All these things make me envious of people who get to work at Google or any other FAANG company, where they are both paid well and validated for their intelligence.
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.