After 12 years at Google, I have decided it is time to move on | Hacker News Reader

After 12 years at Google, I have decided it is time to move on

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99 pointssynthetictask59 comments

As a friend of mine says: When clear paths to grow a business diminish, organizations devolve into turf wars. Sounds like that's what's happening here.

Sounds plausible for growth businesses.

But run-off businesses should be a different kettle of fish... (When does centralised black-bix search become one of those I wonder?)

I worked at Yahoo some time ago -- a run-off tech company if there ever was one. And you should have seen the turf battles. Astonishing.

Did Y! management think that it was a run-off business? Presumably not.

Non-growth businesses don't need much R&D

Not necessarily true IMHO. Maybe not as much as a full-on scale-up in its pomp, but optimising and sweating the remaining assets and market can be an honourable creative activity I think.

I'm reminded of this quote:

> “If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer — so what?

When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people. And they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. Sort of the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.

https://www.bhooshan.com/2017/12/07/quotes-steve-jobs-lost-i...

Looking at what has happened to Google search, it's clear that either they no longer know what a good product is, or they only care about optimising for ad revenue and not customer experience.

What happened to Google search?

Video of the extended Steve Jobs quote here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

Very insightful.

After 12 years at Google I have a couple million$ in my account so I afford to not give a fuck.

This is the real takeaway... not the soap opera-esque blathering coming from folks 10+ years at Google

Or maybe he cares about his former employer and he's willing to share useful feedback.

A post that says I'm leaving with $700K would hit different than I'm leaving with $30M.

I am leaving with 30k.

His homepage is here: https://rws.xoba.com/ He's probably about 65, so I'd hope he has at least a couple million in his retirement account no matter where he's worked, much less Google.

Okay 12 years at 65 and at 35 are also quite different

A couple of million dollars really isn't a lot of money these days.

It actually is a lot for the average worker. If you're in the US and you've been paying full Social Security, and on top of that you have two million in the bank and you've paid off your mortgage, you can easily plan for a $120,000/year income. Just picking a state at random, that would be nearly twice the median household income in North Carolina, and you wouldn't be paying a mortgage or rent. You wouldn't be rich, but you'd be living quite well.

2 million to retire isn’t going to do it even for an average worker. That’s not enough, I don’t think any sane retirement plans say it’s enough in the USA (maybe if you move to Central America or Southeast Asia?). It is nowhere close to FU money in tech, if you don’t adjust your lifestyle by a lot it’s only going to last a few years, and that’s not even talking about covering your own healthcare premiums if you aren’t old enough for Medicare yet.

People underestimate the costs of life in the USA and use median incomes as evidence, but that really just means it’s harder for those making median to get by, it’s tough out there these days.

> That’s not enough

2 million at a conservative 3.5% withdrawal rate pays for 70k expenses a year. Not counting social security. With no mortgage and no rent in a lcol area that's probably enough. Odds are the 2 million grows rather than shrinks.

You're not counting income tax which, unless it's coming from a 401k, is a meaningful amount.

If you're withdrawing from a traditional (pre-tax) 401k or traditional IRA, you have to pay income tax on it. If you're withdrawing from a roth 401k or roth IRA, you don't have to pay any tax on it. If you're withdrawing from a taxable stock market account, you have to pay capital gains tax on the gains. If you're withdrawing from a bank account, you don't have to pay any tax on it (you pay tax on the interest as you get interest).

In the worst case scenario (traditional), $70k of withdrawals would be taxed the same as $70k of income. So this would be enough savings for someone who was making $70k before retirement. Probably actually better, because the person wouldn't have to save some of the withdrawals for retirement, and would get social security.

Long term capital gains and qualified dividends are taxed lower than regular income, if at all. And this should be most of their income.

Normal 401K is taxed as income because the contributions aren’t taxed on the way in. Your investments that are based on principal that has already been taxed will be taxed as capital gains.

Yeah good point, this will make a dent if most/all of their $ is coming from a 401k. Hopefully they have other sources to pull from to lower their taxable income (and tax bracket). And at least there is the standard deduction. And maybe no state income tax.

> That’s not enough, I don’t think any sane retirement plans say it’s enough in the USA

Not for Seattle or Los Angeles. But for most of the US, you will have a retirement income way above what you need. And that's a good thing, because according to the Federal Reserve, the average retirement savings of people 65-74 is about $600,000.

Of course retirement plans are going to tell you it's not enough. That's like ranchers telling you you're not eating enough beef.

> People underestimate the costs of life in the USA and use median incomes as evidence, but that really just means it’s harder for those making median to get by, it’s tough out there these days.

Clearly you're not thinking about all of the US. There are families of four leading happy, healthy lives on $80K out here. They don't use DoorDash three times a week, and they don't buy $8 cups of coffee, but they're doing just fine.

Buying anything from Starbucks, or buying a $8 worth of cup of coffee is just insane to me. Buy an espresso machine for 150 USD, jeez. I live in Eastern Europe and the majority of people who drink coffee have a coffee maker.

I've lived in really cheap places in the US (think Mississippi, but at least not the Delta), and I still don't see it. Yes, you could get a trailer in the middle of the boonies and burn your trash in a barrel, I had friends living like that, BUT is that really living? Let's forget about Doordash and $8 cups of coffee when even going to the grocery store is going to set you back one or two hundred a week. And that's not even counting future inflation, that has to be offset on gains in the $2 million nest egg, and if you are retiring at 40 and have kids...uhm, you won't be able to pay for their college.

And yet most of us don't have it. I think I get your point but if I had a couple million in the bank my day to day would be way more fun and way more ambitious and I definitely wouldn't work at a job I didn't love so I think it matters both in general AND in the context of "I'm quitting"

Is that so? Would you mind giving me some breadcrumbs then?

Try at least $10m USD.

It is cute you think a couple millions dollar is a lot.

My friend worked at palantir as a senior eng for 4 years and already earned that.

This guy is a senior staff engineers at Google for 12 years. Easily earning >$1m per year.

>It is cute you think a couple millions dollar is a lot.

And utterly disgusting to see how far removed from reality some people here are. A million dollars is life changing money for the vast majority of the population, and well beyond what most engineers earn.

It truly is. I am not sure how one can be so detached from reality. To many people one million a year is a LOT. In the US many jobs pay 16 USD per hour or less, and you may not even work every day of the week.

Let us assume that you earn 16 USD per hour and you work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week, you would earn 33280 USD per year before taxes and deducations. Nowhere near a damn million.

I agree with what you're saying, but I think there's been a misunderstanding. The people in the thread who are saying a million or a couple million isn't a lot are talking about dollars of total savings. You're talking about dollars of yearly earnings. Those are very different things.

Perhaps, but I think a million USD in total savings is a lot of money, too, and I do not think the majority has that amount in total savings. Are there any statistics on this?

there are many stats from many sources, probably with varying accuracy. And please keep in mind since it's financial, many of them will be trying to sell you things.

There's also a difference between retirement savings and net worth. I'd guess there was a jump in "house poor" millionaires over the last few years.

The Fed has a Survey of Consumer Finances which can graph net worth broken down by perentile. You're right that even $1M net worth is not the majority, but top 25%ile:

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm?mod=arti...

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...

Probably more millionaires in the last few years with inflation though.

This is all US-centric; the author, Richard, is in Japan; I'm not sure how net worth, savings, retirement, or taxes are in Japan.

Depends on your lifestyle. If you let your lifestyle creep and you need to live in the best apartment, eat at the best restaurants, send your kids to private school, maybe a few million won’t last so long. If you’re single and don’t need to live in Manhattan you can easily retire on a million dollars.

Lifestyle creep is what locks people into miserable tech jobs and eliminates risk taking and chasing dreams. Probably part of the reason that big companies lose the ability to innovate.

While I admire his willingness to share his reasons, and I'm sure he's right and many processes are broken at Google (pretty clear from using all their recent search updates and amount of talent leaving for startups), trying to reduce duplications is a good thing.

Would Google have been more successful if it had been split up a la Ma Bell?

Successful by what definition? It would probably be less profitable. It would probably have had more impact on computer science and people's lives, and be more popular.

Maybe. It's clear they need new leadership.

Is it possible to split it up? All the money comes from advertising and major products exist to capture (email, Chrome, phones, wearable, assistant) or analyse (ML) personal data for that purpose.

The issues here could be entirely unrelated, but I’m sure all the big tech companies had investments that the rapid pace of LLM innovation overtook. Resolving that duplication and pivoting toward the more promising path would be frustrating for people working on the worse one even if executed perfectly.

Definitely sounds like a crappy situation, but maybe not an accidental one. Making someone's job difficult/impossible is an indirect (and possibly money-saving) way for a company to get rid of that employee.

Views past a certain age are very different. Turf wars for many in theirs 20/30's can be fun and challenging. At 65 you get tired - especially if you have a research background.

Internal turf wars have always been tiring and never fun* and a huge waste of emotional capital that should have been better used, which is why I spent my entire 'career' avoiding being on anyone else's payroll.

*Except for the sociopaths.

100% as I'm exactly like you. But such as Apple and many other companies, these approaches have created incredible products... at a cost that's for sure.

But ask Woz - he openly said multiple times he would do it all over again.

to slightly modify the saying,

If you have two world class AI labs, you have no world class AI labs.

What is the point of posting a bitter public critique of your former employer?

I totally believe that Google is very different from 12 years ago and that they are now ponderous, bureaucratic, and dysfunctional in the ways that mega-corporations almost always are. So what? If you've decided to move on, just move on.

I think that the diminishment of organizations and institutions is a tragedy worth lamenting. You can take the ecosystems view that companies need to age, die, and be replaced, but it's still sad when a huge oak tree that did so much and meant so much for so many people becomes withered and dies.

Why did you post this comment?

Attention seeking, impulsivity, entitlement?

> What is the point of posting a bitter public critique of your former employer?

What's the point of not writing a bitter public critique of your former employer, if you believe they went the wrong way?

> are now ponderous, bureaucratic, and dysfunctional in the ways that mega-corporations

Somebody gotta call them on being ponderous, bureaucratic and dysfunctional. This post does just that. We gotta call bad and critique it where we see it, otherwise things will just stay as they are.

It's especially illuminating when a man his age does it. When he says he's never seen an organization this dysfunctional, that's got to count for something. I mean I was crawling up the walls at Google in 2015 around the time OPM was changing everything. Every time I've talked to a person who's worked there since then, it redefines my mental model of horror. It's such a shame since they still really are the most important horse in the glue factory.

Normally yeah this seems pretty career limiting, but it turns out the guy is 65 years old according to another comment, so he can afford to burn all bridges at this point.

It allows me to reflect on all of the jobs that I have left without also posting some odious blog entry about it. So much missed opportunity.

Maybe it was cathartic to write, I dunno. I think if I'm at that point, I waited way too long to leave. Golden handcuffs, hey?

He made it pretty clear he is moving on from tech and is posting on a career oriented social media platform the reasons why he is doing it now. I don’t understand your gripe at all. It’s not like he is making a yet another move to a gig N+1 after year two in gig N, rinse repeat, and posting about it.

To warn future researchers they will be wasting their time if they join.

I know some folks don't care about reputations, but this guy already established a reputation as a leader and should not have to do what he did to justify working on a project (PhD in his field from MIT, worked at AT&T as an MTS, which was a coveted role, for almost 2 decades, professor at a Tier 1 university. To me, if somebody with that level of background at high-value institutions is willing to write this, it means it's true, and important, and should be paid attention to by the appropriate constituency.

As employees near retirement, or have plenty of savings, or have strong opinions (or all three), they become easy targets: cut them out of the loop and make their lives difficult, and then they'll leave.

Presto! new opportunities for you and your friends.

Is there a defense? Not really. Somehow they'd have to convince most that they'd be there long enough to make crossing you a bad idea, and connected enough to know when you're being crossed.

The history of Silicon Valley is less about the founding innovation, and more about how others manage to capture it.

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