What's the worst part about working at Google? | Hacker News Reader

What's the worst part about working at Google?

quora.com

28 pointsgs711 comments

Google is a lot like a federal agency. They get a pile of resources first, then each sub-group figures out how to squander it in ways that make themselves, their work, and their budgets seem necessary and important. The result is they review each other, design processes for process review, monitor compliance, create regulations for other teams, try to find excuses to add more people and budget to their groups, have more and longer meetings, "develop software" by filling in blanks in some proprietary, automated process admin screen spread across three expensive monitors, go to an important Google Tech Talk related to cool technology they won't be allowed to use unless they leave Google, dish political dirt afterwards while noshing on free culinary resources, hurry back to the desk to continue an intense email debate about whether Go really needs exceptions, ride a Segway to the neighboring building for some important dry-cleaning-pick-upping, and, off to face the rush hour traffic on 101 after another brutal day of inventing the future.

Unlike government, they don't take their money by force, so it's fine with me. They just won a corporate mega-lottery, that's all, and now they're finding fun ways to spend it, so they hire all the talent they can afford and try to get them to think of things to do (like government) instead of the usual non-lottery-winner approach of hiring only what they already desperately need.

This may seem like a stupid question, but wouldn't the owners (including current senior management) know this, and be be able to double their wealth by squeezing out the inefficiency? Why does this break down? Is it because outside shareholders don't have voting power?

btw - I like this question on HN because I expect the answers to be of higher quality than on Quora.

Except from my understanding the government is generally hugely understaffed with a large backlog of tasks that are mandated at the congressional or higher executive levels.

Government is "generally hugely understaffed"? Sure, in the sense that Google is hugely understaffed as long as they still aren't as big and powerful as they want to be. Googlers consistently claim that there isn't enough important work to justify all the talent they already have, yet Google keeps adding headcount. Apparently, they just want to be bigger and more powerful, and the reason they need such power is...well, the reason is they want to be bigger and more powerful. They have the resources to do it, so they will, and finding ways to use that power is secondary. Fine. It's their own money.

The percentage of the population whose job is to "govern" us grows relentlessly every decade, yet some people think we are in a permanent, desperate state of not being governed enough. Just because government claims that they need to be much bigger and more powerful in order to be as big and powerful as they want to be doesn't mean that they are "hugely understaffed."

Seems ideological rather than factual. It's well known that the level of employment at the IRS prevents the government from collecting billions of dollars of revenue they are legally owed. In other words, the government is understaffed relative to what is necessary to enforce the law. The way you put makes government growth seem like some nebulous cancer. Make tax law simple enough to be enforced by the current staff, or properly staff this branch of the government. This is categorically different than Google needing to invent new tasks to hire people for. Your ideological position, that the government is not understaffed because the government does too much, is by definition unrelated to objective statements of fact, such as the government is understaffed relative to their task of enforcing law.

You speak of "the law" as if you were discussing laws of nature that government had to "properly staff" to deal with. But these are not objective laws of nature. These laws are demands made by government itself, so "objective statements of fact, such as the government is understaffed relative to the task of enforcing law" is just saying that it's an objective fact that government doesn't have all the staff they need for the task of fully enforcing their growing list of demands. If that's all you meant, I agree with you.

But if your statement that government was "hugely understaffed" meant to imply to any extent that government ought to be expanded, that would be ideology, not fact, and I disagree.

The way you put makes government growth seem like some nebulous cancer.

Putting it some other way doesn't change the facts. They add new laws, regulations, policies, and edicts each year to what you position as some sort of objective "task of enforcing law". That would be fine if they also revoked a similar number of laws, regulations, and demands, letting people go back to managing those affairs for themselves. But that's not their way. They don't give power back. When government decides to give itself more power, the only way the people ever get it back is when government lowers its enforcement priority and shifts staff to exercising other powers.

The government has grown far faster than the economy for over a century. It has grown far faster than the population it governs. Though good government is valuable (I'm no anarchist), bad government is destructive, and you always have some of both. A government that removed defective policies at the rate healthy tissue removes defective cells could evolve into something wonderful. But ours doesn't work that way, and until it does, any implication that the government is hugely understaffed and desperately needs to grow larger is an ideological claim I'll dispute. If you weren't implying a need for more government, I don't dispute your statement.

If you reread my statements, you will realize there is no implication that we need more government. As an ideologue, you have projected onto my statements a position that you want to argue with. To say that the government never relinquishes power is a statement of ideology, not fact. The Supreme Court, a branch of the government, has taken away government power to regulate political donations to PACs, and decided that certain state governments are not beholden to the federal government while modifying voting policies. There are two examples. Repeal of Glass-Steagall is a congressional example. Federalist political movements only make sense in the context of reform to shrink the power of the federal government.

"any implication that the government is hugely understaffed and desperately needs to grow larger is an ideological claim I'll dispute."

This is only an ideological position if you view the rule of law as a ideology. I guess it is, but it's the foundation of civilization, so it shouldn't be controversial. If the government passes laws, it should enforce them. Currently it doesn't have the staff to enforce passed laws. That is a statement of fact. YOUR position, by comparison, IS ideological, because you are holding that the government has more employees than you would prefer based on your political beliefs.

It's interesting, to me at least, that the first answer appears to be from the perspective of someone who hasn't worked at Google and then the second answer confirms the first from personal experience working at Google.

I wonder if there are really just a ton of very bright, very bored people there and what that could mean for their future.

My anecdotal experience of friends there is that they are universally talented. I can't point to anyone who squeeked in. Of them, half are working their tails off optimized completely working at a place that can scale their abilities. The other half could immediately leave for a promotion or two somewhere else. It amazes me that the talent level has scaled to 30,000 employees.

Actually, it's approaching 50,000 employees. Wikipedia cites 46,421.

Speaking as a Googler, I do think that people here are generally smart. However I've come to some conclusions after working here for a few years...

As an established company, I think it appeals more to specialists, compared to the newer internet companies.

About the saying "Do cool things that matter" ... I don't find much of the work to be that cool, but giving Google the benefit of the doubt, I suspect it's because I don't have a strong or specialized CS background (I have a EE/CE background but I work as a SWE). The company is so big now that you really need specialized knowledge to understand and appreciate why a certain project is important.

I think that a lot of Googlers are are specialists in some field. To them, Google is like one big sandbox funded by the ad revenue, and they get paid to work on stuff in their field. Contrary to lagging popular belief, not every Google engineer is a hotshot creative/entrepreneurial type. Most don't seem to be -- they're content just to do work that is technically advanced and challenging, but not particularly important or innovative to someone outside of their field.

e.g. one of the things people say is great about Google is that you get access to all these data centers and map reduces, and you can run algorithms over huge terabyte-sized data sets. But that "selling point" is only a true benefit to those who actually have terabytes of data to crunch. I think people with a background in machine learning or similar research might. I certainly don't.

I know a lot of Googlers who have joined Google X to work on the self driving car, Glass, etc. I think that's one outlet for the people who want to do something that's new and cutting edge. Now if only we could put more people on Google X, where they're actually doing cool things that matter.

This needs to be traced: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3891677&cid=44076497 An important information from the "confidential" studies here for example would be what kind of monitors were tested.

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