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Comment by bartwr | Hacker News Reader

Why do they sound horrible? This is a serious, non provocative question. :)

I personally loved working for Google. Low workload, great work-life balance, amazing perks, mind blowing salary, potential to do really cool stuff that hundreds of millions will use, doing really cutting edge things that almost noone else can do, ridiculously good internal infrastructure and tooling so I can focus just on my tasks, kind and friendly colleagues, nice offices. Everything about my day job and things I worked on (at Google Research) was great.

I disapprove of many other things company does, but they were completely separate from my work.

I have many friends at Meta, company I disapprove way more - but their sentiment is exactly the same.

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Many people would not like the cognitive dissonance of working for an organization that does many things they disagree with.

But from what I hear, it really depends where in google you work. I hear juniors/new grads are worked to the bone

I agree with both your points. The experience varies and depends a lot on the manager.

And about the cognitive dissonance - but to me, personally, it's not like there is one Google, but it's many companies with completely separate goals and ways of acting. And it's not just a metaphor; different orgs really do operate on sometimes opposing goals (like Android vs Pixel vs Research - I was in the middle of that, but won't elaborate publicly). I think long term it should be broken up by regulators, but that's a different and polarizing/political topic.

But back to my original point - a lot of people have amazing experiences there, so my question to the person posting it remains - how is everything about those jobs horrible? This brings me a huge cognitive dissonance, as it's so different from my and my colleagues experiences.

>But from what I hear, it really depends where in google you work. I hear juniors/new grads are worked to the bone

The workload is not too much, but there's a lot of ambiguity and very little hand holding. Even as a newer senior engineer, my work is hard. Not 50+ hours a week hard, but a somewhat stressful 45 hours a week.

But it's fun and interesting so I'm happy, plus the comp is extremely good (not quite Netflix or JS/TGS level, but pretty great).

I'd rather be a little stressed than a lot bored.

> doing really cutting edge things that almost noone else can do

like what, adding more ads in the already ad-covered search page? It doesn't need tens of thousands of engineers for that and it is not rocket science. It is gone the time that working at google and being a worker at google means something amazing. Lots of normal low achieving people at big tech nowadays which the only achievement is getting to Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Uber/whatever and then benefiting from it.

You don't think AWS, GCP, Azure, foundational models, TF, Spanner, Aurora, TPUs, M2 CPUs, realistic AR and more are impressive???

Not really. Linux was impressive. What you described is just normal incremental development. Even less impressive is to be responsible for one line of code of it. I don't deny it is an amazing engineering to create a machine with 10s of thousands of engineers working in one direction (mainly, increase shareholders value).

But being one of those ants doing the work? Nah, not impressed.

Hey the API key on your page is down.

to echo your response:

I know people who worked at Amazon and hated it. And facebook and loved it. Google people did the google world tour (transfer offices every 6-9 months and live everywhere in the world). Pretty great experiences at Dropbox.

The life-changing salary is also pretty great.

I also know people who got so bored at those jobs working on the same one tiny thing all day long.

So many varied experiences. To say they all suck would be quite disingenuous.

I know some folks (all Senior+/Staff level) who worked at Amazon and, while they would never say they loved it, they also won't say they hated it. The common denominator they all share is that working there had such a deep impact on how they operate today that they would absolutely work there again, even knowing what they'd be walking into.

I would never work there, personally. I will (and have!) walk from any employer who regularly demands more than 40 hours a week out of me.

I've just heard a lot of horror stories from colleagues about every single one of them. To be fair a lot of the complaints are typical of working for any large corporate machine. I'm not anti-corporation or anti-capitalist but the bigger a company gets the more bureaucracy, red tape, polices, layers of middle management and overall inefficiencies and burdensome "structures" get put in place.

I'm happy to hear of a counter-example with respects to Google. Since I've tried to de-Google my life as close to 100% as possible (though I do watch YouTube and I own a Pixel so I can use GrapheneOS so there's that, sigh) I don't think I could bring myself to work for them on the sole basis that job satisfaction suffers when I don't like what I'm making. But that's separate from toxic company culture, which is what I hear from these places (but to be fair these companies have so many employees that individual experiences can't NOT vary).

You're hearing from people who had negative experiences and allowing it to color your perspective of the experience of, like, well over 1,000,000 (? I don't really know, just spit-balling here) people who currently collectively work for these organizations. That's kind of short-sighted, right?

Not at all.

1) These are colleagues I know and trust and have a lot to say about their time there. I wouldn't pay attention to them if we didn't have certain things in common, re: cultural expectations and opinions on what a good place to work for looks like, which increase their weight. It's not like I'm reading random Tweets or something (I don't have a Twatter account and wouldn't work there either).

2) I have worked with a lot of middle managers that came from FAANG. They have had this weird kink / fetish about FAANG companies and how projects and people should be managed, and they constantly talk about their time at those companies and how they are taking these processes and cultural opinions directly from that world. Many are some the worst people I have ever met and they are directly representing those companies. It might be a small sample-set, but if that is any indication of the types managers that work at those places then it's enough for me to not be willing to take the risk.

3) Facebook gave us React and GraphQL, Microsoft gave us Windows & Telemetry, Google gave us a world of tech surveillance and Apple gave us... well... every Apple product ever. Those companies can't NOT be toxic based on their products. It might not be fair to single them out since they're not the only companies to produce evil but I can infer what goes on in those corporate offices after 30 years in this industry, and seeing how people from that world operate. That was implied in my initial comment. You don't have to agree with me about how evil they are, it's not a crime to have wrong opinions :P

>but the bigger a company gets the more bureaucracy, red tape, polices, layers of middle management and overall inefficiencies and burdensome "structures" get put in place

eh, this hasn't been my experience working for pre-seed, series A, F50, and FAANG companies.

In my experience, small companies often let product or MBA folks dictate a lot of what happens, and generally engineering is looked down on as worker bees. At FAANG, this isn't the case. ICs have the same level or respect and authority as managers and individual engineer opinion is taken seriously.

Because there's so much infra in big tech, you can spend an entire career barely interacting with MBA/PMs/process people.

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