That's kinda surprising to hear. I wonder what happened. It would have been easy to leave out these 3 sentences or replace them with fluff. The author choosing to write this out suggests that there is some weight here.
Prior to 2023 I pretty much only ever saw the L7s and L8s that I work with leave Google because there was an exciting new opportunity or because they were retiring. Now most of the people I see leave at this level are leaving because they are fed up with Google. It's a mess.
I joined in 2021. I feel like I caught the tail end of old Google. Any decent idea was greenlit.
Now, it is a lot harder to find resources to do things. (This is of course relative. It is still far easier than any other place I've worked at).
The company has transitioned into something a little more traditional.
IC's natural way of growth is to produce larger impact by solving harder problems, there are always hard unsolved problems which hold some business opportunities.
there are levels of problem you will struggle to find 5 people to solve it on avg senior dev salary
> Not in "big tech".
especially in big tech, where there is constant arm race in building systems handling millions QPS over petabytes of data and with all recent advanced AI.
You're agreeing with me even though you think you're disagreeing. Yes it is hard for one person (one senior dev salary) to solve large problems most of the time.
> where there is constant arm race in building systems handling millions QPS over petabytes of data and with all recent advanced AI.
Yes I'm saying that at that scale it's very hard to solve the problem by yourself.
For some problems, one 10x expert could be enough, for others you need some team (small), and they will be able to achieve results where NNN randomly hired senior devs from the market won't produce useful product.
So, the goal of IC is to become such 10x expert if he wants to grow as engineer and not as manager.
Most of the actual groundwork has already been laid by passionate, actual engineers.
Today big tech is just a place people go to make money, and they don’t necessarily care about long term vision.
Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types who have little “passion” for engineering or computers. Zero imagination and outside the box thinking. Just rote memorization to get in and then getting PIP’d or laid off to go do the same at the other big corps. TC or GTFO types.
Better luck at startups that are the Google’s of yesteryear.
But really, Google was cool. Google was hip. So was Apple. Lots of cool things were coming from those companies between 2000 and 2012 or so. My interest in Meta was similar - the reality labs projects seemed really cool when I looked into them back before all the giant cuts lol.
In addition to those things, these were all seen as companies run by engineers, where the software and the tech was seen as the big core thing the company cared about. People thought programmers at google weren't treated as "cost centers" like they often are at companies where software is just a piece of the puzzle.
But yea, times change. In a way a lot of it was just infatuation and dreams that may not have had a basis in reality.
I believe there is a lot of reality. As well as they gave a lot of brilliant co-workers which seems to have made it a great place to spin ideas. Also from stories too leader ship was at least open to listen to criticism in "thanks God it's Friday" meetings.
While from observing some friends the promotion play was always tough as well. If you wanted to be promoted you always had to use your 20% time "wisely" which for some meant to still work on the main project. For other to strategically work on a side project they could use for the promotion panel.
Today's Google seem to be fully focused on numbers, where a lot of the spirit is gone. Back in the days when I visited some friends working for Google we went to Google for breakfast or met at Google for dinner as it was just a good place to hangout. (Which motivated people to stay at Google for more than their regular hours) Nowadays it seem to be more of a workplace.
Now you go for big tech (and startups). The cliche of the young "banker" personality type is now the "tech" personality type, and is coming soon to an Ai startup near you.
There was a mad rush between mid-1997 and mid-2001 to get into tech, then the dot-com bust happened, but that only lasted about 2 years before things ramped up again. That was 20 years ago.
Suggesting that the first decade of the web didn't flip the bit from finance to tech is ahistorical.
"Big Tech" had not been assembled yet. Microsoft was the only tech megacorp in town, and they were _hated_ back then. Apple was still recovering from shambles. Google was a startup nobody heard of. Facebook wasn't a thing yet.
Tech investment money wasn't on the same scale as today. Money was measured in millions instead of the billions today. Most of the money I think was still towards finance at the time. If you look at the public companies with largest market cap before 2010 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... ), you'll see there's quite a couple banks on the list.
You're absolutely correct though that this trend was foreseeable in the 1990s. Which is kinda why the dot-com boom/bust happened -- everyone knew it was the future, I guess people were just a bit too excited for the future, and the companies who'd actually create that future weren't even founded yet, leading to all the mis-investment and subsequent bust.
I think the big difference was that big tech was mostly on enterprise. The big shift to consumer focused big tech made a lot of the big tech more intersting place to work
This is not true in the early 2000s - I remember people at school (UK) using Google in the late 90s.
I also discovered Google in 1999, and then worked there a decade later. I remember listening to the earnings calls around 2011-2012, and my coworkers would express disbelief in the questions that financial analysts would ask, because they totally missed the key drivers of our business performance. "It's simple," someone older and wiser told me, "they assume that the Internet is tapped out, no more people are going to go online, and so the only possible driver of higher revenue is higher cost per click." In reality, search queries increased 4x between 2009-2012. Large numbers of people were still discovering the Internet for the first time in the early 2010s. Hell, large numbers of people are still discovering the Internet for the first time now - Google still has a "next billion users" initiative (largely focused on India and South/Southeast Asia), and only about 35% of the world population are Internet users.
If you wanted to be on the bleeding edge, you would be applying to mobile phone operators like TMN, Vodafone, Optimus, and then code over a remote telnet connection to HP-UX 11 server.
The big tech firms finally started doing RSU's insteda of stock options in the early 2000's, though most startups still were (and are) lagging way behind.
We had a brief window in the mid 2010s when folks started to throw rocks at the tech buses where I thought people were starting to realize it. Around Bernie's presidential run - which makes sense because he preached wealth inequality. But somehow during COVID tech slithered back into everybody's good graces.
* I don't condone people throwing rocks at the buses for both the humanitarian reasons and the fact that few if any executive or social changes could result from that behavior. But it struck me as a microcosm of the prevailing sentiment towards technology workers.
Is that inherent to the technology, or is that just inherent to the way we've chosen to organize society? Really, any technological paradigm shift going back to the industrial revolution has mainly served to enrich a small few people and families, but that's not some immutable property of technology. Like you say, it's a tool. We've chosen (or allowed) it to be wielded toward one end rather than another. I can smash my neighbor's head in with a hammer, or I can build a home with it.
At one point in the United States, there was political will to update our social structures so that the fruits of technological and economic progress did not go disproportionately to one class of society (think early 20th century trust busting, or the New Deal coming out of the Great Depression). I'm afraid we find ourselves with a similar set of problems, yet the political will to create some other reality beyond further wealth concentration seems to be limited.
But it also means that yes, tech intrinsically enables capital to do more with less labor, thereby shifting the balance of power towards capital and empowering those with more capital.
What ‘we decide’ to do with that is another largely unrelated matter.
Refreshing to hear that stated so clearly.
On your general point, I don't know if I feel the same optimism at this stage, much as I'd love to be proven wrong. Populations seem to never tire of jumping from one tech fairy tale to the next.
Developers seem to never tire of burying their head in the sand either, and I sometimes wonder if the two are correlated.
Why do you think this recent AI push will be the straw that breaks the camel's back? What if the camel just keeps plodding along?
That's a good start ^^. It was true before Trump too, but it's still better late than never
Nevertheless the "parasite" "no societal value" reputation of Banking remains. I would suggest however, that doing M&A is less parasitic and has greater social value than any ad-tech.
I do support the notion that tech monopolies have killed a lot of the software industry dynamism by subsidizing anti competitive products. Like Android being free where Windows Mobile needed to make revenue from OEMs.
That was the end of techy swag wearing for me.
People see their cousin's uncle's neighbor's roommate making $400K at Meta and just assume every single employee there makes that much. Or they point to those salary sharing sites where people self-report their best salary + highest possible bonus + equity as if every year was 2021, and think of them as representative.
Every single employee, no. But the average L5 really does make over $300k in total compensation. Yes some of that is stock, but the companies are now stable enough so that doesn't cause a ton of variation.
I think it's true both ways:
A lot of people assume it's like finance money, but it's not.
And on the flip side there's a lot of people coming from normal company or startup land, and assume that the $400k + average performing L5 is a myth, when that's pretty typical for big tech.
And I definitely agree with sibling here: $300k or $400k is good money, but in a place where the median house costs $1.5 million or something insane like the parts of the bay area that have a <45 minute commute, it doesn't go as far as you'd think. And it's incredibly risky, because now you're tied to always getting that level of comp for decades or you'll get evicted. (And while $400k + L5 Meta comp may be typical at Meta, it's not exactly trivial to maintain, or nearly as relaxing as a software gig you can do at other companies)
Household. A married couple both making that are 98th percentile.
In what percentile of your social class do you sit with $300k? Probably not very high.
I was not at FAANG, but a unicorn startup back in mid to late 2010s, and I was making 150-180k in that time, but not in SF.
Rent back then for a 2br was like $2400.. Today, that same apartment goes for $4900.
I am pretty sure the base for the same level today is probably more like 170-200k, but literally everything has also become doubly expensive.
Also if you're in SF you either need to allocate another 300-400 a month for parking, or sell your car. I was paying 130 per month for my garage parking spot (again, not in SF), and when I moved to SF some time ago I sold my car because it was going to cost me a lot to use my car.
And unlike FANG, where you can either hold and double every 3-4 years if lucky, or sell immediately with taxes, I walked away with 10x or more..
I don't have a car, but I feel like that's one of the biggest privileges of living in the city. Maybe the calculus changes if you have kids, though.
I have cats so I need my own place and they need their own spaces :3
Getting rid of the car has been an awesome change though.
I’m so cheap now it’s crazy. Only spend money on food and cat stuff haha.
He has a child on the way. His wife also works. Their rent is 7k a month (home in a good school district - important to us Asians) because they aren’t going to share an apartment and have means to live in a bigger space. They could rent a house for 4k and risk getting shot in Oakland, or live closer to work and have a decent home for their family.
He is always complaining about finances because he spends like 10k a month on just living. If he buys a home, it’s like 2 million at least for something decent in a good area.
I think Bay Area is mad expensive. You really need to make a lucky break to thrive here. Most people sell their vested stock immediately, so those guys who made millions etc are few and far in between because they held for a while.
> but they're not casually making $2M bonuses like the investment banker types over at Goldman Sachs are
Innovation is alive and thriving outside of FANG. And honestly after my experience I don’t get why anyone would work there.
Join a series A-C unicorn track startup and stay like 5 years til IPO. Your vested shares will 10-30x and gg.
What a strange thing to say. You’re describing the elite pedigreed type with this, but then allude to the types of people that PIPed. I really don’t think elite pedigreed types get PIPed outside of rare situations.
It’s not that hard to do well academically. Especially for kumon types.
There’s builder types (rare af) and there’s worker types (plenty aka literally everyone else).
And getting into tech isn’t hard. A principal staff or something like that? Impressive. Senior or staff is not that impressive anymore. Personally I prefer to work with people way, way smarter than me.
I’ve worked with ex-FANG people and they’re robots. They came in after IPO and made me quit lol.
in 1992?
I don’t think comments like these really understand the incredible value of FAANG comp over the past 20 years. People who got and kept these jobs had a true golden ticket.
Paying rent and student loan interest are a rounding error.
These were not normal jobs in normal circumstances.
You wrote me original message with less words
At Google? You can. Or they spent it all, in which case the point still applies.
But they probably haven't for many years.
So their reasons for choosing now to leave are probably a bit more interesting not wanting to show up if they don't need the money.
Very, very few people actually work for that long for a tech company these days, at least in the IT sector in Europe.
So what you wrote is the most shining endorsement in this whole discussion.
My dad and before him my uncle “retired” from tech at ~61 too, neither didn’t wrote a blog post
If there are no large companies with original culture after few decades of their founding it would just imply it is nature of things instead of being a particular person as chief executive.
It's powerful to a point. If it tries to flex its power too much, and international military coalition rolls over Saudi Arabia.
Edit: seems like he wrote about this before:
> Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google
It kind of make sense also since people blasting management while leaving are mostly not looking to launch their own companies so they will not be proven wrong about their "incisive critique" of management.
"Introducing Genkit for Go: Build scalable AI-powered apps in Go"
https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-genkit-for-...
Which is to be expected, there won't be any corporate sponsored language left without AI tooling being pushed.
He did sound relatively defeated when he accused himself of not accurately predicting the future needs of Go users, as if it were even possible!
Maybe management has just been unjustly critical of his performance, and he's taking it too much to heart? Hard to tell, but I just get that feeling.
This severe decline of the median engineer means comp gets cut back, perks get cut back, and most importantly, autonomy gets cut back. Oppressive process and political gamesmanship reign supreme.
Even when I left nearly a decade ago, the idea that something like Gmail could be made in 20% time was a joke. 20% time itself was being snuffed out and dipshit PMs in turf wars would kill anything that did manage to emerge because it wasn’t “polished enough”.
At this point Google is far beyond recovery because it is inundated with B, C and now D players. It’s following the same trajectory of Intel, Cisco, and IBM.
Pockets of brilliance drowning in mediocrity
https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/#:~:text=Gmail...
What do the other engineers have to do with this? Why are they mediocre?
That hasn’t really been happening - perks and comp have been pretty stable for the past 3+ years at least, so…
I actually attribute it to Ruth more than Sundar, but who really knows? All I know is I saw a major decline...and people were already saying similar things when I joined, and they were probably right too.
This isn't to say Google isn't still a great employer...but yes, perks and comp declined.
At least half of the micro-kitchens and cafes have been shutdown. On-site tech support has been dropped. Medical benefits support was changed from Anthem premium to some third-party that is worse than useless. Medical plan costs are up and covered benefits down. Hardware refreshes (even for engineers) has been cancelled, so everyone is working with pre-pandemic hardware.
How are the free massages and dry cleaning treating you?