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Comment by tdb7893 | Hacker News Reader

When I was at Google I mentored a lot of early career engineers and I always told them to write more docs than they think they need. Sometimes docs will catch problems beforehand but early in the career writing easy docs is a simple way to show independence and competence. It slows down projects but Google is probably gonna cancel that project anyway and my theory was "Google doesn't care about you so caring about it just makes you a chump". It was in most ways a great place to work but it slowly drove me insane.

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This sounds like you are championing the very mindset that has made google crumble?

Write docs that slow things down, don't code/build projects, and do it all in the name of greed and the only justification is that it will get cancelled anyways (probably because no real work was being completed).

I was just a cog in a machine. The mindset didn't come from me but how they setup incentives internally and ran projects. To be clear, I ended up really resenting how it works and the advice was based on my experiences with trying to care (in fact I'm trying to get out of tech entirely). I ended up channeling my care and effort into building up coworkers rather than into the company or it's products and that's how I got through it for a while. Different people had different experiences though (it's a huge company after all), anything I say about my experience is very personal.

Edit: also if Google wanted me to really care about my job more than for self interest that relationship needed to be a two way street. The relationship of the devoted employee and disinterested company is common but to me comes across as a bit pathetic. I did a good job there purely because that's how I enjoy doing my job, if the company collapsed I wouldn't have shed a single tear (that's a lie, I miss the free food)

Caveat: Googler here.

One of the things that had been problematic at Google is the creation of many more products than are really needed, leading to the infamous Google Graveyard. One of the reasons I have come to like writing design docs for my ideas is that a lot of the ideas turn out to be crap when they get written out. Quite a few are good enough that they have already been done, or close enough, which my colleagues can then inform me of. This is a very lightweight way of trimming out useless projects.

And no, Reader wasn't useless. Different story.

Docs are very useful. I liked them, especially considering how slow development could be there, It's just that in my experience they incentivized them more than they needed to. For example writing a doc while you are already implementing something only takes like a day but it looks a lot better than a day of coding to people without context. Luckily at least for lower levels they switched to perf evaluators being closer organizationally and the manager being there so at least there was a little context (though often my manager was busy enough that they didn't fully know what I was doing either). There were a lot of specifics essentially check boxes for promo and to a much lesser extent ratings and eventually I decided it was easier to just give them what they want

The problem is with the culture, that the company does not want a "boring" product that can earn a stable amount of per year (say 100M). It only wants products that grow expotentially to billions.

Google could still keep the boring, but profitable products. Just like Microsoft does (although they bundle them).

But it seems that in google promotions are not made for boring things that work.

But if they are going to cancel it anyway I would rather at least code and build just to have fun and at least have a prototype rather than doing the boring work. Also I feel like I can't get into right frame of mind of problem solving by writing a doc compared to if I am coding.

If the project is anyway eventually going to be deprecated and shutdown, maybe it's better to take one of the Google bike and go round the campus drinking one of these tasty granitas from the cafeteria.

Is there alcohol in it? If so, I would consider, but I would still take the alcohol and code the project as well.

The craziest thing to me is that at my location not that many people did the free workout classes. Between those classes and the food I was in the best shape of my life while working there.

I steadily got in better shape as they kept cancelling the projects I worked on and I slowly lost and sort of will to care about my actual job. The quality of my work ended up suffering a lot as I realized just how pointless trying to work there was for me but the pay was too good to want to leave.

Edit: I was unlucky though. I knew some people with more stable projects. I went through 4 cancelled projects in close to 6 years

If they like coding and didn't want to prioritize career advancement I would tell them to put effort into finding the projects (or parts of projects) they find more interesting to code and make sure they get assigned that. My advice was always personalized. The thing is that for most early career engineers they are already coding enough (and it's not like the code is generally particularly interesting) so most of the time the advice is to do more docs since the lack of docs was hurting them for perf/grad but it varied from individual to individual

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