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Comment by asdfman123 | Hacker News Reader

This is also why I'm thinking about leaving Google. I have little to sit through meetings, try to pawn necessary work off to others, and play the game while there's a hundred small tasks that my project desperately needs me to get done.

I can jump ship and make $50-100k/yr more because the next place I work will actually value my experience, even though it's technically much more useful to Google.

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Where will you go that will be a 50k-100k bump over google comp?

Lots of places, for two reasons

1) companies usually hire ex-Googlers up-level because they're perceived as being more valuable (Google titles tend to under-represent engineer capabilities; an L4 Googler is an SSE elsewhere).

2) Google was one of the FAANGs that fixed wages via unofficial non-competes. Their compensation ladders still reflect that.

Dealing with some ex googlers at my current (non tech company) now, Jesus Christ they are culture killers at regular companies.

I know at my last job I closed any resumes that had Google on them. They generally didn’t do well at startups in my opinion, the scope and responsibilities are too broad and there is no where to hide. And the ones I did hire tended to want to make everything look the way it did at Google.

That seems a little much; Google has had such a huge number of software employees, that it seems unwise to draw assumptions about everyone based on what I imagine has been a much smaller sample size than the total that you've personally worked with.

exactly this. Working with a couple ex-google and ex-facebook. Without failing every meeting we hear at least once "At Google/Facebook we used to ..." for something that is completely not applicable here.

I work at one of the big companies and some people do that even here. People just talk about their experience or other systems that they know. It always feels conservative to me, as often it's said to suggest emulating what some other group or company did to solve an often superficially similar problem, but with entirely different constraints. I think some people with certain kinds of thought patterns just pattern match and try to apply past experience a bit too broadly.

Google doesn't exactly pay top of market.

who does these days?

Lots of high-paying companies, if you work on hard engineering problems. Probably not many for CRUD or frontend.

Let's hear some examples :)

HFT (evergreen), kernel hacker, machine learning engineer, AI compiler engineer, GPU engineer are the top of the crop currently.

Google would be a $50-100k bump over Google if they promoted me to the level commensurate with my experience

Google comp is known to be low. Top candidates with in-demand skills can easily ask for 2x TC of google and get a stream of offers pouring in.

ask where?

If you indicate that you're available, and you have a attractive public profile, top headhunters will contact you.

Smaller companies need to outbid Google for talent, especially if they carry less stability. I imagine there are quite many who went like: leaves Google for great cash package at smaller company/start up -> smaller company goes belly up -> go back to FAANG

I did this. Google (at least, the chain of managers I had) didn't know how to manage people like me and I wish I'd realized it sooner.

I make more money now doing more effective work faster at a smaller company with a focused project, not a 100,000-person everything company.

would you be willing to share how much more you made and what you had been making?

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