"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."
Good quote. Although you can extend the lawyers theme out to the rest of the bureaucratic corp too.
I think like 1/3 of the people I knew there who got promotions got it purely off of visibility and not actual customer impact. In one case they literally dumped an unfinished API on Chrome users before it was finished and then after collecting their promotion, abandoned it to let other people clean up the mess. In other cases schedules were compressed or important features were cut so that we could "ship" in time for the next promo round. So frustrating.
> 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.
I think this guy missed the memo that Google bought Waze to put them out to pasture. They were the only real competition to Google Maps and were acquired to ensure Google Maps monopoly. Waze shipping features and winning in the marketplace would be a bad thing. I think a lot of his post stems from missing this.
Hard to align that perspective with his acknowledgement that Waze was allowed to operate independently, and the fact that Waze has been launching lots of new features for the last few years.
>All of our growth at Waze post acquisition was from work we did, not support from the mothership. Looking back, we could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently had we stayed independent.
He also details the constraints and additional burdens imposed by corporate as well the overall lack of support.
In that section of the article, he was talking about marketing and partnership limitations that are imposed by being a part of a larger conglomerate. This has little to do with feature development.
That doesn't support any claims of "putting them out to pasture". Is Microsoft "putting Github out to pasture" by taking a hands off approach and letting them keep doing their own thing?
It's not about the hands off approach or letting them do their own thing. It's about their long term goals. Microsoft wants GitHub to be successful while Google wanted Google Maps to succeed.
Unless they interfere with scheduled meetings, I can’t see why this would bug you as a manager. Pair programming, counting hours for clients, or sprint planning are the only other things that could possibly conflict with last minute personal days. It doesn’t really seem to bug the managers at my organization if there are no calendar conflicts.
If there are calendar items that have to be rescheduled, I think the onus is on them to find an alternative time
I have often heard personal days are to be used if say, you can't get to work due to transportation issues or if your child is home from school. If they aren't to be used that way how do they differ from vacation days?
Sick days are last-minute days for when you are ill.
Personal days are last-minute days for when, say, a pipe breaks in your apartment and you have to spend the day dealing with the mess. Or any other non-medical reason you have to be a person and not an employee for a day.
To be honest, if people are not told they need to give advanced notice for using their time off they often won't - especially when nobody else does.
Obviously, it's not always possible to give advanced notice (illness or other unforseen circumstances), so most employers require a brief explanation when advanced notice isn't possible - "Sick kid," "car trouble," "illness," etc.
These are normal policies, but they must be formal policies and communicated to employees.
If those policies are in place and you have people violating them - then it becomes an HR issue, with formal reprimanded, so a low level manager shouldn't have to complain about it.
If you're running deadlines so tight or your bench is so shallow that any employee ducking out a day here and there is causing big problems, you have a planning/staffing problem.
The spontaneous employee vacation days are just making that problem more obvious.
I mean, there’s an upper bound on how often that can happen (how many personal days people have). Those days are intended to be used at short notice. So if people using them is a problem for the team, imo the team is not correctly matched to the workload.
I do think we often undersize our teams by ignoring the impact of vacation and personal time in taking on work ... but that’s not the fault of the people using the time they are entitled to as part of their compensation.
Uh. I mean. I see it. I’m not from here, I just live here. I came from the EU where 20 vacation days was the minimum to a state in the US where no vacation or personal time is required. I’m still blown away by what companies advertise as “generous”.
Maybe calm down with the assumptions and generalizations too though.
I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with leave days and team sizes; those things are probably perfectly fine.
The issue is:
> 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.
but, also...
> Yes, there is a challenge of how to compensate when there is no equity upside...
The complaint here is that people don't have 'skin in the game', so they dont care if the product succeeds, because it makes to difference to them; so they're taking personal days in a way that disrupts the (probably totally arbitrary) timelines and plans they have.
...so I mean, it's probably fair to say that if people are taking leave in a way that is disruptive, then that's more of an indicator that the team culture is totally screwed up than that there aren't enough people.
If one person wants to 'win' and everyone else a) doesn't care, b) that person has no power to punish them if the product doesn't 'win', c) there's no benefit to them personally if it does 'win'... well, its never going to work out for that one person in the long run.
If you treat people like resources I imagine its hard when they dont function like you want them to, consider treating them as humans (like you and me!) and you might just understand that they need some unexpected time off now and then.
I mean, are the employees required to give advanced notice if possible? Are absences expected to be explained? You can't hold employees up to an expectation without telling them that it's an expectation.
Are your deadlines so tight that any time off, even planned time off that corespondents to the employee's allotted vacation days would put you behind? If so then it's an indication the issue is with the project being understaffed or not staffed with the proper personnel, or the deadlines being unrealistic.
Are you requiring Herculean effort and unpaid overtime regularly? If so your employees are going to eventually breakdown and need a day to recharge. Sidenote: I've noticed some people are happy to work optional paid overtime but unhappy to work mandatory unpaid overtime.
Are your employees regularly missing so many days to the point they are regularly taking leave without pay and not getting prior approval? That is an upper management/HR issue.
Your job as a manager should be to ensure that things don't fall apart if people get sick. If there is a critical process managed by a single person then you failed as a manager.
In every single work I was at people sometimes took a day off next day. It is not like everyone would had infinite amount of days off - it was never a massive problem.
Once in a while someone is missing. Typically, rest of team moves on through their day normally.
I do have the same issue, but since I work in corporate, I have to think about everything I say or write within company. I still do curse a lot when communicating within closest people in my team(which are mostly developers) and noone minds. We even share the hate for the corporate forced politeness together with some.
If you are serious about not being able to not curse if you get excited you may be better off talking to a psychologist than asking the internet for advice.
Have you tried using made-up or downgraded curse words? Fracked, frelled, dren, sparks, slontz, gorram, jagweeds, cheese&crackers, crackers&toast, etc?
It will probably make you feel silly, but you can meditate on it being literally no sillier than using actual curse words to pepper your ordinary speech.
Detaching and reflecting is a good practice, especially where swearing is a verbal crutch for yet-to-be-refined thoughts. Give it a moment, dispassionately and accurately frame the thought. In the end, what you say will be much more direct, and far more useful to everybody involved.
Also consider swears like farts in a relationship. A well-chosen place and time, dropping one is hilarious. All the time though, you just stink.
I find the idea that the best paid people in the industry are entitled to be a bit rich.
Clearly there is unmet demand for quality engineers or you wouldn't be paying that much and allowing perks to dictate the balance of life equation so royally.
Maybe we're not paid enough.
It's like you're welcome to pay less, watch the talent dry up and move on.
I'm sure you'll be fine?
Doesn't Google still make roughly 150x what their employees are paid?
Agreed, I suspect were massively underpaid but companies get away with it because we're also love what we do and are easily take advantage of when we're young and naive
Nothing he is saying is wrong, but this is entitlement as a VP : blaming everything on "corporate" rather than accepting your responsibility as a leader to fix those problems.
Another billionaire talking about others having entitlement issues.
Insert line about smelling their own.
This blog post is yet another confirmation for me that similar to how we can have infinitely big small numbers, we can have infinitely verbose rambles around small ideas.
I don't believe complaints about covid reductions to perks are unique to tech or well paid jobs however. My father is a slightly above minimum wage factory worker. There was plenty of grumbling in there when they shut down the 50% subsidised canteen with covid too.
Just because you're well compensated it doesn't mean you shouldn't be fighting for your perks. Especially when you work for a multibillion corpo which earns 1mil+ per employee.
This "you shouldn't complain if you have it a bit better than others" mindset is a breeding ground for all kinds of corporate exploitation.
Why don't these employees take their high skills, work for $30k/year for 100/hours per week, take no days off and like it?
This guy is hopelessly out of touch. You work to live, not the other way around.
As for misaligned incentives, this is how it is throughout the corporate world - it's not exclusive to Google or other big tech companies. As one of the guys who puts the team on his back and works hard for the users, the reality is that doing a good job does not benefit me in the slightest. My executives care about the number of tickets and new features we churn through. I don't get paid for retention; I don't get paid more for writing good code; I don't get paid more if we get new customers. The only way I get paid more is if I get promoted. What's my motivation to work as hard as I do? My only motivations should be getting promoted or getting a new job.
The only reason any of us work for these companies is for money and benefits. We don't care about your mission statement; and neither do these executives, or they would change the incentives. It's a purely business arrangement: we agree to work X hours per week for Y dollars in total compensation under Z conditions. It's in our interest to reduce X, improve Y and Z. It's the employer's interest to do the opposite - but the employer also cares about other variables, such as retention, total revenue, total profit and costs.
Another chapter in the book of tales from the big tech ivory tower where on some days the cake" wasn't ok but still pretty good". Fair game in a personal blog, although barely newsworthy.
Not sure why everyone is assuming Noam is a billionaire. He mentioned he had little equity, and from what I could find that amounted to single-digit millions out of the acquisition's billion-dollar price tag. Of course, compensation since then and Google's rising market capitalization have surely increased that, but I would bet it's still quite far off from the billion, and even far off from the 9 digits.
Not that it matters — his observations are just as valid regardless of his net worth.
When people say "billionaire" in this line of comments they are trying to point out the perceived hypocrisy that Noam is likely VERY well off... even having a few million dollars can set your family up for life. You are immediately in the top 1% in the US which puts you even higher anywhere else in the globe.
Noam could never pick up a job again and he will have likely made more money than the average US worker will in their lifetime.
His observation of scorn at employees who are well-compensated NOT jumping at the opportunity to work weekends to get something done for users is a sign of privilege (and probably also a sign of his drive, which is commendable) and maybe a little lack of empathy.
This is overstated. As a new hire, sure they put one on my desk but there was 0 pressure to wear it. They didn't even pressure me to attend the TGIF that week (I didn't)
I had to read that sentence a couple of times but I think it’s just poorly worded. He’s not saying that the person is old, he’s saying that the reason for wanting to fire them “you are not doing a great job”, is a “plain old” reason
I'm 99.9% sure OP the author didn't mean that people should be fired for being old. I agree that the phrasing is open to misinterpretation, but I read it as "plain-old not doing a great job"
Another "leader" who complains about employees wanting work life balance and they are extremely entitled. These are the type of managers you want to avoid. I'm sure many Googlers are happy you left.
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.
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).
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> "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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Known Waze practically since inception (I'm from Israel) always carry a grudge for mis-advertise themselves as "open data" and eventually go on to privatize the platform (which was originally built on OSS) and hijack and delete OSM Israel data.
What? How did they do that? I'm not an OpenStreetMap but I thought that sort of "privatization / removal of crowdsourced data" could not be done if not globally...
This was a long time ago, maybe my wording is off, probably along the lines of stopped contributing data to OSM and changed it's license for the data after a certain point..
It was so hard for him to act like an adult and be considerate about the way he speaks. Such a tragedy requiring immense sacrifice from this poor soul.
Maybe others could consider growing "thicker skins", not applying their personal standard to everyone equally, and not getting offended at every single (and/or little) opportunity. Exposure therapy is a wonderful thing.
"None"? Really? At the very least you can't control where you are born and what language you learn as a child...two extremely important factors in deciding whether you end up in a cushy tech job.
Do companies actually find themselves tons of employees that care so deeply about their mission that they sacrifice pay, equity, promotions, life interests, weekends, and benefits for "the cause"?
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.
> Do companies actually find themselves tons of employees that care so deeply
No, but they find tons of employees who really need a job and hate job-hunting, so once they get in they'll do what it takes to keep the paycheck going. This is particularly common in sectors where the median hire can be young, like... the software industry.
I doubt it, since I believe recognition and impact on outcomes are highly relevant to someone feeling motivated to go above and beyond in a corporation. When a team scales, the hierarchy becomes dithered and camaraderie decreases overall, resulting in the "mission" meaning different things to different people. This ultimately results in an 80% of people who do as much work as they need to so they don't get fired, a 10% on one end that does a crapton of work, and 10% who work as little as possible. Even the former 10% can only work so hard before their performance is perceived as a threat to the rest of the team whom simply can't keep up their pace.
There will be a few people, but companies like this will look for "passionate" people, or people who are good at pretending to be passionate to get paid.
The author has a hard time telling apart what works, vs what aligns with his personality and energy levels.
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.
Yeah, my contract stipulates my working hours are monday to friday. This is what we agreed to when I started working. I will make an exception if the system is on fire (but don't expect me at 9am on Monday after it), but not for a management imposed deadline looking like it will be missed. That just encourages setting tighter deadlines to get more work out of employees.
> “ 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. This neuters managers and does not lead to great teams, driven by mission, pushing each other to do better.”
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.
I would like to hear the refutation because I've witnessed this myself in corporate environments. Corporate HR are difficult to deal with, they're very process orientated and risk averse, getting rid of someone reflects poorly on you and your management structure basically doesn't care if there's 1 useless person in your team. You have to put a huge amount of work in to document and justify why the person is not qualified for the job and (in my country) you've got to make a reasonable effort to find another role for them, and if you do start this process with HR it creates documentation that means no one will ever take them if they do want to transfer.
Start to end you're probably talking about ~6 months to get rid of someone and over that time you need an intense process of setting them targets and documenting failing to meet expectations. The result is that most managers are more likely to try and shuffle their bad engineers into other teams than to actually give up a big chunk of their time doing this process. Not to mention the fact it puts you in a very awkward positioning having a working relationship with the person you're getting rid of.
“Putting effort into helping low performers improve or find better fitting roles” is called “leadership.”
It’s mind-blowing that you see a 6 month investment in just doing basic leadership 101 as a massive bureaucratic hassle. I think it’s safe to say that the low performer you’re referring to is not actually the real problem.
It's how it works at most big companies. There's a very big impact to morale if people think they'll get sacked at the end of a big project or if VP's best friend needs a job. The normal way to onboard a new better person is to open up a new position, like repurposing an open headcount from somewhere else, and then shift responsibilities between the new person and old person.
It's certainly a lot harder to fire people than at a startup. You need multiple review cycles with poor ratings, a Performance Improvement Plan, more review cycles of bad ratings, etc. But most people don't want to hang on through that, so they leave since it just sucks to be on a team where you are not valued. But you can definitely hang on for 18 months pretty easily with everyone unhappy with your work if you want to.
So it's not really the same as government jobs where you really can't be fired, but it's very different from a startup where everything can be going fine, you lose a big customer and a week later 10% of the company is gone to keep the burn rate low.
Considering his other values, the question here might be if he couldn't fire people for reasons the rest of the corporation considers normal - like taking time off, not working on weekends or similar.
For someone trying to do that, it might look like its "impossible for fire someone".
There's a pervasive belief by managers that involuntarily working weekends for an extended period of time will increase rather than decrease the total work done, and that engineering output can be measured in "hours", that I find absolutely ridiculous.
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.
I guess you probably heard that classic joke that the (project) manager is the person who thinks that a baby can be produced and delivered in a single month given nine women to do it.
It's from Frederick Brooks' book, "The Mythical Man-Month", the earliest good book on management of software projects. "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned."
I assume you don't really believe getting a job at google qualifies you as superhuman, but just want to reiterate, getting a job at google does not make you superhuman and IMO has a lot more to do with time and place than raw ability...
//I assume you don't really believe getting a job at google qualifies you as superhuman// - No
//just want to reiterate, getting a job at google does not make you superhuman// Agree
I am just tired of people whose entire self image is based on "I work/worked at Google". I know value of getting job there but it is time they stop "why I leave Google" and start "What am I contributing to humanity as an individual?"
> This counted on the fact that Google had promised us autonomy to continue to act as Waze and we more or less believed them.
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.
---------------
> 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.
---------------
> 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?
---------------
> 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.
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.
I've spent some time working for Israeli tech companies (both in Israel and remote) and this guy's attitude does not surprise me at all.
> 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.
That seems like an unfair interpretation to me.
The guy wants to be able to do what's best for the team. We've all worked with that one guy who shouldn't be there, but is.
>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.
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.
"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 - we balance the needs of the employee and the company."
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.
Contrary to popular belief, kids are not some tamagotchi pet that needs constant attention and helicoptering after they're babies. You can perfectly be a good parent and raise independent well minded kids without needing two parents always present every moment of every weekend.
No, but until they're mid-teens, they do need one parent most of the time. If one of them is working weekends a lot, then that assumes the other one is available to parent.
Sounds exorbitant tbh. After they're seven or eight it's not clear why they need constant direct supervision (as opposed to being in another room minding ones business). What are we afraid of?
And this is a good enough reason to expect people to work on the weekend? Kids are not some tamagotchi pet that exists as it is for a long time... kids are constantly growing and if you blink, you miss it. Some people would rather spend their weekends with their kids for purposes other than just keeping them alive.
I'm not advocating we work full weekends, but I'm not sure why I would not have a few hours for myself and do things that don't involve my kids. Some weekend's it would be work but other weekend's it might be something else, but it surely doesn't have to be 24/2 just kids kids?
Of course if you blink you miss them, it's not like you're in a cave across the world, you're probably literally in the next room staring at a screen for a couple hours after a heavy lunch while the kids play on their ps5. How's that weird.
It definitely does not! And clearly we are different people! I would love nothing more than to grab a drink with you sometime and learn from each other though!
That implies then that there will indeed be weekends where your boss expects you to work, your spouse is working, you cannot, and therefore you “fail”.
Also why doesn't balance mean "now you've earned an extra hour or two mid-day for yoga, 0 judgement"? I call it the "retail-worker mentality" when I point it out in friends. It isn't meant to deride retail workers, but to draw attention to the inhumane people and conditions they live under. The conditions aren't justified at low pay nor high pay, and people need an impolite analogy to have this simple but life-changing epiphany. Just look at the deathbed surveys of happiness and regrets.
If I do good work for a rich, high-margin company, I'm going to act like it (towards the employer) and reap the rewards. Because if I don't, someone is, and they're up the chain, so let's pull those rewards back down a bit and reclaim our humanity, ok? This isn't entitlement, this is taking the rewards I've had a hand in building rather than leaving them on the table and saying "thank you for letting me leave these extra 20% of rewards to you".
Separate from this, I might vehemently advocate politically for reversing the upwards redistribution of wealth to the tech elites (me), and that's not hypocritical. Hoping for Richard Stallman-level principaledness among the professional working public isn't the answer to political and social problems such as this, so let's not armchair and claim that working half your Saturdays moves the needle towards wealth fairness better than saying no and going home and taking the paycheck. Inconsistencies can coexist without resolution, and most of life is exactly that. If you can't live with it, then the answer is to quit, not routinely work Saturdays.
The company's budget has room for more staff if it's truly needed (it's not); my life budget of personal hours does not have room for more work, nor should it if my employer is among the wealthiest in human history.
Germany's auto-workers union negotiated a 28-hour workweek. Like them, we shouldn't be ashamed to rebalance our lives towards leisure, personal hobbies, personal relationships, etc, now that technology is so productive. In general, why is it wrong to favor broader participation in the fruits of human effort? I'll do my part by going home and taking the paycheck. Now I have more time and financial security to spread my politics if I want.
Elon Musk is right that companies and communities are fully and precisely the human-machine cyborgs of fiction, just at a different scale. Can that apparatus rebalance towards leisure etc? I think yes, so I'm taking my paycheck and going home early. It's not entitlement, it's living my valid and reasonable politics.
If this post seems off topic, then maybe you haven't thought all the way through what "sure, I can give you more hours of my life" means when you offer it to an employer. We might disagree on some or many points, but all of this post is directly relevant to that negotiation of hours.
> Also why doesn't balance mean "now you've earned an extra hour or two mid-day for yoga, 0 judgement"? I call it the "retail-worker mentality" when I point it out in friends.
A 28 hour workweek is fine if consistently applied. The daily 11am absence however, is likely treated with disdain because:
- doing mid-day yoga while I'm attending daily release engineering meetings to accommodate someone else's schedule slip is grating
- for some reason mid-day workouts are okay but leaving the office at 4pm isn't
Both of which is why it strikes many as slacking off.
This is an amazing post - it describes exactly how bad manager looks like and what kind of expectations does he have from his employees. No emergency PTO (despite being a benefit), ability to just get rid of people who don't suit him, cursing at people, not having a proper work/life balance. It just keeps on giving.
And all for what? A mapping application having features which really don't save lives 99% of the time.
I came exactly to say that, the guy is a nut job manager. Working weekend and probably being belittled by this guy while doing that, for what? A driving app, wow.
I agree with all of that except the swearing part. Is swearing in work a big deal in US? I'm Scottish (even worse Glaswegian) so perhaps have a skewed view.
No idea about US (I'd guess - yeah), but it's certainly a big deal here in continental Europe. I've also not seen anyone casually swear in London either.
It's considered quite unprofessional and aggressive.
Really? I've went to London office a couple of times and have had many colleagues there and they didn't seem notable different to Scots in terms of swearing.
Swearing just changes the dynamic when used in a professional setting (in the US). It is casual, widely interpretable use, generally negative language.
At worst, if targeted to a person, project, or role it immediately heightens the tension in the relationship.
At best, it is used to emphatically describe something ("this code is a bit shitty") but again because of swear words generally inflammatory nature it can be interpreted poorly.
It depends entirely on the context. If swears are being used in a way that even remotely touches on other employees or the company's products, then it's a huge morale drag.
Yelling out "Fuck!" because you just stubbed your toe on your desk, or because you've been stuck on a frustrating problem for awhile that you just can't solve, is fine. Saying "Why does team X's product suck so fucking much?" or "Why do you keep making this same fucking mistake?" is a huge problem.
It's not exactly about the swears per se, but about being overly negative / anti-collaborative. The OP post gives off the vibe of someone who prides themselves on being "brutally honest" in their feedback but which in fact really just comes off as being an asshole to most people.
My view on swearing in the workplace is that you can only do it if everyone who hears it is one of your immediate peers. Swearing down rank is an abuse of power (lower ranks are expected to be polite). Swearing up is a sign of immaturity (can’t contain emotions, etc).
Also swearing should only be used verbally and only in humorous ways: “this code I wrote is fubar” is ok, “Johnson is an asshole” is not.
In the article he says that whatever language he was using, HR was involved over it.
> I began racking up my HR complaints. I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG
He's not just swearing. He's an asshole. But he wants to blame the "PC brigade" for not letting him be an asshole, which he was used to when he had power over everyone else, including HR.
Swearing culture is definitely very different in the US compared to Scotland. I've noticed that people from the US have a tendency to say things like "heck" or "frick" because saying "hell" or "fuck" is seen as something that one ought to do. That's definitely not a thing in Scotland, where in my experience you're likely to hear far "worse" even in formal or professional contexts.
- An Englishman (England is culturally somewhere between the US and Scotland on this I think).
I'm sure it depends on the industry and the circumstances. Way back when, I worked in the US oil industry as an engineer and I remember one rig superintendent in particular who basically couldn't get out a sentence that wasn't punctuated with some cuss word or other. But even in the 90s in tech, some level of cussery was pretty normal. It's definitely true, at least at large companies (and events) these days, anything other than the very occasional f-bomb, especially in public is definitely frowned upon.
You don't "rack up HR complaints" for swearing at Google. You definitely have to be an asshole for that to happen. One HR complaint? Maybe it could have been unreasonable. But multiple HR complaints? The probability of him not being an asshole seriously diminishes.
US is a far more religious society. At least my religion expressly forbids cursing and swearing. I still kind of have a visible reaction when people curse, but I think it makes people regard me poorly, so I am trying to correct it.
Really depends on the sub-industry. In big pharma "That's not a good idea -- it's not going to work b/c blah blah blah" is a scathing rebuke. In games / media "What the fuck is going on with this server?" is background noise. I should say was the kids seem different to me -- maybe I'm out of touch.
I swear, a lot. I work in London finance. It very much depends on the company. I used to work for a clandestine hedge fund with a pretty crazy culture, and swearing was the way to communicate efficiently. I loved it, it fit my personality.
Now I get a letter from HR if I type "shit" on the team's slack channel. I also notice that people are "selectively offended"; they'll use profanity when it suits them, but if something genuinely ticks you off, and you happen to swear (not AT a person, but at things/concepts/in general) they try to use it as a bazooka against you. Try to make you lose all credibility because you said "it's fucked".
To me, as a non-british person (well, I'm British now, I guess, got my citizenship pre-brexit..) it's a super strange and touchy subject. However, I try to power through, being the "rude foreign guy" (rude as in rude language, not rude as in mean or vindictive), and that sort of works. Almost all of my colleagues just know that's what and who I am, I don't mean any offence, and really, nobody gets offended (unless it suits their strategic purposes). We all use a shitload of profanity in our day to day language anyway, so why the fuck would it be different in the office?
This guy is something else. That entitlement section was an eye opener. That stuff should be the norm. Felt like guilt tripping people at one of the most wealthy companies in the world because they don't have a job that treats them poorly.
Companies make a lot of money it should be spent on the people that make that money for the company.
Really? I'd rather you just paid me more, so I can use the money how I'd like, instead of coddling me with loads of benefits.
And then there's this: companies don't provide all this stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. They provide it because it means they can squeeze more out of you. Again, I might be able to get on board with that if it's a company I really want to work for, but I'd still rather they just pay me more instead.
I'm glad that this is the prevailing sentiment in this thread. At first, the article was just run of the mill complaints about Google culture but it took a nasty turn towards the end so I came looking for validation in the comments
A mapping application that frequently diverts traffic off the freeway into narrow residential roads, probably does the opposite of saving lives. In my experience, it doesn't even save time, just gives you a more complicated route
The warnings about objects on road etc. were probably good for safety. The routes are bad and dangerous - it's given me left turns across multiple lanes that never, ever stop before.
100% this! The work life balance section in particular was an eye opener.
I’m sure the Waze employees that were part of the acquisition have a _completely_ different perspective, and I bet they‘ve been much better off after the acquisition.
He is right on almost all of what he is saying regarding work life balance and such.
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.
> 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
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.
Many people simply can't hack startup culture. Corp 'culture' created by worthless (damaging) HR dept isn't even that -- its innovation poison. Perfect for hack and hangers on -- u know... people who call themselves 'thought leaders'. Yoga has zero place at a serious busines. It's not a daycare!
It's "business", and why? Are you paying your (say) coders to write code? Unlikely, otherwise you'd measure their productivity in lines-of-code written, which I hope you realize is a bad idea.
More likely you're paying your coders to solve problems. Is sitting in a chair always the best way to solve problems/think? Not necessarily. If physical activity (like yoga) is conducive to better thinking/problem solving, and the company has the resources (Google does) -- I don't see why not.
839 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 551 ms ] threadGood quote. Although you can extend the lawyers theme out to the rest of the bureaucratic corp too.
I agree. Good quote
Everyone gets mandates from on high, but that shouldn't be all of one's work.
>All of our growth at Waze post acquisition was from work we did, not support from the mothership. Looking back, we could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently had we stayed independent.
He also details the constraints and additional burdens imposed by corporate as well the overall lack of support.
That’s what they’re there for! When I don’t want to work, I use the benefit that lets me not work.
If there are calendar items that have to be rescheduled, I think the onus is on them to find an alternative time
Try getting a job where they advertise a benefit, then complain when you use it.
It seems like people just were abusing it.
Vacation days are days that are long planned.
Sick days are last-minute days for when you are ill.
Personal days are last-minute days for when, say, a pipe breaks in your apartment and you have to spend the day dealing with the mess. Or any other non-medical reason you have to be a person and not an employee for a day.
It seems like people just were abusing it.
Obviously, it's not always possible to give advanced notice (illness or other unforseen circumstances), so most employers require a brief explanation when advanced notice isn't possible - "Sick kid," "car trouble," "illness," etc.
These are normal policies, but they must be formal policies and communicated to employees.
If those policies are in place and you have people violating them - then it becomes an HR issue, with formal reprimanded, so a low level manager shouldn't have to complain about it.
The spontaneous employee vacation days are just making that problem more obvious.
I do think we often undersize our teams by ignoring the impact of vacation and personal time in taking on work ... but that’s not the fault of the people using the time they are entitled to as part of their compensation.
You guys don't even see it do you?
Maybe calm down with the assumptions and generalizations too though.
The issue is:
> 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.
but, also...
> Yes, there is a challenge of how to compensate when there is no equity upside...
The complaint here is that people don't have 'skin in the game', so they dont care if the product succeeds, because it makes to difference to them; so they're taking personal days in a way that disrupts the (probably totally arbitrary) timelines and plans they have.
...so I mean, it's probably fair to say that if people are taking leave in a way that is disruptive, then that's more of an indicator that the team culture is totally screwed up than that there aren't enough people.
If one person wants to 'win' and everyone else a) doesn't care, b) that person has no power to punish them if the product doesn't 'win', c) there's no benefit to them personally if it does 'win'... well, its never going to work out for that one person in the long run.
It's not like they're managing a nuclear reactor or staffing an ER.
Are your deadlines so tight that any time off, even planned time off that corespondents to the employee's allotted vacation days would put you behind? If so then it's an indication the issue is with the project being understaffed or not staffed with the proper personnel, or the deadlines being unrealistic.
Are you requiring Herculean effort and unpaid overtime regularly? If so your employees are going to eventually breakdown and need a day to recharge. Sidenote: I've noticed some people are happy to work optional paid overtime but unhappy to work mandatory unpaid overtime.
Are your employees regularly missing so many days to the point they are regularly taking leave without pay and not getting prior approval? That is an upper management/HR issue.
And all that with European PTO benefits across the team!
Once in a while someone is missing. Typically, rest of team moves on through their day normally.
It turns out he actually had Mad Cow disease (really).
I've found that I really have to detach from the situation to use less curse words, such as counting to 5 mentally before saying _anything_.
Any other tips for similarly terrible people such as myself?
It will probably make you feel silly, but you can meditate on it being literally no sillier than using actual curse words to pepper your ordinary speech.
Also consider swears like farts in a relationship. A well-chosen place and time, dropping one is hilarious. All the time though, you just stink.
Clearly there is unmet demand for quality engineers or you wouldn't be paying that much and allowing perks to dictate the balance of life equation so royally.
Maybe we're not paid enough.
It's like you're welcome to pay less, watch the talent dry up and move on.
I'm sure you'll be fine?
Doesn't Google still make roughly 150x what their employees are paid?
Insert line about smelling their own.
This blog post is yet another confirmation for me that similar to how we can have infinitely big small numbers, we can have infinitely verbose rambles around small ideas.
This "you shouldn't complain if you have it a bit better than others" mindset is a breeding ground for all kinds of corporate exploitation.
This guy is hopelessly out of touch. You work to live, not the other way around.
As for misaligned incentives, this is how it is throughout the corporate world - it's not exclusive to Google or other big tech companies. As one of the guys who puts the team on his back and works hard for the users, the reality is that doing a good job does not benefit me in the slightest. My executives care about the number of tickets and new features we churn through. I don't get paid for retention; I don't get paid more for writing good code; I don't get paid more if we get new customers. The only way I get paid more is if I get promoted. What's my motivation to work as hard as I do? My only motivations should be getting promoted or getting a new job.
The only reason any of us work for these companies is for money and benefits. We don't care about your mission statement; and neither do these executives, or they would change the incentives. It's a purely business arrangement: we agree to work X hours per week for Y dollars in total compensation under Z conditions. It's in our interest to reduce X, improve Y and Z. It's the employer's interest to do the opposite - but the employer also cares about other variables, such as retention, total revenue, total profit and costs.
Not that it matters — his observations are just as valid regardless of his net worth.
Noam could never pick up a job again and he will have likely made more money than the average US worker will in their lifetime.
His observation of scorn at employees who are well-compensated NOT jumping at the opportunity to work weekends to get something done for users is a sign of privilege (and probably also a sign of his drive, which is commendable) and maybe a little lack of empathy.
Took you a while to notice the hazing hats huh bud?
What he meant wasnt age.
"or just plain old [saying] 'you arent doing great job'"
Nope. Most people put them on for a selfie or two then throw them on a shelf.
I don't think Google "cares about" user privacy. I think they care about minimising any legal risk. These are two very different attitudes.
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.
Otherwise, the pressure from people who want to do other things will ensure that privacy or rules will be ignored.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
FFS.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Also software engineer singular, I guess an expense was spared after all
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Rent is the one you are sort of locked into. Food, etc, you have choices ... moving, much harder to shop around.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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).
I think with people holed up in their homes doing the same thing, the experience is diminished somewhat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
(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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Of course. A condition of my personal investment in meeting deadlines is exactly my not being treated like this.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I 100% get his position here. I definitely want to be surrounded by people that are grateful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm starting to think the Bay Area trend of hyperfocusing on identity politics is just the trendy way of deposing shitty managers.
> 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.
> 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.
What? How did they do that? I'm not an OpenStreetMap but I thought that sort of "privatization / removal of crowdsourced data" could not be done if not globally...
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.
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.
No, but they find tons of employees who really need a job and hate job-hunting, so once they get in they'll do what it takes to keep the paycheck going. This is particularly common in sectors where the median hire can be young, like... the software industry.
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.
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.
Start to end you're probably talking about ~6 months to get rid of someone and over that time you need an intense process of setting them targets and documenting failing to meet expectations. The result is that most managers are more likely to try and shuffle their bad engineers into other teams than to actually give up a big chunk of their time doing this process. Not to mention the fact it puts you in a very awkward positioning having a working relationship with the person you're getting rid of.
It’s mind-blowing that you see a 6 month investment in just doing basic leadership 101 as a massive bureaucratic hassle. I think it’s safe to say that the low performer you’re referring to is not actually the real problem.
I found this surprising. I thought this was primarily a problem in union / government positions.
It's certainly a lot harder to fire people than at a startup. You need multiple review cycles with poor ratings, a Performance Improvement Plan, more review cycles of bad ratings, etc. But most people don't want to hang on through that, so they leave since it just sucks to be on a team where you are not valued. But you can definitely hang on for 18 months pretty easily with everyone unhappy with your work if you want to.
So it's not really the same as government jobs where you really can't be fired, but it's very different from a startup where everything can be going fine, you lose a big customer and a week later 10% of the company is gone to keep the burn rate low.
For someone trying to do that, it might look like its "impossible for fire someone".
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.
//just want to reiterate, getting a job at google does not make you superhuman// Agree
I am just tired of people whose entire self image is based on "I work/worked at Google". I know value of getting job there but it is time they stop "why I leave Google" and start "What am I contributing to humanity as an individual?"
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.
---------------
> 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.
---------------
> 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?
---------------
> 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.
That seems like an unfair interpretation to me.
The guy wants to be able to do what's best for the team. We've all worked with that one guy who shouldn't be there, but is.
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.
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.
Of course if you blink you miss them, it's not like you're in a cave across the world, you're probably literally in the next room staring at a screen for a couple hours after a heavy lunch while the kids play on their ps5. How's that weird.
If I do good work for a rich, high-margin company, I'm going to act like it (towards the employer) and reap the rewards. Because if I don't, someone is, and they're up the chain, so let's pull those rewards back down a bit and reclaim our humanity, ok? This isn't entitlement, this is taking the rewards I've had a hand in building rather than leaving them on the table and saying "thank you for letting me leave these extra 20% of rewards to you".
Separate from this, I might vehemently advocate politically for reversing the upwards redistribution of wealth to the tech elites (me), and that's not hypocritical. Hoping for Richard Stallman-level principaledness among the professional working public isn't the answer to political and social problems such as this, so let's not armchair and claim that working half your Saturdays moves the needle towards wealth fairness better than saying no and going home and taking the paycheck. Inconsistencies can coexist without resolution, and most of life is exactly that. If you can't live with it, then the answer is to quit, not routinely work Saturdays.
The company's budget has room for more staff if it's truly needed (it's not); my life budget of personal hours does not have room for more work, nor should it if my employer is among the wealthiest in human history.
Germany's auto-workers union negotiated a 28-hour workweek. Like them, we shouldn't be ashamed to rebalance our lives towards leisure, personal hobbies, personal relationships, etc, now that technology is so productive. In general, why is it wrong to favor broader participation in the fruits of human effort? I'll do my part by going home and taking the paycheck. Now I have more time and financial security to spread my politics if I want.
Elon Musk is right that companies and communities are fully and precisely the human-machine cyborgs of fiction, just at a different scale. Can that apparatus rebalance towards leisure etc? I think yes, so I'm taking my paycheck and going home early. It's not entitlement, it's living my valid and reasonable politics.
If this post seems off topic, then maybe you haven't thought all the way through what "sure, I can give you more hours of my life" means when you offer it to an employer. We might disagree on some or many points, but all of this post is directly relevant to that negotiation of hours.
A 28 hour workweek is fine if consistently applied. The daily 11am absence however, is likely treated with disdain because:
- doing mid-day yoga while I'm attending daily release engineering meetings to accommodate someone else's schedule slip is grating
- for some reason mid-day workouts are okay but leaving the office at 4pm isn't
Both of which is why it strikes many as slacking off.
Why are you making this about gender?
And all for what? A mapping application having features which really don't save lives 99% of the time.
Maybe bad for mental health of the average employee but not for everyone.
At worst, if targeted to a person, project, or role it immediately heightens the tension in the relationship.
At best, it is used to emphatically describe something ("this code is a bit shitty") but again because of swear words generally inflammatory nature it can be interpreted poorly.
Yelling out "Fuck!" because you just stubbed your toe on your desk, or because you've been stuck on a frustrating problem for awhile that you just can't solve, is fine. Saying "Why does team X's product suck so fucking much?" or "Why do you keep making this same fucking mistake?" is a huge problem.
It's not exactly about the swears per se, but about being overly negative / anti-collaborative. The OP post gives off the vibe of someone who prides themselves on being "brutally honest" in their feedback but which in fact really just comes off as being an asshole to most people.
Also swearing should only be used verbally and only in humorous ways: “this code I wrote is fubar” is ok, “Johnson is an asshole” is not.
> I began racking up my HR complaints. I used a four letter word, my analogy was not PC, my language was not PG
He's not just swearing. He's an asshole. But he wants to blame the "PC brigade" for not letting him be an asshole, which he was used to when he had power over everyone else, including HR.
- An Englishman (England is culturally somewhere between the US and Scotland on this I think).
Source: I work at Google
Now I get a letter from HR if I type "shit" on the team's slack channel. I also notice that people are "selectively offended"; they'll use profanity when it suits them, but if something genuinely ticks you off, and you happen to swear (not AT a person, but at things/concepts/in general) they try to use it as a bazooka against you. Try to make you lose all credibility because you said "it's fucked".
To me, as a non-british person (well, I'm British now, I guess, got my citizenship pre-brexit..) it's a super strange and touchy subject. However, I try to power through, being the "rude foreign guy" (rude as in rude language, not rude as in mean or vindictive), and that sort of works. Almost all of my colleagues just know that's what and who I am, I don't mean any offence, and really, nobody gets offended (unless it suits their strategic purposes). We all use a shitload of profanity in our day to day language anyway, so why the fuck would it be different in the office?
And ruins thoroughfares not designed for heavy traffic, while degrading quality of life for people who don't use it!
Really? I'd rather you just paid me more, so I can use the money how I'd like, instead of coddling me with loads of benefits.
And then there's this: companies don't provide all this stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. They provide it because it means they can squeeze more out of you. Again, I might be able to get on board with that if it's a company I really want to work for, but I'd still rather they just pay me more instead.
That's a no for me when the incentives are different in magnitude.
Are you saying you aren't willing to sacrifice your well-being to increase the value of this manager's portfolio? /s
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.
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.
It's "business", and why? Are you paying your (say) coders to write code? Unlikely, otherwise you'd measure their productivity in lines-of-code written, which I hope you realize is a bad idea.
More likely you're paying your coders to solve problems. Is sitting in a chair always the best way to solve problems/think? Not necessarily. If physical activity (like yoga) is conducive to better thinking/problem solving, and the company has the resources (Google does) -- I don't see why not.
The free market seems to say it's worth the boost to employee retention or PR or whatever.