[HN Gopher] Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
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Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
Author : mrowland
Score : 573 points
Date : 2021-02-17 12:59 UTC (8 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (paygo.media)
| seaman1921 wrote:
| "Having trouble scheduling meetings because "it's the new Yoga
| instructor lesson I cannot miss" or "I'm taking a personal day"
| drove me crazy. The worst thing is that this was inline with the
| policies and norms - I was the weirdo who wanted to push things
| fast and expected that some level of personal sacrifice when
| needed. I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I
| also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if
| its on a weekend."
|
| ASSHOLE - Waze employees are probably saying good riddance.
| screye wrote:
| > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic
| reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a
| better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a
| great job
|
| This is a rather dangerous thought process that reflects the
| skewed view that some Americans have of employment: that anything
| less than 'Great' should be considered fire-worthy. Employment
| security is pushed to its exploitative limit. In such cases,
| employees react commensurately. Employee and employers end up in
| relationship that encourages churn & hopping jobs the second that
| your value exceeds your compensation.
|
| > fast moving and changing needs
|
| I find it hard to believe that a behemoth like Google has that
| many of these. In new product teams, sure. But, there is a shit
| load of maintence / upkeep / feature-iteration work that mostly
| requires sufficiently competent and experienced engineers. But,
| not much more.
|
| > traditional tech model of risk reward
|
| I am not sure if this was ever true for big tech. The second a
| company was is big enough to be in S&P 500, no low level IC is
| ever going to have visible impact to the company's stock bottom
| line.
|
| The idea that a foot soldier's compensation was ever reflective
| of their impact is and has always been a lie.
|
| > That tolerance is gone at Google and "words" > "content" is the
| new Silicon Valley mantra of political correctness. You can say
| terrible things as long as your pronouns are correct or can say
| super important things but use one wrong word and it's off to HR
| for you
|
| That's a shame. I was hoping that the media outburst on these
| matters were that of a minority. But, it appears that this dogma
| has taken over Google culture at large.
|
| > When I was growing up in Tech in the '90's - there was no such
| thing as work life balance. We loved what we did and wanted to
| succeed so we worked like crazy to achieve great things. As I had
| kids, I learned the importance of being at home for them and
| that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a balance,
| sometimes you need to work weekends and nights, sometimes you can
| head out early or work from home
|
| I am not sure I can take this serious. This is not what Work Life
| balance means AT ALL. Maybe that's because I am one of the
| younger folk.
|
| > the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. Soon, Lawyers >
| Builders and the builders will need to go elsewhere to start new
| companies.
|
| This appears to be well recognized cycle for big companies in
| every sector. I would characterize the Ballmer era of MSFT as a
| somewhat similar time too.
|
| Good points and a good read. But, if you want start up culture,
| work at a startup...I guess.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| At will employment is the correct method. Otherwise you end up
| with stagnant economies with low pay like in Germany and
| France.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| > " It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic
| reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a
| better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a
| great job. This neuters managers and does not lead to great
| teams, driven by mission, pushing each other to do better."
|
| Ugh, this refuted myth again?
|
| The "insecure, bad leader who blames subordinates for their own
| failures" meter is going off the charts with this one.
| Traster wrote:
| I would like to hear the refutation because I've witnessed this
| myself in corporate environments. Corporate HR are difficult to
| deal with, they're very process orientated and risk averse,
| getting rid of someone reflects poorly on you and your
| management structure basically doesn't care if there's 1
| useless person in your team. You have to put a huge amount of
| work in to document and justify why the person is not qualified
| for the job and (in my country) you've got to make a reasonable
| effort to find another role for them, and if you do start this
| process with HR it creates documentation that means no one will
| ever take them if they do want to transfer.
|
| Start to end you're probably talking about ~6 months to get rid
| of someone and over that time you need an intense process of
| setting them targets and documenting failing to meet
| expectations. The result is that most managers are more likely
| to try and shuffle their bad engineers into other teams than to
| actually give up a big chunk of their time doing this process.
| Not to mention the fact it puts you in a very awkward
| positioning having a working relationship with the person
| you're getting rid of.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| "Putting effort into helping low performers improve or find
| better fitting roles" is called "leadership."
|
| It's mind-blowing that you see a 6 month investment in just
| doing basic leadership 101 as a massive bureaucratic hassle.
| I think it's safe to say that the low performer you're
| referring to is not actually the real problem.
| jmull wrote:
| Is that top 50 brands graphic real?
|
| I recognize every brand on there and know at least a little bit
| what their consumer-facing products are... except waze (until
| now).
|
| I realize it might just be me, but I wonder if this is some kind
| of vanity graphic?
|
| (I have been at a company that would periodically pay for brand
| surveys, that would always tell us how great our brand was doing.
| I don't think there was anything explicitly untoward going on,
| but I think the consultants were finding a way to tell us what we
| wanted to hear. I wonder if they same is going on here?)
| dtoznayxvf wrote:
| Many people simply can't hack startup culture. Corp 'culture'
| created by worthless (damaging) HR dept isn't even that -- its
| innovation poison. Perfect for hack and hangers on -- u know...
| people who call themselves 'thought leaders'. Yoga has zero place
| at a serious busines. It's not a daycare!
| b3kart wrote:
| > Yoga has zero place at a serious busines
|
| It's "business", and why? Are you paying your (say) coders to
| write code? Unlikely, otherwise you'd measure their
| productivity in lines-of-code written, which I hope you realize
| is a bad idea.
|
| More likely you're paying your coders to solve problems. Is
| sitting in a chair always the best way to solve problems/think?
| Not necessarily. If physical activity (like yoga) is conducive
| to better thinking/problem solving, and the company has the
| resources (Google does) -- I don't see why not.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > Yoga has zero place at a serious busines.
|
| The free market seems to say it's worth the boost to employee
| retention or PR or whatever.
| _0o6v wrote:
| "You need to be able to answer the "what have you done for our
| users lately" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be
| happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech."
|
| Good quote. Although you can extend the lawyers theme out to the
| rest of the bureaucratic corp too.
| kevingadd wrote:
| I think like 1/3 of the people I knew there who got promotions
| got it purely off of visibility and not actual customer impact.
| In one case they literally dumped an unfinished API on Chrome
| users before it was finished and then after collecting their
| promotion, abandoned it to let other people clean up the mess.
| In other cases schedules were compressed or important features
| were cut so that we could "ship" in time for the next promo
| round. So frustrating.
| mirthflat83 wrote:
| > at the end of every day, I always ask myself "what did I do
| for our users today". This simple exercise helps keep
| priorities straight. When I found myself avoiding this question
| because I was embarrassed by the answer, I knew my time was up.
|
| I agree. Good quote
| amelius wrote:
| The problem with that question: who are the real users?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| If the only user you can identify for the majority of your
| day-to-day tasks is "my boss" or "my boss's boss", then
| there's probably something wrong.
|
| Everyone gets mandates from on high, but that shouldn't be
| _all_ of one 's work.
| Person5478 wrote:
| If it's an app and the answer to that question isn't clearly
| the people who download and install the app, your priorities
| are fucked.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Parts if society will pressure you to stay on the ladder rather
| than seeking meaning or utility.
| treis wrote:
| I think this guy missed the memo that Google bought Waze to put
| them out to pasture. They were the only real competition to
| Google Maps and were acquired to ensure Google Maps monopoly.
| Waze shipping features and winning in the marketplace would be
| a bad thing. I think a lot of his post stems from missing this.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Hard to align that perspective with his acknowledgement that
| Waze was allowed to operate independently, and the fact that
| Waze has been launching lots of new features for the last few
| years.
| treis wrote:
| Straight from the horse's mouth:
|
| >All of our growth at Waze post acquisition was from work
| we did, not support from the mothership. Looking back, we
| could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently
| had we stayed independent.
|
| He also details the constraints and additional burdens
| imposed by corporate as well the overall lack of support.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| In that section of the article, he was talking about
| marketing and partnership limitations that are imposed by
| being a part of a larger conglomerate. This has little to
| do with feature development.
| Arainach wrote:
| That doesn't support any claims of "putting them out to
| pasture". Is Microsoft "putting Github out to pasture" by
| taking a hands off approach and letting them keep doing
| their own thing?
| treis wrote:
| It's not about the hands off approach or letting them do
| their own thing. It's about their long term goals.
| Microsoft wants GitHub to be successful while Google
| wanted Google Maps to succeed.
| bagacrap wrote:
| You must not be a Waze user.
| dodobirdlord wrote:
| > The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy -
| on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a
| significant waste of resources and focus. After the acquisition,
| we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best
| engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to
| Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero
| value to our users.
|
| So what he _is_ saying is that he wouldn't have done it if he
| wasn't forced to. Perhaps there's a lesson here about what sort
| of organizations are trustworthy custodians of data and what sort
| of organizations are not.
| Shaddox wrote:
| I'm aware that, as a founder, he's obviously very interested in
| the success of his product. His mentality however carried over
| the acquisition and past inertia. Giving him the benefit of the
| doubt, I think his problem is that he's passionate.
|
| And I don't mean the corporate lingo 'passionate', I mean the
| actual passionate. I strongly advise any passionate people to not
| seek to turn their passion into a job. Because it's a long
| journey full of suffering.
|
| Your bosses will drive you insane. Your clients will drive you
| insane. Your coworkers will drive you especially mad. You will
| feel pain every time you will be asked to cut corners. No one
| will appreciate the finer details of your work. You will become
| the office insufferable twat. Passed every promotion.
|
| The sweet spot is somewhere between "I don't hate it" and "I kind
| of like it". You can learn to like something if you do it long
| enough.
| izacus wrote:
| Except that this guy IS a boss and he's been demanding that his
| employees copy his "passion" against their contractual
| benefits. Or wellbeing.
| microtherion wrote:
| And he is also demanding that the second those employees burn
| out (possibly due to too much passion, and too little
| attention paid to their wellbeing), he be allowed to put them
| out to pasture.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Well this is depressing to read, especially this bit: _" The
| sweet spot is somewhere between "I don't hate it" and "I kind
| of like it". You can learn to like something if you do it long
| enough."_
|
| It seems like a great way to waste 40 hours of your life every
| week.
| mattm wrote:
| Completely agree. My motto for work is that you want to care
| the right amount. It's hopefully obvious that caring too little
| is bad. But caring too much can also be a bad thing.
| whycombagator wrote:
| > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic
| reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a
| better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a
| great job. This neuters managers and does not lead to great
| teams, driven by mission, pushing each other to do better.
|
| > I was the weirdo who wanted to push things fast and expected
| that some level of personal sacrifice when needed. I don't
| believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that
| we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend.
|
| > So, why did I leave?
|
| > I did not leave in a confrontational disagreement (which is
| what anyone who knows me thought would happen, as I have a short
| fuse...)
|
| From Twitter:
|
| > Noam Bardin, former Waze CEO (2009-21)
|
| He's clearly a smart guy and I don't disagree with all his
| points, but in general it's sad that there are CEOs/managers out
| there with short fuses that want to fire old people. Also he
| wants personal sacrifice & things delivered no matter what. I
| understand the viewpoint but would likely despise it as an
| employee.
| harryposner wrote:
| I didn't read it as firing old people, but rather firing people
| for the plain old reason that they're not doing a good job.
| aikinai wrote:
| That sentence is very poorly written and I also read it wrong
| the first time, but he's not advocating to fire old people.
| He's saying the "plain old" reason for firing people, "you are
| not doing a great job."
| ativzzz wrote:
| He didn't say he wanted to fire old people, "plain old - you
| are not doing a great job" is just a colloquialism and can be
| replaced with the word "standard reason" or something similar.
|
| This is probably how he got in trouble for some of the HR
| things he mentioned, where he says a word and people take it
| like you did and report him.
| mslack616 wrote:
| I was thinking the exact same, obviously a very smart guy but
| damn I don't really agree/align with most of what he expressed.
| iandanforth wrote:
| I think his derision of entitled ladder-climbing employees is
| valid from the perspective of someone who sees "building
| something valuable" as the point of employment.
|
| There is a whole community however that sees wealth acquisition
| as the point of employment. Even if it's "merely" joining the
| ranks of the top 5% this is lauded as success by many. Lawyers,
| doctors, consultants, stock traders, all the high paying
| professions have people who subscribe to this philosophy. "I want
| to provide the best life possible for my family" might be the
| primary goal. Lower status/pay professions might describe this as
| what a "job" is as opposed to a "career". Something you do for
| money.
|
| Many hackers want to both provide the best possible life for
| their families _and_ participate in a grand adventure of changing
| the world by creating something people want. I am infected with
| this mentality. But this might be considered a delusion of
| grandeur by many, or egotism.
|
| It's hard to empathize with a group who doesn't share a drive you
| see as essential for good character, but that lack of empathy is
| what is drawing people's scorn here.
| CodeMage wrote:
| > _I think his derision of entitled ladder-climbing employees
| is valid from the perspective of someone who sees "building
| something valuable" as the point of employment._
|
| Call me cynical and jaded, but I don't believe "building
| something valuable" is the point of _employment_.
|
| "Building something valuable" is the point of my _vocation_. I
| used to believe that the employment and vocation should align.
| Over the course of more than 20 years of my professional
| career, the vast majority of the employers I 've had have done
| their best to disabuse me of that notion.
|
| The way I see it, the point of employment is to ensure you have
| the money and the benefits you need to live comfortably. If
| your employment and your vocation align, it's a nice bonus. If
| they don't, do what you're passionate about in your free time.
|
| > _Many hackers want to both provide the best possible life for
| their families and participate in a grand adventure of changing
| the world by creating something people want._
|
| If you can get that, it's awesome. But if you can't, then you
| have to choose. And I know what I'm choosing.
| lelele wrote:
| > I used to believe that the employment and vocation should
| align.
|
| > If your employment and your vocation align, it's a nice
| bonus.
|
| That is the meaning of "should", isn't it? And even if they
| don't align 100%, you can always strive for a maximum.
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| It's not the drive that is unshared, it's the incentives. He
| seems to vaguely understand that his employee's incentives at
| Google are different from his own, and seems resent them for it
| even though his pay is probably an order of magnitude higher
| than theirs.
|
| When he talks about perfect alignment between employees and
| investors in the start up world, he is believing his own sales
| pitch. In reality the same divide exists there too.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This guy is deluded about the meaning of his product. I was a
| Waze user. It saved me a few minutes here and there getting to
| work, and that was worth the $0 it cost me. If he ever forced
| an employee to miss even a single kid's soccer game to save me
| two minutes getting to work, though, I no longer feel that is
| worth it.
|
| I spent most of the past five years working on projects for the
| US geointelligence enterprise where if we failed to meet a
| deadline, a satellite might not launch. Before that, I was in
| the Army for 8 years fighting wars. I am perfectly willing to
| make tremendous sacrifices when it is actually worth it, but it
| is amazing to see how deluded Silicon Valley types are about
| the actual importance of what they're doing. Not everything
| changes the world. Most products are trifling conveniences,
| nice to haves, and if you miss a deadline here or there, nobody
| cares. Or at least they really shouldn't care.
| dd36 wrote:
| Same. I can live in a hut in Guatemala if I feel challenged and
| am enjoying my work. Wealth is fun but so long as my family and
| I are good, it's not a motivating factor. Solving problems is.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| "so long as my family and I are good" - wealth goes a long
| way to ensure exactly that.
| dd36 wrote:
| Yes but there is a threshold. Good to me doesn't mean
| everyone drives a Tesla. It means freedom to do what we
| want and not be prisoners to what we own or want to own.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Sure, but if you're a software developer with a few years
| experience then pretty much any job is going to cover that.
| PNWChris wrote:
| I generally agree with you here, the sun is shining and
| we software engineers can make some hay! But...I have
| words of caution. I grew up in Southeastern Michigan. My
| dad is a Stanford grad mechanical engineer who worked for
| a Big 3 auto manufacturer, my wife's parents work in
| auto, and many of my friends families directly or
| indirectly worked in automotive.
|
| Everything about that seemed secure and stable until our
| entire world got rekt in 2008. It took forever for the
| average automotive worker and their family to recover
| from that recession, and I've come out of it incredibly
| cynical about employment and the US economic system. When
| it matters most, DC will bail themselves and their
| cronies out first, and will drag their feet and cry
| deficits when it gets time to help you.
|
| I care about doing great work, but my highest priority is
| to "secure the bag" as the kids say and ensure a stable
| life for myself and my family. I keep a big cash savings,
| save and invest aggressively for retirement, and make no
| assumptions about my employability in a hypothetical time
| of crisis. I have a feeling a lot of mid-late-20s and
| early 30s SWEs share my experience, it's no accident I
| chose such a lucrative field (though I do love my work!).
|
| Watch out for yourself, don't discount the possibility
| that software eng is just living in a repeat of the
| irrationally exuberant 1990s automotive industry.
|
| Side note/PS: It's not all about money: you've got to be
| politically active, invest in community, and advocate for
| the kind of world you believe we should live in! Just
| don't forget to secure yourself financially and make no
| assumptions if you can afford not to, then you can
| confidentially support yourself and others in times of
| crisis.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| There is also a risk of health problems. If at some
| moment my spine decides it is no more acceptable for me
| to spend so much time sitting by the computer, or my eyes
| decide it is no more acceptable to spend so much time
| looking at the screen... I won't be able to work as a
| full-time software developer anymore.
|
| I want to make sure that when that happens, my family
| will be economically okay during the following years.
| bradlys wrote:
| Really varies on the company and where you live. Where I
| am, unless you're at a select few companies, you'll
| barely make ends meet or have to choose to live a
| particularly subpar lifestyle for a professional.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Interesting. I thought software developers were paid
| better than most other professions almost everywhere. Out
| of interest, is this because you live somewhere with low
| wages, or because you live somewhere with high living
| costs?
| DC1350 wrote:
| Most good jobs are in places where it's not possible to
| buy a house as a single engineer, which is a pretty basic
| standard of life that even low income people expect all
| over the country. If you don't optimize for money then
| your options are to either give up and move away, or
| accept poor living conditions like hour long commutes or
| having roommates as a grown adult.
| ska wrote:
| Unless you set a really unusual bar for "subpar lifestyle
| for a professional" this is a very atypical situation. If
| you think of "professional" jobs only, developers
| typically have better than average compensation for
| around the least barrier to entry. The lack of need for
| credentials tends to translate to significantly less debt
| (more so US & maybe Canada specific) and earlier career
| trajectory entry too.
|
| This may be regional, but certainly seems to hold for US,
| Canada, much of EU in my limited experience.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Most Canadian developers don't get paid enough to live in
| the tech hub cities.
| ska wrote:
| And yet, they are tech hubs? How does this differ from
| devs in Montana be California ?
|
| More to the point, are other professions doing notably
| better in those "tech hubs" relative to software
| developers ?
|
| In my experience, no, which suggests your comment really
| boils down to "there are some high COL places where even
| professional couples struggle to afford a house" no?
| [deleted]
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| The problems that I am passionate about are large at scale
| and really require large amounts of capital and not within my
| expertise.
|
| So I need wealth (money).
| Aeolun wrote:
| Working in a corporation where I'm already adequately
| challenged by the work, is there any other goal to strive for
| except promotion and compensation increase?
|
| Once you are at the level where your compensation covers
| everything you want, it's more of a game to increase it than
| necessity.
|
| It also makes me feel better since a lot of people I don't
| respect earn a lot more than I do, so increasing relative
| compensation is righting something in the world :P
| Arainach wrote:
| >Once you are at the level where your compensation covers
| everything you want, it's more of a game to increase it
| than necessity.
|
| This is also why many people choose to plateau at a certain
| point. In the Google/Facebook scheme, that's often L5 -
| I've talked with a number of employees who debate whether
| they even want the responsibility that comes with an L6
| promo and are quite convinced they wouldn't want L7+
|
| Their mindset would probably be foreign to the author of
| this article, but I can see it and it lines up with what
| you said - at a certain point, if comp is high enough, I'd
| prefer to be well paid AND have free time. I've worked with
| some truly incredible L7+ engineers, but they correlate
| strongly with people who never turn off and seemingly never
| stop working, and that's simply not something that appeals
| to me in life.
| Raidion wrote:
| Yea, this seems like a 'scissor' issue where you're going to
| see the two ends being "I want a project where I care about it
| and I want to make an impact and personal sacrifices are worth
| it to make that impact" and "I will never truly be passionate
| about this, this is an economic transaction where I exchange
| life for money, and I'm going to try to get the best deal I
| can."
|
| If you're talking about building a team, having people with
| similar goals is always important. This guy wants a team with
| the "we're gonna change the world" view. You're not going to do
| well on a team like that if you're just looking to maximize the
| salary/effort ratio.
|
| I think one of the reason people get annoyed at stuff like this
| is that a lot of people been sold a "we're gonna change the
| world" vision that turns out to just be some recruiter or
| manager's excitement and end up parsing TPS reports for below
| average salary. True change the world opportunities rarely come
| via a recruiter or job board.
| danans wrote:
| I have to wonder who is more entitled, the person who expects to
| do the 11AM yoga class, or the person who expects his employees'
| weekend time?
|
| To me, the yoga class example is the kind that people can see and
| point judging fingers at (i.e. images of youthful people in yoga
| clothes stretching in a nicely lit yoga studio).
|
| Expecting your employees to work weekends to meet your vision
| (especially if without a clear reward system for doing so) sounds
| like a much more profound form of entitlement.
|
| Disclosure: Long time Googler, and my experience with managers at
| Google has rarely been like the author of the article. When it
| has, I've voted with my feet and changed projects, or avoided
| projects like that altogether.
| Diederich wrote:
| A quick story about "entitlement" at some of the most 'employee
| benefit focused' tech companies. I haven't worked at Google, but
| I've worked at two of the other so-called FAANG companies. The
| soft benefits and perks were amazing, no doubt about it.
|
| For a time, a certain (popular) subset of the free snacks became
| unavailable. My immediate team and I made some jokes about it. A
| week or so later, word got around that somebody had opened a
| medium grade internal incident over the 'outage'. So we looked up
| and sure enough, there it was, an actual filed incident, status
| ongoing. Ok so that's fine; things were generally pretty 'loose'
| at the company, so maybe that was a joke.
|
| Nope; not only had many hundreds of people marked themselves as
| impacted, but the discussion was quite serious.
|
| Mixed in of course were many people making comments about how
| silly/absurd/outrageous it was that OTHER PEOPLE were taking this
| snack outage so seriously.
|
| The whole thing turned into quite a kerfuffle. There were now
| hundreds of comments under the incident, and the associated chat
| channel was getting pretty heated.
|
| Word came down from my area's management, unofficially, in a
| friendly way, suggesting that we just stay clear of the whole
| thing, which was sound advice in my opinion.
|
| To be clear: the vast majority of the heat was about whether this
| thing should be an incident at all, and the size of the 'sides'
| were to my eye roughly even.
|
| I'm not trying to make a statement here about entitlement one way
| or another, but simply recounting a story from a few years ago as
| I best recall it.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Lines up with my experience. For every person having an
| entitled fit, there's two or three people pointing out how
| silly the whole thing is.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't know if it's an entitled fit. Getting rid of a small
| perk can sometimes just be that little thing that causes an
| employee to briefly put his head up and start thinking about
| why he's still working there. It's not something I'd quit
| over, but maybe something that might remind me to check the
| job boards this month rather than ignore them like usual.
| Steve Blank wrote [1] about this.
|
| 1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-
| ear...
| system16 wrote:
| > The product is a tool to advance the employees career, not a
| passion, mission or economic game changer.
|
| Of course it is. With the exception of the founders and possibly
| the first few, other employees rarely reap the benefits of
| product success, and if they do it's a promotion. I.e. advancing
| their career.
|
| It's pretty naive and selfish to expect employees to sacrifice
| and emotionally invest as much in a product as the founders since
| they will not benefit nearly as much should it succeed.
| known wrote:
| Reminds me lack of self-actualization in
| http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/ob/motivation/maslow/
| choppaface wrote:
| It's telling that the author now wants to hold a discussion on
| Clubhouse to discuss the post. Lots of different takes on
| Clubhouse, but today it's a much more "entitled" venue than
| Twitter or a Reddit AMA. Holding the talk on Clubhouse shows how
| much the author values filtering his audience. Whether the
| blogpost says that or not.
| chubot wrote:
| _We had lunch in the cafeteria and a Googler online ahead of us
| was overheard saying "What? Sushi again???" which became our
| inside joke around entitlement_
|
| Back in 2006 I referred a former co-worker to Google. He quit
| after a year or so, and this was one of his complaints.
|
| Our joke was "This foie gras is TERRIBLE. Just terrible".
|
| Yes they literally served foie gras!
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Interesting article all around. I have to raise one minor quibble
| with the author's points:
|
| "No one buys technology, you buy a team and a way of doing
| things."
|
| If the author means in the sense of what a big company like
| Google is purchasing, that's kind of correct (though there's no
| guarantee the company sees it as in their best interest to keep
| that team or way of doing things together).
|
| If the author means in terms of _why_ a company like Google
| purchases another company... That 's only one reason. Here's a
| short list of additional reasons I'm aware of Google has bought a
| company:
|
| - To acquire the data (and agreements to share data) a company
| has built up over the years
|
| - To acquire a company's customers (big in the ad space;
| traditional advertising is a trust network, and the easiest way
| to get into the inner circle of big client service is to buy
| someone who's already serving big clients)
|
| - To remove a competitor from the field of companies in a space
|
| - To acquire the team that built something Google wants to build
| fast (this is a gamble; Google's in-house, NIH-ist software stack
| is an absolute space alien, and teams that built something Google
| wants will likely have to rebuild it atop that stack while
| simultaneously limping along their existing tech stack that
| already does the thing but that Google has immediately labeled
| "DEPRECATED DO NOT EXPAND UNTRUSTED SOFTWARE WE DIDN'T BUILD THE
| KERNEL THIS IS RUNNING ON").
|
| As an owner thinking of selling to Google, I have no idea if you
| know which of these they're thinking of your company as. But it's
| worth noting that many of those reasons don't imply your company
| will stick around as an independent coherent entity in Google (or
| even that Google intends to hire all your employees).
| tejohnso wrote:
| > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic
| reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a
| better person
|
| I found this surprising. I thought this was primarily a problem
| in union / government positions.
| sct202 wrote:
| It's how it works at most big companies. There's a very big
| impact to morale if people think they'll get sacked at the end
| of a big project or if VP's best friend needs a job. The normal
| way to onboard a new better person is to open up a new
| position, like repurposing an open headcount from somewhere
| else, and then shift responsibilities between the new person
| and old person.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| EA apparently hasn't gotten this memo
| Eridrus wrote:
| It's both true and not.
|
| It's certainly a lot harder to fire people than at a startup.
| You need multiple review cycles with poor ratings, a
| Performance Improvement Plan, more review cycles of bad
| ratings, etc. But most people don't want to hang on through
| that, so they leave since it just sucks to be on a team where
| you are not valued. But you can definitely hang on for 18
| months pretty easily with everyone unhappy with your work if
| you want to.
|
| So it's not really the same as government jobs where you really
| can't be fired, but it's very different from a startup where
| everything can be going fine, you lose a big customer and a
| week later 10% of the company is gone to keep the burn rate
| low.
| izacus wrote:
| Considering his other values, the question here might be if he
| couldn't fire people for reasons the rest of the corporation
| considers normal - like taking time off, not working on
| weekends or similar.
|
| For someone trying to do that, it might look like its
| "impossible for fire someone".
| rkagerer wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. It correlates with what I've
| (subjectively) experienced from the outside, i.e. my user
| experience across Google's products has steadily deteriorated
| over the last decade.
|
| This quote really hit home:
|
| _at the end of every day, I always ask myself "what did I do for
| our users today". This simple exercise helps keep priorities
| straight. When I found myself avoiding this question because I
| was embarrassed by the answer, I knew my time was up._
| tomerbd wrote:
| I think it's ok to put additional effort when needed even
| weekends, as long as when it's possible you get it back as days
| off, no problem with it. Same for oncall responsibility, need to
| get back days off after your shift, even if nothing happened due
| to psychological tension. If you go to a company where you need
| to do oncall shifts ask for an additional day off for each week
| you are oncall during a typical year that's it.
| strken wrote:
| There's a pervasive belief by managers that involuntarily working
| weekends for an extended period of time will increase rather than
| decrease the total work done, and that engineering output can be
| measured in "hours", that I find absolutely ridiculous.
|
| If I think back over the times when I've been most productive,
| I've had the kind of trusted flexibility that allows me to work
| 14 hours one day to get a feature in before the big demo, but
| also leave an hour early the next day to go catch up on all the
| real life stuff I didn't do. Reading the article, I get the
| impression the author is praising the 14 hour day while
| condemning the leaving early, which is failing to see that
| they're two sides of the same coin. I'm not going to work myself
| to exhaustion unless my manager helps facilitate it.
| BugWatch wrote:
| I guess you probably heard that classic joke that the (project)
| manager is the person who thinks that a baby can be produced
| and delivered in a single month given nine women to do it.
| not2b wrote:
| It's from Frederick Brooks' book, "The Mythical Man-Month",
| the earliest good book on management of software projects.
| "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many
| women are assigned."
| pyb wrote:
| A lot of interesting things here, but also the usual "billionaire
| complaining about all these entitled employees" vibes.
| geodel wrote:
| Yea, billionaires complaining about millionaires is a
| phenomenon in valley and vice versa too.
| ccozan wrote:
| Well, we wouldn't move forward if we don't complain, right?
| kenneth wrote:
| Not sure why everyone is assuming Noam is a billionaire. He
| mentioned he had little equity, and from what I could find that
| amounted to single-digit millions out of the acquisition's
| billion-dollar price tag. Of course, compensation since then
| and Google's rising market capitalization have surely increased
| that, but I would bet it's still quite far off from the
| billion, and even far off from the 9 digits.
|
| Not that it matters -- his observations are just as valid
| regardless of his net worth.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| When people say "billionaire" in this line of comments they
| are trying to point out the perceived hypocrisy that Noam is
| likely VERY well off... even having a few million dollars can
| set your family up for life. You are immediately in the top
| 1% in the US which puts you even higher anywhere else in the
| globe.
|
| Noam could never pick up a job again and he will have likely
| made more money than the average US worker will in their
| lifetime.
|
| His observation of scorn at employees who are well-
| compensated NOT jumping at the opportunity to work weekends
| to get something done for users is a sign of privilege (and
| probably also a sign of his drive, which is commendable) and
| maybe a little lack of empathy.
| paulcole wrote:
| The whole thing is one red flag after another, but the biggest
| standout to me is the author being annoyed coworkers are taking
| personal days.
|
| That's what they're there for! When I don't want to work, I use
| the benefit that lets me not work.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| Try managing a team where people take last minute personal
| days all the time, without having to give advance notice or a
| reason.
| paulcole wrote:
| I've got a chronic illness and I have personal days. I
| don't plan when I can't work. Deal with it, don't give me
| personal days, or fire me.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Your job as a manager should be to ensure that things don't
| fall apart if people get sick. If there is a critical
| process managed by a single person then _you failed as a
| manager_.
| watwut wrote:
| In every single work I was at people sometimes took a day
| off next day. It is not like everyone would had infinite
| amount of days off - it was never a massive problem.
|
| Once in a while someone is missing. Typically, rest of team
| moves on through their day normally.
| astura wrote:
| I mean, are the employees required to give advanced notice
| if possible? Are absences expected to be explained? You
| can't hold employees up to an expectation without telling
| them that it's an expectation.
|
| Are your deadlines so tight that _any_ time off, even
| planned time off that corespondents to the employee 's
| allotted vacation days would put you behind? If so then
| it's an indication the issue is with the project being
| understaffed or not staffed with the proper personnel, or
| the deadlines being unrealistic.
|
| Are you requiring Herculean effort and unpaid overtime
| regularly? If so your employees are going to eventually
| breakdown and need a day to recharge. Sidenote: I've
| noticed some people are happy to work optional paid
| overtime but unhappy to work mandatory unpaid overtime.
|
| Are your employees regularly missing so many days to the
| point they are regularly taking leave without pay and not
| getting prior approval? That is an upper management/HR
| issue.
| [deleted]
| compscistd wrote:
| Unless they interfere with scheduled meetings, I can't see
| why this would bug you as a manager. Pair programming,
| counting hours for clients, or sprint planning are the only
| other things that could possibly conflict with last minute
| personal days. It doesn't really seem to bug the managers
| at my organization if there are no calendar conflicts.
|
| If there are calendar items that have to be rescheduled, I
| think the onus is on them to find an alternative time
| izacus wrote:
| Tried, worked well, built a successful amazing product
| that's still successful and amazing.
|
| And all that with European PTO benefits across the team!
| willcipriano wrote:
| > Try managing a team where people take last minute
| personal days all the time, without having to give advance
| notice or a reason.
|
| Try getting a job where they advertise a benefit, then
| complain when you use it.
| tester34 wrote:
| Never heard of benefit called "taking free days last min
| is no problem"
| willcipriano wrote:
| I have often heard personal days are to be used if say,
| you can't get to work due to transportation issues or if
| your child is home from school. If they aren't to be used
| that way how do they differ from vacation days?
| tester34 wrote:
| Generally people don't have to use those last minute days
| often and I don't think that's what OP meant.
|
| It seems like people just were abusing it.
| a_c_s wrote:
| That's what "personal days" are for.
|
| Vacation days are days that are long planned.
|
| Sick days are last-minute days for when you are ill.
|
| Personal days are last-minute days for when, say, a pipe
| breaks in your apartment and you have to spend the day
| dealing with the mess. Or any other non-medical reason
| you have to be a person and not an employee for a day.
| tester34 wrote:
| Generally people don't have to use those last minute days
| often and I don't think that's what OP meant.
|
| It seems like people just were abusing it.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| If your team is hemorrhaging personal days left and right,
| the issue is not with personal days, but with how your team
| feel.
| badlucklottery wrote:
| If you're running deadlines so tight or your bench is so
| shallow that any employee ducking out a day here and there
| is causing big problems, you have a planning/staffing
| problem.
|
| The spontaneous employee vacation days are just making that
| problem more obvious.
| themarkn wrote:
| I mean, there's an upper bound on how often that can happen
| (how many personal days people have). Those days are
| intended to be used at short notice. So if people using
| them is a problem for the team, imo the team is not
| correctly matched to the workload.
|
| I do think we often undersize our teams by ignoring the
| impact of vacation and personal time in taking on work ...
| but that's not the fault of the people using the time they
| are entitled to as part of their compensation.
| waheoo wrote:
| Sick days are compensation?
| wokwokwok wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with leave days and
| team sizes; those things are probably perfectly fine.
|
| The issue is:
|
| > I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I
| also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win,
| even if its on a weekend.
|
| but, also...
|
| > Yes, there is a challenge of how to compensate when
| there is no equity upside...
|
| The complaint here is that people don't have 'skin in the
| game', so they _dont care_ if the product succeeds,
| because it makes to difference to them; so they 're
| taking personal days in a way that _disrupts_ the
| (probably totally arbitrary) timelines and plans they
| have.
|
| ...so I mean, it 's probably fair to say that if people
| are taking leave in a way that is _disruptive_ , then
| that's more of an indicator that the team culture is
| totally screwed up than that there aren't enough people.
|
| If one person wants to 'win' and everyone else a) doesn't
| care, b) that person has no power to punish them if the
| product doesn't 'win', c) there's no benefit to them
| personally if it does 'win'... well, its never going to
| work out for that one person in the long run.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| TBH, who cares? Waze is a traffic mapping thing, right?
|
| It's not like they're managing a nuclear reactor or
| staffing an ER.
| dathos wrote:
| If you treat people like resources I imagine its hard when
| they dont function like you want them to, consider treating
| them as humans (like you and me!) and you might just
| understand that they need some unexpected time off now and
| then.
| macintux wrote:
| The "I'm a passionate guy so I can't communicate without
| cursing" part was entertaining.
| higerordermap wrote:
| Dignam from "the departed"
| KDJohnBrown wrote:
| I worked for a guy like that named Mike Homer. There were
| Wired articles about "is Homer a jerk or just passionate?"
|
| It turns out he actually had Mad Cow disease (really).
| the-dude wrote:
| Creutzfeld Jacobs. Please think of the cows.
| dijit wrote:
| Ugh, I'm this guy and I hate myself for it.
|
| I've found that I really have to detach from the situation to
| use less curse words, such as counting to 5 mentally before
| saying _anything_.
|
| Any other tips for similarly terrible people such as myself?
| enriquto wrote:
| Just keep cursing. It's not a big deal.
| waheoo wrote:
| Not giving a fuck.
| leadpan wrote:
| Detaching and reflecting is a good practice, especially
| where swearing is a verbal crutch for yet-to-be-refined
| thoughts. Give it a moment, dispassionately and accurately
| frame the thought. In the end, what you say will be much
| more direct, and far more useful to everybody involved.
|
| Also consider swears like farts in a relationship. A well-
| chosen place and time, dropping one is hilarious. All the
| time though, you just stink.
| atraac wrote:
| I do have the same issue, but since I work in corporate, I
| have to think about everything I say or write within
| company. I still do curse a lot when communicating within
| closest people in my team(which are mostly developers) and
| noone minds. We even share the hate for the corporate
| forced politeness together with some.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| I never cursed around my parents, even as I got older, so
| it's easy for me to switch into that mode
| ido wrote:
| If you are serious about not being able to not curse if you
| get excited you may be better off talking to a psychologist
| than asking the internet for advice.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Have you tried using made-up or downgraded curse words?
| Fracked, frelled, dren, sparks, slontz, gorram, jagweeds,
| cheese&crackers, crackers&toast, etc?
|
| It will probably make you feel silly, but you can meditate
| on it being literally no sillier than using actual curse
| words to pepper your ordinary speech.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| I'm no billionaire, but I am an Xoogler and his descriptions of
| employee entitlement and misaligned incentives are spot on.
| pyb wrote:
| Nothing he is saying is wrong, but this is entitlement as a
| VP : blaming everything on "corporate" rather than accepting
| your responsibility as a leader to fix those problems.
| [deleted]
| arnon wrote:
| He is discussing exactly that. That he failed to fix those
| problems from within.
| callmeal wrote:
| With his attitude, it's clear why he failed to fix those
| problems.
| 4eor0 wrote:
| Another billionaire talking about others having entitlement
| issues.
|
| Insert line about smelling their own.
|
| This blog post is yet another confirmation for me that
| similar to how we can have infinitely big small numbers, we
| can have infinitely verbose rambles around small ideas.
| Macha wrote:
| I don't believe complaints about covid reductions to perks
| are unique to tech or well paid jobs however. My father is a
| slightly above minimum wage factory worker. There was plenty
| of grumbling in there when they shut down the 50% subsidised
| canteen with covid too.
| typon wrote:
| Someone earning high six figure salary needs their
| subsidized food significantly less than someone earning
| minimum wage.
| izacus wrote:
| Just because you're well compensated it doesn't mean you
| shouldn't be fighting for your perks. Especially when you
| work for a multibillion corpo which earns 1mil+ per
| employee.
|
| This "you shouldn't complain if you have it a bit better
| than others" mindset is a breeding ground for all kinds
| of corporate exploitation.
| grumple wrote:
| Why don't these employees take their high skills, work for
| $30k/year for 100/hours per week, take no days off and like
| it?
|
| This guy is hopelessly out of touch. You work to live, not
| the other way around.
|
| As for misaligned incentives, this is how it is throughout
| the corporate world - it's not exclusive to Google or other
| big tech companies. As one of the guys who puts the team on
| his back and works hard for the users, the reality is that
| doing a good job does not benefit me in the slightest. My
| executives care about the number of tickets and new features
| we churn through. I don't get paid for retention; I don't get
| paid more for writing good code; I don't get paid more if we
| get new customers. The only way I get paid more is if I get
| promoted. What's my motivation to work as hard as I do? My
| only motivations should be getting promoted or getting a new
| job.
|
| The only reason any of us work for these companies is for
| money and benefits. We don't care about your mission
| statement; and neither do these executives, or they would
| change the incentives. It's a purely business arrangement: we
| agree to work X hours per week for Y dollars in total
| compensation under Z conditions. It's in our interest to
| reduce X, improve Y and Z. It's the employer's interest to do
| the opposite - but the employer also cares about other
| variables, such as retention, total revenue, total profit and
| costs.
| waheoo wrote:
| I find the idea that the best paid people in the industry are
| entitled to be a bit rich.
|
| Clearly there is unmet demand for quality engineers or you
| wouldn't be paying that much and allowing perks to dictate
| the balance of life equation so royally.
|
| Maybe we're not paid enough.
|
| It's like you're welcome to pay less, watch the talent dry up
| and move on.
|
| I'm sure you'll be fine?
|
| Doesn't Google still make roughly 150x what their employees
| are paid?
| pyb wrote:
| Being an IC is very hard if you want to do the job well.
| The risks are also underappreciated (massive burnout, etc).
| It should be compensated fairly.
| 2ion wrote:
| Another chapter in the book of tales from the big tech ivory
| tower where on some days the cake" wasn't ok but still pretty
| good". Fair game in a personal blog, although barely
| newsworthy.
| joshgoldman wrote:
| Stockholm syndrome maybe
| scrose wrote:
| If you're a new engineer reading this article: Startups are
| talked about as if work-life balance doesn't or shouldn't exist.
| It only doesn't exist if you (1) choose for that to be the case
| or (2) Have a manager like this who holds things like firing you
| if 'someone better comes along' over your head.
|
| There are plenty of startups where you can put in your ~8 hours
| and call it a day 99% of the time and the business will still be
| thriving. Having seen the work some engineers put into cranking
| out code nonstop, a bit less time coding and a bit more time
| thinking would have likely done way more good for the code base
| and the company anyway.
|
| Managers who don't value your personal time and are willing to
| fire you anytime 'someone better' comes along are toxic and
| should be avoided.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of startups are under resourced in terms of people
| though. Maybe nobody is threatening you, but as you settle into
| the role you kind of realize that working a bit more could
| actually be the difference success and failure.
|
| I do agree that it's better if you're making that call on your
| own. If management is trying to squeeze you like this by
| threatening to fire you, it's usually an empty/foolish threat.
| Hiring a proper replacement takes time.
| scrose wrote:
| > Yeah, a lot of startups are under resourced in terms of
| people though. Maybe nobody is threatening you, but as you
| settle into the role you kind of realize that working a bit
| more could actually be the difference success and failure.
|
| This is completely my opinion and shaped from my own
| experience. But if you're working at an understaffed startup,
| the bottleneck for 'success' is usually _not_ the engineering
| team, and also almost definitely not correlated with butt-in-
| seat time and amount of code contributed. Not saying that 's
| what you were implying, but just want to clarify that's the
| direction I'm coming from.
|
| It's up to the business's leaders to determine what should be
| prioritized with the resources they have and take risks on
| building out those ideas accordingly. If you, as an engineer,
| begin working nights and weekends to have the company
| 'succeed', you're now communicating to management there's all
| this untapped engineering capacity. You give the illusion
| that more can consistently be done than is actually
| sustainable and no one wins when the engineering team burns
| out 6-12 months later. Well, maybe the company does somewhat
| when you leave and forfeit all your stock options back to the
| pool...
|
| In my opinion, the biggest impact you can make as an engineer
| at any level is by stepping away at the end of the day, doing
| your own thing, and every now and then just think
| holistically about what you're doing at work and the
| direction the product you're working on is going in. Your
| butt-in-seat time will become far more productive as a
| result.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Yeah, I think you're probably right about that, but that's
| not always easy to see at the time. Especially if it's a
| little earlier in their career.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| How do you check for and avoid (2) in new grad interview
| stages? Especially when you are not assigned to a team when
| applying
| [deleted]
| tomerbd wrote:
| When you get a new job, check if you need to be OnCall if yes
| then ask for 1 day off after every session of being OnCall to
| recover, even if no event happened, the psychological burdon.
| pratio wrote:
| Life is different for me than it was 5 years ago, I have
| colleagues with kids and some are expecting. You start to realize
| how important it is to have a well rested team. When I say well-
| rested, I don't mean just physically but also emotionally. People
| wishing for a work-life balance aren't wrong and calling them
| entitled is definitely wrong.
| waheoo wrote:
| > This was the moment I realized what had happened and that we
| were part of a corporation
|
| Took you a while to notice the hazing hats huh bud?
| kevingadd wrote:
| This is overstated. As a new hire, sure they put one on my desk
| but there was 0 pressure to wear it. They didn't even pressure
| me to attend the TGIF that week (I didn't)
| ionwake wrote:
| A man who feels he was both needed, and thinks the way forward is
| to fire members of his team.
|
| The trouble is, the problem is in my life I always see a person
| getting fired and the solution remaining, the problem being a
| process and an inability to both see and be able to resolve said
| issue.
|
| The horror here being both the problem remains and youve been
| unethical to fire someone who did not deserve it. Which will only
| create problems down the line.
|
| I believe this is why I feel if I was ever in the position where
| someone I hire is not right, I continue trying to make it work
| until I have tried many different solutions. If it still fails, I
| tell them they are great in they ways they were and explain I
| want to part ways, and I make sure expectations are made.
|
| My only experience has been with short contracts, but if I wanted
| to part with someone who I was sure was a problem I would not
| even consider trying to within a 2 year period, its just
| unethical.
|
| If I cant make it work within 2 years, well then we all tried. I
| dont know if this is the right approach but I believe it would
| both help in giving time to find and fixing the right problem,
| the right way.
|
| tldr; firing is not cool
| callmeal wrote:
| >minority that was offended by something (words and not content)
| made it a pain
|
| We're not mind readers: Words _are_ content.
|
| And if there were people misunderstanding what he was saying,
| then it's pretty clear that he was either deliberately provoking
| in his speech or just clueless about the impact words have on
| people who are not him.
| jldugger wrote:
| > And if there were people misunderstanding what he was saying,
| then it's pretty clear that he was either deliberately
| provoking in his speech or just clueless about the impact words
| have on people who are not him.
|
| I mean, I've heard stories of someone reported to HR for using
| the word 'baller' (as in 'That new car is so baller, David.')
| who clearly did not understand the meaning of the word and I
| can only speculate as to why they thought it was a vulgarity.
|
| That said we can always strive to communicate more clearly, and
| someone publicly blogging about how they quit because of it
| probably doesn't get the same benefit of the doubt.
| system16 wrote:
| > I began racking up my HR complaints
|
| Doesn't sound like it was an isolated incident in his case.
| caturopath wrote:
| I agree with almost every point Noam makes, but I feel he could
| have done a better job steelmanning the counterpoint.
|
| There are upsides of having managers not have the level of
| control over their reports' futures that they do at most
| companies. (It accomplishes goals of reducing discrimination and
| it makes people less vulnerable and thus boosts retention.)
|
| There are reasons that the process overhead to accomplish
| anything at Google is more than at a company like pre-acquisition
| Waze. (It simply gets 100x more backlash when Google makes a
| misstep on some of this stuff than any company, in part because
| they have a responsibility as stewards of so many experiences and
| so much data. There's also a culture of doing a really crappy job
| in a first pass -- I think this might be fostered by the process
| overhead, but it certainly makes removing it very dangerous.)
|
| There are benefits to a comp model that doesn't actually reward
| you for what you accomplish. (You can get some of your best
| people to focus long-term.)
|
| There are OBVIOUS benefits to a culture that values political
| correctness. The author didn't make it clear that he wasn't just
| being an asshole.
|
| I think, on balance, that Google is unhealthy and could use some
| more Noam in it, but I think it's not intuitive to everyone why
| these things are done.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| No, political correctness creates a stranglehold on ideas, the
| very last thing those in SV need when they are regulating their
| own monopolies of ideas online.
| titanomachy wrote:
| _Excessive_ political correctness does that. A good amount of
| political correctness means that you never have to work for a
| manager who openly respects you less because of your race or
| gender.
| yters wrote:
| On the other hand, if one is not of the viewpoint labeled
| as politically correct, then prepare to be ostracized in a
| very passive aggressive way. Not that I mind much, but
| passive aggressiveness is annoying. E.g. mentioning
| anything that smacks of religion, or discussing guns, or
| expressing skepticism that we modern people are the
| smartest thing since sliced bread.
| TeaDrunk wrote:
| Or also you never have to work for a manager who openly
| respects others more because of their race or gender. A
| wide variety of things apply this way. A sane amount of
| political correctness allows the meritocracy I want in a
| workplace.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| That's not political correctness. I'm talking about a
| culture of fear around discussing topics like algorithmic
| bias.
|
| BTW: A manager who's secretly a racist is still a racist.
| PC doesn't make this any better.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Worth noting that "political correctness" is a phrase
| created to lampoon/insult the irrational political
| groupthink of Communism, and was later converted into an
| indictment of progressive liberal values.
|
| Saying "some political correctness okay" is equivalent to
| saying either "some irrational groupthink is okay", or
| "some cultural marxism is okay". What's worse than this
| general confusion, is then implying that it's the same
| thing as caring about human rights or the right not to be
| discriminated against. Thus it makes caring about human
| rights something to be ridiculed. But only when you defend
| the use of the term.
|
| The term "political correctness" is only an insult.
| Defending it at all is like defending some insult you're
| given on a playground. "You're a poop
| head!" "Yeah, well... I *want* to be a poop head!"
|
| https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/historical-
| origin-p...
| caturopath wrote:
| Etymology isn't definition.
|
| "Politically correct" has enjoyed non-pejorative use for
| decades.
| thethethethe wrote:
| I still think it is worth pointing out the origin of the
| term. Whether the term is being used as pejorative or
| not, its use still plays into a narrative manufactured by
| the right to suppress and discredit leftist progress
| caturopath wrote:
| I doubt you actually think that political correctness is not
| valuable; I bet you just mean that tech companies have swung
| way too far in one direction in your view.
|
| I bet you'd not be sympathetic to the blogger if the 'words'
| mentioned were "nigger" or "wetback" without some special
| context or if his analogy was a visceral description holding
| down and raping the head of a department they had an issue
| with. (I'm sure they weren't!) There's a balance here, and it
| is silly not to be sensitive to the desire of companies and
| folks at them to tiptoe around things, even if you think they
| should be more open to crudeness.
| buildbot wrote:
| Echoing many others here, this is a perfect example of an
| incredibly toxic manager. Notice how all things lead back to them
| and their success, trying to guilt you into not working harder
| for them. And if you don't? You get fired right away.
|
| Also, this post completely destroyed my desire to use Waze, and
| makes me question if they are really good stewards of our
| location data given how much time was spent complaining about
| policies.
| ElectricMind wrote:
| What is so special about "Why did I leave Google" posts? Any one
| else sick of these overlords/ superhuman / apex people outcries?
| tudelo wrote:
| I assume you don't really believe getting a job at google
| qualifies you as superhuman, but just want to reiterate,
| getting a job at google does not make you superhuman and IMO
| has a lot more to do with time and place than raw ability...
| Pulcinella wrote:
| > _It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic
| reason that you don 't need this role any more or there is a
| better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a
| great job._
|
| Wow I didn't think I would ever see anyone openly state in
| writing that it is too hard to fire people for being old. (Age
| discrimination against those 40 and older is against federal law.
| It's also morally wrong. I would also personally argue that the
| age cutoff should be a lot lower, but that is directly relevant
| to this article).
|
| Edit: ahh that makes sense. He likely meant it as "or just plain
| ol' 'you're not doing a great job.' "
| itsovermyhead wrote:
| I think you're misinterpreting the sentence, I did too when I
| first read it. He's using plain old, as a reference to normal
| or regular.
|
| Like, I just wore a plain old shirt to the concert. Meaning, I
| just wore a regular shirt to the concert.
|
| In this sentence, it means, "or just the regular reason of
| 'you're not doing a great job'."
| 48271e wrote:
| You're misreading the sentence, he's not saying people should
| be fired for being old. He's saying at Google you can not fire
| someone for the "plain old reason" of "they're not doing a good
| job".
|
| Having worked at Google, it is extremely difficult to fire a
| low performer. It takes about 6-12 months, many visits with HR,
| and a ton of documentation. So there is a common practice of
| managers trying to offload their low performers onto other
| teams, as mentioned in the post.
| jolux wrote:
| Does anyone else take it as a red flag that somebody had lots of
| HR complaints and is unwilling to say what, exactly, prompted
| them? The implication is that they weren't warranted but without
| knowing what he said it's kind of hard to say. If he was dropping
| N-bombs left and right, I would find it hard to be sympathetic.
| [deleted]
| monoideism wrote:
| [removing my remark because I was likely wrong about his meaning]
| high_derivative wrote:
| Im fairly certain he means 'plain old not doing a great job'.
| HiJon89 wrote:
| I had to read that sentence a couple of times but I think it's
| just poorly worded. He's not saying that the person is old,
| he's saying that the reason for wanting to fire them "you are
| not doing a great job", is a "plain old" reason
| monoideism wrote:
| I think you're right, but why put the dash in there? It made
| it really hard to parse.
| [deleted]
| igvadaimon wrote:
| You read the comment wrong.
|
| What he meant wasnt age.
|
| "or just plain old [saying] 'you arent doing great job'"
| [deleted]
| JosephRedfern wrote:
| I'm 99.9% sure OP the author didn't mean that people should be
| fired for being old. I agree that the phrasing is open to
| misinterpretation, but I read it as "plain-old not doing a
| great job"
| [deleted]
| shmageggy wrote:
| On top of the many other points raised in this thread, this bit
| struck me as really odd
|
| > _After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that
| consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention
| policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not
| important BUT this had zero value to our users._
|
| What? Respecting the privacy and info-rights of your users
| provides zero value? BigCorp's data policies exist for a reason,
| one important of which is _the law_. People (aka his users)
| clearly valued these things enough to make them the law, so how
| does complying with what they want provide zero value.
|
| This perspective (along with the others pointed out in this
| thread) betrays what I suspect is a disconnect between what the
| author defines as "value" and what I and I hope most reasonable
| people believe makes for a better world. If things like privacy,
| the ability to take personal days, not having to listen to biased
| or offensive speech from a superior, etc don't have value, then
| what does? At a deeper level, it's sad that we have to fight
| against this all the time. Somehow our society has come to so
| highly reward these sorts of narrow-minded "value-creators"to the
| detriment of everything that they don't consider "value".
| nx7487 wrote:
| People offended here are exactly the bubble of entitled morons in
| Silicon Valley that this guy is talking about. I totally agree
| with everything he said, companies where you have to work long
| hours and don't receive lots of weird benefits like yoga and
| sushi are the places I want to work. I would much prefer to have
| my compensation include more equity in the company, and for my
| performance to actually be related to the value provided to
| customers and the fundamental value of the company.
| lostdog wrote:
| > Due to a bunch of mistakes early on, we did not own
| substantial amounts of equity and had a pretty bad relationship
| with some of our board members.
|
| Or maybe your work-life balance could be worse AND your equity
| stake could be meaningless.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| Why would you be surprised that people at a company where
| working more doesn't increase the stock price don't want to
| work more?
|
| Do you want them to work more for no benefit?
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Feel free. Just be aware, those aren't the most profitable
| companies in the world, (i.e. FAANGM) and at some point, you
| might want to work out why that is.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| As if their work culture has anything to do with it! Thanks
| for the laugh.
| pb7 wrote:
| Intelligent, skilled, and well-educated people don't want
| to spend their lives being treated like garbage so they
| seek out employment that provides an environment for a
| healthy balanced life. As a result of attracting this
| talent, these companies become and continue to be
| successful. It's not that hard to understand.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| You're clearly not very intelligent if you can't conceive
| of people having a different attitude towards life than
| yours. Basically every big shot entrepreneur ever had
| opportunity to work at their equivalent of Google, and
| yet they didn't.
| pb7 wrote:
| Go ahead, there are plenty of startups that will gladly own you
| in exchange for some breadcrumb percentage of the company. The
| rest of us have balanced lives to tend to.
| [deleted]
| jrockway wrote:
| He sounds kind of toxic and out of touch, and didn't really
| mention why he stayed so long despite that being the title of the
| article.
|
| You know someone is Up To Something when they rant about HR
| restricting their speech. It's weird to me that he's now a free
| agent, rants about how people complained that "I used a four
| letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG", and
| yet doesn't indulge in his blog post. Maybe he learned something
| about communicating effectively through discussions with HR?
|
| He mentions not getting free distribution on Android phones. It
| baffles me that he couldn't negotiate some sort of deal. I am
| sure someone's end goal was to put all of Waze in Maps, and I
| don't think anyone would have prevented him from doing that. I
| feel like there was some emotional attachment to his baby that he
| couldn't get over, and it hurt the distribution of the product.
| You aren't acquired by a big tech company to be nurtured and grow
| -- you're there to be assimilated, for better or for worse. I'm
| surprised that he's surprised. (You can get bought by Google and
| grow your brand, of course. Android is still called Android, not
| Google Phone. Maybe Andy Rubin was just a better CEO? Though
| quite a piece of human garbage, as I understand it.)
|
| Finally, the rest of the rant is about how those dang employees
| don't work hard enough and want too much money. I can see why
| that irritates the CEO type -- they risked everything to get
| where they are today. But, that's not the game the employees are
| playing. They took a more conservative course and ended up at the
| top of their field, they're there to make your ideas come to life
| efficiently and effectively. If you want naive worker bees who
| will work 80 hours a week for $20,000 a year, you got acquired by
| the wrong company, plain and simple.
|
| For someone who claims to be savvy, he seems to have a lot of
| blind spots. I guess it's nice to get it all out into the open,
| as a warning to people who might choose to work with him on his
| next adventure.
| guyzero wrote:
| At the risk of being not politically correct myself, I think
| there are significant cultural gaps between the west coast
| American standard and people from Israel (Bardin is Isralei).
|
| With the caveat that this is my experience only, Israelis are
| more blunt, direct and often openly critical vs Americans,
| especially Californians. They're often right and all the ones
| I've worked with have been very smart, but the way a message is
| communicated is sometimes more important than the message
| itself.
|
| I think that in this global age people think that the notion of
| intercultural communication issues has gone away, but IMO it
| still exists.
| titanomachy wrote:
| > at the risk of not being politically correct
|
| I don't think it's so controversial to claim that different
| cultures have different default communication styles.
|
| Israelis aren't the only ones who tend to be more direct than
| the average Californian. I usually appreciate it: corporate
| speech tends to dance around the point a bit, and bluntness
| saves time and clarifies where people stand. That said, I can
| also understand how some people would be taken aback or
| intimidated by excessive bluntness, especially from a
| superior.
| pnathan wrote:
| East Coast and West Coast too. I've struggled there a fair
| bit myself, having East Coast parents.
|
| I would love to work with some Israelis or East Coasters
| sometime. Be refreshing :)
| guytv wrote:
| Israeli here.
|
| cultural gaps are very much alive and kicking
|
| During my career I've worked with people around the world,
| all in the Tech industry.
|
| Israeli-Californian cultural gap is huge.
|
| It is made worse by the fact that Israelis usually have a
| good English level, some even have an okay accent - which
| makes their US counterpart expect them to use the same
| communication etiquette they are used to.
|
| Californians will go out of their way to avoid any overt
| conflict.
|
| Israelis see conflict as a valid form of day to day
| communications.
|
| An Israeli can go out of a meeting thinking he was just being
| told "yes", while he was given a glaring "no" delivered in
| the All-American-speak.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| This is interesting to me, because you hear the same thing
| when discussing Japanese vs American culture, with the
| Americans being the more direct ones in that comparison.
|
| I wonder what happens when Israelis work with Japanese
| people.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Without getting too much into the politics of it, I think
| a key factor is how polarized people are.
|
| Another one is how litigious Americans are, or at least
| are perceived to be.
|
| (Quebec person here, we're not exactly known for our
| table manners, but you'll always get a direct answer) ;-)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| Most great things are built out of love.
|
| There is no balance when you love.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| My take-away from this is:
|
| When you sell your startup to Big Tech, your employees have "made
| it". They won't work so hard. They're set for life. That's the
| reality. Move on. Especially don't begrudge them their success.
| Start something new.
| adsharma wrote:
| So much discussion about about work life balance and toxic
| managers, but not enough about exactly what you've accomplished
| by working all these hours?
|
| Did you write another object relational manager or another
| functional programming is great, stop using C++ post?
|
| I wish the conversation was more about how technology was moved
| forward and how it benefited people using the products based on
| that tech.
|
| Some of this I think is caused by power imbalances in the
| employee-employer relationship, prevailing attitudes in SV about
| acceptable limits of speech and the inability to discuss this
| freely at workplace due to the lack of trust. So it spills over
| into anonymous HN and Blind.
| jonahrd wrote:
| Sorry to nitpick, but this "Top 50 Brands" graphic... Where does
| this data come from? Where on earth is Coca-Cola??
| didibus wrote:
| Not going to lie, it just sounds like he failed to adapt and be a
| good CEO in this new system. What did he say about needing to do
| with people who can't adapt and don't have the skills needed at a
| new stage of company growth? Fire them? Well him leaving might
| give Waze a new life, if they find a CEO with more experience
| working in bigger companies, who knows better how to navigate the
| political landscape of a place like that.
|
| Also, my personal issue is that, being part of Google, he seemed
| to still only focus on the success of Waze, not on the success of
| Google. And that's contradictory to his own statement of needing
| to align with company success and investors success. I mean, even
| his "does nothing for users" argument fails for me, when Waze was
| acquired I dreamed of all its features just rolling up into
| Google Maps and Waze going away, so that the best of Maps and
| Waze would combine into a better Map app.
|
| The only thing I can agree with, but honestly that's really not
| new insight at this point, is promotion driven development.
| Though I think he undermines a little how that favors new
| ventures and moonshots over continued refinement of existing
| products. Yes this is a common criticism of Google, but it's also
| how Gmail, Maps, and a lot of the really big money maker success
| of Google happened. It's not that the promotion process is "bad",
| but it optimises for people to always try and grow brand new
| products and enter new markets. Which arguably could be best for
| Google investors.
| Jabbles wrote:
| _The Android app store treated us as a 3rd party, there was no
| pre-installation option and no additional distribution. We did
| have a lot more marketing dollars to spend but had to spend them
| like any other company, except we were constrained in what we
| could do and which 3rd parties we could work with due to
| corporate policies. All of our growth at Waze post acquisition
| was from work we did, not support from the mothership._
|
| Look for this blogpost to be quoted by Google in one of their
| antitrust defences.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > This counted on the fact that Google had promised us autonomy
| to continue to act as Waze and we more or less believed them.
|
| Read: The promise wasn't spelled out in the contract. And whoever
| has experience in organizational politics knows that if it's not
| put in writing, it effectively wasn't said.
|
| > Distribution - we quickly learned, the hard way, that we could
| get no distribution from Google. Any idea we had was quickly co-
| opted by Google Maps.
|
| I know that "hindsight is 20/20", but if you have certain
| expectations from the purchase, why didn't you put the key items
| in the contract? This is not some minor loophole that you missed.
|
| ---------------
|
| > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic
| reason that you don't need this role any more
|
| I very much doubt this. But:
|
| > or there is a better person out there or just plain old. This
| neuters managers
|
| So, the guy basically wanted to totally lord over people and be
| able to fire them essentially at will, or worse. Can't say that
| I'm very sympathetic here.
|
| ---------------
|
| > The only control you have to increase your economic returns are
| whether you get promoted since that drives your equity and salary
| payments. ... this breaks the traditional tech model of risk
| reward.
|
| I thought you wanted people who were focused on the product and
| what helps users, not on maximizing their already-quite-high
| compensation?
|
| ---------------
|
| > I ... began wearing a corporate persona
|
| Now, this I can very much identify with and commiserate. Of
| course, for me, I need a corporate persona the moment I'm hired
| anywhere, since unlike you, I'm not high-up in the hierarchy.
| ido wrote:
| So, the guy basically wanted to totally lord over
| people and be able to fire them essentially at will,
| or worse. Can't say that I'm very sympathetic here.
|
| I've spent some time working for Israeli tech companies (both
| in Israel and remote) and this guy's attitude does not surprise
| me at all.
| Person5478 wrote:
| > So, the guy basically wanted to totally lord over people and
| be able to fire them essentially at will, or worse. Can't say
| that I'm very sympathetic here.
|
| That seems like an unfair interpretation to me.
|
| The guy wants to be able to do what's best for the team. We've
| all worked with that one guy who shouldn't be there, but is.
| campl3r wrote:
| This sounds like a manager I would love to work for. I think the
| entitlement of these employees are eventually going to bring down
| FANG
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| > These realities lead to extreme focus on promotion vs product
| success --Me > We > Product/Users. I feel that the risk reward
| model in Corp-Tech is broken due to ever rising stock prices and
| lack of personal impact on your returns. Perhaps Corp-Tech should
| move to employee share buy back where employees must sacrifice
| some of their salary for equity or change equity to vest by a
| product related metric to connect the teams performance with the
| employee returns.
|
| No. Fuck you, pay me, as the saying goes [1]. As a manager / VP,
| it is your responsibility to set the product vision and goals.
| Engineers can't build / sales can't sell a great product if
| prospective clients are not interested, like putting an art
| gallery online [2].
|
| Additionally, having no personal stake in the product allows
| developers / engineers to be more objective and professional.
| This is a problem that most junior engineers will face at some
| point, and most senior engineers will easily recognize. You put
| so many hours and so much work into a new project that you start
| to make it part of your identity. You can see this in a few
| consumer products like the Xbox One launch, where Microsoft
| employees received special Xboxs that had "I MADE THIS" branded
| on the device [3].
|
| But for most companies engineers and developers have very little
| influence over the product's specifications - they're simply
| asked to build a thing already specc'd to hell by PM's, VP's,
| legal, ADA, and other groups within your organization. So if the
| joint effort of all those groups results in the product failing
| before it even hits a developers' desk, why should their
| compensation be impacted?
|
| The best way to tie development teams to the product is by
| offering bonuses when the product succeeds. But for some odd
| reason many companies don't want to do that.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
|
| [2]: http://paulgraham.com/worked.html
|
| [3]: https://www.neowin.net/news/heres-the-best-look-yet-at-
| the-w...
| raclage wrote:
| > I began racking up my HR complaints. I used a four letter word,
| my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG... I actually
| stopped speaking at events where the majority appreciated what I
| was saying but the minority that was offended by something (words
| and not content) made it a pain. I began watching what I said,
| what I discussed and began wearing a corporate persona (I was
| still probably one of the less PC characters at Google but this
| was my cleaned up act...).
|
| At this point I can't help but be extremely skeptical of people
| that talk about how they've been oppressed by PC censorship and
| don't provide any examples as if it's not the case that there
| aren't lots of people who say widely unacceptable things and use
| this as a shield.
|
| > Having trouble scheduling meetings because "it's the new Yoga
| instructor lesson I cannot miss"
|
| Yeah that's a pretty lame excuse.
|
| > or "I'm taking a personal day" drove me crazy.
|
| Are you kidding me? Days off is the evidence of poor commitment
| to the job? That seems extremely telling about the author, not
| the company.
| asidiali wrote:
| If your engineers are working on weekends, for normal projects
| and deadlines, then you have a serious culture and process
| problem.
|
| On-call engineers for high risk projects and deployments are
| another situation and not the norm.
|
| The only leaders and teams I have seen push back on this, are the
| ones who 1) have no kids or 2) have their entire social life
| wrapped up with their work life. Why would they ever stop working
| when they can just play video games together at the office and
| say they are "working late"?
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Seeing the "top 50 brands picture" - is it bad or is it good
| that, as freelancer, I have horror stories (and some of them are
| multiple stories for same brand) for each and every one of them?
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| > I began racking up my HR complaints
|
| is this common at FAANG? i've never had anything close to an HR
| complaint in 8 years
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I sincerely wish him luck. It was a blunt, forthright essay. Lots
| of self-revelation, and he didn't sugarcoat anything. I don't
| know the chap, but, from what I read, the essay seems to fit his
| personality.
|
| I might not enjoy working for him (but I could be wrong -I often
| am), but I completely sympathize with him, and his essay gave me
| a good window into the current SV mindset. I am glad to read his
| empathy for folks that don't have it as good as he does, and I
| suspect he has it pretty good. I don't encounter that kind of
| awareness too often, and it's nice to hear, from a C-level. He
| seems to have both feet planted firmly on the ground.
|
| I worked for some fairly "stolid" corporations, for most of my
| career. It was not a particularly enjoyable experience, the whole
| time, but it taught me a lot of things about Integrity, Loyalty,
| personal Honor and Consistency. I was never paid FAANG wages, but
| was, nevertheless, able to build up enough of a "nest egg" to get
| to the point where I don't need to work, if I don't want to. I'm
| currently working with a 501(c)(3) startup, not making a dime,
| and working harder than I ever have in my life.
|
| And loving it. I currently feel as if it has all been worth it.
|
| The thing that really bothers me, is that the entire tech
| industry is now built around engineers remaining at a company for
| 18 months. I was talking to a Facebook manager, some time ago,
| and he was boasting about being at FB for longer than he had ever
| worked anywhere.
|
| _" How long was that?"_ I asked.
|
| _" 27 months."_
|
| I worked at my last company for 27 _years_. It has drawn a lot of
| sneers from current SV denizens, but I 'm proud of my record. I
| went places that people have no concept of. I worked at a level
| of trust, for a conservative, classic Japanese corporation, that
| few Americans ever experience, and my tenacity and Integrity had
| a lot to do with it.
|
| When high turnover is endemic, it has a _huge_ impact on
| architecture, corporate culture, productivity, hiring, and, at
| the end of it all, product quality.
|
| I tend to design fairly large, heterodox, infrastructure systems.
| They take months and years to develop and refine, and I expect
| them to last for years. I have written software architectures
| that are still in use after 25 years (albeit greatly changed).
|
| In my experience, "letting go" is vital. I spent ten years
| developing and refining a project that I turned over to a new
| team, about three years ago, and walked away completely, so they
| don't have the "Grandpa can't let go" thing happening. They have
| done very, very well. My being there would have destroyed a
| decade's worth of work. Instead, they built out my infrastructure
| into something amazing.
|
| Walking away also gave me the luxury of working on new stuff. I'm
| in the middle of refactoring a server system that I wrote two
| years ago. It lay fallow until the project I'm working on now,
| and it has aged very, very well. I look forward to, one day,
| turning it all over to someone else, and walking away to new
| horizons.
| autoditype wrote:
| > When COVID hit and we moved to work from home - a huge amount
| of complaints began around why cant employees expense food since
| they are not in the office. While most "real" people were worried
| about keeping their jobs or finding one, many employees were
| complaining about expensing their food on top of their
| salaries/stocks/bonuses. This entitlement continued everywhere -
| while Google is BY FAR the most employee centric company giving
| tremendous hard and soft value to its employees, they keep
| creating imaginary problems to complain about, instead of
| appreciating the hand they have been dealt.
|
| That level of entitlement is incredible. I feel very fortunate to
| make a well above average salary, and I keep reminding myself
| that it's unusual, and that I should increase my savings for when
| the faucet is eventually turned off
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| As much as I felt this guy had some unreasonable thoughts (how
| hard is it to not swear at work?), This really hit me. Many of
| tech employees are entitled, same with University students. I
| don't know why people are like this but it always rubs me
| wrong.
| navbaker wrote:
| This mention of "yoga at 11am" seems to be rubbing some folks the
| wrong way, but what if it was "lunch for an hour at 11am"? In all
| the jobs I've held (including now) where working hours are not
| dictated by external forces, such as customer service
| expectations, our teams make sure we get in our hours and are
| more or less available during a reasonable window, say 8am-5/6pm.
| It is pretty much understood that there will be 45-60 minutes of
| (unpaid/unbillable) downtime, which most people will use for
| lunch, but others will use for a workout, then eat lunch at their
| desk. I've never seen anyone actually work less hours because
| they went to yoga or for a run, they just use the time they would
| ordinarily be using for lunch and still hit their full workday,
| while gaining the benefit of de-stressing mid-day.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Google has a pretty chill work culture where I think a lot of
| people work < 40 hour weeks.
|
| Most don't advertise this widely, for obvious reasons, but you
| see it mentioned occasionally in places like HN, or tech-
| focused subreddits.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Yeah, I don't get the unhealthy interest in other people's
| private life. As long as your job is to get work done, and not
| cover duty station at time xyz, complaining about when people
| choose to take a break is really weird and invasive.
|
| In my experience people who are permitted flexible work
| schedules and take advantage of them tend to be the better
| employees.
| throwaway_dcnt wrote:
| He was complaining about his inability to schedule meetings
| because of the 11:00am spot. Even in the most flexible of
| environments, lunch is usually off-limits, 1:00pm is tricky
| because people can be late due to lunch and this 11:00am yoga
| essentially means a nearly 3 hour block with difficult
| scheduling constraints. I don't agree with a lot he has to
| say but this one kind of makes sense. Routing un-availbility
| at 9:00am, 11:00am and 3:00pm are, well in my opinion at
| least slightly uncool (one off's are fine ofcourse).
| guytv wrote:
| And I had fellow googles spend all their day between
| PlayStation, gym, restaurants, cafe's, hairdresser etc...
| without getting any work done.
| raverbashing wrote:
| The actual problem is not them doing those things, the
| problem is them not doing their job
|
| That's where the demands should lie, not on "bottoms on
| seats"
| navbaker wrote:
| Wow, that's insane! My point of view is working at an east
| coast large research lab, that behavior here would for sure
| be noticed quickly and eliminated!
| 627467 wrote:
| As seen from many comments this posts would be polemic to say the
| least.
|
| Obviously the author is from a different time where tech/SV
| abundance did not exist and had to be created through huge
| personal sacrifice. He speaks as such person and is judged as any
| "nasty uncle on dinner table".
|
| But in my view, there's certainly truth in the entitlement he
| describes. I'm not saying that WBL (as represented as yoga at
| 11AM) is not alright to aim for. But it's incompatible with many
| endeavours. And it's certainly incompatible with competitive/low-
| growth industries, markets and jobs.
|
| The tech sector (still) enjoys high growth and large demand for
| HR, that's why such entitlement exists. But as growth plateaus I
| think entitled people will find it hard to find certain WLB perks
| pyb wrote:
| Noam is not one of the Waze founders.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I work in big tech. Not Google. This is one of the best blog
| posts I have read about big tech. I agree with most things. The
| most important one is the wrong optimization for promotion.
| People would happily push something complicated and unnecessary
| to production just because it can help them to get promoted later
| on (by showing fake impact). The other thing I strongly agree
| with is working on things that don't add value to users but
| rather to follow company guidelines. But it's hard to avoid this
| one. Finally, moving very slowly due to complex systems and so
| many teams that need to get involved in making change. In the end
| most employees end up exactly as described in the post - staying
| because of the amazing salary and benefits, contributing less and
| less as time goes by.
|
| Regarding firing people. From my experience it's doable but takes
| a long time. That's why offloading an employee to another team is
| usually easier.
|
| With all that being said, I still think for most people who work
| for someone else, big tech is better than startups once you're
| experienced. If you don't work for yourself than optimizing for
| money is a reasonable thing to do.
| haswell wrote:
| > _The other thing I strongly agree with is working on things
| that don 't add value to users but rather to follow company
| guidelines._
|
| At face value, what you're agreeing with makes sense, and I'm a
| strong believer in questioning / re-affirming the "why" before
| taking on big projects.
|
| But while the premise seems correct, his one example does not.
| FTA:
|
| > _we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our
| best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools
| to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had
| zero value to our users._
|
| This is a short sighted take, and ignores some of the reasons
| that such initiatives are often necessary (and I'd even
| argue...valuable). Two off the top of my head:
|
| - Alignment with data retention policies = meet my expectations
| as a user about how Waze handles my data. I realize I'm in the
| minority by caring about this.
|
| - Integration with standard tooling = easier for existing teams
| to contribute/maintain, less overhead managing disparate
| tooling, eventual gains in feature velocity which do equate to
| customer value.
|
| So yeah, question the rationale for doing something, but look
| past your own immediate goals when evaluating the value of this
| kind of initiative.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > The most important one is the wrong optimization for
| promotion.
|
| As a CEO, it is literally his job to ensure that promotions are
| aligned with company goals. At Google, VPs have final say on
| every single promotion. If there were people who were getting
| promoted under his command for stupid reasons, he was literally
| the person who could stop it.
| drivebycomment wrote:
| 100x this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble.
| ..
|
| is a fundamental problem that can not go away, ever, and
| managing this _is_ his job as a CEO / executive.
|
| So this post is essentially an unwitting confession that he
| didn't understand what his job was, and how he failed at
| that.
| foobarian wrote:
| > That's why offloading an employee to another team is usually
| easier.
|
| At one point I noticed that our team kept getting these
| incompetent engineers transferred from other parts of the
| company. At first I was puzzled, especially because my director
| was completely unphased by this. Then I realized he kept asking
| a lot of questions in our 1-1s about how X is doing, what X
| could do to improve, etc. And finally after a few months X
| would be gone. I think this guy got a reputation as a "cleaner"
| so our team would get the garbage to get taken out. I always
| wondered if/what kind of special favors he got in exchange for
| doing this from his peers...
| iliekcomputers wrote:
| >After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that
| consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention
| policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not
| important BUT this had zero value to our users.
|
| If it prevented a data leak or a security incident, I'd argue
| that it did actually provide value to your users.
|
| At some point, you have to do the non-trendy infrastructure work,
| skyscrapers aren't built with bricks.
| gok wrote:
| I feel like I need a follow up article from Google along the
| lines of "Why did we let this guy stay so long?"
| good_sir_ant wrote:
| I always enjoy posts like this. When the comments flow in, you
| can identify the steadfast obliviousness the urbanites have
| around how the other 99% of the world approaches work. Just the
| reactions to a different opinion (which more aligns to one formed
| outside of silicon valley) illustrate a built-in intolerance to
| anything resembling reality, difficult as it may be.
| Arainach wrote:
| What "reality" are you referring to? Statistically speaking,
| just about everyone who isn't self-employed (and many of those
| who are) are in it for the money. A boss complaining that their
| employees have no passion for their job and won't work overtime
| sounds like an out of touch awful boss regardless if those
| employees' lack of passion is for a software product, making
| pizzas, teaching, driving a truck, or whatever.
|
| Are there awful bosses in every industry? Probably. That
| doesn't mean that has to be "reality" - it just means that such
| opinions need pushback wherever they're found.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| "We start companies to build products that serve people, not to
| sit in meetings with lawyers. You need to be able to answer the
| "what have you done for our users lately" question with "not much
| but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be
| successful in Corp-Tech."
|
| The only thing worse than not putting the user first when you
| build consumer products is having a core attribute of your
| Googley culture be "put the user first" and not do it.
| phonebucket wrote:
| > ...in a start-up there is complete alignment between the
| product, the company and the brand. The employees, management and
| investors are aligned as well - product does well, company does
| well, investors do well, employees do well.
|
| Perhaps this can be true for founders/founding employees with
| significant stock.
|
| Do employees 15 onwards (i.e. the majority of employees working
| in successful startups) really have so much stock so as to pour
| their hearts into the company?
| arduinomancer wrote:
| So much of the discussion here is superfluous.
|
| Why should the employee care about "users" if their equity
| doesn't increase in value based on those users?
|
| Like--its as simple as that, don't blame the employees for being
| entitled here.
|
| If my equity isn't related to my job then they're not "my users",
| and I'm not a true owner of the product.
| bregma wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| _sips coffee_
|
| I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too.
| alcover wrote:
| 18 scripts, 3 webfonts. For a short text.
|
| Didn't allow, didn't read.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Do you really have to wear those hats when you join Google? How
| long do you have to wear them for?
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Truly optional, just a fun thing they give out on the first
| day.
| mortehu wrote:
| You don't have to participate in the Noogler orientation week
| at all. You can just get straight to work if that's what floats
| your boat.
| badlucklottery wrote:
| >Do you really have to wear those hats when you join Google?
|
| Nope. Most people put them on for a selfie or two then throw
| them on a shelf.
| eru wrote:
| I gave mine to some relatives.
| bjarneh wrote:
| My first question as well. I guess they pay quite well...
| itg wrote:
| Another "leader" who complains about employees wanting work life
| balance and they are extremely entitled. These are the type of
| managers you want to avoid. I'm sure many Googlers are happy you
| left.
| andrew_ wrote:
| The point that's missing here is that there will _always_ be a
| generational divide. Young will always see Old as antiquated,
| out-of-touch. Old will always see Young as entitled, perhaps
| flippant, and out-of-touch. Neither perspective is invalid.
| notRobot wrote:
| Yeah, how dare they think that they're entitled to hobbies or a
| life outside of their job? How dare they take a day off because
| they're not feeling well and want to take care of themselves?
|
| FFS.
| varjag wrote:
| His point is a job is not UBI, you supposed to contribute in
| return and adjust your schedule along other workers (aka a
| 'workday'). I dunno why is that so controversial.
| haswell wrote:
| His points also include:
|
| > _I was the weirdo who wanted to push things fast and
| expected that some level of personal sacrifice when needed_
|
| And
|
| > _I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to
| win, even if its on a weekend_
|
| So _not_ just about "workdays".
|
| As others have noted, he does make some excellent points.
| His comments about entitlement (food) ring so true.
|
| But his section on Work Life Balance is pretty terrible.
| spery wrote:
| That may apply to yoga class at 11am, but asking for a day
| off? Come on...
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| After reading the article I think his only problem was
| that the 11am yoga employee was taking care of their
| health in a way that he didn't understand, so it was bad.
| varjag wrote:
| Days off are certainly fine, as long you give enough
| notice for your coworkers to plan around your absence.
| Not counting emergencies of course.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Especially at a company like Google, which tracks
| vacation days as compensation.
|
| When you tell a Googler they can't take a day off, you
| are basically telling them the company will not honor a
| piece of the compensation package they signed up for.
| You'd better come to that table with a damn good
| alternative offer.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Have you missed the part where he things that working
| nights and weekends is expected in a job? "we have to do
| whatever it takes to win"?
| b3kart wrote:
| Where goalposts for "winning" can conveniently be moved
| each weekend, I imagine.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Yeah, it should be completely unacceptable.
|
| As you get older you realise how valuable your time is.
| You only get one life, you aren't saving up or learning
| more to make your next one easier, you get old and that's
| it.
|
| Having that time to visit family and friends whilst you
| can is incredibly important.
| mmcconnell1618 wrote:
| I think the author is correct that some big tech companies
| create a culture where going to 11am yoga is more important
| that crunching out a few more lines of code. He's correct that
| if your focus is on building and scaling product, this culture
| reduces the velocity of change. However, I see a couple of
| things the author is missing:
|
| 1) Work life balance is about employee long term retention and
| places like Google spend a lot of energy in hiring, so they
| optimize for keeping the people they hire.
|
| 2) Sometimes an 11am yoga class frees your mind enough to
| foster creativity. Raw working hours may be reduced but novel
| solutions might increase.
|
| 3) Some tech workers have figured out the odds of hitting it
| big in a startup or having the next billion dollar idea are not
| that likely. Instead, they've optimized for a far above average
| salary with work life balance. There is nothing wrong with
| choosing that path and this is where the author is missing
| empathy for people who didn't choose his path.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The same people that go for an 11 AM yoga class will stay
| working until 11 PM because they can and are encouraged to.
|
| Second, and another commenter points this out, the
| desirability of anyone that lands a job at a FAANG means they
| get away with it. They have Made It, they are the 1% in their
| field, and they can go anywhere else outside of SF
| (internationally if need be) and instantly be hired as CTO of
| any company. Generally speaking. And of course switch to the
| other FAANG, possibly getting even better compensation and
| perks and a better 11am yoga teacher.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's the sprint versus marathon mindset.
|
| A small startup has a finite amount of time to either become
| a big company in their own right or do something so
| noteworthy that a big company sees the need to acquire them.
| Nothing else matters. There are minimal incentives to invest
| in the long-term welfare of your employees because in the
| long term, the company doesn't exist. You can't even
| guarantee that an acquisition will keep the employees you
| have invested in.
|
| Large corporations like Google are incentivized to give their
| employees reasons to stick around. They can expect the
| company will be there in 30 years, and they can expect a good
| employee to put in a career's worth of work for them (and
| eventually have peer and mentorship contacts that encourage
| other good potential employees to join the company).
|
| This is painting with a broad brush of how the incentives are
| structured... Not all big companies see it this way and not
| all small companies see it this way. But it's the behavior
| the marketplace appears to reward.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Re: It's the sprint versus marathon mindset.
|
| As someone who did track in high school, the whole agile
| nomenclature around "sprint" continues to rub me the wrong
| way. If you aren't a startup facing a launch-or-fail
| moment, the approach should be much more that of a
| marathon.
|
| I was joking with my wife that "sprint" to me implies that
| you go all out and then take a long break before you go
| again. We should be treating the longterm plan like a
| marathon and the intermediate steps like "splits".
|
| If you are working on a product that's been around for
| years , the idea that you are an all-star for delivering
| your 5 points the day before your 2 weeks sprint ends and a
| lazy jerk if you deliver it the day after sprint ends just
| incentivizes a lot of shorterm-ism and corner cutting.
|
| The model of working "all out" and your "break" for
| planning is a 2 hour meeting in between sprints where you
| get praised or scorned for a 10% difference in delivery
| speed is..
| matwood wrote:
| Splits works, but I tend to use iteration. There are
| benefits to breaking work into chunks and checking in how
| it's going every 2-4 weeks, but there's no reason to be
| in perpetual crunch time. There should also be free time
| at the end of every iteration to do some
| problem/design/idea exploration.
| duxup wrote:
| It's such a weird dynamic.
|
| I remember visiting the valley for the first time for a big
| company I worked for at another location. The scale of work
| life balance was unbalanced so many strange ways...
|
| The tech support team I worked with was in 'building 3'.
| Nobody ever left that building through out the day. I went to
| the big cafeteria and the options were amazing. I managed to
| get some of my peers to go with me, several of my peers from
| building 3 were equally amazed as ... they never went there,
| they just worked all day, ate something at their desk, and
| kept working...
|
| Meanwhile I'd go to the cafeteria each day and sit outside
| and watch as some folks would play basketball for an hour,
| then a while later show up and chat it up with coworkers (not
| talking about work) over lunch for what seemed like
| forever...
|
| The game room was always full of the same guys, the other
| amenities, yoga, etc, and it often included people who I
| simply never could get a hold of. HR couldn't be bothered to
| get security to take my photo for my badge for weeks ...
| because the gym schedule changed.
|
| It was a weird, unbalanced, yin and yang.
| xyzelement wrote:
| A few reactions to that.
|
| First, there's always a self selecting thing there. For
| some reason folks from building 3 never bothered to go
| explore, and it sounds like they didn't keep going to the
| caf even once you showed them. Nothing was holding them at
| their desk, they just didn't care/bother.
|
| Second, some jobs are different than others. Some jobs you
| have to "be there" for. Tech support may be like that - you
| have to pick up the call/email when it comes in. Other jobs
| may be more like strategy or research where having a few
| key insights a year generates millions of dollars for the
| company and if hanging in the cafeteria helps you do that,
| everyone wins.
|
| Third, at the end of the day you kinda have to trust the
| system. What I mean is - if the company is successful it's
| because it's overall people strategy is working. So in the
| great net of things, having the caf setup be the way it was
| may be what was needed, even if some individuals abused it
| (which you then would hope be detected in their overall
| output)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| A strange work ethic I must have been born with (weird, I
| know) kept me mashing keys the full 8 hours while some of
| my co-workers might see fit to stay home one day because
| a package was due to arrive.
|
| Or maybe I have always felt like I'm an imposter: if the
| ax fell on the team I didn't want to be the low hanging
| fruit they culled. Who knows.
|
| But I confess to having had a difficult time across my
| career accepting the perks, relaxing. It's been a slow
| awareness that this industry really truly is on fire,
| they really make boatloads of cash, they really need me
| more than they compensate me for.
|
| What a strange time to live in for a blue-collar
| programmer like me.
| duxup wrote:
| I think it is self selecting ... by every individual.
| Each makes their choices.
|
| The real challenge is when you value work life balance
| and ... it starts to hit other people's work.
|
| Like in my case, getting hassled by security every day,
| multiple times a day ... IMO that should supersede
| someone's gym class if it was their job to schedule
| getting me a photo and a proper badge, but it is super
| easy for those kinda "well we value work life balance"
| kinda decisions to push important work aside.
| Aromasin wrote:
| I noticed this when I worked at my first "employee
| satisfaction" focused company. Half the employees took
| every perk they could get, seemingly doing as little work
| as they could under the mantra of "work-life balance". The
| other half never left their desks. It created a strange
| dynamic of resentment between the two parties, where one
| thought the other stupid, and the other thought them lazy.
| It was hard to know where to stand.
| fileyfood500 wrote:
| I agree, I think this situation fits in nicely with the
| discussion of how stock compensation doesn't directly
| result from the results of your work. Employees who
| aren't passionate about or motivated by their jobs seek
| out compensation in return for retention. And even then,
| they scale their efforts at work based on their interest.
| I like the independence of Amazon teams, but the
| independence is limited when the teams don't control
| their own finances.
| duxup wrote:
| I once worked for a team was historically over worked,
| that had changed recently for the better, but the team
| culture was still pretty stressed and nose to the grind
| stone. We were working to bring that down, but it takes
| time.
|
| The offices were being renovated and our team was moved
| next to HR.
|
| HR formally complained (apparently there was a process...
| where HR sent some sort of complaint to ... HR) that the
| team sitting next to them was not very friendly.
|
| Before what I can only imagine would have been a horrific
| joint team meeting / culture clash could occur, someone
| very smart put the kibosh on the complaint / meeting ....
|
| The culture / work experience differences were extreme.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| Another glaring omission - he's now sitting on 7 years of
| savings from his Google manager salary & equity. If you have
| a few million dollars in the bank it's much easier to take
| the pay cut to work at a smaller startup and chase a more
| high risk/high reward outcome.
|
| It's completely out of touch to judge anyone for wanting a
| stable and in the scheme of things ridiculously high paying
| job with good work life balance, like working at Google.
| serverholic wrote:
| This is also part of the argument for basic income. Having
| a stable source of income allows people to take risks like
| starting their own business or joining a small startup.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Or just a more lax unemployment policy.
|
| I worry that if you give everyone $1000/month:
|
| 1) you cannot live on $1000/month so it is an empty
| gesture
|
| 2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even
| emptier gesture
| serverholic wrote:
| 1) So you're saying that giving people $1000/month would
| open up zero new possibilities for people?
|
| 2) It's not that simple because different goods will
| respond differently. Certain goods will get cheaper
| because the increased sales will allow for more economies
| of scale.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Housing is the big one mentioned, and it does not allow
| for any further economies of scale than already exist.
| Rent rises based on the prevailing salary of the area --
| house prices as well, since they represent the years of
| rental income. It's not even necessarily a supply issue,
| since Seattle has more empty houses than it has homeless
| people! Prices simply rise to whatever the market can
| bear. So under the current system, any absolute increase
| in money will likely simply be swallowed by landlords.
| serverholic wrote:
| The implication in his argument was that prices will
| increase in general.
|
| My argument is that we don't know what the overall effect
| will be.
|
| Edit: In other words, if housing increases by $10 but the
| cost of other stuff decreases by $20 then you still come
| out ahead.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You're right of course, but also way more optimistic than
| me.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Housing is a normal economic market that is responsive to
| changes on both the demand and supply side. The major
| problem with housing in this country is that restrictive
| policies have put a damper on housing supply so that it
| is not able to keep up with demand. Seattle has a
| _normal_ amount of vacancies in it. It could have 2X the
| housing (and thus have a lot more people living in
| Seattle paying lower rents) and still have the same
| percentage vacancy. It 's not a real or valid argument to
| say "look there's more vacancies than homeless people, so
| supply must be fine".
| freeone3000 wrote:
| A "normal number" of housing vacancies would only make
| sense if everyone was housed. Housing isn't a voluntary
| good, where you'll expect some unsold stock and you'll
| expect not everyone to buy one -- everyone needs a place
| to live, and will spend as much as they have to in order
| to get housing of minimal quality. The entire concept of
| a "normal" number of vacancies doesn't make sense here.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| There absolutely is a "normal" amount of vacancies
| because it takes time for a house to sell, for someone to
| move out and then someone else to move in, for a new
| lease to be signed, etc. It's exactly the same dynamic
| with employment; there is a "normal" amount of a
| unemployment (a low single digit number) that is
| impossible to improve past, simply because it takes time
| to find a job. Housing is no different.
|
| Also, most of the homeless are unhoused because they
| either can't afford a home or they have mental
| illness/drug addiction issues that makes them incapable
| of earning money in order to be able to afford a house.
| It doesn't matter if housing is vacant if you don't have
| the means to pay the rent, or if they won't even consider
| you for a lease anyway because you don't have a reliable
| source of income.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It makes more sense in a country that already has a
| social safety net; I've read somewhere (citation needed,
| I know, I'm not very deep in the subject) that the cost
| and overhead of assessing and paying the individual cases
| of unemployment, long term sickness, disability,
| homelessness etc is more expensive than just giving
| everyone a basic income.
|
| But yeah, #2 is what I'm afraid of too. Paraphrasing a
| cartoon villain, if everyone is wealthy, nobody is.
|
| Besides, in the past decade, cost of living / housing /
| rent has gone up so much that even a $1000 / month basic
| income can't give you anywhere decent to live anywhere.
| In addition to basic income, we need basic housing -
| which is dangerous, because it invokes the USSR's rows of
| depressing and substandard apartment buildings. But
| everybody should be able to live comfortably at a
| standard of living. Everybody should be able to have
| access to and afford a two bedroom house or apartment on
| a single income, or the social safety net if they are not
| employed.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > 2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even
| emptier gesture
|
| Do you also expect food, transportation, entertainment,
| and technology costs to go up $1000/month nationwide?
|
| Rent goes up due to a lack of available apartments or
| houses in the area. If public policy is geared toward
| allowing development of sufficient housing for the people
| wanting to live in a place, that will have a far bigger
| impact on rents than UBI.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Not an economist. I liken it to the cost of tuition
| having gone up, perhaps because of the availability of
| student loans and the willingness (need?) of students to
| borrow to get a higher education.
|
| Rent is the one you are sort of locked into. Food, etc,
| you have choices ... moving, much harder to shop around.
| [deleted]
| cactus2093 wrote:
| It seems pretty complex to design a version of a lax
| unemployment policy that eliminates steep cliffs that
| might disincentivize working, is fair, and also doesn't
| let anybody slip through the cracks. How do you handle
| someone quitting voluntarily, or retiring early, or
| starting their own business which doesn't pay them yet,
| or only paying themselves a small amount, or working a
| part-time job on the side while focusing on something
| else, etc.
|
| The income tax code already exists and has to solve some
| of these problems, so it seems easier to give everyone
| the money and then tax it back from the highest earners
| later (or implement it as a negative income tax, but that
| has its own hurdles as well, i.e. imagine a homeless
| person needing to wait until tax season and then getting
| paid for the whole year, it would be a big hurdle and
| they'd still need other assistance programs the rest of
| the year if they didn't budget the money well enough).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I agree it is complex, I have no answers. Certainly
| though if the requirement for unemployment is that you
| have to be actively looking for employment ... sort of
| nixes it for the want-to-be entrepreneurs.
| adrianb wrote:
| He's giving a few examples for work-life balance and I have
| completely different feelings about - from the 11 AM Yoga
| class (pretty ridiculous IMO) to taking a personal day
| (reasonable, people need their day off, maybe the personal
| day is for an urgent medical check-up?) to working during the
| weekend (unless the entire service is down and I'm the
| oncall, it can wait).
| watwut wrote:
| In a company I work for, some people take time to exercise
| at lunchtime - 11yoga seem to fit right there. Basically,
| lunch then takes longer then if you eat during that time,
| but not by horribly lot.
|
| I does not seem to me so horrible honestly, assuming that
| you then stay longer to make up for time spend by
| exercising. I dont do that, because I need to take kids out
| of school basically, but when I had time to exercise a bit
| in the middle of the day I was more productive.
| cbarrick wrote:
| The 11 AM Yoga class does _not_ sound ridiculous to me
| precisely because of the nature of tech work: we don 't
| need to all be working together at the exact same time, as
| opposed to most other jobs.
|
| Want to trade an hour in the middle of the day on a Tuesday
| with showing up an hour early Wednesday? Do it. What's the
| problem?
| vmception wrote:
| Why are several people denigrating the 11am mindfulness
| session?
|
| We're not going to talk about people showing up to work on
| acid to perform but make fun of people out of college
| taking advantage of the mental health and exercise course
| offered on site for an hour, and then excuse an entiiiiire
| personal day just because its ... more familiar?
|
| oooookay.
|
| just a perspective.
|
| this manager didn't know how to schedule his workers, and
| couldn't calibrate it and chose to go with "entitled young
| people are the problem" just like people probably said
| about him and millennials, there's nothing more to read
| into this article.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It's almost like different people value different things. I
| knew a guy that got a massage every day at 2pm but he also
| was at work until 10pm. This is also why - even with a
| flexible work schedule - it's useful to have some set of
| "core hours" everyone should be available.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Isn't that an indication that he sees these things as
| equivalent? 11am yoga is just as ridiculous as refusing to
| work weekends. This is precisely the sort of toxic attitude
| that keeps a lot of people away from startups.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I am self-employed and 11am (or, in my case, anywhere within
| the 11am-3pm window) exercise is actually a great refreshment
| for my mind.
| ghaff wrote:
| "When I was growing up in Tech in the '90's - there was no
| such thing as work life balance."
|
| BS. I worked for a large computer systems company throughout
| the 1990s. I mostly headed home by 5-6 and I would take month
| long vacations. (Of course, there crunch times as well.)
|
| I also found his pissiness at apparently not being able to
| curse or whatever in presentations sort of offputting. Yes,
| general standards for language and behavior in the tech
| industry has shifted over time. This isn't anything specific
| to Google. And whining about it comes off as being tone deaf.
| emdowling wrote:
| I've worked as a freelancer, founder, and employee (for start-
| ups, scale-ups and now FAANG).
|
| The one constant has been my daily exercise session, whether
| that has been a workout, yoga session or swim. My daily
| schedule (pre-Covid) usually involves 45 mins at home checking
| email/chat and addressing anything urgent and modifying my to-
| do list for the day. Then it's to the gym for 90 minutes, and
| in the office by 10:30am. It's what I need to do and it keeps
| me sane.
|
| Building a startup in my early 20's was easily the most
| stressful period of my life. Going for a swim each day was
| probably the single most important thing that got me through it
| in one piece.
|
| I have a lot of respect for what the author has accomplished;
| building one of the top tech products and brands in America is
| ridiculously hard. However, this article shows a lack of
| empathy for how people work and what they need.
| [deleted]
| coding123 wrote:
| > While most "real" people were worried about keeping their
| jobs or finding one, many employees were complaining about
| expensing their food on top of their salaries/stocks/bonuses.
| This entitlement continued everywhere - while Google is BY FAR
| the most employee centric company giving tremendous hard and
| soft value to its employees, they keep creating imaginary
| problems to complain about, instead of appreciating the hand
| they have been dealt.
|
| I 100% get his position here. I definitely want to be
| surrounded by people that are grateful.
| znpy wrote:
| I'd like to add... That guy seems to be ignoring the point of
| view of somebody that is _not_ the boss /former-owner of the
| startup that got acquired.
| ghoshbishakh wrote:
| I absolutely agree about the fact that us young CS engineers
| often forget how lucky we are to exist in this space.
|
| I also support the point that the author is trying to make
| about work life balance. If you are passionate about building
| something, you would always want your team to be as passionate.
| And that would mean sacrificing other stuff in your life since
| this product is also a large part of your life.
|
| In other words, "work life balance" treats work separate to
| life. Which often might not be the case. There can definitely
| be an overlap between work and life.
| cashewchoo wrote:
| Because unless you have significant equity in a company, your
| work is literally not your life. Your life consists of things
| you don't lose instantly if you're fired "for any lawful
| reason including no reason".
|
| The US is potentially one of the worst places to get work and
| life mixed up without a securitized, legally binding
| combination of your work and life.
| the_local_host wrote:
| Indeed. I'm struck by the contrast between this complaint from
| the author...
|
| > It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic
| reason that you don't need this role any more
|
| and this other complaint...
|
| > The product is a tool to advance the employees career, not a
| passion, mission or economic game changer.
|
| The author wants employees who perceive their job as a passion,
| and a mission, who can be fired as soon as their role is no
| longer needed? That strikes me as more "entitled" than keeping
| a Yoga class blocked off in your schedule.
| twox2 wrote:
| Seriously, and the next point it's followed up with is
| "entitlement"....
| CydeWeys wrote:
| That was my take-away as well. This might be the guy you want
| to do business with if you're an investor, but that ain't me;
| I'm just an employee. This is NOT the kind of guy you wanna be
| doing business with if you're his employee. And it's not just
| his complaints about employees' supposed entitlement; he's also
| complaining that a lot of them were making too much money (in
| his view)! Opt me the fuck out of that!
|
| Also he spends a lot of time defending his "short fuse" and his
| saying of offensive things; in my experience, when someone's
| own side of the story is that bad, it's actually much worse
| even from the other side (i.e. the side anyone not him would be
| experiencing). You don't want to work for rude assholes. I
| don't know him well enough to know if he's actually one, but
| that's how he's coming off in this blog post anyway. Red flags
| for days.
| secondcoming wrote:
| If I swanned off to do yoga during my contracted core hours I'd
| be sacked
| shadowgovt wrote:
| In this case, the company is offering the yoga as something
| you can do during your work hours.
|
| Google doesn't really have "contracted core hours" precisely.
| They have quarterly goals. If you're accomplishing those
| goals, the corporate culture doesn't much care how. This
| offers flexibility that can make it easier to accomplish
| tasks (I knew people who worked 6AM-2PM because the center-
| of-mass of their team was in a different timezone).
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Yeh the whine about hiring and firing was a dead give away -
| given the low level of employee protection in the USA.
|
| Sounds like the author a senior leader (presumably) hasn't
| internalised what it is to lead - I recall a tweet from a
| serving Army officer about what you must never do is get used
| to the fact you can send out some one for coffee and become
| entitled.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| "I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also
| believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if
| its on a weekend."
|
| lmao what a terrible, horrible manager. I would hate working
| for them, and I would not miss them leaving.
|
| Maybe I'm just playing into their "young people don't want to
| work" stereotype, but if that's what working means, I don't
| want to do it with them.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I worked for 2 hours this past weekend because doing so would
| save about a weeks worth of work due to various reasons.
|
| I will also leave work early to pick up a few things on my
| daughter's birthday later this month.
|
| I think this is reasonable. I don't know if it's the sort of
| thing the author is talking about, but I think my work/life
| balance is fine.
| a_imho wrote:
| Working on the weekend is a management failure.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| No kidding. If you're on team "Do whatever it takes to win"
| then you better at the very least applaud when people do
| whatever it takes.
|
| You can't tell your team "Do whatever it takes to win", and
| then when they work their asses off for you turn around and
| say "Well long hours aren't a badge of honor"
|
| This is an asshole who wants people to work themselves to
| death and doesn't want to give any sort of reward or
| recognition for it.
| gambiting wrote:
| Yep, I was just about to quote this exact sentence here, but
| I see you already did. Absolutely agreed, what an awful
| manager.
| plinkplonk wrote:
| "I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also
| believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if
| its on a weekend."
|
| Especially when said "doing" is done by other people
| (engineers, testers,SREs etc) , not the manager.
|
| Easy enough to hold such beliefs when the cost is paid by
| others.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Literally like Shrek: "Some of you may lose your weekends,
| but that's a price I'm willing to pay..."
| matwood wrote:
| Agree. My first question would be to ask 'win' what? The
| reality is, very few are working on things that are so
| critical if a feature is pushed off a few days because of a
| weekend, nothing will change.
| natchy wrote:
| No he's right. This is vital for a growing company who is
| vacuuming up market share. It's not necessary for big corps
| who just throw more people at a product or use their
| economies of scale to stay ahead.
|
| The nasty truth is that every big Corp had a phase where it
| counted on key people being completely plugged in. If that
| was never you, then you either joined a company late or
| weren't one of the key people.
| cashewchoo wrote:
| Especially when, IME, people are either outright abusers (and
| blatantly leech until discovered and fired) or people tend to
| fall into a distribution whose mean centers around a WLB
| that's slightly tilted in favor of work. Employees in the US
| are already so guilt-tripped and gaslit and scared of
| unemployment that you end up doing things for work you feel
| are unfair even if they don't ask it of you.
| [deleted]
| jskrablin wrote:
| Last time I somehow ended in a company with culture/managers
| similar to the one above I quit after only a month and a
| half. And I don't exactly fit into "young people don't want
| to work" stereotype. You'll only get this kind of
| expectations in extremely toxic places.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| A different way of putting it would be whether an employee
| takes personal responsibility towards their work. It's not
| incongruent with a balanced life. To me It just means
| occasdinally you might stay late at work, once in awhile an
| interesting problem gets you working on the company laptop
| all Saturday, and if something breaks you're not able to log
| off until you fix it. Doesn't mean you cant take Friday's off
| of or that you have to skip your yoga class if that's what
| powers your mojo.
| gambiting wrote:
| Absolutely, 100%. I am hugely against working overtime and
| work life balance is far more important to me than many
| other factors. But I have worked 12 hour days and weekends
| few times in the past, because I felt the personal
| responsibility to either fix something or make sure a
| launch goes through smoothly. You know when I absolutely
| wouldn't do it though? If my manager told me that "they
| expect a level of sacrifice for the company". Nope. Just
| absolutely categorically nope. Now I'm a manager myself I
| would never ever ask someone to do this.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Same. I put in a lot of extra work on the launches of
| .app and .dev to ensure that they went smoothly (and they
| did!), because I personally believed in the product we
| were launching. I did it with no expectation of
| compensation, though I did end up being compensated for
| it in the long run anyway with a promotion. I took pride
| in that work.
|
| But if it hadn't been my idea to do so, if it had just
| been expected of me to work uncompensated nights/weekends
| at no personal benefit? Hell no. I'm not a manager but I
| too would never ask someone to do this either.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| I think this is slightly different from what the OP was
| saying, because in this scenario, you choose to do that.
| IMO personal responsibility and pride in one's work like
| this is amazing and totally compatible with a balanced
| life. But when a manager asks you to have some personal
| responsibility and balance your weekend life towards the
| overtime work side, that's a whole other story.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| The line I draw is that the manager never knows or cares
| when you work. They only see the output and the
| occassional indication that you take your work seriously.
| If someone ever says you should work more or I've never
| seen you work in a weekend, of course I would also run
| away.
| BugWatch wrote:
| Simple question - is there (some kind/means of (extra))
| payment involved?
|
| If the answer is no, then that's a resounding no (for me,
| at least). I might _love_ and adore my job (and the
| workplace), but no way in hell will it be allowed to
| impinge on my private /personal time: sleeping and
| "regular" work already essentially takes 2/3 of it ( _too
| much_ ), and that doesn't even include the time for
| "context shifting" (mental and physical) between those and
| the remainder that is "(free) living".
|
| And if (the hypothetical) you considers that to be
| "entitled", then so be it. Your life's mission is not my
| mission. I am there to do my work and do it
| conscientiously; anything more is asking too much.
| Matticus_Rex wrote:
| Well, that's the thing -- no one _directly_ pays me extra
| when I work an odd night or weekend to make sure things
| get out in a timely manner, but I also definitely only
| have the salary /etc. I do because of the responsibility
| I take (which includes that willingness).
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Exactly, you do you buddy. Let's just not act as if it's
| some God given right that you only work 40 hours for
| outrageous sums of money. We are not talking about
| minimum wage workers, and his point is they're not even
| putting in the 40 hours anyway. All he's asking is that
| he wants to have a different culture within his team.
| It's not his intention to force people who don't share
| his values to work against their will. And as much as it
| might be hard for some to believe, there are people who
| don't need a constant amount of private time that's
| mandated by law (especially when we are not middle class
| or poor). I want to work on interesting things, learn how
| to be as effective as I can be at them, keep improving
| myself in ways that matter to me, and contribute
| meaningfully to whatever the hell it is that I'm paid to
| do (and be okay with contributing to that cause). And
| then I want to find and work with people with similar
| minds. Clearly we exist.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| If you are ever in position where you are recruiting
| people, make sure to put that statement directly into the
| posting. Not during a phone call or at any later stage.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I agree the expectation should be made clear but it's not
| obvious why it has to be at the level of the post. I try
| to look for indications in the resume for the type of
| cultural alignment and set expectations the first time we
| talk in an interview, and don't necessarily feel that any
| further "warnings" need to be given.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > once in awhile an interesting problem gets you working on
| the company laptop all Saturday,
|
| I will _never_ do this. I havent done this since I was very
| very young at my first job and i didn 't know better. I
| couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that
| giving away my own personal time for someone else.
|
| I'm not going to work on the weekend. I've got much better
| things to do, like play video games or _literally anything
| else_ , rather than go back to work and generate wealth for
| someone else for free.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| > " _I couldn 't think of anything sader or more
| depressing that giving away my own personal time for
| someone else_"
|
| The original quote was about "an interesting problem".
| I'm happy to spend some after hours time on technical
| problems if they're personally interesting to me. The
| fact that addressing it helps my employer and makes me
| look good in their eyes is just a nice little bonus.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Uh, I agree with the sentiment of not wanting to work for
| free, but
|
| > _I couldn 't think of anything sader or more depressing
| that giving away my own personal time for someone else._
|
| You just described a job.
|
| Whether you're giving your time away or getting paid for
| giving it up makes no difference to the fact you are
| parting with it in order to produce for someone else.
| Macha wrote:
| Giving away pretty clearly means the objection is to the
| free nature. Getting paid makes a big difference - you
| now obtain tangible value from the interaction that you
| can turn into things like food or housing.
| scrollaway wrote:
| There's no concrete difference from the side of the
| gifter, between giving away time directly, giving away
| money earned from time spent, or giving away a tangible
| gift purchased with money earned from time spent. It's
| just more indirections.
|
| So when someone says there's "nothing sadder", I think
| they should remember that the time is being given up
| either way. Doing so for free amounts to gifting the
| time. Or, flipped on its head, not chasing after the
| money.
|
| People have their own reasons for making gifts. Feeling
| good about themselves, making someone else feel good,
| .... You can have your own reasons for not caring that
| there is no financial benefit to working extra hours on
| something. Maybe you enjoy the work. Maybe you are
| learning something. Maybe you take pride in your work and
| going the extra mile is rewarding in and of itself.
|
| Unlike GP, I don't judge people who sometimes work for
| "free", as long as they don't have to and are aware they
| don't have to.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| It's perfectly okay that you choose your values that way
| but it sounds very judgemental to think that's the only
| way to live. I won't work in a place where I'm not at
| least proud of what I'm doing. If that's true then
| whether the company makes money from it is only
| peripheral to me doing more than what I'm paid for - I
| genuinely like and enjoy what I do, I like to code and
| often the most interesting coding problem before me (with
| the most resources at my disposal by a longshot) is my
| work related problems so I end up spending a good
| fraction of my time in weekends when I feel like u want
| to code, working on side projects that no one asked for
| but are within the company's domain. Simply because
| they're intresting to me and I become A better coder and
| learn new stuff. Also coding too is about practice. 10000
| hours and all that jazz. I have become a better coder
| because of this. I probably won't do this forever but
| I'll learn and get better as much as possible from this
| time.
|
| If you want to build a car from scratch in your weekend
| or just chill out, that's an equally meaningful and
| respectable endeavour as well.
| sergiosgc wrote:
| Let me give you the perspective from the other side of
| the trench:
|
| I never ask my employees for overtime, never control
| their work hours. The typical work week that organically
| arises out of this is about 35 hours.
|
| I would absolutely fire anyone who would close the laptop
| for the weekend and left a critical operation pending on
| Friday. It's about work ethics and personal
| responsibility of the outcome of personal work.
| notaslave wrote:
| If the company is paying me for 40 hours, why would they
| expect me to work more? If the 'outcome of my work' is my
| personal responsibility, I should also be paid based on
| the outcome-I should also get a cut from whatever profit
| the company makes with my work.
|
| If the company thinks they have the right to my personal
| life because they pay me for 40 hours, then its slavery.
| Also, threatening me with firing because I refuse slavery
| is threatening my livelihood, and it's mafia mentality.
| If a manager thinks they have the right my personal time,
| I should have right to their personal time too. Traffic
| should go both way in a bridge.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| They're paying you to do a job. They're not just paying
| you to "put in the hours".
| sergiosgc wrote:
| I don't hire automatons that turn on at 9h and off at
| 17h. I don't pay by the hour for intelligent work. I pay
| for results, defined to be achievable on a regular
| schedule.
|
| I hire intelligent people, treat them as such, and expect
| intelligent behaviour in return. Part of the expectation
| is that everyone manages their own time responsibly. If
| they fail that management and have to work after hours, I
| do expect them to take the fall. There's no slavery and
| no mafia involved here; much to the contrary, it's a
| healthy work environment with historically excellent
| work/life balance.
| notaslave wrote:
| Who defines those schedules? If it's the employees, its
| fine. If it's the management who sets the timelines,
| management should take the fall. Otherwise, its forced
| labor no matter how management tries to spin it. A bunch
| of parasites and leeches sucking other people dry. If the
| paycheck says 'num of hours x per hour rate", that's what
| the company should expect.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| I'm on an oncall rotation. I get paid 1/3rd my normal
| salaried rate for all the time outside of normal working
| hours that I'm expected to be available to respond to
| critical issues. Note that I get paid this regardless of
| whether there actually are critical issues.
|
| Do you have this kind of system set up? If not, do you
| make it clear when you're hiring people that you're
| expecting them to occasionally do what is effectively
| uncompensated oncall on nights/weekends? That's the kind
| of thing you have to know going in in order to be able to
| compare like-for-like in competing offers.
| sergiosgc wrote:
| Events like these are exceedingly rare, to the rate of
| less than one event per year. They have been treated on a
| case by case basis. When it is personal mismanagement of
| time, there is no compensation. When people cover for
| systemic failures, we've historically awarded two
| vacation days per day used (one is a replacement, the
| other a compensation), or equivalent monetary
| compensation.
| groby_b wrote:
| "whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards
| their work."
|
| This is an incredibly important factor. It really matters
| to getting a team that gels and gets things done.
|
| But here's the thing: That has to be a two-way street, or
| it won't work. The company needs to show responsibility
| towards their employees too. And that isn't yoga classes &
| cafeterias, that is basic respect, and a willingness to
| work with the employees, instead of seeing them as
| "resources".
|
| This seems to be, as far as I can tell, an approach that's
| correlated with manager skills & inversely correlated with
| company size. I've done both manual & "white collar" work
| in small companies, and the ones where the leaders did
| right by their employees had employees who would go to
| great lengths for them.
|
| I've done manual & "white collar" work in large companies,
| too. None of them had CEOs that cared that much. But some
| had managers who cared a lot, and were willing to bend
| rules if it meant doing the right thing - those teams
| excelled. The ones with the managers who didn't care about
| their people got teams who didn't care about their work.
|
| And I know the kind of manager who's terribly upset about
| your 11am yoga class. Without fail, that yoga class was on
| your calendar, but they wanted the meeting when they wanted
| it, without a care about you. They could've done 1pm, they
| could've done 10am, but that would've inconvenienced _them_
| , and that's not in their playbooks.
| TravHatesMe wrote:
| > whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards
| their work.
|
| This is a good take. Something that's perhaps overlooked:
| those rare occasions where you need to stay late to deliver
| are very memorable. Isn't it true that strong bonds are
| often built from intense experiences? I think those few
| times that you stay late earn you massive respect from
| those who stuck around, and builds a relationship beyond
| your career. Especially if it isn't even your
| responsibility specifically, maybe it's the team lead's ass
| on the line or a colleague's. It's like indirectly saying
| "hey I got your back on this, you can trust me I'm a team
| player -- we ride together we die together bad boys for
| life"
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Agreed but also with caveats - I've had talks with
| coworkers where after helping put out a fire we should do
| a bit of soul searching on how we can avoid that in the
| future. As a team and a company we should strive towards
| creating systems that don't tax its employees as well,
| that's the company and managers end of the deal with
| employees who take personal responsibility if you ask me.
|
| And the thing that works absolutely counter to this
| philosophy is the peer bonus system. It sounds great in
| principle but seems to incentivize people to continue bad
| practices that are clearly mostly overworking without
| proper post mortem on why such out of description help
| was even needed in the first place. When I was new I used
| to cherish peer bonuses but now I'm proud that no one in
| my team has gotten one in a year (because hopefully none
| of our systems needed such help anymore).
| redleader9345 wrote:
| I wonder how much wfh and distributed teams change this
| dynamic. I totally get what you're saying with the whole
| experience of staying in the office after dark, ordering
| pizza, and just working through a problem, whatever it
| takes.
|
| I think with people holed up in their homes doing the
| same thing, the experience is diminished somewhat.
| greedo wrote:
| I don't think it's a "young people" stereotype. I'm an
| oldster and I wouldn't want to work for someone like that who
| is trying to squeeze every last drop out of his "resources."
| CydeWeys wrote:
| And that's easy to say for someone who has a large equity
| stake in the company, who is directly rewarded for working
| very hard like that. Ridiculous for them to impose it on
| others though who are salaried employees and aren't rewarded
| for all this extra work.
|
| If you want me to work as hard as you are, _pay me_. Take my
| total annual compensation, divide it by 2087, and give me 2X
| that amount as overtime to work nights and weekends in excess
| of 40 hours /week. I'd do it. If he's actually willing to put
| his money where his mouth is I bet he'd get plenty of takers
| to work that hard. But I bet he isn't; he just wants to get
| lots of extra work out of his employees for free.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Well he said.
|
| > I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also
| believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if
| its on a weekend.
|
| I guess he missed the memo that google had already won.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| It is not a fake problem. Of course, working hard all the time
| is not a badge to be worn and is not by itself an end, but it's
| also true that SV tech community is filled to the brim with
| people thinking very highly of themselves when the reality is
| they don't contribute much. What the author is asking for is
| that employees take a degree of personal responsibility without
| needing to give up on a concept of personal life. I come from
| academia that's rife with no work life balance and it was
| positively jarring how badly the pendulum swings in the tech
| world. There's surely a middle ground that is not by any means
| unreasonable.
|
| Importantly, this is a personal choice. I don't want to be in a
| team where members don't take personal responsibility, and I am
| willing to contribute the same. If Google does not allow such a
| team to operate with its own norms then the author is justified
| in saying it's not a good fit.
|
| And to be clear, are you seriously saying that any person
| saying, "what? Sushi again?" Is actually going to have a real
| empathizable reason for saying so? Honestly Google sounds like
| it's filled with what can be considered the modern equivalent
| of upper middle class government administrators of past eras
| who don't really contribute much, couldn't give a rats ass
| about much more than what their weekend plans are and what
| their paycheck is and I will be more than happy that they are
| happy they don't work with someone like me if that thought
| process ever came up.
|
| Of course, companies like Google have found a way to factory-fy
| this system of getting "maybe mediocre but never truly bad"
| engineers and scale a massive software conglomeration that runs
| the world. But this is only possible because of massive
| excesses these companies procure through counterproductive and
| anticompetitive revenue streams like ads and data aggregation,
| so in some ways people in HN want to complain about how these
| big tech companies are evil but at the same time draw heinously
| enormous paychecks from them and act as if they truly deserve
| them. That seems to be the problem.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| > Honestly Google sounds like it's filled with what can be
| considered the modern equivalent of upper middle class
| government administrators of past eras
|
| I like this, I've thought this before too about a lot of big
| tech companies that are throwing off cash and essentially
| want to make sure they have a bunch of top people but don't
| really need them for anything particular day-to-day.
|
| So the employees become a kind of aristocracy with a few
| symbolic duties, but largely a life of leisure, attending
| company events and reading clubs and pushing paper back and
| forth, while making salaries high enough they dont have to
| worry about anything.
|
| I know this is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to
| it, and I definitely know environments where one could behave
| that way.
| matwood wrote:
| There's definitely a pendulum with degrees of difference.
| I've been called militant before at work because I showed up
| on time, worked while at work, and went home when the day was
| over. I just call it being professional to not goof off all
| day.
|
| It seems like what's happened (like in a lot of society) is
| that extremes have formed. Either people are in the work 24/7
| camp or play frisbee golf all day camp. Whatever happened to
| simply being professional?
| Adverblessly wrote:
| > And to be clear, are you seriously saying that any person
| saying, "what? Sushi again?" Is actually going to have a real
| empathizable reason for saying so?
|
| (not the person you responded to)
|
| Benefits are just a part of the total compensation. If you
| work for Google you don't get "free food", you get food that
| you worked for and that was a part of a large number of
| elements you weighed when you decided to work for Google.
| Maybe you get $X at Google but you were also considering an
| offer from Elgoog for $(X+Y) and decided that the convenience
| and cost of Google's food were worth more than $Y for you
| (Elgoog of course doesn't offer "free food" :)). If that
| "free food" isn't working out for you, it is natural to be
| frustrated at being short-changed on your benefits.
|
| If you are in Israel, the norm for tech is to get a Cibus
| card which lets you buy lunch at local restaurants at the
| employer's expense, up to some daily limit. When you are
| comparing offers you can literally compare "this company
| gives $15/day but that one $20/day, so let's deduct $100/mo
| from their offer when comparing". If you work for Google and
| get a "free lunch" maybe you'll evaluate it as a $25/day
| Cibus. If you get a bad lunch at Google, maybe you'll think
| "Ugh, if I was working for <competitor> I could have been
| eating at <favourite restaurant> instead". If you get a bad
| lunch at Google, you effectively paid $25 for it and got a
| bad lunch, so it makes sense to complain about it like you
| would if you went to an actual restaurant, paid $25 and got a
| bad meal.
|
| I agree that in the grand scheme of things these issues
| aren't all that important (maybe about as important as
| someone going to a restaurant and getting a bad meal :)), but
| I don't see how it is impossible to empathize with that
| sentiment.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Great comment. I completely agree.
| rkangel wrote:
| Yes, that made me want to run a mile from ever working for him.
| He is right that we _are_ entitled though. As software
| engineers we are extremely lucky to be in a profession that is
| in demand by companies that make (a lot of) money. Companies
| compete for us with salaries, quality of work and other
| benefits. This puts us in a lucky minority compared to the rest
| of the population (even if we limit to talking about developed
| nations).
|
| We have expectations based on that. Some things are the norm
| for us. We should _absolutely_ try to be aware of that and not
| take it for granted, and we should _absolutely_ understand that
| for others it is the norm. Everyone feels entitled to what they
| get all the time. You need to accept reality, even if you don
| 't like it.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Or the people who complain about work-life balance and sushi
| are the kind of people you would not want to be in the trenches
| with in any sort of challenge.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I think you nailed it.
|
| I will admit that there are pieces of this article that I find
| myself nodding to, but I am not sure I would want to work for
| this person.
|
| "The challenge was that, as Google employees, we were subject
| to all of the Corporate hiring practices. It is practically
| impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't
| need this role any more or there is a better person out there
| or just plain old - you are not doing a great job."
|
| Good grief. If you had any sense as a manager, you did not do
| that either in the previous non-google position. The
| unemployment insurance cost alone is not worth it. Sometimes
| those corporate practices are guided by some reason.
|
| "I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language
| was not PG... I actually stopped speaking at events where the
| majority appreciated what I was saying but the minority that
| was offended by something (words and not content) made it a
| pain."
|
| I am more sympathetic here, because I agree that we are way too
| delicate language-wise in corporate land, but even then I don't
| say whatever comes to mind. Passionate is barely an excuse
| here. When you speak publicly ( panels, events ), you should
| know your audience and have a modicum of self-control.
|
| "Young people want it all - they want to get promoted quickly,
| achieve economic independence,"
|
| Lol. Duh. All of a sudden, I can sort of understand, why 'OK
| boomer' became a meme.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Of course, focus on the one thing he said you don't like. Not
| to mention he didn't really say he's against work life balance.
| But for some people words are more important than content like
| he said.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Yeah, I was sort of getting what they were saying until they
| started complaining about political correctness. If you don't
| explain _what_ you were being censured or censored over, I 'm
| just going to assume it's some vile sexist or racist remark,
| because 9 times out of 10 that IS the quiet part.
|
| I'm starting to think the Bay Area trend of hyperfocusing on
| identity politics is just the trendy way of deposing shitty
| managers.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Work-life balance is always available, but you're not entitled
| to a top-tier salary if you want to 9-to-5 it.
| chovybizzass wrote:
| far too common these days. I haven't been able to find a job in
| a year (fe/js) due to these people rising up the last couple of
| years or so.
| slibhb wrote:
| If they really complained about not getting compensated for
| buying their own food during lockdown I think "entitled" is a
| fair descriptor.
|
| This is the first time I've read one of these blogs where the
| author complains about it being "practically impossible to fire
| someone". To me, that adds an air of authenticity to the
| complaining. In my experience too, the inability to fire people
| for reasons other than "this person is a real jerk" has been a
| looming problem.
|
| As far as work-life balance goes, I think I agree with him
| there too. I have a lot of privileges and I assume Google
| employees have even more. But the flipside of that is that,
| when there's a deadline, I'm very invested in meeting it, even
| if that means working a lot of hours. To me those two things
| are related: the privileges are justified by the periods of
| intense, focused work.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>If they really complained about not getting compensated for
| buying their own food during lockdown I think "entitled" is a
| fair descriptor.
|
| I very much disagree. If you were getting food at work
| previously, as in - it was clearly your agreed part of
| compensation - then I would absolutely complain if suddenly I
| had to buy my own.
|
| >> But the flipside of that is that, when there's a deadline,
| I'm very invested in meeting it, even if that means working a
| lot of hours.
|
| Again, that's fine and if you want to do that yourself,
| great, everyone would love to have you as an employee. But
| the second your manager walks in and says "john, I expect you
| to work this weekend" I'd start looking for a different job.
| Taking personal responsibility and working harder and more
| hours to finish something is one thing, being told you have
| to because your manager demands it is unacceptable.
| slibhb wrote:
| > But the second your manager walks in and says "john, I
| expect you to work this weekend" I'd start looking for a
| different job.
|
| Of course. A condition of my personal investment in meeting
| deadlines is exactly my not being treated like this.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| For what it's worth, food in the United States is very
| clearly _never_ a part of your agreed-upon compensation in
| the way that health /retirement benefits are; it is a
| "team-building office perk" offered by the employer. If it
| were actually part of your compensation, then you'd be
| taxed on it.
|
| I know it may be easy to misunderstand this, and to think
| of it as part of your compensation, because in a way it
| feels like it, but in a real legal sense as currently
| structured it very definitely is not part of your
| compensation.
| ghaff wrote:
| >If it were actually part of your compensation, then
| you'd be taxed on it.
|
| Which is a somewhat contentious topic. Not an accountant,
| but seems to be one of those perks that's right at the
| very edge of IRS rules.
|
| https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-
| topics/benefits/pa...
| CydeWeys wrote:
| To be clear, my statement was descriptive of present
| circumstances, not normative. As you point out this is in
| flux and may be changing in the future. If food does
| become a taxable benefit and part of overall
| compensation, then I might expect to start seeing some
| people opting out of it entirely.
| matwood wrote:
| > But the second your manager walks in and says "john, I
| expect you to work this weekend" I'd start looking for a
| different job.
|
| It's definitely a failure of management, but if John was
| playing games all week and now is being asked to work this
| weekend to finish, that's also on John. His manager should
| have stopped the all week playing, but people want to be
| treated like adults and be given personal responsibility,
| etc...
| asidiali wrote:
| Agree and disagree. Without pushing a point too hard, I will
| ask you this - what if your employment contract states you
| are to receive $X,000 per year in food or food stipend? Would
| you be in favor of employees pushing for subsidized food
| while remote?
|
| Ok, and there's a deadline at work. There's also a deadline
| at your spouses work, your kid is sick, and they took off
| work to look after them last time. What do you do?
| etripe wrote:
| Roll initiative!
|
| On a more serious note, that all depends on the type of
| contract you've got. If you're salaried and get a constant
| wage, you're not exactly being compensated for going above
| and beyond, especially in terms of hours worked.
|
| Surely, if the work to be done is important, that means the
| employer is willing to pay for the privilege of having it
| done during off hours? If not, I would argue the employer,
| not the employee is feeling entitled.
| asidiali wrote:
| Totally agree with what you've said.
|
| Sure yeah, if you're getting the equivalent of overtime
| or time-and-a-half, ok, it may become worth your time and
| like you said you are getting compensated for the extra
| effort and sacrifice.
|
| But the author of the article is talking about salaried
| FTE Google employees. I'm a salaried tech employee, I
| don't earn extra comp for working weekends. I assume that
| is the norm.
|
| Hence why the authors attitude is indeed entitled, and
| not the employees, as you've stated.
| throwaway667555 wrote:
| Any reasonable person understands that "compensation
| includes food stipend of $8000" in a contract means they
| get $8000 if they're home. Clearly GP is referring to less
| cut-and-dry scenarios, i.e., nearly all scenarios in this
| domain.
| asidiali wrote:
| Agreed yeah, hence the loose question. I'd assume this is
| a less formal scenario of oh, we have cafeterias, you're
| welcome to eat there, but this isn't some formal stipend.
| Makes sense, more curious on if that changes GP's
| position on the topic with that added info. I've worked
| for places that did alternatively have a formal stipend
| amount.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| A small number of people did this on the imageboard, which is
| widely known for collecting and upvoting fringe complaints.
| It is a company of like 130,000 people. A few of them are
| going to ask for things that seem unreasonable to others.
|
| Google is somewhat known for being slow to fire. I personally
| like it. Managers are expected to try to get their reports to
| survive PIPs rather than using them as a boot out the door.
| sciprojguy wrote:
| On paper that's fine. Do that too much, though, and your
| willingness to burn personal time for the company's benefit
| will become the norm and factor into their planning. Getting
| management to un-learn that is difficult and tricky and often
| not accomplished without the loss of several employees with
| that reason pointed out in the exit interview.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I mean in your last sentence, it really isn't a privilege if
| you have to do "intense, focused work" to get it... it then
| becomes compensation
|
| Loss of said compensation does certainly warrant some
| conversation about it. Also I don't really appreciate it
| being painted as ALL Googlers when, like most things in life,
| a small passionate minority affected by this brought this up
| and most people didn't think twice about it
| serverholic wrote:
| If google provides food for employees then that's essentially
| indirect compensation. Employees can now use the money they
| would have spent on food to buy other things.
|
| So now that they're remote and have to buy their own food
| they have effectively received a pay decrease.
|
| How is it entitled to complain about a decrease in
| compensation for the same work?
| slibhb wrote:
| I find this legalistic perspective horrifying. It's as if
| you think every aspect of the relationship between you and
| your employer has to be written down as part of a contract
| and endlessly scrutinized.
|
| For me, and I expect for most humans, the ideal employer-
| employee relationship is much more tacit. It's like being
| part of a sports team. There are bounds of duty and
| privilege that are mutual, acceptable to all parties, and
| do not have to be written down.
|
| If everything was written down, it would make work
| intolerable. Every action would have to be catalogued,
| defined, and priced. In an effort to create a "better
| workplace," you would be destroying the things that makes
| work tolerable.
| serverholic wrote:
| You just pulled that argument out of your ass. I wasn't
| implying that everything needs to be written down in a
| legal document.
|
| Also I can't help but feel that your perspective is
| coming from a place of privilege. If I had to guess I'd
| say you either A) Haven't been screwed by an employer
| before or B) Are the employer.
|
| I guarantee that if your employer fucked you over you'd
| be paying a lot more attention in the future.
| srndsnd wrote:
| I think that's an exaggeration of what OP is saying. It's
| fuzzy, but there's a definitive distinction between
| "every aspect of your relationship" and benefits that
| impact someone's bottom line like free food.
|
| OP did not say, and I wouldn't either, that every aspect
| of a employer-employee relationship should be documented
| and tracked like a PnL. But no one should pretend that
| it's not a debate over "unwritten compensation", and the
| value the employer gets from the employee. If employers
| didn't want to quantify that, there wouldn't be demand
| for corporate spyware and monitoring of employees. Yes,
| the Microsoft 365 option was shut down, but it's an arms
| race, and that's one battle in a war.
|
| Why shouldn't employees want to extract the most value
| they can for their labor, and push back when the terms of
| that agreement change? If cost cutting or taking a loss
| necessitated a firing, would that "tacit relationship"
| prevent someone from being fired? My guess is no.
| Business is business, not personal.
| slibhb wrote:
| I extended the previous poster's argument. He said food
| should be priced in, my point is that work is only
| tolerable because we stop pricing things in at a certain
| point. I agree with you: that line is fuzzy, but we have
| to place it somewhere (and amenities should not be priced
| in).
|
| > Why shouldn't employees want to extract the most value
| they can for their labor, and push back when the terms of
| that agreement change? If cost cutting or taking a loss
| necessitated a firing, would that "tacit relationship"
| prevent someone from being fired? My guess is no.
| Business is business, not personal.
|
| One conception of employment involves voluntarily adopted
| shared goals. Another conception is that employees rent
| themselves in exchange for money.
|
| I suppose I think we need to find the happy medium
| between those conceptions. Too much of the latter
| perspective leads to alienation (because you conceive of
| yourself as a wage slave) whereas the former can lead to
| exploitation.
|
| The article is arguing that Google is too far into the
| latter conception. It should towards the former, not all
| the way, but at least a little.
| sneak wrote:
| Google has been known to point out the perks, such as
| catering, when asked by candidates for more salary during
| negotiation, as well.
| serverholic wrote:
| Yeah it's interesting that the person I was replying to
| used the word "privilege" when describing those perks. As
| if Google was doing this out of the goodness of their
| heart.
| sneak wrote:
| It can be privilege to have a job, any job, that comes
| with perks like included food, or healthcare, even if
| those are part of one's negotiated compensation package.
| serverholic wrote:
| Then you're just asking to be taken advantage of. You are
| more important than your employer. Therefore you should
| be looking to extract as much value from your employer as
| possible.
|
| If you don't think your employer is doing the same then
| you're just naive. Google isn't catering food out of the
| goodness of their heart. It's a calculated cost-benefit
| analysis to attract and retain top talent.
|
| Edit: It's also a tactic to get people to work longer
| hours.
| esotericn wrote:
| My employer has killed off office perks during lockdown; it
| doesn't seem intentional, more of a bureaucratic thing.
| People are still in the office, but the management aren't, so
| things don't get done.
|
| I've told them that this is an issue for morale - the old
| "buying the cheap toilet paper" adage comes to mind - but I'm
| not holding out much hope that anything will happen.
|
| Is it a significant hardship for me to buy lunch? No. It
| wouldn't be a significant hardship for them to give it
| either.
|
| To be brutally honest - we all need _more_ support during
| lockdown and restrictions, not less. In the UK, work and the
| supermarket are pretty much the only legal reasons for most
| to be outside at the moment.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > There are people who are great for a stage of the company and
| later, do not have the right skills as the company grows. It is
| not their fault, it is reality.
|
| While at the same time wanting to fire the employee as soon as
| they don't need the skill. The commitment is entirely a one way
| street.
| andor wrote:
| That's not how I read it.
|
| He clearly states that he understands the value of work-life
| balance, but there are _work_ places where work is just not the
| #1 priority _during business hours_ anymore. And that 's
| totally fine and I'm happy if it works for people and their
| employers. But it's not viable for startups that need to find
| product-market-fit before burning through all their cash. Or
| companies trying to make best-in-class products.
| BikiniPrince wrote:
| It doesn't really work long term for large companies either.
|
| Unless you are riding the back of some cash cow you do have
| to worry about profit. I have watched the complete erosion of
| our tech leads and the incoming hires bear so little
| responsibility. Management is also quite aware of what they
| have done, but half of them are on the way out too.
| jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 wrote:
| Get your test levels checked.
| _coveredInBees wrote:
| It's a good article with a lot of solid points, but that
| section had me rolling my eyes. Sure reads like someone pining
| for exploitative "startup" culture to get more than what they
| are paying for out of their employees. If you consistently feel
| the need to impinge on your employees weekends or PTO, that's a
| management failure, not an entitled employee problem.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| There's also this lovely comment in the "focus" session where
| he plainly asserted that "privacy has no value to his users".
| bagacrap wrote:
| I think it's important for all the Google bashers out there
| to note this example of a high profile employee leaving
| because Google cared too much about privacy (or "noise" as
| he terms it).
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I read that as "legal got involved and we had a ton of
| meetings that achieved nothing for our users" rather than
| "privacy did nothing for our users".
|
| I don't think Google "cares about" user privacy. I think
| they care about minimising any legal risk. These are two
| very different attitudes.
| watwut wrote:
| "we have an extremely long project that consumed many of
| our best engineers to align our data retention policies
| and tools to Google"
|
| The only way a big company can somehow ensure that all
| teams are going to follow the privacy or any other policy
| is to force the teams to "align our data retention
| policies and tools to Google".
|
| This is literally Google having process to ensure some
| privacy policy and op having issue with that.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Again, I read it differently. It sounded more like a
| pedantic insistence on company-wide protocol rather than
| a genuine desire to be careful with user data. But I may
| be being uncharitable.
| watwut wrote:
| If you want to keep a company of hundreds or thousands
| people following some rule, really the only way is if you
| create processes that check and force that. There is no
| way to keep company following privacy rules (as weak as
| they are) without company wide protocol and insistence on
| it.
|
| Otherwise, the pressure from people who want to do other
| things will ensure that privacy or rules will be ignored.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| "The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy,
| Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet,
| meant a significant waste of resources and focus."
|
| Oh yeah. That's going to be entirely incompatible with how
| Google does business. Google's primary concern isn't even
| that their customers care about those things (although they
| do)... It's the Google is a giant target and there are
| significant legal consequences for doing things or failing
| to do things that a jury outside of Google's control will
| decide after the fact was something they "should have known
| better" about.
|
| Startup companies end up concerned less about this because
| they have less to lose. A startup company isn't exactly
| "judgement-proof..." The wrong decision can certainly get
| them sued out of existence. but the odds of it happening
| are lower, because at the end of the day they have fewer
| assets to seize. There's a much smaller target on their
| backs and fewer high ticket lawyers for whom the possible
| compensation would justify taking the case. there's no such
| reasonable constraint on how much you could sue Google
| for... a case that a high ticket lawyer wins against Google
| will _definitely_ pay for itself.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I didn't read it as that bad - he states it should be a
| balance.
|
| Balancing work and life means if you get the Yoga session at
| 11am, then you're also OK with getting paged at 11pm to fix
| server downtime.
|
| When I've managed teams, I always held that it's quid-pro-quo.
| If I want the team to stay late to meet the deadline, then I'm
| OK with them leaving early to pick the kids up from school
| (though not on the same day, obviously). If they need to take
| the morning off to go to the dentist, that's cool as long as
| they're OK with getting a call on the weekend if there's a
| problem. It's a give-and-take. If the give-and-take gets too
| much, one way or another, then that's something we can talk
| about at a regular one-to-one and work out.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| At googles scale you would have shift coverage for that
| shurly
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| good point - at that scale the "team" includes all the
| people you'd ever need to cover every eventuality
| alephnan wrote:
| This irks of an entitled Googler.
|
| I reported up to Noam and he's an admirable leader to me. In
| fact, I will be excited to learn about and join his next
| project if it has a culture distinct from this Google "work
| life balance" and the false pretense that "work life balance"
| == happiness.
|
| I was the lowest of low level bricklayers, on the opposite end
| of the pecking order, but his comments on The Corporation and
| its entitled / PC constituent members resonated with me. If it
| didn't resonate with you, that's why you'd probably stick
| around at Google for a long time. Sure, many Googlers may be
| happy he left, but that doesn't disprove his points. If
| anything, it kind of supports Noam's argument.
|
| In case someone says "if you don't like it, then leave". I just
| did.
|
| Google is barely the most innovative place for an engineer to
| work nowadays, nor is compensation "top of market". The rest of
| the tech world has caught up. Actual top of market pay would at
| least made me ignorant, for a little bit longer, to the fact
| that work was unfulfilling. Yeah, we had great work life
| balance, so what? I'm still expected to be there 9-5, and
| spending 1/3rd of your life expanding work to fill the time
| allocated to it doesn't equate happiness. In fact, for me it
| was outright depression. I'm in a more intense work environment
| now, pays a fraction of Google, but I am happier on so many
| fronts. There's much less "abstraction" and needless
| complexity. Some of us would rather have real work to do than
| coast or work on projects/problems that simpler do not need to
| exist.
|
| The state of limbo induced by "work life balance" isn't the
| fault of Noam, because as I interpretted in his blog, the
| Googleplex Twilight Zone inhibits fully realizing the culture
| in the executive team's vision. Maybe the vision is a
| trainwreck or maybe it's brilliant, but I don't believe the
| "autonomy" afforded by Google allows realizing these extremes.
| There's so many layers/indirection between me, the bricklayer,
| and the person at the helm. Combine that with the misaligned
| incentives in a corporation where resume projects are being
| advanced, I wasn't even building the great pyramid of Giza as
| much as I was building some offshoot resort home for one of the
| scribes that reported up to the priest who reported up to the
| pharoah.
| vincnetas wrote:
| For me it was the opposite, i was thinking, wow, this is the
| guy i would like to be working with. But i'm not the one who
| fits this description: You need to be able to
| answer the "what have you done for our users lately" question
| with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that
| answer to be successful in Corp-Tech.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| "What did I do for the customer today" is often in principle
| not answerable within megacorps. If you're the person who
| fixes a new employee's password issues, you have to do mental
| gymnastics like "I helped X fix their password, then X
| created a new Jira ticket for Y, Y helped scope and plan the
| ticket in Z's sprint, Z gathered requirements and assigned it
| to A, A paired with B and they wrote code that removed
| extraneous serifs from the new widget font, C reviewed their
| code, D took the new deployment to the mobile team who QA
| tested it, then E stamped approval on a new rollout of the
| app, and now users of iOS 13.6.9 who also specifically only
| use Firefox Focus won't see extraneous serifs in the font on
| the widget tab in their account page. Let's crack the
| champagne everyone!"
|
| The degree of behemoth incrementalism is so extreme that
| outside the _immediate_ blast radius of your work, there is
| no serious, intellectually honest way to connect the dots
| between your effort and the user. It's like shipping a rover
| to Mars. You do a shitload of work and hope several time
| units later when it actually lands, that your work has some
| barely perceptible positive contribution to the sum total
| outcome.
|
| And all this is even worse in companies where it's not clear
| to anyone whether the user is the product or the customer.
| Just imagine that. "How did you help the user today?" should
| make you freeze like a deer in headlights. Do you mean the ad
| company who can target Starbucks-drinking soccer moms in
| Texas better now because of our cool new image filter for
| posting kid sports pictures? Or do you mean the soccer moms
| themselves? Or do you mean the NSA we are allowing access to
| all this data on both the advertiser and the soccer moms? Or
| do you mean the VCs?
|
| Leaders who say platitudes like "what did you do for the
| customer" are just extremely arrogant know-nothings. They can
| use the stick of "the customer always comes first" to
| indiscriminately beat, shame or fire anyone that they
| conveniently need to attack, no matter how unrealistic it is
| to demand this kind of direct customer impact accounting.
|
| Employees aren't braindead morons who subscribe to your
| company like a religion. But that is _exactly_ what this type
| of thinking is meant to induce.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I think you're violently agreeing with the author.
|
| In a startup it's easy to see what value you added for the
| user every day. In a megacorp it's impossible. In a startup
| having the managers ask "what did we do for the users
| today?" helps the whole team stay on track. In a megacorp
| it's a useless platitude.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| No, I'm not agreeing at all. The author is asserting that
| you _should always be_ in the start-up situation of not
| having incremental work where your ultimate impact on
| customers comes through long chained sequences of tiny
| tweaks or accumulated effects.
|
| It's perfectly fine (good even) to work in a large
| company where your value add is not immediately clarified
| and is just part of a large agglomerated process. Most
| net benefit to consumers occurs this way.
|
| It's also fine if you want to work in the start-up
| manner, but it's not "better" or "more correct" or
| anything.
|
| The author is taking it to a deeply unreasonable extreme
| that shows more about the author's arrogance than about
| any sincere or earnest desire to help customers.
| mabbo wrote:
| > Being promoted has more impact on the individuals economic
| success than the product growth. The decision which product to
| work on stems from the odds of getting promoted and thus we began
| onboarding people with the wrong state of mind - seeing Waze as a
| stepping stone and not as a calling.
|
| Their ability to maximize their own income before the acquisition
| was based on how successful your product was- they had stock
| options! Their ability to maximize their income after the
| acquisition was based on getting their next promotion.
|
| They were never actually in love with your product. The passion
| was not passion for what you did. Their passion was for money.
| Waze was always a stepping stone.
|
| All the while, here you are complaining that you can't
| arbitrarily fire people, that you can't "speak your mind" for
| fear of HR complaints, just generally wishing you could continue
| to abuse your employees. These are things you only did because
| those employees were just a stepping stone for your success, not
| people.
|
| What a whiny hypocrite.
| curiousllama wrote:
| > Any idea we had was quickly co-opted by Google Maps ... Looking
| back, we could have probably grown faster and much more
| efficiently had we stayed independent.
|
| This is a great example of the difference between startup people
| and big company people. A big-company exec would have known to
| (how to?) fight that battle. Waze was a superior product, while
| Maps just had superior resources: they should have built support.
| But there's no mention of other execs.
|
| As a big company guy, I read this and think "oh man..." - I can
| only _imagine_ how frustrated this guy must be
| andrew_ wrote:
| It's astounding in so far as how unique this conversation is to
| tech. I've worked as a pipefitter, electrician's apprentice, and
| general construction hand in the past - I could only imagine how
| it would go telling my former foreman that I'd like to head off
| to yoga in the morning for an hour. Big jobs that require
| overtime to complete get folks to work that overtime - even
| within a union. If it's not you, it's someone else, and they'll
| be remembered for stepping up.
|
| Bringing experience in other fields, namely the trades, to the
| conversation here might make it more clear why these things
| outlined in the article are seen as extreme entitlement. It's not
| a lack of work-life balance - something I see and hear about in
| most industries now - it's about caring deeply about your career,
| your work, and perhaps the project at hand, while not allowing
| that work to define your life. Pride and dedication to work can
| be balanced with family. It's not a zero sum game. What the
| author is trying to explain, in my mind, is that there is large
| priority on only one side of the equation (life), while
| indifference towards the other (work).
|
| We have it _AMAZINGLY WELL_ being in tech, and we have luxuries
| that are unique to tech and bewildering to folks in other fields.
| duxup wrote:
| Even within the world of tech the contrasts are striking.
|
| I worked for a tech company based in the Midwest that was
| acquired by a company in the valley. I regularly went on visits
| to HQ. Some of the folks I met complained strongly about things
| like lunch not being provided... as often. And their lunches
| were amazing, with drinks, and socialization.
|
| I came from a place that maybe once a quarter someone would
| order a bunch of cheap-o pizza... maybe, unless they were
| concerned about the budget (like $300 worth of pizza matters).
| And what that meant was you went and grabbed a piece of pizza
| and went back to your desk...
|
| That's not to say one is right or one was wrong (both locations
| could have certainly used a little of each's culture /
| traditions), but the privileges of the tech world (particularly
| some companies) are generally pretty amazing, and I'm not sure
| folks who have never left those places really get it...
|
| I sometimes feel like I'm talking a to aliens from another tech
| world when it comes to their complaints, like they're from that
| space ship in WALL-E.
| dingo454 wrote:
| I'm in IT, but I've worked as electrician and carpenter for
| some years. IMHO this is not easily comparable as you'd think.
|
| You can easily estimate the time required to perform some
| physical tasks. It's a bit different if you're working on
| something you never did before, but again as an electrician or
| carpenter this rarely happens after the training period.
| Working more hours generally does result in more work done,
| although the physical factor makes this work-life balance waaay
| more obvious to whoever is working.
|
| In IT I'm constantly working on things which are slightly
| different than before. Time estimation is big common issue in
| the field. I'll be fully honest and say that working 4 or 8
| hours a day makes absolutely no difference in work being done
| for me, except in very rare cases. Dedication has nothing to do
| with it (I love what I do). Technically I'm not stopping to
| work at the 6pm hour mark, my brain keeps thinking about
| technical issues also during off hours and the weekend.
|
| I don't know about you but I felt physically tired, but
| _satisfied_ at the end of the day when working as a carpenter.
| Sense of accomplishment was much more rewarding. When coming
| home I would enjoy something different. The next day I was
| recharged.
|
| When working on problem-solving, I don't feel physically tired,
| but I can still feel exhausted in a way that prevents me doing
| other things. It's much, much harder to find a good balance.
| And I'd stress this again: putting more working hours sitting
| in front screen is not necessarily achieving anything.
|
| Note also that these crazy perks as outlined in the article are
| not my experience in IT working in several places in EU. Yes,
| our working hours are more flexible due to the nature of the
| job, but I've yet to see such entitlement in my career. Maybe
| I've been unlucky.
| amykyta wrote:
| The energy drain of software development is something I
| struggle with. I've worked as a painter and can relate to
| wrapping things up for the day and coming home physically
| exhausted but with energy remaining. Especially with Covid
| 'work from anywhere all the time' it's very difficult to find
| a balance as a software slinger.
| yardie wrote:
| I've worked in union shops as well while not being in the
| union. Union overtime is highly coveted because it's a 2x-3x
| bonus that a lot of my union friends used towards a
| downpayment, kids' college tuition, retiring earlier, or
| starting a business. No one had to step up because everyone was
| stepping up. And the shop chief usually decided who got that
| overtime (i.e. young worker trying to buy a house might get
| higher priority over a senior.)
|
| Also, shops had extremely good work life balance. You were at
| the timeclock 4:59 on the dot. No one is asking you to stay
| late, or be on call uncompensated. Your time was your time from
| 5pm-8am. By their virtue of being always online, tech companies
| intrude into that worklife balance and it's not unreasonable to
| ask for some of it back.
| asidiali wrote:
| This - the mental overhead of a software job is not something
| that is easily turned off during non work hours - especially
| with a pushy employer or coworkers with no work life balance
| themselves.
|
| You can't cut steel at home after dinner no matter how hard
| you try if you don't have the tools. Conversely, I'm sure you
| have a computer, can you just login to GitHub for two seconds
| to review this PR I submitted at 9pm...
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > the mental overheard of a software job is not something
| that is easily turned off during non work hours
|
| this is very ignorant.
|
| the ability to leave work at work is a personality trait.
| the job, or type of job, has little to do with it.
|
| software development is not some exceptionally difficult
| thing that tortures and haunts developers.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Ignoring your last sentence (which doesn't merit
| response) to disagree with "the type of job has little to
| do with [the ability to leave work at work]".
|
| Thought work is fundamentally different from physical
| labor. Work:life boundaries are so permeable. Any but the
| most ignorant, junior, "code-monkey" -type developer
| spends a large portion of their cognitive resources on
| solving problems (as opposed to strictly sitting at the
| keyboard writing code like a factory worker).
| Compartmentalization may well be a personality trait or
| learned skill, but setting down physical tools in the
| shop before commuting home is completely different from a
| software dev's home office and potentially round-the-
| clock work cycles.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I couldn't disagree more. I am thinking about hard
| problems in the back of my mind pretty much all the time,
| or am not making progress on them. Software engineering
| can be like pipe fitting, where there is a blueprint; but
| it can also be a much more creative search for solutions
| like looking for a math proof, writing a screenplay, or
| trying to phrase a legal argument that churns up your
| background cycles.
|
| Without those periods I would never be able to do the
| best work I've done. There is a lot of pipe fitting in
| the business - and it's fine to do only that. But it's
| not some personality defect to have work thoughts kicking
| around in the back of your head, it's a necessary trait
| in my experience for the more difficult software jobs.
| asidiali wrote:
| Well said, totally agree. Thank you for explaining the
| more nuanced points here better than I could.
|
| IC-level contracting or consulting gigs are often (not
| always) much more numb - you're handed a design, a user
| spec, maybe some existing APIs or infrastructure, and you
| essentially color in the lines. Other roles require much
| more organic composition, aka, Zero to One.
| jolux wrote:
| > software development is not some exceptionally
| difficult thing that tortures and haunts developers.
|
| There's definitely a difference between white
| collar/knowledge work and manual labor or highly people-
| focused work, though. I've worked retail and food service
| before and the mental overhead is absolutely different.
| It took me a long time (years) to learn how to turn off
| my brain at 5pm and stop programming when I got my first
| tech job. Not something I had a problem with in more
| manual industries: when you're not at the workplace, you
| can't work, even if you wanted to.
| asidiali wrote:
| Agreed! Is it black and white? No of course not. You can
| and need to learn how to properly transition between work
| and home. It takes time. Totally agree with you.
|
| It's nearly impossible to do when your employer is not on
| that same page with you, or even worse is instead
| fighting against it.
| asidiali wrote:
| > the ability to leave work at work is a personality
| trait. the job, or type of job, has little to do with it.
|
| This is very ignorant.
|
| There are many outside factors that go into if an
| employee needs to focus on work after hours, such as
| accessibility to the working environment, cultural
| practices at the company, etc.
|
| Who said anything about haunting?
|
| If my manager hits me up at 11pm asking for something,
| sure I can ignore him or her.
|
| Then I come in the next day, they already did the thing
| they asked for themselves because [insert business
| reason], and says "never mind".
|
| Next time it happens, they go to the other dev who is
| happy to do it at 11pm.
|
| Guess who gets the promotion?
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| The sucker who's working at 11pm?
|
| More seriously, if this is you, find an employer/manager
| who's not gratuitously invading your non work time.
| asidiali wrote:
| Very much agreed. You have to do what is in your control
| as an employee. If it's a cultural problem, that usually
| means your best bet is to simply find a team with better
| culture. Culture is a hard problem to solve if it's not
| right.
| aerosmile wrote:
| With two comments quoting the same example, you seem
| really hell-bent on driving this point home. Ok, I'll
| bite. How often do you get those 11pm requests that will
| otherwise get rerouted to someone else unless you respond
| before 8am? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? A few times per year?
|
| Context matters, because believe it or not, most
| professionals occasionally go the extra mile no matter
| what industry they are in. I recently dropped off a
| motorcycle for a repair, and the young guy working at
| that shop stayed an hour late to get my business. When
| something breaks in my house, I have hundreds of people
| jumping at the bit to come to fix it at any given time,
| before or after work, weekday or weekend.
|
| Nothing is ever perfect in life, but your criticism of
| your experience as a software engineer would come across
| as a lot more empathetic if you started off by
| acknowledging that you made an excellent career choice to
| start with, and that this allows you unprecedented career
| mobility, including the option of easily quitting your
| job should you have the rare misfortune of having landed
| at any of the few bad apples that do not reward you for
| your stress with oodles of money that you wouldn't be
| able to make anywhere else with that amount of effort and
| work experience.
|
| Not to mention that if stress and money are not your
| thing, go and work as a software engineer at an old
| school Fortune 500 company. I promise to you that nobody
| will ever ask you to do anything at 11pm there, and
| you'll still get paid well.
| asidiali wrote:
| > How often do you get those 11pm requests that will
| otherwise get rerouted to someone else unless you respond
| before 8am? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? A few times per year?
|
| Multiple times per month. 3/4 weekends per month. How's
| that? Not uncommon in many small startups I've been a
| part of as an employee, founder, or advisor.
|
| Your point is fine, except for the fact that it totally
| overlooks if an employee is actually already putting in
| that extra effort, and is just getting taken advantage of
| by their company.
|
| What if I am already objectively going the extra mile?
| Who's to say I'm not? My boss. And they will say that.
| See: Tesla Skips 401k Match for Third Straight Year [1],
| while simultaneously investing over $1B into Bitcoin.
|
| > and that this allows you unprecedented career mobility,
| including the option of easily quitting your job should
| you have the rare misfortune of having landed at any of
| the few bad apples that do not reward you for your stress
| with oodles of money that you wouldn't be able to make
| anywhere else with that amount of effort and work
| experience.
|
| Ok, setting aside the fact that the money is relative to
| the value created for these companies (see: richest
| people on the planet and how they got there)...
|
| You didn't actually comment on the main point. You just
| said, oh if that happens, you are able to leave. Yeah -
| that's the point. It happens. And if it does, you should
| leave. Not succumb to Stockholm syndrome and act like oh
| it's part of "sacrificing for this awesome job". Even you
| said it. Go find another job.
|
| If you think this is just happening at "a few bad apples"
| then I'm inclined to assume you have not experienced a
| wide variety of startup and company cultures in multiple
| locales - not saying this is true of you but what it
| sounds like.
|
| I only used the same comment because another person made
| a similar point which warranted an identical response.
|
| [1] https://www.pionline.com/defined-contribution/tesla-
| skips-40...
| aerosmile wrote:
| > many small startups I've been a part of as an employee,
| founder, or advisor
|
| As a significant equity holder in an early stage company,
| you cannot compare yourself to regular employees. We're
| no longer comparing professions, and instead are
| comparing approaches to wealth creation: salary vs
| equity. Again, if you're not a fan of risk, get a job at
| a bank.
|
| To bring it back to your original post - you called
| someone ignorant for stating that leaving work at work is
| a choice. It is indeed a choice, as we both concluded by
| stating that this career gives you plenty of opportunity
| for career mobility.
|
| EDIT: your post changed a couple of times and most
| recently added some bizarre criticism of capitalism
| ("setting aside the fact that the money is relative to
| the value created for these companies"). This is totally
| off-topic, and frankly I am having a hard time following
| your reasoning so I'll disengage and just hope you'll
| find peace and appreciation for the good things in life.
| asidiali wrote:
| > To bring it back to your original post - you called
| someone ignorant for stating that leaving work at work is
| a choice.
|
| It was tongue in cheek. I was literally quoting them
| calling me ignorant - it looks stupid and is not
| condusive to good discussion, I agree!
|
| > As a significant equity holder in an early stage
| company, you cannot compare yourself to regular
| employees.
|
| I was expressing the fact that I've seen this many times
| at several companies, as opposed to it being "a few bad
| apples" as you originally stated. Not that there is any
| similarity in the experiences of those roles.
|
| The choice to leave work at work on the daily, vs the
| choice to switch jobs when you're unhappy, are not the
| same choice - just so we clear that up because I feel
| like there are two separate points being made here vs the
| original comment I was replying to.
|
| It is a choice to leave, yes, definitely agree with you
| there and I appreciate your perspective here. We are
| definitely privileged to be in such a fruitful field.
|
| It is also a choice to leave work at work, however, there
| can be ramifications at your expense and out of your
| control if you do so. That doesn't happen when you are
| unhappy and decide to start looking for another job,
| unless you tell your employer you're doing so...
|
| EDIT: I added some hard data points to back up what I was
| saying. None of the points changed, only added, didn't
| delete. Apologies if that confused you.
|
| Criticism of capitalism? Lol, you said we should be
| grateful for all this money we earn in comparison to
| other industries. I said no duh, we create a ton of
| wealth - look at the wealthiest people in the world, they
| come from software - Gates, Musk, Bezos. It makes sense
| that compensation is higher in an industry where more
| value is being created.
|
| > so I'll disengage and just hope you'll find peace and
| appreciation for the good things in life.
|
| Likewise :)
| bhandziuk wrote:
| Sounds like if you have the potential to be addressing
| business problems at 11pm you should have an on-call
| schedule. Your boss just calling people randomly in the
| night is not a great way to get things done reliably
| anyway.
| asidiali wrote:
| Agreed! It's a business problem. It's not a problem of
| the employee to shift their mentality to suit the demands
| of their employer. People want to do a good job though.
| Hence why there is onus on the employer to provide work-
| life balance. It's not enough to just "not ask" for work
| on the weekends. You need to proactively discourage it.
| andrew_ wrote:
| This is a most excellent point. I will say that movement of
| scope, scheduling, and the like does change during all
| hours of the day, and calls to the home to talk about that
| are common after hours.
| yardie wrote:
| This is where you ignore the email until the morning. The
| only place where working offhours has a use is in early
| startups where money is tight, deadlines are short, and
| products are loosely defined. If you're working at a well
| managed company managers will nip it in the bud. Either way
| I'm not in college and I'm getting my 6-8 hours of sleep.
| If I work late I arrive late and expect no argument over
| it.
|
| I've only ever gotten an email like that because someone's
| ass was on the line for a 12am deadline. You only send an
| email like that because you are burning a personal favour.
| asidiali wrote:
| Copying part of my reply to another comment:
|
| If my manager hits me up at 11pm asking for something,
| sure I can ignore him or her.
|
| Then I come in the next day, they already did the thing
| they asked for themselves because [insert business
| reason], and says "never mind".
|
| Next time it happens, they go to the other dev who is
| happy to do it at 11pm.
|
| Guess who gets the promotion?
|
| Even if it's unfair and shouldn't happen that way -
| company culture is not something controlled by an
| contributing engineer.
|
| But I agree with your other points - a well run company
| will nip this in the bud! That's exactly the point. It's
| not in control of the engineer. It's company culture.
| You're right that I'd say this probably happens much more
| at startups vs larger companies due to the loose and fast
| nature.
| yardie wrote:
| > my manager hits me up at 11pm asking for something
|
| One thing I learned about management is they are getting
| more than salary, usually there is a bonus or RSUs
| attached to everything they do. But they aren't working
| at 11pm for the good of the company if the good of the
| company isn't directly benefiting them. Keep that in mind
| the next time you respond to that midnight email.
|
| > they go to the other dev who is happy to do it at 11pm.
|
| Believe it or not this dev sounds like management
| material. That's not a compliment! If you think back to
| every belittling, sociopathic manager/director story
| you've observed or heard, these are the places they are
| formed. Now some managers are great leaders and you
| recognize why they are in that position. The majority are
| sycophants who kiss the right ass, by working at 11pm on
| a saturday.
| asidiali wrote:
| Sadly I totally agree with you, it is true.
|
| There is a social element to that equation though, which
| is why management in this particular type of situation
| has the tendency to so often turn into a "cool club" of
| people who do everything together, hack on the weekends
| together, drink after work together, etc, and thus the
| work/life balance only gets worse as the cycle repeats
| and new managers are initiat...I mean, hired. Because
| it's in their personal best interest to keep up this
| culture.
| mywacaday wrote:
| It needs to be give and take on both sides, I went back to
| finish a presentation deck last night until 1am but I'll
| finish early in Friday or take time when it suits me and I
| don't have to tell my manager. One of the my direct reports
| took some time this morning to go do some person errands,
| didn't use vacation as he steps up when needed. He sent me a
| courtesy message to say he would be out for a few hours but
| it wasn't for approval. He gives when he needs to and he
| takes when he needs to and I trust him to manage that. But
| trust is needed and I've seen plenty of managers abuse
| people's goodwill, I can see why unions formalize that in a
| way.
| andrew_ wrote:
| I disagree only in that I worked salaried positions in the
| trades for some time. While most trades are hourly, there
| does exist a salaried contingent. The thinking that extra
| asks from your employer is an intrusion into your life is
| inherently, entitlement. Solid companies and management will
| repay that extra effort, in one form or another.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Well by your definition then I've come to makepeace with my
| entitlement, then, if this is truly entitlement to not want
| a work life that thinks it can intrude on my non-work life
| without me saying something about it and trying to minimize
| the blast radius.
|
| Yes, I'm entitled. I'm entitled to being defined by more
| than just how I make money. Yep. 100%
|
| Glad we could have this talk. Feels good to finally get
| that out.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| "Human rights, democracies, and whatever... It's all
| ~~nonsense~~ entitlement..."
|
| (https://pics.me.me/thumb_translated-by-memritv-org-
| human-rig...)
| yardie wrote:
| > The thinking that extra asks from your employer is an
| intrusion into your life is inherently, entitlement.
|
| Let's get this straight an entitlement is something that is
| owed. If I buy health insurance and go to the hospital I am
| entitled to use it. If I pay for unemployment in my salary
| and become unemployed I am entitled to it.
|
| > in one form or another.
|
| Banking and housing unfortunately does not work this way. I
| can only present a paystub or W4 when applying for a loan
| or renting a flat, any other form of compensation is
| disregarded. My dedication to the job should be remitted
| through my salary, a employee pizza/ice cream party doesn't
| mean a thing to me.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Every tech company I've worked at expected me to bring my
| laptop home every night "just in case we need you to jump in"
|
| FANG companies also typically pay your cellphone bill, again
| because they expect to be able to page and call you at any
| time.
| yardie wrote:
| I do the same but I don't jump in right away. We have
| runbooks and escalation routines. If it gets to the point
| that I need to "jump in" I take that time back in the
| upcoming days and weeks.
|
| As a personal favour I will fire off a private message to
| whichever colleague is on call if I see they are
| floundering. Because I'm a good guy and believe the help I
| give today may be requited down the line.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| This. The article author describes a number of symptoms. Viewed
| through my lens of abstraction, he's arguing about passion for
| the job/product/team. People who are passionate about what they
| do are often frustrated when surrounded by those less
| passionate.
|
| I notice in some of the comments either in support of or
| against this guy, there's a subtle distinction. Those against
| say things like "I'd never work _for_ this guy. " And those
| more supportive, say things like "I'd like to work _with_ this
| guy. "
|
| I see in tech often that there are those who want to view it as
| an idyllic "team play" game. We're all on the court together
| trying to score goals. And there's another segment that see it
| in the more traditional factory worker. Clearly defined roles,
| chains of report, advancement up the pyramid.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I've actually had the opposite experience working as summer
| labor for facilities maintenance.
|
| It was extremely 9-to-5; well, technically, 7-to-3:30. Most
| people worked most of the time, because it was hourly, but if
| you needed to arrange to not, it wasn't a big deal, because you
| were hourly, and moreover, not customer-focused. If (nearly)
| everyone took the same day off, you just needed a skeleton crew
| for emergencies and the maintenance just got done a day later.
|
| I don't think the distinction is really "tech versus non-tech"
| or even "white-color versus blue". I think the real distinction
| is jobs that have deadlines for one-off projects versus jobs
| that ... don't, where you just do the same tasks over and over
| because they keep needing to be done. Building maintenance is a
| lot like building construction, it uses the same skills to do
| the same things, but one uses a small number of people to do
| the work over fifty years that the other does with a large
| number in one.
|
| The two types of work require different mindsets and different
| lifestyles. When you have a deadline, one big thing to
| accomplish before you rest, it makes sense to work long hours
| and monomaniacally to meet those deadlines. When you are in it
| for the long haul, you need to pace yourself.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| >> We have it AMAZINGLY WELL being in tech, and we have
| luxuries that are unique to tech and bewildering to folks in
| other fields.
|
| Yep, even other highly paid fields! Can you imagine a surgeon
| scheduling their surgeries around yoga classes?
| asidiali wrote:
| I have news for you buddy...
|
| That's exactly what they do.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Nah. My parents are doctors and I know quite a few
| surgeons. They might schedule their work around kids and
| family and whatnot, but none of them will opt to go to yoga
| or whatever when there is a pending surgery.
|
| I know of only one guy who is a plastic surgeon and he is
| like that, but he's also one of the best in his field and a
| bit of a prima donna...
| asidiali wrote:
| Ok, I hear you. However, I cofounded a medical startup
| with 3 surgeons, seeing their day to day routine pretty
| closely, at their offices, at home, etc...
|
| And they definitely worked around their own schedule.
| They either owned their own practice, or worked at a
| larger one, and controlled their own scheduling via their
| team. Surgeries are scheduled weeks or months in
| advanced. Only when an emergency came in they needed to
| shuffle things around - basically the same thing with
| engineers and planned deployments vs random outages.
|
| > none of them will go to yoga with a pending surgery
|
| Ok, yeah, of course they are not going to just up and
| leave when there is an appointment or deadline. That has
| nothing to do with whether or not they chose the time of
| that appointment in the first place.
|
| > They might schedule their work around kids and family
| and whatnot
|
| s/kids/exercise/g
| Balgair wrote:
| There is the old stereotype of a MD canceling appointments
| because of a Tee-Time conflict, after all.
| amerkhalid wrote:
| Yes they do. I have a few doctor friends, like for any
| customer facing job they cannot just show up an hour late.
| But they have a lot of control on their schedule and they do
| schedule it around their yoga classes, prayer schedule, kids
| stuff etc.
| david38 wrote:
| Overtime is remembered a lot less than you think. I have family
| in the trades and they much prefer their union jobs to my
| programming one.
|
| Yes, I get paid more, but I also work more, in an area where I
| can't afford a house.
| eropple wrote:
| You aren't constrained to live in those areas to make a
| living, though. I'm a senior/principal level developer living
| just outside of Boston (I can walk to a subway in 30 minutes
| or just hop on a commuter rail stop in about five) and I can
| very comfortably afford a 4-bed house on a single salary. And
| the Boston area _is not cheap_.
| ghaff wrote:
| Like many cities that have expensive areas (and
| Boston/Cambridge certainly do), it's often fairly easy to
| get to suburbs--some of which have downtown areas--that
| aren't Midwest cheap but are fairly affordable. I live
| quite a bit further out but I'm still able to drive in for
| an evening or take commuter rail in for a day.
|
| I think the fact that it's hard to get out of the expensive
| areas in the Bay Area in a reasonable amount of time gives
| a lot of people a false impression of the situation with
| other expensive cities.
| asidiali wrote:
| You can't commit a fitted pipe to the company repo at 2am on a
| weekend. You also can't be pressured to. Well you can - but we
| would instantly recognize that one for what it is - ludicrous!
| thefrog wrote:
| > We have it AMAZINGLY WELL being in tech, and we have luxuries
| that are unique to tech and bewildering to folks in other
| fields.
|
| This all fucking day. The worst part of this industry is the
| entitlement and straight up lack of gratitude for your
| position. It's taken for granted.
| jC6fhrfHRLM9b3 wrote:
| Golden handcuffs.
| OakNinja wrote:
| Wow. I'm curious what previous colleagues, employers and board
| members would say about this guy.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> Perhaps Corp-Tech should move to employee share buy back
| where employees must sacrifice some of their salary for equity or
| change equity to vest by a product related metric to connect the
| teams performance with the employee returns.
|
| Wow. It would have to tie into making upper management Pay-for-
| performance linked to similar metrics ;-)
| second--shift wrote:
| One question i have about working at Google - a bit embarrassing
| to ask, but does one's Google account/search history come into
| play during the application/interview process? I'd rather not be
| grilled about why I was Googling how to hack Wi-Fi passwords in
| 2012.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| Can't tell if serious, but there's not a snowball's chance in
| hell that happens.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| Wow! That's the worst you were googling?
|
| You make me look like a saint. :)
| cube2222 wrote:
| Regular overtime is nothing else than organisational and
| management failure to me. It means you have more work than you
| have people for, and should just hire more of them.
|
| I understand having to work late a day or two because there's an
| outage, or a feature needs to be done ASAP, but I'm taking those
| hours back the next day.
|
| Also, not sure about others, but I'm wildly productive when
| working up to 8 hours daily, and my productivity goes out the
| window if I work more than that for prolonged periods of time,
| because I get burned out real quick. (Actually, even with up to 8
| hours I need regular vacations)
|
| And being passionate about my work has absolutely nothing to do
| with that. (I try to work at places where I'm very passionate
| about it)
| darig wrote:
| It been 4 word since I make mistake. Probably good thing I not
| there now.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 9 years @ Google, and I too came from a company acquired by
| Google. (In my case, Google did not keep our product or tech
| stack around, so.) And yes, I can say many Googlers are entitled.
| It's a fair descriptor. And the pace of work is slower than a
| startup. In general.
|
| And I too have many criticisms of Google. But.
|
| Google has entirely different revenue constraints. It can afford
| an entirely different way of working. That pace allows a more
| sustainable cadence of development. It can be a more humane place
| to work, in general.
|
| Google can on the whole accomplish its revenue goals without
| being a meat grinder. So why be one? I think there is a bit of a
| problem with this guy's POV where he's come to fetishize the
| actual process of the making of the sausage versus the sausage
| itself.
|
| Projects need not be run under insane stress if there's a steady
| supply of talent and money to make things happen. Google can
| afford that. Pace will be slower. Perhaps less competitive. But
| the core business continues to do excellently.
|
| For many of us Google is not an "exciting" place to work. But
| it's a pretty good job to have and it pays well and gives access
| to both great benefits and to interesting technology. And that
| compensation in _most_ people does yield a sense of
| responsibility for delivery. But maybe not the survival-of-the-
| fittest-meat-grinder panic that this guy somehow seems to love.
| g9yuayon wrote:
| What the author said was a typical challenge in big enough
| company. Big companies over hire as time goes by, and the
| number of teams eventually outgrows the quantity of work. As a
| result, you have meetings all day to align, to coordinate, and
| to drive. The bigger an organization is, the more you hear
| about such phrases, and the more time you spend in meetings.
| BTW, I dare you to take away those meetings - so many people
| need those meetings to "assert influence", to get visibility,
| and to be promoted. In a large organization, people focus on
| Produktionsverhaltnisse, aka relation of production, instead of
| production itself.
|
| This is also why the Bay Area is a truly great place to live
| in. So many small companies are there for us to choose. They
| move fast yet have reasonable work-life balance. They offer
| great financial perspective too, which can be far better than
| big companies if one's lucky.
|
| Of course, I'm not saying big companies are all bad. Indeed,
| some people are great at navigating company dynamics. They
| build solid relationship in a complex environment. They make
| things happen despite bureaucracy. They lead multiple teams to
| achieve impossibles. They cut through red tapes like hot knife
| cutting through butter. They build a company to last.
|
| So, the real question one should ask is: which type of person
| am I?
| kenjackson wrote:
| > Big companies over hire as time goes by, and the number of
| teams eventually outgrows the quantity of work. As a result,
| you have meetings all day to align, to coordinate, and to
| drive. The bigger an organization is, the more you hear about
| such phrases, and the more time you spend in meetings. BTW, I
| dare you to take away those meetings - so many people need
| those meetings to "assert influence", to get visibility, and
| to be promoted.
|
| I think this is overly cynical. Big companies are typically
| further along the complexity curve. Complexity in
| engineering, but also sales, marketing, support, and growth
| opportunities (that is, growing revenue 25% is typically
| easier when you're revenue is $100K versus $100M).
|
| That said, they are real differences. A lot of people aren't
| going to enjoy that type of work, and will opt-out of it. But
| a lot of the lower-risk, better pay will be in this space (a
| startup is high-risk, potentially incredible payout).
| nixish wrote:
| Great dissection and incision of the OP's "fetishizing of the
| actual process of the making of the sausage vs the sausage
| itself."
|
| Creativity requires space. Space between work and space to
| think, be it on a yoga mat at 12 PM or a 4 PM refresher.
| fossuser wrote:
| My take would be Google can afford it for now because they have
| a web ad monopoly and don't have to compete.
|
| If they ever lose that, the culture they've built will cause
| them to be destroyed and irrelevant in not that much time.
|
| For now, it's summer.
| knuthsat wrote:
| You're assuming the rest of the world is different but it
| isn't. There's a massive amount of companies where working
| pace is very slow. A large percentage of employees do barely
| anything and these companies exist forever.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| This is mostly because at (a lot of) these places - there
| is no reward for doing any work. You don't get promoted if
| you do a good job. If you get a raise, it's like an extra
| $1k a year.
|
| You get little more than a pat on the back.
| throwmeaway_66 wrote:
| This is something that was unknown to me until a few years
| ago and I believe it's unknown to many in the tech
| industry. I make a close to Google-level salary in my
| position (say, 85% of it) in a tech company and I barely do
| any work (or better, I do some work for some hours a week).
| Little accountability, zero stress. And when I say "I
| barely do any work", I mean that when I hear start-up
| people ridiculing the typical Google senior-and-up IC who
| works 30-35 hours a week with weekends off, I say to
| myself: that's crazy, what would they think of me working
| (barely) 1/3 of those hours? Would I be the village idiot?
|
| There is always some drops fear trying to find a way up my
| limbic system whispering to me that one day this will be
| over. One day, I will have to work for real again and I
| will have to pass tough interviews and have new, possibly
| demanding bosses. But this has been going for more than 4
| splendid years, very long-termism tend to make one's life
| pretty dull, and my dream is to open a bicycle shop anyway.
|
| As a famous ad campaign used to suggest: "Think different".
| 01100011 wrote:
| Don't get complacent. I've been where you are, and when
| the party is over you're going to have a hell of a
| hangover unless you can ride that job to retirement.
| Relearning how to compete after a few years of coasting
| is brutal. I was just past 40 when my gravy train
| derailed. The slack years were fun but they went by fast.
| Compensation for a job is about more than money. It's
| about where you end up as a person when the job is over.
| throwmeaway_66 wrote:
| That's a good point and that's the drop of fear climbing
| making his way up to my brain. But I interview around, I
| got some offers that I have declined so far and I do some
| work, just a few hours a week.
|
| You wrote: "Compensation for a job is about more than
| money. It's about where you end up as a person when the
| job is over.". It sounds good in theory, but in practice?
| Should I switch job, maybe/likely accepting less money
| and more stress in the coal train now because when the
| luxury train stops I will be in a better place (I am
| exaggerating for conversation purposes)? I have my
| doubts. This is specific to my situation and I don't want
| to explain too much (and that's why I use a throwaway
| account), but outside of the US that would sound bizarre.
| Switching from a cushy well-payed job to a demanding,
| paying-less job because in a few months/years it will be
| over? Yes, maybe I will get rusty here and there, but I
| can move to Tulum for 3 months and get ready for
| interviews, no?
|
| EDIT: typo
| 01100011 wrote:
| I didn't say you should quit your job. Ride that train as
| long as you can. I'm saying you should manage yourself.
| If you only work half the day, spend the other half of
| the day:
|
| - Look for opportunities to contribute more at your job.
| Don't wait for a manager to tell you what to do. Rewrite
| some code. Propose a new feature. Improve the
| documentation. Write more tests.
|
| - Teach yourself new skills. Don't just skim books on new
| languages/technologies. Develop a personal project and
| pretend like you're being paid to work on it.
|
| - Take practice coding tests. Stay up to date with
| relevent skills.
|
| Enjoy the job you have now, but keep yourself ready for
| the day when that job goes away. I had a very easy job
| for about 6 years. I automated most of my job and
| effectively did not have a boss. I made great money and
| spent most of my time working on hobbies, hiking, or
| working on my house. When the job ended I suddenly
| realized all of my skills were rusty. I regret wasting
| all of that time, and wish I would have used it to better
| myself.
| throwmeaway_66 wrote:
| All very good points. However, if you do (1) (Look for
| opportunities at work), you don't have the time and
| energy for (2) and (3) with the regularity needed for
| making serious advances. At that point, you have a well-
| paid, non-stressful, truly full-time job. I would skip
| (1) and keep mostly (3) (well, that's what I do, more
| than advice. A pat on my shoulder, if you will). They are
| not paying you more, the more you do, the more troubles,
| stress, and annoyances you call in your direction, and
| when the tide turns, it is not that they are looking at
| some code review you did or improved documentation you
| wrote to keep you onboard.
|
| As I like to say: there is no second life, the only one
| that was build was virtual and "failed".
| 01100011 wrote:
| Yeah I didn't mean to suggest doing all 1, 2 and 3. Pick
| one. Do _something_ for at least half of your idle time,
| and do it with purpose.
|
| > when the tide turns, it is not that they are looking at
| some code review you did or improved documentation you
| wrote to keep you onboard.
|
| I mostly disagree, but it depends on your employer. As a
| senior engineer, I very much have the opportunity to
| differentiate myself and protect my position longer than
| others. I lost my easy job to lower paid, lower skilled
| engineer because I chose not to put in the work which
| would have defined my role as a more difficult one. It
| was easy to replace me when the time came because I
| allowed the scope of my role to shrink to menial tasks
| which did not require much thought.
| 46Bit wrote:
| > I can move to Tulum for 3 months and get ready for
| interviews, no?
|
| I've worked with plenty of sysadmins who suddenly had no
| choice but to become software engineers. That learning is
| brutal for _some_ of them-years long process, maybe
| never. 3 months may not be enough if you coast for long
| enough.
| burntengthrw5 wrote:
| Honest question from an eng working the last few decades
| at a FAANG and finding themselves burnt out to the point
| of panic attacks some mornings (e.g. "can I keep going at
| this pressure"; which has me laughing at least a little
| about the "FAANG is easy" sentiment elsewhere in the
| thread)
|
| Where? How do I find jobs like this?
|
| I get what the sister comment points out about long-term
| stagnation, but at the same time, I could desperately use
| a few years without a resume gap, but without a perpetual
| dagger hanging over my head.
| throwmeaway_66 wrote:
| There are plenty of high-revenue companies looking for
| people with prestigious backgrounds in a non-explicitly-
| called-that-way advisory role. It is not difficult to
| find jobs like those in general, but IMO most FAANG
| people lack the finesse needed to understand how to
| position themselves and understand what other people
| want, which, most of the time, are not the coding skills.
|
| Panic attacks are brutal and getting employees to the
| point of having panic attacks is part of what is wrong in
| the tech world. And it happens, in big corps, because
| some people want to advance at the expense of others.
| burntengthrw5 wrote:
| Very true on the last part. There are some quotes I'd
| love to share from mentors in the space but that would ID
| me too tightly.
|
| Would you say that any particular background and skill
| set or credentials/laurels (publishing? writing?
| speaking? management? management at a certain level?)
| sets you up most appropriately for getting this sort of
| role? Basically, how do I take any actionable steps to
| find those positions or move in that direction.
| throwmeaway_66 wrote:
| Certainly the FAANG-er needs to be in a senior role. To
| have a less stressful job, you need to look for senior-
| IC work, not management. Coming from management would be
| ok, but mostly companies I am talking about are looking
| for technical guidance or, more likely, reassurance.
| Publishing is helpful only if in the very specific area
| they are interested about.
|
| As to how to find those positions, my recommendation
| would be to look for (1) high-revenue, big companies
| (they have the money and they have the space), (2) going
| through some sort of transformation (moving to the cloud,
| opening a new business area), and (3) need prestige, both
| internally and externally.
|
| You can find those jobs in job ads, but you need to look
| at the ad written most of the time by a semi-clueless
| recruiter through the lens of points (1-3) above.
| bsaul wrote:
| in my personnal experience, the only kind of companies that
| are really comfortable to employees (in terms of perks) and
| adopt a slow rythm, are benefiting from some kind of
| monopolistic, regulatory situation.
|
| Either public sector companies, or banks & insurance whose
| business model can't be disrupted that easily because of
| regulatory pressures.
|
| Giant IT companies from the valley that successfully built
| a way to lock down users are the other example.
| sorisos wrote:
| could also be a niche market product created a decade ago
| that some other large company depends on. money keeps
| rolling in with little effort. source: personal
| experience. the company is no longer in operation but it
| lasted for a god 30 years.
| [deleted]
| izacus wrote:
| Except that Google was known for all these perks, 20% time (I
| wonder what this guy would think about someone wasting ONE
| DAY A WEEK for something not on his project?!), good food,
| etc. pretty much since inception.
|
| Isn't that why so many people flocked there to work in the
| first place?
| lhorie wrote:
| I recall watching a news report as a teen about how things
| used to be pretty chill at Microsoft at its heyday. These
| days it doesn't seem to have a monopoly on much of anything,
| but it can still crank out interesting projects.
|
| It doesn't have to be a black-and-white do-or-die.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| MSFT is _still_ known for good WLB. Just check places like
| Blind to get an idea of the corporate culture of a company.
| There are certainly hard teams /jobs at MSFT but it seems
| on average that the WLB at MSFT is super good.
| eigenvector wrote:
| Wasn't Microsoft widely regarded as a bit of a meat grinder
| in the Ballmer days due to stack ranking?
| fossuser wrote:
| Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at
| least trending that way. Nadella's turn around is almost
| miraculous and is itself probably an interesting story. I
| wouldn't bet on that as the norm. I'd expect the norm to be
| more like IBM, RIM, or Nokia.
|
| I agree with most of the article, but one line stuck out to
| me as particularly wrong:
|
| >"After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project
| that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data
| retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying
| this is not important BUT this had zero value to our
| users."
|
| Good retention policy does provide value to users.
|
| --
|
| > "When COVID hit and we moved to work from home - a huge
| amount of complaints began around why cant employees
| expense food since they are not in the office. While most
| "real" people were worried about keeping their jobs or
| finding one, many employees were complaining about
| expensing their food on top of their
| salaries/stocks/bonuses."
|
| +1 on this - I find this behavior really irritating, it
| makes me roll my eyes to see some of the most coddled
| employees in human history whining about this kind of
| thing. The most charitable interpretation is its just a
| normal way for people to bond over some shared thing by
| complaining about it, but a lot of the complaining feels
| like more than that.
|
| > "We had lunch in the cafeteria and a Googler online ahead
| of us was overheard saying "What? Sushi again???" which
| became our inside joke around entitlement."
| dcole2929 wrote:
| I really hate this narrative that Nadella came in and
| turned things around. He's absolutely made great
| decisions since taking the reins but most of his early
| success was just riding out things that Ballmer set in
| motion.
|
| Not to mention most of Ballmer's misses were more Bill
| said no.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was
| at least trending that way
|
| I'm not Ballmer's biggest fan, but I think he's often
| sold short (to Nadella's benefit), you'd almost believe
| Microsoft was tanking, but it grew a lot under Ballmer
| (mobile failures notwithstanding).
|
| As far as I can tell, Nadella just reprioritized projects
| that Ballmer launched or shepherded in his boring-but-
| efficient way: what new tech or project did Satya launch
| that you can attribute MS's "turnaround" to? IMHO, it's
| mostly PR/hearts-and-minds stuff, but I quit MS tech a
| long time ago and haven't been following closely.
|
| In retrospect, I think the Win mobile failures were
| overblown, the zeitgeist then was _mobile_ would replace
| desktop /laptop computers, therefore failing on mobile
| could be fatal to Microsoft, and remained as a stain on
| Ballmers name. The "post-pc" world suggested by
| Apple/Jobs never materialized.
| ghaff wrote:
| >The "post-pc" world suggested by Apple/Jobs never
| materialized.
|
| Clearly, it was in Apple's interest to emphasize the
| ascendance of mobile where they were strong vs. the PC
| where Microsoft was. I doubt Jobs thought
| desktops/laptops were going away, just that they'd become
| a less important part of the landscape--and that's almost
| certainly true among consumers as a whole.
| rrradical wrote:
| Stratchery did a nice piece on this:
| https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/
| sangnoir wrote:
| That stratechery piece confirms that a number of Satya's
| "quick wins" were projects mostly developed under Ballmer
| but credited to Nadella... Which is exactly my point -
| that Ballmer doesn't always get the credit he deserves,
| for the sake of magnifying the contrasts between the 2
| leaders.
| lallysingh wrote:
| I don't know about this. I think great engineers delete
| more code than they write. Perhaps something similar is
| relevant here.
| Miraste wrote:
| In a company the size of Microsoft, reprioritizing
| projects correctly is how you create a turnaround. He
| made Azure and Office 365 the central focus of the
| company just as software revenue growth was shifting to
| cloud hosting and SaaS, he stopped lighting money on fire
| trying to resurrect Windows Phone, he pushed Linux and
| OSS compatibility/development, and he put Phil Spencer in
| charge of Xbox which has saved the gaming division. He's
| also made some really nice acquisitions, IMO.
| MrMorden wrote:
| Azure was originally Windows Azure, but that was changed
| a month after satyan became the CEO.
|
| (MS employee; I work in Azure, but didn't become an MS
| employee until 2019.)
| ghaff wrote:
| Yep. You looked at the revenues and it was Windows and
| Office which were clearly not continuing growth areas.
| Azure was floundering and only targeting .Net. Xbox
| wasn't doing great. They were flaming out on mobile. They
| had most of the pieces. They just weren't arranged and
| prioritized properly.
| fossuser wrote:
| See: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/
|
| I think that article gets most of it. There's some MSFT
| narrative that comes up here a lot where people say
| Ballmer was doing great and Nadella just continued his
| plans, I don't buy it.
|
| MSFT had a lot of strategic failures as well as product
| failures under Ballmer. Nadella shifted strategy and made
| them a serious competitor again.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > There's some MSFT narrative that comes up here a lot
| where people say Ballmer was doing great and Nadella just
| continued his plans, I don't buy it.
|
| Then it should be easy to say which green-field projects
| Nadella launched then. I can't think of any, but I'm open
| to learning.
| jariel wrote:
| "made them a serious competitor again?"
|
| They were making money hand over fist, massive growth in
| revenues almost ever year under Ballmer. [1]
|
| Which part of that massive money train is 'not serious
| competitor'?
|
| [1]
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-
| global...
| fossuser wrote:
| I'm open to being wrong here and I'd agree that my
| initial comment was stated in a provocative way, but let
| me clarify a bit.
|
| Revenue growth isn't the whole story. If you're
| extracting rents from legacy locked-in products or
| enterprise deals that doesn't necessarily mean you're a
| competitor on the new paradigms (phone, cloud, web).
|
| At the time Windows phone was a failure and they missed
| that entire platform because of Ballmer (there's hints of
| your argument in this video, "we're making money with
| windows mobile"):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
|
| MSFT cloud wasn't doing well and was overly focused on
| .NET
|
| They were too focused on Windows rather than recognizing
| the strategic value they could provide outside of it:
| https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/
|
| Today I'd make a similar argument for Intel. Intel
| doubled down on old style fabs and is not competitive
| with TSMC. They failed to compete on mobile. They're
| ignoring the end of x86 and mocking Apple: https://hardwa
| re.slashdot.org/story/21/02/08/2221233/intel-b...
|
| Increasing revenue is a good sign, but it matters how. If
| you're making short-term decisions to extract money from
| legacy stuff at the expense of new products - that's bad
| for your long-term future. It can take a while to catch
| up to you, but it eventually will. Then you'll just limp
| a long as a dinosaur that makes enough money to survive
| but nobody really wants to work there and you're done
| doing interesting projects. That's basically what I mean
| by irrelevant.
| zo1 wrote:
| From my point of view, the things I've most "noticed"
| coming from MS that are great seem to all have been
| launched/started during Ballmer's days (2000-2014). For
| me those are:
|
| Office/Word Online (2010)
|
| Azure (2008/2010)
|
| WSL (Can't find info. Looks like it started before 2014
| under Project Astoria)
|
| .Net Core (Happened in 2014 - not sure who "started it")
| greedo wrote:
| "The "post-pc" world suggested by Apple/Jobs never
| materialized."
|
| I think if you could measure the man hours spent using
| iDevices and Android devices, as a percentage of general
| computing hours, you'd find that it would dwarf anything.
| Everyone has a smartphone now. And tablet sales alone
| outnumber PCs.
| niketdesai wrote:
| Nadella I think brought focus on ideas and prioritization
| that complimented Ballmer's ideas. He doesn't need to
| launch new projects, but ensure they are managed into a
| place of relevance. In that regard, it really showcases
| the excellent people MSFT has in the chain and how they
| can help each other get to where they collectively want
| to go.
| newobj wrote:
| MSFT "irrelevant" ... ah, ok, so you're just measuring
| capturing zeitgeist vs. sustainability of the business
| model ... ok
|
| MSFT revenue has NEVER stopped growing: https://www.macro
| trends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/rev...
| jariel wrote:
| "Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was
| at least trending that way. Nadella's turn around is
| almost miraculous "
|
| This is definitely not true.
|
| Ballmer increased revenues massively, and launched a slew
| of new products (XBox, MS Live, cloud etc.) and realigned
| the company. Have a look [1]
|
| Nadella has done nothing approaching that level of
| importance yet, so far, he is riding the wave that was
| handed to him.
|
| Now the _stock price_ - this is a different thing. It
| sagged under Ballmer even as MSFT was massively growing
| revenues, around Naella 's time investors realized that
| MS 'was not fading' and all that extra EPS was like a
| share price slingshot.
|
| Ballmer was as transformative and important as Gates.
|
| Nadella's early transformations were around culture, but
| that's just PR.
|
| [1]
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/267805/microsofts-
| global...
| fossuser wrote:
| Arguably the stock price is a prediction of future
| success, not current revenue.
|
| The fact that it sagged under Ballmer and is now up under
| Nadella aligns with how I'm framing things. I suppose you
| could argue that's entirely PR, but I don't think that's
| the case.
|
| People thought MSFT under Ballmer was trending down, now
| they think it's trending up. I'd argue that's due to
| strategic shifts that happened once Ballmer left.
|
| I've mentioned in other comments that revenue (while
| good) isn't the whole story.
| ghaff wrote:
| I somewhat sympathize with those living in a small
| apartment who used to walk, take a shuttle bus, take the
| subway, etc. to work where they were fed 5 days a week or
| more--and now they're stuck in their small apartments
| with most restaurants closed and facing the prospect of
| maybe having to move to a bigger place. So one can choose
| to interpret complaints about meal expensing in that
| vein.
|
| That said, in general, at least for the well-paid workers
| at these companies, complaints about insufficient expense
| reimbursement like that come across as pretty whiny.
| fossuser wrote:
| In my mind the company provides food as a perk in part so
| people hang around and chat without leaving the office,
| it also makes it more pleasant to work there.
|
| It's not to feed you in your own home.
| ghaff wrote:
| Sure. That's why they do it. (Along with the fact that
| it's an expected perk in some circles.) Which is also why
| paying a meal per diem doesn't make a lot of sense. But
| it's also somewhat understandable why there would be a
| bit of grumbling about a benefit being taken away,
| however unavoidably.
|
| Of course, for many employees, the elimination of
| commuting makes remote work a significant win
| financially. But others never intended to do much more
| than sleep in their apartments and the current situation
| is therefore a net negative, even just financially.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| That's still a ton of entitlement...
|
| "Oh no! I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year,
| and I have to live in my tiny apartment, buy food, and I
| might have to get a bigger apartment."
|
| vs
|
| "Oh no! I don't have a job, and I'm about to lose my
| apartment because I can't pay rent."
| nitrogen wrote:
| I get pretty tired of this back and forth arguing in
| circles over who is more entitled than whom, who has more
| of a right to complain, who is the most aggrieved, who
| has the biggest disadvantage to brag about.
|
| Really nobody has a right to ask for anything, ever,
| because there's always someone who has it worse, right?
| The only legitimate rung of the ladder is the bottom one,
| and we just keep finding lower rungs to use to shame
| anyone higher?
|
| Sure, there are people who live charmed lives and just
| don't understand what the big deal is because nothing has
| ever gone wrong for them. They sure as heck aren't me.
| But let's all just stop with the tone policing. It's 100%
| unproductive, and won't change anything about anybody's
| situation, good or bad.
| ghaff wrote:
| Lots of people at Google, including many developers,
| don't make "hundreds of thousands of dollars." It's also
| just a unilateral change in the terms of their employment
| (unavoidable as it is during the current times) that
| might increase their costs by $25K? after taxes. That
| other people have it much worse doesn't change the fact
| that a fair number of people are seeing a change from
| what they agreed to.
| chad_strategic wrote:
| Out of ~600 or some comments, this wins the award!
|
| Thank you for really getting to the point of this
| article.
|
| But I would add...
|
| I left my job etc, but now I going to stand on soap box
| and write an article about and make myself sound so self
| righteous.
| hackily wrote:
| My apartment in SF does not have a kitchen. Food provided
| by the company helped me get by! With no car, and only a
| handful of restaurant options within 1 mile, it's not the
| easiest to get by without a company cafeteria. I can
| sympathize with why many people would like to be able to
| expense food.
| vletal wrote:
| I like how living in the close proximity to the city
| center might seem somehow special from the perspective of
| suburban oriented culture even though it is usually a
| norm in Europe.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's always seemed like more of a hassle to expense
| lunch/dinner etc. given what we're getting paid.
|
| Who the hell wants to deal with concur for every lunch?!
|
| Then again, if your only goal is to extract as much money
| as possible from the corporate machine, it might work.
| rapsey wrote:
| I don't know about that. Was MS ever not filthy
| profitable? They are very successful with azure, was that
| started by balmer or nadella?
|
| People here give MS too little credit. Their reach is
| MASSIVE. No american company has the world wide reach
| that MS has. Practically every enterprise in the world is
| their customer.
| fossuser wrote:
| Profit is a lagging indicator that often leads companies
| astray with short-term decision making at the expense of
| long-term relevance.
|
| Look at Apple before the return of Jobs (though at that
| point, they were having profit issues too - but what lead
| to that was arguably short-term thinking).
|
| Today, I'd argue Intel has made similar decisions that
| put them on a bad long term path.
|
| MS would have stayed alive for a while, but been a shadow
| of their former self.
|
| Obviously, it's hard to prove a counterfactual like this
| - but this is how I model it.
| rapsey wrote:
| Enterprises are the slowest to change of all and this is
| MS bread and butter. I completely disagree MS was ever
| close to becoming irrelevant. Silicon valley is in it's
| own little world. The rest of the planet is firmly a MS
| customer.
|
| MS can take all the good ideas, implement them and sell
| them worldwide before a startup can get out of silicon
| valley. Case in point: slack vs. teams.
| fossuser wrote:
| Arguably that focus on O365 and Azure - the strategy that
| enabled Teams success was due to Nadella.
|
| You're right though - 'irrelevant' is too provocative and
| strongly worded.
|
| I'm more focused on future bets and trends. I think that
| trend shifted at Microsoft from trending towards future
| irrelevance back in the other direction, to being a
| competitive threat again.
| lhorie wrote:
| > why cant employees expense food since they are not in
| the office
|
| This is surprisingly not specific to Google. I've heard
| of other instances of this in other bay area companies,
| including mine. For us, it had to be put to rest at a
| company-wide all-hands meeting, along with other overly
| entitled complaints like "comp is not competitive", when
| in reality levels.fyi ranks it higher than even FAANG.
|
| Greed sometimes defies logic.
| kamilszybalski wrote:
| Microsoft has, imo, a monopoly of sorts on two critical
| pieces. 1. Its ability to permeate Enterprise, 2. Its
| channel strategy/network.
|
| What comes to mind most recently? See Slack.
| freebee16 wrote:
| that happened after nadella changed course from the balmer
| years. It is not always the case that a new CEO can turn
| around the company (for example see GE).
| devchix wrote:
| See also SUNW. McNealy imported the 6Sigma thing from GE,
| at one time it infected even teams not involved in
| manufacturing. MSFT had the best outcome for giants of
| the aughts. It is too bad OpenSolaris was left for dead,
| otherwise we'd have some choices and competition in *nix
| OS. AIX, dead. HP-UX, dead. Can't recall the DEC, Ultrix?
| Who runs that anymore. The last time I saw BSD
| commercially used was at a telco.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| A lot of my early jobs were porting various Unix things
| to Linux. I spent time writing cross platform C++, perl,
| and bash on Solaris, IRIX, HP-UNIX, and DEC Tru46, but
| mostly Solaris and IRIX.
|
| I gotta say, all those Unices fucking sucked. The
| userland tools were abysmal, with missing flags or bugs
| in their getopts, the compilers and their sockets
| libraries were extremely finicky, and their man pages
| were anemic.
|
| GNU/Linux won because if something sucked, somebody
| somewhere would fix it. By the early 2000s, and
| especially after Linux 2.6, it was obvious closed-source
| UNIX was both worse and overpriced.
|
| Even now it seems like the best part of the closed source
| MacOS Unix stack is the open source homebrew/macports
| stuff.
| devchix wrote:
| Agree with you that tooling was abysmal but all of those
| *nix had their bright flowering that subsequently
| pollinated other *nixes. AIX service management (SRC I
| think?) eventually saw life in Solaris as SMF. BSD jails
| reborn as containers. The HP-UX had batch job management
| that was very good. Solaris ABI/API compat between
| versions was exemplary, you can count on the OS upgrade
| not breaking your application. When the compiler was
| still being sold (thousands of dollars by the seat
| license), it was optimized for the SPARC processor and
| outperformed same code compiled by the GNU compiler. I
| wish we had all of that still.
|
| Apropos of the "curated App Store" or "free-for-all"
| discussion currently active, I remember talking to a
| colleague in the early 2000s that Apple with its curated
| BSD-derivative OS was exactly what open sourced OSes
| needed. Users don't want to do more work than necessary;
| in retrospect, the selling point that users can do
| anything+everything with *nix OS was the wrong message.
|
| You didn't mention package management and network booting
| to be pain points. They were nightmares, which Linux
| eventually solved. I think that's where the race was
| lost.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I've worked at 8 different companies and none of them could
| even hold a candle to Google's pace of work. Everything just
| works. The quota system works, the identity and authorization
| system works, observability works, the build and release system
| works. You can be a productive engineer at Google on day 2 if
| you read the codelabs on day 1. Nobody at Google has ever
| needed to have their manager email the Jira admin to get them
| added to the right group to edit tickets. Nobody at Google has
| a need to raise a ticket with some ops group in Bengaluru to
| partition a Kafka topic, renew a certificate, bridge two VPCs,
| or any of that type of thing. It's almost frictionless. I don't
| get people who say that Google's pace is slow. I've definitely
| worked in startups where some kid thought they were ultra-
| productive with their late-night merges of 20000 lines of
| untested code, but on longer time scales those startups
| inevitably ground to a complete standstill under the weight of
| that debt.
| gresrun wrote:
| 5+ yrs @ Google, Google is my 5th company.
|
| Google has all the building blocks for great backend services
| and front-end development and, if you know where to look and
| have some experience with them, you can build a rock-solid
| product in <6mos, also assuming you have a team that can
| execute and the political will to ship it.
|
| Politics/consensus building is where the real roadblocks lie
| in Google, and presumably other large companies. Trying to
| make high-level product & technical decisions when you have
| 10 stakeholders with 3 VPs, all in different orgs, is serious
| exercise in patience; months of emails & meetings await you.
| brandon wrote:
| > Nobody at Google has a need to raise a ticket with some ops
| group in Bengaluru to partition a Kafka topic, renew a
| certificate, bridge two VPCs, or any of that type of thing.
|
| Except when your team wanted to initially onboard with GOOPS
| and your request sat in Buganizer for 2 weeks waiting for
| someone to triage. Uh oh -- we're turning down this service
| next quarter, you will need to go start this onboarding
| process again with its replacement.
|
| Or when you needed quota in a cell where your product area
| didn't have Flex. Maybe you can set up a VC with your PARM?
| Does next week work for your launch plan? Hopefully they can
| do _something_ for you!
|
| Or when your logs access request sat in GUTS for a month
| because both of the approvers were on vacation and no,
| there's not an escalation path.
|
| Or when you needed to change a firewall rule for a project
| your team inherited which for some reason runs on GCE. Make
| sure you bring your Ariane link when you open your request.
| Have ISE reviewed your code? No? ISE currently have a
| quarter-long backlog, so we're not sure we can grant your
| firewall exception.
|
| None of these examples are contrived; the weight of the
| operational bureaucracy is staggering. It may well be that
| this stuff is felt more on the SRE/Security side around
| production launches than on the SWE side for experimentation
| or iterative development, but I struggle with the idea that
| Google is nimble.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That was some T7-9 whining right there. Do you think it's
| easier to get unplanned compute capacity at some other
| company?
| [deleted]
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Sure, things get hairy when you go off the beaten path, but
| day-to-day infrastructure is not the issue. As a user of
| Google products I don't care as much about developer
| velocity as I do them shipping swiss cheese products
| security-wise. If I have to wait a few months more for some
| new feature, I'll take that trade-off.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Right, the slothful approval process for log retention
| and access is a feature, not a bug. It's part of the
| reason why Google's technical privacy story is
| incomparable.
| throwaway-dos wrote:
| Registered account to reply here, because your complaints
| feel one sided to me.
|
| Most of what you described i felt as well _sometimes_ for
| security related stuff, like dedicated machines in that one
| cluster or an ISE review on short notice--but security
| related is also somewhat out of the norm and considering
| that is, Google does a great job.
|
| For "normal" services what you described does not match my
| experience at all. Even for medium sized infrastructure
| services mostly everything just works (IME).
|
| Never had a GUTS ticket that was not answered within a
| business day, but obviously just n=1 sample--imo support
| staff is mostly amazing.
| xmprt wrote:
| All the reasons you've given for fast pace are tech reasons
| and I don't think anyone is arguing with that. The author
| mostly discussed how people reasons is why the pace is slowed
| down and that's something that's a lot more prevalent at big
| corporations than at startups.
| [deleted]
| chubot wrote:
| The problem is that it can hurt your career, especially if
| you've never worked anywhere else. (random guess: somewhere
| between 15% and 30% of the workforce falls in that category)
|
| You can learn the wrong lessons: you learn how to go up for
| promotion rather than build things that work for users.
|
| In the last 10 years it's become extremely common at Google do
| work that is simply thrown away (because of issues above your
| pay grade). You could work at Google for 5 years and nothing
| you worked on ever sees the light of day. That is a problem.
|
| You don't learn what works when your work gets thrown away. You
| can still get promoted anyway. So why do the work? Just pretend
| you did it. (It's usually not as black-and-white as that;
| employees are usually well intentioned but then are surprised
| when the work that was hyped up by management gets suddenly
| thrown away.)
|
| I'd say that if you want to have a good career as an engineer,
| you should focus exclusively on building things from 22 to 26
| (or whatever your first 4 years are). If you miss a year or 2
| of that because of corporate politics, then you missed a lot of
| learning, and you may be unqualified for future jobs.
|
| There is legitimately a lot to learn about writing software on
| the job -- IMO it's more than the equivalent of another 4 year
| CS degree.
|
| ----
|
| This is probably the best description of it that I've read
| (after working there myself for over a decade and seeing the
| change in values):
|
| https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241
|
| I heard someone describe grad school as "17th grade" for some
| people with the wrong attitude. Google might be "21st grade"
| for others. That is, you're following metrics set up by an
| organization -- getting "graded" -- rather than building things
| for "the world".
|
| The way some Google employees speak about "the world"
| highlights that disconnect. (e.g. the wearables thing on the
| front page yesterday was mocked)
|
| To be fair, this is how things work at most jobs. If you work
| at a big bank or insurance company, you don't really care about
| "customers" either -- they are too far away from you. You care
| about what your boss thinks and his or her boss. This is sort
| of the "default" configuration of society.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yes, well, I agree with all those criticisms. It's been 9
| years of frustration for me, here at Google. But that's not
| what my comment was about. I took issue with his griping that
| he couldn't hire and fire and drive a meat grinder. To me
| that's an entirely other kind of dysfunction...
|
| Perf at Google is broken. But I think it's endemic to large
| companies, probably. I only worked at smaller ones before. I
| worked for some that were meat grinders, and others that were
| better.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Google can on the whole accomplish its revenue goals without
| being a meat grinder. So why be one?
|
| This is a great take. I've worked in a place where the revenue
| was astronomical, to the point where the entire company could
| probably do nothing for 100 years and still be viable, yet it
| was run like a meat grinder, where everyone did insane hours
| and you always worried that it wouldn't be enough and you would
| be stack ranked out of a job. Truly awful, because it was so
| unnecessary. On the other hand, I've worked for a start-up with
| a visibly short runway, where it was obvious to everyone that
| if everyone didn't bust their asses, the company would fail. At
| least there you have an actual reason to be a meat grinder.
|
| I think a lot of companies could succeed yearly and make Wall
| Street happy and still _not_ be a meat grinder, but some sick,
| stubborn cultural norm makes "meat grinder" the default mode
| of operation.
| 627467 wrote:
| Isn't there a place for this kind of fetish? It doesn't need to
| be in today's Google (but maybe in 5 year old Google).
|
| > Google can on the whole accomplish its revenue goals without
| being a meat grinder. So why be one?
|
| I too hope Google can prove that this state can be maintained
| after certain quasi-monopolies it holds start to vanish...
| titanomachy wrote:
| I agree that there's a place (probably not Google) for this
| attitude, and my impression is that this is the realization
| that the author eventually arrived at: he wouldn't change
| Google, or change his nature, so he had to leave. Even though
| his frustration was clear, the message that came through for
| me was not simply "Google is bad" but more "Google and I are
| too different to work together". A lot of what he dislikes
| about Google is true of any large company.
|
| Although, he was very critical of Googlers' entitlement in
| particular. This is a real issue, especially among those who
| have never worked elsewhere, but IME people are more self-
| aware about it than he implies.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > A lot of what he dislikes about Google is true of any
| large company.
|
| Lol, yeah. A lot of what he said made me nod along :)
| dmayle wrote:
| *This
|
| I came here to say something similar. I'm a founder, I've been
| a manager and a software engineer, I did 5 years @ Google.
|
| When I hear someone in "upper management / founder / in a
| position of power over employee's lives" say that what they
| really needed for their own success was a way to threaten/risk
| the livelihood of their employees so that they would work
| harder, it just makes me sad for anyone affected by them.
|
| Yes, sometimes employees need to be fired... but sometimes
| management also needs restructuring. The truth of the matter is
| that at a company the size of Google, it gets harder and harder
| for an individual employee to directly influence success. I
| think that's mostly because of the policies in place to make
| sure that employees don't directly *damage* success either.
|
| This means that you have to work within the system you have. An
| employment contract is two-sided, you're offering something
| that the employee wants, and they're offering something that
| you want. If your first reaction when there's a problem is to
| cut their pay or fire them, then you're the one with the
| problem, not them.
|
| Yes, there are times you need to fire someone (and I have), but
| that should be reserved for one of two cases: 1) they are
| actively damaging the business (e.g. destroying company
| property, morale, hurting business prospects), or 2) despite
| your best efforts, they are unable/unwilling to fulfill their
| side of the contract. Just realize that firing someone has a
| cost for your company and team as well as for the employee.
|
| I'd rather part ways amicably, finding them something that
| works for them if possible, and I think what Noam said about
| managers recommending great employees is unfair both to the
| managers and the employees. I've had employees who were hard-
| working and passionate, just not passionate about the project
| they were working on. When that happens, the best thing you can
| do for both of you is to find them the fit that works.
|
| Can you build a large company that doesn't get mired down in
| things like management and governance and legal and policy? I
| hope to someday get large enough to find out, because I've got
| some ideas... (Like separating those functions out in the same
| way there are engineering teams dedicated to software tooling.)
|
| But it requires a will and effort from the top down, and the
| people who get excited about building billion dollar businesses
| don't seem to get excited about maintaining them once they get
| that size.
| apohn wrote:
| I wish I could give you more than one upvote for this.
|
| I work for a huge company. For every person I've worked with
| who I thought needed to go, there at at least 10 (probably
| more) who have become ineffective because of
| management,politics, and bureaucracy.
|
| I had a very different view of "who should be fired" when I
| joined this company, but I think I've grown up a bit.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| A lack of any real time pressure may lead to unusual or
| unjustifiable architecture decisions, or needless complexity.
| It's true that not every place needs to be a meat grinder, but
| you should timebox your projects.
| hanniabu wrote:
| There's a difference between time pressure and burning out
| your employees. I believe the present is referring to the
| latter.
| JohnCarmack wrote:
| I can certainly see a lot of parallels with Oculus / Facebook.
|
| Perhaps unusually, I actually wanted FB to impress itself more
| strongly on Oculus post acquisition because, frankly, Oculus was
| a bit of a mess. Instead, Oculus was given an enormous amount of
| freedom for many years.
|
| Personally, nobody ever told me what to do, even though I was
| willing to "shut up and soldier" if necessary -- they bought that
| capability! Conversely, I couldn't tell anyone what to do from my
| position; the important shots were always called when I wasn't
| around. Some of that was on me for not being willing to relocate
| to HQ, but a lot of it was built into early Oculus DNA.
|
| I could only lead by example and argument, and the arguments only
| took on weight after years of evidence accumulated. I could have
| taken a more traditional management position, but I would have
| hated it, so that's also on me. The political dynamics never
| quite aligned with an optimal set of leadership personalities and
| beliefs where I would have had the best leverage, but there was
| progress, and I am reasonably happy and effective as a part time
| consultant today, seven years later.
|
| Talking about "entitled workers" almost certainly derails the
| conversation. Perhaps a less charged framing that still captures
| some of the matter is the mixing of people who Really Care about
| their work with the Just A Job crowd. The wealth of the mega
| corps does allow most goals to be accomplished, at great expense,
| with Just A Job workers, but people that have experienced being
| embedded with Really Care workers are going to be appalled at the
| relative effectiveness.
|
| The communication culture does tend a bit passive-aggressive for
| my taste, but I can see why it evolves that way in large
| organizations. I've only been officially dinged by HR once for
| insensitive language in a post, but a few people have reached out
| privately with some gentle suggestions about better
| communication.
|
| All in all, not a perfect fairy tale outcome, but I still
| consider taking the acquisition offer as the correct thing for
| the company in hindsight.
| projectileboy wrote:
| But as someone who recently bought a Quest 2, it really is an
| amazing product, so some things there must have been very
| right. In retrospect, do you know what those things were?
| afdgadfgadfh wrote:
| Along the lines of leaving oculus/fb, can we ask what would
| have to happen for you to stop using an oculus/fb product?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Just curious, what things did you want/expect FB to be more
| hands-on about? General things like company organization, or
| more specific product decisions (I'm thinking of one
| particularly controversial product decision but I understand if
| that's a sensitive topic)?
| dasm wrote:
| I suspect he won't want to get into thorny PR issues, but
| probably company organization. It's easy to imagine a
| disorganized startup scaling poorly, and those within it
| wanting guidance from highly-scaled FB.
| choppaface wrote:
| While I totally agree with your Really Care and Just A Job
| characterization, I think that money does play a significant
| role in overall picture. People behave very differently after
| they run into six, seven, eight figures. And that behavior
| isn't perfectly correlated with how much they put into the job.
| There's a fair place for the "entitled" narrative, and when
| these people have outsized leverage on the company or product,
| it can create outsized problems.
| draw_down wrote:
| The entitlement is all over; talking about entitled employees
| keeps us from turning our attentions elsewhere. Because then
| we'd have to ask bigger questions and oh boy, our heads may
| begin to hurt.
|
| Let us not forget that industry heads have colluded to
| suppress pay for engineers. Let us not forget that in
| general, executives act as though we should be grateful for
| our pay, rather than being remunerated for building the
| systems that pour money into their bank accounts. Their
| compensation is a fact of life, just the way it is. Ours is a
| handout from the generous leadership team to the undeserving
| peons.
|
| Even the "just a job" framing is a form of entitlement; I
| should not have employees who simply do a job for a wage,
| they should _really care_ about that job. And if they have
| moved from a place of _really caring_ to simply "doing a
| job", that isn't the fault of leadership or a symptom of the
| organization. Those people are just, you know, entitled.
| dasm wrote:
| It's surprising to me that your (former) title wouldn't entail
| more direct leadership, even as a simple messenger for "shut up
| and soldier."
| danans wrote:
| > people who Really Care about their work with the Just A Job
| crowd
|
| These aren't discrete categories.
|
| There are a lot of people who care about their work and also
| recognize that at the end of the day, it is a job, and the
| reality is that they can only play a role in shaping the
| outcome, not dictate it per their vision.
|
| Also, depending on the job, the team, the project, and the
| product, people can go from one of those perspectives to the
| other. There are a lot of people whose current job/role
| situations aren't intrinsically motivating, but then find
| incredible motivation due to a change in project or role (I've
| experienced this multiple times).
| ashkankiani wrote:
| Then consider it a spectrum with Really Care on one end and
| Just A Job on the other. I don't think it takes away from the
| original point.
| yks wrote:
| Often workers are perfectly capable and eager of Really Caring
| but then the company incentives and politics force them into
| Just A Job category. Especially when joining Big Tech not via
| acquihire.
| allenu wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. It just goes to show that even the
| best of us can find it difficult to effect change in a big
| company. The nature of a large organization is it requires lots
| of communication, alignment, and on-the-ground politics to make
| things happen, which is definitely a challenge for those of us
| who just want to get shit done.
| leroman wrote:
| Known Waze practically since inception (I'm from Israel) always
| carry a grudge for mis-advertise themselves as "open data" and
| eventually go on to privatize the platform (which was originally
| built on OSS) and hijack and delete OSM Israel data.
| toyg wrote:
| _> hijack and delete OSM Israel data_
|
| What? How did they do that? I'm not an OpenStreetMap but I
| thought that sort of "privatization / removal of crowdsourced
| data" could not be done if not globally...
| leroman wrote:
| This was a long time ago, maybe my wording is off, probably
| along the lines of stopped contributing data to OSM and
| changed it's license for the data after a certain point..
| freewilly1040 wrote:
| Of the author's many entitlements, the funniest one to me is that
| he feels entitled his employee's drive and passion for his
| product, the _second most important mapping app at his own
| company_.
|
| He couldn't perceive that Google was buying him out to neutralize
| a competitor? He was surprised that the distribution priority of
| Waze was lower than Google Maps?
| Kototama wrote:
| "As I had kids, I learned the importance of being at home for
| them and that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a
| balance, sometimes you need to work weekends and nights,
| sometimes you can head out early or work from home - we balance
| the needs of the employee and the company."
|
| _sometimes you need to work weekends and nights while your wife
| take care of the kids alone so that your career progress and her
| 's not._
|
| Here, fixed for you.
| dominotw wrote:
| my wife sometimes has to do this on the weekends ( non tech
| job) and sometimes i have to do on call stuff on weekends.
|
| Why are you making this about gender?
| watwut wrote:
| To be fair, the above attitude is more common among my male
| colleagues.
| 627467 wrote:
| In this is also how gender discrimination perpetuates.
| throwaway667555 wrote:
| Also why doesn't balance mean "now you've earned an extra hour
| or two mid-day for yoga, 0 judgement"? I call it the "retail-
| worker mentality" when I point it out in friends. It isn't
| meant to deride retail workers, but to draw attention to the
| inhumane people and conditions they live under. The conditions
| aren't justified at low pay nor high pay, and people need an
| impolite analogy to have this simple but life-changing
| epiphany. Just look at the deathbed surveys of happiness and
| regrets.
|
| If I do good work for a rich, high-margin company, I'm going to
| act like it (towards the employer) and reap the rewards.
| Because if I don't, someone is, and they're up the chain, so
| let's pull those rewards back down a bit and reclaim our
| humanity, ok? This isn't entitlement, this is taking the
| rewards I've had a hand in building rather than leaving them on
| the table and saying "thank you for letting me leave these
| extra 20% of rewards to you".
|
| Separate from this, I might vehemently advocate politically for
| reversing the upwards redistribution of wealth to the tech
| elites (me), and that's not hypocritical. Hoping for Richard
| Stallman-level principaledness among the professional working
| public isn't the answer to political and social problems such
| as this, so let's not armchair and claim that working half your
| Saturdays moves the needle towards wealth fairness better than
| saying no and going home and taking the paycheck.
| Inconsistencies can coexist without resolution, and most of
| life is exactly that. If you can't live with it, then the
| answer is to quit, not routinely work Saturdays.
|
| The company's budget has room for more staff if it's truly
| needed (it's not); my life budget of personal hours does not
| have room for more work, nor should it if my employer is among
| the wealthiest in human history.
|
| Germany's auto-workers union negotiated a 28-hour workweek.
| Like them, we shouldn't be ashamed to rebalance our lives
| towards leisure, personal hobbies, personal relationships, etc,
| now that technology is so productive. In general, why is it
| wrong to favor broader participation in the fruits of human
| effort? I'll do my part by going home and taking the paycheck.
| Now I have more time and financial security to spread my
| politics if I want.
|
| Elon Musk is right that companies and communities are fully and
| precisely the human-machine cyborgs of fiction, just at a
| different scale. Can that apparatus rebalance towards leisure
| etc? I think yes, so I'm taking my paycheck and going home
| early. It's not entitlement, it's living my valid and
| reasonable politics.
|
| If this post seems off topic, then maybe you haven't thought
| all the way through what "sure, I can give you more hours of my
| life" means when you offer it to an employer. We might disagree
| on some or many points, but all of this post is directly
| relevant to that negotiation of hours.
| jldugger wrote:
| > Also why doesn't balance mean "now you've earned an extra
| hour or two mid-day for yoga, 0 judgement"? I call it the
| "retail-worker mentality" when I point it out in friends.
|
| A 28 hour workweek is fine if consistently applied. The daily
| 11am absence however, is likely treated with disdain because:
|
| - doing mid-day yoga while I'm attending daily release
| engineering meetings to accommodate someone else's schedule
| slip is grating
|
| - for some reason mid-day workouts are okay but leaving the
| office at 4pm isn't
|
| Both of which is why it strikes many as slacking off.
| kleiba wrote:
| Baloney. Who's to say that the wife isn't doing the same to
| further her own career on other nights and weekends?
| watwut wrote:
| Because then he would have to say no to overtime or weekend
| work once in a while.
| asidiali wrote:
| That implies then that there will indeed be weekends where
| your boss expects you to work, your spouse is working, you
| cannot, and therefore you "fail".
| asidiali wrote:
| Thank you
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Contrary to popular belief, kids are not some tamagotchi pet
| that needs constant attention and helicoptering after they're
| babies. You can perfectly be a good parent and raise
| independent well minded kids without needing two parents always
| present every moment of every weekend.
| rkangel wrote:
| No, but until they're mid-teens, they do need one parent most
| of the time. If one of them is working weekends a lot, then
| that assumes the other one is available to parent.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Sounds exorbitant tbh. After they're seven or eight it's
| not clear why they need constant direct supervision (as
| opposed to being in another room minding ones business).
| What are we afraid of?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Mid teens? My 8 year old can read a book in my office while
| I get a couple of hours of work in.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| And this is a good enough reason to expect people to work on
| the weekend? Kids are not some tamagotchi pet that exists as
| it is for a long time... kids are constantly growing and if
| you blink, you miss it. Some people would rather spend their
| weekends with their kids for purposes other than just keeping
| them alive.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I'm not advocating we work full weekends, but I'm not sure
| why I would not have a few hours for myself and do things
| that don't involve my kids. Some weekend's it would be work
| but other weekend's it might be something else, but it
| surely doesn't have to be 24/2 just kids kids?
|
| Of course if you blink you miss them, it's not like you're
| in a cave across the world, you're probably literally in
| the next room staring at a screen for a couple hours after
| a heavy lunch while the kids play on their ps5. How's that
| weird.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| If spending your free time on the weekend working doesn't
| sound awful to you, I think we're just very different
| people.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| It definitely does not! And clearly we are different
| people! I would love nothing more than to grab a drink
| with you sometime and learn from each other though!
| kgog wrote:
| > Today, in Silicon Valley, work life balance has become
| sacrificing Work for Life - not a balance. Young people want it
| all - they want to get promoted quickly, achieve economic
| independence, feel fulfilled at Work, be home early, not miss the
| Yoga class at 11:00am etc.
|
| He lost me here.
|
| Grouping "young people" -- an entirely arbitrary delineation --
| and calling them entitled is typical agist bullshit. Just because
| one person wants to work like a dog, doesn't mean others who
| don't are entitled.
|
| Check yourself jerk.
|
| > I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also
| believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its
| on a weekend.
|
| This is the reason why I refuse to work for managers who work
| outside of business hours AND expect others to be available then
| too. Working like a dog permeates a toxic work environment where
| everything is a competition and zero-sum.
|
| For the vast majority of people, work is an avenue to a better
| work. It's just a job. I think generally the people we consider
| "successful" worked themselves out. However, there is survivor
| bias here as well that needs to be called out. For every 1 burned
| out "successful" workers, there's 99 that failed, and many that
| probably have some form of trauma.
|
| In reality, in large-corp you can cruise and still be in the top
| <5% by income and wealth. I have nothing against people who want
| that as long as they recognize their privilege. I don't call them
| entitled, I just call them people.
|
| Lastly, I'm glad Noam Bardin wrote this post because it's very
| indicative of the kind of person he is. I will run far and fast
| away from every working with him.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| https://archive.is/ujrka
| [deleted]
| toyg wrote:
| On some level, I feel for people like him, I really do. They have
| this massive drive and just cannot understand why others (like
| me) don't share it. It drives them fundamentally insane, and
| pushes them towards sociopathic tendencies. Sometimes they "wake
| up" after decades and have well-documented breakdowns, if they
| realize their passion was fundamentally pointless. Sometimes they
| do move the needle.
|
| On other levels, though, just fuck him. His mindset is the
| typical rationalization of normalizing employee exploitation. If
| you want cult-like devotion to the cause, build a coop; the
| minute you take away real ownership of the fruits of one's
| labour, it is unreasonable to ask for personal sacrifice to any
| significant degree. You tell me how much you pay me for what, and
| I'll do "the what", not "the what but something extra too, just
| because".
|
| As for Google, they now look a lot like early-2000s Microsoft
| (both inside and outside), but this we kinda knew already.
| izacus wrote:
| No idea why your post is downvoted because it really mirrors my
| thoughts. I can see that he doesn't understand why he's
| percieved as overbearing and disliked. We also have way too
| many people like that floating around making people miserable.
| pacificat0r wrote:
| It was so hard for him to act like an adult and be considerate
| about the way he speaks. Such a tragedy requiring immense
| sacrifice from this poor soul.
| BugWatch wrote:
| Maybe others could consider growing "thicker skins", not
| applying their personal standard to everyone equally, and not
| getting offended at every single (and/or little) opportunity.
| Exposure therapy is a wonderful thing.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| If every presentation insulted you, or implied you didn't get
| exist, maybe you'd get pissed off at it as well.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > we began onboarding people with the wrong state of mind -
| seeing Waze as a stepping stone and not as a calling.
|
| > There are people who are great for a stage of the company and
| later, do not have the right skills as the company grows. It is
| not their fault, it is reality. But not being able to replace
| them with people that do have the right skills means that people
| are constantly trying to "offload" an employee on a different
| team rather than fire them - something that is not conducive with
| fast moving and changing needs.
|
| One thing that really irritates me is one way commitment. The
| author wants people who will see their work for the company as a
| calling, while at the same time having no loyalty to the employee
| and seeing them as just a stepping stone, to be used when needed
| and then discarded.
|
| In Japan, the work culture historically was one of crazy
| dedication to the company. However, it was reciprocated. The
| company was expected to take care of your whole life, even to the
| point of coming up with a sinecure for you in your old age. They
| didn't just use you and discard you when they thought you were no
| longer needed.
|
| Every time I see a company talking about how they want employees
| to see the company as their mission and calling, I look at how
| they treat employees to see if they plan on reciprocating that
| loyalty. The answer if pretty much always no. They plan on using
| your loyalty when it is useful to them, often burning you out,
| and discarding you when they think you don't provide value.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Your point is spot on... and Google might be one of the places
| where I have heard they will do just nearly anything to keep
| you at the company.
|
| Internal mobility is exceptional, perks and compensation are
| exceptional (regardless of if you are single, young, married,
| old, disabled, male, female, gay, straight, <other
| qualifications I've missed> etc. there are GREAT perks
| available to you), scope of impact is huge (billions of users
| use your work), and a high bar of employment (though some
| lament the bar has been lowered) means you work with people who
| are generally quite smart/on your level
| rvn1045 wrote:
| Another post about some Faang employee quitting their jobs and
| giving their rational for it. It's thoroughly uninteresting when
| said employee has already spent years working there and
| potentially saved millions of dollars. They stuck around long
| enough to never worry about money and then they write a post
| about philosophizing their quitting.
| gurumeditations wrote:
| Yet another person learns what millions of everyday people have
| learned throughout history: your relationship as an employee with
| a large corporation is one of minimal give and maximum take.
| People like the author are the types that give far more than they
| should and ironically make the situation worse because they hide
| the failure of the incentive setup through their voluntary
| overworking (money coming out of their pocket instead of the
| company's). If the company was exposed to the true cost of their
| incentive structure, unwarped by the guy or gal found in every
| department that pointlessly kills themselves for the company,
| then the company would be forced to adjust itself, and thus make
| this guy less disgruntled.
| Siecje wrote:
| Why does Google want two map apps? Why not just integrate into
| Google Maps?
| waheoo wrote:
| > Entitlement - everyone working in the tech space is SUPER
| LUCKY.
|
| Few good things in this but I found the remark about weekends a
| bit much.
|
| I chose a career in a space I don't need to work weekends.
|
| And none of it is luck. It's careful planning 20 years in the
| making.
| typon wrote:
| "None"? Really? At the very least you can't control where you
| are born and what language you learn as a child...two extremely
| important factors in deciding whether you end up in a cushy
| tech job.
| cbushko wrote:
| Ooof. I think people are picking and choosing too many points to
| make it seem like this guy is an asshole and a toxic manager.
|
| I read that he wants people to:
|
| - Do their work - Provide value for their users - Get stuff done.
|
| vs
|
| - Work on flashy stuff to only get promotions - Be stuck with BAD
| employees that do very little - Have employees spend all day
| doing recreation
|
| Work/life is important to stay healthy but at the same time
| employees need to get their work done. He is saying that the
| pendulum has swung too far towards the recreation side of things.
|
| I think I am biased as I worked at a startup that was chasing
| Google level of perks. They were fantastic but caused a huge
| divide between the people that abused them and the people that
| worked their butts off.
|
| All I want is for people to be reasonable and get their stuff
| done...
| Arainach wrote:
| As the head of Waze, the author was the one responsible for
| setting the OKRs that people were judged against. He also had
| final say in promotions. If people were getting promoted for
| the wrong things, it was directly their fault.
|
| >They were fantastic but caused a huge divide between the
| people that abused them and the people that worked their butts
| off.
|
| Who was forcing these people to "work their butts off"? There
| are some people who seem to always feel that nothing is good
| enough and who put in unreasonable amounts of hours. If that's
| demanded by management (say, by a CEO who things that working
| weekends is OK), that's a cultural problem. On the other hand,
| there's a uniquely American problem with fetishizing long hours
| and no perks. People in general aren't "abusing" perks, they're
| taking advantage of them. If people are having to "work their
| butts off" on a regular basis, then teams need to be better at
| setting cadence and expectations. Once in a great while some
| crunch time will happen, but in general people shouldn't be
| having to work more than 40 hours.
| EricE wrote:
| >I read that he wants people to:
|
| Yes! Most insightful post in this entire thread.
|
| Talk about shallow interpretations of what someone wrote from
| most of the other commenters.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Do companies actually find themselves tons of employees that care
| so deeply about their mission that they sacrifice pay, equity,
| promotions, life interests, weekends, and benefits for "the
| cause"?
|
| I get having a team of 20 that is like this, but it does not seem
| like a concept that scales unless you are SpaceX.
| ravenstine wrote:
| I doubt it, since I believe recognition and impact on outcomes
| are highly relevant to someone feeling motivated to go above
| and beyond in a corporation. When a team scales, the hierarchy
| becomes dithered and camaraderie decreases overall, resulting
| in the "mission" meaning different things to different people.
| This ultimately results in an 80% of people who do as much work
| as they need to so they don't get fired, a 10% on one end that
| does a crapton of work, and 10% who work as little as possible.
| Even the former 10% can only work so hard before their
| performance is perceived as a threat to the rest of the team
| whom simply can't keep up their pace.
| toyg wrote:
| _> Do companies actually find themselves tons of employees that
| care so deeply_
|
| No, but they find tons of employees who really need a job and
| hate job-hunting, so once they get in they'll do what it takes
| to keep the paycheck going. This is particularly common in
| sectors where the median hire can be young, like... the
| software industry.
| ativzzz wrote:
| There will be a few people, but companies like this will look
| for "passionate" people, or people who are good at pretending
| to be passionate to get paid.
| hashingroll wrote:
| Video game industries kinda get away with lower salaries,
| longer hours than rest of the "tech standard".
| izacus wrote:
| Well this guy quit because Googlers wouldn't work weekends on
| his command so the answer might be... "no" ?
| izacus wrote:
| This is an amazing post - it describes exactly how bad manager
| looks like and what kind of expectations does he have from his
| employees. No emergency PTO (despite being a benefit), ability to
| just get rid of people who don't suit him, cursing at people, not
| having a proper work/life balance. It just keeps on giving.
|
| And all for what? A mapping application having features which
| really don't save lives 99% of the time.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| You don't get it. It's about the users! The users!!! /s
| nicioan wrote:
| 100% this! The work life balance section in particular was an
| eye opener. I'm sure the Waze employees that were part of the
| acquisition have a _completely_ different perspective, and I
| bet they've been much better off after the acquisition.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _And all for what? A mapping application having features
| which really don 't save lives 99% of the time._
|
| Are you saying you aren't willing to sacrifice your well-being
| to increase the value of this manager's portfolio? /s
| w0mbat wrote:
| A mapping application that frequently diverts traffic off the
| freeway into narrow residential roads, probably does the
| opposite of saving lives. In my experience, it doesn't even
| save time, just gives you a more complicated route
| hctaw wrote:
| > A mapping application having features which really don't save
| lives 99% of the time.
|
| And ruins thoroughfares not designed for heavy traffic, while
| degrading quality of life for people who don't use it!
| cafard wrote:
| How would children on otherwise quiet streets get to hone their
| reflexes if Waze didn't divert traffic down them?
| moreranchplease wrote:
| This guy is something else. That entitlement section was an eye
| opener. That stuff should be the norm. Felt like guilt tripping
| people at one of the most wealthy companies in the world
| because they don't have a job that treats them poorly.
| Companies make a lot of money it should be spent on the people
| that make that money for the company.
| Demoneeri wrote:
| I came exactly to say that, the guy is a nut job manager.
| Working weekend and probably being belittled by this guy while
| doing that, for what? A driving app, wow.
| thethethethe wrote:
| I'm glad that this is the prevailing sentiment in this thread.
| At first, the article was just run of the mill complaints about
| Google culture but it took a nasty turn towards the end so I
| came looking for validation in the comments
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| He made money tho...
|
| Maybe bad for mental health of the average employee but not for
| everyone.
| ck425 wrote:
| I agree with all of that except the swearing part. Is swearing
| in work a big deal in US? I'm Scottish (even worse Glaswegian)
| so perhaps have a skewed view.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It depends entirely on the context. If swears are being used
| in a way that even remotely touches on other employees or the
| company's products, then it's a huge morale drag.
|
| Yelling out "Fuck!" because you just stubbed your toe on your
| desk, or because you've been stuck on a frustrating problem
| for awhile that you just can't solve, is fine. Saying "Why
| does team X's product suck so fucking much?" or "Why do you
| keep making this same fucking mistake?" is a huge problem.
|
| It's not exactly about the swears per se, but about being
| overly negative / anti-collaborative. The OP post gives off
| the vibe of someone who prides themselves on being "brutally
| honest" in their feedback but which in fact really just comes
| off as being an asshole to most people.
| reidjs wrote:
| My view on swearing in the workplace is that you can only
| do it if everyone who hears it is one of your immediate
| peers. Swearing down rank is an abuse of power (lower ranks
| are expected to be polite). Swearing up is a sign of
| immaturity (can't contain emotions, etc).
|
| Also swearing should only be used verbally and only in
| humorous ways: "this code I wrote is fubar" is ok, "Johnson
| is an asshole" is not.
| thethethethe wrote:
| You don't "rack up HR complaints" for swearing at Google. You
| definitely have to be an asshole for that to happen. One HR
| complaint? Maybe it could have been unreasonable. But
| multiple HR complaints? The probability of him not being an
| asshole seriously diminishes.
|
| Source: I work at Google
| mabbo wrote:
| In the article he says that whatever language he was using,
| HR was involved over it.
|
| > I began racking up my HR complaints. I used a four letter
| word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG
|
| He's not just swearing. He's an asshole. But he wants to
| blame the "PC brigade" for not letting him be an asshole,
| which he was used to when he had power over everyone else,
| including HR.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Swearing culture is definitely very different in the US
| compared to Scotland. I've noticed that people from the US
| have a tendency to say things like "heck" or "frick" because
| saying "hell" or "fuck" is seen as something that one ought
| to do. That's definitely not a thing in Scotland, where in my
| experience you're likely to hear far "worse" even in formal
| or professional contexts.
|
| - An Englishman (England is culturally somewhere between the
| US and Scotland on this I think).
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm sure it depends on the industry and the circumstances.
| Way back when, I worked in the US oil industry as an
| engineer and I remember one rig superintendent in
| particular who basically couldn't get out a sentence that
| wasn't punctuated with some cuss word or other. But even in
| the 90s in tech, some level of cussery was pretty normal.
| It's definitely true, at least at large companies (and
| events) these days, anything other than the very occasional
| f-bomb, especially in public is definitely frowned upon.
| izacus wrote:
| No idea about US (I'd guess - yeah), but it's certainly a big
| deal here in continental Europe. I've also not seen anyone
| casually swear in London either. It's considered quite
| unprofessional and aggressive.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| In the US it's not uncommon to hear f** or sh*. I don't
| personally like it when people do it but it's not uncommon.
| ck425 wrote:
| Really? I've went to London office a couple of times and
| have had many colleagues there and they didn't seem notable
| different to Scots in terms of swearing.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| US is a far more religious society. At least my religion
| expressly forbids cursing and swearing. I still kind of have
| a visible reaction when people curse, but I think it makes
| people regard me poorly, so I am trying to correct it.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Swearing just changes the dynamic when used in a professional
| setting (in the US). It is casual, widely interpretable use,
| generally negative language.
|
| At worst, if targeted to a person, project, or role it
| immediately heightens the tension in the relationship.
|
| At best, it is used to emphatically describe something ("this
| code is a bit shitty") but again because of swear words
| generally inflammatory nature it can be interpreted poorly.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| > I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also
| believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if
| its on a weekend.
|
| That's a no for me when the incentives are different in
| magnitude.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Google had promised us autonomy
|
| Of the many lies in business, the most blatant is when a company
| tells you they'll give you autonomy that they aren't required to
| give you.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Still cannot begin to understand the mindset of people who
| believe their employees actually care about their boring
| projects. Give people a reason to care and they will. I gain
| nothing if my manager or CEO succeeds.
| blodkorv wrote:
| He is right on almost all of what he is saying regarding work
| life balance and such.
|
| But if you have the oportunity to not have to work under a guy
| like that. Why would you? At most you will get a salary raise but
| ultimatley you would be working very hard under his wip to
| realize his dreams and goals.
|
| The mind set he has can be really benefitial for certain
| companies and it is really helpful for start-ups to work like
| this because you establish an base line of dicipline in the
| company culture that is valuable.
|
| But he obviously is not capable to reflect back on himself and
| see who he are. These sort of people rarely are capable of that
| and if they do they dont really care.
| carapace wrote:
| I worked at the Google campus in MV as a TVC for a while, and one
| of my first thoughts was "Yeah, this is a baseline for quality of
| life. If we can get to the point where people live this well,
| that's a win." I mean, we will still have to contend with the
| human condition, but at least the reasonable problems are all
| solved.
|
| To me complaining about "entitlement" just sounds like a kind of
| mild "Stockholm Syndrome" for primitive conditions.
|
| Googlers may have some issues but I don't feel that their
| expectations around baseline quality of life are among them. We
| should all be so fortunate. No really, we should. Let's work on
| that together.
| anticristi wrote:
| I had a similar experience when I worked as a contractor in a big
| corporations coming from a start-up background. You could tell
| that the corporation had a different risk appetite than a start-
| up. At a start-up, your highest risk is running out of runway. At
| a corporation, your income is rather safe, so your biggest risk
| is getting sued. No point launching a product one year early, if
| it costs 4% of your total annual income.
| CompensatedGrnt wrote:
| When highly compensated people moan about the less compensated
| people not putting in the same kind of hours I wonder what kind
| of blinders they have on. Anyone who has even a little bit of
| smarts realizes that they generally shouldn't work as hard as
| their boss, because they will not be compensated the same.
|
| Early on in my career I believed the mantra that managers
| shoulder more risk, so that is why they deserve higher
| compensation. But in my 30 year career I have never seen anyone
| in my management chain face legal trouble. At most managers were
| fired, same as regular employees.
|
| Very high level position hiring tends to be slower than lower
| positions, so you could argue that that is the reason the VP
| salary should be higher. But the compensation is so out of whack
| that this doesn't hold water either. Companies could save a lot
| of money if they paid employees more uniform compensation, and
| when firing someone, the compensation package would be
| proportional to how long a person in that position typically
| takes to find the next job. So maybe an engineer would get a
| month, and a VP 6 months equivalent of salary.
| watwut wrote:
| > online ahead of us was overheard saying "What? Sushi again???"
| which became our inside joke around entitlement.
|
| Yeah, I dont like Sushi either. Not sure why not liking Sushi is
| entitlement, but as I said, normal food tastes better.
| toyg wrote:
| ... implying that sushi is abnormal...?
| watwut wrote:
| In here it definitely is. It is more expensive for same
| amount of food and you have to go to sushi bar to get it.
| When you go to restaurant, then you don't get sushi. It is
| not something canteen would give you, ever.
|
| Also, the "Sushi AGAIN" complain can be entitlement only is
| Sushi is something special where you live. If sushi is
| ordinary food, then it is no more entitled then "chicken
| wings again" - perfectly normal thing to overhear if your
| local cafeteria is giving chicken wings every other day.
| alexashka wrote:
| The author has a hard time telling apart what works, vs what
| aligns with his personality and energy levels.
|
| Not everyone who is an excellent contributor needs to be willing
| to work on weekends or have that 'go-getter' energy.
|
| The optimal path is one of optimizing for the path of least
| resistance, while this fella seems intent on rushing ahead, head
| first, until something breaks, or as he calls it, gets 'worn
| down'.
|
| Of course if you lack the brains to be able to comprehend what
| the path of least resistance is, the next best thing is to be
| extra energetic and try everything until something sticks.
|
| That's this guy in a nutshell. This type of approach to life is
| often destructive and abusive, what the author calls having a
| 'short fuse'. These extra energetic folks need to be reigned in
| by people who have a working brain, then the extra energetic
| people can be excellent. This can be seen in sports, where a
| group of intelligent people take extra energetic maniacs and mold
| them into championship teams.
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah, my contract stipulates my working hours are monday to
| friday. This is what we agreed to when I started working. I
| will make an exception if the system is on fire (but don't
| expect me at 9am on Monday after it), but not for a management
| imposed deadline looking like it will be missed. That just
| encourages setting tighter deadlines to get more work out of
| employees.
| justapassenger wrote:
| While he has valid points of how corp life is different from
| startup, he seems like a horrible, entitled person to work for.
|
| General attitude that comes out of it to me, is that your
| employees growth doesn't matter, only his vision of product
| matters. He complains about people being entitled, and at the
| same time he complains that as CEO of subsidiary of one of the
| biggest company in the world, he cannot say offensive things in
| his talks.
|
| And most entitled one - he's sold his company (that he actually
| didn't own, from the beginning, like with most startups) and he
| cannot control it fully anymore? And complaining that he cannot
| fire people on the spot?
|
| He should check his entitlement before complaining about other
| being entitled by not wanting to put his product vision above
| their wellbeing.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I think you misinterpreting what he's saying. I didn't get the
| impression that he claims that employees growth doesn't matter.
| He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather than
| building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing to
| optimize for, esp for the company.
|
| Not being able to fire people is indeed a big disadvantage. Bad
| employees are much worse than just not contributing. They make
| the people around them worse and have a negative impact on the
| morale. As a manager you want to be able to get rid of such
| people as quickly as possible. I'm not saying firing on the
| spot is a good thing. But it should be reasonable to fire
| someone within 6 months and it shouldn't come as a surprise to
| the employee. Good managers communicate to their employees when
| they are not performing.
| justapassenger wrote:
| > He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather
| than building a better product. That's indeed the wrong thing
| to optimize for, esp for the company.
|
| It's literally his job, as a CEO, to make sure promos and
| career progression align with increased product quality.
|
| Sure, it's harder as a part big company, where there's more
| bureaucracy to deal with (both for good reasons of
| consistency and equality, and bad reasons of just because)
| but no one said growing is easy. As an engineer I'd be fired
| if I wouldn't solve technical challenges of scaling.
| nqo wrote:
| Was literally about to type this out. The issue of
| prioritizing promos over product value doesn't exist when
| delivering product value is what gets you promoted. If
| that's not the case, it's the fault of management and not
| the employee.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| While optimizing for promotion is definitely a corossive
| aspect of large company culture, it's simply not true that
| you can't "fire" people in Google. There is a bi-annual perf
| cycle, and there are ratings, and they mean things, your
| peers are involved, ratings are discussed among managers,
| results are callibrated, and there are "needs improvement"
| flags and "performance improvment" processes.
|
| No you can't fire a person on the spot, but the assumption is
| that if they got into Google in the first place there's
| something of value there, so the company has a commitment to
| fix the problem before jettisoning the person.
|
| What this guy seems to be complaining about is his inability
| to make personal arbitrary choices from his own authority and
| only his.
|
| Yeah, you for sure can't do that at Google. Thank god. It's
| not a feudal kingdom.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I dunno, based on what you wrote about the process it
| sounds impossible to actually _fire_ someone.
|
| Unless they are so toxic that everyone hates them, they'll
| be able to swing performance to an even average.
|
| Or at least squeak along until they leave of their own
| volition.
|
| I can kind of see why that would be annoying to someone
| that used to be able to make personal arbitrary choices
| from his own authority.
| drclau wrote:
| > they'll be able to swing performance to an even average
|
| Ok, but then they're just average, not bad. Hence, no
| need to fire them.
| jstrong wrote:
| you make him sound like Uhtred in Last Kingdom season 1,
| returning home to find his chief servant pilfering from his
| land, prompting him to leap off from his horse and plunge a
| sword through his heart ("now THAT ... is justice!" Uhtred
| boasts to his horrified wife). perhaps 'feudal kingdom' was
| a bit over the top?
| viklove wrote:
| > He's saying that most people optimize for promotion rather
| than building a better product.
|
| If you want them to optimize for building a better product,
| give them more equity. Most people don't want to work during
| the best 40 years of their lives. Give them a way out or they
| will try to find one themselves.
| moreranchplease wrote:
| Exactly! Give people equity if you really want them to care
| about the product over what's best for their career.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| In the article he says this doesn't work because people
| effectively view equity as salary.
| Aeolun wrote:
| And rightly so. Your google equity is absolutely
| disconnected from whatever product you are building
| there. External forces are more likely to affect it than
| anything you do personally.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Yes, exactly. But this is the complete opposite of what
| people are saying in this thread.
| the_local_host wrote:
| But he's not strictly talking about "bad employees"; he
| explicitly mentions firing people for "the basic reason that
| you don't need this role any more".
|
| That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows that
| the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair to expect
| employee "passion" when their own continued employment is
| contingent on whether management thinks they're still
| necessary.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| I agree. Not sure he meant that. People are much more
| important than roles. If you have someone who is good but
| in a role that is not needed anymore, you'll find another
| role for them. Esp in big tech.
| theptip wrote:
| The OP is 100% right here. Sometimes the needs of the
| company change as the company grows, and people can't keep
| up. Or people change and they can't give what the company
| needs from them any more. This is one of the hard aspects
| of being a manager in a startup that's growing quickly.
|
| The easiest example to grok would be if you had hired a VP
| of sales who is an expert in B2C selling, then you pivot
| your product to a B2B offering. Or say you pivot into being
| a data-heavy product and your CTO has no idea how to build
| a data pipeline.
|
| In these cases you could say "they will figure it out", and
| sometimes that works. But sometimes you need to recognize
| that through no fault of their own, your employee now does
| not have the skill set they need to do their job, and find
| someone that does have those skills.
|
| This is most pronounced in hyper-growth startups because
| bigger companies seldom pivot dramatically or change their
| scale rapidly enough that a motivated and smart employee
| can't grow with the role.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > That's not invalid by itself as long as everyone knows
| that the game is purely transactional. But it isn't fair
| to expect employee "passion" when their own continued
| employment is contingent on whether management thinks
| they're still necessary.
|
| This still seems to hold no?
| theptip wrote:
| Maybe to some extent, but I'm not certain. If you are
| passionate about what you do, then you are probably not
| enjoying the job which shifted into not being a fit for
| your skill set, so the need to find someone else can be a
| mutual/positive conversation. It's also really fraught
| with ego and self-worth landmines so it doesn't always go
| that way.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| There's a significant difference between being passionate
| about what you do and being passionate about the
| company/mission. A software developer might care
| immensely about the craft of software and the intricacies
| of tooling, programming languages, etc. but none at all
| about the company or mission, or a developer might care
| only about the company and view the craft of software as
| just the thing that happens to be most helpful for the
| company at the moment. Most people probably fall
| somewhere in the middle.
|
| I suspect employers would like both, but would prefer to
| subordinate the former to the latter, because otherwise
| that employee is easily going to jump ship to a
| competitor or potentially not be an effective employee at
| all and get lost in the weeds of their craft rather than
| the mission. This sort of passion for the mission/company
| itself is also the impression I get from the article.
|
| And that's a pretty big ask if as an employer you also
| want the ability to discard people who are no longer good
| skill fits for the company.
|
| I mean you can ask it and you may well succeed, but I
| would expect quite a few burned bridges along the way.
| theptip wrote:
| > There's a significant difference between being
| passionate about what you do and being passionate about
| the company/mission.
|
| Absolutely.
|
| > I suspect employers would like both, but would prefer
| to subordinate the former to the latter
|
| I think this depends on the company - size in particular
| seems very relevant. A lot of startups want their hires
| to be "mission driven", i.e. passionate about the
| company's objectives. This is more important if (like
| most startups) you're hoping for your hires to be
| generalists, and figure things out as they go along. In
| this scenario you can have meta-level "passionate about
| what you do" regardless of what the object-level task is
| (or more realistically, within a broad range of tasks
| that fall within your area of competence-but-not-
| expertise). But that's not as important as passion for
| the mission, and I do wonder if "passionate for whatever
| thing you're working on" is an oxymoron. In this
| situation I think your point is correct, the small
| companies want passion about the mission.
|
| One of the complaints in the OP was that Google employees
| are _not_ (as) mission-driven. My model here would be
| that at a big company, you're looking for a bunch of
| highly-specialized individuals that are effectively PhD-
| level experts in their field (not saying you completely
| discard/devalue generalists, but the trend is towards
| more specialists as you get bigger since you have more
| tasks that can actually keep a specialist busy full-
| time). For hiring/motivating specialists, you need to
| select for people that are passionate about the craft,
| not necessarily the mission. Not to mention if I
| understand correctly at the lower levels at least you
| tend to apply to a broad "Software engineer" role and get
| slotted in to a team, rather than applying specifically
| for a role in a specific subject area. I'm guessing the
| median Googler is substantially less mission-oriented
| than the median 10-person-startup engineer. Indeed to the
| extent that your mission is "boring" (I don't know many
| people that are excited by selling ads, for example) I
| suspect you want to actively select for people that are
| passionate about the craft, not the mission; these people
| will be happy with any mission, as long as they get to
| craft well. So for large companies I think I disagree
| with your theory about preferences between the two
| passions.
|
| Note with all of this -- you can still be a primarily
| mission-based small/growth startup, and have a situation
| where a skill mismatch emerges, and you need to replace
| someone. I don't think it's hypocritical to want your
| employees to be passionate about the mission, while also
| having the skills required to do the job, and recognize
| that sometimes your passionate and mission-driven
| employee is just not the right person for the role they
| are currently in.
|
| > And that's a pretty big ask if as an employer you also
| want the ability to discard people who are no longer good
| skill fits for the company.
|
| Perhaps there is some hypocrisy if you are really
| encouraging passion about _the company_, and selling the
| "we are a family" story, and then turn around and
| terminate someone because you pivoted and no longer need
| them. I know some startups do this and it's a bit
| awkward. Your company may be close, but you're not a
| family. But I don't think "hires mission driven people"
| and "fires fast if there's a lack of fit" are mutually
| incompatible asks/expectations in general.
| modeless wrote:
| > when their own continued employment is contingent on
| whether management thinks they're still necessary
|
| Talk about entitlement. You think that when a company
| hires you, that should be a commitment to employ you
| forever regardless of need?
|
| Passion can come from your own investment in the success
| of the business, through equity and through the
| opportunities that come to productive employees at
| growing companies, both before and after they leave. Or
| it can come from a belief in the mission, distinct from
| faith in the company. You can pursue the same mission at
| a different company. But I guarantee you one thing:
| passion does not come from a guarantee of continued
| employment.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > passion does not come from a guarantee of continued
| employment.
|
| Then why do founders work harder than hired managers?
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| I think the answer for most people is perceived control
| of one's destiny.
|
| As long as that holds, I think a lot of people,
| especially founder types, are happy. The moment that's
| wrested away, whether by excessive board oversight, or by
| perceived meddling from investors, or by perceived
| interference by a manager, passion drops.
|
| That's why autonomy was so important for the article
| writer.
| modeless wrote:
| Because founders are the most invested, and often have
| the most passion for the mission. But founders do not
| have a guarantee of continued employment anyway. There is
| always the threat of the business failing, and in some
| cases there's a threat of being ousted by investors or
| the board.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > You think that when a company hires you, that should be
| a commitment to employ you forever regardless of need?
|
| Hardly. I can't speak for the original comment I quoted,
| but I personally view employment as pretty transactional.
| You pay me this, I give you this. I may or may not have
| passion, but that should be immaterial to the job at
| hand.
|
| The employer sets a bar. The employee clears it or does
| not. That bar may change over time. If the employee does
| not clear the bar the employer fires the employee. If the
| employee clears the bar the employer continues paying the
| employee.
|
| To the extent that passion comes into the conversation,
| it's an internal issue for the employee to sort out by
| themselves and not really the business of the employer.
|
| Are you saying something different? Because I don't think
| we're actually in disagreement, but maybe we are?
| modeless wrote:
| > I may or may not have passion, but that should be
| immaterial to the job at hand.
|
| Perhaps this is our disagreement. Employees with passion
| often perform better and there is nothing "unfair" about
| employers desiring passionate employees for that reason.
|
| I agree that passion shouldn't be a requirement per se
| (whatever that means) if job performance is otherwise
| good, but passion is _very_ highly correlated with job
| performance.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > Employees with passion often perform better
|
| That sounds really weird to me to bring up, regardless of
| whether it's true or not. As in this makes sense when
| you're thinking of trying to hire folks trying to gauge
| passion as a proxy for their performance when you can't
| directly observe it, but when they're working for you,
| you don't need proxies! You can directly observe
| performance!
|
| So passion seems pretty irrelevant as soon as someone is
| hired, unless you're afraid of them jumping ship. But
| that's the nature of the beast. Employers can fire
| employees and employees can jump ship. Such is life.
|
| > there is nothing "unfair" about employers desiring
| passionate employees
|
| I'm a bit confused; I mean there's nothing unfair about
| desires in general? Someone could want a billion dollars
| to fall from the sky into their lap and I might say "good
| luck," but there's nothing unfair about it. Employers
| might desire their employees to want literally zero pay
| and employees might desire their employers to give
| literally zero work. Good luck to the both of them.
|
| The question then is not so much desires as it is the
| actual dynamics of the job itself and to what extent
| those desires are actually manifested in observable
| behavior.
|
| I think the overarching theme that the_local_host was
| bringing up has to do with the language of morality in
| general.
|
| You can talk about the employee-employer relationship in
| a very dispassionate sense as one of mutual transactional
| need with one discarding the other when one is no longer
| needed, which is fine. You can also talk about the
| relationship in the language of fairness and passion,
| which is also fine.
|
| But there's something pretty unsettling about crossing
| the two together, especially when the perceived dynamic
| is that when it's convenient for the employer they slip
| into one or the other rather than when it's convenient
| for the employee.
|
| EDIT: In response to your additional new line: "I agree
| that passion shouldn't be a requirement per se (whatever
| that means) if job performance is otherwise good, but
| passion is very highly correlated with job performance."
|
| I think the original point of the_local_host's comment is
| that it's just kind of weird to talk about passion at all
| or whether an employee "should" do something or not or
| even the notion of employer/employee entitlement.
|
| Just make the job expectations explicit. If an employer
| wants employees to work weekends make that explicit in
| the job description. If the employer wants a work product
| that a typical employee can only produce after 100 hours
| of work in a week then fine, ask for it, just make it
| clear upfront. If the employer wants employees to work
| extra hours for deadlines, fine just make it explicit.
|
| The employee then takes it or leaves it. And from the
| employer side either the employee fulfills those
| expectations or doesn't.
|
| But don't leave it implicit and then complain about the
| lack of passion, which is what I think the_local_host was
| pointing out.
|
| (There's wider policy questions of whether you want to
| incentivize or disincentivize that behavior on a societal
| level, but that's an altogether different scope/level of
| conversation.)
| asmosoinio wrote:
| > You can directly observe performance!
|
| From my experience this can be extremely hard - to be
| able to know how much one employee is contributing
| compared to another one.
| modeless wrote:
| The thing you quoted literally said it was "unfair" for
| employers to expect passion from their at-will employees.
| I guess you're saying it's fine for employers to "desire"
| passion but not to "expect" it? OK, sure.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > I guess you're saying it's fine for employers to
| "desire" passion but not to "expect" it?
|
| I'm personally saying it isn't really the business of the
| employer to talk about employee passion to begin with. In
| the same way that the employer may desire an employee to
| keep a clean home and healthy living habits, because of
| the various signaling benefits it has for their job
| duties, but it isn't really the employer's business to
| care.
| modeless wrote:
| OK, but that's very far from the quote you originally
| made. So you can understand my initial confusion.
|
| While I agree that there should not be a specific job
| requirement to keep a clean home and healthy living
| habits independent of job performance, I absolutely
| disagree that employers shouldn't "talk" about it in
| general terms. It's perfectly appropriate for companies
| to encourage and help their employees to lead healthy
| lives (e.g. providing healthy food, gym access,
| encouraging taking vacation time, promoting appropriate
| work-life balance, etc), just as it is appropriate for
| companies to encourage having passion for the mission
| even if it isn't strictly a job requirement.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > OK, but that's very far from the quote you originally
| made.
|
| I don't think so. I mean I guess you'd have to ask
| the_local_host whether I'm accurately representing the
| thrust of the quote, but the operative word here is
| indeed "expect" as opposed to desire or encourage.
|
| Rephrasing the original quote in my own language I'd say
| something like:
|
| Employers and employees can use purely transactional
| language to talk about employment and it's fine.
| Employers and employees can use emotional and moral
| language such as "passion" to talk about employment and
| that's fine too. But which language to use should depend
| on what forms the bedrock of the relationship. If the
| transactional needs form the ultimate bedrock of the
| relationship, an expectation of "passion" is no bueno.
|
| There is a difference between encouragement and
| expectation. And I think employees would chafe under the
| _expectation_ of e.g. eating healthy food or using the
| gym (probably not vacation time though, although a select
| few might, in the same way that I don 't think, absent
| flight concerns, employers would be terribly offput by
| employees refusing raises).
|
| In the same way that team activities, team meals, happy
| hour, providing materials about the mission etc. can all
| be viewed as perfectly fine _encouragement_ for passion
| for both the mission and the company, that is not the
| same as expecting passion.
|
| Expectations are two way streets. You get things if you
| meet them. You don't get things or have things taken away
| if you don't meet them.
|
| Desires and encouragement are not.
|
| > I absolutely disagree that employers shouldn't "talk"
| about it in general terms.
|
| Talk is indeed too strong of a word on my part in the
| sense you're using it, but the point I was trying to get
| across is that if transactional needs ultimately dominate
| the relationship then those are the ones that should be
| emphasized.
|
| I would prefer employers tell employees upfront that
| they're expected to work long hours and nights for
| deadlines or similar things in that vein, rather than
| leave it implicit and then tut-tut them for a lack of
| passion.
|
| And because of that that's why I emphasize the word
| "expect" rather than "desire."
| the_local_host wrote:
| I agree that expecting permanent employment based on
| passion would be an overly-entitled attitude. But the
| author's _complaint_ , that employees treat the product
| as "a tool to advance the employees career, not a
| passion, mission or economic game changer", seems
| ridiculous in a context where an employee can be fired as
| soon as they're no longer useful. Why should he complain
| that employees look out for themselves if no one else is
| going to?
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Exactly. It is natural when "human resources" treat their
| company as a "salary resource".
| indeedmug wrote:
| Sometimes I find reading HN comment to be a bizarre
| experience because people seeming read an entirely different
| article than I did. All the article's author is saying that
| at large corporates the incentives are about personal
| promotion as opposed to delivering user experiences. He
| justifies this by saying that individual contributions get
| diluted in large organization. To me, this makes a lot of
| sense and is an interesting and thoughtful conversation.
|
| Somehow the person two comments above me twisted his message
| into the author being the entitled one. I think this is what
| the author is referring to by PC and putting on a corporate
| face.
| apozem wrote:
| Yeah, it shows a lack of self-awareness to complain about
| employees' entitlement and then wish they'd work more, without
| any talk of extra compensation. Seems a bit _entitled_ to
| expect other human beings to sacrifice their weekends and
| happiness to bump the value of your shares.
| johncessna wrote:
| That's a bit unfair. He's clearly passionate about the
| product and its customers. The ask to sacrifice for your
| customers is a reasonable position to take, especially in
| weird one of situations. It also ties into his risk/reward
| compensation section.
|
| I didn't get any indications that he expected 80 hour work
| weeks 52 weeks a year from everyone. To paraphrase, I think
| he was frustrated with his employees going to the townhall or
| yoga class in the quad instead of working on the customer
| outage.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| A charitable explanation is that he would like to motivate
| his workers by equity... but in the company as big as
| Google, equity doesn't work that way anymore, and there is
| no good substitute.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| He seems like the kind of CEO I would love to work for.
|
| It seems like he tries to care about his users a lot, and wants
| his team to as well.
|
| Also, the "offensive things" in his talks were only offensive
| to a small vocal minority by his own account.
| DC1350 wrote:
| Why would you ever prioritize your users over yourself? They
| have no idea who you are and they don't care. Don't you have
| your own goals to worry about?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Where does he say to prioritize users over yourself?
| DC1350 wrote:
| That's what caring about the users or the product at the
| expense of ladder climbing is.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think having a mercenary-like attitude is just as bad
| as naively sacrificing your time for the company. Why
| can't there be a middle ground?
| thethethethe wrote:
| > offensive to a small vocal minority
|
| I really don't see how this is an excuse. it's like saying
| "black people are a minority in the US so who cares if they
| say they are oppressed"
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think it's reasonable to assume that not everyone is
| going to like everything that you say. I don't think this
| is an issue.
|
| If there's a specific demographic that is consistently
| affected by what you're saying, there might be an issue
| though.
| thethethethe wrote:
| > I think it's reasonable to assume that not everyone is
| going to like everything that you say.
|
| Sure but it's really not that hard to keep things under
| control in the work place. I have my own opinions,
| sometimes I share them at work, sometimes people may
| disagree, however, I don't "rack up multiple HR
| complaints" like this guy did.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| _" After the acquisition, I was invited to speak on many
| different Google panels and events and very quickly, I
| began racking up my HR complaints. I used a four letter
| word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG"_
|
| Firstly, these came from events he was _invited_ to speak
| at. If you invite someone to speak and then don't let
| them speak their mind what was the point in inviting
| them?
|
| Secondly, as a non-american none of the things he
| mentions are egregious. A bit unprofessional? Yeah,
| probably. But not worthy of being reported to HR.
| thethethethe wrote:
| I'm sorry but this makes no sense. So what if he was
| invited to speak? Can we not hold people accountable for
| their actions just because they were invited to speak?
|
| How do you know whether or not the things he said were
| worthy of reporting to HR? He didn't say what they were
| for a reason
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| It seems like we're at an impasse.
|
| To me, it sounds like people wanted to "hold him
| accountable" for upsetting them. You clearly think
| otherwise.
|
| And I don't know, but the article makes me believe he is
| not out to attack people. Some people have also pointed
| out cultural differences that are likely at play here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26168899.
|
| Again, you clearly think differently given one of your
| other comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26170030.
| thethethethe wrote:
| > To me, it sounds like people wanted to "hold him
| accountable" for upsetting them. You clearly think
| otherwise
|
| No this is exactly what I think. I think it is valid for
| people to air the grievances. I think the difference here
| is that you are skeptical of the validity if their
| complaints. If I am right, this is a pretty fundamental
| difference in world view that I doubt can be reconciled
| on a HN thread at this point unless you disagree
| raclage wrote:
| > Also, the "offensive things" in his talks were only
| offensive to a small vocal minority by his own account.
|
| Is that really something we should take at face value? There
| are plenty of instances of people getting unreasonably
| offended but it's also extremely common for people to be
| shitty to their colleagues and use this as an excuse. He
| provides no actual examples.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Well, there is a little context provided by the post
| itself. While a lot of people seem to be calling him toxic,
| he comes off as quite genuine to me.
| raclage wrote:
| People can be genuinely toxic though.
|
| Personally I've met and worked with lots of people that
| were in many ways friendly and genuine but had some
| weakness or quirk that induced them to mistreat their
| coworkers.
| campl3r wrote:
| It aligns nearly perfectly with most other reports out of
| google.
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