[HN Gopher] Why I Quit Google's WebAssembly Team, and How It Mad...
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Why I Quit Google's WebAssembly Team, and How It Made Me Sick
Author : kevingadd
Score : 360 points
Date : 2022-05-11 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > I explained to a Google leader how the WebAssembly project was
| struggling without support from his organization and how people
| were being driven away from the project. He agreed with my
| assessment and then told me nothing was going to change. In the
| end, the team changed things on their own.
|
| Man I wish that didn't feel so relevant. Literally on an all-day
| "strategy" meeting right now and heard a variation of this about
| 5 minutes ago...
| tyingq wrote:
| Yeah, that's not great, but I still highly prefer that truthful
| _" nothing is going to change"_ over false promises. At least
| you have the information you need to make a real decision for
| yourself.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| You're absolutely right about that. It's demoralizing, but in
| a "devil you know" kind of way.
| Arcsech wrote:
| Oh yeah, that paragraph really nailed it. Every place I've
| worked that's started to go downhill, it _always_ started with
| executives, who _never_ acknowledged their role in the problem
| or did anything to fix it.
|
| I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our problems
| as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone in power
| accountable for anything.
| itronitron wrote:
| I wonder if presenting concerns to them in the form of
| problem-consequences would compel them to action.
|
| If an employee is just complaining to them they are likely to
| just be annoyed, but if they are told about future negative
| impact then they would need to take some form of action
| (presumably).
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| 100% yes.
|
| Fundamentally, the C-level/senior executives are rarely
| connected with what's actually going at the ground level. And
| IME a lot of them simply don't care. They make decisions
| without understanding the impacts to the rest of the
| organization, and when objections or concerns are raised,
| they're filtered or attenuated at the middle management layer
| (due, usually, to a culture of fear) or dismissed at the top
| levels.
|
| Put another way: When the decision makers don't feel the
| consequences of their decisions, those consequences will be
| ignored. It's a kind of corporate negative externality.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > dismissed at the top levels.
|
| The issue, IMO, is the only accountability C levels face is
| from either a board or stock prices. Otherwise, nothing
| they do has any real impact on them personally.
|
| Another major problem is the effects of their decisions are
| long delayed. Do something that slows development to a
| crawl and you still have a functional product for years
| (even if you can't add new features to it). Tying the
| original decision to the impact on the org is hard, and
| even harder since whoever made that decision isn't likely
| to want to take responsibility for it.
| [deleted]
| juve1996 wrote:
| Innovation no longer happens at these places. I can't think
| of the last thing Google did that was all that impressive.
| The only google products I still use are search, gmail and
| google maps. That's it. The same as in 2005.
|
| These companies no longer need to innovate to stay relevant.
| They focus instead on stifling competition, lobbying
| politicians, marketing, advertising, dark patterns, etc. The
| good people eventually get shut out and shut down and leave
| or stop trying to influence change. The bureaucracy wins and
| eventually the music stops.
|
| > I'm increasingly convinced that a large portion of our
| problems as a society is our absolute refusal to hold anyone
| in power accountable for anything.
|
| The problem is power is too concentrated. Companies no longer
| need to innovate. This isn't just in tech. Everyone wants
| their assets to grow at others expense society be damned.
| WaffleIronMaker wrote:
| The whole GSuite (Google Docs, Google Drive, Etc.) have
| been very productive tools in my experience. (Although
| Google Drive was launched in like 2012, and Docs in 2006)
|
| The Dart language and Flutter framework have been a rather
| innovative attempt at making cross platform apps.
|
| But yeah, the amount of innovation at Google has certainly
| decreased over time.
| anonporridge wrote:
| > Everyone wants their assets to grow at others expense
| society be damned.
|
| Which is sad and short sighted, because the best way to
| increase the absolute value of your assets is to encourage
| large scale societal innovation. Grow the pie, not your
| relative share of the pie.
|
| Sadly, I think there are too many people who would rather
| be king of the wastelands than relatively equal to all
| others in a post scarcity world.
|
| We need to become collectively better about extracting
| these dark personalities from power if we want a good
| future.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think there's also an element of overestimating how much
| power "people in power" actually have. Unless you're at the
| point in the org chart where you can actually move money and
| people you're stuck trying to keep your little zen garden
| clean inside a massive constantly shifting system you have no
| control over.
|
| Power in an organization should probably be measured by
| "resources they have unilateral control over" instead of
| "authority." Because if all you have is authority you're a
| glorified manager.
| TillE wrote:
| There's an incredible amount of soft power in simple
| _leadership_ , which is extraordinarily rare in both
| politics and business. Simply setting out an agenda in
| clear terms and getting people on board.
|
| If you can do that, you don't need to micromanage all the
| levers yourself, because people will eagerly working with
| you towards your shared goal.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| OMG yes. Leadership and vision are essential for success.
| There is an absolute shit-ton of asshat, visionless
| leadership in the world, and in my experience they act so
| entitled and worldly while they crush the business that
| feeds them. Not that I'm bitter or anything.
|
| I highlighted this in TFA,
|
| > Any team needs expert leadership to thrive, and expert
| leaders need support from the people they report to so
| they can do what's necessary.
| AlexMoffat wrote:
| A good definition of power is from Hannah Arendt, it's
| "the ability to coordinate voluntary collective action".
| If you can do this you have power because you can't
| coerce everyone at once all the time.
| drewcoo wrote:
| We hold people responsible. Scapegoats. Low-ranking staff.
|
| The managerial class can be rewarded for failure (learning
| experience) but is so rarely held responsible that it's
| newsworthy when it happens.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I 100% agree with your last generalization.
| grrrrrbox wrote:
| Part of me wonders if this could be an intentional strategy at
| big orgs.
|
| Step 1: Organization holds endless multi-hour meetings about
| intractable organizational issues.
|
| Step 2: Stakeholders go to a bar to drink heavily and
| commissarate.
|
| Step 3: Uninhibited stakeholders decide on a way to ignore the
| inscrutable organizational issues and Just Do It.
|
| Step 4: Organization pats itself on the back for another
| successful round of all-day meetings.
|
| Sort of a variation on the classic "beatings will continue
| until morale improves" strategy.
| nostrademons wrote:
| In my experience, this usually happens because an exec sees a
| presentation or comes up with an idea and is like "Let's do
| this, we'll throw some good people at it and they'll figure
| out how" and then it turns out that after the org is built,
| hundreds of people are working on it, and they've
| investigated all the constraints, it's not actually possible
| to build the idea. The ideas that actually work usually get
| developed in the opposite direction, an engineer says "We
| _can_ build this, let 's put an early version in front of
| some people and see if we _should_. "
|
| Innovation is path-dependent, and
| communication/adoption/organizational/economic constraints
| are just as real as technical ones. It's like how pretty much
| any skilled programmer could've built the first version of
| Facebook in a weekend, but to take off, it needed to start in
| the highest social-status campus (Harvard) of the most
| networked population (college students) of early adopters
| (young people). That limited the pool of entrepreneurs to
| basically just Mark Zuckerburg and the Winklevii, and
| Zuckerburg got there first under somewhat dubious
| circumstances.
|
| Same with a lot of discussions in politics, climate change,
| renewable energy, and Hacker News. An uninformed layperson
| looks at the problem as a whole, says "We should do this,
| let's throw money at it and someone will figure out how", and
| then we end up with a financial bubble and not a whole lot of
| solutions.
| rektide wrote:
| That people within an organization wrap their careers
| around an idea is a huge hazard. There is so much incentive
| to present success, to project positively.
|
| We talked about Jobs' "reality distortion field" but
| there's a much much more mundane almost sycophantic hyping
| up of the future & success that is deeply deeply deeply
| woven into most company's genes.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Oh, we do it better. We just replace step 2 and 3 with
| "Executive management says the same set of empty slogans
| they've been saying for years whenever these problems are
| raised, thus all but admitting that nothing is actually going
| to change."
|
| Then we add a step 5 where middle management goes away and
| gossips about how everything is f*cked.
| adolph wrote:
| Related reading: The pre-CIA OSS "Simple Sabotage Field
| Manual"
|
| _When possible, refer all matters to committees, for
| "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the
| committee as large as possible -- never less than five._
|
| https://www.openculture.com/2015/12/simple-sabotage-field-
| ma...
| akhmatova wrote:
| I zeroed-in in that quote as well. What good does it do to
| optimize your hiring process to select for candidate ability
| implement middle-out bubblesort at the whiteboard when ... this
| is the kind of toxicity they can expect to have crashing down
| on their heads when they actually get there?
| rhizome wrote:
| The middle-out bubblesort stuff is so they don't have to
| decide where to put you. You're a cog with a certain amount
| of learning in you and can be put anywhere someone wants your
| butt in a seat. It's credentialism at its base, but it's also
| resource engineering to cut down on management overhead. Just
| like hint-based management in general, except in these cases
| the hint is the person's skills.
| Allower wrote:
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > If you're building a product that billions of people will be
| stuck with, however, this can lead to a little stress. The
| history of the web is littered with bad APIs, ill-considered
| specs, and tangled piles of security vulnerabilities. Something a
| programmer puts together in a week can consume decades of
| engineering time in the future. WebAssembly could not and would
| not release as a half-baked or ill-considered spec because as
| browser developers we all understood the costs everyone would pay
| for that.
|
| I might be missing something here, but this feels a little like
| unnecessary pressure. As I understand it, billions of people
| wouldn't be using the API; a few compiler authors would. I
| thought that's one of the nice things about WASM: recompile to
| upgrade. Security is a good concern to have, of course!
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I used to work at G. They put this pressure on you
| artificially, I think because they believe it gets you to buy
| in to your work due to its importance. Practically, it seems to
| encourage lethargy because you need to make sure that all
| billion of them are happy. Great engineering is done when you
| know what you can sacrifice some goals for other goals.
|
| People today aren't a lot smarter than people were 20 years
| ago, and we kind of forget that fact when we try to do
| grandiose projects like "replace the entire stack and make sure
| that it works equally well to the old stack in all
| circumstances." The old stack was built well for its goals, and
| had the benefit of 20 years of tuning. The replacement needs to
| come when the goals change. There is plenty of opportunity
| still: peoples' goals change frequently.
|
| If the goal was just to allow you to write webapps using
| toolchains for native apps, then you can put in an LLVM-like
| sidecar next to JS that has terrible performance but amazing
| security (I think this was closest to the goal of WASM).
| However, if the goal was to bring native performance to webapps
| means you can target your spec toward efficient JIT compilation
| on x86 and ARM (and RISC-V), without worrying a lot about
| portability to other architectures. I have heard a mix of the
| two looking at the WASM project from the outside: that they
| wanted native performance with 100% portability of both
| hardware platforms and development languages, and they thought
| they could achieve it.
|
| A great TPM (technical program/product manager - the Google
| term for an engineering-focused product manager) can help
| define these exclusions, and it sounds like OP really tried
| hard to get one. I'm surprised that Google didn't give them one
| to start.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I had the same conclusion: This team needs to get a dedicated
| TPM to act as a stress umbrella for the team. I tell my
| engineering team, if anyone is stressing you out, "pinging
| you" for things, asking you to set up pointless meetings,
| "escalating" things with managers, or anything else that
| sucks away your productivity, please redirect them to me and
| I'll handle these annoyances. If software developers are
| distracted by stressful bullshit, then I'm not doing my job.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Very few developers, yes, but shipped to very many end users.
| As it turns out WASM was used as a springboard for a pretty
| nasty exploit chain to get persistent root on Chromebooks
| (responsibly disclosed and fixed, thankfully.)
| whizzter wrote:
| WASM as in the spec or as in the V8-wasm implementation?
| kevingadd wrote:
| The latter.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Webassembly is just the JVM in the browser all over again.
| jhgb wrote:
| > As I understand it, billions of people wouldn't be using the
| API; a few compiler authors would.
|
| Yes, but billions of people may suffer the consequences of the
| WASM design doing something stupid and then the few compiler
| authors having to semi-successfully deal with it. _That_ may be
| stressing, assuming that you care about such things as your
| brain child being an improvement (not a regression) on what
| came before.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Well thank god they're software engineers and not
| butterflies!
|
| https://ronmayhewphotography.com/2020/02/06/if-a-
| butterfly-f...
| smaddox wrote:
| You mean like requiring functions instead of basic blocks in
| a compiler target?
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Do you have any more information on that? What's the issue
| and what was the reasoning behind that choice?
| andsoitis wrote:
| This 2014 article in LifeHacker describes a "toxic work
| environment" thus:
|
| In short, a toxic work environment is any job where the work, the
| atmosphere, the people, or any combination of those things make
| you so dismayed it causes serious disruptions in the rest of your
| life.
|
| https://lifehacker.com/how-to-handle-a-toxic-work-environmen...
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| WebAssembly is an obscolete tech, it needs to be replaced with
| the disruptively polyglot GraalVM
| ncmncm wrote:
| Chronic stress is no joke. It really does cause brain damage,
| which people usually describe as "burn-out" as if it is just a
| thing to get over. But it takes years to get back to a functional
| condition, and it will not be the condition you started in.
|
| _Never stay with a thing that is giving you chronic stress_.
| Damage is permanent. Leave it, or find a way to not be insulated.
|
| A really excellent book on chronic stress and its effects on
| physiology is "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers", by Robert Sapolsky,
| and endocrinologist. (It is beyond me how anybody can become an
| endocrinologist without suffering chronic stress!) I had to read
| the last chapter at 30 minutes per page, plus breaks, because he
| was tying up threads from the whole rest of the book.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| I can't imagine posting something like this and ever expecting to
| get hired again.
|
| What's the upside? Can outside observers really make a considered
| judgement based on the one-sided and incomplete presentation?
|
| A claim of literal brain damage from stress is both difficult to
| substantiate and difficult to believe, and what are we supposed
| to do with it?
|
| I work at a similarly sized and positioned company, and all I can
| think is that the writer of this post seems very unbalanced.
| didibus wrote:
| Really? Sometimes I'd agree, but this post made me think
| positively of this person.
|
| What they described they were doing and tried to do seems like
| everything I'd expect of a good employee. It's too bad they
| didn't get the support they needed for it to work and suffered
| psychologically from it.
|
| They seemed to care deeply about the work and have really high
| standards for what they were building. They explained that they
| tried to rally people, bring light to the issue, they stepped
| in to try and unblock the project, get people moving along,
| resolve disagreements, etc.
|
| At the same time, all the complaints I've seen before on poorly
| run organizations. Projects are stalled, spinning their wheels,
| entralled in forever discussions, decisions are not being made,
| and when you try to escalate to get things unblocked, the
| leadership doesn't do anything about it, they just go well I
| want you all to figure it out ok. And things go right back to
| being the same dysfunctional. Eventually it hemorrhages talent,
| people start to leave, quit, switch to something else, and only
| then does something gets done because now it reflects in actual
| metrics.
|
| You have to have worked in better run organizations to maybe
| recognize how badly run that is.
|
| The role of an exec is to maximize output from the resources
| and assets under their control. Knowing how to best leverage
| talent, knowing how to properly delegate authority to key
| people, intervene when there's contention that goes unresolved
| for too long, allocate additional resources when output suffers
| from the lack of it, and make decisions about what to invest
| in, who to invest in, and what/who gets the cut and won't be
| invested in. All these things are what good management should
| do.
|
| I think sometimes we talk too much about being a good engineer,
| but we don't have enough conversation about being a good exec,
| trust me, like how half of all engineers are below average, and
| some are outright terrible, this is true of execs as well,
| except execs seem to get away with it for even longer normally,
| because there's so many people under them to pick up their
| slack.
| eropple wrote:
| I'd try to hire Katelyn in an instant if I had an appropriate
| role. Her reputation precedes her (I knew of her from multiple
| social/technical circles long before I knew she was even on HN)
| and honesty, when you've gone out of your way to try to fix a
| problem and it's made you blow a proverbial tire in the
| process, doesn't bother me.
|
| You, on the other hand, are slagging her with personal attacks
| in multiple comments in this thread. I wouldn't hire you after
| knowing you wrote them and I don't think you'd be saying the
| things you are with your name on them.
| [deleted]
| teakettle42 wrote:
| I made two comments, including this one, neither of which I'd
| call "slagging", but I can see why you might disagree.
|
| It sounds like we wouldn't be a good cultural fit for each
| other's organizations and that's okay.
|
| Thanks for providing an alternative viewpoint to consider.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >and all I can think is that the writer of this post seems very
| unbalanced
|
| Maybe the author wasn't that way, and going through the whole
| ordeal really damaged them, resulting in behavior that would
| previously seem unthinkable. Really stressful episodes can
| leave you very screwed up in the head, call it brain damage our
| however you like, it's a very real thing that happens.
| 300bps wrote:
| _Really stressful episodes can leave you very screwed up in
| the head_
|
| Earlier in my career, I would sometimes get very annoyed when
| users would call me to report problems. Thinking about it, I
| realized that it was me that was the problem. I put a picture
| of a guy working in a coal mine next to my phone so I could
| have some perspective.
|
| Operation Overlord was the code-name for the Battle of
| Normandy. The average age of the soldiers in that battle was
| 20. Up to 226,000 casualties with up to 39,000 dead.
|
| I don't mean to belittle anyone's experiences, but she is
| claiming permanent brain damage from the stress of being a
| software engineer and used as evidence of that brain damage
| that, "some days I couldn't find my car in the garage or
| forgot entire conversations". The first one was literally a
| Seinfeld episode. The second one - who doesn't do that?
| random-human wrote:
| > Over time I slowly lost my mind and short term memory, to
| the point that some days ...
|
| Added the first part of the sentence missing from your
| example. Prolonged exposure to an unhealthy stressed
| environment can create physical changes in the brain and
| body. In this case, chronic stress which had such adverse
| effects it caused a forced medical leave.
|
| > ...from the stress of being a software engineer
|
| "My two years at Google were spent perpetually stressed,
| acting as an unofficial PM, helping run meetings and
| document decisions while dealing with sometimes hostile
| colleagues." - I can't speak for others, but this is not
| the 'normal' stress of being a software engineer that I
| know. That has all kinds of red flags. I have never been
| asked to perform the duties of an assistant/secretary or
| help organize a meeting that was not mine. Nor have I had
| to juggle the actual normal stress of my software job on
| top of having an unofficial/unpaid PM role (itself a full
| time job), while also having to deal with hostile
| colleagues. And, it seems they were not the only ones
| having to deal with some of this.
|
| https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/protect-your-
| br...
|
| https://www.metabolismjournal.com/article/S0026-0495(05)000
| 3...
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306
| 4...
| 300bps wrote:
| _In this case, chronic stress which had such adverse
| effects it caused a forced medical leave._
|
| You seem to know a lot about this - can you tell me what
| "forced medical leave" is? It seems to imply that a
| doctor ordered her to stop working against her will and
| that she was forced to obey. In what states is that
| legal? I've googled every iteration of "forced medical
| leave" I can think of and the only thing I can find is
| that it is illegal for employers to force you to take
| medical leave in lieu of complying with reasonable
| accommodations.
|
| I don't see anything about a doctor being able to order
| "forced medical leave" so appreciate any help you can
| provide in helping me understand what that means.
| random-human wrote:
| Employers can require a return-to-work note from the
| doctor. If that doctor involuntary committed her and
| suggested she quit, there is a good chance the doctor may
| hold on to that note for a bit as well.
|
| If something like this is what happened, I would suspect
| it would raise HR flags to the point of requiring the
| note to return to work.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=return+to+work+release
| kevingadd wrote:
| Depending on your medical circumstances, if a physician
| believes there's a threat to your health and safety, they
| can have you sent for in-patient treatment against your
| will. I know people this has happened to.
|
| If your health deteriorates to the point where a
| physician has graduated from gentle advice to very strong
| recommendations, if things get any worse they may be
| forced to take that intervention. There are specific
| symptoms and conditions that will set off red flags and
| alarm bells where they will begin asking you specific
| screening questions that may lead to taking drastic
| action.
|
| Mental health problems can be serious stuff when they get
| out of hand! Your body will do bizarre stuff it wouldn't
| normally do even if you're a perfectly healthy
| individual. In my case it was bad enough things had
| progressed to _very_ strongly worded recommendations, and
| given the circumstances I was totally okay with taking
| the advice even though it would negatively impact the
| project (and my career).
| 300bps wrote:
| _they can have you sent for in-patient treatment_
|
| Sure, everyone knows that. But "forced medical leave"
| from work seems to be something completely different. I
| can't seem to find any information whatsoever about it.
| ayewo wrote:
| Perhaps the author could have worded that differently as
| "involuntary medical leave"?
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| I'm glad that strategy worked out for you. It's very easy
| to get sucked into something (anything), it becoming your
| entire world, and everything triggering a life or death
| stress response, when in reality it's not a problem. Being
| able to take distance from a situation as you mention, and
| remember that you're just sitting in an office and it's not
| like you're literally about to die is a very important
| skill to have.
|
| However, many people don't have it, or just get too
| apathetic about the job if they detach like that, and live
| very stressful lives. I've personally seen it happen
| several times.
| jdlshore wrote:
| > I don't mean to belittle anyone's experiences
|
| Then why did you do it? Surely if you're self-aware enough
| to write this part, you're self-aware enough to not write
| the rest of the paragraph, or to imply that, if it's not
| Battle of Normandy bad, it's not worth mentioning.
|
| She said that she was put on forced medical leave by her
| doctor. You ignored that in favor of making a dismissive
| comment about an anecdote.
|
| The author wrote a highly personal post about a difficult
| situation, in effort to advise people to avoid situations
| that caused her trauma. That takes a lot of courage, and I
| admire her for it.
| 300bps wrote:
| I can tell your comment comes from a place of wanting to
| be kind and I commend you for that intention.
|
| We just have different definitions of what constitutes
| being kind. I think it is kinder to tell people what you
| really think than it is to coddle them. Sometimes people
| are better off hearing hard truths.
|
| She described a career filled with unnecessary stress and
| unsuccessful projects where everyone else is at fault and
| every environment is toxic. If I were describing my own
| career in that way, I'd think it was time for some
| introspection.
| spicymaki wrote:
| > What's the upside? Can outside observers really make a
| considered judgement based on the one-sided and incomplete
| presentation?
|
| Not everything has to have an upside. It takes courage to be a
| whistle-blower.
|
| >... and what are we supposed to do with it?
|
| We are supposed to learn from others experience, so we don't
| repeat the mistakes of the past.
|
| > I work at a similarly sized and positioned company, and all I
| can think is that the writer of this post seems very
| unbalanced.
|
| So what? Why do you think your experience at a different org
| matters in this case? If everything is working well for you,
| good, carry on.
| rektide wrote:
| Possible upsides include catharsis and helping create a better
| known world, helping give us a more accurate image. Of what
| many probably perceieved as an immensely highly skilled part of
| the world, doing unbelievably important & relevant work.
| ryanobjc wrote:
| "Seems very unbalanced".... As in the author isn't presenting
| all sides because it's a personal experience narrative?
|
| Or are you using a sly way of calling them crazy?
| [deleted]
| sam0x17 wrote:
| It's weird, I had the opposite reaction. I find myself
| wondering whether there is some way to fit them in my org. To
| each their own, I suppose.
| [deleted]
| kibwen wrote:
| This comment appears to be an apparently unintentional example
| of the chilling effect on discourse wrought by delegating so
| much power to our corporate overlords.
| throw149102 wrote:
| The other way to look at it is to see it as very intelligent
| filtering by the author. If I only want to work at places that
| are committed to my mental health, and I have the expertise to
| get hired at Google, then I might very well be comfortable with
| filtering out 99% of companies. If the average person sees me
| and goes "Well I think this person is very unbalanced" and
| chooses not to hire them, that saves a lot of time for the
| author.
|
| You could say a very similar thing about coming out as gay. If
| a man figures out he's gay, he doesn't benefit from still
| including women in his dating pool. Maybe his dating pool
| shrinks by 95%, but who cares, he only wants the last 5%
| anyway. The hard part of dating isn't really finding a dateable
| person, but narrowing down the set of all people to a mostly
| optimal one. Likewise, the hard part of finding a job isn't
| finding a place that's hiring, but narrowing down the set of
| all jobs to a mostly optimal one.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| When you look at how some people want to see WASM evolve, there
| are reasons to be very concerned about it
|
| - exception handling
|
| - GC
|
| - JIT
|
| Some people want to make WASM something similar to java bytecode
| or C#'s IL, and it defeats its purpose of being a lightweight,
| platform agnostic target
|
| The harm was already done, WASM is still compelling (today), but
| the direction it is taking mean it'll just die..
|
| I know i'm not the only one who think that, so i'm not surprised
| how painful it is to work on such field, with such team
| laerus wrote:
| These are considered extensions and WASM is useful even without
| them.
| egberts1 wrote:
| You forgot the fourth: file I/O, and wider coverage by
| JavaScript thereof
| alex_duf wrote:
| I'm actually pretty excited about the three features you
| mention, mainly because it would make WASM useful to me.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Sounds like what you want is Java Applets.
| SemanticStrengh wrote:
| Everyone wants graalvm, people have just not realized it
| yet and it's sad
| jhgb wrote:
| I believe that the problem is that the more features you add,
| the less general it's going to be (for example, add canonical
| exception handling and you'll almost certainly exclude Common
| Lisp, the advanced exception handling features of which the
| canonical exception handling for WASM almost certainly won't
| include). Presumably on a scale from a physical computer to a
| JVM, you don't want to slide towards JVM too much, since not
| everyone wants to program in Java.
| amelius wrote:
| Why not make WASM as simple as possible, and let layers on
| top of it deal with extensions like GC?
|
| Stacking abstractions, like how computer architecture used to
| work in the old days.
| Someone wrote:
| If you provide a non-opinionated base platform, users will
| add opinions, and those will not all be compatible with
| each other.
|
| Not adding GC or not defining how exceptions work could
| easily lead to a situation where you want to use a couple
| of third-party libraries, but discover they, combined, use
| three different garbage-collecting memory allocators and
| two different ways to handle exceptions, even where
| function overloading works differently in different
| libraries.
|
| As an example, look at string implementations in various C
| programs. Even if they if they boil down to a pair _(int,
| malloced memory)_ , you still might not be able to pass one
| obtained from a function in one library to a function in
| another library.
| amelius wrote:
| Sounds nice in theory, but I suppose that if Linux or OSX
| or whatever OS you use forced developers to use one style
| of GC, a lot of people would be very disappointed.
| kevingadd wrote:
| EH, GC and JIT are examples of difficult things that some use
| cases demand, yeah. They were intentionally punted out of the
| MVP into the Future as a result of that - the spec committee
| were aware of the need for those things (and some of us
| actively wanted them) but it's really hard to satisfy all
| interested parties and still ship.
|
| Exception Handling appears to be in really good shape right
| now, but I have my doubts about GC. I'm not sure JIT will ever
| be solved (right now people seem to just compile tons of
| modules and hope the browser won't crash).
|
| I don't think any of this means that WASM has a bad future, but
| it'll probably require a lot of careful work as it has up until
| now.
| mamcx wrote:
| GC & JIT are complications, but some error handling and ways to
| deal with complex types are truly useful, IMHO.
| summerlight wrote:
| Aren't those functionalities critical for WASM to fully replace
| JS and become "the common runtime" for all web languages? I
| don't think we can build an efficient implementation of those
| on top of the "simple" WASM.
| brabel wrote:
| Spend 5 minutes reading about WASM and see how everyone
| involved in it keeps repeating "replacing JS is NOT the
| goal". Even with all the repeating, the message does not seem
| to be coming across.
| jhgb wrote:
| To be fair, I imagine the original IBM PC team in 1980 kept
| repeating "replacing our mainframes is NOT the goal", too.
| jhgb wrote:
| The more features you add, the less (not more) common it's
| going to be as a runtime.
| Rusky wrote:
| Adding those features doesn't mean you have to start using them
| for everything. This is different from how they work in the JVM
| or CLR- their role in WebAssembly is to enable interop with the
| host (which already has them regardless), and to round out some
| of the capabilities that native code has but which can't be
| implemented efficiently on the current WebAssembly sandbox.
|
| I don't see how that harms WebAssembly as a lightweight cross-
| platform _target_. It may make it more difficult to _implement_
| , but AIUI there will always be room for simpler hosts that
| leave these features out or keep them simplistic. There is no
| equivalent ecosystem problem to adding these kinds of features
| to a language, where all your dependencies will start using
| them, any more than inherently exists for native code that can
| already just implement those things itself.
| the_duke wrote:
| Exception handling is necessary to efficiently support
| languages that need it without giving them direct control over
| the stack. I'd prefer if exception handling was provided with a
| more general abstraction though.
|
| GC is necessary for the same reasons, to prevent each language
| from bringing it's own GC and to enable cross-language interop.
|
| JIT is already implied by the very nature of Webassembly being
| an architecture independent stack machine, so every runtime has
| to already be a JIT compiler anyway (except interpreters).
| Exposing JITing to Wasm code is a natural progression and very
| valuable.
|
| Not that the WASM spec work doesn't have problems (looking in
| as an outsider), but the existence of these features are not my
| complaints.
| lliamander wrote:
| If you want to write in a high-level language in the browser,
| wouldn't it make more sense to compile to JavaScript?
|
| It seems to me like the main value proposition in Web
| Assembly was to provide a target for languages like C, C++,
| and Rust.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Compiling to JS is a good option, with the caveat that it
| will never deliver consistent performance. JS engine
| vendors place less importance on optimizing for JS
| transpilers now that the future is WebAssembly.
| kgr wrote:
| > of being a lightweight, platform agnostic target
|
| A little late for that. I see that my Chrome browser is
| currently using 2.66GB of RAM (for about 40 tabs, or about 65M
| per tab). I remember when I first started using Java, my whole
| computer only had 8M of RAM, and while it has gotten larger, I
| think it is still considerably lighter weight than a web app,
| despite also giving much richer APIs and multi-threading. The
| advantage of web apps isn't that they're lighter weight from a
| systems resource point of view, but lighter weight from a
| user's effort in installing and using the app, point of view
| (now that Applets are gone).
| torginus wrote:
| I've poked around in Chrome's source code, and what struck me
| is that the JS-to-C++ interface seems pretty similar to what's
| going on in a game engine - C++ classes with generally pretty
| similar APIs to their JS counterparts are wrapped and exposed
| to JavaScript - I think this is the way WebAssembly should be
| implemented as well- an interface that replaces this
| interaction layer with its own - since the native objects'
| lifetimes are handled by C++, a typical WASM target language
| (say C++ or Rust) would be pretty straightforward, since it
| could access these resources with similar semantics.
|
| Additonally, in managed, garbage collected runtimes, like .NET,
| the handling of native resources with explicit lifetimes is a
| solved problem as well - garbage collection would be handled by
| the languages own runtimes, no need to move this responsibility
| to WASM.
|
| This would also avoid the issue of having the .NET GC and the
| JS GC coexist - this typical too many cooks scenario of 2
| separate GCs is a nightmare to manage.
|
| Another daring, pie-in-the-sky thought: Javascript could use
| this interface as well, becoming just one of the many languages
| that can target the browser.
| brabel wrote:
| WASM has become a Web Standard a couple of years ago. It's very
| simple (at its first version at least) which allowed all
| browser implementers to support it from day one. It has
| accomplished the goal of running C/C++ applications
| efficiently. Rust code can mostly compile to WASM and run as
| well (only crates that use stuff like drivers or OS-specific
| calls don't work).
|
| However, a few years later, there's not much that has been
| improved in the WASM world. The work being done on the current
| proposals is monumental and would require the same level of
| investment that has already been spent on things like the JVM
| and the .NET runtime, as you point out. To write a
| specification as well written as WASM for these things is
| basically impossible.
|
| And they're only doing that in order to support other high
| level languages to compile to it without having to ship their
| own runtimes.
|
| But the problem is that given how hard the work is, the benefit
| of doing this would need to be enormous to justify spending so
| much work on it... but it's not! JavaScript, for better or
| worse, has pretty decent performance and a huge amount of code
| has been written in it. If you try to re-write something in
| Java or Go, say, to replace JS, even when WASM supports GC and
| exceptions, I doubt it'll improve anything over JS performance.
|
| Besides, GraalVM already exists which can run nearly any
| language with very high performance if you're not completely
| locked on the web platform.
|
| So, all this drama that's going on around WASM for what?
|
| I say, leave it alone, make sure it stays simple and supports
| high performance stuff written on non-managed languages... and
| consider the job done.
| wvenable wrote:
| > I doubt it'll improve anything over JS performance.
|
| I _will_ take a small memory /performance/bandwidth hit to
| not have to program in JavaScript.
|
| We aren't fully there yet but something like .NET Blazor
| demonstrates the potential. Once we've over the hump I expect
| an explosion of alternatives.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| >Every toxic workplace I've been in was usually the result of bad
| executive leadership, and this was no different.
|
| I remember going to my manager's manager a few years back to
| raise an issue with them. I wasn't the only person to raise it.
| They essentially said "Let this continue for 12 months and at the
| end of the 12 months we'll step in and stop this". It was at that
| point I knew that they were engaged in their job search. "Let's
| just put this off until I'm no longer here" basically.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I do a lot of meetings with a fair amount of companies and while
| it's not a regular occurance, some people think hostility towards
| others is acceptable. The best thing we can do regardless of
| where we stand is call those people out immediately and let them
| know that their behavior is unacceptable. You either get an
| apology or you quickly learn that working at X for Y isn't worth
| it.
| suresk wrote:
| Hostility, yelling, threats, etc just aren't worth it and I
| have zero patience for it in a job. I had an exec once who
| would threaten to cut people's fingers off if they didn't
| accomplish incredibly unreasonable things, or throw them out
| windows, or whatever.. It wasn't a serious threat, but it also
| isn't a fun thing to listen to all the time.
|
| I realized after a while of that sort of abuse that no job is
| worth that and I have much less tolerance for it. Thankfully it
| isn't super common, but it is surprising how many people think
| that is a useful way to work.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| > We did not have a producer. We knew we needed one, we tried to
| get one, and at best we had a part-time producer
|
| What's a producer? Is it the same as a PM?
| kevingadd wrote:
| Depending on where you work it's a PM, yes.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Basically yeah.
| getyourhedchek wrote:
| cute_boi wrote:
| If people are having issue with big techs like Google I can't
| even fathom what is happening to developer working from Asia and
| China where 996 is practiced. In many country the starting salary
| is 200 USD per month without any benefits or 401k that we find in
| United States.
|
| I don't understand why companies do this to their staff. Why
| hoard money at expense of someone's life? Why Execs don't
| understand that they are the main problem of downfall?
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > The WebAssembly spec ended up being built on obscure and ill-
| suited technology
|
| To clarify, do you think it's still built on obscure and ill-
| suited technology, or is that a criticism of how it was at first?
| And which technology are you talking about?
| kevingadd wrote:
| My personal opinion is that web specifications should not be
| written in Ocaml. Things are better now, but when the decision
| was made to do the whole spec in it, you couldn't even run it
| on Windows. It also didn't support float32 at the time (might
| still not support it?) so the reference interpreter had to
| manually implement float32.
|
| I have nothing against people who like MLs though, and they can
| be the right solution for certain problems.
| astrange wrote:
| I thought "obscure and ill-suited technology" was a reference
| to SPIR-V or something. Was not expecting it to be about an
| executable spec in Ocaml.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> We did not have a PM. We knew we needed one, we tried to get
| one, and at best we had a part-time PM for a brief time who
| volunteered and then moved on. This left complex social and
| organizational challenges in the hands of overworked engineers
| with little experience solving them._
|
| That's really the problem, right there, and I think she pretty
| much says it.
|
| I've worked with standards people before (not on the committees,
| themselves, thank Cthulhu). It's a really rocky environment.
|
| Usually, everyone involved is _full_ of self-interest, and they
| want to push their own agenda, because _billions_. Having a
| standard give you an edge, can be _quite_ valuable. Look to some
| of the video codecs, and see why.
|
| In that environment, it's often difficult to get everyone to
| agree on a "The Buck Stops Here" leader. Usually, a Chair is
| appointed when the committee is formed. Sounds like this one just
| sort of congealed.
|
| I sincerely wish her health and happiness. In my case, being
| forced out of the rat race was one of the best things that could
| have happened to me.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| This really hits home for me. I've been in a similar situation
| for more than a year. Extremely overworked, understaffed team
| constantly missing deadlines. Endless pointless meetings.
| Managers don't care. Even my short and long term memory has taken
| a toll, although its probably due to another chronic health
| issue. I want to quit and stay unemployed for a while, but that's
| frankly just scary. Good job.
| rhizome wrote:
| > _Managers don 't care._
|
| It's funny how concepts that get repeated a million times in
| "how to be a boss" type threads are completely forgotten in "my
| job sucks" ones. Case in point: CULTURE COMES FROM THE TOP.
|
| Your managers are the ones closest to you in setting the
| culture, and they're telling you to stop caring. Take the hint,
| just like they'd want you to take the (common at many many
| companies) hint that they aren't going to fire you, but it's
| time for you to move on to your next job.
| Verdex wrote:
| This is an interesting statement to me.
|
| I have a potentially crippling difficulty in understanding
| people and relationships. It's not entirely clear to me what
| I can do to help work through it or increase my skill levels
| with respect to it.
|
| At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to accept
| what people say and do at the object level. Instead of at a
| meta level. That is to say, object level is what people
| actually say and do and meta level is like the subtext to
| borrow a literary term of what people say and do.
|
| The boss saying, "let's all work hard and do what it takes."
| Is something that I want to take literally. What they mean
| is, "Just put in 8ish hours a day and don't take a two week
| vacation right before a release." However, I'm deeply
| uncomfortable with taking the meta version.
|
| When the meta version is totally divorced from the object
| version is where things completely go off the rails for me.
| "Let's all work hard and do what it takes." => "Don't rock
| the boat because none of this was ever going to work in the
| first place."
|
| Fortunately for me, I've only seen such bosses (or I suppose
| scenarios) from afar. As far as I know I've never worked
| directly for one.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > At it's core, I suspect, is that I desperately want to
| accept what people say and do at the object level. Instead
| of at a meta level.
|
| This is a really common failure pattern of people with a
| history of excelling in relatively explicit systems (e.g.
| grades at school).
|
| Reading can actually help a lot here. "Influence" by
| Cialdini, "How to win friends and influence people" by
| Carnegie, or the "Gervais Principle" by Rao decent intros
| to some relevant concepts (though each has problems,
| particularly Rao's book).
|
| Once you have a framework of understanding incentives,
| cognitive traps, and the tools most people use to navigate
| these kinds of political games it gets a lot easier to
| grasp what's going on (being a good player is, IMO, much
| harder)
| kevingadd wrote:
| If you can manage it, my advice would be to just start quietly
| looking for new opportunities on the side. You may be able to
| make a pivot. Putting your health first _also_ means trying to
| make the safest choices so you don 't have more stress to deal
| with.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Put a month in between starting something new, too. Depending
| on the particulars of the healthcare involved that might not
| even require COBRA (many cover you through the end of the
| month rather than ending the day you leave; many also cover
| you day 1 of employment rather than starting X days after, so
| you can quit on the 1st of one month, start new job on the
| 1st of the next month, or similar), but even if not, one
| month of COBRA and missed expenses isn't that bad.
|
| But, that way you can actually have a breather, get back into
| a healthy headspace, etc, before starting in. My best job
| transitions have had a break in between; my worst were quit
| job 1 on Friday, start job 2 on Monday.
| endemic wrote:
| Yeah, I'll second the recommendation to quit early in the
| month, take some time off, then start the next job before
| the next month.
| timcavel wrote:
| bogota wrote:
| I always want to do this but health insurance always keeps me
| from never going a day without being employed. Im fortunate to
| be able to have that kind of job stability but the anxiety of
| being out of a job and then needing any kind of medical care is
| real.
| gopalv wrote:
| > health insurance always keeps me from never going a day
| without being employed.
|
| There's no way to cap the actual health care costs, but the
| health insurance is about 30k/year for a family of 4 on
| COBRA.
|
| That is a lot or not depending on how your job is affecting
| your health.
|
| I'm right now spending a year off work and leaving my job has
| definitely improved my life more than paying me 30k would (of
| course, there are other expenses too - it's like a 120k/year
| burn rate in the bay area).
|
| My father ended his life from issues related to work stress
| (it had to do with violent naxal robberies and being
| personally threatened, but still no sleep for 3-4 days messes
| you up), so I might have a very skewed point of view on this,
| but the lesson was to never take the "retire and do hobbies
| at 60" for granted & to draw-down the financials into time
| spent when you can keep up with your kids on shared things.
| kevingadd wrote:
| At least in the US, you can use COBRA to keep your insurance
| for a little bit. It's very expensive though, so it's still
| not a great option.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| You can often do better on the Affordable Care Act
| insurance exchanges.
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| COBRA is a disaster. its often more expensive than when
| shopping around for insurance by yourself.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Kinda sorta maybe. Yes you can get "cheaper" plans
| through private insurance but the trade off between lower
| premiums vs higher deductibles makes the equation a bit
| more complex.
|
| That being said... yes cobra is usually insanely
| expensive. But that might be market rate for whatever
| "all you can eat low deductible" health plan your
| employer was offering.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| its expensive, but that's how much your employer is paying
| for your health insurance.
|
| The hidden costs keep growing and force people to keep
| jobs...just to have health.
|
| But rest assured, this is a government problem that can be
| fixed.
|
| If you take the employer payroll tax subsidy away, plus
| take mandatory healthcare insurance requisites and poof,
| this problems go away.
|
| There would be tremendous disruption for sure, but we need
| to get away from "insurance for everything" when in reality
| it should be you have "insurance for disaster situations"
| Cd00d wrote:
| You should know that COBRA can be retroactive.
|
| You do not have to sign up when you terminate your
| employment. You can sign up when you actually need medical
| care that you want to be covered. Though, at that time you
| have to pay back for the time since termination.
|
| It makes it a little easier to walk away and "hope for the
| best" on the healthcare front.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >I want to quit and stay unemployed for a while, but that's
| frankly just scary
|
| I don't know you, but if you have the savings to do it, I'd say
| go for it. I've done it and it was wonderful. The day I
| realized I could just quit my job without having another job
| lined up a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. I couldn't
| manage to find the effort needed to go through a job search
| while still employed, and taking a six month sabbatical also
| was great for doing a lot of new things I didn't usually have
| the time for.
| bitwize wrote:
| That's great for you. Not really feasible for the likes of
| me, who have a girlfriend and 3 animals to support. To say
| nothing of those with actual, human kids.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| Having enough savings to not work for a year or two is a
| good thing to aim for, and should be feasible for a lot of
| people in our industry. Just knowing I don't _need_ to stay
| in a job if it starts to suck badly is probably the thing
| that 's had the biggest positive effect on my mental
| health.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Yes, that's why I made clear that money is an issue. It's
| not common to be able to take a sabbatical, but our area is
| usually well-remunerated enough that it is an option for
| many people, at least with proper planning. Someone else
| mentioned that in the US, healthcare is tied to your job,
| which is something I never really considered.
| question_away wrote:
| If I'm reading this right, the crux of the issue was overworked
| engineers and unproductive meetings that got heated between
| experts? And the resultant stress led to brain damage?
|
| Personally, I don't know any software teams that aren't
| understaffed at best. Any project that has multiple stakeholders
| is going to have some meetings that feel unproductive with key
| leaders arguing for their best interests. That's just the natural
| order of collaboration.
|
| These are the kinds of posts that remind me how privileged high-
| skilled software engineers are. I am the first in my family to
| not work in some form of construction and can't help but imagine
| how someone like OP would fare in that environment.
|
| > I spent the next couple years unemployed, working with my
| physicians to try and recover my health while occasionally
| writing code. I'm happy to report that I'm partially recovered at
| this point and being paid to work on open source, but I'll never
| be the same.
|
| Being able to take off 2 years to attend to personal health is a
| luxury pretty exclusive to tech (insofar as how
| available/attainable it is).
| kcplate wrote:
| I pulled the same vibe from this.
|
| My attitude here is if you don't like your job and its making
| you unhealthy AND you work in an industry where just having
| been at Google on your resume will get you hired just about
| anywhere else...you should just leave. Why sacrifice health
| over that?
|
| I have done some shit work prior to tech. My worst tech job in
| the most "toxic" environment was heads and tails better than
| working in an industrial laundry washing shop rags, diapers,
| and restaurant mats.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| Xooglers aren't just handed jobs. They still have to pass
| interviews, and have to live up to a higher expectation
| because of their background. Stress and medical issues still
| affect them too.
| question_away wrote:
| Are we really going to pretend that Xooglers struggle
| landing jobs in tech? Relative to what the average software
| engineer goes through, they are "handed jobs".
| didibus wrote:
| I've worked some construction in the past, didn't find it
| worse, it actually left me feeling better at the end of the
| day, there's something positive about the physical activity
| from it.
|
| My point is, I don't think these comparison judgement are
| useful. Ever heard: "can't compare two people's pain"?
|
| Think about the purpose of your comment? What's the end goal?
| To convince people nothing should be done about anything and
| for everyone to just suck it up? Seems that's a bad attitude to
| be honest.
|
| If your family's construction work environment is toxic and
| treats them badly, you should be complaining about it and bring
| attention to it so hopefully we can all demand better for them.
| Similarly here, someone stepped up to try and raise the
| standards by pointing out at real issues faced in some
| organizations that fail on all front, fails to deliver to the
| business, the customer, the employees, it's worth talking about
| in my opinion. How else you get anything to become better
| otherwise?
| question_away wrote:
| My point is that adopting terms like "toxic" to describe this
| team's culture is over-selling and detracts from workplaces
| that are actually toxic.
|
| If we're dropping the bar of a toxic workplace to be: trouble
| sleeping, questioning self-worth and general anxiety then
| what language do we use for workplaces that involve actual
| malice? Co-workers sabotaging others, misogynistic comments,
| abusive messages, etc are all toxic but clearly on a
| different level than described in the post.
|
| > If you're family's construction work environment is toxic
| and treats them badly, you should be complaining about it and
| bring attention to it so hopefully we can all demand better
| for them.
|
| That sounds nice, but there are workplaces where complaining
| will make life worse for you. And for certain union jobs,
| it's very difficult to leave.
| didibus wrote:
| To me, toxic implies something that's bad for you but in
| insidious ways. That means it's slow and subtle, you
| wouldn't even believe it, at first you'd think this is
| great, these people are happy, this job looks great, but
| years later, you've got memory loss, needed to take
| physical disability, and the whole team quit... What the
| hell?
|
| I feel it perfectly describes toxicity. What can cause such
| a thing? What's the root cause? It seems there are certain
| things about the human psyche we've yet to understand that
| somehow can be very damaging to it.
|
| It means that if say there's a person whose the
| perpetrator, they might not even realize. If a manager
| causes the environment to make people feel crappy, they
| might not understand how, why, even if that's not their
| intent.
|
| Malice can be toxic too, but malice describes the intent,
| someone could purposefully make the environment toxic,
| still toxic, but the intent was malicious. I find toxicity
| describes the environment, it's not because no one was
| purposely poisoning the well that it can't still be toxic.
|
| Now if people are being abusive, psychologically or
| physically, in obvious ways, I would just call that an
| abusive workplace.
|
| That's just the way I interpret those words.
|
| Now if you're simply trying to say we should prioritize our
| efforts first to workplaces that are really bad in obvious
| and extreme ways, downright abusive, I wouldn't disagree,
| but is this really detracting?
|
| That's why I said, if you know of worse offenders, bring
| them up, don't just deny this particular offense. I know
| that labor in other countries is much worse, but I can't as
| easily enact changes in other countries. I know that some
| jobs treat employees really poorly and pays terribly, and
| I'm not okay with that and support labor rights, higher
| wages, and would love to see more paid leave, shorter
| hours, better safety protocols. Simultaneously I happen to
| work in tech, so I'm also interested in seeing those jobs
| improve, they have different kind of issues that seem more
| insidious, they're also worth talking about in my opinion.
|
| I would agree with you if somehow tech worker complaints
| was drowning out the voices of other workers who have more
| obvious abuses going on. I just don't think that's the
| case.
| 015a wrote:
| By my memory; not researched, probably wrong, but: one of
| the early organizations to use the word "toxicity" to
| describe human behavior was actually (not a joke) Riot
| Games, in describing some League of Legends players.
|
| I wish I could find the blog post, as it was at least a
| decade ago at this point, but it described their
| reasoning as: it's not just malicious behavior, but its
| malicious behavior which "spreads" between people. Malice
| creates Malice. Someone yells obscenities in chat, it
| tilts another player, and that player is now yelling
| obscenities in the next game; that's toxicity.
|
| Which is only to say that I think it's a good definition
| and wholly applicable. Corporate politics flows down from
| the top; the behavior of managers affects the behavior of
| middle-managers, which can affect the behavior of line
| workers. Toxicity isn't just a bad apple; its a bad
| organization.
| question_away wrote:
| If you look up any articles about the Activision Blizzard
| saga you'll find the word toxic being used most often to
| describe their workplace. Is OP's situation comparable to
| Activision Blizzard?
| klyrs wrote:
| Is woodsorrel comparable to water hemlock? Kidney stones
| are better than death, but both are toxic. Sounds like
| the author was directly harmed by their work environment,
| so it sounds fair to call it toxic even if it could be
| worse.
| outworlder wrote:
| There's toxic workplaces, and there's actually _hostile_
| ones. We don't need to be literally abused for a workplace
| to be toxic.
| 015a wrote:
| Both examples are toxic; malicious; whatever adjective
| you'd like to use.
|
| If the alternative is to worry about devaluing the word,
| and thus letting less-toxic-by-whatever-definition-suits-
| me-best workplaces slide, because dontchaknow slaves work
| for pennies stitching jeans together in bangladesh; that's
| not acceptable. There's always a greater evil. If you ask
| me choose the lesser evil; I'd prefer not to choose. It's
| possible to hold them both accountable.
|
| Moreover, this idea that tech jobs can't be toxic, they
| must be a lesser evil, because: you're paid so well! You
| get to work from home! You get free lunch at the office!
| Job security for life! That's bullshit. Its all, entirely,
| totally, rooted in society's child-like understanding of
| mental health. OSHA for mind jobs doesn't exist; it
| probably shouldn't, because we really don't understand what
| causes this, why different people react so differently, and
| what "healthy" looks like. But that doesn't mean the damage
| isn't real.
|
| I am entirely and totally convinced that in a few decades:
| we'll look back on comments like your's the same way we
| look back on the companies who used radium to make
| measuring cups, or those who lined the walls of houses with
| asbestos. It'll be overwhelmingly obvious in hind-sight.
| That toxic workplace behavior can cause damage in people so
| significant that its net harm is higher than many of the
| more mundane things OSHA protects against. And maybe more
| critically to Big Business; that workplaces which operate
| like this are overwhelmingly low-performing on any
| timeframe longer than a few weeks.
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| What is your message -- the author shouldn't share their story
| of a toxic workplace because they made more money than folks in
| other toxic workplaces?
| question_away wrote:
| If OP's description is what constitutes a "toxic workplace"
| then any service job/Amazon warehouse/construction job is
| also toxic. From what I read, I would describe OP's team as
| severely dysfunctional and the bar for "toxic" should be
| higher (generally, indicating some level of malice).
|
| I think it's damaging to dilute terms like "toxic" by using
| them to describe a situation that is generally stressful and
| widely experienced.
| kibwen wrote:
| Just because something is widely experienced doesn't mean
| we must dismiss criticisms of it.
| question_away wrote:
| No, but if we're lowering the bar for what constitutes
| "toxic" to something that is widely experienced then that
| is inherently dismissive of actually toxic work
| environments that are not widely experienced.
| eropple wrote:
| _> If OP 's description is what constitutes a "toxic
| workplace" then any service job/Amazon
| warehouse/construction job is also toxic._
|
| _> I think it 's damaging to dilute terms like "toxic" by
| using them to describe a situation that is generally
| stressful and widely experienced._
|
| This characterization is inches away from an epiphany.
| question_away wrote:
| I think every nihilist has the "epiphany" you're
| implying.
|
| My point is that any service job/Amazon
| warehouse/construction job is generally stressful, has
| unproductive meetings, and callous bosses but this is not
| my bar for "toxic". I'd raise that a bit higher to apply
| to Activision, Goldman, etc. where there's a level of
| malice.
| eropple wrote:
| What you are suggesting is "nihilism" would, by people
| who have not decided to norm bad things, perhaps look a
| lot more like communalism.
| 1minusp wrote:
| Share, yes absolutely. But also, keep in perspective, that
| these are ~$500K+ jobs and the (certainly smart) folks in
| these jobs can also move to other parts of google that arent
| as hard to deal with. So, it is understandable that others
| might not consider this to be a bad deal overall.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| I see an emotionally unstable author more than I see a toxic
| workplace.
| kibwen wrote:
| It is prudent to err the side of giving the benefit of the
| doubt to the entity with relatively less power. I see no
| reason to instinctively jump to Google's defense here, they
| are more than capable of defending themselves.
| didibus wrote:
| The whole team left, so it doesn't seem like the author was
| a snowflake in this case.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Though looking at the timelines, the team left or had
| been moved around after a two year period. So it wasn't
| necessarily an abrupt change.
| sfink wrote:
| Based on your other comments, it seems your main complaint is
| the use of the word "toxic". Which I agree is overused and has
| been expanded to cover more ground than it used to, but the OP
| is far from the first to apply it more broadly. This is well
| within the range of how the word is used today, especially when
| referring to "toxic work environments".
|
| As for the rest, I'm having trouble interpreting your comment
| any differently from "paper cuts aren't that bad, so why is
| this person complaining about a stab wound?" Understaffed is
| common and not in itself that big a deal; working in an
| environment where the system is visibly working against you,
| where you lack agency and people are forthright about how your
| well-being doesn't matter? That even the quality and success of
| your project doesn't really matter to them? That's not a paper
| cut.
|
| I used to work in construction as well, and am from a family of
| carpenters stretching several generations. I've also worked
| directly with the OP, though briefly. But I also know a fair
| amount about her work. So I think I have a relevant
| perspective; whether you respect it or not is up to you. But my
| experience is that Katelyn is very good technically. She's no
| whiner, she's persevered through quite a few tough situations
| that I know of, and what happened with the rest of the team
| kind of backs up her perspective on the situation. I agree that
| we software people are privileged, but we also have pressures
| that people in construction don't have and it's worthwhile
| looking at them seriously instead of invalidating them because
| some things are easier. (Construction and carpentry have their
| own distinct pressures, but also their own benefits. I would
| far rather be a software developer personally. My dad would far
| rather be a carpenter. I work on interesting problems and make
| more money. He works outside and directly improves people's
| lives, and becomes long-term friends with many of them.)
| question_away wrote:
| > Based on your other comments, it seems your main complaint
| is the use of the word "toxic". Which I agree is overused and
| has been expanded to cover more ground than it used to, but
| the OP is far from the first to apply it more broadly. This
| is well within the range of how the word is used today,
| especially when referring to "toxic work environments".
|
| I've seen it used as broadly but very rarely - generally,
| "toxic environments" are ones where intentional malice is
| involved.
|
| > people are forthright about how your well-being doesn't
| matter
|
| Where in OP's post is this said? This would actually
| constitute malintent for me and elevate the situation to
| toxic but I can't find where this is said. It's possible
| given your experience that you know this happened, but I
| don't see it in the post itself.
|
| My main issue is the use of "toxic" coupled with the post's
| advocacy for helping others recognize when they're in a toxic
| workplace. My concern is that anyone identifying with the
| general stress described could then accuse their
| coworkers/managers of manufacturing a toxic work environment.
| God forbid I have a meeting that someone else thought was
| unproductive and then accuses me of creating a toxic
| workplace.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > the word "toxic". Which I agree is overused
|
| I found it refreshing (and surprising!) to see the word here
| used in a way that referred to near-universal experiences.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Your other comments aside, just for the record: I was able to
| take the time off because I saved my income instead of spending
| it (also thanks to having paid into disability insurance
| programs for decades). Between rent, food and health insurance
| I used up all my savings. Certainly having any money saved up
| at all is a privilege, and I hope it's one more people are able
| to have in the future.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| And any worker employed at Foxconn could just as easily read
| your post about how you and your family were privileged to be
| able to work in adequately compensated construction jobs with
| OSHA laws, minimum wage, etc.
|
| Or a person who could only find a job working in a coal mine in
| the Appalachia mountains, or (insert less privileged position
| here)...
|
| See how meaningless your comparison is?
| drewcoo wrote:
| Wishing that mommy and daddy would just stop arguing is
| absolutely not a position of privilege.
| question_away wrote:
| Huh?
| rektide wrote:
| Most software frankly isn't really important. It might make or
| break a company, but that's a pretty limited fault domain;
| humanity will be fine.
|
| This post is about something that is glaringly more obvious &
| important than that. The pressure here is immensely real, the
| need & overwhelming desire to do better, to make it good is
| flashing in bright neon signs to me, is extrinsically vital. I
| don't see any of that recognition written in to your privilege-
| call-out. To me, it's really hard hearing something so vital to
| the entire technology world
| (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=wasm&sort=byDate shows 32
| submissions in the past 22 days, and misses all those posts
| using "webassembly" instead of wasm) is a poorly supported
| train-wreck, rampant with infighting, with garden-variety
| shitty management not doing much to support this vital
| endeavor. The typical salt-of-the-earth engineers being left to
| their own devices & expected to just chug along is not a
| "normal" I'm comfortable with for such a vital cornerstone of
| modern technology.
|
| You're making this out to be a story about software development
| & privilege. But I have a very very very different view of this
| as a much more indicative tale, of how core common capacities
| humanity is building have a very hard time making it along. I
| think we all have challenges, for sure, but this is a work that
| so much hope & aspiration is pinned upon, that so much else is
| launching upon. Focusing on dis-empathy for the individual is
| not my take here.
| question_away wrote:
| From the post:
|
| > My hope is that this story will help people recognize toxic
| cultures in their own workplaces
|
| This is the part I'm commenting in reply to. I simply don't
| see the justification of "toxic" in the environment described
| (I think it's definitely dysfunctional and callous) and took
| issue with the stated goal for others to use this experience
| as an understanding of what constitutes "toxic".
| ncmncm wrote:
| Causing brain damage is as toxic as anything needs to be.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| What's the point of this post? Because OP is more privileged
| than a construction worker their complaints are invalid? All
| jobs should be like your family's experience in construction?
| question_away wrote:
| From what I read, "toxic" is an exaggeration of the work
| environment and undermines the message that OP is trying to
| convey.
| JakeAl wrote:
| Never underestimate the important of good leadership. A leader
| can recognize these things and a lot more. It seems like
| companies don't hire experienced project managers/managers
| anymore but try to get programmers to wear those hats because
| they think programmers won't respect someone who isn't a
| programmer even if they are tech savvy. I can't say I blame them
| as marketing and BAs seem to end up in the manager role and
| that's often much worse. There used to be a middle ground in the
| days before agile. Now it's like it doesn't matter because fail
| first and fast is the M.O. and "don't worry, we'll fix it in a
| future sprint after enough people complain."
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I recently left a stressful job after developing shingles and
| then celiac disease. My life is much worse now, I went into that
| job healthy and strong and now I'm sick all the time. Perhaps
| celaic disease was always in the genetic cards for me, or maybe
| the stress triggered it? The worst part is the job wasn't
| especially bad, it was a reasonable job, and I can expect my next
| job to have similar stress I think. What am I going to do?
|
| I'm always amazed at the change in perspective after being in a
| job for a while. While unemployed, I feel competent, I make
| progress on hard problems nobody else in the world is working on,
| and I feel good. While employed, stupid crap stresses me
| constantly, I can't leave the stress at work, I bring it home, I
| obsess about social hierarchies that can vanish in an instant.
| Everytime I've left a job I'm amazed that after just a couple
| days I can barely remember what I was working on before and what
| stressed me, like my brain knows all of that no longer matters
| and let's it go in an instant.
|
| How can I keep a healthy outside perspective while remaining
| employed? How do I avoid becoming mentally trapped in the
| workplace mindset? I've been giving this a lot of thought, but no
| answers so far.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| fsociety wrote:
| They never said anything about those unemployed without
| savings. I grew up in a poor family and am always
| disappointed with this take. Everyone is allowed to share
| their stresses and try to learn how to deal with it from
| others.
| alimov wrote:
| What is the purpose of your comment? They are simply sharing
| their own experience and asking for advice. You don't know
| anything about them, but are dropping in to tell them they
| are privileged... How is that related to anything they said?
| dgreensp wrote:
| Having a toxic job is not a sign of extreme privilege. Nor is
| facing a trade-off between having income and taking care of
| one's mental or physical health.
| beauzero wrote:
| For me it was moving to the rural South and buying a farm.
| Animals die if I don't feed or water them. It gives me a daily
| reset. That and I took a job that I feel ethically pushed to do
| for my 8-5. Just what worked for me. I hope you find your
| "place".
| mescaline wrote:
| Eating habits can change with stress. If I eat certain types of
| wheat, my back hurts. I had an endoscopy and colonoscopy that
| came back normal, but I had some inflammation spots in my
| stomach, likely due to consuming some bad wheat or something
| else. These changes can come about from the state of gut
| biomes.
|
| Cleaning up my eating habits and consuming probiotics seems to
| have helped a lot. I can eat limited amounts of gluten now
| without my back hurting, or my stomach complaining about it. I
| still struggle with cravings of sugar and cream at times,
| especially when I'm fighting depressive events. Eating things
| the body craves is an easy out. It's limiting those actions
| with mind, when it is not so healthy, that challenge many of
| us.
| protomyth wrote:
| Not sure what its called, but there is a test you can get
| your doctor to do that checks what foods you shouldn't eat.
| Sister-in-law took it and discovered soy was not good for her
| along with some other products she ate. Really helped with
| avoid food related problems.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Nowadays many plants, including barley and soybeans, are
| sprayed with round-up two weeks before harvest so they will
| dry in the field. Of course the round-up is not rinsed off,
| because that would defeat the purpose. It is unknown what
| effect consuming that much round-up has on people, but the
| effects we know about are not good.
| debug-desperado wrote:
| Social stress gave me a case of the shingles once in my
| twenties. It didn't make much sense to me at the time, but for
| some reason being stressed out about buying a bunch of
| Christmas gifts late in the season caused it to happen!
| nostrademons wrote:
| Shingles is very commonly brought on by stress. It's latent
| chickenpox virus, which is usually kept in check by the
| immune system, but stress depresses immune response.
|
| I had a coworker who developed shingles as we were nearing
| the deadline on a project that had all sorts of problems in
| layers of the stack we didn't control, and my sister
| developed shingles after being laid off. The first thing I
| associate with that disease is stress.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| As someone whose work imbalances led him from a software
| development manager to years of prison, here's what years of
| alone time to think about things led me to (probably just the
| ravings of someone gone insane but it feels good to share):
|
| 1. Truly take the time to realize that your life is valuable
| and worth prioritizing. Somehow my only identity morphed into
| filling the 'superman' roll at work and successful executive at
| home. If I hadn't saved the company from X or performed some
| herculean feat I had no worth at work. If I didn't get the next
| promotion I had no worth at home. But guess what? I had huge
| worth as a husband and especially as a father, and I sacrificed
| that because I couldn't see it. You are valuable. You have
| worth. You are worthy of love. And hopefully, if you are in the
| right place, you are loved. Being superman/the wonder kid at
| work/the executive big dog so your wife can show off to the
| Joneses does not define you. And eventually you age out of the
| wonder kid role or just actually break in the superman role
| because, sorry, none of us are superman. And all that fancy
| stuff? In 10 years its all outdated and you either need to
| throw it away and replace it or you are too uncool to be one of
| the cool kids.
|
| 2. Find a mentor. Someone who has been through it, who knows
| what's BS and what isn't, and can help you with what's
| important. My healthiest work environments were when I had a
| mentor. One of the most valuable things a mentor always
| reminded me of when I was deep into an 80 hour week fighting
| fires. No one is going to die because of this, and no one is
| going to remember it in 5 years. That and a manager's job is to
| provide his team the tools they need to do their job, not make
| his employees tools to do his.
|
| 3. Find a community. Relating back to step one, it helps us to
| value ourselves when we see others valuing us. If you can't
| find any other, go to an addiction group. You are an addict,
| maybe in search of an addiction at this point because your
| character is still holding out, but if you continue this path
| and haven't already you WILL find your addiction sooner or
| later.
|
| 4. Do not let others tear you down. I had a horrible
| relationship with my ex-wife. Instead of working to fix it I
| put tons of energy into going to court in my head why I was
| right, she was wrong and horrible. Tons of energy into why she
| was right to think I was a total piece of shit and falsely
| think I was not worthy of love (see 1 above). Tons of energy
| into why I deserved a treat/reward for all the hard work I did
| that no one properly gave me recognition for and deserved, and
| secretly rewarding myself in the most destructive of ways. At
| the time I hated my wife. I'm not sure it could be fixed
| looking back, but I would give anything to go back and put the
| energy into that relationship that I put into stupid work
| projects and addiction. Instead the mother of my children, the
| woman who picked me forever, my best friend from high school
| on, with whom I shared every major life event, will never talk
| to me again. A lifetime of memories I don't get to share with
| her. Family vacation memories. The first time we ordered lemon
| light at Takara's and remember how good it used to be. Never
| again a 'dad will you make your amazing ribs this weekend?'.
|
| 5. If you have a family, make sure to have a worry tree in your
| front yard. After a crap work day, after a 1.5 hour commute
| (I'm oldschool from when people still went to work in the
| office, you spoiled kids these days!), before going into the
| house, I paused and left my worries at the worry tree to be
| picked up in the morning, and went into the house leaving work
| behind and myself ready to be present for my kids when I opened
| that door and they ran up screaming excitedly 'daddy's home'
| :'( When we moved I didn't setup a new worry tree routine and I
| that is one of my biggest regrets. So many lost evenings
| because I came home in a shit attitude.
|
| 6. Don't white knuckle through life. Ask for help. Ask for help
| at work. Ask for help at home. Ask for help from a mentor. Ask
| for help from friends. Definitely don't keep track of all the
| times you didn't get help/what you wanted in your head. If you
| didn't ask for it, it's on you. If you keep track of it in your
| head, you are just wasting energy/brain power. You can't judge
| people on not helping/appreciating you if you don't show them
| what you need. No one is going to fix this for you. No one is
| going to say 'wow, Bob's really deserves a
| break/help/affection' unless you are lucky enough to have
| amazing people around you. Ask for a break. Ask for help. Ask
| for affection. Find enough self worth somehow to know you are
| worthy of all of those things! If work doesn't respect that,
| leave. They are a zombie company and will suck you dry. I gave
| 15 years to a company in a field that I felt made a difference.
| Made them millions. Signed over patents. Impacted hundreds of
| thousand of people lives in a positive way. In the end I was
| worth 2 weeks notice. And nothing I ever did mattered when I
| was left so broken I utterly and completely failed my children
| and wife.
|
| Sorry for my rant. I have a mens 'stop being a shitty person'
| group tonight where it is my night to talk about my story, so I
| have been thinking about this stuff today and just kind of
| threw up all over this reply. I apologize for the word vomit.
| dr_monster wrote:
| I also developed celiac disease recently - it is tough to deal
| with. Since diagnosis, meal planning, shopping and cooking have
| become tasks that require a lot of mental energy. Normal things
| like going out to a show or commuting to work are logistically
| difficult when you're unable to eat at any restaurants. I am
| trying to get a WFH job to curb some of this difficulty. Good
| luck with everything.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better my wife has celiac and it
| gets easier with time. Eventually you get pretty familiar
| with things and figure out where is good and where isn't. We
| mostly do GF in our family cause it's easier to just do GF
| than try and mix and match.
|
| Also I hope you like Mexican food corn tortillas and chips
| are a life saver.
| bitexploder wrote:
| Ya, therapy. But, short answer, stoicism / CBT, at least
| narrowly. Focus on what you can control. Check out the
| dichotomy of control. Do your best to be a positive influence.
| Give your work what is fair, but no more.
|
| Work is for earning slavery units to live life. Everything
| outside of work is your actual life. Create hard edged barriers
| between work and not work. Develop and foster deep hobbies you
| enjoy. This takes effort. I would suggest they not be computer
| based hobbies.
| pikuseru wrote:
| Hope you don't mind but I've copied this So I can refer back
| to it ;)
| barelysapient wrote:
| Consider taking up contracting. You pick the clients, set your
| own hours, manage your own deadlines and only take on as much
| as you want. Its helped me tremendously manage my mental
| health.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I certainly agree that it gives you a much broader sense of
| agency. especially when you get to the point you can fire
| clients for just not being good to work with (generally
| wanting the final results but not wanting to put in the
| organizational effort)
|
| it can have the opposite effect on the down times. no one is
| looking after you to make sure to make rent, and alot of
| engineers don't have the kind of training or personality that
| lends to cold calling. at least I don't...I can't even
| imagine what that would look like for systems programmers -
| "oh hi, I'm just calling to see if you need any device
| drivers written". ".......uh..."
| sometimeshuman wrote:
| What worked for me past years is having a vision for the money
| earned at work. My vision is time/energy/financial independence
| and I do that by buying income paying assets (e.g., rental
| properties), running a small business, and being contractor so
| I have a say in the number of hours I work.
|
| What didn't work for me is buying a fancy car, expensive shoes,
| semi-luxury remodels of my home, etc. -- those were just net
| negatives like a drug that keeps life bearable just a little
| longer. Frankly I suspect _needing_ those things are often a
| symptom of not being content with your life.
|
| It's been said "a why to live can bear almost any how". The
| problem in your case is that the stress can make your
| precarious health situation worse. But maybe the why > how
| mitigates stress ? It did in my case. Sorry and thanks for
| sharing. Anyone of us can go from good to poor health so it is
| worth contemplating your situation.
| kerblang wrote:
| It sounds like you're talking about _social_ stress as much as
| anything else?
| Icathian wrote:
| Go to therapy. Seriously. Helping you work through your mind
| not doing what you want is literally their profession. I've
| found it incredibly helpful multiple times throughout my life,
| for lots of things vaguely similar to this.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Sometimes it helps to use a Linter. And a debugger. Even on
| yourself.
| fartcannon wrote:
| I asked a psychiatrist friend of mine what they do when
| someone shows up depressed for reasons that are totally
| reasonable. She said they try to use drugs and therapy to
| generate some minor delusions that would help the person feel
| better in their environment.
|
| Maybe OP is just having the reasonable response to corporate
| work and the rest of us are deluded.
|
| But yeah, talking to therapists is like a cheat code OP.
| You'll feel better. But you might just be having a totally
| rational experience.
|
| Edit: since this seems to be the wrong place to have this
| conversation (my mistake), I'd like to emphasize that my
| point is that you should seek therapy as it was suggested OP,
| but also to commiserate that offices are often horrible
| experiences.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> minor delusions_
|
| What do you mean by that? A delusion is often a symptom of
| a mental health issue, something doctors treat to get rid
| of, so I don't understand it's use in this context.
| fartcannon wrote:
| My entire knowledge of the subject is what she said in
| that quote and I'm otherwise ignorant of the subject from
| a professional perspective so I'd just be guessing if I
| was going to elaborate, but I can tell you what I took
| from it: to me it meant that most people are a little
| deluded about their lives. Some productively, some not so
| much.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I'd like to recommend Dan Lyons' Lab Rats which dissects
| American corporate culture and its negative influence on
| employees.
|
| Dan Lyons wrote the fake Steve Jobs blog, Disrupted, and
| was one of the writers on Silicon Valley.
| fartcannon wrote:
| That sound great, I'll check it out.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > She said they try to use drugs and therapy to generate
| some minor delusions that would help the person feel better
| in their environment.
|
| I struggle to believe that's actually what they said. That
| sounds more like your interpretation of what they said, and
| in particular, a funhouse mirror description of Cognitive
| Behavioural Therapy.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Maybe she was trying to help me, eh? Saying stuff I
| needed to hear so that I would get help. I mean it
| worked, it's stuck with me for years.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Surprisingly, psychiatrists _are_ allowed to have a sense
| of humor.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| That's a perspective on CBT I've heard many times from
| many people with extensive experience with therapy and
| chronic health conditions. You might think it's wrong,
| it's certainly not absurd.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| frereubu wrote:
| That sounds like a pretty nihilistic psychiatrist (which
| I'd note is different from what I'd understand a therapist
| to be - therapists are psychologists, psychiatrists are
| medically trained). Therapists aren't just for irrational
| or subconcious emotions. It can help enormously to talk
| over your reactions to a terrible situation you're in and
| see if there are other paths for your feelings.
| fartcannon wrote:
| She worked with addicts and it was a casual conversation.
| I'm sure if someone pressed her professionally she
| wouldn't say it like that.
| diag wrote:
| Calling what therapy does as "creating delusions" helps
| nobody. Therapy offers a number of tools that helps a
| person get grounded in reality, helps a person create
| boundaries, and helps strengthen a person's abilities to
| deal with their life stresses by creating the framework to
| either deal with them or help move on to a new environment
| that doesn't create as much stress.
|
| Not all therapists are good. If you try somebody and don't
| connect or trust them, try to find somebody else.
| Internalizing stress really destroys the body, and it's
| important to find somebody you trust to help process it.
| iratewizard wrote:
| I've never needed therapy, but from the outside I've seen
| people who have been failed by it. It seems like the
| industry is plagued with one common issue. Therapists
| aren't incentivized to help you stop needing therapy.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Really? It helped me. It was nice for me to have someone
| else acknowledge that the emperor was in fact naked. The
| emperor transparent clothes in this situation was the
| suggestion that offices aren't horrible places to be.
| Take the IBM book of songs, for example.
|
| I would like to emphasize that I agree with you (and my
| original comment): Therapy is a cheat code! It will make
| your life immeasurably better. Everyone should do it!
| agumonkey wrote:
| No need to fight, I think both of you are right. Some
| people can get stuck into painful context or
| interpretations, in which case some therapy trick can
| help get out of the pit. That said if you discuss high
| level sociology you often end up in the "what a massive
| soup of chaos" too.
| ineedasername wrote:
| If the emperor is in fact naked, then you're not deluded
| in believing that. I'm confused by the use of that term
| in this way.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Yeah. I can't write in my own first language. Forgive me.
| Let me try again: The emperor is actually naked (offices
| are bad), but for various reasons people say the emperor
| is not naked (offices aren't bad). Does that help? I need
| help, clearly.
| morpko wrote:
| cossatot wrote:
| _While unemployed, I feel competent, I make progress on hard
| problems nobody else in the world is working on, and I feel
| good._
|
| If those problems are important, is there a way to work on them
| for pay? Like through a nonprofit, for example?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Good idea, but he stuff I work on it just for fun, and not as
| important as I made it sound. My point was that I'm competent
| and motivated, but stress from work encroaches on that and
| ruins it.
| kevingadd wrote:
| It can help a lot to find ways to compartmentalize your work.
| It also helps to have ongoing appointments with therapists or
| other experts who can help you keep an eye on your symptoms to
| figure out whether anything is starting to go wrong - keeping a
| journal etc may help you keep things under control.
|
| For me there were some really obvious signs early in my career
| that I didn't recognize until much later when they led to
| diagnosis (and mostly successful treatment) of chronic illness
| - it's easy to assume that things in your workplace are bad
| because they have to be.
|
| Bringing the stress home is definitely a tough thing. I don't
| have any answers for you on that. It might help to try and find
| work you're good at but don't care about, oddly enough, but
| that poses its own challenges.
| bg24 wrote:
| I wonder how we classify lot of things as "it's in the mind".
|
| My life (eg. family) is already destroyed because of
| environment. Stress adds up to the damage.
|
| Do not rule out: lyme and other diseases - it is hard to detect
| those and try bandaid treatments for symptoms. Mold issues in
| the home/work/car - again this is sickening.
|
| When you have a weak immune systems, you get affected with some
| of the daemonic disease, and then EMF, stress etc. wreaks havoc
| on your body.
|
| Yes, you can CONTROL stress and EMF exposures - and reduce the
| impact on your body.
| cinntaile wrote:
| It must really suck to live on planet earth with its giant
| magnetic field.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| This is why you should always wear a crystal. The crystal
| will adsorb the latent EMF and harmonize you with Gia. Also
| consider a negative-ion bracelet and sleeping with your
| head pointing north which will alleviate any remaining
| symptoms of EMF.
|
| /s
| 4e530344963049 wrote:
| Mars doesn't have one...
| agumonkey wrote:
| I felt this way after leaving an absurdly toxic place[0].
| Anything felt more productive. Even lifting weight felt like a
| torrent of meaning. But I'm not sure this freedom lasts on your
| own. It seems reactionary after being pressured into something
| that hurt you. After 1 month where I did 3h of sport daily and
| read books, my motivation crashed. Be prepared in case that
| happens. Find people with better view on life, better sense of
| workplace sanity. This (IMO) is better long term. Unless you
| manage to monetize your standalone problem solving skills
| (freelancing might be a good option for you too).
|
| Take care.
|
| [0] I had a string of bad luck regarding jobs, and I hated the
| whole work concept, but I got lucky and found a new place which
| is peaceful and interesting enough. Maybe you can find
| something like that.
| jokoon wrote:
| It might explain why WASM stagnated for so long.
|
| To be honest, google and apple probably want to kill WASM. Those
| company lose money because of good standards.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Those company lose money because of good standards._
|
| They absolutely do not, and they often make money and realize
| many other benefits by leveraging and/or contributing to
| standards.
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/3044088/apple-and-usb-a-history-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_File_Format#Extensio...
| drewcoo wrote:
| > "contributing to" standards
|
| ftfy
|
| The gp post did say "good standards," so I'm assuming that
| means open, unbiased ones.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _ftfy_
|
| I think the double quotes are meant to suggest that all
| open source contributions by Google and Apple are bad,
| somehow?
|
| I love the idea of "unbiased" though, as if contributors to
| standards must have no opinions about the standard one way
| or the other in order to be "pure".
| lostcolony wrote:
| Yep. Good standards = healthy competition in the space.
| Standards that basically just standardize what someone has
| already done, standards that require special licensing,
| require a high degree of effort to implement, etc, all
| create competitive advantages for large incumbents.
| dahdum wrote:
| WASM and the further development of API's like WebGL are a
| dangerous threat to their app store revenue, so both Apple
| and Google are incentivized to lead (or sometimes stall)
| development.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _WASM and the further development of API 's like WebGL
| are a dangerous threat to their app store revenue..._
|
| I'm not sure how you arrive at "web technologies are a
| dangerous threat to app store revenue", given that the
| iPhone was introduced with the best web browser ever made
| for mobile, and predated the app store by more than a year.
| Care to elaborate?
| dahdum wrote:
| Sure, Fortnite is a great example. If it can well run via
| web (which is a current workaround via Xbox Cloud
| Gaming), Apple can't take their 30% cut. Same with Roblox
| and other games. Top paid apps like Procreate could do
| the same.
|
| Apple and Google could lose tens of billions in revenue
| if they make the web too good too fast.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Yeah Fortnite could run well in WebAssembly and WebGPU
| for example, cloud streaming isn't necessary to get
| Fortnite on the mobile web.
|
| My team is actually developing a suite of tools and
| platform to enable Unreal Engine game developers to
| deploy their games to HTML5, bypassing walled gardens and
| 30% fees entirely.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _My team is actually developing a suite of tools and
| platform to enable Unreal Engine game developers to
| deploy their games to HTML5, bypassing walled gardens and
| 30% fees entirely._
|
| Okay, so your POV makes more sense now. I'm a fan of the
| web, so I wish you the best in making the web a platform
| for non-casual gaming.
|
| IMHO, if you view this _primarily_ as a technology
| problem, you 're going to learn that it isn't. Even when
| the technology prerequisites exist (Safari supports both
| Wasm and WebGL today), someone will need to solve the
| problems that app stores solve.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Great points. And regarding it not being a technology
| problem, you're referring to the obstacle of getting
| users to go to the web as a platform for discovering
| software, rather than the App Store or Google Play,
| right?
| kingaillas wrote:
| Not the poster you are asking this question of... but
| yes, that was true 15 years ago.
|
| However these days, app stores have proven their massive
| profitability, so web tech on par with native apps
| threatens that income stream.
|
| Offering reasonable functionality via web can be a huge
| win for certain app categories (anything with IAP or
| subscription) because it is easier to offer payment
| options that bypass app stores and their mandatory
| revenue slice.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _However these days, app stores have proven their
| massive profitability, so web tech on par with native
| apps threatens that income stream._
|
| Does it? Of the millions of apps in the Apple and Google
| app stores, can you list a few that were pulled in favor
| of web-only distribution once web APIs made a web app
| possible?
| daenz wrote:
| >If you're building a product that billions of people will be
| stuck with, however, this can lead to a little stress. The
| history of the web is littered with bad APIs, ill-considered
| specs, and tangled piles of security vulnerabilities. Something a
| programmer puts together in a week can consume decades of
| engineering time in the future. WebAssembly could not and would
| not release as a half-baked or ill-considered spec because as
| browser developers we all understood the costs everyone would pay
| for that.
|
| I don't understand how this is Google's fault? It sounds like the
| author had already hyped up the stress to insane levels before
| even working on the project. So it follows that everything they
| experienced within that context was also stressful.
| somethoughts wrote:
| Agree - it seems like the person self selected to be on a
| tremendously challenging/ambitious/ambiguous project that might
| have been more of a side initiative for Google so it could
| watch/influence/keep tabs on the standard.
|
| Like more of a cost center and less a profit center for Chrome.
|
| I'm sure there are less stressful but perhaps less visible
| groups in Google that could have been switched to.
|
| Also seems as much of an issue w.r.t. the competitive/co-
| opetion nature of the standards working group.
| scandox wrote:
| I think you're Anthropomorphizing the Lawnmower here. The
| author is saying that while at Google these things happened to
| her because Google is a massive impersonal machine which hires
| talented, creative and sensitive people, pays them huge money
| and then dumps them in a technical bear pit with the executive
| leadership as audience.
| daenz wrote:
| If a project is too stressful, why didn't she say "no, this
| is too stressful, let me work on something else." To me, it
| reads like they went along with the stress, knowing it was
| going to be stressful, and acknowledging that it is indeed
| very stressful. This sounds like a lesson in asserting your
| boundaries around mental health.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| IME: these things usually creep up on you in new and
| terrible ways. Everything can be fine and then it just sort
| of all hits you.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| Wow that's insane. Everyone I've met at Google (I also work here)
| has been coasting and stealing a living instead of being
| stressed. I guess you meet those most similar to yourself...
| titanomachy wrote:
| A lot of the coasters have pervasive guilt and a sense of
| inadequacy, if you dig deep enough. Not all though.
| sfashset wrote:
| It's not mentioned in the article but you have to wonder how much
| HRT contributed to OPs health struggles. Here [0] they mention
| not being able to stand up straight because of it.
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/antumbral/status/1068185127006552065?s=2...
| iudqnolq wrote:
| *hrt withdrawal
| kevingadd wrote:
| Yeah, the actual meds don't really do anything bad. Just
| withdrawal is nasty, which is pretty common for large classes
| of medication.
| JohnDeHope wrote:
| Not everybody is cut out for every job. I was once essentially
| fired from a job as a checkout clerk at a small business because
| I was so atrociously slow at counting my register's money at
| night. Everybody had to sit around after closing, waiting for
| 30min, while I counted and re-counted my bank. This made me
| pretty unpopular. If you hate your job, for whatever reason, then
| find a new way to earn a living. Look for something you're good
| at: broadly, holistically, in general. This person sounds like a
| good programmer, sure. But they don't sound suited to the culture
| at Google, or as a participant in contentious new specifications.
| That's okay, not every job is for every person. There's lots of
| things to do.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| OP and some of the comment here make it sound like this is a
| job/environment that no sane person would be "cut out" for, or
| at least they'd not remain sane for long.
|
| I don't think making excuses for that is a good idea.
| bityard wrote:
| I don't see GP making excuses for anything, only
| acknowledging that toxic work environments exist in the world
| (which sucks) and some people cope with them better than
| others.
| cleandreams wrote:
| Really interesting. Sorry for your experience but I'm glad I read
| this. At my last job I became overwhelmed and now in retrospect I
| can see I developed attention issues. I just could not focus. I
| have had great focus over decades long career but it got worn
| away.
|
| Some of that is that my manager actually sabotaged me. I think
| the problem is that I am a terrific coder and he is not. He had
| driven away 3 engineers (from the company, not the project)
| before me in a little over a year, so believe me. I could
| _actually_ _not_ get a paid copy of the debugger tool although I
| was the highest ranked engineer on the project!! I was working on
| the free version where I had to make a new account or something
| every few hours!! Wow, I cannot believe I didn 't understand the
| signal there. (He later got demoted from people management.)
|
| The other thing that I intensely dislike in the current tech
| world is the constant interrupt mode from the tools, slack and
| teams. I think that causes focus to deteriorate over time
| although I am not aware of any studies. It causes anxiety to flow
| freely through organizations and I don't think people are aware
| of the downsides to that.
|
| I also had major stresses in my personal life. Family issues. I
| just could not focus anymore and took early retirement. What I
| have been doing is Machine Learning courses. I think I want to do
| my own research projects. The good news is my focus problems, a
| year later, are GONE. The stock market dive may force me back to
| work but I hope not, not right away. I was a principal at one of
| the biggies so I did very well for awhile and with a little luck
| it could last the rest of my life and then some (for the kid).
| syrusakbary wrote:
| > That stress and the importance of the project were central to
| our struggles and the toxicity of the environment. Many design
| discussions became heated and two experts in their fields from
| competing corporations would fail to agree, convinced that their
| informed opinion was correct.
|
| I work in the Wasm ecosystem, and I unfortunately also share this
| viewpoint. I think that the toxicity from the beginning has
| transformed somehow the developers working on it for long and has
| leaked into other ways of managing disagreement within the Wasm
| ecosystem.
|
| Before WebAssembly, I was working full time on GraphQL (a
| community that I deeply love and respect, where everyone was very
| friendly to each other) and I completely found myself lost when
| seeing how competing companies in the Wasm ecosystem, rather
| working towards collaboration paths, wanted to push each other
| down. I have hopes though, that once things stabilize a bit, the
| ecosystem will recover :)
| adepressedthrow wrote:
| > My two years at Google were spent perpetually stressed, acting
| as an unofficial PM, helping run meetings and document decisions
| while dealing with sometimes hostile colleagues.
|
| This is the position I found myself in while working on a
| greenfield project for a FAANG company. Management structure
| either didn't exist (we didn't have a proper PM for nearly a
| year) or wasn't competent enough to take pressure off of the
| devs. It was so hard to fire bad hires and make good new ones
| that I was the _only_ dev contributing for a long time (then it
| became 2 devs, and he's still the only competent dev on the team
| to this day).
|
| I think most of the time when you're in this scenario, the best
| option is just to quit. Most likely you as an individual won't
| make enough of a difference to fix the problems, and regardless,
| it's not worth your health. I eventually left and worked at a
| decent sized startup for ~8 months before completely burning out.
| I wasn't forced by a doctor to take leave, but I felt like I had
| no other choice, and I'm still not working a year later.
|
| TL;DR: Be careful and cognizant of your brain and body. Don't try
| to run everything at your job, because it likely won't end up
| getting fixed and you'll just kill yourself.
| kodah wrote:
| > Worse still, our leads were overworked and lacked the power to
| create change. Any team needs expert leadership to thrive, and
| expert leaders need support from the people they report to so
| they can do what's necessary. Our leadership did not have that
| support. The V8 team as a whole had the misfortune of reporting
| to the leader of the Chrome organization, a careless man who
| continues to have one of the worst approval ratings in the entire
| company. In my career I've seen managers cry multiple times, and
| this is one of the places that happened. A manager should never
| have to ask whether they're a coward, but that happened here.
|
| I just spent four years at a company as a lead who uses an
| internal hierarchy that reinforces this. We hire non-technical
| managers or managers who did not reach Senior or Staff
| engineering ranks. Discussions with them are long and often feel
| like saying your ABC's backwards and forwards. Tech leads are
| leveled under managers and managers carry technical decision
| making authority proxied as business decision making. I started
| getting heart palpatations and my depression and cynicism was
| starting to reach levels that resembled what they were when I
| first got out of the Marines after less than a year off
| deployment.
|
| Just leave. It's not worth spending time in a place where the
| company has such a disorganized idea of itself that it
| prioritizes the people who know how to make the cakes input below
| that of the people who push things from one column into the
| other. There are _no_ amount of "hard conversations" you can
| have with folks like this. You speak two different languages from
| two different perspectives.
| labrador wrote:
| Is there a lawsuit in the offing? Because that's how it feels
| reading this. It will be difficult to prove that the stress of a
| fairly standard difficult work environment in high tech caused
| memory loss and brain damage.
| tinco wrote:
| If there was, they wouldn't or at least shouldn't blog about
| it. To me it just feels like a well deserved rant, that
| hopefully lifts some weight off the author's shoulders, and
| gives us some interesting topic for discussion.
|
| I've never heard of a lawsuit over emotional/psychological
| damage done by a difficult work environment (apart from those
| due to the racism/sexism/abuse-of-power/etc..). I do agree that
| psychologically difficult work environments are very common and
| many are not really avoidable even though some (like probably
| this one) definitely are.
|
| IANAL but I think it would be easy for Google to argue that
| they're paying their workers exorbitant wages with the idea
| that they would be working at the highest tier of skill,
| responsibility, competitiveness and stress. Even though in this
| particular situation it doesn't seem very warranted.
|
| How many tens thousands of workers are working in soul crushing
| zombifying factory lines and Amazon warehouses? I've heard that
| if you work for Amazon in Seattle you literally don't see
| sunlight for the entire winter. If we're going to defend the
| brains of our highest paid workers, what about our lowest ones?
|
| Of course, ideally we would both, I'm just saying law makers
| are probably not very keen on opening that can of worms.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| My sister actually successfully sued an employer for
| psychological damage due to workplace abuse. I never talked
| to her about what specifically they did, though, and this was
| a call center that I have to assume was far more abusive than
| a Google engineer experiences.
|
| Of course, I myself get disability payments from the VA due
| to permanent injuries sustained while in the Army, but that's
| pretty common. I left that job with ten screws in my spine,
| which is a little easier to quantify than "I felt stressed."
| Ironically enough, in spite of having a few diagnosed and
| treated brain injuries, including one in which I wasn't
| allowed to drive for two months, I got nothing for that. I'm
| reasonably sure my memory is worse than it was, but it's
| nearly impossible to prove that. Before and after tests are
| no longer possible if you didn't do a before test, and who
| regularly takes any sort of test of cognitive function before
| getting injured?
| gscott wrote:
| My son was recently in a motorcycle accident and he did a
| multi-hour written test and determined that he could no
| longer do the math he did in college (not the average I
| forgot how to do that but in a much worse way). That might
| work for you if you have college classes to look back on.
| labrador wrote:
| They say they quit a week before their options vested. Why
| not write something up and try to lay the grounds for a
| lawsuit?
| ExGoogTA88 wrote:
| Recent Xoogler here. I've never met anyone who was actually happy
| at Google when you sat them down for an honest talk. Everyone was
| either coasting and depressed/disengaged, or overworked and
| stressed (I would say 80% were the former). People were
| frustrated about the bureaucracy, the promo process, the slow
| pace, the meaninglessness of the work an individual IC does, the
| stress for managers. Even on a super sexy project dealing with
| cutting edge AI that got tons of press coverage, everyone was
| frustrated. This company has a serious cultural issue.
| ProAm wrote:
| > I've never met anyone who was actually happy at Google when
| you sat them down for an honest talk. Everyone was either
| coasting and depressed/disengaged, or overworked and stressed
|
| I think this is true of most careers in the US. At the end of
| the day it's a job, help you provide for yourself and family.
| It would be amazing if you were in love with every minute of
| it, but it a means to the end. You hear many NFL players say
| the same thing, they dont care if they win or lose, it's just
| their job. They show up, play, get a pay check and go on with
| their life.
| ExGoogTA88 wrote:
| I'd settle for at least feeling like my time on earth is not
| wasted and my talents are appreciated. I completely felt that
| in jobs before Google and I'm feeling it right now in my
| post-Google job at another FAANG (but it could be because I'm
| at a more senior role and it's a honeymoon phase)
| koube wrote:
| I'm a Googler who has only worked in startups before, and my
| life has markedly improved in every single way since I started
| working at Google. There is nothing I miss from life before
| FAANGs, and I consider the vast majority of Faangineers be
| obscenely privileged. Most of them have progressed to the same
| point in life that I am at but are 10 years younger.
|
| Opinions are my own.
| nwsm wrote:
| You didn't really give us any experiences in this comment. No
| mention at all of _why_ anything is better, or how your
| experience has differed from OP or the comment you 're
| replying to.
| koube wrote:
| > I've never met anyone who was actually happy at Google
| when you sat them down for an honest talk.
|
| I know plenty of people that have left google for greener
| pastures but also many that stayed. Since my previous team
| mostly went to other teams within Google we did a lot of
| talking about leaving and the consensus was that everyone
| would be fine whether they stayed with Google or decided to
| leave. "Happy" is a subjective term but everyone I talk to
| is comfortable and is fine with staying or leaving.
|
| > Everyone was either coasting and depressed/disengaged, or
| overworked and stressed (I would say 80% were the former).
|
| In a realist sense this one is almost tautological. Either
| you are trying to rank up or you're not trying to rank up.
| If you're not trying to rank up you get a LOT of leeway at
| Google, and you can coast if you want, or you can continue
| to do good work, as I think a lot of people do. If you're
| trying to rank up you're going to be busting ass, but I
| think this is not different than other companies. If you
| have people delivering impact and people who are not, are
| you really going to make the case that you should be
| promoting the less hardworking people? Or that everyone
| should rank up equally?
|
| > People were frustrated about the bureaucracy, the promo
| process,
|
| This is constantly brought up on memegen but there are also
| comments on memegen saying something to the effect of:
| "Despite our complaints Google is still a great place to
| work" and I don't think I've ever seen any pushback on
| this. Compare this to for example Reddit memes where there
| are zero people saying things are still good despite
| complaints. Promo by the way is being revamped due to
| complaints (I think this is public enough that I can
| mention this) and we'll see how the new process is.
|
| > the slow pace, the meaninglessness of the work an
| individual IC does,
|
| Despite my past projects falling flat, I personally find my
| current work important. In general I both agree and
| disagree with this point. It's 100% true that some people
| may not be personally invested in the success of the
| specific projects that they are working on, and I have
| indicated my agreement with this in a later comment. Where
| I disagree with this comment though is that people are very
| invested in project delivery in general, as your are
| extremely well rewarded for delivering projects. Above the
| L5-L6 level you will find people are working extremely hard
| to be impactful. This is maybe where the perception of
| "overworked and stressed" comes from. I will tell you these
| people are generally doing an amazing job and are being
| compensated for this overwork with amazing pay. And when
| they are getting pay commensurate to the work they are
| doing, I personally feel that the use of the label
| "overworked and stressed" needs to be heavily caveated.
|
| > the stress for managers. Even on a super sexy project
| dealing with cutting edge AI that got tons of press
| coverage, everyone was frustrated.
|
| I personally have not seen this but I don't dispute it. I
| have heard other teams have a lot of frustration.
|
| > This company has a serious cultural issue.
|
| This one is entirely subjective, but again I don't dispute
| this in terms the feeling of ennui at work. Sometimes
| leadership doesn't seem to have a coherent strategy and
| work is done for no reason. I can't really define what is
| "an issue" or "not an issue" culturally. What I can do is
| make comparative judgements: In my previous startups the
| culture was much worse, and there was much more of a sense
| of "what is leadership even doing?". I haven't worked in
| any places where I've had the sense that things are done
| better at Google. Others will have to speak to this.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| >> > Everyone was either coasting and
| depressed/disengaged, or overworked and stressed (I would
| say 80% were the former).
|
| > In a realist sense this one is almost tautological.
|
| While you're trying to say google's not that bad, that
| you see depressed-disengaged and overworked-stressed s
| literally _tautologically_ the only possibilities for a
| work experience does not say good things about google to
| me. It sounds like stockholm syndrome.
| koube wrote:
| I am confident that I have effectively communicated that
| working at Google is not similar to a hostage situation,
| and any attempt at framing my words in such a way is
| probably trying too hard.
| ExGoogTA88 wrote:
| > Either you are trying to rank up or you're not trying
| to rank up.
|
| I've seen coasting people getting promoted, and hard
| working people not getting promoted. But you could be
| hard working and not stressed is my point. I know because
| I've been there. I've even been there at Google for a
| short while. I ran a cool project, people were nice, work
| was interesting, it wasn t stressful at all but it was
| challenging. Sadly it didn't last long.
| koube wrote:
| That makes sense. Personally I have not heard a single
| person talk about stress as a SWE, but maybe I'm just not
| the type of person that people talk to about that. I have
| worked late a few times but that was for a short time and
| I consider that normal. In the end each PA and even each
| team can be as different as working as a different
| company, so even if this is not my experience I can't
| dispute this.
| ExGoogTA88 wrote:
| For sure, that's the upside of working there. Every aspect of
| my life outside of career satisfaction improved considerably
| - I relocated to the US, was able to buy a house, my work
| life balance got a lot better compared to working at
| startups, etc. But as a job in and of itself it was pretty
| lame (apart from a few periods that were fun). The thing is,
| I feel like that's true for most people there.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| I also find that the stress and the promo process creates
| an environment where people are aholes to each other, but
| using Googler Norms of social combat.
| koube wrote:
| I've had that feeling as well, absolutely agree that people
| can feel that way at Google. Personally the feeling of
| ennui was much more at my previous jobs, and I expect will
| exist anywhere I go. I do see however people incredibly
| engaged. I think there's a ton of luck in terms of what
| team/product you're placed in.
| ExGoogTA88 wrote:
| Probably. But I feel like there's something in Google's
| current culture that leads to this. I've mostly had these
| conversations with people from the search and cloud PAs.
| Could be different in other orgs. Maybe I just got
| extremely lucky with my pre-Goog jobs that were ultra
| satisfying and challenging in a good way, I just had a
| blast coming to work every day and doing the work.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Another ex-Googler here. I never had a job that was ultra
| satisfying and challenging in a good way. The only way I
| got that was from my own projects / businesses. Maybe I
| got unlucky job-wise. Or maybe I'm an entrepreneur at
| heart, I think fundamentally I cannot be fully satisfied
| working on someone else's project.
|
| Either way, at this point I think I've seen enough. I
| think I should minimize time working and maximize pay.
| Working remotely for G was pretty great. The work sucked
| but there was so little of it. If it weren't for
| mandatory RTO I'd still be there. I'm gonna see how FB
| compares.
| robocat wrote:
| > RTO
|
| .eq. Return To Office # For anyone else chilling
| somewhere in the world that doesn't know that TLA
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > Working remotely for G was pretty great. The work
| sucked but there was so little of it. If it weren't for
| mandatory RTO I'd still be there.
|
| And I think you just justified mandatory RTO!
| mdoms wrote:
| Sounds like a job.
| otikik wrote:
| Using the word "coasting" as "the opposite of overwork" already
| hints at a problem.
| bla3 wrote:
| I loved it while I was there. Fun projects, global impact, good
| pay, fairly reasonable work/life balance.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| A lot of FAANG people want to get paid FAANG levels of money
| but also work on exciting and meaningful projects, we can't
| have it all.
| com2kid wrote:
| The issue is, originally FAANG jobs were exciting.
|
| Think about it this way, everyone who was early at
| Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/etc has awesome stories of
| being on the first team in the world to ever try solving some
| really difficult problems. Exploring unknown new fields of
| computing, designing new UIs for never before imagined
| devices. You did super cool things.
|
| It is comparatively recent that FAANG jobs have become sort
| of lame.
|
| Remember how cool Google maps was when it first came out? Or
| how awesome Gmail was? Those were ground breaking projects!
|
| Heck we take distributed databases for granted now days, but
| Facebook pioneered a lot of amazing technology, so did
| Google, Amazon, and Twitter.
|
| Microsoft actually may have had the right model way back
| when, back when they had teams and job roles in charge of
| making new products, and another org just devoted to
| maintaining current versions of software. Of course that
| division was easy to make back when software came on CDs. Now
| days everything is cloud based and evergreen.
|
| Maybe companies need to have a career path that is just
| "maintain stuff" and your promos are based on how well stuff
| keeps working and any cost savings/perf improvements you can
| squeeze out of the existing code w/o doing a massive rewrite.
| chrsig wrote:
| When they first came out, neither google maps nor gmail was
| really unique. They were just better than the alternatives.
|
| Mapquest and hotmail were the true trail blazers in that
| respect.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| There's such a huge gap in usability between Mapquest and
| the first Google Maps release it would be hard to
| overstate it. Both gmail and google maps were
| groundbreaking not for the fact that they gave you
| "webmail" or "maps on the web" but for the fact that they
| did so as properly interactive applications where the
| HTTP connection got out of your way and you could
| dynamically interact.
|
| Back then Google was doing this kind of groundbreaking
| stuff. Other people had all the technology pieces but
| Google was kind of the only company doing these things at
| scale and letting their engineers cook it up and ship it
| quickly, and in the early/mid-2000s it seemed like they
| were dropping a new "wow, nifty" type of thing every few
| months.
|
| From the people I know who were there at the time (I
| joined later, end of 2011 time frame, right as "the
| social wars" and the G+ era was happening) it sounds to
| me like a serious empowered-nerd culture where people
| just got out of your way so you could _do_ stuff with all
| the neat tools that were available to you.
|
| That era at Google has ended some years ago now. It's too
| big, too political (and no, I don't mean "woke" politics,
| but corporate / promo / perf politics) and if you had a
| "neat idea" like how, say, Gmail started, you'd have a
| hell of a time making it happen past the layers of
| product managers etc.
|
| ... And if you work in a codebase like, say, Chromium,
| you're buried under 50,000 layers of abstraction and the
| product of very complicated decisions and a massive build
| that will bog down a machine with a couple dozen cores
| and 128GB of RAM, and bring any IDE to its knees. A far
| cry from the breath of fresh air of lightness and speed
| that original beta Chrome version felt like, with its
| graphic novel / comic introduction [1] and raw "hey isn't
| this neat check this out" vibe...
|
| [1] https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/
| robocat wrote:
| > Chromium, you're buried under 50,000 layers of
| abstraction and the product of very complicated decisions
| and a massive build
|
| As a webdev a few years ago, the Chromium team was oodles
| better than anyone else at delivering a reliable browser,
| and wayyyy better at fixing bugs than any other software
| team I have ever dealt with in my career (I just
| submitted bug reports to them, no direct or formal
| interaction). No idea what they are like now, but hotdamn
| that team was superlative. I hope it is enjoyable to work
| there, because the work output was phenomenal.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I never worked directly on Chromium, but I worked in its
| code base (for chromecast and google home products) and
| met many of the Waterloo folks who worked on Chrome. They
| were all top notch super smart people.
|
| The codebase is huge. The code quality is on the whole
| excellent, but learning its ins and outs takes time.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| When it first came out, the Tesla Roadster wasn't really
| unique. It was just better than the alternatives.
|
| The Model-T was the true trail blazer in that respect.
| [deleted]
| nostrademons wrote:
| 2gler here. I was actually really happy for about the first 80%
| of my first time at Google (Search, 2009-2012). Miserable for
| the last 20%. Mildly discontent for my first team back,
| reasonably happy after transferring.
|
| Your team and the specific work you're doing matters a lot for
| your happiness at Google (and presumably any big company). Work
| with your manager to craft a job description that's better
| suited for you, or transfer if you can't. You have to actively
| manage your career - and your happiness - in any job.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I mean, I often make the same points as you (also ex-Google.)
|
| But I have to say, as a counterpoint, I met many people inside
| Google who loved it there and were living their best career
| lives there, and getting treated really well to do it.
|
| It wasn't me, but, there's a personality type that thrives in
| those environments. It's not all awful. You get to play with
| some really fancy big tools. Deploy your stuff across thousands
| of servers or ship a product to millions of people. Sit on the
| shoulders of other really smart engineers and use the pretty
| amazing stuff they build (like, seriously, stuff like F1 etc.
| is pretty amazing).
|
| And if you can play the game there well, and you really want to
| succeed there, there's lots of room to climb.
|
| Wasn't my game, but let's be honest, there's actually a lot
| there to go with.
| jrockway wrote:
| Having dealt with burnout in the past, a mistake I wouldn't make
| again is immediately quitting. If your company burned you out,
| they should make you whole again; you shouldn't be paying for
| therapy out of your own pocket. COBRA is an absolute disaster; if
| the insurance company ever actually approves you, you eat through
| your runway too quickly. It's like paying for a second apartment!
|
| How to actually execute this, I'm not completely sure. You don't
| want to ramp down to the "performance improvement plan" level,
| because that will just ruin your mental health. If you can ramp
| down from "strongly exceeds" to "meets expectations" maybe that
| will help, but if burned out it's probably too late for something
| like that.
|
| I'm not sure that medical leave is that helpful. I did this once,
| but was diagnosed with depression when the real problem was that
| I didn't have a good relationship with my manager. (The straw
| that broke the camel's back in that case was that I was on
| vacation the first few days after medical leave, the HR system
| lost the vacation, and HR started calling my immediate family
| with the implication that I was presumed dead. Nope, just in
| Yellowstone without good cell service. I didn't go back to work
| after that debacle.)
|
| The second time I was burned out, I knew there was no way the
| company could help me (tiny startup, and the CEO was burning me
| out), so I just instantly quit. I took about a year off and that
| was great, I totally recovered. But it was very expensive. It
| annoys me that companies know they're burning out their
| employees, and do absolutely nothing to help. So much is lost
| when people leave. "Take 3 months off" is totally normal if you
| have a kid, for both parents now; we should do the same for
| burnout. "I didn't have a kid but I'm going through some shit."
| leave.
|
| Edit: also, sorry for making this comment about me. I read the
| entire article and it just frustrates me to no end. You did such
| a good job making a great spec; the foundation for a better web
| for billions of people, and the foundation for many interesting
| startups. All while single-handedly being the glue needed to keep
| a challenging project making progress. That's truly amazing.
| Google owes you nothing short of a parade in your honor and a
| promotion :) Instead, you're left footing the bill to recover
| from the brain damage caused by continuous stress. I'm so sorry
| you had to go through this, and thank you for writing this up.
| It's something we all face in this industry, and speaking up is
| going to help a lot of people.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Yeah I think quitting early is a mistake, you want to figure
| out a way to ramp down for sure. Not certain what the trick is
| there, and doing it wrong can probably make stress worse.
|
| At one past employer where crunch was a problem, some of the
| leads had an unofficial policy that after launch everyone could
| just quietly show up to work and not do anything for a few
| weeks to decompress. It helped a lot, but it kind of made me
| wonder why everyone was pretending there wasn't a problem.
| djbusby wrote:
| It's wild the job can burn you out then externalize the cost of
| care back to you if you quit. To be clear: even high earners at
| $BigCo benefit from universal health care.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| yeah reading GP it's wild to me that being burnt-out there
| might be a real reason to _stay_ in the place that caused it.
| 0_o
| irrational wrote:
| > I've seen managers cry multiple times, and this is one of the
| places that happened.
|
| What sorts of places are they working that they have seen this
| multiple times?! Maybe I've been very fortunate, but I've worked
| for a Fortune 500 company for 20 years and I cannot think of a
| single times things have become so stressful that anyone was
| close to tears. Usually things are very calm and when managers
| talk about work life balance they really mean it and walk the
| walk and don't just talk the talk.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i wrote and then deleted a comment. I work in consulting and
| I'll just say that tears on conference calls are rare but do
| happen from time to time.
|
| I've seen it at the bottom of the org chart all the way to
| almost the very top and even client side. It's not uncommon for
| race cars to be pushed until the engine blows and it's not
| uncommon for people to be pushed (or push themselves) beyond
| what they can bear. Everyone has their limits and there's no
| shame in reaching/crossing them. I've been there and it sucks,
| it really does.
| [deleted]
| rhizome wrote:
| I've heard of this happening at Apple, and it wasn't portrayed
| as an unusual occurrence.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Where? I have never seen this happen in 30 years at Apple in
| software engineering.
| xwa32 wrote:
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&sto
| r...
|
| "By this point, I was crying harder, and Bob looked like he
| might start crying at any moment now, too. We were also
| pretty far from Bandley 4 by now, and it was starting to
| get dark. The tone of the conversation seemed to shift as
| we both realized that we should start heading back."
|
| But I guess that was 39 years ago...
|
| On a more serious note: I haven't seen it in a long time
| but I've definitely seen it on some of the hardware teams.
| It was when Apple was smaller and we were continually
| trying to fit two weeks of work into one week. At that pace
| everyone eventually breaks down and some do it differently
| than others.
|
| Apple being huge now has its disadvantages but one
| advantage is I haven't heard of months of project death
| marching in a long time.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I've seen it particularly when it's about things that are (or
| seem to be) important but the business has neglected supporting
| the team accordingly. When you're in this position and don't
| have a good place to quickly jump to it's easy to think "I'll
| just put in as much as they do and live on" but when something
| goes wrong and that team is the only one that can fix important
| (or "important") thing inevitably many just go through
| extremely stressful situations.
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