A course in how to deal with ferocious intensity at Google | Hacker News Reader

A course in how to deal with ferocious intensity at Google

nytimes.com

63 pointsdctoedt38 comments

I read these articles about crazy work intensity at Google sometimes and wonder if I'm really working at the same company. I've been at Google since 2004 and have never felt the external pressure described in this article (80 hour work weeks? didn't even realize that was legal). Though I've read enough of articles like these that they surely must be based on truth.

(Of course, like any achievement-driven person I do get stressed about work, but it's internal pressure, like being frustrated about not making progress on something I find important. And that is not a cagey way of saying I work an 80 hour week.)

How long is a typical Google work week?

Not long enough to write a news article about.

I started in mid-2010. My workday starts earlier than most engineers: I take an 0640 shuttle in from the east bay, arriving at my desk around 0715. I typically take the 1655 or 1720 shuttle back home; on rare occasions or when under external deadlines I'll sometimes take the 1810 or 1840 shuttle back home. I almost always leave on the earliest 1605 shuttle on Friday. My day almost always includes a relaxing hour-long lunch with my coworkers.

So at the extreme high end (0640/1840 shuttle), I'm away from my house for about 64 hours a week. Ordinarily (0640/1655 shuttle), I'm away from the house around 55 hours a week. This includes both my lunch and about an hour on the shuttle each day, so depending on whether I work on the shuttle (I almost always do), my actual working hours are 35-45 hours, lunch excluded.

Oftentimes I'll come home and idly hack on work stuff while I'm sitting in my comfy chair and my wife and I watching her shows, but I'm sure exactly how to account for that time. It doesn't feel like work, I'm just hacking on what happens to be the most interesting stuff I could be hacking on at the moment.

It varies a great deal. Each team has a distinctive culture, and there's a lot of individual variation too.

I typically arrive at Google about 9:20 (until recently the breakfast cafeteria at the NYC office closed at 9:30, although that's no longer the case I've kept the habit), but don't really start working until ~10. If I have plans in the evening I'll leave around 6, if not, I'll stay for dinner and keep working until 8-8:30. I've never come in on the weekend.

One coworker on my team is always there before I arrive, and is always still there when I leave, but everyone else on my team floats in gradually until 11:30 (when we have our daily standup), and leaves sometime between 7 and 10.

While some days I may spend 10 hours in the office building, consider that this includes 3 meals and usually at least one other major distraction (a tech talk, a break in the game room, TGIF, or something).

Edit: I've been in the NYC office around 4 months.

Another Aussie Googler in the NYC office? Drop me a line (see my profile).

Personally my schedule varies. Lately I've been getting in between 11 and 1 and staying until dinner (6:30) or later, sometimes very late (midnight+). Not all of that is work time as I often end up hanging out with other night owls.

My team is generally on a more normal schedule. Nearly everyone in the group is gone at or by dinner.

I'm not sure there's such thing as a "typical" work week. I know that even in just my personal experience, there are long weeks, and there are short weeks, depending on the needs of the project at the time.

I have had weeks where I'd get into work around 10:00 AM and work till 1:00 AM on Mon/Tues, till 11:00 PM on Weds, normal hours (about 10:30 AM - 6:30 PM) Thurs/Fri, and then put in about 3-4 hours on Saturday as well.

I've also had weeks - like last week - where I get in at 1:00 PM, do a bunch of code-review threads & meetings, have a launch party, drink some margaritas out on the Charlie's Patio, watch a Starcraft tournament, and go home after dinner at 6:30.

If you have a good manager, their objective will be to have you accomplish a lot of things for Google without burning you out, so that you can continue to accomplish a lot for Google. And the "heavy" weeks I've mentioned above have accomplished a lot for Google - I've made more money for my employer than I am likely to make in my lifetime. As long as I don't spend all my time slacking off, they don't mind if I spend a few mornings on personal stuff and take advantage of the perks at the Googleplex.

Of all the "big company" employees, I've observed (I could be wrong) that the ones that post the most on here are Googlers with a few Facebook people here and there. This observation leads me to believe that maybe it's not so bad. If you've got a bit of time to waste on HN, you most certainly have some quality personal time as well.

Now that I think harder about it, surely HN has a non-representative sample of Googlers. So my experience (and that of the people voting up the grandparent comment) is likely to be atypical. I think Steve's comment below might be a fairer representation.

Just because more Googlers post here doesn't mean Googlers waste more time than employees at other big companies. There are lots of ways to waste time other than HN.

I think a better explanation is that Google (and Facebook, and YC startups) tend to draw from the population of developers that is most likely to read social news sites about science, technology, and programming. They hire from people who try to learn more about the field; those same developers are not likely to stop learning once they've gotten a job at a big company.

FWIW, I'm a Googler and satisfied with the amount of personal time I get. I also don't watch TV, play video games, or spend much time on Facebook, which are the big time sinks for most Americans. The bulk of my non-work time is spent either hanging out in person with friends or commenting on a handful of Internet sites (HN, Reddit, Facebook, G+, OKCupid, and an Amherst-only social network).

When I look at my social networks like Facebook or the Amherst-only one, the most active people tend to be employees of Yahoo, Intuit, Boeing, etc. From this, I can conclude that people at those companies have far more personal time to burn than I do. After all, if they're posting all during the work day, when do they get any work done?

I don't think the US has a mandated maximum number of hours you can work your employees; if it did a lot of start-ups couldn't exist.

Workhours vary a lot by teams and functions at Google. I know of teams where you work 40 hours each week and teams where 15 e-mail threads at 3 AM are the norm. I work on a team closer to the latter and it can be incredibly frustrating to hear about other employees talk about all the awesome perks & benefits I don't have time to even try.

>I don't think the US has a mandated maximum number of hours you can work your employees; if it did a lot of start-ups couldn't exist.

Actually, if there were such laws, no other valley startup could have a competitive advantage of working more hours, so I don't see why any startups couln't exist.

The effect of those laws would be to essentially level the playing field, so what matters is the end product, not how much you overwork your employees...

It could even make the quality of the end product better --since programmers would afford to pay more attention to detail instead of churning out code exhausted and dazzed from lack of proper sleep.

hey evan! it happened to me on my last project there, we were under executive pressure to ship and spent our last 6 months working 80 hours a week.

as for why you feel that this describes a different company, I think there are two reaons: 1) when I was there, (for others: I left in 2006) I felt that the pace of new distinct pockets of work culture was increasing. youtube and android really put an elbow in the curve since they were separate and more successful than the acquisitions that google brought completely in-house. 2) maybe your managers recognize that long hours equals burn out.

-CLICK-

It all depends on what team you end up on... And since you don't usually get any real choice in the matter, or the opportunity to meet your future manager and teammates to see how you'd fit in, it's a game of russian roulette.

BANG

My brief experience at google was a horror show with great perks. I was even signed up to take Meng's course. But I got a better offer for a better team at a different company long before I got to that and I left within 48 hours of receiving that offer with the management effectively suggesting I not let the door hit me in the a$$ on the way out...

In contrast, I have friends who love it there, and have been there for years. I attempted to transfer to their teams before I got the above offer. Those attempts were blocked...

So is there any formal process when you get hired for you to choose which team you get to join? For example, maybe talk to a few teams and then choose which team you get to work on and stuff?

I was given the opportunity to talk to two teams before and decide where to go when I joined Google.

Was this before or after accepting the offer?

I don't work at Google, so I'm not personally aware of the work culture (my colleagues who work there say it ranges from intense to mundane.) I also have not taken Mr. Tan's course or read his book. That said, this article rubs me the wrong way. I'm not faulting Mr. Tan or Google, in fact I think therapy is a good thing.

The article comes off as making stress at Google unique: the intensity, the level of superiority of the workforce, dealing with possible imperfections in one's self, etc. There are elements of judgment in the article, and my reaction is simply "get over yourself".

As if stress at Google has different effects from stress at any other employer. While the sources may be different, how people respond is what's most important. Whether you're a world-famous technical engineer at Google or simply a nameless cog in the machine of XYZ Corp., stress is stress. If anything, I take away that there are more than a few people at Google who could use the opportunity for therapy. (And for good measure; I think many people in the world could use the chance as well.)

If this helps people at Google get over the "ferocious intensity" of the workplace, so be it. But for those who aren't living in that bubble, it's just called stress and therapy to deal with it.

Was working on a major project recently and had the opportunity to put stress in perspective. One of my parents had a stroke the week I needed to be working on the release. Nothing is more fucked up in the modern workplace than how people will perceive such unfortunate events as "convenient". Like you made it up to avoid the stresses of work. Fuck work. Most the stress is contrived due to some BS deadline created by someone trying to meet the deadline placed on them ultimately to make sure it fits in a given financial quarter.

Note that the Googlean Exceptionalism there was invented by the author, not Mr Tan.

Yep, tried to reflect that in my comments.

This article reads like a long advertisement for Mr. Tan's course and book (which has, coincidentally, just been published).

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

When I worked at Microsoft in 2006, I saw not one, but two presenters pass out mid-presentation, both in front of a large audience, about six months apart. This was when we were proposing the Ribbon UI. I remember always being in a perpetual state of "things will get easier, it's just around the corner!"

I don't like the ribbon either.

That sounds really bad. Do they continue the meeting?

Another reason why I'm not a fan of these corporate campuses made to look like amusement parks. I don't like the idea of my office becoming a place to hang out, eat, and take naps. There's something depressing to me about the idea of a company basically saying, "Here, look how awesome we made this place for you. Now you have no real reason to leave work." If long hours are expected, then pay should be commensurate. Investment bankers' lives suck, but at least they get paid huge salaries. I may be alone on this, but "perks" are not enough to motivate me to work longer hours than I agreed to.

That said, I have not worked for Google, and I tend to believe that this article is not very representative of what day-to-day life really looks like.

The office will most likely change and what has traditionally been the office of cubicles or whatever can be benefitted by these sorts of things. Having a huge salary won't always motivate people, which reminds me of an interesting TED talk by Dan Pink [1], mentioned in the article on page two.

[1] www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

That course is called "going to work for Facebook instead".

What makes Facebook less stressful than Google?

"indoor treehouse, volleyball court, apiaries..."

Apiaries? Google has beehives on its campus? Do Googlers like honey that much? Or do they mean aviaries?

Google does, in fact, have four hives of European honeybees on the MTV campus, maintained by a group of Googlers.

It's a network study. :)

I think that's more interesting than the rest of the article. :P

So, Google offers classes on how to cope with working at Google. I guess the amenities at Googleplex somehow hide the fact that you're just a slave.

People get stressed because there is always an infinite amount of work ahead. (This is true of big companies or personal projects.) This class is about how to handle the stress properly so you don't do something stupid like neglect your family to work 80 hour weeks.

I was a submarine officer back during the end of the Cold War, doing special operations and what not.

Now that was a super stressful job & the hours were lots longer, major sleep deprivation.

Our therapy was debauched shore time in various Pacific ports, seemed to get the job done. But I suppose Google HR department wouldn't go for that.

I wonder what happened to that intensity when they were working on the speech recognition for Google Voice. What an utter POS. It can't even recognize long multisyllable names of people who are clearly listed in my Google contacts and have been for years.

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