Put your money where your mouth is, recommend the board make your CEO salary and compensation the same as when Google was 'small and scrappy' in the early years. Lead by example.
Imagine a world where their needs are taken care of outside of work. Do you really think they’d stick around?
People who are completely apathetic and find no enjoyment in any aspect of work probably are also best off working together.
Do all of us enjoy it? Of course not. Do more than any other industry? I would honestly highly suspect so, yeah.
Of all the colleagues I have worked with, the ones that I enjoy to work with are the ones that enjoy their work and are curious and passionate about their craft.
EDIT: There's actually a pretty big generational shift in how work is perceived. Newer generations both bring more of themselves into work, but also expect much more from it. These days, work being a simple 9-17 is simply not good enough anymore, given the alternatives. If you find no enjoyment in any type of work at all, I feel bad for you, because we spend such an enormous portion of our waking hours in the work at work :(
P2 - Apathetic member
P3 - Performing-but-solitary performer
P4 - Performing-and-coach in the company
P5 - Collective intelligence and ability to introduce P3-P4 to other P3-P4 because they’ll do awesome work together.
You may be at P2, but the risk of communicating too much about it, is to demotivate potential P3 into P2.
I’m not an experienced manager so I suppose this is a pipe dream. We need to account for employees with newborns and divorces, how we can modulate work for them.
"I provide the teeth, you provide the torque, I get money, you get profits. Anything else is wasting company resources."
...Where's the joy in that, and what benefit is there to rejecting company-funded efforts to inject joy?
Don't kid yourself or fall for corporate propaganda. You are a cog and you will be treated as such.
We were talking about Google "slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic." and GP opined that he only wanted to show up for a paycheck and not get any extra benefits like travel budgets.
You've reversed the context to "You ARE a cog!!!" which is irrelevant to GP preferring to decline extra benefits when they exist.
Likely not many SWEs at Google are struggling for food; but wouldn't you be at least a little pissed off?
By the time my youngest graduated in 2020 and I again had the opportunity and willing spouse to get a job at BigTech as a software developer and move across the country, I still wasn’t interested.
I kept talking to the recruiter and she suggested another software engineering adjacent job that ended up paying 20% less, but was permanently remote, I jumped at.
I have an entire room in my own house dedicated to cardio equipment and weights and my wife has another room dedicated to her dance studio and workout area. Why would I care about a “free gym” and “free food”? I don’t need “free laundry service”, the only time I dress in anything approaching business casual is when they fly me out to a customer site or a team meeting.
They didn't. No one's salary ever has gotten out of whack, ever:
It is estimated that those who take the most share out of the economic value that they generate are upper-level tech employees. And even them take only up to 10% of the actual economic value they generate.
Which means that the rest of the population get much less. The system is atrocious.
So no. Big tech salaries haven't gotten out of whack. No employee was ever able to get a noticeable share of the economic value that they generate, and those who get most get at most 10%.
After around 2012 as the economy was coming out of the recession, VC money started flowing and computers (smart phones) got more ubiquitous, BigTech compensation really started diverging from being a regular old enterprise corp dev even after taking cost of living into account.
I’m not complaining. I make a comfortable living working for $BigTech doing the same type of enterprise architect work I did three years ago just by knowing “cloud” and having soft skills.
My basic problem (I think) is that I get bored of this disposition. I like to be creatively engaged. But it’s 8+ hours of 5/7s of my waking time!! I don’t spend anywhere near that time sating my appetite, and my hindbrain wants to be the “breathing specialist” on the team, so I cede that to him. I just struggle to go on autopilot and do the disengaged worker bee thing, watching the day go by, caring only as much as needed to deliver nominal output. Every time I try this approach to save my sanity, the “newness” is cool for a couple of days, and then I find myself gradually reinvesting again, because 8 hours of “it doesn’t mean anything to me, I’m just sitting here wiling the time away pondering what interesting things I might be able to do in the scant remaining non-work hours” robot mode just bores the heck out of me and sucks my soul dry.
If you’ve got advice on how to get to this mode that doesn’t involve an IV drip of alcohol induced euphoria, I would love to hear it.
Recent example: I recently moved house. Many of my books and lower-urgency work resources are still in moving boxes. I think I need a new bookshelf, so that I can unbox some stuff. I take pleasure in the act of putting together the bookshelf. It is a 30-60min task, it is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I feel accomplished about doing this proactive step to improve my working environment. Plus I like the new shelf I picked, I like the way it looks, the design itself gives me some small amount of pleasure.
Rinse and repeat. Maybe not every day, but every week, there will be some small/tiny/insignificant victory like this. Learning to appreciate them, will not necessarily bring you lifelong joy or self-actualization on its own, but it will do wonders for improving your relationship and emotional balance with respect to work. Sometimes a big project goes wrong, everything is on fire, my boss is asking me to do some crazy unreasonable thing (but at least, a good boss doesn't ask this unnecessarily, and only very rarely), whatever... but still there are always some minor victories to celebrate, or at least partial progress:
- hey I stopped the bleeding on that production outage -- at least other teams know where to look for deeper fix
- hey I sketched out an outline for that documentation that everyone keeps asking about -- even if the content isn't there, at least people know this is where new content should go
- hey I wrote down all my tasks for tomorrow -- so even though I didn't finish things today, I can still log off and forget about them, then pick them up again in the morning
EDIT: Or, to put it another way:
- don't think about the problem as, "how do I learn to accept tedium or chores, and not get bored/frustrated/angry about them?"
- instead the problem should be, "how do I find contentment in the small details of life, that I previously overlooked as simply being tedious or boring?"
It sounds like you value doing work that brings you to life. Instead of finding a way to subvert that value, perhaps you can find a way to live that value.
Some tips that might or not be helpful depending on how similar our brains are:
- Stick to a routine - start your day with an activity of your choice instead of diving into your inbox (slow coffee, short walk, read for 20min, etc.) - laptop open and closed at specific times - no "popping on just to do a little" after your cutoff - turn off phone notifications (unless on-call) - if something doesn't get done by the end of the work day then it becomes a tomorrow work problem
It takes a while but you'll slowly build more of a door in your mind where you're able to step away from work and move on to other activities
- Make an effort to build relationships and activities outside of work so that work becomes a smaller piece of your overall life
- Reflect on how emotionally invested you're getting (in work issues) and catch yourself when this happens. It's just work.
- Brainstorm your larger career or personal development arc and walk it back to things you need to learn to get from here to there. Figure out how to work these into the projects you take on or request. If you can't check out then make your current work part of your journey and be intentional about your activities.
1. No company has ever gone out of business because I left.
2. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, my employer would send my wife “thoughts and prayers” and they would have a req open for my position before my body was in the ground.
My job affords me the ability to work from anywhere in the US and I am going to be taking advantage of that for at least the next few years to fly across the country and do the “digital nomad” thing.
But I also “live in a position of f%%% you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI). It’s been over 15 years that I haven’t been confident that if the pay/bullshit ratio got too low that I could get another job.
Small and scrappy is fun for many. I don't want to work in a megacorp with forced annual trips organized by a large HR department. I want to work on and build interesting things with smart colleagues who are similarly engaged and motivated.
If I had to guess, most Google engineers aren’t working on cool greenfield stuff, they’re maintaining and extending huge legacy projects with decades worth of cruft, where minuscule changes take days to land.
If you want great engineers to work on that stuff, you need to pay them and shower them with perks. Otherwise they’ll move somewhere small and scrappy that’s actually fun.
No. Those who are pocketing the $72 billion/year net profit should do that. Not you. If you are doing that yourself without being compensated for the value you generate, you are being exploited.
And honestly, swag is a great place to cut. It's such a waste of material and money. Most of it ends up in the dumpster.
The interesting part is that they felt the pennies nearest at hand were in their employee perks, rather than in expanding their business. That is always a bad sign even if the company we're talking about is as profitable as Google.
Not every business needs the best people working there, nor does every business need its employees to be highly motivated - it's a valid move in the extreme for Google to transition to being like SAP, but I can't believe all of the people in this thread that are defending that they have a right to do it without asking what their executives know that makes it seem so appealing.
I'd always sooner have a pay-rise, and choose my own toys.
He joined Google in 2004, the same year as its IPO. The company had 3021 employees at the end of that year.
But he also to roll a critical three times in a row on a D20 to get a payout. Just to make it have the same feeling as small and scrappy, you know.
Because getting rid of perks means higher or stable profits which means the stock goes up and Pichai makes more money.