Googler... ex-Googler | slacker news

    I really was just a fuckin cog in a mega corp.

Yep. One of the most unfortunate realities of modernity.

Your managers, or your managers managers, or their managers don't care about you. At all. If you ask them on the weekend, they'll decry that the things they are asked to do are horrible. but they'll still do it. Some gladly.

They are themselves cogs in the machine.

A machine that goes all the way to the executive class, and they really don't care about you. In fact, more likely than not, they detest you.

We all participate in this hostile culture, in various ways. Usually using the excuse that we need to pay rent, eat, find the work interesting, or with some other excuse that justify the means.

It seems like it's hard to do the right thing when you have something you want to buy or otherwise spent your whole life getting here, before realizing what here is.

So the key thing here is that this didn't used to be how things were at Google.

People outside the ecosystem disbelieve, but I had the mixed privilege of watching the company evolve from a spicy startup to a megacorp. There isn't one point in time you can put your finger on when it shifted, but the shift happened. And for Googlers who'd been there forever, they were legitimately startled to learn that all their years of work hadn't made them insiders as the lines were drawn and management consolidated into something more approximating a traditional corporation.

If there's a lesson here, I think it's that there is a difference between a company like old Google and a company like new Google, but if you only want to work at old Google, you have to pay very close attention to the signs that things are changing around you. Capitalism, to be certain, incentivizes drift in that direction, from small outfit where everyone knows everyone to 100-thousand-person megafirm with concerns about its tax obligations to Ireland.