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adrianmsmith
61 replies
6h17m

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.

toldyouso2022
25 replies
4h44m

The managerial class is the cancer of our time

Edit: I regret using the word cancer, but they are still bad

miroljub
21 replies
4h40m

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?

Heyso
7 replies
3h2m

Work and salaries ? Like from their own pocket ? No. That is the business money. Wasted. Time, attention, of peoples wasted.

That is the same absurd logic as for not to replace low qualified human physical work by machines (self checkout in supermarket).

Having less jobs due to technology or less stupid work should be seen as good for humanity.

Perhaps, instead, of imagining some stupid jobs and occupation, so peoples can be paid and survive. We coul reduce the total workhours of working people, so that senseful work would employ more peoples. And with no changes to the salary ofc.

I am not so good with english, so let me rephrase it. What would happen to humanity if 90 % went jobless because -let's imagine- robots and IA would efficientely replace us. Would 90 % be condemned to die in the cold when there is abondance ? Because they have no job and a 0.00001 % "owns" the robots ?

Our current system cannot work with abondance.

zer0tonin
2 replies
2h23m

Self-checkout is still low qualified human work. It's just done for free by the customers.

amalcon
0 replies
1h49m

The cashier has three jobs:

- Prevent theft

- Keep track of what's specifically been sold, to help determine re-ordering schedules

- Sometimes, put things in bags. Some stores just ask the customer to do this even if they have a cashier.

The thing about physically moving products over a barcode scanner is only for those first two purposes. Mostly the first -- if theft weren't an issue, it would be cheaper to just do manual inventory more frequently.

The customer is not preventing theft. They (mostly) aren'tstealing, but they also aren't deterring anyone from stealing. The lone employee for the eight self-checkout kiosks is doing that -- with the help of scales, cameras, and (these days) a little bit of AI.

ToucanLoucan
0 replies
1h9m

Not free if you "miss" scanning a few items.

Not that I'm endorsing that of course. But if you're going to saddle me with work you don't want to pay people to do, without training and without compensation and I happen to make a mistake... well. Guess that was a bad move on your part.

PH95VuimJjqBqy
2 replies
2h24m

Work and salaries ? Like from their own pocket ? No. That is the business money. Wasted. Time, attention, of peoples wasted.

It actually blows me away sometimes the willingness people w/i companies have to just spend money that isn't theirs.

It's not even the calculation of build vs buy, they'll spend exorbitant amounts of money for nothing in particular. It makes me understand the stereotypical budget constraints, because without them people would just waste money left and right.

shadowgovt
1 replies
1h58m

Eventually, one comes to realize that everyone's spending money that isn't theirs. Including the CEO and the owners, who are spending the money invested by people who expect returns.

PH95VuimJjqBqy
0 replies
27m

sure, but there's a lack of responsibility there that amazes me.

marcosdumay
0 replies
1h38m

What will happen is that either the 0.01% will order the robots to kill the 99%, or the 99% will go out and kill the 0.01% and whoever else is near them.

Or we could reform our system so it can cope with abundance. It's perfectly well known how to do it, and it helps creating that abundance too. But the 0.01% seems completely decided to fight against this to their death, so I'm not holding my breath.

logicchains
3 replies
4h37m

You call a person who brought work and salaries to 20 people for the whole year a cancer?

The entrepreneur did that. Entrepreneurs create jobs. Managers just manage, and shuffle around value, they don't create it like entrepreneurs do.

throwoutway
0 replies
3h55m

I've worked with plenty of managers who are entrepreneurial within large companies. Every year we have to propose new ideas and then (when approved) go deliver on them. That's not "just manage, and shuffle around value"

I have also worked with those "just manage" managers too. But one shoe does not fit all

nativeit
0 replies
1h31m

Or, more likely, the entrepreneur is (perhaps negligently) allowing their managers to spend investors’ money. Only the profoundly lucky entrepreneurs generate enough positive cash flow to cover the more likely losing investments and help pad out ~15% profit to make the VC funds worth maintaining. The idea that businesses are inherently efficient is hysterical.

_heimdall
0 replies
3h31m

There are some good managers out there. The problem is that the system of most large companies isn't designed for entrepreneurial or innovative managers, both the culture and incentive system means those managers are always swimming up stream and risk burnout and even being punished for making waves.

gv83
1 replies
3h18m

Or maybe those 20 people feel insecure about their abilities after 1 year fiddling thumbs and will have to fight a battle against themselves to get in a place where they use their skills better. You know, not all of us like the idea of doing nothing for years but getting paid for that

deebosong
0 replies
2h3m

Banksy (I'm neither for nor against him) said something similar (or is said to have said something similar):

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

All that is to say, it ain't only in tech! And I take this kind of waste – of vainglorious pursuits via manipulation of image-maintenance and resource-mongering for purposes of self-aggrandizing optics (rather than actual collective advancement and good) – is not unique to just advertising and tech, but is prevalent everywhere, throughout history, etc. And only rarely do we see managers & bosses & leaders & corporations & workers come together for actual good.

toldyouso2022
0 replies
4h22m

It's not the person, it's the class and its position in society, its powers and its incentives.

nativeit
0 replies
1h36m

Management has entered the chat.

fnordpiglet
0 replies
2h10m

To add to the other replies, the issue isn’t the manager wasted some corporation or billionaires money.

The issue is that if the manager had grown the team in a way that grew revenues and value they manager could have createdmore than 20roles in the entire organization. Sometimes the manager with 5 engineers and a strong vision can create enough value to hire hundreds or thousands of people throughout the company.

The manager who empire builds often creates negative value. So they create jobs for 20 people. But these jobs contribute nothing. Someone’s work in the org went to pay for those 20 jobs, and they got sucked into a black hole. Worse they require support, interact throughout the company, distract from real valuable work. In the end they contribute negative value, and the manager employed 20 people at the cost of 3 people’s jobs that could have been created but never were, their employment cost -23 people’s worth of value and contributed zero.

Now in many organizations this leads to a promotion because they seem important for having so many employees. They create a role model for other less effective leaders. As they hire managers to work for them, they hire those that add people as fast as possible regardless of value production. Now they’ve created 200 jobs, at a cost of 30. But their emergent doppelgängers have formed 10 of them with 20 people, contributing -30 jobs as well. Now there are 400 created jobs, but -60 net jobs.

Eventually the company is overrun with empire builders. It’s a big company. There are a few highly profitable cash cow teams that are extremely competitive to get into and are largely left alone. The profits though of the entire enterprise are flat and inline with peers of similar size. Headcount makes the comping look like a giant of industry. But it’s half the size it could be if there had been focus on creating new and better value.

In my experience this is why Amazon employs nearly 2 million people and is hyperbolic in its growth over such a long time. While empire building certainly exists there is a lot of process to control for it. Hiring (generally) is well metered, and leaders (sometimes) are rewarded for their dynamism in business growth (not always, YMMV). It adds new businesses constantly and a lot (not all!) businesses do pretty well and if they don’t get shut down and people reassigned.

Google, well, listen. It’s got great benefits and the managers have some impressive empires with high salaries and a stable of smart people to tally up for their biography. But there are only a few successful businesses and god bless you if you can name one that’s launched in the last 10 years. But it is killing them.

Many companies don’t have the luxury of a wildly profitable cash cow like Google. They get overrun and whither away, sometimes really fast.

That’s how it’s like cancer. Not literal cancer, and cancer is a horrible disease not to make light of, but empire building represses job growth over the long term in exchange for rapid short term growth that ultimately kills the host entirely.

brigadier132
0 replies
3h15m

Phrased another way, these managers are getting our best and brightest and putting them in positions where they create and contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity.

Reviving1514
0 replies
4h8m

I feel what they did was essentially break windows

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

IggleSniggle
0 replies
3h9m

Some of us want to contribute something to the world we live in, to make it a nicer place to be. I think it's great he's found a way to get all those people organized together; it's a shame he didn't give them something to do that created true value; it's waste. Not just waste of the company's money and time, but a waste of the labor of the individuals who could have done something great given real leadership.

To be fair, we don't know if the manager was using that headcount to do something impactful outside of the mandated work. Based on the story, however, it seems doubtful that the manager was thinking of anything other than their career trajectory.

Ekaros
0 replies
4h28m

Or they might be doing something productive instead. Or at least not making some resource inefficient system.

shadowgovt
1 replies
2h0m

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 outwho'sgoing 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).

sheepscreek
0 replies
1h36m

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

This is real life for most managers. It is also true some can’t handle the stress and find toxic ways of dealing with it (inappropriate comments, focusing more on the promotion than improving the lives of their team members).

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.

Sort of true. The reality is somewhere in between. Most managers want to go good. Few are truly evil who get off on making others suffer - or take pleasure in uprooting lives. Incentives and personal motivations play a very big part in how they manage.

marcosdumay
0 replies
2h45m

Nah, they grow and spread until they consume all the resources. It's a very good analogy.

leosanchez
17 replies
6h4m

So that was about 10-20 people in total. The project took over a year. All completely unnecessary.

What are the bosses above your boss are doing if resources are allocated on useless projects ?

enriquto
5 replies
5h57m

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!

TeMPOraL
3 replies
5h4m

You jest, but once a company goes public, the hierarchy of bosses loops on itself - the company bosses answer to shareholders, many of whom answer to, or themselves are, regular people with regular jobs and regular bosses...

eru
2 replies
4h28m

That's not a proper loop, because those the regular people who are shareholders don't answer to their work-bosses about any vote they might do as a shareholder.

(Of course, in practice regular people by and large don't vote their shares.)

ElevenLathe
1 replies
3h47m

I've in fact always been afraid to vote my shares against the recommendations of the board. What if someone finds out and takes it personally? I need the job much more than I need any potential upside of the shares I own, so even if all the proposals amount to "let the executives steal whatever isn't nailed down", I figure I'm better off going along with it or just throwing my proxy card away.

IggleSniggle
0 replies
3h6m

Because of the implication. Yes. It's always better in aggregate if people fight back, in order to prevent the inevitable slide towards power consolidation, but it really requires leadership because it's frequently good for the group but bad for the individual, and it's the first through the wall who gets bloodied.

iainmerrick
0 replies
4h58m

I regret that I have but one upvote to give.

numpad0
2 replies
4h43m

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.

JohnFen
0 replies
1h35m

After all you're working to get paid. Making meaningful contributions to the society at large is at very best secondary.

I think how true this is varies from person to person.

IggleSniggle
0 replies
3h1m

You work to get paid so that you can use the money to make the world a more pleasant place to live in. The pay is really the secondary thing once the scales fall from your eyes. This holds true at all levels of society.

"Sucking the company dry" is a really shortsighted way to optimize for your own best life. You're going to have a better life if you use your resources to actually accomplish something that contributes.

ponector
1 replies
5h26m

They are also working hard to grow their unit's headcount and budget.

the_gipsy
0 replies
5h4m

It's turtles all the way up

pjmlp
1 replies
5h34m

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.

jSully24
0 replies
4h30m

Worse still, the bosses brought in from the outside who appear to have technical knowledge from their previous political victories at other employers. And they know someone at your company, thus they are “trusted”.

adrianmsmith
1 replies
5h57m

I can only speculate.

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 itistheir 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?

RugnirViking
0 replies
5h23m

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 think the older and more experienced I get the more I realise that the suits giving overly large estimates are generally just correct. They're a lot better than the suits that want unrealistically short deadlines, at least!

In academia it's very easy to wander into a field adjacent, see a bunch of maths you feel like you ought to understand but don't, spend a bit of time trying to understand and failing, and then making the leap to thinking that everyone in the field is overcomplicating things and wasting their time. Often in actuality there are a bunch of subtleties to the problem you just don't see without spending time working through it.

It's clearly in principle possible to waste time doing unproductive reinventing, but when people set up complicated projects, you really gotta be sure you understand the self-professed reasons people felt like they had to do it that way before being at all convincing in arguing for another course of action. This will require patience and humility.

rebolek
0 replies
5h58m

drinking Champagne while bathing in the blood of young virgins, mostly

oytis
0 replies
5h12m

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.

miroljub
4 replies
4h43m

Like in every organization, "what you measure is what you get".

fnordpiglet
2 replies
2h30m

* unless it’s productivity

TheCoelacanth
1 replies
2h20m

You can't measure productivity; only rough proxies for it.

You'll get the proxy that you measure but often not the actual productivity that you were hoping for.

coffeebeqn
0 replies
1h18m

Exactly - what would you measure for engineers? Lines of code, number of PRs, number of closed bugs, time to ship… everything can be gamed. For some of them you get tech debt, others just bring bloat that kind of looks like work but isn’t

chromakode
0 replies
3h55m

Goodhart's Law

BurningFrog
4 replies
1h28m

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.

epicureanideal
1 replies
1h2m

Google Search is one of the Great Inventions in human history

I don't know about that...

hennell
0 replies
2m

Compared to the alternatives at the time (and really now) it absolutely is. Without decent search the web is a mess, it's just mountains of information with no logic or organisation and the best content and information is nothing if you can't locate it.

These days their search is starting to turn. Too many sponsored results, no way to avoid the AI takeover or copycat sites. In short the search doesn't actually find you the best results. But still it's hard to avoid it. There's no better way to find what you are looking for wherever it is on the web.

yterdy
0 replies
1h10m

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."

EricMausler
0 replies
33m

Isn't that a good thing? It promotes creating jobs and sharing some of the wealth

ChicagoBoy11
3 replies
1h53m

But it doesn't sound even good on paper, though!

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.

projektfu
0 replies
1h18m

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.

joshspankit
0 replies
1h28m

Under the rules of the tradition economy, yes.

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.

chubot
0 replies
55m

Wait until you hear about the incentives to use more computing resources

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

bee_rider
1 replies
1h49m

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.

bee_rider
0 replies
1h12m

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.

castlecrasher2
0 replies
1h48m

Yeah this is definitely one of those things that sounds good on paper but has unintended "consequences" shall we say.

Definitely Goodhart's Law in action.

notpushkin
30 replies
8h17m

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.

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.

mkmk3
12 replies
7h36m

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.

josephg
8 replies
7h24m

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.

dmurray
5 replies
6h17m

SQLite doesn't generally take public contributions, you'd need to get hired by them to write code there </nit>.

ahoka
4 replies
5h32m

And it’s not actually open source, at least definitely not Open Source.

ungamedplayer
2 replies
5h25m

There definitely are nuances to licensing vs public perception.. what makes you say it is not adhering to its license?

https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

TheCleric
1 replies
2h52m

Not agreeing or disagreeing with the parent, but when I’ve seen this argument in the past it’s usually meant as “they’re not using GPL so nothing stops someone from copying the code, creating something new, and then not being forced to distribute their source.”

Essentially they usually mean it’s not Open Source if at some point the source code of downstream projects could be closed source.

wizzwizz4
0 replies
2h22m

The word for that is usually "copyleft".

goldsteinq
0 replies
5h25m

It’s public domain, so open source as defined by OSI.

mkmk3
0 replies
5h25m

Cool, good to hear. Seems like people do make friends in the space, and there is obviously a lot of cooperation involved in getting a change into a shared codebase.

Still wondering about what the actual community aspect of it looks like, beyond individual issues. Probably the best way to find out is to contribute ;)

hiAndrewQuinn
0 replies
4h22m

Well, maybe not SQLite. The three man developer team is very hardcore about keeping all contributions public domain/CCZero, not just open source, and so they very rarely accept contributions because they pose a risk, however small, of jeopardizing that status.

skybrian
0 replies
2h42m

I agree, but there are whole teams at Google working on open source projects, and they probably have starter projects?

notpushkin
0 replies
5h25m

That's actually my experience, too. Last July I've decided to take a year to work onhttps://lunni.dev/, but doing it alone was fun only for the first couple months. (Well, notalonealone—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”).

chankstein38
0 replies
9m

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.

Cthulhu_
8 replies
8h12m

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.

PumpkinSpice
2 replies
7h44m

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.

raverbashing
0 replies
5h41m

Or: to participate in the cycle you need to be there for at least 6mo (or something like that)

Of course, this doesn't mean you're fully off the hook during that time, while it is less informal and laid back, doesn't mean you don't have to deliver

Especially in countries that have some kind of labour protections and limits on letting people go, this is important

filoleg
0 replies
1h1m

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.

Just a small addition, starting from the beginning of 2023, all new hires get their first rating as OI (aka outstanding impact aka one rating higher than the target "meeting expectations"/"significant impact").

cornel_io
1 replies
6h52m

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...

robertlagrant
0 replies
6h37m

the dirty secret at Google is that there's too little meaty work to satisfy all the people hungry to take it on

I think this is also a good reason behind 20% time. It's not to crowd source ideas, it's to keep smart people with the company.

saagarjha
0 replies
2h29m

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.

notpushkin
0 replies
7h31m

how is Google that way, generally speaking?

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

freeCandy
0 replies
7h36m

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.

[1]https://github.com/google

thih9
4 replies
7h15m

Realistically "getting away with doing nothing" would mean a lot of going to meetings, monitoring some obscure systems, writing reports, etc.

Aeolun
1 replies
1h0m

If you are already aiming to get fired, why would you do that?

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.

thih9
0 replies
36m

The article describes scenarios where the author wanted to work according to their preferences and never got the intended outcome.

iainmerrick
0 replies
6h44m

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'retryingto achieve something, or just coasting.(Edit to cynically add:or does it??)

eru
0 replies
4h22m

Attend the meetings remotely, and turn your camera off.

Pretend to monitor the system, but don't actually do anything.

Write the reports with Google Bard.

nkohari
0 replies
2h35m

Others might feel differently, but to me, there is nothing worse than pretending to be busy when you could be doing something of real value.

eru
0 replies
4h21m

I would absolutely take that “offer”, on the condition that they allow me to work on some open source project in the meantime.

The manager could at most offer you a handshake deal.

_the_inflator
0 replies
6h23m

Fantasy. It is still a working relationship and a contract and it can backfire on you.

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.

mattgreenrocks
24 replies
4h58m

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?

bogwog
8 replies
3h3m

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.

...that doesn't make it any less lame though.

financltravsty
4 replies
1h55m

Such is life.

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.

fragmede
3 replies
1h33m

solar power, wind power, grid-scale battery storage, heat pumps, ev cars, ev aircraft, mRNA vaccines, cures for very specific kinds of cancer, spaceX... maybe it's just me, but there's a ton of intesting tech happening outside of computers

financltravsty
2 replies
1h0m

mRNA vaccines is the only one that really "pops" for me. The rest are just iterations on what we've already had, but more efficient/less costly/etc. Nothing really revolutionary, only the same old but better.

In that vein, CRISPR, and how it enables individuals to pursue genetic modification and xenobiology/botany, is one that's being utilized right now to make a lot of very cool stuff (one that comes to mind is theS. Mutansstrain that doesn't produce lactic acid). But it's still a very involved and very chaotic process that doesn't allow innovations to rocket off.

Aeolun
1 replies
43m

Most things are iterations on what you already had. Transistors were just an iteration on tubes, but give it 50 years and…

I think the most world changing tech of the last 20 years is the smartphone.

lotsofpulp
0 replies
30m

I think of the smartphone as a culmination of many technologies. Efficient broadband wireless radio, efficient and powerful microchips, GPS systems, camera technology, display technology, battery technology, etc, and of course the software to make it all work.

All of those come together to make a powerful, easy to use, portable computer that enables its user to do so many things in so many places there were not possible before.

mattgreenrocks
1 replies
2h8m

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!

Aeolun
0 replies
47m

I think the amount of people in it for the sake of building hasn’t really changed. It’s just that the domain has been absolutely flooded by people in it for the money.

Things felt nicer when we were all still just building.

zaptheimpaler
0 replies
42m

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.

xwdv
3 replies
4h9m

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.Realhackers 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.

jhbadger
1 replies
1h47m

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.

xwdv
0 replies
1h12m

Even if true, still a far cry from the typical Silicon Valley brogrammers making pitch decks.

rideontime
0 replies
2h16m

Ok, grandma, let's get you to bed.

actionfromafar
2 replies
3h51m

Probably because it has become increasingly apparent that an aquihire isn’t all what it’s cracked up to be.

mattgreenrocks
1 replies
2h3m

By the same line of logic, doesn't that also implicate full-time work there?

Or do people not think about it that much?

actionfromafar
0 replies
1h41m

You can bust your ass and maybe get a job there after a few years suffering.

Or you can just go there directly without the suffering.

Given the choice, it’s not unrational to skip a few years of uncertain payoff.

TheCleric
1 replies
2h49m

Hacker culture and entrepreneurship are orthogonal.

mattgreenrocks
0 replies
1h45m

Agree. That point was muddled by me. The aim should be in building things, not being seen as successful.

phone8675309
0 replies
57m

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.

You move to get acquihired to get paid.

hotnfresh
0 replies
1h23m

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?

It has to be sarcasm.

dartharva
0 replies
3h49m

That was the time when credit and finance flowed like water. Not anymore.

coffeebeqn
0 replies
1h12m

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?

acuozzo
0 replies
4h44m

It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire.

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.

Cthulhu_
0 replies
4h50m

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".

ZephyrBlu
17 replies
7h46m

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.

PumpkinSpice
7 replies
7h38m

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.

eru
2 replies
4h17m

I did work at Google between 2014 to 2016. It was ok. I enjoyed my time there (about as much as I enjoyed other jobs I had).

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.

yolovoe
0 replies
1h14m

Depends on the team. I work in arguably one of the most core teams at AWS, and I’ll say that most oncalls, I am doing 60 hour weeks at least and getting woken up at night and/or paged in on weekends.

Outside of oncall, I’m constantly pushing back people who try to give me more work. Team is great, manager is great. We’re a team and I can definitely rely on them for support and my welfare. Work life balance can be really bad at times, but we get a good amount of PTO, promotions seem achievable, and my pay at least is really good cause of my manager and perf rating.

programmertote
0 replies
2h1m

I know a little about that. Programmers in Amazon have to work harder mainly due to the poorly-designed/thought-out (despitesometimes unnecessaryprocess like writing design docs and "discussing" over your solution with various 'stakeholders' until it gets approved) systems and tools supporting their internal development work. Pipelines is their CI/CD platform and boy, looking at the interface wants me to puke.

Every single step you need to implement requires you to look up several internal wiki pages, some of which are outdated and/or poorly written or linking out to another wiki page, and so on. My ex-manager always talk about 'scalability' (because they want to sell it to other teams for visibility) although that tool we are designing is going to be used by like 2-3 people and is processing at most like 500GB-1TB a day (which is not big data in my experience). In the name of scalability and rapid deployment, the manager wants us to use CDK, and we spend probably half of our team's effort maintaining/patching/upgrading that CDK dependencies (like Node.js and others). This is not to mention that when you want to tear down the resources created by CDK, it doesn't do things cleanly, so you are left with lots of CDK-created S3 buckets over time. Oh man, I can recount a few more problems surrounding the tools used within Amazon and how obtuse they are for usability and ease-of-development.

personjerry
0 replies
1h59m

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.

marcodave
0 replies
4h16m

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

kevincox
0 replies
3m

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.

jefftk
0 replies
2h15m

> 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.

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.

DannyBee
3 replies
4h21m

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.

crdrost
1 replies
17m

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 wewerebroken into teams and told tobuild 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 wemightbuild, as an app that wehad 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, Icannotwait for my team to actuallyapprovethese 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".

naveens
0 replies
4m

thanks for sharing.

jdthedisciple
0 replies
39m

Does working at Google for this long make one a millionaire?

surajrmal
0 replies
30m

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.

shadowgovt
0 replies
1h52m

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).

gorjusborg
0 replies
3h29m

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 thingsweird. 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'.

gilbetron
0 replies
2h38m

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.

eschneider
0 replies
1h36m

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.

solaarphunk
13 replies
6h14m

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?"

dsr_
5 replies
5h49m

If the Goog reduced headcount by 50%:

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.

solaarphunk
3 replies
4h56m

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).

_heimdall
1 replies
4h35m

Once a public company gets large enough the stock itself is their product.

It really doesn't matter much what the company produces PR how well it manages its org, they just need to keep producing numbers in a quarterly earning report that few even read so a few clips can make a headline and bolster the stock.

eru
0 replies
4h15m

You can short Google.

roenxi
0 replies
4h34m

Yes it is a huge problem. No nobody knows how to fix it. This has been the largest and most glaring problem in software for decades now and is not at all a point of confusion for managers.

It is the same question as "how do we measure programmer productivity?" which is similarly a huge problem and, so far, unsolvable.

meepmorp
0 replies
5h7m

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.

I'm only mostly kidding.

pid-1
1 replies
5h37m

Google is so big not even large investors have stakes relevant enough for this sort of activism.

chris_wot
0 replies
5h1m

One day Google will collapse under its own crapululence.

muzani
1 replies
4h46m

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 askingwhyFB 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.

coffeebeqn
0 replies
1h7m

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?

tmoertel
0 replies
3h39m

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.

rtontic
0 replies
4h3m

I'd assume shareholders value is still increasing, so it wouldn't be a problem for them.

izacus
0 replies
4h7m

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.

workfromspace
9 replies
6h2m

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.

HenryBemis
7 replies
5h59m

"money doesn't matter"

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.

strken
1 replies
5h28m

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.

closewith
0 replies
4h21m

I think in general it's a form of self-justification to allow a person to feel that they are good despite being wealthy in an extremely unequal world.

gorjusborg
1 replies
3h22m

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.

phone8675309
0 replies
54m

Money can't buy happiness, but it does make the sad times easier.

marcodave
0 replies
5h20m

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.

fragmede
0 replies
1h10m

Updating it byhand? What kind of a neanderthal do you take us for?

automatic6131
0 replies
1h27m

"money doesn't matter"

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".

dcminter
0 replies
5h20m

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.

chrismorgan
9 replies
6h5m

DHTML (dynamic HTML, basically what any web app is today)

No, DHTML meant little snippets that you could add to your page to add effects and widgets, whether arguably useful things like button rollover (many of you will remember the incantation I think it was Adobe Fireworks produced, something along the lines of <img src="button1.jpg" onmouseover="MM_something('button1_rollover.jpg')" onmouseout="MM_something('button1.jpg')">) or widgets like a “scroll to top” link in the bottom right corner that only appeared when you had scrolled down some way, or ridiculous things like drawing an analogue clock around the mouse cursor that followed your movement but as though the digits were connected by pieces of elastic each to the next, or snowflakes falling down the screen. Browsehttp://www.dynamicdrive.com/,thatwas DHTML. DHTMLmostlymeant fripperies, but did definitely include useful functionality like calendar widgets. But that was the scope of it: isolated things here and there that you could add to an existing page.

Web apps today are a whole-page affair, where the scripting is woven through the entire thing; they’re essentially unrecognisably different from DHTML.

mpeg
2 replies
1h39m

No, DHTML is exactly what is now called a "web app" or HTML/CSS + Javascript

It was just called DHTML instead of javascript because:

1. Javascript was not nearly as popular as it is today.

2. DHTML actually supported multiple languages, it was a catch all term for any scripting that interfaced with HTML so it included VBScript, JScript/ECMAScript, ActiveX controls, etc.

It very much evolved into web apps as they are today.

chrismorgan
1 replies
33m

Sure, loosely speaking it evolved into web apps as they are today, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same things. Cars are different from horse-and-carts, electric cars are different from ICE cars. I maintain what I said: web apps today are unrecognisably different from DHTML. The term “DHTML” froze in meaning and scope quite early on, and faded from use over the course of several years; and lingering uses of the term over subsequent years were very dominantly of that early scope and meaning—hence I say it froze.

(I don’t feel ActiveX, applets or Flash were ever part of the meaning of DHTML. JavaScript/JScript/VBScript, absolutely. But these others had their own drawing areas and typically didn’t interact with the HTML DOM. They were just embedded alternate worlds, not DHTML.)

mpeg
0 replies
5m

I think it's just semantics, but what I found incorrect was saying that DHTML was just little snippets – that entirely depends on the use, I remember entire websites written with DHTML that were cutting edge at the time.

For me the reason to include ActiveX is because it came bundled with the web browser (IE) while for Flash you had to install the Macromedia plugin. Also, while Flash probably could interact with the DOM I personally almost never saw it done; I definitely remember ActiveX controls that would interface with the DOM, used almost in the way React and co are these days (!)

brynbryn
1 replies
5h47m

And DHTML provides possibly the hardest version of PONG I've ever attempted to playhttp://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex12/phong2.htm

SkyArrow
0 replies
5h29m

Off-topic for this thread but if you can get the ball to ping-pong horizontally while both players are at the top edge then you can stay alive indefinitely - the opponent doesn't seem to move downwards out of this position.

indeyets
0 replies
4h7m

just one word: <layer>

PH95VuimJjqBqy
0 replies
2h5m

web pages today are an evolution of DHTML, it's not accurate to call them a different thing entirely.

LeftCorner
0 replies
3h19m

The MM_ was an acronym for Macromedia who developed Fireworks prior to being acquired by Adobe

Kranar
0 replies
54m

DHTML as a term was introduced in 1997 by Microsoft to refer to the use of HTML, style sheets and JavaScript in Internet Explorer 4.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML

WizardClickBoy
6 replies
6h0m

This sounds like an absolute nightmare and I see stories like this very frequently. Is this the "normal" experience of working at FAANG in 2023, and how long has it been like that? I have never worked for (or been tempted to apply to) any business remotely approaching that scale (currently in largest ever company, 3-400 employees total, only because my previous much smaller company was acquired) and I can't really understand why anybody would ever want to.

Surely the delta in terms of earnings at FAANG vs literally anywhere else is not worth this kind of horror – can anybody explain? Or do people just not find out until it's too late?

wepple
3 replies
5h29m

There seems to be 1-2 posts per week about how terrible $FAANG is to work for (google is in the hot seat this month)

If google has ~200k (I don’t have exact data) employees, there are surely a significant number of people who either don’t hate it enough to blog, or actually enjoy it.

It’s just that nobody writes a blog post saying “I went to work and things were good”, and nobody (especially HN) would upvote it.

But remember, if you see a new update about React, Android, ChaosMonkey, or every time a new apple product lands… that’s someone’s work being released, and at least a subset (possibly small, possibly large) are happy with the work and the outcome

yoz-y
1 replies
4h11m

It has its ups and downs. Yes bureaucracy can be annoying, but. Thing is, that with such a huge company the teams and cultures are so different that it doesn't really make sense to talk about Google culture as a whole.

wepple
0 replies
3h5m

Yeah exactly. Being a tech lead for the next iPhone and being tech lead for some HR system that organizes people’s 401k contributions are both experiences of “being a SWE at apple” but probably overlap in infinitesimally small ways.

A lot of folks don’t seem to get this. There are plenty of horrible 100 person startups, where you quit and move to a different 100 person company where life is amazing. There are hundreds of 100 person units in a FAANG.

It’s similar to the shortsighted conclusion “Americans are X”, ignoring the diversity of different states.

Etheryte
0 replies
4h43m

Honestly I think that would be great content. "Went to work, it was okay. Meeting was boring, had a chat in the coffee corner." Basically the HN equivalent of the local news "local man paints fence".

rebolek
0 replies
5h54m

I'm applying for a job at 100k+ people company. I was sent test for a different position. After I complained, they send me another test. And next hour they've sent another different test again without me requesting it. I guess they don't care about their job very much.

coryrc
0 replies
5h29m

Yes, it's normal. I've rarely had a time when at least one direct coworker wasn't doing work but still employed, sometimes multiple.

Why still here? I'm sick and have two young kids, and I just find projects that interest me but aren't too challenging.

spacecadet
4 replies
8h5m

Hell yeah brother! but as others pointed out, ride that 12 months and start or learn something on their dime! and while we're at it, fuck google! hehe

spacecadet
3 replies
7h7m

Bah! Down votes, sensitive googles afoot.

robertlagrant
1 replies
6h36m

It's just the low quality of the comment that's getting the downvotes.

spacecadet
0 replies
5h50m

I know that Im having fun

spacecadet
0 replies
7h6m

and one more ;) offset back to zero to prevent google bias.

fragkakis
4 replies
6h49m

I skipped to the ending of the post and read only the last paragraph. Now I I have no idea what the post is about.

jjgreen
2 replies
6h42m

Very Meta

adastra22
1 replies
6h33m

No, no this is about Google.

jjgreen
0 replies
6h31m

The pun was intentional (hence the capitalisation :-)

layer8
0 replies
6h42m

From the title, it's about you.

t43562
2 replies
5h15m

Companies are social systems and they develop down some path. I think it can be the case that everyone in them sees some subset of the dysfuntions and cannot stop them and everyone is incentivised not to.

This is why startups have a chance, right? If the larger companies were also efficient it would be impossible to beat them at anything.

passion__desire
1 replies
4h42m

Why a mere number like a headcount should matter at all knowing fully well that it can be gamed? Shouldn't the motivation be get "more done with less"? This way the manager would be incentivized to gather only the best in his team and the best will only agree to go with him if he is really good at his job.

t43562
0 replies
3h30m

I think it truly is harder to manage larger numbers of people - absolutely requires skills that aren't so critical in a small team. There's too much complexity to micromanage so for one thing you need to be good at picking out leaders who can help you keep on top of it all and you need to lead them to solutions without being able to dive into the details like you might have as a developer. I think it's bloody difficult and I'm only one level up now.

That said, I also think some people like to make solutions overly complicated which ends up requiring lots of people. In some companies the simple solution (e.g. django and postgres) isn't seen as "enterprise ready" or whatever. So they end up with lots of people on something that could have been done more simply with 2-3. Then maintaining that takes lots of people and then everyone in the team has an interest in keeping things as complicated as possible - in selling the "we will need it one day" idea.

That also combines with impossible tasks - like "lets rewrite the complicated slow old system while keeping on adding features to it" and so on. Then there are never enough developers to do the impossible task - especially as the rewrite turns out to be complex and have issues too.

eru
2 replies
4h23m

Google isn't what it used to be. Though I don't know if it ever was?

javajosh
0 replies
3h42m

Scaling up search and inventing the ad business was surely an incredible time at Google. But then they got spoiled by infinite money.

Kranar
0 replies
47m

It was an amazing place to work back in 2006, but yeah it's gone downhill since then. It seems like Google is kind of in an internal cultural battle with itself about what exactly it's trying to become.

quantumwoke
1 replies
7h50m

Reading this post in the lens of other articles it seems like google is well into the enshittification phase internally, although this is a limited experience. Was this the average experience 10 years ago?

spacecadet
0 replies
7h4m

Throw in building massive surveillance pieplines and backdoors for NSA.

paulsmith
1 replies
3h15m

If you're reading this, please provide an RSS/Atom feed for your blog - I see you are using Hugo so it shouldn't be too hard to do. I would add your blog to my feed reader. Thanks!

schemescape
0 replies
1h13m

Not affiliated with the blog, but apparently Hugo generates an index.xml feed by default, so try this:

https://danangell.com/blog/index.xml

(I had the same question with a different site two days ago.)

kunley
1 replies
5h11m

Wow.

Sounds almost too surreal to be true.

Is it really that demoralized in the management there? That's scary.

shadowgovt
0 replies
1h51m

It's a 100,000-person company, so the rule is "variance is high."

I saw extremely gelled, competent, high-functioning teams working on key projects with wide impact. I also saw new teams led by inexperienced managers working on fringe / incidental initiatives or keeping the lights on on a system people knew was doomed. These experiences are not the same, though they happen at the same company.

codeulike
1 replies
7h56m

almost as if programming is a genuine craft but management is easier to bullshit at than it is to do properly

unsubstantiated
0 replies
2h46m

people bullshit at programming and don't treat it like a genuine craft all the time

cmsonger
1 replies
4h6m

One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you.

I mean ... you get to choose howyouplay the game.

If your goal is money and you are a manager then in any organization (not just Google) it's likely that income is going to be O(number of reports). More reports == more responsibility == more money.

But if your goal is to get something done and enjoy your job; you can play that game instead.

Perhaps one of the most life improving insights I've discovered about myself over the years is that I like managing engineers more than managing managers of engineers. The conversations in my week are just more interesting.

Now if I want to get a thing done that really takes 70 people then I either have to deal with it, or let someone else do it -- but just because "more comp requires more people" does not mean you have to aspire to more people. It's OK to like your work and want to get meaningful things done without aspiring to play the "more people, more money" game.

jefftk
0 replies
2h8m

> If your goal is money and you are a manager then in any organization (not just Google) it's likely that income is going to be O(number of reports).

Income linear in the number of reports? Increasing with reports, sure, but way less than linear. Logarithmic is usually a good guess with this sort of thing.

rideontime
0 replies
2h17m

My main personal takeaway from this and so many other articles like it is that I need to get my data out of Google ASAP.

refulgentis
0 replies
2h11m

This is Google.

I'm really glad to see this today.

Yesterday, there was a blog from someone else who worked at Google after their company was acquired. The title promised it was describing working at Google, and the length made it feel very in-depth.

It wasn't, there was a few dog whistles you'd hear if you worked there, but it had that saccharine and acrid taste of "don't want to be accountable for anything I say here, so I just won't say anything".

I left last month after 7 years there. I'm not ready to talk about it in full, succinctly: "people are people everywhere all the time"

op00to
0 replies
45m

I feel like I would be really good at working at Google. Am I the baddie?

nine_zeros
0 replies
7h1m

A lot of folks look at FAANG and other adjacent companies with starry eyed gaze. These places rule the internet, must be teeming with innovation right?

Turns out these companies are no different from corporate America, with all the red tape, politics, meaningless toil, dancing to misaligned incentives, and obsession with management-driven work. Everything that makes a job soul sucking is present in these companies, and more.

Large companies were great for me when I needed the money. But beyond that, my soul cried at balancing the 7th iteration of nitpicky code review, and a manager who couldn't think beyond head-count and performance reviews.

neontomo
0 replies
5h57m

I almost thought I had hallucinated DHTML because I've not seen anyone mentioning it in so many years. It's something I learned about while playing around with building websites as a 9 year old and brings back memories.

mgaunard
0 replies
4h0m

Big companies offer good money but are ridden with politics and don't allow you to learn or progress.

Nothing people didn't already know.

hooby
0 replies
7h33m

I wonder if it's a function of company size.

This sort of thing seems to happen in all large companies - and to be very hard to avoid, if you do grow to that level.

hcks
0 replies
39m

I want to earn the scale through hard work

How lost in life do you have to be to start valuing things like that.

I, as an individual, do not care about your SaaS scale. I’m sorry, it literally isn’t weighted at all in my utility function.

gosub100
0 replies
2h7m

doing nothing for 12 months

Here I am reading this wondering "how do I get in!?!" I've never even applied to FAANG but the stupid DS&A questions pretty much kept me out. Maybe I'll reconsider.

danpalmer
0 replies
5h14m

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.

beej71
0 replies
3h41m

We did contact work for Google around 10 years ago. I visited Mountain View, San Francisco, and YouTube. I've worked in startups and video games, and I was genuinely shocked to find that Google felt more like Hewlett-Packard than any of those.

There was a room in the SF office two stories high with an adult playground slide between floors and a free photo booth nearby. No one was there. Super "abandoned amusement park" vibes. Still have the photos, though, somewhere around here.

Never did work there as a W2, and certainly never will. No judgment against those who do; to each their own, right?

aubanel
0 replies
3h18m

Other people with similar experiences at FAANG? About Google, I still cannot yet grasp if the company is just starting to slow down or already declining steeply.

Nimitz14
0 replies
2h16m

As someone who's first job was also for a mature ~20 person start up, I firmly believe those companies are the best to work for as a junior. You will have experienced colleagues who can teach you while also getting to make a significant impact. It's the best.

FrustratedMonky
0 replies
2h14m

Maybe Musk should buy Google and fire everyone.

Sounds super bloated.

DarkNova6
0 replies
5h4m

I also skipped to the ending:

So after 15 months I was out of there. I learned that I don’t care about the money Google pays. I don’t care about the high scale of influence your work can have. I skipped from series A startup to mature IPO’d company and cheated myself out of the experiences you get in-between. I want to earn the scale through hard work. For me FAANG was not a place to learn, it was a way to get paid. But I didn’t come to Silicon Valley to get paid.