A long time ago at Google ,,fun'' was equal to user and customer obsession (looking at logs and other data and trying to understand how to make the products better).
Sundar is an amazing sales person and PM, but Google went too much on the PM/Sales side and puts too much pressure and impossible amount of work on engineers (I started my last quarter by knowing that I won't be able to finish most of the OKRs that were put on by other people from other teams to me, I signaled to my TL, but I didn't care at that point as I was planning to quit anyways).
The pressure is so high that the best engineers and engineering managers there that I know are moving to research where they are left alone to do great and fun stuff.
> puts too much pressures and impossible amount of work on engineers
My understanding is this varies widely by department/manager, and that on average big tech companies work way less hours per day than engineers at startups, for higher base pay & more liquid options. With much more support structure as well.
When was Google about anything more than collecting user data to display ads. No user has ever said “it would really be great if we had more ads”. Giving the user what they want is antithetical to profitability for any company whose business model is anything else besides “customer gives us money and we give them goods and services”
This is such a reductive view of most tech companies that have ads.
Sometimes "giving customers [most of] what they want" is profitable - so they come back later and have a multi-year relationship and use a variety of profit-generating products. Even if that means forgoing short-term profit from extra ads.
Have you ever been to one of those websites that had so many ads you couldn’t see the content (when it loaded 30 seconds later)? Banners and pop up’s and auto playing video all stacked on top of each other…
Google and Facebook don’t look like that. Those sort of sites will never become a lasting concern like google or Facebook because users hate it. Google could make more money if 50% of search results were ads but then people would stop using search and they’d lose all their business. Instead they put less ads and hope you use maps, which also has a few ads, then YouTube which has a few ads then… then… then… It’s a lot more sustainable to “increase inventory” by increasing surface area for customers than using a bigger % of existing area. Same reason cable gets more channels instead of bigger % of existing airtime going to ads. Just like television- you can have a good show, even though ads are in between. that doesn’t make the writing any worse, the writers will still do their best. If you have a good experience with search, you’ll use it for years, and you may use other products since you had a good experience.
The first 7 out of 10 items in my FB feed just now were promoted posts. I just searched for “bicycles” on my iPad. I don’t see any organic results without scrolling when I disable ad blocking.
The writing is definitely worse with ads. Writers write in a specific format to allow ad breaks. Also, if you compare the quality and number of Emmy’s that ad supported TV gets to streaming/premium channels it’s much lower.
I don’t watch TV with commercials. I very much live by the “I pay them money and they give me stuff” motto. I pay for content whenever possible to avoid ads including streaming services and a few podcasts.
Hasn't been my experience at all. I worked mostly decent hours at G, while at startups they demanded 10-12h of work a day, if not more, with little to no perks and lower comp.
Google is far down on the path to becoming a "rest and vest" place like Microsoft, and they don't want that to happen.
When you say you wouldn't be able to make OKRs, is that working normal hours, or working extra hours? From my understanding, Google OKRs are only supposed to be hit at 70%-90%. If you hit 100%, they failed at putting the bar high enough.
I never had an experience like this in ten years at Google. If I ever felt done trying to get promoted, I'm confident I could have worked 25 hours a week and gotten "meets expectations" forever.
That kind of work doesn't satisfy many people. Especially not people who manage to get a job at Google. I went crazy resting and vesting once I realized that 5 -> 6 would be nearly impossible in the position I had.
> Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic.
What you focus on can also help you attract a certain type of employee. The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems. I know plenty of people (myself included) that took pretty drastic pay cuts to work in a more interesting space. To be fair, we were all making above our needs at the time, but the point remains, good engineers care a lot about the things they working on.
As a company becomes successful, they should share the gains with those that helped get them there. But no firm is completely closed, it has to attract new people. And the sell to new employees often overly focuses on money and perks.
The other problem I see is that companies can fall into the trap of focusing too much on inner reflection and feedback. This leads to a lot of heavy handed happiness initiatives that end up just being chores (e.g. forced team bonding, endless happiness surveys, feedback, etc). I can't speak for non-technical employees, but in my experience the best engineers care most about an interesting product space, autonomy and respect. And colleagues matter as well. So even if you have all this, if your values aren't shared by your peers, its a big negative. For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work.
So I think Google's shift is a net positive. Sure it'll upset some employees that care more about catering, travel and perks than their actual work, but that's fine.
It’s fine to say the best engineers want to work on the most interesting problems, and that’s totally valid, but truthfully Google and other big tech companies need an army of highly skilled engineers to turn the red button blue. A simple fact is that maintaining the behemoth requires lots of skill and relying on people being intrinsically interested in that doesn’t scale to the army that Google would need to employ (even if it reduced its current headcount).
I could be wrong as I never worked in the hyper-optimized space, but I don't think that's necessarily a boring problem to work on. It's highly scientific and I'm sure a lot of talented engineers are interested in A/B testing. It's not much different than compiler optimizations that squeeze out tiny efficiencies that are not noticeable and irrelevant to 99.9% of use cases. If you can make red button blue and quantify its effects in terms of UX (people being able to find the button or make reality more aligned with expectations of the user), I think that could be interesting. But I would love to hear from someone that has labored over such a task.
If I were hiring someone to figure out which buttons to turn from red to blue, I would at least try to find people curious and serious about the task. I wouldn't just accept that its monkey work, throw some money at it and hope for the best.
I was using the phrase “turning the red button blue” as a description of the fundamental toil that goes into maintaining complex systems. There might be thousands of people who find that work interesting, but there are millions of buttons.
It is not monkey work. But A/B testing can often be more a trapping of scientific than the real thing. Google UXR is hit or miss. They have done a number of poorly run studies on what shade of blue to color buttons without thinking about multiple comparison corrections, seasonality or evolution in display technologies. I am increasingly unconvinced that these efficiencies are meaningful for UX. Compilers are different and those optimizations are real and matter for both the bottom line and UX.
> I could be wrong as I never worked in the hyper-optimized space, but I don't think that's necessarily a boring problem to work on. It's highly scientific and I'm sure a lot of talented engineers are interested in A/B testing.
I agree with this 100%. I don't work in the gaming industry, but always used to be the "passionate/caring/agreeable" person in my team, until I realised that being so agreeable made me work more for less.
The place I work is actually nice, but since that realisation, I managed to get an offer from a different place, to make my current company to counter with a massive salary increase.
I know and also share the salary numbers with most of my closer friends in the company, so I know how good I'm doing. If they stop giving me the fair regular salary increases, then I'll leave without any regrets.
Lesson for me that blind loyalty - even in nice places - will give you nothing but frustration and exploitation.
Airline pilots are also exploited for their passion (most people don't rack up the needed flying hours by accident).
It's also a false dichotomy: I am both passionate about my work and could do it for free (which I do with F/OSS contributions), but I also care about my compensation.
It isn't like the trade is that we get to work on interesting problems because the travel budget is slashed. Because of headcount clawbacks and concerns about backfill what I'm seeing is teams becoming more conservative and focused on keeping core customers happy rather than focusing on exciting new problems.
Sure. I think that Google can and should prioritize this more. But when the above argument is something resembling "good people like working on flashy and interesting technical problems so why worry about the travel budget" then it becomes relevant to talk about how there also isn't going to be an unlimited amount of flashy and interesting technical problems.
Maybe they don't get to deprecate another chat service and have to support it longer this time or someone has to work on making Google Drive as fast as competitors.
I wonder whether the mention of swag in the reporting was a red herring.
I would've liked to see the full question, and all the other questions, and whatever could be learned from their absolute and relative votings.
Questions on my mind:
1. How many people are concerned about loss of swag, and if so, why? (Is it because they want the swag, or see it as a canary, or because they simply don't understand the belt-tightening when they think the company is doing well, or something else?)
2. If some people are concerned about travel, is it because the travel was fun, or effective for project success, or effective for personal advancement, or something else?
3. How concerned are people about possible layoffs, possible declining TC, and/or possible changing nature of the work lifestyle?
4. Are there any pre-existing concerns that talks of belt-tightening are adding to? (For example, were some people already feeling like they were overextending themselves, or stressed over pursuing a promotion, and now they're wondering whether changes will make make that situation harder?)
(I'd like to understand how different organizations are feeling, and how that changes with circumstances, and the news article's mention of swag might be confusing things. And also, I've always had a soft spot for Google, and I want it to be its best self.)
1. Some people are excessively (IMO) attracted to swag and taking away any benefit, however minor, often attracts outsized opposition.
2. Especially people who aren't on the road most of the time, find a trip to an event a nice change of pace and an opportunity to develop professional connections both within your own company and elsewhere. There is business value but it's also often viewed as a significant perk.
3. Well, Pichai has made statements at least suggestive of staffing cuts. And even if there's some trueing up going on with RSUs, I expect a lot of employees used to getting a lot of their comp in stock in a rising market are looking at effectively significant cuts to their TC.
I'm not a googler, but I'd see this as a canary. Steve Blank's[1] The Elves leave Middle earth - The sodas are no longer free explains why auch "small" changes portend larger cultural shifts
It sounds like a gas lighting attempt to paint employees as selfish and entitled children worried about losing their toys. Most people don't care about that stuff, it's all superficial anyway. Things like this usually means employees asking about why benefits are cut for them and not for executives.
Further down in in the article, if readers made it that far, it implies just that:
> Pichai dodged employee questions asking about cost-cutting executive compensation. Pichai brought in total pay last year of $6.3 million, while other top executives made more than $28 million.
The later on:
> Bret Hill, Google's vice president of "total rewards," fielded a question about raises, equity and bonuses and how they will be affected by the changes. He said the company doesn't plan to deviate from paying workers “at the top end of the market so we can be competitive.”
Which leads me to believe employees know what they're talking about, and the swag question near the top is just clickbait. Employees actually want real answers, and they got none.
can't speak for everyone else, but it seems like a canary. They grew really fast the last few years, so many people joined google recently, with all their reputation for tons of perks. Their new perks are going away, that they just joined for. That's probably a bit of a shock as well.
> they simply don't understand the belt-tightening when they think the company is doing well, or something else?
When you make a median of $300k, being told you need to cut a $50 sweatshirt this year out of the budget, its pretty confusing and concerning.
> is it because the travel was fun, or effective for project success, or effective for personal advancement, or something else?
Probably all of the above. With COVID, lots of teams (at lots of companies) became more distributed, and meeting in person is important occasionally (IMO). Travel is fun, and google tends to be in the fun cities with fun offices (SF, NYC, etc) so traveling to those cities is probably an enjoyable trip compared to flying to eg. Milwaukee. With a "fun budget" even if you have to work, you'll probably enjoy those trips beyond the work.
> How concerned are people about possible layoffs, possible declining TC, and/or possible changing nature of the work lifestyle?
I imagine considering the the earlier claims of "20% productivity increase", product cuts and stalled hiring, layoffs probably feel around the corner for many people. Having to output 20% more is no easy feat unless you really weren't working very hard.
> Are there any pre-existing concerns that talks of belt-tightening are adding to?
I think its just that lots of people are new to this lucrative perk-filled rich company and its an affront to their expectations and potentially reason for joining.
In a distributed company travel becomes essential to keep team coherence: anything from team activities to meeting up to decide on the direction of big projects (no online tool can beat a single room with a single whiteboard and a single marker in terms of usability and speed).
There are also meetings and travel to partners, to industry conferences and forums etc. (depends on teams).
In "tough times" all that is suddenly cut off, and only "essential travel" is allowed. But then some teams get to spend two weeks in Malibu on an "essential travel spa retreat" while their teams cannot even send engineers to a high stakes technical discussions with external party integrations. And of course "essential travel" somehow doesn't include various levels of sales, management and marketing.
The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems for a pay that is high enough to cover quality of life.
If your company shows a slowdown in growth--not loss: less growth--the idea that you're suffering from macroeconomic effects and need to cut spending makes very little sense. You're still making a profit quarter after quarter, where's the financial hardship?
(You might go "what about that 4 billion dollar fine from the EU??" To which the response is "did you look at their earnings report? Google made just shy of 20 billion in operating income last quarter alone, on a 30+% profit margin. $4b is literally still a trivial amount as a fine, constituting less than a month's worth of earnings)
The unfortunate truth with any publicly-traded company is that the CEO's job depends on that growth.
The simplistic relationship is as follows:
- The share price is (theoretically) a reflection of the future earnings expectations of that company
- Slowing growth means lower share price/lower dividends
- Lower share price/lower dividends means reduced profits or losses for shareholders
- 80% of stock is likely owned by institutional investors that have automatic triggers for sale of stock based on certain performance thresholds (think pensions like CALPERS) which further incurs losses for shareholders in the event of sustained periods of lesser growth
So when the shareholders band together and demand growth, they will expect the CEO to deliver it or they will replace that CEO with someone who they think will deliver that growth, simply because the system is structured such that growth is expected/required with some minimal level of risk.
Personally, I think there are better systems we could come up with that would ensure better stability for employees and shareholders even in the face of temporary slowdowns in growth that are caused by structural economics, but any of them would likely lower shareholder returns by some small amount, and the institutional investment plans would balk at that. (That small amount would translate to billions of dollars in projected future equity and would likely make the institutions insolvent at some point in the future.)
> The unfortunate truth with any publicly-traded company is that the CEO's job depends on that growth.
Well, boo hoo for him. That's what he gets the comically outsized paycheck for.
We as an industry need to stop accepting that as an excuse for CEOs cutting wages, hiring, and perks for regular employees (not talking about the executives here) when the company is still making massive profits. If there's a genuine cash-flow problem, then yeah; it sucks but it happens. But screw this "We've got record profits, so now we need to shaft the lot of you that got us there so that we can juice those numbers even higher in order to further increase our high scores!"
The fun thing about Google, though, is that Page and Brin still have majority stockholder voting power because even though they own less than 15% of the shares, they also own pretty much all the super-vote stocks. The shareholders can't vote out the CEO (or really, vote for anything to pass) unless Brin and Page are on board (or don't care). So really, the only threat a Google CEO has is from the board.
While your argument might work when it comes to regular publicly traded companies, Google is nothing like a regular company. As a tech giant LLC, the general public can buy shares, but those shares buy them nothing except for a cut of the profits.
The CEO's stock is tied to that performance. The better the company is doing profit-wise, the more payout the CEO gets. That's why it doesn't make sense for us, the ground employees. But makes perfect sense when you look at it from who calls the shots. Always follow the money!
>For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work.
It is funny how people always consider their own politics as neutral. This is an inherently political statement as it sets up "advancing politics" as opposition to "meaningful work".
For some people the "meaningful work" they "just want to do" is to make the world a better place and that often isn't possible without "advancing politics". Maybe the "interesting product space" is to get one of the world's largest companies to reduce carbon emissions. People like that might view building adtech as the chore they endure for the opportunity to do "meaningful work" of fighting climate change.
imo the problem with big tech executives who rose through the ranks in the growth phase of the company is that after the exponential growth in the employee count they expect the individual performance to be the same as their time in the company without changing anything in the leadership style.
being scrappy might work when you have <1000 employees since the chaos might be manageable but when you have 100000 people working in the company scattered around the world, the leadership must also adapt otherwise you get bloated companies that are ran like a headless chicken.
Sundar and Zuckerberg love to blame the individual contributors for having fun instead of working and slacking off but it's so hard for them to hold themselves accountable for the situation of their companies. They get their bonuses when the company is performing well but when times are tough it's because of a regular employee slacking off. ironic that big tech started off with the idea of being better than large corporations of the time only to end up as a bureaucratic hell itself.
> ironic that big tech started off with the idea of being better than large corporations of the time only to end up as a bureaucratic hell itself.
This is the lifecycle of all corporations.
Before Google and Facebook we had Yahoo and Myspace. Now TikTok is doing the same thing and Sundar and Zuckerberg are crying about it.
They shot themselves in the foot de-platforming and censor content creators. Those creators were welcomed with open arms by Google and Facebook competitors. I see more and more creators pushing their YouTube and Instagram audiences over to Rumble or TikTok. Clearly it's starting to be a real problem for the bottom line.
Before you say TikTok does the same, that's true, but it's not the point. Creators don't like having to walk on eggshells if they can avoid it.
> Yes I’m sure that Google is going to lose billions because it deplatformed some fringe folks.
In the long run, yes. Because what's defined as 'fringe' and undesirable can change any moment like it had in the past with changing governments and corporate sentiment, and the next 'fringe' group may be a group that you are in. Even if it feels like that would be nigh on impossible at this moment.
So an idea can only be mainstream if you deem it acceptable? I guess we should get rid of voting while we're at it, since clearly your views are the only ones that matter.
Well, if you check out what’s going on in many Red states where the officials are trying to pass laws that give the government the power to overturn elections, where the former President tried to convince the Secretary of State in GA to “find votes”, and where he was trying to get the VP not to certify the election results, it’s already happening.
Unless you also believe that Trump is facing down a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles with headquarters below a pizza shop.
Some other group does not need to be mainstream for a group that you belong to be declared fringe or undesirable. That can easily happen with slightly changing public opinion, a different faction taking the government with a slight vote margin and many other factors.
The problem with deplatforming the fringe is that fringe is not measured in absolute terms. It's measured in relative terms. After the fringe group gets removed, the Overton Window shifts and a new group becomes fringe.
Eventually what is fringe gets too close to the average group of people, and they start getting wary.
Every argument in support of censorship boils down to trying to hide the truth, or a belief people can't be trusted to think for themselves.
In your example, replying with a link to vote.gov would not only provide accurate counterfactual information, but help indicate to everyone that the source may not be reliable. Censorship is like pouring gasoline onto a fire because you have no water, or refuse to believe water extinguishes fires.
Good ideas counter bad ideas. I don't understand why this is so hard for some people to grasp.
My work place has been going through its “return to office” discussions and if there’s one thing it’s taught me it’s that tone and perception are wildly different among people. One persons “direct and no bullshit” is another’s “uncaring and defensive” is another’s “angry and abusive”. And if a news company can’t find one person to think something is “heated” or “dismissive” or “angry” they will latch onto that person for their headlines.
> "Pichai, who expressed some annoyance during the meeting, said “I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” and added that, “We shouldn’t always equate fun with money."
Put your money where your mouth is, recommend the board make your CEO salary and compensation the same as when Google was 'small and scrappy' in the early years. Lead by example.
I don’t want to work in a place where any budget cuts result in people saying there is no fun to be had anymore. That’s a pretty negative environment. It seems like a reasonable statement to say, we should try and find ways for the work itself to be fun, and not only expect expensed travel and offsite to be the only source of fun.
I go to work exclusively to trade labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. I don’t go to work to have “fun”. I don’t hate my job any more than I hate breathing. They are both necessary for my survival.
Exactly. And lol that the corporate ruling class wants to call you a "quiet quitter" that isn't a team player because you aren't willing to sacrifice yourself to further enrich them.
I’m sorry if you feel that way. If there is absolutely nothing you can find that is fun about your job then honestly yeah I would rather not have you on my team because it sounds like it would be a pretty bad time working together.
I don’t know what the percentages are. All I know is there are many people who can enjoy some aspect of work, and I would much rather work with them than with someone who can’t enjoy anything about the work.
People who are completely apathetic and find no enjoyment in any aspect of work probably are also best off working together.
They didn't say they have no fun at work. They're simply saying that work is not a source of fun in their life--perhaps they find true joy from their family, hobbies, outdoors, etc. If their work suddenly implodes and goes away they will have no sense of loss or concern, it was simply a place to trade labor for capitol and nothing more.
In fact you are right. My wife and I are going to be doing the digital nomad thing starting later this year and fly around the country staying in hotels. My job working for $BigTech remotely affords us that privilege. It’s going to be much more “fun” exploring the US than anything I’m doing at work.
Hey as long as you enjoy some aspect of work that is fine. If you find things you enjoy more outside of work and derive true meaning from things outside of work, then that's amazing. All I was saying was _IF_ there is absolutely nothing you enjoy about work, then I imagine it would be quite difficult to enjoy working with you.
You don't have to view your work as a source of fun or fulfillment to be enjoyable to work with. And I also don't think you need to enjoy anything to complete tasks well, but if you don't take any joy at all in anything you work on, it's probably not very fun to work with you.
I definitely think many do, and a lot more compared to any other industry. Many of us are fortunate to be able to have our hobby (programming) be our day job.
Do all of us enjoy it? Of course not. Do more than any other industry? I would honestly highly suspect so, yeah.
Of all the colleagues I have worked with, the ones that I enjoy to work with are the ones that enjoy their work and are curious and passionate about their craft.
EDIT: There's actually a pretty big generational shift in how work is perceived. Newer generations both bring more of themselves into work, but also expect much more from it. These days, work being a simple 9-17 is simply not good enough anymore, given the alternatives. If you find no enjoyment in any type of work at all, I feel bad for you, because we spend such an enormous portion of our waking hours in the work at work :(
Go over to r/cscareerquestions and see how many are interested in CS because they “get paid for their hobby” and how many are willing to “grind leetCode” for months on end to “get into a FAANG” because of compensation.
Not all programming is the same. You may love working on automation and Python... but your day to day job is CRUD web apps using Django. Same tools, but totally different stuff.
I agree that many do. But I also think that if many of them won $50 million (or whatever) in the lottery tomorrow, they would, at a minimum, immediately renegotiate the terms of their job.
Finding fun in things you do is different for going to work for fun. When I still worked in an office and commuted, I'd very rarely attend any out-of-work activities. I have my own life and getting home at 10pm so I can have some beers with coworkers after work doesn't fit with my lifestyle.
Nice scale. I'm definitely a P2 but I fake being a P4 mainly because companies pay more. I couldn't give a damn about the product I work on, but I'm good with computers and I'm good with people, and getting more money for doing P4 level work is worth it.
And THAT’S the employees I like best. For me that’s the ultimate goal: Being able to develop a personal life (7hrs work in France), but being correctly dedicated when at work.
I’m not an experienced manager so I suppose this is a pipe dream. We need to account for employees with newborns and divorces, how we can modulate work for them.
It’s the book “Tribal Leadership”, there are summaries on the net. The book itself is not very well written, but still inspiring. I thought it was a classic because I saw it in several companies.
A lot of us have "enough money" that food and shelter became boring years ago. Diminishing returns happens pretty quickly. So, when money no longer matters as much, fun becomes pretty important.
When money no longer matters, the list of things that I can do that are more fun than finding ways to serve ads to enrich a company that is worth over 1T is a mile long.
If I have “enough money” then the institutional investors certainly do. I’ll gladly take more money than I need and give it to my family who aren’t fortunate enough to earn tech salaries and yet have “enough money”
I always ask for competitive compensation. I definitely find uses (for helping others, like you say). But, if most companies are competitive, how do you decide which to pick?
When the company misses profit expectations you can be damn sure they'll rip out cogs and throw them on the street without a second thought to save money and get profits up again.
Don't kid yourself or fall for corporate propaganda. You are a cog and you will be treated as such.
You're changing the context and thus missing the argument.
We were talking about Google "slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic." and GP opined that he only wanted to show up for a paycheck and not get any extra benefits like travel budgets.
You've reversed the context to "You ARE a cog!!!" which is irrelevant to GP preferring to decline extra benefits when they exist.
Good point. Seems like Google and similar companies are really filled with 30-40 year old children. Will throw tantrums if favorite food or TV shows are not provided when demanded.
Maybe, but consider this: when you join a company like Google, you get a top-of-industry offer, for sure, but they often low-ball you regardless, relatively speaking. The recruiter justifies it with perks like this (free meals! free gym! snacks! swag! off-sites! whatever). Then the pandemic hits and all that stops, but most of us understand. The stock however, explodes, and the executives go from 10- to 11-digit wealth. Then we come back to the office, at Their behest, and the second the stock (and THEIR compensation) starts to droop, they instantly cut everything.
Likely not many SWEs at Google are struggling for food; but wouldn't you be at least a little pissed off?
Alternate take: by the time BigTech salaries had gotten so out of whack from none BigTech salaries that the cost of living differences between moving to the west coast made sense, I already was in my mid 30s, newly married with the big house in the burbs with two (step)sons and it just wasn’t appealing to me.
By the time my youngest graduated in 2020 and I again had the opportunity and willing spouse to get a job at BigTech as a software developer and move across the country, I still wasn’t interested.
I kept talking to the recruiter and she suggested another software engineering adjacent job that ended up paying 20% less, but was permanently remote, I jumped at.
I have an entire room in my own house dedicated to cardio equipment and weights and my wife has another room dedicated to her dance studio and workout area. Why would I care about a “free gym” and “free food”? I don’t need “free laundry service”, the only time I dress in anything approaching business casual is when they fly me out to a customer site or a team meeting.
They didn't. No one's salary ever has gotten out of whack, ever:
It is estimated that those who take the most share out of the economic value that they generate are upper-level tech employees. And even them take only up to 10% of the actual economic value they generate.
Which means that the rest of the population get much less. The system is atrocious.
So no. Big tech salaries haven't gotten out of whack. No employee was ever able to get a noticeable share of the economic value that they generate, and those who get most get at most 10%.
Before 2010, once you take into account cost of living, the compensation difference between moving to the west coast and living in almost any other major city as a software developer, wasn’t worth it.
After around 2012 as the economy was coming out of the recession, VC money started flowing and computers (smart phones) got more ubiquitous, BigTech compensation really started diverging from being a regular old enterprise corp dev even after taking cost of living into account.
I’m not complaining. I make a comfortable living working for $BigTech doing the same type of enterprise architect work I did three years ago just by knowing “cloud” and having soft skills.
I really wish I could figure this trick out. I envy people who are able to say this. Having gone through multiple burnout angry mood swings over the last few years, I would love to be able to do this.
My basic problem (I think) is that I get bored of this disposition. I like to be creatively engaged. But it’s 8+ hours of 5/7s of my waking time!! I don’t spend anywhere near that time sating my appetite, and my hindbrain wants to be the “breathing specialist” on the team, so I cede that to him. I just struggle to go on autopilot and do the disengaged worker bee thing, watching the day go by, caring only as much as needed to deliver nominal output. Every time I try this approach to save my sanity, the “newness” is cool for a couple of days, and then I find myself gradually reinvesting again, because 8 hours of “it doesn’t mean anything to me, I’m just sitting here wiling the time away pondering what interesting things I might be able to do in the scant remaining non-work hours” robot mode just bores the heck out of me and sucks my soul dry.
If you’ve got advice on how to get to this mode that doesn’t involve an IV drip of alcohol induced euphoria, I would love to hear it.
Set aside work/career for now. What do you do in your personal life? Have you had any experience with celebrating small (even tiny) milestones or "achievements?
Recent example: I recently moved house. Many of my books and lower-urgency work resources are still in moving boxes. I think I need a new bookshelf, so that I can unbox some stuff. I take pleasure in the act of putting together the bookshelf. It is a 30-60min task, it is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I feel accomplished about doing this proactive step to improve my working environment. Plus I like the new shelf I picked, I like the way it looks, the design itself gives me some small amount of pleasure.
Rinse and repeat. Maybe not every day, but every week, there will be some small/tiny/insignificant victory like this. Learning to appreciate them, will not necessarily bring you lifelong joy or self-actualization on its own, but it will do wonders for improving your relationship and emotional balance with respect to work. Sometimes a big project goes wrong, everything is on fire, my boss is asking me to do some crazy unreasonable thing (but at least, a good boss doesn't ask this unnecessarily, and only very rarely), whatever... but still there are always some minor victories to celebrate, or at least partial progress:
- hey I stopped the bleeding on that production outage -- at least other teams know where to look for deeper fix
- hey I sketched out an outline for that documentation that everyone keeps asking about -- even if the content isn't there, at least people know this is where new content should go
- hey I wrote down all my tasks for tomorrow -- so even though I didn't finish things today, I can still log off and forget about them, then pick them up again in the morning
EDIT: Or, to put it another way:
- don't think about the problem as, "how do I learn to accept tedium or chores, and not get bored/frustrated/angry about them?"
- instead the problem should be, "how do I find contentment in the small details of life, that I previously overlooked as simply being tedious or boring?"
I think it's just different dispositions and values.
It sounds like you value doing work that brings you to life. Instead of finding a way to subvert that value, perhaps you can find a way to live that value.
You probably have room to set some boundaries with work here but I don't believe everybody is capable of "disengaged worker bee". Like you said, it's too many hours out of your day/week/year/life.
Some tips that might or not be helpful depending on how similar our brains are:
- Stick to a routine - start your day with an activity of your choice instead of diving into your inbox (slow coffee, short walk, read for 20min, etc.) - laptop open and closed at specific times - no "popping on just to do a little" after your cutoff - turn off phone notifications (unless on-call) - if something doesn't get done by the end of the work day then it becomes a tomorrow work problem
It takes a while but you'll slowly build more of a door in your mind where you're able to step away from work and move on to other activities
- Make an effort to build relationships and activities outside of work so that work becomes a smaller piece of your overall life
- Reflect on how emotionally invested you're getting (in work issues) and catch yourself when this happens. It's just work.
- Brainstorm your larger career or personal development arc and walk it back to things you need to learn to get from here to there. Figure out how to work these into the projects you take on or request. If you can't check out then make your current work part of your journey and be intentional about your activities.
Simple. In 25+ years of working professionally, I know two things.
1. No company has ever gone out of business because I left.
2. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, my employer would send my wife “thoughts and prayers” and they would have a req open for my position before my body was in the ground.
My job affords me the ability to work from anywhere in the US and I am going to be taking advantage of that for at least the next few years to fly across the country and do the “digital nomad” thing.
But I also “live in a position of f%%% you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI). It’s been over 15 years that I haven’t been confident that if the pay/bullshit ratio got too low that I could get another job.
> I don’t want to work in a place where any budget cuts result in people saying there is no fun to be had anymore.
Small and scrappy is fun for many. I don't want to work in a megacorp with forced annual trips organized by a large HR department. I want to work on and build interesting things with smart colleagues who are similarly engaged and motivated.
The folks at Google are already working at a megacorp. That small and scrappy ship sailed two decades ago.
If I had to guess, most Google engineers aren’t working on cool greenfield stuff, they’re maintaining and extending huge legacy projects with decades worth of cruft, where minuscule changes take days to land.
If you want great engineers to work on that stuff, you need to pay them and shower them with perks. Otherwise they’ll move somewhere small and scrappy that’s actually fun.
Google spent a decade throwing every perk imaginable at it's engineers, from swag to massages to free food, etc. Now people are getting upset that they're cutting back despite making more money then ever and they are confused?
> we should try and find ways for the work itself to be fun
No. Those who are pocketing the $72 billion/year net profit should do that. Not you. If you are doing that yourself without being compensated for the value you generate, you are being exploited.
Would you be happy if they paid him $1 a year and drastically increased his equity stake? That's what CEO comp looks like in small and scrappy. I expect he would take it, and so would most anyone else.
You can't increase his equity without buying back shares and that's going to cost money. But yes the general sentiment is if you are serious about reducing costs, then reducing salary is a major way to get there. The idea is cut costs and the share prices will rise as the company becomes more profitable.
That's not really how equity works. A company can issue equity out of thin air, and in fact, this is how most employee stock based comp works. In fact, Google specifically is criticized on their financial returns because of how much of their compensation is based in equity which dilutes existing shareholders outside the company. You can read about the high level ideas of this at https://www.wallstreetprep.com/knowledge/modeling-stock-base...
They cut non-business critical travel which many employees for some reason felt was a perk of the job. I heard second hand that some employees would do "office tours" just to try the lunches at the different offices (under the guise of doing some in person meetings that certainly could have been done online). Cutting that kind of wasteful travel is necessary in an economic slowdown (and even necessary before that).
Perhaps necessary in an economic slowdown when you're a paper company with 2% margins... Let's be honest, Google does not "have" to do anything. They're just trying to grab some pennies.
The interesting part is that they felt the pennies nearest at hand were in their employee perks, rather than in expanding their business. That is always a bad sign even if the company we're talking about is as profitable as Google.
Not every business needs the best people working there, nor does every business need its employees to be highly motivated - it's a valid move in the extreme for Google to transition to being like SAP, but I can't believe all of the people in this thread that are defending that they have a right to do it without asking what their executives know that makes it seem so appealing.
I admittedly have more swag both from tech events and my own company than I know what to do with. But, especially when it's individually shipped to me at home, I usually roll my eyes a bit when I get some package of random branded Chinese crap in the mail. I do have some swag I've gotten over the years that I really like but don't mail me a T-shirt or a lunch bag.
he's been CEO for the last 7 years, any drastic culture change is on him.
Funny to watch these CEOs try to shift blame for their failures recently. All these companies went on crazy hiring sprees for no real reason and now are crying about "deadweight" employees. Perhaps the people who approved the hiring plans are who should be blamed?
And to make it more fun it has yoyo'd. In 2020 it was panic, doom and gloom. Then suddenly it's irresponsible party time. And now back to doom and gloom.
And it'll also be hilarious in a few years watching them scramble to hire again once they cut the 'deadweight' and all those guys just to move to Ohio or something to work in regular companies without much loss in TC (but half the CoL).
If you don't need the engineers, plenty of companies are hungry to snatch them up.
I learned something when I worked at Google that would never have occurred to me. They hired a ton of people from the midwest- smart computer people who couldn't find good jobs in the midwest. They moved out to Sunnyvale and Cupertino and hated it. Many of them wanted to return to the midwest, but got accustomed to Google pay and didn't want to take a cut moving.
As a Bay Area aficionado, I couldn't quite get this, but when I saw how these folks lived in Cupertino and Sunnyvale (tiny, overpriced houses with ultra-competitive school districts) I could kind of understand the desire to return to an Ohio, or Illinois, or Indiana.
As someone who lived in Ohio for a little while but is now back in the bay, I get it even if I wouldn't do it.
If you're from the midwest, the quaint little midwestern culture is what you know. And it is super cheap, so the cost of entry is low. I know people who moved to Ohio when I was there - "temporarily", and fell in love. You can move to a (small) city, and it has home-town vibes and the people there are townies. Its so easy to make friends and just click and feel like you belong. Everyone does the same things (or some subset of the same things) and goes to the same places, so there's a strong shared cultural overlap, because, yes, that's your friend groups favorite bar too!.
That said, I hated the weather, it was awful compared to the bay. Many cities have "Detroit syndrome" where the business left and everyone is talking doom and gloom about how their city will never make a comeback (even if its in the middle of a comeback). If you're not straight and white and American you may connect less to it, since its got strong "All American" vibes in the 'burbs and a strong religious majority. You're less likely to find the crazy driven type-A overachievers since they moved out to bigger places.
Anyone who wants a break from the Bay or NYC I always point them to Cleveland. Every major sports team for you to root for, houses cost less than a VCR, a few good schools feeding the local businesses, and a great history full of cultural places in the city. Some of the best public schools in Ohio (rocky river, shaker heights, etc). Some of the best museums anywhere, and the best off-broadway theater district. And one of the best hospitals anywhere, because you never know if you'll get sick/hurt. Truly amazing considering the COL can be 1/10 that of San Francisco.
Google hasnt made a great product in longer than 7 years though. He took over a listless ship. It's been a lot of freefall and coasting.... being kept afloat my an advertising monopoly. Now that the monopoly is starting to unravel a bit Google has realized things will need to change, fat needs to be trimmed and innovation must return.
And when they reverse gear, it is usually not the "dead weight" that gets axed, as the dead weight's priority is on looking after number 1, while good engineers get duped into caring about 'challenging problems' or 'the company'.
> All these companies went on crazy hiring sprees for no real reason
Management broadly assumed the pandemic boom was the new normal, but now they are sacrificing labor to placate the wrath of Wall street gods in order to keep their jobs.
Ahhahahah! Who's fun? Why make a profit at all then? Why even make money? Just to hoard it in a bank so no one else can have it?? This is some real Scrooge McDuck shat going on right here. Google the next Amazon! Welcome to the sweatshop ladies and gentlemen!
>> > Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic.
What is this weird obsession with 'swag' in tech companies? My company sends packs of it on a regular basis as a motivational tactic. It's generally not stuff I need, or want, it's wasteful, and there are much better ways the company could be spending that money (and the HR/marketing employees time). I've stopped adding my address to the list at this point when they ask for it.
This has always been my intuition as well. The employer gets free advertising and the employee gets free stuff. Ideally, the employee gets a bit extra to offer to friends and family for bonus marketing.
Maybe Google thinks they don’t have to market anymore?
I guess this might be hard to believe, but lots of people DO like it. It just depends on what kind of person you are.
Eg. lots of people love those forced team building things.
Different people like different things. For a large company though, it's hard to distinguish who wants what, so they default to just sending it to everyone.
Really? The clothes are my least favourite of the swag items. Send me it without the company logo and it's a great gift. But if I have to walk around looking like I'm in uniform then I'd rather buy my own.
When I lived near a large metro area, I liked to hit second hand stores, mostly thrift stores, to pick up really cheap T-shirts. When there's a lot of school districts concentrated in one area, there is often a nice selection of older style logos of local HS teams, which is what I was after. I was fully grown by my junior year, so I can still wear kids' clothes. Anyone that noticed my flare assumed I was local and from that area, so it was a cheap way to assimilate and be left alone.
I don't care about t-shirts, but the best backpack I've ever owned was given to me when I worked at Google. I probably never would have bought a $200 hackpack on my own, but it's great.
I’ve got a Google “exclusive swag” branded messenger bag, it’s a lovely timbuk2 hand made from excellent materials. It’s been my bag of choice for 7 years, only just started to show signs of wear despite travelling with it extensively.
I’ve never worked at Google, I won it at a charity auction for PyLadies at a Python conference and not only was it for a good cause but worth every dollar. I don’t think I’ve had a better bit of swag. Its even been a humorous conversation started at times when people assume I either work for or used to work for Google because I have the bag, particularly at software conferences.
Some swag is definitely higher quality and I think Google put some serious money behind their bag selection at least for the years between your bag and mine.
A lot of people are paying off student loans, and then they're saving up to buy a house, which requires a down payment, and then they're paying a mortgage, and then they're paying for day care on top of it. $200 for a backpack is a luxury, when it's easy to find perfectly decent backpacks for $30-50.
And it's not just about a single $200 backpack. Many times people feel the need to either be the kind of person who responsibly saves money, or you just buy whatever you want all the time, and it can be hard to be in-between. If you're dropping $200 on a backpack without thinking about it, you're probably spending $1,000+/mo. on things you don't really need... and there goes a big chunk of money.
Personally, spending $200 on a backpack sounds like insanity to me. But I've also had the similar experience where someone got me a $200 something as a gift and it turned out to be amazing, and I would have bought it if I had known, but often you don't even know whether something is worth it until you've tried out owning it for a month or two. Nine times out of ten, the $200 item isn't worth it compared to the $50 version. So getting it as a gift and discovering you love it is just really, really nice.
I think software engineers can afford luxury, sooner or later. But I get that saving is more important for some people.
I can only speak for myself, but I've looked for months to find something I really like so it's not an impulse buy and I'm not dropping 1k/mo on random things.
You have amazing people around you, it's great when people show you the good stuff :)
As crazygringo guessed, I have a mortgage...and a few kids, and my wife is a SAHM. I live in a HCOL area. Google compensated me well and I could have spent $200 on a backpack if I specifically wanted it, but I don't spend $200 just on a whim.
I kept the backpack google gave me as a noogler for probably 6-7 years and most of my T-shirts are Google gifts. Those gifts made me feel valued as an employee and also acted as free advertising (I no longer wear those shirts in public, as I don't want to advertise for them).
Small conveniences and tokens of appreciation really help with employee morale. Many people, even those who believe they cannot be bought so easily -- definitely can be swayed by this stuff.
Conversely, though, if you've already lost the trust of your employees—by overworking over the course of years, underpaying them, and generally treating them poorly—those small gestures suddenly seem very paltry and, in some cases, insulting. Because it makes it seem as if you think you can make up for all that abuse just with a few free lunches and free donuts in the conference room.
I think the main point of the Steve Blank article was about the people who are actually not swayed by these tokens. The mere removal of a perk could cause someone who doesn't even use the perk, and is happy with his job, to wake up and think about leaving. The removal itself is a signal to start looking, regardless of whether you care about the actual thing being removed.
I also don't understand the "swag obsession" (well, maybe except for the Rust Ferris, Go Gopher and Dart Dash plushies) but neutering conferences and travelling would make me frustrated.
Travelling to conferences is a huge learning opportunity: you can upskill by having fun with people all over the world for two-three days.
If I worked for a FAANG company where I am supposed to be or become an expert of a technology, and they don't want to pay me for one or two conferences per year, I'd also feel frustrated.
Let's be real. Most of the traveling to conferences that Google employees do is just an excuse to get out of work and be paid to do so. Pichai is right to tighten the purse strings.
Traveling to conferences allows a person to get OUT of the same old day-in-day , while also allowing to network. This can help fight burn out. Changing up your environment, even temporary, can lead to better problem solving, often during vacation, because you remove the tunnel vision.
Would like to see number of psychology and socially studies around it.
My opinion of why Meta-verse will fail is because you are using their technology in the same environment. A bad environment is a bad environment no mater how expensive the VR/AR tech your using. And also lacks body language communication.
Except the employee is paid for travel, transportation, food, and lodging.
A while back when I was working at a company that had significant spending in GCP, we'd get free tickets to Next. My director basically said that there wasn't any expectation for the employees he was sending to learn or network, it was basically a semi-vacation. Kind of makes sense honestly.
For a small company, networking can be the first time people hear of the company. For a company like Google, I wonder how often networking translates instead into chances for other companies to hire away their people (without really helping much vice-versa, everyone knows about Google's hiring process)
No matter how much that actually happens, I wouldn't be shocked if it gets echoed and magnified internally as a problem.
Those employees are making order of magnitudes of their salary in revenue. Google is having record profits. Why exactly should Pichai tighten the purse strings? For the shareholders? What, exactly, have those shareholders done to create this revenue (except for the ones that are employees and get golden handcuffs shares)?
Then why are they employed? If they perform any function that helps to materialise that revenue they are indirectly responsible for it.
Unsure why the HN crowd is so hyper-focused on direct attribution. As a worker in a corporation you are part of a machine, this machine uses you as a part of it and the machine as a whole generates revenue. You might not be the main piston firing and generating power but you are still part of the mechanism. If someone hired you even though you won't be creating any value it's not your problem that the machine is dysfunctional.
I just think it is a funny juxtaposition when workers shout about the "Value or revenue they created" on one hand and then claim and then claim individual value creation doesn't matter on the other hand.
The whole question of where the value comes from and "who deserves it" is central to the argument, and there are a lot of positions with different axioms.
I hadn't heard that it is deserved simply for being a warm body in a chair independent of any productivity, so that's a new one.
The same could be said of shareholders:
Why are employees so focused on direct attribution? As a shareholder you are part of the machine, ect. If you aren't creating any value, its not your problem the machine is dysfunctional...
> I hadn't heard that it is deserved simply for being a warm body in a chair independent of any productivity, so that's a new one.
A worker was hired by a system, that system decided they needed that worker and as a contract promised said worker a salary. Why is the fault of the worker that the work they perform doesn't add value?
I really can't comprehend why a systemic failure such as hiring people that you think don't add value is supposedly an individual's fault. If the system failed, why is that you point to the worker and not to the system that failed and hired said zero/negative value worker?
> As a shareholder you are part of the machine
That's a new one. What part exactly does a shareholder perform in this machine, given we are discussing a public company? No bullshit about "pricing" and other financial shenanigans, please.
I'm not saying anything is the employees fault. Good on them for taking advantage of systemic dysfunction to get a salary. I just don't think it is also an argument that they are creating value.
As for the shareholder, If I were to steal man the position I would say the critical role in the machine they provide is the motivation. The equivalent of the animal brain amygdala. Their existence provides the drive to execute and reward pathway.
A different analysis might say that both the useless employee and the shareholders are cancer, sucking up value and providing nothing. In a better designed system both would be surgically removed
People aren't paid the revenue they create. In fact the revenue you create is nothing but an upper limit to how much you can be paid. You get paid what your company believes your replacement cost is. Google believes the market is cooling and therefore replacement cost is decreasing, so pay goes down.
> Let's be real. Most of the traveling to conferences that Google employees do is just an excuse to get out of work and be paid to do so
Absolutely ok. In the world of work, that has been the case for a century or so. That's why those are considered perks. Because that's what they are. Everyone knows it. You just call it 'conference travel'.
Yeah, I'm not with a FAANG but I'm having an experience where we seem to have replaced all learning opportunities with horrible online presentation style courses. It's like they've taken as many bad practices about providing a learning experience and automated them.
Monotonous speaker? Check. Visuals that don't relate well to the content? Check. Wall of text slides? Check. Lack of opportunity to ask questions? Check. Asocial learning environment? Check. Bad pacing? Check. Prescriptive teaching style which doesn't give learners an opportunity to broaden their understanding? Check. Uncompelling or just nonexistent narrative? Check. Badly targeted subject matter? In spades.
Every time I get asked to give my size for a piece of swag, I tell them that the only “swag” I want with the company’s name on it as shares. Everything else is worthless and wasteful.
If the employee doesn't get it, it doesn't go to another employee, it goes to the shareholders. Words like "entitlement" are just the wrong concepts for that situation. "Those greedy Googlers, putting themselves before the shareholder's returns" just doesn't have a ring to it.
In fact, because of supply and demand, if Google competes less for labor, the pay at non-tech companies will go down. This hurts people lower down the ladder.
At least some companies recognize there's little difference between the amount of value provided by a top engineer vs, say, a law firm. I think the gap needs to be closed even further, I plan to double my rates again over the next 1-2 years.
This makes sense, you'd be staring at the monitor for hours a day but likely would spend the $500 on <something> and forget about it or more likely it would be direct deposited and just end up washing in with whatever monthly purchases you normally make.
Taxes are a non-trivial consideration. Google employees in California have an almost 50% marginal tax rate plus I imagine Google gets better prices than retail monitors (plus someone else maintains it for you).
So they'd need to give you ~+$1000 in salary/bonus instead of a $500 monitor to get the same monitor for personal use.
In order to have a marginal rate of 50% you would need to be making over $625k. In order to have a marginal rate of "almost" 50% you wuld need to be making over $312k.
And if you're getting paid that much by a GAMMA its because California's economy, and the laws that gave rise to that economy, give you the market power to demand that sort of a salary. Because you're sure as sh3t not getting paid that much to do the same job in Kansas.
not all swags are of same quality. some are much higher quality than others. i often wear my old employer's hoodie that i got on my first day 9 years ago. it's still going strong and comfy af. same goes for a Yeti tumbler. it's not a huge thing but definitely something to look forward to for some people.
My big company stopped sending swag/care packages to employees shortly before they started pressuring everyone on RTO. Before that RTO campaign there was a lot of language shared about employee satisfaction and "taking care of each other", etc.
They also acknowledge the employee NPS score has gone down but have used a lot of corporate speak to "speak to" that score without initiating any responses to it. I'm pretty sure they, and probably like many others, think the lower ENPS scores and RTO are the only correlation for employee attitudes right now.
So no, the care packages aren't really important, but they're usually commensurate with other endeavors from the top that may not sit well. As another example, the company has done nothing to acknowledge nor address rising attrition... which started before the economy turned (I fully acknowledge they may be happy with it). But the attrition -- even welcomed -- usually has a negative impact on morale overall.
"Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity." -Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 2004
It's kind of nice to get a T-Shirt with a Team Logo on it when you join a team. Especially if you see other people on that team already have that T-Shirt.
It's kind of nice to celebrate a major accomplishment with a coffee cup that has some cool art on it.
It's kind of nice to see what interests other people have by noting the stickers on their laptops.
It's kind of nice to get a surprise nice new backpack when you wouldn't normally bother to take care of yourself by getting one.
It's kind of nice, as a manager, to send some token appreciation to your team when you see them working hard to solve a problem.
It's kind of nice.
Some people kind of like it. If you read the book "Love Languages," you'll see that different people feel appreciated through different ways. Some like token gifts. Some like words of appreciation. It's worth learning how someone else likes to feel appreciated, because it costs you very little to express your appreciation in a way that they particularly enjoy.
"Expect us to get bored of running google and go on to do dumb rich people things with the money you employees made us" -- Probably Page and Brin sometime in 2014
I feel like it's so wasteful. I have so much crap collecting dust. A denim jacket with the logo. A bright silver logo that actually shines. A jersey. Idk who is picking this either. Idk what to even do with it?
To be clear, it's not marketing swag which is what people usually think of when they think of "swag" that's given to potential customers.
It's more like custom team t-shirts, custom figurines, custom bobbleheads, and whatnot. Special rare acrylic desk pieces for every patent your team has generated. Stuff that says "hey, we're a team and we've been through some stuff, like important launches and inventions that we're proud of, and these are symbolic reminders of that".
Similarly, traveling -- whether to a conference or a team-building prototyping retreat -- is a way to build bonds and trust with your coworkers, in a way that just doesn't happen in the regular 9-5 in the office or (worse yet) over Zoom.
When you work in a 100,000+ person company, it's really, really easy to feel depressingly lost and just a cog in the machine. It's both the little mementos and the big travel experiences that help us remember the path we've been on and get to know the people we work with as human beings.
So it really does feel like nickel-and-diming when these are some of the most effective long-term investments you can make in a team.
<< Pichai responded by saying that telling the entire workforce of cuts is “not a scaleable way to do it,” but he said he will “try and notify the company of the more important updates.”
Importance is clearly in the eye of the beholder. If I were an employee, I would like to know. Trying to hide may do more damage than just adding it on internal news portal. Heavens know I get tons of notifications on everything. This would likely qualify as such a notification, I think.
Money for me, but not for thee. During times of record profits and huge cash reserves, difficult choices must be made. If you are not passionate about making stakeholders and leadership more money while they decrease spending on you, then you need to rethink your priorities!
Lodging in city centers has become outrageously expensive and I talked to several people at Meta recently who were struggling to find decent hotels within their travel budgets. If I had to stress out about affording a room during a mandatory work trip, I'd be pissed too. If you can't afford to put your staff up at a decent hotel near your office, don't make them travel.
I had to travel for work from London to Ottawa. They put me up in a suite hotel; there was a kitchenette, a huge TV, another huge TV in the bedroom, a second double bedroom, and a bathroom with twin washbasins.
The next day I discovered a utility room with a washer and dryer; and a second bathroom, also with twin washstands. The only problem was that the hotel had no bar; to get booze, I had to go to the hotel next door.
I later learned that there was a major international conference going on in Ottawa at that time, and all the hotel rooms had been taken by politicians and diplomats. They weren't doing me a favour; they were just ensuring as best they could that I didn't jump on the next flight back to London.
> struggling to find decent hotels within their travel budgets
Don't they have a travel department to worry about booking accommodations? I can confirm hotels in some cities (downtown Boston, for example), are crazy pricy these days. It seems like you can't even find a bad hotel under $450 depending on what is happening that week or weekend.
Urban hotels seem to have gotten back to something like pre-COVID levels depending on what's going on at a given time. I live far enough out of Boston that I occasionally book hotel when I'm at a multi-day event and pricing in Boston and Cambridge are pretty much in line with NYC, SF, and other top dollar places.
A travel department? I work in consulting at $BigTech. We go into Concur and book our travel. Sure we have a policy about how much we can spend on hotels. But if I book “our of policy” for any reason, my explanation can be as simple as “I wanted to be in walking distance to the site” and have never gotten push back. Especially when it was for in house traffic (ie not billing a customer)
> “I remember when Google was small and scrappy,” he said. “Fun didn’t always — we shouldn’t always equate fun with money. I think you can walk into a hard-working startup and people may be having fun and it shouldn’t always equate to money.”
Google is not small.
Is too regulated to be scrappy.
And is NOT a startup
It’s an ads monopoly. Working there is all about making money.
There are gigantic corporations that are much more regulated than Google in Europe and they are able to run scrappy global operations.
This is not anything related to scrappiness. This is related to improving Google shareholders' returns. Its base capitalism in its most ugly form - hurting lower rank employees for the benefit of majority shareholders and upper management.
This morning I saw a Google Cloud executive post on their LinkedIn page that they had an offsite where they made custom Nike shoes that looked like Noogler hats.
I remember when my old company cut the "swag" to the tune of about $100,000 a year. The CFO was proud of himself but the work environment wasn't great before that, which lead to a few key people leaving. They had stayed not for swag but the social parts of the job were keeping people happy. A few more followed them. It wasn't long before half of the tech team had gone.
At the time we were spending about 40k for recruiter fees to replace each engineer. During my exit interview I asked the CFO if he thought that math worked out. He had some regrets.
It's interesting that the Software Dev job market has been on fire for over a decade but retention strategies have evolved at a glacial pace. The industry just collectively decided turnover is to be expected and eat all the associated costs - which are significantly higher than many other professions inside the org.
I mean, in general, management as a group has no idea how to retain employees.
Part of this is because (as you allude to) a very significant chunk of them don't even believe that's important to do: employees are just interchangeable cogs in their system, grinding along to produce bonuses for them.
But part of it is because retention is about motivation, which is a very, very complicated topic, and any attempt to create a one-size-fits-all solution to it will inevitably fail.
Of course, a large percentage of those who do believe that retention is important are deeply convinced they know exactly what one-size-fits-all solution is The One True Way, and anyone who doesn't respond to it is just some degenerate weirdo.
So they go on missing, and we go on shaking our heads.
I sense there's a bit of a crisis with top tech firms. They cannot afford to keep paying the wages the tech market demands. Costs must come down. It's feels things are reaching a tipping point.
It's somewhat of a chicken and egg sort of thing. If some segment of your workforce seems to have high turnover in spite of efforts to retain people, maybe it makes sense to stop trying so hard and accept that it's just a market dynamic.
Not even expected: Preferred! Every company I've worked at would rather pay $X+2 to a fresh new employee than retain an experienced employee by raising his or her salary from $X to $X+1. I can't explain it.
I doubt he had any regrets as long as his boss was happy with his decision.
Very few people give a shit if something is cost effective, ethical, or even intelligent to do if their boss is happy with the decision or they’re able to placate their boss.
Google works on interesting things? I guess to PhDs into ML.
They scrapped cutting edge R&D and became a one-trick ad-pushing pony. When the companies trajectory has been away from interesting ideas into ad laden messes and Gmail UX refreshes, the perks are all people show up for. I could work on shoving 10 ads in a YT video? Sign me up!
I question whether Sundar is a good CEO. Google succeeded given the broader economic shift to tech, not his leadership. Pedaling nostalgia for a time when growth was easy suggests to me he has no idea how to iterate forward in interesting ways.
Covid was exceptional but in general I can't see how Google would escape the transition to a traditional corporation tied to stockholder expectations and macroeconomic conditions. This is just reality and whining about snacks and travel being cut is not helpful. Return to office, on the other hand, is a really interesting question and generally not handled well by leadership.
> If all Google employees quit on the same day, and refuse to return without getting a seat in the board
You're expecting way too much. I know plenty of people who work at Facebook all the while claiming that "they know it's bad for the world", and guess why? Because those $400,000 a year are still flowing in.
He’s right, I don’t get why companies feel the need to do six figure morale events off campus. When I worked at a smaller company, we would do a company picnic in a park and play kickball and drink a keg of beer or sodas and just eat cheap food, and it was 100x more fun than the elaborate offsites I attended at Microsoft. Microsoft’s idea of a morale event is to rent out a stadium or a boat and have Macklemore or Walk the Moon do a concert
It's embarrassing when a company puts out a giant suggestion box to figure out how to be efficient. It means the company has no clue how it operates. You shouldn't have to ask random employees what the problems are. You should already know, because identifying and eliminating inefficiency (in order to improve quality) should be part of your standard practice. Putting out a giant suggestion box is the laziest and least useful way imaginable. You have no idea which 'suggestion' is a bigger problem, you have no metrics, no context. It's just 7,000 people complaining about 7,000 random things.
Don't get me wrong - the low-level people always know what is wrong and know how to fix it. But nobody in upper management gives a shit. Which is why your company is inefficient. Soliciting advice from random ICs now will result in the same dont-give-a-shit syndrome by management. And management continues to do whatever bullshit helps themselves rather than the company or ICs.
Never really thought about it until you laid it out, and yeah it is troubling.
At my company there have been meetings on how to be “innovative.” The suggestions are straight out of Dilbert. Someone said we needed more meetings and everyone agreed. Another said that everything we do is innovative and everyone agreed.
I have no idea how a modern corporation is suppose to work I guess. Maybe the dream is be innovative me become large then watch the next few generations of leadership slowly tear the company down into irrelevancy.
I forgot where I read this but there’s an idea of a “manager” class that refuses to innovative or change anything because rocking the boat potentially means losing out on bonuses or stocks or promotions, so you do everything in your power to maintain the status quo until you go to the next gig basically playing a game of hot potato until you retire. The “manager” class has taken over the corporate world for decades.
A company that releases three messaging apps during their yearly conference and leaves city roads in ruins because they are no longer interested in one of their projects, is not “well run”.
Sometimes, a suggestions box is a hunt for a scape goat. Do you plan to make an unpopular change but don't want any of the blame? Gather a bunch of suggestions, then choose one close to your original plan. Now nobody can say your choices show your disconnect from regular employees.
Except if we equate the working environment with school then traveling to conferences is basically a school trip.
That is the most fun, people who are lucky enough to having been in a sports team when they were younger understand that being on the road is the best.
If you were a student/athlete then going on the road was a unique mix of working for a future shot in the world of pros AND fun being on the road with your mates.
I understand the dynamics and inequalities that are inherent in capitalism. However the insane CEO and corporate board member salaries are simply not justifiable.
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[ 283 ms ] story [ 583 ms ] threadSundar is an amazing sales person and PM, but Google went too much on the PM/Sales side and puts too much pressure and impossible amount of work on engineers (I started my last quarter by knowing that I won't be able to finish most of the OKRs that were put on by other people from other teams to me, I signaled to my TL, but I didn't care at that point as I was planning to quit anyways).
The pressure is so high that the best engineers and engineering managers there that I know are moving to research where they are left alone to do great and fun stuff.
My understanding is this varies widely by department/manager, and that on average big tech companies work way less hours per day than engineers at startups, for higher base pay & more liquid options. With much more support structure as well.
Sometimes "giving customers [most of] what they want" is profitable - so they come back later and have a multi-year relationship and use a variety of profit-generating products. Even if that means forgoing short-term profit from extra ads.
We aren’t talking about Apple giving three months free to entice customers to subscribe to AppleTV+ or Apple Music.
Google and Facebook don’t look like that. Those sort of sites will never become a lasting concern like google or Facebook because users hate it. Google could make more money if 50% of search results were ads but then people would stop using search and they’d lose all their business. Instead they put less ads and hope you use maps, which also has a few ads, then YouTube which has a few ads then… then… then… It’s a lot more sustainable to “increase inventory” by increasing surface area for customers than using a bigger % of existing area. Same reason cable gets more channels instead of bigger % of existing airtime going to ads. Just like television- you can have a good show, even though ads are in between. that doesn’t make the writing any worse, the writers will still do their best. If you have a good experience with search, you’ll use it for years, and you may use other products since you had a good experience.
The writing is definitely worse with ads. Writers write in a specific format to allow ad breaks. Also, if you compare the quality and number of Emmy’s that ad supported TV gets to streaming/premium channels it’s much lower.
I don’t watch TV with commercials. I very much live by the “I pay them money and they give me stuff” motto. I pay for content whenever possible to avoid ads including streaming services and a few podcasts.
Google is far down on the path to becoming a "rest and vest" place like Microsoft, and they don't want that to happen.
When you say you wouldn't be able to make OKRs, is that working normal hours, or working extra hours? From my understanding, Google OKRs are only supposed to be hit at 70%-90%. If you hit 100%, they failed at putting the bar high enough.
Did they?
They are still deprecating products on people's faces. And combining/renaming/tweaking product names.
What you focus on can also help you attract a certain type of employee. The best engineers I know want to work on interesting problems. I know plenty of people (myself included) that took pretty drastic pay cuts to work in a more interesting space. To be fair, we were all making above our needs at the time, but the point remains, good engineers care a lot about the things they working on.
As a company becomes successful, they should share the gains with those that helped get them there. But no firm is completely closed, it has to attract new people. And the sell to new employees often overly focuses on money and perks.
The other problem I see is that companies can fall into the trap of focusing too much on inner reflection and feedback. This leads to a lot of heavy handed happiness initiatives that end up just being chores (e.g. forced team bonding, endless happiness surveys, feedback, etc). I can't speak for non-technical employees, but in my experience the best engineers care most about an interesting product space, autonomy and respect. And colleagues matter as well. So even if you have all this, if your values aren't shared by your peers, its a big negative. For instance, if your peers are more interested in advancing politics at work or exploiting perks, it will create tension with those that just want to do meaningful work.
So I think Google's shift is a net positive. Sure it'll upset some employees that care more about catering, travel and perks than their actual work, but that's fine.
If I were hiring someone to figure out which buttons to turn from red to blue, I would at least try to find people curious and serious about the task. I wouldn't just accept that its monkey work, throw some money at it and hope for the best.
I agree that the learning part is interesting but at google I suspect those are two different jobs.
That's why Google ends up with 25 shades of blue because each button is "scientifically interestingly A/B tested to death": "When you desgined 5 screens in Figma, but couldn't be bothered to chose the better buttons, fought with managers and requested an A/B/C/D/E test" https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1555686876274630656 and https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/1557755746686754818
Every time i see businesses taliing about passion, they are aiming to underpay and exploit employees.
Gaming industry has the most passion, very skilled people and the worst working conditions in the entire IT.
Capitalism for me but not for thee
The place I work is actually nice, but since that realisation, I managed to get an offer from a different place, to make my current company to counter with a massive salary increase.
I know and also share the salary numbers with most of my closer friends in the company, so I know how good I'm doing. If they stop giving me the fair regular salary increases, then I'll leave without any regrets.
Lesson for me that blind loyalty - even in nice places - will give you nothing but frustration and exploitation.
It's also a false dichotomy: I am both passionate about my work and could do it for free (which I do with F/OSS contributions), but I also care about my compensation.
What a shocking business priority!
Those choices are easier when you have a nice cushion.
I would've liked to see the full question, and all the other questions, and whatever could be learned from their absolute and relative votings.
Questions on my mind:
1. How many people are concerned about loss of swag, and if so, why? (Is it because they want the swag, or see it as a canary, or because they simply don't understand the belt-tightening when they think the company is doing well, or something else?)
2. If some people are concerned about travel, is it because the travel was fun, or effective for project success, or effective for personal advancement, or something else?
3. How concerned are people about possible layoffs, possible declining TC, and/or possible changing nature of the work lifestyle?
4. Are there any pre-existing concerns that talks of belt-tightening are adding to? (For example, were some people already feeling like they were overextending themselves, or stressed over pursuing a promotion, and now they're wondering whether changes will make make that situation harder?)
(I'd like to understand how different organizations are feeling, and how that changes with circumstances, and the news article's mention of swag might be confusing things. And also, I've always had a soft spot for Google, and I want it to be its best self.)
1. Some people are excessively (IMO) attracted to swag and taking away any benefit, however minor, often attracts outsized opposition.
2. Especially people who aren't on the road most of the time, find a trip to an event a nice change of pace and an opportunity to develop professional connections both within your own company and elsewhere. There is business value but it's also often viewed as a significant perk.
3. Well, Pichai has made statements at least suggestive of staffing cuts. And even if there's some trueing up going on with RSUs, I expect a lot of employees used to getting a lot of their comp in stock in a rising market are looking at effectively significant cuts to their TC.
1. https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Further down in in the article, if readers made it that far, it implies just that:
> Pichai dodged employee questions asking about cost-cutting executive compensation. Pichai brought in total pay last year of $6.3 million, while other top executives made more than $28 million.
The later on:
> Bret Hill, Google's vice president of "total rewards," fielded a question about raises, equity and bonuses and how they will be affected by the changes. He said the company doesn't plan to deviate from paying workers “at the top end of the market so we can be competitive.”
Which leads me to believe employees know what they're talking about, and the swag question near the top is just clickbait. Employees actually want real answers, and they got none.
> they simply don't understand the belt-tightening when they think the company is doing well, or something else?
When you make a median of $300k, being told you need to cut a $50 sweatshirt this year out of the budget, its pretty confusing and concerning.
> is it because the travel was fun, or effective for project success, or effective for personal advancement, or something else?
Probably all of the above. With COVID, lots of teams (at lots of companies) became more distributed, and meeting in person is important occasionally (IMO). Travel is fun, and google tends to be in the fun cities with fun offices (SF, NYC, etc) so traveling to those cities is probably an enjoyable trip compared to flying to eg. Milwaukee. With a "fun budget" even if you have to work, you'll probably enjoy those trips beyond the work.
> How concerned are people about possible layoffs, possible declining TC, and/or possible changing nature of the work lifestyle?
I imagine considering the the earlier claims of "20% productivity increase", product cuts and stalled hiring, layoffs probably feel around the corner for many people. Having to output 20% more is no easy feat unless you really weren't working very hard.
> Are there any pre-existing concerns that talks of belt-tightening are adding to?
I think its just that lots of people are new to this lucrative perk-filled rich company and its an affront to their expectations and potentially reason for joining.
There are also meetings and travel to partners, to industry conferences and forums etc. (depends on teams).
In "tough times" all that is suddenly cut off, and only "essential travel" is allowed. But then some teams get to spend two weeks in Malibu on an "essential travel spa retreat" while their teams cannot even send engineers to a high stakes technical discussions with external party integrations. And of course "essential travel" somehow doesn't include various levels of sales, management and marketing.
So, people get grumpy.
If your company shows a slowdown in growth--not loss: less growth--the idea that you're suffering from macroeconomic effects and need to cut spending makes very little sense. You're still making a profit quarter after quarter, where's the financial hardship?
(You might go "what about that 4 billion dollar fine from the EU??" To which the response is "did you look at their earnings report? Google made just shy of 20 billion in operating income last quarter alone, on a 30+% profit margin. $4b is literally still a trivial amount as a fine, constituting less than a month's worth of earnings)
The simplistic relationship is as follows: - The share price is (theoretically) a reflection of the future earnings expectations of that company - Slowing growth means lower share price/lower dividends - Lower share price/lower dividends means reduced profits or losses for shareholders - 80% of stock is likely owned by institutional investors that have automatic triggers for sale of stock based on certain performance thresholds (think pensions like CALPERS) which further incurs losses for shareholders in the event of sustained periods of lesser growth
So when the shareholders band together and demand growth, they will expect the CEO to deliver it or they will replace that CEO with someone who they think will deliver that growth, simply because the system is structured such that growth is expected/required with some minimal level of risk.
Personally, I think there are better systems we could come up with that would ensure better stability for employees and shareholders even in the face of temporary slowdowns in growth that are caused by structural economics, but any of them would likely lower shareholder returns by some small amount, and the institutional investment plans would balk at that. (That small amount would translate to billions of dollars in projected future equity and would likely make the institutions insolvent at some point in the future.)
Well, boo hoo for him. That's what he gets the comically outsized paycheck for.
We as an industry need to stop accepting that as an excuse for CEOs cutting wages, hiring, and perks for regular employees (not talking about the executives here) when the company is still making massive profits. If there's a genuine cash-flow problem, then yeah; it sucks but it happens. But screw this "We've got record profits, so now we need to shaft the lot of you that got us there so that we can juice those numbers even higher in order to further increase our high scores!"
While your argument might work when it comes to regular publicly traded companies, Google is nothing like a regular company. As a tech giant LLC, the general public can buy shares, but those shares buy them nothing except for a cut of the profits.
It is funny how people always consider their own politics as neutral. This is an inherently political statement as it sets up "advancing politics" as opposition to "meaningful work".
For some people the "meaningful work" they "just want to do" is to make the world a better place and that often isn't possible without "advancing politics". Maybe the "interesting product space" is to get one of the world's largest companies to reduce carbon emissions. People like that might view building adtech as the chore they endure for the opportunity to do "meaningful work" of fighting climate change.
being scrappy might work when you have <1000 employees since the chaos might be manageable but when you have 100000 people working in the company scattered around the world, the leadership must also adapt otherwise you get bloated companies that are ran like a headless chicken.
Sundar and Zuckerberg love to blame the individual contributors for having fun instead of working and slacking off but it's so hard for them to hold themselves accountable for the situation of their companies. They get their bonuses when the company is performing well but when times are tough it's because of a regular employee slacking off. ironic that big tech started off with the idea of being better than large corporations of the time only to end up as a bureaucratic hell itself.
This is the lifecycle of all corporations.
Before Google and Facebook we had Yahoo and Myspace. Now TikTok is doing the same thing and Sundar and Zuckerberg are crying about it.
They shot themselves in the foot de-platforming and censor content creators. Those creators were welcomed with open arms by Google and Facebook competitors. I see more and more creators pushing their YouTube and Instagram audiences over to Rumble or TikTok. Clearly it's starting to be a real problem for the bottom line.
Before you say TikTok does the same, that's true, but it's not the point. Creators don't like having to walk on eggshells if they can avoid it.
If they were such a powerful voice, Truth Social wouldn’t be struggling.
The inescapable fact of the matter is TikTok is eating Instagram's lunch. I bet we'll see Rumble do the same to YouTube in a year or two.
In the long run, yes. Because what's defined as 'fringe' and undesirable can change any moment like it had in the past with changing governments and corporate sentiment, and the next 'fringe' group may be a group that you are in. Even if it feels like that would be nigh on impossible at this moment.
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/qanon-trump-conspiracy-the...
Unless you also believe that Trump is facing down a shadowy cabal of Democratic pedophiles with headquarters below a pizza shop.
Eventually what is fringe gets too close to the average group of people, and they start getting wary.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-election-exclusi...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532
Are you really comparing the laptop of Biden’s son to spreading lies about voting eligibility, voting places, etc?
In your example, replying with a link to vote.gov would not only provide accurate counterfactual information, but help indicate to everyone that the source may not be reliable. Censorship is like pouring gasoline onto a fire because you have no water, or refuse to believe water extinguishes fires.
Good ideas counter bad ideas. I don't understand why this is so hard for some people to grasp.
That will do much good to their hiring process...
To me it felt like a CEO explaining difficult choices and the reasoning behind them.
These are not "difficult choices". But they do like to make them at the expense of employees.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q2_alphabet_earnings...
What the CEO's answer revealed exactly how much he values employees at Google.
Also I would recommend you remember his answer next time the executives' compensation is adjusted.
Put your money where your mouth is, recommend the board make your CEO salary and compensation the same as when Google was 'small and scrappy' in the early years. Lead by example.
Because getting rid of perks means higher or stable profits which means the stock goes up and Pichai makes more money.
Imagine a world where their needs are taken care of outside of work. Do you really think they’d stick around?
People who are completely apathetic and find no enjoyment in any aspect of work probably are also best off working together.
Do all of us enjoy it? Of course not. Do more than any other industry? I would honestly highly suspect so, yeah.
Of all the colleagues I have worked with, the ones that I enjoy to work with are the ones that enjoy their work and are curious and passionate about their craft.
EDIT: There's actually a pretty big generational shift in how work is perceived. Newer generations both bring more of themselves into work, but also expect much more from it. These days, work being a simple 9-17 is simply not good enough anymore, given the alternatives. If you find no enjoyment in any type of work at all, I feel bad for you, because we spend such an enormous portion of our waking hours in the work at work :(
P2 - Apathetic member
P3 - Performing-but-solitary performer
P4 - Performing-and-coach in the company
P5 - Collective intelligence and ability to introduce P3-P4 to other P3-P4 because they’ll do awesome work together.
You may be at P2, but the risk of communicating too much about it, is to demotivate potential P3 into P2.
I’m not an experienced manager so I suppose this is a pipe dream. We need to account for employees with newborns and divorces, how we can modulate work for them.
"I provide the teeth, you provide the torque, I get money, you get profits. Anything else is wasting company resources."
...Where's the joy in that, and what benefit is there to rejecting company-funded efforts to inject joy?
Don't kid yourself or fall for corporate propaganda. You are a cog and you will be treated as such.
We were talking about Google "slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic." and GP opined that he only wanted to show up for a paycheck and not get any extra benefits like travel budgets.
You've reversed the context to "You ARE a cog!!!" which is irrelevant to GP preferring to decline extra benefits when they exist.
Likely not many SWEs at Google are struggling for food; but wouldn't you be at least a little pissed off?
By the time my youngest graduated in 2020 and I again had the opportunity and willing spouse to get a job at BigTech as a software developer and move across the country, I still wasn’t interested.
I kept talking to the recruiter and she suggested another software engineering adjacent job that ended up paying 20% less, but was permanently remote, I jumped at.
I have an entire room in my own house dedicated to cardio equipment and weights and my wife has another room dedicated to her dance studio and workout area. Why would I care about a “free gym” and “free food”? I don’t need “free laundry service”, the only time I dress in anything approaching business casual is when they fly me out to a customer site or a team meeting.
They didn't. No one's salary ever has gotten out of whack, ever:
It is estimated that those who take the most share out of the economic value that they generate are upper-level tech employees. And even them take only up to 10% of the actual economic value they generate.
Which means that the rest of the population get much less. The system is atrocious.
So no. Big tech salaries haven't gotten out of whack. No employee was ever able to get a noticeable share of the economic value that they generate, and those who get most get at most 10%.
After around 2012 as the economy was coming out of the recession, VC money started flowing and computers (smart phones) got more ubiquitous, BigTech compensation really started diverging from being a regular old enterprise corp dev even after taking cost of living into account.
I’m not complaining. I make a comfortable living working for $BigTech doing the same type of enterprise architect work I did three years ago just by knowing “cloud” and having soft skills.
My basic problem (I think) is that I get bored of this disposition. I like to be creatively engaged. But it’s 8+ hours of 5/7s of my waking time!! I don’t spend anywhere near that time sating my appetite, and my hindbrain wants to be the “breathing specialist” on the team, so I cede that to him. I just struggle to go on autopilot and do the disengaged worker bee thing, watching the day go by, caring only as much as needed to deliver nominal output. Every time I try this approach to save my sanity, the “newness” is cool for a couple of days, and then I find myself gradually reinvesting again, because 8 hours of “it doesn’t mean anything to me, I’m just sitting here wiling the time away pondering what interesting things I might be able to do in the scant remaining non-work hours” robot mode just bores the heck out of me and sucks my soul dry.
If you’ve got advice on how to get to this mode that doesn’t involve an IV drip of alcohol induced euphoria, I would love to hear it.
Recent example: I recently moved house. Many of my books and lower-urgency work resources are still in moving boxes. I think I need a new bookshelf, so that I can unbox some stuff. I take pleasure in the act of putting together the bookshelf. It is a 30-60min task, it is trivial in the grand scheme of things, but I feel accomplished about doing this proactive step to improve my working environment. Plus I like the new shelf I picked, I like the way it looks, the design itself gives me some small amount of pleasure.
Rinse and repeat. Maybe not every day, but every week, there will be some small/tiny/insignificant victory like this. Learning to appreciate them, will not necessarily bring you lifelong joy or self-actualization on its own, but it will do wonders for improving your relationship and emotional balance with respect to work. Sometimes a big project goes wrong, everything is on fire, my boss is asking me to do some crazy unreasonable thing (but at least, a good boss doesn't ask this unnecessarily, and only very rarely), whatever... but still there are always some minor victories to celebrate, or at least partial progress:
- hey I stopped the bleeding on that production outage -- at least other teams know where to look for deeper fix
- hey I sketched out an outline for that documentation that everyone keeps asking about -- even if the content isn't there, at least people know this is where new content should go
- hey I wrote down all my tasks for tomorrow -- so even though I didn't finish things today, I can still log off and forget about them, then pick them up again in the morning
EDIT: Or, to put it another way:
- don't think about the problem as, "how do I learn to accept tedium or chores, and not get bored/frustrated/angry about them?"
- instead the problem should be, "how do I find contentment in the small details of life, that I previously overlooked as simply being tedious or boring?"
It sounds like you value doing work that brings you to life. Instead of finding a way to subvert that value, perhaps you can find a way to live that value.
Some tips that might or not be helpful depending on how similar our brains are:
- Stick to a routine - start your day with an activity of your choice instead of diving into your inbox (slow coffee, short walk, read for 20min, etc.) - laptop open and closed at specific times - no "popping on just to do a little" after your cutoff - turn off phone notifications (unless on-call) - if something doesn't get done by the end of the work day then it becomes a tomorrow work problem
It takes a while but you'll slowly build more of a door in your mind where you're able to step away from work and move on to other activities
- Make an effort to build relationships and activities outside of work so that work becomes a smaller piece of your overall life
- Reflect on how emotionally invested you're getting (in work issues) and catch yourself when this happens. It's just work.
- Brainstorm your larger career or personal development arc and walk it back to things you need to learn to get from here to there. Figure out how to work these into the projects you take on or request. If you can't check out then make your current work part of your journey and be intentional about your activities.
1. No company has ever gone out of business because I left.
2. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, my employer would send my wife “thoughts and prayers” and they would have a req open for my position before my body was in the ground.
My job affords me the ability to work from anywhere in the US and I am going to be taking advantage of that for at least the next few years to fly across the country and do the “digital nomad” thing.
But I also “live in a position of f%%% you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI). It’s been over 15 years that I haven’t been confident that if the pay/bullshit ratio got too low that I could get another job.
Small and scrappy is fun for many. I don't want to work in a megacorp with forced annual trips organized by a large HR department. I want to work on and build interesting things with smart colleagues who are similarly engaged and motivated.
If I had to guess, most Google engineers aren’t working on cool greenfield stuff, they’re maintaining and extending huge legacy projects with decades worth of cruft, where minuscule changes take days to land.
If you want great engineers to work on that stuff, you need to pay them and shower them with perks. Otherwise they’ll move somewhere small and scrappy that’s actually fun.
No. Those who are pocketing the $72 billion/year net profit should do that. Not you. If you are doing that yourself without being compensated for the value you generate, you are being exploited.
But he also to roll a critical three times in a row on a D20 to get a payout. Just to make it have the same feeling as small and scrappy, you know.
And honestly, swag is a great place to cut. It's such a waste of material and money. Most of it ends up in the dumpster.
The interesting part is that they felt the pennies nearest at hand were in their employee perks, rather than in expanding their business. That is always a bad sign even if the company we're talking about is as profitable as Google.
Not every business needs the best people working there, nor does every business need its employees to be highly motivated - it's a valid move in the extreme for Google to transition to being like SAP, but I can't believe all of the people in this thread that are defending that they have a right to do it without asking what their executives know that makes it seem so appealing.
I'd always sooner have a pay-rise, and choose my own toys.
He joined Google in 2004, the same year as its IPO. The company had 3021 employees at the end of that year.
Funny to watch these CEOs try to shift blame for their failures recently. All these companies went on crazy hiring sprees for no real reason and now are crying about "deadweight" employees. Perhaps the people who approved the hiring plans are who should be blamed?
If you don't need the engineers, plenty of companies are hungry to snatch them up.
As a Bay Area aficionado, I couldn't quite get this, but when I saw how these folks lived in Cupertino and Sunnyvale (tiny, overpriced houses with ultra-competitive school districts) I could kind of understand the desire to return to an Ohio, or Illinois, or Indiana.
If you're from the midwest, the quaint little midwestern culture is what you know. And it is super cheap, so the cost of entry is low. I know people who moved to Ohio when I was there - "temporarily", and fell in love. You can move to a (small) city, and it has home-town vibes and the people there are townies. Its so easy to make friends and just click and feel like you belong. Everyone does the same things (or some subset of the same things) and goes to the same places, so there's a strong shared cultural overlap, because, yes, that's your friend groups favorite bar too!.
That said, I hated the weather, it was awful compared to the bay. Many cities have "Detroit syndrome" where the business left and everyone is talking doom and gloom about how their city will never make a comeback (even if its in the middle of a comeback). If you're not straight and white and American you may connect less to it, since its got strong "All American" vibes in the 'burbs and a strong religious majority. You're less likely to find the crazy driven type-A overachievers since they moved out to bigger places.
Anyone who wants a break from the Bay or NYC I always point them to Cleveland. Every major sports team for you to root for, houses cost less than a VCR, a few good schools feeding the local businesses, and a great history full of cultural places in the city. Some of the best public schools in Ohio (rocky river, shaker heights, etc). Some of the best museums anywhere, and the best off-broadway theater district. And one of the best hospitals anywhere, because you never know if you'll get sick/hurt. Truly amazing considering the COL can be 1/10 that of San Francisco.
Yep. 'Discarding people like trash' will be added to Google's reputation of 'discarding users like trash' with their 'deprecations'.
Management broadly assumed the pandemic boom was the new normal, but now they are sacrificing labor to placate the wrath of Wall street gods in order to keep their jobs.
Surely such a system would never filter on the wrong employee type.
What is this weird obsession with 'swag' in tech companies? My company sends packs of it on a regular basis as a motivational tactic. It's generally not stuff I need, or want, it's wasteful, and there are much better ways the company could be spending that money (and the HR/marketing employees time). I've stopped adding my address to the list at this point when they ask for it.
Maybe Google thinks they don’t have to market anymore?
Eg. lots of people love those forced team building things.
Different people like different things. For a large company though, it's hard to distinguish who wants what, so they default to just sending it to everyone.
When I lived near a large metro area, I liked to hit second hand stores, mostly thrift stores, to pick up really cheap T-shirts. When there's a lot of school districts concentrated in one area, there is often a nice selection of older style logos of local HS teams, which is what I was after. I was fully grown by my junior year, so I can still wear kids' clothes. Anyone that noticed my flare assumed I was local and from that area, so it was a cheap way to assimilate and be left alone.
I’ve never worked at Google, I won it at a charity auction for PyLadies at a Python conference and not only was it for a good cause but worth every dollar. I don’t think I’ve had a better bit of swag. Its even been a humorous conversation started at times when people assume I either work for or used to work for Google because I have the bag, particularly at software conferences.
Some swag is definitely higher quality and I think Google put some serious money behind their bag selection at least for the years between your bag and mine.
That's weird being on Google salary. It just resonates with me because I'm getting one soon, on a fraction of that pay :)
And it's not just about a single $200 backpack. Many times people feel the need to either be the kind of person who responsibly saves money, or you just buy whatever you want all the time, and it can be hard to be in-between. If you're dropping $200 on a backpack without thinking about it, you're probably spending $1,000+/mo. on things you don't really need... and there goes a big chunk of money.
Personally, spending $200 on a backpack sounds like insanity to me. But I've also had the similar experience where someone got me a $200 something as a gift and it turned out to be amazing, and I would have bought it if I had known, but often you don't even know whether something is worth it until you've tried out owning it for a month or two. Nine times out of ten, the $200 item isn't worth it compared to the $50 version. So getting it as a gift and discovering you love it is just really, really nice.
I can only speak for myself, but I've looked for months to find something I really like so it's not an impulse buy and I'm not dropping 1k/mo on random things.
You have amazing people around you, it's great when people show you the good stuff :)
Cheap substitute for pay rises or benefits improvements.
Small conveniences and tokens of appreciation really help with employee morale. Many people, even those who believe they cannot be bought so easily -- definitely can be swayed by this stuff.
Offering to take someone out for a $20 lunch can move mountains.
Fill the void for your friend when their own company is letting them down.
Even if you’re cost cutting there should be a million places to make huge savings than the few $ of free drinks an employee goes through a month.
Travelling to conferences is a huge learning opportunity: you can upskill by having fun with people all over the world for two-three days.
If I worked for a FAANG company where I am supposed to be or become an expert of a technology, and they don't want to pay me for one or two conferences per year, I'd also feel frustrated.
Would like to see number of psychology and socially studies around it.
My opinion of why Meta-verse will fail is because you are using their technology in the same environment. A bad environment is a bad environment no mater how expensive the VR/AR tech your using. And also lacks body language communication.
A while back when I was working at a company that had significant spending in GCP, we'd get free tickets to Next. My director basically said that there wasn't any expectation for the employees he was sending to learn or network, it was basically a semi-vacation. Kind of makes sense honestly.
No matter how much that actually happens, I wouldn't be shocked if it gets echoed and magnified internally as a problem.
Unsure why the HN crowd is so hyper-focused on direct attribution. As a worker in a corporation you are part of a machine, this machine uses you as a part of it and the machine as a whole generates revenue. You might not be the main piston firing and generating power but you are still part of the mechanism. If someone hired you even though you won't be creating any value it's not your problem that the machine is dysfunctional.
The whole question of where the value comes from and "who deserves it" is central to the argument, and there are a lot of positions with different axioms. I hadn't heard that it is deserved simply for being a warm body in a chair independent of any productivity, so that's a new one.
The same could be said of shareholders:
Why are employees so focused on direct attribution? As a shareholder you are part of the machine, ect. If you aren't creating any value, its not your problem the machine is dysfunctional...
A worker was hired by a system, that system decided they needed that worker and as a contract promised said worker a salary. Why is the fault of the worker that the work they perform doesn't add value?
I really can't comprehend why a systemic failure such as hiring people that you think don't add value is supposedly an individual's fault. If the system failed, why is that you point to the worker and not to the system that failed and hired said zero/negative value worker?
> As a shareholder you are part of the machine
That's a new one. What part exactly does a shareholder perform in this machine, given we are discussing a public company? No bullshit about "pricing" and other financial shenanigans, please.
As for the shareholder, If I were to steal man the position I would say the critical role in the machine they provide is the motivation. The equivalent of the animal brain amygdala. Their existence provides the drive to execute and reward pathway.
A different analysis might say that both the useless employee and the shareholders are cancer, sucking up value and providing nothing. In a better designed system both would be surgically removed
Not only the HN crowd, but increasingly everyone, everywhere are so hyper-focused on direct attribution because...
> As a worker in a corporation you are part of a machine
...our work life, less, our actual society should not be made into a soulless machine for the profit of absentee shareholders.
I don't care that they own the company, that's meaningless for my question...
Absolutely ok. In the world of work, that has been the case for a century or so. That's why those are considered perks. Because that's what they are. Everyone knows it. You just call it 'conference travel'.
Monotonous speaker? Check. Visuals that don't relate well to the content? Check. Wall of text slides? Check. Lack of opportunity to ask questions? Check. Asocial learning environment? Check. Bad pacing? Check. Prescriptive teaching style which doesn't give learners an opportunity to broaden their understanding? Check. Uncompelling or just nonexistent narrative? Check. Badly targeted subject matter? In spades.
In my mind it’s pure entitlement and another example of the staggering divide between the tech world and the real world. It makes me very sad.
In fact, because of supply and demand, if Google competes less for labor, the pay at non-tech companies will go down. This hurts people lower down the ladder.
So they'd need to give you ~+$1000 in salary/bonus instead of a $500 monitor to get the same monitor for personal use.
And if you're getting paid that much by a GAMMA its because California's economy, and the laws that gave rise to that economy, give you the market power to demand that sort of a salary. Because you're sure as sh3t not getting paid that much to do the same job in Kansas.
More seriously, it's a way to build a "clique" organically, same as for sports teams. It's a non mandatory uniform in a way.
They also acknowledge the employee NPS score has gone down but have used a lot of corporate speak to "speak to" that score without initiating any responses to it. I'm pretty sure they, and probably like many others, think the lower ENPS scores and RTO are the only correlation for employee attitudes right now.
So no, the care packages aren't really important, but they're usually commensurate with other endeavors from the top that may not sit well. As another example, the company has done nothing to acknowledge nor address rising attrition... which started before the economy turned (I fully acknowledge they may be happy with it). But the attrition -- even welcomed -- usually has a negative impact on morale overall.
It's kind of nice to get a T-Shirt with a Team Logo on it when you join a team. Especially if you see other people on that team already have that T-Shirt.
It's kind of nice to celebrate a major accomplishment with a coffee cup that has some cool art on it.
It's kind of nice to see what interests other people have by noting the stickers on their laptops.
It's kind of nice to get a surprise nice new backpack when you wouldn't normally bother to take care of yourself by getting one.
It's kind of nice, as a manager, to send some token appreciation to your team when you see them working hard to solve a problem.
It's kind of nice.
Some people kind of like it. If you read the book "Love Languages," you'll see that different people feel appreciated through different ways. Some like token gifts. Some like words of appreciation. It's worth learning how someone else likes to feel appreciated, because it costs you very little to express your appreciation in a way that they particularly enjoy.
idk how to say it without it sounding bad but lots of developers are manchildren and treating them like manchildren seem to work very well
It's more like custom team t-shirts, custom figurines, custom bobbleheads, and whatnot. Special rare acrylic desk pieces for every patent your team has generated. Stuff that says "hey, we're a team and we've been through some stuff, like important launches and inventions that we're proud of, and these are symbolic reminders of that".
Similarly, traveling -- whether to a conference or a team-building prototyping retreat -- is a way to build bonds and trust with your coworkers, in a way that just doesn't happen in the regular 9-5 in the office or (worse yet) over Zoom.
When you work in a 100,000+ person company, it's really, really easy to feel depressingly lost and just a cog in the machine. It's both the little mementos and the big travel experiences that help us remember the path we've been on and get to know the people we work with as human beings.
So it really does feel like nickel-and-diming when these are some of the most effective long-term investments you can make in a team.
Importance is clearly in the eye of the beholder. If I were an employee, I would like to know. Trying to hide may do more damage than just adding it on internal news portal. Heavens know I get tons of notifications on everything. This would likely qualify as such a notification, I think.
I guess they want workers to be presential but don't want to pay them enough for the expenses huh.
Google and Apple campuses are quite empty most of the time.
The next day I discovered a utility room with a washer and dryer; and a second bathroom, also with twin washstands. The only problem was that the hotel had no bar; to get booze, I had to go to the hotel next door.
I later learned that there was a major international conference going on in Ottawa at that time, and all the hotel rooms had been taken by politicians and diplomats. They weren't doing me a favour; they were just ensuring as best they could that I didn't jump on the next flight back to London.
Don't they have a travel department to worry about booking accommodations? I can confirm hotels in some cities (downtown Boston, for example), are crazy pricy these days. It seems like you can't even find a bad hotel under $450 depending on what is happening that week or weekend.
Google is not small. Is too regulated to be scrappy. And is NOT a startup
It’s an ads monopoly. Working there is all about making money.
There are gigantic corporations that are much more regulated than Google in Europe and they are able to run scrappy global operations.
This is not anything related to scrappiness. This is related to improving Google shareholders' returns. Its base capitalism in its most ugly form - hurting lower rank employees for the benefit of majority shareholders and upper management.
Um, maybe you should start your cuts there.
Your engineers are smart enough to understand this.
At the time we were spending about 40k for recruiter fees to replace each engineer. During my exit interview I asked the CFO if he thought that math worked out. He had some regrets.
Part of this is because (as you allude to) a very significant chunk of them don't even believe that's important to do: employees are just interchangeable cogs in their system, grinding along to produce bonuses for them.
But part of it is because retention is about motivation, which is a very, very complicated topic, and any attempt to create a one-size-fits-all solution to it will inevitably fail.
Of course, a large percentage of those who do believe that retention is important are deeply convinced they know exactly what one-size-fits-all solution is The One True Way, and anyone who doesn't respond to it is just some degenerate weirdo.
So they go on missing, and we go on shaking our heads.
Capitalism. The absentee shareholders' interests trample everyone else's interests. Even the actual founders' interests...
Very few people give a shit if something is cost effective, ethical, or even intelligent to do if their boss is happy with the decision or they’re able to placate their boss.
They scrapped cutting edge R&D and became a one-trick ad-pushing pony. When the companies trajectory has been away from interesting ideas into ad laden messes and Gmail UX refreshes, the perks are all people show up for. I could work on shoving 10 ads in a YT video? Sign me up!
I question whether Sundar is a good CEO. Google succeeded given the broader economic shift to tech, not his leadership. Pedaling nostalgia for a time when growth was easy suggests to me he has no idea how to iterate forward in interesting ways.
Tyrany in Russia is a reality too. So was loosing your hand in a machine without compensation.
Whether rights or snacks, if you want to keep them, you have to fight for them.
If all Google employees quit on the same day, and refuse to return without getting a seat in the board, maybe they get somewhere.
You're expecting way too much. I know plenty of people who work at Facebook all the while claiming that "they know it's bad for the world", and guess why? Because those $400,000 a year are still flowing in.
Instead of talking about it as a law of physics
Don't get me wrong - the low-level people always know what is wrong and know how to fix it. But nobody in upper management gives a shit. Which is why your company is inefficient. Soliciting advice from random ICs now will result in the same dont-give-a-shit syndrome by management. And management continues to do whatever bullshit helps themselves rather than the company or ICs.
At my company there have been meetings on how to be “innovative.” The suggestions are straight out of Dilbert. Someone said we needed more meetings and everyone agreed. Another said that everything we do is innovative and everyone agreed.
I have no idea how a modern corporation is suppose to work I guess. Maybe the dream is be innovative me become large then watch the next few generations of leadership slowly tear the company down into irrelevancy.
I forgot where I read this but there’s an idea of a “manager” class that refuses to innovative or change anything because rocking the boat potentially means losing out on bonuses or stocks or promotions, so you do everything in your power to maintain the status quo until you go to the next gig basically playing a game of hot potato until you retire. The “manager” class has taken over the corporate world for decades.
I think this was Econ talk but I’m unsure.
Well run is Amazon or Apple. Not perfect but the best run large companies out their today
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
That is the most fun, people who are lucky enough to having been in a sports team when they were younger understand that being on the road is the best.
If you were a student/athlete then going on the road was a unique mix of working for a future shot in the world of pros AND fun being on the road with your mates.
I understand the dynamics and inequalities that are inherent in capitalism. However the insane CEO and corporate board member salaries are simply not justifiable.