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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

By the end of my employment at Google I was not working very hard. Probably a few hours a day, mostly doing whatever I felt like doing. My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations" regardless of how much I achieved or how hard I worked. However, any time there was an emergency related to my function, I had everything required to jump in, fix serious problems, and then get out of the way during the cleanup then contributing my bit to the postmortem. I could tell there were very few (fewer all the time) people who truly understand google prod, and in that sense, the company seems to be OK with paying top salaries to people who can prevent the company losing lots of money, or other critical prod issues.

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I have a feeling this extends to several areas in Google. I come from the GDC side of things and have the exact same experience. To keep my job requires very minimal effort on my part. In fact, nowadays I'm punishing myself by trying to do anything "above and beyond." This is mostly due to the rapid growth of committees and the struggle for power that has come out of it (i.e., I'm more likely to be denied by a change control board over political reasons).

Regardless, I'm on my way out despite people's shock that I would leave such a "cushy" job. The fact of the matter is that the lack of challenge has actually caused me to spiral into a deep depression and the best decision for me personally is to move on.

You post strikes a chord with me. I have found over time that I personally require some mental challenge and some physical challenge to remain mentally healthy. Some days, work provides the mental challenge, the feeling you get by solving difficult problems. If we get too far into the weeds and end up in a constant state of talking about work instead of doing it, things begin to turn depressing until I need to supplement on the side by learning something new or whatever. Same goes physically for me, I keep pretty regular on working out but if I take a week or two off I start feeling sort of sad. Best of luck to you wherever you land!

I hope you’re okay pal. But good on you for recognizing a problem and working hard for a solution!

I don't know if you're familiar with the book but "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber examined this phenomenon. He found that many people with bullshit jobs are struggling with deep unhappiness. Quit as soon as possible.

Why do you look to your job for challenges. Why not simply look at it as a way to put food on the table and use the rest of your time and resources to seek out other challenges?

I can answer this- at the time I joined GOogle, my goal was to use their resources to enhance my future career as a researcher. Google gave me access to world class hardware, software, and employees, which I could use in ways that never would have been available at any other location. It helped me build and achieve a system that academia would not have allowed, that I could not have done on my own time and money.

But my goal was always to take that newly learned skill and credibility and use it to go back to academia with a stronger hiring position. I mean, that's the mental model nearly all scientists have: couple your job with your interests to maximize your impact using other people's money and time.

Is that what you ended up doing? Are you happy with how it turned out?

No, I would never return to academia now. i handle IT stuff for a large biotech, and looking at what scientist (both PIs and staff) have to put up with in academia, I don't think I'd be happy. Also, I just didn't boost my scientific creds enough to make a strong return.

This is how govt employees treat their jobs in various countries. In the private sector, there is no job security. What happens when one gets laid off with rusty skills? That's why folks want to use the existing job to improve skills. That explains why people want to use new frameworks, tools, languages at work.

i imagine because you’re required to be present in some sense for ~8 hours a day 5 days a week. that doesn’t leave much time for anything else, especially if you have caring responsibilities or any other life commitments. once you’re in a depressive state getting out of that hole can be a real struggle

Exactly, and it can turn into a horrible snowball effect if left unchecked. That is what happened to me and it wasn't until I started getting help in therapy that I was more able to understand the situation.

Why not both? Work is ~40hrs a week, so it's nicer if you have the option to enjoy it. There are other software jobs with similar pay to Google, but with more rewarding work. Win-win to switch, if that's what you're looking for.

Personally, the type of problems I solve at work are more interesting than I could realistically come up with and work on on my own. Ymmv.

The short answer is I tried - for about three years. Meanwhile, I had the onset of depression, panic attacks, and numerous other physical ailments. It's taken about two years of therapy, but I've finally realized that I am just not the person that can do that.

Funny enough, I have a co-worker who is able to perform in this way and he appears to have no issues with the current status quo. As much as I might wish I could be more tolerant, I've accepted that I'm just built different and I need my job to provide a challenging environment.

Usually, jobs with challenges pay more. I switch jobs if both of these conditions are met: a) good enough challenges, b) pays more than current job

It's exhausting being mentally present while knowing you're not doing anything useful. Using that time to actually work on side projects feels very unethical, so it's kind of just going with the tide for 8 hours a day then being exhausted at night. So the challenges I found were usually in games, not anything productive.

I have far more energy now that I'm actually productively working in a new job and seem to have lost a lot of interest in games as a side effect.

It takes third of the lifetime. It's massive waste of time and energy if you get only money out of this.

I went through a similar struggle to how I read your story. I had a cushy job that paid more than ever, my manager was great, and the work was easy, but I was struggling with depression. I ended up quitting and crashing on a friend's couch for a while, and despite making that change to be able to pursue more meaningful work, my depression didn't abate. I ended up crashing and burning in a pretty significant way, and it was rough.

The point I wanted to make in sharing this story is that I wish I had taken the depression more seriously by itself and hadn't assumed that it was solely or maybe even largely caused by my job situation. Both from my experience with mental illness and from the scientific literature I've read, sometimes the big external issues are masks or plausible excuses for your body & mind to go into a depression because it makes sense that you have a big change outside, and so you get a big change inside. Sometimes those external changes do definitely cause big psychological struggles, but other times the depression kind of comes out because your psychological defenses feel comfortable enough that you will avoid addressing the root of the problem, and only address the external circumstances which you are able to reasonably enough blame your depression on. It's like a release valve in some way, but whose function is to avoid real psychological change at all costs, because the status quo is the safest place to be for our psyches.

I'm not a scientist and you might describe this as some kind of "just so" explanation or too much into psychoanalysis, and that's certainly a possibility. But with this stuff I've found that often times our psyches are very cagey and difficult to really understand in a straightforward way. If my explaining this pattern I've observed in my own history is beneficial to you or anyone else reading this, or at the very least interesting, that's good enough for me.

I think the theory you're describing is pretty interesting, I had never thought about depression this way.

You've hit the nail on the head, and I think many people who have struggled with substance abuse disorders would agree: You can't fix whats inside by changing the outside... sure maybe changing external circumstance can help nudge you in the right direction, but it wont fix anything. Recovering drug addicts don't magically become functioning members of society just because they stopped using drugs... They do a lot of internal work, and find happiness within themselves, not within their surroundings or substances (or they go back to abusing drugs and die an addict).

If you are interested in any of this I highly recommend reading about the psychology of drug addiction more, because it is so very relevant to anyone and everyone at the end of the day (and very related to what you're speaking about). Even non-addicts can learn a lot about themselves and how to be happy, by learning how recovering drug addicts do it. If a formerly homeless heroin addict can find his way to happiness and 6 figure income, why wouldn't your average person not want to learn more about that journey for their own benefit? This is why a lot of recovering addicts wind up being more effective at life than the average person IF they managed to overcome addiction and stay sober. Overcoming addiction is like a master class in effectively living life, being happy, and overcoming anything. Its unfortunate that so few make it, but there's a lot be learned from it.

Yes!! I haven't had struggles with substance addiction, but I see SO much overlap in what you described as how much extra work and problem solving and self-leadership addicts have to foster and constantly practice to survive, let alone thrive, in what I've had to do to try to heal my depression and other maladies. It's like, I can't even begin to describe how much work it's been to someone who hasn't had to deal with that kind of a problem.

I was given an irrevocable 100 hour a week job called "try to survive while depressed" when I was 17, and thrown in the deep end with no guide, no mentors, and no reasons why. Every day of my life is a battle to keep my head above water. For years I barely managed and somehow am still here, but it is relentlessly difficult. Some days you think you're starting to get things figured out, on a roll, and then your positive wellbeing evaporates into thin air from the time it takes you to walk from your car to your apartment door. What is this life? You start to lose all hope of even figuring out any rhyme or reason or pattern in your depression, and just try to get through the day.

When it gets to be like that, I have found MUCH solace in the mantra of the substance abuse recovery world, "One day at a time." It's like an alien tongue to someone who's never dealt with the kind of waking death spirit companion depression comes to be. How could anything be so bad that you can only focus on a single day at a time, or that doing so would help in any kind of way? Thank your everything that that phrase gives you no feeling or hope. It's the last refuge of the damned.

a well paying job with low expectations sounds great, but actually sucks after a while. i’ve been there a couple times. it’s just not fulfilling. it brought out a weird mixture of guilt and sadness in me. i was getting great reviews, and by every measure was doing my job well.

when i’ve moved on from those jobs i’ve been happier, grown more, and it’s led to more money.

This is why I don’t understand when some say that people would rather not work at all if given the opportunity and still live well. As people we need challenges to keep finding meaning in our lives. I’ve also experienced depression in the past as a result of getting paid but lack of work. Zuck and Pichai’s complain isn’t wrong, it’s just that they’re part of the problem for paid employees having little work, and it’s admittedly very hard for any of us to recognize when we’re the problem. Everyone suffers from bad leadership, from the employees to the boss.

> lack of challenge has actually caused me to spiral into a deep depression

Why does this have to be at work? Google might not offer you challenges but you can go rock climbing at Yosemite every other week if you wanted to (or whatever other challenging things you like)? Especially if you only need minimal effort to hang around.

Because you often only get to join these companies if you’re passionate about your field of work.

You can’t force a programmer to find meaning in rock climbing (for example).

You might propose working on your passion for programming outside of work, but it’s complicated and people end up in two minds about that.

What if you keep the he cushy job, and use the money and freedom to find more meaning outside of work?

Learn music, art, woodworking, a new language…

It’s a lot harder to find meaning with less money and more work hours.

Yeah this seems obvious to me. So many people have trained their minds to rely on their professional career to be happy. In my opinion there is nothing wrong with finding something you can stand, and then devoting yourself 100% elsewhere to something you love or want to learn/explore.

That's how I think of it. You pay firemen for their ability to solve a problem quickly and efficiently, and for being able to execute when called upon.

Giant companies making money hand over fist pay a lot of "don't fuck this up" salaries. The primary goal for everyone is to keep the money printer running smoothly; everything else is secondary.

Firefighting used to be very lucrative as people was willing to pay a lot to "solve the problem" when their house was on fire. Also one house on fire could possibly mean the whole city could burn down.

It's worth noting that the beginning, the end and the middle of Scrum and what most companies laughably call "Agile" is to prevent exactly this: the entire structure is there to force every developer to interview for their job every morning and prove they're making "contributions" (it doesn't matter if they're good contributions, they just have to be completed by the deadlines).

Such a beautiful metaphor for the daily standup!

The key difference is people understand you’re paying the firemen for the emergencies- but a lot of SREs are actually firemen but paid like developers.

When everyone is quietly pretending you’re not a fireman but you are it leads do a disconnect where everyone is playing charades.

The people handling the emergencies should get paid considerably more than developers - when they system is down, the real, actual, company-sustaining money stops coming in.

But on the other hand they don't add new features or push product forward in any way.

Maybe this is okay for a late stage company that is in the value extraction mode. In that case the private equity playbook is to lay off the app developers, and they can throw more money at ops to increase efficiency of the shrinking pie.

On the other hand if you're in a highly competitive growth industry then you need to innovate, and if you optimize for SRE talent, you won't have sufficiently senior engineering talent to find the right balance between innovation and stability.

> SREs are actually firemen but paid like developer

Firefighters who also do development work to reduce fires and make their firefighting easier.

That said developers also do firefighting. They can be an escalation point for deeper system issues that may elude SREs.

Reading this caused the following factoid bubbled up in my mind: the leading cause of death for firefighters is now heart disease. The 98% of their time that’s not responding to calls is evidently spent napping and eating lasagna. I’m not naysaying this arrangement, it’s how it has to be. I don’t see why it should be too different at Google, for some employees anyways.

Isn't the #1 cause of death for everyone heart disease?

Yeah, but for a long time previously it was things actually related to fire (burns, asphyxia, internal trauma, etc.)

> My managers consistently gave me "meets expectations"

That's because his bonus was probably tied to your performance. By making sure all his subordinates receive meets or exceeds expectations, then he looks good. His manager does the same, all the way up the chain.

They played the same game when I worked at Amazon. What's more, it became automated. They introduced non-optional surveys that popped up on your computer daily. At first I assume it was a well intentioned system to gauge general employee sentiment. It was annoying and stupid HR bullshit, so of course I immediately went in and disabled it. After a year or so, my manager finally notices and orders me to enable it again. I soon guessed why. Within a few months, we start having quarterly group meetings going over graphs of the answers. And of course, the surveys aren't anonymous, so he would call out the people who gave bad answers and start grilling them about their issue in front of everyone, if they didn't immediately recant, then they would "schedule a meeting". I assume his performance bonus had become tied to the results and everyone needed to tow the line. It was amusing to me how many of the younger employees didn't understand the game they were playing and would continue to answer honestly. I just glanced at the options, picked whatever made my manager look good and went on with my day.

You'd think those idiots in charge at the upper management levels would have heard of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." But apparently not.

Seems like the feedback would need to be reviewable in a "skip level" fashion for that to work.

> That's because his bonus was probably tied to your performance

Or they just don't want to take on the burden of getting you to improve. PIPs are a pain for everyone involved. If a manger hands out anything lower than "Meets Expectations", their next step is to help you get there, or gather enough data points for HR to safely see you out the door

That's bullshit and you're gonna scare the shit out of any junior Amazonian reading this unnecessarily. Obviously nothing is TRULY anonymous - at the end of the day there is a super secured database that HR can go into if there is a need. The data is there much in the same way that every email you send is discoverable in a lawsuit. Or if you get fired and bring a USB key and copy all your data they'll get it. Nothing you do on a work computer is truly private.

But that doesn't mean anyone's manager has access to some secret dashboard to get any of this data or is able to view it on demand. Short of a serious legal case it just won't be relevant.

Noone's manager has access to individual answers and neither does anyone in their org chart.By default, week-over-week, that connections information is private.

What actually (probably) happened is your team's scores were shitty and somewhere up in your org chart noticed and started giving your manager shit to improve them. Then they went in and decided to use their best guesses about who voted for what to start harassing people to figure out how to improve things.

They absolutely epitomized Goodhart's law and they got the result they wanted - you stopped giving a shit and voted for whatever got them off your back.

That sucks but thats not how it is on most teams. Every team I've been on used this data bi-weekly or monthly to have an honest review of what we're doing well and where we need to improve. Nobody gets picked on. If there is a clear outlier where one person was unhappy we don't try to find out why but I (as a senior leader) try to be vocally self-critical and try to come up with multiple guesses and/or reasons for why they might have said that, and what could be done about different root causes. (TO not force whoever was the outlier to speak up).

Your manager sounds like an idiot/asshole, but the least I can say from looking up your name is at least your former manager isn't managing anyone anymore!

"But that's not how it is on my team!" is the dumbest and yet most common response you hear from Amazon employees when they hear about Amazon's horrible business practices. The whole company is in fact a team. You are part of the exact same team.

My main message was that NO - that's not how it is ANYWHERE at the company. Connections data isn't available to managers de-anonymized. Period. On any team.

This post also has nothing to do with Amazon's business practices, but rather HR practices with employees.

Lastly, yes, there are some facets of what I wrote that are about my team. But this is the case anywhere. Some teams have good manager. Some have bad ones. Good ones rise. Bad ones fall. That includes using the same tools and techniques for good or for evil.

I absolutely do see Amazon as one whole team. That's why I felt the need to comment to make people working on other teams not think that this poster is revealing some secret insider information, and new SDEs be scared thinking what is happening with their 'private survey' results.

The REASONS for why there is such a variability in process and culture between AMazon teams would need a whole other blog post, but the tl;dr is: The #1 focus of Amazon development teams is delivering results and getting things done. This is done by removing road blocks and incentivizing RADICAL autonomy on the teams - way more than is available at tech giants of comparable stature (whether Apple, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft).

The upside of this is a tremendous sense of autonomy and responsibility offered to every engineer which is empowering and addictive.

The downside of this is that toxic managers can thrive temporarily and ruin good teams through misused autonomy. They do get weeded out, but it takes time. And good people can be lost along the way.

This is not an excuse, this is an explanation.

I stand corrected about the anonymity of the surveys. I wasn't a manager and I can't say I paid much attention during the meetings. But there are a lot of sub-managers who have just a couple of reports and it can't be particularly hard to figure out. Still, I shouldn't have stated it as fact. I'd edit the post if I could.

You didn't confirm or deny that manager performance was tied to those connections data. Care to clarify this? As I said, it was a guess on my part.

My manager was actually a great guy and our group was productive. He only got that way after the surveys became a thing and - I'm guessing - his superiors started getting uptight.

Heh, I like how you checked up on me, but use amzn-throw for your comment. Comms is watching you Wazowski, always watching. Anyways, I still stand by my general sentiment.

My primary HN account has a lot of other things in it that I'd rather not be associated with me being an "Amazonian", hence this one :)

Manager performance is not tied to connections data. However, manager's performance is tied to the kind of facets of team cohesion, productivity, satisfaction, and delivery that the Connections data. Does that make sense?

And it's not a terrible proxy. For example, it would be relevant if a manager was measured on their ability to hire and retain people, right? Well, if certain connections questions have a direct correlation with people leaving the team, you can imagine someone would tell the manager "Fix this connections score, or else people will leave the team."

But if they fixed the connection score, but people still left the team, they wouldn't be able to get away with that as a success. The metric is a proxy, not the target.

I have never worked for Google and likely never will. Stories like these make me wonder why we put X-Googlers on such a high pedestal. I don't mean that personally in an offence to anyone. It's just a general observation.

I did not come away with anything from the story that would make me have a negative opinion on author's technical capability.

I didn't see it as negative as well. Rather, it's not special. Not exceptional. It's just a job. It sounds like all the other jobs out there.

If you were early at Google it means more as going through that hypergrowth was very difficult and there was less dead weight. But for the last 10 years Google means essentially two things from a hiring manager's perspective: 1) you have decent floor of basic technical ability as no one stupid or a complete faker makes it through the technical interviews (but note it's a low floor as anybody with 100 IQ and reasonably technical mind can probably brute force their way to passing if they want it bad enough) and 2) if you were successful there you can deal well with large-scale system complexity and (likely) the politics of working with many partner teams and stakeholders. It's not foolproof as any given individual, role or team could get lucky in terms of having relatively high agency and fewer dependencies, but on balance anyone L5+ is going to have to deal with a fair amount of that.

Given the 15 years of essentially unconstrained growth and moats from any real competition, I think your assessment is largely correct though. The name brand reputation of Google far outweighs the likely strength of any given candidate, especially if you expect execution without limitless resources and industry-leading technical mentors/gatekeepers at every critical juncture.

The reputation of ex Googlers was established in the early days when they were tremendously productive, the bar was genuinely very high and turnover was tiny so there were very xooglers to begin with and they were mostly founding startups.

Over time Google grew an enormous amount. Productivity dropped through the floor due to endless headcount expansion, the bar did get lower and "I was at Google for two years" became a much more common thing to hear. But first impressions stick so Google still had done of that early day mystique.

Source: was at Google 8 years, early days, still have friends who work there. Saw the changes with my own eyes.

I think it’s actually a good thing to just have a pool of people who know how stuff actually works.

Otherwise there could be very key infra that only one or two people fully understand since the code is “mature”, doesn’t need modifications, and nobody wants to work on it.

In theory of course, I’m sure in reality the digital world isn’t at the mercy of <200 SWEs who gave up on promo and live in the basement.

This is an interesting question to me — do software engineers follow a Pareto distribution on their impact?

That would imply that around 1,000 SDEs are delivering 38% of the impact in the field.

A change in culture which drove out that 0.1% would potentially noticeably drop the UX of “tech”, across the US.

Impact is hard to define, I’m just talking about sprawling code bases, decades of reorgs, title changes, corporate priorities, and the very important little bits that just kinda make it all run.

Maybe the distribution is relative to the company's Eng org?

Were you an SRE? What you described sounds very similar to what I experienced.

I started as a test engineer on an SRE team (ads database, which I think no longer exists), did a mission control rotation, and then sort of found a way to be a software engineer (non-SRE, which pissed off the SRE leadership) and run my own projects in prod without any real oversight (that was exacycle- using all the idle cycles in prod). I used my knowledge of SRE and my good connections with SRE to run my service with minimal impacts on the $MONEY$ services.

Later I did stuff that involved working closely with SRE and hwops but always SRE-adjacent, not part of SRE. I had a standing offer to join multiple SRE groups but chose not to because I can't do oncalls while my kids are still at home.

What are test engineer roles like at Google? I’ve basically only spent my time in startups on critical systems (defense, finance) so have no idea what it’d be like at a larger company or team.

This was a long time ago and it was a "bespoke" position created by the SRE team. I set up a continuous build and then fixed bugs until it went green.

Test engineers at Google at the time (~2008) were expected to build test infrastructure, rather than writing unit tests (SWEs were expected to write unit tests and integration tests), or to build complex system tests.

Yeah that sounds pretty familiar to my experience! Right now I'm in an infra team and work on the CI pipelines, testing frameworks for devs, testing infra, etc... So more time dealing with docker/k8s than a unit testing framework that's for sure!

It's varied. Some posts below describe the standard software test engineering. Test engineers on Google Fiber would buy every microwave and 2.4GHz cordless phone and baby monitor, and see if our changes to interference mitigation algorithms improved or regressed between releases. So you're basically in a lab trying to break Wifi algorithms, probably not writing much code. (Also things like "does our change to move iPhone 6 to 5GHz when it's closer to the 5GHz access point also work with and iPhone 5?")

> which pissed off the SRE leadership

Really? I thought Googlers could move internally with little friction and yada yada. Is that just propaganda?

No, you can move easily, which is why he could piss off his current leadership without consequence.

Being able to move doesn't mean your current manager will be happy about you moving. The "easy" part of the process means that they just can't do much to sabotage you or your future.

At the time (2009 or so) it was hard to leave SRE and be a SWE because SRE had a hard time keeping employees given the oncall and nature of the role. My mistake was to tell people it was easy to leave SRE, which the head of SRE didn't like. He called my new manager and chewed him out. To his credit, my new manager told me I wasn't in trouble, but to be more circumspect when dealing with predatory leadership.

I wonder if it's still that way. At Meta it is not, you need to go through an interview loop to move from Production Engineering to SWE (even though the culture at Meta makes PE far more similar to SWE than SRE is to SWE). I bet the reasoning is the same: they don't want to make it easy for folks to move from PE to SWE.

I’ve had someone unironically tell me SREs are just people who are too dumb to be SWE so there’s probably more to the gatekeeping than just on-call lol

Often times the interesting teams knew who they wanted to fill headcount with. They would say "stop by for an informal chat", then in that chat they would interview you on (e.g.) very niche terminology. After that they would tell you it is not a good fit. Tried to go to 3 different teams on my way out of Google and none of them were interested. I think it is a bit of a status game, like they are looking for a PhD or to justify a visa.

Specific examples, an Android static analysis team and Fuchsia security both passed after informal chats (unprepared interviews). I've spent a ton of time in reverse engineering frameworks, malware, and building automated code analysis solutions (with tons of bugs found to my name). When you have that experience, and they bring you on to do front end dev on some internal tool, like there is just such a disconnect.

chrome is still buggy, the search bar moves my plugins a little after loading and I end up favoriting an empty page by clicking the star on the search bar. I think Google engineers are highly overrated for such a simple problem to still exist

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