Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
tinystruggles.com
tinystruggles.com
Engineering from >10 years ago seems like it was a wild west. Some truly stunning pieces of technology, strung together with duct tape. Everything had its own configuration language, workflow engine, monitoring solution, etc. Deployments were infrequent, unreliable, and sometimes even done from a dev's machine. I don't want to disparage engineers who worked there during that time, the systems were amazing, but everything around the edge seemed pretty disparate, and I suspect gave rise to the "promo project" style development meme.
Nowadays we've got Boq/Pod, the P2020 suite, Rollouts, the automated job sizing technologies, even BCID. None of these are perfect by any means, but the convergence is a really good thing. I switched team, PA, and discipline 6 months ago, and it was dead easy to get up and running because I already knew the majority of the tech, and most of that tech is pretty mature and capable.
Maybe Google has become more like other tech companies (although I doubt they have this level of convergence), but I think people glorify the old days at Google and miss that a lot of bad engineering was done. Just one example, but I suspect Google has some of the best internal security of any software company on the planet, and that's a very good thing, but it most certainly didn't have that back in the day.
> Deployments were infrequent, unreliable, and sometimes even done from a dev's machine.
Deployments were weekly and done from a dev machine because that way someone was watching it and could intervene in case of unexpected problems. Some teams didn't do that and tried to automate rollouts completely. I could always tell which products weren't doing enough manual work because I'd encounter obviously broken features live in production, do a bit of digging and discover end user complaints had been piling up in the support forums for months. But nobody was reading them, and the metrics didn't show any problem, and changes flowed into prod so the team just ... didn't realize their product wasn't working. There's no substitute for trying stuff out for yourself. I encounter clearly broken software that never seems to get fixed way too often these days and I'm sure it's partly because the teams in question don't use their own product much and don't even realize anything is wrong.
Additionally, rolling out from a dev machine brings so many risks – security, reproducibility, human error, and so on.
I'm glad this is not the way things work anymore, and for the most part things are more reliable as a result.
It doesn't sound like what's done now is a whole lot different tbh.
On the other hand, someone who started in 2015 missed out on the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt. That’s about when the culture started turning against “big tech” in general (rather than specific companies like Microsoft).
It's been interesting to see the tech and public zeitgeist shift on this.
Lesson: if you're going to be popular for killing a king, be careful how similarly the thing you place on your head starts to look to a crown.
I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's possible to avoid Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix, but by 2015 it started to become nearly impossible to avoid Google or their products.
Not sure if that's the reason public opinion shifted, I'd started to get worried about the same time I also dropped my Facebook account, so ~2011. I have successfully managed to avoid Facebook products and tracking, but I had to give up on avoiding Google, it's simply not possible unless one is willing to make extreme sacrifices. So i kinda gave up, it was starting to become digital masochism. There's a very bitter irony in me typing this on a pixel 8,but I've just accepted that there isn't any avoiding Google tracking my online life so I've just stopped caring as much as I used to.
Google killed the king, and the king was the desktop. The king was apps. Microsoft seemed omnipotent & in total control, and the rise of the web isn't totally Google's but they sure did a lot and they sure rode that wave.
My personal feeling is that Google lost the ball in the g+ era. Up until then, it felt like Google understood their role was to help others create value, that they had to offer APIs and platforms to let other developers onto the platform, let other people expand the value proposition. G+ was an about face, a totalizing product push, and one that offered nothing to the world. Essentially no API offered. Google wanted to make g+, they wanted to run itz and if you wanted to use it, you needed to use their client and your account with them.
Where-as in the past, with efforts like Buzz, they we're trying to expand the protocols & value of the web as a whole. Once they gave up on platform & tried to be a product company, it was much harder to believe in the futures they were trying to sell.
To my recollection, G+ was actually pretty good at launch. It just was killed (or hobbled, for future killing) incredibly early for a network-effects, non-first mover product.
When it was a disparate group of products... incentives were generally aligned with the users of those products.
When they began to look at themselves as a platform company (Google search-on-everything, Android, Chrome), that fundamentally broke and they started making sound-platform-business but user-hostile decisions.
So I guess the moral of that story is that platforms will make you rich, but you have to be very careful to enunciate your value priorities clearly to users. (E.g. Apple: "privacy"; Google: "openness"?)
Early Google initiatives also had a high failure rate. (Buzz, for example.)
My guess is that there are still Googlers trying to improve the web. Young people are idealistic, so why wouldn't they? But nowadays it's unlikely to be successful unless it's relatively uncontroversial infrastructure. (Some examples might be things like certificate transparency and QUIC, which became HTTP/3.)
Higher-profile initiatives to really change things often fail because they raise deep suspicion and resistance. They're certain to be misinterpreted in the worst possible way.
Also, significant changes affect vested interests. Some of those vested interests are internal.
I'm personally more of the opinion that Google has caused enough serious issues for enough people - with famously no way to get the issues resolved - that they themselves seeded or caused the negative public opinion.
Combine that with Google behaviour of clearly doing things in their own interest even when not to their user's benefit (manifest v3 proposal is a good example), and many people are like "screw Google". ;)
The browser itself might be pretty much okay, but the extensions are where the terrible code is.
Clearly there was no other way... /s
More: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/the-asymmetry-of-nudges
> In reality, Manifest V3 was meant to solve a real problem — and to do so for the right reasons. I know this because about eight years ago, we set out to conduct a survey of the privacy practices of popular browsers extensions. We were appalled by what we uncovered. From antivirus to “privacy” tools, a considerable number of extensions hoovered up data for no discernible reason. Some went as far as sending all the URLs visited by the user — including encrypted traffic — to endpoints served over plain text. Even for well-behaved extensions, their popularity, coupled with excessive permissions, opened the doors for abuse. The compromise of a single consumer account could have given the bad guys access to the digital lives of untold millions of users — exposing their banking, email, and more.
Maybe they could have avoided controversy by grandfathering in a few popular extensions and watching them closely?
Every bad thing has to have some nominal selling point as the way to get everyone to take it.
mv3 sales pitch is to remove the ability for plugins to harm users.
It does do that, but:
1: Only by also removing plugins ability to help users
2: and giving google themselves and anyone else google approves of (entities who pay google or who have other influence like government) the very same ability to work against the user that they took away from anyone else. ie they control the entire browser let alone a plugin. They literally control what you can even see at all. You search and they choose whether something is in the results. You search with not-google and they still control if the dns resolves anything. You use other dns and they still control if the ssl is valid, which it doesn't matter if 11 techies know how to overcome all that, they still controlled what 7 billion people saw, and thus what they were allowed to even think, minus a handful of impervious super geniuses like you and me.
3: There are infinite possible ways to address the supposed problem of harmful plugins, just as there are infinite possible ways to attack any problem. Even if one decides to agree that it was necessary to do something about the problem, it was not necessary to do this about the problem.
There used to be a theory that apparently doesn't exist any more, about the appearance of impropriety. The idea goes that in any situation where someone has power over another, especially over the public at large, like a judge or a politician etc, where everyone has to simply trust that they are acting with integrity, that in fact no they don't have to simply trust. The appearance of impropriety is damning enough all by itself. Since no one can prove what someone was thinking, and the position carries enough responsibility and consequence, then the office holder doesn't get to say "it just looks like I awarded this contract to my brother because he's my brother, that's just a coincidense" That might be true in the absolute term like in physics where technically anything is literally possible. But since there is no way to disprove it, and the bad effects are bad enough, we don't have to prove it. The appearance of impropriety is enough, because anyone holding a position like that also already knows that they have a responsibility to act with integrity and not allow any possible question about that. They already know that they can't just give a contract to a family member. And so doing it anyway and expecting to be able to excuse it, is it's own form of impropriety regardless what quality work the brother will do or what the alternatives were.
Google removing utility from the user and granting it to themselves is way way more than merely "the appearance of impropriety".
It doesn't matter what harms some plugins have done.
The answer is easy - Microsoft. They didn't directly take on MS's business, but in the general understanding of what was the big tech company, the one that gobbled up the best engineers, the one that startups were afraid would decide to compete with them - that was Microsoft in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it started shifting to Google.
And even though they didn't directly compete with them on being everyone's OS, they indirectly competed with them by turning the browser itself into, effectively, the OS everyone uses. They killed IE with Chrome, they made which OS you use far less relevant, they took over Mobile OS (shared with Apple, of course), and they are now competing on Cloud.
There is no question that what Google was from 2005ish to 2020ish, Microsoft was before that. You can even read pg articles about this exact thing.
During the lifetime of Google: mobile has dethroned PC, video streaming has dethroned TV, SaaS over pay-once software, online advertising over physical, etc. Google has been a force in all of these (and more) - though not alone of course.
The culture turned on Google around the same time Google lost their innocence and dropped the "Don't be evil" clause (note the dropping of that clause was not the cause, just one of the symptoms).
I suspect that even today you'd have a hard time finding a random person on the street who even knows that Oracle is a company and not a character from The Matrix or ancient Greek mythology. And if you tell them they bought Sun they'll think you mean the newspaper, if you talk about Java they'll either think you mean the island or are talking about a brand of coffee.
When did that happen? It's still there.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
But as that article notes, they didn't drop the phrase. It's there now. It's always been there. There was never a time when they dropped it.
I look at it as somewhat inevitable considering the path the company has taken, but it is certainly different. We are cranking out money and that’s fine, but it is a change.
That's not to disparage the latter. making things work at scale is hard engineering. But when people praise the glory days, it may be a preference for working on new ideas in small projects.
The way I like to look at it is that small things take a while, but big things happen remarkably quickly. For example, rolling out a "hello world" service might take a few days, but having that service serve 1M QPS is pretty much free (in terms of effort). At my previous place a new service might have taken an hour to set up a deployment for, but having it serve 1M QPS would have required overhauling several aspects of our infrastructure over months.
Could you elaborate on what these are for a non-googler? Ironically enough, Google isn't very helpful.
P2020 + Rollouts: This is for intent-driven deployment, where deployment configuration for jobs, networks, pubsub topics, and other resources are declaratively checked into source, and the Annealing system automatically finds diffs against production state and resolves those diffs (aka a rollout).
Automated job sizing: load-trend driven automated capacity planning. Separate from autopilot, which is a more time-sensitive autoscaler. This will actually make configuration changes based on trends in traffic, and request quota for you automatically (with your approval).
BCID: this is for verifiable binaries and configs in prod, where it requires two parties to make source changes, two parties to make config changes, two parties to approve non-automated production changes, and only verified check-in binaries and configs can run in prod, not stuff you build on your desktop machine.
That sounds amazing.
history's biggest yakshave...? not surprising for a programmer-run company
I'm sure it still matters to bring down the power and server bills. But one can't help feel like they could be doing much more
Unified rollouts, unified versioning, universal dashboards, security compliance, standardized quota management, standard alert configs. It's opinionated, but I can drop into any team and hit the ground running. I don't want to learn your custom dashboards doing the exact same thing with different names.
The issue with PoD is that it's a great concept and implementation that's tight on resources, and doesn't have much of a plan to expand beyond its current paradigm. The P2020 team deserves way more recognition for all the work they have done.
It was a real mistake, SRE is hugely stressful and really unrewarding compared to SWE. Yes you learn some skills and get some occasional glory, but year after year of fighting fires really didn't build any long lasting career.
After switching back to SWE I've finally got promotions and pay rises again, as well as good night sleep and much less stress.
Back to the OP, I raise a glass to your sabbatical. Most SREs end up needing a healing period from repetitive stress injury (AKA burnout).
If I may offer some completely unsolicited advice, don't put too much pressure on yourself in the next few months. People who gravitate towards SRE work tend to thrive under short-term ambiguity and emergency/urgency. However, long/medium term ambiguity without a clear productive goal can quickly feel like a crisis. OP mentions this in closing, so I'm rooting for them to rest and "sit still" for a bit.
I cannot disagree more: our team is healthy, oncall is quite a fine activity to do (and compensated, of course), we have plenty of engineering work to do.
I've had five promotions (and tripled salary) and done so working on plenty rewarding activities over time. I've done from deployment automation, to capacity planning, distributed system design, large data migrations, designing ietf standards for auth protocols, wrote client sdks, now we even do AI for different things (including model development).
I'd recommend to not generalize from "I didn't like it / the experience wasn't a match for me" to "the role is shitty".
> oncall is quite a fine activity to do (and compensated, of course),
Overnight on call is never compensated. I know some tech companies pay but I've never seen it.
> deployment automation, to capacity planning, distributed system design, large data migrations, designing ietf standards for auth protocols, wrote client sdks, now we even do AI for different things (including model development).
To me that is mostly SWE work (capacity planning and migrations perhaps is SRE). in regulated environments SREs are explicitly forbidden from making changes to the code base.
> I'd recommend to not generalize from "I didn't like it / the experience wasn't a match for me" to "the role is shitty".
Agreed.
I miss working in software that also utilizes my skills in infrastructure, but I do not miss the constant escalations, terrible on-call schedules, and only about 20% of my time being spent on the rewarding parts of the job.
I think in general that type of experience would help Developers be more empathetic to the operations side of things. Those fires often come from trade-offs made in development.
I think it made me a better developer because I've seen a lot of what can go wrong. Probably reduces my productivity but ultimate my stuff is more likely to work.
Yeah, that's the essential mechanic of it. When "stuff is more likely to work" then everyone can build upon it.
Though at some point(s) that stable foundation needs updating too, so new stuff can be built upon it. That's where the choosing the right balance for the right pieces needs figuring out.
The root cause of this disaster is that, when writing software, interruptions are the death of productivity. Having a software engineer wear too many different hats at one time, especially when some of those hats are largely real-time interrupt driven, can absolutely kill productivity.
To emphasize, I'm not at all in favor of "throwing things over the wall". Software engineers are responsible, for example, for making software that is easy to test and has good observability in place for when production problems show up. But just because you listed a bunch of things that are "critical for software development" doesn't mean that one person or role should be responsible for all of these things.
At the very least, e.g. for smaller teams I recommend that there is a rotating role so devs working on feature development aren't constantly interrupted by production issues, and instead each dev just gets a week-long stint where all they're expected to do is work on support issues and production tooling improvements.
However, I argue that if the engineers are interrupted by QA issues, they will be motivated to find ways to not have those QA issues. In absence of that, we end up with the familiar “feature complete, let QA find bugs” situation.
There are institutional limitations that engineers cannot overcome, no matter how zealous or motivated. Moreover, companies also ought to remember that engineers can "find ways to not have those QA issues" by seeking employment elsewhere!
I ask this question here because there seem to be quite some (ex-)Google employees in this thread.
Due to "an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank"?
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...
That's honestly a very hard issue to track because such legacy setups often can slip by later tooling, in this case the part where it was set to "auto expire" after certain time, but instead it became a production environment.
despite Google's recent pivot to suckling at the US defence department money teat, Google spends lots of money tellign the US (and everyone else's) government to fuck off in the courts, and and the finding out that the NSA had hacked Google's backbone led to a near instantaneous decision to encrypt all traffic on it, at a pretty large cost to the company in energy and effort.
If I take another software gig it will certainly be at a small company where my daily work contributes directly to the company’s central goals.
Programming is a superpower that can change the world. Yet the best paying jobs for programmers are at FAANGs building systems to peddle ads. .
this is true, but it did not at all affect how 90% of the company worked. the ads teams made money and everyone else did whatever, supported by that infinite firehose of cash.
a large part of the reason google has sucked (internally and externally) for the last few years is that this changed.
It got to a point of being almost farcical, where they were scheduling meetings at 9:30pm multiple times a week. After two years of it I had to leave, I was coming home catatonic and depressed, to a point where my wife was getting concerned.
I add value, I choose (mostly) what value to add, and my division is profitable.
I recently did some consulting for a large company. It reaffirmed for me that my path was right for me. I haven't made as much money as my corporate brethren, but the endless treadmill of meaningless work, manager meetings, measurement-by-jira and so on would have spit me out early.
I enjoy the creativity of my work, the direct interaction with customers (especially when they like me :) - the intuition to see how things could be better, and the freedom yo execute on it.
My path to joy is not for everyone, others get joy from bringing on a large team - that's OK- each person needs to find their own path.
thanks in advance!
(I never worked at any FAANG thing, and I never worked for a US company, so this is extremely... interesting and strange.... because I am no stranger to long nights, had the occasional death march, some kind of startup momentum and expectations here or there, small teams and overtime, deadlines, but .. also headcount was less than 20 for us)
It started when my team opened up Singapore office. That's fine, but they are 12 hours ahead of New York, and the genius middle managers on my team thought it was very important that we synchronize on a lot of these meetings, and the only times that kind-of-sort-of-not-really "worked" for everyone was between 7:30pm-9:30pm NYC time.
That was already bad enough, but this genius would bog the first 5-10 minutes of the meetings with small talk, giving his opinion on the latest keynote or something else. Small talk is generally fine, but not when everyone is looking to go to bed.
It got really out of hand once COVID started. Suddenly, since everyone was working from home and as such it could be assumed that they had access to their work computer, managers just decided that there's basically no time off limits for a useless meeting.
> did you attend them?
Yes, most of the time. We'd get in trouble if we just skipped them.
> did you decline eventually?
As many as I could, but if I did it too often I could reliably expect a phone call complaining about it.
> how does it work? who was your actual boss?
I don't want to give specific names. My direct manager was actually fine and generally only scheduled meetings that were reasonable. His boss was pretty stupid, and scheduled a few useless meetings a week . His boss was a complete moron and I think was completely incapable of scheduling a meeting that was actually useful. The chain goes up several more levels.
It was more or less like Office Space: if you made a mistake you'd get like six managers separately explaining your mistake to you.
> is there some kind of resource management? (ie. where your time is allocated?)
Apple has its own ticketing system called "Radar". It's kind of like Jira or something, but it's a GUI app instead of a web application. Tickets are more or less ranked in the same way they are in Jira, you just estimate the number of hours it will take.
A few points of fairness to Apple:
- I'm a very annoying and difficult person to manage, and I am extremely impatient, so maybe I overreacted to all this stuff (though I know that I was not the only person really annoyed by this stuff).
- Judging by the high turnover rate my team had, I suspect that I was on an exceptionally poorly run team. I did try transferring to another team, and actually did pretty well in the interview, but I was declined because I had received a poor performance review the year before [1]. I know other people who worked at Apple who really like it, so I think I just had some bad luck.
[1] Honestly, the bad review was kind of justified, much as I hate to admit it. I had become pretty frustrated over a lot of stuff happening in my life and it was reflected in my work output. I did get better but not before the review period was over.
It seems initial impressions in these huge corps are almost everything. If things are great people are willing to put in the hours, money is great after all, so one's trajectory quickly curves upward, promotions, yeey! But if it's bad, it's hard to go anywhere, even laterally, because of the baggage, so there's only down from there :(
What you're seeing from Google in the last ten years is a maybe predictable consequence of that culture, where some Googlers really do seem to think they're generically much smarter than everyone else, about everything. You started to see mass scale social engineering via manipulation of search results and products, driven apparently by the immense faith they have in their own wisdom. Is there any claim Googlers cannot immediately resolve as true or false given nothing more than a few ML models and a team of contractors in LatAm? Apparently some of them think that's all it takes.
This quasi-misanthropic culture is miles away from the trusting "make it universally available and useful" culture the company once had, but the seeds of that culture's end were clearly visible even at the start. You can't constantly validate people by telling them they're super smart before some of them come to actually believe it, and that leads naturally to the belief that if they're really the smartest people in the world then surely that means they should be running it.
its the proximity, pedigree, profile that you have to fit to get in to Google
I'm happy for those that made it. Not everybody gets to work for Google. But the work they do are no less challenging or more important than what the rest of us do.
If anything FAANG has contributed greatly to the American Firewall of Algorithms and have destroyed an entire generation's ability to reason and value common sense.
I remember this quote which I can't remember who said but "if they are paying you a large salary, what they take from you is far greater"
Hmm, this seems like a nice thing to tell oneself to avoid feeling underpaid :)
for one, it would buy loyalty. Not many Googlers stood up when they realized their technology was enabling military drone strikes on children.
One nice thing about being <= L5 is that your vacations are actual vacations. I can disappear for months, totally ignore my email, and have nothing be on fire when I come back.
It's like the fourth time I read/hear this. I understand that it's a tricky one to adress.
I’ve worked for European and Asian owned companies, and they seem to be able to handle distributed authority much better. For the “land of the free”, it sure seems like US companies run on a feudal system.
Heaven is an American boss, Chinese cook, Russian wife and English house.
Hell is an English cook, Chinese house, Russian boss, and American wife.
Sometimes you'd have people delegated out of one division/subcompany to provide help elsewhere - personally experienced this when we needed a PostgreSQL expert on a project where we subcontracted/bodyshopped for one of those subcompanies, and the headquarters delegated a postgresql core team member from japan, including having him visit for a time.
But day to day the decisions were local - the most feudal thing was that we knew one team (~50% of the company that was our direct client) was the most important one and that it's lead had actually more power than CEO - the specific division was essentially a way to park his independent team so he didn't have to deal with administrative overhead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_management_culture#Ma...
scrum master: “points per sprint is going down guys!1!1 (after moving stories to next sprint). Velocity is gucci”
If you spent the last 9y at Google in SF/NYC (the top comp regions), you'd have a million dollars in stock alone. It doesn't go as far as it did 9 years ago, but it's still ahead of a whole lot of people in this economy.
I am one of those engineers who do not care about culture as long as I am getting paid for the efforts I put in. Google in that sense beat others by HUGE margin.
The engineering work was however very different. We focused on right engineering solutions instead of just business aspect. While that kind of attitude hurts us in short term, it pays big in long term.
Then large companies are not for you. Navigating the culture is key to advancement and long-term satisfaction. Otherwise you will feel like an outcast and likely let go during layoff rounds or kept around at lower compensation rates.
Whoah, it seems fantastic! That alone seems like a good reason to work for Google. Unfortunately, none of the companies I worked for was interested in less than 100%. I told them many times, you can keep your money, I just want to spend 20% or 30% less time at work, but they always insisted on 100%. I have a feeling they would go for 120% if legally allowed.
I'd love to know how in a fast paced office environment you can improve those, none of the trainings or anything are about this (even the leadership like ones feel like just standardized template stuff rather than actually have an environment where you can practice social skills and get the correct timely feedback to improve it)
How much, do you think?
They have a great business that prints money.
The problem Google has is making more money printing business lines - like Microsoft.
I do hope Google turns around and gets back to its roots.
There is nothing all that special about Google. Maybe there was twenty years ago, but that ship has long since sailed. It’s just another large US tech company. Like Microsoft and IBM before it.
This is just a hyperbolic statement that should not be taken seriously at all.
Look, Google isn't some fantasy land that some people might have lauded it as once upon a time, and it isn't unique in terms of pay or talent, but it is certainly at the top echelon.
I did an interview loop for high level IC at both Azure and GCP simultaneously and the different in talent level (as well as pay) was astounding.
IBM has never a company where engineers could rise to the same ranks as directors and higher with a solid IC track.
Is Google special compared to Apple/Netflix/Meta? No. Is it special compared to Microsoft, IBM, and any non FAANG or a company that isn't a top deca-corn? Yes.
It's a similar trajectory is what people are saying. When Google was small and everyone wanted to work there they could take their pick of the top talent. When you run a huge company you inevitably end up with something around the average. I.e. all those huge companies that pay similar wages and do similar work basically end up having similar talent +/- and within that there are likely some great people and some less than great people.
But IBM and Microsoft don't pay the same as the largest top tech companies.
Never? Maybe if you’re talking the last 15-20 years, but IBM has been around a lot longer than that…
I personally know people who moved up the ranks there to director and above, so I can say with confidence you’re absolutely wrong.
Obviously people could read about the past, but sometimes that's asking too much, they are busy creating "the future".
I didn't mean that engineers can't become directors, I meant that IBM didn't have a track for top ICs to get paid more than directors and still not be on a manager track.
This is maybe the third time I've heard this mentioned here on HN, so now I'm curious: What specific kinds of differences?
I imagine there might be a certain kind of prejudice against Microsoft and its employees, especially for "using Windows" or whatever, which I've found often unfairly coloring the opinions of people from Silicon Valley that are used to Linux.
If you don't mind sharing, what specific differences did you notice that gave you a bad impression of the Microsoft team and such a good impression of the Google team?
Overall talent level. Almost everyone I've interviewed with at Google impressed me, as well as came across as thoughtful and kind.
I did interviews with many teams at Microsoft (9 technical interviews total) and the only person that impressed me is now at OpenAI.
Every single interview question I got at Microsoft was straight out of intro to CS /classic Leetcode.
They would straight up ask "find all anagrams", "string distance", "LCA of a tree".
Google instead disguises many classic CS questions, so it takes a lot more thinking. Microsoft seemed to just verify that you can quickly regurgitate classic algorithms in code.
I'm sure there are some great teams at Microsoft: but because each division/org is much more silo'd I think it's more likely a team has a lower overall bar.
Google makes everyone pass through a hiring committee and you're interviewed by people that have nothing to do with the team you might end up on. Meta is similar. Amazon has the team interview you, but they also have bar raisers come from other teams.
Microsoft seems the outlier here that someone can get on a team with only interviewing with people on said team.
However, during recent years I have turned into a Google hater. He does not mention any of those aspects. Google is an evil business IMHO. They are an advertising company. The challenges for this planet are sustainability. The goal of advertising is to waste resources. I can type this on a low end phone that soon turns 10. It works perfectly, except that no recent Android version is supported. Google is in the business that cores and memory have been doubled several times since then, for no benefit to mankind. And phones are far from the only category, advertisement is about selling a lot of stuff that does not bring any true improvement in quality of life. Video is one of the worst energy wasters in computing. 90% of Youtube is useless crap, not worth destroying the planet. Nobody would pay a realistic price for it. They are an ugly oligopolist. The list could go on and on...
The claim that more memory/computing power has no benefits at all seems nonsensical.
Video games, supposedly the Killer App for high-end computing hardware, are among the worst offenders: your average modern 2D side-scrolling platformer (Mario clone) locks up my computer (to say nothing of AAA games). Web browsers are the second-worst offenders. Chat clients (secretly web browsers) are third: they barely work, and interoperability has gone the way of the dodo. Operating systems are fourth: they (mostly) still let you use older versions of software, but they have mostly just grown new problems (e.g. built-in adware in Windows; GNOME… well, GNOME) without fixing long-standing ones (e.g. slow domain login in Windows; most systemd misfeatures).
> 90% of Youtube is useless crap
That is the way of all things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
But the best of YouTube, people are clearly willing to pay for that.
The bad ones are barely watched; sitting on a hard drive after getting transcoded isn't an environmental disaster.
You could try to argue that popular culture is fundamentally bad; people have been saying that about TV when I was a kid, dance music before that, novels in the 1800s, Christmas in Puritan New England, and the Olympics in ancient Rome.
The people tend to disagree.
It’s not that popular culture is bad, it’s that a wasteful way of living isn’t sustainable, and it’s beginning to erode the foundations of our lives.
I don’t know how you can decry video streaming and advertising as destroying the planet and thus hating one of the companies that provide these services YET you use it.
It's not enough to fully switch, but at the very least I get their stuff without mis-gendered advertising — as seen the other day on YouTube, where I was presented with an unskippable ad for sanitary pads.
(They also post so infrequently that I forgot I'd subscribed to them).
Their “monopoly” is one of quality, habit, and convenience, not lack of consumer choice.
Anyway, congratulations to those Googlers who "picked" GOOG by not selling their GSUs and who made out like bandits. You certainly got lucky, and nobody should expect their own employers' RSUs to do the same.
Googlers from the past ~15 years are comparatively filthy rich. Imagine having had an opportunity to miss out on 8 figures of stock returns and only be left with 7 figures because you followed sound financial advice. Bruce Willis is no doubt dabbing his eyes on Memegen.
The last 15 years were good in tech but the earlier Google employees did even better.
I'm guessing neither of us made money on bitcoin or gamestop... I don't lose sleep over that.
A bit of perspective may be warranted. There are single mothers busting ass raising kids on tips and food stamps, while you're asking for sympathy for making out with only seven figures from your Google stock options.
I'm pretty sure the luck of being born with sufficient intelligence to work at Google is orders of magnitude greater than the luck of making big ROI on Google stock.
> because you followed sound financial advice
Most financial advice is there to help the clueless masses to not lose their savings to get-rich-quick schemes and then default on their debt during their next unemployment period. Anyone smart enough to do Silicon Valley work has probably outgrown those training wheels and can think for themselves when investing.
> It’s a shallow post-mortem
I respectfully disagree. It’s an 8 minute read. Sure, it’s mostly in dot-point form, but personally I’d rather that than some massive 80,000 word blog post that I’m going to drop 1/8 of the way through.
Since when does a personal blog post need to be a well constructed and lengthy document?
And it is worth noting that a lot of the bullet point lists do start with "I made a ton of money" in as many words, which is also just not very interesting to most folks, though it is certainly very relevant and important to the writer.
I don't see that reflected in the rest of their postmortem learning - other than them being dissatisfied with doing what they were good at / promoted for - so that kind of helps me ignore the rest of the postmortem. :)
Making a "ton of money"....it matters because new people want to know what price is paid for exceptional comp.
But a well articulated, technically correct post that’s evenly paced? Heavenly. Its a David Attenborough documentary for tech nerds. It’s exactly what I am after.
I wouldn’t say anything against having an upfront summary for people who don’t have time/patience.
9 years working at a top tech company of bleeding edge work reduced down to “I made money. Oh, I made money. My stocks did well, so I made even more money” is the pinnacle of intellectual laziness. That’s not a postmortem by any stretch of imagination.
Slight OT: what do people recommended for simple server & db monitoring (for a small saas business)?
monit, nagios, victoria metrics, etc?
Lots maybe. But if it's under 8 figures before the dot, it's not tons.
Is Google really different from other companies? I talk to a lot of Amazonians (AWS Hero, FreeBSD/EC2 maintainer) and my general impression is that developers below L7 ought to be classified as "Junior" -- my mapping is basically L4-L6 = Junior Developer, L7/L8 = Developer, and L10 = Senior Developer. Anything which doesn't have L7+ involvement gives me major "these kids need adult supervision" vibes for all the newbie mistakes they make.
Fifteen years ago L5 was actually senior, L4 was a developer, L3 was a junior developer. L6+ = you owned major user-visible features with hundreds of millions of users. L9 = you did something world-class like invent BigTable or Google News, and L10 didn't exist.
This seems extremely surprising. I can believe that the 2010-engineers were more technically capable, but there was also a lot less non-technical complexity involved in getting things done in 2010 than there is today.
Amazon and Microsoft also have less "alignment" at various levels compared to silicon valley due to literal geographic and historical reasons. Principal SWE at AWS is probably ~L6 at G in my experience. Obviously there are always outliers in all directions.
L3 is early career, L4 is mid-career, L5 is senior. You can hit L5 on the strength of pure technical contributions regardless of business/org needs, usually.
L6+ is staff, and tends to involve a very different skillset. (If you're not looking to lead a team, you're probably not going to have the kind of impact that gets you to L6, let alone L7 or higher at Google.)
This is all to say that ICs in the L3/L4/L5 bucket generally show a clear progression in technical skills but beyond that it's fuzzier.
I'd say the same held true at Amazon but I was in groups which were, at the time, at the periphery of the company's engineering efforts - we didn't have any associated principals to talk to, and maybe one SDE3/L6 to 10 SDE2/L5s mixed with SDE1/L4s.
If you were a senior engineer at a 50-person startup you would commonly get hired at L4.
* I left Google 18 months ago; also, Google is a large company, and while they strive for uniformity across teams, the levels aren't really quite the same company-wide.
As for L10, that's Distinguished Engineer. I think if they're managers they're also called VPs? I'm not exactly sure what the deal is there; but I know plenty of Amazon L10s who are fantastic engineers.
Of note, The person who wrote this article spent the vast majority of their tenure as a SRE TL/M, from their timeline. That's not going to map cleanly into any career track at Amazon, and when this person tried being an L6 SWE, they transitioned back into management.
At Google, I knew L6/L7/L8 managers who were fantastic engineers; I knew L6/L7/L8 managers who were pure-management and excellent at that but hadn't written code in a decade and change. Varied dramatically by what the org needed - those engineer-managers tended to have a lot of lower-leveled engineers and the pure-managers had more highly leveled engineering reporting to them.
Anyways, while I was at Google, L5 was the lowest level where you could officially have a direct report (not counting interns), so yeah, anything of cross-team note was generally lead by an L6 or higher. (L5s routinely lead things that were critical _inside_ of a given group, but if you were having cross-team impact, well, that's L6 work.)