All these things make me envious of people who get to work at Google or any other FAANG company, where they are both paid well and validated for their intelligence.
These are great benefits for sure, but one of the reasons I left is a totally ineffective and wasteful management structure that makes it extremely hard to actually do anything. It is very hard to feel like your work means anything at a company of that size, since the chances of having the goals of your work changed (or being laid off) at a moments notice makes it hard to stay motivated.
If I take another software gig it will certainly be at a small company where my daily work contributes directly to the company’s central goals.
In case of Google, it's not just the size of company. It's the fact that the company makes it's money from selling ads. No matter how well you do your job, the end result is only that more ads were sold.
Programming is a superpower that can change the world. Yet the best paying jobs for programmers are at FAANGs building systems to peddle ads. .
> It's the fact that the company makes it's money from selling ads.
this is true, but it did not at all affect how 90% of the company worked. the ads teams made money and everyone else did whatever, supported by that infinite firehose of cash.
a large part of the reason google has sucked (internally and externally) for the last few years is that this changed.
everything else also now needs to make money.. since it's impossible to directly make really any meaningful revenue compared to ads (and maaaybe cloud) the only thing remaining is to integrate ads, upsell cloud, downside, etc.
There are so many middle managers at Apple that feel the need to justify their existence within the company, and as such they schedule endless meetings and/or send "urgent" emails that they expect you to respond to immediately.
It got to a point of being almost farcical, where they were scheduling meetings at 9:30pm multiple times a week. After two years of it I had to leave, I was coming home catatonic and depressed, to a point where my wife was getting concerned.
I've spent my career on the opposite side of the fence. I work for a tiny company, and I report to "mostly" no-one.
I add value, I choose (mostly) what value to add, and my division is profitable.
I recently did some consulting for a large company. It reaffirmed for me that my path was right for me. I haven't made as much money as my corporate brethren, but the endless treadmill of meaningless work, manager meetings, measurement-by-jira and so on would have spit me out early.
I enjoy the creativity of my work, the direct interaction with customers (especially when they like me :) - the intuition to see how things could be better, and the freedom yo execute on it.
My path to joy is not for everyone, others get joy from bringing on a large team - that's OK- each person needs to find their own path.
can you please explain how these meetings got so out of hand? did you attend them? did you decline eventually? why, why not? how does it work? who was your actual boss? is there some kind of resource management? (ie. where your time is allocated?)
thanks in advance!
(I never worked at any FAANG thing, and I never worked for a US company, so this is extremely... interesting and strange.... because I am no stranger to long nights, had the occasional death march, some kind of startup momentum and expectations here or there, small teams and overtime, deadlines, but .. also headcount was less than 20 for us)
I'm not going to pretend that I really understand the psychology of a person that thinks that 4+ hours of meetings a day is a good idea.
It started when my team opened up Singapore office. That's fine, but they are 12 hours ahead of New York, and the genius middle managers on my team thought it was very important that we synchronize on a lot of these meetings, and the only times that kind-of-sort-of-not-really "worked" for everyone was between 7:30pm-9:30pm NYC time.
That was already bad enough, but this genius would bog the first 5-10 minutes of the meetings with small talk, giving his opinion on the latest keynote or something else. Small talk is generally fine, but not when everyone is looking to go to bed.
It got really out of hand once COVID started. Suddenly, since everyone was working from home and as such it could be assumed that they had access to their work computer, managers just decided that there's basically no time off limits for a useless meeting.
> did you attend them?
Yes, most of the time. We'd get in trouble if we just skipped them.
> did you decline eventually?
As many as I could, but if I did it too often I could reliably expect a phone call complaining about it.
> how does it work? who was your actual boss?
I don't want to give specific names. My direct manager was actually fine and generally only scheduled meetings that were reasonable. His boss was pretty stupid, and scheduled a few useless meetings a week . His boss was a complete moron and I think was completely incapable of scheduling a meeting that was actually useful. The chain goes up several more levels.
It was more or less like Office Space: if you made a mistake you'd get like six managers separately explaining your mistake to you.
> is there some kind of resource management? (ie. where your time is allocated?)
Apple has its own ticketing system called "Radar". It's kind of like Jira or something, but it's a GUI app instead of a web application. Tickets are more or less ranked in the same way they are in Jira, you just estimate the number of hours it will take.
A few points of fairness to Apple:
- I'm a very annoying and difficult person to manage, and I am extremely impatient, so maybe I overreacted to all this stuff (though I know that I was not the only person really annoyed by this stuff).
- Judging by the high turnover rate my team had, I suspect that I was on an exceptionally poorly run team. I did try transferring to another team, and actually did pretty well in the interview, but I was declined because I had received a poor performance review the year before [1]. I know other people who worked at Apple who really like it, so I think I just had some bad luck.
[1] Honestly, the bad review was kind of justified, much as I hate to admit it. I had become pretty frustrated over a lot of stuff happening in my life and it was reflected in my work output. I did get better but not before the review period was over.
It seems initial impressions in these huge corps are almost everything. If things are great people are willing to put in the hours, money is great after all, so one's trajectory quickly curves upward, promotions, yeey! But if it's bad, it's hard to go anywhere, even laterally, because of the baggage, so there's only down from there :(
and then, after all that bad leadership and bureaucracy, one of the top executives (Schmidt) blames google's lost lead in AI on the workers who don't want to work anymore and are just concerned with getting all the perks and work life balance.
The validated for their intelligence thing is a problem. Googlers in the early days constantly told each other that they were the "smartest people in the world". I noticed this immediately after joining and found it quietly troubling, because there's all kinds of smart and the interview processes were really only selecting for skill with computers or maths. A lot of Googlers wouldn't survive long on the streets or alone in the wilderness, as these require different kinds of smart to what they had. Some colleagues were troubled by those statements for other reasons: they didn't personally feel like one of the smartest people in the world, and this led to imposter syndrome. But we said nothing because, hey, the company was doing great and people did seem pretty smart overall back then. Plus nobody wants to call themselves out as an imposter, and Google had a certain degree of institutional humility to it as well. The company was very much about empowering everyone, no matter who or how "smart" they were.
What you're seeing from Google in the last ten years is a maybe predictable consequence of that culture, where some Googlers really do seem to think they're generically much smarter than everyone else, about everything. You started to see mass scale social engineering via manipulation of search results and products, driven apparently by the immense faith they have in their own wisdom. Is there any claim Googlers cannot immediately resolve as true or false given nothing more than a few ML models and a team of contractors in LatAm? Apparently some of them think that's all it takes.
This quasi-misanthropic culture is miles away from the trusting "make it universally available and useful" culture the company once had, but the seeds of that culture's end were clearly visible even at the start. You can't constantly validate people by telling them they're super smart before some of them come to actually believe it, and that leads naturally to the belief that if they're really the smartest people in the world then surely that means they should be running it.
I think when you're hiring people like Russ Cox, Rob Pike, Van Jacobson, Jeffrey Mogul, Jennifer Rexford, Bram Moolenar, Vint Cerf, etc. (and that's just a tiny fraction of their well known amazing talent) it's hard not to think they're hiring the smartest & brightest.
its the proximity, pedigree, profile that you have to fit to get in to Google
I'm happy for those that made it. Not everybody gets to work for Google. But the work they do are no less challenging or more important than what the rest of us do.
If anything FAANG has contributed greatly to the American Firewall of Algorithms and have destroyed an entire generation's ability to reason and value common sense.
I remember this quote which I can't remember who said but "if they are paying you a large salary, what they take from you is far greater"
is that what you tell yourself? mine was aimed at the notion that salaried compensation especially if its very large implies an asymmetrical return for the company.
for one, it would buy loyalty. Not many Googlers stood up when they realized their technology was enabling military drone strikes on children.
If I take another software gig it will certainly be at a small company where my daily work contributes directly to the company’s central goals.