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Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a lot of high level engineers at Google leave over the past couple of years. There's vastly more pressure from management and much less trust. And a bunch of L7+ folks have been expected to shift to working on AI stuff to have "enough impact." The increased pressure has created a lot of turf wars among these folks, as it isn't enough to be a trusted steward but now you need your name at the top of the relevant docs (and not the names of your peers).

Prior to 2023 I pretty much only ever saw the L7s and L8s that I work with leave Google because there was an exciting new opportunity or because they were retiring. Now most of the people I see leave at this level are leaving because they are fed up with Google. It's a mess.

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I think there's a simpler answer. Google has drastically slowed hiring. Less hiring means fewer natural opportunities for growth.

I joined in 2021. I feel like I caught the tail end of old Google. Any decent idea was greenlit.

Now, it is a lot harder to find resources to do things. (This is of course relative. It is still far easier than any other place I've worked at).

The company has transitioned into something a little more traditional.

For at least some of the L7+ people I know who have left they weren't interested in growth (others I'm not certain). I know one person who left because they weren't able to get the VPs to greenlight their stuff and eventually got frustrated by it but I definitely know others who left because "continue to be a responsible steward for this large ecosystem that is important to Google's ongoing success" was no longer a viable path to sustained work (as opposed to promotion).

> Less hiring means fewer natural opportunities for growth.

IC's natural way of growth is to produce larger impact by solving harder problems, there are always hard unsolved problems which hold some business opportunities.

This is almost a myth. Think of it this way: you can either manage 5 people that solve a problem or you can solve a problem yourself that it would've taken 5 people to solve. At the end of the day, it's the scale of the problem that matters (not the technical "hardness"). Are there sometimes problems that one domain expert can solve, effectively and fully, that it would've taken 5 generalists to solve otherwise? Sure. Is it common? Not in "big tech".

> Think of it this way: you can either manage 5 people that solve a problem

there are levels of problem you will struggle to find 5 people to solve it on avg senior dev salary

> Not in "big tech".

especially in big tech, where there is constant arm race in building systems handling millions QPS over petabytes of data and with all recent advanced AI.

> there are levels of problem you will struggle to find 5 people to solve it on avg senior dev salary

You're agreeing with me even though you think you're disagreeing. Yes it is hard for one person (one senior dev salary) to solve large problems most of the time.

> where there is constant arm race in building systems handling millions QPS over petabytes of data and with all recent advanced AI.

Yes I'm saying that at that scale it's very hard to solve the problem by yourself.

My point is that in certain domains your regular devs can't solve problem, there are some 10x experts who can solve it.

For some problems, one 10x expert could be enough, for others you need some team (small), and they will be able to achieve results where NNN randomly hired senior devs from the market won't produce useful product.

So, the goal of IC is to become such 10x expert if he wants to grow as engineer and not as manager.

it's very hard to tell when an individual has solved a problem that otherwise would have taken 5 people to solve... so you'll likely find that it's much easier for big tech to reward people for managing large teams or leading large teams to execute on a project rather than for solving such problems themselves

Forget about being rewarded for being a problem solver in a big corp. Respected: yes. Rewarded: no.

I don't know what it's like right now, but around the time I left last year, it was a proper exodus. What a sorry waste.

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