Hacker News Reader

Comment by aappleby | Hacker News Reader

12 years at Google for me, 2011-2023. Left after they froze internal transfers the same day I was going to transfer, which put me in limbo for 6 months despite management saying they'd find a way to get it done.

Absolutely agree with this article. The disaster of Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful" was the first major crack in the culture. The layoffs destroyed what was left.

The change in frankness and honesty during TGIF once Larry and Sergei were no longer hosting it was sad to see. I hadn't watched one in years by the time I left.

View on HN

> Google+ and "Real Names Considered Harmful"

That happened right after I'd accepted an offer from Google but before I'd started work there; it was an uncomfortable shock and a bad way to begin. I only lasted a year, also largely because I was unable to transfer. It's funny what happens to one's motivation when unable to do meaningful work...

This author's remark about Vic Gundotra struck me as... a very tactful way of describing him. To my ears, that guy was a straight-up bullshit artist, and his prominence in Google management significantly damaged my faith in the organization.

Googlers that were around when Vic Gundotra was a big player love trashing him. I was surprised when this blog described him in mixed and maybe even positive terms.

I left in 2021, only 3 years tenure. The company was extremely chaotic. We had multiple calls to walkout, unionization, Sundar locking down communication in the wake of people fighting on memegen. We had company wide drama all the time. I had a list of every major dramatic happening and it grew to like 5-6 things in a year. I showed my manager and we laughed about how crazy it was.

I left and from what I hear it just got worse. Thomas Kurian gave ex-AWS people control of GCP. GCP is learning to execute like AWS but now it is becoming like AWS.

GCP has also been bringing in Oracle execs to run things. The results are very much so affecting our relationship with Google to the negative.

> affecting our relationship with Google to the negative

If you're paying them more money now then your relationship is affected to the positive (from Google Cloud's perspective).

Its pretty heartening that among all this drama and activism I've never heard of a users data being maliciously leaked from Google.

To me thats the strongest signal that user data is pretty safe at Google (one of the authors points).

They did have one incident though - https://www.thedailybeast.com/google-engineer-stalked-spied-...

And of course there was never a postmortem for Google+ and nobody was held accountable for that failure.

There was an extensive postmortem for Google+ on Memegen, search for the phrase "vicg" among others.

(un?)fortunately I haven't had access to Memegen since 2020.

Why don't you have access? I'm curious

Non-FTEs lost access in 2020 or 2021 IIRC

That's super unfortunate; memegen is one of the best perks of working at Google

Possibly for the same reason they can't access MoMa.

Actually I got the date wrong, but it's because I quit my job at Google in late 2020 and my last day was in early 2021 :). I wanted to work somewhere where I'd get to do something interesting and have a meaningful impact in a reasonable time frame. Based on my experience, I felt that would be hard to find at Google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com