FAQ on Leaving Google

The author also published [1] an email he wrote at the beginning of his tenure. It is amazing how alien and out of place early Google sounds in today's corporate environment. They have completely eroded the perception that Google is this kind of place:

Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground [...] Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.

Even if this was only half-true back then, there's very little you could do to convince me that it's true at all now. This culture and the public perception of it has been squandered.

[1]: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2005-09-25-FirstWee...

Both Maps and Earth were acquisitions. MOST Google products are.

The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail. Maybe you can count Scholar but it’s really just a type of search.

Workspace was assembled from various acquisitions, YouTube they bought, Cloud is just a Jack Ma-esque “copy whatever Bezos is doing” initiative.

Most home grown Google products have either failed or been killed in the cradle. G+, Stadia, etc etc

20% was always a myth.

Google Chrome seems like a success as well.

Also forked from something Apple made (Webkit)

1) using that test, Apple didn't make webkit either. It's a fork of KHTML and why everything still uses LGPLv2 2) very little of what goes into making a browser successful is just the render. In WebKit and now Blink make up only a small percentage of the total browser.

Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013).

The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium.

I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.

I think v8 and the multi-process model were the big differentiators of Chrome when it first launched, and how it originally got marketshare! Regardless, I think "ground-up" building isn't a great way to measure product building; after all, macOS is "just" a BSD fork, as others have pointed out Webkit was originally a KHTML fork, etc. And just about any web product runs on Linux and is effectively a wrapper around libc, which wasn't ground-up built by any modern tech co.

MacOS is not a fork of BSD but uses some of its use land. I think it’s considered a BSD because of that, but the kernel and graphics libraries are all Apple.

The kernel isn't all Apple, it's a fork of the open-source Mach kernel developed at CMU (which was a replacement BSD kernel). "Ground up" just isn't real!

The graphics libraries are definitely more custom... Although in total fairness they're not entirely ground-up Apple either; Quartz was based on Display PostScript, which was acquired from NeXT, and which NeXT built in collaboration with Adobe based on Adobe's earlier work on PostScript. It's obviously true Apple's done a lot of work since then (e.g. Metal), but in that case, so has Google since forking Webkit.

Chrome/Chromium was developed for quite a while using Webkit. Chromium was created in 2008 and only after Google had already captured a third of the browser market share (according to Statista) did they fork it (April 2013).

I think you missed the point, there's two forks in the history of Blink (Chromium). Yes, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but WebKit is a fork of KHTML. So it's not like it originated at Apple either, it originated at KDE.

I did not miss the point, I just don't see why it's relevant. This isn't a thread about Apple's products and their success. The fact that Apple started from KHTML is not really relevant. However, it's clear that at the beginning Google was very dependent on Webkit and Apple, and there's a good reason why it took them five years of gaining development expertise and market share before forking Webkit.

I've already stated that Chrome's success is not just because that it was forked from Webkit (e.g. v8, and other things that people mentioned here as well), but it was a huge jumpstart for them, and it would've taken them much longer to get a leading browser without it. e.g. Microsoft basically gave up on developing their own engine after failing with IE and the original Edge - and are now also based on Chromium.

Chrome is (IMO) much better than Safari, Maps is (IMO) a great product, Youtube is a a huge success and much bigger than it was when they bought it (homegrown Google Video failed), Android was also essentially an acquihire, as others have mentioned (using a lot of Google's resources) and is hugely successful. It doesn't change the fact that most existing Google products today are acquisitions that they improved, and not home-grown products from the "20% do your own thing" era - which is what the original comment talked about.

The original genius in Chrome was not the renderer built out of webkit. It was:

1. The V8 JavaScript engine, which blew away everything else. 2. The sandboxed, multiprocess, threading model.

Those were the two things emphasized in the original Chrome "comic" at launch, if I recall:

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

Kind of easy to forget the true innovation of Google chrome these days. I will try to remember this again any time I see an aww snap on my web browser because it would have been all tabs all windows dead at once before Google chrome.

Firefox only declared it completed electrolysis in 2018, nearly a decade after this comic.

And Apple forked WebKit from KDE!

That’s like saying os x was just a fork of bsd

My guess is Google Chrome spends well over a billion dollars a year and comes up with ridiculous rules like this https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#media_engagement_... because Google Chrome is Google first and a web browser second.

It will collapse under its own weight if Google stops spending billions of dollars on it every year.

This is an interesting point. Can anyone from the inside estimate the annual budget for Chrome? A billion sounds like a lot. That implies: 1b / 250k = 4,000 (expensive) developers. I guess at least 1,000 well-paid people are involved, so hundreds of millions sounds more likely.

There is also advertising and cross promotion. I am also counting the opportunity cost of ads not sold because the spot went to Google Chrome.

Disclaimer: I’ve never worked at Google and have no insider information.

250k is conservative for employee cost. A staff engineer at Google can reach 1 MM total comp. And add in all the overhead a company has (real estate, free food, perks, taxes, etc)

500k-700k is a little more realistic. 1500 employees across all domains (engineering, marketing, product management, customer service, etc) isn’t a huge number

Google engineers cost closer to $500K/head all in.

Mozilla at least at one point had 1,000 and is and always was chronically underfunded. 4,000 seems about reasonable. Keep in mind it's not 4,000 engineers, it's PMs, managers, UX, Infra, there's a lot more to software development that just line engineers.

A billion dollars is cheap considering it saves Google from having to pay Apple or Mozilla more money to stay the default search engine. Google gives Apple 10 billion a year just in traffic acquisition payments.

Android was developed entirely at google (and redone midway after iphone came out) despite being originally an acquisition. Youtube basically just sold userbase + content. Chrome. Waymo. AppEngine precedes ec2 and heroku by some time. Most of hashicorp products (and dozen other startups) are basically copies of what google had internally.

The theory that google hasn’t birthed any original products just doesnt hold any water

Wasn't the idea of Android basically the acquisition of Danger Inc.

This kind of lineage is interesting, but I don’t give large amounts of credit-for-success to a company that failed at what they were trying to do, or gave up and sold themselves off. How much of why Android is huge today could really be attributed to Danger? Not too much, in my book.

Can we really say that Danger could have accomplished the same thing? I was in the carrier industry at that time and Danger was just another handset company.

Android's whole design is very Danger though- the Java userspace, Binder RPC stuff.

Kind of - danger was bought by msft, then everyone left and joined Android/Google. I think their original plan more akin to those chinese all-in-one apps

I thought the original idea was instead of having to download and run random JAR files for random Nokia or Erickson phones, wouldn’t it be nice to have an open handset alliance that would allow developers like Google to write their applications only once and it would work on all phones running android…

I believe it was Android Inc. that Google purchased. Danger was a previous company founded by Andy Rubin and others.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110205190729/http://www.busine...

YouTube was founded in 2005, and then sold to Google in 2006.

Then it was run under Google from 2006 to 2023.

Does anyone remember what 2005 looked like at all?

But people really like the narrative that Google couldn’t make a YouTube

And, there is no way that YouTube could survive on its own. The last mile bandwidth problem required a Google-sized company to help them solve it. This is usually overlooked.

Legend has it they had like weeks of runway left and didn’t pay any of their bills once it looked like the deal was going to close

I remember Google Videos being better than YouTube at the time, but IIRC it didn't have the amount of pirate content that initially made YouTube popular.

They had a YouTube. It was called Google Video, and it went nowhere.

Youtube basically just sold userbase + content.

Those are kinda important parts. Like, to the point that if they'd homegrown "GVideos" I bet it would have failed.

Chrome.

Which was a WebKit wrapper - explicitly just the browser chrome.

They did have Google Videos before they bought Youtube, and integrated it a while after.

Right, it was google video (that was just a bunch of users and content) that was "merged" into youtube. As usual they didn't bother redirecting the url's. Just let all of those hundreds of millions of links rot. What an opportunity to ruin an unimaginable number of threads and blog posts.

I'm trying to picture a white board with someone drawing up a plan how to destroy everything and take over.

Woah, video replies, we have to remove those. Threaded conversations under videos? Lets make them into an unbearable mess and make it as hard as possible for anyone to have a conversation. We can put it under history! ha-ha good one! Wait, we could suck everyone into a vacuum and have them all watch the same videos? ~ Excellent idea!

Creative company indeed

Those are kinda important parts. Like, to the point that if they'd homegrown "GVideos" I bet it would have failed.

The YouTube product which is their creator economy that exists today didn't back then. In fact, I'm pretty sure original team would've run out of money soon.

Which was a WebKit wrapper - explicitly just the browser chrome.

And Docker is "a wrapper" around Linux Cgroups. So? It was a unique product with instant market fit - "fast browser without the UI clutter and with sandbox'ed tabs".

This is a really off base characterization of Android within Google.

Chet Haase wrote a book on those years, and while it is clear that Google gave them rocket fuel to meet their ambitions, their company culture was wildly different from the rest of Google. Shipping code on Android would not have passed muster for anyone at mainline Google; the process and standards were utterly alien from one another.

There is no way Android happens without the acquisition.

Yeah, when I first looked at the shocking source code for bionic (Android's libc) to figure out why my code wasn't working I couldn't believe it was written by Google. It wasn't really. (Nor did they (initially) borrow from any of the high-quality open source libcs out there.)

Not so much that Google hasn't birthed _any_ original products but rather that their customer service is abysmal and they've consistently shown poor long-term commitment to the end user, or worse, e.g. Reader, Nest, Fitbit, even Tensorflow is dead. The theory is that Google makes it needlessly hard for product people to innovate there, and the evidence is in Google's outsized insularity and coddling of technical projects that end up mostly for internal entertainment.

20% was very real, I saw it many times

Googles main successful product was amazing infrastructure. Lots of real innovation. It enabled massive scale of everything else, including acquisitions. YouTube was about to hit the wall when they got acquired.

By the time I got to Google in 2012, 20% seemed dead to me. If it had any meaning, it just meant "you can do some extra work on something management approves", not "I have a wild idea and want to go off and try it in my 20%" (as I naively understood it before coming there.)

It was already the case, at that point, that 20% really just meant doing more of what Google was already doing.

But maybe I just didn't know the right people or have the right connections or status.

Yes, by then it was org dependent. Some were not supportive, but some were.

2005 was still very open

100% - Google IS SRE. My favorite group of people to work with when I was there, a true honor, just amazing infra.

But the people “leading” the place are trash.

The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail.

Chrome. Photos. Hadoop. Kubernetes. Brain. Spanner. T in GPT (Transformers). And lots more. Google's real contribution was internet scale systems and how to run them reliably.

Google photos was spawned from Picasa, which they bought https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109121493116979168

Photos totally replaced Picasa, including, you know, replacing a local desktop app with a web/cloud app.

Google Photos came from the acquisition of Flock (via Bump) which was a mobile photo organizing and sharing app https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/31/google-to-close-bump-and-f...

Stadia was amazing.

That was an absolutely spot-on description of what it was like when I joined in 2007 or 2008. Within 2 year of joining, I had approval to use all the idle cycles in prod for protein design, folding, and drug discovery, and I had a front-row seat with some of the best programmers in the industry. By and large, employees were fun people to interact with, and the management was generally understanding of our hijinx. The main struggle I had was to convince the leadership to move faster into the cloud ("But we have appengine!" and "But profits aren't as good as ads", until MSFT ate their lunch). As soon as it was possible, I built and launched the cloud product I had wanted Google to make even before I joined!

It really did just feel like grad school with better funding. For me it lasted until around 2014 (wow, 10 years ago) when a director stole my ideas and bad-mouthed me to a bunch of senior folks. I hung on a bit longer (working for a close friend of the author of this FAQ on 3d printing and making stuff) and then a couple stints with ML hardware, before I finally concluded that the company was well on its way to enhittifying everything it did.

Sundar is sort of the complete opposite of this. He wants a large pool of completely anonymous programmers and a small number of directors who know how to turn those programmers into growth products, but those directors don't have a clue. For example, with gChat, one day the head of chat told TGIF that chat was changing, that japanese teen girls were the primary target, and they wanted emojis. He didn't even get that there was this enormous number of professional workers using gmail/gchat/gcal/gdocs and that by fucking up the product, he lost their trust.

Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.

Grad school...with all the politics to match.

Exactly, and for someone like myself who hated academia, the internals of Google when I was there (2011-2021) were awful for the same reasons.

It's hard enough to be motivated to work on things in a Big Company. It's even harder when you have to consciously play a game to advertise and promote your success and work -- spending almost as much time doing that as actually doing work. ... and then have others come along and take credit for your work, etc.

I've always despised the higher echelons of academia, the top 1%, the Ivy leagues et. al. for a similar reason.

Success in academia comes to those who pick the right people to work with, pick the right things to work on at the right time and say the right things at the right times to the right people, all to push yourself ahead of others guised under veils and veneers of goodness. Truth, morality and the quest for knowledge be damned.

"Picking" is more than what the word suggests. It involves shutting others out, stealing ideas and actual work, propagandizing, giving out freebies but keeping the kickbacks hidden, buttering people for favors, building and fostering inner circles etc. All this is the politics.

No surprise that the ones who are left and thrive are self driven narcissists and ruthless cold blooded creatures painted in playful colors.

Google is the equivalent of the Ivy league. Hopeless, clueless and on a path to irrelevance fostered by a thousand leeches.

Some argue, the world is better because of what Google produced and hence entitled to such inner workings. Same argument as the Ivy's. That's missing the forest for the trees. The real loss isn't what Google or the Ivys have become, but the opportunity loss comparing to what they could have been, with all their resources, had they not gone down this path. This isn't the only possible outcome in this game.

Something new will have to be made. You wont get credit for that effort, no riches, not even a thank you. Fooling around with the puzzle is the only reward and it should be good enough even if it amounts to nothing.

What is even the real question? How should we do politics?

Success in academia comes to those who pick the right people to work with, pick the right things to work on at the right time and say the right things at the right times to the right people, all to push yourself ahead of others guised under veils and veneers of goodness. Truth, morality and the quest for knowledge be damned.

Do you have a proposal to repair this? It seems any organizational effort is going to end up in a similar situation, because the people who desire to be at the top are the people willing to do the things required to get there, and that leaves little room for people who just want to pursue 'truth, morality and the quest for knowledge'.

It seems to me that the only solution to resolving this problem is to either (a) rely on a benevolent, genius, moral autocrat; (b) completely purge the leadership regularly; or (c) delegate authority to some future un-corruptible intelligence.

Why is this downvoted? It seems relevant to the conversation.

he lost their trust

What does this mean? Yes, I understand the English, but I mean deeper: What are you trying to say? And, why does it matter?

Who cares about "losing the trust of the users". What matters is that 99% of "professional workers" don't have a choice what mail/chat/calendar/word processor they use. Their IT department decided for them. And, if they do have a choice, what do they use instead?

Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.

Most of Google is now mature products. Run it like a business -- maximize profits. It seems logical to me.

Who cares about "losing the trust of the users". What matters is that 99% of "professional workers" don't have a choice what mail/chat/calendar/word processor they use. Their IT department decided for them. And, if they do have a choice, what do they use instead?

That's true until is isn't. Complacency's impact is subtle, but no company is actually invincible forever.

What if they lose the trust of the IT department that chooses which office ecosystem they’re in..?

Most of Google is now mature products. Run it like a business -- maximize profits. It seems logical to me.

It is logical if all you want is to extract maximum short-term value from what was already built. To me, the logical conclusion of this path is irrelevance in the long term.

One of the things that makes me sad about this is that Sergei and Larry seem so checked out. They were mostly gone when I was there, but I've always gotten the feeling that Google was like grad school because Larry and Sergei wanted it that way.

I get that they've made a ton of money, but it also seems like they really wanted to spend their lives making awesome stuff and doing things like scanning books and making them free. And it feels a bit like the market forces took Google away from them. They put Sundar and a bunch of other McKinsey alums in charge. And McKinsey is, from what I can tell, basically the opposite of grad school.

Whenever I did see Larry or Sergei make an appearance they always looked a little dead inside and like they were just going through the motions.

And from what I can tell, the original sin was taking VC funding. Once they took VC funding, they had limited actual control over what happened to their company. So while they talked in 2004 about not wanting to be a conventional company, and while they warned in 1998 that ad-driven search engines were biased against their users, they still had limited ability to be unconventional in any way that was unattractive to investors. And that includes, in a sense, just being too different. A large company will eventually need to be run by professional management, and professional managers need a thing that looks and drives like a conventional company.

To put the picture together: So VC money, the DoubleClick merger, and McKinsey ‘culture’ eroded Google (culture)?

Google stopped needing VC money very fast, by the time I joined in 2006 it had long since been irrelevant. Google was funding the VCs by then, not the other way around.

The DoubleClick acquisition wasn't a merger, and had no impact on anything as far as I could tell. It was really acquired for the market share not the people and iirc every DoubleClick employee was reinterviewed, maybe half didn't make it!

I doubt McKinsey had much to do with it either.

IMO the problem was more that the culture of endless hiring disconnected from need eventually caught up with it. I think once Page finally became CEO he may have decided he didn't like it much, especially as with ever greater numbers of restless/bored employees the flow of negative feedback / hate mail got bigger and bigger. People like Pichai are often appointed as CEOs when founders move on, because they will stick to the founders vision and won't make any big changes. Ballmer and Tim Cook are similar, I think, except that Cook seems to have done a better job of keeping things on the original path than the other two did. Typically under such CEOs revenues and profits increase a lot, but there are few bold initiatives or risks taken. It's easy for drift to set in.

>One of the things that makes me sad about this is that Sergei and Larry seem so checked out.

I think this one sentence describes everything, companies are all about the people at the top. Its these people that set the culture, pace and overall direction of the company.

If the founders tune out and outsource the very soul of the company to general managers, who can keep lights on rather too well. Well thats what you get. The lights will be on, it will be life as usual and gradual erosion of that very soul that was the company.

You can't blame Larry and Sergei either. There are better things to enjoy when you have billions in the bank and one life to spend it.

Jesus. Tell me more. You didn’t happen to be involved in deepmind are you? I kind of _loathe_ google these days but find it absolutely mind blowing that there was a time when they were just casually unblocking the scientific community for funsies…to the point where parents could just leverage google’s freebies to maybe shed some light on their kids’ rare disease.

It pains me to think this won’t be happening anymore because really, you can’t sic your brightness engineers on detecting ad blockers _and_ casually make scientific breakthroughs. Something happened to google and the we’ll be writing about for decades to come but if there’s one thing I’m certain it’s that they are done trying to make the world a better place.

Has that changed? AlphaFold is recent and was practically given away to the biotech community. Google is doing a startup based around it as well. So they're still unblocking scientists for funsies, maybe moreso than in the past.

Google/Deepmind research still has a fairly large subgroup working on health problems, but most of that work is not given away (or even easily licensable) or published in a way that competitors could reproduce.

What Isomorphic, the spinoff, learned pretty quickly is that protein structure prediction is not, has never been, and is unlikely to be, the most critical blocking step in developing new drugs. That won't stop pharma from investing biobucks (virtual dollars that are gated by milestones) in them. Right now pharma is terrified because their pipelines are drying up, their blockbusters are going generic, and the recent rates of new discoveries leading to new candidates (target diseases/bio pathways) are dropping, even as they invest more and more into automation and machine learning.

(By the way Mike- I always did wish you had been able to run your "math problems" on exacycle, as a way of monetizing idle cores)

How was Sundar at the time you joined? According to Wikipedia he spearheaded the development of Chrome, GDrive, GMaps, GMail and the VP8 format which are all monumental products so he sounds like he was quite like every other talented hacker that thrived in early Google culture. Is that not the case? What made him turn to the dark side so abruptly?

Sundar wasn't a hacker, he was a product manager, and he was very good at identifying growing products, becoming their leader, and riding them to glory. But what really sealed the deal was Sundar's ability to sit in meeting with Larry Page while all the Chief Lieutenants fought, and patiently argue them all down (which Larry never wanted to do).

It's news to me that Sundar had anything to do with gdrive, gmaps, and gmail, except that he was head of Apps for a while, long after those products had completely established themselves.

Interesting, thanks for your reply

I think it was Jamie Zawinski who said the reason he left Netscape was that it went from being full of people that wanted to build a great company to being full of people who wanted to work at a great company. The later culture won.

Are there any places today that are like Google in the early days? I would love to work at a place like this.

IMO no. The unique combination of parameters with early-Google were:

- Small, relatively young company.

- Absolutely gargantuan amounts of revenue

You can't run a company this way unless you have a very large money firehose.

The last time this happened was early-Facebook. I don't think there has been a single company since then that fit the description - which IMO is fine, the celestial alignment of factors is pretty rare.

Companies nowadays have kind of the opposite problem: lots of hiring, but not enough revenue to show for it. Some tried to build a similar culture on VC funding but imploded once the cash ran out. You really need an intensely profitable product to make this formula work.

Google was like this before they identified the ad firehose. Facebook didn’t find its own profits until way after IPO. Thats not the correct answer. It was that they were instantly truly successful without being blatantly exploitative (which Uber et al were). And the investors trusted that they will find their profits somewhere. That environment doesn’t exist anymore. Except maybe in OpenAI.

OpenAI seems to be a bunch of people who spend 18 hours a day trying to bring about AGI, though. Driven, sure, but nobody is looking to solve world hunger there unless it involves a cluster of GPUs in some way.

I don’t remember Google solving world hunger either?

AGI might solve world hunger, although that particular problem seems to be more about societal organization and trust between people. AGI would without doubt lead to an incredible productivity boost though, and that helps solve many existential problems we currently have as well.

Google AdWords launched in 2000; AdSense in 2003. Google itself only dates to 1998; there's not much "before" the ads.

They probably mean pre-doubleclick

I also think that experimental culture is gone due to things like startup culture. Any half viable idea, they leave and create a startup.

So Google has really only been doing obvious ideas. Like Pixel phones, Pixel buds, getting into cloud too late.

That's true, that's not much incentive for a brilliant individual to do something inside Google when they can do it outside and make a lot more money without any politics. In the 0% interest rate world anyway.

Indeed. I don't know that something like this can ever happen again, barring another major upset. Many people don't realize or remember how transformative the dot-com era really was. The amount of money firehose that was there to go around was staggering. We're just at a much more mature point in the market. Ironically, a lot of the people that make it difficult/impossible to have the money firehose are the ones that made their fortune from that environment!

It's still possible for a one-off startup here and there to maybe get into this boat, but at this point the big tech players are there to slurp up the real money makers early and often and assimilate them into the borg.

If this sort of environment were what I wanted to work in, I'd probably look at specialized teams/niches inside of big corps. Surely very difficult to find, but they do exist.

- Absolutely gargantuan amounts of revenue

clearly you're incorrect, since Google was (famously!) exactly like this before the ads firehose of cash started.

Roblox was like that for a while. They did some nice work on scaling up big MMOs with user-created content, something I'm into. They overexpanded, losing money on every user. They'd gone public, and the stock is way down. Peaked at $126, now $40. Despite many attempts, they just can't retain users beyond middle school.

I also want to know the answer to this, but I'm starting to think I might not recognize it.

Part of Google's perceived aura (IMHO) when they started was that they seemed to be like the nebulous group of pre-Web Internet-savvy techies. Which were a smart group, tending towards altruistic and egalitarian, and wanting to bring Internet goodness to people, and onboard people into Internet culture. What seemed like one sign of this was times that you'd see old-school techies outside of Google treating Google like stewards rather than exploiters. And when they said "Don't Be Evil", I thought I knew exactly what they meant.

Well, the dotcom gold rush happened, huge masses of people rushed in looking for what it was about, huge money rushed in and soon tried to landgrab and then exploit those masses rather than onboard them, Doubleclick acquired Google :), techie job interviews started looking like rituals to induct affluent young new grads into their rightful upper-middle career paths, unethical behaviors became so commonplace that people can't even see them, and academia was infected a bit. Which I think means...

...If another Google happened, would we even recognize it? From where could it draw its culture that's not pretty completely overtaken by big money and all that attracts and builds?

Maybe the next Google can't be in the space of computing/communications/information at all, because big money and and coattail-riders would be all over that too quickly.

Maybe it would instead arise from people that really love to study insects. And they have a cooperative community around that, and have been trying to explain the importance of insects to the world for years, but not many care. Then it turns out that insects are the key to averting an imminent Earth extinction-level event. So the bug nuts get huge infusions of cash, and can work on all the problems they've wanted to.

And it'll be at least a few years before people with no interest in insects, other than chasing money, can really take over and start perverting the field, set up gatekeeping to pass people like them, while excluding the actual people who created and loved the field and saved the world, etc.

Personally, I have always disliked bugs, and will never be a candidate for Bügle.

Maybe it would instead arise from people that really love to study insects.

Join the ant revolution!

If a company had invented LLMs by themselves (without anyone else having the technology) that would be a very similar situation to what Google was in the early days.

Probably but by the time the conditions are well known it has started degrading already. I’m convinced that ending up at a place like that in the early days has a massive luck component, even if you are the sort of person who would trivially get in hiring bar wise.

early every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.

maps and earth were both acquisitions

you say acquisitions, others might say stolen.

They bought the companies; that’s very literally not stealing.

So, you're totally discounting the work of Terravision

"The Billion Dollar Code" is a Netflix series about the lawsuit of Google trouncing the little guys. [0] is a brief bit from its creator about the impetus for the show. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty good. In the [0], they compare it to The Social Network being from the Zucks point of view, aka the winner. This story is told from the view of the losing side.

[0] https://variety.com/2021/streaming/global/netflix-the-billio...!

I've seen plenty of "documentaries" which were really just pushing an agenda. You can distinguish advocacy from accuracy usually within the first few sentences.

Documentaries are usually painfully open about their agendas, like changing policies in Madagascar to save the lemurs, save the smokers, save the obese, etc. But no documentary until "The Billion Dollar Code" ever made me feel genuinely lied to and outright manipulated, and there's no way I would have known if I hadn't read the primary materials. When I discovered the deception, I edited the Terravision Wikipedia page to mention SRI, so there's clues for the next person who enjoys the series, but someone would have to write truthful secondary sources in order for the article to be improved further. Who can say who benefits from poking Google Maps in the eye. Netflix must have been tripping when they approved that one.

Which is also said about anything that tends to go against the views of the other side. It's a bit of entertainment "based" on true events. Nobody claims it is the gospel according to.... They even qualify this in the interview I linked.

The majority of people have no idea on how/when/where the products they use on a daily basis originated. By the time a FAANG type of company releases something, you can pretty much be assured there are casualties along the way.

The obviousness comes from:

1. speculation, without identifying it as speculation

2. hyperbolic words

3. absence of any contraindications to their thesis

Don't believe everything you watch on television or read on Wikipedia. Terravision was created by the Stanford Research Institute. Google used to be a Stanford research project. The group called ART+COM that Netflix portrays as a bunch of scrappy innovative hackers is actually just a den of patent trolls. I know reality is a bummer isn't it?

Lau explained that he gave individuals from Art+Com copies of the SRI TerraVision “source code, walked them through it, and talked to them about it.” Id. at 1050–51

https://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-order...

Local was in-house. What we know of as Maps today is the merger of Google Local (Bret Taylor, in-house), Where2 (Lars & Jens Rasmussen, acquisition), KeyHole (John Hanke, acquisition), and probably a few other projects.

It's not true anymore and started going away during Larry Page's tenure.

~ ex-Googler : 2011 to 2018

People don’t give Eric enough credit as CEO

I give Eric all the credit. I honestly don’t know if Google would have been hugely successfully without him. Sure, they would not have failed, but they probably would’ve plateaued early like most successful startups.

L&S were very important imo, just not good at being in charge of everything directly.

Context: When I was laid off from Google, I knew I'd be deluged with questions. I wrote this FAQ to share with friends and family, to prevent repeated explanation.

This is quite sweet in its stereotypical techie approach to life - your friends and family are asking questions about your situation because they care about and want to bond with you, not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying :-)

Well they can find alternative methods then that are less frazzling, there are fewer things worse than not feeling seen due to only answering questions!

I know it can be good, but sometimes the questions can legitimately get in the way of connection and spending quality time, and not everyone wants to have the hard conversation while being in the hotseat (especially not over, and over, and over again. I am transgender, for example, and while having 1 mildly hostile family member would be a somewhat-problem, most of my extended family only wants to talk about that thing, and that one thing, with me, to the point where it effectively creates a wall. That at least is my experience of the issue, it's not quite the same, but I've definitely experienced the "questions dynamic" within other, much-more-mild scenarios, and generally, IMPE, I really dislike it unless I'm actively getting something interesting out of it, which I'm oftentimes not! It can be very much isolating, as far as my personal experience goes.)

So, not really a terrible solution, I think! <3 :'))))

Then learn how to respond to questions that are being asked out of politeness and bonding vs some fellow techie that actually is interested in gobbledygook detailed answers. You can talk about work and why it was cool/fun/horrible/frustrating to non-techies and still bond with them in your commiseration of being laid off.

This is so typical of normies.

Why does the techie have to go out of his way and adjust to the non techie normie?

Why don't they drink their own cool aid and adjust to the techie?

We don't like all these personal questions. Just leave us alone instead of asking the same thing over and over. If we point you to an FAQ, be like "oh yeah awesome, thank you" instead keeping on asking if we are alright. Just shut up and read the FAQ.

What the actual fuck is a normie?

typically, someone that's not an addict. someone that can cope in life without the assistance of a drug/alcohol. i guess we're stretching that definition to someone with social anxieties?

Normies live for drugs and alcohol and social interactions while the non-normies live for train simulators, coexistence is an eternal struggle.

No, addicts live for drugs and alcohol. Normies do not live their lives with the sole purpose of their next fix.

    WHAT IS A NORMIE?

    Normie is a slang for a “normal person,” especially someone seen to have conventional, mainstream tastes, interests, viewpoints, etc. It is intended as an insult but often used ironically.
    Normie is also sometimes used by specific in-groups to refer and distinguish themselves from specific out-groups.

In case it wasn't clear from me using normie vs techie in the actual comment. I'm talking about a guy like the one that posted the FAQ (techie) that is different from most "socially normal" people (normie) that would actually appreciate all these questions over and over and take comfort in them. Well he doesn't apparently. Deal with it.

yes, why doesn't the rest of the world conform to me? that old trope? we're all individuals. in every relationship, there are gives/takes. sometimes you have to do normie things. i have relationships with true addicts that play this normie won't understand card waaaay too often for me to be swayed by it. sometimes, the mountain won't come to Muhammad.

See that's the thing. Yes we all are individuals. This individual in the original post is one.

Who are these commenter's that demand for him not to post an FAQ? Why can't he just post an FAQ and they are like "oh yeah thank you very much!" and everyone is happy? Why does he have to feel bad for his FAQ and instead answer the same uncomfortable questions over and over even though he's fine but nobody believes him?

Why do these normies demand that the world adjusts to them?

I'm always happy to give the standard "I don't like to discuss work stuff when I don't get paid for it, it's not that interesting really" answer. Sometimes followed with "I work now for company X and I write code that deals with Y" to not be seen as insufferable asshole.

I mean, again, that's not really the point that I was making. I'm talking about the foundational emotional need of connection, not everyone connects well in that manner, the quality of the response to the question doesn't always have a huge bearing on that.

Like, sure, sometimes it is good bonding, and sometimes it's not, it's very much context dependent.

If having the emotional security of not being in the hotseat answering questions from family members is necessary for an amount of emotional security on the OP's part, then I would consider that to be a good strategy. It might not be what you would do in that scenario, which is okay, as you and OP are different and might have different methods of addressing and meeting your respective emotional needs.

Yeah not having to be in the hot seat is crucial. Stuff like FAQs for personal things are helpful not just because they deduplicate effort, so people can just read it and grok your deal and then bond with you without excruciating rote ramp up, but also because it's emotionally exhausting to have to go through explanations about personal things, especially often, whereas pointing people to an FAQ alleviates that and actually makes further bonding possible bc you won't be harried and tired.

Oh hey I'm trans too and I was literally just about to pop in to respond in a nearly identical way! Yeah, having to answer the same set of questions, that aren't particularly interesting or bond-generating to you, over and over, just creates a really annoying barrier to interact with people. It's apparently a really common experience in a lot of marginalized communities. So it really can sometimes just be easier to have something to get the rote questions out og the way so you can get to more meaningful personal interaction.

Yes! Playing through the rote action exchange can be rather exhausting, especially if I've already bridged that connection and know the person -- there's not much reason for it, and it can be exhausting!

Unfortunately, with where my past is, a whole lot of my family too has the idea that I'm living a distorted life, and that this needs to be corrected (almost as a first priority thing). There's almost an Animal-Farm-istic "All sins are equal, but some sins are more equal than others" kind of thing going on there, if you catch what I mean.

Intellectually, I think many of them can understand how this is not really the most rational thing given the on-paper beliefs, but emotionally, it's a very different story, and the emotions seem to win out on that front.

Answering the basics isn't too terrible for me, though it definitely can be a problem if it's the only focus (and if the conversation inevitably keeps looping around to that singular topic. I am a freaking human being, darnmnitall!!)

right. human being gets laid off.

Has this ever happened before. It does seem like SV folks have an elevated sense of purpose. Which is maybe fair to a point because of SVs inclusion in our online lives. But really, it seems like people in high paid jobs getting laid off isn't so much news for anyone, in general.

Maybe if there's some juice about how to order the world's information, but then they'd get sued for saying no doubt.

Not everything on the Internet is aimed at you. Sometimes it's aimed at friends and family who the author doesn't see every week.

Did I imply that it was, no, so why imply it.

That's what social networks and email is for, not broadcasting it to the wider world, see, you're on Hacker News, me you, them and everyone in general.

Did I imply that it was, no, so why imply it.

No, you did not imply that. You outright stated it.

You have decided to visit another persons homepage. Remember that word?

To what end they use their little corner of the internet is up to them, and them alone. They did not link it here. They did not invite you. And you certainly do not get to coral them into your little "social media" silos to provide you with "content" in the form and place you deem appropriate.

What links you click on is your own responsibility. As is recognizing that you are not the navel of the world, and not everything you encounter is targeted is you.

You are exhibiting a _grating_ amount of "main character syndrome", as the kids call it these days.

Jesus fucking Christ on a pogostick, I really should know better. But every once in a blue moon I feel like pissing in the wind.

True.

I think it is news in same sense that they got hired for jobs that paid hundreds of thousand dollars. Maybe a those truck drivers making 50K/ year really want to know about SV's best and the brightest. After all once truck divers, warehouse workers, paralegals etc finish their PhD in machine learning they will be working right along with valley folks.

The other side of it is probably not wanting to bond and spend 30 minutes getting cared about. That might feel like a luxury, but to each their own.

Which brings us to the second half of the parent's sentence: "not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying".

If you don't want to bond and spend 30 minutes getting cared about, just say "I'm fine, I just don't want to talk about it right now". Maybe follow with "And you, how are you?", but that's optional.

Again, they probably don't particularly care about the actual information.

This plus not everyone wants to talk about it multiple times. Saying "no" can be tough without a fallback.

I took this writing as a way for him to still reconcile unresolved feelings, seeing how he wants follow up with more writing on cultural shift at Google.

Also, he knows a lot of people. Not everyone who might be interested will feel like making direct contact.

they care about and want to bond with you

You haven't met my family. They just want gossip.

With certain things like being laid off, being able to tap the sign is a lot nicer than relitigating something a couple of dozen times, which can be stressful.

Yes, but you know _the_ rule of leaving Google - one must always publish an article about it to ensure that the whole world is aware ;)

I mean, most techies get that, but ask yourself: if it were you in this situation, could you really pass up on an opportunity to change an O(N) operation into O(1)?

The conflict between “uncomfortable culture” and “golden handcuffs” was becoming intolerable.

Amen :_(

What is he referring to here exactly?

Google culture is significantly different from 10-15+ years ago. Some of those differences can be uncomfortable for someone used to the earlier times.

But also a Director is probably pulling >$1,000,000 / yr (the golden handcuffs).

He mentions that the culture changed a year ago which is when they started doing things like requiring 3 days in, actually checking employee in/out times, etc. IIRC for a long time it was 3 days required but it was on the honor system. Though I'm not even sure someone like him or fitz would need to follow that.

My friends who are still at g seemed pretty miserable in 2023. I haven't heard from them this month though, didn't realize another layoff round hit. It's absolutely off my wishlist of companies nowadays.

It's not quite that, TL;DR: performance review system was 'de-complexified'. Googlers will say "GRAD", and people outside assume it has something to do with RTO because of timing (which is still ~fake at Google. No one knows the secret # to get a nasty email, but 3 times in 6 weeks doesn't get it).

- 80% get average grade. 2% get worst, 6-8% get between worst and average. That covers 90% of the distribution.

- The below-average grade is a death sentence to your career there.

- The rest, people recently found out, is half-eaten by people who get promoted.

- There's now _precious_ little incentive to put in an effort in a culture that was already known for it's rest-and-vest-ness.

- The quotas are enforced 3-4 levels up from bottom, and managers are expected to warn anyone who might get below average. In practice, that means 15-20% of people are being told they might get a scarlet letter.

- There is ~nowhere to transfer internally since late 2021. 100 applicants for every open role.

- The internal orgs all love to do whatever the opposite of "yes, and" is. And each were told to Focus™, so that leads to people having an easy excuse to turning down _any_ request. It's much more efficient to shit all over the other org and not do the work and tell your director it's their fault than it is to enable bottom-up action.

- The simplification of performance reviews also meant it shifted from being 80% peer feedback and 20% management to 95% management. And Google, like anywhere, is full of people at their worst, and their best. It's lead to a, frankly, gob-smacking amount of chicanery that I thought I left behind at immature companies. Even your average gossip-y early startup is better, because there's a certain sense of reality, instead of ad dollars that magically convert to paychecks.

- Constant, ever-beating drum of firings. There was the huge one last year, and then the sizable one recently in a couple orgs, but it's been near-constant.

- The firings are absurdly post-modern sterile. You wake up, locked out of your laptop, locked out of the office, and have an email in your personal inbox telling you they're cutting your team.

- They have to "cut teams" instead of do layoffs because of the legal / cost ramifications of just doing layoffs to drive up profits. But that opens up some of that chicanery I mentioned: have it on good authority from 2 sources that the political movers who came into the Assistant org. for Bard would ship people onto "classic" Assistant teams just to fire them.

It's really hard to explain concisely, but basically, I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone come close to that place unless they're sub 100K in savings. Nothing makes sense, nothing is real, everyone knows it, and you have a bunch of the world's smartest people optimizing for how to do the least without being the least. A lot of that involves saying no and telling everyone it's someone else's fault, and like any hierarchical organization.........

That's really thorough and unfortunate. I hadn't heard about all of that.

I had a committee interview there maybe 8 years ago and already that was such an impersonal feeling that I really disliked my experience and didn't continue, not that they'd have hired me in the end.

I had 2 referrals for the team I wanted to join and I thought I'd be interviewing with that teams members who knew me from various foss projects or at least knew of the projects. When I heard it was by committee my anxiety went through the roof.

I hope things improve for everyone.

The type of nepotism that you were hoping to get you in isn't actually a good thing. A distributed system of interviewers and decision makers is more consistent and less biased. It's one of the reasons why people are able to switch teams quickly and easily -- everyone is held to the same standard and can be relied on. This is a good thing. Sucks that you didn't get in though.

Doesn't that system of interviewers just bring different biases? Even if they use a standardized scoring method or something, the bias would be built into that. And everyone would indeed be held to the same, biased, standard.

A single interviewer is likely to be strongly biased. But the bias of a pool of thousands of people is much smaller - the individual biases partially cancel out.

In addition, the process adds some steps to keep a single person's irrational biases from propagating: formal rubrics, rating broken down into components each of which requires written justification, and the group of people making the decision to hire or not hire are explicitly ones who never see or hear the candidate and are deciding based on interviewers' written reports.

But the bias of a pool

Maybe? What if the pool is being influenced with whatever is trendy at the time?

I would take my bias of working with a former colleague for years over what the current societal pressures are enforcing. Some may call it nepotism, I'd call it risk management.

Me and 3 other Principal/Staff levels have now worked at 3 companies in a row together over the last 12-15 years. One of us will move elsewhere and slowly bring on the rest of us as we leave if we hear great things about the place. If not we go elsewhere. We actually have a group chat of about 8 people we've all worked at various places together and love to bring others on board because we know their style and that we can work well with them.

They are amazing engineers and we've all grown together over the last decade and we know what each of us is great and at where they'd be fantastic in a company. They're SWEs and I'm an SRE so we actually aren't on the same team or anything but they know they can bring me on as a Staff/Princ SRE and we'll get things done well cross-team far beyond what most companies of disparate eng/teams gets done.

These are people super passionate about the technology. We give presentations/talks on various projects, etc. I know their skills are up to date and growing constantly. Finding someone passionate is difficult. Maybe not at google but in normal-not-faang world it is.

It's more like two committees in fact.

There's the not-quite-randomly-selected people who interview you, and write feedback. Then there's the completely separate set of people on the hiring committee who make a decision reading the feedback and other stuff (referrals, resume, etc). The latter group doesn't talk to the former group though, just the written feedback.

It's not clear that hiring people you know directly into your team is even a good idea. I liked the Google interview system, and since leaving I have only seen worse ones.

You like the possibility of someone being placed onto your team without anyone who is part of that team having interviewed them? Maybe that does happen at some point, I forget. Long time.

If it doesn't.. I think I would absolutely hate that.

I don't interview people I know personally or refer or know from projects but I absolutely want 2-3 from my team to be speak to them and us do the technical tests.

But I'm an SRE and not a SWE and there are a lot fewer operation/platform people compared to the 6-10 dev teams of 6-12 people doing various languages one sre team supports so there are usually plenty of SWE specific people to bring on committees. My team is 6 who support 80 SWEs so there are just a lot fewer proficient IAC writers on staff.

Yes, I do prefer choosing new team members from among people who got hired into level by a team-neutral process, because I have seen too many instances of a hiring manager throwing out all the standards to hire a person they want into a particular role, which can be detrimental to companies because hiring people who don't really meet your standards is one of the worst things you can do as a company.

Someone managed to pull this off in 2021 at Google and I'm still very, very, confused as to how

Eh, I loved my time at Google (left in late 2022 for a startup). Amazing coworkers, amazing tech, and you get to work at a mind-boggling scale.

My experience with RTO at Google is that the long-term Googlers are the ones who really love the old office experience and bemoan the loss of it since the pandemic, whereas it's the newer people that complain about having to come in and try to get away with doing it as little as possible.

He didn't mention coming to the office as a complaint of his so I don't think it is one.

Imagine being paid $1-$2m a year but not liking the how the culture of a company you'd been at for decades was changing. Would you quit? When?

I only need 100k/year post-tax to be happy. If I can take 4% out per year, that's 2.5m total I need. So give me ~4 years to make that up after tax with some buffer, and then it's a matter of time. If i still enjoy the time spent working, stay. If not, leave.

Pedantic notes:

1. The 4% number comes from the Trinity study, which found that 95% of the time you have >$0 after 30 years. If you're >30 years from death now, a more appropriate benchmark might be 3% or possibly 3.5%.

2. $100k/yr post tax is more than $100k/yr pretax, even if it's mostly long term capital gains and dividend taxes.

3. Health insurance $$$.

So the number for you is probably a little higher maybe $5m to switch to 3% and add an additional $50k for tax and health insurance costs.

But yea the general point stands. Someone working as a director probably pulling >$1m/yr, with a long tenure, almost definitely has way over that amount. (I wouldn't be surprised if it was $20m+)

Don't forget inflation!

iirc all of those already account for inflation

I can't speak to making that much money, but I did leave a job where I had worked most of my career, making more money than I had ever imagined making, due to a changing culture.

The hard part wasn't the money at all. The hard part was that I had let the company culture become a major part of my self identity. It sounds like the author didn't let that happen to him. Kudos. I wish I hadn't.

it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google”

Someone decided to handle this situation that way, so one has a perfect right to be angry at them, and generalize that as "being angry at Google".

The author takes it with philosophy and pragmatism, that's admirable and I'm certainly not one to tell them how they should feel. But other factors indicate that his situation was also prone for that positiveness (feeling like a relief because of golden handcuffs, long tenure in a stock-distributing tech company + director level meaning that there's likely no concerns regarding money, side career already underway, maybe a relief to have some change).

Others might not be in the same situation, and are now jobless in in slow economy, with tenuous savings, rent or mortgage coming up. They might feel outright furious for a layoff that they have neither control on, nor were a reason for, and that shows no face to take responsibility - and they're completely entitled to feel that way, if that helps them cope. I'd say it makes sense to me, and don't feel bad for being angry if that's how you feel.

they're completely entitled to feel that way, if that helps them cope

This is actually not a productive way to cope and it’s good advice to tell people not to cope this way.

Anger at the Kafkaesque ministrations of the neo-feudal lords is a valid emotion. Let's not normalize the passive, defeatist acceptance of abusive corporate culture. One doesn't need to be angry, but that's a privilege of someone who isn't living paycheck to paycheck.

Anger at the Kafkaesque ministrations of the neo-feudal lords is a valid emotion.

I mean, yes. And it'll make Mr Angry feel worse, make the people around him feel worse, and make the world worse. So the recommendation is don't do that. If someone is going to do something productive after being sacked, learning to do it out of a place of love is a skill well worth picking up. Makes the world better and all that.

I think this is a bit of a shallow read on what anger is – one can rightfully feel angry at an injustice and use that motivation to effect positive change.

I also prefer—on a personal level—to set anger aside. But anger is probably one of the strongest forces driving individuals to "make the world better".

But anger is probably one of the strongest forces driving individuals to "make the world better".

Are you thinking of an instance? Anger typically locks in the status-quo by causing people to fight each other. Greed on the other hand has pushed us from farming monkeys into modern society with a material existence that was hitherto unthinkably comfortable. Harnessing greed created and powers the modern engine of wealth creation. And greed works best when people are thoughtful, patient, kind and calm.

Typically anger just makes people do things that are hasty and stupid. I'm not thinking of situations where I've seen it get much done. It isn't an emotion that can power long term, strategic plans - or at least not good ones. Tends to burn out or be destructive.

"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."

"Anger is a gift"

Life is a gift. Death is a gift. Anger is a gift. Sadness is a gift.

It all comes and it all goes. Let it come. Let it go.

Maybe the bigger lesson is that, beyond family and a few close friends, the world doesn't generally care how you feel?

You way of saying it is nicer, granted.

Is it not? Honestly, it wouldn’t help, but ranting at the impersonal machine that is Google (or big tech) would certainly make me feel better.

If you worked at Google for any number of years, is there any reason to have tenuous savings?

Heck in any major city in the US, your average CRUD enterprise dev is probably making twice as much as the local median household income and should have savings

If you worked there as an entry developer for a couple years in an expensive city with a student loan, you'd have a reason, yes. Or if you were an immigrant with a family to support abroad. Or if you are divorced and need to pay spousal and child support.

A number of reasons, yes.

I bet you even in that “expensive city” you’re making more than twice the median compensation in that same city.

In many expensive cities the median compensation is well below the poverty line

Uh, what? Can you name some and provide numbers?

Director at Google is a 7 figure position. I have no problem if Google demands extraordinary performance from someone making that kind of money, and decides to lay off people who don't meet that bar.

This is very different than say, if an L3 engineer got hit with a layoff a year after joining.

Looking at Google L3 salaries in Chicago: They should be well off in a layoff situation.

Yeah, not like he basically accuses Google of age discrimination.

Because "getting rid of senior people" is exactly what that is.

I don’t think senior in that context is what you think it means. It tends to mean experienced/higher ranking people and not senior citizens. Senior engineers, for instance, are engineers with more than 8 years experience.

one has a perfect right to be angry at them, and generalize that as "being angry at Google".

People who climb their way to Director usually don't tilt at windmills and shake their fists at clouds.

The dude was at Google for 19 years. A director level. Possibly reap >$50m. I imagine it wouldn't be hard to not be angry.

now jobless in in slow economy

It really doesn't look like a slow economy!

See https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

And this is why Googlers' favorite line is "I'm sorry you feel that way." At Google, yes there are feelings good and bad, but only reason is right, and so Google protects itself by making any criticism unreasonable.

Tech is simply maturing. It has had two major meltdowns at this point. The first one it was still getting it's footing. The second one accounts for bloat in an age where half the hiring was done during a pandemic that necessitated positions that are pretty much superfluous now. Zoom competitors, Virtual meetings, 3d environments - all the pandemic related initiatives that "brought people together" are over. We're moving back to the office, we're dropping DEI, migrating things to AI.

This is not the end of extremely large paychecks, but it's the end of potentially 30% of them.

I think this portends a larger culture shift in Silicon Valley tech that, in my opinion, cannot come quickly enough.

Here you've got a guy, 18 years at Google, probably earning somewhere between 500k-1mil per year, probably $5-10 million in his Schwab account without breaking a sweat. With a little blurb at the top of his blog about "How to Leader", feeling the need to explain whether any of this is "fair" or why it's ok that "Google did this to you".

Honestly, as an industry--we need to grow the fuck up. Using the wrong part of speech or talking about what is or isn't "fair" are things I do with my three-year old when she's throwing a tantrum. Not something I expect from an emotionally mature professional in his 40s or 50s who's likely earning a million/year or more. Google is a trillion-dollar, global multinational with shareholders, and a board, and a stock price. If you don't deliver, you will be cut, period.

It's not that I even blame this author--I think this post shows a lot of maturity and self-awareness. It's the broader culture of unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.

That's bs. There are whole industries that exist 100% because of regulatory capture and systems of control they've set up to protect themselves and are a million times more worthless. Tech is a shining star of people getting paid a lot to just try to figure out new ways of doing things and throwing off more value than any where else in the economy on an off day, and the industry was 1000 times better even with the wastefulness before than it will be if it becomes just some shit corporate world like old style companies.

So I think it's worth discussing this a bit.

Maybe there was a time when this wasn't true. I spent a lot of the 2010s working in San Francisco tech jobs. It was quite enjoyable and I just got back from a guy's wedding who I worked with closely 2012-2015. Three different startups, one mine, other two as an employee. All three crashed and burned.

I think there are three possibilities.

One is that tech is somehow different/exceptional and bound to stay that way forever. I doubt it.

The second is that we were always lying to ourselves, it was always just "a job", but we were all young, stupid, and naive. This feels too cynical.

The third, which I feel is most accurate these days, is that tech was different, but now is a more mature industry, and is, as you put it "just some shit corporate world". Maybe there was a time when it was genuinely true that people got "unlimited vacation", that "titles don't matter" and that the CEO ate with the hoi polloi. But I think those days have passed. Everything's different now. The people coming into this industry today are 4.0 GPA high school kids, not misfits tinkering with computers in their basement. Competitive parents no longer feel they have to justify why their kid is going into tech rather than law, finance, or medicine. Salaries have increased 3-5x (!!). Tech influences elections, mints billionaires, and controls many facets of American life.

The problem is that the attitudes haven't kept up. These days, Google, facebook, etc are just standard American megacorps. They are some of the most valuable companies in the world with huge lobbying budgets, and tremendous pressure to deliver shareholder value.

The simple fact is that margins always get compressed as industries mature. Google has been under greater and greater margin pressure over the last decade as Apple demands higher payments to be their default search engine, OpenAI starts to steal share, and more people head directly to Amazon for search results. Google of course is going to blame the pandemic for this, but the actual issue is long-term erosion of margin. It's hard to see how any of this is going to reverse course over time.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I hope my comment wasn't too inflammatory. I just have a strong visceral reaction that something important and beautiful is lost if the west coast computer company that works hard, plays hard, treats their employees like professionals that can act independently and cares a lot about research and craft even at the expense of some reasonable amount of efficiency turns into mostly just a bunch of IBMs or Oracles.

Don't doubt yourself Atreyu. Most news sites aren't aligned with the best interests the tech industry. Tech is a whipping boy that eats its own tail. I must admit I blinked for a few seconds after reading your comment since it's not everyday I get to read an opinion that's firmly pro-tech on the Internet.

For various reasons that are beside the point right now, most companies will degrade over time into a boring standard corporation. What was different about tech was that there were so many young companies that simply hadn't had the time to degrade. Whenever a company got old and shitty enough, it died and got replaced with newer companies.

For whatever reason that stopped happening. Google was founded in 1998 and went IPO in 2004. Facebook was founded in 2004 and had a billion MAU by 2012. It's 2024; we should have had an equally big success by now.

It's worth mentioning that tech didn't just invent better products. Tech also figured out a way to give them away for free. Tech also figured out how to ensure people of all classes and backgrounds got equal access to superior products for free. Tech furthermore figured out how to ensure it wasn't just the American classes that got free stuff, but that the free better products could be enjoyed by people from all nations.

`If you don't deliver, you will be cut, period.`

That's not what's happening at Google.

I understand the intensity of your position on it in light of that being assumed.

Beyond that, I'm wondering if you have any examples of the `unseemly whining by some of the most mature, intelligent, and professionally successful individuals that needs to die in a fire.`?

Generally people seem upset by it turning into a post-modern extremist firing: you show up to work one morning, you're locked out of your laptop, you can't badge into the building, you get an email to your personal email address on file, and that's it.

It's actually totally OK to use the wrong part of speech if you like to. Nothing to do with being emotionally immature.

We're moving back to the office, we're dropping DEI, migrating things to AI.

Are these things 'growing up'? I don't really see them happening in the ways you're describing.

At the tech giants, RTO is quite common, but I also see the creation of countless new companies that were birthed in the pandemic and have healthy remote cultures that benefit from hiring flexibly.

With respect to DEI, it's more at the forefront than ever. It's easier to hire now than it was a decade ago given the layoffs, meaning it's even easier to assess many qualified applicants and validate that you're bringing on fresh, healthy perspectives to your team.

The AI thing I'll concede though. That's been a lot of fun and I do agree is happening across the board.

RTO? I agree with everyone else but it seems anything other than majority WFH is a waste. Once most companies stop laying people off and start hiring, I expect (and hope) it will be brought out in force as a way to get people to join/stay with significantly lower salary.

A nice writeup but

"achieving really cool things in the [..] Ads [..] divisions"?

Come on, no need to fool anyone now that you are free.. There's nothing cool to be achieved in ads, unless you were working to dismantle the entire industry from the inside.

Morally? Probably not.

In terms of challenge and complexity? Sure!

It's the same thing as working in military tech. You shouldn't be a huge fan of blowing people to bits but the challenges and solutions are incredible.

Also, morally - I would argue that the billions of people who choose to use Google for free every single day because it makes their live better, thanks to ads, might think it’s pretty cool too.

Please stop demonizing the very thing you enjoy using. If not you then probably your parents, etc. Google became so valuable because it gives people a lot of value.

That's like saying that people should feel thankful for paying their taxes because that's what paves their roads and builds their schools. Yes, ads bring in money, and maybe they do enable Search - but it's at most a necessary evil, not something to celebrate.

Nah taxes solve a variety of collective action and common goods problems that we are apparently unable to solve otherwise. They are to be celebrated, not simply as a necessary evil.

Personally I appreciate progressive tax system for its... progressivity. Much much better than head tax. It's a necessary evil yes, but so is giving money for any other thing. If it can be fairer and even win-win it ought to be appreciated.

I'm on board with paying taxes in an abstract conceptual sense. It's generally how it's spent and how it's collected (who pays how much) that are problematic.

Also worth noting that Google originally aimed to create less intrusive ads. Relevant, text-only ads with no Javascript, clearly distinguished from the search results by being on the side instead of above the search results. Those days have long since passed.

Even as a staunch capitalist and borderline libertarian, I am thankful for taxes, why shouldn’t I be? I am not going to celebrate it, but I don’t see it as immoral in any way.

This sentiment seems out of place on a site dedicated to startups. Targeted advertising is often an important part of growing a startup and acquiring new customers. You can't just ignore advertising if you want to create a billion dollar company!

Really? We're still considering the reaping of your personal info and resale of it to 1000s of morally deficient corporations and likely by extension 100 governments is "free"?

Yeah ok.

Look, there may have been a very brief time when Google was not part of the evil ad empire (maybe before the acquired Gator/Doubleclick/etc) and was in the business of relatively innocuous ad targeting.

NOT ANYMORE.

Some people can be won over by the technical minutiae of a problem alone, regardless of what problem it actually sets out to solve.

Personally I can’t remotely relate to that.

I spent almost the entire first decade of my career being uncomfortable at how...unenthused? I was to solve business problems. I now have landed on this; technical aspects of a problem aren't enough for me to give a shit about what I do at work. It's a means to an end. My current role has interesting technical problems but the product means nothing to me, I think I'm going to take a hefty paycut for my next role if only to just have some sort of emotional investment in my work.

Please understand: Google is not a person.

Literally true. On the other hand, the founders still have complete voting control of the company, so really the buck stops with them.

How did this person work here for so long and not understand the function of googles special Executive Board — it’s literally three people that control the entire company.

It’s absolutely a person — well 3 to be exact.

But since about 2017 or so L&S just seemed completely absent. Maybe they're making the choices behind the scenes, that Sundar & Ruth are executing, but it feels like ... not really?

Even the last few TGIFs where they properly attended they seemed very much spaced out of things.

The execs are merely the hired minds and hands. They only do what the capital owners want. If you keep a wild dog, you are still responsible for its behavior.

Well, yes, here I agree. I think that in the earlier days Google could remain insulated from that because the returns it was getting were so high, and Capital didn't know what to do with it, and didn't want to do anything to stop the goose from laying golden eggs.

I think now we're seeing a concerted effort across the tech industry to instill labour discipline, and break the relative power that our profession has had. Started with Twitter, then MS, then Google, and it's not going to stop until they get our salaries down, and get these businesses operating like more traditional exploitative organizations where we are disposable "resources".

The threat of "AI" is one tool among many to make that happen, along with layoffs, etc.

Yea I don’t get why so many people ignore this: the layoffs were to send a message to labor in conjunction with the Fed. Stop wanting more more and stop moving jobs. We need to get inflation under control and return the worker class to their jobs.

It’s an intense reevaluation of the American dream by the last class that was experiencing it

My read was L and S were spaced out because the issues googlers kept ranting about were so outside the scope of issues the company was facing.

Workers became increasingly obsessed with political and social issues while the company was dealing with an ultra hostile administration.

Please understand: Google is not a person.

Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower...

Ref: Bryan Cantrill, speaking of Larry Ellison, in the context of working for Oracle after Sun got acquired:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

It's a hilarious rant, starting at 34:00, and the specific quote around 38:35.

Protip: you can link directly to a specific timepoint in a YouTube video with the &t= (or #t=) parameter, measured in seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2060s

Tenured professor tip: you don't need to convert to seconds, you can use:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=38m35s

Sure, but you get seconds if you right click the time control and select "copy video URL current time" :)

. To that end, it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google”

I do love the weird qualifier of 'to that end'.

Would love to see a follow up in 6-12 months when the culture's flavor-aid is cleared out of their system.

Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower...

. . . it doesn't like it.

IMHO a lot of googlers (especially old timers) believe they were special, here is a news flash. You weren't, Google didn't come with a lot of products. And that's why where Google is right now.

They were and still are special. They fundamentally changed the web with a better search engine. Also, Android. Also, Chrome. Also, infra required to run YouTube... even if you don't like the end product, the infra is incredible (same for FaceMeta and Netflix).

A nearly $2T dollar company and growing? A more successful company than nearly all others in the history of humanity? Yeah, must be terrible for them.

Where it is now? 300B revenue with 11% growth and 96B in earnings with 120B in cash. They are fine.

Found the non technical manager

I'm a software engineer with 5 years at a FANG company. In the entirety of your time at Google did you ever identify a high performing contractor and make your mission to make them a full-time employee?

My team did. We had a fantastic test engineer (contractor) and hired him. We got no end of shit from management about it (hiring contractors is a no-no) but it was the right thing to do.

JOOC Why is hiring contractors a no-no? I have the opposite problem right now -- I'm a contractor being pestered to go W2 and I am resisting as politely as I can. It's actually been a common thing in my career. (here's half of the cash and a dental plan -- uhhh thanks but no?)

Surprised that someone like G would avoid using this as a culture/work fit litmus test and not want to fast-track great contractors.

I assume you're asking as a contractor wanting to become fulltime? It's probably worth letting people you work with know that you'd take a fulltime role, because IME many contractors had no interest whatsoever in converting. But you should make sure to know about any legal/administrative blockers, like agreements between your contract company and your FAANG workplace.

depends on the contract, some contracts have a clause for non-solicitation

Two talks given by Ben Collins-Sussman absolutely changed my career path from being a hot headed programmer to thinking like a professional engineer.

The Myth of the Genius Programmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ

The Art of Organizational Manipulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTCuYzAw31Y

I rewatch these every few years, or before an interview. Puts me back in the right headspace.

If you're reading this Ben, thank you.

Just watched the second video and I am confused.

It starts with some general points one could summarize as defining a "good culture" and how that should pay off for both employer and employees, but then later tramples all over it by excusing or outright endorsing the exact type of political behaviour that was criticized at the beginning: upward perception, the favour economy, finding influential friends, connectors, not burning bridges, and facetime.

edit: The mentioned plan B (leaving) is really the only option for what they call a "hostile corporation". I don't agree with many of the plan A "learning to play the game" recommendations. This just changes you for the worse.

It's a version of Might Makes Right or the Economics of the Markets.

You can't change the nature of reality, but you can choose to play the game in the service of good moral outcomes, or in servive of selfish greed.

Ah. The ego of Effective Altruism and Sam-Bankman Fried.

I wrote something questioning why Google employees should deserve wider news here

But if you look at Googler posts here, it's pretty clear how bent out of place a lot of them are.

All said, smart as they are, plenty less smart people leave jobs, so what's the news here?

It was the same with Twitter. There's no special 'crying place' for other jobs and departures, so why here and now?

Bc a lot of them read HN?

Bc what sorry? I didn't realise HN was a big story about people's personal journeys, which the post is.

I thought HN was about smart tech folk who like tech stories with something novel about the thing.

The news is Google layoffs and is interesting to many how the culture of such a large and influential tech company has changed. The person laid off is also a known OSS author (Subversion). If you don’t find it interesting you can just move on you know? Many others find these posts interesting and that’s enough according to HN guidelines.

IMHO, these senior people leaving is a good thing for them and for society.

Most have enough savings to be able to start up something interesting, fun, and that delivers a lot more societal value than their current Google role.

Junior redundancies are more problematic, particularly in the current job market.

It's only a matter of time before there a no remaining don't-be-evil googlers. Not particularly looking forward to that.

That boat has sailed. Everybody knows the score or has their head in the sand.

And that time was 2009? Who with any morals would have worked at Google at any time since then?

"Google is not a person"... Google lawyers will tell you completely otherwise! Google is certainly a person in the thinking of the US supreme court.

Definitely a big shift in perspective from the old days when a company was "family" and you had a pension and an expectation to stick with the company for the long haul. Nowadays it's unhealthy to treat a company that way, since that "culture of loyalty" was just a short lived thing around the time boomers worked.

The oldest boomers were mid-career by the time financialization took hold.

Right, which is why you should treat it as a person legally, but emotionally and ethically - who cares? It doesn't have feelings! People and corporations are allowed to do all sorts of shitty things to each other by the laws of the U.S, and you shouldn't do them to other people because that's not what being a good person is about, but when it comes to a corporation - its feelings are not going to get hurt.

I had to pause here for a second

“enormous pride” in “building” a Chicago Engineering office over decades, and achieving really cool things in the Developer, “Ads”, and Search divisions

Why? He and Brian Fitzpatrick were the founding engineers for the Chicago office. I worked with them on Google Code back when there was almost no competition in forges and GitHub had just barely become a thing. Search brings enormous value to all kinds of people and Ads makes it all financially viable. There is plenty to be proud of and without those founding engineers in that office Chicago would not have been a part of it and offered gainful employment to many different engineers in that area. He was a fantastic manager and a great director.

My favorite were his (or fitz's) videos of the building they moved into; it was an old storage facility and they had to defrost something like 30 years of ice and remove 50 years of walls.

He basically built svnhub before github existed, but leadership saw little to no value in owning a code site. He knew how to build products for professional hackers who wanted to build interesting things. And he helped fund a generation of gsoc hackers improving open source codes.

I keep seeing references to this recent “uncomfortable culture” at Google. Can someone from Google (past or present) explain what this is?

Some examples:

* Loss of trust, loss of openness. Someone kept leaking TGIF presentations to the media, so TGIF turned into contentless corpspeak and dodging of any hard questions. Someone kept leaking internal docs, so new docs now are locked down to specific teams or divisions instead of being readable company-wide.

* Attempts to start some lucrative but morally questionable projects (like the CBP contract or the China reengagement) that many employees felt went against "don't be evil".

* Cost cutting everywhere. Putting more work on fewer, burned out people. Desk hoteling in some places. No hardware refreshes. Very limited travel. And of course, cancelling or downsizing some fun but experimental projects.

* The pointlessly insulting way the 2023 layoffs were handled - e.g. cutting the laid off people off from all corp network access, even their email, without warning.

Ever heard of James Damore?

Googles layoff are among the dumbest I’ve ever seen.

Laying off randomly and not low performers is par for the course for the management of Google. High performers will leave when the market gets Better and the company will fill itself with more shitty performers.

This is not how a top tier company behaves.

Laying off randomly and not low performers

Low performers? By what metric? And your metric sucks, that's because a single metric is meaningless, even 10 metrics are useless.

Did you do over 200 CLs a year? 10000 LoC? 10-20 design docs? 10 product launches? CL comments, reviews, bug fixed, filed?

Sure you can identify outliers, but the baseline is not exactly very telling.

In my other companies layoffs were always random.

Striving to cut low performers and sometimes getting it wrong is orders of magnitude better than randomly cutting people, gutting high performers, and ruining confidence to other high performers that working hard will be appreciated.

So yes, it doesn't matter which metric you want to use, but use something that is directionally correct with being a low performer, and get rid of those people. You might get some wrong but for the most part, people will be happier that the coasters and stragglers are gone.

Hey, current Googler here. I joined in 2017. For those who are looking from outside to those who reminisce past Google, I have an update for you: Google is still a f'ing amazing workplace. It's easily the best company I worked for in my 24 yrs of post-college career. Amazing colleagues. Incredible learning opportunity. Super fun projects. Really good pay. Your mileage may vary. This is my N=1 impression as an ML expert currently working on Ads. Best of luck!

So I agree the pay is good but for me (and most of my friends it really wore me down over time) that place really wore me down over time. I was already planning on leaving but I was shocked at how happy I was to be laid off from there, people kept messaging me concerned and I needed to explain to them that I felt fantastic.

I loved the office (I was also in the Chicago office, the best office at Google! Though it might lose that title without Ben Sussman to lead it) and my team was so amazing but the shifting priorities and reorgs really sapped my motivation, especially recently as cost cutting created more organizational churn. Objectively it's a good place to work, I always told Nooglers that this job in this particular location is one of the best jobs to have ever existed and I honestly think in many ways that's true. I think if you're pretty resilient to corporate bullshit (I thought I was but over time it got to me) or if you can get a good project I do sincerely recommend it as a place to work. On the other hand for me it is also true that it was slowly sapping my joy of engineering and leaving me with no motivation besides collecting a paycheck and that really sucked for a bit.

Please understand: Google is not a person. It’s many groups of people following locally-varying processes, rules, and culture. To that end, it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google”; it’s not a consciousness, and it has no sense of duty nor debt.

This isn't right. Behind every decision is still a human (for now). Someone messed up and you were the victim.

Someone messed up and you were the victim.

That's a giant leap. How do you know his layoff was a "mess up"?

He's not entitled to work there. No one is.

Step one: dry your tears while counting your giant pile of money...

If you do it for the money, I doubt your productivity is en par

[edit] snark

He's been part of some very pivotal oss projects/books/talks so people like to follow him to see where he's going and what he may be working on. I'm sure there are a huge number of engineers he's worked with/mentored who would also be interested.

I actually follow fitz all over the place but didn't realize he was part of Subversion so I'm seeing this from the other end and get to trace back to his previous stuff.

Gotta ask....do you play the banjo?

I knew Ben Collins-Sussman from his work on Subversion and his writing and speaking about engineering management... but I had no idea he'd co-composed two musicals as well! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Collins-Sussman#Musical_co...

All yoir vested unvested stock can give that flexibility !

Jesus. That was kind of tone deaf. Not everyone laid off is an Engineering Director who has worked at Google for 18 years. That guy probably could have retired years ago. There are many who were laid off for whom that isn't true.

Great. I hope that you now have time to reflect on the impact your products have on humanity.

Very easy FAQ to write for a 55 years old someone who's been a director for close to 6 years and therefore earning more than a million a year for that period. It's another story for a newly hired L3 engineer.

I'm lucky that not a single one of my friends has been affected by layoffs at my company, but I find apologism of bad executive management like this is incredibly bad taste if not outright insulting to people that are affected by layoffs.

Having toiled in the Google mines for almost as long a tenure as Ben before my time came in 2021, the words 'The conflict between “uncomfortable culture” and “golden handcuffs” was becoming intolerable.' could not ring any truer.

Please understand: Google is not a person.

In both law and culture Google is infact a person in such that they inherit the rights of a person.

Ben's follow up from Jan 12: "Surprised by the Response" (https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-12-ExitResp...).

This is unfair! After all you’ve done, how could Google do this to you?

Please understand: Google is not a person. It’s many groups of people following locally-varying processes, rules, and culture. To that end, it makes no sense to either love or be angry at “Google”; it’s not a consciousness, and it has no sense of duty nor debt.

This is a such a strange view. You shouldn't be angry at google, because google is just people. No mention of being angry at the people, who maybe it would be unfair to blame for "google"s actions. Conveniently there's no appropriate subject (or object) to feel about.

I think the shorthands he attacks, though they're literally untrue, are also really helpful metaphors. Large organizations have a character that no one person is responsible for and personifying them and assessing how we feel about their actions is a useful tool for reflection and assessment. Each member of those "groups of people" should reflect on how they as individuals (and their group) contributes to it. A company isn't "just" an aggregate of all people in it - but it is mostly that.

You can't hurt a company's feelings (just the feelings of the people who work there) - but you can be upset at what it does to you and speak about that.

Sigh, if I was making 700k/year for 18 years (plus stock options) I want to believe I’d be “fine” if I was laid off.

Unfortunately, That is so certainly not the reality I live in right now.

Google is not a person.

Citizens United has entered the chat. [1]

[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...

I met this guy at a Google weekend-gathering in Chicago one winter. Really enjoyed chatting with him and wish him the best.

best of luck, Ben. I spent a few days visiting the Chicago office (when it was opposite Marina Towers), so maybe we met.