Why I left Google: work-life balance
scottkennedy.us
scottkennedy.us
> Only then did I realize bucket #1 had been running low for a while.
I'm somewhat puzzled. If the author is struggling to socialize with friends (bucket #3) and struggling to pay attention to physical health (bucket #2) then why does he think that this is going to help improve work-life balance:
> I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now.
I can empathize with the desire to get caught up in a high-energy startup (it's fun!) but this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Filling your days with extra work can fill the "bucket #1" (career) but it seems like a nail in the coffin for the author's problems with bucket #2 (physical health) and bucket #3 (social life).
Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.
> By mid-2021 I was tired all the time. I know I wasn’t alone, because it was an ongoing meme inside Google2. It’s only now that I realize what was wrong: I missed the satisfaction of building things and finishing projects.
The false dichotomy is the idea that the alternative to Google is to work more hours + evenings + weekends at a startup. He's replacing one problem with another, but this new problem feels fresh and new and like turning over a new leaf. At least for now.
The article really hit home for me, personally.
I've worked myself a little extra with a few of these, and I'm glad for it.
I've found a tendency in my line of work/colleagues to call patchwork acceptable, and it regularly comes back to haunt us.
We find a way to stop the 3AM calls and stop there.. neglecting that maybe one person has the necessary context and it may grow out of control again
They weren’t saying that they needed to work harder at Google to be happy, they were saying they needed to move somewhere else where they could get job satisfaction from completing projects.
I believe a better title for the blog post could be "Why I left Google: unsatisfying work" and seems more inline with what the author experienced.
Add that everything you say probably means your work life is also unsatisfying... I mean, nothing makes me happier about my work than when I get something done.
That said, while I think "offices with every perk you can think of" is definitely a part of Google culture, the "living at the office" stereotype really only applies to younger folks. Once you have a family, living in a van in the Google parking lot and showering at the gym doesn't really work.
Are there actually folks who live in a van in the parking lot or is that a healthy bit of humor?
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-employee-lives-in-tru...
It's the kind of socially awkward but technically allowed "lifehack" kind of thing you can imagine a stereotypical Googler coming up with.
He was living in a crappy studio apartment in the bay area. He decided to try and save money by buying an RV and live in one of the known Google shanty towns in an unused office parking lot. We all teased him that he would never find a girlfriend without real plumbing. He lived there for about 6 months, until security politely asked him to leave because the company wanted to start using the parking lot.
This whole passage had me in stitches. I'm glad I asked. I may never heard the phrase "known Google shanty towns" again but I will probably never forget it. Cheers.
Maybe they did it long enough to save up money for a house.
Restaurants and bars is getting a bit iffy, because that's an inherently social activity and I think you need wider horizons than a hundred fellow Metamates.
Yes, there are cafes and they serve dinner. There is a gym and a game room and other perks. And you know what? At dinner time, there's only a handful of people eating and the rest of the office is a ghost town.
I'm sure that some people do end up with their life revolving around Google. That's probably particularly true for people who got hired right out of college and moved for work. But most people I know seem to have very balanced work and personal lives.
I think people love the idea of a narrative that everything that appears nice about working at Google is actually secretly sinister and is making Googlers miserable but, like, maybe it's just a good job, you know? Maybe they offer all the perks because competition for software engineers is high and it helps attract talent.
Obviously, there's many valid criticisms of Google, as there are with most companies their size. But it's not a supervillain fortress full of trapped minions or something. It's just a huge corporation that found ways to make a lot of money per employee thanks to the magic of software and data. In industries where the marginal cost is zero and competition is still high, this is what you should expect to see.
I left to give a smaller startup a shot. I've been there 6 years, and the project continues to keep me engaged and fulfilled. They wrote meals into my employment contract, which I thought was pretty funny. They've followed through with it, although it's not as nice as having dozens of themed cafeterias. I've struggled to consistently hit the gym the last few years because of the relative inconvenience. It's my own lack of self-discipline, though, rather than any pressure from work.
Basically: reduce activation energy, increase desire.
I think I am justified it blaming myself for lack of self-discipline. I lost about 8lb since November by calorie counting, due to having elevated liver enzymes. I've gained about half of it back since my enzymes went back to normal though, because it lost its relative importance. My best guess it was due to a medication rather than my weight, and I changed medication. I have a serious and rare medical condition, and the medication I'm taking is probably going to give me cancer in a few decades, so if I'm going to motivate myself to do something it's playing with my daughter or a hobby. If I obsessively worked out, maybe I wouldn't even have the medical condition, but that doesn't seem to be something I'm capable of right now.
10 years ago I got really depressed at work and started working out 3x a week with Herbalife "health coaches". I ached and was hungry all the time and it was great. I was 40lb lighter than I am now, and could do 100 pull-ups. I know I'm still physically capable of doing that, yet it also seems impossible. Laying on the couch reading hacker news seems more important most of the time.
You have free weights at home.
> I think I am justified it blaming myself for lack of self-discipline.
The harsh side of me agrees with this. You have all of the material resources to set up a really cool training setup.
The empathetic/caring side of me disagrees. "Self-discipline" is certainly a thing, but you are also dealing with a medical condition and maybe your body shouldn't be working out in the way that your rational mind thinks it should, plus you want to be a good father to your daughter. Plus, your regular workouts seemed to always have a social component.
Your sub/unconscious needs will dominate whatever "self-discipline" you try to consciously apply.
That's the diagnosis. If correct, the prescription I offer is:
Find a way to do "workouts" which involve your daughter. I started taking my son to the gym when he was 8, he was doing freeweights. He'd help me count reps. When it was his turn to lift, I stressed 1) low weight high reps (like sets of 30), 2) technique, 3) stop before exhaustion. Kid is eight, skeleton is not built for weight-bearing, so cannot stress it with heavy things.
"workouts" could also be walks, preferably in the park/in nature with your daugher. If you want to make it really physical for you while still keeping your daughter's pace, buy a goruck backpack and put 20lbs in it, then 30, then 40. You don't have to walk fast to exercise when carrying a heavy ruck. Your daughter stops to smell a flower? So do you, bend over to sniff the flower--- while wearing a 40lb ruck. You'll get your workout, all while exploring the world at a child's pace.
I also expect 90% of people to find that whole idea strange or unreasonable.
Fitness comes down to finding some physical activity that you enjoy, or can comfortably perform multiple times per week. I like big, 'chunky' barbell work, such as deadlifts and overhead presses, but used to solely do cardio. Some people like rock climbing, or hiking, or biking. So long as it's a physical activity, it's likely able to be counted as some kind of fitness or exercise.
If you only have the energy for fitness/exercise 1x or 2x a week, then that's all you need to start with. It won't do very much, but is a great starting point for building a stronger habit without overloading yourself.
You don't need to answer these to me, but if you end up going forward with fitness, you'll probably have to answer them for yourself:
What kind of physical activities do you enjoy? Do you have any fitness goals? Are there any weird aches or pains you have that might be lessened with regular exercise? How many sessions are you willing to commit to in a week? Are you willing to follow a healthier diet?
How does offering perks that people don't actually use attract people? Surely people clever enough to work at Google would see that those things aren't really perks.
The Google of 2022 has over 150k employees, the culture is way different than say, 2007. The average age of the employees these days is older.
I think the thing others are pointing out is that regardless of what he clarifies in the post itself, the title does not match the content.
It’s a confusing title for what comes after it.
At the end of a day when you worked on some task for a solid 8 hours, it's easy to unwind - work is done, work was accomplished, you know what you're doing the next day.
At the end of a day when you spent the whole day trying to find out what you should be doing, didn't find anything and will resume that the next day...you can't unwind. Were you doing the right thing? Maybe there was someone else you should've contacted? What if you don't find it tomorrow? Is the organization broken? Should you try to fix it? (No) - there's a lot that you can't help but think about it.
In an environment like this the incentive is to become a bottleneck for a lot of projects (so you get at least some that get delivered) and then a) do nothing on most to outwait the inevitable cancellation b) do the minimum possible work on the remainder, but make it seem as complex as possible.
Even with low hours of work this becomes a very stressful environment as if you are trying to get something done, you have to be constantly convincing people you are depending on that the project is worthy of category b). While doing the exact thing to the people depending on you. Turnover makes this hard also as a small percentage of coworkers are very valuable to you (you can trust them to prioritize your project).
From my experience this stress stretches into your out of work time, making the WLB worse even with a reasonable amount of "in office" hours.
I'll never forget the launch. I was sick, and sitting on the floor of a war room live-coding a script to give every attendee $1. Python, had tests, and it persisted its state to SQLite so that we could Control-C it if our service got too slow. It didn't get too slow; we did a lot of load testing and capacity problems and the launch was very smooth. Most fun I've ever had while sick. (10-year-older jrockway wouldn't go to work while sick, though.)
Thanks for the insight on why Google makes so many braindead decisions. It's so frustrating I'm ready to abandon them entirely.
Strategically, this is called being a Fast Follower. One of GOOG's problems is that it acts in the market as a fast follower, but tells itself internally that its an groundbreaking innovator. Your reaction (which was also my reaction),
> Nothing I ever do here is exciting. Thought maybe working on app with over a billion users would be exciting...
is a form of corporate-wide cognitive dissonance between GOOG's propaganda and reality.
And that's why things slowly rot away. Cleanup should be a priority, otherwise it eventually slows down new feature work.
In fact, a project should not be declared finished until its inevitable follow-up cleanup tasks have been completed as well. Just like a party weekend is not finished until you have cleaned up the mess after. Somebody is going to have to do it, and if it's not you right after you're done with your deliverables, then somebody else will have to do it. Possibly yourself further down the road when you actually want to do something else more exciting. Just like doing the dishes. Nobody wants to start preparing a big meal by having to do the dishes from the week prior.
In business, we don't have to be adults.
Somehow this pace of low energy, zero initiative and low motivation also crushes your motivation for personal project.
Atm I am in a super demanding job, requiring me to overwork, make decisions on the spot, work on problems etc.
On my free time while I want to sit down and watch some TV, go for running, enjoy a nice dinner or whatever... I FEEL EMPTY!
I am fixated with my work... its not healthy and its creating low motivation for me. It feels like work has taken away all pleasures in life for me. It is not HEALTHY at all (I am currently seeing professionals about it)
Generally anything in moderation is key...
P.S. I do overwork myself for someone else to enjoy the fruits of my labour... sad story.
But well if you are depressed at your job... how bad can it get?
And can really the money you make from a job make back for the depression? My personal opinion is NO!
I can appreciate this feeling, because I've been living it for awhile. If I can borrow the original author's metaphor, as my career bucket sprung a leak, my other buckets were filled, and I've been just fine with that. As others have pointed out in this discussion, this is really all about perspective. If the career bucket is really important, then you will tend to that (but, again, here's where the metaphor falls apart, at least for the author -- he noticed his other buckets also leaking, but he focused on the career bucket [which, of course, is fine if it works for him]).
Yes, the constantly changing landscape of my work can be a mental strain at times, but, for me, it's the devil I know. I've invested 15+ years with my employer, and I know the domain well. I don't want my other buckets to lose water in an effort to fill my career bucket, at least right now.
tl;dr;
To each their own.
Having clear and achievable targets (that are achieved!) and consistent expectations is much preferable.
Now that he enjoys his work more, he's finding that he also has more energy for gym / social situations etc.
I had the same experience in big tech. Lack of work progress made me depressed and bled into other parts of my life.
Startups have their own issues, but at least there's more momentum on most days. Important to go with well-funded ones in this environment though, preferably by the top VCs: https://topstartups.io/
Their hybrid you-have-to-come-to-the-office approach basically means that you still need to live in an area near to the office, which basically means no real benefits from remote setting.
Ironically for me I went the opposite direction, now working at a large tech company I have more than enough work to fill my plate. I am no longer worried about not doing enough:D
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But I do agree the conclusion for leaving being work life balance seems incorrect.
I completely understand finding it unsatisfying to work in a situation where you're not making any progress. It's something that I think is the worst thing about my current role, and the lack of progress contributes to burnout in its own way. But working weekends and nights regularly is another, faster way to burnout, especially for someone who has a family.
Agree that the title could be better worded though.
I personally find working harder is the only way I can survive. Being unproductive is depressing because it brings lackluster mediocre life/rewards with it. With life that is less rewarding and dull, my mental health suffers. Spiraling downwards. It has happened twice.
On the other hand, I never get burned out no matter hours or effort. Building stuff is too much fun. Building stuff with super cool people is even more fun.
Early Googler's were the happiest bunch when it was in a startup stage.
So, I can relate with the author more than your cynical take on this.
Because buckets #2 and #3 are low, people are having a harder time accepting a bad hand in bucket #1. If you have a good life outside of work you can push through bad work environments for a while.
I mean sure, the author is in a somewhat luxurious position. But then, why does anyone leave Google if not for some version of this.
Many times that is taken from you on larger teams.
It is odd that HBS and value extractors (business/finance/project/marketing) have taken so much power from value creators (creatives/developers/product people) in terms of the power balance, most people know that makes bad products and was really the basis of capitalism starting, ownership of direction.
> In his landmark 1776 work The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith showed that a clever division of labor could make a commercial enterprise vastly more productive than if each worker took personal charge of constructing a finished product. [1]
The project managers and finance want to make the product now, from a value extraction viewpoint over a value creation one. It ultimately leads many value creators to go do their own thing.
No matter how hard they try to remove the creative element of product creation, it is actually a key input to successful projects.
Products are like creative works, they should be built with depth, deep dives and aim to be a fun experience and friend of the user.
Bottom up processes can create great products with polish and love, they are value creation processes.
Top down processes and deadlines create shallow features and products, they are value extraction processes.
The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors.
> The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors.
This is consistent with the development process I've used with my game/app (nebulous) for the last 7 years. I learned very early on that players responded directly (as in told me via reviews and emails) and overwhelmingly positively to frequent substantiative updates. Early on it pushed me to find my absolute limit: ~2 weeks of < 4 hours of sleep each night, on a ~28 hour day schedule.
I kept bureaucracy, overhead, and expenses to a minimum and have been fortunate enough to reap the rewards over an extended period of time. My focus has always been on maximizing user experience first, revenue second.
More power/product decisions from the bottom or the developers/creatives/value creators than the top down project managers/finance/value extractors.
Yes, making your own projects is almost a requirement or having side projects when work in on a big team on your day job or other projects. Everyone needs a creative outlet and programming, no matter how hard they try to remove it, is a creative process.
While revenue/value extraction is important long term, it is much easier to sell when love/value creation is present. You can't market and extract value from value that isn't there. You can't rush a quality game mechanic that makes all aspect of your game fun.
Creativity doesn't always fit a 8-6 tightly wound agile process focused on just revenue, you need some open mode or play with that closed mode. It is why indies and artists or writers perform better when they can control their own destiny more. With less oversight directing you to short chance important parts or prototypes, there is more play and open mode which always leads to a better refined product especially where "fun" is part of the product.
This has been the key pitch since Intel at least, perhaps even Fairchild.
Agree. Some rationalizations in this post reminded me of a recent "Mourning loss as a remote team"[1] entry.
Being exited and happy for 9 hours a day at work abd coming home with a sense of accomplishment can actually give you energy to do more for the othe 15 hours.
Based on personal experience.
And it works both ways. If you are drained by your job, you get home exhausted and want to just lay on the couch. If you are energized by your job, you get home excited. You feel like you can take on the world and then might be up to go to dinner with friends instead of drained and depressed and want to stay home and eat ice cream to console yourself (my personal go to).
The same goes in the other directions. If you are healthy, you will have more energy for other things. If you are unhealthy, your body will drag you down, it will be harder to do other things. Think of having a broken leg or a lot of pain. You just don't feel well and will bring that feeling into other parts of life.
Energy management isn't a zero sum game.
However, I think you do point out something else. Throwing yourself into work because you want to avoid dealing with issues in your other buckets is not an energy gain. But there is a key difference between working more to avoid painful things and reigniting a spark of joy in your work.
Something I try to do whenever I read articles like this: Whenever you see the name of the giant corporation that the author worked at, replace it with "my team". Google has over 100,000 employees, so there's no real "here's what it's like to work at Google". At that scale, there is too much variance for any simple neat summary (though there are certainly trends and commonalities).
I've met people who worked at Amazon who described it as a hellscape of misery and others who felt it was incredibly rewarding. There's been times when I worked at EA when I loved my job and times when I hated it.
A single data point is useful, but it's only a single data point. I'm glad the author found a better job that fits what they're looking for. That's all any of us really want in our careers.
I think a better suggestion would be to say that when you read articles like this you should ask if the author has the right perspective to know what the truly common elements of a company's culture are or if they're extrapolating from a single data point.
Yeah there are teams coasting by. Of course, there are engineers working 60 hours a week who will tell you about their excellent work life balance. Some of it is relative.
Still, Google is obviously not the hacker-driven company it used to be 10 years ago. Almost all data points suggest that Google lacks internal vision and leadership (likely outside of a few key areas). This sounds like a typical multi-national corpo w/ a lot of money to burn.
Google has a culture. Large companies have a way of operating. I don't think any of OP's comments are at all off-base for Google. A lot of what OP wrote is fundamental to any organization with tens of thousands of people.
And you know something? That's fine. I know people who are very happy there, and I know people who are miserable there. There are times in my life when /I/ would have been very happy in that sort of place, and there are times in my life when /I/ would have been completely miserable there.
A lot of that comes down to personality, and a lot of that is situational.
For example, I want a very different employer if I don't have kids and can throw my life into work than when I'm dealing with a difficult family situation. I've been in both situations.
I would be completely miserable at Google _right now_. It might have been a dream job out-of-college, and it might be a great job again in just a few years.
That's true, but blog posts written solely by people who left are unlikely to capture it well. There is an implicit selection bias in play. People tend to write most about transitions, but if you want to know what it's like to work somewhere, the people you really want to ask are those right in the middle of it, because that's where you spend the most time.
I am noticing a (darkish?) pattern in these recurring “I transitioned jobs” reports. Worryingly, they represent many of the words I imagine myself writing if I were again a blogger.
It’s basically the honeymoon/wanderlust cycle. Person gets job. It is a dream job. It is described as a dream job because of reasons a1, b1, and c1. Delta t passes. Things have changed. Because of reasons x1, y1, and z1, job is no longer a good dream job. It’s now a bad dream/nightmare job. Person has awakened now, and for reasons, a2, b2, and c2 is living a new dream. Blink, flinch, repeat.
The nagging suspicion is that while things change, they don’t so much actually. They shift around. What does change is how we come to see things. At one point, we convince ourselves things are awesome. Later we believe it’s not. Which is the real truth we ought to accept? It’s like trying to measure the one way speed of light. You can’t, just the sum of the round trip.
So do we make the assumption that somewhere in the middle of this good-to-bad cycle is the reality? Or suspect it was always that bad, we were just able to initially gaslight ourselves? Or perhaps that it was and still is good, we’ve just let the negatives creep in and take over?
Some would philosophize that all happiness is an illusion. Or a choice. Or whatever.
But what frustrates me about this (having been through this cycle 3-4 times now), is that it is not a universal life experience. I have relationships with family, friends, and various institutions that grow stronger and stronger over time. They do NOT loop like work relationships do. Is there something inherit in work relationships that makes this loop inevitable? Do all experience it, or only a certain mindset of persons? Are there cases where this loop is broken, but they just rare enough, you don’t hear about them? Should I despair or hope?
Relationships are different though. I see work as primarily transactional, whereas personal relationships work best when they aren’t. In a friendship it’s common for both people to grow in the same direction, while a company is inflexible and doesn’t respond to your individual growth so it’s more likely that you’ll “grow apart.”
I suspect that exposure to constant stress at work causes us to have negative feelings over time (burnout), and the easiest way to reset the emotional clock is to get a different job working on something else.
But some people appear to be highly resistant to burnout, and I’m not sure why. I’d definitely like to learn more about it, though.
You should meet my mother
I've had 3 "dream jobs." I only regret joining one of them and it basically followed the pattern you describe, and I think I just narrowly avoided entering into this cycle in my most recent job search. In the last year, I had multiple opportunities to continue the cycle and switch jobs to another local maxima, but I think I broke the cycle, but mostly by refusing to keep playing the game.
I had weekly conversations with my friend who ended up hearing about all of my job complaints and this friend was able to see how my feelings about work changed over time. At times this friend was ready to hit me over the head because of how repetitive my complaints were.
Every time I interviewed and got a job offer, I would convince myself that I wanted to switch companies because company Y was offering me more money and responsibilities than company X and I thought company Y would give me growth opportunities beyond what I would have at company X. I would rationalize the decision in a lot of ways and would be thorough in comparing the pros and cons of switching to company Y.
And then I would talk to my friend. And my friend would say "okay, so company Y is offering you more money than company X. What do you want to do?" And I would say something like "I'm not 100% sure if I will be happy at company Y, but they're offering me more money and the company / team / product is cool. If I'm not happy in 1-2 years I can use that money to start my own company and be in a better position."
It didn't seem like I wanted to work at company Y that badly if my answer to "what do you want to do" isn't "work at company Y!" I justified my decision to change jobs by finding the things I didn't like at company X and contrasted them with the things I liked at company Y.
Leaving company X needs to be a separate decision from joining company Y in order to make the best decision. In the past I always considered them as the same decision. Even when I was interviewing at lots of companies which should have given me more choice, it always came down to making decisions about company Y based on company X instead of being about what I wanted to do for the long-term.
I talked to a bunch of other friends and family about switching to company Y and everyone else except this one friend went along with whatever I said. Some people lightly questioned what I said but only to see that I had an answer for their questions, but the human mind can rationalize basically anything and I had already fooled myself into thinking I wanted to switch jobs when I was just unhappy with company X.
I fooled everyone except my one friend, because my friend realized that my decision-making process was fundamentally flawed. That gave my friend the confidence to push-back on what I said. Having a contrary perspective gave me the space to reconsider my decisions.
I quit my job at company X and am currently trying to start my own company since that's what I wanted to do all along.
But Google is terrible for our industry. On the whole. And for many people who are trying to get satisfaction out of their work.
For innovation generally, and a terrible employer for people like TFA writer (and myself). The more people who quit to go to startups or smaller companies, the better, because it will ultimately accelerate technology and innovation. This is precisely why compensation at Google is what it is: to capture a chunk of talent and cordon it off from the potential of creating value elsewhere... to keep the revenue firehose running there but most importantly to make sure none of that revenue firehose ever diverts elsewhere.
All the talk of "innovation" there amounts to: we want your intellectual property, yes, but if we can't get it or it's not worth much, we mostly want you to not create intellectual property elsewhere (or for yourself). And we'll pay absolutely handsomely to make sure that nothing you ever think of or write contributes to the success of anybody else.
That's how a behemoth like Google survives.
I'm surely not the most amazing engineer in the world, but at Google I was a mediocre one. Not technically, mind you, but organizationally: I was terrible at playing the game, writing the design docs and getting the comments, presenting my work to other people, snatching "impactful" projects before others could take them... and showing it all off to perform the promo dance. I sucked at that, and that is primarily what success at Google is about...I failed at it... Except they didn't care, that was all fine, there was plenty of space to just plod along... because they don't need you to succeed. Just not succeed somewhere else.
But before Google I aggressively contributed to the success of some of the companies I was at, including ones competing with Google. Once I was at Google, I was no longer doing that. And, actually, it became clear to me... that was my actual value to Google...
You can tell the author is mostly worn out not from long hours or challenging technical work, but from fighting against the overwhelming inertia that faces building/shipping anything. It’s exhausting.
I recall reading a thread on some facebook group where the OP was freshly hired at an (undisclosed) Large Company with amazing compensation only to do... well, nothing in particular for there weeks at the time of writing.
Commenters tried to make sense of it and figured that either no one is in control of the budget or he's essentially "parked" for a project that's supposed to launch at the start of the next quarter.
But perhaps the said company was large enough to engage in such practices.
My personal experience says most mid-sized startups don't do any better on most fronts either. Contrast the process you described "writing the design docs and getting the comments, presenting my work to other people" to "the SVP engineering feels we should do X by Friday even though it isn't urgent to business" and the former doesn't sound as bad. In fact, you have way more agency in former.
The promo game sucks, no doubt. But there are games at play in companies of all sizes. Promo games in some, authority games in others.
How often is that viable?
For me, I work at a FAANG like company and I kind of hate it. I'm doing work that touches 1-2 billion people but it's just not fun. For me, WFH sucks. My best times were in small companies with small teams where people had to work together to do stuff where as my FAANG job you just pull off of piece of the never ending list of work to do and do it.
I do feel the golden handcuffs though. I need the money to retire. I'd give it up for a job I was sure I'd like, for one that I think has a reasonably okay chance to succeed, and for one where if it succeeds I feel like I got a reasonable %.
To try to be clearer on those last points. I wouldn't need to replicate my FAANG like compensation. I just need to believe that when the company does well I don't feel that all I did was make the boss rich (which can be the case in small companies)
But, I no longer know what kind of job I'd be happy at.
we all end up in the same place—six feet underground
And you know what? That's exactly what Google wants.
Keeping you out of the job market and out of competitors' hands is worth every penny to them.
I don't have the answer for you about what's next, because I quit in December and haven't picked up anything new yet. But, yeah. That's my take.
This is why it is so hard to financially justify working for a startup. To cover the risk requires large outsized gains. And financially the 15 percentage points drop in salary could easily be say a 50% drop in disposable income.
Yet the pleasure is worth the price.
And the above ignores any longer hours (I personally struggle to value my time or satisfaction, in either dollars or opportunity costs).
I’d be over the moon with that 50k job, never mind the 300k one. Even with currency conversion I’d be up 10k/y
America, fancy outsourcing to the UK?
+ enough salary to pay my bills
+ I work more hours" and even "on the weekend now"
+ enough equity
All of these are actually worse or much lower chance of being better compared to a job at Google.
I'm inclined to agree. Working uphill in a complexity jungle (organization or technical) can drain the soul.
The most important metric is consistent and passive income from wealth. Once you have "enough" of such passive income, you can spend your time on self actualization.
Most people don't reach the level of passive income required for their chosen lifestyle quality, and so cannot expend time for self actualization. So instead, they double up their career and make that the mode for self actualization (after all, two birds one stone and all that). But i do believe that it mostly does not work, unless the job is somehow a 1:1 mapping to that particular person's method of self actualization. Unfortunately, a lot of people kid themselves and pretend that it does match.
I could sympathize with OP if this "loss of productivity" meant sitting in a physical office twiddling your thumbs, but Covid changed the game. I cooked during meetings. I sat in the sauna, did yoga, played videogames, or hung out with my friends when I was blocked. When I was waiting for blaze to build/run my code, or was waiting for presubmit checks to pass (shit took forever), I would switch tabs in iTerm and would work on my side project. I never touched my corp laptop after I figured out how to VNC/SSH in from my personal computer.
If it weren't for mandatory RTO I would still be at Google and I probably would be for the rest of my career, or till my side hustle was bringing in serious cash. We'll see how remote Facebook compares. If it's at all similar to remote Google, I am never going back to being an employee at a startup. In a post-covid world, having a "meaningful" corporate job is for suckers. It's all about minimizing hours and maximizing pay.
He clearly was working on projects at google that were exhausting for his scope of mind, the specific hours were less relevant than the fact that he was spending 30-40 hours a week could be "wasted" hours, even if he's now doing 60 hours a week, they're all more gratifying.
Many things worth doing can't be accomplished without a team, sometimes a large team. It can be impossible to do this solely on passive income (unless you're a billionaire or something).
This is an opinion with which reasonable people can disagree.
You write as though it’s impossible to hold a job you don’t love and at the same time work toward self-actualization. This is clearly not true for all definitions of self-actualization that I’m familiar with.
Sure, part of the job being satisfying can be that you actually need the money so doing it means you provide for your family. While still craving that the job be intrinsically satisfying.
As a thought experiment, can you imagine hunting being more satisfying to a person than eating a farmed cow? Maybe it satisfies some innate desire to hunt? Maybe they like they challenge?
Now could you imagine that same hunting being far more satisfying if they are hungry, or if their family needs the food, than if they already have access to infinite food?
Similar for job satisfaction. Many people might be most fulfilled when doing something challenging where generating work product directly translates to meeting material survival needs.
i challenge the notion that this can apply to many people. It applies to _some_ people - arguably, a very small number, compared to the number of jobs.
The activities that many people self-actualize on are likely to be non-essential and require capital to perform. Activities such as sports, arts, music, literature, etc. Very few people would self-actualize on being a carpet cleaner, flipping burgers, or being accountant.
Also for bigger orgs, if there is already a contract with Microsoft, Codespaces will be the likely choice over any alternatives.
click
I've heard about this concept often but this time reading it, I think I finally found out why it's not working for me.. Where's the fourth bucket? Where's the me bucket?
Maybe not everyone is like that, but, even though I enjoy, and find meaning in both career, exercise and family+friends, it all drains me, it exhausts me, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, and the only time I can recharge is during long unstructured stretches of time alone without external responsibilities.
Do people not generally need the fourth bucket or what?
Can we agree how screwed up our joke interview culture is when a Google engineer with 10 years experience has to brush up interview skills? Come on.
Yeah, I was in a role where I was full time managing for the second half of my Google tenure. Hence the rusty coding skills.
Yes, this also means I'm ridiculing myself on the whole OKR framing thing.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1524166696461864962?s=20&t=...
I think I get what they're saying though - they were fundamentally unhappy with their ability to make an individual impact at Giant Corp. Well, that's pretty normal and probably a reason for a lot of people's unhappiness at big companies.
A startup can help satiate that need, or even a small company.
Arguably a healthier approach is to detach one's self identity and satisfaction from work, and get that from non-work things. Easier said than done though. Inevitably this person is going to burn out hard when the start up they go to fails expectations.
I'm not agree with this. I think physical health should absolutely be the number one priority.
Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health.
That said, I would not put my health on any kind of trading table, it's the only thing that I actually own, and I can't afford to dis-own it.
Also, I don't think it's a "three buckets problem", someone probably invented it so they can talk about such thing safely in front of their boss.
You work to improve your life, and you need a good life so you can and know how to improve the life of the others (through the product you helped making). It is hard for someone to generate good results if they're living in miserable condition. A good boss should know this.
You may want to consider rating mental health higher than physical health. They are correlated, but if in doubt and/or if you need to choose, mental health is the one.
And that's where the social/family component comes in. And the work component. Both contribute to mental health. Just as physical health does. But if work and family/friends "buckets" suck, then no matter how tip-top shape you get physically, mental health will suffer.
Therefore, it makes sense to not place the physical health bucket over the other two. All has to contribute to mental health.
- a huge number of people and teams pigeonholed into narrow specializations
- a huge number of corporate interfaces, silos and bottlenecks
- ever increasing bureaucracy to maintain the fragile infrastructure of personnel
- depersonalization of employees as the role they were confined to, rather than the talents they possess
I thought this was laugh out loud funny. I was in need of a good laugh so thanks for that.
I'm curious though did you just walk away because it wasn't for you or something else? Isn't just getting in there a colossal months-long interview affair?
Family circumstances just changed and it wasn’t going to work out. It was a heartbreaker but i was glad to have done it.
For that role i think i did ten interviews. The previous attempt was 14 and i didn’t get an offer. Its a bit shorter loop for xooglers and in the past six years I’ve had two other offers but there was always a confounding factor. One was comp, I’m not SWE and in every case i did or would have taken a pay cut.
Interesting you've had two other offers from Google since leaving? Why would they require a pay cut? If you don't mind my asking what's your area if not SWE? Are you on the AI or research side?
Infosec.
[1] From Wikipedia: Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful."[14] The study also found that while there was some correlation between occupation and feelings of uselessness, they did not correspond neatly with Graeber's analysis; bullshit "taskmasters" and "goons" such as hedge-fund managers or lobbyists were vastly satisfied with their work, while essential workers like refuse collectors and cleaners often felt their jobs were useless.
It sounds like a shady org and the CEO sounds like a total jerk. I too remember having a really poor impression after reading this.
He also publicly slandered said employee and never corrected himself. It’s a big thumbs down from me.
> While I still think that the totality of the design decisions was a clear a privileged copy, I don't think it warranted my reaction. I'm sorry for that, and I give you permission to publish Riju.
Like thanks for giving me permission to publish MY weekend project that you have 0 say over what I do with, and blame the project as being a copy over “design decisions”. Meaning, a square box with the name of the language overlaying it?
Instead of owning his mistake as he should he basically claims “I have to remember I’m not the struggling kid from Jordan anymore” to avoid taking responsibility and shifts the blame to this ex-intern anyways.
You think he would have apologized if the guy's post didn't get massive amounts of attention on HN?
If you're making a sincere apology you don't try to cover your ass ("While I still think that the totality of the design decisions was a clear a privileged copy") at the same time.
There will always be assholes in life, and they're not going to stop being assholes. But they do sometimes control billion dollar companies, and we sometimes need to work with those billion dollar companies. Getting a real impactful change in the world is much more important than the satisfaction of the fall of an ego.
Your argument now is “So what, many companies are headed by assholes, deal with it” which is just your opinion.
I chuckled at this one. Middle managers gonna middle manage.
I know a lot of this behavior is simply due to the position in which they are where senior managers and execs wont take no for an answer. But you have to make tough choices: If you don’t believe deep down that you can deliver, push back hard rather than playing games.
> This sounds simple, but expenses for a family of three with a house in the Bay Area are no joke. It wound up being ~85% of my Google salary.
I live in the Bay area, but under exotic conditions. I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college. Am I don't the math wrong?
> I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college.
Bay Area is definitely livable on far below $500K.
The "2 kids in college" makes your math impossible to guess because that could be anywhere from a minor footnote to the entirety of your budget if you're trying to pay full sticker price tuition in real-time with no prior savings (which almost nobody does, but it would make the math look terrifying). That's not really a feature of the Bay Area, though, because you'd carry that college line item on your personal budget wherever you moved.
Correct about not including RSUs in that footnote. Since I've always budgeted to live off salary and not bonus/RSUs, they weren't part of that particular calculation.
Obviously my W2 will look very different in 2022, since RSUs essentially get treated as cash grants and startup options are illiquid.
Family: Grocery: $20,000/yr Daycare 2 kids: $48,000/yr (yes daycare is $2000/mo in SF... to START) Transportation: $8,000/yr (car payment + insurance + gas) Annual one week "really nice" vacation: $10,000 (4 round trip tickets, 2 hotel rooms, food, transport, entertainment etc) Misc costs: $10,000 Total: $96,000
Comes out to about $230k/year in raw expenses. These are pretty accurate for 2021 San Francisco 40 minutes walking distance from FiDi. Of course there's no way you'd qualify for an $8500/mo mortgage on that salary (19k/mo) so instead you'd have to settle for a 2 bedroom condo ($960,000? maybe? can you squeeze 2 adults and 2 kids into 1050 sq feet? long term?) for the four of you, sharing one car.
You might be able to pull this off on $300,000 with substantial help from family if they are local, but after taxes etc you will be struggling to save 1% of your income and not really building/maintaining an emergency fund or building savings for other projects/hobbies.
That's way too high. https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-calculator/ gives ~83k/year at presumably today's interest rate (5.61%). At a quite plausible 3.5% it's ~65k.
You’d need to show your estimated incomes and expenses and explain your retirement goals.
As a Bay Area native it seems high unless you’re paying $50k/yr for expensive colleges.
I’d expect the same to be doable with a reasonable social life and vacations for 300k (still a lot).
Many make do in the same situation for far far far less.
I have no reference for the bay area living expenses, but it isn't correct to say that just because something was once doable that it still is.
You definitely don't need $500k to rent a 3bed apartment in the South Bay. I think market rate is probably around $5.5k/mo? Call it an even $6k to include parking and utilities. Should be comfortably affordable on $200k with breathing room ($200k for a married couple with claimable dependents being roughly $146k after tax, $72k going to housing, $74k post-tax for whatever else), though not sure about kids' tuition.
Right now is a terrible time to buy a home in the South Bay (rising interest rates + RTO) so don't take all-in home ownership costs at face value.
It goes up from there. Townhouses are getting close to $1.5MM now in the same area. I haven't followed prices in SF recently, but they are no better I assume. I think you'd be priced out of a small house on the peninsula at $500k/year.
If you're paying for college times 2, I don't know, $500k sounds kind of minimal with 7-10k a month mortgage if you want any sort of ability to save a meaningful amount of money.
Keep in mind you'll be paying $30k+ a year in property taxes every single year for the privilege of that house.
My colleagues have a greater sense of urgency and are more biased toward action . I do believe the saying (paraphrased) “you are a reflection of the people you spend the most time with”, and I think that’s how the energy and action I get in my work life “trickles” into my social life and fitness goals.
Not necessarily good reasons to have a family. But reasons that do exist, unfortunately.
Oddly, I also really enjoy repls in general. Repl.it has always been a big way for me to learn quickly and to explore programming language edge-cases, and even think about code-reviews (when trying a simpler code I may want to comment on). I'm interested in Replit, as I've never heard of it before.
Best of luck!
What I believe is being discussed is something different. It is having meaningful work.
For many people, life just isn’t fulfilling without productive achievement. And for many, career is the space where productive achievement is pursued.
Think about how a single 30 minute video meeting can drain all your energy for the entire day. This can be so much worse than long hours or stressful deadlines.
When people talk about work life balance, they tend to talk about x hours doing A, B, C.
But, even if cliche, the quality of these activities is what determines the level of satisfaction, of fulfillment.
You can spend 4 hours a day with your spouse but if your relationship is terrible and you bicker the whole time, is this good work/life balance?
It won’t feel like it.
I applaud OP for seeing on some level how precious each year of this limited life is, and making a self-aware choice about how to spend some of them.
You found the secret. Small companies rock, no amount of clout or equity can buy you the sanity and clear conscious of not having to deal with the Organizational Mire.
The suggestion is that teams are atomic, that projects are scoped larger than what teams can do, and the bag-of-teams for a given project is volatile - because teams are seeking the highest reward projects. What's missing for me is an organizational cadence where projects pitch, teams shop, and then all commit for some period of time and then evaluate in phase.
Maybe that approach is too static. It is interesting to think about teams independently managing their committments as bandit experiments inside the org.
Second point - maybe 5 years and hundreds of "leaving Google" posts ago. And the author doesn't seem to try to make it bigger than it is. TFA is exactly that - an explanation of a career decisions which HN found good/resonating.
>"I left because I needed to fix my work-life balance."
The summary paragraph then states: >"I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. But what I do makes a difference that I can see. Progress feels 10x faster."
It doesn't appear that they fixed their work-life balance at all. It does sound like they may have fixed their work-satisfaction balance however but that wasn't the stated reason for leaving.
It also makes me think that my philosophy about work is probably not compatible with working in a startup. Normalizing excessive working hours is something I don't see myself doing any time soon.
I've worked at startups and Google. The glacial pace of the latter can mean working late feels necessary to get anything done. And even tiny changes can take forever so the feeling of having accomplished something of value is infrequent at best. Maybe it gets better at higher levels, though the internal memes don't give me much hope.
Some people are suited to big corps while others prefer start-ups. Nothing wrong with a little diversity.
this hits all big companies - it's fascinating
You had Tasks / Save email to tasks / etc for a decade and did nothing with it.
Im being forced to use MS task management and they've caugbt this and actually implemented quite well.
What am in talking about? I gues im just moaning that its a symotom of what this blog post is talking about, amongs many others.
Ok, that is taking it to the extreme, for sure, but Google has been, for a long while now, an evil behemoth. It tries to funnel an increasing chunk of people's activities on the Internet, using that to help commercial companies sell you products and services you probably don't need (already questionable manipulation), and moreover - collecting huge amounts of personal and inter-personal information for the US and other governments to spy on you, and gradually also to more carefully filter and control what information you get access to.
> Google was incredibly good to me. I had some incredible teammates and role models. My family’s financial situation is forever changed. I got promoted fairly steadily and was set up well to keep advancing. > > So why was I unhappy?
Apparently, not because of what Google does to most people. Which is not "incredibly good". Don't go work there.
I don't need a lot of social; my bucket is probably a bit smaller than most peoples. I have very few close friends but still too many to catch up with as often as I'd like.
I've had some back issues and so physical health has had an increased priority recently-ish because, as I've been told by my ever-loving, ever-suffering wife, I'm not as happy a person to be around if I'm not regularly playing sport. So, I'm both playing sport as well as increasing core, back, and general physical strength in order to be able to continue to play sport for as long as I freakin' well can. Physical health, done right, is a massive consumer of time and headspace.
I have two kids that I love spending time with, interacting with, and developing into rational, well-balanced humans (hopefully, if there is such a thing). This is also a massive consumer of time and both mental and physical effort.
I've been to a couple of funerals recently, and the shit that people remember, the things that touches and changes the lives of those you love and choose to spend time with, is a million miles away from "work" or "career".
My bucket #1 gets the spill-off from the other buckets, enough that the bucket doesn't go dry.
Note: I'm aware the above is entirely my personal experience, and there are people I know who LOVE their careers and are happy to sacrifice other buckets for it. My wife is a teacher, and wholly committed to educating kids and she gets legitimate life affirmation from seeing past students go on to be successful - and I have great respect for this. I work in IT, it's fucking BS that means nothing and just funds the other buckets. The two roles I've left in my "career" were for work/life balance reasons, and I took a pay cut both times. And don't regret either decision, other than both should have been done earlier.
I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. But what I do makes a difference that I can see. Progress feels 10x faster
Might feel more satisfaction but the work life balance is still missing and eventually will come back to make him write "Why I left Repl.it"
Eastern traditions have solved this a long time back. You have to break the cycle.
Have they? I don't think I've ever heard anything sane, let alone good regarding Japan when it comes to work life balance.
As for the Eastern traditions I think you're implying, the solution is simple, but not easy. Clearly there aren't many Buddhas roaming around in continuous states of bliss, and it isn't for a lack of trying. Having said that, the insight he gained when he was stripped of his 'life' balancing activities is precisely the sort of realizations people can make on their path through some of these traditions.
I very much agree.
Source?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/04/before-google-kills-...
It's "work/life" balance, BTW.