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> So what happens when you promote someone for maintaining the same system for years? When do you stop promoting them? There's a person on my team who is happy to maintain what he works on. He has worked on fundamentally the same project for over a decade. He's a senior level engineer, and as far as I know doesn't have aspirations beyond that, which is perfectly fine. Assuming he keeps doing that work, and no more, does he get promoted again?

I know a few of these people who have been on the same product at Google for a decade and they generally cap out at L6, which is staff engineer.

L7 engineers are typically careerist and have larger a scope, focusing on higher level cross team collaborations. Some L6s are like this but there are plenty of them that are just chilling

> Is there any non-exploitative way to interpret this? The only thing worse than wasting my time on features for promo rather than users is working overtime to make more money for those with significant equity/ownership in ways that will never seriously affect my comp. Without promo or "promo by a different name" i.e. money, how do you incentivize people? How do you decide who to allocate your finite equity and money to?

Easy, there is no promo, you just pay everyone 450k like Netflix and raise everyone's pay each year to stay at the top of the market.

> What the process _does_ reward is whitepapers, tech talks, daily updates, and delegation. It sometimes felt like the goal was to make every little change as noisy as possible: if you just fix something yourself, you get no points. If you plan it out, generate whitepapers, announce it, convince other people to work on it, send daily updates to every possible stakeholder and then a triumphant announcement, and then do a round of tech talks on every piece of it, you're a shoo-in for promo--whether on not the 'it' was actually important or valuable to the company.

This is absolutely my experience at Google. If you want to move up quickly you have to write docs to convince people to work on your ideas.

> Forcing _everybody_ to follow the one path to progress means a lot of noise. A lot of tech talks from people who have no real interest or talent for giving them, on topics that nobody is particularly interested in, just for the sake of a line on their promo packet.

This doesn't really align with my experience. Most people I interact with at Google do not try to do this. They are happy being ICs at L4 or L5 doing their own thing. There is plenty of room to be an L5 or even L6 IC without constantly self promoting, it will just take you much longer to get there and you will never move past L6.

Us median _household_ income is 60k

> There is no debate about these "woke" issues.

Uhhh isn't this thread a debate?

Did you take testosterone for a short period or do you need to take it consistently?

Not so sure that making it legal alone will stop trafficking (not saying it shouldn't be legal though). People are trafficked to do legal work all the time, like in nail salons, laundromats, construction, canvasing, etc.

The majority of western accounts of great Chinese famine come from the book "Hungry Ghosts" which provides almost zero actual evidence of the event other than sensationalized accounts.

If you actually look for the sources of data and don't just blindly believe the western propaganda pieces repeating the same figures, this will become pretty obvious.

I'm not suggesting that there wasn't trouble, death, and suffering during this period but I'd take the multi million death counts generously extrapolated from incomplete with a bolder of salt.

https://mronline.org/2006/09/21/did-mao-really-kill-millions...

I went to a few of these places. I tried to run away from one of them and then they made me exercise until I couldn't move any more. They called it "energy release." I couldn't bend my knees at all for at least 2 weeks. It's still open and has only grown since I left.

Yeah they are going to raise taxes to pay for it because that's all they can do. Which is the opposite of what OP said

> It would significantly expand taxes

How exactly? Do you have any examples? Also, have you ever seen the price of car infrastructure? I would be willing to bet that denser walkable urban infrastructure projects are waaaaay cheaper than building and maintaining sprawling road, sewage, and power transmission networks. Sprawl is seriously draining the finances of many small cities and towns in the US. There's a whole book about it: https://www.google.com/search?q=strong+towns

You could also just watch this smug video https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0

Understood, thank you for clarifying. It seems as though we are in general agreement here. I appreciate your candor!

> But to assume that all societal issues involving industries can be blamed solely on the companies and people working in those industries is naïve.

I never suggested this at all. I am just saying that there are externalities that our work generates and we should be critical of that instead of pretending that it doesn't matter.

As for the examples you gave, I think it's pretty obvious that there is a major qualitative difference between manufacturing rope and designing weapons that are regularly used to kill people. One provides general utility and the other is specifically designed to mame and kill.

> Does that mean it's unethical to work for a paint thinner company?

Yeah why not? Shouldn't we be trying to manufacture non-toxic chemicals that don't poison people and the planet. People working at those companies arent solely responsible by any means but that doesn't mean that their actions don't have serious negative affects on society and the planet.

Also cars are bad for many more reasons that just accident. Cars are loud, they pollute, they take up valuable space. Building roads and parking lots to support them destroyed entire neighborhoods, historic buildings and public space. They also isolate people, encourage wasteful sprawling urban design, and make it more difficult for disabled people to get around. The list goes on and on

> It’s not unethical to work in the auto industry because people can die in car accidents.

Why not? Cars are pretty fucked in a lot of ways. I wouldn't consider someone working in the auto industry to be morally bankrupt but that doesn't mean that automobiles are not ethically ambiguous

> It’s not unethical to work in the beer business because people can become alcoholics

Why not? You are producing a dangerous drug that is constantly killing people. Would you say that people manufacturing illegal heroin are absolved from their externalities?

> It’s not unethical to work for a credit card company because people can bury themselves in debt.

Also why not? Credit cards, like automobiles, are pretty fucked in a lot of ways.

> it’s not unethical to work in defense because the weapons may fall into the wrong hands

Once again, why not? It seems as though weapons have consistently fallen into the wrong hands for all of history.

Im not saying that all people in these industries are bad people, but we can't pretend that our actions have no externalities just because those externalities are accepted by society as normal

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621190

> What’s up with all of the multi-platform outages lately? Seems abnormal looking at historical data.

Source?

Disc: Googler opinions are my own.

I've been an SRE on a tier 1 GCP product for over three years this is not the case. In my experience, our systems have only gotten more reliable and easier to understand since I joined.

It's not like there are only a few key knowledge holders that single handedly prevent outages from happening. In reality, you don't need to know shit about how a system works internally to prevent outages if things are setup correctly.

In theory, my dog should be able to sit on my laptop and submit a prod breaking change without any fear that it will make it to prod and damage the system because automated testing/canary should catch it and, if it does make it to prod, we should be able to detect and mitigate it before the change effects more users using probes or whitebox monitoring.

This is happens for 99.9% of potential issues and is completely invisible to users. However it's what's not caught (the remaining 0.01%) that actually matters.

> Light rail in the US in the past 50 years has objectively been an over priced under utilized boondoggle. It's entirely believable buses may well have been the far better option for crossing the golden gate, even if a guy who works for the light rail system today doesn't think so.

BART is not light rail, it is a fully grade separated heavy rail rapid transit system. Muni operates San Francisco's light rail network

For some reason I can't reply to the other comment so I am replying to my own comment.

Just because they said it's over doesn't mean it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_of_US_military_presen...

Same thing for Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Army_ins...

I never said that the US was "occupying" all countries it has bases in. For the countries mentioned, they are definitely occupied. The governments are okay with it because they are subordinate to the US. Also, two of the three countries mentioned the United States defeated in war and has been occupying ever since.

It doesn't matter whether the West is going to attack or not. No country wants an adversary at on their boarder, let alone at the single weakest point of entry to the country

Strategy and narrative are not the same thing. I talked about my options regarding narrative vs reality in my other comments.

But yeah, I agree that pissing off your neighbors seems like a bad strategy. Though, if you look at recent history when Russia did the same thing to other neighboring countries like chechenya, Georgia, and Ukraine in 2014, Russia handily got away with this kind of aggression, so I don't think it's too unreasonable to think that Russian leaders bet they can do it again.

I'm an American actually. It's pretty ironic that you're saying that Russia is obsessed with imperial domination when you're comparing it to the United States which has over 800 military bases spread across dozens of countries all around the world, is literally occupying multiple countries with tens of thousands of troops right now including Japan, Germany and Australia, has overthrown dozens of regimes it didn't like all around the world and has completely destroyed two entire countries on the opposite side of the planet in the last two decades. If that's not imperial hegemony, I'm not sure what is.

Also, the West never explicitly invited Ukraine into NATO but they repeatedly refused to say the door was closed for two decades.

> No need to imagine, there already were enemy rockets on Cuba and it was not solved in such a moronic way as Putin does

What is the bay of pigs? United States tried to invade Cuban overthrow their government in the '60s as well. How did that go? The United States also weighed more extreme options like all out military invasion instead of a tactical invasion. We can thank JFK for not doing that.

I am not trying to defend Putins war or tactics, I am just pushing back on the notion that he is a mad man with no reason behind his actions other than his ego, greed, and glory. This is the simple narrative the American media wants you to believe so you don't notice that they actually wanted this war to happen.

Almost third of Europe is already neutral. Also I never said that, I was just referring to Ukraine, which is clearly of the most geostrategic significance to Russia.

Wellbutrin. Similar to Adderall but a lot easier to get legitimately and isn't fleeting with time.

At Google an oncaller typically gets paged, triages the incident and, if it's bad, they page other oncallers and or team members for help. For more serious incidents, people take on different roles like communications lead, incident commander etc.

During the worst outage I was a involved in basically the entire org including all of the most senior engineers worked around the clock for two weeks to fix everything

I had a purple 2 king and it was very comfortable but the motion transfer was bad. I suggest getting something else of you have a partner and a couple of grand to spend

I'm guessing they are referring to how Google uses Blaze (internal version of Bazel) to build Go binaries, not the 'go' command and it's modules.

The first time I went to work on a personal project using Go after I joined Google, tried using Bazel because I was so used to Blaze and I liked it a lot. I was very disappointed to find that the integration between Bazel and Go was severely lacking and required me to use third party extensions to get things working as expected, which was quite disappointing. That was a few years ago so things might better now

> think of a situation involving a caregiver and a baby. The caregiver is found to be feeding the baby poison. When questioned, they respond that they continued to feed this to the baby because initially, the infant seemed to respond favorably to the taste. The caregiver claims the final result isn’t their fault, because it’s what the baby continued to go for. The caregiver is aware of the dangers of the toxin, but they seemingly ignore this as the baby keeps coming back for more. The caregiver is only concerned with the fact that the baby is eating their food, rather than what the baby is consuming. That bleak analogy isn’t far off from Facebook’s dealings.

A great example of how the mainstream center-left in America views the unwashed masses. Talk about paternalism. No wonder the vitriol peddled by right wing media hits home for so many people. This doesn't seem like a great strategy for American liberals going forward. Not a great way to build a coalition with the people they are supposedly trying to help

Added an edit to the comment based on your info, thanks