[enneff]

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.

[happosai]

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. .

[bananapub]

> 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.

[dalyons]

Changed how?

[pas]

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.

[tombert]

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.

[bruce511]

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.

[pas]

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)

[tombert]

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.

[pas]

wow, thanks for the details!

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 :(

[jjeaff]

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.

[enneff]

Yeah he should really stop saying stuff. My opinion of him has really plummeted.