Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long? (opens in new tab)

Perhaps unusually, I actually wanted FB to impress itself more strongly on Oculus post acquisition because, frankly, Oculus was a bit of a mess. Instead, Oculus was given an enormous amount of freedom for many years.

Personally, nobody ever told me what to do, even though I was willing to "shut up and soldier" if necessary -- they bought that capability! Conversely, I couldn't tell anyone what to do from my position; the important shots were always called when I wasn't around. Some of that was on me for not being willing to relocate to HQ, but a lot of it was built into early Oculus DNA.

I could only lead by example and argument, and the arguments only took on weight after years of evidence accumulated. I could have taken a more traditional management position, but I would have hated it, so that's also on me. The political dynamics never quite aligned with an optimal set of leadership personalities and beliefs where I would have had the best leverage, but there was progress, and I am reasonably happy and effective as a part time consultant today, seven years later.

Talking about "entitled workers" almost certainly derails the conversation. Perhaps a less charged framing that still captures some of the matter is the mixing of people who Really Care about their work with the Just A Job crowd. The wealth of the mega corps does allow most goals to be accomplished, at great expense, with Just A Job workers, but people that have experienced being embedded with Really Care workers are going to be appalled at the relative effectiveness.

The communication culture does tend a bit passive-aggressive for my taste, but I can see why it evolves that way in large organizations. I've only been officially dinged by HR once for insensitive language in a post, but a few people have reached out privately with some gentle suggestions about better communication.

All in all, not a perfect fairy tale outcome, but I still consider taking the acquisition offer as the correct thing for the company in hindsight.

And all for what? A mapping application having features which really don't save lives 99% of the time.

And I too have many criticisms of Google. But.

Google has entirely different revenue constraints. It can afford an entirely different way of working. That pace allows a more sustainable cadence of development. It can be a more humane place to work, in general.

Google can on the whole accomplish its revenue goals without being a meat grinder. So why be one? I think there is a bit of a problem with this guy's POV where he's come to fetishize the actual process of the making of the sausage versus the sausage itself.

Projects need not be run under insane stress if there's a steady supply of talent and money to make things happen. Google can afford that. Pace will be slower. Perhaps less competitive. But the core business continues to do excellently.

For many of us Google is not an "exciting" place to work. But it's a pretty good job to have and it pays well and gives access to both great benefits and to interesting technology. And that compensation in _most_ people does yield a sense of responsibility for delivery. But maybe not the survival-of-the-fittest-meat-grinder panic that this guy somehow seems to love.

Bringing experience in other fields, namely the trades, to the conversation here might make it more clear why these things outlined in the article are seen as extreme entitlement. It's not a lack of work-life balance - something I see and hear about in most industries now - it's about caring deeply about your career, your work, and perhaps the project at hand, while not allowing that work to define your life. Pride and dedication to work can be balanced with family. It's not a zero sum game. What the author is trying to explain, in my mind, is that there is large priority on only one side of the equation (life), while indifference towards the other (work).

We have it AMAZINGLY WELL being in tech, and we have luxuries that are unique to tech and bewildering to folks in other fields.

There is a whole community however that sees wealth acquisition as the point of employment. Even if it's "merely" joining the ranks of the top 5% this is lauded as success by many. Lawyers, doctors, consultants, stock traders, all the high paying professions have people who subscribe to this philosophy. "I want to provide the best life possible for my family" might be the primary goal. Lower status/pay professions might describe this as what a "job" is as opposed to a "career". Something you do for money.

Many hackers want to both provide the best possible life for their families and participate in a grand adventure of changing the world by creating something people want. I am infected with this mentality. But this might be considered a delusion of grandeur by many, or egotism.

It's hard to empathize with a group who doesn't share a drive you see as essential for good character, but that lack of empathy is what is drawing people's scorn here.

Good quote. Although you can extend the lawyers theme out to the rest of the bureaucratic corp too.

I get having a team of 20 that is like this, but it does not seem like a concept that scales unless you are SpaceX.

sometimes you need to work weekends and nights while your wife take care of the kids alone so that your career progress and her's not.

Here, fixed for you.

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

> So, why did I leave?

> I did not leave in a confrontational disagreement (which is what anyone who knows me thought would happen, as I have a short fuse...)

From Twitter:

> Noam Bardin, former Waze CEO (2009-21)

He’s clearly a smart guy and I don’t disagree with all his points, but in general it’s sad that there are CEOs/managers out there with short fuses that want to fire old people. Also he wants personal sacrifice & things delivered no matter what. I understand the viewpoint but would likely despise it as an employee.

You know someone is Up To Something when they rant about HR restricting their speech. It's weird to me that he's now a free agent, rants about how people complained that "I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG", and yet doesn't indulge in his blog post. Maybe he learned something about communicating effectively through discussions with HR?

He mentions not getting free distribution on Android phones. It baffles me that he couldn't negotiate some sort of deal. I am sure someone's end goal was to put all of Waze in Maps, and I don't think anyone would have prevented him from doing that. I feel like there was some emotional attachment to his baby that he couldn't get over, and it hurt the distribution of the product. You aren't acquired by a big tech company to be nurtured and grow -- you're there to be assimilated, for better or for worse. I'm surprised that he's surprised. (You can get bought by Google and grow your brand, of course. Android is still called Android, not Google Phone. Maybe Andy Rubin was just a better CEO? Though quite a piece of human garbage, as I understand it.)

Finally, the rest of the rant is about how those dang employees don't work hard enough and want too much money. I can see why that irritates the CEO type -- they risked everything to get where they are today. But, that's not the game the employees are playing. They took a more conservative course and ended up at the top of their field, they're there to make your ideas come to life efficiently and effectively. If you want naive worker bees who will work 80 hours a week for $20,000 a year, you got acquired by the wrong company, plain and simple.

For someone who claims to be savvy, he seems to have a lot of blind spots. I guess it's nice to get it all out into the open, as a warning to people who might choose to work with him on his next adventure.

Regarding firing people. From my experience it's doable but takes a long time. That's why offloading an employee to another team is usually easier.

With all that being said, I still think for most people who work for someone else, big tech is better than startups once you're experienced. If you don't work for yourself than optimizing for money is a reasonable thing to do.

And I don't mean the corporate lingo 'passionate', I mean the actual passionate. I strongly advise any passionate people to not seek to turn their passion into a job. Because it's a long journey full of suffering.

Your bosses will drive you insane. Your clients will drive you insane. Your coworkers will drive you especially mad. You will feel pain every time you will be asked to cut corners. No one will appreciate the finer details of your work. You will become the office insufferable twat. Passed every promotion.

The sweet spot is somewhere between "I don't hate it" and "I kind of like it". You can learn to like something if you do it long enough.

There are plenty of startups where you can put in your ~8 hours and call it a day 99% of the time and the business will still be thriving. Having seen the work some engineers put into cranking out code nonstop, a bit less time coding and a bit more time thinking would have likely done way more good for the code base and the company anyway.

Managers who don’t value your personal time and are willing to fire you anytime ‘someone better’ comes along are toxic and should be avoided.

I read that he wants people to:

- Do their work - Provide value for their users - Get stuff done.

vs

- Work on flashy stuff to only get promotions - Be stuck with BAD employees that do very little - Have employees spend all day doing recreation

Work/life is important to stay healthy but at the same time employees need to get their work done. He is saying that the pendulum has swung too far towards the recreation side of things.

I think I am biased as I worked at a startup that was chasing Google level of perks. They were fantastic but caused a huge divide between the people that abused them and the people that worked their butts off.

All I want is for people to be reasonable and get their stuff done...

For a time, a certain (popular) subset of the free snacks became unavailable. My immediate team and I made some jokes about it. A week or so later, word got around that somebody had opened a medium grade internal incident over the 'outage'. So we looked up and sure enough, there it was, an actual filed incident, status ongoing. Ok so that's fine; things were generally pretty 'loose' at the company, so maybe that was a joke.

Nope; not only had many hundreds of people marked themselves as impacted, but the discussion was quite serious.

Mixed in of course were many people making comments about how silly/absurd/outrageous it was that OTHER PEOPLE were taking this snack outage so seriously.

The whole thing turned into quite a kerfuffle. There were now hundreds of comments under the incident, and the associated chat channel was getting pretty heated.

Word came down from my area's management, unofficially, in a friendly way, suggesting that we just stay clear of the whole thing, which was sound advice in my opinion.

To be clear: the vast majority of the heat was about whether this thing should be an incident at all, and the size of the 'sides' were to my eye roughly even.

I'm not trying to make a statement here about entitlement one way or another, but simply recounting a story from a few years ago as I best recall it.

Wow I didn’t think I would ever see anyone openly state in writing that it is too hard to fire people for being old. (Age discrimination against those 40 and older is against federal law. It’s also morally wrong. I would also personally argue that the age cutoff should be a lot lower, but that is directly relevant to this article).

Edit: ahh that makes sense. He likely meant it as “or just plain ol’ ‘you’re not doing a great job.’ “

If I think back over the times when I've been most productive, I've had the kind of trusted flexibility that allows me to work 14 hours one day to get a feature in before the big demo, but also leave an hour early the next day to go catch up on all the real life stuff I didn't do. Reading the article, I get the impression the author is praising the 14 hour day while condemning the leaving early, which is failing to see that they're two sides of the same coin. I'm not going to work myself to exhaustion unless my manager helps facilitate it.

There are upsides of having managers not have the level of control over their reports' futures that they do at most companies. (It accomplishes goals of reducing discrimination and it makes people less vulnerable and thus boosts retention.)

There are reasons that the process overhead to accomplish anything at Google is more than at a company like pre-acquisition Waze. (It simply gets 100x more backlash when Google makes a misstep on some of this stuff than any company, in part because they have a responsibility as stewards of so many experiences and so much data. There's also a culture of doing a really crappy job in a first pass -- I think this might be fostered by the process overhead, but it certainly makes removing it very dangerous.)

There are benefits to a comp model that doesn't actually reward you for what you accomplish. (You can get some of your best people to focus long-term.)

There are OBVIOUS benefits to a culture that values political correctness. The author didn't make it clear that he wasn't just being an asshole.

I think, on balance, that Google is unhealthy and could use some more Noam in it, but I think it's not intuitive to everyone why these things are done.

We're not mind readers: Words _are_ content.

And if there were people misunderstanding what he was saying, then it's pretty clear that he was either deliberately provoking in his speech or just clueless about the impact words have on people who are not him.

Obviously the author is from a different time where tech/SV abundance did not exist and had to be created through huge personal sacrifice. He speaks as such person and is judged as any "nasty uncle on dinner table".

But in my view, there's certainly truth in the entitlement he describes. I'm not saying that WBL (as represented as yoga at 11AM) is not alright to aim for. But it's incompatible with many endeavours. And it's certainly incompatible with competitive/low-growth industries, markets and jobs.

The tech sector (still) enjoys high growth and large demand for HR, that's why such entitlement exists. But as growth plateaus I think entitled people will find it hard to find certain WLB perks

Not everyone who is an excellent contributor needs to be willing to work on weekends or have that 'go-getter' energy.

The optimal path is one of optimizing for the path of least resistance, while this fella seems intent on rushing ahead, head first, until something breaks, or as he calls it, gets 'worn down'.

Of course if you lack the brains to be able to comprehend what the path of least resistance is, the next best thing is to be extra energetic and try everything until something sticks.

That's this guy in a nutshell. This type of approach to life is often destructive and abusive, what the author calls having a 'short fuse'. These extra energetic folks need to be reigned in by people who have a working brain, then the extra energetic people can be excellent. This can be seen in sports, where a group of intelligent people take extra energetic maniacs and mold them into championship teams.

> 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. But not being able to replace them with people that do have the right skills means that people are constantly trying to “offload” an employee on a different team rather than fire them - something that is not conducive with fast moving and changing needs.

One thing that really irritates me is one way commitment. The author wants people who will see their work for the company as a calling, while at the same time having no loyalty to the employee and seeing them as just a stepping stone, to be used when needed and then discarded.

In Japan, the work culture historically was one of crazy dedication to the company. However, it was reciprocated. The company was expected to take care of your whole life, even to the point of coming up with a sinecure for you in your old age. They didn’t just use you and discard you when they thought you were no longer needed.

Every time I see a company talking about how they want employees to see the company as their mission and calling, I look at how they treat employees to see if they plan on reciprocating that loyalty. The answer if pretty much always no. They plan on using your loyalty when it is useful to them, often burning you out, and discarding you when they think you don’t provide value.

Their ability to maximize their own income before the acquisition was based on how successful your product was- they had stock options! Their ability to maximize their income after the acquisition was based on getting their next promotion.

They were never actually in love with your product. The passion was not passion for what you did. Their passion was for money. Waze was always a stepping stone.

All the while, here you are complaining that you can't arbitrarily fire people, that you can't "speak your mind" for fear of HR complaints, just generally wishing you could continue to abuse your employees. These are things you only did because those employees were just a stepping stone for your success, not people.

What a whiny hypocrite.

To me complaining about "entitlement" just sounds like a kind of mild "Stockholm Syndrome" for primitive conditions.

Googlers may have some issues but I don't feel that their expectations around baseline quality of life are among them. We should all be so fortunate. No really, we should. Let's work on that together.

Of course it is. With the exception of the founders and possibly the first few, other employees rarely reap the benefits of product success, and if they do it's a promotion. I.e. advancing their career.

It's pretty naive and selfish to expect employees to sacrifice and emotionally invest as much in a product as the founders since they will not benefit nearly as much should it succeed.

Also, my personal issue is that, being part of Google, he seemed to still only focus on the success of Waze, not on the success of Google. And that's contradictory to his own statement of needing to align with company success and investors success. I mean, even his "does nothing for users" argument fails for me, when Waze was acquired I dreamed of all its features just rolling up into Google Maps and Waze going away, so that the best of Maps and Waze would combine into a better Map app.

The only thing I can agree with, but honestly that's really not new insight at this point, is promotion driven development. Though I think he undermines a little how that favors new ventures and moonshots over continued refinement of existing products. Yes this is a common criticism of Google, but it's also how Gmail, Maps, and a lot of the really big money maker success of Google happened. It's not that the promotion process is "bad", but it optimises for people to always try and grow brand new products and enter new markets. Which arguably could be best for Google investors.

But if you have the oportunity to not have to work under a guy like that. Why would you? At most you will get a salary raise but ultimatley you would be working very hard under his wip to realize his dreams and goals.

The mind set he has can be really benefitial for certain companies and it is really helpful for start-ups to work like this because you establish an base line of dicipline in the company culture that is valuable.

But he obviously is not capable to reflect back on himself and see who he are. These sort of people rarely are capable of that and if they do they dont really care.

On-call engineers for high risk projects and deployments are another situation and not the norm.

The only leaders and teams I have seen push back on this, are the ones who 1) have no kids or 2) have their entire social life wrapped up with their work life. Why would they ever stop working when they can just play video games together at the office and say they are “working late”?

At this point I can't help but be extremely skeptical of people that talk about how they've been oppressed by PC censorship and don't provide any examples as if it's not the case that there aren't lots of people who say widely unacceptable things and use this as a shield.

> Having trouble scheduling meetings because “it's the new Yoga instructor lesson I cannot miss”

Yeah that's a pretty lame excuse.

> or “I’m taking a personal day” drove me crazy.

Are you kidding me? Days off is the evidence of poor commitment to the job? That seems extremely telling about the author, not the company.

He couldn't perceive that Google was buying him out to neutralize a competitor? He was surprised that the distribution priority of Waze was lower than Google Maps?

No. Fuck you, pay me, as the saying goes [1]. As a manager / VP, it is your responsibility to set the product vision and goals. Engineers can't build / sales can't sell a great product if prospective clients are not interested, like putting an art gallery online [2].

Additionally, having no personal stake in the product allows developers / engineers to be more objective and professional. This is a problem that most junior engineers will face at some point, and most senior engineers will easily recognize. You put so many hours and so much work into a new project that you start to make it part of your identity. You can see this in a few consumer products like the Xbox One launch, where Microsoft employees received special Xboxs that had "I MADE THIS" branded on the device [3].

But for most companies engineers and developers have very little influence over the product's specifications - they're simply asked to build a thing already specc'd to hell by PM's, VP's, legal, ADA, and other groups within your organization. So if the joint effort of all those groups results in the product failing before it even hits a developers' desk, why should their compensation be impacted?

The best way to tie development teams to the product is by offering bonuses when the product succeeds. But for some odd reason many companies don't want to do that.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U

[2]: http://paulgraham.com/worked.html

[3]: https://www.neowin.net/news/heres-the-best-look-yet-at-the-w...

To me, the yoga class example is the kind that people can see and point judging fingers at (i.e. images of youthful people in yoga clothes stretching in a nicely lit yoga studio).

Expecting your employees to work weekends to meet your vision (especially if without a clear reward system for doing so) sounds like a much more profound form of entitlement.

Disclosure: Long time Googler, and my experience with managers at Google has rarely been like the author of the article. When it has, I've voted with my feet and changed projects, or avoided projects like that altogether.

Early on in my career I believed the mantra that managers shoulder more risk, so that is why they deserve higher compensation. But in my 30 year career I have never seen anyone in my management chain face legal trouble. At most managers were fired, same as regular employees.

Very high level position hiring tends to be slower than lower positions, so you could argue that that is the reason the VP salary should be higher. But the compensation is so out of whack that this doesn't hold water either. Companies could save a lot of money if they paid employees more uniform compensation, and when firing someone, the compensation package would be proportional to how long a person in that position typically takes to find the next job. So maybe an engineer would get a month, and a VP 6 months equivalent of salary.

I understand having to work late a day or two because there's an outage, or a feature needs to be done ASAP, but I'm taking those hours back the next day.

Also, not sure about others, but I'm wildly productive when working up to 8 hours daily, and my productivity goes out the window if I work more than that for prolonged periods of time, because I get burned out real quick. (Actually, even with up to 8 hours I need regular vacations)

And being passionate about my work has absolutely nothing to do with that. (I try to work at places where I'm very passionate about it)

Did you write another object relational manager or another functional programming is great, stop using C++ post?

I wish the conversation was more about how technology was moved forward and how it benefited people using the products based on that tech.

Some of this I think is caused by power imbalances in the employee-employer relationship, prevailing attitudes in SV about acceptable limits of speech and the inability to discuss this freely at workplace due to the lack of trust. So it spills over into anonymous HN and Blind.

This is a great example of the difference between startup people and big company people. A big-company exec would have known to (how to?) fight that battle. Waze was a superior product, while Maps just had superior resources: they should have built support. But there's no mention of other execs.

As a big company guy, I read this and think "oh man..." - I can only _imagine_ how frustrated this guy must be

Perhaps this can be true for founders/founding employees with significant stock.

Do employees 15 onwards (i.e. the majority of employees working in successful startups) really have so much stock so as to pour their hearts into the company?

Also, this post completely destroyed my desire to use Waze, and makes me question if they are really good stewards of our location data given how much time was spent complaining about policies.

When you sell your startup to Big Tech, your employees have "made it". They won't work so hard. They're set for life. That's the reality. Move on. Especially don't begrudge them their success. Start something new.

That level of entitlement is incredible. I feel very fortunate to make a well above average salary, and I keep reminding myself that it's unusual, and that I should increase my savings for when the faucet is eventually turned off

I find that people who make this comparison are usually highly un-empathetic, and are not as decent in their hearts as they their own self-image suggests.

#1: Words matter. I used to think they didn't either. "It's just words". But they matter. That "slur" that you absentmindedly threw out as a joke or a throwaway line in a non-serious context? Someone had that used against them in the past in a threatening, hurtful, aggressive manner. It's not a joke to them. So why should they be forced to endure reliving a past trauma just because you didn't bother updating your slang since the 90's?

#2: When you get down deep enough, you find a lot of time these folks have worse things going on in their hearts than they let on. Even in this example. "So long as your pronouns are correct" makes me think this person thinks preferred pronouns are a ridiculous waste of time, and are irrelevant. Just what I can infer from their analogy.

Which makes me think that this person is not an ally or a supporter of trans/non-binary folks, and his problems go far deeper than just using the "wrong words".

Look for this blogpost to be quoted by Google in one of their antitrust defences.

The only thing worse than not putting the user first when you build consumer products is having a core attribute of your Googley culture be "put the user first" and not do it.

> After the acquisition, we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.

What? Respecting the privacy and info-rights of your users provides zero value? BigCorp's data policies exist for a reason, one important of which is the law. People (aka his users) clearly valued these things enough to make them the law, so how does complying with what they want provide zero value.

This perspective (along with the others pointed out in this thread) betrays what I suspect is a disconnect between what the author defines as "value" and what I and I hope most reasonable people believe makes for a better world. If things like privacy, the ability to take personal days, not having to listen to biased or offensive speech from a superior, etc don't have value, then what does? At a deeper level, it's sad that we have to fight against this all the time. Somehow our society has come to so highly reward these sorts of narrow-minded "value-creators"to the detriment of everything that they don't consider "value".

He lost me here.

Grouping "young people" -- an entirely arbitrary delineation -- and calling them entitled is typical agist bullshit. Just because one person wants to work like a dog, doesn't mean others who don't are entitled.

Check yourself jerk.

> 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.

This is the reason why I refuse to work for managers who work outside of business hours AND expect others to be available then too. Working like a dog permeates a toxic work environment where everything is a competition and zero-sum.

For the vast majority of people, work is an avenue to a better work. It's just a job. I think generally the people we consider "successful" worked themselves out. However, there is survivor bias here as well that needs to be called out. For every 1 burned out "successful" workers, there's 99 that failed, and many that probably have some form of trauma.

In reality, in large-corp you can cruise and still be in the top <5% by income and wealth. I have nothing against people who want that as long as they recognize their privilege. I don't call them entitled, I just call them people.

Lastly, I'm glad Noam Bardin wrote this post because it's very indicative of the kind of person he is. I will run far and fast away from every working with him.

"No one buys technology, you buy a team and a way of doing things."

If the author means in the sense of what a big company like Google is purchasing, that's kind of correct (though there's no guarantee the company sees it as in their best interest to keep that team or way of doing things together).

If the author means in terms of why a company like Google purchases another company... That's only one reason. Here's a short list of additional reasons I'm aware of Google has bought a company:

- To acquire the data (and agreements to share data) a company has built up over the years

- To acquire a company's customers (big in the ad space; traditional advertising is a trust network, and the easiest way to get into the inner circle of big client service is to buy someone who's already serving big clients)

- To remove a competitor from the field of companies in a space

- To acquire the team that built something Google wants to build fast (this is a gamble; Google's in-house, NIH-ist software stack is an absolute space alien, and teams that built something Google wants will likely have to rebuild it atop that stack while simultaneously limping along their existing tech stack that already does the thing but that Google has immediately labeled "DEPRECATED DO NOT EXPAND UNTRUSTED SOFTWARE WE DIDN'T BUILD THE KERNEL THIS IS RUNNING ON").

As an owner thinking of selling to Google, I have no idea if you know which of these they're thinking of your company as. But it's worth noting that many of those reasons don't imply your company will stick around as an independent coherent entity in Google (or even that Google intends to hire all your employees).

is this common at FAANG? i've never had anything close to an HR complaint in 8 years

I disagree. Having well thought out, auditable processes around how you handle data and user privacy is also part of focusing on the user and also part of delivering a good product. Sure you might want to focus on shipping “value” with bells, whistles, and features, but the old-school mentality that one can ignore these other aspects of technology and move quickly and cavalierly is arguably exactly why the push for regulation is so hard right now—the pendulum is swinging the other way precisely because this myopic view of things is so dangerous.

I found this surprising. I thought this was primarily a problem in union / government positions.

So what he is saying is that he wouldn’t have done it if he wasn’t forced to. Perhaps there’s a lesson here about what sort of organizations are trustworthy custodians of data and what sort of organizations are not.

I recognize every brand on there and know at least a little bit what their consumer-facing products are... except waze (until now).

I realize it might just be me, but I wonder if this is some kind of vanity graphic?

(I have been at a company that would periodically pay for brand surveys, that would always tell us how great our brand was doing. I don’t think there was anything explicitly untoward going on, but I think the consultants were finding a way to tell us what we wanted to hear. I wonder if they same is going on here?)

This quote really hit home:

at the end of every day, I always ask myself "what did I do for our users today". This simple exercise helps keep priorities straight. When I found myself avoiding this question because I was embarrassed by the answer, I knew my time was up.

If it prevented a data leak or a security incident, I'd argue that it did actually provide value to your users.

At some point, you have to do the non-trendy infrastructure work, skyscrapers aren't built with bricks.

sips coffee

I'm going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too.

Pretty quickly debunks the idea of being better able to grow with a bigger budget from a 'mothership'. The constraints from the mothership create more drag than the extra budget creates lift.

I might not enjoy working for him (but I could be wrong -I often am), but I completely sympathize with him, and his essay gave me a good window into the current SV mindset. I am glad to read his empathy for folks that don't have it as good as he does, and I suspect he has it pretty good. I don't encounter that kind of awareness too often, and it's nice to hear, from a C-level. He seems to have both feet planted firmly on the ground.

I worked for some fairly "stolid" corporations, for most of my career. It was not a particularly enjoyable experience, the whole time, but it taught me a lot of things about Integrity, Loyalty, personal Honor and Consistency. I was never paid FAANG wages, but was, nevertheless, able to build up enough of a "nest egg" to get to the point where I don't need to work, if I don't want to. I'm currently working with a 501(c)(3) startup, not making a dime, and working harder than I ever have in my life.

And loving it. I currently feel as if it has all been worth it.

The thing that really bothers me, is that the entire tech industry is now built around engineers remaining at a company for 18 months. I was talking to a Facebook manager, some time ago, and he was boasting about being at FB for longer than he had ever worked anywhere.

"How long was that?" I asked.

"27 months."

I worked at my last company for 27 years. It has drawn a lot of sneers from current SV denizens, but I'm proud of my record. I went places that people have no concept of. I worked at a level of trust, for a conservative, classic Japanese corporation, that few Americans ever experience, and my tenacity and Integrity had a lot to do with it.

When high turnover is endemic, it has a huge impact on architecture, corporate culture, productivity, hiring, and, at the end of it all, product quality.

I tend to design fairly large, heterodox, infrastructure systems. They take months and years to develop and refine, and I expect them to last for years. I have written software architectures that are still in use after 25 years (albeit greatly changed).

In my experience, "letting go" is vital. I spent ten years developing and refining a project that I turned over to a new team, about three years ago, and walked away completely, so they don't have the "Grandpa can't let go" thing happening. They have done very, very well. My being there would have destroyed a decade's worth of work. Instead, they built out my infrastructure into something amazing.

Walking away also gave me the luxury of working on new stuff. I'm in the middle of refactoring a server system that I wrote two years ago. It lay fallow until the project I'm working on now, and it has aged very, very well. I look forward to, one day, turning it all over to someone else, and walking away to new horizons.

Back in 2006 I referred a former co-worker to Google. He quit after a year or so, and this was one of his complaints.

Our joke was "This foie gras is TERRIBLE. Just terrible".

Yes they literally served foie gras!

Wow. It would have to tie into making upper management Pay-for-performance linked to similar metrics ;-)

Why should the employee care about "users" if their equity doesn't increase in value based on those users?

Like--its as simple as that, don't blame the employees for being entitled here.

If my equity isn't related to my job then they're not "my users", and I'm not a true owner of the product.

Their support was not crushing you. How many serious Waze competitors are there these days?

You are getting acquired, for God's sake. You are under Google's scrutiny and Google will be accountable for what you do - even legally. So yes, there are going to be legal issues. Yes, Google is going to involve itself and it is going to follow those policies.

Basically such startup founders want to have the cake and eat it as well. Want to get all the economic benefits of the acquisition, then leverage google in customer acquisition perks etc. but still want google to leave them alone. NO matter how much promise is there pre-acquisition, it is just not going to happen. And that is the way it should be.

If they want money with independence, ask google to fund them like a VC instead of asking for an acquisition.

...yet I imagine verifying a feature is not actually illegal is a fairly good use of time.

General attitude that comes out of it to me, is that your employees growth doesn’t matter, only his vision of product matters. He complains about people being entitled, and at the same time he complains that as CEO of subsidiary of one of the biggest company in the world, he cannot say offensive things in his talks.

And most entitled one - he’s sold his company (that he actually didn’t own, from the beginning, like with most startups) and he cannot control it fully anymore? And complaining that he cannot fire people on the spot?

He should check his entitlement before complaining about other being entitled by not wanting to put his product vision above their wellbeing.

On other levels, though, just fuck him. His mindset is the typical rationalization of normalizing employee exploitation. If you want cult-like devotion to the cause, build a coop; the minute you take away real ownership of the fruits of one's labour, it is unreasonable to ask for personal sacrifice to any significant degree. You tell me how much you pay me for what, and I'll do "the what", not "the what but something extra too, just because".

As for Google, they now look a lot like early-2000s Microsoft (both inside and outside), but this we kinda knew already.

This is a rather dangerous thought process that reflects the skewed view that some Americans have of employment: that anything less than 'Great' should be considered fire-worthy. Employment security is pushed to its exploitative limit. In such cases, employees react commensurately. Employee and employers end up in relationship that encourages churn & hopping jobs the second that your value exceeds your compensation.

> fast moving and changing needs

I find it hard to believe that a behemoth like Google has that many of these. In new product teams, sure. But, there is a shit load of maintence / upkeep / feature-iteration work that mostly requires sufficiently competent and experienced engineers. But, not much more.

> traditional tech model of risk reward

I am not sure if this was ever true for big tech. The second a company was is big enough to be in S&P 500, no low level IC is ever going to have visible impact to the company's stock bottom line.

The idea that a foot soldier's compensation was ever reflective of their impact is and has always been a lie.

> That tolerance is gone at Google and “words” > “content” is the new Silicon Valley mantra of political correctness. You can say terrible things as long as your pronouns are correct or can say super important things but use one wrong word and it's off to HR for you

That's a shame. I was hoping that the media outburst on these matters were that of a minority. But, it appears that this dogma has taken over Google culture at large.

> When I was growing up in Tech in the ‘90’s - there was no such thing as work life balance. We loved what we did and wanted to succeed so we worked like crazy to achieve great things. As I had kids, I learned the importance of being at home for them and that's how I understood Work Life balance - its a balance, sometimes you need to work weekends and nights, sometimes you can head out early or work from home

I am not sure I can take this serious. This is not what Work Life balance means AT ALL. Maybe that's because I am one of the younger folk.

> the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. Soon, Lawyers > Builders and the builders will need to go elsewhere to start new companies.

This appears to be well recognized cycle for big companies in every sector. I would characterize the Ballmer era of MSFT as a somewhat similar time too.

Good points and a good read. But, if you want start up culture, work at a startup...I guess.

Of the many lies in business, the most blatant is when a company tells you they'll give you autonomy that they aren't required to give you.

Proceeds to continue complaining about working at Google.

Didn't allow, didn't read.

Yeah, I dont like Sushi either. Not sure why not liking Sushi is entitlement, but as I said, normal food tastes better.

There is no balance when you love.

As someone who originally worked 3 years of retail, I can relate to this feeling. To be clear, I don't (and did not) advocate for working on weekends or any crap like that but I had that feeling of looking over my shoulder in fear for quite a long time.

As a bit of context, retail has slow creep to it where it can slowly consume your life if you're not careful. Everything is always understaffed so "Can you please just work another day" starts out as a feel good "I want to help" but quickly turns into an implicit expectation. If you start turning it down, nothing happens but socially, you feel like you're letting the team down.

A lot of it comes from the feeling of "We're the underdogs", even if it's intra-store such as the storemen (people who work in the loading bays) being understaffed and feeling like the underdogs compared to the grocery/longlife department.

Anyway, when I started out in tech, I was arguably pretty paranoid and couldn't understand why everyone seemed so nice (in comparison). What do you mean there's a gym? How can you just wander upstairs to the vending machine or to go for a nap without restrictions? I never outright asked these things and I understood it on a business and social level but I could never overcome the feeling that I'd get caught out one day and held up as letting everyone down in some way.

I suppose it helps to point out that at the bottom end, a night shift worker had doused themselves in petrol only to not have it in them to follow through. My manager (23 at the time as was I) told me the story in the morning, he ended his recount by chuckling and saying "I guess he couldn't even do that right".

While my current employer is more traditional (read: corporate) to some extent, I sort of wish I had taken more advantage of those opportunities, even if I didn't understand them. I'm sure having a nap every so often would probably help. I can confirm that, as someone who is simply an average developer, that not taking breaks doesn't really seem to be very effective, haha.

Beats me if this comment is insightgul in anyway but I guess something something work life balance is good?

One last thing: Something I found fascinating recently is that Dave Cutler (the NT kernel architect) always took his holidays religiously. That surprised me given my false assumption is that someone who churns out that much work (and is considered a craftsman) must surely be going all out. Personally I hate the idea of hustle culture but it's hard not to be affected by it.

If anyone can speak to the philosophy behind people who also religiously take holidays, I mean, on one hand it's clearly obvious that rest is good but I feel like it'd be helpful to read more about it anyway as someone who has struggled greatly actually relaxing :)

The trouble is, the problem is in my life I always see a person getting fired and the solution remaining, the problem being a process and an inability to both see and be able to resolve said issue.

The horror here being both the problem remains and youve been unethical to fire someone who did not deserve it. Which will only create problems down the line.

I believe this is why I feel if I was ever in the position where someone I hire is not right, I continue trying to make it work until I have tried many different solutions. If it still fails, I tell them they are great in they ways they were and explain I want to part ways, and I make sure expectations are made.

My only experience has been with short contracts, but if I wanted to part with someone who I was sure was a problem I would not even consider trying to within a 2 year period, its just unethical.

If I cant make it work within 2 years, well then we all tried. I dont know if this is the right approach but I believe it would both help in giving time to find and fixing the right problem, the right way.

tldr; firing is not cool

Let us not forget that industry heads have colluded to suppress pay for engineers. Let us not forget that in general, executives act as though we should be grateful for our pay, rather than being remunerated for building the systems that pour money into their bank accounts. Their compensation is a fact of life, just the way it is. Ours is a handout from the generous leadership team to the undeserving peons.

Even the "just a job" framing is a form of entitlement; I should not have employees who simply do a job for a wage, they should really care about that job. And if they have moved from a place of really caring to simply "doing a job", that isn't the fault of leadership or a symptom of the organization. Those people are just, you know, entitled.

Few good things in this but I found the remark about weekends a bit much.

I chose a career in a space I don't need to work weekends.

And none of it is luck. It's careful planning 20 years in the making.

Ugh, this refuted myth again?

The “insecure, bad leader who blames subordinates for their own failures” meter is going off the charts with this one.

Took you a while to notice the hazing hats huh bud?

ASSHOLE - Waze employees are probably saying good riddance.

Read: The promise wasn't spelled out in the contract. And whoever has experience in organizational politics knows that if it's not put in writing, it effectively wasn't said.

> Distribution - we quickly learned, the hard way, that we could get no distribution from Google. Any idea we had was quickly co-opted by Google Maps.

I know that "hindsight is 20/20", but if you have certain expectations from the purchase, why didn't you put the key items in the contract? This is not some minor loophole that you missed.

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

I very much doubt this. But:

> or there is a better person out there or just plain old. This neuters managers

So, the guy basically wanted to totally lord over people and be able to fire them essentially at will, or worse. Can't say that I'm very sympathetic here.

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> The only control you have to increase your economic returns are whether you get promoted since that drives your equity and salary payments. ... this breaks the traditional tech model of risk reward.

I thought you wanted people who were focused on the product and what helps users, not on maximizing their already-quite-high compensation?

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> I ... began wearing a corporate persona

Now, this I can very much identify with and commiserate. Of course, for me, I need a corporate persona the moment I'm hired anywhere, since unlike you, I'm not high-up in the hierarchy.