Google employees confess all the things they hated most about working at Google | Hacker News Reader

Google employees confess all the things they hated most about working at Google

independent.co.uk

63 pointsJerry221 comments

> How could a gig at the biggest, most ambitious tech company on the planet possibly be bad?

I know this is journalism and it's just a setup for the premise of the story, but my god it's so naive it hurts my heart.

This is just a blogspam wrapper around a Quora thread from 2013 (though there are more recent answers): https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-negatives-in-working-in-a...

This part was interesting:

>Sean Gerrish, Former Software Engineer: "Google must tread carefully in order to avoid litigation. In general, Google cannot do things like violate copyright laws without immediate, significant effects. This is exacerbated because governments' laws will change to affect Google itself."

>"In contrast, many startups can run circles around Google, not because they are better at execution (although some of them are better at execution), but because they can often get quite far by flouting regulations or civil actions before being discovered."

What would be an example of a 'law breaking startup'?

uber and airbnb? I support uber (and some of these laws are stupid / give cab companies monopolys) but they obviously ignore or circumvent various laws around private hire vehicles.

Airbnb knows many of their rentals are illegal but puts the burden on hosts to click a checkbox saying they're "aware of all applicable laws" and then abdicates all responsibility.

Even Apple's moves limiting third party apps on the iPhone would probably incur the wrath of the EU if Google did them.

Definitely Uber. Make no mistake, I use uber several times a week. But what they did is a complete circumvention of the law; it's why taxi drivers were so fed up, and somewhat hypocritically I do think uber needs to pay some fines. Uber's strategy was to spread fast and wide, faster and further than government regulatory agencies could notice or even deal with (and having a massive legal firm behind you helps with that) all while sticking a huge middle finger to legitimate entities within the system.

Pre-acquisition YouTube was probably skating on thin ice here. Rumor has that eBay's origin was less pure than selling Pez dispensers.

Having worked at many startups, I can say that it is very common for startups to have an 'original sin'.

Snapchat was a teen sexting app before it was about 'Stories'.

A lot of people work late because "there will be a roast dinner at 7PM". I'm 100% convinced that it's in Google's financial interest to cater and that smart law firms and other traditional industries (that currently think free food is amazing) will do the same in the next 10 years.

Speaking from personal experience, I suppose that is better than companies that are too cheap to buy pizza for their employees who are putting in crazy hours to make a deadline.

it saves time and money. and unless someone is very "type-A" about meal planning and time management, this convenience buys them a certain amount of emotional security (ie it lowers the slight anxiety about "what am I going to do for dinner tonight). The more anxiety and stress you can eliminate, the happier your employees are. I think it's great.

That is not new, in NYC pretty much everyone on Wall St gets to order dinner on Seamless for free if they're at work past 8pm. Some companies will also reimburse a cab home after that time too

Standard have fallen then, a family friend of my parent's generation (boomer) used to get fresh shirts if he worked late on Wall St.

Maybe you can "pay" people to work more hours at a law firm with food.

But at Google, people either already would work >40 hours a week anyway. Or if they don't want to, they'll stroll in at 11am to stay for the 7pm roast.

At FB, dinner starts at 6pm. It's a perk, not an incentive to work later.

Google Sounds like Microsoft in the late 90s

Was this also what IBM was like in the 70's?

Yes ex ibm and Microsoft and any other monopoly company. I've seen it myself 5 times

Boring article, sounds like any large organization.

That's what is noteworthy. Google had really good PR for a long time about how great it was to work there. Well, it turns out they have feet of clay after all, and many of the attributes that used to make them a better place to work than other tech giants were really just consequences of not having grown quite as much yet.

I'm getting a "Server not responding error" in plain text on a white page. Doesn't look good.

I can speak to the server provisioning complaint in the Quora thread since I briefly worked on the PaaS team in their CorpEng group.

Google's server and infrastructure provisioning is actually not that bad. It's MILES better what I've seen at any other large company I've worked for (and I've worked for a few). Requesting new servers and instances is automated (plenty of places require you putting in a ticket), virtual instances are provisioned almost immediately and are available in minutes (much faster if your workload is on internal GCE) and many of the changes to those instances are nearly instant if they're reasonable. You could even modify login and ownership permissions with this damn tool. It was an incredible piece of work.

Obtaining hardware was a different story. Requesting it was automated just like it was for virtual compute, but getting servers racked-and-stacked took longer because the tickets generated by the request tool needed to be routed to a hardware operations team in our datacenters. (By the way, they have a REALLY strong hardware ops team. These guys and gals, but mostly guys, care about every damn resistor in their machines, especially the ones that were built by them for Borg compute.) This took a while sometimes because, as you would expect, Google had two different request systems and seeing which updates were made where wasn't always easy. As for the servers themselves, let's put it this way: their SMALLEST server was bigger than the largest servers provisioned by MOST large companies. Obtaining a beast of a server (32-cores, 256GB RAM, a few TB of disk space) was pretty easy despite being frowned upon ("can that run on Borg? No? Okay!"). They have tried adding costs to stuff a bunch of times to make teams feel bad about abusing compute (SRE/SWE-minutes/hours are a real thing, and some tools even tell you how many were spent on your request), but it didn't matter too much in the end since Google's internal IT budget was always pretty lofty and it mostly affected who got to take their entire team on an all-expenses-paid vacation at the end of the year.

The teams were siloed to high heaven, so that did slow things down (my job there: "Is it the operating system? No? Pass it onto networking/HWops/VM team!"), but those teams absolutely knew their shit.

Everything else in that post was spot-on, though, and pretty accurately described why I no longer work there. But, without question, Google is one of the most employee-friendly companies in the world. If you want a high-paying tech job in an urban city, stability and all of the fucking perks you can imagine (you can fill your entire closet on Google clothing and gear, though you'll need to buy pants and underwear; the SRE backpack they gave me is one of the best I've ever used), you can't beat working at Google.

However, if you're the slightest bit entrepreneurial, want to make as much money as a dev or whatever as possible or want a fast-tracked career of some sort, Google is, at best, a good pit stop between your current job and your next impressive gig. (Their non-compete is ridiculously limiting; you essentially can't work on any side projects while working for them that you intend on selling.)

Mostly correct. One nit: Mountain View is hardly an "urban city" and SF is a 90 minute commute away.

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