Honestly this sounds like a thought experiment.

Do you have any ethical hangups about entering an environment where falling out of your favor can leave someone stress-crying in their place of work and/or about their livelihood.

If so, how much money would it take for you to join the system anyway?

How long would you stay in such a system if you found yourself already in one?

Back in the real world, in a business context, it sounds like an abusive workplace and an untenable system. Like, that obviously can't last forever.

- "I'm sure there are managers and engineers crying in private in every big company out there": You're not excusing google here, just expanding the range of companies whose apparent behavior is mortifying a couple of people in this thread.

- "Google probably does some things very well to keep all the talent despite the negative press it gets.": probably. They probably do a lot of a/b testing to dial in the compensation/retention ratio they're looking for, or maybe they just heap rewards onto engineers because they can afford it. Be that as it may, some people think that what google's doing is detrimental to society, or at least the problems are bigger than a salary or even a total compensation package should make up for.

I still think Google stands as an attractive workplace for reasons that are not just compensation and resume boost, though.

Is this referring to how they creepily track people, or are they doing worse things which I’m not aware of?

Is this your idea of an engineering nirvana? Does engineering happiness have to come at the expense of manager happiness?

A very substantial point actually.

I'm not so sure this is better. I was an individual contributor for over ten years until I became a manager a couple of years ago, so I've seen both sides of this coin. My experience has been that typically engineers aren't interested in understanding all the non-technical things that are necessarily part of the decision making process, or worse think of these things as beneath them, asinine, or "easy". Much of the feedback from engineers is negative, not useful due to an overly narrow focus on specific tech stacks or solutions, or lacking context. Sometimes the context isn't there because of poor management decisions to not be transparent but often it's not there because the engineers' bias results in them not seeking it out. Very few things are black-and-white, and certainly it's better to include engineers' in the decision making process at some level, but that's a two way street--maybe engineers could work a little harder to overcome their own erroneous biases.

Return question: Do you have a firm grasp on quite how much money it is?

Obviously not saying FAANGs are quite that bad, but still, this is a pretty shallow reason to work somewhere.

I'm surprised we're even having this conversation.

That seems pretty likely.

> My point is that these are entirely different things.

Entirely? I'm sure that Google employs plenty of fools (as do all large corporations) but to suggest there is no correlation is preposterous on its face.