[elgoog1212]

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I have first hand experience with both FB and Google. When it comes to office politics, Google is currently turning into shit pretty rapidly, comparatively speaking. It's still miles better than most other companies, but the deterioration is now beyond the point of no return. There are _tons_ of layers of management, and 90% of the time, you'd be hard pressed to see what they actually do besides playing power games and fucking up the products as a result (as if Google needed any help with that). Managers here are mostly ex-engineers, and most of them suck at managing. The reason why they are managers in the first place is that it's virtually impossible for an engineer to attain a level beyond T6 (and massive increase in comp that comes with that), whereas the requirement to do so if you're a manager is that you have a pulse, and you're able to take credit for your reports' work. You won't believe what kind of people get L7 and above at Google once they switch to management. At Google you don't have to be good at managing to actually manage. TL;DR: as an engineer your career at Google will end at T6 if you're lucky, and at T5 if you're not; this is where things _begin_ for managers. So Google values managers more.

FB is actually more mindful of the quality of their management talent. They put a bonfire under their feet in the form of charging managers with direct responsibility to hire for their teams, and _encouraging_ team members to leave for other teams every now and then to overcome human inertia. If you suck or if your project sucks, you will have trouble hiring and retaining talent, so pretty quickly you won't be a manager anymore.

[brianx]

I'm not sure that Google is turning into shit. It seems to me it's always been like that. I've been at Google for 4 years and noticed very quickly that turning software engineers into managers could not possibly work. I've switched teams recently and am happier for the time being, but my previous manager sucked ass.

My new project is actually quite interesting. There's very little politics involved too, which is a plus, and I'm glad I'm not writing yet another chat app that we will deprecate in 2 years time.

The worst part about Google for me is the level of incivility. This is what, the 4th time a senior exec has to call people out and tell them to behave on memegen? And it's only getting worse.

Also, considering how mediocre many Google engineers are, I never understood where all that arrogance comes from.

Edit: fix typos.

[elgoog1212]

The level of incivility is more of a side effect of being a large company. Google is also full of professional victims who blow even the minor transgressions (e.g. telling someone they look good at an offsite) completely out of proportion. This makes it seem like there is a lot more incivility than there really is. VPs on memegen is virtue signaling, nothing more, pay no attention.

As to the quality of engineers, I've worked with some AMAZING people at Google, far and away the best I've ever seen in my long career. After a while Google skews your perception as to what it means to be "good", because even the very worst SWEs at Google are well above average in the industry. Google would not be able to function without this, given that it takes a full 3-4 months to just become productive with its internal infra and kinda-sorta figure _some_ things out.

[zump]

> The worst part about Google for me is the level of incivility. This is what, the 4th time a senior exec has to call people out and tell them to behave on memegen? And it's only getting worse.

What does this mean?

[elgoog1212]

Memegen is actually the best part about Google. It's an internal meme site where people poke fun at the various failings (perceived or real) of Google, each other, and upper management. You can even poke fun at the founders and the CEO, and people often do. Though of course neither the founders nor the CEO actually read it.