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Comment by t8sr | Hacker News Reader

Google in 2015 had probably 30,000 employees, maybe more. And it was still completely open internally and had a real community feel to it.

One time, I was stuck in Montreal for 7 days for personal reasons (a vacation plan that exploded). I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later. It is entirely possible to keep this kind of culture going for much longer than people think.

Conversely, I've worked at companies with 500 employees that were the blandest kind of "enterprise business company firm" you can imagine. :)

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I like the old times when you could assume everyone around you is smarter than you, so collaboration and communication were never an issue. They never rely on "experts" in other teams to collaborate, they quickly and easily pick up how other systems work in depth themselves. Smart people just shine and work together to create amazing stuff.

Nowadays, you need to explain to people why unit test is needed, why you can't use production as the first place to try a risky experiment, and rely on 20 experts, one in each tiny service, to figure out and to deliver a tiny feature with bloated timeline and messy quality.

Ok, but you also just non ironically said "collaborating on an OKR".

It’s funny now, but OKRs as originally conceived were the simple, “just set a simple goal and work on it” lightweight thing, standing in opposition to the old way of corporate planning. I used to have goals like “try X and write a paper about it”.

Of course every process becomes perverted into waterfall eventually.

This sounds interesting. Maybe it's just me, but all 5000+ people companies (I actually only worked with 200+ or 5000+, never the middle so could be BS) I worked for are a lot of BS and politics. Again this is probably because me not good enough so that I don't get to do deep technical things that I want to do.

> I walked into the Google office there, made some friends, worked on a random project they were doing and ended up collaborating on an OKR a year later.

This is the coolest shit I have ever read.

Now that's a company culture of which people would want to be a part.

I work at a fairly large non-tech company in the IT department and we have this culture. The IT department alone probably has about 500 people in it, but this past weekend I found myself in a different region needing a desk for a meeting. I reached out to the IT guys at the nearest location and within 20 minutes they had a desk cleared for me, and I was able to bounce questions and ideas of them for process improvements. This communal culture is hard to find and I have no intention of leaving until the culture dies.

Is there currently companies where you can do this?

The industry has changed in a few important ways that I think make this kind of culture difficult to maintain.

First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more specialized.

Second, the industry is a lot more regulated and risk-averse, and fewer people maintain the kind of wide-eyed optimism about tech that fed into the old Google. Things are more locked down and organizations less trusting.

Third, the reasons why people go into tech have changed. It's nowadays a "good job" and there are entire cottage industries dedicated to getting you a job at a tech company. The people making their start in the 90s generally went into computing because they loved it, not because it was a good job.

I've gone to one of the companies that people from Google have been going to, and I know people at some others. They're nice places to work, but the vibes are very different. And there are reasons to think that the current cycle (AI...) will favor the incumbents, not newcomers, being already extremely heavy on GPUs and regulation.

This is a long-winded way of saying I don't think it's possible in this industry at this moment.

> First, in the boom prior to around 2015, most software problems were accessible to a smart generalist, but nowadays I don't think that's true. Teams are more specialized.

Do you mean that new areas appeared that require specialization that didn't exist previously, or that areas that require some sort of specialization have comparatively grown? (Or something completely different?)

Well, it’s more that the problems in an area like ML or security were solvable if you generally knew how computers work and were smart and good at learning new things. Switching to a new domain took a few months, but ultimately there wasn’t /so much/ you had to learn.

Nowadays, those easy problems are solved. If you want to contribute to an area, you have to learn all the context, read a bunch of papers, it basically takes at least a year. So you can’t quite be a generalist SWE, drop into a random team for three weeks and meaningfully contribute.

Put another way, the relative value of spunk and generalist ability has decreased and the relative value of domain knowledge has increased.

I think this depends on setting ci/cd and good data pipelines are like game changers in research ML projects and generalists definitely can do those it is not that flashy stuff.

conversely, I'm a boomerang Googler who worked there in 2015 and again now. In 2015, I felt like no one cared, that Googler engineering skills were overrated, and 17/23 people on my team quit in a year. In this stint, however, I'm amazed by how smart and passionate people are about a variety of different technologies, and enjoy collaborating across many teams on different things.

I think the takeaway for me is that, in a company of hundreds of thousands of people, these experiences are more situational/random/based on what energy you bring to a space/team-based/seniority-based than they are a symptom of universal company culture.

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