Why I left Google (HN search results)
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Of course, additional supporting reasons become clear as one looks for and finds the door, and the understanding for why a person or institution is wrong for you evolves as you separate.
I'd be interested in hearing more about how that understanding/perspective changes over time.
But it's not every case, some experienced specialists can just write story as summary to give some experience to young newcomers, to arouse interest, maybe answer possible questions.
It actually seems like this is frequently the case to me. A lot of people get to the point where they simply don't like coming into work everyday, and have to come up for a reason why they feel that way.
Since they "don't like coming into work", the reason already exists, they just (maybe) don't know it yet. As such, it isn't so much inventing a reason as it is discovering it.
Eventually, there's a event that is enough standard deviations larger than the typical crap that the person just breaks. The veil of happiness is irrevocably pierced. And when that happens, all the other crap that they've been putting up with kind of comes crashing down. This is your "additional supporting reasons": they really existed the whole time, but they were at least tolerable before the veil was broken.
In my experience, it's rare that it's more like a dam that eventually breaks under pressure. There's usually that one event that finally breaks the person's will to continue. But then all the stuff that was being held back behind the dam is loosed and there's no coming back from that.
It also sounds like Microsoft in the 90’s, when they were stepping on necks and didn’t give a shit about anybody else. Because they were better than everybody else and why should you worry about inferior people?
Although in MS’s case they took it a step further: we are the best people in the world.
But MS was known to use a lot of ugly PR tactics to weaken and purchase or obliterate competition. Google may or may not be doing the same thing but they don’t have a reputation of being cold blooded about it.
Funny story: after a couple years at last big corp I worked for, I guess there was a decision made to join the ranks of the area's Best Places to Work. So memos were circulated, surveys were sent out and lo and behold, a year later the announcement was made: we had made the list of Best Places to Work, Large Company category. There was even a company-wide ceremony with a big cake to celebrate the feat.
So a few weeks later, I come across the actual dead-tree journal touting that year's Best Places to Work laying around in our breakroom. I open it up to find out where we actually ranked. Out of 44 companies in our category, #44.
We improved over the next couple years. Banners appeared around campus celebrating our achievement. The cakes got bigger. Things got worse for me personally at the company.
As you can probably guess, the impression I and others got was that the ranking was actually more important than actual employee sentiment. And I got the distinct sense that HR was motivated even moreso than previously for the sake of their Best Places ranking to push out employees that were critical (even legitimately, perhaps especially legitimately) of the way the company operated than deal constructively with their concerns.
So yes, if you work in a very profitable company under a crappy manager then it will be a very crappy life. If you work in a non-profitable company under a great manager it will be a better life than the former but not matter how great your manager is he/she won't be able to help you with things like benefits, compensation, additional hardware/software to make your work easier. The size of the company also gives a lot more options to find different projects to work on.
I would say statistically speaking you are likely to end up with an average manager and if you are then it's better to be at a largely profitable company while under such a manager. :)
It turned out to be a great move. In my experience, just about everything is better about Netflix as compared to Google: impact, pay, freedom, culture. The only thing that's worse is that I really miss the on-campus food at Google. And TGIF, eng-misc, etc.
If it is a deal-breaker and you are senior or otherwise considered a key team member they can't let leave, going remote can sometimes work out.
Certainly that must be illegal under the ADA, or something similar?
I think it’s pretty typical to say coming into the office is a requirement so full time remote would not be a reasonable accommodation under the ADA.
I think the reason why many companies don’t allow as a rule is that by selectively allowing remote work, they are vulnerable to ADA suits.
Hmm, where can I find out more about remote roles there? Is it worldwide or US-only?
Every job I've had the people I've interacted with in recruiting/interviews have all been very positive about the company.
And as for the "recruiters", they didn't really try to sell Google at all. I think they assumed that the Google name was sufficient reason to want to work for them. (It isn't, or at least was not for me.)
This is my experience too. I've only been here for a year but what surprised me was how negative non-official internal communications about the company seem to be..
Note I don't necessarily disagree with their points but the lack of civility.
From the inside you're dealing with a lot of people who have internalized the job as part of their identity and it's very difficult to just up and leave without formulating a narrative about why it's okay.
It was part of the personal narrative of the person (their identity) to keep telling that to themselves.
As another former Googler, this was one of the most concerning things about my experience at Google. The pressure I put on myself and received from others when I was debating whether to leave was enormous, especially because it was my first job. Nevermind the rampant imposter syndrome while you still work there. In hindsight, it was super toxic and led me to stay there even longer than was good for me and burning out harder. I've talked to a few current Googlers and Xooglers who also felt that way.
This was one of the reasons I decided to bail out after the first phone interview. I had some serious concerns, such as:
- I am not interested in working as an SRE when I just finished a PhD in Computational Linguistics.
- I am not really interested in living in London or Silicon Valley.
But any such question were all waved away with an air of 'such concerns are all irrelevant if you can work for the greatest company in existence'. The interviewer was really a nice person, but there seemed to be an immense groupthink.
(I now also have strong moral objections to working for Google, but that's another story.)
Many stories have been written about how their early hiring practices made for Google's huge success. I largely agree.
And related to your comment, groupthink or not, they do overall look pretty happy, even if you dial back for the social media factor: https://gxjam.com/ig-gallery/googler-instagrams-by-googlers-...
When I quit, I left town and began doing freelance work. If I had stayed in town or transferred to a different job at a smaller company, I might have felt compelled to justify my decision to leave. I probably would have gotten a lot of social push back and inquiries as to why on earth I would do such a thing.
I imagine most of these posts are written partly for that reason. It cuts back on being asked in the first place and then you can email the link the next 20 times you are asked. Plus, it is free therapy, among other things.
So when the time comes for you to leave the company, you aren't just leaving the company, you're leaving your entire life. It's the life change of leaving your job, getting divorced, and moving to a new town all rolled into one: it is one of the most significant events in your life, and you can't not think about it and try to understand it and explain it to other people.
I somewhat regret the large amounts of time I put into my side projects when I was young (20s). They definitely produced results in my career, but I'm uncertain if they provided that much of a boost. From my vantage point, you can get along quite well by latching on to a bandwagon and networking, rather than working so hard.
But I regret the proportion of time spent.
People who talked to him literally couldn't believe that he voluntarily left P&G and assumed he'd gotten fired. So strange.
As a result I'm a bit surprised that there aren't even more of these stories. At lunch one day the topic came up and we joked it would be interesting if engineers could earn medals (similar to the ones in the military) for each company they worked for. It would make for an interesting fashion accessory.
Best available alternative: wear tshirt from company A with jacket from company B and backpack from company C
It was due to an advantageous loophole in the corporate dress code. About 2/3 of the software developers on my team did it. It was as much of an inside joke as the memorial stack of the useless, corporate-branded, brass-plated railway spikes that grew by one every time someone left the company.
Every time the c-level poured out more Flavor-Aid, we checked the height of the stack and estimated the days left until all of us would be fired for not resigning fast enough.
To name names: Corporation Service Company. If they buy your company, find a new gig ASAP.
First thought: "Is that name for real?"
At some point, they decided that intellectual property research and protection services were in their milieu, so they bought up the best team I have ever worked with, and summarily threw us all in the trash, because apparently all the value of the acquisition was in the code base rather than the personnel.
I would prepare a special place in Hell for the principals, if I could get there first.
I'm not all that surprised. I can see people that stay a relatively short period of time just attributing it to a bad fit, or blaming themselves. Once you've established yourself comfortably and see yourself as an employee (and not a "new hire"), it's much more obvious that the choice is purely because you decided you wanted to change the status quo, and that might be something people feel better about talking about, or even feel compelled to talk about.
It is very easy to tell exactly who leaves google. It has a list available to any employee which is auto-updated and often includes any farewell message the leaving person sent.
We get t-shirts instead. Can't wear multiple at the same time though.
It surprises me how many interesting stories get flagged off the front page.
Edit: beaten by softawre
beaten by softawre
https://drewdevault.com/2016/11/16/Getting-on-without-Google...
I'll update the article, thanks!
...
And then I remember why I stopped using social networks (besides github) years ago.
- iPhone
- DDG
- Firefox/Safari
- Some other email then google
That's pretty much all you need.
- cloud storage
- shared document editing
- translate
- instant messaging
- calendar
- maps
Not that any of those have no non-Google alternative, but they're all things that Google offers.
learn every language?
I would switch in a heartbeat if the results were comparable. Every time I’ve given it (or Bing) a shot for a few weeks, Google was simply better.
I don’t miss Google services - apart from Maps—Apple Maps is usable, just.
― Cecil Day-Lewis
> 404 page not found
* Meta refresh tags: `<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://example.com/" />`
* HTTP Status codes `301` and `302`
* Canonical link tags: `<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/"/>`
In fact that's the rub. If they still have access to the original page's location, then GOTO makes sense. If they don't have access, then how do you know you're getting what you hoped for?
What happens if I say I used to be https://google.com, and then through some disaster the Google homepage is inaccessible for 3 seconds? That's a lot of users that just filtered down to my potentially malicious site, no matter how low the conversion rate.
If the web was still a network of documents, I think something like what you're suggesting would be a lot more viable, particularly with hashing and signatures helping do the heavy lifting.
But as an application delivery platform that still looks and pretends to be a network of documents, suddenly that carries a lot more risk.
Unless there's corporate malfeasance, it's counterproductive in the long run to talk so badly about a former employer, especially on a forever-archived blog post. Even if it does feel good to let out pent-up thoughts.
When I wrote a blog post about leaving Apple (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14270897), I made a conscious effort to be objective with the rationale why I left (to grow my technical skills), and not emotionally judge Apple as a company (I still strongly support Apple).
And this is hardly a slam, he still specifies that he believes it is basically the best place to work, and his follow-up post provides a bit more context to the main quote from the previous blog.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=why%20i%20joined%20google&sort...
Meanwhile when you stop using Google products... no one notices. No one cares. It's a completely personal decision. I stopped using Google products one by one when I found competitors I liked better and absolutely no one knows and no one asks because no one cares. I can still email Gmail users and they'll never know. I can send someone an address that I got from Apple Maps and they can open it in Google Maps just fine. If they send me a Google Maps link, I can open it in Google Maps because I don't need an account and a profile and a friends list first. I can use Bing or DDG and no one notices.
It's a really big deal to stop using Facebook. It's a really big deal to stop working at Google. In both cases you're losing some part of your social identity. Not the case when you're stopping using Google products.
I disabled posting to my wall for example, so on my birthday people struck up conversations instead. I anticipate I'll have it open for a while longer, but I'm removing people as we establish side channels so-far. I never added strangers but I'm not attached to everyone, like single conversation partners (I originally typed friends, haha, deprogramming).
It's those who choose to trumpet their cause get the most attention though, and it is representative only of their personalities, rather than the workplace.
I don't want to work at Google simply because I don't want to work that hard.
With all due the respect, your assumption that it would be full of pre-concieved ideas is simply wrong. I just have anti-bodies that fully reject the Kool-Aid and the cult-level fanboyism that is so common around these companies.
> this is where you are wrong
So, have you ever worked at Google?
The fact you assume it is common at Google is, exactly, a pre-conceived idea.
I am puzzled that nobody is talking about the author's claim that Google has lost the ability to innovate and is not focused on users any more. Is he right or wrong?
Would love to tab through a collection of the reasons the last 10-20 people left any particular company, and I believe we'd still likely fare far better in appearance and substance.
(Disclosure: I work at Google)
So its often easier to settle - this is true for those harassed being brave enough to go public and possibly be cross examined by a £2k a day barrister is a nontrivial thing to do.
Forcing companies to publish the number of such agreements made might make an interesting metric to use when evaluating companies.