I think the author is correct that some big tech companies create a culture where going to 11am yoga is more important that crunching out a few more lines of code. He's correct that if your focus is on building and scaling product, this culture reduces the velocity of change. However, I see a couple of things the author is missing:

1) Work life balance is about employee long term retention and places like Google spend a lot of energy in hiring, so they optimize for keeping the people they hire.

2) Sometimes an 11am yoga class frees your mind enough to foster creativity. Raw working hours may be reduced but novel solutions might increase.

3) Some tech workers have figured out the odds of hitting it big in a startup or having the next billion dollar idea are not that likely. Instead, they've optimized for a far above average salary with work life balance. There is nothing wrong with choosing that path and this is where the author is missing empathy for people who didn't choose his path.

Another glaring omission - he’s now sitting on 7 years of savings from his Google manager salary & equity. If you have a few million dollars in the bank it’s much easier to take the pay cut to work at a smaller startup and chase a more high risk/high reward outcome.

It’s completely out of touch to judge anyone for wanting a stable and in the scheme of things ridiculously high paying job with good work life balance, like working at Google.

This is also part of the argument for basic income. Having a stable source of income allows people to take risks like starting their own business or joining a small startup.

Or just a more lax unemployment policy.

I worry that if you give everyone $1000/month:

1) you cannot live on $1000/month so it is an empty gesture

2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even emptier gesture

It makes more sense in a country that already has a social safety net; I've read somewhere (citation needed, I know, I'm not very deep in the subject) that the cost and overhead of assessing and paying the individual cases of unemployment, long term sickness, disability, homelessness etc is more expensive than just giving everyone a basic income.

But yeah, #2 is what I'm afraid of too. Paraphrasing a cartoon villain, if everyone is wealthy, nobody is.

Besides, in the past decade, cost of living / housing / rent has gone up so much that even a $1000 / month basic income can't give you anywhere decent to live anywhere. In addition to basic income, we need basic housing - which is dangerous, because it invokes the USSR's rows of depressing and substandard apartment buildings. But everybody should be able to live comfortably at a standard of living. Everybody should be able to have access to and afford a two bedroom house or apartment on a single income, or the social safety net if they are not employed.

1) So you're saying that giving people $1000/month would open up zero new possibilities for people?

2) It's not that simple because different goods will respond differently. Certain goods will get cheaper because the increased sales will allow for more economies of scale.

Housing is the big one mentioned, and it does not allow for any further economies of scale than already exist. Rent rises based on the prevailing salary of the area -- house prices as well, since they represent the years of rental income. It's not even necessarily a supply issue, since Seattle has more empty houses than it has homeless people! Prices simply rise to whatever the market can bear. So under the current system, any absolute increase in money will likely simply be swallowed by landlords.

Housing is a normal economic market that is responsive to changes on both the demand and supply side. The major problem with housing in this country is that restrictive policies have put a damper on housing supply so that it is not able to keep up with demand. Seattle has a normal amount of vacancies in it. It could have 2X the housing (and thus have a lot more people living in Seattle paying lower rents) and still have the same percentage vacancy. It's not a real or valid argument to say "look there's more vacancies than homeless people, so supply must be fine".

A "normal number" of housing vacancies would only make sense if everyone was housed. Housing isn't a voluntary good, where you'll expect some unsold stock and you'll expect not everyone to buy one -- everyone needs a place to live, and will spend as much as they have to in order to get housing of minimal quality. The entire concept of a "normal" number of vacancies doesn't make sense here.

There absolutely is a "normal" amount of vacancies because it takes time for a house to sell, for someone to move out and then someone else to move in, for a new lease to be signed, etc. It's exactly the same dynamic with employment; there is a "normal" amount of a unemployment (a low single digit number) that is impossible to improve past, simply because it takes time to find a job. Housing is no different.

Also, most of the homeless are unhoused because they either can't afford a home or they have mental illness/drug addiction issues that makes them incapable of earning money in order to be able to afford a house. It doesn't matter if housing is vacant if you don't have the means to pay the rent, or if they won't even consider you for a lease anyway because you don't have a reliable source of income.

The implication in his argument was that prices will increase in general.

My argument is that we don't know what the overall effect will be.

Edit: In other words, if housing increases by $10 but the cost of other stuff decreases by $20 then you still come out ahead.

You're right of course, but also way more optimistic than me.

It seems pretty complex to design a version of a lax unemployment policy that eliminates steep cliffs that might disincentivize working, is fair, and also doesn't let anybody slip through the cracks. How do you handle someone quitting voluntarily, or retiring early, or starting their own business which doesn't pay them yet, or only paying themselves a small amount, or working a part-time job on the side while focusing on something else, etc.

The income tax code already exists and has to solve some of these problems, so it seems easier to give everyone the money and then tax it back from the highest earners later (or implement it as a negative income tax, but that has its own hurdles as well, i.e. imagine a homeless person needing to wait until tax season and then getting paid for the whole year, it would be a big hurdle and they'd still need other assistance programs the rest of the year if they didn't budget the money well enough).

I agree it is complex, I have no answers. Certainly though if the requirement for unemployment is that you have to be actively looking for employment ... sort of nixes it for the want-to-be entrepreneurs.

> 2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even emptier gesture

Do you also expect food, transportation, entertainment, and technology costs to go up $1000/month nationwide?

Rent goes up due to a lack of available apartments or houses in the area. If public policy is geared toward allowing development of sufficient housing for the people wanting to live in a place, that will have a far bigger impact on rents than UBI.

Not an economist. I liken it to the cost of tuition having gone up, perhaps because of the availability of student loans and the willingness (need?) of students to borrow to get a higher education.

Rent is the one you are sort of locked into. Food, etc, you have choices ... moving, much harder to shop around.

It's such a weird dynamic.

I remember visiting the valley for the first time for a big company I worked for at another location. The scale of work life balance was unbalanced so many strange ways...

The tech support team I worked with was in 'building 3'. Nobody ever left that building through out the day. I went to the big cafeteria and the options were amazing. I managed to get some of my peers to go with me, several of my peers from building 3 were equally amazed as ... they never went there, they just worked all day, ate something at their desk, and kept working...

Meanwhile I'd go to the cafeteria each day and sit outside and watch as some folks would play basketball for an hour, then a while later show up and chat it up with coworkers (not talking about work) over lunch for what seemed like forever...

The game room was always full of the same guys, the other amenities, yoga, etc, and it often included people who I simply never could get a hold of. HR couldn't be bothered to get security to take my photo for my badge for weeks ... because the gym schedule changed.

It was a weird, unbalanced, yin and yang.

I noticed this when I worked at my first "employee satisfaction" focused company. Half the employees took every perk they could get, seemingly doing as little work as they could under the mantra of "work-life balance". The other half never left their desks. It created a strange dynamic of resentment between the two parties, where one thought the other stupid, and the other thought them lazy. It was hard to know where to stand.

I once worked for a team was historically over worked, that had changed recently for the better, but the team culture was still pretty stressed and nose to the grind stone. We were working to bring that down, but it takes time.

The offices were being renovated and our team was moved next to HR.

HR formally complained (apparently there was a process... where HR sent some sort of complaint to ... HR) that the team sitting next to them was not very friendly.

Before what I can only imagine would have been a horrific joint team meeting / culture clash could occur, someone very smart put the kibosh on the complaint / meeting ....

The culture / work experience differences were extreme.

I agree, I think this situation fits in nicely with the discussion of how stock compensation doesn’t directly result from the results of your work. Employees who aren’t passionate about or motivated by their jobs seek out compensation in return for retention. And even then, they scale their efforts at work based on their interest. I like the independence of Amazon teams, but the independence is limited when the teams don’t control their own finances.

A few reactions to that.

First, there's always a self selecting thing there. For some reason folks from building 3 never bothered to go explore, and it sounds like they didn't keep going to the caf even once you showed them. Nothing was holding them at their desk, they just didn't care/bother.

Second, some jobs are different than others. Some jobs you have to "be there" for. Tech support may be like that - you have to pick up the call/email when it comes in. Other jobs may be more like strategy or research where having a few key insights a year generates millions of dollars for the company and if hanging in the cafeteria helps you do that, everyone wins.

Third, at the end of the day you kinda have to trust the system. What I mean is - if the company is successful it's because it's overall people strategy is working. So in the great net of things, having the caf setup be the way it was may be what was needed, even if some individuals abused it (which you then would hope be detected in their overall output)

I think it is self selecting ... by every individual. Each makes their choices.

The real challenge is when you value work life balance and ... it starts to hit other people's work.

Like in my case, getting hassled by security every day, multiple times a day ... IMO that should supersede someone's gym class if it was their job to schedule getting me a photo and a proper badge, but it is super easy for those kinda "well we value work life balance" kinda decisions to push important work aside.

A strange work ethic I must have been born with (weird, I know) kept me mashing keys the full 8 hours while some of my co-workers might see fit to stay home one day because a package was due to arrive.

Or maybe I have always felt like I'm an imposter: if the ax fell on the team I didn't want to be the low hanging fruit they culled. Who knows.

But I confess to having had a difficult time across my career accepting the perks, relaxing. It's been a slow awareness that this industry really truly is on fire, they really make boatloads of cash, they really need me more than they compensate me for.

What a strange time to live in for a blue-collar programmer like me.

He's giving a few examples for work-life balance and I have completely different feelings about - from the 11 AM Yoga class (pretty ridiculous IMO) to taking a personal day (reasonable, people need their day off, maybe the personal day is for an urgent medical check-up?) to working during the weekend (unless the entire service is down and I'm the oncall, it can wait).

Why are several people denigrating the 11am mindfulness session?

We're not going to talk about people showing up to work on acid to perform but make fun of people out of college taking advantage of the mental health and exercise course offered on site for an hour, and then excuse an entiiiiire personal day just because its ... more familiar?

oooookay.

just a perspective.

this manager didn't know how to schedule his workers, and couldn't calibrate it and chose to go with "entitled young people are the problem" just like people probably said about him and millennials, there's nothing more to read into this article.

Isn't that an indication that he sees these things as equivalent? 11am yoga is just as ridiculous as refusing to work weekends. This is precisely the sort of toxic attitude that keeps a lot of people away from startups.

The 11 AM Yoga class does not sound ridiculous to me precisely because of the nature of tech work: we don't need to all be working together at the exact same time, as opposed to most other jobs.

Want to trade an hour in the middle of the day on a Tuesday with showing up an hour early Wednesday? Do it. What's the problem?

I was watching Jurassic Park (1993) the other day, and I got a kick out of the software engineer rambling about a compile taking a long time as an excuse for going on a break

Also software engineer singular, I guess an expense was spared after all

It's almost like different people value different things. I knew a guy that got a massage every day at 2pm but he also was at work until 10pm. This is also why - even with a flexible work schedule - it's useful to have some set of "core hours" everyone should be available.

In a company I work for, some people take time to exercise at lunchtime - 11yoga seem to fit right there. Basically, lunch then takes longer then if you eat during that time, but not by horribly lot.

I does not seem to me so horrible honestly, assuming that you then stay longer to make up for time spend by exercising. I dont do that, because I need to take kids out of school basically, but when I had time to exercise a bit in the middle of the day I was more productive.

It's the sprint versus marathon mindset.

A small startup has a finite amount of time to either become a big company in their own right or do something so noteworthy that a big company sees the need to acquire them. Nothing else matters. There are minimal incentives to invest in the long-term welfare of your employees because in the long term, the company doesn't exist. You can't even guarantee that an acquisition will keep the employees you have invested in.

Large corporations like Google are incentivized to give their employees reasons to stick around. They can expect the company will be there in 30 years, and they can expect a good employee to put in a career's worth of work for them (and eventually have peer and mentorship contacts that encourage other good potential employees to join the company).

This is painting with a broad brush of how the incentives are structured... Not all big companies see it this way and not all small companies see it this way. But it's the behavior the marketplace appears to reward.

Re: It's the sprint versus marathon mindset.

As someone who did track in high school, the whole agile nomenclature around "sprint" continues to rub me the wrong way. If you aren't a startup facing a launch-or-fail moment, the approach should be much more that of a marathon.

I was joking with my wife that "sprint" to me implies that you go all out and then take a long break before you go again. We should be treating the longterm plan like a marathon and the intermediate steps like "splits".

If you are working on a product that's been around for years , the idea that you are an all-star for delivering your 5 points the day before your 2 weeks sprint ends and a lazy jerk if you deliver it the day after sprint ends just incentivizes a lot of shorterm-ism and corner cutting.

The model of working "all out" and your "break" for planning is a 2 hour meeting in between sprints where you get praised or scorned for a 10% difference in delivery speed is..

Splits works, but I tend to use iteration. There are benefits to breaking work into chunks and checking in how it's going every 2-4 weeks, but there's no reason to be in perpetual crunch time. There should also be free time at the end of every iteration to do some problem/design/idea exploration.

The same people that go for an 11 AM yoga class will stay working until 11 PM because they can and are encouraged to.

Second, and another commenter points this out, the desirability of anyone that lands a job at a FAANG means they get away with it. They have Made It, they are the 1% in their field, and they can go anywhere else outside of SF (internationally if need be) and instantly be hired as CTO of any company. Generally speaking. And of course switch to the other FAANG, possibly getting even better compensation and perks and a better 11am yoga teacher.

I am self-employed and 11am (or, in my case, anywhere within the 11am-3pm window) exercise is actually a great refreshment for my mind.

"When I was growing up in Tech in the ‘90’s - there was no such thing as work life balance."

BS. I worked for a large computer systems company throughout the 1990s. I mostly headed home by 5-6 and I would take month long vacations. (Of course, there crunch times as well.)

I also found his pissiness at apparently not being able to curse or whatever in presentations sort of offputting. Yes, general standards for language and behavior in the tech industry has shifted over time. This isn't anything specific to Google. And whining about it comes off as being tone deaf.

"I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend."

lmao what a terrible, horrible manager. I would hate working for them, and I would not miss them leaving.

Maybe I'm just playing into their "young people don't want to work" stereotype, but if that's what working means, I don't want to do it with them.

"I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend."

Especially when said "doing" is done by other people (engineers, testers,SREs etc) , not the manager.

Easy enough to hold such beliefs when the cost is paid by others.

Literally like Shrek: "Some of you may lose your weekends, but that's a price I'm willing to pay..."

A different way of putting it would be whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work. It's not incongruent with a balanced life. To me It just means occasdinally you might stay late at work, once in awhile an interesting problem gets you working on the company laptop all Saturday, and if something breaks you're not able to log off until you fix it. Doesn't mean you cant take Friday's off of or that you have to skip your yoga class if that's what powers your mojo.

Absolutely, 100%. I am hugely against working overtime and work life balance is far more important to me than many other factors. But I have worked 12 hour days and weekends few times in the past, because I felt the personal responsibility to either fix something or make sure a launch goes through smoothly. You know when I absolutely wouldn't do it though? If my manager told me that "they expect a level of sacrifice for the company". Nope. Just absolutely categorically nope. Now I'm a manager myself I would never ever ask someone to do this.

Same. I put in a lot of extra work on the launches of .app and .dev to ensure that they went smoothly (and they did!), because I personally believed in the product we were launching. I did it with no expectation of compensation, though I did end up being compensated for it in the long run anyway with a promotion. I took pride in that work.

But if it hadn't been my idea to do so, if it had just been expected of me to work uncompensated nights/weekends at no personal benefit? Hell no. I'm not a manager but I too would never ask someone to do this either.

Simple question - is there (some kind/means of (extra)) payment involved?

If the answer is no, then that's a resounding no (for me, at least). I might love and adore my job (and the workplace), but no way in hell will it be allowed to impinge on my private/personal time: sleeping and "regular" work already essentially takes 2/3 of it (too much), and that doesn't even include the time for "context shifting" (mental and physical) between those and the remainder that is "(free) living".

And if (the hypothetical) you considers that to be "entitled", then so be it. Your life's mission is not my mission. I am there to do my work and do it conscientiously; anything more is asking too much.

Well, that's the thing -- no one directly pays me extra when I work an odd night or weekend to make sure things get out in a timely manner, but I also definitely only have the salary/etc. I do because of the responsibility I take (which includes that willingness).

Exactly, you do you buddy. Let's just not act as if it's some God given right that you only work 40 hours for outrageous sums of money. We are not talking about minimum wage workers, and his point is they're not even putting in the 40 hours anyway. All he's asking is that he wants to have a different culture within his team. It's not his intention to force people who don't share his values to work against their will. And as much as it might be hard for some to believe, there are people who don't need a constant amount of private time that's mandated by law (especially when we are not middle class or poor). I want to work on interesting things, learn how to be as effective as I can be at them, keep improving myself in ways that matter to me, and contribute meaningfully to whatever the hell it is that I'm paid to do (and be okay with contributing to that cause). And then I want to find and work with people with similar minds. Clearly we exist.

If you are ever in position where you are recruiting people, make sure to put that statement directly into the posting. Not during a phone call or at any later stage.

I agree the expectation should be made clear but it's not obvious why it has to be at the level of the post. I try to look for indications in the resume for the type of cultural alignment and set expectations the first time we talk in an interview, and don't necessarily feel that any further "warnings" need to be given.

> whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work.

This is a good take. Something that's perhaps overlooked: those rare occasions where you need to stay late to deliver are very memorable. Isn't it true that strong bonds are often built from intense experiences? I think those few times that you stay late earn you massive respect from those who stuck around, and builds a relationship beyond your career. Especially if it isn't even your responsibility specifically, maybe it's the team lead's ass on the line or a colleague's. It's like indirectly saying "hey I got your back on this, you can trust me I'm a team player -- we ride together we die together bad boys for life"

Agreed but also with caveats - I've had talks with coworkers where after helping put out a fire we should do a bit of soul searching on how we can avoid that in the future. As a team and a company we should strive towards creating systems that don't tax its employees as well, that's the company and managers end of the deal with employees who take personal responsibility if you ask me.

And the thing that works absolutely counter to this philosophy is the peer bonus system. It sounds great in principle but seems to incentivize people to continue bad practices that are clearly mostly overworking without proper post mortem on why such out of description help was even needed in the first place. When I was new I used to cherish peer bonuses but now I'm proud that no one in my team has gotten one in a year (because hopefully none of our systems needed such help anymore).

It's one thing when you help your friend prepare for an incoming hurricane and that bonds you together, it's another when your team lead's ass is on the line because someone higher up the chain set an arbitrary deadline deliberately to squeeze you to work harder in a dark pattern of employee manipulation based around guilt and emotional appeals and intangibles like "we ride together we die together" that are a poor substitute for money.

Staying late, with the boss who is also working on the same project, to deliver for the customer, is quite different from staying late, to deliver for a deadline, because some team didn't make any decisions sooner, while the boss reminds you from far away that you should be grateful, and then sets things up so another avoidable crunch is inevitable.

Reminder that you're not actually trying to build strong bonds, you're trying to build software (or whatever). And said "strong bonds" won't stop the company from deciding your team is splitting, or your coworkers from leaving for promotions or other companies.

I wonder how much wfh and distributed teams change this dynamic. I totally get what you're saying with the whole experience of staying in the office after dark, ordering pizza, and just working through a problem, whatever it takes.

I think with people holed up in their homes doing the same thing, the experience is diminished somewhat.

I think this is slightly different from what the OP was saying, because in this scenario, you choose to do that. IMO personal responsibility and pride in one's work like this is amazing and totally compatible with a balanced life. But when a manager asks you to have some personal responsibility and balance your weekend life towards the overtime work side, that's a whole other story.

The line I draw is that the manager never knows or cares when you work. They only see the output and the occassional indication that you take your work seriously. If someone ever says you should work more or I've never seen you work in a weekend, of course I would also run away.

"whether an employee takes personal responsibility towards their work."

This is an incredibly important factor. It really matters to getting a team that gels and gets things done.

But here's the thing: That has to be a two-way street, or it won't work. The company needs to show responsibility towards their employees too. And that isn't yoga classes & cafeterias, that is basic respect, and a willingness to work with the employees, instead of seeing them as "resources".

This seems to be, as far as I can tell, an approach that's correlated with manager skills & inversely correlated with company size. I've done both manual & "white collar" work in small companies, and the ones where the leaders did right by their employees had employees who would go to great lengths for them.

I've done manual & "white collar" work in large companies, too. None of them had CEOs that cared that much. But some had managers who cared a lot, and were willing to bend rules if it meant doing the right thing - those teams excelled. The ones with the managers who didn't care about their people got teams who didn't care about their work.

And I know the kind of manager who's terribly upset about your 11am yoga class. Without fail, that yoga class was on your calendar, but they wanted the meeting when they wanted it, without a care about you. They could've done 1pm, they could've done 10am, but that would've inconvenienced them, and that's not in their playbooks.

> once in awhile an interesting problem gets you working on the company laptop all Saturday,

I will never do this. I havent done this since I was very very young at my first job and i didn't know better. I couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that giving away my own personal time for someone else.

I'm not going to work on the weekend. I've got much better things to do, like play video games or literally anything else, rather than go back to work and generate wealth for someone else for free.

Uh, I agree with the sentiment of not wanting to work for free, but

> I couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that giving away my own personal time for someone else.

You just described a job.

Whether you're giving your time away or getting paid for giving it up makes no difference to the fact you are parting with it in order to produce for someone else.

Giving away pretty clearly means the objection is to the free nature. Getting paid makes a big difference - you now obtain tangible value from the interaction that you can turn into things like food or housing.

There's no concrete difference from the side of the gifter, between giving away time directly, giving away money earned from time spent, or giving away a tangible gift purchased with money earned from time spent. It's just more indirections.

So when someone says there's "nothing sadder", I think they should remember that the time is being given up either way. Doing so for free amounts to gifting the time. Or, flipped on its head, not chasing after the money.

People have their own reasons for making gifts. Feeling good about themselves, making someone else feel good, …. You can have your own reasons for not caring that there is no financial benefit to working extra hours on something. Maybe you enjoy the work. Maybe you are learning something. Maybe you take pride in your work and going the extra mile is rewarding in and of itself.

Unlike GP, I don't judge people who sometimes work for "free", as long as they don't have to and are aware they don't have to.

Let me give you the perspective from the other side of the trench:

I never ask my employees for overtime, never control their work hours. The typical work week that organically arises out of this is about 35 hours.

I would absolutely fire anyone who would close the laptop for the weekend and left a critical operation pending on Friday. It's about work ethics and personal responsibility of the outcome of personal work.

If the company is paying me for 40 hours, why would they expect me to work more? If the 'outcome of my work' is my personal responsibility, I should also be paid based on the outcome-I should also get a cut from whatever profit the company makes with my work.

If the company thinks they have the right to my personal life because they pay me for 40 hours, then its slavery. Also, threatening me with firing because I refuse slavery is threatening my livelihood, and it's mafia mentality. If a manager thinks they have the right my personal time, I should have right to their personal time too. Traffic should go both way in a bridge.

I don't hire automatons that turn on at 9h and off at 17h. I don't pay by the hour for intelligent work. I pay for results, defined to be achievable on a regular schedule.

I hire intelligent people, treat them as such, and expect intelligent behaviour in return. Part of the expectation is that everyone manages their own time responsibly. If they fail that management and have to work after hours, I do expect them to take the fall. There's no slavery and no mafia involved here; much to the contrary, it's a healthy work environment with historically excellent work/life balance.

Who defines those schedules? If it's the employees, its fine. If it's the management who sets the timelines, management should take the fall. Otherwise, its forced labor no matter how management tries to spin it. A bunch of parasites and leeches sucking other people dry. If the paycheck says 'num of hours x per hour rate", that's what the company should expect.

They're paying you to do a job. They're not just paying you to "put in the hours".

I'm on an oncall rotation. I get paid 1/3rd my normal salaried rate for all the time outside of normal working hours that I'm expected to be available to respond to critical issues. Note that I get paid this regardless of whether there actually are critical issues.

Do you have this kind of system set up? If not, do you make it clear when you're hiring people that you're expecting them to occasionally do what is effectively uncompensated oncall on nights/weekends? That's the kind of thing you have to know going in in order to be able to compare like-for-like in competing offers.

Events like these are exceedingly rare, to the rate of less than one event per year. They have been treated on a case by case basis. When it is personal mismanagement of time, there is no compensation. When people cover for systemic failures, we've historically awarded two vacation days per day used (one is a replacement, the other a compensation), or equivalent monetary compensation.

You don't see any doublethink in never asking for overtime, never controlling their work hours, and firing them if they don't work the overtime hours you want at the time you want?

No I don't. I don't hire hours. I hire people. I don't even hire people who put in hours. I hire people who produce work. If the work they produce is ok, I'm fine. If the work they produce is poor, I have a problem. In the example I gave, leaving a critical operation pending a whole weekend is poor workmanship (schedules and work hours are totally irrelevant in that assertion).

There's a second level to this, which is the definition of an acceptable workload. That is company-cultural, and you'll have to take my word for it when I say it is acceptable. We have the position that in the long run it's best that people feel happy on the job, which requires workloads compatible with life outside the company.

It's perfectly okay that you choose your values that way but it sounds very judgemental to think that's the only way to live. I won't work in a place where I'm not at least proud of what I'm doing. If that's true then whether the company makes money from it is only peripheral to me doing more than what I'm paid for - I genuinely like and enjoy what I do, I like to code and often the most interesting coding problem before me (with the most resources at my disposal by a longshot) is my work related problems so I end up spending a good fraction of my time in weekends when I feel like u want to code, working on side projects that no one asked for but are within the company's domain. Simply because they're intresting to me and I become A better coder and learn new stuff. Also coding too is about practice. 10000 hours and all that jazz. I have become a better coder because of this. I probably won't do this forever but I'll learn and get better as much as possible from this time.

If you want to build a car from scratch in your weekend or just chill out, that's an equally meaningful and respectable endeavour as well.

> "I couldn't think of anything sader or more depressing that giving away my own personal time for someone else"

The original quote was about "an interesting problem". I'm happy to spend some after hours time on technical problems if they're personally interesting to me. The fact that addressing it helps my employer and makes me look good in their eyes is just a nice little bonus.

No kidding. If you're on team "Do whatever it takes to win" then you better at the very least applaud when people do whatever it takes.

You can't tell your team "Do whatever it takes to win", and then when they work their asses off for you turn around and say "Well long hours aren't a badge of honor"

This is an asshole who wants people to work themselves to death and doesn't want to give any sort of reward or recognition for it.

No he’s right. This is vital for a growing company who is vacuuming up market share. It’s not necessary for big corps who just throw more people at a product or use their economies of scale to stay ahead.

The nasty truth is that every big Corp had a phase where it counted on key people being completely plugged in. If that was never you, then you either joined a company late or weren’t one of the key people.

I worked for 2 hours this past weekend because doing so would save about a weeks worth of work due to various reasons.

I will also leave work early to pick up a few things on my daughter's birthday later this month.

I think this is reasonable. I don't know if it's the sort of thing the author is talking about, but I think my work/life balance is fine.

Especially when, IME, people are either outright abusers (and blatantly leech until discovered and fired) or people tend to fall into a distribution whose mean centers around a WLB that's slightly tilted in favor of work. Employees in the US are already so guilt-tripped and gaslit and scared of unemployment that you end up doing things for work you feel are unfair even if they don't ask it of you.

And that's easy to say for someone who has a large equity stake in the company, who is directly rewarded for working very hard like that. Ridiculous for them to impose it on others though who are salaried employees and aren't rewarded for all this extra work.

If you want me to work as hard as you are, pay me. Take my total annual compensation, divide it by 2087, and give me 2X that amount as overtime to work nights and weekends in excess of 40 hours/week. I'd do it. If he's actually willing to put his money where his mouth is I bet he'd get plenty of takers to work that hard. But I bet he isn't; he just wants to get lots of extra work out of his employees for free.

Yep, I was just about to quote this exact sentence here, but I see you already did. Absolutely agreed, what an awful manager.

I don't think it's a "young people" stereotype. I'm an oldster and I wouldn't want to work for someone like that who is trying to squeeze every last drop out of his "resources."

Last time I somehow ended in a company with culture/managers similar to the one above I quit after only a month and a half. And I don't exactly fit into "young people don't want to work" stereotype. You'll only get this kind of expectations in extremely toxic places.

Agree. My first question would be to ask 'win' what? The reality is, very few are working on things that are so critical if a feature is pushed off a few days because of a weekend, nothing will change.

Working on the weekend is a management failure.

It's a good article with a lot of solid points, but that section had me rolling my eyes. Sure reads like someone pining for exploitative "startup" culture to get more than what they are paying for out of their employees. If you consistently feel the need to impinge on your employees weekends or PTO, that's a management failure, not an entitled employee problem.

There's also this lovely comment in the "focus" session where he plainly asserted that "privacy has no value to his users".

I think it's important for all the Google bashers out there to note this example of a high profile employee leaving because Google cared too much about privacy (or "noise" as he terms it).

I read that as "legal got involved and we had a ton of meetings that achieved nothing for our users" rather than "privacy did nothing for our users".

I don't think Google "cares about" user privacy. I think they care about minimising any legal risk. These are two very different attitudes.

"we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google"

The only way a big company can somehow ensure that all teams are going to follow the privacy or any other policy is to force the teams to "align our data retention policies and tools to Google".

This is literally Google having process to ensure some privacy policy and op having issue with that.

Again, I read it differently. It sounded more like a pedantic insistence on company-wide protocol rather than a genuine desire to be careful with user data. But I may be being uncharitable.

If you want to keep a company of hundreds or thousands people following some rule, really the only way is if you create processes that check and force that. There is no way to keep company following privacy rules (as weak as they are) without company wide protocol and insistence on it.

Otherwise, the pressure from people who want to do other things will ensure that privacy or rules will be ignored.

"The amount of time and effort spent on Legal, Policy, Privacy - on features that have not shipped to users yet, meant a significant waste of resources and focus."

Oh yeah. That's going to be entirely incompatible with how Google does business. Google's primary concern isn't even that their customers care about those things (although they do)... It's the Google is a giant target and there are significant legal consequences for doing things or failing to do things that a jury outside of Google's control will decide after the fact was something they "should have known better" about.

Startup companies end up concerned less about this because they have less to lose. A startup company isn't exactly "judgement-proof..." The wrong decision can certainly get them sued out of existence. but the odds of it happening are lower, because at the end of the day they have fewer assets to seize. There's a much smaller target on their backs and fewer high ticket lawyers for whom the possible compensation would justify taking the case. there's no such reasonable constraint on how much you could sue Google for... a case that a high ticket lawyer wins against Google will definitely pay for itself.

If they really complained about not getting compensated for buying their own food during lockdown I think "entitled" is a fair descriptor.

This is the first time I've read one of these blogs where the author complains about it being "practically impossible to fire someone". To me, that adds an air of authenticity to the complaining. In my experience too, the inability to fire people for reasons other than "this person is a real jerk" has been a looming problem.

As far as work-life balance goes, I think I agree with him there too. I have a lot of privileges and I assume Google employees have even more. But the flipside of that is that, when there's a deadline, I'm very invested in meeting it, even if that means working a lot of hours. To me those two things are related: the privileges are justified by the periods of intense, focused work.

If google provides food for employees then that's essentially indirect compensation. Employees can now use the money they would have spent on food to buy other things.

So now that they're remote and have to buy their own food they have effectively received a pay decrease.

How is it entitled to complain about a decrease in compensation for the same work?

I find this legalistic perspective horrifying. It's as if you think every aspect of the relationship between you and your employer has to be written down as part of a contract and endlessly scrutinized.

For me, and I expect for most humans, the ideal employer-employee relationship is much more tacit. It's like being part of a sports team. There are bounds of duty and privilege that are mutual, acceptable to all parties, and do not have to be written down.

If everything was written down, it would make work intolerable. Every action would have to be catalogued, defined, and priced. In an effort to create a "better workplace," you would be destroying the things that makes work tolerable.

I think that's an exaggeration of what OP is saying. It's fuzzy, but there's a definitive distinction between "every aspect of your relationship" and benefits that impact someone's bottom line like free food.

OP did not say, and I wouldn't either, that every aspect of a employer-employee relationship should be documented and tracked like a PnL. But no one should pretend that it's not a debate over "unwritten compensation", and the value the employer gets from the employee. If employers didn't want to quantify that, there wouldn't be demand for corporate spyware and monitoring of employees. Yes, the Microsoft 365 option was shut down, but it's an arms race, and that's one battle in a war.

Why shouldn't employees want to extract the most value they can for their labor, and push back when the terms of that agreement change? If cost cutting or taking a loss necessitated a firing, would that "tacit relationship" prevent someone from being fired? My guess is no. Business is business, not personal.

I extended the previous poster's argument. He said food should be priced in, my point is that work is only tolerable because we stop pricing things in at a certain point. I agree with you: that line is fuzzy, but we have to place it somewhere (and amenities should not be priced in).

> Why shouldn't employees want to extract the most value they can for their labor, and push back when the terms of that agreement change? If cost cutting or taking a loss necessitated a firing, would that "tacit relationship" prevent someone from being fired? My guess is no. Business is business, not personal.

One conception of employment involves voluntarily adopted shared goals. Another conception is that employees rent themselves in exchange for money.

I suppose I think we need to find the happy medium between those conceptions. Too much of the latter perspective leads to alienation (because you conceive of yourself as a wage slave) whereas the former can lead to exploitation.

The article is arguing that Google is too far into the latter conception. It should towards the former, not all the way, but at least a little.

You just pulled that argument out of your ass. I wasn't implying that everything needs to be written down in a legal document.

Also I can't help but feel that your perspective is coming from a place of privilege. If I had to guess I'd say you either A) Haven't been screwed by an employer before or B) Are the employer.

I guarantee that if your employer fucked you over you'd be paying a lot more attention in the future.

Google has been known to point out the perks, such as catering, when asked by candidates for more salary during negotiation, as well.

Yeah it's interesting that the person I was replying to used the word "privilege" when describing those perks. As if Google was doing this out of the goodness of their heart.

It can be privilege to have a job, any job, that comes with perks like included food, or healthcare, even if those are part of one's negotiated compensation package.

Then you're just asking to be taken advantage of. You are more important than your employer. Therefore you should be looking to extract as much value from your employer as possible.

If you don't think your employer is doing the same then you're just naive. Google isn't catering food out of the goodness of their heart. It's a calculated cost-benefit analysis to attract and retain top talent.

Edit: It's also a tactic to get people to work longer hours.

I also think it's a privilege to be born healthy, to have access to clean water, et c, and I don't think that makes me "asking to be taken advantage of".

I don't for a second think that Google is doing anything out of the goodness of their hearts, just that most people's jobs have no perks and few or no benefits whatsoever.

Anyone working anywhere that pays them a six figure salary and provides food and healthcare is pretty fortunate, all things considered here on Earth. It's nothing to do with Google.

>>If they really complained about not getting compensated for buying their own food during lockdown I think "entitled" is a fair descriptor.

I very much disagree. If you were getting food at work previously, as in - it was clearly your agreed part of compensation - then I would absolutely complain if suddenly I had to buy my own.

>> But the flipside of that is that, when there's a deadline, I'm very invested in meeting it, even if that means working a lot of hours.

Again, that's fine and if you want to do that yourself, great, everyone would love to have you as an employee. But the second your manager walks in and says "john, I expect you to work this weekend" I'd start looking for a different job. Taking personal responsibility and working harder and more hours to finish something is one thing, being told you have to because your manager demands it is unacceptable.

> But the second your manager walks in and says "john, I expect you to work this weekend" I'd start looking for a different job.

Of course. A condition of my personal investment in meeting deadlines is exactly my not being treated like this.

For what it's worth, food in the United States is very clearly never a part of your agreed-upon compensation in the way that health/retirement benefits are; it is a "team-building office perk" offered by the employer. If it were actually part of your compensation, then you'd be taxed on it.

I know it may be easy to misunderstand this, and to think of it as part of your compensation, because in a way it feels like it, but in a real legal sense as currently structured it very definitely is not part of your compensation.

>If it were actually part of your compensation, then you'd be taxed on it.

Which is a somewhat contentious topic. Not an accountant, but seems to be one of those perks that's right at the very edge of IRS rules.

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pa...

To be clear, my statement was descriptive of present circumstances, not normative. As you point out this is in flux and may be changing in the future. If food does become a taxable benefit and part of overall compensation, then I might expect to start seeing some people opting out of it entirely.

> But the second your manager walks in and says "john, I expect you to work this weekend" I'd start looking for a different job.

It's definitely a failure of management, but if John was playing games all week and now is being asked to work this weekend to finish, that's also on John. His manager should have stopped the all week playing, but people want to be treated like adults and be given personal responsibility, etc...

Agree and disagree. Without pushing a point too hard, I will ask you this - what if your employment contract states you are to receive $X,000 per year in food or food stipend? Would you be in favor of employees pushing for subsidized food while remote?

Ok, and there’s a deadline at work. There’s also a deadline at your spouses work, your kid is sick, and they took off work to look after them last time. What do you do?

Roll initiative!

On a more serious note, that all depends on the type of contract you've got. If you're salaried and get a constant wage, you're not exactly being compensated for going above and beyond, especially in terms of hours worked.

Surely, if the work to be done is important, that means the employer is willing to pay for the privilege of having it done during off hours? If not, I would argue the employer, not the employee is feeling entitled.

Totally agree with what you’ve said.

Sure yeah, if you’re getting the equivalent of overtime or time-and-a-half, ok, it may become worth your time and like you said you are getting compensated for the extra effort and sacrifice.

But the author of the article is talking about salaried FTE Google employees. I’m a salaried tech employee, I don’t earn extra comp for working weekends. I assume that is the norm.

Hence why the authors attitude is indeed entitled, and not the employees, as you’ve stated.

Any reasonable person understands that "compensation includes food stipend of $8000" in a contract means they get $8000 if they're home. Clearly GP is referring to less cut-and-dry scenarios, i.e., nearly all scenarios in this domain.

Agreed yeah, hence the loose question. I’d assume this is a less formal scenario of oh, we have cafeterias, you’re welcome to eat there, but this isn’t some formal stipend. Makes sense, more curious on if that changes GP’s position on the topic with that added info. I’ve worked for places that did alternatively have a formal stipend amount.

My employer has killed off office perks during lockdown; it doesn't seem intentional, more of a bureaucratic thing. People are still in the office, but the management aren't, so things don't get done.

I've told them that this is an issue for morale - the old "buying the cheap toilet paper" adage comes to mind - but I'm not holding out much hope that anything will happen.

Is it a significant hardship for me to buy lunch? No. It wouldn't be a significant hardship for them to give it either.

To be brutally honest - we all need _more_ support during lockdown and restrictions, not less. In the UK, work and the supermarket are pretty much the only legal reasons for most to be outside at the moment.

A small number of people did this on the imageboard, which is widely known for collecting and upvoting fringe complaints. It is a company of like 130,000 people. A few of them are going to ask for things that seem unreasonable to others.

Google is somewhat known for being slow to fire. I personally like it. Managers are expected to try to get their reports to survive PIPs rather than using them as a boot out the door.

On paper that's fine. Do that too much, though, and your willingness to burn personal time for the company's benefit will become the norm and factor into their planning. Getting management to un-learn that is difficult and tricky and often not accomplished without the loss of several employees with that reason pointed out in the exit interview.

I mean in your last sentence, it really isn't a privilege if you have to do "intense, focused work" to get it... it then becomes compensation

Loss of said compensation does certainly warrant some conversation about it. Also I don't really appreciate it being painted as ALL Googlers when, like most things in life, a small passionate minority affected by this brought this up and most people didn't think twice about it

It is not a fake problem. Of course, working hard all the time is not a badge to be worn and is not by itself an end, but it's also true that SV tech community is filled to the brim with people thinking very highly of themselves when the reality is they don't contribute much. What the author is asking for is that employees take a degree of personal responsibility without needing to give up on a concept of personal life. I come from academia that's rife with no work life balance and it was positively jarring how badly the pendulum swings in the tech world. There's surely a middle ground that is not by any means unreasonable.

Importantly, this is a personal choice. I don't want to be in a team where members don't take personal responsibility, and I am willing to contribute the same. If Google does not allow such a team to operate with its own norms then the author is justified in saying it's not a good fit.

And to be clear, are you seriously saying that any person saying, "what? Sushi again?" Is actually going to have a real empathizable reason for saying so? Honestly Google sounds like it's filled with what can be considered the modern equivalent of upper middle class government administrators of past eras who don't really contribute much, couldn't give a rats ass about much more than what their weekend plans are and what their paycheck is and I will be more than happy that they are happy they don't work with someone like me if that thought process ever came up.

Of course, companies like Google have found a way to factory-fy this system of getting "maybe mediocre but never truly bad" engineers and scale a massive software conglomeration that runs the world. But this is only possible because of massive excesses these companies procure through counterproductive and anticompetitive revenue streams like ads and data aggregation, so in some ways people in HN want to complain about how these big tech companies are evil but at the same time draw heinously enormous paychecks from them and act as if they truly deserve them. That seems to be the problem.

> Honestly Google sounds like it's filled with what can be considered the modern equivalent of upper middle class government administrators of past eras

I like this, I've thought this before too about a lot of big tech companies that are throwing off cash and essentially want to make sure they have a bunch of top people but don't really need them for anything particular day-to-day.

So the employees become a kind of aristocracy with a few symbolic duties, but largely a life of leisure, attending company events and reading clubs and pushing paper back and forth, while making salaries high enough they dont have to worry about anything.

I know this is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it, and I definitely know environments where one could behave that way.

> And to be clear, are you seriously saying that any person saying, "what? Sushi again?" Is actually going to have a real empathizable reason for saying so?

(not the person you responded to)

Benefits are just a part of the total compensation. If you work for Google you don't get "free food", you get food that you worked for and that was a part of a large number of elements you weighed when you decided to work for Google. Maybe you get $X at Google but you were also considering an offer from Elgoog for $(X+Y) and decided that the convenience and cost of Google's food were worth more than $Y for you (Elgoog of course doesn't offer "free food" :)). If that "free food" isn't working out for you, it is natural to be frustrated at being short-changed on your benefits.

If you are in Israel, the norm for tech is to get a Cibus card which lets you buy lunch at local restaurants at the employer's expense, up to some daily limit. When you are comparing offers you can literally compare "this company gives $15/day but that one $20/day, so let's deduct $100/mo from their offer when comparing". If you work for Google and get a "free lunch" maybe you'll evaluate it as a $25/day Cibus. If you get a bad lunch at Google, maybe you'll think "Ugh, if I was working for <competitor> I could have been eating at <favourite restaurant> instead". If you get a bad lunch at Google, you effectively paid $25 for it and got a bad lunch, so it makes sense to complain about it like you would if you went to an actual restaurant, paid $25 and got a bad meal.

I agree that in the grand scheme of things these issues aren't all that important (maybe about as important as someone going to a restaurant and getting a bad meal :)), but I don't see how it is impossible to empathize with that sentiment.

There's definitely a pendulum with degrees of difference. I've been called militant before at work because I showed up on time, worked while at work, and went home when the day was over. I just call it being professional to not goof off all day.

It seems like what's happened (like in a lot of society) is that extremes have formed. Either people are in the work 24/7 camp or play frisbee golf all day camp. Whatever happened to simply being professional?

Great comment. I completely agree.

Yes, that made me want to run a mile from ever working for him. He is right that we are entitled though. As software engineers we are extremely lucky to be in a profession that is in demand by companies that make (a lot of) money. Companies compete for us with salaries, quality of work and other benefits. This puts us in a lucky minority compared to the rest of the population (even if we limit to talking about developed nations).

We have expectations based on that. Some things are the norm for us. We should absolutely try to be aware of that and not take it for granted, and we should absolutely understand that for others it is the norm. Everyone feels entitled to what they get all the time. You need to accept reality, even if you don't like it.

Yeah, how dare they think that they're entitled to hobbies or a life outside of their job? How dare they take a day off because they're not feeling well and want to take care of themselves?

FFS.

His point is a job is not UBI, you supposed to contribute in return and adjust your schedule along other workers (aka a 'workday'). I dunno why is that so controversial.

Have you missed the part where he things that working nights and weekends is expected in a job? "we have to do whatever it takes to win"?

Where goalposts for "winning" can conveniently be moved each weekend, I imagine.

Yeah, it should be completely unacceptable.

As you get older you realise how valuable your time is. You only get one life, you aren't saving up or learning more to make your next one easier, you get old and that's it.

Having that time to visit family and friends whilst you can is incredibly important.

His points also include:

> I was the weirdo who wanted to push things fast and expected that some level of personal sacrifice when needed

And

> I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend

So not just about “workdays”.

As others have noted, he does make some excellent points. His comments about entitlement (food) ring so true.

But his section on Work Life Balance is pretty terrible.

That may apply to yoga class at 11am, but asking for a day off? Come on...

Especially at a company like Google, which tracks vacation days as compensation.

When you tell a Googler they can't take a day off, you are basically telling them the company will not honor a piece of the compensation package they signed up for. You'd better come to that table with a damn good alternative offer.

Days off are certainly fine, as long you give enough notice for your coworkers to plan around your absence. Not counting emergencies of course.

After reading the article I think his only problem was that the 11am yoga employee was taking care of their health in a way that he didn’t understand, so it was bad.

For me it was the opposite, i was thinking, wow, this is the guy i would like to be working with. But i'm not the one who fits this description:

   You need to be able to answer the "what have you done for our users lately" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech.

“What did I do for the customer today” is often in principle not answerable within megacorps. If you’re the person who fixes a new employee’s password issues, you have to do mental gymnastics like “I helped X fix their password, then X created a new Jira ticket for Y, Y helped scope and plan the ticket in Z’s sprint, Z gathered requirements and assigned it to A, A paired with B and they wrote code that removed extraneous serifs from the new widget font, C reviewed their code, D took the new deployment to the mobile team who QA tested it, then E stamped approval on a new rollout of the app, and now users of iOS 13.6.9 who also specifically only use Firefox Focus won’t see extraneous serifs in the font on the widget tab in their account page. Let’s crack the champagne everyone!”

The degree of behemoth incrementalism is so extreme that outside the immediate blast radius of your work, there is no serious, intellectually honest way to connect the dots between your effort and the user. It’s like shipping a rover to Mars. You do a shitload of work and hope several time units later when it actually lands, that your work has some barely perceptible positive contribution to the sum total outcome.

And all this is even worse in companies where it’s not clear to anyone whether the user is the product or the customer. Just imagine that. “How did you help the user today?” should make you freeze like a deer in headlights. Do you mean the ad company who can target Starbucks-drinking soccer moms in Texas better now because of our cool new image filter for posting kid sports pictures? Or do you mean the soccer moms themselves? Or do you mean the NSA we are allowing access to all this data on both the advertiser and the soccer moms? Or do you mean the VCs?

Leaders who say platitudes like “what did you do for the customer” are just extremely arrogant know-nothings. They can use the stick of “the customer always comes first” to indiscriminately beat, shame or fire anyone that they conveniently need to attack, no matter how unrealistic it is to demand this kind of direct customer impact accounting.

Employees aren’t braindead morons who subscribe to your company like a religion. But that is exactly what this type of thinking is meant to induce.

I think you're violently agreeing with the author.

In a startup it's easy to see what value you added for the user every day. In a megacorp it's impossible. In a startup having the managers ask "what did we do for the users today?" helps the whole team stay on track. In a megacorp it's a useless platitude.

No, I’m not agreeing at all. The author is asserting that you should always be in the start-up situation of not having incremental work where your ultimate impact on customers comes through long chained sequences of tiny tweaks or accumulated effects.

It’s perfectly fine (good even) to work in a large company where your value add is not immediately clarified and is just part of a large agglomerated process. Most net benefit to consumers occurs this way.

It’s also fine if you want to work in the start-up manner, but it’s not “better” or “more correct” or anything.

The author is taking it to a deeply unreasonable extreme that shows more about the author’s arrogance than about any sincere or earnest desire to help customers.

I didn't read it like that. I think the author knows that that's impossible in a megacorp, but he wanted to continue thinking like that even though he'd become part of a megacorp. He seemed to understand the reality of megacorp politics - the whole spiel about "this is how you get promoted" - but didn't want that for himself, or his team (which I agree is unrealistic).

It's very difficult to change perspective once you've worked in one paradigm for a while (at least I find it so - I'm a terrible employee because I've been a freelancer and co-founder for so long). I agree, one is not objectively "better" or "more correct", but that can be a subjective opinion of a blog article author.

This irks of an entitled Googler.

I reported up to Noam and he's an admirable leader to me. In fact, I will be excited to learn about and join his next project if it has a culture distinct from this Google "work life balance" and the false pretense that "work life balance" == happiness.

I was the lowest of low level bricklayers, on the opposite end of the pecking order, but his comments on The Corporation and its entitled / PC constituent members resonated with me. If it didn't resonate with you, that's why you'd probably stick around at Google for a long time. Sure, many Googlers may be happy he left, but that doesn't disprove his points. If anything, it kind of supports Noam's argument.

In case someone says "if you don't like it, then leave". I just did.

Google is barely the most innovative place for an engineer to work nowadays, nor is compensation "top of market". The rest of the tech world has caught up. Actual top of market pay would at least made me ignorant, for a little bit longer, to the fact that work was unfulfilling. Yeah, we had great work life balance, so what? I'm still expected to be there 9-5, and spending 1/3rd of your life expanding work to fill the time allocated to it doesn't equate happiness. In fact, for me it was outright depression. I'm in a more intense work environment now, pays a fraction of Google, but I am happier on so many fronts. There's much less "abstraction" and needless complexity. Some of us would rather have real work to do than coast or work on projects/problems that simpler do not need to exist.

The state of limbo induced by "work life balance" isn't the fault of Noam, because as I interpretted in his blog, the Googleplex Twilight Zone inhibits fully realizing the culture in the executive team's vision. Maybe the vision is a trainwreck or maybe it's brilliant, but I don't believe the "autonomy" afforded by Google allows realizing these extremes. There's so many layers/indirection between me, the bricklayer, and the person at the helm. Combine that with the misaligned incentives in a corporation where resume projects are being advanced, I wasn't even building the great pyramid of Giza as much as I was building some offshoot resort home for one of the scribes that reported up to the priest who reported up to the pharoah.

Well he said.

> I don't believe long hours are a badge of honor but I also believe that we have to do whatever it takes to win, even if its on a weekend.

I guess he missed the memo that google had already won.

> While most "real" people were worried about keeping their jobs or finding one, many employees were complaining about expensing their food on top of their salaries/stocks/bonuses. This entitlement continued everywhere - while Google is BY FAR the most employee centric company giving tremendous hard and soft value to its employees, they keep creating imaginary problems to complain about, instead of appreciating the hand they have been dealt.

I 100% get his position here. I definitely want to be surrounded by people that are grateful.

I'd like to add... That guy seems to be ignoring the point of view of somebody that is not the boss/former-owner of the startup that got acquired.

Indeed. I'm struck by the contrast between this complaint from the author...

> It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more

and this other complaint...

> The product is a tool to advance the employees career, not a passion, mission or economic game changer.

The author wants employees who perceive their job as a passion, and a mission, who can be fired as soon as their role is no longer needed? That strikes me as more "entitled" than keeping a Yoga class blocked off in your schedule.

That's not how I read it.

He clearly states that he understands the value of work-life balance, but there are workplaces where work is just not the #1 priority during business hours anymore. And that's totally fine and I'm happy if it works for people and their employers. But it's not viable for startups that need to find product-market-fit before burning through all their cash. Or companies trying to make best-in-class products.

It doesn’t really work long term for large companies either.

Unless you are riding the back of some cash cow you do have to worry about profit. I have watched the complete erosion of our tech leads and the incoming hires bear so little responsibility. Management is also quite aware of what they have done, but half of them are on the way out too.

Yeh the whine about hiring and firing was a dead give away - given the low level of employee protection in the USA.

Sounds like the author a senior leader (presumably) hasn't internalised what it is to lead - I recall a tweet from a serving Army officer about what you must never do is get used to the fact you can send out some one for coffee and become entitled.

That was my take-away as well. This might be the guy you want to do business with if you're an investor, but that ain't me; I'm just an employee. This is NOT the kind of guy you wanna be doing business with if you're his employee. And it's not just his complaints about employees' supposed entitlement; he's also complaining that a lot of them were making too much money (in his view)! Opt me the fuck out of that!

Also he spends a lot of time defending his "short fuse" and his saying of offensive things; in my experience, when someone's own side of the story is that bad, it's actually much worse even from the other side (i.e. the side anyone not him would be experiencing). You don't want to work for rude assholes. I don't know him well enough to know if he's actually one, but that's how he's coming off in this blog post anyway. Red flags for days.

I've worked as a freelancer, founder, and employee (for start-ups, scale-ups and now FAANG).

The one constant has been my daily exercise session, whether that has been a workout, yoga session or swim. My daily schedule (pre-Covid) usually involves 45 mins at home checking email/chat and addressing anything urgent and modifying my to-do list for the day. Then it's to the gym for 90 minutes, and in the office by 10:30am. It's what I need to do and it keeps me sane.

Building a startup in my early 20's was easily the most stressful period of my life. Going for a swim each day was probably the single most important thing that got me through it in one piece.

I have a lot of respect for what the author has accomplished; building one of the top tech products and brands in America is ridiculously hard. However, this article shows a lack of empathy for how people work and what they need.

I didn't read it as that bad - he states it should be a balance.

Balancing work and life means if you get the Yoga session at 11am, then you're also OK with getting paged at 11pm to fix server downtime.

When I've managed teams, I always held that it's quid-pro-quo. If I want the team to stay late to meet the deadline, then I'm OK with them leaving early to pick the kids up from school (though not on the same day, obviously). If they need to take the morning off to go to the dentist, that's cool as long as they're OK with getting a call on the weekend if there's a problem. It's a give-and-take. If the give-and-take gets too much, one way or another, then that's something we can talk about at a regular one-to-one and work out.

At googles scale you would have shift coverage for that shurly

good point - at that scale the "team" includes all the people you'd ever need to cover every eventuality

I absolutely agree about the fact that us young CS engineers often forget how lucky we are to exist in this space.

I also support the point that the author is trying to make about work life balance. If you are passionate about building something, you would always want your team to be as passionate. And that would mean sacrificing other stuff in your life since this product is also a large part of your life.

In other words, "work life balance" treats work separate to life. Which often might not be the case. There can definitely be an overlap between work and life.

Because unless you have significant equity in a company, your work is literally not your life. Your life consists of things you don't lose instantly if you're fired "for any lawful reason including no reason".

The US is potentially one of the worst places to get work and life mixed up without a securitized, legally binding combination of your work and life.

From the article:

> There are people who are great for a stage of the company and later, do not have the right skills as the company grows. It is not their fault, it is reality.

While at the same time wanting to fire the employee as soon as they don’t need the skill. The commitment is entirely a one way street.

Of course, focus on the one thing he said you don't like. Not to mention he didn't really say he's against work life balance. But for some people words are more important than content like he said.

Or the people who complain about work-life balance and sushi are the kind of people you would not want to be in the trenches with in any sort of challenge.

The point that's missing here is that there will _always_ be a generational divide. Young will always see Old as antiquated, out-of-touch. Old will always see Young as entitled, perhaps flippant, and out-of-touch. Neither perspective is invalid.

Work-life balance is always available, but you're not entitled to a top-tier salary if you want to 9-to-5 it.

I think you nailed it.

I will admit that there are pieces of this article that I find myself nodding to, but I am not sure I would want to work for this person.

"The challenge was that, as Google employees, we were subject to all of the Corporate hiring practices. It is practically impossible to fire someone for the basic reason that you don't need this role any more or there is a better person out there or just plain old - you are not doing a great job."

Good grief. If you had any sense as a manager, you did not do that either in the previous non-google position. The unemployment insurance cost alone is not worth it. Sometimes those corporate practices are guided by some reason.

"I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG… I actually stopped speaking at events where the majority appreciated what I was saying but the minority that was offended by something (words and not content) made it a pain."

I am more sympathetic here, because I agree that we are way too delicate language-wise in corporate land, but even then I don't say whatever comes to mind. Passionate is barely an excuse here. When you speak publicly ( panels, events ), you should know your audience and have a modicum of self-control.

"Young people want it all - they want to get promoted quickly, achieve economic independence,"

Lol. Duh. All of a sudden, I can sort of understand, why 'OK boomer' became a meme.

Seriously, and the next point it's followed up with is "entitlement"....

far too common these days. I haven't been able to find a job in a year (fe/js) due to these people rising up the last couple of years or so.

If I swanned off to do yoga during my contracted core hours I'd be sacked

In this case, the company is offering the yoga as something you can do during your work hours.

Google doesn't really have "contracted core hours" precisely. They have quarterly goals. If you're accomplishing those goals, the corporate culture doesn't much care how. This offers flexibility that can make it easier to accomplish tasks (I knew people who worked 6AM-2PM because the center-of-mass of their team was in a different timezone).

Fair enough. But I'd assume that there's an implicit understanding in that agreement that if you're needed for something work-related you probably shouldn't go to yoga, i.e. they assume you'll be an adult about it.

Correct. It's pretty loose and varies from team to team, but the generally-applicable rule is "We have OKRs each quarter. If we're not hitting them, that's a problem." How a team goes about hitting them is left as the responsibility of the team.

One way that process can break down is if you have a manager that's bad at planning or over-promising for your team without testing the wind of how much work their engineers will actually get done. Google makes it pretty easy for demonstrated high-performers to change teams, so if you do that too much you run the risk of hemorrhaging good team members (who can't get promoted if goals aren't met and therefore will seek out a team that knows how to meet goals) and being left trying to get your tasks accomplished with only the people who, for whatever reason, can't transfer.

Yeah, I was sort of getting what they were saying until they started complaining about political correctness. If you don't explain what you were being censured or censored over, I'm just going to assume it's some vile sexist or racist remark, because 9 times out of 10 that IS the quiet part.

I'm starting to think the Bay Area trend of hyperfocusing on identity politics is just the trendy way of deposing shitty managers.