
Google Employees Confess The Worst Things About Working At Google - rosser
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Google-Employees-Confess-The-Worst-Things-About-4951481.php
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patio11
Somebody please do a panel about The Future of Journalism analyzing how you
can use an established newspaper brand to market whitelabeled content from an
Internet publisher which is itself content-farm levels of editing applied to
crowdsourced posts from a Q&A site, and profit from the CPM advertising sold
to brand advertisers which cannot appear on the Q&A site itself because
stooping to pick up those pennies would murder their implied valuations.

Here's the Quora thread which Business Insider added 25 words of synopsis to:

[http://www.quora.com/Working-at-Google-1/Whats-the-worst-
par...](http://www.quora.com/Working-at-Google-1/Whats-the-worst-part-about-
working-at-Google?share=1)

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sz4kerto
Business Insider is a tabloid, despite its name.

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ewzimm
Not saying it isn't true, but it reads like a giant humblebrag. "Everyone is
awesome" is the number one complaint.

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1g00gler
Disclaimer: I work for Google

A lot of those comments seem to come from people who had a bad experience and
I don't think necessarily reflect the average.

The arrogance part is very true, though. Just take a quick glance at mailing
lists like industry-info or eng-misc and you'll see a bunch of condescending
assholes looking down on past co-workers and competing companies.

Sometimes I wonder if those people get any work done at all as I always see
the same names.

Even during internal presentations we are constantly reminded about how Apple
is bad and inferior and Google products are awesome, even if they end up being
a buggy pile of shit because internal feedback was ignored.

A lot of managers at Google are great engineers and piss-poor managers with no
people skills at all.

Among the young crowd who joined the company straight from college you see the
ones who think of Google as a religion and will not accept any criticism at
all. There's also the ones who think they're still in college and don't
understand simple things such as being mature and respectful with your fellow
Googlers.

The latter you can see spending a lot of time posting passive aggressive memes
on memegen.googleplex.com

I've been here 3 years and have noticed a big change, for the worst. It got so
bad at one point that Urs Holzle had to write a 'No Jerks' manifesto calling
out the childish and disrespectful behavior that has, sadly, become so
prominent.

Sales are considered second class citizens and a substantial part of
engineering despises Social and Android product areas and their leaders.

Despite all that it's still the best place to work, way better then your
average corporation.

James

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z92
"It's like never-never land - people never grow up. They drink at all hours,
socialize constantly, play games, and do little to no work."

I was wondering how Google make their programmers work. Looks like Google
haven't found a solution to this problem either.

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pestaa
It's the easiest problem for a company to solve, but unfortunately it requires
the management to also do their work.

~~~
Kiro
How do you solve it?

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pestaa
Empowering employees, trusting them, treating them well and fairly, observing
their wishes and resolving conflicts proactively. Et cetera.

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tmister
Reddit had a discussion about it a while ago
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1pto3b/google_e...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1pto3b/google_employees_confess_the_worst_things_about/).
Also the comment posted at this context
[http://www.reddit.com/r/firstworldproblems/comments/1pvgjx/g...](http://www.reddit.com/r/firstworldproblems/comments/1pvgjx/google_employees_complaining_about_their_jobs/cd6qzu1?context=3)
comparing about environments of Google and Microsoft is now at top of
r/bestof.

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lifeisstillgood
Ignoring everything else, now I have a young family I want to work somewhere
that I can do awesome work, and still get home in time to read bedtime
stories.

I can live without free sodas.

The obvious next step however is remote working for all - making free sodas a
little redundant.

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ojbyrne
This reads like a list of 50 random complaints that got crowdsourced down to
the best 13. I.e. actually interesting.

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gtz58
I think 13 is being a little generous, I counted one.

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arcticfox
While these are almost certainly true, #1 seems like it would be a complaint
of the subjects mentioned in #2.

"Everyone is awesome."

"Many of the engineers are arrogant."

