(My idea that was that we should engage independent developers and provide the resources to integrate them with Hangouts, thus having a double win because we'd both (a) get people comfortable with Hangouts and (b) have a higher quality of games than if we published Zynga dreck.)
> Well, now the company that treated me like human garbage
> for pointing out a doomed product direction will, at
> least, have to view me as human garbage that was right.
As I recall, your position was that Google+ Games should prefer intricate rulesets based on obscure board- and card-games on the basis that popular casual games are not sufficiently complex to pose an intellectual challenge.
It seems unlikely that positioning Google+ Games as the place to go for half-baked Catan knockoffs would have made it more popular.
Toohey: "Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."
Roark: "But I don’t think of you."
My Atlas Shrugged post was all about how the concept, while appealing, wouldn't work.
Part of the challenge in working with large groups of people is convincing them that your ideas have merit. That's not unique to Google or any company -- that's just the psychology of social interactions. It sounds like you have an unreasonable expectation that everyone bow down immediately and unquestioningly to your opinions, and leads me to wonder if you have delusions of your own grandeur.
Learning how to interact with people seems to be a skill that you have not acquired, and it certainly makes me want to never work with you.
What I can't stand is when people don't make the fucking effort to reach the right idea, but just fall back on rank. That will make me very angry.
If they'd given me an explanation of why my idea wouldn't work or why they had to do things a certain way, I would have been happy with that. They could have brought me into a few of the meetings so I'd see how the sausage is made, and maybe I'd realize some of the constraints they were under and see why my idea wouldn't work in that context.
I do, however, expect to be treated as an equal, and I'll raise hell if I'm not. That doesn't mean my ideas are taken without question. Shit, how could anyone even want that? The yes-man behavior (taking someones' ideas without question) isn't respectful; it sets a person up for future embarrassment.
> What I can't stand is when people don't make the fucking effort to reach the right idea, but just fall back on rank. That will make me very angry.
Optimal decisions are rarely made by groups of people, which is part of the challenge of working with people. It's understandably upsetting, but if this bothers you so much, you should consider: (a) changing jobs if the person pulling rank is unreasonable, or (b) working out the power structure and on your relationships and communication to get your point across better.
> They could have brought me into a few of the meetings so I'd see how the sausage is made, and maybe I'd realize some of the constraints they were under and see why my idea wouldn't work in that context.
It sounds like you were cut out of the decision-making process. Perhaps your superiors were genuinely unreasonable, in which case you should have done what everyone in an unreasonable work situation should do: switch teams, or switch jobs. Alternatively, if your real-world interactions convey as much arrogance and petulance as your online rants do, then you're maybe losing out because people don't find it productive to bring you into the decision-making process. Perhaps you're right, but perhaps the way you communicate turns people off. I'm just laying out some alternate possibilities, since your posts seem to convey that everyone was against you.
> I do, however, expect to be treated as an equal, and I'll raise hell if I'm not.
Perhaps you're not earning peoples' respect with this attitude. It sounds a bit like what my 5-year-old does when he thinks we're being unfair to him.
EDIT: You're obviously intelligent, but you have to realize that there are other intelligent people, and all things being equal, most people would rather work with someone who can communicate.
Also, I'm not that angry about the mishandling of G+ Games. I wasn't even on that team, so it's not a big deal. That's just one symptom of an underlying problem, which is the dishonesty that exists when a company is marketed as open and engineer-centric but was taken over by managers several years ago.
Google is a bank with worse pay. If it admitted as much-- you'll be working in a closed-allocation environment, because we're now a bank-- I would fully respect that.
"Ha, my negativity has been vindicated by failure!" is never a good public stance to take. Not for you, nor for the people who disagreed with you. It is a victory for you, but it's one to internalise. The people who were there and complete strangers will think less or you for gloating otherwise. Know that you were right, apply the lesson in the future.
Oh, and Google is one of those stuck-up companies where if you get a bad performance review, you can never move to another project.
It finally ended up being up to me to expose that manager (which I did after finding my next job) and when I did, I experienced some extremely unprofessional attacks. Someone (possibly my ex-manager) found out where my next job was and called in a hit.
Given that, I'm justified in enjoying Google's stumbles.
The problem is that these things are common. They happen all the time, and they keep happening to people all over the place, and nothing is done to these fuckers. That's what makes me fucking angry.
The guy pulled that shit for years and HR not only did nothing, but repeatedly kept people from moving away from him. Same story, five fucking years, over and over, and they did nothing.
One bad manager is just life. A company that deliberately allows them to thrive for supposed project expediency gains has no right to use the motto: Don't Be Evil.
So as someone who went through something similar after diving headfirst into the Googleplex without a helmet, can I suggest that you really ought to move on for your own good and let karma eventually catch up with these guys?
It's magical what they'll do to themselves in the long run - it just takes time. I already saw one round of comeuppances after the dotcom boom. It really works because eventually they cross the wrong person at the right time and the universe balances the equation all on its own.
The problem is that the career system (especially in software, which has this hypocritical sense of itself as a meritocracy) is the most elaborate system of victim-shaming ever devised.
I'm almost 30 and my IQ is over 150. I should be an EIR or doing cutting-edge machine learning work, and I'm not, because I was robbed by those fuckers.
Yes, they'll get their comeuppances. I'm sure they'll fall into the wrong fight. But I suffer every day from what those pieces of shit stole from me. I'm years behind where a person at my level of talent should be. Some of it is my fault, some of it is not, but the rest of the world sees it as 100% a reflection on me.
Work is the only society in which being robbed is treated as 100% the victim's fault. If your boss steals from you by giving you shitty work experience and then ruining your career, you are the subhuman piece of shit that deserves to die, not him.
Needless to say, I was very successful at destroying my career. But much like the guy who got turned into a newt, I got better.
You're going to live past 100 assuming you don't get hit by a truck or an asteroid, the game's barely started. Go do something amazing that no one else could have done, by hook or by crook, and whatever happened in the past will be forgotten overnight.
But above all, don't be a victim. Even if you are a victim, don't be one.
As I recall, he was given almost exactly this advice when he was having his meltdown at Google, except s/live past 100/become a productive employee/ . It didn't seem to help.
And stop thinking that your IQ entitles you to anything. I scored 175 on an IQ test (Cattell III B - probably equivalent to 147 on the test you took) and I work doing CRUD apps for an insurance broker for $40000. I'll never work for Google or a company like that much as I'd love to. Your IQ test score is nice - and great for showing off - but it doesn't entitle you to anything. You need to earn your career.
"Don't Be Evil" is such a conflated concept at Google. It sounds that you were fooled by it. Get real. Google's primary goal is to benefit itself. Good news [for users] is that benefiting the user is usually what benefits Google the most. Righting wrongs in HR issues that would expose Google as an employer to potential lawsuit liabilities and negative PR is not. Don't be so fucking idealistic.
Does shit happens deliberately? No, it's just the law of large numbers at Google's size today. However, covering up the shit is sometimes rational and evolutionary. How many start-ups die because they don't deal with HR issues the "right" way?
You were unlucky, but you also lack the tact to deal with your situation. Your years of experience and your 150 IQ didn't help, so what makes you think you would fare better as an EIR?
If you are in a tough spot in your career, try to be honest with yourself about how/where you can improve, and make an effort to improve. At 30, it sounds like you are looking for instant gratification.
My recommendation: stop getting on these boards talking negatively and using profanity. It's not helping. Start bringing relevant insight and commentary that highlights your skills. Be open to constructive feedback from friends and colleagues. Work to improve. It may take a few years to rebuild - but think of it this way: 5 years is an eternity in the tech world. If you do things right for 5 years you may have an entirely different outlook.
Exactly, this is you being unlucky and constantly throwing yourself under any bus-like object that crosses your path.
I'm not exactly in the tech community, so I'm hoping it means something different than my understanding.
Working for Google was, by far, the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life. No question about that.
Ah yes, putting the employee on "probation" and awaiting any reason to let them go.
Intended as helpful: What is the point of your screed here? What do you think it will do for you? What are you trying to accomplish?
People who are awful to you are highly unlikely to own up, apologize, make amends...etc.. Life rarely works that way.
Not trying to make your life harder. I have done some venting myself on HN at times.