The conflict between “uncomfortable culture” and “golden handcuffs” was becoming intolerable.
Amen :_(
replies(2):
Amen :_(
But also a Director is probably pulling >$1,000,000 / yr (the golden handcuffs).
My friends who are still at g seemed pretty miserable in 2023. I haven't heard from them this month though, didn't realize another layoff round hit. It's absolutely off my wishlist of companies nowadays.
- 80% get average grade. 2% get worst, 6-8% get between worst and average. That covers 90% of the distribution.
- The below-average grade is a death sentence to your career there.
- The rest, people recently found out, is half-eaten by people who get promoted.
- There's now _precious_ little incentive to put in an effort in a culture that was already known for it's rest-and-vest-ness.
- The quotas are enforced 3-4 levels up from bottom, and managers are expected to warn anyone who might get below average. In practice, that means 15-20% of people are being told they might get a scarlet letter.
- There is ~nowhere to transfer internally since late 2021. 100 applicants for every open role.
- The internal orgs all love to do whatever the opposite of "yes, and" is. And each were told to Focus™, so that leads to people having an easy excuse to turning down _any_ request. It's much more efficient to shit all over the other org and not do the work and tell your director it's their fault than it is to enable bottom-up action.
- The simplification of performance reviews also meant it shifted from being 80% peer feedback and 20% management to 95% management. And Google, like anywhere, is full of people at their worst, and their best. It's lead to a, frankly, gob-smacking amount of chicanery that I thought I left behind at immature companies. Even your average gossip-y early startup is better, because there's a certain sense of reality, instead of ad dollars that magically convert to paychecks.
- Constant, ever-beating drum of firings. There was the huge one last year, and then the sizable one recently in a couple orgs, but it's been near-constant.
- The firings are absurdly post-modern sterile. You wake up, locked out of your laptop, locked out of the office, and have an email in your personal inbox telling you they're cutting your team.
- They have to "cut teams" instead of do layoffs because of the legal / cost ramifications of just doing layoffs to drive up profits. But that opens up some of that chicanery I mentioned: have it on good authority from 2 sources that the political movers who came into the Assistant org. for Bard would ship people onto "classic" Assistant teams just to fire them.
It's really hard to explain concisely, but basically, I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone come close to that place unless they're sub 100K in savings. Nothing makes sense, nothing is real, everyone knows it, and you have a bunch of the world's smartest people optimizing for how to do the least without being the least. A lot of that involves saying no and telling everyone it's someone else's fault, and like any hierarchical organization.........
I had a committee interview there maybe 8 years ago and already that was such an impersonal feeling that I really disliked my experience and didn't continue, not that they'd have hired me in the end.
I had 2 referrals for the team I wanted to join and I thought I'd be interviewing with that teams members who knew me from various foss projects or at least knew of the projects. When I heard it was by committee my anxiety went through the roof.
I hope things improve for everyone.
In addition, the process adds some steps to keep a single person's irrational biases from propagating: formal rubrics, rating broken down into components each of which requires written justification, and the group of people making the decision to hire or not hire are explicitly ones who never see or hear the candidate and are deciding based on interviewers' written reports.
Maybe? What if the pool is being influenced with whatever is trendy at the time?
I would take my bias of working with a former colleague for years over what the current societal pressures are enforcing. Some may call it nepotism, I'd call it risk management.
They are amazing engineers and we've all grown together over the last decade and we know what each of us is great and at where they'd be fantastic in a company. They're SWEs and I'm an SRE so we actually aren't on the same team or anything but they know they can bring me on as a Staff/Princ SRE and we'll get things done well cross-team far beyond what most companies of disparate eng/teams gets done.
These are people super passionate about the technology. We give presentations/talks on various projects, etc. I know their skills are up to date and growing constantly. Finding someone passionate is difficult. Maybe not at google but in normal-not-faang world it is.