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Comment by strikelaserclaw | Hacker News Reader

Seems like most of the people who want to join google these days, "why do you want to join google", "for the tc and prestige"

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I just joined because I've always wanted to, and when I had the opportunity to check that box I did. I had no delusions about what being a cog in the machine entails or where the fealty of a public corporation lies.

Now that I've checked that box, I have one foot out the door at all times. Fortunately or unfortunately, no one has given me a reason to leave yet.

The "powers that be" seem to be sending plenty of signals about what kind of a workplace this is, though. I might leave sooner than I intended as a result.

Doesn't seem like the worst plan in the world.

Yeah I recently left a startup that I worked at for 6 years to join Google. At the startup I was overworked+underpaid, generally found it impossible to eat more than 2 meals a day (and difficult to eat more than one), usually worked on Saturdays (and always on Black Friday), rarely made time to visit family, and always lived on tenterhooks thinking about the next RFP we had to win. I did care about the mission of the startup but I am significantly happier now that I'm eating 3 healthy+free meals per day, working out, walking my dog during long breaks, using great build tools and learning new things while still generally having enough focus time to meet the expectations of my role. Google doesn't seem that bad to me as I sit here on Thanksgiving weekend, between hangouts with my extended family, with enough compensation to treat them all to great food.

The build tools are not great. Well, maybe the tools are fine, but the build times are killing me. Going from 5ms builds at home to 5 minute builds at work is brutal. 98% of my day is just waiting for builds, tests, CL approvals, experiment results, launch approvals and lunch lines.

I meant more that when I started the job and only had to type one command to run a giant application locally, that tooling blew my mind. No config files, env vars, not even any apt-get or cloning 50 different repos. Just boq run

Yeah it is definitely a lot of waiting. I try to work around that by having a lot of small CLs going at once. But even when I do have to wait it really only helps make this job more of a breath of fresh air, as it builds natural breaks into the work.

Surely they could do something better for humanity, such as selling heroin to middle schoolers.

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