Why I Quit Google’s WebAssembly Team, and How It Made Me Sick | Hacker News Reader

Why I Quit Google’s WebAssembly Team, and How It Made Me Sick

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I recently left a stressful job after developing shingles and then celiac disease. My life is much worse now, I went into that job healthy and strong and now I'm sick all the time. Perhaps celaic disease was always in the genetic cards for me, or maybe the stress triggered it? The worst part is the job wasn't especially bad, it was a reasonable job, and I can expect my next job to have similar stress I think. What am I going to do?

I'm always amazed at the change in perspective after being in a job for a while. While unemployed, I feel competent, I make progress on hard problems nobody else in the world is working on, and I feel good. While employed, stupid crap stresses me constantly, I can't leave the stress at work, I bring it home, I obsess about social hierarchies that can vanish in an instant. Everytime I've left a job I'm amazed that after just a couple days I can barely remember what I was working on before and what stressed me, like my brain knows all of that no longer matters and let's it go in an instant.

How can I keep a healthy outside perspective while remaining employed? How do I avoid becoming mentally trapped in the workplace mindset? I've been giving this a lot of thought, but no answers so far.

Go to therapy. Seriously. Helping you work through your mind not doing what you want is literally their profession. I've found it incredibly helpful multiple times throughout my life, for lots of things vaguely similar to this.

I asked a psychiatrist friend of mine what they do when someone shows up depressed for reasons that are totally reasonable. She said they try to use drugs and therapy to generate some minor delusions that would help the person feel better in their environment.

Maybe OP is just having the reasonable response to corporate work and the rest of us are deluded.

But yeah, talking to therapists is like a cheat code OP. You'll feel better. But you might just be having a totally rational experience.

Edit: since this seems to be the wrong place to have this conversation (my mistake), I'd like to emphasize that my point is that you should seek therapy as it was suggested OP, but also to commiserate that offices are often horrible experiences.

Calling what therapy does as "creating delusions" helps nobody. Therapy offers a number of tools that helps a person get grounded in reality, helps a person create boundaries, and helps strengthen a person's abilities to deal with their life stresses by creating the framework to either deal with them or help move on to a new environment that doesn't create as much stress.

Not all therapists are good. If you try somebody and don't connect or trust them, try to find somebody else. Internalizing stress really destroys the body, and it's important to find somebody you trust to help process it.

Really? It helped me. It was nice for me to have someone else acknowledge that the emperor was in fact naked. The emperor transparent clothes in this situation was the suggestion that offices aren't horrible places to be. Take the IBM book of songs, for example.

I would like to emphasize that I agree with you (and my original comment): Therapy is a cheat code! It will make your life immeasurably better. Everyone should do it!

No need to fight, I think both of you are right. Some people can get stuck into painful context or interpretations, in which case some therapy trick can help get out of the pit. That said if you discuss high level sociology you often end up in the "what a massive soup of chaos" too.

If the emperor is in fact naked, then you're not deluded in believing that. I'm confused by the use of that term in this way.

Yeah. I can't write in my own first language. Forgive me. Let me try again: The emperor is actually naked (offices are bad), but for various reasons people say the emperor is not naked (offices aren't bad). Does that help? I need help, clearly.

The problem is not that you’re saying “offices are bad”, it’s that you’re conflating “the ability to maintain a healthy-ish mental state after being exposed to an office” with “a delusion that offices are good”.

Lots of bad things exist, being able to function in the face of Bad Things does not require you to deny or ignore that reality.

Poisonous spiders exist, but overcoming arachnophobia (an unusually debilitating reaction to encountering spiders) isn’t a “delusion that spiders are safe”, and won’t make you try to kiss a Black Widow.

I vouched for your comment after it was killed. I think it's a valid point. Certainly nuance is vital when talking about mental health.

I've never needed therapy, but from the outside I've seen people who have been failed by it. It seems like the industry is plagued with one common issue. Therapists aren't incentivized to help you stop needing therapy.

I've heard this "therapists are just out to keep you hooked on therapy" trope many times and I don't think it is true. The demand for good therapists vastly outstrips the supply - they don't need to keep patients hooked when there are plenty of new ones waiting.

Most therapists I've had recently have said something along the lines of "therapy should be temporary for most people, if you're a few months in and not seeing measurable progress then you might need another therapist." This is in keeping with my experience, which is that you make progress on whatever issue brought you to therapy, the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and it's no longer worth the time and expense.

Of course some people have more serious conditions and do need to be in therapy constantly, but that isn't the norm for most who experience mental health problems.

Also - never needed therapy? Ever? For anything? Not even a little bit? Sounds like some self examination might be in order.

Interesting perspective, and I'm sure I've never heard someone talk about their success with therapy because it isn't a topic that's likely to come up.

No, I've never needed therapy. I self examine on a regular basis. I have generally followed a stoic philosophy of life, which means regularly working on my physical and mental wellness. I've steered clear of unhealthy addictions and other problem generators. Therapy is just one tool in a large toolbox of mental health.

Fwiw, the 3 people I know that need therapy the most also claim that they don't need it.

Cool

Indeed

> If you try somebody and don't connect or trust them, try to find somebody else

What do you do if part of your condition is that it is really hard for you to connect with and trust people?

The first thing to try is to bring that up. By stating that you struggle to trust people, you can ask them to help you examine what thoughts you have that are associated with trust in the first place, and that's really helpful in developing a mindful understanding of what's happening.

Trust is also a push-pull thing in the first place, so going in with an honest attempt can help you gauge your reaction before learn who to trust.

That sounds like a pretty nihilistic psychiatrist (which I'd note is different from what I'd understand a therapist to be - therapists are psychologists, psychiatrists are medically trained). Therapists aren't just for irrational or subconcious emotions. It can help enormously to talk over your reactions to a terrible situation you're in and see if there are other paths for your feelings.

She worked with addicts and it was a casual conversation. I'm sure if someone pressed her professionally she wouldn't say it like that.

> She said they try to use drugs and therapy to generate some minor delusions that would help the person feel better in their environment.

I struggle to believe that's actually what they said. That sounds more like your interpretation of what they said, and in particular, a funhouse mirror description of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

Maybe she was trying to help me, eh? Saying stuff I needed to hear so that I would get help. I mean it worked, it's stuck with me for years.

That's a perspective on CBT I've heard many times from many people with extensive experience with therapy and chronic health conditions. You might think it's wrong, it's certainly not absurd.

Surprisingly, psychiatrists are allowed to have a sense of humor.

>minor delusions

What do you mean by that? A delusion is often a symptom of a mental health issue, something doctors treat to get rid of, so I don't understand it's use in this context.

My entire knowledge of the subject is what she said in that quote and I'm otherwise ignorant of the subject from a professional perspective so I'd just be guessing if I was going to elaborate, but I can tell you what I took from it: to me it meant that most people are a little deluded about their lives. Some productively, some not so much.

I’d like to recommend Dan Lyons’ Lab Rats which dissects American corporate culture and its negative influence on employees.

Dan Lyons wrote the fake Steve Jobs blog, Disrupted, and was one of the writers on Silicon Valley.

That sound great, I'll check it out.

>I asked a psychiatrist friend of mine what they do when someone shows up depressed for reasons that are totally reasonable. She said they try to use drugs and therapy to generate some minor delusions that would help the person feel better in their environment.

I've literally just been through this, and I can 100% say it actually helped. I'm still on the drugs but I've got just enough tools to create just enough minor delusions to ride out the current funk and get to a better place where I can come off the drugs. I'm pretty glad I caught it in time as I can totally see what that level of stress/anxiety/depression does to people and I'm particularly vulnerable to it.

Sometimes it helps to use a Linter. And a debugger. Even on yourself.

Turns out I'm covered in lint and basically a walking fire hazard.

It can help a lot to find ways to compartmentalize your work. It also helps to have ongoing appointments with therapists or other experts who can help you keep an eye on your symptoms to figure out whether anything is starting to go wrong - keeping a journal etc may help you keep things under control.

For me there were some really obvious signs early in my career that I didn't recognize until much later when they led to diagnosis (and mostly successful treatment) of chronic illness - it's easy to assume that things in your workplace are bad because they have to be.

Bringing the stress home is definitely a tough thing. I don't have any answers for you on that. It might help to try and find work you're good at but don't care about, oddly enough, but that poses its own challenges.

I wonder how we classify lot of things as "it's in the mind".

My life (eg. family) is already destroyed because of environment. Stress adds up to the damage.

Do not rule out: lyme and other diseases - it is hard to detect those and try bandaid treatments for symptoms. Mold issues in the home/work/car - again this is sickening.

When you have a weak immune systems, you get affected with some of the daemonic disease, and then EMF, stress etc. wreaks havoc on your body.

Yes, you can CONTROL stress and EMF exposures - and reduce the impact on your body.

It must really suck to live on planet earth with its giant magnetic field.

This is why you should always wear a crystal. The crystal will adsorb the latent EMF and harmonize you with Gia. Also consider a negative-ion bracelet and sleeping with your head pointing north which will alleviate any remaining symptoms of EMF.

Mars doesn't have one...

You sound like you might have a somatoform disorder.

What worked for me past years is having a vision for the money earned at work. My vision is time/energy/financial independence and I do that by buying income paying assets (e.g., rental properties), running a small business, and being contractor so I have a say in the number of hours I work.

What didn't work for me is buying a fancy car, expensive shoes, semi-luxury remodels of my home, etc. -- those were just net negatives like a drug that keeps life bearable just a little longer. Frankly I suspect _needing_ those things are often a symptom of not being content with your life.

It's been said "a why to live can bear almost any how". The problem in your case is that the stress can make your precarious health situation worse. But maybe the why > how mitigates stress ? It did in my case. Sorry and thanks for sharing. Anyone of us can go from good to poor health so it is worth contemplating your situation.

I also developed celiac disease recently - it is tough to deal with. Since diagnosis, meal planning, shopping and cooking have become tasks that require a lot of mental energy. Normal things like going out to a show or commuting to work are logistically difficult when you’re unable to eat at any restaurants. I am trying to get a WFH job to curb some of this difficulty. Good luck with everything.

If it makes you feel any better my wife has celiac and it gets easier with time. Eventually you get pretty familiar with things and figure out where is good and where isn't. We mostly do GF in our family cause it's easier to just do GF than try and mix and match.

Also I hope you like Mexican food corn tortillas and chips are a life saver.

Sadly chain restaurants are your friend now. PF Chang's has never poisoned me with their gluten free. Red Robin's are pretty good about their gluten free but ask them and make sure they know you are actually celiac, the waitress will normally tell you if the place is safe for celiac or just kind of 'gluten free'. Make sure they have a dedicated fryer for their frys, the whole swapping it out is not good enough for celiacs. No other chains have been consistently safe enough 'gluten free' to risk on a business trip for me. Big surprise is the Thai places around me don't have gluten in their soy sauce so they are safe if you order smart/tip well enough that they make sure not to cross contaminate, so you might check with them to see if they will let you look at their soy sauce label, but obviously don't try out places like that on work trips. 'The sickness' in a hotel with jet lag and having to be 'on' to meet clients sucks.

Be careful with things you think are safe. Tortilla chips can have too much cross contamination so experiment when it's safe to 'get the sickness' and find what works for you. When my daughter and I were first diagnosed we couldn't drink coke because the carmel color supposedly had gluten. Some craft rootbeers/dark sodas still have the 'bad' natural color not the 'good' artificial one. Another tricky one that got me a lot until I figured it out, red wine can use a wheat paste to seal the barrels. So cheap steel aged reds only. Red wine is the only thing that gets cheaper when you go gluten free :)

It sounds like you're talking about social stress as much as anything else?

Eating habits can change with stress. If I eat certain types of wheat, my back hurts. I had an endoscopy and colonoscopy that came back normal, but I had some inflammation spots in my stomach, likely due to consuming some bad wheat or something else. These changes can come about from the state of gut biomes.

Cleaning up my eating habits and consuming probiotics seems to have helped a lot. I can eat limited amounts of gluten now without my back hurting, or my stomach complaining about it. I still struggle with cravings of sugar and cream at times, especially when I'm fighting depressive events. Eating things the body craves is an easy out. It's limiting those actions with mind, when it is not so healthy, that challenge many of us.

Not sure what its called, but there is a test you can get your doctor to do that checks what foods you shouldn't eat. Sister-in-law took it and discovered soy was not good for her along with some other products she ate. Really helped with avoid food related problems.

Nowadays many plants, including barley and soybeans, are sprayed with round-up two weeks before harvest so they will dry in the field. Of course the round-up is not rinsed off, because that would defeat the purpose. It is unknown what effect consuming that much round-up has on people, but the effects we know about are not good.

ncmncm, do you have a citation for the harvest claims?

Farmer relatives.

> do you have a citation for the harvest claims?

https://extension.umn.edu/small-grains-harvest-and-storage/m...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation

Social stress gave me a case of the shingles once in my twenties. It didn't make much sense to me at the time, but for some reason being stressed out about buying a bunch of Christmas gifts late in the season caused it to happen!

Shingles is very commonly brought on by stress. It's latent chickenpox virus, which is usually kept in check by the immune system, but stress depresses immune response.

I had a coworker who developed shingles as we were nearing the deadline on a project that had all sorts of problems in layers of the stack we didn't control, and my sister developed shingles after being laid off. The first thing I associate with that disease is stress.

I felt this way after leaving an absurdly toxic place[0]. Anything felt more productive. Even lifting weight felt like a torrent of meaning. But I'm not sure this freedom lasts on your own. It seems reactionary after being pressured into something that hurt you. After 1 month where I did 3h of sport daily and read books, my motivation crashed. Be prepared in case that happens. Find people with better view on life, better sense of workplace sanity. This (IMO) is better long term. Unless you manage to monetize your standalone problem solving skills (freelancing might be a good option for you too).

Take care.

[0] I had a string of bad luck regarding jobs, and I hated the whole work concept, but I got lucky and found a new place which is peaceful and interesting enough. Maybe you can find something like that.

Consider taking up contracting. You pick the clients, set your own hours, manage your own deadlines and only take on as much as you want. Its helped me tremendously manage my mental health.

I certainly agree that it gives you a much broader sense of agency. especially when you get to the point you can fire clients for just not being good to work with (generally wanting the final results but not wanting to put in the organizational effort)

it can have the opposite effect on the down times. no one is looking after you to make sure to make rent, and alot of engineers don't have the kind of training or personality that lends to cold calling. at least I don't...I can't even imagine what that would look like for systems programmers - "oh hi, I'm just calling to see if you need any device drivers written". ".......uh..."

You don't cold call, you hook up with a small agency, who also doesn't cold call. They are plugged into the VC network; when some startup needs outside technical help, they ask their VC to find someone. Your agency gets those calls. There are many of these small agencies focusing on different parts of the software ecosystem, the trick being to find them.

For me it was moving to the rural South and buying a farm. Animals die if I don't feed or water them. It gives me a daily reset. That and I took a job that I feel ethically pushed to do for my 8-5. Just what worked for me. I hope you find your "place".

Ya, therapy. But, short answer, stoicism / CBT, at least narrowly. Focus on what you can control. Check out the dichotomy of control. Do your best to be a positive influence. Give your work what is fair, but no more.

Work is for earning slavery units to live life. Everything outside of work is your actual life. Create hard edged barriers between work and not work. Develop and foster deep hobbies you enjoy. This takes effort. I would suggest they not be computer based hobbies.

Hope you don’t mind but I’ve copied this So I can refer back to it ;)

Be my guest. I am an older (41) but have been in tech since 1998, my first job was a local tech shop writing apps in ColdFusion…I built software for a long time before going into cybersecurity. My hobbies and interests have changed, but having that switch you can flip and just transport yourself completely to something else is amazing. It helps you have perspective and not let work stuff become your whole universe.

Even the author of this article fell into that trap IMO. Of course the whole article was about them recognizing it. They felt their work was super important and let it slowly eat their life. You get so invested in promotions and grinding things out, making projects look good for promotions. It is all toxic as heck. Like, when you see that happening just, stop. Who knows what will happen, but at least you won’t lose yourself. You may not get promoted as fast, but on a difficult project being eaten by politics that is likely anyway, our own heroics can’t overcome inertia like that.

Work isn’t worth it. Do right by the project, but just stop caring about it so much. Sorry, older tech survivor rant over. But, yeah, take care of yourselves, the golden FAANG chains aren’t worth your health :)

While unemployed, I feel competent, I make progress on hard problems nobody else in the world is working on, and I feel good.

If those problems are important, is there a way to work on them for pay? Like through a nonprofit, for example?

Good idea, but he stuff I work on it just for fun, and not as important as I made it sound. My point was that I'm competent and motivated, but stress from work encroaches on that and ruins it.

As someone whose work imbalances led him from a software development manager to years of prison, here's what years of alone time to think about things led me to (probably just the ravings of someone gone insane but it feels good to share):

1. Truly take the time to realize that your life is valuable and worth prioritizing. Somehow my only identity morphed into filling the 'superman' roll at work and successful executive at home. If I hadn't saved the company from X or performed some herculean feat I had no worth at work. If I didn't get the next promotion I had no worth at home. But guess what? I had huge worth as a husband and especially as a father, and I sacrificed that because I couldn't see it. You are valuable. You have worth. You are worthy of love. And hopefully, if you are in the right place, you are loved. Being superman/the wonder kid at work/the executive big dog so your wife can show off to the Joneses does not define you. And eventually you age out of the wonder kid role or just actually break in the superman role because, sorry, none of us are superman. And all that fancy stuff? In 10 years its all outdated and you either need to throw it away and replace it or you are too uncool to be one of the cool kids.

2. Find a mentor. Someone who has been through it, who knows what's BS and what isn't, and can help you with what's important. My healthiest work environments were when I had a mentor. One of the most valuable things a mentor always reminded me of when I was deep into an 80 hour week fighting fires. No one is going to die because of this, and no one is going to remember it in 5 years. That and a manager's job is to provide his team the tools they need to do their job, not make his employees tools to do his.

3. Find a community. Relating back to step one, it helps us to value ourselves when we see others valuing us. If you can't find any other, go to an addiction group. You are an addict, maybe in search of an addiction at this point because your character is still holding out, but if you continue this path and haven't already you WILL find your addiction sooner or later.

4. Do not let others tear you down. I had a horrible relationship with my ex-wife. Instead of working to fix it I put tons of energy into going to court in my head why I was right, she was wrong and horrible. Tons of energy into why she was right to think I was a total piece of shit and falsely think I was not worthy of love (see 1 above). Tons of energy into why I deserved a treat/reward for all the hard work I did that no one properly gave me recognition for and deserved, and secretly rewarding myself in the most destructive of ways. At the time I hated my wife. I'm not sure it could be fixed looking back, but I would give anything to go back and put the energy into that relationship that I put into stupid work projects and addiction. Instead the mother of my children, the woman who picked me forever, my best friend from high school on, with whom I shared every major life event, will never talk to me again. A lifetime of memories I don't get to share with her. Family vacation memories. The first time we ordered lemon light at Takara's and remember how good it used to be. Never again a 'dad will you make your amazing ribs this weekend?'.

5. If you have a family, make sure to have a worry tree in your front yard. After a crap work day, after a 1.5 hour commute (I'm oldschool from when people still went to work in the office, you spoiled kids these days!), before going into the house, I paused and left my worries at the worry tree to be picked up in the morning, and went into the house leaving work behind and myself ready to be present for my kids when I opened that door and they ran up screaming excitedly 'daddy's home' :'( When we moved I didn't setup a new worry tree routine and I that is one of my biggest regrets. So many lost evenings because I came home in a shit attitude.

6. Don't white knuckle through life. Ask for help. Ask for help at work. Ask for help at home. Ask for help from a mentor. Ask for help from friends. Definitely don't keep track of all the times you didn't get help/what you wanted in your head. If you didn't ask for it, it's on you. If you keep track of it in your head, you are just wasting energy/brain power. You can't judge people on not helping/appreciating you if you don't show them what you need. No one is going to fix this for you. No one is going to say 'wow, Bob's really deserves a break/help/affection' unless you are lucky enough to have amazing people around you. Ask for a break. Ask for help. Ask for affection. Find enough self worth somehow to know you are worthy of all of those things! If work doesn't respect that, leave. They are a zombie company and will suck you dry. I gave 15 years to a company in a field that I felt made a difference. Made them millions. Signed over patents. Impacted hundreds of thousand of people lives in a positive way. In the end I was worth 2 weeks notice. And nothing I ever did mattered when I was left so broken I utterly and completely failed my children and wife.

Sorry for my rant. I have a mens 'stop being a shitty person' group tonight where it is my night to talk about my story, so I have been thinking about this stuff today and just kind of threw up all over this reply. I apologize for the word vomit.

Thank you for sharing. I wish you the best.

Have an upvote. Thanks for sharing. This helped me put some things into perspective. Never feel ashamed to share

thanks for sharing man, some hard earned wisdom.

While not a cure-all, try Ashwaghanda. It lowers cortisol levels.

> How do I avoid becoming mentally trapped in the workplace mindset?

Think about starting your own business, or at least find a job where you have a greater degree of freedom, or perhaps where you feel you have more of an impact.

how was your celiac disease diagnosed?

The elephant in the room is that the vast majority of people who are coping are supporting a family, usually with kids, or are at some age-appropriate stage on that track. The stupid crap and social hierarchies at work are trivialities, obstacles to be overcome and then forgotten. People raising families are often swimming in an ocean of oxytocin and existential fulfillment giving them huge mental and emotional boosts.

I'm pointing this out in case you're endlessly ruminating on what is wrong with you, why can't you just buckle down and deal, whatever, and you're coming home to an empty apartment and Netflix year after year. That's missing the big picture. I'm not saying you should start a family if you don't have one. Maybe you can't or won't, in which case, be gentle with yourself and make sure that you are taking the whole picture into account when you compare yourself with others.

> I explained to a Google leader how the WebAssembly project was struggling without support from his organization and how people were being driven away from the project. He agreed with my assessment and then told me nothing was going to change. In the end, the team changed things on their own.

Man I wish that didn't feel so relevant. Literally on an all-day "strategy" meeting right now and heard a variation of this about 5 minutes ago...

Part of me wonders if this could be an intentional strategy at big orgs.

Step 1: Organization holds endless multi-hour meetings about intractable organizational issues.

Step 2: Stakeholders go to a bar to drink heavily and commissarate.

Step 3: Uninhibited stakeholders decide on a way to ignore the inscrutable organizational issues and Just Do It.

Step 4: Organization pats itself on the back for another successful round of all-day meetings.

Sort of a variation on the classic "beatings will continue until morale improves" strategy.

In my experience, this usually happens because an exec sees a presentation or comes up with an idea and is like "Let's do this, we'll throw some good people at it and they'll figure out how" and then it turns out that after the org is built, hundreds of people are working on it, and they've investigated all the constraints, it's not actually possible to build the idea. The ideas that actually work usually get developed in the opposite direction, an engineer says "We can build this, let's put an early version in front of some people and see if we should."

Innovation is path-dependent, and communication/adoption/organizational/economic constraints are just as real as technical ones. It's like how pretty much any skilled programmer could've built the first version of Facebook in a weekend, but to take off, it needed to start in the highest social-status campus (Harvard) of the most networked population (college students) of early adopters (young people). That limited the pool of entrepreneurs to basically just Mark Zuckerburg and the Winklevii, and Zuckerburg got there first under somewhat dubious circumstances.

Same with a lot of discussions in politics, climate change, renewable energy, and Hacker News. An uninformed layperson looks at the problem as a whole, says "We should do this, let's throw money at it and someone will figure out how", and then we end up with a financial bubble and not a whole lot of solutions.

That people within an organization wrap their careers around an idea is a huge hazard. There is so much incentive to present success, to project positively.

We talked about Jobs' "reality distortion field" but there's a much much more mundane almost sycophantic hyping up of the future & success that is deeply deeply deeply woven into most company's genes.

Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans they've been saying for years whenever these problems are raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going to change."

Then we add a step 5 where middle management goes away and gossips about how everything is f*cked.

>Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans they've been saying for years whenever these problems are raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going to change."

This. I've learned to completely ignore what companies state their values are and/or these slogans they trot out. Culture isn't a poster you put on the wall.

> Culture isn't a poster you put on the wall.

Good one.

Related reading: The pre-CIA OSS "Simple Sabotage Field Manual"

When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five.

https://www.openculture.com/2015/12/simple-sabotage-field-ma...

Oh yeah, that paragraph really nailed it. Every place I've worked that's started to go downhill, it always started with executives, who never acknowledged their role in the problem or did anything to fix it.

I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.

100% yes.

Fundamentally, the C-level/senior executives are rarely connected with what's actually going at the ground level. And IME a lot of them simply don't care. They make decisions without understanding the impacts to the rest of the organization, and when objections or concerns are raised, they're filtered or attenuated at the middle management layer (due, usually, to a culture of fear) or dismissed at the top levels.

Put another way: When the decision makers don't feel the consequences of their decisions, those consequences will be ignored. It's a kind of corporate negative externality.

> dismissed at the top levels.

The issue, IMO, is the only accountability C levels face is from either a board or stock prices. Otherwise, nothing they do has any real impact on them personally.

Another major problem is the effects of their decisions are long delayed. Do something that slows development to a crawl and you still have a functional product for years (even if you can't add new features to it). Tying the original decision to the impact on the org is hard, and even harder since whoever made that decision isn't likely to want to take responsibility for it.

From my management experience the leaders are actually doing their job when they do this. Leaders at that level are expected to make strong decisions and to stick with them. It is thought better to have a leader make the wrong decisions firmly and adjust later with a well planned change than the business wobling down the road. So the senior executives are actually doing what the board expects/tasked them to do, keep the direction stable until the next planned/controlled correction. That is why it feels like you are talking to a wall. You are. What you see as a 'bug' the board sees as a 'feature' and the expected output of a C-level.

Bad analogy (I'm old) the light at the intersection is going to stay red until it is time to turn green, even though it would make more sense right now for it to turn green for you because you are the only one at the intersection. Bigger picture, having the lights on timers works better than everyone having a stop sign, even though it looks/feels stupid waiting at a red light with no one else there. The lights seem stupid sometimes, but it scales better than a bunch of stop and go stop signs. (Yes, I know that now lights have sensors, bad analogy now like I said).

TLDR; What if it's not a bug, but it's actually the output the board wants.

That's a misunderstanding.

What should be kept stable are the goals the company wants to reach, not the details in execution.

When you notice your navigation app is sending you down a cliff, do you still follow that route? Of course not.

It's the same with organizations, except a lot of organizations are not intelligent and agile enough to course-correct. Just imagine what they could accomplish with better leadership.

> When you notice your navigation app is sending you down a cliff, do you still follow that route? Of course not.

Good point. A person or organization has to be careful about blindly following or being blind to the situation they are in.

I think there's also an element of overestimating how much power "people in power" actually have. Unless you're at the point in the org chart where you can actually move money and people you're stuck trying to keep your little zen garden clean inside a massive constantly shifting system you have no control over.

Power in an organization should probably be measured by "resources they have unilateral control over" instead of "authority." Because if all you have is authority you're a glorified manager.

There's an incredible amount of soft power in simple leadership, which is extraordinarily rare in both politics and business. Simply setting out an agenda in clear terms and getting people on board.

If you can do that, you don't need to micromanage all the levers yourself, because people will eagerly working with you towards your shared goal.

OMG yes. Leadership and vision are essential for success. There is an absolute shit-ton of asshat, visionless leadership in the world, and in my experience they act so entitled and worldly while they crush the business that feeds them. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

I highlighted this in TFA,

> Any team needs expert leadership to thrive, and expert leaders need support from the people they report to so they can do what’s necessary.

>Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Hahahahah. Me neither man, me neither.

But isn't vision just holding firmly to a plan and sticking with it? The same thing people here are complaining about C-Levels doing? Rigidly plunging ahead (driving towards the vision) and not sidetracking from the vision instead taking everyone's input?

Not the same, no. Plans are tactical; vision is strategic, or maybe even above strategy. And in my experience, people really struggle to understand that some plans just aren’t compatible with the vision, and should be abandoned.

A good definition of power is from Hannah Arendt, it's "the ability to coordinate voluntary collective action". If you can do this you have power because you can't coerce everyone at once all the time.

Innovation no longer happens at these places. I can't think of the last thing Google did that was all that impressive. The only google products I still use are search, gmail and google maps. That's it. The same as in 2005.

These companies no longer need to innovate to stay relevant. They focus instead on stifling competition, lobbying politicians, marketing, advertising, dark patterns, etc. The good people eventually get shut out and shut down and leave or stop trying to influence change. The bureaucracy wins and eventually the music stops.

> I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.

The problem is power is too concentrated. Companies no longer need to innovate. This isn't just in tech. Everyone wants their assets to grow at others expense society be damned.

> Everyone wants their assets to grow at others expense society be damned.

Which is sad and short sighted, because the best way to increase the absolute value of your assets is to encourage large scale societal innovation. Grow the pie, not your relative share of the pie.

Sadly, I think there are too many people who would rather be king of the wastelands than relatively equal to all others in a post scarcity world.

We need to become collectively better about extracting these dark personalities from power if we want a good future.

> best way to increase the absolute value of your assets is to encourage large scale societal innovation

but from a company & shareholder perspective, this sort of societal innovation and improvement is not privately capturable. Back in the 70-80's, Bell labs did this sort of innovation, but they were funded directly via a gov't subsidy (because they are given a monopoly on telecommunications), and so management didn't have to care that the expenditure on R&D returned profit, as long as it is innovative.

I wish we could return to those days, but i dont believe it is possible today.

The whole GSuite (Google Docs, Google Drive, Etc.) have been very productive tools in my experience. (Although Google Drive was launched in like 2012, and Docs in 2006)

The Dart language and Flutter framework have been a rather innovative attempt at making cross platform apps.

But yeah, the amount of innovation at Google has certainly decreased over time.

The gsuite is very much a product of a bunch of acquisitions:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs

That's not to say Google didn't do a ton to advance the concept, but it wasn't their idea originally, and they acquired a lot of the technology.

> The only google products I still use are search, gmail and google maps. That's it. The same as in 2005.

Never stopped to think about it, but you are right.

> The only google products I still use are search, gmail and google maps. That's it. The same as in 2005.

Its even worse than that for me in that not only am I not using any new products Google is producing, but they killed off a number of the ones I did use (some which they produced, some which they acquired and killed).

So not only are they not producing products I care about to begin with, even if they managed to change this I'd be super hesitant to adopt the product because of the reasonable expectation they will kill it off after I start to depend on it.

I think Google innovates plenty!

You might only use Maps, Gmail, and Search, but you've probably also:

- Used a ton of services hosted in Google Cloud (which Google built outright),

- interacted with data that was filtered through BigQuery or Cloud Spanner (which Google built)

- Edited something in Sheets, Docs, Slides, or Forms (all acquisitions, I think)

- Viewed a photo on Google Photos,

- Used Chrome,

- etc.

And that's before all of the stuff Google has produced that's open-source (Golang, Kubernetes, Flutter/Dart, V8, etc), or their AI stuff (DeepMind, AlphaGo, Brain), or their autonomous driving stuff (Waymo, which is probably a patent factory on its own accord)

Also, let's not discount that Maps has gotten a LOT of innovations over time. Is there another mapping service that can give you historical street view of almost any road in the US within seconds?

I worked there in 2015 and also disliked my experience, but Google definitely definitely moves the needle on stuff.

Also, as the article points out, they're huge contributors to Web standards like Webassembly. HTTP/2, QUIC, and HTTP/3 are also huge.

I don't think anything in your list is all that impressive or innovative, other companies do most of those things, or do them better. In any case, none of them changed the way I interacted with the world like Search did. If any of them disappeared, I wouldn't really notice.

Google's "innovations" are minor evolutions now. They have some moonshots, sure, if Waymo is succesful, but nothing impacted the world like search did. Historical street view? Really?

Give me some easy to use and not self-hosted alternatives and I'll switch right now.

We hold people responsible. Scapegoats. Low-ranking staff.

The managerial class can be rewarded for failure (learning experience) but is so rarely held responsible that it's newsworthy when it happens.

I 100% agree with your last generalization.

I wonder if presenting concerns to them in the form of problem-consequences would compel them to action.

If an employee is just complaining to them they are likely to just be annoyed, but if they are told about future negative impact then they would need to take some form of action (presumably).

>I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power accountable for anything.

Well the problem is you try and then you disappear either because you self-select out of that environment or you get managed out because that's an easier problem for the manager to solve because it doesn't involve admitting they're the problem.

It's sad but true.

> it always started with executives, who never acknowledged their role in the problem or did anything to fix it

Wow I see a lot of executive hate on HN. Sure some is probably deserved, but I have seen a lot projects and companies (after being brought in as a consultant to fix) where the technologists had a pretty clear business vision given to them and were left to their own devices with good budgets, platform, and process freedom fail miserably due to team dysfunction and all too often—incompetence.

I zeroed-in in that quote as well. What good does it do to optimize your hiring process to select for candidate ability implement middle-out bubblesort at the whiteboard when ... this is the kind of toxicity they can expect to have crashing down on their heads when they actually get there?

The middle-out bubblesort stuff is so they don't have to decide where to put you. You're a cog with a certain amount of learning in you and can be put anywhere someone wants your butt in a seat. It's credentialism at its base, but it's also resource engineering to cut down on management overhead. Just like hint-based management in general, except in these cases the hint is the person's skills.

Yeah, that's not great, but I still highly prefer that truthful "nothing is going to change" over false promises. At least you have the information you need to make a real decision for yourself.

You're absolutely right about that. It's demoralizing, but in a "devil you know" kind of way.

Recent Xoogler here. I've never met anyone who was actually happy at Google when you sat them down for an honest talk. Everyone was either coasting and depressed/disengaged, or overworked and stressed (I would say 80% were the former). People were frustrated about the bureaucracy, the promo process, the slow pace, the meaninglessness of the work an individual IC does, the stress for managers. Even on a super sexy project dealing with cutting edge AI that got tons of press coverage, everyone was frustrated. This company has a serious cultural issue.

I'm a Googler who has only worked in startups before, and my life has markedly improved in every single way since I started working at Google. There is nothing I miss from life before FAANGs, and I consider the vast majority of Faangineers be obscenely privileged. Most of them have progressed to the same point in life that I am at but are 10 years younger.

Opinions are my own.

For sure, that's the upside of working there. Every aspect of my life outside of career satisfaction improved considerably - I relocated to the US, was able to buy a house, my work life balance got a lot better compared to working at startups, etc. But as a job in and of itself it was pretty lame (apart from a few periods that were fun). The thing is, I feel like that's true for most people there.

I've had that feeling as well, absolutely agree that people can feel that way at Google. Personally the feeling of ennui was much more at my previous jobs, and I expect will exist anywhere I go. I do see however people incredibly engaged. I think there's a ton of luck in terms of what team/product you're placed in.

Probably. But I feel like there's something in Google's current culture that leads to this. I've mostly had these conversations with people from the search and cloud PAs. Could be different in other orgs. Maybe I just got extremely lucky with my pre-Goog jobs that were ultra satisfying and challenging in a good way, I just had a blast coming to work every day and doing the work.

Another ex-Googler here. I never had a job that was ultra satisfying and challenging in a good way. The only way I got that was from my own projects / businesses. Maybe I got unlucky job-wise. Or maybe I'm an entrepreneur at heart, I think fundamentally I cannot be fully satisfied working on someone else's project.

Either way, at this point I think I've seen enough. I think I should minimize time working and maximize pay. Working remotely for G was pretty great. The work sucked but there was so little of it. If it weren't for mandatory RTO I'd still be there. I'm gonna see how FB compares.

> RTO

.eq. Return To Office # For anyone else chilling somewhere in the world that doesn’t know that TLA

> Working remotely for G was pretty great. The work sucked but there was so little of it. If it weren't for mandatory RTO I'd still be there.

And I think you just justified mandatory RTO!

I also find that the stress and the promo process creates an environment where people are aholes to each other, but using Googler Norms of social combat.

Sounds like a job.

You didn't really give us any experiences in this comment. No mention at all of why anything is better, or how your experience has differed from OP or the comment you're replying to.

> I've never met anyone who was actually happy at Google when you sat them down for an honest talk.

I know plenty of people that have left google for greener pastures but also many that stayed. Since my previous team mostly went to other teams within Google we did a lot of talking about leaving and the consensus was that everyone would be fine whether they stayed with Google or decided to leave. "Happy" is a subjective term but everyone I talk to is comfortable and is fine with staying or leaving.

> Everyone was either coasting and depressed/disengaged, or overworked and stressed (I would say 80% were the former).

In a realist sense this one is almost tautological. Either you are trying to rank up or you're not trying to rank up. If you're not trying to rank up you get a LOT of leeway at Google, and you can coast if you want, or you can continue to do good work, as I think a lot of people do. If you're trying to rank up you're going to be busting ass, but I think this is not different than other companies. If you have people delivering impact and people who are not, are you really going to make the case that you should be promoting the less hardworking people? Or that everyone should rank up equally?

> People were frustrated about the bureaucracy, the promo process,

This is constantly brought up on memegen but there are also comments on memegen saying something to the effect of: "Despite our complaints Google is still a great place to work" and I don't think I've ever seen any pushback on this. Compare this to for example Reddit memes where there are zero people saying things are still good despite complaints. Promo by the way is being revamped due to complaints (I think this is public enough that I can mention this) and we'll see how the new process is.

> the slow pace, the meaninglessness of the work an individual IC does,

Despite my past projects falling flat, I personally find my current work important. In general I both agree and disagree with this point. It's 100% true that some people may not be personally invested in the success of the specific projects that they are working on, and I have indicated my agreement with this in a later comment. Where I disagree with this comment though is that people are very invested in project delivery in general, as your are extremely well rewarded for delivering projects. Above the L5-L6 level you will find people are working extremely hard to be impactful. This is maybe where the perception of "overworked and stressed" comes from. I will tell you these people are generally doing an amazing job and are being compensated for this overwork with amazing pay. And when they are getting pay commensurate to the work they are doing, I personally feel that the use of the label "overworked and stressed" needs to be heavily caveated.

> the stress for managers. Even on a super sexy project dealing with cutting edge AI that got tons of press coverage, everyone was frustrated.

I personally have not seen this but I don't dispute it. I have heard other teams have a lot of frustration.

> This company has a serious cultural issue.

This one is entirely subjective, but again I don't dispute this in terms the feeling of ennui at work. Sometimes leadership doesn't seem to have a coherent strategy and work is done for no reason. I can't really define what is "an issue" or "not an issue" culturally. What I can do is make comparative judgements: In my previous startups the culture was much worse, and there was much more of a sense of "what is leadership even doing?". I haven't worked in any places where I've had the sense that things are done better at Google. Others will have to speak to this.

>> > Everyone was either coasting and depressed/disengaged, or overworked and stressed (I would say 80% were the former).

> In a realist sense this one is almost tautological.

While you're trying to say google's not that bad, that you see depressed-disengaged and overworked-stressed s literally tautologically the only possibilities for a work experience does not say good things about google to me. It sounds like stockholm syndrome.

I am confident that I have effectively communicated that working at Google is not similar to a hostage situation, and any attempt at framing my words in such a way is probably trying too hard.

You're trying to refute the previous comment, but, by the definition of Stockholm Syndrome are actually strengthening it.

The fact that your time at Google seems to have taught you it is literally not possible to work anywhere without being either over-worked or depressed does not say good things about Google, is all I'm saying.

Because it's definitely possible. Just apparently, in your experience, not at Google. Which you've internalized to incorrectly believe this is universal.

The "stockholm syndrome" metaphor is overwrought, you're right, sorry.

This is just word play, I never implied anything close to the notion that anyone working a job will be either overworked or depressed.

> Either you are trying to rank up or you're not trying to rank up.

I've seen coasting people getting promoted, and hard working people not getting promoted. But you could be hard working and not stressed is my point. I know because I've been there. I've even been there at Google for a short while. I ran a cool project, people were nice, work was interesting, it wasn t stressful at all but it was challenging. Sadly it didn't last long.

That makes sense. Personally I have not heard a single person talk about stress as a SWE, but maybe I'm just not the type of person that people talk to about that. I have worked late a few times but that was for a short time and I consider that normal. In the end each PA and even each team can be as different as working as a different company, so even if this is not my experience I can't dispute this.

A lot of FAANG people want to get paid FAANG levels of money but also work on exciting and meaningful projects, we can't have it all.

The issue is, originally FAANG jobs were exciting.

Think about it this way, everyone who was early at Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/etc has awesome stories of being on the first team in the world to ever try solving some really difficult problems. Exploring unknown new fields of computing, designing new UIs for never before imagined devices. You did super cool things.

It is comparatively recent that FAANG jobs have become sort of lame.

Remember how cool Google maps was when it first came out? Or how awesome Gmail was? Those were ground breaking projects!

Heck we take distributed databases for granted now days, but Facebook pioneered a lot of amazing technology, so did Google, Amazon, and Twitter.

Microsoft actually may have had the right model way back when, back when they had teams and job roles in charge of making new products, and another org just devoted to maintaining current versions of software. Of course that division was easy to make back when software came on CDs. Now days everything is cloud based and evergreen.

Maybe companies need to have a career path that is just "maintain stuff" and your promos are based on how well stuff keeps working and any cost savings/perf improvements you can squeeze out of the existing code w/o doing a massive rewrite.

When they first came out, neither google maps nor gmail was really unique. They were just better than the alternatives.

Mapquest and hotmail were the true trail blazers in that respect.

There's such a huge gap in usability between Mapquest and the first Google Maps release it would be hard to overstate it. Both gmail and google maps were groundbreaking not for the fact that they gave you "webmail" or "maps on the web" but for the fact that they did so as properly interactive applications where the HTTP connection got out of your way and you could dynamically interact.

Back then Google was doing this kind of groundbreaking stuff. Other people had all the technology pieces but Google was kind of the only company doing these things at scale and letting their engineers cook it up and ship it quickly, and in the early/mid-2000s it seemed like they were dropping a new "wow, nifty" type of thing every few months.

From the people I know who were there at the time (I joined later, end of 2011 time frame, right as "the social wars" and the G+ era was happening) it sounds to me like a serious empowered-nerd culture where people just got out of your way so you could do stuff with all the neat tools that were available to you.

That era at Google has ended some years ago now. It's too big, too political (and no, I don't mean "woke" politics, but corporate / promo / perf politics) and if you had a "neat idea" like how, say, Gmail started, you'd have a hell of a time making it happen past the layers of product managers etc.

... And if you work in a codebase like, say, Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the product of very complicated decisions and a massive build that will bog down a machine with a couple dozen cores and 128GB of RAM, and bring any IDE to its knees. A far cry from the breath of fresh air of lightness and speed that original beta Chrome version felt like, with its graphic novel / comic introduction [1] and raw "hey isn't this neat check this out" vibe...

[1] https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/

> Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the product of very complicated decisions and a massive build

As a webdev a few years ago, the Chromium team was oodles better than anyone else at delivering a reliable browser, and wayyyy better at fixing bugs than any other software team I have ever dealt with in my career (I just submitted bug reports to them, no direct or formal interaction). No idea what they are like now, but hotdamn that team was superlative. I hope it is enjoyable to work there, because the work output was phenomenal.

I never worked directly on Chromium, but I worked in its code base (for chromecast and google home products) and met many of the Waterloo folks who worked on Chrome. They were all top notch super smart people.

The codebase is huge. The code quality is on the whole excellent, but learning its ins and outs takes time.

When it first came out, the Tesla Roadster wasn't really unique. It was just better than the alternatives.

The Model-T was the true trail blazer in that respect.

Google Maps was acquired from another company though. I wonder how much of the UX was there already before the port to the browser.

For the history of Google Maps, Earth, and Street View, check out "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality". Written by one of the founders of Keyhole (the company that built what became Google Earth), the book is mostly about the founding of Keyhole and gathering map data from many sources, but also talks about Google's acquisition of Where 2 Technologies (the company that built what became Google Maps).

I mean, I often make the same points as you (also ex-Google.)

But I have to say, as a counterpoint, I met many people inside Google who loved it there and were living their best career lives there, and getting treated really well to do it.

It wasn't me, but, there's a personality type that thrives in those environments. It's not all awful. You get to play with some really fancy big tools. Deploy your stuff across thousands of servers or ship a product to millions of people. Sit on the shoulders of other really smart engineers and use the pretty amazing stuff they build (like, seriously, stuff like F1 etc. is pretty amazing).

And if you can play the game there well, and you really want to succeed there, there's lots of room to climb.

Wasn't my game, but let's be honest, there's actually a lot there to go with.

2gler here. I was actually really happy for about the first 80% of my first time at Google (Search, 2009-2012). Miserable for the last 20%. Mildly discontent for my first team back, reasonably happy after transferring.

Your team and the specific work you're doing matters a lot for your happiness at Google (and presumably any big company). Work with your manager to craft a job description that's better suited for you, or transfer if you can't. You have to actively manage your career - and your happiness - in any job.

> You have to actively manage your career - and your happiness - in any job.

Truth.

I loved it while I was there. Fun projects, global impact, good pay, fairly reasonable work/life balance.

> I've never met anyone who was actually happy at Google when you sat them down for an honest talk. Everyone was either coasting and depressed/disengaged, or overworked and stressed

I think this is true of most careers in the US. At the end of the day it's a job, help you provide for yourself and family. It would be amazing if you were in love with every minute of it, but it a means to the end. You hear many NFL players say the same thing, they dont care if they win or lose, it's just their job. They show up, play, get a pay check and go on with their life.

I'd settle for at least feeling like my time on earth is not wasted and my talents are appreciated. I completely felt that in jobs before Google and I'm feeling it right now in my post-Google job at another FAANG (but it could be because I'm at a more senior role and it's a honeymoon phase)

Using the word "coasting" as "the opposite of overwork" already hints at a problem.

What I mean was that I saw no middle - people working okay hours and enjoying themselves. You had motivated people producing good work with decent load but hating it, like me. Or people not caring and coasting doing little work - also like me when I got depressed from the work. And people super stressed and burning out. But I saw no happy people.

I’m a Googler and I’m very happy with my job and the company in general. People I work on projects with also seem engaged and satisfied with their work.

This really hits home for me. I've been in a similar situation for more than a year. Extremely overworked, understaffed team constantly missing deadlines. Endless pointless meetings. Managers don't care. Even my short and long term memory has taken a toll, although its probably due to another chronic health issue. I want to quit and stay unemployed for a while, but that's frankly just scary. Good job.

I always want to do this but health insurance always keeps me from never going a day without being employed. Im fortunate to be able to have that kind of job stability but the anxiety of being out of a job and then needing any kind of medical care is real.

At least in the US, you can use COBRA to keep your insurance for a little bit. It's very expensive though, so it's still not a great option.

You can often do better on the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges.

COBRA is a disaster. its often more expensive than when shopping around for insurance by yourself.

Kinda sorta maybe. Yes you can get “cheaper” plans through private insurance but the trade off between lower premiums vs higher deductibles makes the equation a bit more complex.

That being said… yes cobra is usually insanely expensive. But that might be market rate for whatever “all you can eat low deductible” health plan your employer was offering.

its expensive, but that's how much your employer is paying for your health insurance.

The hidden costs keep growing and force people to keep jobs...just to have health.

But rest assured, this is a government problem that can be fixed.

If you take the employer payroll tax subsidy away, plus take mandatory healthcare insurance requisites and poof, this problems go away.

There would be tremendous disruption for sure, but we need to get away from "insurance for everything" when in reality it should be you have "insurance for disaster situations"

Or we could realize that we already have socialized healthcare, just in the stupidest most expensive way, at the ER (who can not refuse anyone service) and change it to a more effective way. No one is arguing that ERs should turn dieing people away, so we not only have it, but it's pretty much universally supported. Now we just need to agree to have it in a better form.

> health insurance always keeps me from never going a day without being employed.

There's no way to cap the actual health care costs, but the health insurance is about 30k/year for a family of 4 on COBRA.

That is a lot or not depending on how your job is affecting your health.

I'm right now spending a year off work and leaving my job has definitely improved my life more than paying me 30k would (of course, there are other expenses too - it's like a 120k/year burn rate in the bay area).

My father ended his life from issues related to work stress (it had to do with violent naxal robberies and being personally threatened, but still no sleep for 3-4 days messes you up), so I might have a very skewed point of view on this, but the lesson was to never take the "retire and do hobbies at 60" for granted & to draw-down the financials into time spent when you can keep up with your kids on shared things.

You should know that COBRA can be retroactive.

You do not have to sign up when you terminate your employment. You can sign up when you actually need medical care that you want to be covered. Though, at that time you have to pay back for the time since termination.

It makes it a little easier to walk away and "hope for the best" on the healthcare front.

>I want to quit and stay unemployed for a while, but that's frankly just scary

I don't know you, but if you have the savings to do it, I'd say go for it. I've done it and it was wonderful. The day I realized I could just quit my job without having another job lined up a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I couldn't manage to find the effort needed to go through a job search while still employed, and taking a six month sabbatical also was great for doing a lot of new things I didn't usually have the time for.

That's great for you. Not really feasible for the likes of me, who have a girlfriend and 3 animals to support. To say nothing of those with actual, human kids.

Yes, that's why I made clear that money is an issue. It's not common to be able to take a sabbatical, but our area is usually well-remunerated enough that it is an option for many people, at least with proper planning. Someone else mentioned that in the US, healthcare is tied to your job, which is something I never really considered.

Having enough savings to not work for a year or two is a good thing to aim for, and should be feasible for a lot of people in our industry. Just knowing I don't need to stay in a job if it starts to suck badly is probably the thing that's had the biggest positive effect on my mental health.

If you can manage it, my advice would be to just start quietly looking for new opportunities on the side. You may be able to make a pivot. Putting your health first also means trying to make the safest choices so you don't have more stress to deal with.

Put a month in between starting something new, too. Depending on the particulars of the healthcare involved that might not even require COBRA (many cover you through the end of the month rather than ending the day you leave; many also cover you day 1 of employment rather than starting X days after, so you can quit on the 1st of one month, start new job on the 1st of the next month, or similar), but even if not, one month of COBRA and missed expenses isn't that bad.

But, that way you can actually have a breather, get back into a healthy headspace, etc, before starting in. My best job transitions have had a break in between; my worst were quit job 1 on Friday, start job 2 on Monday.

Yeah, I'll second the recommendation to quit early in the month, take some time off, then start the next job before the next month.

>Managers don't care.

It's funny how concepts that get repeated a million times in "how to be a boss" type threads are completely forgotten in "my job sucks" ones. Case in point: CULTURE COMES FROM THE TOP.

Your managers are the ones closest to you in setting the culture, and they're telling you to stop caring. Take the hint, just like they'd want you to take the (common at many many companies) hint that they aren't going to fire you, but it's time for you to move on to your next job.

This is an interesting statement to me.

I have a potentially crippling difficulty in understanding people and relationships. It's not entirely clear to me what I can do to help work through it or increase my skill levels with respect to it.

At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a meta level. That is to say, object level is what people actually say and do and meta level is like the subtext to borrow a literary term of what people say and do.

The boss saying, "let's all work hard and do what it takes." Is something that I want to take literally. What they mean is, "Just put in 8ish hours a day and don't take a two week vacation right before a release." However, I'm deeply uncomfortable with taking the meta version.

When the meta version is totally divorced from the object version is where things completely go off the rails for me. "Let's all work hard and do what it takes." => "Don't rock the boat because none of this was ever going to work in the first place."

Fortunately for me, I've only seen such bosses (or I suppose scenarios) from afar. As far as I know I've never worked directly for one.

> At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a meta level.

This is a really common failure pattern of people with a history of excelling in relatively explicit systems (e.g. grades at school).

Reading can actually help a lot here. "Influence" by Cialdini, "How to win friends and influence people" by Carnegie, or the "Gervais Principle" by Rao decent intros to some relevant concepts (though each has problems, particularly Rao's book).

Once you have a framework of understanding incentives, cognitive traps, and the tools most people use to navigate these kinds of political games it gets a lot easier to grasp what's going on (being a good player is, IMO, much harder)

I found Gervais Principle to be fascinating. Although, like you say the book definitely has it's problems. Fortunately, years before I encountered Gervais Principle, I had already seen a similar thing with technical books. Just because an author talks with confidence and presents a logical soundish framework doesn't mean they actually know what they are talking about OR it doesn't mean that what they are talking about is universally applicable.

I got the same feeling from Gervais Principle. There's some lessons to learn here, however you also need to make sure you bring a lot of salt to the table.

> Endless pointless meetings.

Normally I have few meetings, but recently it's gone up a bit. I told people I'll be available so they can call me in if they have a specific question. Suddenly I got stuff done again.

> Managers don't care.

This is part of the reason why I looked for a smaller company, where passion is required to survive.

> We did not have a PM. We knew we needed one, we tried to get one, and at best we had a part-time PM for a brief time who volunteered and then moved on. This left complex social and organizational challenges in the hands of overworked engineers with little experience solving them.

That's really the problem, right there, and I think she pretty much says it.

I've worked with standards people before (not on the committees, themselves, thank Cthulhu). It's a really rocky environment.

Usually, everyone involved is full of self-interest, and they want to push their own agenda, because billions. Having a standard give you an edge, can be quite valuable. Look to some of the video codecs, and see why.

In that environment, it's often difficult to get everyone to agree on a "The Buck Stops Here" leader. Usually, a Chair is appointed when the committee is formed. Sounds like this one just sort of congealed.

I sincerely wish her health and happiness. In my case, being forced out of the rat race was one of the best things that could have happened to me.

I work at Google and generally love it but this is currently my #1 complaint about being on an infra team. We have no PM so it falls to me to figure out how best to apply the systems and tools we have in new domains... but I can't actually make these decisions unilaterally. It requires people on the other side of whatever engagement and those relationships are complex and often fickle and it takes a huge amount of my time to navigate them. We temporarily had a PM who got a bunch of initiatives started but then swapped teams and all of the momentum vanished.

> If you’re building a product that billions of people will be stuck with, however, this can lead to a little stress. The history of the web is littered with bad APIs, ill-considered specs, and tangled piles of security vulnerabilities. Something a programmer puts together in a week can consume decades of engineering time in the future. WebAssembly could not and would not release as a half-baked or ill-considered spec because as browser developers we all understood the costs everyone would pay for that.

I might be missing something here, but this feels a little like unnecessary pressure. As I understand it, billions of people wouldn't be using the API; a few compiler authors would. I thought that's one of the nice things about WASM: recompile to upgrade. Security is a good concern to have, of course!

> As I understand it, billions of people wouldn't be using the API; a few compiler authors would.

Yes, but billions of people may suffer the consequences of the WASM design doing something stupid and then the few compiler authors having to semi-successfully deal with it. That may be stressing, assuming that you care about such things as your brain child being an improvement (not a regression) on what came before.

Well thank god they're software engineers and not butterflies!

https://ronmayhewphotography.com/2020/02/06/if-a-butterfly-f...

You mean like requiring functions instead of basic blocks in a compiler target?

Do you have any more information on that? What's the issue and what was the reasoning behind that choice?

Very few developers, yes, but shipped to very many end users. As it turns out WASM was used as a springboard for a pretty nasty exploit chain to get persistent root on Chromebooks (responsibly disclosed and fixed, thankfully.)

Webassembly is just the JVM in the browser all over again.

WASM as in the spec or as in the V8-wasm implementation?

The latter.

I used to work at G. They put this pressure on you artificially, I think because they believe it gets you to buy in to your work due to its importance. Practically, it seems to encourage lethargy because you need to make sure that all billion of them are happy. Great engineering is done when you know what you can sacrifice some goals for other goals.

People today aren't a lot smarter than people were 20 years ago, and we kind of forget that fact when we try to do grandiose projects like "replace the entire stack and make sure that it works equally well to the old stack in all circumstances." The old stack was built well for its goals, and had the benefit of 20 years of tuning. The replacement needs to come when the goals change. There is plenty of opportunity still: peoples' goals change frequently.

If the goal was just to allow you to write webapps using toolchains for native apps, then you can put in an LLVM-like sidecar next to JS that has terrible performance but amazing security (I think this was closest to the goal of WASM). However, if the goal was to bring native performance to webapps means you can target your spec toward efficient JIT compilation on x86 and ARM (and RISC-V), without worrying a lot about portability to other architectures. I have heard a mix of the two looking at the WASM project from the outside: that they wanted native performance with 100% portability of both hardware platforms and development languages, and they thought they could achieve it.

A great TPM (technical program/product manager - the Google term for an engineering-focused product manager) can help define these exclusions, and it sounds like OP really tried hard to get one. I'm surprised that Google didn't give them one to start.

I had the same conclusion: This team needs to get a dedicated TPM to act as a stress umbrella for the team. I tell my engineering team, if anyone is stressing you out, "pinging you" for things, asking you to set up pointless meetings, "escalating" things with managers, or anything else that sucks away your productivity, please redirect them to me and I'll handle these annoyances. If software developers are distracted by stressful bullshit, then I'm not doing my job.

Chrome already had Google Native Client (NaCl), basically the LLVM sidebar you describe, so asm.js and wasm (and even Google's own Dart VM) had an uphill battle to being adopted by Chrome.

> I’ve seen managers cry multiple times, and this is one of the places that happened.

What sorts of places are they working that they have seen this multiple times?! Maybe I’ve been very fortunate, but I’ve worked for a Fortune 500 company for 20 years and I cannot think of a single times things have become so stressful that anyone was close to tears. Usually things are very calm and when managers talk about work life balance they really mean it and walk the walk and don’t just talk the talk.

I've heard of this happening at Apple, and it wasn't portrayed as an unusual occurrence.

Where? I have never seen this happen in 30 years at Apple in software engineering.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

"By this point, I was crying harder, and Bob looked like he might start crying at any moment now, too. We were also pretty far from Bandley 4 by now, and it was starting to get dark. The tone of the conversation seemed to shift as we both realized that we should start heading back."

But I guess that was 39 years ago...

On a more serious note: I haven't seen it in a long time but I've definitely seen it on some of the hardware teams. It was when Apple was smaller and we were continually trying to fit two weeks of work into one week. At that pace everyone eventually breaks down and some do it differently than others.

Apple being huge now has its disadvantages but one advantage is I haven't heard of months of project death marching in a long time.

I've seen it particularly when it's about things that are (or seem to be) important but the business has neglected supporting the team accordingly. When you're in this position and don't have a good place to quickly jump to it's easy to think "I'll just put in as much as they do and live on" but when something goes wrong and that team is the only one that can fix important (or "important") thing inevitably many just go through extremely stressful situations.

i wrote and then deleted a comment. I work in consulting and I'll just say that tears on conference calls are rare but do happen from time to time.

I've seen it at the bottom of the org chart all the way to almost the very top and even client side. It's not uncommon for race cars to be pushed until the engine blows and it's not uncommon for people to be pushed (or push themselves) beyond what they can bear. Everyone has their limits and there's no shame in reaching/crossing them. I've been there and it sucks, it really does.

Chronic stress is no joke. It really does cause brain damage, which people usually describe as "burn-out" as if it is just a thing to get over. But it takes years to get back to a functional condition, and it will not be the condition you started in.

Never stay with a thing that is giving you chronic stress. Damage is permanent. Leave it, or find a way to not be insulated.

A really excellent book on chronic stress and its effects on physiology is "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers", by Robert Sapolsky, and endocrinologist. (It is beyond me how anybody can become an endocrinologist without suffering chronic stress!) I had to read the last chapter at 30 minutes per page, plus breaks, because he was tying up threads from the whole rest of the book.

>Every toxic workplace I’ve been in was usually the result of bad executive leadership, and this was no different.

I remember going to my manager's manager a few years back to raise an issue with them. I wasn't the only person to raise it. They essentially said "Let this continue for 12 months and at the end of the 12 months we'll step in and stop this". It was at that point I knew that they were engaged in their job search. "Let's just put this off until I'm no longer here" basically.

Having dealt with burnout in the past, a mistake I wouldn't make again is immediately quitting. If your company burned you out, they should make you whole again; you shouldn't be paying for therapy out of your own pocket. COBRA is an absolute disaster; if the insurance company ever actually approves you, you eat through your runway too quickly. It's like paying for a second apartment!

How to actually execute this, I'm not completely sure. You don't want to ramp down to the "performance improvement plan" level, because that will just ruin your mental health. If you can ramp down from "strongly exceeds" to "meets expectations" maybe that will help, but if burned out it's probably too late for something like that.

I'm not sure that medical leave is that helpful. I did this once, but was diagnosed with depression when the real problem was that I didn't have a good relationship with my manager. (The straw that broke the camel's back in that case was that I was on vacation the first few days after medical leave, the HR system lost the vacation, and HR started calling my immediate family with the implication that I was presumed dead. Nope, just in Yellowstone without good cell service. I didn't go back to work after that debacle.)

The second time I was burned out, I knew there was no way the company could help me (tiny startup, and the CEO was burning me out), so I just instantly quit. I took about a year off and that was great, I totally recovered. But it was very expensive. It annoys me that companies know they're burning out their employees, and do absolutely nothing to help. So much is lost when people leave. "Take 3 months off" is totally normal if you have a kid, for both parents now; we should do the same for burnout. "I didn't have a kid but I'm going through some shit." leave.

Edit: also, sorry for making this comment about me. I read the entire article and it just frustrates me to no end. You did such a good job making a great spec; the foundation for a better web for billions of people, and the foundation for many interesting startups. All while single-handedly being the glue needed to keep a challenging project making progress. That's truly amazing. Google owes you nothing short of a parade in your honor and a promotion :) Instead, you're left footing the bill to recover from the brain damage caused by continuous stress. I'm so sorry you had to go through this, and thank you for writing this up. It's something we all face in this industry, and speaking up is going to help a lot of people.

Yeah I think quitting early is a mistake, you want to figure out a way to ramp down for sure. Not certain what the trick is there, and doing it wrong can probably make stress worse.

At one past employer where crunch was a problem, some of the leads had an unofficial policy that after launch everyone could just quietly show up to work and not do anything for a few weeks to decompress. It helped a lot, but it kind of made me wonder why everyone was pretending there wasn't a problem.

It's wild the job can burn you out then externalize the cost of care back to you if you quit. To be clear: even high earners at $BigCo benefit from universal health care.

yeah reading GP it's wild to me that being burnt-out there might be a real reason to stay in the place that caused it. 0_o

>If you’re building a product that billions of people will be stuck with, however, this can lead to a little stress. The history of the web is littered with bad APIs, ill-considered specs, and tangled piles of security vulnerabilities. Something a programmer puts together in a week can consume decades of engineering time in the future. WebAssembly could not and would not release as a half-baked or ill-considered spec because as browser developers we all understood the costs everyone would pay for that.

I don't understand how this is Google's fault? It sounds like the author had already hyped up the stress to insane levels before even working on the project. So it follows that everything they experienced within that context was also stressful.

I think you're Anthropomorphizing the Lawnmower here. The author is saying that while at Google these things happened to her because Google is a massive impersonal machine which hires talented, creative and sensitive people, pays them huge money and then dumps them in a technical bear pit with the executive leadership as audience.

If a project is too stressful, why didn't she say "no, this is too stressful, let me work on something else." To me, it reads like they went along with the stress, knowing it was going to be stressful, and acknowledging that it is indeed very stressful. This sounds like a lesson in asserting your boundaries around mental health.

IME: these things usually creep up on you in new and terrible ways. Everything can be fine and then it just sort of all hits you.

Because there are strong incentives to persevere. Shipping a foundational spec is a major achievement, so it's easy to think that the stress is worth the goal. There's a cultural pressure to "suck it up" and not be "weak". Quitting can hurt your career and finances. So you try your best for as long as you can… until you can't.

Nobody is forced to climb Mount Everest, and doing so can be deadly. But do you blame the mountain for being "too attractive of an achievement" when someone dies trying to reach the summit? Know your limits and set your boundaries.

The question I've answered was about motivation, not blame.

The analogy you bring up isn't fitting, because unlike mountains, companies are run by people who consciously set up the incentives, assemble teams, set goals, receive feedback and can react to it. If a Mount Everest Travel Agency Ltd. advertised awesome climbs, got feedback from a participant that they're struggling and need a guide, and the company said "you won't get one, keep going!" then yes, I'd blame them for the injuries.

If what you say is a valid explanation, then the original question "I don't understand how this is Google's fault?" should be answered with "they should reduce the incentives for employees so that they won't burn themselves out trying to outdo themselves".

Yeah, it sounds like sarcasm but I think the logic above can be read both ways.

Or they could focus on reducing the stress instead, like ensuring projects have a manager who listens to employees' feedback.

Agree - it seems like the person self selected to be on a tremendously challenging/ambitious/ambiguous project that might have been more of a side initiative for Google so it could watch/influence/keep tabs on the standard.

Like more of a cost center and less a profit center for Chrome.

I'm sure there are less stressful but perhaps less visible groups in Google that could have been switched to.

Also seems as much of an issue w.r.t. the competitive/co-opetion nature of the standards working group.

If I'm reading this right, the crux of the issue was overworked engineers and unproductive meetings that got heated between experts? And the resultant stress led to brain damage?

Personally, I don't know any software teams that aren't understaffed at best. Any project that has multiple stakeholders is going to have some meetings that feel unproductive with key leaders arguing for their best interests. That's just the natural order of collaboration.

These are the kinds of posts that remind me how privileged high-skilled software engineers are. I am the first in my family to not work in some form of construction and can't help but imagine how someone like OP would fare in that environment.

> I spent the next couple years unemployed, working with my physicians to try and recover my health while occasionally writing code. I’m happy to report that I’m partially recovered at this point and being paid to work on open source, but I’ll never be the same.

Being able to take off 2 years to attend to personal health is a luxury pretty exclusive to tech (insofar as how available/attainable it is).

What is your message -- the author shouldn't share their story of a toxic workplace because they made more money than folks in other toxic workplaces?

I see an emotionally unstable author more than I see a toxic workplace.

It is prudent to err the side of giving the benefit of the doubt to the entity with relatively less power. I see no reason to instinctively jump to Google's defense here, they are more than capable of defending themselves.

The whole team left, so it doesn't seem like the author was a snowflake in this case.

Though looking at the timelines, the team left or had been moved around after a two year period. So it wasn't necessarily an abrupt change.

If OP's description is what constitutes a "toxic workplace" then any service job/Amazon warehouse/construction job is also toxic. From what I read, I would describe OP's team as severely dysfunctional and the bar for "toxic" should be higher (generally, indicating some level of malice).

I think it's damaging to dilute terms like "toxic" by using them to describe a situation that is generally stressful and widely experienced.

Just because something is widely experienced doesn't mean we must dismiss criticisms of it.

No, but if we're lowering the bar for what constitutes "toxic" to something that is widely experienced then that is inherently dismissive of actually toxic work environments that are not widely experienced.

Toxic work environments are widespread. Their widespread nature doesn't somehow magically make them not qualify as 'toxic'. And if anything, it should prompt wider changes in industry, because clearly it is not an isolated incident.

> If OP's description is what constitutes a "toxic workplace" then any service job/Amazon warehouse/construction job is also toxic.

> I think it's damaging to dilute terms like "toxic" by using them to describe a situation that is generally stressful and widely experienced.

This characterization is inches away from an epiphany.

I think every nihilist has the "epiphany" you're implying.

My point is that any service job/Amazon warehouse/construction job is generally stressful, has unproductive meetings, and callous bosses but this is not my bar for "toxic". I'd raise that a bit higher to apply to Activision, Goldman, etc. where there's a level of malice.

What you are suggesting is "nihilism" would, by people who have not decided to norm bad things, perhaps look a lot more like communalism.

Share, yes absolutely. But also, keep in perspective, that these are ~$500K+ jobs and the (certainly smart) folks in these jobs can also move to other parts of google that arent as hard to deal with. So, it is understandable that others might not consider this to be a bad deal overall.

Your other comments aside, just for the record: I was able to take the time off because I saved my income instead of spending it (also thanks to having paid into disability insurance programs for decades). Between rent, food and health insurance I used up all my savings. Certainly having any money saved up at all is a privilege, and I hope it's one more people are able to have in the future.

What's the point of this post? Because OP is more privileged than a construction worker their complaints are invalid? All jobs should be like your family's experience in construction?

From what I read, "toxic" is an exaggeration of the work environment and undermines the message that OP is trying to convey.

I've worked some construction in the past, didn't find it worse, it actually left me feeling better at the end of the day, there's something positive about the physical activity from it.

My point is, I don't think these comparison judgement are useful. Ever heard: "can't compare two people's pain"?

Think about the purpose of your comment? What's the end goal? To convince people nothing should be done about anything and for everyone to just suck it up? Seems that's a bad attitude to be honest.

If your family's construction work environment is toxic and treats them badly, you should be complaining about it and bring attention to it so hopefully we can all demand better for them. Similarly here, someone stepped up to try and raise the standards by pointing out at real issues faced in some organizations that fail on all front, fails to deliver to the business, the customer, the employees, it's worth talking about in my opinion. How else you get anything to become better otherwise?

My point is that adopting terms like "toxic" to describe this team's culture is over-selling and detracts from workplaces that are actually toxic.

If we're dropping the bar of a toxic workplace to be: trouble sleeping, questioning self-worth and general anxiety then what language do we use for workplaces that involve actual malice? Co-workers sabotaging others, misogynistic comments, abusive messages, etc are all toxic but clearly on a different level than described in the post.

> If you're family's construction work environment is toxic and treats them badly, you should be complaining about it and bring attention to it so hopefully we can all demand better for them.

That sounds nice, but there are workplaces where complaining will make life worse for you. And for certain union jobs, it's very difficult to leave.

There's toxic workplaces, and there's actually _hostile_ ones. We don't need to be literally abused for a workplace to be toxic.

To me, toxic implies something that's bad for you but in insidious ways. That means it's slow and subtle, you wouldn't even believe it, at first you'd think this is great, these people are happy, this job looks great, but years later, you've got memory loss, needed to take physical disability, and the whole team quit... What the hell?

I feel it perfectly describes toxicity. What can cause such a thing? What's the root cause? It seems there are certain things about the human psyche we've yet to understand that somehow can be very damaging to it.

It means that if say there's a person whose the perpetrator, they might not even realize. If a manager causes the environment to make people feel crappy, they might not understand how, why, even if that's not their intent.

Malice can be toxic too, but malice describes the intent, someone could purposefully make the environment toxic, still toxic, but the intent was malicious. I find toxicity describes the environment, it's not because no one was purposely poisoning the well that it can't still be toxic.

Now if people are being abusive, psychologically or physically, in obvious ways, I would just call that an abusive workplace.

That's just the way I interpret those words.

Now if you're simply trying to say we should prioritize our efforts first to workplaces that are really bad in obvious and extreme ways, downright abusive, I wouldn't disagree, but is this really detracting?

That's why I said, if you know of worse offenders, bring them up, don't just deny this particular offense. I know that labor in other countries is much worse, but I can't as easily enact changes in other countries. I know that some jobs treat employees really poorly and pays terribly, and I'm not okay with that and support labor rights, higher wages, and would love to see more paid leave, shorter hours, better safety protocols. Simultaneously I happen to work in tech, so I'm also interested in seeing those jobs improve, they have different kind of issues that seem more insidious, they're also worth talking about in my opinion.

I would agree with you if somehow tech worker complaints was drowning out the voices of other workers who have more obvious abuses going on. I just don't think that's the case.

If you look up any articles about the Activision Blizzard saga you'll find the word toxic being used most often to describe their workplace. Is OP's situation comparable to Activision Blizzard?

Is woodsorrel comparable to water hemlock? Kidney stones are better than death, but both are toxic. Sounds like the author was directly harmed by their work environment, so it sounds fair to call it toxic even if it could be worse.

We don't have a good way to measure harm, let alone be able to compare it between contexts. So we just don't know to be honest.

All I know is memory loss, and needing to take a 2 year work leave sounds pretty bad. You're only hesitant to recognize this because you don't understand the cause. If I told you it turned out there was lead exposure in the office, now you probably would find it terrible. One day we'll hopefully understand the cause and effect of such thing, and the behaviors or whatever it could be, still might be caused by actual toxins who knows, but when you do, you'll similarly go, I can't believe they allowed this to go on when we know it causes memory loss and traumatic brain disabilities. Even if it's only on certain individuals, you'd be appalled to know some restaurant willingly served peanuts to someone allergic wouldn't you?

By my memory; not researched, probably wrong, but: one of the early organizations to use the word "toxicity" to describe human behavior was actually (not a joke) Riot Games, in describing some League of Legends players.

I wish I could find the blog post, as it was at least a decade ago at this point, but it described their reasoning as: it's not just malicious behavior, but its malicious behavior which "spreads" between people. Malice creates Malice. Someone yells obscenities in chat, it tilts another player, and that player is now yelling obscenities in the next game; that's toxicity.

Which is only to say that I think it's a good definition and wholly applicable. Corporate politics flows down from the top; the behavior of managers affects the behavior of middle-managers, which can affect the behavior of line workers. Toxicity isn't just a bad apple; its a bad organization.

Both examples are toxic; malicious; whatever adjective you'd like to use.

If the alternative is to worry about devaluing the word, and thus letting less-toxic-by-whatever-definition-suits-me-best workplaces slide, because dontchaknow slaves work for pennies stitching jeans together in bangladesh; that's not acceptable. There's always a greater evil. If you ask me choose the lesser evil; I'd prefer not to choose. It's possible to hold them both accountable.

Moreover, this idea that tech jobs can't be toxic, they must be a lesser evil, because: you're paid so well! You get to work from home! You get free lunch at the office! Job security for life! That's bullshit. Its all, entirely, totally, rooted in society's child-like understanding of mental health. OSHA for mind jobs doesn't exist; it probably shouldn't, because we really don't understand what causes this, why different people react so differently, and what "healthy" looks like. But that doesn't mean the damage isn't real.

I am entirely and totally convinced that in a few decades: we'll look back on comments like your's the same way we look back on the companies who used radium to make measuring cups, or those who lined the walls of houses with asbestos. It'll be overwhelmingly obvious in hind-sight. That toxic workplace behavior can cause damage in people so significant that its net harm is higher than many of the more mundane things OSHA protects against. And maybe more critically to Big Business; that workplaces which operate like this are overwhelmingly low-performing on any timeframe longer than a few weeks.

Your comment will probably age well with time.

I'll add that in this "information economy", we have few (if any) easy-to-learn-and-apply frameworks, analogous to notions of food groups, good vs bad fats, etc.

Thus, not only are we drowning in information (especially as knowledge workers), we're also extremely prone to navigating it in ways detrimental to our (mental) health.

This sounds like a crabs in a bucket response to me.

I have been assigned physical labor jobs in prison that were actual torture where I finished with hypothermia and shredded hands embedded with fiberglass and complaining would definatlely lead to much worse. I have had the bottom of society post prison jobs, like recycling plant where you sorted shit (actual fesses, also, one time a dead body) out of cardboard off a belt going 90 miles an hour with a 60 piece per minute pick requirement and 10 hour shifts. I have worked on stressful development projects. The development projects were much worse for my health mentally and physically long term, and in fact my coping with that in the dumbest way possible led to the sweet prison gig.

At least in the recycling gig we were all in it together, and the prison one I had a fixed date when the suffering would end.

Had to come back because this upset me so much. Here we have an elite person functioning at an incredibly elite level with the strength to reveal their weakness publically with nothing to gain from it but maybe helping others they don't even know and your response is to attack them as being priveledged or coddled. This isn't a seven year old not wanting to go to school and needing to learn a lesson that sometimes we have to work hard. This person has proven themselves already.

Dude your attitude is the reason people don't talk. The reason people OD. The reason they turn to self medicating or self harm. FU! You want an unacceptable view take a look at yourself. If someone has the courage to tell you they are hurting be a God damn human being and understand that they are hurting and don't respond with saying they really shouldn't say anything.

And any worker employed at Foxconn could just as easily read your post about how you and your family were privileged to be able to work in adequately compensated construction jobs with OSHA laws, minimum wage, etc.

Or a person who could only find a job working in a coal mine in the Appalachia mountains, or (insert less privileged position here)...

See how meaningless your comparison is?

I pulled the same vibe from this.

My attitude here is if you don’t like your job and its making you unhealthy AND you work in an industry where just having been at Google on your resume will get you hired just about anywhere else…you should just leave. Why sacrifice health over that?

I have done some shit work prior to tech. My worst tech job in the most “toxic” environment was heads and tails better than working in an industrial laundry washing shop rags, diapers, and restaurant mats.

Xooglers aren't just handed jobs. They still have to pass interviews, and have to live up to a higher expectation because of their background. Stress and medical issues still affect them too.

Are we really going to pretend that Xooglers struggle landing jobs in tech? Relative to what the average software engineer goes through, they are "handed jobs".

> have to live up to a higher expectation because of their background

So you think their background doesn’t give them a leg up in recruiting, interviewing, or hiring, but once they are hired they have to live up to a higher expectation?

Sorry, but they get preference and deference all the way through the process. I have seen it first hand. Also, employers should have high expectations of former Google employees, they are supposed to be the brightest of the bunch.

Wishing that mommy and daddy would just stop arguing is absolutely not a position of privilege.

Huh?

Based on your other comments, it seems your main complaint is the use of the word "toxic". Which I agree is overused and has been expanded to cover more ground than it used to, but the OP is far from the first to apply it more broadly. This is well within the range of how the word is used today, especially when referring to "toxic work environments".

As for the rest, I'm having trouble interpreting your comment any differently from "paper cuts aren't that bad, so why is this person complaining about a stab wound?" Understaffed is common and not in itself that big a deal; working in an environment where the system is visibly working against you, where you lack agency and people are forthright about how your well-being doesn't matter? That even the quality and success of your project doesn't really matter to them? That's not a paper cut.

I used to work in construction as well, and am from a family of carpenters stretching several generations. I've also worked directly with the OP, though briefly. But I also know a fair amount about her work. So I think I have a relevant perspective; whether you respect it or not is up to you. But my experience is that Katelyn is very good technically. She's no whiner, she's persevered through quite a few tough situations that I know of, and what happened with the rest of the team kind of backs up her perspective on the situation. I agree that we software people are privileged, but we also have pressures that people in construction don't have and it's worthwhile looking at them seriously instead of invalidating them because some things are easier. (Construction and carpentry have their own distinct pressures, but also their own benefits. I would far rather be a software developer personally. My dad would far rather be a carpenter. I work on interesting problems and make more money. He works outside and directly improves people's lives, and becomes long-term friends with many of them.)

> Based on your other comments, it seems your main complaint is the use of the word "toxic". Which I agree is overused and has been expanded to cover more ground than it used to, but the OP is far from the first to apply it more broadly. This is well within the range of how the word is used today, especially when referring to "toxic work environments".

I've seen it used as broadly but very rarely - generally, "toxic environments" are ones where intentional malice is involved.

> people are forthright about how your well-being doesn't matter

Where in OP's post is this said? This would actually constitute malintent for me and elevate the situation to toxic but I can't find where this is said. It's possible given your experience that you know this happened, but I don't see it in the post itself.

My main issue is the use of "toxic" coupled with the post's advocacy for helping others recognize when they're in a toxic workplace. My concern is that anyone identifying with the general stress described could then accuse their coworkers/managers of manufacturing a toxic work environment. God forbid I have a meeting that someone else thought was unproductive and then accuses me of creating a toxic workplace.

> My main issue is the use of "toxic" coupled with the post's advocacy for helping others recognize when they're in a toxic workplace. My concern is that anyone identifying with the general stress described could then accuse their coworkers/managers of manufacturing a toxic work environment.

And they should.

A workplace is not supposed to be baseline stressful - and it's your manager's job to make sure it isn't. If stress is a constant part of your work environment, then your manager (or their manager, etc.) isn't doing their job, and that absolutely does create a toxic work environment.

> the word "toxic". Which I agree is overused

I found it refreshing (and surprising!) to see the word here used in a way that referred to near-universal experiences.

Most software frankly isn't really important. It might make or break a company, but that's a pretty limited fault domain; humanity will be fine.

This post is about something that is glaringly more obvious & important than that. The pressure here is immensely real, the need & overwhelming desire to do better, to make it good is flashing in bright neon signs to me, is extrinsically vital. I don't see any of that recognition written in to your privilege-call-out. To me, it's really hard hearing something so vital to the entire technology world (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wasm&sort=byDate shows 32 submissions in the past 22 days, and misses all those posts using "webassembly" instead of wasm) is a poorly supported train-wreck, rampant with infighting, with garden-variety shitty management not doing much to support this vital endeavor. The typical salt-of-the-earth engineers being left to their own devices & expected to just chug along is not a "normal" I'm comfortable with for such a vital cornerstone of modern technology.

You're making this out to be a story about software development & privilege. But I have a very very very different view of this as a much more indicative tale, of how core common capacities humanity is building have a very hard time making it along. I think we all have challenges, for sure, but this is a work that so much hope & aspiration is pinned upon, that so much else is launching upon. Focusing on dis-empathy for the individual is not my take here.

From the post:

> My hope is that this story will help people recognize toxic cultures in their own workplaces

This is the part I'm commenting in reply to. I simply don't see the justification of "toxic" in the environment described (I think it's definitely dysfunctional and callous) and took issue with the stated goal for others to use this experience as an understanding of what constitutes "toxic".

Causing brain damage is as toxic as anything needs to be.

If people are having issue with big techs like Google I can't even fathom what is happening to developer working from Asia and China where 996 is practiced. In many country the starting salary is 200 USD per month without any benefits or 401k that we find in United States.

I don't understand why companies do this to their staff. Why hoard money at expense of someone's life? Why Execs don't understand that they are the main problem of downfall?

Often, it's as simplistic as greed by the top. Generating profits for themselves, then seeing workers as an expensive consumable, as oppose to a more holistic view. Where their workers are human beings, who should be viewed as valuable to their families, society, and company.

Why not, if there are no real consequences.

Wow that's insane. Everyone I've met at Google (I also work here) has been coasting and stealing a living instead of being stressed. I guess you meet those most similar to yourself...

A lot of the coasters have pervasive guilt and a sense of inadequacy, if you dig deep enough. Not all though.

It is an absolutely giant company. This means that you can find almost every possible experience. "Google is awful and here is why" blogs get a lot of traction and there will always be ample supply of people who had a bad experience and chose to leave simply by virtue of there being like 80,000 engineers.

Lots of people are irreparably damaged by toxic workplaces. One of the insidious things about it is the amount of physiological and mental damage being done may not be consciously noticed until far too late. Even to the point of suicide, heart attacks, etc...

Many companies view their workers as a consumable resource, that they can burn up as much as they like. After they burn you out, they bring in the next "victim". This kind of company ideology also attracts sadistic and psycho managers to it, who enjoy creating and inflicting stress and trauma on those they have rank or control over.

These days, it is better for workers to make their mental and physical health a priority. Always be looking for a better company, work environment, or an option that's more suitable. If the difference is between being happy or losing your health, remember that there is no going back or use for money, when you are dead. So a person should take any bad work environments or sadistic supervisors as the "dead serious" threat to their life and happiness as it truly is.

I can’t imagine posting something like this and ever expecting to get hired again.

What’s the upside? Can outside observers really make a considered judgement based on the one-sided and incomplete presentation?

A claim of literal brain damage from stress is both difficult to substantiate and difficult to believe, and what are we supposed to do with it?

I work at a similarly sized and positioned company, and all I can think is that the writer of this post seems very unbalanced.

Possible upsides include catharsis and helping create a better known world, helping give us a more accurate image. Of what many probably perceieved as an immensely highly skilled part of the world, doing unbelievably important & relevant work.

This comment appears to be an apparently unintentional example of the chilling effect on discourse wrought by delegating so much power to our corporate overlords.

>and all I can think is that the writer of this post seems very unbalanced

Maybe the author wasn't that way, and going through the whole ordeal really damaged them, resulting in behavior that would previously seem unthinkable. Really stressful episodes can leave you very screwed up in the head, call it brain damage our however you like, it's a very real thing that happens.

Really stressful episodes can leave you very screwed up in the head

Earlier in my career, I would sometimes get very annoyed when users would call me to report problems. Thinking about it, I realized that it was me that was the problem. I put a picture of a guy working in a coal mine next to my phone so I could have some perspective.

Operation Overlord was the code-name for the Battle of Normandy. The average age of the soldiers in that battle was 20. Up to 226,000 casualties with up to 39,000 dead.

I don't mean to belittle anyone's experiences, but she is claiming permanent brain damage from the stress of being a software engineer and used as evidence of that brain damage that, "some days I couldn’t find my car in the garage or forgot entire conversations". The first one was literally a Seinfeld episode. The second one - who doesn't do that?

I'm glad that strategy worked out for you. It's very easy to get sucked into something (anything), it becoming your entire world, and everything triggering a life or death stress response, when in reality it's not a problem. Being able to take distance from a situation as you mention, and remember that you're just sitting in an office and it's not like you're literally about to die is a very important skill to have.

However, many people don't have it, or just get too apathetic about the job if they detach like that, and live very stressful lives. I've personally seen it happen several times.

> I don't mean to belittle anyone's experiences

Then why did you do it? Surely if you’re self-aware enough to write this part, you’re self-aware enough to not write the rest of the paragraph, or to imply that, if it’s not Battle of Normandy bad, it’s not worth mentioning.

She said that she was put on forced medical leave by her doctor. You ignored that in favor of making a dismissive comment about an anecdote.

The author wrote a highly personal post about a difficult situation, in effort to advise people to avoid situations that caused her trauma. That takes a lot of courage, and I admire her for it.

I can tell your comment comes from a place of wanting to be kind and I commend you for that intention.

We just have different definitions of what constitutes being kind. I think it is kinder to tell people what you really think than it is to coddle them. Sometimes people are better off hearing hard truths.

She described a career filled with unnecessary stress and unsuccessful projects where everyone else is at fault and every environment is toxic. If I were describing my own career in that way, I'd think it was time for some introspection.

If you were her friend, sure. But you're just some internet stranger piling on. Hard truths are delivered in private, not shouted in a public square where the author isn't even present.

But that's not what actually inspired me to comment. The main thing that bugged me about this subthread is that, rather than contributing to a potentially interesting conversation about whether workspaces are toxic, and what to do about it, people are nitpicking whether the author's self-described trauma is legitimate or not. Regardless of whether it's true, it strikes me as a form of ad-hominem... ignoring the content in favor of attacking the author.

That's not so much about you, I have to admit, as the whole subthread. Thanks for a thoughtful reply.

> "Every toxic workplace I’ve been in was usually the result of bad executive leadership, and this was no different."

> "...were central to our struggles and the toxicity of the environment. ... two experts in their fields from competing corporations would fail to agree"

> "...at best we had a part-time PM for a brief time who volunteered and then moved on"

> "...our leads were overworked and lacked the power to create change."

>"...I’ve seen managers cry multiple times, and this is one of the places that happened."

>"...and I’ve been blessed with colleagues and leads who have seen the worth of it and supported me."

This does not read as though she is blaming "everyone else". Throughout the post there is a very heavy focus on "we" and "our" for referring to the team and the teams stress and lack of empowerment. I thought she went out of her way to make clear it wasnt the team she worked with, but upper management fostering a negative environment.(ex, not supporting the team needing a PM) Finally recognizing that upper leadership and people outside the project injecting themselves into or blocking change, seems like introspection. Finally seeing that this was not right/healthy, is how one gets out of an abusive pattern. This is more of a retrospective than the sprint

> Over time I slowly lost my mind and short term memory, to the point that some days ...

Added the first part of the sentence missing from your example. Prolonged exposure to an unhealthy stressed environment can create physical changes in the brain and body. In this case, chronic stress which had such adverse effects it caused a forced medical leave.

> ...from the stress of being a software engineer

"My two years at Google were spent perpetually stressed, acting as an unofficial PM, helping run meetings and document decisions while dealing with sometimes hostile colleagues." - I can't speak for others, but this is not the 'normal' stress of being a software engineer that I know. That has all kinds of red flags. I have never been asked to perform the duties of an assistant/secretary or help organize a meeting that was not mine. Nor have I had to juggle the actual normal stress of my software job on top of having an unofficial/unpaid PM role (itself a full time job), while also having to deal with hostile colleagues. And, it seems they were not the only ones having to deal with some of this.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/protect-your-br...

https://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(05)0003...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03064...

In this case, chronic stress which had such adverse effects it caused a forced medical leave.

You seem to know a lot about this - can you tell me what "forced medical leave" is? It seems to imply that a doctor ordered her to stop working against her will and that she was forced to obey. In what states is that legal? I've googled every iteration of "forced medical leave" I can think of and the only thing I can find is that it is illegal for employers to force you to take medical leave in lieu of complying with reasonable accommodations.

I don't see anything about a doctor being able to order "forced medical leave" so appreciate any help you can provide in helping me understand what that means.

Depending on your medical circumstances, if a physician believes there's a threat to your health and safety, they can have you sent for in-patient treatment against your will. I know people this has happened to.

If your health deteriorates to the point where a physician has graduated from gentle advice to very strong recommendations, if things get any worse they may be forced to take that intervention. There are specific symptoms and conditions that will set off red flags and alarm bells where they will begin asking you specific screening questions that may lead to taking drastic action.

Mental health problems can be serious stuff when they get out of hand! Your body will do bizarre stuff it wouldn't normally do even if you're a perfectly healthy individual. In my case it was bad enough things had progressed to very strongly worded recommendations, and given the circumstances I was totally okay with taking the advice even though it would negatively impact the project (and my career).

they can have you sent for in-patient treatment

Sure, everyone knows that. But "forced medical leave" from work seems to be something completely different. I can't seem to find any information whatsoever about it.

Perhaps the author could have worded that differently as “involuntary medical leave”?

Employers can require a return-to-work note from the doctor. If that doctor involuntary committed her and suggested she quit, there is a good chance the doctor may hold on to that note for a bit as well.

If something like this is what happened, I would suspect it would raise HR flags to the point of requiring the note to return to work.

https://www.google.com/search?q=return+to+work+release

> What’s the upside? Can outside observers really make a considered judgement based on the one-sided and incomplete presentation?

Not everything has to have an upside. It takes courage to be a whistle-blower.

>... and what are we supposed to do with it?

We are supposed to learn from others experience, so we don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

> I work at a similarly sized and positioned company, and all I can think is that the writer of this post seems very unbalanced.

So what? Why do you think your experience at a different org matters in this case? If everything is working well for you, good, carry on.

“Seems very unbalanced”…. As in the author isn’t presenting all sides because it’s a personal experience narrative?

Or are you using a sly way of calling them crazy?

The other way to look at it is to see it as very intelligent filtering by the author. If I only want to work at places that are committed to my mental health, and I have the expertise to get hired at Google, then I might very well be comfortable with filtering out 99% of companies. If the average person sees me and goes "Well I think this person is very unbalanced" and chooses not to hire them, that saves a lot of time for the author.

You could say a very similar thing about coming out as gay. If a man figures out he's gay, he doesn't benefit from still including women in his dating pool. Maybe his dating pool shrinks by 95%, but who cares, he only wants the last 5% anyway. The hard part of dating isn't really finding a dateable person, but narrowing down the set of all people to a mostly optimal one. Likewise, the hard part of finding a job isn't finding a place that's hiring, but narrowing down the set of all jobs to a mostly optimal one.

Really? Sometimes I'd agree, but this post made me think positively of this person.

What they described they were doing and tried to do seems like everything I'd expect of a good employee. It's too bad they didn't get the support they needed for it to work and suffered psychologically from it.

They seemed to care deeply about the work and have really high standards for what they were building. They explained that they tried to rally people, bring light to the issue, they stepped in to try and unblock the project, get people moving along, resolve disagreements, etc.

At the same time, all the complaints I've seen before on poorly run organizations. Projects are stalled, spinning their wheels, entralled in forever discussions, decisions are not being made, and when you try to escalate to get things unblocked, the leadership doesn't do anything about it, they just go well I want you all to figure it out ok. And things go right back to being the same dysfunctional. Eventually it hemorrhages talent, people start to leave, quit, switch to something else, and only then does something gets done because now it reflects in actual metrics.

You have to have worked in better run organizations to maybe recognize how badly run that is.

The role of an exec is to maximize output from the resources and assets under their control. Knowing how to best leverage talent, knowing how to properly delegate authority to key people, intervene when there's contention that goes unresolved for too long, allocate additional resources when output suffers from the lack of it, and make decisions about what to invest in, who to invest in, and what/who gets the cut and won't be invested in. All these things are what good management should do.

I think sometimes we talk too much about being a good engineer, but we don't have enough conversation about being a good exec, trust me, like how half of all engineers are below average, and some are outright terrible, this is true of execs as well, except execs seem to get away with it for even longer normally, because there's so many people under them to pick up their slack.

It's weird, I had the opposite reaction. I find myself wondering whether there is some way to fit them in my org. To each their own, I suppose.

I'd try to hire Katelyn in an instant if I had an appropriate role. Her reputation precedes her (I knew of her from multiple social/technical circles long before I knew she was even on HN) and honesty, when you've gone out of your way to try to fix a problem and it's made you blow a proverbial tire in the process, doesn't bother me.

You, on the other hand, are slagging her with personal attacks in multiple comments in this thread. I wouldn't hire you after knowing you wrote them and I don't think you'd be saying the things you are with your name on them.

I made two comments, including this one, neither of which I’d call “slagging”, but I can see why you might disagree.

It sounds like we wouldn’t be a good cultural fit for each other’s organizations and that’s okay.

Thanks for providing an alternative viewpoint to consider.

Yeah, let's just be slaves and never say what we really think.

Engineers should never succumb to corporate slavery, here are the reasons:

1) too smart

2) Can find a job elsewhere

3) Google in a resume is literally gold(for her particularly)

Should there never be a competence level after which one can share what they really think.

Are we really free if we can't voice unpopular opinions like hey it's a FAANG but it sucked.

> Worse still, our leads were overworked and lacked the power to create change. Any team needs expert leadership to thrive, and expert leaders need support from the people they report to so they can do what’s necessary. Our leadership did not have that support. The V8 team as a whole had the misfortune of reporting to the leader of the Chrome organization, a careless man who continues to have one of the worst approval ratings in the entire company. In my career I’ve seen managers cry multiple times, and this is one of the places that happened. A manager should never have to ask whether they’re a coward, but that happened here.

I just spent four years at a company as a lead who uses an internal hierarchy that reinforces this. We hire non-technical managers or managers who did not reach Senior or Staff engineering ranks. Discussions with them are long and often feel like saying your ABC's backwards and forwards. Tech leads are leveled under managers and managers carry technical decision making authority proxied as business decision making. I started getting heart palpatations and my depression and cynicism was starting to reach levels that resembled what they were when I first got out of the Marines after less than a year off deployment.

Just leave. It's not worth spending time in a place where the company has such a disorganized idea of itself that it prioritizes the people who know how to make the cakes input below that of the people who push things from one column into the other. There are no amount of "hard conversations" you can have with folks like this. You speak two different languages from two different perspectives.

> My two years at Google were spent perpetually stressed, acting as an unofficial PM, helping run meetings and document decisions while dealing with sometimes hostile colleagues.

This is the position I found myself in while working on a greenfield project for a FAANG company. Management structure either didn't exist (we didn't have a proper PM for nearly a year) or wasn't competent enough to take pressure off of the devs. It was so hard to fire bad hires and make good new ones that I was the _only_ dev contributing for a long time (then it became 2 devs, and he's still the only competent dev on the team to this day).

I think most of the time when you're in this scenario, the best option is just to quit. Most likely you as an individual won't make enough of a difference to fix the problems, and regardless, it's not worth your health. I eventually left and worked at a decent sized startup for ~8 months before completely burning out. I wasn't forced by a doctor to take leave, but I felt like I had no other choice, and I'm still not working a year later.

TL;DR: Be careful and cognizant of your brain and body. Don't try to run everything at your job, because it likely won't end up getting fixed and you'll just kill yourself.

Really interesting. Sorry for your experience but I'm glad I read this. At my last job I became overwhelmed and now in retrospect I can see I developed attention issues. I just could not focus. I have had great focus over decades long career but it got worn away.

Some of that is that my manager actually sabotaged me. I think the problem is that I am a terrific coder and he is not. He had driven away 3 engineers (from the company, not the project) before me in a little over a year, so believe me. I could actually not get a paid copy of the debugger tool although I was the highest ranked engineer on the project!! I was working on the free version where I had to make a new account or something every few hours!! Wow, I cannot believe I didn't understand the signal there. (He later got demoted from people management.)

The other thing that I intensely dislike in the current tech world is the constant interrupt mode from the tools, slack and teams. I think that causes focus to deteriorate over time although I am not aware of any studies. It causes anxiety to flow freely through organizations and I don't think people are aware of the downsides to that.

I also had major stresses in my personal life. Family issues. I just could not focus anymore and took early retirement. What I have been doing is Machine Learning courses. I think I want to do my own research projects. The good news is my focus problems, a year later, are GONE. The stock market dive may force me back to work but I hope not, not right away. I was a principal at one of the biggies so I did very well for awhile and with a little luck it could last the rest of my life and then some (for the kid).

I do a lot of meetings with a fair amount of companies and while it's not a regular occurance, some people think hostility towards others is acceptable. The best thing we can do regardless of where we stand is call those people out immediately and let them know that their behavior is unacceptable. You either get an apology or you quickly learn that working at X for Y isn't worth it.

Hostility, yelling, threats, etc just aren't worth it and I have zero patience for it in a job. I had an exec once who would threaten to cut people's fingers off if they didn't accomplish incredibly unreasonable things, or throw them out windows, or whatever.. It wasn't a serious threat, but it also isn't a fun thing to listen to all the time.

I realized after a while of that sort of abuse that no job is worth that and I have much less tolerance for it. Thankfully it isn't super common, but it is surprising how many people think that is a useful way to work.

> We did not have a producer. We knew we needed one, we tried to get one, and at best we had a part-time producer

What's a producer? Is it the same as a PM?

Basically yeah.

Depending on where you work it's a PM, yes.

> That stress and the importance of the project were central to our struggles and the toxicity of the environment. Many design discussions became heated and two experts in their fields from competing corporations would fail to agree, convinced that their informed opinion was correct.

I work in the Wasm ecosystem, and I unfortunately also share this viewpoint. I think that the toxicity from the beginning has transformed somehow the developers working on it for long and has leaked into other ways of managing disagreement within the Wasm ecosystem.

Before WebAssembly, I was working full time on GraphQL (a community that I deeply love and respect, where everyone was very friendly to each other) and I completely found myself lost when seeing how competing companies in the Wasm ecosystem, rather working towards collaboration paths, wanted to push each other down. I have hopes though, that once things stabilize a bit, the ecosystem will recover :)

Not everybody is cut out for every job. I was once essentially fired from a job as a checkout clerk at a small business because I was so atrociously slow at counting my register's money at night. Everybody had to sit around after closing, waiting for 30min, while I counted and re-counted my bank. This made me pretty unpopular. If you hate your job, for whatever reason, then find a new way to earn a living. Look for something you're good at: broadly, holistically, in general. This person sounds like a good programmer, sure. But they don't sound suited to the culture at Google, or as a participant in contentious new specifications. That's okay, not every job is for every person. There's lots of things to do.

OP and some of the comment here make it sound like this is a job/environment that no sane person would be "cut out" for, or at least they'd not remain sane for long.

I don't think making excuses for that is a good idea.

I don't see GP making excuses for anything, only acknowledging that toxic work environments exist in the world (which sucks) and some people cope with them better than others.

OP also has a history of mental illness, so I would take their conception of sanity with a grain of salt

Nothing about this surprises me. Google is an engineering driven organization that has no idea how to utilize PMs properly and where being the “smartest person in the room” is incentivized so there’s little to no humility and curiosity and it’s more about individual “winning” than best outcomes for customers; if you operate in a mutual learning way you’ll just have worse but more aggressive/ambitious people end run around you. These things are fixable (and there are some pockets in the company that don’t have these pathologies) but there seems to be little interest in doing so company wide.

But maybe I’m just a disgruntled ex-employee who prefers a Satya Nadella to a Sundar Pichai.

It might explain why WASM stagnated for so long.

To be honest, google and apple probably want to kill WASM. Those company lose money because of good standards.

> Those company lose money because of good standards.

They absolutely do not, and they often make money and realize many other benefits by leveraging and/or contributing to standards.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

https://www.fastcompany.com/3044088/apple-and-usb-a-history-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_File_Format#Extensio...

> "contributing to" standards

ftfy

The gp post did say "good standards," so I'm assuming that means open, unbiased ones.

> ftfy

I think the double quotes are meant to suggest that all open source contributions by Google and Apple are bad, somehow?

I love the idea of "unbiased" though, as if contributors to standards must have no opinions about the standard one way or the other in order to be "pure".

Yep. Good standards = healthy competition in the space. Standards that basically just standardize what someone has already done, standards that require special licensing, require a high degree of effort to implement, etc, all create competitive advantages for large incumbents.

WASM and the further development of API's like WebGL are a dangerous threat to their app store revenue, so both Apple and Google are incentivized to lead (or sometimes stall) development.

> WASM and the further development of API's like WebGL are a dangerous threat to their app store revenue…

I'm not sure how you arrive at "web technologies are a dangerous threat to app store revenue", given that the iPhone was introduced with the best web browser ever made for mobile, and predated the app store by more than a year. Care to elaborate?

Sure, Fortnite is a great example. If it can well run via web (which is a current workaround via Xbox Cloud Gaming), Apple can’t take their 30% cut. Same with Roblox and other games. Top paid apps like Procreate could do the same.

Apple and Google could lose tens of billions in revenue if they make the web too good too fast.

Yeah Fortnite could run well in WebAssembly and WebGPU for example, cloud streaming isn't necessary to get Fortnite on the mobile web.

My team is actually developing a suite of tools and platform to enable Unreal Engine game developers to deploy their games to HTML5, bypassing walled gardens and 30% fees entirely.

> My team is actually developing a suite of tools and platform to enable Unreal Engine game developers to deploy their games to HTML5, bypassing walled gardens and 30% fees entirely.

Okay, so your POV makes more sense now. I'm a fan of the web, so I wish you the best in making the web a platform for non-casual gaming.

IMHO, if you view this primarily as a technology problem, you're going to learn that it isn't. Even when the technology prerequisites exist (Safari supports both Wasm and WebGL today), someone will need to solve the problems that app stores solve.

Great points. And regarding it not being a technology problem, you're referring to the obstacle of getting users to go to the web as a platform for discovering software, rather than the App Store or Google Play, right?

Not the poster you are asking this question of... but yes, that was true 15 years ago.

However these days, app stores have proven their massive profitability, so web tech on par with native apps threatens that income stream.

Offering reasonable functionality via web can be a huge win for certain app categories (anything with IAP or subscription) because it is easier to offer payment options that bypass app stores and their mandatory revenue slice.

> However these days, app stores have proven their massive profitability, so web tech on par with native apps threatens that income stream.

Does it? Of the millions of apps in the Apple and Google app stores, can you list a few that were pulled in favor of web-only distribution once web APIs made a web app possible?

https://infrequently.org/2021/04/progress-delayed/

Never underestimate the important of good leadership. A leader can recognize these things and a lot more. It seems like companies don't hire experienced project managers/managers anymore but try to get programmers to wear those hats because they think programmers won't respect someone who isn't a programmer even if they are tech savvy. I can't say I blame them as marketing and BAs seem to end up in the manager role and that's often much worse. There used to be a middle ground in the days before agile. Now it's like it doesn't matter because fail first and fast is the M.O. and "don't worry, we'll fix it in a future sprint after enough people complain."

> The WebAssembly spec ended up being built on obscure and ill-suited technology

To clarify, do you think it's still built on obscure and ill-suited technology, or is that a criticism of how it was at first? And which technology are you talking about?

My personal opinion is that web specifications should not be written in Ocaml. Things are better now, but when the decision was made to do the whole spec in it, you couldn't even run it on Windows. It also didn't support float32 at the time (might still not support it?) so the reference interpreter had to manually implement float32.

I have nothing against people who like MLs though, and they can be the right solution for certain problems.

I thought "obscure and ill-suited technology" was a reference to SPIR-V or something. Was not expecting it to be about an executable spec in Ocaml.

Hugs, I'm not gonna make this about me, just so sorry you had to go through this too. It does take time to recover to the point where we're functional again; but prolonged periods of fight/flight, and no safe place, does something to our psyche as well as physical health. I trigger easily on things from toxic men that most women manage to deal with by age 13 or so. Struggling now to find ways of making the world a better place so that our children and grandchildren don't have to go through this too.

This 2014 article in LifeHacker describes a “toxic work environment” thus:

In short, a toxic work environment is any job where the work, the atmosphere, the people, or any combination of those things make you so dismayed it causes serious disruptions in the rest of your life.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-handle-a-toxic-work-environmen...

Ah yes, toxic bosses. I once left a gig after my boss convinced me to take over as lead, and then blamed every problem with the schedule/features/etc. on me a few weeks later.

Another terrible boss told me one day I was spending too much time on a task, and the next day that I was not spending enough time on a task. I did learn to ask pointedly in hiring interviews whether there was any sign of micro-management in the role.

> lost my mid and short term memory

Yep -- after taking on 3+ job contexts (teaching, software startups, and volunteer orgs), I lost all confidence in saying people's names because I started having trouble recalling them... people I knew for years.

For others, I recommend "The End of Burnout" by Jonathan Malesic. It helped me to identify unhealthy work habits and change the priority system I use to manage my time.

I'd love to see the retrospective warning signs. I wonder if there's ways to see a boss at a bigCo is a dictator during the interview process.

I have been through the same too. I still remember the click in my head, when something snapped in my brain after an unusually long week where I basically slept at the office to get a change request through change management.

It was excruciating company stupidity red tape hell on earth. But the fix was neccessary after a bug in our latest software that severly slowed down one of our big customers. And change management fascists dragged out a simple fix for a whole week from a different timezone than mine.

After that click I could all of a sudden enter the car park with groceries in my hands having no memory of going there, what was in the bags or where the car was.

I had trouble signing my name on credicard purchases.

I stopped sleeping and got into a state of perpetual constant stress, rage and fear.

I was entering clinical insanity.

I did not do therapy in the end. I quit my job, found another with less pay but also less responsabilities and moved into a small flat. Rented out my own. For a year I spent my time with one mattress, one glass, one dish and a small case of clothes.

Went to and from work walking and spent most my free time walking around with nature sound in my player. Water mostly. Or excercising. Strength, yoga , cardio all kinds.

Changed eating habits to simple eating.

Not a diet per se but simple easy to make and eat foods. A little meat and potaoes. A dish of pasta. A fruit. Always home made dishes. That was part of the healing. Simple cooking.

About 3 months in I started sleeping again and it took a year before I had no longer that stress knot in my stomach.

Its been 6 years now and I will never be the same, something broke me at that job.

I do however stop immediatly if the stress knot is starting to return and pause. What am I doing? Why am I stressed. Etc.

I find wfh relaxes me. I am less aware of office politics from home which is a huge stress trigger for me. I started reading again. Learning how to enjoy simple things helped me a great deal.

Stop social media. I hung on to social media until the past 2 years.

reddit was by far my worst trigger for a while, next to facebook. Cut down even on streaming. Only a few select movies and series.

I cut out toxic people from my life, that included toxic co workers.

I would find ways of doing my job with a minuscule or zero amount of toxic co workers.

I asked to change teams when I realized I had a terrible boss. Old me would have sucked it up.

New me went to HR and asked if I could move to another team.

Great team as it happened.

The old me is never coming back, the new me will rather wash dishes in a restaurant than go down that road again.

Also, I got a cash bonus of about 2000 dollars for that week that I finally broke. And the customer sent me a box of chocolates.

So that was the price tag for my mental health I guess…..

When you look at how some people want to see WASM evolve, there are reasons to be very concerned about it

- exception handling

- GC

- JIT

Some people want to make WASM something similar to java bytecode or C#'s IL, and it defeats its purpose of being a lightweight, platform agnostic target

The harm was already done, WASM is still compelling (today), but the direction it is taking mean it'll just die..

I know i'm not the only one who think that, so i'm not surprised how painful it is to work on such field, with such team

I'm actually pretty excited about the three features you mention, mainly because it would make WASM useful to me.

Why not make WASM as simple as possible, and let layers on top of it deal with extensions like GC?

Stacking abstractions, like how computer architecture used to work in the old days.

If you provide a non-opinionated base platform, users will add opinions, and those will not all be compatible with each other.

Not adding GC or not defining how exceptions work could easily lead to a situation where you want to use a couple of third-party libraries, but discover they, combined, use three different garbage-collecting memory allocators and two different ways to handle exceptions, even where function overloading works differently in different libraries.

As an example, look at string implementations in various C programs. Even if they if they boil down to a pair (int, malloced memory), you still might not be able to pass one obtained from a function in one library to a function in another library.

Sounds nice in theory, but I suppose that if Linux or OSX or whatever OS you use forced developers to use one style of GC, a lot of people would be very disappointed.

I believe that the problem is that the more features you add, the less general it's going to be (for example, add canonical exception handling and you'll almost certainly exclude Common Lisp, the advanced exception handling features of which the canonical exception handling for WASM almost certainly won't include). Presumably on a scale from a physical computer to a JVM, you don't want to slide towards JVM too much, since not everyone wants to program in Java.

Sounds like what you want is Java Applets.

Everyone wants graalvm, people have just not realized it yet and it's sad

EH, GC and JIT are examples of difficult things that some use cases demand, yeah. They were intentionally punted out of the MVP into the Future as a result of that - the spec committee were aware of the need for those things (and some of us actively wanted them) but it's really hard to satisfy all interested parties and still ship.

Exception Handling appears to be in really good shape right now, but I have my doubts about GC. I'm not sure JIT will ever be solved (right now people seem to just compile tons of modules and hope the browser won't crash).

I don't think any of this means that WASM has a bad future, but it'll probably require a lot of careful work as it has up until now.

Aren't those functionalities critical for WASM to fully replace JS and become "the common runtime" for all web languages? I don't think we can build an efficient implementation of those on top of the "simple" WASM.

The more features you add, the less (not more) common it's going to be as a runtime.

Spend 5 minutes reading about WASM and see how everyone involved in it keeps repeating "replacing JS is NOT the goal". Even with all the repeating, the message does not seem to be coming across.

To be fair, I imagine the original IBM PC team in 1980 kept repeating "replacing our mainframes is NOT the goal", too.

Exception handling is necessary to efficiently support languages that need it without giving them direct control over the stack. I'd prefer if exception handling was provided with a more general abstraction though.

GC is necessary for the same reasons, to prevent each language from bringing it's own GC and to enable cross-language interop.

JIT is already implied by the very nature of Webassembly being an architecture independent stack machine, so every runtime has to already be a JIT compiler anyway (except interpreters). Exposing JITing to Wasm code is a natural progression and very valuable.

Not that the WASM spec work doesn't have problems (looking in as an outsider), but the existence of these features are not my complaints.

If you want to write in a high-level language in the browser, wouldn't it make more sense to compile to JavaScript?

It seems to me like the main value proposition in Web Assembly was to provide a target for languages like C, C++, and Rust.

Compiling to JS is a good option, with the caveat that it will never deliver consistent performance. JS engine vendors place less importance on optimizing for JS transpilers now that the future is WebAssembly.

GC & JIT are complications, but some error handling and ways to deal with complex types are truly useful, IMHO.

WASM has become a Web Standard a couple of years ago. It's very simple (at its first version at least) which allowed all browser implementers to support it from day one. It has accomplished the goal of running C/C++ applications efficiently. Rust code can mostly compile to WASM and run as well (only crates that use stuff like drivers or OS-specific calls don't work).

However, a few years later, there's not much that has been improved in the WASM world. The work being done on the current proposals is monumental and would require the same level of investment that has already been spent on things like the JVM and the .NET runtime, as you point out. To write a specification as well written as WASM for these things is basically impossible.

And they're only doing that in order to support other high level languages to compile to it without having to ship their own runtimes.

But the problem is that given how hard the work is, the benefit of doing this would need to be enormous to justify spending so much work on it... but it's not! JavaScript, for better or worse, has pretty decent performance and a huge amount of code has been written in it. If you try to re-write something in Java or Go, say, to replace JS, even when WASM supports GC and exceptions, I doubt it'll improve anything over JS performance.

Besides, GraalVM already exists which can run nearly any language with very high performance if you're not completely locked on the web platform.

So, all this drama that's going on around WASM for what?

I say, leave it alone, make sure it stays simple and supports high performance stuff written on non-managed languages... and consider the job done.

> I doubt it'll improve anything over JS performance.

I will take a small memory/performance/bandwidth hit to not have to program in JavaScript.

We aren't fully there yet but something like .NET Blazor demonstrates the potential. Once we've over the hump I expect an explosion of alternatives.

These are considered extensions and WASM is useful even without them.

> of being a lightweight, platform agnostic target

A little late for that. I see that my Chrome browser is currently using 2.66GB of RAM (for about 40 tabs, or about 65M per tab). I remember when I first started using Java, my whole computer only had 8M of RAM, and while it has gotten larger, I think it is still considerably lighter weight than a web app, despite also giving much richer APIs and multi-threading. The advantage of web apps isn't that they're lighter weight from a systems resource point of view, but lighter weight from a user's effort in installing and using the app, point of view (now that Applets are gone).

You forgot the fourth: file I/O, and wider coverage by JavaScript thereof

Adding those features doesn't mean you have to start using them for everything. This is different from how they work in the JVM or CLR- their role in WebAssembly is to enable interop with the host (which already has them regardless), and to round out some of the capabilities that native code has but which can't be implemented efficiently on the current WebAssembly sandbox.

I don't see how that harms WebAssembly as a lightweight cross-platform target. It may make it more difficult to implement, but AIUI there will always be room for simpler hosts that leave these features out or keep them simplistic. There is no equivalent ecosystem problem to adding these kinds of features to a language, where all your dependencies will start using them, any more than inherently exists for native code that can already just implement those things itself.

I've poked around in Chrome's source code, and what struck me is that the JS-to-C++ interface seems pretty similar to what's going on in a game engine - C++ classes with generally pretty similar APIs to their JS counterparts are wrapped and exposed to JavaScript - I think this is the way WebAssembly should be implemented as well- an interface that replaces this interaction layer with its own - since the native objects' lifetimes are handled by C++, a typical WASM target language (say C++ or Rust) would be pretty straightforward, since it could access these resources with similar semantics.

Additonally, in managed, garbage collected runtimes, like .NET, the handling of native resources with explicit lifetimes is a solved problem as well - garbage collection would be handled by the languages own runtimes, no need to move this responsibility to WASM.

This would also avoid the issue of having the .NET GC and the JS GC coexist - this typical too many cooks scenario of 2 separate GCs is a nightmare to manage.

Another daring, pie-in-the-sky thought: Javascript could use this interface as well, becoming just one of the many languages that can target the browser.

WebAssembly is an obscolete tech, it needs to be replaced with the disruptively polyglot GraalVM

Is there a lawsuit in the offing? Because that's how it feels reading this. It will be difficult to prove that the stress of a fairly standard difficult work environment in high tech caused memory loss and brain damage.

If there was, they wouldn't or at least shouldn't blog about it. To me it just feels like a well deserved rant, that hopefully lifts some weight off the author's shoulders, and gives us some interesting topic for discussion.

I've never heard of a lawsuit over emotional/psychological damage done by a difficult work environment (apart from those due to the racism/sexism/abuse-of-power/etc..). I do agree that psychologically difficult work environments are very common and many are not really avoidable even though some (like probably this one) definitely are.

IANAL but I think it would be easy for Google to argue that they're paying their workers exorbitant wages with the idea that they would be working at the highest tier of skill, responsibility, competitiveness and stress. Even though in this particular situation it doesn't seem very warranted.

How many tens thousands of workers are working in soul crushing zombifying factory lines and Amazon warehouses? I've heard that if you work for Amazon in Seattle you literally don't see sunlight for the entire winter. If we're going to defend the brains of our highest paid workers, what about our lowest ones?

Of course, ideally we would both, I'm just saying law makers are probably not very keen on opening that can of worms.

They say they quit a week before their options vested. Why not write something up and try to lay the grounds for a lawsuit?

My sister actually successfully sued an employer for psychological damage due to workplace abuse. I never talked to her about what specifically they did, though, and this was a call center that I have to assume was far more abusive than a Google engineer experiences.

Of course, I myself get disability payments from the VA due to permanent injuries sustained while in the Army, but that's pretty common. I left that job with ten screws in my spine, which is a little easier to quantify than "I felt stressed." Ironically enough, in spite of having a few diagnosed and treated brain injuries, including one in which I wasn't allowed to drive for two months, I got nothing for that. I'm reasonably sure my memory is worse than it was, but it's nearly impossible to prove that. Before and after tests are no longer possible if you didn't do a before test, and who regularly takes any sort of test of cognitive function before getting injured?

My son was recently in a motorcycle accident and he did a multi-hour written test and determined that he could no longer do the math he did in college (not the average I forgot how to do that but in a much worse way). That might work for you if you have college classes to look back on.

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