Why I left Google

He said "I am worried it might make my job much worse." He's a technical writer. Seems kind of obvious to me. Have the bot write documentation, or hire one technical writer to write docs for only bots to read: both seem like a worse job (really, no job) for highly compensated Google technical writers.

I personally loved the tangent to a more spiritual side, probably a moral/tech/ai topic that is pretty common this days will make me skip it.

Generally speaking, 3 years ago there wasn’t as much paranoia as there is now. The paranoia stems from 2 things.

1) layoffs resulting in uncertainty which in turn results in people being less civil while jockeying for position.

2) open AI being first to market with a gen AI product that stuck. It feels a lot different working at a company that feels in the lead than one trying to catch up.

The culture changed drastically between 2020 and 2024.

I've been at Google for about 10 years. Over the last three or so years I've seen the following frustrating changes.

A switch from a bottom up culture to a broken mix of bottom up and top down. I used to feel empowered to write up proposals for new ambitious projects and to seek funding for them, even if they didn't always get funded. Now, I barely try anything like this. VPs demand that work conforms to a vision that they cannot communicate and they can barely explain why any given project gets rejected. I'd be okay with an actually top down culture if leaders could actually lead - but instead you get the worst of both worlds. Since 2021, I don't think I have ever been in a meeting with a VP that I felt was useful.

This lack of vision goes all the way to the top. The execs cannot communicate a vision to the company.

Major process overhead and churn in these processes. Some of this stuff is indeed important (it makes sense to go through the trouble of making sure all of your systems are properly labeled for DMA compliance, for example). But a lot of it is bullshit. It feels like there is constantly some GRAD or OKR ritual that we have perform that nobody is actually looking at closely or getting value from. The old performance review process was involved, but it at least felt useful in a lot of ways.

Layoffs coupled with highest-ever profits. Google has literally never made more money than it is currently making. Layoffs are sudden, frustrating, and feel unmotivated when the company has more money than God. I get that Google needs to keep showing higher and higher profits to keep the line going up, but living in a world where "fuck, now we need to replan 2024" keeps happening while posting record numbers on earnings calls is dispiriting.

AI Mania. LLMs are clearly useful tools, but it doesn't feel (to me) like the company is seeking to apply them where they are most useful. It feels instead like the company is shouting "AI is the future" and demanding that it be shoved into everything. The effect on me is that I need to defend to my director and/or VP why my particular product isn't just going all in on Gemini.

All of the above has also caused a bunch of people who've been around for a long time and are deeply skilled, knowledgeable, and who exhibit the culture of 2016 Google to leave. They take some of that old culture with them.

Ultimately, I stay because I've got a remote position and high pay and my day to day work is pretty enjoyable and I'm planning on retiring in the not too distant future anyway.

When I worked at Big Bank we had this junior kid, who finished both law school and made a CS degree. One of the smartest guys with whom I worked. Me and other lead made a huge effort to put him on a fast track and promote him to a senior role to match salary to his contributions. Shortly after he decided to leave because, as he put it, he wasn't comfortable working for this evil company and decided to move to a NGO. We haven't spoke too much about it, but I feel it could be even more than 50%. For a while I thought of him as my personal hero. I too worked in ad, games, and ended up in big co. He threw it all away for the greater good. What a champ.

I've met him few years later, at a annual meetup of ex Bank workers and he was bascially begging for recomendations anywhere because he ran out of money.

It was either this or take Bill Hick's advice?

I think you'd really like Derek Thompson's essay on "Workism":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...

Your attitude is as common as water in the ocean, but here you have come to the desert to complain. Do you not know what Ycombinator is?

Optimized the service depreciation documentation process which allowed engineers to meet their quarterly KPIs?

It means the cloud service documentation was written in Rust.

i took it as a tongue-in-cheek description of the gig at google.

Been through similar. How did you actually end up figuring it out? The old-fashioned way I assume?

> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

What that management training course said is true only in a world without camaraderie, solidarity, and collegiality. I wonder if "out of step with the company" necessarily means your peers and colleagues, or shareholders and executives?

This had been eating at me for a while before I eventually got fired for essentially being burntout and unproductive. I thought I could persevere through it as the companies values changed to no longer match my own, but I couldn't.

It's better to leave as long as that option is available to you.

I had to learn this the hard way, unfortunately. After years of my worldview being spat on and openly mocked I got to the point where my mental health plummeted. What made it strange was that management really liked me due to my status as an SME and having global impact. But the daily company culture was completely at odds with me.

So I had to make the decision to leave. Turns out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made so far my in career.

I think surely the implied bit is 'enough out of step', and then the whole 'draw the rest of the owl' thing is figuring out where that line is (and what constitutes 'values') and if it's been crossed?

There's so much I would do/have done differently if I had carte blanche, but it's not my startup, and no reason to think I would have done as well nevermind better, it's easy to judge from the position of not being bothered to go out on my own.

I'm certainly not going to be giving any seminars on mental health, but I don't think mine would have benefited from just abandoning anything I didn't completely agree with.

Not to suggest the actual advice you got and the way you mean it was as lacking nuance as that.

I learned this truth in the School of Hard Knocks, and now I live by it. It's why there's a lengthy list of companies that I will never be willing to work at, and it's also why I'm in favor of probationary periods: you often can't tell if a company is out of step with your values until you start working there.

That's always the case with these why-I-left-my-high-paying-job-at-$FAANG posts.

Is anything evil? Or does everything just exist, and nothing more?

Prisons are not evil. Prisons just are.

We all just need to adapt on who gets to decide that you need to live in one.