Did Google culture in 2011/2012 then again in 2022/2023.
2011 was watching them recruit and hire everyone smart enough to sit around to just make stuff and eat each other's dogfood. There were posters for little experiments to try at the elevators or lobbies. Good times! Will we release this Dropbox clone or not? Should we drop this dorky AR glasses or not? Anything is possible in the quest to organize the world's information and free food!
2022 was watching the new cohorts come in and realize the game is now just throwing stuff against the wall, clinch an exec to back you, get to google scale, and get your bonus so you can finally buy a house in a post-G+ landscape. Oh, on top of that you're really just a pawn in a corrupt game of keepaway from the other companies.
Now everything scaled back, a lot of projects get scrutinized, then boom, someone else is taking Google R&D and productizing it better than Google PMs can and we don't know what to do anymore. But we still do leetcode, and if you pass then just press that space bar so you can buzz in during the standup to say all good, no updates.
I know a bunch of ex-Googlers who spent 8+ years with the company, and what cracks me up is that they all have some version of this "how the mighty have fallen" story, but it's always relative to their tenure dates.
Some remember Google as being fantastic when they joined in 2005 and then going downhill after. Some think the peak was in 2009. Some in 2012. And I'm sure there are engineers joining now who, in ten years' time, will be reminiscing about the golden days of 2023.
In reality, I think we tend to rationalize our decisions to join a company by imagining it's better than it really is, and then rationalize our decision to leave by imagining it's worse. More often than not, the only real change is that we've grown tired of the workplace and need a change of scenery.
When I joined (2007 or 2008) there was actually a huge amount of literature on previous cultures, as well as people who had been there a long time.
I watched enough of the recorded Bedtime Stories (or whatever they called them, it was basically a bunch of nooglers in jammies listening to a distinguished engineer talk about the old days) and talked to enough old timers to learn that the period after the early search engine problems and ad revenue problems were solved, so about 2002-2004, was definitely a highlight that was better than my time.
For example: the microkitchens were all loaded to the gills with tons of amazing snacks. By the time I arrived they were downsized for cost and health reasons and when I left in 2021 they were only a shadow of their previous self.
My point is that some of us did research and saw that the earlier days before our tenure were even better.
Charlie was still present in his cafe (or its predecessor) and often cooked a whole cow for lunch every day. By the time I joined, Charlie's was just a long line for crappy food.
I've heard mixed results about the very early days- absolutely thrilling, but totally terrifying and stressful.
The reason is pretty simple. As companies get larger, the culture dies.
Those who joined big-tech early-ish in their career likely see the state of the company at the time as way better than what they're used to. Then it gets worse.
It doesn't really matter where you enter in the history of the company, the culture is almost always going to be the best as you know it when you join and get worse over time. Very rarely does the opposite happen.
On the contrary, higher CEO pay is a symptom of enshitification because it means ownership has dispersed enough and/or the majority owners have checked out enough that there's no strong hand slapping the CEO around when he proposes utter BS for his pay package. I did my undergrad econ final thesis on this subject almost 20 years ago now, it was quite interesting. Over 500k of total compensation a year correlated very heavily with a whole host of policies that indicate CEO board capture (Don't ask me what they were at this point, it's lost to the sands of time) and likely enshitification progression as well since the guys providing the capital have checked out and the CEO's interest is in increasing his comp, not in making sure the capital is well compensated.
They could all be right. 2005 Google can be a much better place to work than 2015 Google, which can also be a much better place to work than 2023 Google, which can still be better than many other large companies out there. When your starting point is as good as Google's early days was there's a lot of room to get steadily worse over the years.
At least now the path to unseating Google seems not only possible but inevitable! Anti-trust investigations and lawsuits, the product graveyard, search seemingly degrading, and now getting trounced on AI.
I remember back when I felt Google was invincible but it doesn’t feel like that anymore. Can’t wait to see what succeeds them in search.
Even though it was edgy for its time - it is much more "tamer" compared to what orgs (atleast in tech) are these days. For example I used to think - there is no way that "bear is sticky with honey" can be real. Oh boy! What surprises me is the straight face during the regular utterances (I am saddened and surprised that I am still surprised about it!)
Any time someone mentions Google cloud all I can think is google will lose interest and shut it down. In reality the risk is probably pretty low but they’re immediately on the back foot with me. I suspect I’m not alone in thinking like this.
Good for him. It's been years since I worked for a place that pays per hour. That's pretty much the point of exempt work: whether it takes you 10 hours per week or 60 hours per week, you're getting paid to get the work done.
Sorry Business Insider. If you're trying to get me riled up that a 900 billion dollar company can afford to pay to the equivalent of $375-750/hr for an engineer, sorry. Even at the bottom of the bell curve, he's bringing in more value to Google than that.
I have no sympathy for Google, but I don't think you can apply that value heuristic. The bottom of the bell curve at most large companies is actually negative. People that not only don't contribute enough to revenue to cover their salary, but actively waste other people's time.
Average revenue per employee is just that, an average. It also includes work that was done in the past and keeps paying dividends even though the employee might not even be there anymore.
> When he interned at Google prior to his current role, he said he worked "probably under two hours a day," which freed up time to take a weeklong hush trip to Hawaii while on-the-job.
This is more messed up than the rest of the article. You need to have a serious failure of processes and/or extremely low expectations from your interns if they can work 10hrs/week and get a FTE offer afterwards.
I have zero expectations from an intern. The scope of the programs vary wildly, but I have seen platforms that are as little as two months. It takes a month just to get someone a new laptop, access to systems, any kind of onboarding to processes, etc. Then you can give them a project, but unless they are exceptionally gifted, the mentor is going to have to spoon feed the requests. My experience dealing with people fresh out of school is that they need discrete assignments, there is less ownership and global thinking. The scope of the work has to be so limited that it requires minimal expertise.
Which is to say nothing of the value proposition of having experienced person taking hours out of their day to mentor someone with a limited shelf-life.
I expect nothing from interns either, but in this case he got a full-time offer after his internship which is the part that I find baffling.
He's either very gifted or got a manager/hiring manager that just went "eh he's ok let's give him an offer", which is the part that is a failing in processes in my opinion.
> manager/hiring manager that just went "eh he's ok let's give him an offer"
When you've got plenty of money in the budget it's not beyond poor managers to hire more for no other reason than to grow their "kingdom", as a bigger headcount equals bigger importance.
Wow this was the complete opposite from my personal experience. I'm almost over with my summer internship at google.
I was given a project complete opposite of "discrete assignments, less ownership and global thinking". I am really happy with the project I was given and the outcome of it. The objective was purposely vague which allowed me to take control: Designing the implementation, consideration of alternatives, setting up experiments, creating feature review documentation. I had to reach out and interact with people from multiple teams. I feel like I really got to experience the FTE life in my short 14 weeks.
I worked at least 50 hours a week during my research internship at Google. Towards the end, I worked seven days a week. It was mostly because I was the only person on my team with the expertise required to complete the project, and I cared about being eligible for future internships. There were a few non-research interns who I vaguely remember not spending a lot of time in the office, but I would say they were there at least 20 hours a week.
It's kind of crazy that Google of all places doesn't have any sort of system to alert when one of their devices signs on from a location not associated with that employee.
Google does monitor network usage and activity for at least some of their non-developer contractors. I briefly dated a Ukrainian woman who had a mouse jiggler plugged into her Chromebook to game the activity monitoring.
You might be on to something. Although it’s not too far fetched for someone to get their work done in a few hours and have the rest of the day to themselves. Especially a very competent jr who gets assigned easy work at a slow moving company. I had this experience when I was Jr engineer years ago. I wasn’t given enough work and half the time was just told to spend time learning by manager or Sr Engineer. Heck just browse cscareerquestions and you’ll see several posts about Jr engineers complaining about lack of work and fear of their skills stagnating and not learning enough or fears of being made redundant.
I think you are thinking of Forbes opinion articles, which anyone can submit for. Forbes, like Business Insider, has no paywall and seems to have a low quality threshold. Fortune is still paywalled at over $200 per year after the trial year, while at Forbes an annual subscription is $50 for less ads. If you want to submit an article to Fortune you have to send a pitch to an editor.
There's a process where you declare this work. And if it gets approved, you have ammunition to back you in a court case if it ends up going to such lengths.
I have had projects approved - questions that get asked are about e.g. conflict of interest or actual competition.
Google actually doesn't want to own your fruit-stand-in-the-park business.
This is intended to prevent situations like the zuck/winklevoss case (just to name 1 publicly well known example).
No, they don't care to own most people's weekend projects. They wouldn't have any claim on that anyways.
But when someone is spending the time Google pays for to work on a startup, I would THINK they would care about that. Or maybe Google's internal processes is okay with them doing 1 hr/day of work "as long as they're getting done whats expected of them."
> work on a startup, I would THINK they would care about that
The decision is not made based on whether the work is a "startup" or not. It's not even clear what a startup is - some companies that are worth more than $1 Billion are still somehow "startup".
It's based on conflict of interest, legitimate business competition, leaking/selling sensitive information, and other concrete criteria, in my opinion, are quite fair.
It does not depend on whether it is a "startup" or not
Being proven in court is all well and good until Google jams you up in the case for so long and costs you so much for lawyers they effectively torpedo your startup.
He's effectively banking that Google will be so big they won't notice - just like only working 1 hour per day.
This is the kind of thing that will be pointed to as a reason to bring employees back into the office. So much so, that it's hard to believe it's real.
If you are applauding these guys while maintaining that being forced into the office is a crime against humanity, you may want to do some introspection.
What makes you think he couldn't and wouldn't do the same in the office? I had a government job in the early 90's and there was a guy who had a desk and a job there, but also had a real estate business. He took realtor-related calls in the office (loud enough for everybody to hear him doing it) pretty much all day long.
This is probably propaganda, but it's also a management self-own. Either most of your people are so shitty they're indistinguishable from someone working 1hr/day and thus you suck at hiring, or you're so incompetent that you can't tell the difference. Either way, not a good reflection on management.
The problem with these big companies is how slow things move. Smart, talented engineers often join them and get the enthusiasm beat out of them by corporate politics and lack of impact, all that’s left is watching their bank account grow and apathy.
I know if I was making $150K working one hour per day and spent the rest of my time working on a startup, I would not want an article written about me and published on the internet...
I realise that it is considered most improper on this website to actually read the article, but the person being talked to was not compelled to talk to Fortune (the original source) and Fortune is protecting their identity, as is normal for this sort of story.
Protecting the identify of this specific individual is irrelevant really.
If this one person got away with all this at Google, then there's reason to suspect many more are. The entire program at Google might be under strict review going forward because of this article. Time will tell..
I mean, maybe? I’d imagine they’ve messed with the numbers a bit as well for obfuscation. However, the important point is that the subject did this voluntarily.
Its probably still not challenging. Their major shtick is search, with a minor in neural net AI. Gen Z age range. Worked here on an internship. Bought a plane ticket to Hawaii during internship. Makes ~$150,000, +/- obfuscation error. Mostly only tends to make commits in the morning. May have been dumb and used GMail. If its not obfuscated, and almost exactly $150k, then its really easy.
You used to be able to substantially increase your comp at G with good performance.. The problem is that as the company tries to fit everyone in the same performance bucket and cracks down on spend it becomes pretty opaque about when and whether you'll get anything for the additional effort vs slotted into the same performance bucket as everyone else. This simplifies performance management, basically making it very difficult to get anything extra but it is also pretty demotivating.
this person is working on their startup in the meantime. it's not about not wanting to work, it's about the profligate spending and bloat in big tech
it's so obvious to me that I can't believe people need proof, I don't even live in SF and I know plenty of engineers with cushy lifestyles working < half the day at FAAMG. are yall just closing your eyes and justifying this amongst yourselves or something?
This will be interesting given how hiring was driven by a preference to, as one Google exec directly described it to me, have people inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in.
If you're not denying the staff to your potential competitors by keeping them on payroll then are all of them actually worth keeping?
A lot of the early FAANG hiring was to prevent staff from going to (or founding) a competitor. So build a pipeline to identify the people who are likely to build a competitive threat to e.g. Search and hire them before they get a chance to do that. Pay them enough over the years that they get lazy and start thinking about retirement by 35.
It's a bonus if they ship anything useful, and you have in theory increased the odds of that happening by hiring so many of the talented young programmers that graduate every year.
Every developer for Google who has on payroll is a developer that competitors can’t hire.
Google is large enough to impact local labor markets for specific roles.
If you tell the world that you can make $200k at Google to dick around all day, you’ve now caused your competitors to need to pay developers more money to attract talent and make them perform at a high level.
If someone is going to urinate, you'd rather have them stand inside the tent and piss towards the outside (which is unpleasant) rather than stand outside the tent and piss towards the inside (urine landing in you). Similarly, better to have a disrupter on payroll causing issues within your organization than disrupting it.
Stories like these seem fanciful, but given the benefit of the doubt, I think they are contributing to management's drive to return to office. They read articles like this and lose their marbles.
I didn't find this credible. It pretends that writing code is what they do when the reality is that most of it is figuring out what people really want - and the way to do that is spending most of your time communicating with the customer; certainly more then one hour a day.
2011 was watching them recruit and hire everyone smart enough to sit around to just make stuff and eat each other's dogfood. There were posters for little experiments to try at the elevators or lobbies. Good times! Will we release this Dropbox clone or not? Should we drop this dorky AR glasses or not? Anything is possible in the quest to organize the world's information and free food!
2022 was watching the new cohorts come in and realize the game is now just throwing stuff against the wall, clinch an exec to back you, get to google scale, and get your bonus so you can finally buy a house in a post-G+ landscape. Oh, on top of that you're really just a pawn in a corrupt game of keepaway from the other companies.
Now everything scaled back, a lot of projects get scrutinized, then boom, someone else is taking Google R&D and productizing it better than Google PMs can and we don't know what to do anymore. But we still do leetcode, and if you pass then just press that space bar so you can buzz in during the standup to say all good, no updates.
This new silicon valley era is weird.