It starts with some general points one could summarize as defining a "good culture" and how that should pay off for both employer and employees, but then later tramples all over it by excusing or outright endorsing the exact type of political behaviour that was criticized at the beginning: upward perception, the favour economy, finding influential friends, connectors, not burning bridges, and facetime.
edit: The mentioned plan B (leaving) is really the only option for what they call a "hostile corporation". I don't agree with many of the plan A "learning to play the game" recommendations. This just changes you for the worse.
The author also published [1] an email he wrote at the beginning of his tenure. It is amazing how alien and out of place early Google sounds in today's corporate environment. They have completely eroded the perception that Google is this kind of place:
> Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground [...] Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.
Even if this was only half-true back then, there's very little you could do to convince me that it's true at all now. This culture and the public perception of it has been squandered.
That was an absolutely spot-on description of what it was like when I joined in 2007 or 2008. Within 2 year of joining, I had approval to use all the idle cycles in prod for protein design, folding, and drug discovery, and I had a front-row seat with some of the best programmers in the industry. By and large, employees were fun people to interact with, and the management was generally understanding of our hijinx. The main struggle I had was to convince the leadership to move faster into the cloud ("But we have appengine!" and "But profits aren't as good as ads", until MSFT ate their lunch). As soon as it was possible, I built and launched the cloud product I had wanted Google to make even before I joined!
It really did just feel like grad school with better funding. For me it lasted until around 2014 (wow, 10 years ago) when a director stole my ideas and bad-mouthed me to a bunch of senior folks. I hung on a bit longer (working for a close friend of the author of this FAQ on 3d printing and making stuff) and then a couple stints with ML hardware, before I finally concluded that the company was well on its way to enhittifying everything it did.
Sundar is sort of the complete opposite of this. He wants a large pool of completely anonymous programmers and a small number of directors who know how to turn those programmers into growth products, but those directors don't have a clue. For example, with gChat, one day the head of chat told TGIF that chat was changing, that japanese teen girls were the primary target, and they wanted emojis. He didn't even get that there was this enormous number of professional workers using gmail/gchat/gcal/gdocs and that by fucking up the product, he lost their trust.
One of the things that makes me sad about this is that Sergei and Larry seem so checked out. They were mostly gone when I was there, but I've always gotten the feeling that Google was like grad school because Larry and Sergei wanted it that way.
I get that they've made a ton of money, but it also seems like they really wanted to spend their lives making awesome stuff and doing things like scanning books and making them free. And it feels a bit like the market forces took Google away from them. They put Sundar and a bunch of other McKinsey alums in charge. And McKinsey is, from what I can tell, basically the opposite of grad school.
Whenever I did see Larry or Sergei make an appearance they always looked a little dead inside and like they were just going through the motions.
And from what I can tell, the original sin was taking VC funding. Once they took VC funding, they had limited actual control over what happened to their company. So while they talked in 2004 about not wanting to be a conventional company, and while they warned in 1998 that ad-driven search engines were biased against their users, they still had limited ability to be unconventional in any way that was unattractive to investors. And that includes, in a sense, just being too different. A large company will eventually need to be run by professional management, and professional managers need a thing that looks and drives like a conventional company.
I think it was Jamie Zawinski who said the reason he left Netscape was that it went from being full of people that wanted to build a great company to being full of people who wanted to work at a great company. The later culture won.
Jesus. Tell me more. You didn’t happen to be involved in deepmind are you? I kind of _loathe_ google these days but find it absolutely mind blowing that there was a time when they were just casually unblocking the scientific community for funsies…to the point where parents could just leverage google’s freebies to maybe shed some light on their kids’ rare disease.
It pains me to think this won’t be happening anymore because really, you can’t sic your brightness engineers on detecting ad blockers _and_ casually make scientific breakthroughs. Something happened to google and the we’ll be writing about for decades to come but if there’s one thing I’m certain it’s that they are done trying to make the world a better place.
How was Sundar at the time you joined? According to Wikipedia he spearheaded the development of Chrome, GDrive, GMaps, GMail and the VP8 format which are all monumental products so he sounds like he was quite like every other talented hacker that thrived in early Google culture. Is that not the case? What made him turn to the dark side so abruptly?
What does this mean? Yes, I understand the English, but I mean deeper: What are you trying to say? And, why does it matter?
Who cares about "losing the trust of the users". What matters is that 99% of "professional workers" don't have a choice what mail/chat/calendar/word processor they use. Their IT department decided for them. And, if they do have a choice, what do they use instead?
> Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.
Most of Google is now mature products. Run it like a business -- maximize profits. It seems logical to me.
Both Maps and Earth were acquisitions. MOST Google products are.
The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail. Maybe you can count Scholar but it’s really just a type of search.
Workspace was assembled from various acquisitions, YouTube they bought, Cloud is just a Jack Ma-esque “copy whatever Bezos is doing” initiative.
Most home grown Google products have either failed or been killed in the cradle. G+, Stadia, etc etc
Android was developed entirely at google (and redone midway after iphone came out) despite being originally an acquisition. Youtube basically just sold userbase + content. Chrome. Waymo. AppEngine precedes ec2 and heroku by some time. Most of hashicorp products (and dozen other startups) are basically copies of what google had internally.
The theory that google hasn’t birthed any original products just doesnt hold any water
Googles main successful product was amazing infrastructure. Lots of real innovation. It enabled massive scale of everything else, including acquisitions. YouTube was about to hit the wall when they got acquired.
This is technically true, but Maps before Google was nothing like what you see now. Most of the innovation happened at Google. Earth hasn't changed that much, but it's not really the killer app that Maps is.
> The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail.
Chrome. Photos. Hadoop. Kubernetes. Brain. Spanner. T in GPT (Transformers). And lots more. Google's real contribution was internet scale systems and how to run them reliably.
I also want to know the answer to this, but I'm starting to think I might not recognize it.
Part of Google's perceived aura (IMHO) when they started was that they seemed to be like the nebulous group of pre-Web Internet-savvy techies. Which were a smart group, tending towards altruistic and egalitarian, and wanting to bring Internet goodness to people, and onboard people into Internet culture. What seemed like one sign of this was times that you'd see old-school techies outside of Google treating Google like stewards rather than exploiters. And when they said "Don't Be Evil", I thought I knew exactly what they meant.
Well, the dotcom gold rush happened, huge masses of people rushed in looking for what it was about, huge money rushed in and soon tried to landgrab and then exploit those masses rather than onboard them, Doubleclick acquired Google :), techie job interviews started looking like rituals to induct affluent young new grads into their rightful upper-middle career paths, unethical behaviors became so commonplace that people can't even see them, and academia was infected a bit. Which I think means...
...If another Google happened, would we even recognize it? From where could it draw its culture that's not pretty completely overtaken by big money and all that attracts and builds?
Maybe the next Google can't be in the space of computing/communications/information at all, because big money and and coattail-riders would be all over that too quickly.
Maybe it would instead arise from people that really love to study insects. And they have a cooperative community around that, and have been trying to explain the importance of insects to the world for years, but not many care. Then it turns out that insects are the key to averting an imminent Earth extinction-level event. So the bug nuts get huge infusions of cash, and can work on all the problems they've wanted to.
And it'll be at least a few years before people with no interest in insects, other than chasing money, can really take over and start perverting the field, set up gatekeeping to pass people like them, while excluding the actual people who created and loved the field and saved the world, etc.
Personally, I have always disliked bugs, and will never be a candidate for Bügle.
IMO no. The unique combination of parameters with early-Google were:
- Small, relatively young company.
- Absolutely gargantuan amounts of revenue
You can't run a company this way unless you have a very large money firehose.
The last time this happened was early-Facebook. I don't think there has been a single company since then that fit the description - which IMO is fine, the celestial alignment of factors is pretty rare.
Companies nowadays have kind of the opposite problem: lots of hiring, but not enough revenue to show for it. Some tried to build a similar culture on VC funding but imploded once the cash ran out. You really need an intensely profitable product to make this formula work.
Probably but by the time the conditions are well known it has started degrading already. I’m convinced that ending up at a place like that in the early days has a massive luck component, even if you are the sort of person who would trivially get in hiring bar wise.
If a company had invented LLMs by themselves (without anyone else having the technology) that would be a very similar situation to what Google was in the early days.
This was a terrible way to run a company then and now. It leads to an incoherent product strategy. It doesn't provide the persistence required to pursue strategies that take many years to eventuate. Google succeeded in spite of this culture, not because of it; they found an immensely profitable niche, which enabled them to hire huge amounts of incredible talent, which covered up their cultural problems.
Also, this is a great example of a recurring problem: successful organisations venerate their culture, so that every part of it is assumed to be essential to their success until very painful experiences prove otherwise.
Another example: Linux developers thinking that managing patches by email is the best approach ever, because Linux is dominant.
Local was in-house. What we know of as Maps today is the merger of Google Local (Bret Taylor, in-house), Where2 (Lars & Jens Rasmussen, acquisition), KeyHole (John Hanke, acquisition), and probably a few other projects.
> it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google”
Someone decided to handle this situation that way, so one has a perfect right to be angry at them, and generalize that as "being angry at Google".
The author takes it with philosophy and pragmatism, that's admirable and I'm certainly not one to tell them how they should feel. But other factors indicate that his situation was also prone for that positiveness (feeling like a relief because of golden handcuffs, long tenure in a stock-distributing tech company + director level meaning that there's likely no concerns regarding money, side career already underway, maybe a relief to have some change).
Others might not be in the same situation, and are now jobless in in slow economy, with tenuous savings, rent or mortgage coming up. They might feel outright furious for a layoff that they have neither control on, nor were a reason for, and that shows no face to take responsibility - and they're completely entitled to feel that way, if that helps them cope. I'd say it makes sense to me, and don't feel bad for being angry if that's how you feel.
Anger at the Kafkaesque ministrations of the neo-feudal lords is a valid emotion. Let's not normalize the passive, defeatist acceptance of abusive corporate culture. One doesn't need to be angry, but that's a privilege of someone who isn't living paycheck to paycheck.
Director at Google is a 7 figure position. I have no problem if Google demands extraordinary performance from someone making that kind of money, and decides to lay off people who don't meet that bar.
This is very different than say, if an L3 engineer got hit with a layoff a year after joining.
If you worked at Google for any number of years, is there any reason to have tenuous savings?
Heck in any major city in the US, your average CRUD enterprise dev is probably making twice as much as the local median household income and should have savings
If you worked there as an entry developer for a couple years in an expensive city with a student loan, you'd have a reason, yes. Or if you were an immigrant with a family to support abroad. Or if you are divorced and need to pay spousal and child support.
And this is why Googlers' favorite line is "I'm sorry you feel that way." At Google, yes there are feelings good and bad, but only reason is right, and so Google protects itself by making any criticism unreasonable.
I don’t think senior in that context is what you think it means. It tends to mean experienced/higher ranking people and not senior citizens. Senior engineers, for instance, are engineers with more than 8 years experience.
> Context: When I was laid off from Google, I knew I'd be deluged with questions. I wrote this FAQ to share with friends and family, to prevent repeated explanation.
This is quite sweet in its stereotypical techie approach to life - your friends and family are asking questions about your situation because they care about and want to bond with you, not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying :-)
Well they can find alternative methods then that are less frazzling, there are fewer things worse than not feeling seen due to only answering questions!
I know it can be good, but sometimes the questions can legitimately get in the way of connection and spending quality time, and not everyone wants to have the hard conversation while being in the hotseat (especially not over, and over, and over again. I am transgender, for example, and while having 1 mildly hostile family member would be a somewhat-problem, most of my extended family only wants to talk about that thing, and that one thing, with me, to the point where it effectively creates a wall. That at least is my experience of the issue, it's not quite the same, but I've definitely experienced the "questions dynamic" within other, much-more-mild scenarios, and generally, IMPE, I really dislike it unless I'm actively getting something interesting out of it, which I'm oftentimes not! It can be very much isolating, as far as my personal experience goes.)
So, not really a terrible solution, I think! <3 :'))))
Oh hey I'm trans too and I was literally just about to pop in to respond in a nearly identical way! Yeah, having to answer the same set of questions, that aren't particularly interesting or bond-generating to you, over and over, just creates a really annoying barrier to interact with people. It's apparently a really common experience in a lot of marginalized communities. So it really can sometimes just be easier to have something to get the rote questions out og the way so you can get to more meaningful personal interaction.
Then learn how to respond to questions that are being asked out of politeness and bonding vs some fellow techie that actually is interested in gobbledygook detailed answers. You can talk about work and why it was cool/fun/horrible/frustrating to non-techies and still bond with them in your commiseration of being laid off.
With certain things like being laid off, being able to tap the sign is a lot nicer than relitigating something a couple of dozen times, which can be stressful.
I took this writing as a way for him to still reconcile unresolved feelings, seeing how he wants follow up with more writing on cultural shift at Google.
Which brings us to the second half of the parent's sentence: "not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying".
If you don't want to bond and spend 30 minutes getting cared about, just say "I'm fine, I just don't want to talk about it right now". Maybe follow with "And you, how are you?", but that's optional.
Again, they probably don't particularly care about the actual information.
I mean, most techies get that, but ask yourself: if it were you in this situation, could you really pass up on an opportunity to change an O(N) operation into O(1)?
Has this ever happened before. It does seem like SV folks have an elevated sense of purpose. Which is maybe fair to a point because of SVs inclusion in our online lives. But really, it seems like people in high paid jobs getting laid off isn't so much news for anyone, in general.
Maybe if there's some juice about how to order the world's information, but then they'd get sued for saying no doubt.
I think it is news in same sense that they got hired for jobs that paid hundreds of thousand dollars. Maybe a those truck drivers making 50K/ year really want to know about SV's best and the brightest. After all once truck divers, warehouse workers, paralegals etc finish their PhD in machine learning they will be working right along with valley folks.
IMHO, these senior people leaving is a good thing for them and for society.
Most have enough savings to be able to start up something interesting, fun, and that delivers a lot more societal value than their current Google role.
Junior redundancies are more problematic, particularly in the current job market.
Readit News
The Myth of the Genius Programmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ
The Art of Organizational Manipulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTCuYzAw31Y
I rewatch these every few years, or before an interview. Puts me back in the right headspace.
If you're reading this Ben, thank you.
It starts with some general points one could summarize as defining a "good culture" and how that should pay off for both employer and employees, but then later tramples all over it by excusing or outright endorsing the exact type of political behaviour that was criticized at the beginning: upward perception, the favour economy, finding influential friends, connectors, not burning bridges, and facetime.
edit: The mentioned plan B (leaving) is really the only option for what they call a "hostile corporation". I don't agree with many of the plan A "learning to play the game" recommendations. This just changes you for the worse.
You can't change the nature of reality, but you can choose to play the game in the service of good moral outcomes, or in servive of selfish greed.
> Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground [...] Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.
Even if this was only half-true back then, there's very little you could do to convince me that it's true at all now. This culture and the public perception of it has been squandered.
[1]: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2005-09-25-FirstWee...
It really did just feel like grad school with better funding. For me it lasted until around 2014 (wow, 10 years ago) when a director stole my ideas and bad-mouthed me to a bunch of senior folks. I hung on a bit longer (working for a close friend of the author of this FAQ on 3d printing and making stuff) and then a couple stints with ML hardware, before I finally concluded that the company was well on its way to enhittifying everything it did.
Sundar is sort of the complete opposite of this. He wants a large pool of completely anonymous programmers and a small number of directors who know how to turn those programmers into growth products, but those directors don't have a clue. For example, with gChat, one day the head of chat told TGIF that chat was changing, that japanese teen girls were the primary target, and they wanted emojis. He didn't even get that there was this enormous number of professional workers using gmail/gchat/gcal/gdocs and that by fucking up the product, he lost their trust.
Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.
I get that they've made a ton of money, but it also seems like they really wanted to spend their lives making awesome stuff and doing things like scanning books and making them free. And it feels a bit like the market forces took Google away from them. They put Sundar and a bunch of other McKinsey alums in charge. And McKinsey is, from what I can tell, basically the opposite of grad school.
Whenever I did see Larry or Sergei make an appearance they always looked a little dead inside and like they were just going through the motions.
And from what I can tell, the original sin was taking VC funding. Once they took VC funding, they had limited actual control over what happened to their company. So while they talked in 2004 about not wanting to be a conventional company, and while they warned in 1998 that ad-driven search engines were biased against their users, they still had limited ability to be unconventional in any way that was unattractive to investors. And that includes, in a sense, just being too different. A large company will eventually need to be run by professional management, and professional managers need a thing that looks and drives like a conventional company.
It pains me to think this won’t be happening anymore because really, you can’t sic your brightness engineers on detecting ad blockers _and_ casually make scientific breakthroughs. Something happened to google and the we’ll be writing about for decades to come but if there’s one thing I’m certain it’s that they are done trying to make the world a better place.
What does this mean? Yes, I understand the English, but I mean deeper: What are you trying to say? And, why does it matter?
Who cares about "losing the trust of the users". What matters is that 99% of "professional workers" don't have a choice what mail/chat/calendar/word processor they use. Their IT department decided for them. And, if they do have a choice, what do they use instead?
> Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.
Most of Google is now mature products. Run it like a business -- maximize profits. It seems logical to me.
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Dead Comment
The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail. Maybe you can count Scholar but it’s really just a type of search.
Workspace was assembled from various acquisitions, YouTube they bought, Cloud is just a Jack Ma-esque “copy whatever Bezos is doing” initiative.
Most home grown Google products have either failed or been killed in the cradle. G+, Stadia, etc etc
20% was always a myth.
The theory that google hasn’t birthed any original products just doesnt hold any water
Googles main successful product was amazing infrastructure. Lots of real innovation. It enabled massive scale of everything else, including acquisitions. YouTube was about to hit the wall when they got acquired.
This is technically true, but Maps before Google was nothing like what you see now. Most of the innovation happened at Google. Earth hasn't changed that much, but it's not really the killer app that Maps is.
Chrome. Photos. Hadoop. Kubernetes. Brain. Spanner. T in GPT (Transformers). And lots more. Google's real contribution was internet scale systems and how to run them reliably.
Part of Google's perceived aura (IMHO) when they started was that they seemed to be like the nebulous group of pre-Web Internet-savvy techies. Which were a smart group, tending towards altruistic and egalitarian, and wanting to bring Internet goodness to people, and onboard people into Internet culture. What seemed like one sign of this was times that you'd see old-school techies outside of Google treating Google like stewards rather than exploiters. And when they said "Don't Be Evil", I thought I knew exactly what they meant.
Well, the dotcom gold rush happened, huge masses of people rushed in looking for what it was about, huge money rushed in and soon tried to landgrab and then exploit those masses rather than onboard them, Doubleclick acquired Google :), techie job interviews started looking like rituals to induct affluent young new grads into their rightful upper-middle career paths, unethical behaviors became so commonplace that people can't even see them, and academia was infected a bit. Which I think means...
...If another Google happened, would we even recognize it? From where could it draw its culture that's not pretty completely overtaken by big money and all that attracts and builds?
Maybe the next Google can't be in the space of computing/communications/information at all, because big money and and coattail-riders would be all over that too quickly.
Maybe it would instead arise from people that really love to study insects. And they have a cooperative community around that, and have been trying to explain the importance of insects to the world for years, but not many care. Then it turns out that insects are the key to averting an imminent Earth extinction-level event. So the bug nuts get huge infusions of cash, and can work on all the problems they've wanted to.
And it'll be at least a few years before people with no interest in insects, other than chasing money, can really take over and start perverting the field, set up gatekeeping to pass people like them, while excluding the actual people who created and loved the field and saved the world, etc.
Personally, I have always disliked bugs, and will never be a candidate for Bügle.
- Small, relatively young company.
- Absolutely gargantuan amounts of revenue
You can't run a company this way unless you have a very large money firehose.
The last time this happened was early-Facebook. I don't think there has been a single company since then that fit the description - which IMO is fine, the celestial alignment of factors is pretty rare.
Companies nowadays have kind of the opposite problem: lots of hiring, but not enough revenue to show for it. Some tried to build a similar culture on VC funding but imploded once the cash ran out. You really need an intensely profitable product to make this formula work.
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~ ex-Googler : 2011 to 2018
[Disclaimer: I work at Google.]
Another example: Linux developers thinking that managing patches by email is the best approach ever, because Linux is dominant.
maps and earth were both acquisitions
Someone decided to handle this situation that way, so one has a perfect right to be angry at them, and generalize that as "being angry at Google".
The author takes it with philosophy and pragmatism, that's admirable and I'm certainly not one to tell them how they should feel. But other factors indicate that his situation was also prone for that positiveness (feeling like a relief because of golden handcuffs, long tenure in a stock-distributing tech company + director level meaning that there's likely no concerns regarding money, side career already underway, maybe a relief to have some change).
Others might not be in the same situation, and are now jobless in in slow economy, with tenuous savings, rent or mortgage coming up. They might feel outright furious for a layoff that they have neither control on, nor were a reason for, and that shows no face to take responsibility - and they're completely entitled to feel that way, if that helps them cope. I'd say it makes sense to me, and don't feel bad for being angry if that's how you feel.
People who climb their way to Director usually don't tilt at windmills and shake their fists at clouds.
This is actually not a productive way to cope and it’s good advice to tell people not to cope this way.
You way of saying it is nicer, granted.
This is very different than say, if an L3 engineer got hit with a layoff a year after joining.
Heck in any major city in the US, your average CRUD enterprise dev is probably making twice as much as the local median household income and should have savings
A number of reasons, yes.
It really doesn't look like a slow economy!
See https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
Because "getting rid of senior people" is exactly what that is.
This is quite sweet in its stereotypical techie approach to life - your friends and family are asking questions about your situation because they care about and want to bond with you, not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying :-)
I know it can be good, but sometimes the questions can legitimately get in the way of connection and spending quality time, and not everyone wants to have the hard conversation while being in the hotseat (especially not over, and over, and over again. I am transgender, for example, and while having 1 mildly hostile family member would be a somewhat-problem, most of my extended family only wants to talk about that thing, and that one thing, with me, to the point where it effectively creates a wall. That at least is my experience of the issue, it's not quite the same, but I've definitely experienced the "questions dynamic" within other, much-more-mild scenarios, and generally, IMPE, I really dislike it unless I'm actively getting something interesting out of it, which I'm oftentimes not! It can be very much isolating, as far as my personal experience goes.)
So, not really a terrible solution, I think! <3 :'))))
If you don't want to bond and spend 30 minutes getting cared about, just say "I'm fine, I just don't want to talk about it right now". Maybe follow with "And you, how are you?", but that's optional.
Again, they probably don't particularly care about the actual information.
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You haven't met my family. They just want gossip.
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Has this ever happened before. It does seem like SV folks have an elevated sense of purpose. Which is maybe fair to a point because of SVs inclusion in our online lives. But really, it seems like people in high paid jobs getting laid off isn't so much news for anyone, in general.
Maybe if there's some juice about how to order the world's information, but then they'd get sued for saying no doubt.
I think it is news in same sense that they got hired for jobs that paid hundreds of thousand dollars. Maybe a those truck drivers making 50K/ year really want to know about SV's best and the brightest. After all once truck divers, warehouse workers, paralegals etc finish their PhD in machine learning they will be working right along with valley folks.
Most have enough savings to be able to start up something interesting, fun, and that delivers a lot more societal value than their current Google role.
Junior redundancies are more problematic, particularly in the current job market.
Amen :_(
But also a Director is probably pulling >$1,000,000 / yr (the golden handcuffs).
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