages in working for Google, like 25% more money and Google on the resume (I already had another FAANG), which can open other lucrative doors down the road.

I am not a hardcore tech guy, in the sense that I could switch tomorrow to selling bicycles (for the same money, of course), and not miss tech one bit, so my north stars are money conditional on time spent working and stress (assuming the job itself if not terrible).

I would guess that my current position, given zero stress, little time at work, and good salary, is on par with the Google position I was interviewing for.

But I am not willing to go through those ridiculous interviews again, then waiting for weeks for a the committee decision, then the recruiter cannot say what happened, are you kidding me.

> salty-fish generalization

What does this mean?

Salty-ish (autocorrection got it wrong). I am a bit salty because I was rejected and my tone may reflect that, although it is true that people at Google are in my experience (that is, the one I met professionally or outside work, or saw at events, giving lectures etc.) not very interesting (on average!), in part because that's what the interview process, maybe inadvertently, screens for.

We live in a finite planet with finite resources. I think every argument for growth (on the scale FAANG companies operate) should also mention that part.

I also want to say that it's completely acceptable to work on a place without exorbitant pay, stocks, or promotions every 6 months. A job can be many other things. Different people want different things at different phases of their life. For some of them, a job is just a job.

While I agree that we should be mindful of our finite resources, it’s worth noting that you can have sustained growth and still consume fewer resources. For example, US per-capita CO2 emissions have declined 30% since 1970, while per-capita GDP has grown more than twelvefold. In recent years, technology has been by far the largest contributor to that widening gap between GDP growth and emissions. That’s not to ignore the impact technology has on the environment from e.x. rare earth mining, but if you look at the big picture I think you’ll be positively surprised.

Although I appreciate the honesty about the company in this blog, my issue is almost every big company behaves in the same way. FAANG is not the absolute best, it is just best option among the worst. The only other option is to work at a small startup or start your own company but that is a different ballgame and requires extreme levels of grind.

> If a great new opportunity comes up, take it, but drop something else. If the dropped thing was important, it'll get staffed. If not... why work on it?

The above seems to explain how a thing that fills a gaping functionality hole in one google product via another just gets deleted without any consideration for the interaction between the two.

Down for me. Mirror: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:glQF_0...

That resonated a lot more than I expected it to do. Not the Google parts but the burnout parts. I exited my job during summer and am still not looking for something new and this article and the one by Maya linked in it really helped me put words on it

> My wife also works in tech and can comfortably support us both. I hope in a year, I'll be rested and ready to jump back into tech with a better sense of purpose and direction.

If you have this luxury, use your precious time to work less.

Is this just long form "calling in rich"? With an L5 RSU package and the share price tripling, a few hundred thousand turns into a few million and you can afford to leave. Nice problem to have.

> To summarize, <why I left>

He didn't like working enough to make himself happy, I guess. It's a person who is at a different point in their life than when they started. Notably with enough money that they question their own motivations to continue.

These blog posts seem devoid of anything interesting or actionable.

Cached: https://web.archive.org/web/20211023032551/https://jayconrod...

> Google doesn't use the go command or modules, and since there's no direct measurable benefit to Google, it's very difficult to make the case.

i'm curious. What exactly they don't use internally?

I'm guessing they are referring to how Google uses Blaze (internal version of Bazel) to build Go binaries, not the 'go' command and it's modules.

The first time I went to work on a personal project using Go after I joined Google, tried using Bazel because I was so used to Blaze and I liked it a lot. I was very disappointed to find that the integration between Bazel and Go was severely lacking and required me to use third party extensions to get things working as expected, which was quite disappointing. That was a few years ago so things might better now

From the outside, this paints google as a bunch of engineers moving around, dropping projects, trying to get promoted.

Obsession with promotions instead of product quality won't lead anywhere nice.

An interesting look into the reality of working at Google. Thanks for sharing!

These posts almost feel like a Scientology style exodus and moment of clarity.

> I couldn't work anymore, and it was time for an extended break. From speaking with other people that have gone through this, it seems like the only thing that really helps.

Maybe changing teams or company can get you working again. 1 year seems too long to me

Nah, 1 year is pretty much the minimum burnout recovery period. I've seen it happen several times now.

Work isn't worth doing just for work's sake. You have to feel aligned.

This website seems to have switched to stoplang, because it’s down.

I believe "scale" should probably be "growth"

Larry, from his lair in Fiji: “I should sell some shares”

site is currently down: https://archive.md/YV9AQ

Seems takeaway is if Google didn't cut this person's pay by 10 per cent then all their "shitty behavior" like Project Maven and so on would have been just fine.

Another article on the site expands on this:

> I still feel uncertain about everything though. Google approved my remote work application last week, but I haven't gotten a new offer letter yet, and I've been told to expect a pay cut of at least 10% because the market rate for software engineers is supposedly lower in southern California. This feels like a shitty thing to do. My work is not less valuable. It's a reminder that this is nothing more than a business relationship, and the company is not interested in loyalty to workers or support in a difficult time. I'm not sure what, if anything, I'm going to do yet, but it has me thinking harder about my career and future.

Not sure why _this_ is what it took to get to that revelation, but better late than never. But on the point about value vs. cost of living... I mean how do you work as a developer in the United States and not notice you get paid a lot more to do this work than people in other places?

I always find it interesting that lots of tech folks I meet are strongly in favor of more income equality except when it would cause them to earn less money. Then it's a shitty thing to do.

I don't know maybe it is the thing with top level engineers hired at FAANG who deserve absolute truth, justice and equality.

To me earning nowhere at level as these folks, still it embarasses me to whine about pay/promotion when so many hard working folks doing important work in society are paid pittance.

It depends on the market. If someone wants to pay you between 1.5x to 2x for the same work you’re doing right now with same work/life balance, will you take it? People generally don’t whine about pay or promotions, they interview and get better offers.

Why did he leave? The tl'dr is the L6 glass ceiling and the remote pay cut. I can speak to both of those:

First, for those that don't know, new grads get hired at L3, PhDs at L4 (which IMHO is actually a mistake but that's another issue) and there is an expectation of getting promoted to L5 (Senior Software Engineer). There's no set time frame for this. I've known people who stayed L4 for many years and were quite happy. L6+ start to require increasingly extraordinary influence and technical contribution.

> It's hard to get promoted beyond L5 for open source work

I'll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it's hard to get promoted to L6 for anything. This is by design. It's how the company controls costs and maintain retention (by dangling that L6 promotion, possibly for years).

One of the things that Ruth Porat did when she became CFO is lowered the promotion target percentage. This meant less people got promoted at each cycle.

How promotions work is a committee of higher-level engineers (eg L7s consider promotions to L6) and will have 10-15 packets to assess. These will get stack ranked by the committee. If you're above the line you'll get promoted. If you're not, you won't. Ruth's change just made that line a little higher.

As for the pay cut, this requires some context. By the time you reach L5+ the majority of your total compensation comes from equity, both your initial grant (for the first 4 years) and annual refreshes and discretionary grants you get along the way. So less than 50% of your income comes from salary plus bonus.

For those employees who go permanent remote, there is a location-based pay adjustment. SF and NYC are at 100% rate. Other areas at 85-95% of that.

That only applies to the salary plus bonus (since bonus is derived from salary) part of your total compensation. So a 10% cut for L5+ is in reality <5%. You don't save on taxes by moving to San Diego but it is cheaper than the Bay Area. If you move to a no-state income tax state however your net pay can in fact be higher.

So, the argument for no pay cut is you're saving the company money by not having to pay for office space, a desk (etc), free food and so on, all while doing the same job. This seems to be the author's position and I'm certainly sympathetic.

The argument for a pay cut is that your compensation isn't really associated with your output at all and is entirely market-based. For many people not going into the office and being able to live somewhere that isn't the Bay Area is a huge plus so people are willing to give up something for that. Plus you could argue the company doesn't want people going remote who don't really want to by offering the same pay. By lowering your pay slightly it creates a psychological barrier such that only people who really want to do it do so. I'm sympathetic to that argument too.

10% of the company is at L6 or higher so it can't be that hard.

Most of those got promoted by going into management and lucking out that the product they worked on grew and therefore needed to hire a lot, and you easily get promoted as you start to manage more people. Getting promoted on technical merit on the other hand is really hard.

This seems like a super-biased view, and having sat on tons of promo committees for IC, ICTLM, and EngMgr for many years, i'd suggest to you it could not be more wrong.

Managers don't get promoted for growing teams. I've watched lots and lots of people who write "grew team from x to y" get feedback on their promo packet that this isn't, by itself, a valuable thing.

I didn't say you get promoted for growing a team, I said you easily get promoted when you manage a lot of people.

This is also, in my experience, wrong.

But you also started with "lucking out that the product grew" as your view for how that happens too.

I guess their real promo is when they interview elsewhere and tell how they've been managing a big hoard of ICs. A few years later they come back and tell the story how they've been a director/VP/etc. and get a matching level which is above the level of that guy who wrote "not a valuable thing" feedback.

Google doesn't matches levels based on title when hiring.

The main cases of "title inflation" of this kind are related to M&A rather than hiring. That's obviously much rarer.

In hiring, the only thing the title/size of org buys you is an initial guess at level.

(IE i get asked to interview the person for a potential director position).

TLM L6 here. I completely disagree. "Be a manager" is sufficient only to L5. Simply managing a team, even a large team, is not going to build a case to L6 at all. The primary challenge that L5->L6 TLMs and EngManagers face is finding time for doing the other stuff beyond just the baseline of management to build a case for L6.

> I'll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it's hard to get promoted to L6 for anything.

It's hard if you're on the wrong project (read: low impact and/or low visibility). There are different routes to L6 at Google, but by far the most successful was to become TLM or just M of a medium impact project. It's hard to make the case as an IC for L6, but colleagues did it multiple times. Large enough, long-running projects also reach a critical mass of L6+ people and then getting high-level support becomes much easier.

Having been through the process, seeing the process from an IC, TL, TLM, and promotion committee member, if you think that L6 is unachievable, there is either a problem with your project or your expectations.

"Having been through the process, seeing the process from an IC, TL, TLM, and promotion committee member, if you think that L6 is unachievable, there is either a problem with your project or your expectations."

Lots of managers are also not good at talent management (and not just at Google). Which is sad. So they tell people it's a promo committee's fault, or .. Realistically, it's also the manager's fault. If they don't have scope/work that can help someone grow to L6, the right move is to help the person find a place that does, rather than string them along. Stringing them along ends up with them leaving or unhappy or ... Helping them grow elsewhere ends up with people who will likely want to come back to your org at some point when you have the need/scope/role for them.

I know that IC is Individual Contributor, but what are TL, M, and TLM?

Techlead, manager, and techlead-manager.

Thank you!

For those of us without direct knowledge what are IC, TL and TLM?

Individual Contributor, Tech Lead, and Combo Tech Lead / Manager.

Long-time former Googler here, author of go/l6talk (internal presentation on getting promoted to L6). While there I coached a lot of people on the L5-to-L6 promotion process. It seems a lot of Googlers get disillusioned about getting promoted above L5. Broadly speaking Google's culture is heavily focused on levels and promotions, which is too bad, since many L5's are doing just great and getting paid extremely well.

If it weren't for the fact that Google makes level information public within the company, I doubt there would be quite so much emphasis on getting a promotion. Most people want to get L6 for the recognition and the fact that it elevates you above other engineers in terms of status and influence. When I worked at Apple, levels were private, so you had to treat everyone the same -- a person's influence was not dictated by what level they had on their company profile (there is no company profile at Apple). In my opinion this approach was much better, and significantly lessened the internal competition for promotions.

"The argument for a pay cut" ...

Another argument is that if tech paid everyone the same, everywhere, it would greatly exacerbate income equality issues in a lot of places.

Tech is certainly not altruistic, as you point out, and generally wants to pay market rate rather than output rate or whatever. But it doesn't make less true that it would worsen a whole bunch of social problems by paying people the same everywhere.

Another another argument would be that income inequality is not the fault of employees but rather the fault of management, whether politically, culturally, socially or all of the above.

That is a ludicrous argument. The whole income/wealth inequality is not about working people earning more, it is about capital owners earning vastly more due to various reasons.

Some businesses do earn more due to ease of access to additional capital, and hence can pay employees more, but the root of the income/wealth divide is certainly not employers paying employees more. It is certain employers (capital owners) getting disproportionately more in the first place.

Tech employees are simply in sufficiently high demand relative to supply that they can demand a piece of the pie. But there is no point in trying to address a problem by addressing its symptoms rather than causes.

Specifically, in this case, paying Alphabet employees less in the name of helping the income/wealth divide only helps other owners of Alphabet stock be even richer.

"That is a ludicrous argument. The whole income/wealth inequality is not about working people earning more, it is about capital owners earning vastly more due to various reasons."

Uh, what? No, it's about where the money is concentrated and how that concentration changes (or doesn't) over time. It's true that other forms of earning have a bad effect on this, but i'n not sure why that's particularly relevant.

To whit - tech folks, paid in SF dollars, but living in various cheap ares of the US, are in the 0.1-1%. Easily.

The fact that they got there by being paid rather than some other form of wealth accumulation, is irrelevant. They will stay there just the same as anyone else.

Why would it be any less unequal because someone is starting in the 1% by getting paid a ridiculous salary on a regular basis rather than earning money through the stock market on a regular basis? Why would one not transform into the other? It's rhetorical of course, since that is what will happen. In fact, it's what the tech folks moving want to happen. They want more money to buy a large house and invest and retire and be richer than they can be in SF.

" But there is no point in trying to address a problem by addressing its symptoms rather than causes."

You haven't, at all, explained why putting more people in a seriously unequal position makes anything better, or why it's "pointless" to avoid doing that.

It's not pointless. It avoids more inequality. Does it avoid all of it? Of course not. But again, the other way demonstrably makes things worse.

Do you have a concrete argument as to why it makes sense to keep doing that?

Because your entire comment feels precisely like the rest of the discussions around this - "it's not my fault, i shouldn't earn less money, it's the other people who are at fault. Particularly the ones who have 10x/100x what i do".

> paid in SF dollars

There are US dollars, there is no purpose in framing something as SF dollars.

> You haven't, at all, explained why putting more people in a seriously unequal position makes anything better, or why it's "pointless" to avoid doing that.

They are not being put in a more unequal position. An economy with money flowing in is helping lift people out of an unequal position. Maybe not all at the same time, but if anything, it is helping in the long run, not hurting.

> It's not pointless. It avoids more inequality. Does it avoid all of it? Of course not. But again, the other way demonstrably makes things worse.

The other way is money staying with the company? I do not understand how paying employees less and letting the employer and hence shareholders keep more could be better than spreading wealth to more employees in more places of the goal is to reduce income/wealth inequality. The other way is some places continuing to stay poor and some places continuing to stay rich.

> Do you have a concrete argument as to why it makes sense to keep doing that?

> Because your entire comment feels precisely like the rest of the discussions around this - "it's not my fault, i shouldn't earn less money, it's the other people who are at fault. Particularly the ones who have 10x/100x what i do".

The argument is that you do not want to disincentivize people working to earn money. That is a good thing for society. Go ahead and increase marginal income tax rate/implement wealth taxes, but there is no reason to regulate prices between market participants.

If tech ends up paying more, then more people will be attracted to tech, and supply of labor will increase, thereby reducing the inequality.

There's a few things here that are subtly wrong.

> How promotions work is a committee of higher-level engineers (eg L7s consider promotions to L6) and will have 10-15 packets to assess. These will get stack ranked by the committee. If you're above the line you'll get promoted. If you're not, you won't. Ruth's change just made that line a little higher.

FWIW this is no longer true for a lot of orgs, and will likely soon be untrue for all orgs. Also fairly sure that stack ranking within a single promo committee was never how it worked.

> That only applies to the salary plus bonus (since bonus is derived from salary)

Currently, however management is on record stating that this will change in the future, since I don't know exactly how, I'm not going to speculate, but the intent is for equity to reflect the compensation regions in the US eventually.

> I started losing a lot of sleep, and I got a lot of headaches and back pain. I got a lot of "brain fog": inability to concentrate or make decisions. I started forgetting words and names and losing the thread of a conversation mid-sentence. I felt like I had no energy left for anything other than work, and I could barely manage that.

Other than back pain these symptoms match mine exactly, except I hadn't worked full time for the past 2 years and I wouldn't say I'm stressed or anything. I'm not sure what it is - maybe cabin fever? Yesterday I nearly lost consciousness when I got up too quickly. I'm also losing weight (12kg so far, which would be great if I knew _why_ I'm losing weight). Did a blood test about a month ago - everything is fine. I did wonder if these are vaccine side effects, but that seems very implausible - the second dose was in May. But I digress.

I totally get what Jay is saying in his writeup. I largely felt the same way except in the opposite direction in one aspect - the number and shrillness of "activists" has become overbearing to the point where it was severely impeding work and morale. Seeing that he has pronouns in his twitter bio he might have been more sympathetic, but I bet this stuff distracted even him.

Contrary to belief popular on the outside, Google is indeed a fairly stressful and thankless place unless you're skilled at self promotion, which I'm not, or you don't care about working on cool things and getting promoted. This is why every time their recruiters ping me I tell them I'm not interested "at this time". No matter how much they pay me, I can't imagine subjecting myself to such treatment again. And I was pretty successful there - high profile projects, wrote lots of code, shipped impressive stuff, and I still felt like shit most of the time. I can only imagine what less "forceful" folks feel if I felt like a gnat on this elephant's ass.

Contrary to belief popular inside Google, life is great on the outside. Freedom is a thing folks, and without moving around you aren't experiencing it. I know when you're on the inside it feels like you're "changing the world", but of all Google products nowadays I only use Gmail and YouTube. If everything else disappeared completely I wouldn't even notice. Heck, if Gmail disappeared I'd switch to Proton Mail in a day, and if YouTube disappeared there's BitChute and Rumble which are modest, but adequate. So whatever you're "changing" there impacts me very little, and mostly in negative ways.

I certainly do not regret leaving. If anything I should have left much sooner than I did.

I don't really want to give anything that seems like medical advice in HN comments. I just want to give a bit of information that might be useful to you or others. Obviously you should do your own research, talk with a doctor about it, etc.

Brain fog and headache are also one of the most common symptoms of long covid. Losing consciousness when getting up sounds like POTS[1] and is also common in long covid. Research is showing that people who are asymptomatic during infection can also develop long covid[2].

In general things like brain fog and headache are also symptoms of burnout and probably lots of other things, so I think it would be pretty difficult to clearly distinguish between them. There also isn't a test for it and it won't show up in standard blood tests. And of course it's also possible to have both. Some form of long covid, even if it is just "light" compared to other people who have long covid, could easily push someone who is already on the brink of burnout over the edge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postural_orthostatic_tachycard... [2] https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/study-many-long-haul-covi...

Something I intend to check on with my doctor, thanks for caring enough to provide references. Who knows, maybe I had covid and didn't even know.

All these people talking about "Google changed, man" seem like they need to consider two points:

1) So did you. E.g. the commenter who was at Google for 9 years. Do you not think you changed? You changed. It reminds me of right wing commentators who say "everything was so great in the 50s!". Sure it was, because you were a child!

2) Selection bias. You left. Of course if you take the people leaving, they'll be less happy with Google than the people who stay.

Oh, and the "Of course, when you leave Google you have to write some kind of letter or rant". Ugh. So childish. No, you do not need an exit rant. And joke or not, this was an exit rant.

> A 10% cut is pretty damn unfavorable, considering I was doing the same work on the same team

So were all your colleagues working in offices outside the bay area. That was literally your "bay area bonus". You're being super spoiled and disrespectful.

I'm sad... I used like their slogan Don't be evil. Now it's like when Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm relabels it to 4 legs are good, but 2 legs are better.

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