Leaving Google | Hacker News Reader

Leaving Google

jayconrod.com

462 pointsdcu437 comments

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google's problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue growth. That is Google's true mission. Eat the world. It's now $180 billion in revenue. In five years, that will need to be $400 billion. And five years after that, it will need to be pulling close to a trillion.

> And scale is simply because greed.

Is it possible that it is simply because of survival? The general theme of business I see is if you do not keep up with others, you will lose to your competitors. Especially in a winner take all business with network effects and low marginal costs like tech.

No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing.

Most businesses in the world survive with their piece of the pie and remaining having the same profits or slightly lower/higher than previous years. You don't disappear over night, and no market is really a "winner takes it all", it's just what management wants you to believe so you fight the good fight for your company.

Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral.

I am not sure if that is called survival.

And no, most businesses in the world do not survive that long. Lifetime of businesses are often much shorter than lifetime of humans. Even many of them that look like have survived may share the name only and are effectively new businesses.

This is what people seem to forget. A company that doesn't grow for all intents and purposes is a dead company. Or in the M&A world we call it "distressed". It doesn't matter how profitable you are if you don't get grow there are serious implications - employee motivation, loss of talent, erosion of customer services, etc.

> Sure, but the stock price would tank (note that the current multiple assumes growth), employees would leave due to poor compensation, and starts a downward spiral.

This assertion presumes that it is impossible to propose any form of compensation that's enticing without involving stock. This is not only baseless but also flies in the face of reality, as other tech companies, including other FAANGs, barely offer any stock and still manage to attract top talent.

They could achieve good multiples by paying dividends. The question is whether they're wasting as much money trying to grow as they are saving by keeping their profits offshore (and not paying tax on them). I don't know, but at some point the answer may become obvious.

If the stock price went down, they would just pay employees in cash, which is a slightly less tax-advantaged solution.

> employees would leave due to poor compensation

With a gross profit of 100 billion dollars a year [1] they can easily outbid the market compensation if they want to and stay with current revenue. But again how many Jeff Deans can one company need before it calls itself The Man?

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/gros...

You could compensate the employees with things other than stock

> and no market is really a "winner takes it all"

Market for OSes for PCs (not Macs) is a great example. Windows has what, 98% market share there? It got there thanks to the dynamics of this particular market, which is totally a "winner takes all" one. In particular, if Microsoft were more relaxed in 80ties and 90ties, there likely would not be Microsoft or Windows at all today, and everybody'd be using Os/2 Warp or BeOS or something else on our PCs.

>most business in the world survive

While this may be the case for capital-intensive businesses (oil, consumer goods, energy), this is usually not the case for intangible-asset businesses (media, tech). In the former, the assets will generate cashflow, whereas in the latter it's a people-centric model

What was the last time you chose yahoo over google or altavista over google?

Google was always greedy, but when it was small it was cool to be the disruptor. Now it's perceived as only greedy. This is typically the case for any successful company (from HP, IBM, to the new 'big tech').

Good (related) book recommendation btw: capitalism without capital

According to Peter Thiel, Google is a de-facto monopoly in search-engines and online advertising (apart from social media). I think that's an accurate take. They are in this position because of their "winner takes it all" attitude. So to say they would "easily survive" is short sighted as well as ignoring where Google came from.

> Maintaining existing services

Everything a capitalist market teaches us is against this, if they don't obsolete themselves before somebody else can then they will fall into obscurity and ultimately lose what they've built, just like other companies before it who didn't.

FAANGS companies aren't at fault for when they're winning a game which is rigged from the start.

> No, Google would easily survive if they focused on maintaing existing services and making the headcount stable instead of increasing.

No such thing. In capitalism you are either growing or dying. Stagnation means others will grow around you, and relative to them you are shrinking in the same market. Thus, stagnating == dying.

Survival for executives at publicly traded companies has led to a maniacal focus on quarterly results, discouraging R&D without near-term payout and disincentivizing minimization of negative externalities that will eventually impact everyone, including the company and its employees. The Long Term Stock Exchange was recently launched as an alternative and Asana and Twilio recently listed there (dual-listed along with existing NYSE listings) [1]. It's far too early to say if it will have any wider impact but I think the larger point is that what's necessary for "survival" is dependent on the context, and it may be possible to change the underlying conditions.

[1] https://medium.com/hps-insight/on-short-termism-8e28fbe4ccc6

I thought the tech companies we are talking about do do some very hefty R&D, at least compared to other companies. For example, Amazon plowing all revenue back into expanding for 2 decades, Apple obviously invests quite a bit and just came out with a leap in processors, Google with its many services including Maps and self driving cars, Facebook and VR, etc.

Keeping up with the competition, if you’re talking about quality of product/service, isn’t the same thing as growing yearly revenues, which usually entails scaling up operations and product lines to more places and more customers, which no business has to do just for the sake of survival. See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses. There doesn’t seem to be another motivation for chasing YoY revenue growth other than greed.

// See for example long-surviving small- to medium-scale family businesses

Are these business in industries with fierce large competitors? If not, it's an unreasonable comparison - they are only not getting eaten because nobody's trying to eat them.

I love small and medium businesses but just making a game theoretical point - you can only chose to limit your competitive effort to the extent that nobody is increasing theirs.

or simple corporate charter. if the company is organized around maximizing shareholder value, that's what they'll do.

that's why we have public benefit corporations.

Call it greed if you want, but this is just the emergent result of the economic system we have in our society. Corporations are optimization algorithms to maximize revenue. Not because they have to, but because its comprised of rational individuals who are incentivized to maximize their own revenue. The natural result is an ever-growing entity, adaptive to dangers and emergently intelligent. It's possible to run a corporation differently but it actively takes energy to resist the natural gravity of every individual's interests.

This does not seem too dissimilar to a country or tribe’s leader promising their constituents a better life in the future. And I cannot imagine a country/tribe selecting a leader that does not promise progress and growth over one that does.

Also due to wanting to keep your employees. You can't make the same amount of money year over year and retain employees who never get raises above CPI or promotions into management/ownership. That's just not going to work.

I don't know about that. There are plenty of examples of "boutique" companies who pay well and have insanely good retention over the long term— 37signals/basecamp as one example, at least until that dustup earlier this year. Valve is probably another.

It's not hard to imagine a Google that had taken this path, just focused indefinitely on search & search ads, run itself with <1000 highly skilled, highly paid employees, and never done email, maps, docs, payments, mobile phones, video, or and any of the rest of it.

That’s my dream too, but unfortunately the Google that took that path would have died long ago after being choked off by other large ecosystems from Microsoft, Apple, etc.

First Chrome, then Android were critical, life-or-death maneuvers for Google. Without paving their own path straight to users’ eyeballs, Google would have never survived. But succeeding in that path also required an entire ecosystem to back it up.

Google also does a lot of frivolous stuff to explore, but all of the major expansions are required just to protect their Search and Ad products.

It's not just engineers this applies to. Sure, if everyone makes $400k + benefits and profit share with good work-life balance and such, I guess that might fly. But most companies have customer support, IT, and other cost centers where you have entry-level employees who need to progress, and that necessarily means increasing wages over time to retain and advance good employees.

Besides, junior developers / interns are supposed to do what exactly if there is no increasing revenue at a company and no one leaves above them? Just hang out until someone quits even though they're not going to?

Retraining a junior developer is costly. Advancing them is as well, but less costly than constantly cycling in new junior developers and interns to do the HTML/CSS + ETL script jobs no one likes doing.

Growth is natural and important towards keeping your staff happy and moving up.

Both Basecamp and Valve were growing massively, so I don't think those are good examples.

I think they could have even done most of those things and remained small and lean. Most of the bloat isn't that they've entered these spaces, but that there are a million little sub-projects within each one chasing marginal (at best) improvements.

Valve doesn’t have as many employees but they definitely grow in both revenue and product line (vr, deck, they had other hardware products before - steam itself was a “side project” to distribute half life 2!)

The trillion dollar companies won't be able to survive? They're in danger? I simply cannot muster any sympathy.

Actually I think they're not in enough danger. They take things for granted, our attention and private information for example. Denying Google, Facebook those should put some real fear in them.

Is there anything significant about a trillion dollars in 2021? Was it not $10B+ in the 1980s and $100B in the 2000s?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z93yWXb9Tb0

I do not know what you mean by sympathy, I am just opining on the economic reasons for why successful businesses keep trying to expand, and that is if they do not, then they risk falling behind.

That’s only true if you are currently under threat of not being at the head of the pack. Google still very clearly leading search, which is their main income provider.

There are countless examples of companies who used to be at the head of the pack and seemingly not under threat. Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, Sears, IBM, Xerox, etc.

A common sentiment on this forum is that companies who fail to keep challenging themselves and get complacent on rent seeking from one product/service will eventually lose to an upstart.

collective systemic greed

When you live long enough it becomes evident that scale in tech is a pandemic. At a certain point greed inevitably takes over. I believe there's some kind of a threshold beyond which a company has no choice, but to turn evil.

It is just my personal opinion, but I think that it is what is going on with gitlab now.

Can you elaborate on that? Why do you think is Gitlab turning evil?

It is not necessarily evil, but corporate interest led.

When it was created, gitlab core value was to be the open source alternative to GitHub. Then, it started to add light premium features.

Now, free versions have a lot of frustratingly limited features with nag screens to push you to subscribe. The free core is less and less a priority and less and less sufficient.

After the ipo, things will get even worse. Most of new shareholders (Ie owners) are just profit led. It's an investment for them and they will want the net result to grow at whatever cost.

Management has no choice else than to follow what shareholders require.

So, if it is economically viable, nothing prevent gitlab to stop new versions to be open source if they think that will make them more profitable.

> And scale is simply because greed.

This seems over simplified. A large company is a complex system that is shaped by all kinds of forces. I'm not sure we can attribute Google's scale to a single heinous factor

Well, the state of the Internet has changed fundamentally over the last years where now most traffic is going through a small number of portals. Also, we were not that thoroughly tracked 10 years ago. Fundamentally, I believe that the ad-tracking economy of the current version of the Internet is the wrong direction. And, I hope (and work actively on) that we will find more effective ways to earn money on the Internet.

In the US, the vast, vast majority of people have effectively no upload capacity and are behind huge CGNATs. I do not see any alternative future until the vast majority of residential dwellings have quality internet connections providing symmetric up and down bandwidth (i.e. fiber to the home) and ipv6.

Only then would people be able to roll out peer to peer solutions that bypass the big tech companies.

I don't really buy that argument, because google is still the only IT company which supports long term R&D, like dart, flutter or fuchsia. Of course they can afford such boutique projects, but the good thing is they do.

My idea is still the wrong PM incentive structure, which is harming the work culture and projects.

Microsoft has a pretty good reputation for investing in research too.

Can you shed some light on what the right and wrong incentive structure looks like?

If Google doesn't take that next $200bn share in ad revenue over the next 5 years, where else will that revenue go? What about the additional $400bn of potential growth 5 years after that?

Somebody in the online ad space is going to eat that conventional ad revenue, or "build that value", or whatever we want to call it. If it isn't Google it will be Facebook, or Twitter, or Apple, or Tiktok, etc.

What happens to Google if Facebook has a $1tn online ad business in 10 years time, and Google's ad business is still 'only' worth their current $200bn?

This is absolutely about survival. In a super high-growth industry, you grow or you die.

> This is absolutely about survival. You grow or you die.

How? With that argument, neither Facebook nor any other ad networks would already be dead since Google basically owns the space already, but they are not, they are also pulling in huge profits, just not as huge as Google, but they are still well off.

The others are surviving because they are growing too. If they stall out and stop growing, they will become a smaller and smaller slice of the pie as the rest of it grows around them. They would become less and less relevant, and therefore find it harder to get new business.

In a high growth business there is no stable static strategy. Staying the same is functionally equivalent to shrinking, in terms of scale effects and relevance, as the rest of the market dwarfs you. As long as you keep growing, you can keep relevant.

If facebook had a $1tn ad business and Google still had $200bn, would Google's business actually be the same as it is now? Would they still be able to hire the cream of graduates? Would they find it as easy to replace lost business from natural attrition with new clients? Would they find it as easy to launch new ad products and get attention for them?

Do you have sort of research/statistics that backs up your statements or are you just echoing what you've heard others say about these "high growth businesses"?

Let's pray they don't start to manufacture paperclips.

Scale kills them all except for Apple? There is a comment somewhere here saying that levels at Apple are private.

This seems to be an interesting concept to keep a somewhat flat hierarchy.

There’re private in a sense that there isn’t internal registry where you can just look up anyone like at google. From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US

> From what i can observe over years apple has almost exactly same perf culture as google and any other similarly sized company in the US

Right, if you look from very far away and put "all large US company" in the same bag.

Otherwise, if you zoom on "Silicon Valley Tech Companies" then Apple and Google's perf process and associated incentives look quite radically different in many aspects.

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis?

> Why are they still able to continuously pushed out great products and keep innovating? What’s your hypothesis?

Big assumption that Apple is indeed innovating right now. Yeah, M1 was a great innovation, but before that, the iPhone was the previous innovation. Everything between has just been iterations basically, so I disagree with your assumption that Apple is in-fact highly innovative.

Google has no problems innovating on their ad backend and infrastructure you just don’t get to see it bc you’re not a customer - you’re just part of their product

As a normie I sometimes wonder what happens to FAANGlers(googlers + other FAANG). You are used doing things the FAANG way and been doing it for a while and now it’s too late for you to learn how the “rest of the world” does so how does one adapt? Just curious. I find it hard to believe that one has transferable skills after doing time at FAANG.

Well paying jobs typically don't look for people with experience in specific technologies, rather they look for people with experience in relevant domains. And the domain experience you learn at FAANG is worth a ton, lots of companies wants to be more like FAANG.

Example: You are making a search engine, you use technology X. Would you rather hire a person who worked on Google search but didn't work with technology X, or would you want an expert on technology X?

In my recent interviewing cycle I got dinged in most interviews for not being a React expert. Every panel knew going in that my React experience was recent and limited. I have 4+ years of relevant domain experience at a FAANG on my resume. I laughed with interviewers about how every few years the de facto tech stack changes and every team I've ever joined required me to learn completely new (to me) frameworks. Still got dinged.

I wish what you're saying was the truth but I think it's very much the minority.

HTTP requests work exactly the same on the other side. If anything some ex-faang have an edge as they generally see many trends years before they permeate the wider industry

If they don't grow revenue the stock won't go up. Most big companies are organized around "STONK MUST GO UP". I could justify this with smarter sounding words and more detail but in essence thats all it is. We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane.

> We literally organize large parts of society to make charts go up. It is insane.

The alternative is to not borrow from the future. Then your country/tribe is at a severe competitive disadvantage on the global playing field.

Revenue growth means customer growth which means more people benefit from google’s product (advertising). This is not some sort of bad thing.

“Quite a few activists and researchers were fired for asking Google to be a bit more ethical”

In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond “asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn’t seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they’re on the right side of an ethical (and sometimes just political) issue.

Exactly, perhaps people read too many comic book with these one dimensional villains to think that an employee asked Google to be more ethical and then they fired them right there and you could hear an evil laugh in the background.

I've looked at some of the correspondence between Timnit and others and it's fairly unprofessional on her part if you ask me and it has this self righteousness tone to it too.

Another very funny thing people believe is that Google wanted to do "evil" things but their perfectly crafted plan fell apart at the last second when they realized that they have "do no evil" in their code of conduct. After much scrambling the order came from the top to quickly remove it to unblock the evil plans.

That said, there sure are jerks at Google like any other company but I've realized most these dramatic stories regurgitated by the media is BS

Do you think she got fired for those reasons? Citing her as sounding self righteous or unprofessional seems weak.

She was not fired, she quit.

She was publishing studies critical of Google, Google wanted at least the right to have studies of the company reviewed and to include more updated information etc. which is extremely gracious on the part of Google.

She gave the company an ultimatum i.e. 'Change the Terms or I Quit' so they said 'We're not changing the terms, we accept your resignation'.

It's galling how many people (and their supporters) think that they have a right to be employed by a company and then publicly criticize them with misleading information, unmitigated or reviewed by the company.

That’s true for academics getting grants (being able to publicly critizise the one that gave them). Why would it not be true for academics being directly bankrolled by a company?

I'm not privy to the full details so idk but I provided my perspective based on what I'd witnessed which makes me believe she was fired/forced resigned because of how she approached issues at work (giving ultimatums / looking for identities of her reviewers, harassing LeCun on Twitter, etc)

> Another very funny thing people believe is that Google wanted to do "evil" things but their perfectly crafted plan fell apart at the last second when they realized that they have "do no evil" in their code of conduct.

Of course the CoC is not binding, but having that in there was a statement, which meant, roughly interpreted, "the impact of our work should not be net negative". The removal of the line itself did not change anything, of course, but it was a clear statement that this priority had been dropped. I think it's quite obvious why this is seen as not great.

First of all it's still there if you haven't checked for yourself: https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

Second, if you were wearing "I'm a good guy" badge on your shirt and later on decided to go rogue and work for the enemy, would you then remove that badge right away? Of course not unless you're truly incompetent at being bad.

I'd understand it if they got rid of the wording because of how much headache it creates for them.

Btw, that's basically why government and business officials often resort to saying the least informative statements. Because every word and sound bite will be used against them.

> After much scrambling the order came from the top to quickly remove it to unblock the evil plans.

Well otherwise it would be considered securities fraud

I'm not sure this is true. Normally I'd be inclined to agree with you, but the Timnit situation was handled badly.

Objectively, there was nothing wrong with her paper.

You may have a point about the other researchers. I'm not familiar enough with their situations. But I dug into Timnit's pretty thoroughly.

Their recent behavior isn't too encouraging either: https://archive.md/7jCQY

(Related Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/jackclarkSF/status/1451273190974660612)

Hopefully everyone will just chill out and focus on research.

Um - she wasn’t fired because of her paper - she required they out an anonymous reviewer or she wouldn’t be able to work there.

It’s pretty likely the reviewer would have been harassed - a good thing perhaps if you have one view of thing - but a bad thing from another perspective.

Google refused and accepted that she writing be able to continue working there

This is the common story, yes. But it evaporates when you dig into the details, which I've posted below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965631

I think it's worth reflecting on why we're so quick to believe the corporate version of events. Corporations have an astronomical amount of power and influence. Aren't you at least a little curious whether it's true?

And if there was nothing wrong with her paper, that raises the question of why an anonymous reviewer was grilling her about it.

It very much does not evaporate.

Her paper got got flagged during internal review. There wasn’t time to revise it because she submitted it late. She then wrote an angry rant to her coworkers that claimed she was oppressed and told them to stop working. And then she demanded the name of the anonymous reviewer and threatened to quit if the company did not meet her demand.

Your defense is that most papers were submitted late without a problem. Perhaps most papers don’t need revisions, but this one did, and there’s no excuse for how she handled it.

I’ve had papers rejected from my company’s internal review process. It sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. You make some revisions and submit to the next conference. You don’t go ballistic and tell your coworkers their work is meaningless and threaten to quit unless you get your way.

Do you have sources other than quoting yourself on HN? I'd like to read them

> I think it's worth reflecting on why we're so quick to believe the corporate version of events

I reflected on it and found that it mainly happens when the person affect have their entire work life on basis of their politics as opposed other victims of corporate malfeasance who get plenty of support/ empathy from general community.

Timnit is unethical as hell. She's also the worst kind of being unethical: being unethical in the name of doing good. She second guessed the motives of her coworkers. She attributed every difference to her paper or claim to racism or white supremacy or oppression or any combination out of the three. For all I know, only a true racist would view everything through a racial lens.

She's a disgrace to the research community.

I had some sympathies with her when the initial story broke out. But the continous flaming on Twitter, harping and retweeting her supportive followers and the performative activism for a select set of racial topic makes me feel she cares only about her own set of interests.

From what I read at the time, she wasn’t fired for the content of the paper (though she initially made it sound like this before more details became public). She gave the company an ultimatum to reveal the name of an anonymous reviewer or she would quit, and they took her threat seriously.

She was subjected to a process that wasn't the norm at Google. I'd be pretty upset too.

The details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25313994

Discussion about whether the review process was normal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25308847

She submitted her paper late for internal review when it was too late for revisions. It might be the case that most papers are submitted late for internal review, but most papers don’t expressly criticize the employer’s work. That’s an important distinction, and it was naive to not anticipate that the paper might get extra scrutiny.

Regardless, being upset because you didn’t get your way doesn’t give you carte blanche to do unprofessional things that will get you fired. You can’t say “Give me X or I quit” and not assume there’s a chance your bluff will be called (especially when “X” is a demand for the company to violate its own policies).

Other people circumventing policy doesn't mean that it is fine for her to do it. It is really hard to judge as you do without more data on the circumstances of the other people circumventing the policy and not getting punished, right now we have to take their word that what she did wasn't worse than what most others did. We can't know that. Similarly one engineer force pushing code to fix an issue might be fine, but another engineer doing the same thing might not be fine and the second gets investigated, is that unfair? We can't tell, there isn't enough information here.

I have a feeling her continuous rants on Twitter is because her overall demands and feeling of entitlement were stood down. She demanded things which would have been just another kind of shit show and targeted harassment.

A social-justice themed charade is being made out of just being salty at getting fired.

I have mentioned this long time ago and would do so again: No matter how righteous be the cause, threatening your employers and instigating a mutinous conduct with fellow employees doesn't go down too well. Both sides could have done better. Both sides includes Timnit's subsequent conduct as well.

> threatening your employers and instigating a mutinous conduct with fellow employees doesn't go down too well.

That sounds to me like what strikes do. Sometimes they do go down well, sometimes they don't.

Right, the one-person strikes tend to be less effective.

I have read the paper. There were several things wrong with it. The most glaring example was comparing the power consumption of training a machine learning NLP model with a gas guzzling jet.

Not once in the paper does she mention that Google has been carbon neutral since 2008, because that would trash half her paper. The paper seemed of desperation to make non existent arguments.

I wouldn't be surprised if the people who worked on BERT generated more CO2 commuting to work than they did training the model. It seems like a drop in the bucket.

Could you explain in detail why the power consumption calculations were mistaken?

It sounds like you're saying that the calculations weren't mistaken, but that she didn't mention the carbon neutral status of Google as a whole.

Consider this paragraph

"We first consider environmental risks. Echoing a line of recent work outlining the environmental and financial costs of deep learn- ing systems [129], we encourage the research community to priori- tize these impacts. One way this can be done is by reporting costs and evaluating works based on the amount of resources they con- sume [57]. As we outline in §3, increasing the environmental and financial costs of these models doubly punishes marginalized com- munities that are least likely to benefit from the progress achieved by large LMs and most likely to be harmed by negative environ- mental consequences of its resource consumption. At the scale we are discussing (outlined in §2), the first consideration should be the environmental cost."

This whole paragraph is such a reach, and so absurd that it seems like a parody. Are we supposed to believe that marginalized communities are being harmed by Google training NLP models using green energy? Or will they benefit from better translation from English language content into marginalized languages?

Timnit has zero interest in what actually benefits marginalized communities. She uses them as a prop to build a career in high paying AI field where, apparently, the sub field of ai fairness has a low bar for publication.

Yes, I never said that the power consumption calculations were wrong. The paper wasn't about power consumption, but CO2 emissions leading to global warming. She compared the power consumption of model training to jet fuel exhaust and used jet fuel exhaust to tie the power consumption to CO2 emissions. Of course, she didn't mention that Google is carbon neutral and its data centers are primarily powered by green energy. I have not seen a more dishonest paper in CS.

Electricity from the grid can come from green sources, and in the particular case if Google, it actually does. Comparing electricity consumption for a one time training with jet fuel usage is absurd.

Moreover, the paper doesn't mention any possible benefit of building such nlp models. Increased accessibility of web content across languages and for disabled people.

Google, simply through its search, maps and navigation saves a lot of wasted carbon. Complaining about the power consumption of ML models is absolutely ridiculous.

Her paper reeked of desperation to find something, anything within the AI space that could be posted as an ethical dilemma.

Reading that paper convinced me that Timnit could bring absolutely no value to AI as a field, in terms of ethics or otherwise.

"Carbon neutral" via buying offsets and renewables made electricity is better than nothing but also a half truth. Their energy demand is displacing other consumers of that electricity, and for example, who will then consume eg fossil made electricity instead.

That's not how economics of scale work. This is zero sum thinking.

Google buying green electricity makes green electricity cheaper, not more expensive. More producers are incentivized to produce green electricity as Google's demand increases continuously. Other companies like Microsoft and Facebook go green as well, and the economies of scale kick in. Prices start collapsing. This is actually happening right now.

If I go solar today with my home, it is not a negative action that displaces someone else. It actually expands the solar industry and enables cheaper solar in the future.

Without early customers, green energy would never have taken off.

You mean Google bought pieces of paper and pretends that they represent removing co2 from the atmosphere, when in reality they don't.

https://www.dezeen.com/2021/07/30/carbon-neutrality-google-s...

You can use the same argument to argue that EVs are a scam, because some electricity is generated by coal.

The point is that electricity can have a green source, liquid carbon fuel can't. You absolutely cannot compare the two. FWIW, Google's data centers are primarily powered by green energy.

If the now died down Timnit reporting did not convince you that Timnit didn't apply the right tactic, if we agree to set aside the legitimacy of her cause in the first place (which itself was and still is under intense debate), then there does not seem any good way to unify our views.

Dr. Gebru was fired for having approached a lawyer about workplace issues. (She told Jeff Dean and others that she was doing so in an email made public). That triggers Legal to retaliate and look for a reason to fire the employee, immediately. Jeff Dean let the conflict drag out 6+ months because he thought he had control of the situation (and he was wrong). Without Jeff Dean’s persistence, Dr. Gebru would probably have been retaliated upon as swiftly as those in the Alphabet Workers Union. That’s how Legal and HR work—- they retaliate if litigation looks imminent. (Levandowski lasted so long because he was dealing with not Jeff Dean but Larry Page).

Google handled Dr Gebru’s exit differently than that of Anthony Levandowski, Andy Rubin, David Drummond, etc etc because Jeff Dean made the call in timing and he was really that clueless about public optics, especially with Tensorflow’s huge following. Moreover, Dr Gebru didn’t have the bankroll to fund a legal team like any of the others listed.

A lot of the posts here suggest Google is struggling with scale. Dr Gebru’s case definitely would have been handled differently were Google a smaller company. Also if there wasn’t COVID—- keep in mind she was fired a couple days before Thanksgiving during COVID. The whole country was a mess then.

> Dr. Gebru was fired for having approached a lawyer about workplace issues.

That is just very dishonest. She gave an ultimatum. Execs accepted the ultimatum. You are gaslighting other people on this topic. At the very least, you should've acknowledged that this is up to an interpretation.

Regardless whether she was fired or quit, she was toxic as hell. She dragged Jeff Dean into an unrelated matter in public and implied Jeff Dean supported personal attack.

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1278569638532530177 -- this happened a few months before she left or was fired from google

If a direct report did this to me, I would've wanted them to leave. In this case, Gebru wanted to leave (according to her ultimatum). Jeff Dean wanted her to leave (I don't doubt this. nobody wanted to work with a colleage who attacked them on twitter). I see a happy ending for both.

Gebru and her supporters have been dishonest about the whole thing.

The email about the lawyers is months before the “ultimatum.”

The reason Dr Gebru’s case is so divisive in tech (especially in this thread) is because so many are agnostic or ignorant of the role of ethics in tech; and almost every employee is ignorant of how Legal/HR execute retaliation. Anthony Levandowski is a literal criminal and yet is still enjoying tens of millions of dollars of Google’s money. Same with Andy Rubin. Even Michael Church is rich. If one percent of the energy spent fighting Dr Gebru was put into fighting the real scumbags in tech… you’d have something more like Google before it got greedy with scale.

What does this have to do with attack Jeff Dean personally on twitter?

Please note that this was months before she left.

The 3 names you mentioned have nothing to do with Jeff Dean.

Handling those 3 people has nothing to do with supporting Gebru or Jeff Dean.

This has nothing to do with Gebru being a toxic person.

Is there any reason to think Michael Church earned more than Dr. Gebru? Michael Church only worked at Google for 6 months, so I would guess none of his stock vested.

Can you explain why you think dragging a low level IC who worked at the company less than year over 10 years ago and afaik never really did anyone any harm into this is appropriate?

Did she threaten litigation before or after she posted an angry rant telling her coworkers to stop working?

Before or after she demanded that the company release the name of an anonymous reviewer?

Before or after she told them to schedule her last day if they didn’t meet her demands?

She said we was consulting a lawyer about discrimination in the workplace. That’s all you need to say to trigger Legal to retaliate. If you’re Anthony Levandowski bartering with Larry Page, though, Legal takes a back seat. It doesn’t even matter when Levandowski instigated a collision on the 101.

I think it’s interesting that the good things about working there had nothing to do with the employer and the bad things had everything to do with the employer.

Indeed, this line is the takeaway, in my opinion: “…is because we've been at least a little brainwashed into thinking a job at Google is the pinnacle of employment.”

I haven’t worked for one so this take might be quite hot, but I get the sense that big tech companies do a great job selling you on the idea that they’re elite and therefore you must be elite too if you get the job. But then you’re really just another fungible developer in a pool of tens of thousands. There’s exceptions of course.

I worked at Google from 2005 to 2013, seeing it grow from 4,000 to 50,000 employees during this time.

In 2005, it was a wonderful, prestigious place to work with many great people and a startup vibe, the place was vibrant. By 2013, Larry and Sergey were put out to pasture, and the company took on a much more bureaucratic, compartmentalized feel.

I was working hard, most of my work was fighting bureaucracy and optimizing what I did for the horrific perf process, and going through constant re-orgs so that I had no consistent manager, and no chance of promotion (this is a big deal at Google). Joining in 2005 was the best thing I've done for my career, and leaving in 2013 was again the best thing I've done for my career. I value the time there, but the Google that I remember no longer exists.

I was there 2006-2009. Each year a new level of management appeared above me, and things got ever more "political" and perf centric.

Just as people are different at age 10, 20 and 40, companies are different in different stages and sizes. Know what you want and look for it.

I realized I want to be at small companies, and have not worked at a company larger than 25 people since.

I've found the sweet spot to be around 50-200. I've always worked at smaller companies, and the 10-person company I worked at was the only terrible experience of the bunch. It sounds weird to say, but... I'm really glad to have an HR department again.

I'm sure it varies widely. I just feel like a tiny company leaves too much room for unhealthy and unprofessional dynamics, even though I'm sure it can be perfectly fine in other cases. Just depends on the people.

This is eerily similar to my experience at Amazon including how I feel when I look back. Even the years are same :-). I somehow feel joining and leaving Amazon when I did (2005-2012) was the best thing to have happened.

What makes it more special was the stellar team that I got to be a part of with whom I’m still in touch with. It’s like being part of a secret club.

The only thing we used to discuss among colleagues most of the time was solving some hairy interesting engineering problem. That changed as years wore on, it became more gossip and internal politics and who got promoted how and when etc.

The funny thing (to me) is that 4000 people already seems unwieldy to me - I run a company of 5 and can imagine managing maybe 20-30 people, 100 at a stretch but I have no idea how to run a company with anywhere close to 4000 employees (nor what would so many people work on).

The perf process sounds good on paper. It's just like peer reviews in the academia they said.

However its outcome in practice can't be any worse. To this day, people "cook up" a project that doesn't need to exist and won't share the credit or their territory with anyone (or else the committee will doubt their ownership) and abandon the project less than six months after their promotion and switch to a new team.

So... it's like academia.

Q: What's the fastest way to go from L4->L5 at Google?

A: Get a job at Facebook at E4, get promoted to E5, and get hired back at Google L5.

https://youtu.be/8DYje57V_BY

Google is somewhat famous for downleveling so I'm really not sure that this is actually true.

It’s been a while since I’ve considered Google a pinnacle of anything. I think the executives of google might be a bit delusional about how far that propaganda is effective.

It's still a major selling point if you're raising money for your company. "Ex-Google engineer" somehow still makes rich people want to throw money at you, deservedly or not.

I think this speaks to the credulity of VCs more than anything else. Google is huge, a decent chunk of us are ex google pure as a function of the numbers. Never mind how many ex googlers were doing something unique to Google and not something other higher grade tech firms are doing.

There are teams at Google and other big tech companies that are working on groundbreaking things. Working at these companies gives you a chance to do very "impactful" things. Is that sense of purpose sometimes abused to exploit workers? Sure. But there are some really smart folks doing amazing things that they'd never have a chance to do working anywhere else.

Do you have to be elite to work there? In some roles you absolutely do. In other roles you just need to do the work. You're often working alongside people who care a great deal(and some unknowingly toxic people whose self-worth seems to come solely from their career achievements), and that can raise the bar for what you and/or the company expect from yourself.

The "toxic" thing in my experience often just comes from rapid, unmanaged growth. The company is literally morphing into something new with every passing day. People are being sucked up the management chain without merit. Systems aren't yet in place to deal with the changes. New employees are flooding in faster than they can assimilate the old culture.

I'm not saying I love the valley or anything, but I'm glad I got to spend a couple years of my life here and contribute 0.0001% to some of the greatest discoveries in the last few decades. I hope more engineers get a chance to have that feeling.

> ...selling you on the idea that they’re elite and therefore you must be elite too if you get the job

Also true of Ivy League Schools, movie studios, and certain neighborhoods. Prestige is weird, and if you value it, that's totally fine, but it's probably better the separate the myth from the real-world entity that's made up of people doing stuff.

I think that changed about 15 years ago.

It’s kind of incredible how fast the shine has come off of most of the FAANG companies.

They're no longer about breadth, limitless innovation, and moonshots, but rather extraction of platform economic control.

They're the new Oracles, except they own mobile, social, and web instead of databases.

Start new companies and push them over. Fight their ability to land grab more.

Demoting then removing "Don't be evil" was a pretty good canary clause.

Yeah you might be. But they also have way more resources for you to build your talents. There's still a lot there if you have realistic expectations.

I am in the middle of the same sort of sabbatical from Google. It was my first job out of college and I joined the same time as Jay. In fact for a time sat right across the aisle from the Go team when I was working on Abseil (abseil.io) and I can confirm that Alan Donovan is a really kind, friendly guy. The company got progressively more and more "corporate" and felt less and less dynamic as time wore on. Most of the people I know who are still there are burnt out. It's a company filled with people who tend to put a lot of pressure on themselves and I felt, at least on my last team, a rising sense of anxiety and isolation from what was already a very high level before the pandemic.

That all being said, the quality of humans there is pretty amazing. I count almost all of my old managers as friends and I felt privileged constantly to be surrounded by such intelligent people and to work on such huge ranging vastly impactful projects as I did. But I'm happy I left. The self-direction feels too good after being in such a behemoth to start my career.

On to new adventures!

Thank you for Abseil, if nothing else. It’s been my go-to for years now.

I’ve been at Google for a little less than OP, and while I’m also considering leaving, my main reason is sort of the opposite: I’m bored. The whole team is bored. It feels like we’re doing nothing, and have been doing nothing for years. I work under 25 hours a week, and the vast majority of time is spent in useless meetings or reading useless docs. My actual work is maybe 5 hours a week. What are we even getting paid for? No one knows. We just keep working on new projects nobody needs, then a few months later upper management shifts priorities and repeat. Seems like the only reason we have projects is to keep us busy. And oh, we’re always hiring. Apparently we’re understaffed. Some secretly call it a pyramid scheme.

plenty of people have suggested that it's better for Google and other big tech companies to pay talented engineers to do nothing rather than risk them founding a company that could disrupt them

Is is not possible for you to transfer to another team/org internally?

Sounds like a job in a bank. Or any other monopolistic entity.

There are other 'monopolistic entities' who don't give their employees a cushy life.

Highly doubt it. It's the nature of monopolies that do not have an army (real guns and blood).

There are employees that will create pressure out of nothing and will ruin the cushy possibilities just out of their own boredom and misery due to not being able to progress the hierarchy of the monopoly (most old monopolies don't really give big raises and it's very hard to reward employees because most don't really have any impact). (managers that start micromanaging employees that somehow do something productive, regular workers that overdo it at the task managing platforms and then stress over the backlog, etc.) But it's not the monopoly that's taking the cushy from them.

Also a Googler, opinions are my own. My current experience is very different (I work on Assistant and there are plenty of problems to solve, a mix of interesting technical ones and some organizational ones), but I have been on teams where I've seen what you're talking about. I strongly suggest changing teams!

If I were in that position I would consider studying while on the job. Is there anything in the realm of computer science or adjacent areas that appeals to you to study? Maybe get a serious ramp-up in an area that you'd like to work in next?

Seems like a day in a lot of big corps; embrace it or switch.

> Why I left [...] Burnout [...] I wish I'd done more to fight those things, beyond signing petitions and walkouts. I'm not much of an activist though, especially with burnout.

It's interesting that the author mentions this, but doesn't make a connection between feeling burned out and feeling that they have to be personally responsible for everything the company does.

I don't even disagree with many of the demands of internal "activist", but the strategies they use (walkouts, trying to keep everyone outraged as much as possible) seem ineffectual to me: The main effect seems to be that it makes ordinary employees feel more burned out since they're made aware of many things that they're suppose to be angry about but at the same time they're powerless to change them. That's a recipe for burnout.

I get that the thinking is that ordinary employees are not powerless due to collective action, but for that to work you have to be a lot better at picking your battles. You can affect one to two larger things per year, so getting up in arms over every (comparatively) little thing just has the effect that your activism achieves nothing but burn out the people who want to have on your side.

I just wanted to let you know I found this comment very insightful. I've never really thought about all tiny ways feeling responsible for stuff in a company can creep into your mind and fester there without you realizing it. It's easier to attribute burn-out directly to a bad manager, unrealistic deadlines, not getting a promotion, etc - it's harder realize there there are so many other tangential things you think you should engage in and feel guilty about not having the time or mental space to engage with. All of which adds up into a overwhelming mental load.

> Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports

It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would let it get that bad. 10 reports is “you put this off a bit too long” territory, 25 is in the “someone up the chain should be fired” territory.

Not a Googler, but I’m my experience 25 person managers can work (barely) if they are just their to keep the HR stuff in line and people actually transactional work with other teams or if there is an informal team structure beneath the manager. Think a team where there are 4 tech leads that actually run the teams, but where the “manager” deals with career and hr issues.

While working in consulting I spent about 4 months with a manager who had 60 direct employees. That was a disaster, but I got to spend 3 /4 months with no responsibilities :)

I remember hearing a story (maybe apocryphal) that after Larry and Sergey abandoned their "no managers" experiment, they decided to give each manager a minimum of 10 direct reports and preferably closer to 20 so that the manager wouldn't have time to micromanage any of them.

Speaking as a Google manager of a reasonably sized org, 25 direct reports is too many. Twice a year you have to do Perf for them, if nothing else, and doing that well for 25 people would likely be the only thing you get done. I think it’d be possible, but it would be at the expense of your own career. “Did Perf for my team of 25” is not a next level accomplishment. “Organized my team so that I didn’t have 25 directs” is much more of an accomplishment (next level or not depends on the level, it’s something my group would evaluate as “meeting expectations” of an L7).

The rule of thumb at Google is 10 directs in an engineering management role, less if you’re a TLM (an IC with some management responsibilities) since you’re still evaluated on the IC ladder. There are exceptions, but they usually involve “managing” a number of contractors where you have significant program management support for coordinating their day to day activities.

I think the only way 25 comes anywhere close to working is by creating an informal team structure under the manager who has 25 “directs”, as you said. But at that point you’re informally creating the team structure that should formally exist, which in and of itself is a management failure. Either the org should hire some managers to manage those people, or some of the ICs in that informal structure are functionally performing management duties, and deserve the recognition, comp, and training opportunities that a formal promotion into management comes with.

You're partly right: With a significant number of reports, you can't keep juggling all the balls yourself. But what varies is how that handled?

A micromanager will be absolutely crushed by a high number of reports. In fact 10+ years at Google, managers intentionally had a large number of directs so they couldn't micromanage.

If you have a pretty autonomous team, strong tech leads, can delegate, ~20 still isn't great, but it's not horrible. It's not the steady state you want, but it's doable for a few quarters.

I agree that micromanagers can’t micromanage at 20, but good managers also can’t give the attention and mentorship their directs deserve either. In my experience teams want a good manager, and being under managed by an overworked or absentee manager can be a problem for morale and team cohesion.

I think the real solution here is to find the micromanagers and train them or fire them, rather than hampering all the managers in order to cut the micromanagers off at the metaphorical pass.

Personally I’d quit in such a situation. If I’m going to be managing 20 people and creating informal team structures under me, then some of my directs deserve a management title and I would want a title befitting a manager of managers. The whole thing has a whiff of “how can we avoid promoting a bunch of people” to me.

Counter anecdot - I managed about 20 directs for a few years and it was fine. Of course in reality I was grooming a bunch of them to become team leads (which eventually happened) so I was leaning on them to take care of and lead others day to day. It was fine - everyone grew through the experience. No idea if this type of thing is common but bottom line it doesn't have to be awful.

Or you might have been under the impression that it was fine, because nobody tells his management that their organization isn't working.

My manager has about 25 reports and he thinks it's ok, because we're all organized in smaller teams that manage daily work themselves. That's true, but the effect is that the person who should care about people aspects has no idea about you (how you're doing, how you want to evolve, whether you're performing, what you need to improve, whether you deserve a raise or a promotion, whether you're burnt out, whether you're looking for a new position...).

And nobody tells him, because he's the manager and you don't go to your manager with problems, especially if he doesn't maintain a close relationship with you.

Due to various internal reorgs my manager currently has a number of reports approaching that number. It's mostly gone fine for now, because there are multiple teams under her that are mostly self-sufficient in deciding their product direction. We have a team lead who isn't a "manager" but is providing input on what we do and we go to her when we have problems or need administrative work done. It's not horrible.

Your manager’s manager should be working with her to help her address the issue, because it’s not sustainable. It may be okay for now, not disputing that at all, but what to you may look like relative calm is much more likely her giving her best imitation of a duck (calm on the surface, but paddling furiously).

For instance, has she had to reduce the frequency, duration, and/or quality of her 1:1s? I’m guessing the answer is “of course” and maybe some ameliorating fact like having more 1:1 time with the team lead. The “so what?” here is that 1:1s are how you head off problems before they get serious. So either the tech lead is picking up that slack and is your de facto manager or you’re simply coasting on the strength of past 1:1s, but inertia will only get you so far.

Also, this tech lead you mention is likely doing less actual technical work because they are picking up slack left by your manager not having enough time in the day. This might not be a problem right now, but the first question I would be asking in your manager’s shoes is: “is my TL happy? Is this sustainable for them?” The second would be something like “What long term technical objectives are being sacrificed to deal with this management issue?”

It’s often the case in the situation you’re describing that the TL is interested in moving into management, and this is a “try out” effectively. Personally I like to be open about situations like this, although there are valid arguments against that. In any event, I think most people would agree that it’s best do such “try outs” when the stakes are relatively low, and the TL can have an easy escape if they need it. The situation you’re describing doesn’t fit my definition of low risk, although ymmv — maybe conditions are such that this is a very temporary state and the machinery to fix it is already in motion.

> It’s often the case in the situation you’re describing that the TL is interested in moving into management, and this is a “try out” effectively. Personally I like to be open about situations like this, although there are valid arguments against that. In any event, I think most people would agree that it’s best do such “try outs” when the stakes are relatively low, and the TL can have an easy escape if they need it.

The best way I’ve seen to accomplish this is have a job title that’s purposefully ambiguous. Usually I’ve seen this as a “lead engineer”, which can come with or without direct reports. This lets people try out management while giving them space to change their mind without losing title or status.

My direct supervisor has 75 direct reports. (Not a tech company––an elite private school in the Bay––but still...)

Education is a completely different animal. You’re not comparing apples to oranges here, you’re comparing leptons to gorillas.

I’m good friends with one of the high school teachers at “an elite private school in the Bay” (HRS) and it’s fun comparing and contrasting our jobs, but they are not at all the same job.

Fuck that. Nobody is being served by that arrangement. Nobody.

Short term capital returns are!

Which is to say, everyone who matters

I would, because I wouldn't be bothered by a useless manager running around calling meetings and doing other useless activites.

They're saving a bunch of money just having one useless person.

Managers aren’t inherently useless; just the ones you’ve had.

I don't know, I think that's pretty normal in education? For example, you have a large number of teachers that report up to the head of middle school or something?

2005-2017 for me. On the "20% project" stuff, which everyone seemed to have heard of:

I think it was 2008 or so when I was sitting at a table with about eight other people, and somehow or other the question came up "who has a 20% project?" Only one of us did.

The main utility of a 20% was that you could try out a new group before transferring to it, and they could try you out. Other than that, very few people actually had one, even then.

I can only speak for myself and my org of 300 or so, but it’s surprising how few people are actually interested in a 20% project. I’m sure there are factors at play here:

* we have a lot of work to do, the poster in this thread who is bored and only has 5 hours of real work a week is definitely not in my BU

* they may be concerned how such a project will reflect on them in perf. it may seem better to go all in on one thing vs splitting your attention

* we’re relatively new (acquisition) so perhaps the 20% ethos hasn’t percolated over to us yet

But at any rate, I think I’ve gotten exactly 2 requests for 20% projects, which I approved after confirming the person wasn’t going to be doing the dreaded 120% project.

> PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence.

This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.

Product Management, in many orgs, is the old wine of Taylorism in a new bottle, where there is a "thinking class," and there is a separate "doing class." The stereotype of an engineer with poor social skills who can't grasp the "high-level cross functional relationships and strategies" (from nostrebored's sibling comment) is not very different from Taylor's idea of workers:

    One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit 
    to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he 
    shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more 
    nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than 
    any other type. The man who is mentally alert and 
    intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to 
    what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work 
    of this character.

It is sad to see this happen at places like Google, where engineers had a lot more autonomy.

Most knowledge workers who have the mental capacity to grasp deep technical topics will find the "cross functional relationships and strategies" discussed in garden variety business books a light stroll in the park.

This is exactly right. I studied both engineering and management, so I have experienced both schools.

Actually understanding science and manipulating the world is hard. Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves, or how a web request happens. They can never understand it on the required level to fix things.

Now try to explain to an engineer how a bond works, or how industrial strategy works. He can do both his own work and the manager's work.

I sound pretty bitter for a guy who's managed to dodge most of the BS things in large corporations his while career, but that's because I really think this aspect of the world needs fixing.

It seems like just about every human endeavour is encumbered by MBA people who pretend to understand something hard, who get paid at least as well as those people who can both solve the technical and the strategic problems.

This might be more of a problem in the Anglo world. Engineers getting promoted is more common in Europe according to rumor.

> Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves

I always love a classic hacker news take where software engineers are the only people who can understand how things work. It's not like high school dropouts are ever car mechanics.

I think there's a point to make on good PMs. Those are totally worth their weight.

The issue I have with bad PMs is the same issue with bad engineers. They can cause so much damage to a product or codebase, especially when they have free reign and an ear from higher management.

> Actually understanding science and manipulating the world is hard. Try to explain to a non techie how a car moves, or how a web request happens. They can never understand it on the required level to fix things.

I'm pretty sure that being a car mechanic is one of those trades jobs that people are discouraged from pursuing if they're seen as having alternatives.

Also a lot of what comes up on a search for "redneck engineering" is I think not consistent with this assertion.

I think you have made excellent point here. I absolutely see this behavior at workplaces. The Architects/PMs one side and developers who are mainly Jira/Daily standup chumps on other side.

You left out the best part:

> We were expected to hit precise deadlines on multi-quarter projects (within two weeks), and when that inevitably didn't happen, we had to track all the time we spent on anything in 30 minute increments. It felt very cog-in-the-machine.

This is absurd. I haven't been asked to file timesheets (other than for days off) as a sweng in over a decade, including when I was at Google. Management on that team has completely lost it.

I read that as the "30 minute increment" tracking is used as a short term punishment for not meeting the deadline.

I find it amusingly ironic that Google employees don't like the idea of being tracked.

...even when paid handsomely.

Some of the best minds in generations, all focused on selling us things we really don't want.

Still depends on the org. Many orgs still engineering driven. This happens when engineers are more familiar with tech and business than PM, which surprisingly is not that uncommon (GCP)

Well there's no grand strategy and it's too big and settled for engineering to have much impact.

It's inertia-led.

I bet most googlers hate ads so it's a big state of cognitive dissonance too.

If they hate ads then wouldn't that make them the best people to control them?

Turns out love of large paychecks is stronger than hatred of ads.

no, that'd hurt shareholders.

seems like this is most relevant video:

https://youtu.be/P4VBqTViEx4

It is not only relevant for Google. Apple is exactly IBM from the past + some design and marketing sprinkled over.

Thanks for sharing that - I had never seen that before and it rings incredibly true

Check out "Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview" which is long form footage from the clips used in "Triumph of the Nerds" and "Revenge of the Nerds". Two fantastic documentaries that chronicle the history of personal computing.

I can see this as a result from too many employees going from college to Google with nothing in between.

They lack real-world experience and ability to grasp non-technical concepts.

As a founder, and having worked in multiple startups is hard for me to communicate with their relative worldview. Despite how brilliant they are.

This could be Cloud Org characteristic. Enterprise applications cannot be engineering led as tech does not matter but 'checkboxes' do (features).

For checkboxes one needs to be constantly in touch with customers, sales, pre-sales, need to be full time demo giver, etc. These are not the job of engineers and even if it is made so, it is setting them and the team/org/company up for failure on both fronts - frontend and backend.

Do you think checkboxes magically spring from the aether just to support sales demos?

Don't get your point. I was referring to this statement from OP: Google used to have a reputation for being an "engineer led" organization, I guess that's slowly changing over time.

In enterprise applications (which solves for workflows - business, IT etc.) one needs lot of PM thinking for feature identifications, what to prioritize, gathering requirements etc.

In Search defined Google one did not need PMs as requirement is pretty straight forward from feature perspective, but one needs deep engineering and computing science knowledge for making the best search algorithm. Whereas in Cloud IT world the focus shifts more towards product & roadmap planning.

Snowflake is this way too. Its so depressing

As a complete outsider, I have an impression at least that Google PMs have some level of technical knowledge. Which would make them far more "engineer led" than is common.

You either die a hero, etc etc.

I wonder if there's any "big, established" company where IC engineers have more weight than the PHB types. I'd be genuinely curious if anyone knows of some good examples, I suppose HN would be the place where people might.

It seems like that's one of the natural equilibrating factors that offer some small amount of competitive grace to Davids competing against Goliaths. Google hasn't been David for a long time now, I think.

I guess it depends on which organization you're part of. I've never really been told what to do in my 5+ years at Google. I usually just have an idea, say I'm going to work on it, and then do it. Most of my peers also work this way, and while more junior ones usually need some assistance with coming up with ideas which align with priorities, it's not like management is telling them what to do - usually a senior team member helps them. PMs help set higher level goals and priorities, but not unilaterally. Managers provide incentives to align to org level goals and priorities but balance that with bottom up driven ones. This has been true for both teams I've been on in two separate orgs, but I'm sure it's not universally true throughout Google. Prior experience at companies previous to Google gave me almost no autonomy.

That can happen when corporate leadership is dominated by a technical founder. Once MBAs and sales/marketing alums run the show it always turns into a grindhouse. They don't fundamentally understand the work that goes into the product and so they rule by metrics to make their dev factory "more efficient".

The idea that products at large tech companies are going to be lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people or understand the cross functional relationships and strategies is absurd.

This isn't a future engineers want either -- I hear complaints about meetings from nearly every engineer I know. The idea that you should have low level knowledge of the system you're working on and high level knowledge of all the cross functional team's responsibilities along with the responsibility for cultivating those relationships is ridiculous.

People say this without having any idea what PMs do.

> lead by engineers who by and large do not talk to people

Do you think the engineer who leads a 1000 man org is not talking to people? I talked to the engineer leading our 500 man org, he talked to a lot of people and wanted their input and tried to understand the whole to make decisions. He had technical expertise so he could talk to low level engineers as well, but also to business people etc.

The engineer you describe sounds like an ex-engineer. That engineer sounds a manager.

Yes -- within engineering typically! That is a the role of a PE/Staff Eng.

> who by and large do not talk to people or understand the cross functional relationships and strategies

The idea that (good) engineers are somehow not able to understand cross-functional relationships, business strategies, or don’t know what PMs do, is absurd. You’re digging your own grave there.

I don't often downvote, but when I do, it's dumb shit like this

Google has 140,000 employees, the size of a size-able city in the U.S. Does anyone really care when someone leaves Google?

It makes for flawless blogspam. There are enough people leaving Google that some of them will publish criticisms that align with the community's preconceived notions and will let them all feel superior to Googlers. Further, because Google is so big there will almost necessarily be pockets that really are truly bad to work in. Readers can therefore extrapolate and assume the entire company functions this way.

I guess people do in the "why would you ever leave such a great job?!" sense, but people can get bored of any job after enough time.

Outsiders also don't grasp how high a lowly senior engineer earns.

Compensation in tech is so insane.

Other high earning occupation just doesn't even come close.

It would take doctors years to earn 250k a year. In tech with stock growth + RSU, you might get that as a junior eng. I earned 450k as a junior per year with pre-ipo company.

This is why engineers can just leave and others are surprised.

Get a google job straight of of college and it seems you can retire very comfortably in your mid 30s

To many people the high pay makes it more surprising, not less.

There are entire companies built around OP’s and his teammates’ oss contributions - relatively small group of people. You can’t say that about 99.9% of others in that 140K

I’ve come to suspect the reason (ex) Google people write these is basically humblebragging. There just isn’t enough interesting material presented to have any other explanation make much sense. Just an opinion; ymmv.

Personally I’m quite happy with every blog post that someone claims to be burned out in. Al least I feel like I’m not alone.

Everyone wants to feel special.

My thoughts as well

i miss google+, the world's preeminent social network for google employees to announce to the world their intentions to leave google.

I never realized how deeply the promotion mindset is damaging my personal happiness and growth, until I left Google in 2019...

Most things promoted in Google about growth boils down to promotion, which is just a cover word of getting your hands on promising project without proactively doing much by yourself.

Self motivated ideas actually get me into various trouble. In hindsight, I can see that many coworkers are silently watching this guy getting burnt without offering much helping hands.

In the end, I learned the googely way of working at Google, and find it not worthwhile to stay...

A few months ago, I considered applying to Google to join the JAX team.

It turns out that you can't apply to Google's JAX team. You have to apply to Google, and then managers at various teams select whether they want you.

The thing is, JAX is amazing. So I'm now faced with the uncomfortable idea that this process must make sense, because it clearly works. Yet I profoundly dislike it.

Perhaps my ideas are the problem, and Google is four steps ahead. I don't know. It just seemed like you should be able to apply to specific teams at Google, and that the team should be able to choose whether you'd be a valuable teammate.

I don't think it's true that "you can't apply directly to a team". I've seen many people got interviewed/hired for exactly one position. The manager of the team will need to be in the loop though. If they don't know you and don't agree with you applying directly, then it's most likely you're going to the normal pipeline.

Ah, interesting. Thank you. My info about the hiring process came from a friend at Google. But in hindsight, they were probably relaying what their own path had been like, rather than making a statement about the process in general.

Well your friend is correct in theory, you never apply to a particular team, you always apply to Google. However you are free to choose what team you'd like to work for as long as that teams manager agrees to let you join, meaning if you already know the manager you can guarantee a spot at that team if you pass the regular Google interview. But if for some reason that team disappears etc, you have still passed the Google hiring bar and is therefore free to join another team.

This is mostly not true. If you know a hiring manager on the JAX team and they have headcount and they want to hire you if you pass the interviews, they can walk you through the process and hire you.

This is what I do. Every single person on my team applied directly to my team.

If the team wants you bad enough, they can hire you. It has to come from the inside, which I'm sure has no impact on whether nepotism happens.

What about JAX is so amazing? It takes the worst of functional programming and tensor programming and gives you yet another half baked lib with 12 edge cases at every API call

The most desirable teams are filled by internal transfers. External hires get the teams that have trouble hiring internally.

Relevant perhaps is the fact that Google folks just came out of a promo cycle, which is run by a committee. Folks I talked to seem to agree the process is utterly broken, so this is about the time many will decide to jump ship.

I will say as companies grow the appetite for huge ambition shrinks. It’s natural for a few reasons.

- you’re established, no longer a startup, you prioritize the momentum in the current cash cow.

- your hiring pool changes. Instead of people who want to come build the “next big thing” you tend to attract folks who value the security of a big name. And they will tend to hire folks like them, and so on..

- you’re publicly traded. Holding an asset that reliably produces steady growth, creates very different incentives than trying to hit some kind of hockey stick unicorn growth

Reading these always makes me a bit sad. There is a lot in here and people have their reasons, but levels are not everything and various “cuts” aren’t that meaningful when you consider TC of faang. Where else are you going to have a chance to make things better for billions of people? Maybe not life changing but at least slightly better?

A small improvement for billions adds up. Though burnout and pain are real, there’s more to all this. Hope OP finds what he’s looking for!

Interesting that the person moved to San Diego (not a cheap place by any means), and Google cuts the salary.

There is some strange fixation Google currently has, especially towards getting people into their New York offices - must be some tax incentives or other deals with the city....

A friend just recently wanted to work from google office in another tech hub city (not remote/from home by any means) and during offer negotiation it was denied, so she didn't join - as she didn't wanna move to NYC.

Odd things happening at Google lately - I mean even Amazon is more remote friendly these days. Lol

Surely NYC/SFBA are even more expensive?

It’s probably SFBA >Manhattan/some parts of Brooklyn > San Diego > NYC Metro.

It isn't. Bay Area and NYC Metro are both in the highest paying bracket.

Proportionally, a greater area of San Diego can still be more expensive than a similarly proportional area of NYC Metro.

For example, NYC Metro would have cheaper housing 60min from work than San Diego. I generally find land in coastal CA to be more expensive than everywhere else in the US.

While the original site isn’t feeling well: https://archive.md/YV9AQ

I wasn’t able to view the content with this link. I tried using the captcha but it kept unchecking itself. I’m on mobile so I couldn’t debug.

I mean, nothing wrong with anything the guy says here. But this says more about the author than Google, really. No shame in having had enough of a job and wanting to move on after nearly a decade, but I don't think the fact that they wouldn't let him move far away from the office without a pay cut or the unlikelihood of a promotion indicates that the job radically changed on him, exactly.

I'm sad to see Jay go, I've interacted with him in his role as bazel-go maintainer. It's clear that project wasn't getting the resources it needs. As a former Googler myself, I understand his frustration all too well. Google used to be run like a university, a place of learning and scientific advancement. It's not anymore. Many of my former coworkers have quit. All of them tell the same story of it feeling like a big corporation.

Note that Google was a huge, profitable, publicly traded company before this happened - it was possible to be an institution and be publicly traded, but for how long? Can we build long term focused companies that are subject to the whims of the stock markets? I'm not sure. Truthfully, I think it's a social problem.

A few days ago I got the usual call from the Google recruiter, after being rejected a year ago with feedback of 2 sure hire, one lean, two no hire. A strange collection, isn't it? Well, I would have “fired" two of them plus the recruiter, one who wasn't paying attention to my interview and one who turned off the video and whose accent and questions were basically incomprehensible (I am non-US myself, btw). Maybe the two no-hire?

I make 75% of what a Google would make for the (high) position they would hire me for, but I work 1/5 of what I would work at Google and with little overhead such as performance review, promotion packages, and excuse my French, other assorted bs I have zero interest for at my age and with my experience.

If the hiring process were more reasonable, i.e., not dependent on the mood, accent, question of the day of interviewers whom I will (probably) never meet again after they nonchalantly determine my future employment, I might agree to interview again and then evaluate their proposal, but otherwise I think Google will continue to bleed talent and hire little uninteresting robots (mine is a salty-fish generalization of course) who have the patience for nonsense that I, and people like me, do not have.

Why did you pursue the position? You seem content where you are?

There are definitely some advantages in working for Google, like 25% more money and Google on the resume (I already had another FAANG), which can open other lucrative doors down the road.

I am not a hardcore tech guy, in the sense that I could switch tomorrow to selling bicycles (for the same money, of course), and not miss tech one bit, so my north stars are money conditional on time spent working and stress (assuming the job itself if not terrible).

I would guess that my current position, given zero stress, little time at work, and good salary, is on par with the Google position I was interviewing for.

But I am not willing to go through those ridiculous interviews again, then waiting for weeks for a the committee decision, then the recruiter cannot say what happened, are you kidding me.

> salty-fish generalization

What does this mean?

Salty-ish (autocorrection got it wrong). I am a bit salty because I was rejected and my tone may reflect that, although it is true that people at Google are in my experience (that is, the one I met professionally or outside work, or saw at events, giving lectures etc.) not very interesting (on average!), in part because that's what the interview process, maybe inadvertently, screens for.

We live in a finite planet with finite resources. I think every argument for growth (on the scale FAANG companies operate) should also mention that part.

I also want to say that it's completely acceptable to work on a place without exorbitant pay, stocks, or promotions every 6 months. A job can be many other things. Different people want different things at different phases of their life. For some of them, a job is just a job.

While I agree that we should be mindful of our finite resources, it’s worth noting that you can have sustained growth and still consume fewer resources. For example, US per-capita CO2 emissions have declined 30% since 1970, while per-capita GDP has grown more than twelvefold. In recent years, technology has been by far the largest contributor to that widening gap between GDP growth and emissions. That’s not to ignore the impact technology has on the environment from e.x. rare earth mining, but if you look at the big picture I think you’ll be positively surprised.

Although I appreciate the honesty about the company in this blog, my issue is almost every big company behaves in the same way. FAANG is not the absolute best, it is just best option among the worst. The only other option is to work at a small startup or start your own company but that is a different ballgame and requires extreme levels of grind.

> If a great new opportunity comes up, take it, but drop something else. If the dropped thing was important, it'll get staffed. If not... why work on it?

The above seems to explain how a thing that fills a gaping functionality hole in one google product via another just gets deleted without any consideration for the interaction between the two.

Down for me. Mirror: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:glQF_0...

That resonated a lot more than I expected it to do. Not the Google parts but the burnout parts. I exited my job during summer and am still not looking for something new and this article and the one by Maya linked in it really helped me put words on it

> My wife also works in tech and can comfortably support us both. I hope in a year, I'll be rested and ready to jump back into tech with a better sense of purpose and direction.

If you have this luxury, use your precious time to work less.

Is this just long form "calling in rich"? With an L5 RSU package and the share price tripling, a few hundred thousand turns into a few million and you can afford to leave. Nice problem to have.

> To summarize, <why I left>

He didn't like working enough to make himself happy, I guess. It's a person who is at a different point in their life than when they started. Notably with enough money that they question their own motivations to continue.

These blog posts seem devoid of anything interesting or actionable.

Cached: https://web.archive.org/web/20211023032551/https://jayconrod...

> Google doesn't use the go command or modules, and since there's no direct measurable benefit to Google, it's very difficult to make the case.

i'm curious. What exactly they don't use internally?

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

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

From the outside, this paints google as a bunch of engineers moving around, dropping projects, trying to get promoted.

Obsession with promotions instead of product quality won't lead anywhere nice.

An interesting look into the reality of working at Google. Thanks for sharing!

These posts almost feel like a Scientology style exodus and moment of clarity.

> I couldn't work anymore, and it was time for an extended break. From speaking with other people that have gone through this, it seems like the only thing that really helps.

Maybe changing teams or company can get you working again. 1 year seems too long to me

Nah, 1 year is pretty much the minimum burnout recovery period. I've seen it happen several times now.

Work isn't worth doing just for work's sake. You have to feel aligned.

This website seems to have switched to stoplang, because it’s down.

I believe "scale" should probably be "growth"

Larry, from his lair in Fiji: “I should sell some shares”

site is currently down: https://archive.md/YV9AQ

Seems takeaway is if Google didn't cut this person's pay by 10 per cent then all their "shitty behavior" like Project Maven and so on would have been just fine.

Another article on the site expands on this:

> I still feel uncertain about everything though. Google approved my remote work application last week, but I haven't gotten a new offer letter yet, and I've been told to expect a pay cut of at least 10% because the market rate for software engineers is supposedly lower in southern California. This feels like a shitty thing to do. My work is not less valuable. It's a reminder that this is nothing more than a business relationship, and the company is not interested in loyalty to workers or support in a difficult time. I'm not sure what, if anything, I'm going to do yet, but it has me thinking harder about my career and future.

Not sure why _this_ is what it took to get to that revelation, but better late than never. But on the point about value vs. cost of living... I mean how do you work as a developer in the United States and not notice you get paid a lot more to do this work than people in other places?

I always find it interesting that lots of tech folks I meet are strongly in favor of more income equality except when it would cause them to earn less money. Then it's a shitty thing to do.

I don't know maybe it is the thing with top level engineers hired at FAANG who deserve absolute truth, justice and equality.

To me earning nowhere at level as these folks, still it embarasses me to whine about pay/promotion when so many hard working folks doing important work in society are paid pittance.

It depends on the market. If someone wants to pay you between 1.5x to 2x for the same work you’re doing right now with same work/life balance, will you take it? People generally don’t whine about pay or promotions, they interview and get better offers.

Why did he leave? The tl'dr is the L6 glass ceiling and the remote pay cut. I can speak to both of those:

First, for those that don't know, new grads get hired at L3, PhDs at L4 (which IMHO is actually a mistake but that's another issue) and there is an expectation of getting promoted to L5 (Senior Software Engineer). There's no set time frame for this. I've known people who stayed L4 for many years and were quite happy. L6+ start to require increasingly extraordinary influence and technical contribution.

> It's hard to get promoted beyond L5 for open source work

I'll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it's hard to get promoted to L6 for anything. This is by design. It's how the company controls costs and maintain retention (by dangling that L6 promotion, possibly for years).

One of the things that Ruth Porat did when she became CFO is lowered the promotion target percentage. This meant less people got promoted at each cycle.

How promotions work is a committee of higher-level engineers (eg L7s consider promotions to L6) and will have 10-15 packets to assess. These will get stack ranked by the committee. If you're above the line you'll get promoted. If you're not, you won't. Ruth's change just made that line a little higher.

As for the pay cut, this requires some context. By the time you reach L5+ the majority of your total compensation comes from equity, both your initial grant (for the first 4 years) and annual refreshes and discretionary grants you get along the way. So less than 50% of your income comes from salary plus bonus.

For those employees who go permanent remote, there is a location-based pay adjustment. SF and NYC are at 100% rate. Other areas at 85-95% of that.

That only applies to the salary plus bonus (since bonus is derived from salary) part of your total compensation. So a 10% cut for L5+ is in reality <5%. You don't save on taxes by moving to San Diego but it is cheaper than the Bay Area. If you move to a no-state income tax state however your net pay can in fact be higher.

So, the argument for no pay cut is you're saving the company money by not having to pay for office space, a desk (etc), free food and so on, all while doing the same job. This seems to be the author's position and I'm certainly sympathetic.

The argument for a pay cut is that your compensation isn't really associated with your output at all and is entirely market-based. For many people not going into the office and being able to live somewhere that isn't the Bay Area is a huge plus so people are willing to give up something for that. Plus you could argue the company doesn't want people going remote who don't really want to by offering the same pay. By lowering your pay slightly it creates a psychological barrier such that only people who really want to do it do so. I'm sympathetic to that argument too.

Long-time former Googler here, author of go/l6talk (internal presentation on getting promoted to L6). While there I coached a lot of people on the L5-to-L6 promotion process. It seems a lot of Googlers get disillusioned about getting promoted above L5. Broadly speaking Google's culture is heavily focused on levels and promotions, which is too bad, since many L5's are doing just great and getting paid extremely well.

If it weren't for the fact that Google makes level information public within the company, I doubt there would be quite so much emphasis on getting a promotion. Most people want to get L6 for the recognition and the fact that it elevates you above other engineers in terms of status and influence. When I worked at Apple, levels were private, so you had to treat everyone the same -- a person's influence was not dictated by what level they had on their company profile (there is no company profile at Apple). In my opinion this approach was much better, and significantly lessened the internal competition for promotions.

> I'll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it's hard to get promoted to L6 for anything.

It's hard if you're on the wrong project (read: low impact and/or low visibility). There are different routes to L6 at Google, but by far the most successful was to become TLM or just M of a medium impact project. It's hard to make the case as an IC for L6, but colleagues did it multiple times. Large enough, long-running projects also reach a critical mass of L6+ people and then getting high-level support becomes much easier.

Having been through the process, seeing the process from an IC, TL, TLM, and promotion committee member, if you think that L6 is unachievable, there is either a problem with your project or your expectations.

"Having been through the process, seeing the process from an IC, TL, TLM, and promotion committee member, if you think that L6 is unachievable, there is either a problem with your project or your expectations."

Lots of managers are also not good at talent management (and not just at Google). Which is sad. So they tell people it's a promo committee's fault, or .. Realistically, it's also the manager's fault. If they don't have scope/work that can help someone grow to L6, the right move is to help the person find a place that does, rather than string them along. Stringing them along ends up with them leaving or unhappy or ... Helping them grow elsewhere ends up with people who will likely want to come back to your org at some point when you have the need/scope/role for them.

I know that IC is Individual Contributor, but what are TL, M, and TLM?

Techlead, manager, and techlead-manager.

For those of us without direct knowledge what are IC, TL and TLM?

Individual Contributor, Tech Lead, and Combo Tech Lead / Manager.

"The argument for a pay cut" ...

Another argument is that if tech paid everyone the same, everywhere, it would greatly exacerbate income equality issues in a lot of places.

Tech is certainly not altruistic, as you point out, and generally wants to pay market rate rather than output rate or whatever. But it doesn't make less true that it would worsen a whole bunch of social problems by paying people the same everywhere.

That is a ludicrous argument. The whole income/wealth inequality is not about working people earning more, it is about capital owners earning vastly more due to various reasons.

Some businesses do earn more due to ease of access to additional capital, and hence can pay employees more, but the root of the income/wealth divide is certainly not employers paying employees more. It is certain employers (capital owners) getting disproportionately more in the first place.

Tech employees are simply in sufficiently high demand relative to supply that they can demand a piece of the pie. But there is no point in trying to address a problem by addressing its symptoms rather than causes.

Specifically, in this case, paying Alphabet employees less in the name of helping the income/wealth divide only helps other owners of Alphabet stock be even richer.

"That is a ludicrous argument. The whole income/wealth inequality is not about working people earning more, it is about capital owners earning vastly more due to various reasons."

Uh, what? No, it's about where the money is concentrated and how that concentration changes (or doesn't) over time. It's true that other forms of earning have a bad effect on this, but i'n not sure why that's particularly relevant.

To whit - tech folks, paid in SF dollars, but living in various cheap ares of the US, are in the 0.1-1%. Easily.

The fact that they got there by being paid rather than some other form of wealth accumulation, is irrelevant. They will stay there just the same as anyone else.

Why would it be any less unequal because someone is starting in the 1% by getting paid a ridiculous salary on a regular basis rather than earning money through the stock market on a regular basis? Why would one not transform into the other? It's rhetorical of course, since that is what will happen. In fact, it's what the tech folks moving want to happen. They want more money to buy a large house and invest and retire and be richer than they can be in SF.

" But there is no point in trying to address a problem by addressing its symptoms rather than causes."

You haven't, at all, explained why putting more people in a seriously unequal position makes anything better, or why it's "pointless" to avoid doing that.

It's not pointless. It avoids more inequality. Does it avoid all of it? Of course not. But again, the other way demonstrably makes things worse.

Do you have a concrete argument as to why it makes sense to keep doing that?

Because your entire comment feels precisely like the rest of the discussions around this - "it's not my fault, i shouldn't earn less money, it's the other people who are at fault. Particularly the ones who have 10x/100x what i do".

Another another argument would be that income inequality is not the fault of employees but rather the fault of management, whether politically, culturally, socially or all of the above.

There's a few things here that are subtly wrong.

> How promotions work is a committee of higher-level engineers (eg L7s consider promotions to L6) and will have 10-15 packets to assess. These will get stack ranked by the committee. If you're above the line you'll get promoted. If you're not, you won't. Ruth's change just made that line a little higher.

FWIW this is no longer true for a lot of orgs, and will likely soon be untrue for all orgs. Also fairly sure that stack ranking within a single promo committee was never how it worked.

> That only applies to the salary plus bonus (since bonus is derived from salary)

Currently, however management is on record stating that this will change in the future, since I don't know exactly how, I'm not going to speculate, but the intent is for equity to reflect the compensation regions in the US eventually.

10% of the company is at L6 or higher so it can't be that hard.

Most of those got promoted by going into management and lucking out that the product they worked on grew and therefore needed to hire a lot, and you easily get promoted as you start to manage more people. Getting promoted on technical merit on the other hand is really hard.

This seems like a super-biased view, and having sat on tons of promo committees for IC, ICTLM, and EngMgr for many years, i'd suggest to you it could not be more wrong.

Managers don't get promoted for growing teams. I've watched lots and lots of people who write "grew team from x to y" get feedback on their promo packet that this isn't, by itself, a valuable thing.

TLM L6 here. I completely disagree. "Be a manager" is sufficient only to L5. Simply managing a team, even a large team, is not going to build a case to L6 at all. The primary challenge that L5->L6 TLMs and EngManagers face is finding time for doing the other stuff beyond just the baseline of management to build a case for L6.

> I started losing a lot of sleep, and I got a lot of headaches and back pain. I got a lot of "brain fog": inability to concentrate or make decisions. I started forgetting words and names and losing the thread of a conversation mid-sentence. I felt like I had no energy left for anything other than work, and I could barely manage that.

Other than back pain these symptoms match mine exactly, except I hadn't worked full time for the past 2 years and I wouldn't say I'm stressed or anything. I'm not sure what it is - maybe cabin fever? Yesterday I nearly lost consciousness when I got up too quickly. I'm also losing weight (12kg so far, which would be great if I knew _why_ I'm losing weight). Did a blood test about a month ago - everything is fine. I did wonder if these are vaccine side effects, but that seems very implausible - the second dose was in May. But I digress.

I totally get what Jay is saying in his writeup. I largely felt the same way except in the opposite direction in one aspect - the number and shrillness of "activists" has become overbearing to the point where it was severely impeding work and morale. Seeing that he has pronouns in his twitter bio he might have been more sympathetic, but I bet this stuff distracted even him.

Contrary to belief popular on the outside, Google is indeed a fairly stressful and thankless place unless you're skilled at self promotion, which I'm not, or you don't care about working on cool things and getting promoted. This is why every time their recruiters ping me I tell them I'm not interested "at this time". No matter how much they pay me, I can't imagine subjecting myself to such treatment again. And I was pretty successful there - high profile projects, wrote lots of code, shipped impressive stuff, and I still felt like shit most of the time. I can only imagine what less "forceful" folks feel if I felt like a gnat on this elephant's ass.

Contrary to belief popular inside Google, life is great on the outside. Freedom is a thing folks, and without moving around you aren't experiencing it. I know when you're on the inside it feels like you're "changing the world", but of all Google products nowadays I only use Gmail and YouTube. If everything else disappeared completely I wouldn't even notice. Heck, if Gmail disappeared I'd switch to Proton Mail in a day, and if YouTube disappeared there's BitChute and Rumble which are modest, but adequate. So whatever you're "changing" there impacts me very little, and mostly in negative ways.

I certainly do not regret leaving. If anything I should have left much sooner than I did.

I don't really want to give anything that seems like medical advice in HN comments. I just want to give a bit of information that might be useful to you or others. Obviously you should do your own research, talk with a doctor about it, etc.

Brain fog and headache are also one of the most common symptoms of long covid. Losing consciousness when getting up sounds like POTS[1] and is also common in long covid. Research is showing that people who are asymptomatic during infection can also develop long covid[2].

In general things like brain fog and headache are also symptoms of burnout and probably lots of other things, so I think it would be pretty difficult to clearly distinguish between them. There also isn't a test for it and it won't show up in standard blood tests. And of course it's also possible to have both. Some form of long covid, even if it is just "light" compared to other people who have long covid, could easily push someone who is already on the brink of burnout over the edge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postural_orthostatic_tachycard... [2] https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/study-many-long-haul-covi...

Something I intend to check on with my doctor, thanks for caring enough to provide references. Who knows, maybe I had covid and didn't even know.

All these people talking about "Google changed, man" seem like they need to consider two points:

1) So did you. E.g. the commenter who was at Google for 9 years. Do you not think you changed? You changed. It reminds me of right wing commentators who say "everything was so great in the 50s!". Sure it was, because you were a child!

2) Selection bias. You left. Of course if you take the people leaving, they'll be less happy with Google than the people who stay.

Oh, and the "Of course, when you leave Google you have to write some kind of letter or rant". Ugh. So childish. No, you do not need an exit rant. And joke or not, this was an exit rant.

> A 10% cut is pretty damn unfavorable, considering I was doing the same work on the same team

So were all your colleagues working in offices outside the bay area. That was literally your "bay area bonus". You're being super spoiled and disrespectful.

I'm sad... I used like their slogan Don't be evil. Now it's like when Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm relabels it to 4 legs are good, but 2 legs are better.

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