Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
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Perhaps unusually, I actually wanted FB to impress itself more strongly on Oculus post acquisition because, frankly, Oculus was a bit of a mess. Instead, Oculus was given an enormous amount of freedom for many years.
Personally, nobody ever told me what to do, even though I was willing to "shut up and soldier" if necessary -- they bought that capability! Conversely, I couldn't tell anyone what to do from my position; the important shots were always called when I wasn't around. Some of that was on me for not being willing to relocate to HQ, but a lot of it was built into early Oculus DNA.
I could only lead by example and argument, and the arguments only took on weight after years of evidence accumulated. I could have taken a more traditional management position, but I would have hated it, so that's also on me. The political dynamics never quite aligned with an optimal set of leadership personalities and beliefs where I would have had the best leverage, but there was progress, and I am reasonably happy and effective as a part time consultant today, seven years later.
Talking about "entitled workers" almost certainly derails the conversation. Perhaps a less charged framing that still captures some of the matter is the mixing of people who Really Care about their work with the Just A Job crowd. The wealth of the mega corps does allow most goals to be accomplished, at great expense, with Just A Job workers, but people that have experienced being embedded with Really Care workers are going to be appalled at the relative effectiveness.
The communication culture does tend a bit passive-aggressive for my taste, but I can see why it evolves that way in large organizations. I've only been officially dinged by HR once for insensitive language in a post, but a few people have reached out privately with some gentle suggestions about better communication.
All in all, not a perfect fairy tale outcome, but I still consider taking the acquisition offer as the correct thing for the company in hindsight.
Joel on Software used to explain that rich entrepreneurs always sound passionate, but it is useless to try to emulate passion, because a big success can make someone passionate for anything. (...and I confirm – since we make 70k€ a month per cofounder, I became more passionate).
my experience is the absolute reverse direction. money is so very numbing
I remember reading an article about a Chinese cockroach farmer that incidentally described how his wife said the cockroaches were misunderstood. "Look how shiny they are!"
I imagine it helped the cockroaches' case that, by her standards, she was rich and successful.
These aren't discrete categories.
There are a lot of people who care about their work and also recognize that at the end of the day, it is a job, and the reality is that they can only play a role in shaping the outcome, not dictate it per their vision.
Also, depending on the job, the team, the project, and the product, people can go from one of those perspectives to the other. There are a lot of people whose current job/role situations aren't intrinsically motivating, but then find incredible motivation due to a change in project or role (I've experienced this multiple times).
That's, imo, an unreasonable requirement, but if you're super passionate about something, I can see why someone might see it.
At least in my experience, the Just A Job crowd are generally _very_ vocal about their view that this is Just A Job. Their worldview is not compatible with the worldview of people who Really Care. There is a very healthy middle ground of people who (in NON CAPITAL LETTERS) both really care and for whom this is just a job, but they don't _identify_ with those as their primary worldview.
> but people that have experienced being embedded with Really Care workers are going to be appalled at the relative effectiveness.
Unless you've experienced the Really Care type of team and situation, it's difficult to understand.
I don't mean any disrespect to the Just A Job people. There is nothing wrong with keeping your head down, getting your work done, and checking it at the door when you sign off at 5PM Monday through Friday. Frankly, that's the correct approach for most people.
However, there really are situations and teams where people won't stop until they can get the outcome as close to their vision as possible.
In my experience, this is far more likely to happen at small startups where members have reasonable equity to work with, as well as significant career upside for accomplishing the big tasks. Large companies like Google are so big that finding upside or even a niche to influence can seem impossible. Combine that with guaranteed high income and the motivation to do work that goes above and beyond gives way to a motivation to be associated with the right projects at the right time, regardless of your contribution.
When I look back, the happiest time of my career was when I was embedded among people who Really Care, trying to accomplish a goal that was likely to fail, working well over 40 hours a week (my choice), and not getting paid much. I've since moved to much higher compensation at bigger companies, but I'm often tempted to give it up to get back to a situation that sparks that kind of motivation and happiness again.
I think people who Really Care are as much a product of the environment as they are responsible for creating the environment. I Really Care about what I work on, and I try very hard to make it the best option out there, giving it a huge portion of my creative energy and not just keeping my head down and turning a crank, but I also recognize that in the end, it's also just a job.
upd: I did generalize "I care so much" people as well; but I do consider myself one.
- Colleagues push back on providing status, while simultaneously asking for a long roadmap of your future requests.
- Promotions for your best people get blocked by peers because “Not enough time at level, and others will complain”
- Punishment is much higher for picking up a dropped ball “and not following process” than leaving the ball on the floor.
In the end, if you’re outnumbered too much, it’s a road to frustration rather than success.
This spectrum of Really Care vs Just A Job isn't entirely accurate. A lot of projects are honestly just hard to "really care" about. The technical work is uninteresting or the mission itself isn't interesting. The monetary goal of success could be the most interesting aspect (i.e. your startup makes it big and you're rich), but the day to day could just not be that compelling.
Over enough time, you will naturally go from a Really Care person to a Just A Job person given the right project environment. The novelty of a job will wear off.
There's no nobility in trying to really care about everything you are paid to do.
I think the problem is actually deeper than that. I've spent much of my career avoiding megacorps, or even just corps, because I find them pretty frustrating. I have though worked at a couple of larger companies - one of them very large - as much to see what I could learn as anything else.
I sit somewhere on the spectrum between "Really Care" and "Just A Job", and it's varied quite a lot depending on what I'm doing and who I'm working with.
The problem with big companies is the "Really Care" gets beaten out of you: if you show any initiative whatsoever to try to get ahead of a situation or help another team you pretty quickly get shut down and told to stay in your lane.
Big companies tend to fragment and specialise responsibilities, if not actual skills.
Related to this hardly anyone has any decision-making power which means that any change requires a combinatorial explosion of interactions between individuals and teams to happen regardless of how competent or committed those individuals are.
It just favours mediocrity and coasting, along with a high tolerance for boredom, because there often isn't a viable alternative course of action for many employees no matter how good (or bad) those employees might be in another context working for another company. Sometimes you're in the right place at the right time, or have a conversation with the right person, to make something happen.
Another related issue: the vast majority of employees at big companies have no concept of the value of time, which manifests itself in all kinds of ways, but ultimately results in the performance of large quantities of BS/non-value adding work. If you're employed by a smaller company working in partnership with a larger company the asymmetry in understanding of time's value becomes particularly stark: you can often find yourself wondering why these people at the larger company feel so free to waste so much of your time asking you to do things that aren't valuable to the partnership or to the success of either company, or asking you to have the same conversation over and over again with different groups of people.
Back on point, the corporation has to "make do" with "Just A Job" workers because, in large part, the corporation creates them regardless of their initial state of motivation.
i wonder who at FB has the cachet to tell such thing to John Carmack. Zuck probably had the poster of John Carmack on the internal mental wall while going to middle school.
People that have worse are "Just a Job" crowd that lack real programming skill. They would be quickly hit by ageism and their careers stuck very quickly on Senior Developer position because they do not care enough to be promoted into management.
And I too have many criticisms of Google. But.
Google has entirely different revenue constraints. It can afford an entirely different way of working. That pace allows a more sustainable cadence of development. It can be a more humane place to work, in general.
Google can on the whole accomplish its revenue goals without being a meat grinder. So why be one? I think there is a bit of a problem with this guy's POV where he's come to fetishize the actual process of the making of the sausage versus the sausage itself.
Projects need not be run under insane stress if there's a steady supply of talent and money to make things happen. Google can afford that. Pace will be slower. Perhaps less competitive. But the core business continues to do excellently.
For many of us Google is not an "exciting" place to work. But it's a pretty good job to have and it pays well and gives access to both great benefits and to interesting technology. And that compensation in _most_ people does yield a sense of responsibility for delivery. But maybe not the survival-of-the-fittest-meat-grinder panic that this guy somehow seems to love.
> Google can on the whole accomplish its revenue goals without being a meat grinder. So why be one?
I too hope Google can prove that this state can be maintained after certain quasi-monopolies it holds start to vanish...
Although, he was very critical of Googlers' entitlement in particular. This is a real issue, especially among those who have never worked elsewhere, but IME people are more self-aware about it than he implies.
Lol, yeah. A lot of what he said made me nod along :)
If they ever lose that, the culture they’ve built will cause them to be destroyed and irrelevant in not that much time.
For now, it’s summer.
It doesn't have to be a black-and-white do-or-die.
I agree with most of the article, but one line stuck out to me as particularly wrong:
>”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.”
Good retention policy does provide value to users.
--
> "When COVID hit and we moved to work from home - a huge amount of complaints began around why cant employees expense food since they are not in the office. While most "real" people were worried about keeping their jobs or finding one, many employees were complaining about expensing their food on top of their salaries/stocks/bonuses."
+1 on this - I find this behavior really irritating, it makes me roll my eyes to see some of the most coddled employees in human history whining about this kind of thing. The most charitable interpretation is its just a normal way for people to bond over some shared thing by complaining about it, but a lot of the complaining feels like more than that.
> "We had lunch in the cafeteria and a Googler online ahead of us was overheard saying “What? Sushi again???” which became our inside joke around entitlement."
That said, in general, at least for the well-paid workers at these companies, complaints about insufficient expense reimbursement like that come across as pretty whiny.
"Oh no! I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and I have to live in my tiny apartment, buy food, and I might have to get a bigger apartment."
vs
"Oh no! I don't have a job, and I'm about to lose my apartment because I can't pay rent."
Really nobody has a right to ask for anything, ever, because there's always someone who has it worse, right? The only legitimate rung of the ladder is the bottom one, and we just keep finding lower rungs to use to shame anyone higher?
Sure, there are people who live charmed lives and just don't understand what the big deal is because nothing has ever gone wrong for them. They sure as heck aren't me. But let's all just stop with the tone policing. It's 100% unproductive, and won't change anything about anybody's situation, good or bad.
Thank you for really getting to the point of this article.
But I would add...
I left my job etc, but now I going to stand on soap box and write an article about and make myself sound so self righteous.
vs
"I live in a tent encampment."
vs
"I live in a shantytown in a third-world country."
vs
"I am on death row."
vs
"I am on death row for a crime I didn't commit."
vs...
It's important to try to maintain perspective about our own good fortunes. But it's also human nature to feel our own pain as relative to our previous experience. Someone's always got it worse than you but that doesn't mean it's fair to expect everyone else to wander around farting rainbows with grins plastered to their faces.
All of the Googlers I know are well aware of the many ways in which we're fortunate and privileged. But we're also, you know, human, and occasionally whining about stuff is just part of the human experience.
It’s not to feed you in your own home.
Of course, for many employees, the elimination of commuting makes remote work a significant win financially. But others never intended to do much more than sleep in their apartments and the current situation is therefore a net negative, even just financially.
Who the hell wants to deal with concur for every lunch?!
Then again, if your only goal is to extract as much money as possible from the corporate machine, it might work.
this system worked pretty nice imo, lunch wasn't anything fancy but it was healthy, cheap and having lunch with coworkers from other departments helped massively in regards to culture.
People here give MS too little credit. Their reach is MASSIVE. No american company has the world wide reach that MS has. Practically every enterprise in the world is their customer.
Look at Apple before the return of Jobs (though at that point, they were having profit issues too - but what lead to that was arguably short-term thinking).
Today, I'd argue Intel has made similar decisions that put them on a bad long term path.
MS would have stayed alive for a while, but been a shadow of their former self.
Obviously, it's hard to prove a counterfactual like this - but this is how I model it.
MS can take all the good ideas, implement them and sell them worldwide before a startup can get out of silicon valley. Case in point: slack vs. teams.
You're right though - 'irrelevant' is too provocative and strongly worded.
I'm more focused on future bets and trends. I think that trend shifted at Microsoft from trending towards future irrelevance back in the other direction, to being a competitive threat again.
I find it interesting that Apple has money, hardware, OS, many apps, web presence. And now ARM CPU knowhow.
Why aren't they forcibly pushing into Corporate?
Sure, they'd have to develop corporate fleet management stuff but at this stage they could buy a few companies and be 80% of the way there. Or build it right from the start for only a handful of their hundreds of billions.
How many iphone toting CTOs in your average non-silicon valley companies would jump for Apple "Just Works" in their business?
Either they see something they don't like or a Gates/Jobs handshake said no.
Enterprise means people in suits doing sales calls. It’s a patient, one-on-one, handholding process, and it’s just not in Apple’s DNA.
Far better for them to come up with some new consumer widget that also leverages their strength in supply chain. That’s what they’re good at, and it’s extraordinarily profitable.
Microsoft obviously has large corporate presence, but also Xbox for example.
I just see so many already operational/technical/financial/branding assets in Apples favour compared to incumbents that I'm not sure how they'd fail to make money. OTOH, someone smarter than me in the company clearly thinks otherwise. I just wish I knew what they knew.
Maybe it is as you say, "just not Apple's DNA."
This is surprisingly not specific to Google. I've heard of other instances of this in other bay area companies, including mine. For us, it had to be put to rest at a company-wide all-hands meeting, along with other overly entitled complaints like "comp is not competitive", when in reality levels.fyi ranks it higher than even FAANG.
Greed sometimes defies logic.
I'm not Ballmer's biggest fan, but I think he's often sold short (to Nadella's benefit), you'd almost believe Microsoft was tanking, but it grew a lot under Ballmer (mobile failures notwithstanding).
As far as I can tell, Nadella just reprioritized projects that Ballmer launched or shepherded in his boring-but-efficient way: what new tech or project did Satya launch that you can attribute MS's "turnaround" to? IMHO, it's mostly PR/hearts-and-minds stuff, but I quit MS tech a long time ago and haven't been following closely.
In retrospect, I think the Win mobile failures were overblown, the zeitgeist then was mobile would replace desktop/laptop computers, therefore failing on mobile could be fatal to Microsoft, and remained as a stain on Ballmers name. The "post-pc" world suggested by Apple/Jobs never materialized.
...but someone has to write the code first, before some of it can be deleted by a great engineer ;)
(MS employee; I work in Azure, but didn't become an MS employee until 2019.)
I think that article gets most of it. There's some MSFT narrative that comes up here a lot where people say Ballmer was doing great and Nadella just continued his plans, I don't buy it.
MSFT had a lot of strategic failures as well as product failures under Ballmer. Nadella shifted strategy and made them a serious competitor again.
Then it should be easy to say which green-field projects Nadella launched then. I can't think of any, but I'm open to learning.
They were making money hand over fist, massive growth in revenues almost ever year under Ballmer. [1]
Which part of that massive money train is 'not serious competitor'?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...
Revenue growth isn't the whole story. If you're extracting rents from legacy locked-in products or enterprise deals that doesn't necessarily mean you're a competitor on the new paradigms (phone, cloud, web).
At the time Windows phone was a failure and they missed that entire platform because of Ballmer (there's hints of your argument in this video, "we're making money with windows mobile"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
MSFT cloud wasn't doing well and was overly focused on .NET
They were too focused on Windows rather than recognizing the strategic value they could provide outside of it: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/
Today I'd make a similar argument for Intel. Intel doubled down on old style fabs and is not competitive with TSMC. They failed to compete on mobile. They're ignoring the end of x86 and mocking Apple: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/02/08/2221233/intel-b...
Increasing revenue is a good sign, but it matters how. If you're making short-term decisions to extract money from legacy stuff at the expense of new products - that's bad for your long-term future. It can take a while to catch up to you, but it eventually will. Then you'll just limp a long as a dinosaur that makes enough money to survive but nobody really wants to work there and you're done doing interesting projects. That's basically what I mean by irrelevant.
Ballmer didn't 'make money from extracting rents and screw everything else up'.
Ballmer entrenched and expanded MS core products i.e. Office to the Cloud and along with that massively expanded revenues, which continue to this day, long after his departure, with no signs of slowing down.
He completely screwed up Search and Mobile, but those were risky new things, that's to be expected. Frankly he should have had 1 of 2 ...
But he also established XBox and Cloud; the former is a very successful play into a very difficult space (though maybe not as nice in terms of profits) - remember, Google just completely failed at this. The later, is now a hugely successful and growing business, and frankly, over the long haul has a shot at actually going toe-to-toe with Amazon.
Microsoft has 10's of thousands of sales people and direct access to every single CTO in the world if companies with > 1000 emoloyees. Much the same way they are going to stomp Slack, they have that kind of advantage (though not the same leverage) against AWS. Point being - he started a massive business.
Azure now has revenues of more than Windows did when Ballmer started, and it's growing by 40% YoY.
So yes 'revenue' is not the 'whole story' if someone is bilking a cache cow and running everything else into the ground ... but that's now what happened.
Ballmer 'grew and entrenched the cash cows' and made some other huge bets, some of them working out to the point where they are now also, big growing foundational aspects of the business.
'The Market' took a long time to recognize this, but all the historical sales numbers are there for everyone to see.
I believe that once Analysts realized that 1) Windows and Office is 'here to stay' and 2) due to AWS, Azure is going to be huge ... that they revised their view on MSFT from a 'old company' to a 'well run growth company'.
Satya seems great and has made some good moves, but nothing of the magnitude that Ballmer did. At least not yet.
Satya's changes have been positive but most of the money he is making is due to Gates + Ballmer.
I think he's good but we'll have to wait to see the full picture.
Office/Word Online (2010)
Azure (2008/2010)
WSL (Can't find info. Looks like it started before 2014 under Project Astoria)
.Net Core (Happened in 2014 - not sure who "started it")
Clearly, it was in Apple's interest to emphasize the ascendance of mobile where they were strong vs. the PC where Microsoft was. I doubt Jobs thought desktops/laptops were going away, just that they'd become a less important part of the landscape--and that's almost certainly true among consumers as a whole.
I think if you could measure the man hours spent using iDevices and Android devices, as a percentage of general computing hours, you'd find that it would dwarf anything. Everyone has a smartphone now. And tablet sales alone outnumber PCs.
I am sure someone inside Microsoft saw this early, and figured that Azure could be a platform-agnostic backend to mobile apps and browser-based apps, without having to completing with Apple since they lack core-competences there. Pivotally, tablets failed to replace desktops in the enterprise market, as was initially predicted (and feared by Microsoft).
This is a very US/EU centric evaluation of computing. It might not even be accurate for Gen Z, overall.
Not to mention most of Ballmer's misses were more Bill said no.
MSFT revenue has NEVER stopped growing: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/rev...
This is definitely not true.
Ballmer increased revenues massively, and launched a slew of new products (XBox, MS Live, cloud etc.) and realigned the company. Have a look [1]
Nadella has done nothing approaching that level of importance yet, so far, he is riding the wave that was handed to him.
Now the stock price - this is a different thing. It sagged under Ballmer even as MSFT was massively growing revenues, around Naella's time investors realized that MS 'was not fading' and all that extra EPS was like a share price slingshot.
Ballmer was as transformative and important as Gates.
Nadella's early transformations were around culture, but that's just PR.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-global...
The fact that it sagged under Ballmer and is now up under Nadella aligns with how I'm framing things. I suppose you could argue that's entirely PR, but I don't think that's the case.
People thought MSFT under Ballmer was trending down, now they think it's trending up. I'd argue that's due to strategic shifts that happened once Ballmer left.
I've mentioned in other comments that revenue (while good) isn't the whole story.
Sure, the stock price is always a prediction of future success. But it can change overnight, and when it does, it's not because reality or the "facts on the ground" changed overnight (usually) it's because perception changed. Often if not always because a catalyst made people aware of something that was building for a fair amount of time.
>strategic shifts that happened once Ballmer left.
I'm not saying this is wrong, but I don't think it's appropriate to treat the stock price as evidence of it.
I believe if Ballmer had of hung on for a few more years, that change would have happened eventually.
Investors eventually would realize 'This is not just Windows and Office'.
I think Ballmer couldn’t have done it, he was too tied up personally in windows.
Some of the examples you mention under Ballmer are more examples of strategic failure under his watch. Xbox is the easiest example, the Xbox One’s launch was awful and focus on cable boxes was bad.
I don’t think it took a while for investors to realize, I think investors had an accurate model of what was going on. When Ballmer left things improved.
1) He reconstituted Windows and Office distribution, sales, put office on the cloud.
2) He launched XBox and more notable Azure.
So if you think 'Desktop is dying' (desktop sales were plateauing) then 1 seems like it's going away and cloud isn't a huge business then 2 doesn't matter.
But the prediction was wrong:
A) Even with flatlining desktop sales, Win + Office continued to thrive. Even to this day. It's not a 'legacy business' it's a 'healthy ongoing business.
B) XBox, in particular Azure are huge. Azure makes more money today than Windows generated in revenue when Ballmer took over Microsoft.
Ballmer's failures were mostly Search and Mobile ... both of which were sad, but also they were up against Google Search and iPhone, the best products of our era. XBox and Azure are in very difficult areas, and are doing well.
In hindsight, Ballmer did quite well, there's not a lot to debate unless someone things that Search/Mobile success should have been imminent, but I don't think that's true.
He massively grew and adapted the baseline businesses, and started a few new, huge businesses. Glorious profits all around.
Satya hasn't yet quite made the kind of decisions that will have the lasting impact Ballmer has had, in his defence, he's in an era were the 'new fields of competition' are less obvious.
Windows + Office is a legacy product line. It makes money, but it's not the future. They need it obviously, but over-focusing on that at the expense of other things was a mistake.
The Xbox launched in 2001 - was the original one even Ballmer? I think Gates left in 2000? I'm not sure that counts. Xbox One launch/strategy was bad.
I'm not trying to say he did nothing right, but I think we just disagree on his overall performance.
Could that be just someone not liking sushi? As someone who doesn't like sushi and rather eat hotdog form gas station, I could see myself saying that.
The charitable interpretation is that total compensation has just dropped, while the work hasn't. It's Loss Aversion[1], losing something hurts more than gaining the equivalent thing. Google isn't suffering from people staying at home using the internet more, it's not like Google cut manager salaries by 50% to keep the factory lights on and the orphans fed. Google's share price is up at least 50% since Jan 2020, and they've taken away some thousands of dollars of remuneration from staff and saved money on not having to run kitchens, and are demanding that staff feel grateful about this by handwaving at suffering people elsewhere.
> ">”After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.”"
Calling legal and privacy efforts "a waste of resources" and saying they provide "zero value" /is/ saying they are not important.
I gotta say, all those Unices fucking sucked. The userland tools were abysmal, with missing flags or bugs in their getopts, the compilers and their sockets libraries were extremely finicky, and their man pages were anemic.
GNU/Linux won because if something sucked, somebody somewhere would fix it. By the early 2000s, and especially after Linux 2.6, it was obvious closed-source UNIX was both worse and overpriced.
Even now it seems like the best part of the closed source MacOS Unix stack is the open source homebrew/macports stuff.
Apropos of the "curated App Store" or "free-for-all" discussion currently active, I remember talking to a colleague in the early 2000s that Apple with its curated BSD-derivative OS was exactly what open sourced OSes needed. Users don't want to do more work than necessary; in retrospect, the selling point that users can do anything+everything with *nix OS was the wrong message.
You didn't mention package management and network booting to be pain points. They were nightmares, which Linux eventually solved. I think that's where the race was lost.
What comes to mind most recently? See Slack.
Either public sector companies, or banks & insurance whose business model can't be disrupted that easily because of regulatory pressures.
Giant IT companies from the valley that successfully built a way to lock down users are the other example.
There is always some drops fear trying to find a way up my limbic system whispering to me that one day this will be over. One day, I will have to work for real again and I will have to pass tough interviews and have new, possibly demanding bosses. But this has been going for more than 4 splendid years, very long-termism tend to make one's life pretty dull, and my dream is to open a bicycle shop anyway.
As a famous ad campaign used to suggest: "Think different".
You wrote: "Compensation for a job is about more than money. It's about where you end up as a person when the job is over.". It sounds good in theory, but in practice? Should I switch job, maybe/likely accepting less money and more stress in the coal train now because when the luxury train stops I will be in a better place (I am exaggerating for conversation purposes)? I have my doubts. This is specific to my situation and I don't want to explain too much (and that's why I use a throwaway account), but outside of the US that would sound bizarre. Switching from a cushy well-payed job to a demanding, paying-less job because in a few months/years it will be over? Yes, maybe I will get rusty here and there, but I can move to Tulum for 3 months and get ready for interviews, no?
EDIT: typo
- Look for opportunities to contribute more at your job. Don't wait for a manager to tell you what to do. Rewrite some code. Propose a new feature. Improve the documentation. Write more tests.
- Teach yourself new skills. Don't just skim books on new languages/technologies. Develop a personal project and pretend like you're being paid to work on it.
- Take practice coding tests. Stay up to date with relevent skills.
Enjoy the job you have now, but keep yourself ready for the day when that job goes away. I had a very easy job for about 6 years. I automated most of my job and effectively did not have a boss. I made great money and spent most of my time working on hobbies, hiking, or working on my house. When the job ended I suddenly realized all of my skills were rusty. I regret wasting all of that time, and wish I would have used it to better myself.
As I like to say: there is no second life, the only one that was build was virtual and "failed".
> when the tide turns, it is not that they are looking at some code review you did or improved documentation you wrote to keep you onboard.
I mostly disagree, but it depends on your employer. As a senior engineer, I very much have the opportunity to differentiate myself and protect my position longer than others. I lost my easy job to lower paid, lower skilled engineer because I chose not to put in the work which would have defined my role as a more difficult one. It was easy to replace me when the time came because I allowed the scope of my role to shrink to menial tasks which did not require much thought.
I've worked with plenty of sysadmins who suddenly had no choice but to become software engineers. That learning is brutal for some of them–years long process, maybe never. 3 months may not be enough if you coast for long enough.
Where? How do I find jobs like this?
I get what the sister comment points out about long-term stagnation, but at the same time, I could desperately use a few years without a resume gap, but without a perpetual dagger hanging over my head.
Panic attacks are brutal and getting employees to the point of having panic attacks is part of what is wrong in the tech world. And it happens, in big corps, because some people want to advance at the expense of others.
Would you say that any particular background and skill set or credentials/laurels (publishing? writing? speaking? management? management at a certain level?) sets you up most appropriately for getting this sort of role? Basically, how do I take any actionable steps to find those positions or move in that direction.
As to how to find those positions, my recommendation would be to look for (1) high-revenue, big companies (they have the money and they have the space), (2) going through some sort of transformation (moving to the cloud, opening a new business area), and (3) need prestige, both internally and externally.
You can find those jobs in job ads, but you need to look at the ad written most of the time by a semi-clueless recruiter through the lens of points (1-3) above.
You get little more than a pat on the back.
Isn't that why so many people flocked there to work in the first place?
I came here to say something similar. I'm a founder, I've been a manager and a software engineer, I did 5 years @ Google.
When I hear someone in "upper management / founder / in a position of power over employee's lives" say that what they really needed for their own success was a way to threaten/risk the livelihood of their employees so that they would work harder, it just makes me sad for anyone affected by them.
Yes, sometimes employees need to be fired... but sometimes management also needs restructuring. The truth of the matter is that at a company the size of Google, it gets harder and harder for an individual employee to directly influence success. I think that's mostly because of the policies in place to make sure that employees don't directly *damage* success either.
This means that you have to work within the system you have. An employment contract is two-sided, you're offering something that the employee wants, and they're offering something that you want. If your first reaction when there's a problem is to cut their pay or fire them, then you're the one with the problem, not them.
Yes, there are times you need to fire someone (and I have), but that should be reserved for one of two cases: 1) they are actively damaging the business (e.g. destroying company property, morale, hurting business prospects), or 2) despite your best efforts, they are unable/unwilling to fulfill their side of the contract. Just realize that firing someone has a cost for your company and team as well as for the employee.
I'd rather part ways amicably, finding them something that works for them if possible, and I think what Noam said about managers recommending great employees is unfair both to the managers and the employees. I've had employees who were hard-working and passionate, just not passionate about the project they were working on. When that happens, the best thing you can do for both of you is to find them the fit that works.
Can you build a large company that doesn't get mired down in things like management and governance and legal and policy? I hope to someday get large enough to find out, because I've got some ideas... (Like separating those functions out in the same way there are engineering teams dedicated to software tooling.)
But it requires a will and effort from the top down, and the people who get excited about building billion dollar businesses don't seem to get excited about maintaining them once they get that size.
I work for a huge company. For every person I've worked with who I thought needed to go, there at at least 10 (probably more) who have become ineffective because of management,politics, and bureaucracy.
I had a very different view of "who should be fired" when I joined this company, but I think I've grown up a bit.
Even if sometimes people need to get fired, I’d say it is more important to make a good hire upfront and normally these people should be very capable and adapt to these dynamic environments. Just firing on the quickest difficulty says something about beeing rather a bad manager or not knowing how to hire / what to look for.
I’ve seen many incompetent managers firing their tech leader or program leaders just because it did not meet the set arbitrary delivery goals. By firing them it only reinforced the managing-by-fear way of working and lead to a cover-you-a* mentality that things just became even slower...
Thanks for your comment and I wish there were more managers like you!
Don’t get the asymmetry. Why no firing for mgmt?
Yes, sometimes management needs firing as well, but in the context of my comment above, we were talking about a case where one employee's performance doesn't match up with the expectations of their manager.
To put it in the context of software engineering, if you have an engineer responsible for ten features in a year, and nine of them are coming along just fine, but the tenth was completely bungled, it would be incredibly rare to think that it was time to fire the engineer over the tenth. You're more likely to restructure things so that the engineer has less of a workload, or has help on the tenth, or maybe even just give them a bad review and make it clear that their performance needs to improve.
Firing a manager has an even greater cost for a company and team than firing an employee because the manager is a representative of the relationship between their employees and the company, so firing a manager also damages that relationship for each of their employees.
This is not exclusive to managers. Other roles like engineering team leads and senior architects also have a greater cost, because they're the employees whose roles have a connection to more people than just themselves.
You can learn the wrong lessons: you learn how to go up for promotion rather than build things that work for users.
In the last 10 years it's become extremely common at Google do work that is simply thrown away (because of issues above your pay grade). You could work at Google for 5 years and nothing you worked on ever sees the light of day. That is a problem.
You don't learn what works when your work gets thrown away. You can still get promoted anyway. So why do the work? Just pretend you did it. (It's usually not as black-and-white as that; employees are usually well intentioned but then are surprised when the work that was hyped up by management gets suddenly thrown away.)
I'd say that if you want to have a good career as an engineer, you should focus exclusively on building things from 22 to 26 (or whatever your first 4 years are). If you miss a year or 2 of that because of corporate politics, then you missed a lot of learning, and you may be unqualified for future jobs.
There is legitimately a lot to learn about writing software on the job -- IMO it's more than the equivalent of another 4 year CS degree.
----
This is probably the best description of it that I've read (after working there myself for over a decade and seeing the change in values):
https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241
I heard someone describe grad school as "17th grade" for some people with the wrong attitude. Google might be "21st grade" for others. That is, you're following metrics set up by an organization -- getting "graded" -- rather than building things for "the world".
The way some Google employees speak about "the world" highlights that disconnect. (e.g. the wearables thing on the front page yesterday was mocked)
To be fair, this is how things work at most jobs. If you work at a big bank or insurance company, you don't really care about "customers" either -- they are too far away from you. You care about what your boss thinks and his or her boss. This is sort of the "default" configuration of society.
Perf at Google is broken. But I think it's endemic to large companies, probably. I only worked at smaller ones before. I worked for some that were meat grinders, and others that were better.
This is also why the Bay Area is a truly great place to live in. So many small companies are there for us to choose. They move fast yet have reasonable work-life balance. They offer great financial perspective too, which can be far better than big companies if one's lucky.
Of course, I'm not saying big companies are all bad. Indeed, some people are great at navigating company dynamics. They build solid relationship in a complex environment. They make things happen despite bureaucracy. They lead multiple teams to achieve impossibles. They cut through red tapes like hot knife cutting through butter. They build a company to last.
So, the real question one should ask is: which type of person am I?
I think this is overly cynical. Big companies are typically further along the complexity curve. Complexity in engineering, but also sales, marketing, support, and growth opportunities (that is, growing revenue 25% is typically easier when you're revenue is $100K versus $100M).
That said, they are real differences. A lot of people aren't going to enjoy that type of work, and will opt-out of it. But a lot of the lower-risk, better pay will be in this space (a startup is high-risk, potentially incredible payout).
Creativity requires space. Space between work and space to think, be it on a yoga mat at 12 PM or a 4 PM refresher.
Google has all the building blocks for great backend services and front-end development and, if you know where to look and have some experience with them, you can build a rock-solid product in <6mos, also assuming you have a team that can execute and the political will to ship it.
Politics/consensus building is where the real roadblocks lie in Google, and presumably other large companies. Trying to make high-level product & technical decisions when you have 10 stakeholders with 3 VPs, all in different orgs, is serious exercise in patience; months of emails & meetings await you.
It is like a democracy, but differs in that you need every single team leader onboard to get anything done vs say 51% of the "vote".
But for most engineers, most of the time, you're working well below the level of those executives, and especially if you're engaging with shared infrastructure, the executive who is the final decision maker is Sundar.
For example, I am involved in an issue where 3 ICs whose levels are between 4 and 6 (really this is a simplification), are engaged in dealing with solving a problem. These three ICs are in 3 different PAs, reporting indirectly to 3 different SVPs, who join up at Sundar. It isn't worth it to have the CEO spend time refereeing this decision.
Ultimately this was resolved at the director level, by consensus building, because it would reflect badly on every one of those directors if they failed to resolve it and had to escalate to SVPs or CEOs about something that is, on the company scale, trivial (to be clear this is still a thing that is multiple engineer-years of work, but it's still Google-trivial).
I expect the same is true at Amazon or Apple. Cook and Bezos aren't making every decision. VPs and Directors deal with small potatoes, and most things are small potatoes. The difference may be organizationally that those companies are more siloed and so leaves from different trees interact less often. But this friction also is often intentional and has value (SRE explicitly not reporting up through normal product eng ladders, for example).
Next up is the documentation. That requires the doc team's approval. Oh they require IL8n, lets go to that team and see where in their queue we are <Doc team has power to delay your launch>.
This same flow occurs across all supporting teams. And it can get complex with Service A depends on Service B, which depends on Service C...and Service C can reject the quota increase delaying your launch...etc.
> I expect the same is true at Amazon or Apple
At amazon you would connect to who everyone reports up to, or whoever has clear decision making authority. You would then provide a written document going over the facts and suggested decisions, and ask they make the call. After that its "disagree and commit".
I don't see how this is distinct from what I said, except perhaps that for many teams, the GFE team reports up to a different SVP than you, so the person who you'd connect up via is the CEO, which like I said, doesn't scale for every launch.
If you want to try and escalate your launch up to the CEO, nothing is stopping you, except perhaps your director or VP. But that is itself a signal that perhaps this isn't worth escalating about and that the status quo is acceptable.
Except when your team wanted to initially onboard with GOOPS and your request sat in Buganizer for 2 weeks waiting for someone to triage. Uh oh — we're turning down this service next quarter, you will need to go start this onboarding process again with its replacement.
Or when you needed quota in a cell where your product area didn't have Flex. Maybe you can set up a VC with your PARM? Does next week work for your launch plan? Hopefully they can do something for you!
Or when your logs access request sat in GUTS for a month because both of the approvers were on vacation and no, there's not an escalation path.
Or when you needed to change a firewall rule for a project your team inherited which for some reason runs on GCE. Make sure you bring your Ariane link when you open your request. Have ISE reviewed your code? No? ISE currently have a quarter-long backlog, so we're not sure we can grant your firewall exception.
None of these examples are contrived; the weight of the operational bureaucracy is staggering. It may well be that this stuff is felt more on the SRE/Security side around production launches than on the SWE side for experimentation or iterative development, but I struggle with the idea that Google is nimble.
The need to run in a particular cell is unusual.
Most of what you described i felt as well _sometimes_ for security related stuff, like dedicated machines in that one cluster or an ISE review on short notice--but security related is also somewhat out of the norm and considering that is, Google does a great job.
For "normal" services what you described does not match my experience at all. Even for medium sized infrastructure services mostly everything just works (IME).
Never had a GUTS ticket that was not answered within a business day, but obviously just n=1 sample--imo support staff is mostly amazing.
Emphasis on single product as they tend to have 5 apps that do the same thing until they kill off the popular ones.
This is a great take. I've worked in a place where the revenue was astronomical, to the point where the entire company could probably do nothing for 100 years and still be viable, yet it was run like a meat grinder, where everyone did insane hours and you always worried that it wouldn't be enough and you would be stack ranked out of a job. Truly awful, because it was so unnecessary. On the other hand, I've worked for a start-up with a visibly short runway, where it was obvious to everyone that if everyone didn't bust their asses, the company would fail. At least there you have an actual reason to be a meat grinder.
I think a lot of companies could succeed yearly and make Wall Street happy and still not be a meat grinder, but some sick, stubborn cultural norm makes "meat grinder" the default mode of operation.
There is a whole community however that sees wealth acquisition as the point of employment. Even if it's "merely" joining the ranks of the top 5% this is lauded as success by many. Lawyers, doctors, consultants, stock traders, all the high paying professions have people who subscribe to this philosophy. "I want to provide the best life possible for my family" might be the primary goal. Lower status/pay professions might describe this as what a "job" is as opposed to a "career". Something you do for money.
Many hackers want to both provide the best possible life for their families and participate in a grand adventure of changing the world by creating something people want. I am infected with this mentality. But this might be considered a delusion of grandeur by many, or egotism.
It's hard to empathize with a group who doesn't share a drive you see as essential for good character, but that lack of empathy is what is drawing people's scorn here.
This may be regional, but certainly seems to hold for US, Canada, much of EU in my limited experience.
More to the point, are other professions doing notably better in those “tech hubs” relative to software developers ?
In my experience, no, which suggests your comment really boils down to “there are some high COL places where even professional couples struggle to afford a house” no?
Yes, I could make more if I worked a lot more, or worked in the U.S., but it's not worth it to me (as someone who doesn't want kids). When I'm employed, I still live a much more comfortable life than the majority of people in Vancouver, let alone globally.
Everything about that seemed secure and stable until our entire world got rekt in 2008. It took forever for the average automotive worker and their family to recover from that recession, and I've come out of it incredibly cynical about employment and the US economic system. When it matters most, DC will bail themselves and their cronies out first, and will drag their feet and cry deficits when it gets time to help you.
I care about doing great work, but my highest priority is to "secure the bag" as the kids say and ensure a stable life for myself and my family. I keep a big cash savings, save and invest aggressively for retirement, and make no assumptions about my employability in a hypothetical time of crisis. I have a feeling a lot of mid-late-20s and early 30s SWEs share my experience, it's no accident I chose such a lucrative field (though I do love my work!).
Watch out for yourself, don't discount the possibility that software eng is just living in a repeat of the irrationally exuberant 1990s automotive industry.
Side note/PS: It's not all about money: you've got to be politically active, invest in community, and advocate for the kind of world you believe we should live in! Just don't forget to secure yourself financially and make no assumptions if you can afford not to, then you can confidentially support yourself and others in times of crisis.
I want to make sure that when that happens, my family will be economically okay during the following years.
So I need wealth (money).
Once you are at the level where your compensation covers everything you want, it’s more of a game to increase it than necessity.
It also makes me feel better since a lot of people I don’t respect earn a lot more than I do, so increasing relative compensation is righting something in the world :P
This is also why many people choose to plateau at a certain point. In the Google/Facebook scheme, that's often L5 - I've talked with a number of employees who debate whether they even want the responsibility that comes with an L6 promo and are quite convinced they wouldn't want L7+
Their mindset would probably be foreign to the author of this article, but I can see it and it lines up with what you said - at a certain point, if comp is high enough, I'd prefer to be well paid AND have free time. I've worked with some truly incredible L7+ engineers, but they correlate strongly with people who never turn off and seemingly never stop working, and that's simply not something that appeals to me in life.
If you're talking about building a team, having people with similar goals is always important. This guy wants a team with the "we're gonna change the world" view. You're not going to do well on a team like that if you're just looking to maximize the salary/effort ratio.
I think one of the reason people get annoyed at stuff like this is that a lot of people been sold a "we're gonna change the world" vision that turns out to just be some recruiter or manager's excitement and end up parsing TPS reports for below average salary. True change the world opportunities rarely come via a recruiter or job board.
When he talks about perfect alignment between employees and investors in the start up world, he is believing his own sales pitch. In reality the same divide exists there too.
Call me cynical and jaded, but I don't believe "building something valuable" is the point of employment.
"Building something valuable" is the point of my vocation. I used to believe that the employment and vocation should align. Over the course of more than 20 years of my professional career, the vast majority of the employers I've had have done their best to disabuse me of that notion.
The way I see it, the point of employment is to ensure you have the money and the benefits you need to live comfortably. If your employment and your vocation align, it's a nice bonus. If they don't, do what you're passionate about in your free time.
> Many hackers want to both provide the best possible life for their families and participate in a grand adventure of changing the world by creating something people want.
If you can get that, it's awesome. But if you can't, then you have to choose. And I know what I'm choosing.
> If your employment and your vocation align, it's a nice bonus.
That is the meaning of "should", isn't it? And even if they don't align 100%, you can always strive for a maximum.
Not really. It's a difference between "should have" and "nice to have".
If you go in with the expectation that your job and your vocation should align, then you're setting yourself up for a negative experience. Maybe not immediately, but definitely down the road, because that alignment won't last forever.
I prefer to go in with the idea that it's a desirable, but entirely optional bonus.
I guess it depends on how "risk averse" you are in this context. It's kinda like salary negotiations. I prefer to put most of the weight on the base salary. Equity and bonuses are nice, but if the base salary isn't enough to live comfortably, then you're setting yourself up for a big risk: you're one management decision away from coming up short. Yes, I know that most US employers can fire you at will in theory, but in practice getting laid off doesn't happen as often as the myriad of stuff that can adversely affect your bonus or equity.
Different people have different outlooks. Mine puts the "job-passion balance" in the same category as "bonus" and "equity". It comes from my own, personal experience. YMMV.
I spent most of the past five years working on projects for the US geointelligence enterprise where if we failed to meet a deadline, a satellite might not launch. Before that, I was in the Army for 8 years fighting wars. I am perfectly willing to make tremendous sacrifices when it is actually worth it, but it is amazing to see how deluded Silicon Valley types are about the actual importance of what they're doing. Not everything changes the world. Most products are trifling conveniences, nice to haves, and if you miss a deadline here or there, nobody cares. Or at least they really shouldn't care.
Was that worth it? Do you consider that superior to working on trifling conveniences?
And all for what? A mapping application having features which really don't save lives 99% of the time.
Maybe bad for mental health of the average employee but not for everyone.
At worst, if targeted to a person, project, or role it immediately heightens the tension in the relationship.
At best, it is used to emphatically describe something ("this code is a bit shitty") but again because of swear words generally inflammatory nature it can be interpreted poorly.
Yelling out "Fuck!" because you just stubbed your toe on your desk, or because you've been stuck on a frustrating problem for awhile that you just can't solve, is fine. Saying "Why does team X's product suck so fucking much?" or "Why do you keep making this same fucking mistake?" is a huge problem.
It's not exactly about the swears per se, but about being overly negative / anti-collaborative. The OP post gives off the vibe of someone who prides themselves on being "brutally honest" in their feedback but which in fact really just comes off as being an asshole to most people.
Also swearing should only be used verbally and only in humorous ways: “this code I wrote is fubar” is ok, “Johnson is an asshole” is not.
> I began racking up my HR complaints. I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG
He's not just swearing. He's an asshole. But he wants to blame the "PC brigade" for not letting him be an asshole, which he was used to when he had power over everyone else, including HR.
- An Englishman (England is culturally somewhere between the US and Scotland on this I think).
Source: I work at Google
Now I get a letter from HR if I type "shit" on the team's slack channel. I also notice that people are "selectively offended"; they'll use profanity when it suits them, but if something genuinely ticks you off, and you happen to swear (not AT a person, but at things/concepts/in general) they try to use it as a bazooka against you. Try to make you lose all credibility because you said "it's fucked".
To me, as a non-british person (well, I'm British now, I guess, got my citizenship pre-brexit..) it's a super strange and touchy subject. However, I try to power through, being the "rude foreign guy" (rude as in rude language, not rude as in mean or vindictive), and that sort of works. Almost all of my colleagues just know that's what and who I am, I don't mean any offence, and really, nobody gets offended (unless it suits their strategic purposes). We all use a shitload of profanity in our day to day language anyway, so why the fuck would it be different in the office?
And ruins thoroughfares not designed for heavy traffic, while degrading quality of life for people who don't use it!
Really? I'd rather you just paid me more, so I can use the money how I'd like, instead of coddling me with loads of benefits.
And then there's this: companies don't provide all this stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. They provide it because it means they can squeeze more out of you. Again, I might be able to get on board with that if it's a company I really want to work for, but I'd still rather they just pay me more instead.
That's a no for me when the incentives are different in magnitude.
Are you saying you aren't willing to sacrifice your well-being to increase the value of this manager's portfolio? /s
You know someone is Up To Something when they rant about HR restricting their speech. It's weird to me that he's now a free agent, rants about how people complained that "I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG", and yet doesn't indulge in his blog post. Maybe he learned something about communicating effectively through discussions with HR?
He mentions not getting free distribution on Android phones. It baffles me that he couldn't negotiate some sort of deal. I am sure someone's end goal was to put all of Waze in Maps, and I don't think anyone would have prevented him from doing that. I feel like there was some emotional attachment to his baby that he couldn't get over, and it hurt the distribution of the product. You aren't acquired by a big tech company to be nurtured and grow -- you're there to be assimilated, for better or for worse. I'm surprised that he's surprised. (You can get bought by Google and grow your brand, of course. Android is still called Android, not Google Phone. Maybe Andy Rubin was just a better CEO? Though quite a piece of human garbage, as I understand it.)
Finally, the rest of the rant is about how those dang employees don't work hard enough and want too much money. I can see why that irritates the CEO type -- they risked everything to get where they are today. But, that's not the game the employees are playing. They took a more conservative course and ended up at the top of their field, they're there to make your ideas come to life efficiently and effectively. If you want naive worker bees who will work 80 hours a week for $20,000 a year, you got acquired by the wrong company, plain and simple.
For someone who claims to be savvy, he seems to have a lot of blind spots. I guess it's nice to get it all out into the open, as a warning to people who might choose to work with him on his next adventure.
With the caveat that this is my experience only, Israelis are more blunt, direct and often openly critical vs Americans, especially Californians. They're often right and all the ones I've worked with have been very smart, but the way a message is communicated is sometimes more important than the message itself.
I think that in this global age people think that the notion of intercultural communication issues has gone away, but IMO it still exists.
I don't think it's so controversial to claim that different cultures have different default communication styles.
Israelis aren't the only ones who tend to be more direct than the average Californian. I usually appreciate it: corporate speech tends to dance around the point a bit, and bluntness saves time and clarifies where people stand. That said, I can also understand how some people would be taken aback or intimidated by excessive bluntness, especially from a superior.
cultural gaps are very much alive and kicking
During my career I've worked with people around the world, all in the Tech industry.
Israeli-Californian cultural gap is huge.
It is made worse by the fact that Israelis usually have a good English level, some even have an okay accent - which makes their US counterpart expect them to use the same communication etiquette they are used to.
Californians will go out of their way to avoid any overt conflict.
Israelis see conflict as a valid form of day to day communications.
An Israeli can go out of a meeting thinking he was just being told "yes", while he was given a glaring "no" delivered in the All-American-speak.
I wonder what happens when Israelis work with Japanese people.
Another one is how litigious Americans are, or at least are perceived to be.
(Quebec person here, we're not exactly known for our table manners, but you'll always get a direct answer) ;-)
Never got a chance to work with Japanese.
I come from a family of direct argumentative people. Many people do not, and this style of communication will shut them down, leading to suffering and ultimately only one side being heard. I'm more ambivalent about the value of directness now.
New York (probably all US East) and Israeli cultures are fairly analogous. In just 3 extra timezones, West Coast workplace culture is light years away.
Many of my Israeli colleagues have no patience for the soft-pedaled corporate standard double talk (which they would call "PC"), and think that all US workplaces are like this. They have a hard time believing that my NY experience was just like our local Tel Aviv office.
I would love to work with some Israelis or East Coasters sometime. Be refreshing :)
Israelis are straight to the point without the typical American BS. I have been on a conference call with Israelis and Americans and every 15 seconds the Israelis would go on mute to complain how stupid the Americans sounded. They were speaking a lot but effectively saying nothing of value.
Say what you mean, mean what you say.
Someone hasn't heard of Minnesota nice[0]. The conflict avoidance in the midwest is way more extreme than what I've experienced in California.
Shouldn't we be inclusive and understand that people from other cultures can't be expected to act the way others do? Especially people from California.
Then again, there's a real high to being part of a team of 10 people who are shipping a product that people love all across the globe. Interesting. I'm definitely not a big-co guy.
Their ability to maximize their own income before the acquisition was based on how successful your product was- they had stock options! Their ability to maximize their income after the acquisition was based on getting their next promotion.
They were never actually in love with your product. The passion was not passion for what you did. Their passion was for money. Waze was always a stepping stone.
All the while, here you are complaining that you can't arbitrarily fire people, that you can't "speak your mind" for fear of HR complaints, just generally wishing you could continue to abuse your employees. These are things you only did because those employees were just a stepping stone for your success, not people.
What a whiny hypocrite.
If I think back over the times when I've been most productive, I've had the kind of trusted flexibility that allows me to work 14 hours one day to get a feature in before the big demo, but also leave an hour early the next day to go catch up on all the real life stuff I didn't do. Reading the article, I get the impression the author is praising the 14 hour day while condemning the leaving early, which is failing to see that they're two sides of the same coin. I'm not going to work myself to exhaustion unless my manager helps facilitate it.
There are plenty of startups where you can put in your ~8 hours and call it a day 99% of the time and the business will still be thriving. Having seen the work some engineers put into cranking out code nonstop, a bit less time coding and a bit more time thinking would have likely done way more good for the code base and the company anyway.
Managers who don’t value your personal time and are willing to fire you anytime ‘someone better’ comes along are toxic and should be avoided.
I do agree that it's better if you're making that call on your own. If management is trying to squeeze you like this by threatening to fire you, it's usually an empty/foolish threat. Hiring a proper replacement takes time.
This is completely my opinion and shaped from my own experience. But if you're working at an understaffed startup, the bottleneck for 'success' is usually not the engineering team, and also almost definitely not correlated with butt-in-seat time and amount of code contributed. Not saying that's what you were implying, but just want to clarify that's the direction I'm coming from.
It's up to the business's leaders to determine what should be prioritized with the resources they have and take risks on building out those ideas accordingly. If you, as an engineer, begin working nights and weekends to have the company 'succeed', you're now communicating to management there's all this untapped engineering capacity. You give the illusion that more can consistently be done than is actually sustainable and no one wins when the engineering team burns out 6-12 months later. Well, maybe the company does somewhat when you leave and forfeit all your stock options back to the pool...
In my opinion, the biggest impact you can make as an engineer at any level is by stepping away at the end of the day, doing your own thing, and every now and then just think holistically about what you're doing at work and the direction the product you're working on is going in. Your butt-in-seat time will become far more productive as a result.
Good quote. Although you can extend the lawyers theme out to the rest of the bureaucratic corp too.
I agree. Good quote
Everyone gets mandates from on high, but that shouldn't be all of one's work.
>All of our growth at Waze post acquisition was from work we did, not support from the mothership. Looking back, we could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently had we stayed independent.
He also details the constraints and additional burdens imposed by corporate as well the overall lack of support.
Regarding firing people. From my experience it's doable but takes a long time. That's why offloading an employee to another team is usually easier.
With all that being said, I still think for most people who work for someone else, big tech is better than startups once you're experienced. If you don't work for yourself than optimizing for money is a reasonable thing to do.
At one point I noticed that our team kept getting these incompetent engineers transferred from other parts of the company. At first I was puzzled, especially because my director was completely unphased by this. Then I realized he kept asking a lot of questions in our 1-1s about how X is doing, what X could do to improve, etc. And finally after a few months X would be gone. I think this guy got a reputation as a "cleaner" so our team would get the garbage to get taken out. I always wondered if/what kind of special favors he got in exchange for doing this from his peers...
As a CEO, it is literally his job to ensure that promotions are aligned with company goals. At Google, VPs have final say on every single promotion. If there were people who were getting promoted under his command for stupid reasons, he was literally the person who could stop it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
is a fundamental problem that can not go away, ever, and managing this is his job as a CEO / executive.
So this post is essentially an unwitting confession that he didn't understand what his job was, and how he failed at that.
At face value, what you're agreeing with makes sense, and I'm a strong believer in questioning / re-affirming the "why" before taking on big projects.
But while the premise seems correct, his one example does not. FTA:
> we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.
This is a short sighted take, and ignores some of the reasons that such initiatives are often necessary (and I'd even argue...valuable). Two off the top of my head:
- Alignment with data retention policies = meet my expectations as a user about how Waze handles my data. I realize I'm in the minority by caring about this.
- Integration with standard tooling = easier for existing teams to contribute/maintain, less overhead managing disparate tooling, eventual gains in feature velocity which do equate to customer value.
So yeah, question the rationale for doing something, but look past your own immediate goals when evaluating the value of this kind of initiative.
In this particular example he even acknowledged that it was important. But it's not always the case and then I can understand the frustration. As you said "question the rationale for doing something".
In my experience people who are permitted flexible work schedules and take advantage of them tend to be the better employees.
Mostly don't you sit down with your team and figure out good meeting times and bad meeting times? Did employee say 11am is a great time for meetings then go get an 11am hobby? Then sure employee is a jackass.
Any coding, debugging, thinking had to be done either after 6pm or on weekends, or WFH. Now perhaps you can see why people coast; not everybody is willing to sacrifice nights and weekends to be productive.
That's where the demands should lie, not on "bottoms on seats"
Most don't advertise this widely, for obvious reasons, but you see it mentioned occasionally in places like HN, or tech-focused subreddits.
I read that he wants people to:
- Do their work - Provide value for their users - Get stuff done.
vs
- Work on flashy stuff to only get promotions - Be stuck with BAD employees that do very little - Have employees spend all day doing recreation
Work/life is important to stay healthy but at the same time employees need to get their work done. He is saying that the pendulum has swung too far towards the recreation side of things.
I think I am biased as I worked at a startup that was chasing Google level of perks. They were fantastic but caused a huge divide between the people that abused them and the people that worked their butts off.
All I want is for people to be reasonable and get their stuff done...
Yes! Most insightful post in this entire thread.
Talk about shallow interpretations of what someone wrote from most of the other commenters.
>They were fantastic but caused a huge divide between the people that abused them and the people that worked their butts off.
Who was forcing these people to "work their butts off"? There are some people who seem to always feel that nothing is good enough and who put in unreasonable amounts of hours. If that's demanded by management (say, by a CEO who things that working weekends is OK), that's a cultural problem. On the other hand, there's a uniquely American problem with fetishizing long hours and no perks. People in general aren't "abusing" perks, they're taking advantage of them. If people are having to "work their butts off" on a regular basis, then teams need to be better at setting cadence and expectations. Once in a great while some crunch time will happen, but in general people shouldn't be having to work more than 40 hours.
I learned so much, 70 hour weeks will do that, but I also learned about balance and what was important to me. Getting my work done so that I can spend time with my family is more important than free food, yoga classes and beer on tap. It is cool if your priorities are different than mine and good on you for taking advantage of the perks.
I will be at my desk working so that I can go home at 5.
To me complaining about "entitlement" just sounds like a kind of mild "Stockholm Syndrome" for primitive conditions.
Googlers may have some issues but I don't feel that their expectations around baseline quality of life are among them. We should all be so fortunate. No really, we should. Let's work on that together.
For a time, a certain (popular) subset of the free snacks became unavailable. My immediate team and I made some jokes about it. A week or so later, word got around that somebody had opened a medium grade internal incident over the 'outage'. So we looked up and sure enough, there it was, an actual filed incident, status ongoing. Ok so that's fine; things were generally pretty 'loose' at the company, so maybe that was a joke.
Nope; not only had many hundreds of people marked themselves as impacted, but the discussion was quite serious.
Mixed in of course were many people making comments about how silly/absurd/outrageous it was that OTHER PEOPLE were taking this snack outage so seriously.
The whole thing turned into quite a kerfuffle. There were now hundreds of comments under the incident, and the associated chat channel was getting pretty heated.
Word came down from my area's management, unofficially, in a friendly way, suggesting that we just stay clear of the whole thing, which was sound advice in my opinion.
To be clear: the vast majority of the heat was about whether this thing should be an incident at all, and the size of the 'sides' were to my eye roughly even.
I'm not trying to make a statement here about entitlement one way or another, but simply recounting a story from a few years ago as I best recall it.
1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
And I don't mean the corporate lingo 'passionate', I mean the actual passionate. I strongly advise any passionate people to not seek to turn their passion into a job. Because it's a long journey full of suffering.
Your bosses will drive you insane. Your clients will drive you insane. Your coworkers will drive you especially mad. You will feel pain every time you will be asked to cut corners. No one will appreciate the finer details of your work. You will become the office insufferable twat. Passed every promotion.
The sweet spot is somewhere between "I don't hate it" and "I kind of like it". You can learn to like something if you do it long enough.
It seems like a great way to waste 40 hours of your life every week.
This seems like the more depressing take to me. Most people don't have the good fortune to work in jobs they truly love - yet many of those jobs are still important and not at all a waste of your life.
To take an extreme example, most rubbish collectors probably dislike their job. Yet doing it provides an important service to society. I would never tell the person who takes my trash away that their efforts are a waste of their life...
I get having a team of 20 that is like this, but it does not seem like a concept that scales unless you are SpaceX.
No, but they find tons of employees who really need a job and hate job-hunting, so once they get in they'll do what it takes to keep the paycheck going. This is particularly common in sectors where the median hire can be young, like... the software industry.
What? How did they do that? I'm not an OpenStreetMap but I thought that sort of "privatization / removal of crowdsourced data" could not be done if not globally...
Of course it is. With the exception of the founders and possibly the first few, other employees rarely reap the benefits of product success, and if they do it's a promotion. I.e. advancing their career.
It's pretty naive and selfish to expect employees to sacrifice and emotionally invest as much in a product as the founders since they will not benefit nearly as much should it succeed.
Also, my personal issue is that, being part of Google, he seemed to still only focus on the success of Waze, not on the success of Google. And that's contradictory to his own statement of needing to align with company success and investors success. I mean, even his "does nothing for users" argument fails for me, when Waze was acquired I dreamed of all its features just rolling up into Google Maps and Waze going away, so that the best of Maps and Waze would combine into a better Map app.
The only thing I can agree with, but honestly that's really not new insight at this point, is promotion driven development. Though I think he undermines a little how that favors new ventures and moonshots over continued refinement of existing products. Yes this is a common criticism of Google, but it's also how Gmail, Maps, and a lot of the really big money maker success of Google happened. It's not that the promotion process is "bad", but it optimises for people to always try and grow brand new products and enter new markets. Which arguably could be best for Google investors.
There are upsides of having managers not have the level of control over their reports' futures that they do at most companies. (It accomplishes goals of reducing discrimination and it makes people less vulnerable and thus boosts retention.)
There are reasons that the process overhead to accomplish anything at Google is more than at a company like pre-acquisition Waze. (It simply gets 100x more backlash when Google makes a misstep on some of this stuff than any company, in part because they have a responsibility as stewards of so many experiences and so much data. There's also a culture of doing a really crappy job in a first pass -- I think this might be fostered by the process overhead, but it certainly makes removing it very dangerous.)
There are benefits to a comp model that doesn't actually reward you for what you accomplish. (You can get some of your best people to focus long-term.)
There are OBVIOUS benefits to a culture that values political correctness. The author didn't make it clear that he wasn't just being an asshole.
I think, on balance, that Google is unhealthy and could use some more Noam in it, but I think it's not intuitive to everyone why these things are done.
Saying "some political correctness okay" is equivalent to saying either "some irrational groupthink is okay", or "some cultural marxism is okay". What's worse than this general confusion, is then implying that it's the same thing as caring about human rights or the right not to be discriminated against. Thus it makes caring about human rights something to be ridiculed. But only when you defend the use of the term.
The term "political correctness" is only an insult. Defending it at all is like defending some insult you're given on a playground.
"You're a poop head!"
"Yeah, well... I *want* to be a poop head!"
"Politically correct" has enjoyed non-pejorative use for decades.
BTW: A manager who's secretly a racist is still a racist. PC doesn't make this any better.
We're not mind readers: Words _are_ content.
And if there were people misunderstanding what he was saying, then it's pretty clear that he was either deliberately provoking in his speech or just clueless about the impact words have on people who are not him.
I mean, I've heard stories of someone reported to HR for using the word 'baller' (as in 'That new car is so baller, David.') who clearly did not understand the meaning of the word and I can only speculate as to why they thought it was a vulgarity.
That said we can always strive to communicate more clearly, and someone publicly blogging about how they quit because of it probably doesn't get the same benefit of the doubt.
Doesn't sound like it was an isolated incident in his case.
But if you have the oportunity to not have to work under a guy like that. Why would you? At most you will get a salary raise but ultimatley you would be working very hard under his wip to realize his dreams and goals.
The mind set he has can be really benefitial for certain companies and it is really helpful for start-ups to work like this because you establish an base line of dicipline in the company culture that is valuable.
But he obviously is not capable to reflect back on himself and see who he are. These sort of people rarely are capable of that and if they do they dont really care.
Or maybe your work-life balance could be worse AND your equity stake could be meaningless.
Do you want them to work more for no benefit?
On-call engineers for high risk projects and deployments are another situation and not the norm.
The only leaders and teams I have seen push back on this, are the ones who 1) have no kids or 2) have their entire social life wrapped up with their work life. Why would they ever stop working when they can just play video games together at the office and say they are “working late”?
At this point I can't help but be extremely skeptical of people that talk about how they've been oppressed by PC censorship and don't provide any examples as if it's not the case that there aren't lots of people who say widely unacceptable things and use this as a shield.
> Having trouble scheduling meetings because “it's the new Yoga instructor lesson I cannot miss”
Yeah that's a pretty lame excuse.
> or “I’m taking a personal day” drove me crazy.
Are you kidding me? Days off is the evidence of poor commitment to the job? That seems extremely telling about the author, not the company.
He couldn't perceive that Google was buying him out to neutralize a competitor? He was surprised that the distribution priority of Waze was lower than Google Maps?
No. Fuck you, pay me, as the saying goes [1]. As a manager / VP, it is your responsibility to set the product vision and goals. Engineers can't build / sales can't sell a great product if prospective clients are not interested, like putting an art gallery online [2].
Additionally, having no personal stake in the product allows developers / engineers to be more objective and professional. This is a problem that most junior engineers will face at some point, and most senior engineers will easily recognize. You put so many hours and so much work into a new project that you start to make it part of your identity. You can see this in a few consumer products like the Xbox One launch, where Microsoft employees received special Xboxs that had "I MADE THIS" branded on the device [3].
But for most companies engineers and developers have very little influence over the product's specifications - they're simply asked to build a thing already specc'd to hell by PM's, VP's, legal, ADA, and other groups within your organization. So if the joint effort of all those groups results in the product failing before it even hits a developers' desk, why should their compensation be impacted?
The best way to tie development teams to the product is by offering bonuses when the product succeeds. But for some odd reason many companies don't want to do that.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
[2]: http://paulgraham.com/worked.html
[3]: https://www.neowin.net/news/heres-the-best-look-yet-at-the-w...
To me, the yoga class example is the kind that people can see and point judging fingers at (i.e. images of youthful people in yoga clothes stretching in a nicely lit yoga studio).
Expecting your employees to work weekends to meet your vision (especially if without a clear reward system for doing so) sounds like a much more profound form of entitlement.
Disclosure: Long time Googler, and my experience with managers at Google has rarely been like the author of the article. When it has, I've voted with my feet and changed projects, or avoided projects like that altogether.
Early on in my career I believed the mantra that managers shoulder more risk, so that is why they deserve higher compensation. But in my 30 year career I have never seen anyone in my management chain face legal trouble. At most managers were fired, same as regular employees.
Very high level position hiring tends to be slower than lower positions, so you could argue that that is the reason the VP salary should be higher. But the compensation is so out of whack that this doesn't hold water either. Companies could save a lot of money if they paid employees more uniform compensation, and when firing someone, the compensation package would be proportional to how long a person in that position typically takes to find the next job. So maybe an engineer would get a month, and a VP 6 months equivalent of salary.
sometimes you need to work weekends and nights while your wife take care of the kids alone so that your career progress and her's not.
Here, fixed for you.
Of course if you blink you miss them, it's not like you're in a cave across the world, you're probably literally in the next room staring at a screen for a couple hours after a heavy lunch while the kids play on their ps5. How's that weird.
If I do good work for a rich, high-margin company, I'm going to act like it (towards the employer) and reap the rewards. Because if I don't, someone is, and they're up the chain, so let's pull those rewards back down a bit and reclaim our humanity, ok? This isn't entitlement, this is taking the rewards I've had a hand in building rather than leaving them on the table and saying "thank you for letting me leave these extra 20% of rewards to you".
Separate from this, I might vehemently advocate politically for reversing the upwards redistribution of wealth to the tech elites (me), and that's not hypocritical. Hoping for Richard Stallman-level principaledness among the professional working public isn't the answer to political and social problems such as this, so let's not armchair and claim that working half your Saturdays moves the needle towards wealth fairness better than saying no and going home and taking the paycheck. Inconsistencies can coexist without resolution, and most of life is exactly that. If you can't live with it, then the answer is to quit, not routinely work Saturdays.
The company's budget has room for more staff if it's truly needed (it's not); my life budget of personal hours does not have room for more work, nor should it if my employer is among the wealthiest in human history.
Germany's auto-workers union negotiated a 28-hour workweek. Like them, we shouldn't be ashamed to rebalance our lives towards leisure, personal hobbies, personal relationships, etc, now that technology is so productive. In general, why is it wrong to favor broader participation in the fruits of human effort? I'll do my part by going home and taking the paycheck. Now I have more time and financial security to spread my politics if I want.
Elon Musk is right that companies and communities are fully and precisely the human-machine cyborgs of fiction, just at a different scale. Can that apparatus rebalance towards leisure etc? I think yes, so I'm taking my paycheck and going home early. It's not entitlement, it's living my valid and reasonable politics.
If this post seems off topic, then maybe you haven't thought all the way through what "sure, I can give you more hours of my life" means when you offer it to an employer. We might disagree on some or many points, but all of this post is directly relevant to that negotiation of hours.
A 28 hour workweek is fine if consistently applied. The daily 11am absence however, is likely treated with disdain because:
- doing mid-day yoga while I'm attending daily release engineering meetings to accommodate someone else's schedule slip is grating
- for some reason mid-day workouts are okay but leaving the office at 4pm isn't
Both of which is why it strikes many as slacking off.
Why are you making this about gender?
I understand having to work late a day or two because there's an outage, or a feature needs to be done ASAP, but I'm taking those hours back the next day.
Also, not sure about others, but I'm wildly productive when working up to 8 hours daily, and my productivity goes out the window if I work more than that for prolonged periods of time, because I get burned out real quick. (Actually, even with up to 8 hours I need regular vacations)
And being passionate about my work has absolutely nothing to do with that. (I try to work at places where I'm very passionate about it)
Did you write another object relational manager or another functional programming is great, stop using C++ post?
I wish the conversation was more about how technology was moved forward and how it benefited people using the products based on that tech.
Some of this I think is caused by power imbalances in the employee-employer relationship, prevailing attitudes in SV about acceptable limits of speech and the inability to discuss this freely at workplace due to the lack of trust. So it spills over into anonymous HN and Blind.
Bringing experience in other fields, namely the trades, to the conversation here might make it more clear why these things outlined in the article are seen as extreme entitlement. It's not a lack of work-life balance - something I see and hear about in most industries now - it's about caring deeply about your career, your work, and perhaps the project at hand, while not allowing that work to define your life. Pride and dedication to work can be balanced with family. It's not a zero sum game. What the author is trying to explain, in my mind, is that there is large priority on only one side of the equation (life), while indifference towards the other (work).
We have it AMAZINGLY WELL being in tech, and we have luxuries that are unique to tech and bewildering to folks in other fields.
Also, shops had extremely good work life balance. You were at the timeclock 4:59 on the dot. No one is asking you to stay late, or be on call uncompensated. Your time was your time from 5pm-8am. By their virtue of being always online, tech companies intrude into that worklife balance and it's not unreasonable to ask for some of it back.
Yes, I’m entitled. I’m entitled to being defined by more than just how I make money. Yep. 100%
Glad we could have this talk. Feels good to finally get that out.
(https://pics.me.me/thumb_translated-by-memritv-org-human-rig...)
Let's get this straight an entitlement is something that is owed. If I buy health insurance and go to the hospital I am entitled to use it. If I pay for unemployment in my salary and become unemployed I am entitled to it.
> in one form or another.
Banking and housing unfortunately does not work this way. I can only present a paystub or W4 when applying for a loan or renting a flat, any other form of compensation is disregarded. My dedication to the job should be remitted through my salary, a employee pizza/ice cream party doesn't mean a thing to me.
FANG companies also typically pay your cellphone bill, again because they expect to be able to page and call you at any time.
As a personal favour I will fire off a private message to whichever colleague is on call if I see they are floundering. Because I'm a good guy and believe the help I give today may be requited down the line.
You can’t cut steel at home after dinner no matter how hard you try if you don’t have the tools. Conversely, I’m sure you have a computer, can you just login to GitHub for two seconds to review this PR I submitted at 9pm...
this is very ignorant.
the ability to leave work at work is a personality trait. the job, or type of job, has little to do with it.
software development is not some exceptionally difficult thing that tortures and haunts developers.
There's definitely a difference between white collar/knowledge work and manual labor or highly people-focused work, though. I've worked retail and food service before and the mental overhead is absolutely different. It took me a long time (years) to learn how to turn off my brain at 5pm and stop programming when I got my first tech job. Not something I had a problem with in more manual industries: when you're not at the workplace, you can't work, even if you wanted to.
It’s nearly impossible to do when your employer is not on that same page with you, or even worse is instead fighting against it.
This is very ignorant.
There are many outside factors that go into if an employee needs to focus on work after hours, such as accessibility to the working environment, cultural practices at the company, etc.
Who said anything about haunting?
If my manager hits me up at 11pm asking for something, sure I can ignore him or her.
Then I come in the next day, they already did the thing they asked for themselves because [insert business reason], and says “never mind”.
Next time it happens, they go to the other dev who is happy to do it at 11pm.
Guess who gets the promotion?
More seriously, if this is you, find an employer/manager who's not gratuitously invading your non work time.
Context matters, because believe it or not, most professionals occasionally go the extra mile no matter what industry they are in. I recently dropped off a motorcycle for a repair, and the young guy working at that shop stayed an hour late to get my business. When something breaks in my house, I have hundreds of people jumping at the bit to come to fix it at any given time, before or after work, weekday or weekend.
Nothing is ever perfect in life, but your criticism of your experience as a software engineer would come across as a lot more empathetic if you started off by acknowledging that you made an excellent career choice to start with, and that this allows you unprecedented career mobility, including the option of easily quitting your job should you have the rare misfortune of having landed at any of the few bad apples that do not reward you for your stress with oodles of money that you wouldn't be able to make anywhere else with that amount of effort and work experience.
Not to mention that if stress and money are not your thing, go and work as a software engineer at an old school Fortune 500 company. I promise to you that nobody will ever ask you to do anything at 11pm there, and you'll still get paid well.
Multiple times per month. 3/4 weekends per month. How’s that? Not uncommon in many small startups I’ve been a part of as an employee, founder, or advisor.
Your point is fine, except for the fact that it totally overlooks if an employee is actually already putting in that extra effort, and is just getting taken advantage of by their company.
What if I am already objectively going the extra mile? Who's to say I'm not? My boss. And they will say that. See: Tesla Skips 401k Match for Third Straight Year [1], while simultaneously investing over $1B into Bitcoin.
> and that this allows you unprecedented career mobility, including the option of easily quitting your job should you have the rare misfortune of having landed at any of the few bad apples that do not reward you for your stress with oodles of money that you wouldn't be able to make anywhere else with that amount of effort and work experience.
Ok, setting aside the fact that the money is relative to the value created for these companies (see: richest people on the planet and how they got there)...
You didn’t actually comment on the main point. You just said, oh if that happens, you are able to leave. Yeah - that’s the point. It happens. And if it does, you should leave. Not succumb to Stockholm syndrome and act like oh it’s part of “sacrificing for this awesome job”. Even you said it. Go find another job.
If you think this is just happening at "a few bad apples" then I'm inclined to assume you have not experienced a wide variety of startup and company cultures in multiple locales - not saying this is true of you but what it sounds like.
I only used the same comment because another person made a similar point which warranted an identical response.
[1] https://www.pionline.com/defined-contribution/tesla-skips-40...
As a significant equity holder in an early stage company, you cannot compare yourself to regular employees. We're no longer comparing professions, and instead are comparing approaches to wealth creation: salary vs equity. Again, if you're not a fan of risk, get a job at a bank.
To bring it back to your original post - you called someone ignorant for stating that leaving work at work is a choice. It is indeed a choice, as we both concluded by stating that this career gives you plenty of opportunity for career mobility.
EDIT: your post changed a couple of times and most recently added some bizarre criticism of capitalism ("setting aside the fact that the money is relative to the value created for these companies"). This is totally off-topic, and frankly I am having a hard time following your reasoning so I'll disengage and just hope you'll find peace and appreciation for the good things in life.
It was tongue in cheek. I was literally quoting them calling me ignorant - it looks stupid and is not condusive to good discussion, I agree!
> As a significant equity holder in an early stage company, you cannot compare yourself to regular employees.
I was expressing the fact that I've seen this many times at several companies, as opposed to it being "a few bad apples" as you originally stated. Not that there is any similarity in the experiences of those roles.
The choice to leave work at work on the daily, vs the choice to switch jobs when you're unhappy, are not the same choice - just so we clear that up because I feel like there are two separate points being made here vs the original comment I was replying to.
It is a choice to leave, yes, definitely agree with you there and I appreciate your perspective here. We are definitely privileged to be in such a fruitful field.
It is also a choice to leave work at work, however, there can be ramifications at your expense and out of your control if you do so. That doesn't happen when you are unhappy and decide to start looking for another job, unless you tell your employer you're doing so...
EDIT: I added some hard data points to back up what I was saying. None of the points changed, only added, didn't delete. Apologies if that confused you.
Criticism of capitalism? Lol, you said we should be grateful for all this money we earn in comparison to other industries. I said no duh, we create a ton of wealth - look at the wealthiest people in the world, they come from software - Gates, Musk, Bezos. It makes sense that compensation is higher in an industry where more value is being created.
> so I'll disengage and just hope you'll find peace and appreciation for the good things in life.
Likewise :)
Without those periods I would never be able to do the best work I’ve done. There is a lot of pipe fitting in the business - and it’s fine to do only that. But it’s not some personality defect to have work thoughts kicking around in the back of your head, it’s a necessary trait in my experience for the more difficult software jobs.
IC-level contracting or consulting gigs are often (not always) much more numb - you’re handed a design, a user spec, maybe some existing APIs or infrastructure, and you essentially color in the lines. Other roles require much more organic composition, aka, Zero to One.
Thought work is fundamentally different from physical labor. Work:life boundaries are so permeable. Any but the most ignorant, junior, "code-monkey" -type developer spends a large portion of their cognitive resources on solving problems (as opposed to strictly sitting at the keyboard writing code like a factory worker). Compartmentalization may well be a personality trait or learned skill, but setting down physical tools in the shop before commuting home is completely different from a software dev's home office and potentially round-the-clock work cycles.
I've only ever gotten an email like that because someone's ass was on the line for a 12am deadline. You only send an email like that because you are burning a personal favour.
If my manager hits me up at 11pm asking for something, sure I can ignore him or her.
Then I come in the next day, they already did the thing they asked for themselves because [insert business reason], and says “never mind”.
Next time it happens, they go to the other dev who is happy to do it at 11pm.
Guess who gets the promotion?
Even if it’s unfair and shouldn’t happen that way - company culture is not something controlled by an contributing engineer.
But I agree with your other points - a well run company will nip this in the bud! That’s exactly the point. It’s not in control of the engineer. It’s company culture. You’re right that I’d say this probably happens much more at startups vs larger companies due to the loose and fast nature.
One thing I learned about management is they are getting more than salary, usually there is a bonus or RSUs attached to everything they do. But they aren't working at 11pm for the good of the company if the good of the company isn't directly benefiting them. Keep that in mind the next time you respond to that midnight email.
> they go to the other dev who is happy to do it at 11pm.
Believe it or not this dev sounds like management material. That's not a compliment! If you think back to every belittling, sociopathic manager/director story you've observed or heard, these are the places they are formed. Now some managers are great leaders and you recognize why they are in that position. The majority are sycophants who kiss the right ass, by working at 11pm on a saturday.
There is a social element to that equation though, which is why management in this particular type of situation has the tendency to so often turn into a "cool club" of people who do everything together, hack on the weekends together, drink after work together, etc, and thus the work/life balance only gets worse as the cycle repeats and new managers are initiat...I mean, hired. Because it's in their personal best interest to keep up this culture.
I notice in some of the comments either in support of or against this guy, there's a subtle distinction. Those against say things like "I'd never work for this guy." And those more supportive, say things like "I'd like to work with this guy."
I see in tech often that there are those who want to view it as an idyllic "team play" game. We're all on the court together trying to score goals. And there's another segment that see it in the more traditional factory worker. Clearly defined roles, chains of report, advancement up the pyramid.
Yep, even other highly paid fields! Can you imagine a surgeon scheduling their surgeries around yoga classes?
That’s exactly what they do.
I know of only one guy who is a plastic surgeon and he is like that, but he’s also one of the best in his field and a bit of a prima donna...
And they definitely worked around their own schedule. They either owned their own practice, or worked at a larger one, and controlled their own scheduling via their team. Surgeries are scheduled weeks or months in advanced. Only when an emergency came in they needed to shuffle things around - basically the same thing with engineers and planned deployments vs random outages.
> none of them will go to yoga with a pending surgery
Ok, yeah, of course they are not going to just up and leave when there is an appointment or deadline. That has nothing to do with whether or not they chose the time of that appointment in the first place.
> They might schedule their work around kids and family and whatnot
s/kids/exercise/g
Yes, I get paid more, but I also work more, in an area where I can’t afford a house.
I think the fact that it's hard to get out of the expensive areas in the Bay Area in a reasonable amount of time gives a lot of people a false impression of the situation with other expensive cities.
I worked for a tech company based in the Midwest that was acquired by a company in the valley. I regularly went on visits to HQ. Some of the folks I met complained strongly about things like lunch not being provided... as often. And their lunches were amazing, with drinks, and socialization.
I came from a place that maybe once a quarter someone would order a bunch of cheap-o pizza... maybe, unless they were concerned about the budget (like $300 worth of pizza matters). And what that meant was you went and grabbed a piece of pizza and went back to your desk...
That's not to say one is right or one was wrong (both locations could have certainly used a little of each's culture / traditions), but the privileges of the tech world (particularly some companies) are generally pretty amazing, and I'm not sure folks who have never left those places really get it...
I sometimes feel like I'm talking a to aliens from another tech world when it comes to their complaints, like they're from that space ship in WALL-E.
google is definitely getting a net gain in profits from providing lunch, they are not doing this out of the kindness of their heart.
You can easily estimate the time required to perform some physical tasks. It's a bit different if you're working on something you never did before, but again as an electrician or carpenter this rarely happens after the training period. Working more hours generally does result in more work done, although the physical factor makes this work-life balance waaay more obvious to whoever is working.
In IT I'm constantly working on things which are slightly different than before. Time estimation is big common issue in the field. I'll be fully honest and say that working 4 or 8 hours a day makes absolutely no difference in work being done for me, except in very rare cases. Dedication has nothing to do with it (I love what I do). Technically I'm not stopping to work at the 6pm hour mark, my brain keeps thinking about technical issues also during off hours and the weekend.
I don't know about you but I felt physically tired, but satisfied at the end of the day when working as a carpenter. Sense of accomplishment was much more rewarding. When coming home I would enjoy something different. The next day I was recharged.
When working on problem-solving, I don't feel physically tired, but I can still feel exhausted in a way that prevents me doing other things. It's much, much harder to find a good balance. And I'd stress this again: putting more working hours sitting in front screen is not necessarily achieving anything.
Note also that these crazy perks as outlined in the article are not my experience in IT working in several places in EU. Yes, our working hours are more flexible due to the nature of the job, but I've yet to see such entitlement in my career. Maybe I've been unlucky.
It was extremely 9-to-5; well, technically, 7-to-3:30. Most people worked most of the time, because it was hourly, but if you needed to arrange to not, it wasn't a big deal, because you were hourly, and moreover, not customer-focused. If (nearly) everyone took the same day off, you just needed a skeleton crew for emergencies and the maintenance just got done a day later.
I don't think the distinction is really "tech versus non-tech" or even "white-color versus blue". I think the real distinction is jobs that have deadlines for one-off projects versus jobs that ... don't, where you just do the same tasks over and over because they keep needing to be done. Building maintenance is a lot like building construction, it uses the same skills to do the same things, but one uses a small number of people to do the work over fifty years that the other does with a large number in one.
The two types of work require different mindsets and different lifestyles. When you have a deadline, one big thing to accomplish before you rest, it makes sense to work long hours and monomaniacally to meet those deadlines. When you are in it for the long haul, you need to pace yourself.
I work in IT of a non-Tech company and it's sometimes crazy to think that just because our industry is so short-handed on IT people we get paid so much more compared to the guys in the company "doing the work". I think it's probably fine because we also play a vital role in the company's success and it's good taking pride in your work, but some of my colleagues act like they are the reason we are making any profit. They are running the tool that enables our sales, but they are not the ones doing the actual selling. Just because the company has been around longer than there has been commodity sales order software and they are still running it does not mean they are the cause for all the revenue in their tool.
We have it amazingly well and we should make sure to be nice to other people, especially since we are privileged.
This is a great example of the difference between startup people and big company people. A big-company exec would have known to (how to?) fight that battle. Waze was a superior product, while Maps just had superior resources: they should have built support. But there's no mention of other execs.
As a big company guy, I read this and think "oh man..." - I can only _imagine_ how frustrated this guy must be
Perhaps this can be true for founders/founding employees with significant stock.
Do employees 15 onwards (i.e. the majority of employees working in successful startups) really have so much stock so as to pour their hearts into the company?
Obviously the author is from a different time where tech/SV abundance did not exist and had to be created through huge personal sacrifice. He speaks as such person and is judged as any "nasty uncle on dinner table".
But in my view, there's certainly truth in the entitlement he describes. I'm not saying that WBL (as represented as yoga at 11AM) is not alright to aim for. But it's incompatible with many endeavours. And it's certainly incompatible with competitive/low-growth industries, markets and jobs.
The tech sector (still) enjoys high growth and large demand for HR, that's why such entitlement exists. But as growth plateaus I think entitled people will find it hard to find certain WLB perks
That’s what they’re there for! When I don’t want to work, I use the benefit that lets me not work.
If there are calendar items that have to be rescheduled, I think the onus is on them to find an alternative time
Try getting a job where they advertise a benefit, then complain when you use it.
It seems like people just were abusing it.
Vacation days are days that are long planned.
Sick days are last-minute days for when you are ill.
Personal days are last-minute days for when, say, a pipe breaks in your apartment and you have to spend the day dealing with the mess. Or any other non-medical reason you have to be a person and not an employee for a day.
It seems like people just were abusing it.
Obviously, it's not always possible to give advanced notice (illness or other unforseen circumstances), so most employers require a brief explanation when advanced notice isn't possible - "Sick kid," "car trouble," "illness," etc.
These are normal policies, but they must be formal policies and communicated to employees.
If those policies are in place and you have people violating them - then it becomes an HR issue, with formal reprimanded, so a low level manager shouldn't have to complain about it.
The spontaneous employee vacation days are just making that problem more obvious.
I do think we often undersize our teams by ignoring the impact of vacation and personal time in taking on work ... but that’s not the fault of the people using the time they are entitled to as part of their compensation.
You guys don't even see it do you?
Maybe calm down with the assumptions and generalizations too though.
The issue is:
> I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend.
but, also...
> Yes, there is a challenge of how to compensate when there is no equity upside...
The complaint here is that people don't have 'skin in the game', so they dont care if the product succeeds, because it makes to difference to them; so they're taking personal days in a way that disrupts the (probably totally arbitrary) timelines and plans they have.
...so I mean, it's probably fair to say that if people are taking leave in a way that is disruptive, then that's more of an indicator that the team culture is totally screwed up than that there aren't enough people.
If one person wants to 'win' and everyone else a) doesn't care, b) that person has no power to punish them if the product doesn't 'win', c) there's no benefit to them personally if it does 'win'... well, its never going to work out for that one person in the long run.
It's not like they're managing a nuclear reactor or staffing an ER.
Are your deadlines so tight that any time off, even planned time off that corespondents to the employee's allotted vacation days would put you behind? If so then it's an indication the issue is with the project being understaffed or not staffed with the proper personnel, or the deadlines being unrealistic.
Are you requiring Herculean effort and unpaid overtime regularly? If so your employees are going to eventually breakdown and need a day to recharge. Sidenote: I've noticed some people are happy to work optional paid overtime but unhappy to work mandatory unpaid overtime.
Are your employees regularly missing so many days to the point they are regularly taking leave without pay and not getting prior approval? That is an upper management/HR issue.
And all that with European PTO benefits across the team!
Once in a while someone is missing. Typically, rest of team moves on through their day normally.
It turns out he actually had Mad Cow disease (really).
I've found that I really have to detach from the situation to use less curse words, such as counting to 5 mentally before saying _anything_.
Any other tips for similarly terrible people such as myself?
It will probably make you feel silly, but you can meditate on it being literally no sillier than using actual curse words to pepper your ordinary speech.
Also consider swears like farts in a relationship. A well-chosen place and time, dropping one is hilarious. All the time though, you just stink.
Clearly there is unmet demand for quality engineers or you wouldn't be paying that much and allowing perks to dictate the balance of life equation so royally.
Maybe we're not paid enough.
It's like you're welcome to pay less, watch the talent dry up and move on.
I'm sure you'll be fine?
Doesn't Google still make roughly 150x what their employees are paid?
Insert line about smelling their own.
This blog post is yet another confirmation for me that similar to how we can have infinitely big small numbers, we can have infinitely verbose rambles around small ideas.
This "you shouldn't complain if you have it a bit better than others" mindset is a breeding ground for all kinds of corporate exploitation.
This guy is hopelessly out of touch. You work to live, not the other way around.
As for misaligned incentives, this is how it is throughout the corporate world - it's not exclusive to Google or other big tech companies. As one of the guys who puts the team on his back and works hard for the users, the reality is that doing a good job does not benefit me in the slightest. My executives care about the number of tickets and new features we churn through. I don't get paid for retention; I don't get paid more for writing good code; I don't get paid more if we get new customers. The only way I get paid more is if I get promoted. What's my motivation to work as hard as I do? My only motivations should be getting promoted or getting a new job.
The only reason any of us work for these companies is for money and benefits. We don't care about your mission statement; and neither do these executives, or they would change the incentives. It's a purely business arrangement: we agree to work X hours per week for Y dollars in total compensation under Z conditions. It's in our interest to reduce X, improve Y and Z. It's the employer's interest to do the opposite - but the employer also cares about other variables, such as retention, total revenue, total profit and costs.
Not that it matters — his observations are just as valid regardless of his net worth.
Noam could never pick up a job again and he will have likely made more money than the average US worker will in their lifetime.
His observation of scorn at employees who are well-compensated NOT jumping at the opportunity to work weekends to get something done for users is a sign of privilege (and probably also a sign of his drive, which is commendable) and maybe a little lack of empathy.
Also, this post completely destroyed my desire to use Waze, and makes me question if they are really good stewards of our location data given how much time was spent complaining about policies.
When you sell your startup to Big Tech, your employees have "made it". They won't work so hard. They're set for life. That's the reality. Move on. Especially don't begrudge them their success. Start something new.
Nope. Most people put them on for a selfie or two then throw them on a shelf.
I don't think Google "cares about" user privacy. I think they care about minimising any legal risk. These are two very different attitudes.
The only way a big company can somehow ensure that all teams are going to follow the privacy or any other policy is to force the teams to "align our data retention policies and tools to Google".
This is literally Google having process to ensure some privacy policy and op having issue with that.
Otherwise, the pressure from people who want to do other things will ensure that privacy or rules will be ignored.
Oh yeah. That's going to be entirely incompatible with how Google does business. Google's primary concern isn't even that their customers care about those things (although they do)... It's the Google is a giant target and there are significant legal consequences for doing things or failing to do things that a jury outside of Google's control will decide after the fact was something they "should have known better" about.
Startup companies end up concerned less about this because they have less to lose. A startup company isn't exactly "judgement-proof..." The wrong decision can certainly get them sued out of existence. but the odds of it happening are lower, because at the end of the day they have fewer assets to seize. There's a much smaller target on their backs and fewer high ticket lawyers for whom the possible compensation would justify taking the case. there's no such reasonable constraint on how much you could sue Google for... a case that a high ticket lawyer wins against Google will definitely pay for itself.
You need to be able to answer the "what have you done for our users lately" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech.The degree of behemoth incrementalism is so extreme that outside the immediate blast radius of your work, there is no serious, intellectually honest way to connect the dots between your effort and the user. It’s like shipping a rover to Mars. You do a shitload of work and hope several time units later when it actually lands, that your work has some barely perceptible positive contribution to the sum total outcome.
And all this is even worse in companies where it’s not clear to anyone whether the user is the product or the customer. Just imagine that. “How did you help the user today?” should make you freeze like a deer in headlights. Do you mean the ad company who can target Starbucks-drinking soccer moms in Texas better now because of our cool new image filter for posting kid sports pictures? Or do you mean the soccer moms themselves? Or do you mean the NSA we are allowing access to all this data on both the advertiser and the soccer moms? Or do you mean the VCs?
Leaders who say platitudes like “what did you do for the customer” are just extremely arrogant know-nothings. They can use the stick of “the customer always comes first” to indiscriminately beat, shame or fire anyone that they conveniently need to attack, no matter how unrealistic it is to demand this kind of direct customer impact accounting.
Employees aren’t braindead morons who subscribe to your company like a religion. But that is exactly what this type of thinking is meant to induce.
In a startup it's easy to see what value you added for the user every day. In a megacorp it's impossible. In a startup having the managers ask "what did we do for the users today?" helps the whole team stay on track. In a megacorp it's a useless platitude.
It’s perfectly fine (good even) to work in a large company where your value add is not immediately clarified and is just part of a large agglomerated process. Most net benefit to consumers occurs this way.
It’s also fine if you want to work in the start-up manner, but it’s not “better” or “more correct” or anything.
The author is taking it to a deeply unreasonable extreme that shows more about the author’s arrogance than about any sincere or earnest desire to help customers.
It's very difficult to change perspective once you've worked in one paradigm for a while (at least I find it so - I'm a terrible employee because I've been a freelancer and co-founder for so long). I agree, one is not objectively "better" or "more correct", but that can be a subjective opinion of a blog article author.
FFS.
When you tell a Googler they can't take a day off, you are basically telling them the company will not honor a piece of the compensation package they signed up for. You'd better come to that table with a damn good alternative offer.
As you get older you realise how valuable your time is. You only get one life, you aren't saving up or learning more to make your next one easier, you get old and that's it.
Having that time to visit family and friends whilst you can is incredibly important.
> I was the weirdo who wanted to push things fast and expected that some level of personal sacrifice when needed
And
> I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend
So not just about “workdays”.
As others have noted, he does make some excellent points. His comments about entitlement (food) ring so true.
But his section on Work Life Balance is pretty terrible.
1) Work life balance is about employee long term retention and places like Google spend a lot of energy in hiring, so they optimize for keeping the people they hire.
2) Sometimes an 11am yoga class frees your mind enough to foster creativity. Raw working hours may be reduced but novel solutions might increase.
3) Some tech workers have figured out the odds of hitting it big in a startup or having the next billion dollar idea are not that likely. Instead, they've optimized for a far above average salary with work life balance. There is nothing wrong with choosing that path and this is where the author is missing empathy for people who didn't choose his path.
A small startup has a finite amount of time to either become a big company in their own right or do something so noteworthy that a big company sees the need to acquire them. Nothing else matters. There are minimal incentives to invest in the long-term welfare of your employees because in the long term, the company doesn't exist. You can't even guarantee that an acquisition will keep the employees you have invested in.
Large corporations like Google are incentivized to give their employees reasons to stick around. They can expect the company will be there in 30 years, and they can expect a good employee to put in a career's worth of work for them (and eventually have peer and mentorship contacts that encourage other good potential employees to join the company).
This is painting with a broad brush of how the incentives are structured... Not all big companies see it this way and not all small companies see it this way. But it's the behavior the marketplace appears to reward.
As someone who did track in high school, the whole agile nomenclature around "sprint" continues to rub me the wrong way. If you aren't a startup facing a launch-or-fail moment, the approach should be much more that of a marathon.
I was joking with my wife that "sprint" to me implies that you go all out and then take a long break before you go again. We should be treating the longterm plan like a marathon and the intermediate steps like "splits".
If you are working on a product that's been around for years , the idea that you are an all-star for delivering your 5 points the day before your 2 weeks sprint ends and a lazy jerk if you deliver it the day after sprint ends just incentivizes a lot of shorterm-ism and corner cutting.
The model of working "all out" and your "break" for planning is a 2 hour meeting in between sprints where you get praised or scorned for a 10% difference in delivery speed is..
I remember visiting the valley for the first time for a big company I worked for at another location. The scale of work life balance was unbalanced so many strange ways...
The tech support team I worked with was in 'building 3'. Nobody ever left that building through out the day. I went to the big cafeteria and the options were amazing. I managed to get some of my peers to go with me, several of my peers from building 3 were equally amazed as ... they never went there, they just worked all day, ate something at their desk, and kept working...
Meanwhile I'd go to the cafeteria each day and sit outside and watch as some folks would play basketball for an hour, then a while later show up and chat it up with coworkers (not talking about work) over lunch for what seemed like forever...
The game room was always full of the same guys, the other amenities, yoga, etc, and it often included people who I simply never could get a hold of. HR couldn't be bothered to get security to take my photo for my badge for weeks ... because the gym schedule changed.
It was a weird, unbalanced, yin and yang.
First, there's always a self selecting thing there. For some reason folks from building 3 never bothered to go explore, and it sounds like they didn't keep going to the caf even once you showed them. Nothing was holding them at their desk, they just didn't care/bother.
Second, some jobs are different than others. Some jobs you have to "be there" for. Tech support may be like that - you have to pick up the call/email when it comes in. Other jobs may be more like strategy or research where having a few key insights a year generates millions of dollars for the company and if hanging in the cafeteria helps you do that, everyone wins.
Third, at the end of the day you kinda have to trust the system. What I mean is - if the company is successful it's because it's overall people strategy is working. So in the great net of things, having the caf setup be the way it was may be what was needed, even if some individuals abused it (which you then would hope be detected in their overall output)
Or maybe I have always felt like I'm an imposter: if the ax fell on the team I didn't want to be the low hanging fruit they culled. Who knows.
But I confess to having had a difficult time across my career accepting the perks, relaxing. It's been a slow awareness that this industry really truly is on fire, they really make boatloads of cash, they really need me more than they compensate me for.
What a strange time to live in for a blue-collar programmer like me.
The real challenge is when you value work life balance and ... it starts to hit other people's work.
Like in my case, getting hassled by security every day, multiple times a day ... IMO that should supersede someone's gym class if it was their job to schedule getting me a photo and a proper badge, but it is super easy for those kinda "well we value work life balance" kinda decisions to push important work aside.
The offices were being renovated and our team was moved next to HR.
HR formally complained (apparently there was a process... where HR sent some sort of complaint to ... HR) that the team sitting next to them was not very friendly.
Before what I can only imagine would have been a horrific joint team meeting / culture clash could occur, someone very smart put the kibosh on the complaint / meeting ....
The culture / work experience differences were extreme.
We're not going to talk about people showing up to work on acid to perform but make fun of people out of college taking advantage of the mental health and exercise course offered on site for an hour, and then excuse an entiiiiire personal day just because its ... more familiar?
oooookay.
just a perspective.
this manager didn't know how to schedule his workers, and couldn't calibrate it and chose to go with "entitled young people are the problem" just like people probably said about him and millennials, there's nothing more to read into this article.
I does not seem to me so horrible honestly, assuming that you then stay longer to make up for time spend by exercising. I dont do that, because I need to take kids out of school basically, but when I had time to exercise a bit in the middle of the day I was more productive.
Want to trade an hour in the middle of the day on a Tuesday with showing up an hour early Wednesday? Do it. What's the problem?
Also software engineer singular, I guess an expense was spared after all
It’s completely out of touch to judge anyone for wanting a stable and in the scheme of things ridiculously high paying job with good work life balance, like working at Google.
I worry that if you give everyone $1000/month:
1) you cannot live on $1000/month so it is an empty gesture
2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even emptier gesture
2) It's not that simple because different goods will respond differently. Certain goods will get cheaper because the increased sales will allow for more economies of scale.
My argument is that we don't know what the overall effect will be.
Edit: In other words, if housing increases by $10 but the cost of other stuff decreases by $20 then you still come out ahead.
Also, most of the homeless are unhoused because they either can't afford a home or they have mental illness/drug addiction issues that makes them incapable of earning money in order to be able to afford a house. It doesn't matter if housing is vacant if you don't have the means to pay the rent, or if they won't even consider you for a lease anyway because you don't have a reliable source of income.
But yeah, #2 is what I'm afraid of too. Paraphrasing a cartoon villain, if everyone is wealthy, nobody is.
Besides, in the past decade, cost of living / housing / rent has gone up so much that even a $1000 / month basic income can't give you anywhere decent to live anywhere. In addition to basic income, we need basic housing - which is dangerous, because it invokes the USSR's rows of depressing and substandard apartment buildings. But everybody should be able to live comfortably at a standard of living. Everybody should be able to have access to and afford a two bedroom house or apartment on a single income, or the social safety net if they are not employed.
The income tax code already exists and has to solve some of these problems, so it seems easier to give everyone the money and then tax it back from the highest earners later (or implement it as a negative income tax, but that has its own hurdles as well, i.e. imagine a homeless person needing to wait until tax season and then getting paid for the whole year, it would be a big hurdle and they'd still need other assistance programs the rest of the year if they didn't budget the money well enough).
Do you also expect food, transportation, entertainment, and technology costs to go up $1000/month nationwide?
Rent goes up due to a lack of available apartments or houses in the area. If public policy is geared toward allowing development of sufficient housing for the people wanting to live in a place, that will have a far bigger impact on rents than UBI.
Rent is the one you are sort of locked into. Food, etc, you have choices ... moving, much harder to shop around.
Second, and another commenter points this out, the desirability of anyone that lands a job at a FAANG means they get away with it. They have Made It, they are the 1% in their field, and they can go anywhere else outside of SF (internationally if need be) and instantly be hired as CTO of any company. Generally speaking. And of course switch to the other FAANG, possibly getting even better compensation and perks and a better 11am yoga teacher.
BS. I worked for a large computer systems company throughout the 1990s. I mostly headed home by 5-6 and I would take month long vacations. (Of course, there crunch times as well.)
I also found his pissiness at apparently not being able to curse or whatever in presentations sort of offputting. Yes, general standards for language and behavior in the tech industry has shifted over time. This isn't anything specific to Google. And whining about it comes off as being tone deaf.
Google doesn't really have "contracted core hours" precisely. They have quarterly goals. If you're accomplishing those goals, the corporate culture doesn't much care how. This offers flexibility that can make it easier to accomplish tasks (I knew people who worked 6AM-2PM because the center-of-mass of their team was in a different timezone).
One way that process can break down is if you have a manager that's bad at planning or over-promising for your team without testing the wind of how much work their engineers will actually get done. Google makes it pretty easy for demonstrated high-performers to change teams, so if you do that too much you run the risk of hemorrhaging good team members (who can't get promoted if goals aren't met and therefore will seek out a team that knows how to meet goals) and being left trying to get your tasks accomplished with only the people who, for whatever reason, can't transfer.
lmao what a terrible, horrible manager. I would hate working for them, and I would not miss them leaving.
Maybe I'm just playing into their "young people don't want to work" stereotype, but if that's what working means, I don't want to do it with them.
But if it hadn't been my idea to do so, if it had just been expected of me to work uncompensated nights/weekends at no personal benefit? Hell no. I'm not a manager but I too would never ask someone to do this either.
If the answer is no, then that's a resounding no (for me, at least). I might love and adore my job (and the workplace), but no way in hell will it be allowed to impinge on my private/personal time: sleeping and "regular" work already essentially takes 2/3 of it (too much), and that doesn't even include the time for "context shifting" (mental and physical) between those and the remainder that is "(free) living".
And if (the hypothetical) you considers that to be "entitled", then so be it. Your life's mission is not my mission. I am there to do my work and do it conscientiously; anything more is asking too much.
I will never do this. I havent done this since I was very very young at my first job and i didn't know better. I couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that giving away my own personal time for someone else.
I'm not going to work on the weekend. I've got much better things to do, like play video games or literally anything else, rather than go back to work and generate wealth for someone else for free.
> I couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that giving away my own personal time for someone else.
You just described a job.
Whether you're giving your time away or getting paid for giving it up makes no difference to the fact you are parting with it in order to produce for someone else.
So when someone says there's "nothing sadder", I think they should remember that the time is being given up either way. Doing so for free amounts to gifting the time. Or, flipped on its head, not chasing after the money.
People have their own reasons for making gifts. Feeling good about themselves, making someone else feel good, …. You can have your own reasons for not caring that there is no financial benefit to working extra hours on something. Maybe you enjoy the work. Maybe you are learning something. Maybe you take pride in your work and going the extra mile is rewarding in and of itself.
Unlike GP, I don't judge people who sometimes work for "free", as long as they don't have to and are aware they don't have to.
I never ask my employees for overtime, never control their work hours. The typical work week that organically arises out of this is about 35 hours.
I would absolutely fire anyone who would close the laptop for the weekend and left a critical operation pending on Friday. It's about work ethics and personal responsibility of the outcome of personal work.
If the company thinks they have the right to my personal life because they pay me for 40 hours, then its slavery. Also, threatening me with firing because I refuse slavery is threatening my livelihood, and it's mafia mentality. If a manager thinks they have the right my personal time, I should have right to their personal time too. Traffic should go both way in a bridge.
I hire intelligent people, treat them as such, and expect intelligent behaviour in return. Part of the expectation is that everyone manages their own time responsibly. If they fail that management and have to work after hours, I do expect them to take the fall. There's no slavery and no mafia involved here; much to the contrary, it's a healthy work environment with historically excellent work/life balance.
Do you have this kind of system set up? If not, do you make it clear when you're hiring people that you're expecting them to occasionally do what is effectively uncompensated oncall on nights/weekends? That's the kind of thing you have to know going in in order to be able to compare like-for-like in competing offers.
There's a second level to this, which is the definition of an acceptable workload. That is company-cultural, and you'll have to take my word for it when I say it is acceptable. We have the position that in the long run it's best that people feel happy on the job, which requires workloads compatible with life outside the company.
The original quote was about "an interesting problem". I'm happy to spend some after hours time on technical problems if they're personally interesting to me. The fact that addressing it helps my employer and makes me look good in their eyes is just a nice little bonus.
If you want to build a car from scratch in your weekend or just chill out, that's an equally meaningful and respectable endeavour as well.
This is a good take. Something that's perhaps overlooked: those rare occasions where you need to stay late to deliver are very memorable. Isn't it true that strong bonds are often built from intense experiences? I think those few times that you stay late earn you massive respect from those who stuck around, and builds a relationship beyond your career. Especially if it isn't even your responsibility specifically, maybe it's the team lead's ass on the line or a colleague's. It's like indirectly saying "hey I got your back on this, you can trust me I'm a team player -- we ride together we die together bad boys for life"
And the thing that works absolutely counter to this philosophy is the peer bonus system. It sounds great in principle but seems to incentivize people to continue bad practices that are clearly mostly overworking without proper post mortem on why such out of description help was even needed in the first place. When I was new I used to cherish peer bonuses but now I'm proud that no one in my team has gotten one in a year (because hopefully none of our systems needed such help anymore).
I think with people holed up in their homes doing the same thing, the experience is diminished somewhat.
Staying late, with the boss who is also working on the same project, to deliver for the customer, is quite different from staying late, to deliver for a deadline, because some team didn't make any decisions sooner, while the boss reminds you from far away that you should be grateful, and then sets things up so another avoidable crunch is inevitable.
Reminder that you're not actually trying to build strong bonds, you're trying to build software (or whatever). And said "strong bonds" won't stop the company from deciding your team is splitting, or your coworkers from leaving for promotions or other companies.
This is an incredibly important factor. It really matters to getting a team that gels and gets things done.
But here's the thing: That has to be a two-way street, or it won't work. The company needs to show responsibility towards their employees too. And that isn't yoga classes & cafeterias, that is basic respect, and a willingness to work with the employees, instead of seeing them as "resources".
This seems to be, as far as I can tell, an approach that's correlated with manager skills & inversely correlated with company size. I've done both manual & "white collar" work in small companies, and the ones where the leaders did right by their employees had employees who would go to great lengths for them.
I've done manual & "white collar" work in large companies, too. None of them had CEOs that cared that much. But some had managers who cared a lot, and were willing to bend rules if it meant doing the right thing - those teams excelled. The ones with the managers who didn't care about their people got teams who didn't care about their work.
And I know the kind of manager who's terribly upset about your 11am yoga class. Without fail, that yoga class was on your calendar, but they wanted the meeting when they wanted it, without a care about you. They could've done 1pm, they could've done 10am, but that would've inconvenienced them, and that's not in their playbooks.
Especially when said "doing" is done by other people (engineers, testers,SREs etc) , not the manager.
Easy enough to hold such beliefs when the cost is paid by others.
I will also leave work early to pick up a few things on my daughter's birthday later this month.
I think this is reasonable. I don't know if it's the sort of thing the author is talking about, but I think my work/life balance is fine.
The nasty truth is that every big Corp had a phase where it counted on key people being completely plugged in. If that was never you, then you either joined a company late or weren’t one of the key people.
You can't tell your team "Do whatever it takes to win", and then when they work their asses off for you turn around and say "Well long hours aren't a badge of honor"
This is an asshole who wants people to work themselves to death and doesn't want to give any sort of reward or recognition for it.
If you want me to work as hard as you are, pay me. Take my total annual compensation, divide it by 2087, and give me 2X that amount as overtime to work nights and weekends in excess of 40 hours/week. I'd do it. If he's actually willing to put his money where his mouth is I bet he'd get plenty of takers to work that hard. But I bet he isn't; he just wants to get lots of extra work out of his employees for free.
> I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend.
I guess he missed the memo that google had already won.
Importantly, this is a personal choice. I don't want to be in a team where members don't take personal responsibility, and I am willing to contribute the same. If Google does not allow such a team to operate with its own norms then the author is justified in saying it's not a good fit.
And to be clear, are you seriously saying that any person saying, "what? Sushi again?" Is actually going to have a real empathizable reason for saying so? Honestly Google sounds like it's filled with what can be considered the modern equivalent of upper middle class government administrators of past eras who don't really contribute much, couldn't give a rats ass about much more than what their weekend plans are and what their paycheck is and I will be more than happy that they are happy they don't work with someone like me if that thought process ever came up.
Of course, companies like Google have found a way to factory-fy this system of getting "maybe mediocre but never truly bad" engineers and scale a massive software conglomeration that runs the world. But this is only possible because of massive excesses these companies procure through counterproductive and anticompetitive revenue streams like ads and data aggregation, so in some ways people in HN want to complain about how these big tech companies are evil but at the same time draw heinously enormous paychecks from them and act as if they truly deserve them. That seems to be the problem.
I like this, I've thought this before too about a lot of big tech companies that are throwing off cash and essentially want to make sure they have a bunch of top people but don't really need them for anything particular day-to-day.
So the employees become a kind of aristocracy with a few symbolic duties, but largely a life of leisure, attending company events and reading clubs and pushing paper back and forth, while making salaries high enough they dont have to worry about anything.
I know this is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it, and I definitely know environments where one could behave that way.
It seems like what's happened (like in a lot of society) is that extremes have formed. Either people are in the work 24/7 camp or play frisbee golf all day camp. Whatever happened to simply being professional?
(not the person you responded to)
Benefits are just a part of the total compensation. If you work for Google you don't get "free food", you get food that you worked for and that was a part of a large number of elements you weighed when you decided to work for Google. Maybe you get $X at Google but you were also considering an offer from Elgoog for $(X+Y) and decided that the convenience and cost of Google's food were worth more than $Y for you (Elgoog of course doesn't offer "free food" :)). If that "free food" isn't working out for you, it is natural to be frustrated at being short-changed on your benefits.
If you are in Israel, the norm for tech is to get a Cibus card which lets you buy lunch at local restaurants at the employer's expense, up to some daily limit. When you are comparing offers you can literally compare "this company gives $15/day but that one $20/day, so let's deduct $100/mo from their offer when comparing". If you work for Google and get a "free lunch" maybe you'll evaluate it as a $25/day Cibus. If you get a bad lunch at Google, maybe you'll think "Ugh, if I was working for <competitor> I could have been eating at <favourite restaurant> instead". If you get a bad lunch at Google, you effectively paid $25 for it and got a bad lunch, so it makes sense to complain about it like you would if you went to an actual restaurant, paid $25 and got a bad meal.
I agree that in the grand scheme of things these issues aren't all that important (maybe about as important as someone going to a restaurant and getting a bad meal :)), but I don't see how it is impossible to empathize with that sentiment.
I will admit that there are pieces of this article that I find myself nodding to, but I am not sure I would want to work for this person.
"The challenge was that, as Google employees, we were subject to all of the Corporate hiring practices. It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a great job."
Good grief. If you had any sense as a manager, you did not do that either in the previous non-google position. The unemployment insurance cost alone is not worth it. Sometimes those corporate practices are guided by some reason.
"I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG… I actually stopped speaking at events where the majority appreciated what I was saying but the minority that was offended by something (words and not content) made it a pain."
I am more sympathetic here, because I agree that we are way too delicate language-wise in corporate land, but even then I don't say whatever comes to mind. Passionate is barely an excuse here. When you speak publicly ( panels, events ), you should know your audience and have a modicum of self-control.
"Young people want it all - they want to get promoted quickly, achieve economic independence,"
Lol. Duh. All of a sudden, I can sort of understand, why 'OK boomer' became a meme.
This is the first time I've read one of these blogs where the author complains about it being "practically impossible to fire someone". To me, that adds an air of authenticity to the complaining. In my experience too, the inability to fire people for reasons other than "this person is a real jerk" has been a looming problem.
As far as work-life balance goes, I think I agree with him there too. I have a lot of privileges and I assume Google employees have even more. But the flipside of that is that, when there's a deadline, I'm very invested in meeting it, even if that means working a lot of hours. To me those two things are related: the privileges are justified by the periods of intense, focused work.
Ok, and there’s a deadline at work. There’s also a deadline at your spouses work, your kid is sick, and they took off work to look after them last time. What do you do?
On a more serious note, that all depends on the type of contract you've got. If you're salaried and get a constant wage, you're not exactly being compensated for going above and beyond, especially in terms of hours worked.
Surely, if the work to be done is important, that means the employer is willing to pay for the privilege of having it done during off hours? If not, I would argue the employer, not the employee is feeling entitled.
Sure yeah, if you’re getting the equivalent of overtime or time-and-a-half, ok, it may become worth your time and like you said you are getting compensated for the extra effort and sacrifice.
But the author of the article is talking about salaried FTE Google employees. I’m a salaried tech employee, I don’t earn extra comp for working weekends. I assume that is the norm.
Hence why the authors attitude is indeed entitled, and not the employees, as you’ve stated.
So now that they're remote and have to buy their own food they have effectively received a pay decrease.
How is it entitled to complain about a decrease in compensation for the same work?
If you don't think your employer is doing the same then you're just naive. Google isn't catering food out of the goodness of their heart. It's a calculated cost-benefit analysis to attract and retain top talent.
Edit: It's also a tactic to get people to work longer hours.
I don't for a second think that Google is doing anything out of the goodness of their hearts, just that most people's jobs have no perks and few or no benefits whatsoever.
Anyone working anywhere that pays them a six figure salary and provides food and healthcare is pretty fortunate, all things considered here on Earth. It's nothing to do with Google.
For me, and I expect for most humans, the ideal employer-employee relationship is much more tacit. It's like being part of a sports team. There are bounds of duty and privilege that are mutual, acceptable to all parties, and do not have to be written down.
If everything was written down, it would make work intolerable. Every action would have to be catalogued, defined, and priced. In an effort to create a "better workplace," you would be destroying the things that makes work tolerable.
Also I can't help but feel that your perspective is coming from a place of privilege. If I had to guess I'd say you either A) Haven't been screwed by an employer before or B) Are the employer.
I guarantee that if your employer fucked you over you'd be paying a lot more attention in the future.
OP did not say, and I wouldn't either, that every aspect of a employer-employee relationship should be documented and tracked like a PnL. But no one should pretend that it's not a debate over "unwritten compensation", and the value the employer gets from the employee. If employers didn't want to quantify that, there wouldn't be demand for corporate spyware and monitoring of employees. Yes, the Microsoft 365 option was shut down, but it's an arms race, and that's one battle in a war.
Why shouldn't employees want to extract the most value they can for their labor, and push back when the terms of that agreement change? If cost cutting or taking a loss necessitated a firing, would that "tacit relationship" prevent someone from being fired? My guess is no. Business is business, not personal.
> Why shouldn't employees want to extract the most value they can for their labor, and push back when the terms of that agreement change? If cost cutting or taking a loss necessitated a firing, would that "tacit relationship" prevent someone from being fired? My guess is no. Business is business, not personal.
One conception of employment involves voluntarily adopted shared goals. Another conception is that employees rent themselves in exchange for money.
I suppose I think we need to find the happy medium between those conceptions. Too much of the latter perspective leads to alienation (because you conceive of yourself as a wage slave) whereas the former can lead to exploitation.
The article is arguing that Google is too far into the latter conception. It should towards the former, not all the way, but at least a little.
I very much disagree. If you were getting food at work previously, as in - it was clearly your agreed part of compensation - then I would absolutely complain if suddenly I had to buy my own.
>> But the flipside of that is that, when there's a deadline, I'm very invested in meeting it, even if that means working a lot of hours.
Again, that's fine and if you want to do that yourself, great, everyone would love to have you as an employee. But the second your manager walks in and says "john, I expect you to work this weekend" I'd start looking for a different job. Taking personal responsibility and working harder and more hours to finish something is one thing, being told you have to because your manager demands it is unacceptable.
Of course. A condition of my personal investment in meeting deadlines is exactly my not being treated like this.
It's definitely a failure of management, but if John was playing games all week and now is being asked to work this weekend to finish, that's also on John. His manager should have stopped the all week playing, but people want to be treated like adults and be given personal responsibility, etc...
I know it may be easy to misunderstand this, and to think of it as part of your compensation, because in a way it feels like it, but in a real legal sense as currently structured it very definitely is not part of your compensation.
Which is a somewhat contentious topic. Not an accountant, but seems to be one of those perks that's right at the very edge of IRS rules.
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pa...
Google is somewhat known for being slow to fire. I personally like it. Managers are expected to try to get their reports to survive PIPs rather than using them as a boot out the door.
I've told them that this is an issue for morale - the old "buying the cheap toilet paper" adage comes to mind - but I'm not holding out much hope that anything will happen.
Is it a significant hardship for me to buy lunch? No. It wouldn't be a significant hardship for them to give it either.
To be brutally honest - we all need _more_ support during lockdown and restrictions, not less. In the UK, work and the supermarket are pretty much the only legal reasons for most to be outside at the moment.
Loss of said compensation does certainly warrant some conversation about it. Also I don't really appreciate it being painted as ALL Googlers when, like most things in life, a small passionate minority affected by this brought this up and most people didn't think twice about it
We have expectations based on that. Some things are the norm for us. We should absolutely try to be aware of that and not take it for granted, and we should absolutely understand that for others it is the norm. Everyone feels entitled to what they get all the time. You need to accept reality, even if you don't like it.
He clearly states that he understands the value of work-life balance, but there are workplaces where work is just not the #1 priority during business hours anymore. And that's totally fine and I'm happy if it works for people and their employers. But it's not viable for startups that need to find product-market-fit before burning through all their cash. Or companies trying to make best-in-class products.
Unless you are riding the back of some cash cow you do have to worry about profit. I have watched the complete erosion of our tech leads and the incoming hires bear so little responsibility. Management is also quite aware of what they have done, but half of them are on the way out too.
Balancing work and life means if you get the Yoga session at 11am, then you're also OK with getting paged at 11pm to fix server downtime.
When I've managed teams, I always held that it's quid-pro-quo. If I want the team to stay late to meet the deadline, then I'm OK with them leaving early to pick the kids up from school (though not on the same day, obviously). If they need to take the morning off to go to the dentist, that's cool as long as they're OK with getting a call on the weekend if there's a problem. It's a give-and-take. If the give-and-take gets too much, one way or another, then that's something we can talk about at a regular one-to-one and work out.
I 100% get his position here. I definitely want to be surrounded by people that are grateful.
I also support the point that the author is trying to make about work life balance. If you are passionate about building something, you would always want your team to be as passionate. And that would mean sacrificing other stuff in your life since this product is also a large part of your life.
In other words, "work life balance" treats work separate to life. Which often might not be the case. There can definitely be an overlap between work and life.
The US is potentially one of the worst places to get work and life mixed up without a securitized, legally binding combination of your work and life.
I reported up to Noam and he's an admirable leader to me. In fact, I will be excited to learn about and join his next project if it has a culture distinct from this Google "work life balance" and the false pretense that "work life balance" == happiness.
I was the lowest of low level bricklayers, on the opposite end of the pecking order, but his comments on The Corporation and its entitled / PC constituent members resonated with me. If it didn't resonate with you, that's why you'd probably stick around at Google for a long time. Sure, many Googlers may be happy he left, but that doesn't disprove his points. If anything, it kind of supports Noam's argument.
In case someone says "if you don't like it, then leave". I just did.
Google is barely the most innovative place for an engineer to work nowadays, nor is compensation "top of market". The rest of the tech world has caught up. Actual top of market pay would at least made me ignorant, for a little bit longer, to the fact that work was unfulfilling. Yeah, we had great work life balance, so what? I'm still expected to be there 9-5, and spending 1/3rd of your life expanding work to fill the time allocated to it doesn't equate happiness. In fact, for me it was outright depression. I'm in a more intense work environment now, pays a fraction of Google, but I am happier on so many fronts. There's much less "abstraction" and needless complexity. Some of us would rather have real work to do than coast or work on projects/problems that simpler do not need to exist.
The state of limbo induced by "work life balance" isn't the fault of Noam, because as I interpretted in his blog, the Googleplex Twilight Zone inhibits fully realizing the culture in the executive team's vision. Maybe the vision is a trainwreck or maybe it's brilliant, but I don't believe the "autonomy" afforded by Google allows realizing these extremes. There's so many layers/indirection between me, the bricklayer, and the person at the helm. Combine that with the misaligned incentives in a corporation where resume projects are being advanced, I wasn't even building the great pyramid of Giza as much as I was building some offshoot resort home for one of the scribes that reported up to the priest who reported up to the pharoah.
The one constant has been my daily exercise session, whether that has been a workout, yoga session or swim. My daily schedule (pre-Covid) usually involves 45 mins at home checking email/chat and addressing anything urgent and modifying my to-do list for the day. Then it's to the gym for 90 minutes, and in the office by 10:30am. It's what I need to do and it keeps me sane.
Building a startup in my early 20's was easily the most stressful period of my life. Going for a swim each day was probably the single most important thing that got me through it in one piece.
I have a lot of respect for what the author has accomplished; building one of the top tech products and brands in America is ridiculously hard. However, this article shows a lack of empathy for how people work and what they need.
Also he spends a lot of time defending his "short fuse" and his saying of offensive things; in my experience, when someone's own side of the story is that bad, it's actually much worse even from the other side (i.e. the side anyone not him would be experiencing). You don't want to work for rude assholes. I don't know him well enough to know if he's actually one, but that's how he's coming off in this blog post anyway. Red flags for days.
Sounds like the author a senior leader (presumably) hasn't internalised what it is to lead - I recall a tweet from a serving Army officer about what you must never do is get used to the fact you can send out some one for coffee and become entitled.
I'm starting to think the Bay Area trend of hyperfocusing on identity politics is just the trendy way of deposing shitty managers.
> It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more
and this other complaint...
> The product is a tool to advance the employees career, not a passion, mission or economic game changer.
The author wants employees who perceive their job as a passion, and a mission, who can be fired as soon as their role is no longer needed? That strikes me as more "entitled" than keeping a Yoga class blocked off in your schedule.
> There are people who are great for a stage of the company and later, do not have the right skills as the company grows. It is not their fault, it is reality.
While at the same time wanting to fire the employee as soon as they don’t need the skill. The commitment is entirely a one way street.
Not everyone who is an excellent contributor needs to be willing to work on weekends or have that 'go-getter' energy.
The optimal path is one of optimizing for the path of least resistance, while this fella seems intent on rushing ahead, head first, until something breaks, or as he calls it, gets 'worn down'.
Of course if you lack the brains to be able to comprehend what the path of least resistance is, the next best thing is to be extra energetic and try everything until something sticks.
That's this guy in a nutshell. This type of approach to life is often destructive and abusive, what the author calls having a 'short fuse'. These extra energetic folks need to be reigned in by people who have a working brain, then the extra energetic people can be excellent. This can be seen in sports, where a group of intelligent people take extra energetic maniacs and mold them into championship teams.
That level of entitlement is incredible. I feel very fortunate to make a well above average salary, and I keep reminding myself that it's unusual, and that I should increase my savings for when the faucet is eventually turned off
Wow I didn’t think I would ever see anyone openly state in writing that it is too hard to fire people for being old. (Age discrimination against those 40 and older is against federal law. It’s also morally wrong. I would also personally argue that the age cutoff should be a lot lower, but that is directly relevant to this article).
Edit: ahh that makes sense. He likely meant it as “or just plain ol’ ‘you’re not doing a great job.’ “
Having worked at Google, it is extremely difficult to fire a low performer. It takes about 6-12 months, many visits with HR, and a ton of documentation. So there is a common practice of managers trying to offload their low performers onto other teams, as mentioned in the post.
Like, I just wore a plain old shirt to the concert. Meaning, I just wore a regular shirt to the concert.
In this sentence, it means, "or just the regular reason of 'you're not doing a great job'."
> There are people who are great for a stage of the company and later, do not have the right skills as the company grows. It is not their fault, it is reality. But not being able to replace them with people that do have the right skills means that people are constantly trying to “offload” an employee on a different team rather than fire them - something that is not conducive with fast moving and changing needs.
One thing that really irritates me is one way commitment. The author wants people who will see their work for the company as a calling, while at the same time having no loyalty to the employee and seeing them as just a stepping stone, to be used when needed and then discarded.
In Japan, the work culture historically was one of crazy dedication to the company. However, it was reciprocated. The company was expected to take care of your whole life, even to the point of coming up with a sinecure for you in your old age. They didn’t just use you and discard you when they thought you were no longer needed.
Every time I see a company talking about how they want employees to see the company as their mission and calling, I look at how they treat employees to see if they plan on reciprocating that loyalty. The answer if pretty much always no. They plan on using your loyalty when it is useful to them, often burning you out, and discarding you when they think you don’t provide value.
Internal mobility is exceptional, perks and compensation are exceptional (regardless of if you are single, young, married, old, disabled, male, female, gay, straight, <other qualifications I've missed> etc. there are GREAT perks available to you), scope of impact is huge (billions of users use your work), and a high bar of employment (though some lament the bar has been lowered) means you work with people who are generally quite smart/on your level
I find that people who make this comparison are usually highly un-empathetic, and are not as decent in their hearts as they their own self-image suggests.
#1: Words matter. I used to think they didn't either. "It's just words". But they matter. That "slur" that you absentmindedly threw out as a joke or a throwaway line in a non-serious context? Someone had that used against them in the past in a threatening, hurtful, aggressive manner. It's not a joke to them. So why should they be forced to endure reliving a past trauma just because you didn't bother updating your slang since the 90's?
#2: When you get down deep enough, you find a lot of time these folks have worse things going on in their hearts than they let on. Even in this example. "So long as your pronouns are correct" makes me think this person thinks preferred pronouns are a ridiculous waste of time, and are irrelevant. Just what I can infer from their analogy.
Which makes me think that this person is not an ally or a supporter of trans/non-binary folks, and his problems go far deeper than just using the "wrong words".
Look for this blogpost to be quoted by Google in one of their antitrust defences.
The only thing worse than not putting the user first when you build consumer products is having a core attribute of your Googley culture be "put the user first" and not do it.
> After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.
What? Respecting the privacy and info-rights of your users provides zero value? BigCorp's data policies exist for a reason, one important of which is the law. People (aka his users) clearly valued these things enough to make them the law, so how does complying with what they want provide zero value.
This perspective (along with the others pointed out in this thread) betrays what I suspect is a disconnect between what the author defines as "value" and what I and I hope most reasonable people believe makes for a better world. If things like privacy, the ability to take personal days, not having to listen to biased or offensive speech from a superior, etc don't have value, then what does? At a deeper level, it's sad that we have to fight against this all the time. Somehow our society has come to so highly reward these sorts of narrow-minded "value-creators"to the detriment of everything that they don't consider "value".
He lost me here.
Grouping "young people" -- an entirely arbitrary delineation -- and calling them entitled is typical agist bullshit. Just because one person wants to work like a dog, doesn't mean others who don't are entitled.
Check yourself jerk.
> I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend.
This is the reason why I refuse to work for managers who work outside of business hours AND expect others to be available then too. Working like a dog permeates a toxic work environment where everything is a competition and zero-sum.
For the vast majority of people, work is an avenue to a better work. It's just a job. I think generally the people we consider "successful" worked themselves out. However, there is survivor bias here as well that needs to be called out. For every 1 burned out "successful" workers, there's 99 that failed, and many that probably have some form of trauma.
In reality, in large-corp you can cruise and still be in the top <5% by income and wealth. I have nothing against people who want that as long as they recognize their privilege. I don't call them entitled, I just call them people.
Lastly, I'm glad Noam Bardin wrote this post because it's very indicative of the kind of person he is. I will run far and fast away from every working with him.
> I was the weirdo who wanted to push things fast and expected that some level of personal sacrifice when needed. I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend.
> So, why did I leave?
> I did not leave in a confrontational disagreement (which is what anyone who knows me thought would happen, as I have a short fuse...)
From Twitter:
> Noam Bardin, former Waze CEO (2009-21)
He’s clearly a smart guy and I don’t disagree with all his points, but in general it’s sad that there are CEOs/managers out there with short fuses that want to fire old people. Also he wants personal sacrifice & things delivered no matter what. I understand the viewpoint but would likely despise it as an employee.
This is probably how he got in trouble for some of the HR things he mentioned, where he says a word and people take it like you did and report him.
"No one buys technology, you buy a team and a way of doing things."
If the author means in the sense of what a big company like Google is purchasing, that's kind of correct (though there's no guarantee the company sees it as in their best interest to keep that team or way of doing things together).
If the author means in terms of why a company like Google purchases another company... That's only one reason. Here's a short list of additional reasons I'm aware of Google has bought a company:
- To acquire the data (and agreements to share data) a company has built up over the years
- To acquire a company's customers (big in the ad space; traditional advertising is a trust network, and the easiest way to get into the inner circle of big client service is to buy someone who's already serving big clients)
- To remove a competitor from the field of companies in a space
- To acquire the team that built something Google wants to build fast (this is a gamble; Google's in-house, NIH-ist software stack is an absolute space alien, and teams that built something Google wants will likely have to rebuild it atop that stack while simultaneously limping along their existing tech stack that already does the thing but that Google has immediately labeled "DEPRECATED DO NOT EXPAND UNTRUSTED SOFTWARE WE DIDN'T BUILD THE KERNEL THIS IS RUNNING ON").
As an owner thinking of selling to Google, I have no idea if you know which of these they're thinking of your company as. But it's worth noting that many of those reasons don't imply your company will stick around as an independent coherent entity in Google (or even that Google intends to hire all your employees).
is this common at FAANG? i've never had anything close to an HR complaint in 8 years
You make me look like a saint. :)
I disagree. Having well thought out, auditable processes around how you handle data and user privacy is also part of focusing on the user and also part of delivering a good product. Sure you might want to focus on shipping “value” with bells, whistles, and features, but the old-school mentality that one can ignore these other aspects of technology and move quickly and cavalierly is arguably exactly why the push for regulation is so hard right now—the pendulum is swinging the other way precisely because this myopic view of things is so dangerous.
I found this surprising. I thought this was primarily a problem in union / government positions.
It's certainly a lot harder to fire people than at a startup. You need multiple review cycles with poor ratings, a Performance Improvement Plan, more review cycles of bad ratings, etc. But most people don't want to hang on through that, so they leave since it just sucks to be on a team where you are not valued. But you can definitely hang on for 18 months pretty easily with everyone unhappy with your work if you want to.
So it's not really the same as government jobs where you really can't be fired, but it's very different from a startup where everything can be going fine, you lose a big customer and a week later 10% of the company is gone to keep the burn rate low.
For someone trying to do that, it might look like its "impossible for fire someone".
So what he is saying is that he wouldn’t have done it if he wasn’t forced to. Perhaps there’s a lesson here about what sort of organizations are trustworthy custodians of data and what sort of organizations are not.
I recognize every brand on there and know at least a little bit what their consumer-facing products are... except waze (until now).
I realize it might just be me, but I wonder if this is some kind of vanity graphic?
(I have been at a company that would periodically pay for brand surveys, that would always tell us how great our brand was doing. I don’t think there was anything explicitly untoward going on, but I think the consultants were finding a way to tell us what we wanted to hear. I wonder if they same is going on here?)
This quote really hit home:
at the end of every day, I always ask myself "what did I do for our users today". This simple exercise helps keep priorities straight. When I found myself avoiding this question because I was embarrassed by the answer, I knew my time was up.
If it prevented a data leak or a security incident, I'd argue that it did actually provide value to your users.
At some point, you have to do the non-trendy infrastructure work, skyscrapers aren't built with bricks.
sips coffee
I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too.
Pretty quickly debunks the idea of being better able to grow with a bigger budget from a 'mothership'. The constraints from the mothership create more drag than the extra budget creates lift.
I might not enjoy working for him (but I could be wrong -I often am), but I completely sympathize with him, and his essay gave me a good window into the current SV mindset. I am glad to read his empathy for folks that don't have it as good as he does, and I suspect he has it pretty good. I don't encounter that kind of awareness too often, and it's nice to hear, from a C-level. He seems to have both feet planted firmly on the ground.
I worked for some fairly "stolid" corporations, for most of my career. It was not a particularly enjoyable experience, the whole time, but it taught me a lot of things about Integrity, Loyalty, personal Honor and Consistency. I was never paid FAANG wages, but was, nevertheless, able to build up enough of a "nest egg" to get to the point where I don't need to work, if I don't want to. I'm currently working with a 501(c)(3) startup, not making a dime, and working harder than I ever have in my life.
And loving it. I currently feel as if it has all been worth it.
The thing that really bothers me, is that the entire tech industry is now built around engineers remaining at a company for 18 months. I was talking to a Facebook manager, some time ago, and he was boasting about being at FB for longer than he had ever worked anywhere.
"How long was that?" I asked.
"27 months."
I worked at my last company for 27 years. It has drawn a lot of sneers from current SV denizens, but I'm proud of my record. I went places that people have no concept of. I worked at a level of trust, for a conservative, classic Japanese corporation, that few Americans ever experience, and my tenacity and Integrity had a lot to do with it.
When high turnover is endemic, it has a huge impact on architecture, corporate culture, productivity, hiring, and, at the end of it all, product quality.
I tend to design fairly large, heterodox, infrastructure systems. They take months and years to develop and refine, and I expect them to last for years. I have written software architectures that are still in use after 25 years (albeit greatly changed).
In my experience, "letting go" is vital. I spent ten years developing and refining a project that I turned over to a new team, about three years ago, and walked away completely, so they don't have the "Grandpa can't let go" thing happening. They have done very, very well. My being there would have destroyed a decade's worth of work. Instead, they built out my infrastructure into something amazing.
Walking away also gave me the luxury of working on new stuff. I'm in the middle of refactoring a server system that I wrote two years ago. It lay fallow until the project I'm working on now, and it has aged very, very well. I look forward to, one day, turning it all over to someone else, and walking away to new horizons.
Back in 2006 I referred a former co-worker to Google. He quit after a year or so, and this was one of his complaints.
Our joke was "This foie gras is TERRIBLE. Just terrible".
Yes they literally served foie gras!
Wow. It would have to tie into making upper management Pay-for-performance linked to similar metrics ;-)
Why should the employee care about "users" if their equity doesn't increase in value based on those users?
Like--its as simple as that, don't blame the employees for being entitled here.
If my equity isn't related to my job then they're not "my users", and I'm not a true owner of the product.
Their support was not crushing you. How many serious Waze competitors are there these days?
You are getting acquired, for God's sake. You are under Google's scrutiny and Google will be accountable for what you do - even legally. So yes, there are going to be legal issues. Yes, Google is going to involve itself and it is going to follow those policies.
Basically such startup founders want to have the cake and eat it as well. Want to get all the economic benefits of the acquisition, then leverage google in customer acquisition perks etc. but still want google to leave them alone. NO matter how much promise is there pre-acquisition, it is just not going to happen. And that is the way it should be.
If they want money with independence, ask google to fund them like a VC instead of asking for an acquisition.
...yet I imagine verifying a feature is not actually illegal is a fairly good use of time.
General attitude that comes out of it to me, is that your employees growth doesn’t matter, only his vision of product matters. He complains about people being entitled, and at the same time he complains that as CEO of subsidiary of one of the biggest company in the world, he cannot say offensive things in his talks.
And most entitled one - he’s sold his company (that he actually didn’t own, from the beginning, like with most startups) and he cannot control it fully anymore? And complaining that he cannot fire people on the spot?
He should check his entitlement before complaining about other being entitled by not wanting to put his product vision above their wellbeing.
Not being able to fire people is indeed a big disadvantage. Bad employees are much worse than just not contributing. They make the people around them worse and have a negative impact on the morale. As a manager you want to be able to get rid of such people as quickly as possible. I'm not saying firing on the spot is a good thing. But it should be reasonable to fire someone within 6 months and it shouldn't come as a surprise to the employee. Good managers communicate to their employees when they are not performing.
That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect employee "passion" when their own continued employment is contingent on whether management thinks they're still necessary.
The easiest example to grok would be if you had hired a VP of sales who is an expert in B2C selling, then you pivot your product to a B2B offering. Or say you pivot into being a data-heavy product and your CTO has no idea how to build a data pipeline.
In these cases you could say “they will figure it out”, and sometimes that works. But sometimes you need to recognize that through no fault of their own, your employee now does not have the skill set they need to do their job, and find someone that does have those skills.
This is most pronounced in hyper-growth startups because bigger companies seldom pivot dramatically or change their scale rapidly enough that a motivated and smart employee can’t grow with the role.
This still seems to hold no?
I suspect employers would like both, but would prefer to subordinate the former to the latter, because otherwise that employee is easily going to jump ship to a competitor or potentially not be an effective employee at all and get lost in the weeds of their craft rather than the mission. This sort of passion for the mission/company itself is also the impression I get from the article.
And that's a pretty big ask if as an employer you also want the ability to discard people who are no longer good skill fits for the company.
I mean you can ask it and you may well succeed, but I would expect quite a few burned bridges along the way.
Absolutely.
> I suspect employers would like both, but would prefer to subordinate the former to the latter
I think this depends on the company - size in particular seems very relevant. A lot of startups want their hires to be "mission driven", i.e. passionate about the company's objectives. This is more important if (like most startups) you're hoping for your hires to be generalists, and figure things out as they go along. In this scenario you can have meta-level "passionate about what you do" regardless of what the object-level task is (or more realistically, within a broad range of tasks that fall within your area of competence-but-not-expertise). But that's not as important as passion for the mission, and I do wonder if "passionate for whatever thing you're working on" is an oxymoron. In this situation I think your point is correct, the small companies want passion about the mission.
One of the complaints in the OP was that Google employees are _not_ (as) mission-driven. My model here would be that at a big company, you're looking for a bunch of highly-specialized individuals that are effectively PhD-level experts in their field (not saying you completely discard/devalue generalists, but the trend is towards more specialists as you get bigger since you have more tasks that can actually keep a specialist busy full-time). For hiring/motivating specialists, you need to select for people that are passionate about the craft, not necessarily the mission. Not to mention if I understand correctly at the lower levels at least you tend to apply to a broad "Software engineer" role and get slotted in to a team, rather than applying specifically for a role in a specific subject area. I'm guessing the median Googler is substantially less mission-oriented than the median 10-person-startup engineer. Indeed to the extent that your mission is "boring" (I don't know many people that are excited by selling ads, for example) I suspect you want to actively select for people that are passionate about the craft, not the mission; these people will be happy with any mission, as long as they get to craft well. So for large companies I think I disagree with your theory about preferences between the two passions.
Note with all of this -- you can still be a primarily mission-based small/growth startup, and have a situation where a skill mismatch emerges, and you need to replace someone. I don't think it's hypocritical to want your employees to be passionate about the mission, while also having the skills required to do the job, and recognize that sometimes your passionate and mission-driven employee is just not the right person for the role they are currently in.
> And that's a pretty big ask if as an employer you also want the ability to discard people who are no longer good skill fits for the company.
Perhaps there is some hypocrisy if you are really encouraging passion about _the company_, and selling the "we are a family" story, and then turn around and terminate someone because you pivoted and no longer need them. I know some startups do this and it's a bit awkward. Your company may be close, but you're not a family. But I don't think "hires mission driven people" and "fires fast if there's a lack of fit" are mutually incompatible asks/expectations in general.
Talk about entitlement. You think that when a company hires you, that should be a commitment to employ you forever regardless of need?
Passion can come from your own investment in the success of the business, through equity and through the opportunities that come to productive employees at growing companies, both before and after they leave. Or it can come from a belief in the mission, distinct from faith in the company. You can pursue the same mission at a different company. But I guarantee you one thing: passion does not come from a guarantee of continued employment.
Hardly. I can't speak for the original comment I quoted, but I personally view employment as pretty transactional. You pay me this, I give you this. I may or may not have passion, but that should be immaterial to the job at hand.
The employer sets a bar. The employee clears it or does not. That bar may change over time. If the employee does not clear the bar the employer fires the employee. If the employee clears the bar the employer continues paying the employee.
To the extent that passion comes into the conversation, it's an internal issue for the employee to sort out by themselves and not really the business of the employer.
Are you saying something different? Because I don't think we're actually in disagreement, but maybe we are?
Perhaps this is our disagreement. Employees with passion often perform better and there is nothing "unfair" about employers desiring passionate employees for that reason.
I agree that passion shouldn't be a requirement per se (whatever that means) if job performance is otherwise good, but passion is very highly correlated with job performance.
That sounds really weird to me to bring up, regardless of whether it's true or not. As in this makes sense when you're thinking of trying to hire folks trying to gauge passion as a proxy for their performance when you can't directly observe it, but when they're working for you, you don't need proxies! You can directly observe performance!
So passion seems pretty irrelevant as soon as someone is hired, unless you're afraid of them jumping ship. But that's the nature of the beast. Employers can fire employees and employees can jump ship. Such is life.
> there is nothing "unfair" about employers desiring passionate employees
I'm a bit confused; I mean there's nothing unfair about desires in general? Someone could want a billion dollars to fall from the sky into their lap and I might say "good luck," but there's nothing unfair about it. Employers might desire their employees to want literally zero pay and employees might desire their employers to give literally zero work. Good luck to the both of them.
The question then is not so much desires as it is the actual dynamics of the job itself and to what extent those desires are actually manifested in observable behavior.
I think the overarching theme that the_local_host was bringing up has to do with the language of morality in general.
You can talk about the employee-employer relationship in a very dispassionate sense as one of mutual transactional need with one discarding the other when one is no longer needed, which is fine. You can also talk about the relationship in the language of fairness and passion, which is also fine.
But there's something pretty unsettling about crossing the two together, especially when the perceived dynamic is that when it's convenient for the employer they slip into one or the other rather than when it's convenient for the employee.
EDIT: In response to your additional new line: "I agree that passion shouldn't be a requirement per se (whatever that means) if job performance is otherwise good, but passion is very highly correlated with job performance."
I think the original point of the_local_host's comment is that it's just kind of weird to talk about passion at all or whether an employee "should" do something or not or even the notion of employer/employee entitlement.
Just make the job expectations explicit. If an employer wants employees to work weekends make that explicit in the job description. If the employer wants a work product that a typical employee can only produce after 100 hours of work in a week then fine, ask for it, just make it clear upfront. If the employer wants employees to work extra hours for deadlines, fine just make it explicit.
The employee then takes it or leaves it. And from the employer side either the employee fulfills those expectations or doesn't.
But don't leave it implicit and then complain about the lack of passion, which is what I think the_local_host was pointing out.
(There's wider policy questions of whether you want to incentivize or disincentivize that behavior on a societal level, but that's an altogether different scope/level of conversation.)
I'm personally saying it isn't really the business of the employer to talk about employee passion to begin with. In the same way that the employer may desire an employee to keep a clean home and healthy living habits, because of the various signaling benefits it has for their job duties, but it isn't really the employer's business to care.
While I agree that there should not be a specific job requirement to keep a clean home and healthy living habits independent of job performance, I absolutely disagree that employers shouldn't "talk" about it in general terms. It's perfectly appropriate for companies to encourage and help their employees to lead healthy lives (e.g. providing healthy food, gym access, encouraging taking vacation time, promoting appropriate work-life balance, etc), just as it is appropriate for companies to encourage having passion for the mission even if it isn't strictly a job requirement.
I don't think so. I mean I guess you'd have to ask the_local_host whether I'm accurately representing the thrust of the quote, but the operative word here is indeed "expect" as opposed to desire or encourage.
Rephrasing the original quote in my own language I'd say something like:
Employers and employees can use purely transactional language to talk about employment and it's fine. Employers and employees can use emotional and moral language such as "passion" to talk about employment and that's fine too. But which language to use should depend on what forms the bedrock of the relationship. If the transactional needs form the ultimate bedrock of the relationship, an expectation of "passion" is no bueno.
There is a difference between encouragement and expectation. And I think employees would chafe under the expectation of e.g. eating healthy food or using the gym (probably not vacation time though, although a select few might, in the same way that I don't think, absent flight concerns, employers would be terribly offput by employees refusing raises).
In the same way that team activities, team meals, happy hour, providing materials about the mission etc. can all be viewed as perfectly fine encouragement for passion for both the mission and the company, that is not the same as expecting passion.
Expectations are two way streets. You get things if you meet them. You don't get things or have things taken away if you don't meet them.
Desires and encouragement are not.
> I absolutely disagree that employers shouldn't "talk" about it in general terms.
Talk is indeed too strong of a word on my part in the sense you're using it, but the point I was trying to get across is that if transactional needs ultimately dominate the relationship then those are the ones that should be emphasized.
I would prefer employers tell employees upfront that they're expected to work long hours and nights for deadlines or similar things in that vein, rather than leave it implicit and then tut-tut them for a lack of passion.
And because of that that's why I emphasize the word "expect" rather than "desire."
From my experience this can be extremely hard - to be able to know how much one employee is contributing compared to another one.
Then why do founders work harder than hired managers?
As long as that holds, I think a lot of people, especially founder types, are happy. The moment that's wrested away, whether by excessive board oversight, or by perceived meddling from investors, or by perceived interference by a manager, passion drops.
That's why autonomy was so important for the article writer.
So the claim is that employees should be so passionate that they are willing to make personal sacrifices for the benefit of the company.
But if things aren't working out the company is in its rights to immediately cut them lose. Shouldn't the company be willing to make some sacrifices for the employee?
I don't think the point is that you shouldn't get rid of a role that isn't needed anymore, that absolutely should be done. If you are expecting a level of commitment from an employee far beyond what you are willing to commit to them, something is broken.
That VP of sales and CTO will almost certainly do fine. The jobs need to be radically different for it to be worth the morale hit of firing people, and the cost of hiring and onboarding new staff.
Don't expect passion and dedication if the company doesn't offer the same guarantee back when the going gets tough or they change direction. You treat your staff like mercenaries, that's what you'll get.
It’s literally his job, as a CEO, to make sure promos and career progression align with increased product quality.
Sure, it’s harder as a part big company, where there’s more bureaucracy to deal with (both for good reasons of consistency and equality, and bad reasons of just because) but no one said growing is easy. As an engineer I’d be fired if I wouldn’t solve technical challenges of scaling.
If you want them to optimize for building a better product, give them more equity. Most people don't want to work during the best 40 years of their lives. Give them a way out or they will try to find one themselves.
No you can't fire a person on the spot, but the assumption is that if they got into Google in the first place there's something of value there, so the company has a commitment to fix the problem before jettisoning the person.
What this guy seems to be complaining about is his inability to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority and only his.
Yeah, you for sure can't do that at Google. Thank god. It's not a feudal kingdom.
Unless they are so toxic that everyone hates them, they’ll be able to swing performance to an even average.
Or at least squeak along until they leave of their own volition.
I can kind of see why that would be annoying to someone that used to be able to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority.
Ok, but then they're just average, not bad. Hence, no need to fire them.
Somehow the person two comments above me twisted his message into the author being the entitled one. I think this is what the author is referring to by PC and putting on a corporate face.
I didn't get any indications that he expected 80 hour work weeks 52 weeks a year from everyone. To paraphrase, I think he was frustrated with his employees going to the townhall or yoga class in the quad instead of working on the customer outage.
It seems like he tries to care about his users a lot, and wants his team to as well.
Also, the "offensive things" in his talks were only offensive to a small vocal minority by his own account.
Is that really something we should take at face value? There are plenty of instances of people getting unreasonably offended but it's also extremely common for people to be shitty to their colleagues and use this as an excuse. He provides no actual examples.
Personally I've met and worked with lots of people that were in many ways friendly and genuine but had some weakness or quirk that induced them to mistreat their coworkers.
The second kind of people you mention are, well, human. Such small transgressions exist in family and among friends as well.
I really don't see how this is an excuse. it's like saying "black people are a minority in the US so who cares if they say they are oppressed"
If there's a specific demographic that is consistently affected by what you're saying, there might be an issue though.
Sure but it's really not that hard to keep things under control in the work place. I have my own opinions, sometimes I share them at work, sometimes people may disagree, however, I don't "rack up multiple HR complaints" like this guy did.
Firstly, these came from events he was _invited_ to speak at. If you invite someone to speak and then don't let them speak their mind what was the point in inviting them?
Secondly, as a non-american none of the things he mentions are egregious. A bit unprofessional? Yeah, probably. But not worthy of being reported to HR.
How do you know whether or not the things he said were worthy of reporting to HR? He didn't say what they were for a reason
To me, it sounds like people wanted to "hold him accountable" for upsetting them. You clearly think otherwise.
And I don't know, but the article makes me believe he is not out to attack people. Some people have also pointed out cultural differences that are likely at play here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26168899.
Again, you clearly think differently given one of your other comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170030.
No this is exactly what I think. I think it is valid for people to air the grievances. I think the difference here is that you are skeptical of the validity if their complaints. If I am right, this is a pretty fundamental difference in world view that I doubt can be reconciled on a HN thread at this point unless you disagree
You can't just throw BLM around, or we'll end up with stuff like: "So yeah, this code is bad and I'm the only one who thinks so, but not caring about my opinion is like not caring about oppression of black people!".
I disagree. The OP was essentially arguing that being offensive to a group of people is okay if that group is a minority. I was simply demonstrating how absurd that argument is when directly applied to a specific group of people.
I honestly don't even understand your analogy, it isn't similar to what I was saying at all. It is pretty safe to assume the author of the article was saying offensive things to a group of people, not having an unpopular opinion about something in general. These are two very different things that any sensible person with empathy would be able to differentiate. So, because of these inherent differences, your slippery slope argument makes no sense and is not be reflected in actual social interactions
On other levels, though, just fuck him. His mindset is the typical rationalization of normalizing employee exploitation. If you want cult-like devotion to the cause, build a coop; the minute you take away real ownership of the fruits of one's labour, it is unreasonable to ask for personal sacrifice to any significant degree. You tell me how much you pay me for what, and I'll do "the what", not "the what but something extra too, just because".
As for Google, they now look a lot like early-2000s Microsoft (both inside and outside), but this we kinda knew already.
This is a rather dangerous thought process that reflects the skewed view that some Americans have of employment: that anything less than 'Great' should be considered fire-worthy. Employment security is pushed to its exploitative limit. In such cases, employees react commensurately. Employee and employers end up in relationship that encourages churn & hopping jobs the second that your value exceeds your compensation.
> fast moving and changing needs
I find it hard to believe that a behemoth like Google has that many of these. In new product teams, sure. But, there is a shit load of maintence / upkeep / feature-iteration work that mostly requires sufficiently competent and experienced engineers. But, not much more.
> traditional tech model of risk reward
I am not sure if this was ever true for big tech. The second a company was is big enough to be in S&P 500, no low level IC is ever going to have visible impact to the company's stock bottom line.
The idea that a foot soldier's compensation was ever reflective of their impact is and has always been a lie.
> That tolerance is gone at Google and “words” > “content” is the new Silicon Valley mantra of political correctness. You can say terrible things as long as your pronouns are correct or can say super important things but use one wrong word and it's off to HR for you
That's a shame. I was hoping that the media outburst on these matters were that of a minority. But, it appears that this dogma has taken over Google culture at large.
> When I was growing up in Tech in the ‘90’s - there was no such thing as work life balance. We loved what we did and wanted to succeed so we worked like crazy to achieve great things. As I had kids, I learned the importance of being at home for them and that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a balance, sometimes you need to work weekends and nights, sometimes you can head out early or work from home
I am not sure I can take this serious. This is not what Work Life balance means AT ALL. Maybe that's because I am one of the younger folk.
> the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. Soon, Lawyers > Builders and the builders will need to go elsewhere to start new companies.
This appears to be well recognized cycle for big companies in every sector. I would characterize the Ballmer era of MSFT as a somewhat similar time too.
Good points and a good read. But, if you want start up culture, work at a startup...I guess.
What he meant wasnt age.
"or just plain old [saying] 'you arent doing great job'"
Of the many lies in business, the most blatant is when a company tells you they'll give you autonomy that they aren't required to give you.
Are there awful bosses in every industry? Probably. That doesn't mean that has to be "reality" - it just means that such opinions need pushback wherever they're found.
Proceeds to continue complaining about working at Google.
Didn't allow, didn't read.
Yeah, I dont like Sushi either. Not sure why not liking Sushi is entitlement, but as I said, normal food tastes better.
Also, the "Sushi AGAIN" complain can be entitlement only is Sushi is something special where you live. If sushi is ordinary food, then it is no more entitled then "chicken wings again" - perfectly normal thing to overhear if your local cafeteria is giving chicken wings every other day.
There is no balance when you love.
As someone who originally worked 3 years of retail, I can relate to this feeling. To be clear, I don't (and did not) advocate for working on weekends or any crap like that but I had that feeling of looking over my shoulder in fear for quite a long time.
As a bit of context, retail has slow creep to it where it can slowly consume your life if you're not careful. Everything is always understaffed so "Can you please just work another day" starts out as a feel good "I want to help" but quickly turns into an implicit expectation. If you start turning it down, nothing happens but socially, you feel like you're letting the team down.
A lot of it comes from the feeling of "We're the underdogs", even if it's intra-store such as the storemen (people who work in the loading bays) being understaffed and feeling like the underdogs compared to the grocery/longlife department.
Anyway, when I started out in tech, I was arguably pretty paranoid and couldn't understand why everyone seemed so nice (in comparison). What do you mean there's a gym? How can you just wander upstairs to the vending machine or to go for a nap without restrictions? I never outright asked these things and I understood it on a business and social level but I could never overcome the feeling that I'd get caught out one day and held up as letting everyone down in some way.
I suppose it helps to point out that at the bottom end, a night shift worker had doused themselves in petrol only to not have it in them to follow through. My manager (23 at the time as was I) told me the story in the morning, he ended his recount by chuckling and saying "I guess he couldn't even do that right".
While my current employer is more traditional (read: corporate) to some extent, I sort of wish I had taken more advantage of those opportunities, even if I didn't understand them. I'm sure having a nap every so often would probably help. I can confirm that, as someone who is simply an average developer, that not taking breaks doesn't really seem to be very effective, haha.
Beats me if this comment is insightgul in anyway but I guess something something work life balance is good?
One last thing: Something I found fascinating recently is that Dave Cutler (the NT kernel architect) always took his holidays religiously. That surprised me given my false assumption is that someone who churns out that much work (and is considered a craftsman) must surely be going all out. Personally I hate the idea of hustle culture but it's hard not to be affected by it.
If anyone can speak to the philosophy behind people who also religiously take holidays, I mean, on one hand it's clearly obvious that rest is good but I feel like it'd be helpful to read more about it anyway as someone who has struggled greatly actually relaxing :)
The trouble is, the problem is in my life I always see a person getting fired and the solution remaining, the problem being a process and an inability to both see and be able to resolve said issue.
The horror here being both the problem remains and youve been unethical to fire someone who did not deserve it. Which will only create problems down the line.
I believe this is why I feel if I was ever in the position where someone I hire is not right, I continue trying to make it work until I have tried many different solutions. If it still fails, I tell them they are great in they ways they were and explain I want to part ways, and I make sure expectations are made.
My only experience has been with short contracts, but if I wanted to part with someone who I was sure was a problem I would not even consider trying to within a 2 year period, its just unethical.
If I cant make it work within 2 years, well then we all tried. I dont know if this is the right approach but I believe it would both help in giving time to find and fixing the right problem, the right way.
tldr; firing is not cool
Let us not forget that industry heads have colluded to suppress pay for engineers. Let us not forget that in general, executives act as though we should be grateful for our pay, rather than being remunerated for building the systems that pour money into their bank accounts. Their compensation is a fact of life, just the way it is. Ours is a handout from the generous leadership team to the undeserving peons.
Even the "just a job" framing is a form of entitlement; I should not have employees who simply do a job for a wage, they should really care about that job. And if they have moved from a place of really caring to simply "doing a job", that isn't the fault of leadership or a symptom of the organization. Those people are just, you know, entitled.
The large tech companies are looking for young blood that also happens to be incredibly naive. They are the clueless, in the Gervais Principle[1]. Basically, idiot savants.
In addition to colluding to suppress pay, here are ways they optimize for youth and naivety:
- They call their HQs a "campus". They create an environment that emulates a university setting. Tourists flock to these "campuses" much like university prospects touring a university. Foosball tables, beanbag chairs, hip decor, etc. It's Peter Pan never-grow-up bullshit.
- Leet code interviews. If you're already in your career or have a family (or even a social life), you don't have the hundreds of hours to study. This prevents people from job hopping (salary suppression) and filters out people of a certain age and seniority or those that aren't willing to die for the company.
- Company "culture". Netflix has an entire document on this. It's practically a cult. I've had conversations with senior and director-level Facebook employees and the way they light up when talking about things Zuckerberg says or does is, frankly, creeping me out. There is an indocrination program in just about every startup today, that mimics what the FAANGs do. I think it's time someone said it: your trendy corporate "culture" is a soul-sucking vampire on the surface of your rent-seeking, data-hoarding, privacy-invading ad company pretending to be anything but an ad company.
If you ask me, if someone "Really Cares" about working at either Facebook or Google, then something is fundamentally off with that person. Like someone gleefully working at Philip Morris. If a person works at Facebook and admits they are a mercenary, that's at least an understandable position. I might not like you any more, but at least I know you're not totally insane.
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I cared more when I started work because I had my hands on the code and logs and could fix things quickly. This kind of agency was empowering even in an industry I didn't care about. Solving problems was fun.
Now we have layers of bureaucracy, helpdesk tickets take weeks to return basic information that I no longer have access to, I don't know the names of anyone there because we must work with The System and not individuals, and we have frequent outages which seem to result in no fundamental fixes or changes. It's a culture of mediocrity and I can't see extra effort being rewarded (intrinsically and extrinsically) anymore.
The issue of course is that I now have a lot of experience in one place with older tools and that doesn't transfer well. So keep this in mind, kids.
I think it's understandable that people can be excited working for one of the most successful businessman of our times (no matter what you think about his business).
Few good things in this but I found the remark about weekends a bit much.
I chose a career in a space I don't need to work weekends.
And none of it is luck. It's careful planning 20 years in the making.
Ugh, this refuted myth again?
The “insecure, bad leader who blames subordinates for their own failures” meter is going off the charts with this one.
Start to end you're probably talking about ~6 months to get rid of someone and over that time you need an intense process of setting them targets and documenting failing to meet expectations. The result is that most managers are more likely to try and shuffle their bad engineers into other teams than to actually give up a big chunk of their time doing this process. Not to mention the fact it puts you in a very awkward positioning having a working relationship with the person you're getting rid of.
It’s mind-blowing that you see a 6 month investment in just doing basic leadership 101 as a massive bureaucratic hassle. I think it’s safe to say that the low performer you’re referring to is not actually the real problem.
Took you a while to notice the hazing hats huh bud?
//just want to reiterate, getting a job at google does not make you superhuman// Agree
I am just tired of people whose entire self image is based on "I work/worked at Google". I know value of getting job there but it is time they stop "why I leave Google" and start "What am I contributing to humanity as an individual?"
It's "business", and why? Are you paying your (say) coders to write code? Unlikely, otherwise you'd measure their productivity in lines-of-code written, which I hope you realize is a bad idea.
More likely you're paying your coders to solve problems. Is sitting in a chair always the best way to solve problems/think? Not necessarily. If physical activity (like yoga) is conducive to better thinking/problem solving, and the company has the resources (Google does) -- I don't see why not.
The free market seems to say it's worth the boost to employee retention or PR or whatever.
ASSHOLE - Waze employees are probably saying good riddance.
Read: The promise wasn't spelled out in the contract. And whoever has experience in organizational politics knows that if it's not put in writing, it effectively wasn't said.
> Distribution - we quickly learned, the hard way, that we could get no distribution from Google. Any idea we had was quickly co-opted by Google Maps.
I know that "hindsight is 20/20", but if you have certain expectations from the purchase, why didn't you put the key items in the contract? This is not some minor loophole that you missed.
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> It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more
I very much doubt this. But:
> or there is a better person out there or just plain old. This neuters managers
So, the guy basically wanted to totally lord over people and be able to fire them essentially at will, or worse. Can't say that I'm very sympathetic here.
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> The only control you have to increase your economic returns are whether you get promoted since that drives your equity and salary payments. ... this breaks the traditional tech model of risk reward.
I thought you wanted people who were focused on the product and what helps users, not on maximizing their already-quite-high compensation?
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> I ... began wearing a corporate persona
Now, this I can very much identify with and commiserate. Of course, for me, I need a corporate persona the moment I'm hired anywhere, since unlike you, I'm not high-up in the hierarchy.
So, the guy basically wanted to totally
lord over people and be able to fire
them essentially at will, or worse.
Can't say that I'm very sympathetic here.