Quite truthful. When I left Google at the end of March to start my own thing a lot of folks came out of the woodwork telling me about their plans, how they've saved up $xxx,xxx to start their app and leave the company, etc. I visit friends back there for lunch every month or so and I still see the same faces at the same desks. When I ask them about pulling the trigger it's always "you know . . ."

It's really a testament to the HR and REWS departments that they've constructed a workspace and a compensation package that keeps so many people there despite their own intentions! Masterful really.

You're also taking them at their word that they do intend to start their own companies, I think to a lot of folks in the Valley this sentiment is the same as the "I'm going to quit and write my novel" cliche from the 20th century.

What's the line from the first episode of Silicon Valley "I don't want to become a Hooli-lifer"?

Do you think REWS is actually useful for retention?

I've always thought that REWS was much more beneficial for recruiting, in the phase when they walk you around campus and show you all the impressive public spaces, and talk about all the nice services they offer. The one thing they don't show you is the huge, loud, windowless open office space where the team you'll be joining actually works. And by constantly shrinking that space, removing cube walls, and making workplaces more and more miserable, I think they actually hurt retention.

When I left Google in June of 2015, my team was just about to be transitioned from an older building on the main campus where we had actual cubes with walls (nevermind that there were already 6 people per cube) and a few shared offices, into a modern design in Sunnvale, with just a giant room with tables and little/no dividers. Between loosing access to all the cool things on the main campus (cafe choice, gyms, events like TGIF) and the new, crappy workspace, it just seemed like a gigantic downgrade.

I now work from home in the middle of nowhere, where I have an office with a door I can close, and a window for natural light. (and working remotely was something else that was not possible at Google)

This is not unique at all to Google, or even tech. People complain and whinge about leaving, but never actually do (or don't for a while).

Or maybe they just don't hire people they can't trap there...

You can't possible believe this, right? Many of them have "fuck you" money that would permit them to never work a day again in their lives were that to be their choice.

Please refrain from insulting every employee of a company as an idiot sheep simply because you don't like the company.

I've always wondered what percentage of employees at Google or Facebook are like this? Do you know?

One of my coworkers on a previous team has been at Google for 17.5 years, has employee ID #7X, almost certainly has enough money to never work again, and is still an SRE carrying a pager with a 3-minute hands-on-keyboard response SLA.

Some people just love what they do.

Wow. How can you even have that kind of an SLA? Like what if you happen to be in the shower or in the middle of traffic or if your Internet drops out or something? How do these SLAs work?

You're usually on-call for a fairly humane shift, not 24h a day.

Yeah, it's not possible (or perhaps just a really, really bad idea) to do "always on" oncall with that kind of SLA. Either people will be constantly missing it, or you'll burn them out really fast. The SRE book talks about this, I think, in terms of the minimum number of people and distributed offices you need in order to do a robust oncall rotation.

Ah I see, thanks. Hopefully you don't need to use the bathroom too badly during that shift I guess :)

Then you transfer to secondary or nack the page for the secondary to handle.

In my old team's case, the shift was 10am-10pm either Mon-Thu or Fri-Sun. If you needed to commute or grab lunch or something, you just had to coordinate with the secondary oncaller to cover for you for a half-hour or whatever.

Stuff like bathroom visits, showers, etc aren't usually a big deal since 1) we didn't get paged that often (see the SRE Book on proper alerting design) and 2) three minutes is longer than you'd think. Usually plenty of time to "wrap things up" and get back to your laptop.

If your internet dropped out, you'd either switch to tethering, get your secondary to cover while you drove to the office or a coffee shop, or worst case contact your manager to help find emergency coverage.

Normally when I was oncall, I'd be on the couch playing video games or watching a movie with my work laptop nearby and logged into a shell on my work desktop.

Awesome, thanks! I kind of want to be an SRE now. (Not because of the video game part, though I wouldn't mind that ;) I meant because it sounds exciting.)

Hand off to the secondary.

It's entertaining to see Larry Page wishing he had a penny for every time something happened!

"Mr Page, you do, in fact, have several pennies for each time that could possibly have happened."

In multiple universes

"Man, if only I had a penny every time someone placed a web ad that got seen by 1000 people!"

'But you ... do ...?'

"i wish i had a penny for every time" really takes on a different meaning when it's in the same deposition as "i can't be expected to keep track of every hundred million dollar payout"

Interesting comparison given that the hundred-million-dollar payout came from 10 billion pennies' worth of ad clicks.