> One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you.
Yeah this is definitely one of those things that sounds good on paper but has unintended "consequences" shall we say.
I worked for one company about a decade ago where the task was to redesign the corporate homepage. The "about us" pages on the homepage, not the actual product the company was selling. These pages got a few hundred hits a month. The decision was made to create two sub-teams, one would create a custom CMS, the other would "render" the data entered into the CMS to the website visitors. So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary.
I didn't understand why this was happening. Who gained from this? I couldn't figure it out. I supposed it was just a lack of controls on how long things took, and this was the result, but that didn't really feel right to me. It felt like someone had to really gain from this, but I couldn't work it out.
Anyway, during my leaving drinks, after a few pints, my boss told me "yeah I think I'm going to get promoted, the other managers who are applying for this job manage far fewer people so I think I'm well positioned to get it".
The penny dropped. The purpose of this project was to occupy people, so that more people could get hired, so his headcount increased, so he could get a promotion, and a payrise.
Google has Search and Ads, which generate vastly more money than they need to operate. Google Search is one of the Great Inventions in human history, so I think the money is well deserved.
But this creates an environment where the natural empire building among managers isn't tempered by the need for their units to produce revenue covering their costs. So the organization tends to grow to where it consumes all the billions raining from the sky.
Disclaimer: Just a loose thought from a cynical ex Googler.
Google could give it to schools with no heat or AC and outdated textbooks. Or help solve homelessness. Or fund fixing the country's bridges. "Sorry we really don't have the funds for more heads or ridiculous raises we're busy not being evil."
Calling Google Search one of history's great inventions is beyond delusional starting from the fact that Google didn't invent website indexing and searching if anything it had better algos and was less disrupted by the various waves of SEO spammers that killed the likes of Yahoo or Lycos or Altavista, etc.
Most of those bosses have zero technical knowledge, straight out of pure business school, probably the only software they used during their degree was Office or similar.
Then there are those from other backgrounds that somehow landed a position in management as well.
It is like politics, as long as the boat is going forward and not letting them do a bad figure in whatever evaluation meetings are taking place, all is fine.
It's much more lucrative to fake/fail upwards and try to suck the company dry. After all you're working to get paid. Making meaningful contributions to the society at large is at very best secondary.
Then comes the disruption, the catharsis, the big revenge, the complete destruction of old systems and arrival of techno-utopia where everything is done and done right and done correct, we're all told, or...the "young man" comment is quite apt here.
But I think that beyond a certain level management probably doesn't have a clear idea of how long things should take. If they've worked in a company for 20 years, and have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is? I mean you may argue it is their job to know such things, and that might be right, but maybe they're just not competent and their managers aren't competent either?
Or maybe they don't really care as it's not their money?
Or maybe it really doesn't matter and there is higher-impact stuff for that level of manager to focus on? I mean if the company is making $100m a year and they can do something that will drive a 10% increase in that, would foregoing that activity to reduce spending on a website down from $1m be the right call?
Financial and HR management is more often than not decoupled from engineering management. So on one hand, yes, you need to allocate your resources to deliver important projects most of all. But also in good times it might be easier to justify your need for more resources to finance, and increase the total number of your subordinates. And don't forget that in the times of plenty public companies might be rewarded for increasing their headcount too.
People under you ~= cost of whatever it is you are providing. Equating that to some sort of "value" you create is an insane proposition; the only thing that communicates, at first glance, is that you/your division/what you work on is EXPENSIVE.
In tech, however, any company is ~1 good (implemented) idea away from >100X ROI. From the top that looks like bringing in as many good people as possible in order to maximize your chances of one of them having that idea while on your clock.
Once a company is big enough it’s the multiple management layers that make that simple equation almost impossibly complicated.
If you have one leader with a team of two, and another with a team of forty, which one gets promoted to manage five teams with 2-40 people on each team?
Answer: the one that's most familiar to the person making the decision.
I saw this happen at Google, too, but in a slightly different (and arguably better... maybe? ... way), where a senior manager (in the cases I saw, a director and an MD) promoted people in their org explicitly so they could become managers of people their own level, which is almost a prerequisite for promotion to more senior levels of management (MD, VP). It worked, too. Doesn't matter that none of the people they promoted to director & managing director are still in their roles, and only one is still at Google, those two people got theirs!
In terms of bad side effects of dumb systems, maybe this is not the worst in the world.
20 people got to keep their paychecks and the company retained them, which means the company held on to their capacity to do work, in case a new project came up.
It turns out they didn’t need that capacity, but we all pay a lot for insurance that we hopefully and typically don’t use.
Actually this has made me wonder what other apparently pathological management tendencies (from the engineer’s point of view) are just inefficiencies introduced via unused “insurance policies”/capacity maintenance/margin for error.
Of course, thinking critically about the error margins is one of the things that engineers are explicitly trained in, so it is somewhat surprising that we get upset about this sort of thing.
This is a really great point! The big tech companies are partly banks of human capital that can be deployed when an investment opportunity arises. Unlike money, the human capital actually cares about whether it's sitting idle or is efficiently deployed.
hardest part of managing groups of people at any scale is aligning incentives. Larger organizations have a harder time with it and the amount of money/power they have makes it a prime target for bad actors looking to exploit them for their own game
The fundamental issue for Google/tech in general is that their culture was designed to work for nerds with good intentions but now it has been taken over by the types of money chasing psychopaths who would have been working for Wall Street or McKinsey 30 years ago.
When you have a money printer like Search it attracts these types of people to try and skim some of the money in various ways by climbing the power structure. Politicians take over while the builders who create value are forced out. Culturally Google is pretty similar to corrupt 3rd world countries with oil money, lots of cash spent on leadership's vanity projects and in deep trouble if the cash cow gets disrupted
At the core, organizations want to align individual growth with organizational & business growth.
Because most of these companies run many businesses with wide varying nature of revenue impact, they've decided to use size of organization as a proxy for business impact. From my experience at Amazon, there's a process to acquire additional headcount where business leaders will assess your proposal and approve additional headcount.
However, most mid level managers now purely optimize for headcount with complete disregard for customer value or business impact. I think we're missing 2 things:
- Leaders who can discern whether some work requires X people or 2X people. The margins are not off by 10-20%, they are off by 200-500%.
- Feedback loops. I havent seen this talked about much in the tech circles yet. Once headcount is assigned, there's no further checks on whether original goals have been met. Leaders, managers & teams move on to find even more land to grab. If we had feedback loops around what that additional headcount has achieved, a lot of the empire building behavior could be curtailed.
This person asserts that headcount is a measure of success, but I suspect they are confused about headcount being a proxy for production volume, which would be a closer measure for success. Every healthy team has more work than they have people available, they all want more people because they wanted to get more work done.
Teams that would allow engineers to idle should be the exception and not the norm. I am not sure extrapolating the experience from such a team would produce an accurate image of a large company.
Unfortunately, I've seen an alternative that isn't much better.
Google has separate management and SWE tracks, but tries to promote SWEs to management. It's pretty disastrous: people who fundamentally just want to be writing code burn their day on performance reviews and people issues (resolving a database latency issue is not nearly as fun as figuring out who's going to resolve it because the database guy's mom just died, and he'll be out... Shit, we don't know, his mom just died, it's on a spectrum of "he'll be back in a week" to "he'll be changing careers," it's not up to the manager).
The end result is that people who want to do good work are managed by people who are ill-trained and ill-temperamented to enable them to do good work, and it can make for a pretty miserable experience. There are exceptions, but the exceptions usually come from the process finding the rare superhuman who's extremely competent in (and fulfilled by) both arenas. The best managers at Google cared deeply about systems and deeply about their teams, and they were rare to find (and usually ended up at the top of an org chart where they could do the most good, so rarely were the direct boss for a SWE II or SWE III).
You call a person who brought work and salaries to 20 people for the whole year a cancer?
Would those 20 people have enough to do and feed their families if not for that man? If he did it differently, the shareholders would be a bit richer, those (or other 20) hard-working people without income, and their families would be starving. And your and my taxes would rise to support those people not to die homeless and hungry.
Do you still want to call that manager cancer, or you may reconsider and call him a hero he really is?
> He told me (paraphrasing) “Well, you know it’s really a lot of paper-work to fire you. You could just get away with doing nothing for 12 months.” [...] Why tell me this? Presumably for him this was a way to pad his head-count.
Right, it would be more accurate to say "getting away with achieving nothing". You still need to do the busywork.
Of course plenty of people don't achieve very much, but it makes a big difference whether you're trying to achieve something, or just coasting. (Edit to cynically add: or does it??)
I believe it was Apple who is really, really strict about that kind of thing (that is, contributing to open source while employed by Apple) (source is anecdotal, someone in the Go slack got hired by Apple and could no longer participate as actively in the space); how is Google that way, generally speaking?
Also, how do people get job offers for these high paid do nothing jobs?
I did get a recruiter email from Google the one time, I believe it was for the Google Docs / Workspace team, but it involved relocating to Germany and Docs didn't seem interesting to me, so I didn't take them up on the offer at the time.
Most large tech companies essentially give a pass to new hires on their first eval cycle. Depending on your start date, you might be either outright ineligible for a rating, or the rating defaults to "meeting expectations," because the expectations for the first 1-2 months are for you to just learn the stack and get to know the team. If you hit the ground running, good for you, but your manager might face an uphill battle to justify anything other than "meets."
For the next 1-2 months, you can probably keep making excuses. If your manager is paying close attention to new hires, they might object. But many managers are overstretched. Between office politics, planning, and all the ongoing "problem cases," they might simply not have enough cycles to watch your output real close.
Even after your manager is fed up, it takes time to fire you. In part to avoid legal risks, HR typically wants to see a written plan first, giving you about three months to prove yourself. If you do nothing, that's usually the end of the road. But if you lift a finger and earn a passing grade, the timer essentially restarts. In fact, you're now your manager's success story, and they might be reluctant to admit they were wrong.
And that's on average teams. If you end up on a dysfunctional team or on a project in turmoil, you might not even have to pretend. There's just no one who is close enough to your role and still cares about the result.
Google generally approves almost any open source work. They're also really generous about approving even for-profit side projects as long as there are no conflicts and you're willing to wait for approval. I was cleared to work on a few side-project games while I was there.
Re: do-nothing tolerance, the dirty secret at Google is that there's too little meaty work to satisfy all the people hungry to take it on, and everything takes ages to do anyways because of all the red tape, so it's kinda hard to tell who's phoning it in deliberately and who's getting stuck in the constant muck of cross-team approval and bikeshedding bullshit when they take 4x as long as expected to deliver half of what was promised (which mostly doesn't have any impact anyways). And managers are (were?) rated at least in part based on how many people they manage, not what their teams produce, so dead weight doesn't matter to most managers, if they're trying to get bumped up to director level the last thing they want is the distraction of having to PIP and then fire someone when they could just keep them around as padding and say they hit their staffing target...
I've seen tons of very active projects under Google's GitHub org[1] that have the disclaimer "This is not an officially supported Google product" so I would take a guess that they have a much better policy on employees participating in OSS than Apple does.
Haven't worked at Google so this is entirely my speculation, but:
From the amount [1] of GitHub repos, with some things tangential to any current Google project [2], I think it's not too hard to get approval to do a project on company time. Maybe even contribute to a third-party one, totally unrelated to whatever you're supposed to do at Google.
The general policy is: ask, if it's not like an obvious competitor and you assign copyright to Google you'll probably get it approved. Trying to own the project is extra work.
Working alone for 12 months seems kind of rough to me. It being whatever you want to work on is nice, but I don't think I would find it as fulfilling as just finding a new job where I can actually work with a team.
I also haven't worked on open source, not really, I could imagine there being communities that would make it significantly nicer to work on.
Plenty of opensource projects are built by communities. If you want to do opensource work with peers, you can always work on llvm, rust, Ruby on Rails, the Linux kernel, wayland, SQLite, postgres, docker, OpenSSL, or all sorts of other high impact, important projects that run the world.
Most of the important, high impact opensource projects are built by teams.
And if you don’t like your job - well, it’s an open secret that contributing to llvm or chrome is a great way to get hired.
I don't understand this sentiment. How are there developers that need to be around people? I spent 6 years alone in my house working from home only really visiting family once a week. I met someone and she moved in now sometimes I miss living alone lol
It'd be incredible to be paid to do whatever I want for a year. I have a billion projects I want to do but don't have time for.
That's actually my experience, too. Last July I've decided to take a year to work on https://lunni.dev/, but doing it alone was fun only for the first couple months. (Well, not alone alone—I do have a chat with a couple of my friends who use it, which helps a lot, but it still sucks to do it without a cofounder.)
Now I can barely do anything at all (re: Lunni, not in general), so I've decided to focus on finding a job instead (as I have maybe 3-4 more months of personal “runway”).
Yeah, folks here saying they would dedicate time to open-source probably have not been through these landscapes.
"Do nothing for 12 months, you do you" literally means "Don't cause any more trouble, get out of here on your account ASAP, make it easier for me to fire you"
Basically everything I've read and heard about Google makes it extremely dystopian.
I work at a fairly large tech company, and I've very happy that my experience has been nothing like the one the author described. Things move relatively quickly, people care and are earnest, managers are empathetic and actually good, etc.
Not all sunshine and rainbows of course, but it's pretty damn good compared to what I hear about other companies.
Few people write blog posts to say "I worked at Foo Corp and it was okay." There's a strong bias toward horror stories. There's also a HN selection bias: a story about FAANG is a lot more likely to be upvoted than a story about some small startup.
I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better. They all have their idiosyncrasies, they all have good teams and terrible ones, they all have a ton of red tape.
I think the main problem is that they built their reputation by claiming they invented a new way of doing business and a new way of treating their employees. They were supposed to be the antidote to the corporate culture at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and whatnot. But ultimately, they converged on pretty much the same.
I cared a lot about work-life balance so I did take some notes from friends.
First, it matters most what team you're on at these big companies. There are definitely teams that are more chill, and you better believe there are great managers that care about you. But many don't, and often teams that are "high impact" (i.e. move the needle on growth by owning the signup funnel) are more intense.
As for FAANG, Netflix was known to be the most laborious, although the best paying; They'd slash the bottom x% every cycle. Apple was known for being secretive and siloed, and because of their shipping cycles many teams can have intense overtime, but overall it seemed ok. Amazon in general sounded like a half a tier lower in terms of pay and work culture. Google and Facebook were often similar on most fronts and generally pleasant to work at, although I did hear Google's promotions were more bureaucratic.
In terms of "a new way of treating employees", well yes they achieved that. Outside of silicon valley have you heard of those flexible hours, rest and vest, unlimited free food, arcades, swag, best equipment, or even well-documented formulaic promotions? I remember telling my friends and family for the first time and without fail their jaws would drop. That's why most people in the world would love to work at FAANG still. You better bet those thousands of employees are very much happy there. These practices have spread by way of tech startups, but are still not "common" by any measure.
Anyway that's my 2c, I worked on a very pleasant team at FB.
I worked at Google 2016-2020 as an SRE in Ads. It was ok. It was definitely big corporation in that making globally optimal decisions was mired in bureaucracy and the upper management would say whatever they think would make the company happiest rather than their actual goals (lots of internal "PR" instead of transparency). But I don't think this is actually much different from other large companies, and day to day work was clear and valuable to the company.
Funnily, isn't it what happens with "disruptor" companies like Uber and Airbnb? first they revolutionize the taxi/hotel market, then they slowly become what they were supposed to revolutionize
I've been at Google for 18 years, starting as an L4, I'm now a VP.
I've had nothing like the experience described (even while working on lots of non-shiny things).
I had previously worked at numerous large tech companies - Microsoft, IBM, etc.
Small ones too - redhat when it was quite small, etc
It is, by far, the best large tech company i worked at.
At the same time I would offer within a company the size of Google, particularly one whose divisions are large and do such different things, you will find remarkably different cultures and experiences.
> you will find remarkably different cultures and experiences.
I think people often mistake this. When you join a small early stage startup, you really are joining "the company". When you sign on as ID 25432 at bigcorp, you are (excepting exec roles) joining "a team". Your experience can be wildly different than someone who joins a different team, even at the same time. Depending on the org, this may be basically irreversible, or easily changed.
Yeah, "different cultures and experiences" is absolutely right, it's huge, unfathomably huge.
To complete the picture I had a kind of "mediocre" story at Google, negative but not the worst possible. I was hired as the pandemic started, before anyone had figured out how to onboard me or ship me a work laptop, then the actual onboarding experience itself was a lot of talks about how "privacy is very important to us, accessibility VERY important to us, oh you can't forget that security is VERRRY important to us." (At orientation we were broken into teams and told to build an app together, but the team met like twice and was undecided about what app to build and at the end someone presented one of the three ideas of apps that we might build, as an app that we had built, and not a line of code was shed.)
Working on my team was a little better, although nobody really took me "under their wing" and when I would ping with having trouble with my dev environment my team was not very responsive. For about a year the only person on my team who really cared enough to review my CLs was halfway across the world in Singapore, so day-to-day dev work fixing bugs incurred this really long latency. For feature development, there was a different really long latency: because everyone insisted on design docs that they didn't get around to approving! So after my second perf cycle kicked in and I was told that the volume of the output was not looking great (because, on perf, maintenance work and bugs fixed doesn't really count for anything), it was just like "okay, I cannot wait for my team to actually approve these before starting the work, that'll be just like the Nooglers bickering about which app to start." So I got like 90% of the way through shipping a feature and the key stakeholders still hadn't gotten around to reviewing and approving the design doc.
The ridiculous latencies actually led to me going a little "cabin-fever"-crazy and writing stochastic simulations of work at Google so that I could give better estimates to my manager about my deadlines. I was optimized by my whatever-it-was-like-7-years at smaller companies to eliminate multitasking and pursue things with a considerable focus; but the simulations showed that my major problem was that in this high-latency environment you have to multitask as aggressively as possible: you basically need to have "this person is reviewing this for me and that person is doing that for me and I have this design doc when my CLs are waiting to be reviewed and and and...". I was working in the best way possible to get a lot of meaningful work done in a small focused team, but simulations showed it was the worst way possible to work at Google, even though the actual team size was about the same.
The cabin fever was a sort of real mental-health decline. I deferred taking my baby-bonding leave to be with my daughter for like a whole year of my wife saying "hey I really need your help here" because every week it was like "oh we'll just finally ship this thing and then I'll be leaving on a high" and it's like nope, things never really shipped. Was so focused on "respecting the opportunity" that I didn't really "respect your own biology and go to the doctor and stuff" -- it never really seemed like my work was successful enough that I was psychologically safe to take time for those basic things. The simulations helped me know that it wasn't "just me" and "here's what you need to do."
So I eventually successfully got my work output up, even to the point of doing some honest-to-goodness team leadership: I noticed that we had overcommitted on our OKRs for the upcoming Q1 2023, I had some really productive work with others at the end of Q4 2022, so I developed a design doc on "Hot Potato Agile" for how the team was going to work together like a small-company team to deliver on our ambitious OKRs and we could get everyone's OKRs done if we all worked together, I had a super-excited manager and buy-in for everyone to do this experiment with me... and then like the very next day after everyone was super excited for this thing, I and thousands of colleagues chosen apparently at random suddenly discovered that we were locked out of everything, both social and professional, for two months as we waited to be axed. Nobody knew how to contact me to say goodbye to me, eventually some folks pinged me on LinkedIn.
And like it was nice to have Tony's Chocolonely in the microkitchen on the third floor and bidets on the toilets and a barista making me free mochas on the fifth, when I was in the office. Felt very swanky. Although my favorite part, truth be told, was just the GBikes. I love the wind in my hair. And it was especially nice in the US to go to a pharmacy for my maintenance inhaler and to have my card out and the person who handed me the medicine was just like "oh don't worry about that, you owe $0, have a nice day," like "what is this, the UK or something?". But the day-to-day work felt like Sisyphus and a boulder at times, just never-ending grind to end up in the same place you started. That, I didn't like. A real mix of "Great" and "WTF".
Your point is actually understated with saying "within a company the size of Google".
Thinking about it, the same dynamics hold at even the smallest scale. If a company has two divisions of 25 employees in each division, over time they will start to feel like working at two different companies if you work in both divisions. Even the same department can feel like a different company after a management shakeup.
I think Google's biggest challenge is they are still (even at their ridiculous scale) pivoting from a small company to a big company.
You can't manage a 100-person firm and a 100,000-person firm in the same way. Not unlike large distributed computer systems, personnel and management systems that work fine in the small do not scale in the large. So Google is (slowly but surely) coming around to being a traditional company with checks and balances and process and protocol, but because self-motivation, encouragement of independence, and the remaining veneer of "the company that will save the world" is still there, these systems clash hard and can make for the occasional miserable outcome.
I can't tell how many anecdotes I picked up of people who gave it there all like they felt ownership of the company only to realize it's just a company, and promotion is driven more by salary budget constraints, headcount, very arbitrary quotas, and market and social forces uncontrollable by one employee than by effort. It's made worse by the aspects of the old system that are still there, such as your work being evaluated by a team that is intentionally chosen to know very little about your project (to minimize favoritism), which has the side effect of encouraging self-promotion and communication skills that aren't particularly valuable in the day-to-day of software engineering (in other words, good engineering can be overlooked in favor of good self-promotion).
I've worked at Google for nearly 8 years and nothing in this post resonates with me and I've been on several teams. It's a big company and so there is certainly some variance. It seems like folks who have the worst experiences are the ones who write blog posts which get popular. Typically if I tell folks why I really like my experience at Google they tell me I'm just shilling and bought into the corporate propaganda.
It's not clear to me where the average experience is closer to mine or the one on this blog post, but I hope it's closer to mine.
I think the cycle is general, not specific to Google.
The people who build a successful business attract others by that success. The 'others' weren't attracted to the company for the same reason as the builders, they are joining because prestige and money are there already. These people change the culture of the company from prioritizing the things that made it sucessful to prioritizing prestige and pay of the 'others'. This distortion then makes things weird. The reputation of the company tarnishes. The builders no longer opt to join due to the weirdness. Now, all that is left are the 'others'.
This is misleadingly bimodal. There are a ton of great "builders" out there who just aren't cut out for early stage work - they want to work on a functioning team with a well defined role and clear goals/targets.
This is really orthogonal to the problem you are pointing out, which has a kernel of truth: if the money and/or impact gets big enough you start to attract people who are primarily motivated by that. This is true at all levels.
Very good point. Especially true when there's no corrective pressure from the market to do something about the accumulation of the prestige-money employees.
Search revenue gives them a nearly infinite rope to keep accumulating the 'others' without having to attract 'builders' to open up new revenues. Just use blind for an hour and you'll see how bad it has gotten over the years.
I work with a fair amount of Xooglers (20+) that were there for anywhere from 3 to 15 years, and they really enjoyed most of their time there. Generally speaking, you only hear squeaky wheels.
Some companies are definitely better than others for pay/benefits/process/general BS level, but for ICs, most of your experience is going to be shaped by the quality of your direct manager and coworkers (and there's usually a strong correlation between the quality of your direct manager and coworkers. :)
If you have any concerns about (or god forbid, no knowledge of) your manager in a new opportunity, that's an excellent reason for a hard-pass.
Everything? I don't think that's right - the reason stories like this play so well is we've heard lots of good things about Google. As in the article, at one time it was considered the absolute best place to be by a lot of people. There is also a lot of bias in what you hear - don't forget that the majority of people wouldn't dream of writing the kind of blog post that ranks high on HN.
As a shareholder, I'm curious why others aren't more furious to hear that this is how things are run at Google. It's common knowledge how bureaucratic and political the company has become; these stories are everywhere.
If I were a large pension fund or asset manager, I would be asking questions to the board like, "Given nothing gets done on many teams, what would happen if Google reduced its headcount by 50%?" and "Why is increasing headcount currently an incentive for managers within organizations, especially without any apparent penalty function?"
> As a shareholder, I'm curious why others aren't more furious to hear that this is how things are run at Google.
Probably because most people understand that horror stories reported on the web are likely to be outliers and not representative of the typical experience, or of a massive company as a whole.
It takes motivation to write a horror story. If you worked at a company that you expected to be a good place to work, and it turned out that it was a good place to work, what's your motivation to write about it? And if you do write about it, what's the motivation for someone to submit your non-horror story to a site like Hacker News, or of a reader to upvote it?
So the distribution of stories you'll see on the web and HN is going to be biased toward horror stories and other extremes.
> As a shareholder, I'm curious why others aren't more furious to hear that this is how things are run at Google.
Because the way things are run at Google now are all FOR SHAREHOLDERS and for maximum value extraction with maximum stock buybacks.
Hacker culture and non-standard corporate leadership is always undesireable and PUNISHED by the shareholding class. Oracle/IBM type business leadership is familiar and rewarded.
This state of matters is the default for corporate America and Google was special because it managed to not be that for so long - until shareholders finally managed to bring it under control into the operating mode they understand.
There's a reason why modern corporate america is eating its own economic future and is becomming brittle to attacks from China.
They could not accurately judge productivity, talent or motivation, so some groups would lose their key players. This would demotivate everyone left. They would launch 500-1000 startups with knowledge of how some market of merely a hundred million people is being underserved. A dozen or a hundred of those would become true competitors in those markets.
It would be good for everyone except those who lost health insurance and income at the wrong time, and the Goog itself.
> They would launch 500-1000 startups with knowledge of how some market of merely a hundred million people is being underserved. A dozen or a hundred of those would become true competitors in those markets.
So, cut headcount, juice the stock, then have a bunch of possible acquisition targets that have developed viable products in new markets by not being saddled with the intractable corporate inefficiencies you suffer? Sounds like breaking some eggs for a tasty omelette.
Wouldn't it mean that their entire organization is broken, if they can't effectively identify productive and talented people? This seems like a huge problem!
I agree that Google benefits from monopolizing headcount, even if the employees waste their lives doing nothing, because it reduces competition. I would even Google poisons people's work ethic/priorities permanently when they try to leave and go to other startups (this is my personal experience working with former non-technical google employees who only play politics).
Most of these giant tech companies grow to be such sizes because of a huge market and highly profitable product.
They can pretty much do whatever they want and still make money. Most shareholders don't really care about what happens in there. Money in, money out.
I think a lot of people also falsely hold on to the belief that money validates process. FB had some terrible processes going on and yet people kept cheering them on. Then when stock prices plummeted, they blamed it on the most recent event, rather than asking why FB rebranded to Meta.
It's similar here. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Many shareholders are happy to blindly trust the leadership and paying them huge containers of money as long as stonks go up.
Besides what tools do investors have to affect change at a 100k people company? They can replace the CEO maybe but that hardly ever magically fixes things.
Are the other fortune 100 companies better or worse managed than Google?
Cynical take is that Google is a monopoly. They could probably easily double net income margins from ~25% to ~50% while still growing at a similar rate. Instead, they waste hundreds of billions to satisfy employees and placate regulators.
I have nothing against Google, but the slow decline in collective aspiration of hacker culture sucks.
It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire. Now everyone seems to believe the ultimate goal of a tech job is to land at a FAANG, and just stay there for life?
It’s so tame, so complicit. Hackerdom is now mostly about obscene levels of money and status?
> It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire.
This really goes to show how pathetic the tech industry has been for the past ~2 decades. People don't aspire to build the next Google, just to get a job with Google. That's like saying the Matrix inspired you to land a job where you get your own cubicle.
When I was a kid dreaming of the future, I never thought that "success" meant being acquihired by a tech giant. That seems stupid, why wouldn't I just apply like a normal person? Building something like eBay or YouTube and turning it into a massive success to rival the giants was the dream. All you needed was a keyboard and luck.
I don't know if I'm alone in that, or if this is a generational thing? I'm currently under 30, so if it is, then it's probably a relatively recent phenomenon. I guess programmers born in the mid 00s probably grew up in a world already dominated by the same few tech giants, and missed the part where they were growing and fighting for dominance.
Of course, I would say that's probably the most reasonable dream to have considering the circumstances. If you do manage to build an innovative and sustainable business, it's unlikely you'll survive once the tech giants attack you with anticompetitive tactics that they know they can get away with.
Don't think it's generational. I'm 41 and had the same take.
I think the core of it is that I internalized a (supposedly) fundamental hacker aesthetic of autonomy, and it seems the culture traded that away for a needy, zero sum, external-validation-needing void.
Now we're told that we really should be working on our brands, amassing our GitHub stars, and other bullshit that is wholly orthogonal to actually building cool stuff. Cause who wants to do that when the rewards are uncertain? Follower counts are what really matters, this is the attention economy, and you can't be left behind!
I think this is missing a really, really important observation- it's only in the past two decades that the Internet (specifically, the World Wide Web) has become such a dominant medium of culture at large. Our view of "what tech culture was like" is very much skewed by the fact that relatively few people were participating in the early "online" culture, and the folks that were, were very much the ones taking risks that turned out to be the major companies of these latter years. We don't talk about all the programmers that ended up at (for example) Sun, or IBM, of one of the many other major tech companies that have since fallen from grace.
The people you're talking about are still out there, maybe there's just less of them proportionally as the industry grows. In absolutes there are probably a lot more tech entrepreneurs at every scale.
Tech boomed because: the economy was "good" (people could afford to go after creative and speculative pursuits) and there was technology that hadn't been utilized in creative ways yet (computers, phones, the internet, GPUs, etc.). This allowed "hackers"/"geeks"/"creatives"/"entrepreneurs" to work on stuff that most likely wouldn't make any money, but would be more interesting and fulfilling than doing a job or going after a career.
Then once the money started coming in, and others started hitting home-runs, the "sociopaths"/"prestige hounds"/"MBAs"/"money lovers" came in to formalize and formulize, so the gravy train would be more sustainable and predictable -- and that they could get theirs.
Now we're here. Something cool is no longer cool.
In another vein, what is there left to do? The economy needs to improve and there needs to be new -- actually ground-breaking and revolutionary -- technology brought to the world, so others may use it in novel and creative ways. Then we repeat the cycle.
LLMs seem to be the only contender for "ground-breaking" tech right now. Otherwise, I can't think of anything else.
There's hackers on the one side, but for the vast majority of developers (myself inclusive) it's just a job. FAANG is some of the best pay you'll ever get, and you're guaranteed for work and minimal income if you have that on your CV.
"Hackerdom" whatever that means is separate from "working for a living".
True “hackers” don’t give a fuck about startups. Hackers are interested in how things work and how they can be exploited to do things or grant access to forbidden data. Real hackers back in the late 90s early 00s casually did things that would make a lot of today’s “hackers” blanche in the face and wet themselves at the thought of computer crime, or at least grope around for a downvote button. It was a thrilling era for freaks and geeks. Ever found yourself scrolling down a stolen CSV full of credit card numbers and full billing info? It’s like snorting a line of coke. As a teen I once stole $22k, spent several years looking over my shoulder expecting to be shot or cuffed.
At some point the term “hacker” was co-opted to mean anyone writing code. These Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs aren’t really “hackers”: they’re businessmen with some software engineering skills. But that doesn’t sound nearly as edgy or cool as calling yourself a hacker.
Computer criminals calling themselves "hackers" is fairly recent, only the past few decades. And that's as unwarranted as calling anyone who codes as "hackers" as you mention.
Originally hackers were the people actually creating new innovations, typically with no financial gain desired either criminal or legitimate. People at places like MIT or Stanford in the 1970s and the like.
> It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire.
> It’s so tame, so complicit. Hackerdom is now mostly about obscene levels of money and status?
The goal of many who make a startup that big tech would acquihire _is_ about achieving obscene levels of money and status. If they're acquihiring you then by definition you no longer have full say about what the business does. If it really was about making something, the best something you can, then you would resist being acquihired.
It’s simple - Most people work for money. If someone offers me compensation that allows me to be financially independent in 10 years that’s a deal that is smart to take no?
Does this need a /s at the end? Your lament is that we’ve abandoned the dream of getting acquihired by big tech for… the same thing but with fewer steps?
Google is a big company, most possible types of tech job probably exist somewhere within it. There are toxic managers, dead end projects, and there are rocketships and places with amazing culture.
I'm lucky to be on the good side of this, very much so, but I understand the experiences this person went through.
One thing I would say is that some of the takes here suggest that the author missed some interesting learning and development from their experiences. That's not to say it would have changed the final outcome, and they may not have been set up to learn by their manager, but I came in from a similar background and met a few of the same challenges, but had different take-aways from them and feel I have grown as an engineer from my startup roots as a result.
Money doesn't matter (or buy happiness) - Rich people.
Google isn't important - Ex-Googler.
I think I see his point, but I think he's forgetting about the privilege of making good money at Google for a while and becoming an ex-Googler for all his life.
I can say that the people who say this DO NOT keep an excel on their desktop where every 1st of the month they go around their accounts, investments, etc. and enter the 'updated values' and they see their net-worth growing month-by-month. Money matters (when you are planning your vacations, when you get seriously ill, when you want to buy a new house/car/laptop), etc. Only naive people say that money don't matter. There are MANY things that matter, money is one of them.
There's a reason the English saying is 'Money can't buy happiness', not 'money doesn't matter'.
The point is that it isn't money that makes you happy, it is the life you build. That can be different for different people, and money can help. The point is that money isn't the goal.
People who say money doesn't matter aren't naive. They're mostly either trying to make someone feel better about not having any, or trying to get someone to stop placing so much importance on wealth. It's one of those "serious but not literal" statements.
As someone who just this year started to keep track of the money across the months, I can say that you get some sort of high when you get close to payday and you see the line going up.
Understood to mean (in the context of this blog) the difference in living standards and happiness are not affected by a 150k/year income or a 450k/year income. Or another way, "I (author) have encountered the diminishing return on happiness. dH/dm = 0".
If one didn't have such a spreadsheet and did't know how to start tracking such things as they were a bit financially illiterate, where would you recommend they start?
He didn't say money didn't matter, he said that's not why he moved to Silicon Valley. i.e. it's not his top priority. Yes, it's a position of privilege, but he's allowed to have differing priorities from someone who is struggling.
Once you have enough money for basics and contingencies, yes, happiness is more important.
Incentives at large companies can be weird. I once had a situation where a vendor put in an estimate of close to $100K to, in effect, generate a 40 page PDF for us. I pushed back until they came back with a still high but less outrageous proposal.
Upon looking back, I realized that if I had approved the original request nothing bad would have happened. No one, other than myself, was going to look at the bill. The amount involved was a rounding error of a rounding error of that week's revenue. In fact, the only one that got hurt was my team as the work got delayed while we went back and forth on the proposal.
The incentives in this case were set up so that the rational course of action for a manager is to be less frugal or responsible with company funds.
Readit News
Yeah this is definitely one of those things that sounds good on paper but has unintended "consequences" shall we say.
I worked for one company about a decade ago where the task was to redesign the corporate homepage. The "about us" pages on the homepage, not the actual product the company was selling. These pages got a few hundred hits a month. The decision was made to create two sub-teams, one would create a custom CMS, the other would "render" the data entered into the CMS to the website visitors. So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary.
I didn't understand why this was happening. Who gained from this? I couldn't figure it out. I supposed it was just a lack of controls on how long things took, and this was the result, but that didn't really feel right to me. It felt like someone had to really gain from this, but I couldn't work it out.
Anyway, during my leaving drinks, after a few pints, my boss told me "yeah I think I'm going to get promoted, the other managers who are applying for this job manage far fewer people so I think I'm well positioned to get it".
The penny dropped. The purpose of this project was to occupy people, so that more people could get hired, so his headcount increased, so he could get a promotion, and a payrise.
But this creates an environment where the natural empire building among managers isn't tempered by the need for their units to produce revenue covering their costs. So the organization tends to grow to where it consumes all the billions raining from the sky.
Disclaimer: Just a loose thought from a cynical ex Googler.
I don't know about that...
What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects ?
You're very clever, young man, very clever. But it's bosses all the way up!
Then there are those from other backgrounds that somehow landed a position in management as well.
It is like politics, as long as the boat is going forward and not letting them do a bad figure in whatever evaluation meetings are taking place, all is fine.
Then comes the disruption, the catharsis, the big revenge, the complete destruction of old systems and arrival of techno-utopia where everything is done and done right and done correct, we're all told, or...the "young man" comment is quite apt here.
But I think that beyond a certain level management probably doesn't have a clear idea of how long things should take. If they've worked in a company for 20 years, and have always been told that creating a corporate website requires a team of 20 people for 2 years, they'll just assume that's the way it is? I mean you may argue it is their job to know such things, and that might be right, but maybe they're just not competent and their managers aren't competent either?
Or maybe they don't really care as it's not their money?
Or maybe it really doesn't matter and there is higher-impact stuff for that level of manager to focus on? I mean if the company is making $100m a year and they can do something that will drive a 10% increase in that, would foregoing that activity to reduce spending on a website down from $1m be the right call?
People under you ~= cost of whatever it is you are providing. Equating that to some sort of "value" you create is an insane proposition; the only thing that communicates, at first glance, is that you/your division/what you work on is EXPENSIVE.
By and large the team doing the work are the technical experts
Nobody higher up really knows more
If you use more resources, then your project looks more impressive
This is a problem in many fields including academia. They need some way to judge work, but the only people qualified are your peers
In tech, however, any company is ~1 good (implemented) idea away from >100X ROI. From the top that looks like bringing in as many good people as possible in order to maximize your chances of one of them having that idea while on your clock.
Once a company is big enough it’s the multiple management layers that make that simple equation almost impossibly complicated.
Answer: the one that's most familiar to the person making the decision.
20 people got to keep their paychecks and the company retained them, which means the company held on to their capacity to do work, in case a new project came up.
It turns out they didn’t need that capacity, but we all pay a lot for insurance that we hopefully and typically don’t use.
Of course, thinking critically about the error margins is one of the things that engineers are explicitly trained in, so it is somewhat surprising that we get upset about this sort of thing.
The fundamental issue for Google/tech in general is that their culture was designed to work for nerds with good intentions but now it has been taken over by the types of money chasing psychopaths who would have been working for Wall Street or McKinsey 30 years ago.
When you have a money printer like Search it attracts these types of people to try and skim some of the money in various ways by climbing the power structure. Politicians take over while the builders who create value are forced out. Culturally Google is pretty similar to corrupt 3rd world countries with oil money, lots of cash spent on leadership's vanity projects and in deep trouble if the cash cow gets disrupted
At the core, organizations want to align individual growth with organizational & business growth.
Because most of these companies run many businesses with wide varying nature of revenue impact, they've decided to use size of organization as a proxy for business impact. From my experience at Amazon, there's a process to acquire additional headcount where business leaders will assess your proposal and approve additional headcount.
However, most mid level managers now purely optimize for headcount with complete disregard for customer value or business impact. I think we're missing 2 things:
- Leaders who can discern whether some work requires X people or 2X people. The margins are not off by 10-20%, they are off by 200-500%.
- Feedback loops. I havent seen this talked about much in the tech circles yet. Once headcount is assigned, there's no further checks on whether original goals have been met. Leaders, managers & teams move on to find even more land to grab. If we had feedback loops around what that additional headcount has achieved, a lot of the empire building behavior could be curtailed.
Teams that would allow engineers to idle should be the exception and not the norm. I am not sure extrapolating the experience from such a team would produce an accurate image of a large company.
Definitely Goodhart's Law in action.
Instead, in my experience, it’s more based on ego and politics whether you or anyone else keeps their job.
that's how bankers used to measure companies (some still do), a sad metric in a wrong place
Edit: I regret using the word cancer, but they are still bad
Google has separate management and SWE tracks, but tries to promote SWEs to management. It's pretty disastrous: people who fundamentally just want to be writing code burn their day on performance reviews and people issues (resolving a database latency issue is not nearly as fun as figuring out who's going to resolve it because the database guy's mom just died, and he'll be out... Shit, we don't know, his mom just died, it's on a spectrum of "he'll be back in a week" to "he'll be changing careers," it's not up to the manager).
The end result is that people who want to do good work are managed by people who are ill-trained and ill-temperamented to enable them to do good work, and it can make for a pretty miserable experience. There are exceptions, but the exceptions usually come from the process finding the rare superhuman who's extremely competent in (and fulfilled by) both arenas. The best managers at Google cared deeply about systems and deeply about their teams, and they were rare to find (and usually ended up at the top of an org chart where they could do the most good, so rarely were the direct boss for a SWE II or SWE III).
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Would those 20 people have enough to do and feed their families if not for that man? If he did it differently, the shareholders would be a bit richer, those (or other 20) hard-working people without income, and their families would be starving. And your and my taxes would rise to support those people not to die homeless and hungry.
Do you still want to call that manager cancer, or you may reconsider and call him a hero he really is?
I would absolutely take that “offer”, on the condition that they allow me to work on some open source project in the meantime. Don't really care if it would have to be © Google instead of in my name. Getting paid to do something you like that would help everybody? Hey, why not.
Of course plenty of people don't achieve very much, but it makes a big difference whether you're trying to achieve something, or just coasting. (Edit to cynically add: or does it??)
Pretend to monitor the system, but don't actually do anything.
Write the reports with Google Bard.
Like, doing the fun parts of the job, sure.
But to deliberately do only the boring, soul-destroying parts seems like it’s own special circle of hell.
Also, how do people get job offers for these high paid do nothing jobs?
I did get a recruiter email from Google the one time, I believe it was for the Google Docs / Workspace team, but it involved relocating to Germany and Docs didn't seem interesting to me, so I didn't take them up on the offer at the time.
For the next 1-2 months, you can probably keep making excuses. If your manager is paying close attention to new hires, they might object. But many managers are overstretched. Between office politics, planning, and all the ongoing "problem cases," they might simply not have enough cycles to watch your output real close.
Even after your manager is fed up, it takes time to fire you. In part to avoid legal risks, HR typically wants to see a written plan first, giving you about three months to prove yourself. If you do nothing, that's usually the end of the road. But if you lift a finger and earn a passing grade, the timer essentially restarts. In fact, you're now your manager's success story, and they might be reluctant to admit they were wrong.
And that's on average teams. If you end up on a dysfunctional team or on a project in turmoil, you might not even have to pretend. There's just no one who is close enough to your role and still cares about the result.
Re: do-nothing tolerance, the dirty secret at Google is that there's too little meaty work to satisfy all the people hungry to take it on, and everything takes ages to do anyways because of all the red tape, so it's kinda hard to tell who's phoning it in deliberately and who's getting stuck in the constant muck of cross-team approval and bikeshedding bullshit when they take 4x as long as expected to deliver half of what was promised (which mostly doesn't have any impact anyways). And managers are (were?) rated at least in part based on how many people they manage, not what their teams produce, so dead weight doesn't matter to most managers, if they're trying to get bumped up to director level the last thing they want is the distraction of having to PIP and then fire someone when they could just keep them around as padding and say they hit their staffing target...
[1] https://github.com/google
Haven't worked at Google so this is entirely my speculation, but:
From the amount [1] of GitHub repos, with some things tangential to any current Google project [2], I think it's not too hard to get approval to do a project on company time. Maybe even contribute to a third-party one, totally unrelated to whatever you're supposed to do at Google.
[1]: https://github.com/orgs/google/repositories – 2.6k!
[2]: e. g. https://github.com/google/sonic-midi, and I've seen a couple outright silly ones, though I can't remember the names right now
I also haven't worked on open source, not really, I could imagine there being communities that would make it significantly nicer to work on.
Most of the important, high impact opensource projects are built by teams.
And if you don’t like your job - well, it’s an open secret that contributing to llvm or chrome is a great way to get hired.
It'd be incredible to be paid to do whatever I want for a year. I have a billion projects I want to do but don't have time for.
Now I can barely do anything at all (re: Lunni, not in general), so I've decided to focus on finding a job instead (as I have maybe 3-4 more months of personal “runway”).
It can even be a trap to lure you into a position where you end up with an instant dismissal.
Lines can change as well.
If you feel wrong at what you are doing switch places. For your own good.
"Do nothing for 12 months, you do you" literally means "Don't cause any more trouble, get out of here on your account ASAP, make it easier for me to fire you"
The manager could at most offer you a handshake deal.
I work at a fairly large tech company, and I've very happy that my experience has been nothing like the one the author described. Things move relatively quickly, people care and are earnest, managers are empathetic and actually good, etc.
Not all sunshine and rainbows of course, but it's pretty damn good compared to what I hear about other companies.
I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better. They all have their idiosyncrasies, they all have good teams and terrible ones, they all have a ton of red tape.
I think the main problem is that they built their reputation by claiming they invented a new way of doing business and a new way of treating their employees. They were supposed to be the antidote to the corporate culture at Microsoft, IBM, Sun, and whatnot. But ultimately, they converged on pretty much the same.
First, it matters most what team you're on at these big companies. There are definitely teams that are more chill, and you better believe there are great managers that care about you. But many don't, and often teams that are "high impact" (i.e. move the needle on growth by owning the signup funnel) are more intense.
As for FAANG, Netflix was known to be the most laborious, although the best paying; They'd slash the bottom x% every cycle. Apple was known for being secretive and siloed, and because of their shipping cycles many teams can have intense overtime, but overall it seemed ok. Amazon in general sounded like a half a tier lower in terms of pay and work culture. Google and Facebook were often similar on most fronts and generally pleasant to work at, although I did hear Google's promotions were more bureaucratic.
In terms of "a new way of treating employees", well yes they achieved that. Outside of silicon valley have you heard of those flexible hours, rest and vest, unlimited free food, arcades, swag, best equipment, or even well-documented formulaic promotions? I remember telling my friends and family for the first time and without fail their jaws would drop. That's why most people in the world would love to work at FAANG still. You better bet those thousands of employees are very much happy there. These practices have spread by way of tech startups, but are still not "common" by any measure.
Anyway that's my 2c, I worked on a very pleasant team at FB.
And an HN selection bias in tone too: a story about how great it was to work at a FAANG is probably also not going to get many upvotes.
> I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better.
Amazon had a reputation for working their software people pretty hard. Not sure if that's still the case.
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I had previously worked at numerous large tech companies - Microsoft, IBM, etc.
Small ones too - redhat when it was quite small, etc
It is, by far, the best large tech company i worked at.
At the same time I would offer within a company the size of Google, particularly one whose divisions are large and do such different things, you will find remarkably different cultures and experiences.
I think people often mistake this. When you join a small early stage startup, you really are joining "the company". When you sign on as ID 25432 at bigcorp, you are (excepting exec roles) joining "a team". Your experience can be wildly different than someone who joins a different team, even at the same time. Depending on the org, this may be basically irreversible, or easily changed.
To complete the picture I had a kind of "mediocre" story at Google, negative but not the worst possible. I was hired as the pandemic started, before anyone had figured out how to onboard me or ship me a work laptop, then the actual onboarding experience itself was a lot of talks about how "privacy is very important to us, accessibility VERY important to us, oh you can't forget that security is VERRRY important to us." (At orientation we were broken into teams and told to build an app together, but the team met like twice and was undecided about what app to build and at the end someone presented one of the three ideas of apps that we might build, as an app that we had built, and not a line of code was shed.)
Working on my team was a little better, although nobody really took me "under their wing" and when I would ping with having trouble with my dev environment my team was not very responsive. For about a year the only person on my team who really cared enough to review my CLs was halfway across the world in Singapore, so day-to-day dev work fixing bugs incurred this really long latency. For feature development, there was a different really long latency: because everyone insisted on design docs that they didn't get around to approving! So after my second perf cycle kicked in and I was told that the volume of the output was not looking great (because, on perf, maintenance work and bugs fixed doesn't really count for anything), it was just like "okay, I cannot wait for my team to actually approve these before starting the work, that'll be just like the Nooglers bickering about which app to start." So I got like 90% of the way through shipping a feature and the key stakeholders still hadn't gotten around to reviewing and approving the design doc.
The ridiculous latencies actually led to me going a little "cabin-fever"-crazy and writing stochastic simulations of work at Google so that I could give better estimates to my manager about my deadlines. I was optimized by my whatever-it-was-like-7-years at smaller companies to eliminate multitasking and pursue things with a considerable focus; but the simulations showed that my major problem was that in this high-latency environment you have to multitask as aggressively as possible: you basically need to have "this person is reviewing this for me and that person is doing that for me and I have this design doc when my CLs are waiting to be reviewed and and and...". I was working in the best way possible to get a lot of meaningful work done in a small focused team, but simulations showed it was the worst way possible to work at Google, even though the actual team size was about the same.
The cabin fever was a sort of real mental-health decline. I deferred taking my baby-bonding leave to be with my daughter for like a whole year of my wife saying "hey I really need your help here" because every week it was like "oh we'll just finally ship this thing and then I'll be leaving on a high" and it's like nope, things never really shipped. Was so focused on "respecting the opportunity" that I didn't really "respect your own biology and go to the doctor and stuff" -- it never really seemed like my work was successful enough that I was psychologically safe to take time for those basic things. The simulations helped me know that it wasn't "just me" and "here's what you need to do."
So I eventually successfully got my work output up, even to the point of doing some honest-to-goodness team leadership: I noticed that we had overcommitted on our OKRs for the upcoming Q1 2023, I had some really productive work with others at the end of Q4 2022, so I developed a design doc on "Hot Potato Agile" for how the team was going to work together like a small-company team to deliver on our ambitious OKRs and we could get everyone's OKRs done if we all worked together, I had a super-excited manager and buy-in for everyone to do this experiment with me... and then like the very next day after everyone was super excited for this thing, I and thousands of colleagues chosen apparently at random suddenly discovered that we were locked out of everything, both social and professional, for two months as we waited to be axed. Nobody knew how to contact me to say goodbye to me, eventually some folks pinged me on LinkedIn.
And like it was nice to have Tony's Chocolonely in the microkitchen on the third floor and bidets on the toilets and a barista making me free mochas on the fifth, when I was in the office. Felt very swanky. Although my favorite part, truth be told, was just the GBikes. I love the wind in my hair. And it was especially nice in the US to go to a pharmacy for my maintenance inhaler and to have my card out and the person who handed me the medicine was just like "oh don't worry about that, you owe $0, have a nice day," like "what is this, the UK or something?". But the day-to-day work felt like Sisyphus and a boulder at times, just never-ending grind to end up in the same place you started. That, I didn't like. A real mix of "Great" and "WTF".
Thinking about it, the same dynamics hold at even the smallest scale. If a company has two divisions of 25 employees in each division, over time they will start to feel like working at two different companies if you work in both divisions. Even the same department can feel like a different company after a management shakeup.
You can't manage a 100-person firm and a 100,000-person firm in the same way. Not unlike large distributed computer systems, personnel and management systems that work fine in the small do not scale in the large. So Google is (slowly but surely) coming around to being a traditional company with checks and balances and process and protocol, but because self-motivation, encouragement of independence, and the remaining veneer of "the company that will save the world" is still there, these systems clash hard and can make for the occasional miserable outcome.
I can't tell how many anecdotes I picked up of people who gave it there all like they felt ownership of the company only to realize it's just a company, and promotion is driven more by salary budget constraints, headcount, very arbitrary quotas, and market and social forces uncontrollable by one employee than by effort. It's made worse by the aspects of the old system that are still there, such as your work being evaluated by a team that is intentionally chosen to know very little about your project (to minimize favoritism), which has the side effect of encouraging self-promotion and communication skills that aren't particularly valuable in the day-to-day of software engineering (in other words, good engineering can be overlooked in favor of good self-promotion).
It's not clear to me where the average experience is closer to mine or the one on this blog post, but I hope it's closer to mine.
The people who build a successful business attract others by that success. The 'others' weren't attracted to the company for the same reason as the builders, they are joining because prestige and money are there already. These people change the culture of the company from prioritizing the things that made it sucessful to prioritizing prestige and pay of the 'others'. This distortion then makes things weird. The reputation of the company tarnishes. The builders no longer opt to join due to the weirdness. Now, all that is left are the 'others'.
This is really orthogonal to the problem you are pointing out, which has a kernel of truth: if the money and/or impact gets big enough you start to attract people who are primarily motivated by that. This is true at all levels.
Search revenue gives them a nearly infinite rope to keep accumulating the 'others' without having to attract 'builders' to open up new revenues. Just use blind for an hour and you'll see how bad it has gotten over the years.
If you have any concerns about (or god forbid, no knowledge of) your manager in a new opportunity, that's an excellent reason for a hard-pass.
If I were a large pension fund or asset manager, I would be asking questions to the board like, "Given nothing gets done on many teams, what would happen if Google reduced its headcount by 50%?" and "Why is increasing headcount currently an incentive for managers within organizations, especially without any apparent penalty function?"
Probably because most people understand that horror stories reported on the web are likely to be outliers and not representative of the typical experience, or of a massive company as a whole.
It takes motivation to write a horror story. If you worked at a company that you expected to be a good place to work, and it turned out that it was a good place to work, what's your motivation to write about it? And if you do write about it, what's the motivation for someone to submit your non-horror story to a site like Hacker News, or of a reader to upvote it?
So the distribution of stories you'll see on the web and HN is going to be biased toward horror stories and other extremes.
Dead Comment
Because the way things are run at Google now are all FOR SHAREHOLDERS and for maximum value extraction with maximum stock buybacks.
Hacker culture and non-standard corporate leadership is always undesireable and PUNISHED by the shareholding class. Oracle/IBM type business leadership is familiar and rewarded.
This state of matters is the default for corporate America and Google was special because it managed to not be that for so long - until shareholders finally managed to bring it under control into the operating mode they understand.
There's a reason why modern corporate america is eating its own economic future and is becomming brittle to attacks from China.
They could not accurately judge productivity, talent or motivation, so some groups would lose their key players. This would demotivate everyone left. They would launch 500-1000 startups with knowledge of how some market of merely a hundred million people is being underserved. A dozen or a hundred of those would become true competitors in those markets.
It would be good for everyone except those who lost health insurance and income at the wrong time, and the Goog itself.
So, cut headcount, juice the stock, then have a bunch of possible acquisition targets that have developed viable products in new markets by not being saddled with the intractable corporate inefficiencies you suffer? Sounds like breaking some eggs for a tasty omelette.
I'm only mostly kidding.
I agree that Google benefits from monopolizing headcount, even if the employees waste their lives doing nothing, because it reduces competition. I would even Google poisons people's work ethic/priorities permanently when they try to leave and go to other startups (this is my personal experience working with former non-technical google employees who only play politics).
They can pretty much do whatever they want and still make money. Most shareholders don't really care about what happens in there. Money in, money out.
I think a lot of people also falsely hold on to the belief that money validates process. FB had some terrible processes going on and yet people kept cheering them on. Then when stock prices plummeted, they blamed it on the most recent event, rather than asking why FB rebranded to Meta.
It's similar here. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Many shareholders are happy to blindly trust the leadership and paying them huge containers of money as long as stonks go up.
Are the other fortune 100 companies better or worse managed than Google?
"Major investor calls on Google owner to ‘aggressively’ cut staff and pay"
A couple of months after this article appeared, google laid off 12,000 employees and didn't renew quite a few contracts. There were a few others too.
And this after a fairly hard hiring freeze that left a bunch of people in limbo.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-inv...
It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire. Now everyone seems to believe the ultimate goal of a tech job is to land at a FAANG, and just stay there for life?
It’s so tame, so complicit. Hackerdom is now mostly about obscene levels of money and status?
This really goes to show how pathetic the tech industry has been for the past ~2 decades. People don't aspire to build the next Google, just to get a job with Google. That's like saying the Matrix inspired you to land a job where you get your own cubicle.
When I was a kid dreaming of the future, I never thought that "success" meant being acquihired by a tech giant. That seems stupid, why wouldn't I just apply like a normal person? Building something like eBay or YouTube and turning it into a massive success to rival the giants was the dream. All you needed was a keyboard and luck.
I don't know if I'm alone in that, or if this is a generational thing? I'm currently under 30, so if it is, then it's probably a relatively recent phenomenon. I guess programmers born in the mid 00s probably grew up in a world already dominated by the same few tech giants, and missed the part where they were growing and fighting for dominance.
Of course, I would say that's probably the most reasonable dream to have considering the circumstances. If you do manage to build an innovative and sustainable business, it's unlikely you'll survive once the tech giants attack you with anticompetitive tactics that they know they can get away with.
...that doesn't make it any less lame though.
I think the core of it is that I internalized a (supposedly) fundamental hacker aesthetic of autonomy, and it seems the culture traded that away for a needy, zero sum, external-validation-needing void.
Now we're told that we really should be working on our brands, amassing our GitHub stars, and other bullshit that is wholly orthogonal to actually building cool stuff. Cause who wants to do that when the rewards are uncertain? Follower counts are what really matters, this is the attention economy, and you can't be left behind!
Tech boomed because: the economy was "good" (people could afford to go after creative and speculative pursuits) and there was technology that hadn't been utilized in creative ways yet (computers, phones, the internet, GPUs, etc.). This allowed "hackers"/"geeks"/"creatives"/"entrepreneurs" to work on stuff that most likely wouldn't make any money, but would be more interesting and fulfilling than doing a job or going after a career.
Then once the money started coming in, and others started hitting home-runs, the "sociopaths"/"prestige hounds"/"MBAs"/"money lovers" came in to formalize and formulize, so the gravy train would be more sustainable and predictable -- and that they could get theirs.
Now we're here. Something cool is no longer cool.
In another vein, what is there left to do? The economy needs to improve and there needs to be new -- actually ground-breaking and revolutionary -- technology brought to the world, so others may use it in novel and creative ways. Then we repeat the cycle.
LLMs seem to be the only contender for "ground-breaking" tech right now. Otherwise, I can't think of anything else.
Prior to that the dream was to just make a successful business. Consider Sun Microsystems.
But let's be real and invoke NoTrueScotsman: "hackers" are supposed to be more like Bill Joy at UCB than Bill Joy at Sun.
I doubt Bill Joy was thinking about business and financial success while hacking on BSD at UCB. Hacking was the end, not a means to an end.
"Hackerdom" whatever that means is separate from "working for a living".
At some point the term “hacker” was co-opted to mean anyone writing code. These Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs aren’t really “hackers”: they’re businessmen with some software engineering skills. But that doesn’t sound nearly as edgy or cool as calling yourself a hacker.
Originally hackers were the people actually creating new innovations, typically with no financial gain desired either criminal or legitimate. People at places like MIT or Stanford in the 1970s and the like.
> It’s so tame, so complicit. Hackerdom is now mostly about obscene levels of money and status?
The goal of many who make a startup that big tech would acquihire _is_ about achieving obscene levels of money and status. If they're acquihiring you then by definition you no longer have full say about what the business does. If it really was about making something, the best something you can, then you would resist being acquihired.
You move to get acquihired to get paid.
Or do people not think about it that much?
It has to be sarcasm.
I'm lucky to be on the good side of this, very much so, but I understand the experiences this person went through.
One thing I would say is that some of the takes here suggest that the author missed some interesting learning and development from their experiences. That's not to say it would have changed the final outcome, and they may not have been set up to learn by their manager, but I came in from a similar background and met a few of the same challenges, but had different take-aways from them and feel I have grown as an engineer from my startup roots as a result.
I think I see his point, but I think he's forgetting about the privilege of making good money at Google for a while and becoming an ex-Googler for all his life.
I can say that the people who say this DO NOT keep an excel on their desktop where every 1st of the month they go around their accounts, investments, etc. and enter the 'updated values' and they see their net-worth growing month-by-month. Money matters (when you are planning your vacations, when you get seriously ill, when you want to buy a new house/car/laptop), etc. Only naive people say that money don't matter. There are MANY things that matter, money is one of them.
The point is that it isn't money that makes you happy, it is the life you build. That can be different for different people, and money can help. The point is that money isn't the goal.
Understood to mean (in the context of this blog) the difference in living standards and happiness are not affected by a 150k/year income or a 450k/year income. Or another way, "I (author) have encountered the diminishing return on happiness. dH/dm = 0".
Once you have enough money for basics and contingencies, yes, happiness is more important.
"Money doesn't buy you happiness, but lack of money does buy you misery!"
Anyone "rich" who forgets this is inhaling their success too deeply and is not acknowledging their good fortune.
Upon looking back, I realized that if I had approved the original request nothing bad would have happened. No one, other than myself, was going to look at the bill. The amount involved was a rounding error of a rounding error of that week's revenue. In fact, the only one that got hurt was my team as the work got delayed while we went back and forth on the proposal.
The incentives in this case were set up so that the rational course of action for a manager is to be less frugal or responsible with company funds.