FAQ on Leaving Google
social.clawhammer.net
social.clawhammer.net
The Myth of the Genius Programmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ
The Art of Organizational Manipulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTCuYzAw31Y
I rewatch these every few years, or before an interview. Puts me back in the right headspace.
If you're reading this Ben, thank you.
It starts with some general points one could summarize as defining a "good culture" and how that should pay off for both employer and employees, but then later tramples all over it by excusing or outright endorsing the exact type of political behaviour that was criticized at the beginning: upward perception, the favour economy, finding influential friends, connectors, not burning bridges, and facetime.
edit: The mentioned plan B (leaving) is really the only option for what they call a "hostile corporation". I don't agree with many of the plan A "learning to play the game" recommendations. This just changes you for the worse.
You can't change the nature of reality, but you can choose to play the game in the service of good moral outcomes, or in servive of selfish greed.
> Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground [...] Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.
Even if this was only half-true back then, there's very little you could do to convince me that it's true at all now. This culture and the public perception of it has been squandered.
[1]: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2005-09-25-FirstWee...
It really did just feel like grad school with better funding. For me it lasted until around 2014 (wow, 10 years ago) when a director stole my ideas and bad-mouthed me to a bunch of senior folks. I hung on a bit longer (working for a close friend of the author of this FAQ on 3d printing and making stuff) and then a couple stints with ML hardware, before I finally concluded that the company was well on its way to enhittifying everything it did.
Sundar is sort of the complete opposite of this. He wants a large pool of completely anonymous programmers and a small number of directors who know how to turn those programmers into growth products, but those directors don't have a clue. For example, with gChat, one day the head of chat told TGIF that chat was changing, that japanese teen girls were the primary target, and they wanted emojis. He didn't even get that there was this enormous number of professional workers using gmail/gchat/gcal/gdocs and that by fucking up the product, he lost their trust.
Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.
It's hard enough to be motivated to work on things in a Big Company. It's even harder when you have to consciously play a game to advertise and promote your success and work -- spending almost as much time doing that as actually doing work. ... and then have others come along and take credit for your work, etc.
Success in academia comes to those who pick the right people to work with, pick the right things to work on at the right time and say the right things at the right times to the right people, all to push yourself ahead of others guised under veils and veneers of goodness. Truth, morality and the quest for knowledge be damned.
"Picking" is more than what the word suggests. It involves shutting others out, stealing ideas and actual work, propagandizing, giving out freebies but keeping the kickbacks hidden, buttering people for favors, building and fostering inner circles etc. All this is the politics.
No surprise that the ones who are left and thrive are self driven narcissists and ruthless cold blooded creatures painted in playful colors.
Google is the equivalent of the Ivy league. Hopeless, clueless and on a path to irrelevance fostered by a thousand leeches.
Some argue, the world is better because of what Google produced and hence entitled to such inner workings. Same argument as the Ivy's. That's missing the forest for the trees. The real loss isn't what Google or the Ivys have become, but the opportunity loss comparing to what they could have been, with all their resources, had they not gone down this path. This isn't the only possible outcome in this game.
Do you have a proposal to repair this? It seems any organizational effort is going to end up in a similar situation, because the people who desire to be at the top are the people willing to do the things required to get there, and that leaves little room for people who just want to pursue 'truth, morality and the quest for knowledge'.
It seems to me that the only solution to resolving this problem is to either (a) rely on a benevolent, genius, moral autocrat; (b) completely purge the leadership regularly; or (c) delegate authority to some future un-corruptible intelligence.
What is even the real question? How should we do politics?
It pains me to think this won’t be happening anymore because really, you can’t sic your brightness engineers on detecting ad blockers _and_ casually make scientific breakthroughs. Something happened to google and the we’ll be writing about for decades to come but if there’s one thing I’m certain it’s that they are done trying to make the world a better place.
What Isomorphic, the spinoff, learned pretty quickly is that protein structure prediction is not, has never been, and is unlikely to be, the most critical blocking step in developing new drugs. That won't stop pharma from investing biobucks (virtual dollars that are gated by milestones) in them. Right now pharma is terrified because their pipelines are drying up, their blockbusters are going generic, and the recent rates of new discoveries leading to new candidates (target diseases/bio pathways) are dropping, even as they invest more and more into automation and machine learning.
(By the way Mike- I always did wish you had been able to run your "math problems" on exacycle, as a way of monetizing idle cores)
> That won't stop pharma from investing biobucks (virtual dollars that are gated by milestones) in them.
I didn't quite follow this, could you maybe elaborate? What is a virtual dollar in this context? Do you mean they make promises of future payments if certain goals are achieved, but the dollars never become real because the goals aren't achievable?
Re: math problems. I remember looking at Exacycle and wondering about that :) but concluded it would have been self defeating, as it'd just have resulted in Google dominating the network and that'd have been seen as an attack.
What I’m saying is, I don’t think there’s another one project like it in the pipeline…not from the company that’s focusing its resources and talents on throttling browsers with adblockers.
I realize that this is an oversimplification and these changes take decades to become fully realized but you have to admit, it’s a bizarre thing to focus on from the company that literally solved protein folding.
These geniuses were advancing humankind and at some point and now they’re doing “this”.
As for more projects in the pipeline, well, see the sibling post by dekhn. It's hard to know what's important to work on if you aren't actually on the front lines. DeepMind did AlphaFold because it saw a way to apply its general AI research to biotech, not because it's a biotech firm.
I get that they've made a ton of money, but it also seems like they really wanted to spend their lives making awesome stuff and doing things like scanning books and making them free. And it feels a bit like the market forces took Google away from them. They put Sundar and a bunch of other McKinsey alums in charge. And McKinsey is, from what I can tell, basically the opposite of grad school.
Whenever I did see Larry or Sergei make an appearance they always looked a little dead inside and like they were just going through the motions.
And from what I can tell, the original sin was taking VC funding. Once they took VC funding, they had limited actual control over what happened to their company. So while they talked in 2004 about not wanting to be a conventional company, and while they warned in 1998 that ad-driven search engines were biased against their users, they still had limited ability to be unconventional in any way that was unattractive to investors. And that includes, in a sense, just being too different. A large company will eventually need to be run by professional management, and professional managers need a thing that looks and drives like a conventional company.
I think this one sentence describes everything, companies are all about the people at the top. Its these people that set the culture, pace and overall direction of the company.
If the founders tune out and outsource the very soul of the company to general managers, who can keep lights on rather too well. Well thats what you get. The lights will be on, it will be life as usual and gradual erosion of that very soul that was the company.
You can't blame Larry and Sergei either. There are better things to enjoy when you have billions in the bank and one life to spend it.
The DoubleClick acquisition wasn't a merger, and had no impact on anything as far as I could tell. It was really acquired for the market share not the people and iirc every DoubleClick employee was reinterviewed, maybe half didn't make it!
I doubt McKinsey had much to do with it either.
IMO the problem was more that the culture of endless hiring disconnected from need eventually caught up with it. I think once Page finally became CEO he may have decided he didn't like it much, especially as with ever greater numbers of restless/bored employees the flow of negative feedback / hate mail got bigger and bigger. People like Pichai are often appointed as CEOs when founders move on, because they will stick to the founders vision and won't make any big changes. Ballmer and Tim Cook are similar, I think, except that Cook seems to have done a better job of keeping things on the original path than the other two did. Typically under such CEOs revenues and profits increase a lot, but there are few bold initiatives or risks taken. It's easy for drift to set in.
For what it's worth, I don't think it's wrong or bad, but just the way corporations work.
What does this mean? Yes, I understand the English, but I mean deeper: What are you trying to say? And, why does it matter?
Who cares about "losing the trust of the users". What matters is that 99% of "professional workers" don't have a choice what mail/chat/calendar/word processor they use. Their IT department decided for them. And, if they do have a choice, what do they use instead?
> Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.
Most of Google is now mature products. Run it like a business -- maximize profits. It seems logical to me.
That's true until is isn't. Complacency's impact is subtle, but no company is actually invincible forever.
It is logical if all you want is to extract maximum short-term value from what was already built. To me, the logical conclusion of this path is irrelevance in the long term.
It's news to me that Sundar had anything to do with gdrive, gmaps, and gmail, except that he was head of Apps for a while, long after those products had completely established themselves.
maps and earth were both acquisitions
"The Billion Dollar Code" is a Netflix series about the lawsuit of Google trouncing the little guys. [0] is a brief bit from its creator about the impetus for the show. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty good. In the [0], they compare it to The Social Network being from the Zucks point of view, aka the winner. This story is told from the view of the losing side.
[0] https://variety.com/2021/streaming/global/netflix-the-billio...!
> Lau explained that he gave individuals from Art+Com copies of the SRI TerraVision “source code, walked them through it, and talked to them about it.” Id. at 1050–51
https://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-order...
The majority of people have no idea on how/when/where the products they use on a daily basis originated. By the time a FAANG type of company releases something, you can pretty much be assured there are casualties along the way.
1. speculation, without identifying it as speculation
2. hyperbolic words
3. absence of any contraindications to their thesis
- Small, relatively young company.
- Absolutely gargantuan amounts of revenue
You can't run a company this way unless you have a very large money firehose.
The last time this happened was early-Facebook. I don't think there has been a single company since then that fit the description - which IMO is fine, the celestial alignment of factors is pretty rare.
Companies nowadays have kind of the opposite problem: lots of hiring, but not enough revenue to show for it. Some tried to build a similar culture on VC funding but imploded once the cash ran out. You really need an intensely profitable product to make this formula work.
It's still possible for a one-off startup here and there to maybe get into this boat, but at this point the big tech players are there to slurp up the real money makers early and often and assimilate them into the borg.
If this sort of environment were what I wanted to work in, I'd probably look at specialized teams/niches inside of big corps. Surely very difficult to find, but they do exist.
So Google has really only been doing obvious ideas. Like Pixel phones, Pixel buds, getting into cloud too late.
clearly you're incorrect, since Google was (famously!) exactly like this before the ads firehose of cash started.
Part of Google's perceived aura (IMHO) when they started was that they seemed to be like the nebulous group of pre-Web Internet-savvy techies. Which were a smart group, tending towards altruistic and egalitarian, and wanting to bring Internet goodness to people, and onboard people into Internet culture. What seemed like one sign of this was times that you'd see old-school techies outside of Google treating Google like stewards rather than exploiters. And when they said "Don't Be Evil", I thought I knew exactly what they meant.
Well, the dotcom gold rush happened, huge masses of people rushed in looking for what it was about, huge money rushed in and soon tried to landgrab and then exploit those masses rather than onboard them, Doubleclick acquired Google :), techie job interviews started looking like rituals to induct affluent young new grads into their rightful upper-middle career paths, unethical behaviors became so commonplace that people can't even see them, and academia was infected a bit. Which I think means...
...If another Google happened, would we even recognize it? From where could it draw its culture that's not pretty completely overtaken by big money and all that attracts and builds?
Maybe the next Google can't be in the space of computing/communications/information at all, because big money and and coattail-riders would be all over that too quickly.
Maybe it would instead arise from people that really love to study insects. And they have a cooperative community around that, and have been trying to explain the importance of insects to the world for years, but not many care. Then it turns out that insects are the key to averting an imminent Earth extinction-level event. So the bug nuts get huge infusions of cash, and can work on all the problems they've wanted to.
And it'll be at least a few years before people with no interest in insects, other than chasing money, can really take over and start perverting the field, set up gatekeeping to pass people like them, while excluding the actual people who created and loved the field and saved the world, etc.
Personally, I have always disliked bugs, and will never be a candidate for Bügle.
Join the ant revolution!
~ ex-Googler : 2011 to 2018
The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail. Maybe you can count Scholar but it’s really just a type of search.
Workspace was assembled from various acquisitions, YouTube they bought, Cloud is just a Jack Ma-esque “copy whatever Bezos is doing” initiative.
Most home grown Google products have either failed or been killed in the cradle. G+, Stadia, etc etc
20% was always a myth.
The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium.
I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.
The graphics libraries are definitely more custom... Although in total fairness they're not entirely ground-up Apple either; Quartz was based on Display PostScript, which was acquired from NeXT, and which NeXT built in collaboration with Adobe based on Adobe's earlier work on PostScript. It's obviously true Apple's done a lot of work since then (e.g. Metal), but in that case, so has Google since forking Webkit.
It's turned out that vector images aren't that performant or easy to deal with for various reasons, although they are still used in some places.
I think you missed the point, there's two forks in the history of Blink (Chromium). Yes, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but WebKit is a fork of KHTML. So it's not like it originated at Apple either, it originated at KDE.
I've already stated that Chrome's success is not just because that it was forked from Webkit (e.g. v8, and other things that people mentioned here as well), but it was a huge jumpstart for them, and it would've taken them much longer to get a leading browser without it. e.g. Microsoft basically gave up on developing their own engine after failing with IE and the original Edge - and are now also based on Chromium.
Chrome is (IMO) much better than Safari, Maps is (IMO) a great product, Youtube is a a huge success and much bigger than it was when they bought it (homegrown Google Video failed), Android was also essentially an acquihire, as others have mentioned (using a lot of Google's resources) and is hugely successful. It doesn't change the fact that most existing Google products today are acquisitions that they improved, and not home-grown products from the "20% do your own thing" era - which is what the original comment talked about.
1. The V8 JavaScript engine, which blew away everything else. 2. The sandboxed, multiprocess, threading model.
Those were the two things emphasized in the original Chrome "comic" at launch, if I recall:
Firefox only declared it completed electrolysis in 2018, nearly a decade after this comic.
It will collapse under its own weight if Google stops spending billions of dollars on it every year.
Disclaimer: I’ve never worked at Google and have no insider information.
500k-700k is a little more realistic. 1500 employees across all domains (engineering, marketing, product management, customer service, etc) isn’t a huge number
The theory that google hasn’t birthed any original products just doesnt hold any water
https://web.archive.org/web/20110205190729/http://www.busine...
Can we really say that Danger could have accomplished the same thing? I was in the carrier industry at that time and Danger was just another handset company.
Then it was run under Google from 2006 to 2023.
Does anyone remember what 2005 looked like at all?
But people really like the narrative that Google couldn’t make a YouTube
Those are kinda important parts. Like, to the point that if they'd homegrown "GVideos" I bet it would have failed.
> Chrome.
Which was a WebKit wrapper - explicitly just the browser chrome.
I'm trying to picture a white board with someone drawing up a plan how to destroy everything and take over.
Woah, video replies, we have to remove those. Threaded conversations under videos? Lets make them into an unbearable mess and make it as hard as possible for anyone to have a conversation. We can put it under history! ha-ha good one! Wait, we could suck everyone into a vacuum and have them all watch the same videos? ~ Excellent idea!
Creative company indeed
The YouTube product which is their creator economy that exists today didn't back then. In fact, I'm pretty sure original team would've run out of money soon.
> Which was a WebKit wrapper - explicitly just the browser chrome.
And Docker is "a wrapper" around Linux Cgroups. So? It was a unique product with instant market fit - "fast browser without the UI clutter and with sandbox'ed tabs".
Chet Haase wrote a book on those years, and while it is clear that Google gave them rocket fuel to meet their ambitions, their company culture was wildly different from the rest of Google. Shipping code on Android would not have passed muster for anyone at mainline Google; the process and standards were utterly alien from one another.
There is no way Android happens without the acquisition.
Googles main successful product was amazing infrastructure. Lots of real innovation. It enabled massive scale of everything else, including acquisitions. YouTube was about to hit the wall when they got acquired.
It was already the case, at that point, that 20% really just meant doing more of what Google was already doing.
But maybe I just didn't know the right people or have the right connections or status.
2005 was still very open
But the people “leading” the place are trash.
Chrome. Photos. Hadoop. Kubernetes. Brain. Spanner. T in GPT (Transformers). And lots more. Google's real contribution was internet scale systems and how to run them reliably.
I point this out because google has had a lot of innovations that aren't necessarily now _products_.
This is technically true, but Maps before Google was nothing like what you see now. Most of the innovation happened at Google. Earth hasn't changed that much, but it's not really the killer app that Maps is.
[Disclaimer: I work at Google.]
Another example: Linux developers thinking that managing patches by email is the best approach ever, because Linux is dominant.
Someone decided to handle this situation that way, so one has a perfect right to be angry at them, and generalize that as "being angry at Google".
The author takes it with philosophy and pragmatism, that's admirable and I'm certainly not one to tell them how they should feel. But other factors indicate that his situation was also prone for that positiveness (feeling like a relief because of golden handcuffs, long tenure in a stock-distributing tech company + director level meaning that there's likely no concerns regarding money, side career already underway, maybe a relief to have some change).
Others might not be in the same situation, and are now jobless in in slow economy, with tenuous savings, rent or mortgage coming up. They might feel outright furious for a layoff that they have neither control on, nor were a reason for, and that shows no face to take responsibility - and they're completely entitled to feel that way, if that helps them cope. I'd say it makes sense to me, and don't feel bad for being angry if that's how you feel.
This is actually not a productive way to cope and it’s good advice to tell people not to cope this way.
It all comes and it all goes. Let it come. Let it go.
I mean, yes. And it'll make Mr Angry feel worse, make the people around him feel worse, and make the world worse. So the recommendation is don't do that. If someone is going to do something productive after being sacked, learning to do it out of a place of love is a skill well worth picking up. Makes the world better and all that.
I also prefer—on a personal level—to set anger aside. But anger is probably one of the strongest forces driving individuals to "make the world better".
Are you thinking of an instance? Anger typically locks in the status-quo by causing people to fight each other. Greed on the other hand has pushed us from farming monkeys into modern society with a material existence that was hitherto unthinkably comfortable. Harnessing greed created and powers the modern engine of wealth creation. And greed works best when people are thoughtful, patient, kind and calm.
Typically anger just makes people do things that are hasty and stupid. I'm not thinking of situations where I've seen it get much done. It isn't an emotion that can power long term, strategic plans - or at least not good ones. Tends to burn out or be destructive.
That isn't true. Emotions are usually rational, and may or may not be swift. Consider greed - it can be harnessed to power long-term plans, as can be seen when looking at the economy. And that is hardly cherry picking, we're surrounded by examples and it is foundational to the theory of why it all works. Consider someone saving up money to buy a fancy car. That might be a decision powered by love; is probably powered by greed and it seems a stretch to say people would do that because they were really angry with the world.
Anger doesn't have the same staying power as positive emotions, or more neutral emotions like greed.
> You are cherry picking.
You may note I'm explicitly asking Mr. matthewmacleod to cherry pick.
You way of saying it is nicer, granted.
People who climb their way to Director usually don't tilt at windmills and shake their fists at clouds.
This is very different than say, if an L3 engineer got hit with a layoff a year after joining.
Heck in any major city in the US, your average CRUD enterprise dev is probably making twice as much as the local median household income and should have savings
A number of reasons, yes.
For an individual, HUD puts the "low income" threshold at $70k and "very low income" at 44k.
The mean household income is $70k and the average household size is like 2.7.
For a household of 2 people, the HUD low income threshold is $80k. For a household of 3 or 4 it's $90-100k. Although they'd be a bit above the HUD very low income threshold
Because "getting rid of senior people" is exactly what that is.
It really doesn't look like a slow economy!
This is quite sweet in its stereotypical techie approach to life - your friends and family are asking questions about your situation because they care about and want to bond with you, not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying :-)
If you don't want to bond and spend 30 minutes getting cared about, just say "I'm fine, I just don't want to talk about it right now". Maybe follow with "And you, how are you?", but that's optional.
Again, they probably don't particularly care about the actual information.
I know it can be good, but sometimes the questions can legitimately get in the way of connection and spending quality time, and not everyone wants to have the hard conversation while being in the hotseat (especially not over, and over, and over again. I am transgender, for example, and while having 1 mildly hostile family member would be a somewhat-problem, most of my extended family only wants to talk about that thing, and that one thing, with me, to the point where it effectively creates a wall. That at least is my experience of the issue, it's not quite the same, but I've definitely experienced the "questions dynamic" within other, much-more-mild scenarios, and generally, IMPE, I really dislike it unless I'm actively getting something interesting out of it, which I'm oftentimes not! It can be very much isolating, as far as my personal experience goes.)
So, not really a terrible solution, I think! <3 :'))))
Like, sure, sometimes it is good bonding, and sometimes it's not, it's very much context dependent.
If having the emotional security of not being in the hotseat answering questions from family members is necessary for an amount of emotional security on the OP's part, then I would consider that to be a good strategy. It might not be what you would do in that scenario, which is okay, as you and OP are different and might have different methods of addressing and meeting your respective emotional needs.
Why does the techie have to go out of his way and adjust to the non techie normie?
Why don't they drink their own cool aid and adjust to the techie?
We don't like all these personal questions. Just leave us alone instead of asking the same thing over and over. If we point you to an FAQ, be like "oh yeah awesome, thank you" instead keeping on asking if we are alright. Just shut up and read the FAQ.
WHAT IS A NORMIE?
Normie is a slang for a “normal person,” especially someone seen to have conventional, mainstream tastes, interests, viewpoints, etc. It is intended as an insult but often used ironically.
Normie is also sometimes used by specific in-groups to refer and distinguish themselves from specific out-groups.
Who are these commenter's that demand for him not to post an FAQ? Why can't he just post an FAQ and they are like "oh yeah thank you very much!" and everyone is happy? Why does he have to feel bad for his FAQ and instead answer the same uncomfortable questions over and over even though he's fine but nobody believes him?
Why do these normies demand that the world adjusts to them?
Unfortunately, with where my past is, a whole lot of my family too has the idea that I'm living a distorted life, and that this needs to be corrected (almost as a first priority thing). There's almost an Animal-Farm-istic "All sins are equal, but some sins are more equal than others" kind of thing going on there, if you catch what I mean.
Intellectually, I think many of them can understand how this is not really the most rational thing given the on-paper beliefs, but emotionally, it's a very different story, and the emotions seem to win out on that front.
Answering the basics isn't too terrible for me, though it definitely can be a problem if it's the only focus (and if the conversation inevitably keeps looping around to that singular topic. I am a freaking human being, darnmnitall!!)
Has this ever happened before. It does seem like SV folks have an elevated sense of purpose. Which is maybe fair to a point because of SVs inclusion in our online lives. But really, it seems like people in high paid jobs getting laid off isn't so much news for anyone, in general.
Maybe if there's some juice about how to order the world's information, but then they'd get sued for saying no doubt.
That's what social networks and email is for, not broadcasting it to the wider world, see, you're on Hacker News, me you, them and everyone in general.
I think it is news in same sense that they got hired for jobs that paid hundreds of thousand dollars. Maybe a those truck drivers making 50K/ year really want to know about SV's best and the brightest. After all once truck divers, warehouse workers, paralegals etc finish their PhD in machine learning they will be working right along with valley folks.
You haven't met my family. They just want gossip.
Most have enough savings to be able to start up something interesting, fun, and that delivers a lot more societal value than their current Google role.
Junior redundancies are more problematic, particularly in the current job market.
Amen :_(
But also a Director is probably pulling >$1,000,000 / yr (the golden handcuffs).
My friends who are still at g seemed pretty miserable in 2023. I haven't heard from them this month though, didn't realize another layoff round hit. It's absolutely off my wishlist of companies nowadays.
- 80% get average grade. 2% get worst, 6-8% get between worst and average. That covers 90% of the distribution.
- The below-average grade is a death sentence to your career there.
- The rest, people recently found out, is half-eaten by people who get promoted.
- There's now _precious_ little incentive to put in an effort in a culture that was already known for it's rest-and-vest-ness.
- The quotas are enforced 3-4 levels up from bottom, and managers are expected to warn anyone who might get below average. In practice, that means 15-20% of people are being told they might get a scarlet letter.
- There is ~nowhere to transfer internally since late 2021. 100 applicants for every open role.
- The internal orgs all love to do whatever the opposite of "yes, and" is. And each were told to Focus™, so that leads to people having an easy excuse to turning down _any_ request. It's much more efficient to shit all over the other org and not do the work and tell your director it's their fault than it is to enable bottom-up action.
- The simplification of performance reviews also meant it shifted from being 80% peer feedback and 20% management to 95% management. And Google, like anywhere, is full of people at their worst, and their best. It's lead to a, frankly, gob-smacking amount of chicanery that I thought I left behind at immature companies. Even your average gossip-y early startup is better, because there's a certain sense of reality, instead of ad dollars that magically convert to paychecks.
- Constant, ever-beating drum of firings. There was the huge one last year, and then the sizable one recently in a couple orgs, but it's been near-constant.
- The firings are absurdly post-modern sterile. You wake up, locked out of your laptop, locked out of the office, and have an email in your personal inbox telling you they're cutting your team.
- They have to "cut teams" instead of do layoffs because of the legal / cost ramifications of just doing layoffs to drive up profits. But that opens up some of that chicanery I mentioned: have it on good authority from 2 sources that the political movers who came into the Assistant org. for Bard would ship people onto "classic" Assistant teams just to fire them.
It's really hard to explain concisely, but basically, I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone come close to that place unless they're sub 100K in savings. Nothing makes sense, nothing is real, everyone knows it, and you have a bunch of the world's smartest people optimizing for how to do the least without being the least. A lot of that involves saying no and telling everyone it's someone else's fault, and like any hierarchical organization.........
I had a committee interview there maybe 8 years ago and already that was such an impersonal feeling that I really disliked my experience and didn't continue, not that they'd have hired me in the end.
I had 2 referrals for the team I wanted to join and I thought I'd be interviewing with that teams members who knew me from various foss projects or at least knew of the projects. When I heard it was by committee my anxiety went through the roof.
I hope things improve for everyone.
There's the not-quite-randomly-selected people who interview you, and write feedback. Then there's the completely separate set of people on the hiring committee who make a decision reading the feedback and other stuff (referrals, resume, etc). The latter group doesn't talk to the former group though, just the written feedback.
If it doesn't.. I think I would absolutely hate that.
I don't interview people I know personally or refer or know from projects but I absolutely want 2-3 from my team to be speak to them and us do the technical tests.
But I'm an SRE and not a SWE and there are a lot fewer operation/platform people compared to the 6-10 dev teams of 6-12 people doing various languages one sre team supports so there are usually plenty of SWE specific people to bring on committees. My team is 6 who support 80 SWEs so there are just a lot fewer proficient IAC writers on staff.
In addition, the process adds some steps to keep a single person's irrational biases from propagating: formal rubrics, rating broken down into components each of which requires written justification, and the group of people making the decision to hire or not hire are explicitly ones who never see or hear the candidate and are deciding based on interviewers' written reports.
Maybe? What if the pool is being influenced with whatever is trendy at the time?
I would take my bias of working with a former colleague for years over what the current societal pressures are enforcing. Some may call it nepotism, I'd call it risk management.
They are amazing engineers and we've all grown together over the last decade and we know what each of us is great and at where they'd be fantastic in a company. They're SWEs and I'm an SRE so we actually aren't on the same team or anything but they know they can bring me on as a Staff/Princ SRE and we'll get things done well cross-team far beyond what most companies of disparate eng/teams gets done.
These are people super passionate about the technology. We give presentations/talks on various projects, etc. I know their skills are up to date and growing constantly. Finding someone passionate is difficult. Maybe not at google but in normal-not-faang world it is.
He didn't mention coming to the office as a complaint of his so I don't think it is one.
1. The 4% number comes from the Trinity study, which found that 95% of the time you have >$0 after 30 years. If you're >30 years from death now, a more appropriate benchmark might be 3% or possibly 3.5%.
2. $100k/yr post tax is more than $100k/yr pretax, even if it's mostly long term capital gains and dividend taxes.
3. Health insurance $$$.
So the number for you is probably a little higher maybe $5m to switch to 3% and add an additional $50k for tax and health insurance costs.
But yea the general point stands. Someone working as a director probably pulling >$1m/yr, with a long tenure, almost definitely has way over that amount. (I wouldn't be surprised if it was $20m+)
The hard part wasn't the money at all. The hard part was that I had let the company culture become a major part of my self identity. It sounds like the author didn't let that happen to him. Kudos. I wish I hadn't.
I'm lucky that not a single one of my friends has been affected by layoffs at my company, but I find apologism of bad executive management like this is incredibly bad taste if not outright insulting to people that are affected by layoffs.
Unfortunately, That is so certainly not the reality I live in right now.
Literally true. On the other hand, the founders still have complete voting control of the company, so really the buck stops with them.
It’s absolutely a person — well 3 to be exact.
Even the last few TGIFs where they properly attended they seemed very much spaced out of things.
I think now we're seeing a concerted effort across the tech industry to instill labour discipline, and break the relative power that our profession has had. Started with Twitter, then MS, then Google, and it's not going to stop until they get our salaries down, and get these businesses operating like more traditional exploitative organizations where we are disposable "resources".
The threat of "AI" is one tool among many to make that happen, along with layoffs, etc.
It’s an intense reevaluation of the American dream by the last class that was experiencing it
Workers became increasingly obsessed with political and social issues while the company was dealing with an ultra hostile administration.
Anyways, that's about when they started moving on. They got bored.
Nothing about whatever social/woke stuff you're intimating here. Sounds like you have a hammer and you're looking for nails to hi.
But if you look at Googler posts here, it's pretty clear how bent out of place a lot of them are.
All said, smart as they are, plenty less smart people leave jobs, so what's the news here?
It was the same with Twitter. There's no special 'crying place' for other jobs and departures, so why here and now?
I thought HN was about smart tech folk who like tech stories with something novel about the thing.
* Loss of trust, loss of openness. Someone kept leaking TGIF presentations to the media, so TGIF turned into contentless corpspeak and dodging of any hard questions. Someone kept leaking internal docs, so new docs now are locked down to specific teams or divisions instead of being readable company-wide.
* Attempts to start some lucrative but morally questionable projects (like the CBP contract or the China reengagement) that many employees felt went against "don't be evil".
* Cost cutting everywhere. Putting more work on fewer, burned out people. Desk hoteling in some places. No hardware refreshes. Very limited travel. And of course, cancelling or downsizing some fun but experimental projects.
* The pointlessly insulting way the 2023 layoffs were handled - e.g. cutting the laid off people off from all corp network access, even their email, without warning.
Surprised that someone like G would avoid using this as a culture/work fit litmus test and not want to fast-track great contractors.
Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
It's a hilarious rant, starting at 34:00, and the specific quote around 38:35.
I do love the weird qualifier of 'to that end'.
Would love to see a follow up in 6-12 months when the culture's flavor-aid is cleared out of their system.
. . . it doesn't like it.
I loved the office (I was also in the Chicago office, the best office at Google! Though it might lose that title without Ben Sussman to lead it) and my team was so amazing but the shifting priorities and reorgs really sapped my motivation, especially recently as cost cutting created more organizational churn. Objectively it's a good place to work, I always told Nooglers that this job in this particular location is one of the best jobs to have ever existed and I honestly think in many ways that's true. I think if you're pretty resilient to corporate bullshit (I thought I was but over time it got to me) or if you can get a good project I do sincerely recommend it as a place to work. On the other hand for me it is also true that it was slowly sapping my joy of engineering and leaving me with no motivation besides collecting a paycheck and that really sucked for a bit.
"achieving really cool things in the [..] Ads [..] divisions"?
Come on, no need to fool anyone now that you are free.. There's nothing cool to be achieved in ads, unless you were working to dismantle the entire industry from the inside.
In terms of challenge and complexity? Sure!
It's the same thing as working in military tech. You shouldn't be a huge fan of blowing people to bits but the challenges and solutions are incredible.
Please stop demonizing the very thing you enjoy using. If not you then probably your parents, etc. Google became so valuable because it gives people a lot of value.
Also worth noting that Google originally aimed to create less intrusive ads. Relevant, text-only ads with no Javascript, clearly distinguished from the search results by being on the side instead of above the search results. Those days have long since passed.
Yeah ok.
Look, there may have been a very brief time when Google was not part of the evil ad empire (maybe before the acquired Gator/Doubleclick/etc) and was in the business of relatively innocuous ad targeting.
NOT ANYMORE.
Personally I can’t remotely relate to that.
When things are going well, everyone is happy, and the culture feels solid. But culture is also important, arguably more, when things aren't going well.
There have been enough accounts like this that it's safe to say Google is beyond just smoke; there is a fire.
This isn't right. Behind every decision is still a human (for now). Someone messed up and you were the victim.
That's a giant leap. How do you know his layoff was a "mess up"?
He's not entitled to work there. No one is.
> Please understand: Google is not a person. It’s many groups of people following locally-varying processes, rules, and culture. To that end, it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google”; it’s not a consciousness, and it has no sense of duty nor debt.
This is a such a strange view. You shouldn't be angry at google, because google is just people. No mention of being angry at the people, who maybe it would be unfair to blame for "google"s actions. Conveniently there's no appropriate subject (or object) to feel about.
I think the shorthands he attacks, though they're literally untrue, are also really helpful metaphors. Large organizations have a character that no one person is responsible for and personifying them and assessing how we feel about their actions is a useful tool for reflection and assessment. Each member of those "groups of people" should reflect on how they as individuals (and their group) contributes to it. A company isn't "just" an aggregate of all people in it - but it is mostly that.
You can't hurt a company's feelings (just the feelings of the people who work there) - but you can be upset at what it does to you and speak about that.
Laying off randomly and not low performers is par for the course for the management of Google. High performers will leave when the market gets Better and the company will fill itself with more shitty performers.
This is not how a top tier company behaves.
Low performers? By what metric? And your metric sucks, that's because a single metric is meaningless, even 10 metrics are useless.
Did you do over 200 CLs a year? 10000 LoC? 10-20 design docs? 10 product launches? CL comments, reviews, bug fixed, filed?
Sure you can identify outliers, but the baseline is not exactly very telling.
In my other companies layoffs were always random.
So yes, it doesn't matter which metric you want to use, but use something that is directionally correct with being a low performer, and get rid of those people. You might get some wrong but for the most part, people will be happier that the coasters and stragglers are gone.
Hasbro's latest round still tops this though.
In both law and culture Google is infact a person in such that they inherit the rights of a person.
This is not the end of extremely large paychecks, but it's the end of potentially 30% of them.
Here you've got a guy, 18 years at Google, probably earning somewhere between 500k-1mil per year, probably $5-10 million in his Schwab account without breaking a sweat. With a little blurb at the top of his blog about "How to Leader", feeling the need to explain whether any of this is "fair" or why it's ok that "Google did this to you".
Honestly, as an industry--we need to grow the fuck up. Using the wrong part of speech or talking about what is or isn't "fair" are things I do with my three-year old when she's throwing a tantrum. Not something I expect from an emotionally mature professional in his 40s or 50s who's likely earning a million/year or more. Google is a trillion-dollar, global multinational with shareholders, and a board, and a stock price. If you don't deliver, you will be cut, period.
It's not that I even blame this author--I think this post shows a lot of maturity and self-awareness. It's the broader culture of unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.
That's not what's happening at Google.
I understand the intensity of your position on it in light of that being assumed.
Beyond that, I'm wondering if you have any examples of the `unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.`?
Generally people seem upset by it turning into a post-modern extremist firing: you show up to work one morning, you're locked out of your laptop, you can't badge into the building, you get an email to your personal email address on file, and that's it.
Maybe there was a time when this wasn't true. I spent a lot of the 2010s working in San Francisco tech jobs. It was quite enjoyable and I just got back from a guy's wedding who I worked with closely 2012-2015. Three different startups, one mine, other two as an employee. All three crashed and burned.
I think there are three possibilities.
One is that tech is somehow different/exceptional and bound to stay that way forever. I doubt it.
The second is that we were always lying to ourselves, it was always just "a job", but we were all young, stupid, and naive. This feels too cynical.
The third, which I feel is most accurate these days, is that tech was different, but now is a more mature industry, and is, as you put it "just some shit corporate world". Maybe there was a time when it was genuinely true that people got "unlimited vacation", that "titles don't matter" and that the CEO ate with the hoi polloi. But I think those days have passed. Everything's different now. The people coming into this industry today are 4.0 GPA high school kids, not misfits tinkering with computers in their basement. Competitive parents no longer feel they have to justify why their kid is going into tech rather than law, finance, or medicine. Salaries have increased 3-5x (!!). Tech influences elections, mints billionaires, and controls many facets of American life.
The problem is that the attitudes haven't kept up. These days, Google, facebook, etc are just standard American megacorps. They are some of the most valuable companies in the world with huge lobbying budgets, and tremendous pressure to deliver shareholder value.
The simple fact is that margins always get compressed as industries mature. Google has been under greater and greater margin pressure over the last decade as Apple demands higher payments to be their default search engine, OpenAI starts to steal share, and more people head directly to Amazon for search results. Google of course is going to blame the pandemic for this, but the actual issue is long-term erosion of margin. It's hard to see how any of this is going to reverse course over time.
For whatever reason that stopped happening. Google was founded in 1998 and went IPO in 2004. Facebook was founded in 2004 and had a billion MAU by 2012. It's 2024; we should have had an equally big success by now.
Are these things 'growing up'? I don't really see them happening in the ways you're describing.
At the tech giants, RTO is quite common, but I also see the creation of countless new companies that were birthed in the pandemic and have healthy remote cultures that benefit from hiring flexibly.
With respect to DEI, it's more at the forefront than ever. It's easier to hire now than it was a decade ago given the layoffs, meaning it's even easier to assess many qualified applicants and validate that you're bringing on fresh, healthy perspectives to your team.
The AI thing I'll concede though. That's been a lot of fun and I do agree is happening across the board.
Citizens United has entered the chat. [1]
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...
I actually follow fitz all over the place but didn't realize he was part of Subversion so I'm seeing this from the other end and get to trace back to his previous stuff.
> “enormous pride” in “building” a Chicago Engineering office over decades, and achieving really cool things in the Developer, “Ads”, and Search divisions
He basically built svnhub before github existed, but leadership saw little to no value in owning a code site. He knew how to build products for professional hackers who wanted to build interesting things. And he helped fund a generation of gsoc hackers improving open source codes.