[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.