Light on details and mostly seems to revolve around money.
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?
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.
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.