Why Google Employees Quit (2009)
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I ultimately left Google because I felt bored working there. You admin systems and fill out resource request through web browsers and work with proprietary stacks all day. It didn't take long to feel my skills as a Linux professional start to atrophy. The longer I stayed the more concerned I became about passing interviews in the rest of the industry as I became a Google engineer.
I often miss the tools I had at Google but it's exciting building those tools at smaller companies and working with industry best practices.
Although congress has been pretty stingy with the "regular pay raises" over the last few years.
Interesting. Could you tell a little more about these tools? Which ones do you miss most, and why?
1. you are 20-something, white or Asian, fresh out of college, Jewish/Stanford/Ivy/otherwise-2nd-gen-pampered-background, male, maybe still in college or 1st startup AND you are willing to move anywhere they want, do anything they tell you, you have no spouse, no kids, no ill parents, no local geo investments, no major illnesses, not multi-careered, you're still impressed by Shiny/Words, etc.
2. you are 30/40-ish but now established as a Major Name (Linus, Vint, Guido, etc.) and/or owner of a company Google wants to buy, and therefore $M+ talks loudly
if you don't fit (approximately) into one of those two boxes, then Google is a non-ideal fit for you
META: downvote me all you want HN, I do not care what the GroupMind's Allowed Opinion algorithm here thinks anymore
Any Google employee who spews something like "Google is perfect if you are 20-something, white or Asian, Jewish/blah blah background male..." will be (with high probability) asked by his[1] coworkers WTF he is talking about, and would he please shut up or learn to open his mouth without insulting his coworkers. If the behavior continues, it may or may not result in disciplinary action, though the consensus seemed that there aren't enough disciplinary action. (I guess it depends on who you ask.)
Contrary to popular conception, Google employs a lot of thoughtful people and they want to make their workplace a better place to live and work.
[1] I'd normally say "their", but it seems "his" here is more coherent with my... "observation of reality."
On my team are two very experienced engineers (one's been at Google for longer than all but 38 employees), and it will be a great opportunity to learn from some really great people and grow my skills, which had been stagnating due to lack of challenge at my last company.
There was never any pressure at my last job to work crazy hours, so that wasn't really a factor in moving per se; but Google is big on work-life balance, which is super important to me.
an entire side discussion about Bayes predictions could be entered here. where having a few rough rules would yield a 90% beneficial prediction. add a 2nd rule or exception boosts your yield to 95%. add a 3rd rule/exception boosts your yield to 97%. and so on...
I've been to google campus on Mt. View and LAX Google (which is really in Venice...).
They're mostly Asian and White. On a Saturday I was visiting a buddy and I swear it was 90% Asian.
Race doesn't really matter, it just that it happen to be there are just many Asian and White in the tech fields.
trust me, if you're smart and wise then the older you get you should be getting more and more reality-based in your decisions. not theory. not ideal. not PC. reality.
http://www.google.com/diversity/index.html#chart
If you click the "Tech" tab, they self-report as 59% White, 35% Asian, 2% Hispanic, 1% Black. Note that the ethnicity data is US-only (the gender data is global).
Here's a post from November 2014 about a black woman's experience at Google: https://medium.com/thelist/the-other-side-of-diversity-1bb3d...
It's a very interesting read, I recommend it.
Well, seeing as I am a non-white non-Asian former Google employee....
The wording of:
> When I transferred to my second team there, Desktop Support, diversity lightning struck: I was a black woman reporting to another black woman in a technical role. Moreover, our team was predominantly black.
strikes me as a bit funny. Clearly "diversity lightning" implies an interesting chance outcome, facilitated by the possibility of there being similar people around, but "a black woman reporting to a black woman, in a predominantly black team" is stretching "diversity" to mean non-white (or more probably, non-white, non-male, non-gay).
I completely understand (in an entirely outside-looking-in way) the authors perspective -- but in my book a "diversity success story" would've been if the co-workers at Google hadn't been close-minded fucks, pardon the expression.
Now, I still think positive (hiring) discrimination is one of the best ways to achieve a mixed/diverse team, and that in turn is one cornerstone for a diverse and tolerant culture.
But sometimes you find yourself in the cultural stone age, and it's hard to see a good way out. Sounds like Google California was one such place -- not just due to Google, but apparently due to something (real equal opportunity) missing from higher education in the US in general?
https://medium.com/@ericajoy/seeking-happy-58a2a375340a
relevant, interesting. And a bit more positive to boot.
She also prefers to be around blacks, preferably black women.
This has little to do with Google though.
Google is rather corporate and thus it's only for people willing to adapt a corporate personality during the day - often in combination with a rather conservative physical appearance.
Cornrows and overly casual probably wouldn't fly too well in the head office, no matter if you're black, white or asian.
She should just get another job.
Why that is and if that's something to be concerned about are separate questions which I think are out of scope here, but it certainly doesn't necessarily imply that you need to conform to have an enjoyable work experience.
Person 1:
* Pay/benefits
Person 2:
* Benefits
Person 3:
* Hiring process
Person 4:
* Company felt too big.
* Pay
* Company goals were too constrained
Person 5:
* Hiring process
* Benefits
Person 6:
* Hiring process
Person 7:
* Pay (international office)
Person 8:
* Cannot figure out why this person left, but it was after 11 days of working there.
Person 9:
* Pursuing different career path (overall was happy with Google)
Person 10:
* Hiring process
Person 11:
* Management
Person 12:
* Bad work/life balance
* Pay (other people paid less than what they deserved)
* Management
* Hard to get noticed in remote office
Person 13:
* Company was changing too much
* Management
Person 14:
* Hiring process
* Management
* Hard to get promotion
* Bad work/life balance
Person 15:
* Hiring process
Person 16:
* N/A
Person 17:
* Salary/hiring bonus/relocation
* Office benefits being removed
Person 18:
* Felt underutilized
* Management
Person 19:
* Management
* Lack of fun culture in remote office
Bad hiring practices represents a lot of organizational dysfunction, some of which impact your every day work, and since the hiring process is your first contact with the company it's often the first thing to come to mind.
Bad hiring practices also cause you to be interviewing candidates. A lot. "Google-style" tech hiring is characterized by generally meaningless interviews with very, very low acceptance rates. This is not just frustrating for candidates who fail, but also the people who get to interview them.
When I was at Amazon I was in this situation - a combination of poor hiring practices and organizational dysfunction meant that all of a sudden I was literally spending 5+ hours every single day interviewing people. It was brutal and demoralizing - doubly so when a candidate everyone liked is rejected for seemingly arbitrary/bureaucratic reasons. The sheer gauntlet of back-to-back interviews candidates are subject to also means that for every one candidate, many engineer-hours are spent interviewing them. The impact of diverting this much time towards interviewing candidates instead of actual work is easily felt.
To summarize the situation - we were a pretty scrappy team of 3 engineers that gradually took on more and more work as the scope of our work increased. There was an org-wide hiring freeze put in place because of the general doom-and-gloom right after 2008, so our demands to hire more people to cope with the increasing workload were repeatedly refused.
Come ~2011, the company starts breathing again and finally lifts the hiring freeze, at which point 7 engineering positions suddenly opened on my team, and the 3 of us became nearly full-time interviewers. I was gone within a few months, my other coworker soon after, and the most senior engineer on the team transferred within the company.
I'm not sure what the salient lesson is here - don't try to hire for 7 positions simultaneously with only 3 interviewers? Don't put a hiring freeze in place when there's obviously more work to be done? Something.
There were also lots of problems with the recruitment and hiring process itself:
- the quality of candidates we were getting from HR was very poor. Each of us wasted incredible amounts of time phone screening candidates who were wildly mismatched with the role, or straight up not qualified. Our phone screen fail rate was easily >90%, and this not only was disappointing for the candidates but also kills your interviewers' productivity and morale.
- Amazon has the "bar raiser" system. The standard on-site interview at Amazon was a full-day (6-8 hours) of back-to-back interviews, including lunch. One of these interviewers is a designated "bar raiser", who is usually a more senior, particularly trusted (or just political) person. This person can veto even an entire room full of "yes" decisions - and this happened with some regularity. It is absolutely devastating for team morale when an arbitrarily appointed person - who usually isn't even on your own team - vetoes a candidate that everyone on the team liked. This naturally resulted in us interviewing even more people, and more frustrated because we knew even if the candidate passed with flying colors there's still a chance they'll be caught by the bar-raiser's decimation and arbitrarily be rejected.
That last part is the situation I'm in at my current place - I'm at a smaller company where one of the original high-level engineers insists on interviewing everyone. He's also a fan of gotcha brain teaser problems - so even well-qualified candidates who interview well with the rest of the team will get into a room with him and he'll veto the candidate when they fail his teaser-of-the-day.
Translation: Amazon suffered almost 100% knowledge loss on the systems your team were the exclusive owners of. The cost of this kind of thing is staggering and yet I've seen companies discount it again and again, over decades. It's insane.
And as to your current gig: run. You'll never be able to grow a decent team with an idiot in charge, and you've got an idiot in charge. Get out, if you can. Nothing but good teams build good products, and if you can't hire a good team because you've got an idiot with a veto you'll be stuck building mediocre (at best) products.
It's a pity there is no actual demand for quality software developers. If there was, this kind of nonsense would be abraded away by market forces with incredible speed. The fact that it persists demonstrates that hardly anyone really cares whether they get good developers or not.
Perhaps the gentleman concerned is simply someone who helped start the company and hasn't quite understood the need for routine staff turnover in what is now a much larger organisation?
Adding my own personal anecdote to this: about 75% of the time, when I get contacted by recruiters for major West Coast companies[1] the positions they are scouting me for are inappropriate to my skill set, background, and interests. Sometimes wildly so.
[1] Which is probably once every two months or so.
I never forgot what they put me through though, and showed zero allegiance to the organization. I put on a smile, and kissed the right people, but in reality; I was a horrid employee.
I don't think companies realize how certain employees hold grudges? That HR idiot who calls every phone number on the resume, and talks for too long should be fired.(I know they're suspose to keep it brief in most states, but as a past employer, they have kept me on the phone for too long. I have had HR dudes call me when they were out at dinner--drinking--heavily.. I had one lady ask me, "Does the girl do drugs? She seems like the type?" I was floored. The women in question had a slight speech impediment, but overqualified for the position.
I would like to do away with resumes. I always felt a test would make the process fairer, and would do away with nepotism, padded resumes, and all the other BS we have had to put up with? (By the way--it is illegial for an employer to check your credit score in California.)
That might not cause you to quit immediately, but it might be an indicator for other problems and you might become more acutely aware of those when you start.
Also, now you have "I passed the Google hiring process" on your CV.
Which to me means that the way you treat them during the interview and their first weeks at work end up being part of the calculus of Stay or Go. I've really taken this to heart, and I'm profusely embarrassed if for instance their equipment is not there day 1 and I'm working order.
Who am I kidding, of course SOMEONE would, but more than one or two people?
It was not for Google directly though, but via a temp agency for a Google project.
Google rented an office building just for the project with temp agency HR on site and a few Googlers that were mostly in management and supervising things.
Contracts were structured in a way to avoid having to pay benefits and to be able to maximize pressure on the the employee with extremely short notice periods.
The turnover was enormous, almost everyone hated working there and 30-40% of the employees were reminded weekly by HR that they're on probation and will get fired if their performance isn't better next week.
Basically a modern day sweatshop.
(Perhaps off-topic) Isn't that the default? Doesn't every company do that -- pay you the bonus and then Uncle Sam (and friends) take a cut depending on the tax situation?
I checked one of my offer letter (not from google) and the wording is like "an amount of $XXXXX grossed up for U.S taxes".
I don't know about the US, but in Europe it was always marked as expenses refunded to me on the payslip, which is tax free.
In the US, if they gave you $1000 straight-up for moving costs, you'd probably see something like:
1. Company gives you $1000.
2. $750 hits your bank account after withholding.
3. You spend $1000 to move.
4. You file taxes, claim $1000 deduction for moving expenses.
5. You receive $250 refund.A hiring bonus would presumably always be pre-tax, since there's no expenses to reimburse.
Don't get me wrong, they're doing amazing stuff. The drone delivery system they built is cool.
It's just that, aside from maps, it seems like they have a hard time pushing through to completion.
Sounds exactly like the last 4 non-Google jobs I've had, including the current one.
I suspect that any sufficiently large group of humans self-organises into this state of affairs.
there's always going to be some percentage of folks who quit or are not perfectly happy for various reasons
if google makes it a better place to work than other companies i think that's a pretty good achievement in and of itself
Their recruiters keep calling 1-2 times a year since then, but nowadays I can't even imagine applying. It's a huge preparation effort with unclear chances and benefits. Just can't afford it.
There is this thing: the google 25. Yeah it's worse than freshman year - you're gonna get fat bro.
It is an interesting culture that's for sure.