xoogler2004

The amount of speaking out of one’s own arse that’s happening in this thread is absolutely amazing.

No. SVB was not a bank for high risk people. They were the 16th largest bank in the United States. They were a regular commercial bank. First Republic, Northern Trust, etc are all very large banks that cater to specific clientele.

It’s not that they catered to high risk clients it’s that they understood that the definition of risk was not universal. What may look risky to Bank of America isn’t actually more risky if you know the nuances of startups.

Or put another way, the odds that a new commercial Bank of America company goes on to become a 10 billion dollar company is probably 1 in a billion. The odds that an SVB customer would go on to become one is probably 1 in a thousand.

But the important thing is that SVB didn’t fail because of bad credit or bad loans - something you’d expect from riskier clients. SVB’s problem was that they had more deposits and cash than they could handle, they literally had too much money and the fed has raised interest rates too fast for them to absorb.

hahahahhahahahahah

Senior staff is L7.

Swe 2, Swe 3, senior, staff, senior staff, principal, distinguished, god

In that order, except god isn’t really a level it’s just Sanjay and Jeff.

Swe 2 is L3, goes up by one for each level, thus senior is 5, senior staff is 7, etc

This was a side project.

Truthfully? Prioritizing bottom up innovation has to oddly enough happen from the top down. Give middle and front line managers the responsibility and mandate to continually foster such a culture, and that’s what this is, culture. If you’re stuck in a company that doesn’t do this… and if you want to do amazing things, just be honest with yourself - is this the place for you?

More than we want to admit and not enough to get us to stay.

Yes. A handful remain. But the next big thing will come from those who yearn to be what Google had and lost. Jeff Dean jokes aside, no one person or group made Google great. It was the combined optimism and output of thousands of brilliant and supportive Googlers with imperfect but good enough leadership. Don’t deify any one person or leader, but if you can see the potential in any company’s ambition, thinking, and culture - it’s going to be worth the ride.

As a xoogler who interviewed way back in 2004, let me say that this post sums up my feelings exactly. The people I worked with at Google back then weren’t necessarily there for high six figure salaries. We were there to work with other people like us. We were there to be part of something larger than ourselves. In some sense I felt alone most of the time, and when I interviewed I felt as if I had found my tribe. These are people who made me feel dumb, but also astutely aware that I could improve. I learned so much during my tenure there, and I regret none of it. Perhaps I do regret taking so long to realize the sense of purpose and mission died when Emerald Sea started and good projects (reader, google talk, code search) were being canabalized to prop up a pipe dream that was never going to work. That’s the nexus event in Google’s time line… where things went askew and never came back to normal. Now people only care about perf, OKRs, and levels. Being a poor new grad with no savings and intentionally picking projects that would not get you promoted (but were fun) was frequent back then. The courage to do new things is rewarded in ways different than titles and symbols. Perhaps no “one” is more cognizant of that than the anthropomorphic Google of today.