>Interviews<p>One of the people featured is a friend and former coworker at a different company. When I sent him this link, he said they never talked to him. They just pulled info off of his blog.
In the era of Sundar it has become harder and harder to recommend Google as a place to work to friends. Trust me, it is quite noticeable on the inside when the company stops being run by the founders, and starts being run by an MBA with no vision.<p>Posted anonymously to avoid work repercussions.<p>-Googler of > 5.5years
I left Google because I was working on a crank that was attached to a spindle. It was super boring and what I was learning did not accrue to anything that was valuable outside the company.<p>Otherwise it was a fine place to work. No better than Microsoft or Netflix or the rest, but no worse either.
These responses seem kind of formulaic and bland. I don't know why but I expected something juicier - these are mostly just people realising they need to move on, for the same reasons most of us do.
Anyone that has been lucky enough to be able to build and run any organization with 50+ people knows that every month you will have new people joining and at least someone leaving. That has nothing to do with your company culture or how well you can retain good talent, it is just a numbers game.<p>Obviously any organization with thousands of people will have this happen at a much bigger scale.
Similar thread from a week ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18192534" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18192534</a>
For people outside Silicon Valley or still studying at the university, Google probably seems like an awesome place.<p>It's just another Silicon Valley bigco. That's especially true now. In the early 2000s, it was probably a very cool place. But all big companies get more awful as they get bigger. I'm sure the bureaucracy and politics there are stifling, like all bigcos.<p>I was happy at the other companies I worked at. I selected and targeted all the companies I worked at, and Google wasn't one of them. I never answered the voice mails from Google recruiters and never responded to their LinkedIn messages.
I worked at Google for close to 10 years. I resigned when I had made enough money to retire comfortably (for the next 40 years) in a European city.<p>The first two years were enjoyable but then it started going downhill, fast. Some close friends and co-workers had major implosions on the job and I was burned out. Once I realized that Google would suck me dry if I let it and that reality was completely different to the expectations I had going in, I found ways to drastically reduce the number of hours I actually worked and spent the rest (company time) doing things that contributed to my self-development (side projects and reading books, mostly).<p>I spent the last ~5 years doing no more than two hours of actual work per day. Needless to say, these were some of the best, most carefree years of my life. My mind rebounded and it felt great knowing that I was screwing the company that only viewed me as a commodity whilst getting paid top dollar.
I am pretty sure I wasn't the only one doing it, either.