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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> ...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.

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.

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.

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