Leaving Google

I joined in 2010 and left in 2019. The company I joined was very different than the one I left. Every single one of Google&#x27;s problems can be traced back to scale. Loss of trust, distance to top leadership, tone-deafness, repeated failures, escalating surveillance dystopia, perf management overhead, leaks...all of them are fundamentally due to scale. And scale is simply because greed. Gotta make that 23% YoY revenue growth. <i>That</i> is Google&#x27;s true mission. Eat the world. It&#x27;s now $180 billion in revenue. In five years, that will need to be $400 billion. And five years after that, it will need to be pulling close to a trillion.

“Quite a few activists and researchers were fired for asking Google to be a bit more ethical”<p>In the examples the author cited, those activists and researchers were fired for reasons going beyond “asking Google to be a bit more ethical. And frankly it doesn’t seem ethical for activists, researchers, and the author to deliberately misconstrue facts whenever they believe they’re on the right side of an ethical (and sometimes just political) issue.

I think it’s interesting that the good things about working there had nothing to do with the employer and the bad things had everything to do with the employer.<p>Indeed, this line is the takeaway, in my opinion: “…is because we&#x27;ve been at least a little brainwashed into thinking a job at Google is the pinnacle of employment.”<p>I haven’t worked for one so this take might be quite hot, but I get the sense that big tech companies do a great job selling you on the idea that they’re elite and therefore you must be elite too if you get the job. But then you’re really just another fungible developer in a pool of tens of thousands. There’s exceptions of course.

I am in the middle of the same sort of sabbatical from Google. It was my first job out of college and I joined the same time as Jay. In fact for a time sat right across the aisle from the Go team when I was working on Abseil (abseil.io) and I can confirm that Alan Donovan is a really kind, friendly guy. The company got progressively more and more &quot;corporate&quot; and felt less and less dynamic as time wore on. Most of the people I know who are still there are burnt out. It&#x27;s a company filled with people who tend to put a lot of pressure on themselves and I felt, at least on my last team, a rising sense of anxiety and isolation from what was already a very high level before the pandemic.<p>That all being said, the quality of humans there is pretty amazing. I count almost all of my old managers as friends and I felt privileged constantly to be surrounded by such intelligent people and to work on such huge ranging vastly impactful projects as I did. But I&#x27;m happy I left. The self-direction feels too good after being in such a behemoth to start my career.<p>On to new adventures!

I’ve been at Google for a little less than OP, and while I’m also considering leaving, my main reason is sort of the opposite: I’m bored. The whole team is bored. It feels like we’re doing nothing, and have been doing nothing for years. I work under 25 hours a week, and the vast majority of time is spent in useless meetings or reading useless docs. My actual work is maybe 5 hours a week. What are we even getting paid for? No one knows. We just keep working on new projects nobody needs, then a few months later upper management shifts priorities and repeat. Seems like the only reason we have projects is to keep us busy. And oh, we’re always hiring. Apparently we’re understaffed. Some secretly call it a pyramid scheme.

&gt; Why I left [...] Burnout [...] I wish I&#x27;d done more to fight those things, beyond signing petitions and walkouts. I&#x27;m not much of an activist though, especially with burnout.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that the author mentions this, but doesn&#x27;t make a connection between feeling burned out and feeling that they have to be personally responsible for everything the company does.<p>I don&#x27;t even disagree with many of the demands of internal &quot;activist&quot;, but the strategies they use (walkouts, trying to keep everyone outraged as much as possible) seem ineffectual to me: The main effect seems to be that it makes ordinary employees feel more burned out since they&#x27;re made aware of many things that they&#x27;re suppose to be angry about but at the same time they&#x27;re powerless to change them. That&#x27;s a recipe for burnout.<p>I get that the thinking is that ordinary employees are not powerless due to collective action, but for that to work you have to be a lot better at picking your battles. You can affect one to two larger things per year, so getting up in arms over every (comparatively) little thing just has the effect that your activism achieves nothing but burn out the people who want to have on your side.

&gt; Second, management was spread way too thin. My last manager had around 25 reports<p>It would be rude to describe my anatomical response to having 25 reports, but suffice to say it wasn’t good. I generally consider 6-7 the ideal max, and 8-9 the “I’m dropping all the unimportant balls in order to keep juggling” line. 25 is so far beyond the pale I can’t imagine how any manager of managers’s worth their salary would let it get that bad. 10 reports is “you put this off a bit too long” territory, 25 is in the “someone up the chain should be fired” territory.

2005-2017 for me. On the &quot;20% project&quot; stuff, which everyone seemed to have heard of:<p>I think it was 2008 or so when I was sitting at a table with about eight other people, and somehow or other the question came up &quot;who has a 20% project?&quot; Only one of us did.<p>The main utility of a 20% was that you could try out a new group before transferring to it, and they could try you out. Other than that, very few people actually had one, even then.

<i>&gt; PMs made all the decisions. Engineers (at least at my level) had very little influence.</i><p>This is interesting given Google used to have a reputation for being an &quot;engineer led&quot; organization, I guess that&#x27;s slowly changing over time.

Google has 140,000 employees, the size of a size-able city in the U.S. Does anyone really care when someone leaves Google?

I’ve come to suspect the reason (ex) Google people write these is basically humblebragging. There just isn’t enough interesting material presented to have any other explanation make much sense. Just an opinion; ymmv.

i miss google+, the world&#x27;s preeminent social network for google employees to announce to the world their intentions to leave google.

I never realized how deeply the promotion mindset is damaging my personal happiness and growth, until I left Google in 2019...<p>Most things promoted in Google about growth boils down to promotion, which is just a cover word of getting your hands on promising project without proactively doing much by yourself.<p>Self motivated ideas actually get me into various trouble. In hindsight, I can see that many coworkers are silently watching this guy getting burnt without offering much helping hands.<p>In the end, I learned the googely way of working at Google, and find it not worthwhile to stay...

A few months ago, I considered applying to Google to join the JAX team.<p>It turns out that you can&#x27;t apply to Google&#x27;s JAX team. You have to apply to Google, and then managers at various teams select whether they want you.<p>The thing is, JAX is amazing. So I&#x27;m now faced with the uncomfortable idea that this process must make sense, because it clearly works. Yet I profoundly dislike it.<p>Perhaps my ideas are the problem, and Google is four steps ahead. I don&#x27;t know. It just seemed like you should be able to apply to specific teams at Google, and that the team should be able to choose whether you&#x27;d be a valuable teammate.

Relevant perhaps is the fact that Google folks just came out of a promo cycle, which is run by a committee. Folks I talked to seem to agree the process is utterly broken, so this is about the time many will decide to jump ship.

I will say as companies grow the appetite for huge ambition shrinks. It’s natural for a few reasons.<p>- you’re established, no longer a startup, you prioritize the momentum in the current cash cow.<p>- your hiring pool changes. Instead of people who want to come build the “next big thing” you tend to attract folks who value the security of a big name. And they will tend to hire folks like them, and so on..<p>- you’re publicly traded. Holding an asset that reliably produces steady growth, creates very different incentives than trying to hit some kind of hockey stick unicorn growth

Reading these always makes me a bit sad. There is a lot in here and people have their reasons, but levels are not everything and various “cuts” aren’t that meaningful when you consider TC of faang. Where else are you going to have a chance to make things better for billions of people? Maybe not life changing but at least slightly better?<p>A small improvement for billions adds up. Though burnout and pain are real, there’s more to all this. Hope OP finds what he’s looking for!

Interesting that the person moved to San Diego (not a cheap place by any means), and Google cuts the salary.<p>There is some strange fixation Google currently has, especially towards getting people into their New York offices - must be some tax incentives or other deals with the city....<p>A friend just recently wanted to work from google office in another tech hub city (not remote&#x2F;from home by any means) and during offer negotiation it was denied, so she didn&#x27;t join - as she didn&#x27;t wanna move to NYC.<p>Odd things happening at Google lately - I mean even Amazon is more remote friendly these days. Lol

While the original site isn’t feeling well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;YV9AQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;YV9AQ</a>

I mean, nothing wrong with anything the guy says here. But this says more about the author than Google, really. No shame in having had enough of a job and wanting to move on after nearly a decade, but I don&#x27;t think the fact that they wouldn&#x27;t let him move far away from the office without a pay cut or the unlikelihood of a promotion indicates that the job radically changed on him, exactly.

I&#x27;m sad to see Jay go, I&#x27;ve interacted with him in his role as bazel-go maintainer. It&#x27;s clear that project wasn&#x27;t getting the resources it needs. As a former Googler myself, I understand his frustration all too well. Google used to be run like a university, a place of learning and scientific advancement. It&#x27;s not anymore. Many of my former coworkers have quit. All of them tell the same story of it feeling like a big corporation.<p>Note that Google was a huge, profitable, publicly traded company before this happened - it was possible to be an institution and be publicly traded, but for how long? Can we build long term focused companies that are subject to the whims of the stock markets? I&#x27;m not sure. Truthfully, I think it&#x27;s a social problem.

A few days ago I got the usual call from the Google recruiter, after being rejected a year ago with feedback of 2 sure hire, one lean, two no hire. A strange collection, isn&#x27;t it? Well, I would have “fired&quot; two of them plus the recruiter, one who wasn&#x27;t paying attention to my interview and one who turned off the video and whose accent and questions were basically incomprehensible (I am non-US myself, btw). Maybe the two no-hire?<p>I make 75% of what a Google would make for the (high) position they would hire me for, but I work 1&#x2F;5 of what I would work at Google and with little overhead such as performance review, promotion packages, and excuse my French, other assorted bs I have zero interest for at my age and with my experience.<p>If the hiring process were more reasonable, i.e., not dependent on the mood, accent, question of the day of interviewers whom I will (probably) never meet again after they nonchalantly determine my future employment, I might agree to interview again and then evaluate their proposal, but otherwise I think Google will continue to bleed talent and hire little uninteresting robots (mine is a salty-fish generalization of course) who have the patience for nonsense that I, and people like me, do not have.

We live in a finite planet with finite resources. I think every argument for growth (on the scale FAANG companies operate) should also mention that part.<p>I also want to say that it&#x27;s completely acceptable to work on a place without exorbitant pay, stocks, or promotions every 6 months. A job can be many other things. Different people want different things at different phases of their life. For some of them, a job is just a job.

Although I appreciate the honesty about the company in this blog, my issue is almost every big company behaves in the same way. FAANG is not the absolute best, it is just best option among the worst. The only other option is to work at a small startup or start your own company but that is a different ballgame and requires extreme levels of grind.

&gt; If a great new opportunity comes up, take it, but drop something else. If the dropped thing was important, it&#x27;ll get staffed. If not... why work on it?<p>The above seems to explain how a thing that fills a gaping functionality hole in one google product via another just gets deleted without any consideration for the interaction between the two.

Down for me. Mirror: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:glQF_0OknwEJ:https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jayconrod.com&#x2F;+&amp;cd=1&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:glQF_0...</a>

That resonated a lot more than I expected it to do. Not the Google parts but the burnout parts. I exited my job during summer and am still not looking for something new and this article and the one by Maya linked in it really helped me put words on it

&gt; My wife also works in tech and can comfortably support us both. I hope in a year, I&#x27;ll be rested and ready to jump back into tech with a better sense of purpose and direction.<p>If you have this luxury, use your precious time to work less.

Is this just long form &quot;calling in rich&quot;? With an L5 RSU package and the share price tripling, a few hundred thousand turns into a few million and you can afford to leave. Nice problem to have.

Cached: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20211023032551&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jayconrod.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;122&#x2F;leaving-google" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20211023032551&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jayconrod...</a>

&gt; Google doesn&#x27;t use the go command or modules, and since there&#x27;s no direct measurable benefit to Google, it&#x27;s very difficult to make the case.<p>i&#x27;m curious. What exactly they don&#x27;t use internally?

From the outside, this paints google as a bunch of engineers moving around, dropping projects, trying to get promoted.<p>Obsession with promotions instead of product quality won&#x27;t lead anywhere nice.

An interesting look into the reality of working at Google. Thanks for sharing!

These posts almost feel like a Scientology style exodus and moment of clarity.

&gt; I couldn&#x27;t work anymore, and it was time for an extended break. From speaking with other people that have gone through this, it seems like the only thing that really helps.<p>Maybe changing teams or company can get you working again. 1 year seems too long to me

This website seems to have switched to stoplang, because it’s down.

I believe &quot;scale&quot; should probably be &quot;growth&quot;

Larry, from his lair in Fiji: “I should sell some shares”

site is currently down: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;YV9AQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;YV9AQ</a>

Seems takeaway is if Google didn&#x27;t cut this person&#x27;s pay by 10 per cent then all their &quot;shitty behavior&quot; like Project Maven and so on would have been just fine.

Why did he leave? The tl&#x27;dr is the L6 glass ceiling and the remote pay cut. I can speak to both of those:<p>First, for those that don&#x27;t know, new grads get hired at L3, PhDs at L4 (which IMHO is actually a mistake but that&#x27;s another issue) and there is an expectation of getting promoted to L5 (Senior Software Engineer). There&#x27;s no set time frame for this. I&#x27;ve known people who stayed L4 for many years and were quite happy. L6+ start to require increasingly extraordinary influence and technical contribution.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s hard to get promoted beyond L5 for open source work<p>I&#x27;ll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it&#x27;s hard to get promoted to L6 for <i>anything</i>. This is by design. It&#x27;s how the company controls costs and maintain retention (by dangling that L6 promotion, possibly for years).<p>One of the things that Ruth Porat did when she became CFO is lowered the promotion target percentage. This meant less people got promoted at each cycle.<p>How promotions work is a committee of higher-level engineers (eg L7s consider promotions to L6) and will have 10-15 packets to assess. These will get stack ranked by the committee. If you&#x27;re above the line you&#x27;ll get promoted. If you&#x27;re not, you won&#x27;t. Ruth&#x27;s change just made that line a little higher.<p>As for the pay cut, this requires some context. By the time you reach L5+ the majority of your total compensation comes from equity, both your initial grant (for the first 4 years) and annual refreshes and discretionary grants you get along the way. So less than 50% of your income comes from salary plus bonus.<p>For those employees who go permanent remote, there is a location-based pay adjustment. SF and NYC are at 100% rate. Other areas at 85-95% of that.<p>That only applies to the salary plus bonus (since bonus is derived from salary) part of your total compensation. So a 10% cut for L5+ is in reality &lt;5%. You don&#x27;t save on taxes by moving to San Diego but it is cheaper than the Bay Area. If you move to a no-state income tax state however your net pay can in fact be higher.<p>So, the argument for no pay cut is you&#x27;re saving the company money by not having to pay for office space, a desk (etc), free food and so on, all while doing the same job. This seems to be the author&#x27;s position and I&#x27;m certainly sympathetic.<p>The argument for a pay cut is that your compensation isn&#x27;t really associated with your output at all and is entirely market-based. For many people not going into the office and being able to live somewhere that isn&#x27;t the Bay Area is a huge plus so people are willing to give up something for that. Plus you could argue the company doesn&#x27;t want people going remote who don&#x27;t really want to by offering the same pay. By lowering your pay slightly it creates a psychological barrier such that only people who really want to do it do so. I&#x27;m sympathetic to that argument too.

&gt; I started losing a lot of sleep, and I got a lot of headaches and back pain. I got a lot of &quot;brain fog&quot;: inability to concentrate or make decisions. I started forgetting words and names and losing the thread of a conversation mid-sentence. I felt like I had no energy left for anything other than work, and I could barely manage that.<p>Other than back pain these symptoms match mine exactly, except I hadn&#x27;t worked full time for the past 2 years and I wouldn&#x27;t say I&#x27;m stressed or anything. I&#x27;m not sure what it is - maybe cabin fever? Yesterday I nearly lost consciousness when I got up too quickly. I&#x27;m also losing weight (12kg so far, which would be great if I knew _why_ I&#x27;m losing weight). Did a blood test about a month ago - everything is fine. I did wonder if these are vaccine side effects, but that seems very implausible - the second dose was in May. But I digress.<p>I totally get what Jay is saying in his writeup. I largely felt the same way except in the opposite direction in one aspect - the number and shrillness of &quot;activists&quot; has become overbearing to the point where it was severely impeding work and morale. Seeing that he has pronouns in his twitter bio he might have been more sympathetic, but I bet this stuff distracted even him.<p>Contrary to belief popular on the outside, Google is indeed a fairly stressful and thankless place unless you&#x27;re skilled at self promotion, which I&#x27;m not, or you don&#x27;t care about working on cool things and getting promoted. This is why every time their recruiters ping me I tell them I&#x27;m not interested &quot;at this time&quot;. No matter how much they pay me, I can&#x27;t imagine subjecting myself to such treatment again. And I was pretty successful there - high profile projects, wrote lots of code, shipped impressive stuff, and I still felt like shit most of the time. I can only imagine what less &quot;forceful&quot; folks feel if I felt like a gnat on this elephant&#x27;s ass.<p>Contrary to belief popular inside Google, life is great on the outside. Freedom is a thing folks, and without moving around you aren&#x27;t experiencing it. I know when you&#x27;re on the inside it feels like you&#x27;re &quot;changing the world&quot;, but of all Google products nowadays I only use Gmail and YouTube. If everything else disappeared completely I wouldn&#x27;t even notice. Heck, if Gmail disappeared I&#x27;d switch to Proton Mail in a day, and if YouTube disappeared there&#x27;s BitChute and Rumble which are modest, but adequate. So whatever you&#x27;re &quot;changing&quot; there impacts me very little, and mostly in negative ways.<p>I certainly do not regret leaving. If anything I should have left much sooner than I did.

All these people talking about &quot;Google changed, man&quot; seem like they need to consider two points:<p>1) So did you. E.g. the commenter who was at Google for 9 years. Do you not think you changed? You changed. It reminds me of right wing commentators who say &quot;everything was so great in the 50s!&quot;. Sure it was, because you were a child!<p>2) Selection bias. You left. Of course if you take the people leaving, they&#x27;ll be less happy with Google than the people who stay.<p>Oh, and the &quot;Of course, when you leave Google you have to write some kind of letter or rant&quot;. Ugh. So childish. No, you do not need an exit rant. And joke or not, this was an exit rant.<p>&gt; A 10% cut is pretty damn unfavorable, considering I was doing the same work on the same team<p>So were all your colleagues working in offices outside the bay area. That was literally your &quot;bay area bonus&quot;. You&#x27;re being super spoiled and disrespectful.

I&#x27;m sad... I used like their slogan Don&#x27;t be evil. Now it&#x27;s like when Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm relabels it to 4 legs are good, but 2 legs are better.