Many of these are very recent departures, eg. Craig Silverstein left in Feb 2012, Amit Patel was within the last year or two, Marissa was last week. I'm kinda amazed that half of the first 20 employees had 10+ year careers there, despite being financially independent since the IPO. I read somewhere that median Silicon Valley job tenure is about 2-3 years.
Tenures are not 2-3 years when you're financially independent. When you have an epic trump card in all conversations about what you should spend your time on, do you think you'd spend more than a minute doing something you didn't want to?
I believe the term is "fuck-you money".
"""
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck-you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators.
"""
Do engineers in SV actually spend time doing things they don't want to do?
You don't need a lifetime supply of cash to have "fuck you money", you only need enough to be reasonably certain that you can find some other way to get more money. In Silicon Valley, that's about 2 days for a skilled engineer. None of my software-engineer friends are doing things they don't want to do.
Almost all SV developers, even those at the "perfect job", still have to do things they don't want to. This is a factor in salaries; the more unpleasant a company is to work at, the more they have to spend to hire skilled developers.
And "fuck you money" isn't only enough money to tide you over to your next job, it's enough money to quit working forever, to live completely as you want for as long as you want.
Anyone who wants to accomplish anything has to do things they don't want to. This is not a function of the money in the bank, it's a function of the difficulty of the task. Someone founding their second startup still has to empty the wastepaper baskets; or perhaps they can hire a cleaning crew, but then, someone on their first startup can do that too, and they don't get quite the same respect from their employees as if they did it themselves.
I define "fuck you money" as "Can you stand up in the middle of an important meeting and say 'fuck you, I quit' to your boss?" You don't need to be set for life for that, only to be sure you can get a job with someone who doesn't give a damn that you just said fuck you to your previous boss. And it's as much a function of reputation and chutzpah as money.
None of my software-engineer friends are doing things they don't want to do.
That would be remarkable. That would mean that the solution to an optimization problem without constraints ("Of all the things I could be doing, which will make me the happiest?") is the same as to a corresponding problem with an extra constraint ("Of all the things I could be doing that also bring enough money to pay the mortgage, which will make me the happiest?")
It doesn't often happen in life that adding an extra constraint, especially one that limits the space of possible solutions so drastically, doesn't change the solution. No doubt there exist people like that, but it seems unlikely that it would be true for all of your friends. They probably just put on an act which is expected in this kind of environment, and you naively take it at face value.
It's a different way of thinking about the problem. Most of my friends are not trying to optimize their life. Instead, life happens. The way to be happy is...to be happy, to change the things that you can change that make you unhappy, and accept everything else and not worry about it.
It's not an act any more than you choosing to view the world through the lens of an optimization problem is an act. You can't really judge what someone's desires are - just because they don't desire what you desire doesn't make it wrong.
Reminds me of something a girl I once dated once told me. We were talking about a mutual friend of ours, someone who (like me) tends to view everything through a hyper-logical lens and treat it as an optimization problem, and she said something along the lines of, "I can't read anything he writes. It's like everything has to follow logically from some past premise, but he doesn't realize that not everyone starts from the same assumptions as him. How can you relate to someone like that?"
FWIW, I've thought like that for much of my life (which is perhaps why said girl and I are not together), so I do understand what you're saying. I'm trying to point out that it's possible for people to genuinely be happy doing whatever they're doing, at least until something better comes along. And I'll go out on a limb and say that most people think like that, and the type of achievement-driven, believes-they'll-be-fulfilled-if-they-had-$10M mindset is overrepresented on HN. (BTW, people generally tend to associate with others of similar worldviews - remember my date's comment of "How can you relate to someone like that?" - which is why the bulk of my friends are perfectly happy doing whatever they do, and perhaps the bulk of your friends are always striving for something better.)
(It probably also helps that there're lots of jobs available for Xooglers in Silicon Valley, and that category is already fairly self-selecting for people who enjoy programming, so the universe of "things I enjoy doing that will pay the mortgage" is quite large.)
I phrased the thought that way, but that doesn't mean that only hyper-logical people feel like that and everyone else agrees with you. Quite the opposite: most people would think you're crazy if you suggested that they want to go to the office in the morning rather than say spend the day chilling out by the pool. It's precisely the software engineers from Silicon Valley who more often embrace the flavor of denial you are advocating.
What you said about being happy is no doubt true, but so what. No doubt there were happy slaves and unhappy kings. Did the happy slaves not do things they didn't want to?
Early 30s, largely working on maintenance & refactoring of a 10-years-old codebase, with some iOS devs mixed in.
(Perhaps I shouldn't speak for them, as people might hide all sorts of unhappiness to avoid rocking the boat. But they seem happy, and when I've offered them jobs on my projects - which I think are much more interesting, but I've learned that what's interesting to me is not necessarily what's interesting to everyone - they've declined.)
The departures come at a time when Google is in transition, its becoming "old." Having worked there between the time it exited its giddily irresponsible teen years to the start of its midlife crisis, I recognized the symptoms. What was humorous to me was that I lived through that the first time at Sun (at Sun 10 years) from Sun just going public to the point where they were struggling with their identity. And for much of that time Eric Schmidt was either my boss, or my boss' boss. 'one hop' in the food chain as it were. At Google I mentioned to Eric that we'd been in this movie before :-) He pointed out the numbers were a lot bigger in the picture on this go round. From what I hear from friends who have left after I did, the movie is playing out the same way.
The last group I was in at Sun was the Java group that later was the core of JavaSoft. It had been populated with low employee number 'refugees' as one of them put it. A number of folks certainly had enough money to not work if they chose to. But an interesting thing happens.
When you suddenly have enough money in the bank so that you can quit when ever you want, you lose your fear of losing your job and trying to find another. And not having that fear to hold you back, can be tremendously empowering.
This was one of the messages in the movie Office Space which is sometimes expressed as 'Work like you don't need to work.'
The change is both subtle and dramatic. People stand up for things they value rather than things they think they should support. They sometimes stop everything they are doing to spend a couple of months to help a promising new employee get their bearings and become effective. They push back on schedule fantasies with hard nosed realities, they tell upper management when things are borked or when they are making bad calls. When you don't care if you get fired, as long as your a reasonably principled person, you can become immensely more effective.
And you learn is that it isn't that you don't like work, its that you don't like bogus things that get in your way at work. Nearly every single person I know who has 'retired' it really meant they stopped reporting to someone else and instead invested their time and energy into things they were passionate about and could make a big impact on. Sure pretty much everyone takes some time off to just breathe and think three related thoughts in succession, but once decompressed from the demands of that large organization, they engage in their vision with diligence and passion. Because of that I am not at all surprised when people who became financially independent at a company continue to work there for many more years. How they work changes, and sometimes what they work on changes, but making things happen is a powerful drug.
As for the median thing, my experience is that people I've interviewed have short stints with longer stints in the middle, so they go job A -> B -> C then at job D they find someone or something to keep their attention and work there for a longer time 5, 6, 10 years then move on. My cycle time seems to be 5 to 10 years but its really an individual thing.
"People stand up for things they value rather than things they think they should support."
This is an awesome reply. Not because the views on Google but how reaching financial independence changes the outlook on work. It something I can closely relate. As I have gotten closer to FI, I am more likely to do things that I value even if they ruffle the feathers than just go along with things that I dont value personally but still need to do as part of doing the job.
This reply was so timely for me as just yesterday I told my boss that I quit go find somebody else because I was being asked something that diverged from my value system. Being customer-centric, I value customer satisfaction very high and I am not fond of the hurdles being erected to achieve that goal.
Great response. For the "retired" who stayed on, what sort of impact did their newfound attitudes have on things? Did they play a part in any of the major new products or improvements that came later?
Generally the impact I've observed was folks getting more stuff done. I attributed that to them not worrying about pissing someone off if they stepped on their toes, but it may have been that they just had only one thing to focus on.
To be balanced I've also seen them leave, basically to put to the powers that be a set of facts or demands that need to be true, only to have those same powers tell them it wasn't going to happen. Then they left. I try to pay a lot of attention to those sorts of events because depending on whose reasoning I find more credible it can inform my own thoughts about staying or leaving.
I always find this kind of speculation through determinism a little silly (under the covers all it's really saying is "x is the new y").
Yes, many companies fall into similar patterns as they get older, but many don't. Most of the giant corporations we talk about on HN are fairly unique, don't have exact analogues, and, complex systems being what they are... Meanwhile, people also leave jobs because they took them when they were 25 and now they want to try their hand at Khan Academy (or Yahoo for some reason).
I think you are absolutely right to suspicious of such narratives. They are always a product of both the observer's bias and the systemic bias of the environment in which they operate. I didn't immigrate here, which changes how I experience the place, and as someone who tends to work for 5 to 10 years at a place the half dozen places I have direct experience at are a small fraction of the total number of companies.
The effect I've observed is that Silicon Valley has such mobility (which is to say between jobs) and such commonality between business structure, that the larger companies get, the less pronounced their differences become. I attribute that to the challenge of assimilating folks into the company culture that is too far off the valley 'mainstream.' It also provides a tremendous amount of cross fertilization where people say "Oh at my old company we used to do X" and if its a better thing than what the locals do it has a good chance of being adopted. So management techniques, office layouts, and programming methodologies have a sort of viral nature to them as well. This seems to homogenize the way companies evolve than you might expect.
This is gold. Not so much for the comments on Google, as for the comments on what being fearless does to you. But I've also experienced that you need to couple being fearless with having some superior or even unique skills to maximise satisfaction.
"When you suddenly have enough money in the bank so that you can quit when ever you want, you lose your fear of losing your job and trying to find another. And not having that fear to hold you back, can be tremendously empowering."
My take on this is that (if you are a good engineer) you can just choose to be fearless anyway and trust you'll get a job whenever you want one. Life is too short to skulk around in fear of what some random middle manager thinks about you. This doesn't mean that you should go around rubbing people the wrong way (you shouldn't) or that you shouldn't be trying to make your FU money (you should).
But I've seen many many talented devs twist themselves in knots, trying to please their managers' unreasonable demands, and otherwise live a life of cringing fear or quiet desperation, just out of fear of being fired/demoted/whatever. This is particularly true in India, where hierarchical power structures are more pronounced than in the USA. and losing a job has more of a social cost.
"Nearly every single person I know who has 'retired' it really meant they stopped reporting to someone else and instead invested their time and energy into things they were passionate about and could make a big impact on."
Gold. I am only semi-"retired" (I have money in the bank, I don't really have FU money. Any day now ;)) and I am nowhere as talented as Google's top 20 employees, but this is true ime.
I was always fairly "fearless", so didn't have to work on that bit. But I did have to consciously choose never to work on uninteresting/boring things or with boring/uninteresting people.
(I am aware that most people in the world don't have that choice - all the more reason that people who do have such a choice should probably exercise it)
After being ground down after a decade of working on outsourced enterprise software -and it did take some grinding, some of us are good at deceiving ourselves - I decided I would never ever work on meaningless (to me) things again or with uninteresting people.
It paid off in spades for me. I now work on interesting machine learning projects, and have more interesting work offered to me than I can complete in a lifetime. I work much harder than in my salaried 'coding body' days, but the work is challenging and feeds my soul.
"making things happen is a powerful drug."
A very very addictive one, and you don't really need to be part of a large organization to partake of it. There are many people working quietly in many areas on very ambitious projects, with little fanfare - there is a large world outside the valley (and outside software). Perhaps the drug is too addictive, but that is the subject of a different post.
Entirely different loyalty, maybe even belief in the long term. I would say that the difference between the two companies is that Facebook hired young, while Google hired older, highly educated employees.
(In the list below, I wouldn't even count Steve Chen, he was from Paypal and spent no time at Facebook).
Yes, and that is a great thing. When journalism was the old school "I get a few bits of info and use it to decorate a short article with my uninformed opinion about random topics I have nothing to do with", it was worse. Each time I had an insider knowledge of the topic, I was horrified by how biased, approximate, reductive, or plain wrong journalism was.
I also have direct reports (my wife) of journalists asking questions in the streets to many people until they got the answer they were looking for. I bet it is common practice: you are not only told to write a piece about X, you are also implicitly told what to write and you just bend your material, data or street interview or whatnot, in the direction that will get the more emotional reaction from the reader.
Disc: I'm talking about French journalism here, maybe US journalism or Eskimo journalism is magically much better, I don't know.
For non-anonymous answers, they ask the writer before publishing. I was just published on there, and got a Quora message asking for my permission. Not sure how they handle anonymous answers.
