Why I Left Google | Hacker News Reader

Why I Left Google

spencertipping.com

28 pointsdphassler10 comments

Fascinating account, but even more fascinating is the author's consultancy:

http://spencertipping.com/zeroconsulting/

You email me with a problem you'd like me to solve. (Be sure to put "zero" in the subject so that my email filter catches it.) This could be anything: a debugging project, advice about something, a library you need, end-user code, etc. Anything you send me is confidential. I'll then follow up with you with any additional information I need and any initial impressions I have.

I will then try to implement a solution _and will never send you a bill_. I may or may not be able to implement something, depending on a variety of factors including my skill set. If I'm successful, I'll send you what I come up with. You may, at your option, pay me whatever you think my solution is worth. It's fine if this is nothing at all; that's useful information for me (I won't nag you about it, for instance).

Wow, that's cool. Clearly a guy with a love for the art. I'd be interested to hear how this approach works out for him and the breakdown of his project offers once he's been at it a while.

So, one of the major reasons is because you don't like Java. I don't like some things people do with Java, but generally it is indeed good enough. In fact, as far as I'm aware, there are three official languages in Google: Java, C++ and Python. Wasn't it possible to get assigned to python stuff?

Agreed. To be honest I don't see why he left...from his description it would almost make me want to work there.

Java and C++ have their problems, but in general they work very well. If I was in charge of software development at Google I wouldn't be using some obscure language.

I agree with his comment about bugs...Google's products seem very buggy, and they don't seem to give much of a crap about fixing them.

        Google's products seem very buggy, and they don't seem to give much of a crap about fixing them.

That's the essence of Silicon Valley right there. The Cool Kids don't fix bugs. They don't test their code much beyond "Well, it doesn't crash for me.". The Cool Kids only write new code using the latest and greatest programming languages - because they're cool, naturally. (Yes, this flies in the face of the JavaJavaJava slant mentioned in the article - must be some interesting forces there to keep all of the Interns and College Grads from incessantly advocating for whatever teaching language they used in school.)

I think Go is quickly approaching the status of an 'official language.' I know this mostly by rumor, so if any Googlers can shed light on Go's role, that would be much appreciated.

I get the impression that the issue lies more with engineers' inability to choose a language based on the problem, and being forced into Java whether it made the most sense or not.

"My experiences working with this committee were completely positive, but there was often a two-month lag before I got an official reply from them." -- he's describing the situation where they own everything you do if it has anything to do with them.

I have a pet hypothesis which is that these non-competes are strangling innovation in the Valley (and beyond). I know I personally made sure to shut off the "ideas" part of my brain until I was free and clear lest they try to claim ownership of things I would later invent.

This "delay for long enough to kill it" thing happened to a friend of mine. I wrote about it here: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/09/16/squashed/

First, this is not the normal open sourcing process. He says "This uncertainty bothered me a lot, since I wasn't sure whether my project could be legally released as open source.". The normal open sourcing process takes about 3-7 days. If he really wanted certainty about releasing it as open source, he could have gone through that process and been done with it.

The process he is talking about is the process of Google granting ownership of various IP rights that google would normally own, to the employee. For various reasons (ethics, patents, copyright, etc) this is more complicated, and takes longer. Google is one of the few large companies that even lets you do this, AFAIK. The humorous part of all this is that the page describing the process, states quite clearly it will take about 2 months to make a decision. So it's not like the 2 month wait was unexpected, either, and phrasing it like he does implies that there was some amount of uncertainty in the time period where he was being strung along, which is simply not the case.

"Coding standards and reviews prevented bad low-level decisions, but not bad high-level ones"

This is true for coding standards and reviews everywhere. That's what design standards are for -- i.e. some kind of process around specifying a technical design.

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