
Google employees confess all the things they hated most about working at Google - Jerry2
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/google-employees-silicon-valley-worst-things-about-working-a7472166.html
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gdulli
> How could a gig at the biggest, most ambitious tech company on the planet
> possibly be bad?

I know this is journalism and it's just a setup for the premise of the story,
but my god it's so naive it hurts my heart.

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Veratyr
This is just a blogspam wrapper around a Quora thread from 2013 (though there
are more recent answers): [https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-negatives-in-
working-in-a...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-negatives-in-working-in-a-
too-good-to-be-true-offices-like-Google)

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Jerry2
This part was interesting:

> _Sean Gerrish, Former Software Engineer: "Google must tread carefully in
> order to avoid litigation. In general, Google cannot do things like violate
> copyright laws without immediate, significant effects. This is exacerbated
> because governments' laws will change to affect Google itself."_

> _" In contrast, many startups can run circles around Google, not because
> they are better at execution (although some of them are better at
> execution), but because they can often get quite far by flouting regulations
> or civil actions before being discovered."_

What would be an example of a 'law breaking startup'?

~~~
oautholaf
Pre-acquisition YouTube was probably skating on thin ice here. Rumor has that
eBay's origin was less pure than selling Pez dispensers.

Having worked at many startups, I can say that it is very common for startups
to have an 'original sin'.

~~~
nailer
Snapchat was a teen sexting app before it was about 'Stories'.

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nailer
A lot of people work late because "there will be a roast dinner at 7PM". I'm
100% convinced that it's in Google's financial interest to cater and that
smart law firms and other traditional industries (that currently think free
food is amazing) will do the same in the next 10 years.

~~~
madengr
Speaking from personal experience, I suppose that is better than companies
that are too cheap to buy pizza for their employees who are putting in crazy
hours to make a deadline.

~~~
digler999
it saves time and money. and unless someone is very "type-A" about meal
planning and time management, this convenience buys them a certain amount of
emotional security (ie it lowers the slight anxiety about "what am I going to
do for dinner tonight). The more anxiety and stress you can eliminate, the
happier your employees are. I think it's great.

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zubairq
Google Sounds like Microsoft in the late 90s

~~~
icefox
Was this also what IBM was like in the 70's?

~~~
zubairq
Yes ex ibm and Microsoft and any other monopoly company. I've seen it myself 5
times

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cylinder
Boring article, sounds like any large organization.

~~~
marssaxman
That's what is noteworthy. Google had really good PR for a long time about how
great it was to work there. Well, it turns out they have feet of clay after
all, and many of the attributes that used to make them a better place to work
than other tech giants were really just consequences of not having grown quite
as much yet.

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burger_moon
I'm getting a "Server not responding error" in plain text on a white page.
Doesn't look good.

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nunez
I can speak to the server provisioning complaint in the Quora thread since I
briefly worked on the PaaS team in their CorpEng group.

Google's server and infrastructure provisioning is actually not that bad. It's
MILES better what I've seen at any other large company I've worked for (and
I've worked for a few). Requesting new servers and instances is automated
(plenty of places require you putting in a ticket), virtual instances are
provisioned almost immediately and are available in minutes (much faster if
your workload is on internal GCE) and many of the changes to those instances
are nearly instant if they're reasonable. You could even modify login and
ownership permissions with this damn tool. It was an incredible piece of work.

Obtaining hardware was a different story. Requesting it was automated just
like it was for virtual compute, but getting servers racked-and-stacked took
longer because the tickets generated by the request tool needed to be routed
to a hardware operations team in our datacenters. (By the way, they have a
REALLY strong hardware ops team. These guys and gals, but mostly guys, care
about every damn resistor in their machines, especially the ones that were
built by them for Borg compute.) This took a while sometimes because, as you
would expect, Google had two different request systems and seeing which
updates were made where wasn't always easy. As for the servers themselves,
let's put it this way: their SMALLEST server was bigger than the largest
servers provisioned by MOST large companies. Obtaining a beast of a server
(32-cores, 256GB RAM, a few TB of disk space) was pretty easy despite being
frowned upon ("can that run on Borg? No? Okay!"). They have tried adding costs
to stuff a bunch of times to make teams feel bad about abusing compute
(SRE/SWE-minutes/hours are a real thing, and some tools even tell you how many
were spent on your request), but it didn't matter too much in the end since
Google's internal IT budget was always pretty lofty and it mostly affected who
got to take their entire team on an all-expenses-paid vacation at the end of
the year.

The teams were siloed to high heaven, so that did slow things down (my job
there: "Is it the operating system? No? Pass it onto networking/HWops/VM
team!"), but those teams absolutely knew their shit.

Everything else in that post was spot-on, though, and pretty accurately
described why I no longer work there. But, without question, Google is one of
the most employee-friendly companies in the world. If you want a high-paying
tech job in an urban city, stability and all of the fucking perks you can
imagine (you can fill your entire closet on Google clothing and gear, though
you'll need to buy pants and underwear; the SRE backpack they gave me is one
of the best I've ever used), you can't beat working at Google.

However, if you're the slightest bit entrepreneurial, want to make as much
money as a dev or whatever as possible or want a fast-tracked career of some
sort, Google is, at best, a good pit stop between your current job and your
next impressive gig. (Their non-compete is ridiculously limiting; you
essentially can't work on any side projects while working for them that you
intend on selling.)

~~~
eecsninja
Mostly correct. One nit: Mountain View is hardly an "urban city" and SF is a
90 minute commute away.

