Sorry but I cannot stand that level of internal koolaid. I guess you also think that Google got the "smartest" people? There are literally thousands of companies working on problems way more interesting and with more stakes and upsides for humanity than Google and the adtech industry. I would qualify all of those companies as "better place to work" than Google. It is maybe the best place to work if you have no sense of ethics, want to take it easy, work 9 to 5 and maximize your money.
You can say, well, those don't count, because Google isn't making money from them! But if you take that route, you also have to exclude all the startups working on "interesting" problems that don't and won't make money. You're left with a very small set of companies. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the null set.
I'd say a fair assessment is a random team at Google is as likely to be doing something interesting and beneficial as a team at a random startup (which is to say, unlikely but possible). At Google, though, you're going to have both better average financial outcomes and lower risk.
It's nothing more, until it finds a way to turn a profit on its other ventures. (Just like those startups - realistically, until they turn a profit, they're just in the exploratory stage.)
Calling google just an ad company is ignoring a large amount of reality.
afaik, hardware is nowhere near close to profitable once you add the costs of Android. Android is an ads delivery channel and a defense against ios usurping an ads delivery channel.
You have a point about gsuite and gcp.
this is a classic misaligned incentive problem though. getting more pay for lower risk just makes the google workers risk-averse, so their success rate will be lower than startup founders who put more on the line (and who are therefore incentivized to make tougher decisions faster/earlier). a former founder-turned-googler friend admitted as much to me in casual conversation.
Probably if Google were broken up we'd see many more and more successful startups, for reasons of funding and talent (and the end of the tendency for Google to make some halting inroad into a niche only to abandon it because of internal politics). That doesn't translate into a better experience for workers though.
Hey, that's me to a t. Google is not actually that great for that. The pay is average and they make too much of a song and dance about helping people, even if you're working on ML used to ferret out dissidents in China.
The good companies for 9 to 5 casual evil are small >50 man shops which require security clearance to work at.
Depends on what you mean by average. When I talked to google I was looking at L5 for just over 300k with stock and bonus. In Evil Inc I was making well over over 500k all cash for the same job description.
That’s more than the ceiling for CEOs of public companies in my country.
Tech salaries in the US really seem out of proportions.
I see no reason why I should get paid less than a CEO, when most of their job is similar to that of a kindergarten teacher.
Google just recently said they're ready to talk business with did again. They said Maven employee upset was just a one time thing.
Where do I sign up?
(Edit: this is a serious question.)
(Second edit: Mencius.)
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Sure there are great people and projects but anybody claiming any of them would exist without the drudgery and 90% revenue stream of “adtech” have their blinders on. And fwiw, if all one cares about us pay, Facebook pays MUCH much more.
Creature comforts: I have an actual cubicle with >2x the space. Excellent meals are still provided, but now lines are <1 min. I can always find a parking space. I can always find a bathroom stall.
Engineering culture: No more promo or perf review nonsense. There's none of the internal competition / pressure that I felt every day at Google. The org and leadership has vastly less churn. The place is dead at 5:15pm. And the people I work with are incredibly smart.
In terms of company: my new employer is not creepy. My grandmother understands what I work on.
Do follow your heart, but I'm so happy I left.
It's great that you like working for Google and have found a good fit.
Some features I like in workplace culture:
- Empowering the "builders" and developers to have autonomy and guide how product development cycles are defined.
- Top cover provided by managers - managing expectations from stake holders
- Overall non-toxic environment
- Quality work and product vision
Your qualification of what makes a company's problems more interesting or beneficial to humanity is certainly debatable, but if you think people at Google are "taking it easy" talentless slobs you are quite objectively wrong
There is a lot of overlap, because both are about gaining power and influence, but there are big differences in needs, resources and routes taken. It's easy to misunderstand them.
Google, thanks to the amount of info they sit on and decisions they make about how it flows, is stuck bang in the middle of those two worlds. Other corps sit in that intersection too such as oil/energy, defense, banking, media etc but none of them have achieved info scale that Google has.
This is still early days where traditional Politicians/Parties (other than the Chinese) haven't fully processed what those info flows can do to them.
They recognize now, how important corps sitting on top of mountain ranges of data are. But the moment they loose power and influence because of those info flow is when real awakening happens. It's safe to assume Real World Politics will dominate Org Politics within such corps. Things will break apart just as they did with Newspapers and TV/Radio News.
At an individual level it's always good to think about what your needs are and be conscious of them. People who aren't, just get dragged by whatever chaos is unfolding thinking they have no role to play or choice. Those that are in touch with their needs and values experience the whole story very differently.
The level of self-censorship my friends from Goog exercise and how carefully they choose their words on everyday topics is unlike anything I've seen from people working at any other big corps. They've also become more flexible on moral stances that once used to be clear cut lines for them.
Google is a borderline cult. It has fallen far below the bar that most people would set for 'best workplace'. This is just something that Goog employees don't become aware of until they leave the bubble.
Seems like it's time to remind folk of Joy's Law: "no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,”[0].
I don't know why this would surprise anyone. People are people and politics are politics in any large organization. There is no reason to think Google would be exempt.
Except that it did seem to be exempt, for much longer and while becoming much larger than I think most people would have imagined.
I guess around the time Sundar became ascendant.
It can be controlled in some way. If you only hire people from the same political pool, for example. Or getting them early enough (young enough) to shape them in a way that will lower internal tensions. Not every large company is burning in political fires.
That’s not possible. In fact, one of the best ways to stoke internal political fires is to make the mistake of convincing those holding the majority political viewpoint that they represent the viewpoint of the whole company.
The minefield about trying to predict what's going to be politically correct in the future is so true--you nailed it. You might carefully self-censor your discussions to things that are politically allowed today but everything lives forever, so something you say may fall out of fashion and years from now it could get you in hot HR water. The only solution is to just stick to work topics, really. The need for both current and forward self-censorship is very real.
The "bring your whole self to work" thing is actually kind of a trap. If you're politically aligned the correct way, then sure, you're welcome to bring your whole self to work and participate in political discussions. If you're a Trump supporter, for example, or don't buy in to the whole pronouns thing, then [it's kind of unspoken that] you're expected to please leave that whole self at home thankyouverymuch. Kind of a one way street.
I just come in to work and don't seek out political drama. It's totally optional. Besides the above future-PC worry, you really have to go out and look for trouble. For me, memegen is a place to read silly lighthearted memes and nothing more.
What is there to buy into about pronouns? If my first name is Stan, named after my dad also named Stan, and my middle name is Jason, and my dad abandoned my family when I was young so I prefer people to call me Jason, you'd have no problem calling me Jason and be understanding that calling me Stan is a sore point, right?
What if I don't want to explain my personal issues with my father and childhood family situation to coworkers? If I just say that I really strongly prefer Jason and that it genuinely upsets me if you call me Stan, would you demand an explanation?
So if I claim, without explaining, that I strongly dislike being addressed as "she" and strongly prefer "he", isn't that the same amount of work? What is there to buy into, an explanation about personal struggles with gender dysphoria? That seems like a pretty personal thing to expect from a coworker, does it not?
What am I missing?
And then there’s the the third side that can perhaps see that both sides have valid points, except that none of it matters in the long run. If words are so empty that they can be bent to call a woman a man, a man a woman, blue as red, 50 as 1,000, depending on a person’s internal emotional state, then whatever we choose to say is as valid as anything else.
And if one person refuses to comply with social niceties, it doesn’t necessarily indicate anything other than, at worst, said person is a dick.
So I think right now, it’s a social crusade for both parties, and not everyone wants to get sucked into feeling passionate about everyone else's fights. And that doesn’t mean you’re choosing sides.
But somehow, less than 100% virtue signaling in either direction means you’re implicitly supporting “them”.
But, my approach is, when dealing with people, I’m not going to be a dick, and I’ll happily call them a preferred pronoun, within reason, even though it’s really not that important to me. But I’m also not going to go out of my way to try to fix everyone who is a dick either, even when it is something important to me.
Based on this statement, I don't quite think you understand what being transgender actually is. It's not people asking to be called the opposite gender, it's people asking to be called the gender that they actually are, and have been their entire lives, but who had the vast misfortune of being born into the wrong body. There is not a 1:1 correlation between the body's sex and the mind's sex; usually they match up, but sometimes they don't. Gender dysphoria has severely negative outcomes for mental health and well-being, and no one chooses it willingly.
I’m not saying these are easy questions or that I even understand the experience. But simply that there are many people who view themselves or others in a way that contradicts quantitative facts, but there isn’t a large social movement to have the world at large support that perception.
But as I said originally, inasmuch as it doesn’t require anyone to do anything and doesn’t have a cost to anyone else, what do I care?
So if you look like and behave like a man then people will call you a man, if you look like and behave like a woman then people will call you a woman. Of course there are cases where the person looks like and behaves like the other gender but some assholes still calls them by their old pronoun, but in most cases I see someone who is obviously male wanting to be called female or vice versa. In those cases it hurts a bit because it goes against the meaning of the words, and given how our language is structured it is very hard to avoid the subject like most people do with other attributes.
What is the issue, that you are claiming grave consequences exist for making an innocent mistake, and that's happened to you enough times to generalize?
...or are you saying you are unwilling to behave in an expected manner once you understand the expectations?
...in the latter case, do you find yourself frequently disagreeing with other people about who looks and behaves like a man/woman? Or are you just disagreeing about whether to honor their preferences?
Edit/addition: There was a time when people claimed a man with long hair or a woman with short hair was indistinguishable from the opposite sex.[1] Which pronoun do you use in that situation?
Edit: Note that I am not the person above the parent, I don't think there are any grave consequences for missgendering people, at least not if you don't do it consistently. I guess it could happen if you did it on for example twitter and some activist picked it up, but not in a casual conversation at work.
Late edit: As for what I consider man/woman, take this picture: https://keyassets.timeincuk.net/inspirewp/live/wp-content/up...
If I saw it without context I'd assume it was a guy being surrounded by two women based on their body and face structures, it is very hard to see the middle one as a woman. But surprisingly they are all three women.
I'm a very busy person at work. The amount of daily cognitive load I dedicate to pronouns there is essentially zero because it never comes up. The only time it becomes nonzero is when someone else who thinks it's vitally important brings it up, which is pretty much always memegen or some other internal forum where political advocacy creeps in. If someone were to ever ask me, "Hey, can you call me 'she' instead" I'd have no problem doing so. It's just common courtesy and most of my job at Google involves building and maintaining relationships. But I don't go out of my way to list people's pronouns next to their userids in design docs, or have a section in every presentation on pronouns in order to signal that I'm woke. Just like if someone pointed out that he goes by a middle name, I'd call them that because that's what they prefer, but I'm not going to ask everyone I meet if they go by a middle name or some other name.
As engineers we consider rare edge cases in our designs but typically do not build our solutions around them.
The difference between pronouns and first-names is that nobody is out there searching for instances where I inadvertently called someone by their first name so that they can go into outrage mode, call me out and shame me for it.
When I say some people don't "buy into the whole pronouns thing", I mean they are indifferent to it--they don't think about it every day, they don't consider it some vitally important cause that the company must urgently dedicate resources and collective cognitive load to.
I don't know how fair it is to suggest that people who have a section in their presentations on pronouns are just trying to "signal that they're woke". It makes sense to me that someone who is personally sensitive about them or has a close personal connection with someone who is personally sensitive about them would do so out of conscientiousness, not disingenuousness.
Thanks for your perspective, I totally agree that it doesn't deserve much cognitive load. Adding pronouns to a slide that had people's names on it would take up less space than most surnames, and while shaming someone if it doesn't occur to them to do so is undeserved, it baffles me when people vehemently resist and spend incredible cognitive resources arguing that it's an enormous burden they can't possibly bear.
I'm not sure why becoming a political issue is relevant—if Alice is generally kind to people but refuses to be kind to Bob not because of something Bob did wrong, but because the particular instance of kindness is a political issue, I don't think Alice is a kind person.
The point about grammar doesn't make much sense to me. Someone says "actually I'm not John, I'm Mary", you think it would be more grammatical to start referring to them as Mary, but continue to use he/him?
Such comments is what changed at Google. There are other excellent places to work at these days, like Microsoft (also Amazon) if you are interested in large scale cloud services and not advertisement.
Amazon seems to be very focused on squeezing out most out of its employees. The curious vesting schedule means you instantly lose 10% of your stock grant value. The company expects you to pull more hours and do some real oncall duties: this means less free time for you and less pay/hour rate. Good and gym are out if question. And don't forget to pay for your parking spot. IMHO, if you aren't big enough to demand a custom contract, you don't go to Amazon unless you have no better choices.
My question is still open: what are those better places?
By the best place I just meant best in terms of getting knowledge, status and pay with the least effort in the least stressful conditions.
This is not how anything works.
What actually happens is, today you post something insensitive and disparaging because you can get away with it as a "joke", tomorrow, people will actually stand up for themselves and tell you it's not ok to say that, and it never was, and you were too much of an asshole to even consider that that might be the case.
People who see it the way you do are pitiable, to say the least. The perfect joke is forever a shifting target and us being the humans we are can only approach it by trying repeatedly and through different tacks. One of those is being an asshole which can be funny and is funny to pretty much everyone under different circumstances and environments - but it is offensive and will always be offensive. You can look at nearly any stand up comic and see that's the case. I think you and your ilk need to lay off and relax.
Just give it some thought. You take one joke but change the audience, the time, the place, the delivery, the intonation, possibly the surrounding comments around the joke itself and everything changes. As an example If I make a joke about drowning and some person's brother who's in the same group I'm in died five years ago because a random orca dragged him under suddenly I'm the asshole. Maybe you're laughing because you didn't know either. But maybe next year there's a rash of orca attacks and someone finds a youtube recording of me making a joke about people drowning. I'm screwed now. I'm never becoming a CEO. Sounds pretty outlandish right? I bet all of those people who did blackface probably thought the same thing back in the 60s or whenever.
I think you guys need to have some empathy for people who just want to make a joke. Attempts at humor are ok but Statutes of limitations should be applicable.
I'm not going to put my ethnicity or sexual orientation on here right now but I feel no distaste for those people who wore black face or made jokes about people with different sexual orientations or whatever you might think is super bad because I know that they were acting within the boundaries of acceptability back then yet trying to have fun. If they're still doing those things at a time and place when it's not acceptable it's a different story but copping some 'Holier Than Thou' attitude over things that happen in the past when IT REALLY WAS OK TO SAY THOSE THINGS really rubs me the wrong way. It's as if they'd never said anything at the wrong time to the wrong person or in the wrong company. You might as well not say anything at all and give up all attempts at humor.
We are human. We try to laugh. Try not to hold it against us in the future.
I don't know why HN wants to hide behind this strawman so bad. Noone is getting fired for posting about geometric shapes, unless you're trying to say something insensitive or disparaging.
The line of what is acceptable to stay has changed, but turns out if you wern't being an asshole in the first place, people are very forgiving.
Also, Twitter is not an example. People are constantly unforgiving assholes on Twitter for short-term Internet fame; your workplace isn't Twitter.
I've met genuinely funny, kind people, who are able to make jokes on the line of what is "acceptable", but because they could read the room, they could stay within acceptable and rarely offend people. When they did offend, they were quick to admit their mistake and apologize. Their apologies are genuine, because they believe it's wrong to offend their coworkers trying to be funny.
I've also met people who believe it's their right to make jokes on the line of whatever they think is acceptable, regardless the thoughts of everyone who has to hear them. Some of these guys were really funny. But they did offend some people and were generally not apologetic when called out. A lot of them were assholes. All of them had somebody who thought they were an asshole.
Honestly, I find there's tons of humor at work that goes nowhere near the line. I feel like funny things happen all of the time at my work. If your workplace feels soul-deadening it might be worth applying somewhere else.
And nowadays 'the room' is becoming the entire world and can include a decade or more into the future.
Today you make an edgy joke that everyone considers hilarious. A decade from now, after the Overton Window has shifted, a recording of you making this joke will become trending on Twitter and you will lose your job.
Can you give me a link to someone that lost their job for something they wrote 5+ years ago that was actually "edgy" and not, like, grossly insensitive?
The poster I replied to, in a separate common for this article, used blackface as an example. I believe, however acceptable to the majority of people at the time, blackface was always cruel and derogatory.
People respond to images of them doing blackface 20+ years ago with "well it was just a joke and okay back then" and not "back then, our culture felt okay with cruel jokes meant to bring down black people, and by participating, I helped bring down black people"
If you think it was just "okay back then" you're missing the point.
Second. Many googlers read HN. In some sense, HN is the extension of the internal forums.
CNBC made a good summary and I can comment on each bullet point.
Larry and Brin probably stopped attending because nothing important is said on TGIFs. More people -> more leaks -> less interesting information -> less attendence. Nothing surprising here. Sundar's solution seems to be resorting to boring once a quarter all-hands about business strategy. I wonder what the attendance will be.
It's a hypocrisy to complain about troubles with trust and at the same time ban political or whatever discussions. Googlers are generally very smart folks and understand that whatever they say may be used against them in the future, when policies change once again. Today you post a memegen where you state that triangles are better than squares, tomorrow you get fired because squares have become the symbol of some protected class. You have to apply a form of forward self-censorship and be very careful about what you say to whom.
I don't think there is a tension between execs and workers, but only because the two classes live in different worlds.
Don't get me wrong. Google is still the best workplace with top notch pay, but as it's got big, it's also morphed into a typical big corporation with typical corporate politics.
Just my 2c.