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Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
- xyst 2y agoWorking at the modern Google seems so overrated. Wonder what it was like in early 2000s when Larry and Sergei were not C-level douches
- bitpush 2y ago[flagged]
- laweijfmvo 2y agostill pays more than just about anywhere shrug
- lordswork 2y agoSergey is still down in the trenches quite a bit. He regularly pair-programs with folks on the Gemini team and ran an AI paper review for a while.
- paulpauper 2y agothe pay is great
- foobarbaz569 2y agoThanks for writing this! I work on AppEngine / Serverless as a SWE. Nice to see that you worked on it as an SRE and I can totally relate to the cognitive complexity of the systems! :)
- st3fan 2y agoYou forgot the action items to be moved into the next sprint.
- xyst 2y agothat’s just standard at all Fortune 500s. I called it “cooking the charts” so clueless executives don’t idiotically/blindly cut budgets scrum master: “points per sprint is going down guys!1!1 (after moving stories to next sprint). Velocity is gucci”
- kimbernator 2y agoStory points are the pieces of flair of the SWE world. Trivial to have more of, but the only objective measure execs can freak out about
- stonethrowaway 2y agoLight on details and mostly seems to revolve around money.
- moosedev 2y ago> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
- stonethrowaway 2y agoIt’s a shallow postmortem.
- bitpush 2y ago[flagged]
- sk5t 2y agoIt’s an appropriate dismissal as the article itself is surprisingly shallow.
- redrix 2y agoIsn’t this the whole point of working; particularly at a FAANG? > It’s a shallow post-mortem I respectfully disagree. It’s an 8 minute read. Sure, it’s mostly in dot-point form, but personally I’d rather that than some massive 80,000 word blog post that I’m going to drop 1/8 of the way through. Since when does a personal blog post need to be a well constructed and lengthy document?
- stonethrowaway 2y agoI would rather read an 80,000 word blog post. It would satisfy my curiosity and it’s exactly the sort of material I come to HN for. It’s Hacker News. Not Digest. It’s also why I don’t read the news often posted here from big media companies - they’re often just awful hit pieces against someone or something. Or are pushing a product. But a well articulated, technically correct post that’s evenly paced? Heavenly. Its a David Attenborough documentary for tech nerds. It’s exactly what I am after. I wouldn’t say anything against having an upfront summary for people who don’t have time/patience. 9 years working at a top tech company of bleeding edge work reduced down to “I made money. Oh, I made money. My stocks did well, so I made even more money” is the pinnacle of intellectual laziness. That’s not a postmortem by any stretch of imagination.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bitpush 2y agoJesus Christ. Not all articles are meant to be thought provoking, deep intellectual pieces A person wrote their experience on their damn website, and you in your infinite wisdom chose to come here and then poop on it? Get a grip.
- typeofhuman 2y ago> Tons of money Lots maybe. But if it's under 8 figures before the dot, it's not tons.
- gregoryl 2y agoI think that's fair. I'd like to think I have some fairly strong ethical requirements for work, but I can see those evaporate in the face of 8 figures.
- pizzafeelsright 2y agoHuh. That's concerning.
- rabbits77 2y agoI recently left a job at a very different large company with a similar timeframe (a little under ten years). Pretty much everything this author states is related to my experience. There is nothing all that special about Google. Maybe there was twenty years ago, but that ship has long since sailed. It’s just another large US tech company. Like Microsoft and IBM before it.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago> It’s just another large US tech company. Like Microsoft and IBM before it. This is just a hyperbolic statement that should not be taken seriously at all. Look, Google isn't some fantasy land that some people might have lauded it as once upon a time, and it isn't unique in terms of pay or talent, but it is certainly at the top echelon. I did an interview loop for high level IC at both Azure and GCP simultaneously and the different in talent level (as well as pay) was astounding. IBM has never a company where engineers could rise to the same ranks as directors and higher with a solid IC track. Is Google special compared to Apple/Netflix/Meta? No. Is it special compared to Microsoft, IBM, and any non FAANG or a company that isn't a top deca-corn? Yes.
- tw04 2y ago> IBM has never a company where engineers could rise to the same ranks as directors and higher with a solid IC track. Never? Maybe if you’re talking the last 15-20 years, but IBM has been around a lot longer than that… I personally know people who moved up the ranks there to director and above, so I can say with confidence you’re absolutely wrong.
- rabbits77 2y agoYes! It’s sad how ignorant of IBM and US technology industry history some of these comments are. Then again, I suppose every generation does a lot of its own “this time we’re different” myth making. Not everyone has the wisdom to see the broader context.
- 2y ago
- incognito124 2y agoL3 to L4 in 9months is crazy fast, kudos
- zeroCalories 2y agoThat doesn't sound too unusual. I'm more impressed that they made L6 in 9 years. I've known Googlers 10+ years forever stuck in L5. The easiest way to promo at these companies is to leave and come back at a higher level.
- tdb7893 2y agoMy experience was L5 always seemed like the happiest engineers. It has often the most interesting technical work, still great pay, and low stress (compared to higher levels at least). It seemed like when people got promoted to L6 their overall quality of life would go down. I knew a lot of people sticking at L5 on purpose (I once even talked to a CTO at a small company who said they had wished they never were promoted above technical lead).
- yellow_postit 2y agoL5 is a great terminal level (and the equivalent at other companies). you are trusted to walk and chew gum at the same time, can cause meaningful damage (good and bad), and largely “too lowly” to be in the perpetual pissing matches of mid/upper mgmt. sure you won’t control your own destiny in broader projects but it’s a good life you often don’t miss till you’re past it.
- bsimpson 2y agoIt's easy to be underleveled at a BigCo job, and to not even realize what that means because the leveling system is obtuse from the outside. You can spend many years fighting the bureaucracy just getting your title/comp to catch up to your skills. One nice thing about being <= L5 is that your vacations are actual vacations. I can disappear for months, totally ignore my email, and have nothing be on fire when I come back.
- guender 2y ago[dead]
- danpalmer 2y agoThere are a bunch of comments saying that Google is just like any other big tech company and that the exciting engineering bit has gone. My experience is only from the last 2.5 years, but I've got a slightly different take. Engineering from >10 years ago seems like it was a wild west. Some truly stunning pieces of technology, strung together with duct tape. Everything had its own configuration language, workflow engine, monitoring solution, etc. Deployments were infrequent, unreliable, and sometimes even done from a dev's machine. I don't want to disparage engineers who worked there during that time, the systems were amazing, but everything around the edge seemed pretty disparate, and I suspect gave rise to the "promo project" style development meme. Nowadays we've got Boq/Pod, the P2020 suite, Rollouts, the automated job sizing technologies, even BCID. None of these are perfect by any means, but the convergence is a really good thing. I switched team, PA, and discipline 6 months ago, and it was dead easy to get up and running because I already knew the majority of the tech, and most of that tech is pretty mature and capable. Maybe Google has become more like other tech companies (although I doubt they have this level of convergence), but I think people glorify the old days at Google and miss that a lot of bad engineering was done. Just one example, but I suspect Google has some of the best internal security of any software company on the planet, and that's a very good thing, but it most certainly didn't have that back in the day.
- whiterknight 2y ago"Bad engineering" in adhoc ways tends to mean new ideas are being explored. Sophisticated deployments, logistics, procedures, tends to mean you're optimizing or extending existing system. That's not to disparage the latter. making things work at scale is hard engineering. But when people praise the glory days, it may be a preference for working on new ideas in small projects.
- danpalmer 2y agoThere are most definitely trade-offs. Getting a small project off the ground now is hard because the size of the organisation puts so many requirements on you. The way I like to look at it is that small things take a while, but big things happen remarkably quickly. For example, rolling out a "hello world" service might take a few days, but having that service serve 1M QPS is pretty much free (in terms of effort). At my previous place a new service might have taken an hour to set up a deployment for, but having it serve 1M QPS would have required overhauling several aspects of our infrastructure over months.
- markus_zhang 2y agoThe money alone is good enough. I can probably just retire with all those money and stocks. Let alone tons of techs and a shiny CV. Kudos for starting from a height most people can't reach for life. I guess you are going to start another company eventually?
- keepamovin 2y ago9 years is a long time just for money tho. Too much money focused on that attitude
- markus_zhang 2y agoIt's not that long if you can retire and learn good skills.
- j0hnyl 2y agoI don't think so, in fact, now that I'm a little "older", I regret not chasing money earlier.
- markus_zhang 2y agoExactly. Now at 40+ I can only hope for a lottery ticket to retire early and do what I really want. Anything else is just too slow or might reduce my wealth.
- underdeserver 2y ago9 years is just about enough time to big a sweet nest egg.
- bsimpson 2y agoComp is higher at L6 and lower in London, so I don't know how that balances but… If you spent the last 9y at Google in SF/NYC (the top comp regions), you'd have a million dollars in stock alone. It doesn't go as far as it did 9 years ago, but it's still ahead of a whole lot of people in this economy.
- rr808 2y agoI've done the path from SWE to SRE and back to SWE. I was always happy to do production support and diagnose and fix production problems, so I naturally moved to SRE which is always looking for people. It was a real mistake, SRE is hugely stressful and really unrewarding compared to SWE. Yes you learn some skills and get some occasional glory, but year after year of fighting fires really didn't build any long lasting career. After switching back to SWE I've finally got promotions and pay rises again, as well as good night sleep and much less stress.
- aaomidi 2y agoSRE is an absolutely shitty role. I completely agree with you.
- orev 2y agoThanks for recognizing what SRE/SysAdmins have to deal with all the time. I think in general that type of experience would help Developers be more empathetic to the operations side of things. Those fires often come from trade-offs made in development.
- rr808 2y agoYeah if you're a SRE or admin good luck. I think some companies are much better at looking after you than others so make sure you find somewhere good. I think it made me a better developer because I've seen a lot of what can go wrong. Probably reduces my productivity but ultimate my stuff is more likely to work.
- justinclift 2y ago> stuff is more likely to work. Yeah, that's the essential mechanic of it. When "stuff is more likely to work" then everyone can build upon it. Though at some point(s) that stable foundation needs updating too, so new stuff can be built upon it. That's where the choosing the right balance for the right pieces needs figuring out.
- kimbernator 2y ago
- atleastoptimal 2y agoAll these things make me envious of people who get to work at Google or any other FAANG company, where they are both paid well and validated for their intelligence.
- deisteve 2y agobut the work that Googlers do most of HN can do its the proximity, pedigree, profile that you have to fit to get in to Google I'm happy for those that made it. Not everybody gets to work for Google. But the work they do are no less challenging or more important than what the rest of us do. If anything FAANG has contributed greatly to the American Firewall of Algorithms and have destroyed an entire generation's ability to reason and value common sense. I remember this quote which I can't remember who said but "if they are paying you a large salary, what they take from you is far greater"
- jjeaff 2y agosometimes if they pay you a large salary, the only thing they are taking from you is your ability to work for a competitor.
- deisteve 2y ago[flagged]
- mandmandam 2y ago[flagged]
- deisteve 2y ago[flagged]
- mandmandam 2y ago[flagged]
- dave333 2y agoThe traditional view is that young engineers should join startups in hope of a massive payoff if one goes big, but working for 10 years at BigCo with good salary and stock plans can set you up for life without any risk. One path to avoid is the one I took which was to work at a big tech co as a contractor. Good rates but nothing to show for it after 10 years other than the experience and whatever I had put in my 401K.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoAnother path to avoid is working "W2" for a BigCo via a contractor. You don't get any of the security or compensation, and you may not even get the benefit of the name for your resume.
- I_AM_A_SMURF 2y agoI don't know that sounds very optimistic. I'm 10 in tech and L6 now. I'm definitely not set for life, like, not even close.
- wnolens 2y agoIn big tech? One can pocket an avg 100k/year. Less in first few years, more later on. That isn't "quit immediately and coast" money, but several times a juicy down payment in the bank and a guaranteed MINIMUM 200k USD/year for the rest of your life IS set for life IMO.
- spacemadness 2y agoIt is not several times a juicy down payment if you live where near any big campus. And a lifetime salary above 200k in tech is not a thing. Tech is riskier the older you get unfortunately.
- saagarjha 2y agoUh, it very much is? Sure, there is age discrimination, but there are plenty of people in their 50s and 60s making well north of that.
- lysace 2y ago> USA centric culture, if you are not in USA at Google and don’t have a big presence in a location it’s a bit like swimming upstream, it’s easy to feel isolated, sidelined or on the flipside overwhelmed with late meetings It's like the fourth time I read/hear this. I understand that it's a tricky one to adress.
- lll-o-lll 2y agoThis is US companies in general! Never work for one in another country; if you can help it. All decisions will be centralized to the US head office and require face to face. Communication is generally terrible. I’ve worked for European and Asian owned companies, and they seem to be able to handle distributed authority much better. For the “land of the free”, it sure seems like US companies run on a feudal system.
- cat_plus_plus 2y agoREALLY? Japanese companies are an example of non-hierarchical culture with distributed decision making?
- teractiveodular 2y agoAs a matter of fact, yes, Japanese companies operate largely on a bottom-up consensus model. Approval from the top is still required, but they rarely refuse it if everybody in the ranks is aligned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_management_culture#Managerial_style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_management_culture#Ma...
- p_l 2y agoMy limited exposure in practice involved a huge japanese company, the kind that survived while still being huge even the dissolution of zaibatsu, using the approach of many semi-independent divisions. Sometimes the divisions would be even created specifically in different country to provide a place to put in a team whose leader is getting extra extra independency in hopes of delivering new products from scratch. Sometimes you'd have people delegated out of one division/subcompany to provide help elsewhere - personally experienced this when we needed a PostgreSQL expert on a project where we subcontracted/bodyshopped for one of those subcompanies, and the headquarters delegated a postgresql core team member from japan, including having him visit for a time. But day to day the decisions were local - the most feudal thing was that we knew one team (~50% of the company that was our direct client) was the most important one and that it's lead had actually more power than CEO - the specific division was essentially a way to park his independent team so he didn't have to deal with administrative overhead.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- keepamovin 2y agoReading this healed me of my need to work at Google or a megacorp. Cool story, cool journey! Good luck in your next step
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tiffanyh 2y agoSince this post is about SRE… Slight OT: what do people recommended for simple server & db monitoring (for a small saas business)? monit, nagios, victoria metrics, etc?
- adin8mon 2y agoI personally use monit (emphasis on "simple"). I've been looking at nagios lately, though.
- d0gsg0w00f 2y agoIs nagios still a thing? I used it 10 years ago and loved it. I feel like people would look at me funny if I suggested it now. Datadog is all the rage.
- georgeburdell 2y agoPerhaps a condescending take but I think the author got a bit of a big head from getting promoted quickly, and the subtext is that it was due to their amazing technical competence. It’s a noteworthy feat to get recruited out of school, but SRE is a godawful position with high attrition, so it’s easier than SWE to get promoted. That they regret not moving to SWE sooner ignores that SRE is a talent sink and considered a separate ladder by most companies. At this point, the ship has sailed. Eat humble pie, embrace your skillset, and move onward and upward
- cperciva 2y agoL6 ICs are pretty rare - it already is a top tier of seniority in engineering Is Google really different from other companies? I talk to a lot of Amazonians (AWS Hero, FreeBSD/EC2 maintainer) and my general impression is that developers below L7 ought to be classified as "Junior" -- my mapping is basically L4-L6 = Junior Developer, L7/L8 = Developer, and L10 = Senior Developer. Anything which doesn't have L7+ involvement gives me major "these kids need adult supervision" vibes for all the newbie mistakes they make.
- I_AM_A_SMURF 2y agoWhat? Especially at Amazon a Principal engineer (equivalent to Google L6) is a pretty rare beast in some areas of the company. Sure there are some hip orgs with a lot of senior engineers, but in general it's not a common position at all. Isn't L10 a VP at Amazon? Never heard of one doing any real engineering work.
- cperciva 2y agoPrincipal Engineer is L7 at a Amazon. So if that's the same as a Google L6 I guess the scales are a bit different. As for L10, that's Distinguished Engineer. I think if they're managers they're also called VPs? I'm not exactly sure what the deal is there; but I know plenty of Amazon L10s who are fantastic engineers.
- lexlash 2y agohttps://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google&track=Software... is largely accurate. An L7 at Amazon would have an easy time getting an L6 interview at Google; an L6 at Google would not have an easy time getting an L7 interview at Amazon, barring prior experience and other modifiers. Of note, The person who wrote this article spent the vast majority of their tenure as a SRE TL/M, from their timeline. That's not going to map cleanly into any career track at Amazon, and when this person tried being an L6 SWE, they transitioned back into management. At Google, I knew L6/L7/L8 managers who were fantastic engineers; I knew L6/L7/L8 managers who were pure-management and excellent at that but hadn't written code in a decade and change. Varied dramatically by what the org needed - those engineer-managers tended to have a lot of lower-leveled engineers and the pure-managers had more highly leveled engineering reporting to them. Anyways, while I was at Google, L5 was the lowest level where you could officially have a direct report (not counting interns), so yeah, anything of cross-team note was generally lead by an L6 or higher. (L5s routinely lead things that were critical _inside_ of a given group, but if you were having cross-team impact, well, that's L6 work.)
- memtet 2y ago[dead]
- luckyone15 2y agoWhat in God's Holy Name Are You Blathering About! - my reaction to most of the ideas coming from SRE like 'class SRE implements interface DevOps'
- cat_plus_plus 2y agoIf you don't enjoy waking up at 4am, work on mobile. Once a new app release is on the phone, nothing is going to make it suddenly break and there is no hurry to send the new release to all users advance, go through internal employee testing and then roll out slowly so that any breakage doesn't affect a lot of users.
- saagarjha 2y agoOS updates and server outages :)
- dr_dshiv 2y ago“earn more money that I could have imagined” How much, do you think?
- usr1106 2y agoSome 20 - 10 years ago I was seriously interested in joining Google for many of the reasons he lists. In the end I never applied because at the time they had no development in any country I would have been interested to relocate to. However, during recent years I have turned into a Google hater. He does not mention any of those aspects. Google is an evil business IMHO. They are an advertising company. The challenges for this planet are sustainability. The goal of advertising is to waste resources. I can type this on a low end phone that soon turns 10. It works perfectly, except that no recent Android version is supported. Google is in the business that cores and memory have been doubled several times since then, for no benefit to mankind. And phones are far from the only category, advertisement is about selling a lot of stuff that does not bring any true improvement in quality of life. Video is one of the worst energy wasters in computing. 90% of Youtube is useless crap, not worth destroying the planet. Nobody would pay a realistic price for it. They are an ugly oligopolist. The list could go on and on...
- sva_ 2y agoAt least newer Android phones have something like 7 years of updates, so there is some progress. The claim that more memory/computing power has no benefits at all seems nonsensical.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoI can do fewer things with my computer than I could when computers were slower. Software has more than destroyed the gains of hardware. (The only exception is numerical simulation, which I need occasionally for academic research, but not in my day-to-day life.) Video games, supposedly the Killer App for high-end computing hardware, are among the worst offenders: your average modern 2D side-scrolling platformer (Mario clone) locks up my computer (to say nothing of AAA games). Web browsers are the second-worst offenders. Chat clients (secretly web browsers) are third: they barely work, and interoperability has gone the way of the dodo. Operating systems are fourth: they (mostly) still let you use older versions of software, but they have mostly just grown new problems (e.g. built-in adware in Windows; GNOME… well, GNOME) without fixing long-standing ones (e.g. slow domain login in Windows; most systemd misfeatures).
- KorematsuFredt 2y agoHaving spent some time with Google as SWE, I think Google was by far the best engineering company I have worked with. Even Amazon, Microsoft were terrible when it comes to software engineering. I am one of those engineers who do not care about culture as long as I am getting paid for the efforts I put in. Google in that sense beat others by HUGE margin. The engineering work was however very different. We focused on right engineering solutions instead of just business aspect. While that kind of attitude hurts us in short term, it pays big in long term.
- cudgy 2y ago“I am one of those engineers who do not care about culture as long as I am getting paid for the efforts I put in.” Then large companies are not for you. Navigating the culture is key to advancement and long-term satisfaction. Otherwise you will feel like an outcast and likely let go during layoff rounds or kept around at lower compensation rates.
- p4bl0 2y agoI've always wondered if privacy conscious engineers who work at Google do actually use Google's services for their personal lives (Google Drive, Google Photos, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Keep, Google Docs, etc.)? And if so, do they continue to use them when after leaving the company? I ask this question here because there seem to be quite some (ex-)Google employees in this thread.
- googler_thrwy 2y agoGoogle is large enough that you will hear plenty of opinions on this. In my bubble (Zurich, Security) the overall sentiment seems to be "I trust Google handling my data way more now compared to before I joined".
- makerofthings 2y agoI work at google and I use google products. Sure, some giant automated heap of code is processing your data and deciding how many grammerly adverts to show you, but your data is about as safe as it can be from loss or from humans. There are so many controls and checks in place when working with user data it's difficult to get things done some times (and quite rightly too).
- 0xpgm 2y agoHow do we explain the deletion of the $135 billion Australian pension fund data that happened to UniSuper? Due to "an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank"? https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/details-of-google-cloud-gcve-incident https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/detail...
- dehugger 2y agoIt seems that they explained things fairly clearly in your link? What kind of answer are you fishing for?
- 2y ago
- meiraleal 2y agoOne of the funniest things in HN that I love to "lose" some karma points is to join discussions about/with frustrated ex- Googlers. Google is shit, completely enshitiffied and the engineers there are responsible for that but still when you get to this kind of thread the only thing you see is them praising each other, patting back. Google is gone, my friends. Men in suits destroyed it. Gone is the time that people working there were considered smart, now only the greedy remained.
- nojvek 2y agoGoogle could fire 50% of its staff and still make multiple 100B+ revenues from search ads and cloud. They have a great business that prints money. The problem Google has is making more money printing business lines - like Microsoft. I do hope Google turns around and gets back to its roots.
- Aardwolf 2y ago> drastically improved my soft skills I'd love to know how in a fast paced office environment you can improve those, none of the trainings or anything are about this (even the leadership like ones feel like just standardized template stuff rather than actually have an environment where you can practice social skills and get the correct timely feedback to improve it)
- commandersaki 2y agoI try not to be jaded having never cleared the dreaded google interview multiple times, but I'm very envious of the high compensation, amenities (which their recruiters argue is compensation), and probably getting paid doing very technically challenging work. For me in Australia, it seems to be a case of choose one.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Balinares 2y agoHoly crap hi! :) Hello from another PD SRE of 9 years. It's been great working with you. Stay awesome!
- dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago> working 60% or 80% were fantastic for my lifestyle and building relationships outside of work Whoah, it seems fantastic! That alone seems like a good reason to work for Google. Unfortunately, none of the companies I worked for was interested in less than 100%. I told them many times, you can keep your money, I just want to spend 20% or 30% less time at work, but they always insisted on 100%. I have a feeling they would go for 120% if legally allowed.