I have worked for a company similar in size to Google for a long time. During covid I experienced the highest high of my 18 years here. Flexibility was suddenly rampant (it was forced, but still) in a company that had been stodgy and inflexible since its founding. They began hiring just like Google and every other company did, so jobs were plentiful. This had a 'rising tide' effect on everyone (I got a promotion without asking for it, which is basically unheard of). Suddenly, I was able to define my work pretty much universally, and I was appreciated for doing do. It created an environment where I and my colleagues all wanted to contribute more than ever before. We put in tons of extra hours, many even unpaid.
Side note: it was RTO mandates that killed this.
But I digress. It made me wonder: is this fun, experimenting, creative, flexible environment one that pops up in general when all companies first form and the business realities of non-unlimited funding haven't caught up with the leadership yet? Is it something that hits all companies for a while when the economy is on an upward trend (as I attested to in my own company)? Have people found pockets of this kind of environment, even in the worst of times?
I'm trying to figure out when and where it exists so I can find it again. I'd never experienced it until covid, and now that I have, I want it back, and for the first time, I'm willing to do something major to get it because I know now what it feels like. It feels like Star Trek Generations, where that guy is trying to do whatever he can to get back on the nexus (except I'm not trying to destroy a planet).
When an organization is growing there's enough cake for everyone. It's a positive environment which naturally encourages collaboration. But mathematically speaking, no organization can grow forever. Eventually they reach a stable size or even shrink. At that point it becomes a zero-sum game and the only way to advance your career is at the expense of your colleagues, so you have to shift focus towards politics and managing upwards. If you find yourself in such an environment then unless you've been given the nod from senior leaders as someone on the fast track, you should start looking around for a new job. Realistically the situation is unlikely to improve.
Some static size organizations such as militaries or professional partnerships try to escape this trap with an "up or out" policy that systematically terminates the lowest performers at each level every year in order to open up more opportunities for promotion. This works to an extent, but causes other dysfunctions and probably wouldn't work in most tech companies.
Thoughts and prayers and all that but honestly this is for the best. As an economy we can finally reassign the massive investment of talent into something other than advertising.
And maybe we can be honest with ourselves that Wall Street always wins in the long run.
Be careful what you wish for: Many of those highly talented individuals will likely end up channeling their skills into areas that one could view as equally negative societally, such as hedge funds or defense contracting (like Palantir).
This isn't to justify the current state of advertising, but rather to express skepticism that dismantling an industry will lead talented individuals to willingly accept a significant reduction in their salary to go work on unlucrative-but-exciting frontiers.
Programmers in my experience are some of the least risky people I know. The majority will absolutely take their talents to the next highest bidder regardless of moral or ethical scruples. I don’t blame em, personally, I also see it as the only logical outcome
Actual defense contracting (Boeing/Lockheed, not Palantir) are hugely societally positive in defending the homeland. Unfortunately, Google engineers likely think of these companies as employing lesser people, mostly because they genuinely do pay very poorly.
Many of those highly talented individuals will likely end up channeling their skills into areas that one could view as equally negative societally
Or they could go the other way. Just like after previous bubbles.
When the real estate bubble burst and took a good chunk of the financial industry with it, plenty of people went into healthcare, or the arts, or started their own small businesses without the goal of taking over the world.
People aren't boolean. They aren't rats trained to only go after the biggest piece of cheese. The vast majority have human-scale goals and families and desires. Very few people, even in the tech sector, are comic book villains.
It’s almost guaranteed that advertising will find its way into whatever ends up replacing Google. Convincing/tricking people into buying things is a fundamental part of any free market consumer economy.
People don't want to pay for digital content, search, or social networking. Advertising, data harvesting, aka surveillance capitalism is the only remaining major business model for the web. This is like saying your neighborhood gas/petrol station is downsizing because of mismanagement, and you're cheering because you think that means the end of the fossil fuels industry is near. Whatever replaces Google, if it fails, will certainly be at least as invested in advertising as they are.
Xoogler here, left in 2015. I don't think Google's offices have been "happy" or "exuberant" for a long time. The big cultural shift was already underway when I left.
Xoogler as well - arguably, you could see this coming in the late 2000s.
but also: it depends a LOT on which division/group you're in and especially who your manager is - I know a lot of happy googlers who continue to knock-out kickass stuff.
> it depends a LOT on which division/group you're in
Yep, that seems to be the takeaway message and applies to any large organization you find yourself in. Applies to not just companies, but country locations and city locations.
This was the 2nd half of the 90's and Apple was at that point in its history when it was circlng the drain. It was another lesson that would be reinforced over and over in my three-decade career as a programmer: if you work very long in this field, know that everything will eventually change.
It was the supposed "dark times" to be at Apple: whole teams would be suddenly let go (the rest of us that lingered still might go through the abandoned offices of once co-workers looking to pull RAM out of their hardware for our own development machines). Some engineers like Tom, could see the writing on the wall early enough and knew when to switch teams. Tom ended up moving to the QuickTime team where he was able to continue to use his graphics talents. Later he worked on the iTunes visualizer if I recall correctly.
It's possible to join a company at a bad time and still have a good experience there.
(I don't know if everyone is aware how bad things got for Apple back then. IIRC they tried to sell the company to Sony, but Sony turned them down. They only survived due to investment from arch-nemesis Microsoft.)
Yeah :| my problem right now is that I haven't been outside in a very long time, am paid incredibly well, and really have hyper specialized in getting stuff done at Google.
The things I've done I can only really explain well to googlers. So it's been quite challenging finding a role outside that pays me as well.
> "From an H.R. standpoint, this is a nightmare... It completely reverses their image as a desirable employer."
Good. I mentor early career and nontraditional-background engineers, and among this set, Google has acquired a certain reputation. To paraphrase, if you can just pass the interview bar, you'll find yourself in an organization where the pay is amazing, the oversight is minimal, the visa/greencard policy is generous, and the HR processes rarely fire anyone. I routinely got to see people who I would never want to work with get hired there.
If Google becomes less of a target for barely-qualified people who want to rest and vest, I'm all for it.
And I would still recommend any early career person to “grind leetcode and work for a FAANG”. The money is too good to give up.
I would also tell them to live below their means and save like crazy while they were there and to immediately sell their stock once it is vested and diversify.
FWIW: I didn’t get into BigTech until 46. It served its purpose and I have no desire to go back to any large company. But again, I’m 50.
The fundamental insight of modern democracy, is not 1 man 1 vote, but that of balances and checks against power.
1 man 1 vote does not lead to the wisest or most long term of decision making, however, without it, the natural tendency is for the politician class and the wealthy to coalesce into one, with money reinforcing political power, and vice versa, sucking away any vitality in society.
In the US, as well as in many countries, its been shown again and again that money cannot simply buy the vote of every person. And there mass voting already demonstrates its power.
This principle extends to every facet of society. Company executives are checked by the board, the board checked by the shareholders, the shareholders checked by each other (the US allows shorting stocks for a reason).
I therefore find it questionable that a bunch of unchecked software engineers will lead to very good outcomes. No oversight, no pressure = freedom to pursue creativity and outcomes? Or merely idle hands? When people were proposing working multiple remote jobs during COVID, was that people being smart, or unethical behaviour being tolerated and justified?
Now the pendulum swinging too far back into the other direction would also be bad. See what happens to Boeing when engineers get completely subjugated by MBA management. But software people should not treat the exhortation to work a full 40 hour week as being whipped by slaves.
>> I routinely got to see people who I would never want to work with get hired there.
Can you expland on this? It doesn't really mesh with the preview sentence for me.
>>If Google becomes less of a target for barely-qualified people who want to rest and vest
It's always been my impression that people who actually manage to get a job at Google are extremely competent(so by definition - qualified) - is that not true?
As an anecdote, right before I left I did my standard self-assessment for performance season. I to my horror I realized that I had accomplished nothing for an entire year. This was largely (I believe...) due to factors outside my control: I did lots of work, but nothing came of it due to delays, procedural slowdown, project cancellations, etc. Instead of reprimanding me for this lack of output, my manager put me up for promotion. I left shortly after this.
Google has been in a decaying orbit for awhile. Plus was dead on arrival. They don’t seem to even be able to steward their money making endeavors that well. Ads are a black hole of money, money goes in and it’s unclear what you get out.
It's a depressing era with post-covid sugar crash, new wars, getting over inflation, job market being in the trash, etc. etc.
I'd argue there are no "happy offices" as a whole, and won't be for another ~10 years until everything settles and we're on an upwards trajectory (and sugar rush) again.
Why we as a society put up with this yoyo-ing economic model will never make sense to me. Nobody likes recessions, or layoffs, yet we're all complicit with them.
Readit News
Side note: it was RTO mandates that killed this.
But I digress. It made me wonder: is this fun, experimenting, creative, flexible environment one that pops up in general when all companies first form and the business realities of non-unlimited funding haven't caught up with the leadership yet? Is it something that hits all companies for a while when the economy is on an upward trend (as I attested to in my own company)? Have people found pockets of this kind of environment, even in the worst of times?
I'm trying to figure out when and where it exists so I can find it again. I'd never experienced it until covid, and now that I have, I want it back, and for the first time, I'm willing to do something major to get it because I know now what it feels like. It feels like Star Trek Generations, where that guy is trying to do whatever he can to get back on the nexus (except I'm not trying to destroy a planet).
Some static size organizations such as militaries or professional partnerships try to escape this trap with an "up or out" policy that systematically terminates the lowest performers at each level every year in order to open up more opportunities for promotion. This works to an extent, but causes other dysfunctions and probably wouldn't work in most tech companies.
And maybe we can be honest with ourselves that Wall Street always wins in the long run.
This isn't to justify the current state of advertising, but rather to express skepticism that dismantling an industry will lead talented individuals to willingly accept a significant reduction in their salary to go work on unlucrative-but-exciting frontiers.
Or they could go the other way. Just like after previous bubbles.
When the real estate bubble burst and took a good chunk of the financial industry with it, plenty of people went into healthcare, or the arts, or started their own small businesses without the goal of taking over the world.
People aren't boolean. They aren't rats trained to only go after the biggest piece of cheese. The vast majority have human-scale goals and families and desires. Very few people, even in the tech sector, are comic book villains.
but also: it depends a LOT on which division/group you're in and especially who your manager is - I know a lot of happy googlers who continue to knock-out kickass stuff.
It's definitely a different experience being in a row of desks with a lot of random people versus being in a cube-farm with your team.
Yep, that seems to be the takeaway message and applies to any large organization you find yourself in. Applies to not just companies, but country locations and city locations.
This was the 2nd half of the 90's and Apple was at that point in its history when it was circlng the drain. It was another lesson that would be reinforced over and over in my three-decade career as a programmer: if you work very long in this field, know that everything will eventually change.
It was the supposed "dark times" to be at Apple: whole teams would be suddenly let go (the rest of us that lingered still might go through the abandoned offices of once co-workers looking to pull RAM out of their hardware for our own development machines). Some engineers like Tom, could see the writing on the wall early enough and knew when to switch teams. Tom ended up moving to the QuickTime team where he was able to continue to use his graphics talents. Later he worked on the iTunes visualizer if I recall correctly.
It's possible to join a company at a bad time and still have a good experience there.
(I don't know if everyone is aware how bad things got for Apple back then. IIRC they tried to sell the company to Sony, but Sony turned them down. They only survived due to investment from arch-nemesis Microsoft.)
The things I've done I can only really explain well to googlers. So it's been quite challenging finding a role outside that pays me as well.
Good. I mentor early career and nontraditional-background engineers, and among this set, Google has acquired a certain reputation. To paraphrase, if you can just pass the interview bar, you'll find yourself in an organization where the pay is amazing, the oversight is minimal, the visa/greencard policy is generous, and the HR processes rarely fire anyone. I routinely got to see people who I would never want to work with get hired there.
If Google becomes less of a target for barely-qualified people who want to rest and vest, I'm all for it.
I would also tell them to live below their means and save like crazy while they were there and to immediately sell their stock once it is vested and diversify.
FWIW: I didn’t get into BigTech until 46. It served its purpose and I have no desire to go back to any large company. But again, I’m 50.
https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=scarface_74&commen...
Not everyone is motivated by greed.
1 man 1 vote does not lead to the wisest or most long term of decision making, however, without it, the natural tendency is for the politician class and the wealthy to coalesce into one, with money reinforcing political power, and vice versa, sucking away any vitality in society.
In the US, as well as in many countries, its been shown again and again that money cannot simply buy the vote of every person. And there mass voting already demonstrates its power.
This principle extends to every facet of society. Company executives are checked by the board, the board checked by the shareholders, the shareholders checked by each other (the US allows shorting stocks for a reason).
I therefore find it questionable that a bunch of unchecked software engineers will lead to very good outcomes. No oversight, no pressure = freedom to pursue creativity and outcomes? Or merely idle hands? When people were proposing working multiple remote jobs during COVID, was that people being smart, or unethical behaviour being tolerated and justified?
Now the pendulum swinging too far back into the other direction would also be bad. See what happens to Boeing when engineers get completely subjugated by MBA management. But software people should not treat the exhortation to work a full 40 hour week as being whipped by slaves.
Can you expland on this? It doesn't really mesh with the preview sentence for me.
>>If Google becomes less of a target for barely-qualified people who want to rest and vest
It's always been my impression that people who actually manage to get a job at Google are extremely competent(so by definition - qualified) - is that not true?
Why though, do you work there?
As an anecdote, right before I left I did my standard self-assessment for performance season. I to my horror I realized that I had accomplished nothing for an entire year. This was largely (I believe...) due to factors outside my control: I did lots of work, but nothing came of it due to delays, procedural slowdown, project cancellations, etc. Instead of reprimanding me for this lack of output, my manager put me up for promotion. I left shortly after this.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240205135109/https://www.nytim...
I'd argue there are no "happy offices" as a whole, and won't be for another ~10 years until everything settles and we're on an upwards trajectory (and sugar rush) again.