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Comment by nazka | Hacker News Reader

> How did the folks at Google ship this with a straight face?

You have been doing 60-70 hours a week for a few years at startups that never took off. You tried to go into some big companies but got rejected several times. You managed to pass the first screening to the process at being hired at Google. You go through all the process. It’s long and tiring. Somehow you went through it after several weeks and so many steps. After several years in your career of not so successful job/startups this is like a huge thing. You can say to all your family and friends and girlfriend that you work at Google. The pay is great but the work is bad. They ask you to code more stuff to track people into Chrome. You evaluate what quitting would be like and what other opportunities like this you could have. And then I guess they are like hmm no. Let’s code this things from now on.

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I’m convinced at least 75% of devs consider working at a FAANG to be the absolute apex of a career, regardless of what’s worked on. Which, to me, says it’s purely about prestige.

It’s impossible to say for sure, but there’s a certain pervasive collective worship of these employers that will just not quit.

If by “prestige” you mean “enough money to work for 4 years and retire anywhere that’s not the Bay Area and never work another day” then yea, it’s prestige.

> enough money to work for 4 years and retire anywhere that’s not the Bay Area

Four years is probably optimistic, unless you got lucky with stock growth.

I searched for "average cost of living map" and found a site[1] that says cost of living at Santa Clara County is $138K. I then did a search for "average salary at Google" and one website[2] says it's $124K, which suggests saving enough money in 4 years on salary alone would be difficult.

You might think that working for Google while living somewhere outside of Bay Area would be a good way to save, but because compensation is dependent on where you live, this doesn't always work out.

[1] https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/budget-map/

[2] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Google%2C_Inc....

That's cost of living for 4 people, mind you:

> The cost of living for a two-parent, two-child family

The typical case is more likely single or DINK.

Manage the money well, throw in a couple of bonuses and a favorable liquidity event around y4 and it's plausible enough to become a motivator or rationalization, I assume.

The people building this ad tech nonsense make well over $124k. I'd wager that number comes from nation/worldwide salaries, and the folks that the original comment described aren't data center janitors or whatever. These folks get paid very well to insure Google dominance – in salary and in stock.

Thank you for bringing data to the discussion. I’m not sure that average salary is the right metric, however. The people inventing new adtech projects are being paid 4-5x that number based on my experience. Although anecdotes can only be trusted so far I guess…

That average salary must include non-engineers.

The average salary for a mid-career engineer at google is north of $300k if you assume no stock movement.

https://levels.fyi

Oh, crap. You put an actual number in your comment, and now there's going to be a whole subthread debating the accuracy of it, completely ignoring the relevant point of the comment.

Is there? I'm happy to not be making hiring decisions these days but if I was I'd definitely think twice about hiring somebody who was ok spending their days making the web worse.

In fairness, if they're applying to work elsewhere, it wouldn't be safe to assume they were ok with what their current or former employers are doing. That might be why they're leaving. I don't give points or demerits for working at Google, personally.

> there’s a certain pervasive collective worship of these employers that will just not quit

That's my observation as well. And I think this applies especially to Google: for some reason it still has the reputation of this cool tech company here on HN, even though it's an advertising and user tracking/profiling company at this point, and there is really nothing "cool" about it anymore. But criticize Google on HN and you'll get downvoted really quickly.

The collective worship is the set of people who (1a) have worked there previously and (1b) didn’t hate it, or (2) want to work there in the future.

It’s a pretty large absolute number of people, although thanks to section 1 clause b, it’s growing smaller.

YMMV, but “people who worship recent FAANG employment” can be a filter that’s positive to apply when seeking employment.

I think this would actually be bad for their careers. I believe this is all open source and in public and you would get really bad rep for building this. If it was me I would ask for a transfer to a different team.

Nah. You do this kind of dirty work at Google for a few years. Then you say that "after working at Google, you have decided to fight for users" or some other noble goal.

Now you have it both ways. You have the resume prestige of working at Google and the faux prestige of being a "virtuous person" who is willing to forgo the comfy Google life to "do what is right."

devs should definitely have their names on the products they build. same for PMs

> The pay is great but the work is bad.

In just about any other context this is called a bribe. But you're right. If that person doesn't do it, someone else will.

There are also a lot of Googlers who got in on their first or second try and genuinely do not understand end-users, do not WANT to understand end-users, and thus are very happy to implement this stuff. Also PMs who are extraordinarily metrics-focused and will buy the koolaid 100%

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