[space_invaders]

Google has turned into the "new IBM" for years now. I've worked with Google engineers and managers from different "generations". It's shocking how the newer engineers are just your average consultancy engineer with leet code practice. They have little abstracting capabilities and would be pissed-off if you use some tool/workflow that's not "The Google Way™" (and that includes things like Github for code reviews (instead of Gerrit or a Gerrit-clone), multirepos or monorepos without Bazel, anything else than gRPC...).

And the managers... Oh, the managers... They just act for the sake of their own promotion even if that means damaging someone's else career or the company in the long term. And will complain about things not being done the "Google Way", even if the proposed Google Way failed multiple times in that context (startups and scaleups, in my case). But what's really shocking is how they have no interpersonal skills, to the point of making you constantly question yourself: how, why, did this person ended up in a management track in a supposedly Y-career company? How not only did they got there but also promoted multiple times for this role?

Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays.

[Osiris]

I worked at a startup with just 2 other engineers. They hired a guy from Google with a decade less experience than me.

When I arrived I was taking my time to understand the culture, company, needs, etc. before making any suggestions. One example, they did Agile with sprints and I think KANBAN works better. But, I didn’t see it as an important issue to spend time on.

So the Google guy comes in and from day 1 began making suggestions for big changes to both process and the software architecture. He often started by saying, “At Google we…”

I was let go, in part, because the CEO thought I was not contributing to certain technical discussions. I told him I thought the proposed change wouldn’t bring any value to potential customers because it was a purely internal architectural change. We had a lot of actual customer facing work to do and this was a distraction.

So… a guy with only 5 years of professional experience all at Google won over the 26 year old CEO more than someone with 20 years of experience across multiple companies and having built a very similar product just a year before.

[dumpster_fire]

On the flip side, Xooglers are expected to do that. That's mostly the reason they are hired for. If they ever suggested just hosting a static page with 0.01 QPS on an existing API server, they'd be deemed as failed Googlers.

Everyone expects them to be building Kubernetes, Terraform, and other useless bullshit that a startup with a total critical traffic of 10QPS absolutely doesn't need.

We've also had ex-Facebookers back in the day who would throw out perfectly fine coding processes and get everyone to use Phabricator. Bloated software that took many engineering hours to design processes around, and came with features that no one with Atlassian would ever downgrade to use. It was like coding with PHPBB.

[alephnerd]

1. Terraform is absolutely useful for both startups and enterprises. IaC makes everyone's (Platform, App, Ops, Security) lives easier from an accounting, governance, and reproducibility standpoint.

2. Terraform isn't a Google product. It's by Hashicorp

[dumpster_fire]

I know Terraform isn't by Google. I'm saying that's what Xooglers are expected to know since this new meta of IaC buzzword has been present in Google for close to a decade. It's nothing new.

Also, do you really need it when you're a startup running 3 EC2 clusters with "potentially tons of customers"? No.

[anon848553]

I have experienced a similar situation at a startup. I was an early employee with many years of experience, and we were shipping functionality without any major issues. After an investment round, we hired several new developers.

The new developers managed to convince the leadership that we needed "better" processes, and other technologies. The result of this was rewriting the system into more micro services than developers in different languages and multiple frameworks. The new processes ensured that teams didn't talk together because each team should be independent and effectively blocked any input. The startup failed hard and barely survived even after major cuts

[ch4s3]

You’re probably better off without that nonsense.

[epicureanideal]

Except that nonsense is 90% of startups these days. Most of the people who get funded are well connected fools or charlatans. I’m shocked at how poorly money is invested.

[lowbloodsugar]

If the CEO thought process used in a megacorp was appropriate for a four engineer startup, then he is a fucking idiot and you are better off out of that impending cluster fuck.

[bushbaba]

Often those who’ve only worked at small companies don’t grock how much organizational bloat is needed to run a large enterprise. Alignment cannot be done in a 50k employee company by having everyone hash it out over beers.

Large companies also tend to have sociopaths become the VPs, who only care about their career progression and not the actual company direction.

[prepend]

> grock

“Grok” is from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It was a super important word to me as a kid. I’ve recently started hearing it again used by people who never read the book and find it interesting.

Do you remember where you first heard this word? I assume you heard it as it’s such a memorable word and difficult to misspell.

[alephnerd]

Not OP but I use the word Grok a bunch without having read Heinlein.

I heard about it from graybeards and HN, hence why there might be a resurgence now that HN is mainstream.

[lowbloodsugar]

The failure begins at around 150 employees, from what I've seen in startups I joined when smaller and grew to that point.

[ffgjgf1]

> 26 year old CEO

In 95%+ cases that’s a pretty terrible idea

[adastra22]

Sounds like you dodged a bullet.

[listenallyall]

Dodging the bullet is not getting hired by a shitty company. Getting fired, even if it's by the same shitty company, is taking the bullet.

[sharts]

That's why they say having "Google" on your resume sets you up forever (˃̣̣̥‿˂̣̣̥)

[wahnfrieden]

The worker wasn’t the problem, the boss’s imposed hierarchy of command was

[jedmeyers]

You might have had 20 years of experience building products that don't need to scale for millions of concurrent users, if you consider all "purely internal architectural changes" to be lower priority than the customer facing work just because it's purely internal. And the Google guy might have tried to spend time scaling a product that will have five concurrent users, because "this is Google" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI). It's all about perspective, and CEO thought the other perspective was more valuable.

[Stephen_0xFF]

He mentioned there was a lot of customer facing issues to tackle, it was a startup, and their team had 4 devs. Scale shouldn’t be an issue until you know you’ll scale. Who cares if you use Kafka and Kubernetes. You sacrifice so much man power to do things thinking you’ll have a million users, but then fail like 90% of all other startups. I’ve never once heard of a startup failing because they had trouble scaling their architecture — just their business. We know he lost his job because the CEO valued the perspective of the ex googler, but the ex googler had 5 years on systems that were already large, massive man power, and budgets that dwarf startups. You’ll make any new CEO salivate showing road maps that will handle 1,000,000 concurrent users, but “handle” and road maps to “get to” are different.

[voytec]

> Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays.

Feeling rather uncomfortable as Devil's advocate in this case but I was testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a cost-saving replacement for Google Cloud Platform recently and they are worlds apart.

GCP is a cloud service where you can issue a command or click on a web panel to get your resources up. Oracle, on the other hand, will set up multiple meetings with various "specialists" to teach you how a cloud should be used. Unproductive meeting after meeting after meeting and no work gets done.

I felt like an unpaid QA engineer when going over all the unpleasantries of their Terraform provider with them. Documentation is garbage and no variables are are explained[1]? No problem, we've got 5 specialists who will train you how you should use the cloud.

Here's a generous free tier so you can test everything. Oh, want to set up resources using it? Raise a support ticket. Want GPU VMs? No problem, request the hardware for a specific region days in advance and we hope it'll work. Oh, not working? Please share your screen and open a support ticket. Want a second VM instance or a node pool for your cluster? Request limit increase. Want more RAM? Request limit increase. Don't worry, we have a team granting these very quickly.

Absolute shitshow. Oracle Cloud is as frustrating as Digital Ocean when you try to treat it as a cloud and not a VPS vendor. GCP more or less "just works".

[1] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/oracle/oci/latest/do...

[u801e]

> that includes things like Github for code reviews

I've never worked at Google, but if you want a clean set of commits to implement a feature (think Linux kernel/subsystem, git, etc), Github makes it unnecessarily hard to do that. The best they have is squash and merge which basically makes one mega commit and a merge commit that references a branch with a single commit.

[baq]

I’ve just reviewed ‘spr’, ‘git-spr’ and ‘git-grok’ which supposedly make it easier to submit a stack of prs for review. They all kinda work, I didn’t like any though. GitHub really makes it more difficult than it should be.

I think ‘stg’ with a GitHub publish/stack sync option would be a winner.

[bottom999mottob]

You think Gerrit is any better? The way I've seen Gerrit used essentially erases the commit history with an amend, and its configured so only one person can work on a branch at a time, locking out vertical, parallel work. Maybe that's just been my experience however.

[whiplash451]

Not a Googler, but the point about gerrit vs gitlab is totally valid.

The tools you use are culture-defining.