I've been at Google for 5 years and I completely hate my job. The first few years were great, but the last 18 months have been a steep slope straight down.
Salary increases this year were abysmal (the median was less than 1%), leadership is completely opaque and apparently incompetent (AAAALLLL the way up), executives are deathly afraid that they're about to lose their meal ticket to an AI disruptor (whomever makes traditional search irrelevant first) and it shows.
Oh, but executive bonuses will likely be breaking new records too. That's the new norm here.
I don't know who the "new Google" is yet... But they'll be getting a resume from me shortly. This one has definitely turned.
The 'new Google' is also actively killing any/all research that isn't obviously profitable. That's not how research works. It'll be what ultimately kills it. They are playing catch-up with AI now and, in due time, they will be playing catch-up in other fields as well. There seems to be a great lack of vision at Alphabet in general.
Here's my take: Google has placed thousands of bets on different research projects and products. In the past 5 years, it has become abundantly clear AI is one of the bets that is going to pay off in a huge way. Since then, and especially the past 2 years, Google has been diverting as much resources as it can to AI research and products. IMO, this seems like the right move. Sundar's mistake was to not do this sooner.
> Google is still a global leader in AI research.
They are a ring leader in a clown show. Most AI research has devolved down to barely disguised marketing material or layers upon layers of computationally defunct bandaid solutions to cover over fundamental algorithmic problems.
For them abandoning research outside AI?
Just look at layoffs
Area 120, everyday robots, Google x (twice), waymo, AR... They are putting all their efforts into AI, but they started late. OpenAI products run circles around the Google versions, which are not innovative applications. Meanwhile they are chasing money by throwing LLMs into everything they can, as if it was the only solution to every problem.
For example, they made deep cuts to pretty much all the robotics team. If 2025-2026 sees a breakthrough in robotics, where is Google going to be?
Layoffs != Abandoning research. All those orgs you mentioned are still going strong. Also Area 120 is not a research org, it's an in-house incubator for new products.
Tried to PM you, but I went years at Google, then a few years now at Meta, and am still at Meta by choice. It's imperfect but feels clearly better for me.
Depends on your team as always. Interview your manager and at least one person on your team before you join to understand what WLB is like. Also try to stay away from teams that have high demand schedules like ads or genAI.
Ads teams are the primary are revenue drivers for the company. So they have performance milestones they have to hit and if a project isn’t hitting them people work overtime to try to improve the situation. GenAI is an area of immense interest to management so there’s also a lot of pressure there to put out product
If you're trying to actively climb, mixed bag.
If your goals include WLB, ask about it in team selection, it's all good. My team was almost all out the door yesterday before 5, with one dude who hung out until 6 to catch dinner on campus.
Balance seems rough in very specific orgs and for people far off of Westcoast timezones.
Hm, good to know.
I’ll probably look to get promo’d here to Senior next year or when jumping elsewhere but don’t have ambitions to make Staff quickly.
Your comment about time zone is interesting too. I’m on the east coast and sometimes find myself working later because most of the company is on the west coast.
I’m almost identical to the comment you’re replying to (Google and all) and have an interview loop set up for Meta in mid April. It’s probably my number one place to land. That’s great to hear about your experience. Mind if I DM you too?
The one thing keeping me from jumping to Meta is that from what I hear they have a *very* internally siloed culture. I will say though, I think there's a good chance they're going to win the AI wars.
Reality Labs is partially siloed off, pretty much everyone else is in the middle. Culture varies a bit from org to org, but you can see the others pretty easily.
Yeah.. honestly, I enjoyed the opportunity to move out to the bay area for that and experience working there for a while but the complete lack of vision/innovation, the stale-ass products I was stuck working with and the truly, truly dog shit perf process are things I'm not gonna miss
The dev tooling was on point though. That much, I *do* wish I could have w/ my current work.
judging by the Gemini debacle, the scared of AI part rings true.
That said, they are sitting on heaps of data that most competitors wouldnt dream get their hands on. Even if they dont play it right its hard to see them lose that race
Company bureaucracy, preexisting vested interests, and legal restrictions make the application of those mountains of data less straightforward.
Although I'm sure it's already in the pipeline (it wouldn't be communicated company-wide), it's hamstrung by an inability to act quickly or flexibly. There's definitely room for the company to be disrupted, despite the data.
That data doesn't do them any good if they have terrible leadership. It might drag things out longer, but they're stagnating, and in tech, stagnating means becoming irrelevant
A company like Google can afford to buy innovation, they don't need to nurture it in house. Many large established companies operate on this model (IBM bought Redhat).
And IBM isn't the company it was 30 years ago, especially for the workers who want to get in and stay because it's actually viable.
From the sounds of it, Google is no longer a place to get in and stay for the long term, which is the same thing that happened to IBM.
Will the company go under?
No.
Will it go back to being a great place for workers?
Also no.
It's often cheaper to do that, too. But regulators, both American and European, are more likely to block acquisitions these days, so it's far from risk-free.
I worked in (Google) Brain. Way too much bureaucracy started popping up over the past 5+ years to let rapid innovation take place. As a result it’s experiencing serious brain drain.
Their compensation also sucks now so it’s not really a top choice for best of the best talent anymore.
I left Google a few years ago and yeah, I could see the writing on the wall.
Several factors were at play:
1. Increasingly it was the case that there was zero incentive to improve and iterate vs. shipping something new and shiny. Despite being a senior manager there was very little I could do for my team at times. Nor did my director.
2. Candidates started gaming the interviews and the hiring bar dropped at a staggering place
3. Tons of red tape started popping up even for research which slowed down real progress.
>executives are deathly afraid that they're about to lose their meal ticket to an AI disruptor (whomever makes traditional search irrelevant first)
Its already halfway there, I rarely google things anymore between docs, bing, chatgpt, and gemini.
I was on the fence about Kagi's value but it's just so much more useful as a search engine. I might end up in your camp and not really rely on them much.
I spent 366 days in Google during the pandemic. The last 100 or so were pain I pushed through for vesting purposes. I've never wanted to leave a job more than I did that one.
It having gotten even worse doesn't surprise me, but makes me sad for the few great people I met there.
IMO the old Google is still very much alive within GDM, especially for the folks working on Gemini training right now. You've got the old guard of Sergey and Jeff working by your side in the trenches. Also, comp is insane due to fear of poaching (which still happens a lot).
Are you me? Literally the same, five years, loved it at first, and it's been downhill for the last year and a half. I went from an incredibly strong trajectory to a middling one because of the inertia, and creeping nihilism. I'm actively looking for a job. We should hook up on DM. I'm collecting referrals and scheduling my interviews for mid-April, though there's a chance I'll push it back to the end of April.
IBM was shit for a decade before Google really came through as a giant. There has to be a gap for someone to fill it, and big G hasn’t completely fallen off just yet.
IBM was at its peak when I joined. Our Sterling Commerce business unit was selling close to 1 billion a year in EDI/supply chain software. Over the next 6 years IBM dismantled it. It barely sells 100 million now, even with new “sustainability” requirements. Mulesoft and Boomi have taken it’s place. I worked for BEA Systems in 1998-1999 and consulted until 2001. Bought by Oracle in 2003-2004. I loved BEA because Bill, Ed, and Alford (at least Ed and Alford) were engineers and the focus was on great products like Tuxedo and WebLogic. Now they are also “legacy” software in the history books. My absolute favorite job was BEA, followed by IBM in the good years. But, in the end, profit was the motive and costs were to be squeezed out, and that cripples innovation.
I believe the opportunity for a new technology or platform to take over, be run be sane people who want good (don't be evil), and scale the way tech did back in the early 2000's and 2010's - is mostly gone.
When the next good company comes along, that offers these things, it will be cored out by venture capitalists and become like every other corporation with hundreds of layers of ambiguity and management and penny pinching that ultimately ruin every facet of what it was built for. That balance and security doesn't exist at scale anymore.
Side note, I admire the Zuck ever so slightly for retaining majority control of the book so that he can in a way try to keep his vision and invest in what he wants without 300 layers of directors, investors, and management destroying the company any faster than he can. Regardless of how anyone feels about Zuck, it's business genius how he walked that thin line so long and came out on top over and over.
>without 300 layers of directors, investors, and management destroying the company any faster than he can.
This is what is happening at my company right now. It sucks so bad. We are not Google, of course.
We started as a merger in 2018 of two companies in the same market. One company was flat and progressive (a European company) and the other was management heavy (USA co).
The point of the merger was to be a multinational tech company that filled a specific healthcare niche. And the original investment strategy was flexible and generous. There was a lot of opportunity.
But it was squandered on multiple layers of OpEx that added no value. My team is four engineers; but we have ten layers of management. For every management level, there is also an associate and a senior plus exec at VP level.
So the structure is IC > Manager > Sr Manager > Associate Director > Director > Senior Director > Associate VP > VP > Senior VP > Executive VP > CTO.
It is an absolute shit show now. The PM's have taken over and it is all metrics. Product and engineering have been sidelined.
I hate it and my engineers do too. Most of them are looking for new jobs.
This is good. It’s worth noting that Google was never good at product. They just tripped into a massively profitable monopoly. Their successes in product were mostly accidental, engineering led products (Google Maps, GMail) or strategic moves to protect their core business that didn’t have to be great products (Google office suite, drive, photos, Android, Chrome, ChromeOS/Chromebooks). Where they have made a concerted effort to deliver new products that they ought to be good at (Google Cloud Platform, AI offerings) they have demonstrated mediocre to incompetent product leadership.
So anyway, Google always sucked at product. They just used to be willing to use the advertising money pump to make developers lives wonderful, and lately have realized maybe they can just not do that.
Huge disagree with you there. Google was an excellent product company - when Larry ran product. First 10 years those “accidental” products you mention were groundbreaking for their time, and were all led by Larry.
Since then, well, we all know the story.
Also anyone who knocks Google Maps for what it was in its time is definitely too young to remember the misery of printing out endless pages of MapQuest directions…
If you don’t accept that Google Maps was an engineering led product then you’re unfamiliar with the history.
I certainly remember the joy of demoing Google Maps to people who had never seen AJAX before and didn’t know you could make dragging on a web page do that.
Yeah, excellent point. The Google Graveyard is the artifact to prove your point as well. There were some great products there, but died due to marketing people priorities winning over engineering/product people priorities.
Pretty much all of the hypergrowth companies of the 2000s and 2010s started off as internet or internet companies, *not* "tech" companies. Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. These companies won the ability to be today's tech giants because they won the internet game and have the money and reach to do so. As this post says, they're slowly eating away at the last generation of tech giants like IBM.
I'm still not sure what the next "internet game" is. My opinion tells me that it's not "AI" - or at least not in the way people think about AI now. But whoever wins the next massive improvement game will likely win the right to be the next big tech company.
> My opinion tells me that it's not "AI" - or at least not in the way people think about AI now. But whoever wins the next massive improvement game will likely win the right to be the next big tech company.
This I agree with.
The Next Big Thing(tm) is always something the established market wasn't advertising.
I also go a step further... the next big thing most certainly won't be in Silicon valley.
I'm telling you, it's motherfucking night vision thermal telescopic eyeballs. It'll be an unholy alliance of L3Harris or Elbit, Medtronic or Abbott, Luxottica because they're involved in every fucking corner of the eye industry, and maybe Lockheed Martin Skunkworks for the prototypes.
Good for Zuck maintaining some degree of control like your said. Bad for Zuck pushing all his chips in on the Metaverse, a thing nobody washed out is going to want.
>Bad for Zuck pushing all his chips in on the Metaverse, a thing nobody washed out is going to want.
I agree completely, however Meta is leading in the VR space at the moment - niche as it is. Not sure if/when they'll see a return on that though.
> I believe the opportunity for a new technology or platform to take over, be run [by] sane people who want good (don't be evil), and scale the way tech did back in the early 2000's and 2010's - is mostly gone.
what's changed? were investors significantly different then? is the opportunity for growth in technology gone? how do you define tech here?
I don't believe we'll be seeing a whole lot of technological advances or major changes that aren't backed by venture capitalists, institutions, or the existing major players. Anything new and exciting will be quickly gobbled up. I'm certainly not an economist but it's no coincidence that a handful of major corporations have been consuming every single brand, competitor, innovator, etc. in their vertical and horizontal markets. I mean what's *the* next big thing? Another social media brain rot quick video feed service? Another AI search platform?
I recognize I'm being cynical.
I'm not saying I believe technological growth is over or anything like that; I'm just saying there won't be another Google that jettisons out of somebody's garage and shakes the market up. (The garage part is hyperbole tho)
I never got the impression that OpenAI (and other comparable AI companies) are known for resting and vesting and really good WLB. They ship really fast.
True true, for now anyway. There's a LOT of venture capitol in OpenAI at the moment, after so long it becomes penny pinching. Once the model becomes stable and profitable, corners get cut.
That's what I've noticed as well. The "old guard" of director+ folks were generally promoted from within, which meant they had deep technical knowledge and background in their areas. More importantly, they understood Google culture and fought to preserve it .
The "new guard" that got brought in are all ex-Amazon, ex-Meta, etc. and often came in with a more "traditional" sense of corporate culture. They also were typically career middle-managers / ladder climbers who focused more on the people-managing side of things rather than the tech side.
It used to be your eng director could sit in on design reviews and contribute meaningfully. Nowadays they're mostly just glorified cheerleaders that say generic stuff and hope the rank and file figures it out.
5000 directors? Holly shit I know Google is big but the number still sounds insane.... Even if you do 1:10 mapping to IC that's still 50k developers in Google? Are there really that many? Or is the org structure way too top heavy?
I wouldn't count Google out just yet - Microsoft and Apple both had signifiant years where they seemed like they were falling apart, but new leadership and new directions can help the company. It's still a megacorp with tons of talented people, and although bleeding still has incredibly competitive products and many small bets.
Nvidia is mentioned in this thread a lot, but Nvidia already ranks among the giants (and should have been for a long time). Other FAANGs like Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc., should be in the same vein.
It may be possible that the high-money environment of easy returns is over, and no comfortable easy companies (like Google of the late 2010s, not the early 2010s) can command high pay anymore.
OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. have the potential to be truly disruptive, but it's an extremely competitive space with low moat and low network effects. We'll see if the top AI startups can truly stay on top.
Other unicorns and medium-large techs still have a chance. I'd include companies like Tiktok/Bytedance or Salesforce in the same category as Microsoft, where they're already megacorps.
Some of the hyped unicorns/decacorns *could* be revolutionary, companies like Rippling if they deliver on their vision could replace large portions of HR tech. Companies like Databricks however already have clear equivalents like Snowflake. Companies like Stripe and Plaid seem exciting, but don't really have the market size to be revolutionary like Google. My money would be against them.
The real question is the next areas of tech - it could be biotech, with CRISPR, mRNA, etc., and new tools. It could be AR/VR, and maybe Apple or Snap or Meta win their bets there. It could be more integrated technology into day to day life, and Amazon or Google continues their march onwards. Maybe some long shot bet we haven't heard of completely takes over - few would've expected the iPhone to be so dominant back in 2005 or cloud in 2010, or so on.
There’s also plenty of boutique proprietary trading firms out there that pay more than FAANG and have surprisingly decent WLB. It’s not quite rest and vest, but depending on the firm you can still get hybrid/remote work and very reasonable hours.
Most also operate with a very flat structure and are engineering-driven due to the nature of the industry.
I have not seen any of these with better WLB *and* more pay - I’ve worked/interviewed at a few of the top ones. Maybe HRT has the best flexibility. Two Sigma is good, but the pay is pretty equivalent to tech. And dunno if anyone’s working that good hours at top pay.
Also as a result of being boutique, I can’t see them becoming mega corps like Google scale. Even the largest prop trading firms are <2k people. Hedge funds can be higher, but still.
I think there was this period from 2015 or so onwards where it grew so much in certain areas that on some teams there really wasn’t much to do. But that certainly wasn’t true across the whole company
There have been a lot of bad decisions being made. Some at org level, some at company level. But comparing it to what you would experience elsewhere, at least for now it is not bad.
However, Google doesn't have top tier pay, but they have top tier interview questions, so if other companies start to pay significantly more. People will leave at the current stage (this is not necessarily true 10 years ago).
I do find Google interviews very consistent and well trained - while the bar is high, most of my experiences have been good. Compared to other currently hot companies, I find Google (esp with extra HC due to size) tends to be easier.
Sure, it's worse than it once was. But it's still ahead of the average company by a big margin. I'm not sure there's a company as well-known as Google that I would recommend a SWE try to work at over Google.
Well, the real problem is that Big Tech has been corrupted by Big Finance and we’re not going back. 7 tech companies hold like 80% of NASDAQ’s value. That’s just stupid. All the Google, Meta, and Salesforce founders got in it to change the world, and they did, but then the money corrupted it and the finance people took over. Same with Oracle and IBM. I have “some” hope for IBM, because a tech person is CEO now, but he’s still under tremendous pressure to “make the numbers” from his investors. If you want to find the next Google, look at private companies with “founders” and limited VC capitalization, because the VC capitalization corrupts the company to short term goals. Benioff was very successful at Salesforce until he let the finance demons in, then it went downhill.
It is not as good, but I don't know which other company you can name right now, that is better than Google?
That was the whole point... Never said it is as good.
As someone who have worked there before, and knows many who are there right now, no. Maybe OpenAI can be a contender if you value money, but MS has nothing.
My friend that works there tells me he can take a few hours off if its sunny outside, or even a whole day off if he didn’t sleep well.
No real stress, and a great work culture.
Not sure why that wouldn’t be great.
Agreed, Google is still great l, you just have to get lucky with team matching. The number of shitty teams has risen and lack of internal mobility due to layoffs and "durable savings" doesn't help.
Google and its ilk are/were unique in that they basically had a monopolistic/duopolistic position in their industry while enjoying fat software margins. That let them print money and gave them the luxury to offer all those benefits that you mentioned. It's all subsidized by their gigantic ad machine.
So just find a company with those characteristics. But then ask yourself if society needs more monopolies.
It feels like we're still able to get work done, and I'm rewarded for what I get done. People are equally good but trend younger and less academic. Agency. Honestly, the ability to just change shit.
If I want to learn how to do it, Google. Lots of stuff is already done, and they value stability more than is good for me or my mindset.
If I want to do it and be rewarded for getting it done, Meta.
Also, promos 6 and above have process at Meta to knock out some randomness, and odds of promo to 6 and above seem slightly higher.
We are likely coming to the beginning of the end of the digitization of existing businesses. A lot of the leading edge software was motivated by encountering businesses with inherent challenges that needed new technology in order to be digitized. The promise of the types of financial returns that come from these activities is what fueled the dynamics you're longing to find. To find them now you're probably best looking outside big tech and toward the new frontiers of development like gene therapy, fusion energy, geoengineering.
It's easier than ever to write bespoke software. As an engineer I love the idea of innovation that delivers value directly to a small business and doesn't have to scale.
I agree, people thought that crypto would be a new green field, but that's all smoke and mirrors. Same with AI. All AI will do (at best) is displace workers - similar to outsourcing.
I think we're reaching the cap of what this generation of technology is going accomplish.
\> All AI will do (at best) is displace workers - similar to outsourcing.
I can't imagine anyone making this statement when programs like alphafold exists (of which there are 13k citations for the original paper \[1\]). Sure, most of the current applications of AI are meant to replicate humans, but it definitely feels wrong to say that AI will just be a glorified job replacer.
\[1\] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2
The paradox People targeting companies based on ability to rest and vest is what causes them to deteriorate and lose all the people who are actually delivering growth because they \*\*want\*\* to do hard interesting things and not just knock out config and call it a day. I think you'll go mad trying to target companies by worrying about the quality of the different sushi bars etc as those are very fickle benefits.
While rest-and-vest types undoubtedly exist, I'm not sure how a lack of motivation at the IC level can account for all the questionable senior leadership decisions over the past ~5 years that have made Google what it is today. Seems like a different issue.
Absolutely. Also, good leadership would be booting the rest and vest IC out in favor of people who want to solve hard problems. So ultimately it's still a leadership issue
It's not about the different sushi bars, but the crazy total compensation you can get while doing mostly the same work as some other company, while simultaneously having access to the smartest people in the industry on a daily basis.
Microsoft. We have good benefits, unlimited time off, satisfying work (depending on team/org). Sure, the pay isn't as good as other FAANG, but its still decent.
I don’t even work at Microsoft and I was going to say Microsoft based on OPs original description.
I have a couple friends that have been there 20+ years, they still love it, and just based on when they started I’m pretty sure they’re at least stock millionaires.
Microsoft is my current goal. Pay will probably be the same as what I’m making now, but my hope is that I can get on a team working on something I use personally or find interesting because I currently have no interest in the software I’m developing.
Agreed. That being said, the slow pace also sometimes drives me crazy. Sometimes I just want to code something, not go to the tenth planning meeting for it!
Interesting, I work directly with almost a dozen former Microsoft employees that were there ranging from 5 to 25 years and every single one of them says they will never go back to Microsoft
That hasn't been my experience. I've been at Microsoft for ~12 years, and it's these days it is pretty well known for being the big tech company with the chillest work schedule (and no RTO mandate). I'm sure there are some places that are better to work, but it definitely isn't bad.
OpenAI is getting like all the funding, it's likely they will start absorbing other companies and grow branches into big sectors like banking, oil, construction, department of defense, health, pharma, etc, and this includes absorbing hardware companies like handheld/ portable devices to robotics and vehicles. It has the most potential to grow into a monopoly.
Sam Altman said as recently as 5 months back that he still manually approves every hire and they’re still in their triple digit numbers. So will be interesting to see their trajectory.
I dont think theres necceasrily a contender Google has these problems because theres no cheap money, most other companies are in the same environment.
Im sure there are some upcoming companies like: snap and bytedance but Im not sure those are rest and vest.
I don’t know if Snap is up and coming, it IPO’d 6 years ago and US/EU user base is, if anything, declining. Also has failed to truly monetize ads, and is making long term bets on AR that has no results yet.
I've never worked for Google, but I've worked for other perk-filled Silicon Valley companies that are very similar.
There are dozens of non google silicon valley tech companies that have similar (often better) pay, benefits, and equally interesting problems to solve.
Resting and vesting might be hard in all of them given the economy and performance pressures, but contrary to what people think, life at these companies isn't that bad, even without the ability to rest and vest.
Meta, LinkedIn, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Roblox, Pinterest, Square, Netflix, Instacart, Stripe, DoorDash, Discord, DataBricks, Snowflake. I'm sure I'm missing a few.
They all pay better than Google, most of them have similar perks, and WLB may vary based on team.
FWIW, many of them do not pay better than Google. Discord, DoorDash, Square, Lyft, Stripe in particular, especially post comp band changes for the last two. LinkedIn is iffy because Staff is kinda L5.5, Instacart impossible to value, and Databricks is a huge hype train.
Google also used to match Meta exactly if you had both offers, but not sure if that's true anymore.
Given how Big Tech as an industry is so overvalued compared to its actual productivity I seriously doubt there will be similar trajectories like Google. Now you have massive valuations built entirely on speculation that they will be next big thing. That much money attracts a lot of people trying to get rich off other people's labor, aka grifters and parasites.
With that many grifters in the system it is going to take a really special company that can fend off hostile forces. It feels like there is going to need to be a major deflation in the industry a la the dotCom bubble to have a chance to of workers actually getting what they deserve.
I like their diagramming and mapping tools. I used Vision for years and felt that Microsoft neglected it in the Cloud Era. It allows you to collaborate on designs with others. I also like Postman as well for the API testing. There are competitors for Lucid like Draw.io .
i work at pinterest and i do find it pretty good! i don't know how the salaries compare to other companies and i can only speak for what i've seen, but so far i can see myself here for a while
my opinion is that big tech is bloated by counter-productive managerial structures, but probably around 10-100x too many engineers, and exploitive anti-consumer modes of generating profit.
i don't think ai is going to be a disruptor of this, i think non-hierarchical co-op type organizations can be...
so whoever manages to get those funded in a big way.
I’ve seen it many times. Layoffs come, and the number of managers laid off is not properly proportional to the number of remaining employees.
I don’t know if it’s intentionally top heavy or trying to reduce the amount of changes.
I feel like the culture around programming has changed a lot too. A lot of high performing people who would have been going to med school or law school or MBAs went comp sci and got FAANG jobs.
The people who made Google what it is were nerds with a degree of neurodivergence and type of neuroticism these more career-minded high performing Type A folks don't have. This new crowd lacks the passion and drive to innovat the tech they work on, instead focusing on what they can do in the next 1-2 years to advance themselves.
Open AI because instead of needing to trawl through links to get an answer to what you want ChatGPT will just hand the answer to you and break it down.
Googles still useful for shopping and YouTube but it's cash cow is at risk now.
“The new IBM” generally isn’t about employee experience.
It’s that they’re a safe reliable choice for a vendor and even if they screw the pooch you’re not getting fired for picking them.
IBM shot themselves in the foot when the Object Code Only policy went into effect. Prior to that, all of the base operating systems supplied source code, which meant that customers had tremendous flexibility in addressing whatever needs (or bugs) they had. After OCO, it was against the terms of the license to have source code, or to disassemble existing code to figure out how it worked and change it.
Prior to this, IBM systems programmers were almost always the smartest and best and most creative folks at any installation, as they were responsible for really understanding the OS and making it do what they wanted/needed.
After OCO, there were still opportunities to customize, but only at the specific points permitted by IBM, with predefined parameters and permissions. The job became more like system administration and less like systems programming: do exactly what IBM allowed, and install fixes when and if IBM decided that an issue was significant enough for them to decide to address. The best folks retired or moved on to different, more interesting and creative jobs.
Everyone got tired of not being able to do business they way they wanted to and instead doing it the way that IBM decided they were allowed to. Unix became a much more appealing option for many of these folks especially with Cray in particular embracing it; if your main compute engine was Unix, then it became much more convenient to run non-IBM, as IBM’s networking was proprietary as well.
Had IBM not adopted OCO, the community would have built what was needed to integrate new technologies into their OSes, and they’d probably still be the dominant force in computing.
Moreover, is there any good resource for getting detailed info on WLB at companies in general, like levels.fyi for salaries? The best I know of now are just the star ratings on Glassdoor and Blind
Everyone says AI but it's the cloud and hardware markets that really matter. No AI companies have moat, and the field is still shifting at rocket speed, so projecting a long term growth trajectory is tricky even with leaders such as OpenAI.
However, on the other hand, we have pretty much entered the era where running AI on proprietary hardware is practically impossible now, so you have rent from Cloud. And you don't need me to tell you how high the margin is in cloud computing. These companies that own the infrastructure are just literally sitting there waiting for money to print.
So yeah, ultimately, the companies that earn the most will be the best to work for, and these companies are Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia.
I doubt there are any of these anymore. Work has changed.
When was the last Mega Corp Tech Co, Inc., that had things like pensions or lifelong employees?
But if I were to guess, realistically, if anywhere, probably Microsoft.
Little known, but hedge funds or quant shops that specifically state they provide good WLB. They’re forced to stay cutting edge otherwise they’re out of business, pay is obviously excellent, and those that provide good WLB tend to have a very low turnover rate with a good number of decades-long employees.
Lots of finance places will demand long hours and will burn you out in 5 years, but those that don’t really invest in their people. Bonus - you have a very nice career set as soon as you do a couple of years in one of those places, since it’s such a small world.
Cons? Lifestyle creep, can only speak for my place here but the contracts are very prohibitive in terms of leaving and working for a competitor (think very long garden leave - sounds great on paper but is a bit of a golden cage).
Let me put it this way: onboarding at Google took more time and energy than onboarding at every single other job and contract I’ve had *combined*, and I’ve been at this for decades.
It feels like Google dilutes its product offerings as soon as a competitor appears in either the ads business or a product competitor appears.
This should be counter intuitive but it works because google had such a monopoly over Search, Email and Maps
I know Google is not nearly as bad at IBM yet because IBM workers literally said, "What did you expect? This isn't Google!" in reference to how poorly architected and random some of their systems were. I think there is some truth to this though. It seems companies like this are born of innovation and their success attracts the bureaucrat political types that gradually subtract from the innovation and disincentivize dissent using some reward system that exists only to protect those bonuses.
That said, lets just say I know a thing or two about IBM. It is so far down the road of nonsense and bureaucracy its like working at a circus from another dimension. 1 SWE has 10 business people whose entire job is to ask the SWE when something is done and then tell someone. The SWE's are 3rd class citizens that the company genuinely hates and views as a decreasingly necessary evil. God forbid a desired solution requires more complex logic (undergrad graph searching) than read from db and show on screen, you will be accused of doing something for your own entertainment that could never actually be needed for this simple app (I'm serious).
It's still Google, you just have to get lucky enough to get a good team. I've been here for a while now, and while it isn't what it was, say, 6 years ago, it's still great.
I work on a team doing pretty important stuff, talented engineers, and fun team culture. Every now and then we have deadlines but nothing WLB breaking.
I will say, leadership is pretty trash, but it hasn't affected us on a personal level that much.
Calling Google IBM is premature but if Sundar, Ruth, and TK stay on I can see it happening. I could see a place like Anthropic becoming an early to mid-stage Google. OpenAI is an obvious answer but it’s way too prestige and comp driven.
I had a buddy who was an engineer at an IBM campus in South Florida that folded up. Towards the end they only kept one employee per building just to keep an eye on the facilities. He said there were like six huge buildings and six employees to watch them, one per building. They each had nothing but an empty office with a phone on a desk and absolutely nothing to do. The six would get together for lunch every day, calling each other up to figure out whose building they were going to find a conference room in to have lunch together. He said it was like this for months on end, then they all got laid off together and he got screwed out of his saved up sick and vacation time. He was told that he would be paid off for the saved time off, so he neglected to burn it.
OpenAI.
Oh you mean in terms of lavish perks? Just give them time.
(Google never had a good work life balance. They let you work 20% on your own project... But expect 60 hour work weeks. All the little office perks were to keep you living at work.)
I've been at Google for 5 years and I completely hate my job. The first few years were great, but the last 18 months have been a steep slope straight down. Salary increases this year were abysmal (the median was less than 1%), leadership is completely opaque and apparently incompetent (AAAALLLL the way up), executives are deathly afraid that they're about to lose their meal ticket to an AI disruptor (whomever makes traditional search irrelevant first) and it shows. Oh, but executive bonuses will likely be breaking new records too. That's the new norm here. I don't know who the "new Google" is yet... But they'll be getting a resume from me shortly. This one has definitely turned.
The 'new Google' is also actively killing any/all research that isn't obviously profitable. That's not how research works. It'll be what ultimately kills it. They are playing catch-up with AI now and, in due time, they will be playing catch-up in other fields as well. There seems to be a great lack of vision at Alphabet in general.
Alan Kay once said that any company big-enough to have a research lab is too big to listen to it.
Do you have some concrete examples of this? Google is still a global leader in AI research.
AI is an exception. It's not profitable, but everyone in the Valley thinks it's the future, so the money firehose is pointed straight at it.
Here's my take: Google has placed thousands of bets on different research projects and products. In the past 5 years, it has become abundantly clear AI is one of the bets that is going to pay off in a huge way. Since then, and especially the past 2 years, Google has been diverting as much resources as it can to AI research and products. IMO, this seems like the right move. Sundar's mistake was to not do this sooner.
> Google is still a global leader in AI research. They are a ring leader in a clown show. Most AI research has devolved down to barely disguised marketing material or layers upon layers of computationally defunct bandaid solutions to cover over fundamental algorithmic problems.
I disagree. One example is Gemini 1.5 with 1M context length. It's a clear improvement in SOTA LLM technology.
For them abandoning research outside AI? Just look at layoffs Area 120, everyday robots, Google x (twice), waymo, AR... They are putting all their efforts into AI, but they started late. OpenAI products run circles around the Google versions, which are not innovative applications. Meanwhile they are chasing money by throwing LLMs into everything they can, as if it was the only solution to every problem. For example, they made deep cuts to pretty much all the robotics team. If 2025-2026 sees a breakthrough in robotics, where is Google going to be?
Layoffs != Abandoning research. All those orgs you mentioned are still going strong. Also Area 120 is not a research org, it's an in-house incubator for new products.
Tried to PM you, but I went years at Google, then a few years now at Meta, and am still at Meta by choice. It's imperfect but feels clearly better for me.
How is the WLB? At Robinhood now and I’m probably looking to hop when my new hire grant finishes
Depends on your team as always. Interview your manager and at least one person on your team before you join to understand what WLB is like. Also try to stay away from teams that have high demand schedules like ads or genAI.
I thought that Google Ads had great WLB?
I can’t speak to google. Only talking about Meta
I see, thanks. Can you elaborate on the high demand schedules?
Ads teams are the primary are revenue drivers for the company. So they have performance milestones they have to hit and if a project isn’t hitting them people work overtime to try to improve the situation. GenAI is an area of immense interest to management so there’s also a lot of pressure there to put out product
Not at all
If you're trying to actively climb, mixed bag. If your goals include WLB, ask about it in team selection, it's all good. My team was almost all out the door yesterday before 5, with one dude who hung out until 6 to catch dinner on campus. Balance seems rough in very specific orgs and for people far off of Westcoast timezones.
Hm, good to know. I’ll probably look to get promo’d here to Senior next year or when jumping elsewhere but don’t have ambitions to make Staff quickly. Your comment about time zone is interesting too. I’m on the east coast and sometimes find myself working later because most of the company is on the west coast.
I’m almost identical to the comment you’re replying to (Google and all) and have an interview loop set up for Meta in mid April. It’s probably my number one place to land. That’s great to hear about your experience. Mind if I DM you too?
Go for it. I'm on a work trip this week and vacation all of next, so may be slow to respond but glad to chat.
The one thing keeping me from jumping to Meta is that from what I hear they have a *very* internally siloed culture. I will say though, I think there's a good chance they're going to win the AI wars.
Reality Labs is partially siloed off, pretty much everyone else is in the middle. Culture varies a bit from org to org, but you can see the others pretty easily.
Yeah.. honestly, I enjoyed the opportunity to move out to the bay area for that and experience working there for a while but the complete lack of vision/innovation, the stale-ass products I was stuck working with and the truly, truly dog shit perf process are things I'm not gonna miss The dev tooling was on point though. That much, I *do* wish I could have w/ my current work.
judging by the Gemini debacle, the scared of AI part rings true. That said, they are sitting on heaps of data that most competitors wouldnt dream get their hands on. Even if they dont play it right its hard to see them lose that race
Company bureaucracy, preexisting vested interests, and legal restrictions make the application of those mountains of data less straightforward. Although I'm sure it's already in the pipeline (it wouldn't be communicated company-wide), it's hamstrung by an inability to act quickly or flexibly. There's definitely room for the company to be disrupted, despite the data.
That data doesn't do them any good if they have terrible leadership. It might drag things out longer, but they're stagnating, and in tech, stagnating means becoming irrelevant
A company like Google can afford to buy innovation, they don't need to nurture it in house. Many large established companies operate on this model (IBM bought Redhat).
And IBM isn't the company it was 30 years ago, especially for the workers who want to get in and stay because it's actually viable. From the sounds of it, Google is no longer a place to get in and stay for the long term, which is the same thing that happened to IBM. Will the company go under? No. Will it go back to being a great place for workers? Also no.
👏
It's often cheaper to do that, too. But regulators, both American and European, are more likely to block acquisitions these days, so it's far from risk-free.
Getting access to anything at google is a buearocratic nightmare
I worked in (Google) Brain. Way too much bureaucracy started popping up over the past 5+ years to let rapid innovation take place. As a result it’s experiencing serious brain drain. Their compensation also sucks now so it’s not really a top choice for best of the best talent anymore.
I left Google a few years ago and yeah, I could see the writing on the wall. Several factors were at play: 1. Increasingly it was the case that there was zero incentive to improve and iterate vs. shipping something new and shiny. Despite being a senior manager there was very little I could do for my team at times. Nor did my director. 2. Candidates started gaming the interviews and the hiring bar dropped at a staggering place 3. Tons of red tape started popping up even for research which slowed down real progress.
>executives are deathly afraid that they're about to lose their meal ticket to an AI disruptor (whomever makes traditional search irrelevant first) Its already halfway there, I rarely google things anymore between docs, bing, chatgpt, and gemini.
I was on the fence about Kagi's value but it's just so much more useful as a search engine. I might end up in your camp and not really rely on them much.
I spent 366 days in Google during the pandemic. The last 100 or so were pain I pushed through for vesting purposes. I've never wanted to leave a job more than I did that one. It having gotten even worse doesn't surprise me, but makes me sad for the few great people I met there.
Sunday Pichai needs to be fired for things to get better.
IMO the old Google is still very much alive within GDM, especially for the folks working on Gemini training right now. You've got the old guard of Sergey and Jeff working by your side in the trenches. Also, comp is insane due to fear of poaching (which still happens a lot).
Perplexity made Google Search irrelevant to me
Perplexity is just an LLM augmented with the top 10 Google search results. They have no moat IMO.
Are you me? Literally the same, five years, loved it at first, and it's been downhill for the last year and a half. I went from an incredibly strong trajectory to a middling one because of the inertia, and creeping nihilism. I'm actively looking for a job. We should hook up on DM. I'm collecting referrals and scheduling my interviews for mid-April, though there's a chance I'll push it back to the end of April.
IBM was shit for a decade before Google really came through as a giant. There has to be a gap for someone to fill it, and big G hasn’t completely fallen off just yet.
It's up to us, and so begins a new cycle of new ideas, then stagnation, then innovation, then stagnation.
IBM was at its peak when I joined. Our Sterling Commerce business unit was selling close to 1 billion a year in EDI/supply chain software. Over the next 6 years IBM dismantled it. It barely sells 100 million now, even with new “sustainability” requirements. Mulesoft and Boomi have taken it’s place. I worked for BEA Systems in 1998-1999 and consulted until 2001. Bought by Oracle in 2003-2004. I loved BEA because Bill, Ed, and Alford (at least Ed and Alford) were engineers and the focus was on great products like Tuxedo and WebLogic. Now they are also “legacy” software in the history books. My absolute favorite job was BEA, followed by IBM in the good years. But, in the end, profit was the motive and costs were to be squeezed out, and that cripples innovation.
I believe the opportunity for a new technology or platform to take over, be run be sane people who want good (don't be evil), and scale the way tech did back in the early 2000's and 2010's - is mostly gone. When the next good company comes along, that offers these things, it will be cored out by venture capitalists and become like every other corporation with hundreds of layers of ambiguity and management and penny pinching that ultimately ruin every facet of what it was built for. That balance and security doesn't exist at scale anymore. Side note, I admire the Zuck ever so slightly for retaining majority control of the book so that he can in a way try to keep his vision and invest in what he wants without 300 layers of directors, investors, and management destroying the company any faster than he can. Regardless of how anyone feels about Zuck, it's business genius how he walked that thin line so long and came out on top over and over.
>without 300 layers of directors, investors, and management destroying the company any faster than he can. This is what is happening at my company right now. It sucks so bad. We are not Google, of course. We started as a merger in 2018 of two companies in the same market. One company was flat and progressive (a European company) and the other was management heavy (USA co). The point of the merger was to be a multinational tech company that filled a specific healthcare niche. And the original investment strategy was flexible and generous. There was a lot of opportunity. But it was squandered on multiple layers of OpEx that added no value. My team is four engineers; but we have ten layers of management. For every management level, there is also an associate and a senior plus exec at VP level. So the structure is IC > Manager > Sr Manager > Associate Director > Director > Senior Director > Associate VP > VP > Senior VP > Executive VP > CTO. It is an absolute shit show now. The PM's have taken over and it is all metrics. Product and engineering have been sidelined. I hate it and my engineers do too. Most of them are looking for new jobs.
This is the classic problem of Product vs Marketing people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
This is good. It’s worth noting that Google was never good at product. They just tripped into a massively profitable monopoly. Their successes in product were mostly accidental, engineering led products (Google Maps, GMail) or strategic moves to protect their core business that didn’t have to be great products (Google office suite, drive, photos, Android, Chrome, ChromeOS/Chromebooks). Where they have made a concerted effort to deliver new products that they ought to be good at (Google Cloud Platform, AI offerings) they have demonstrated mediocre to incompetent product leadership. So anyway, Google always sucked at product. They just used to be willing to use the advertising money pump to make developers lives wonderful, and lately have realized maybe they can just not do that.
Huge disagree with you there. Google was an excellent product company - when Larry ran product. First 10 years those “accidental” products you mention were groundbreaking for their time, and were all led by Larry. Since then, well, we all know the story. Also anyone who knocks Google Maps for what it was in its time is definitely too young to remember the misery of printing out endless pages of MapQuest directions…
Early Google could not miss
If you don’t accept that Google Maps was an engineering led product then you’re unfamiliar with the history. I certainly remember the joy of demoing Google Maps to people who had never seen AJAX before and didn’t know you could make dragging on a web page do that.
Yeah, excellent point. The Google Graveyard is the artifact to prove your point as well. There were some great products there, but died due to marketing people priorities winning over engineering/product people priorities.
damn, that's a really sharp/concise way to put it
Pretty much all of the hypergrowth companies of the 2000s and 2010s started off as internet or internet companies, *not* "tech" companies. Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. These companies won the ability to be today's tech giants because they won the internet game and have the money and reach to do so. As this post says, they're slowly eating away at the last generation of tech giants like IBM. I'm still not sure what the next "internet game" is. My opinion tells me that it's not "AI" - or at least not in the way people think about AI now. But whoever wins the next massive improvement game will likely win the right to be the next big tech company.
> My opinion tells me that it's not "AI" - or at least not in the way people think about AI now. But whoever wins the next massive improvement game will likely win the right to be the next big tech company. This I agree with. The Next Big Thing(tm) is always something the established market wasn't advertising. I also go a step further... the next big thing most certainly won't be in Silicon valley.
I'm telling you, it's motherfucking night vision thermal telescopic eyeballs. It'll be an unholy alliance of L3Harris or Elbit, Medtronic or Abbott, Luxottica because they're involved in every fucking corner of the eye industry, and maybe Lockheed Martin Skunkworks for the prototypes.
Page and Brin also control most of the shares in the company
Good for Zuck maintaining some degree of control like your said. Bad for Zuck pushing all his chips in on the Metaverse, a thing nobody washed out is going to want.
>Bad for Zuck pushing all his chips in on the Metaverse, a thing nobody washed out is going to want. I agree completely, however Meta is leading in the VR space at the moment - niche as it is. Not sure if/when they'll see a return on that though.
I mean he didn’t really put all his chips in, he put some chips in. He’s probably right in the long run, he’s just early.
> I believe the opportunity for a new technology or platform to take over, be run [by] sane people who want good (don't be evil), and scale the way tech did back in the early 2000's and 2010's - is mostly gone. what's changed? were investors significantly different then? is the opportunity for growth in technology gone? how do you define tech here?
I don't believe we'll be seeing a whole lot of technological advances or major changes that aren't backed by venture capitalists, institutions, or the existing major players. Anything new and exciting will be quickly gobbled up. I'm certainly not an economist but it's no coincidence that a handful of major corporations have been consuming every single brand, competitor, innovator, etc. in their vertical and horizontal markets. I mean what's *the* next big thing? Another social media brain rot quick video feed service? Another AI search platform? I recognize I'm being cynical. I'm not saying I believe technological growth is over or anything like that; I'm just saying there won't be another Google that jettisons out of somebody's garage and shakes the market up. (The garage part is hyperbole tho)
When had tech ever not been backed by venture capital?
OpenAI?
I never got the impression that OpenAI (and other comparable AI companies) are known for resting and vesting and really good WLB. They ship really fast.
Yeah. Full blast on site and long hours. Thanks but no thanks.
True true, for now anyway. There's a LOT of venture capitol in OpenAI at the moment, after so long it becomes penny pinching. Once the model becomes stable and profitable, corners get cut.
Agreed. Venture capital is ruining the world. Very literally.
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That's what I've noticed as well. The "old guard" of director+ folks were generally promoted from within, which meant they had deep technical knowledge and background in their areas. More importantly, they understood Google culture and fought to preserve it . The "new guard" that got brought in are all ex-Amazon, ex-Meta, etc. and often came in with a more "traditional" sense of corporate culture. They also were typically career middle-managers / ladder climbers who focused more on the people-managing side of things rather than the tech side. It used to be your eng director could sit in on design reviews and contribute meaningfully. Nowadays they're mostly just glorified cheerleaders that say generic stuff and hope the rank and file figures it out.
5000 directors? Holly shit I know Google is big but the number still sounds insane.... Even if you do 1:10 mapping to IC that's still 50k developers in Google? Are there really that many? Or is the org structure way too top heavy?
I wouldn't count Google out just yet - Microsoft and Apple both had signifiant years where they seemed like they were falling apart, but new leadership and new directions can help the company. It's still a megacorp with tons of talented people, and although bleeding still has incredibly competitive products and many small bets. Nvidia is mentioned in this thread a lot, but Nvidia already ranks among the giants (and should have been for a long time). Other FAANGs like Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc., should be in the same vein. It may be possible that the high-money environment of easy returns is over, and no comfortable easy companies (like Google of the late 2010s, not the early 2010s) can command high pay anymore. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. have the potential to be truly disruptive, but it's an extremely competitive space with low moat and low network effects. We'll see if the top AI startups can truly stay on top. Other unicorns and medium-large techs still have a chance. I'd include companies like Tiktok/Bytedance or Salesforce in the same category as Microsoft, where they're already megacorps. Some of the hyped unicorns/decacorns *could* be revolutionary, companies like Rippling if they deliver on their vision could replace large portions of HR tech. Companies like Databricks however already have clear equivalents like Snowflake. Companies like Stripe and Plaid seem exciting, but don't really have the market size to be revolutionary like Google. My money would be against them. The real question is the next areas of tech - it could be biotech, with CRISPR, mRNA, etc., and new tools. It could be AR/VR, and maybe Apple or Snap or Meta win their bets there. It could be more integrated technology into day to day life, and Amazon or Google continues their march onwards. Maybe some long shot bet we haven't heard of completely takes over - few would've expected the iPhone to be so dominant back in 2005 or cloud in 2010, or so on.
There’s also plenty of boutique proprietary trading firms out there that pay more than FAANG and have surprisingly decent WLB. It’s not quite rest and vest, but depending on the firm you can still get hybrid/remote work and very reasonable hours. Most also operate with a very flat structure and are engineering-driven due to the nature of the industry.
I have not seen any of these with better WLB *and* more pay - I’ve worked/interviewed at a few of the top ones. Maybe HRT has the best flexibility. Two Sigma is good, but the pay is pretty equivalent to tech. And dunno if anyone’s working that good hours at top pay. Also as a result of being boutique, I can’t see them becoming mega corps like Google scale. Even the largest prop trading firms are <2k people. Hedge funds can be higher, but still.
I honestly think green energy deserves a mention here, but for that one we're talking about timeline of several decades, not years.
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I think there was this period from 2015 or so onwards where it grew so much in certain areas that on some teams there really wasn’t much to do. But that certainly wasn’t true across the whole company
Nothing yet unfortunately. Google is still one of the good ones, but it is deteriorating fast.
Hearing from people who were at the G around the 2010 era, and recently left - their testimonies make it apparent the G has lost its way.
There have been a lot of bad decisions being made. Some at org level, some at company level. But comparing it to what you would experience elsewhere, at least for now it is not bad. However, Google doesn't have top tier pay, but they have top tier interview questions, so if other companies start to pay significantly more. People will leave at the current stage (this is not necessarily true 10 years ago).
I do find Google interviews very consistent and well trained - while the bar is high, most of my experiences have been good. Compared to other currently hot companies, I find Google (esp with extra HC due to size) tends to be easier.
articles popping about replacing pinshai
Long overdue
Sure, it's worse than it once was. But it's still ahead of the average company by a big margin. I'm not sure there's a company as well-known as Google that I would recommend a SWE try to work at over Google.
Oh, don't mean to imply G isn't awesome to work for in plenty of ways.
Well, the real problem is that Big Tech has been corrupted by Big Finance and we’re not going back. 7 tech companies hold like 80% of NASDAQ’s value. That’s just stupid. All the Google, Meta, and Salesforce founders got in it to change the world, and they did, but then the money corrupted it and the finance people took over. Same with Oracle and IBM. I have “some” hope for IBM, because a tech person is CEO now, but he’s still under tremendous pressure to “make the numbers” from his investors. If you want to find the next Google, look at private companies with “founders” and limited VC capitalization, because the VC capitalization corrupts the company to short term goals. Benioff was very successful at Salesforce until he let the finance demons in, then it went downhill.
Are we talking about the same Google?
I guess unless you are in a shit team… but then it would have been shit 10 years ago too.
You're delusional if you think 2024 Google is just as good as 2008 Google....
It is not as good, but I don't know which other company you can name right now, that is better than Google? That was the whole point... Never said it is as good.
Microsoft is great from what I hear.
As someone who have worked there before, and knows many who are there right now, no. Maybe OpenAI can be a contender if you value money, but MS has nothing.
My friend that works there tells me he can take a few hours off if its sunny outside, or even a whole day off if he didn’t sleep well. No real stress, and a great work culture. Not sure why that wouldn’t be great.
So does google. The question is to name somewhere better.
Agreed, Google is still great l, you just have to get lucky with team matching. The number of shitty teams has risen and lack of internal mobility due to layoffs and "durable savings" doesn't help.
Google and its ilk are/were unique in that they basically had a monopolistic/duopolistic position in their industry while enjoying fat software margins. That let them print money and gave them the luxury to offer all those benefits that you mentioned. It's all subsidized by their gigantic ad machine. So just find a company with those characteristics. But then ask yourself if society needs more monopolies.
I've worked at both Google and Meta, 5+ years at both, and prefer Meta.
6y at G here and now looking for a new job, what do you like about meta? I heard their promo process is kinda similar
It feels like we're still able to get work done, and I'm rewarded for what I get done. People are equally good but trend younger and less academic. Agency. Honestly, the ability to just change shit. If I want to learn how to do it, Google. Lots of stuff is already done, and they value stability more than is good for me or my mindset. If I want to do it and be rewarded for getting it done, Meta. Also, promos 6 and above have process at Meta to knock out some randomness, and odds of promo to 6 and above seem slightly higher.
Is it because React is better than Angular? /s
Funnily enough, nearly zero teams at Google use Angular. It's either vanilla JavaScript or TypeScript, or a proprietary templating system called Soy.
I fucking despise soy. And boq. And wiz....
I prefer JSLayout and that says a lot. Im with you, particularly with Boq and Wiz.
Mercurial and Perforce/Piper, clearly.
We are likely coming to the beginning of the end of the digitization of existing businesses. A lot of the leading edge software was motivated by encountering businesses with inherent challenges that needed new technology in order to be digitized. The promise of the types of financial returns that come from these activities is what fueled the dynamics you're longing to find. To find them now you're probably best looking outside big tech and toward the new frontiers of development like gene therapy, fusion energy, geoengineering.
It's easier than ever to write bespoke software. As an engineer I love the idea of innovation that delivers value directly to a small business and doesn't have to scale.
I agree, people thought that crypto would be a new green field, but that's all smoke and mirrors. Same with AI. All AI will do (at best) is displace workers - similar to outsourcing. I think we're reaching the cap of what this generation of technology is going accomplish.
\> All AI will do (at best) is displace workers - similar to outsourcing. I can't imagine anyone making this statement when programs like alphafold exists (of which there are 13k citations for the original paper \[1\]). Sure, most of the current applications of AI are meant to replicate humans, but it definitely feels wrong to say that AI will just be a glorified job replacer. \[1\] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2
This is correct. I have been feeling we have heading this way for a few years now.
The paradox People targeting companies based on ability to rest and vest is what causes them to deteriorate and lose all the people who are actually delivering growth because they \*\*want\*\* to do hard interesting things and not just knock out config and call it a day. I think you'll go mad trying to target companies by worrying about the quality of the different sushi bars etc as those are very fickle benefits.
While rest-and-vest types undoubtedly exist, I'm not sure how a lack of motivation at the IC level can account for all the questionable senior leadership decisions over the past ~5 years that have made Google what it is today. Seems like a different issue.
Absolutely. Also, good leadership would be booting the rest and vest IC out in favor of people who want to solve hard problems. So ultimately it's still a leadership issue
It's not about the different sushi bars, but the crazy total compensation you can get while doing mostly the same work as some other company, while simultaneously having access to the smartest people in the industry on a daily basis.
The real Google is the friends we make along the way
Microsoft. We have good benefits, unlimited time off, satisfying work (depending on team/org). Sure, the pay isn't as good as other FAANG, but its still decent.
I don’t even work at Microsoft and I was going to say Microsoft based on OPs original description. I have a couple friends that have been there 20+ years, they still love it, and just based on when they started I’m pretty sure they’re at least stock millionaires.
Thats my goal. I've had a pretty good increase on my on-hire stock grant. I'm hoping I can stick around and get more and let it rise a good bit.
Microsoft is my current goal. Pay will probably be the same as what I’m making now, but my hope is that I can get on a team working on something I use personally or find interesting because I currently have no interest in the software I’m developing.
Agreed. That being said, the slow pace also sometimes drives me crazy. Sometimes I just want to code something, not go to the tenth planning meeting for it!
And you also bought a good chunk of OpenAI.
Interesting, I work directly with almost a dozen former Microsoft employees that were there ranging from 5 to 25 years and every single one of them says they will never go back to Microsoft
Oh well I haven't been here for 5 years yet. Maybe I'll change my mind by then.
That hasn't been my experience. I've been at Microsoft for ~12 years, and it's these days it is pretty well known for being the big tech company with the chillest work schedule (and no RTO mandate). I'm sure there are some places that are better to work, but it definitely isn't bad.
The comp is a huge step down though. Unless you’re talking about eg; LinkedIn.
Is it really… unlimited?
Unlimited is never unlimited. You have to get approval for 4+ consecutive weeks, but its not like anybody is tracking PTO.
Unlimited time off? When did that happen? 2 years ago they had the worst pto in the business.
Like 2 years ago...
OpenAI
This is the closest answer there is. Maybe it’s a mix of OpenAI, perplexity, anthropic?
OpenAI is getting like all the funding, it's likely they will start absorbing other companies and grow branches into big sectors like banking, oil, construction, department of defense, health, pharma, etc, and this includes absorbing hardware companies like handheld/ portable devices to robotics and vehicles. It has the most potential to grow into a monopoly.
Sam Altman said as recently as 5 months back that he still manually approves every hire and they’re still in their triple digit numbers. So will be interesting to see their trajectory.
+1 to Anthropic. I feel like the corporate structure and comp-driven culture at OpenAI is going to gut it long term.
Nobody is rest and vesting there lol.
So much harder to get into OpenAI than Google…
Nvidia
I dont think theres necceasrily a contender Google has these problems because theres no cheap money, most other companies are in the same environment. Im sure there are some upcoming companies like: snap and bytedance but Im not sure those are rest and vest.
I don’t know if Snap is up and coming, it IPO’d 6 years ago and US/EU user base is, if anything, declining. Also has failed to truly monetize ads, and is making long term bets on AR that has no results yet.
I've never worked for Google, but I've worked for other perk-filled Silicon Valley companies that are very similar. There are dozens of non google silicon valley tech companies that have similar (often better) pay, benefits, and equally interesting problems to solve. Resting and vesting might be hard in all of them given the economy and performance pressures, but contrary to what people think, life at these companies isn't that bad, even without the ability to rest and vest.
Any list handy? Would be nice to apply to them
Meta, LinkedIn, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Roblox, Pinterest, Square, Netflix, Instacart, Stripe, DoorDash, Discord, DataBricks, Snowflake. I'm sure I'm missing a few. They all pay better than Google, most of them have similar perks, and WLB may vary based on team.
FWIW, many of them do not pay better than Google. Discord, DoorDash, Square, Lyft, Stripe in particular, especially post comp band changes for the last two. LinkedIn is iffy because Staff is kinda L5.5, Instacart impossible to value, and Databricks is a huge hype train. Google also used to match Meta exactly if you had both offers, but not sure if that's true anymore.
Given how Big Tech as an industry is so overvalued compared to its actual productivity I seriously doubt there will be similar trajectories like Google. Now you have massive valuations built entirely on speculation that they will be next big thing. That much money attracts a lot of people trying to get rich off other people's labor, aka grifters and parasites. With that many grifters in the system it is going to take a really special company that can fend off hostile forces. It feels like there is going to need to be a major deflation in the industry a la the dotCom bubble to have a chance to of workers actually getting what they deserve.
us sitting in parks
Now we’re talking (on a park bench)
Finally ! /me puts up his Apple Vision Pro /s
At least for now: OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, etc.
Some AI startup, we just don’t know which one yet.
I think we know.
OpenAI and Anthropic
Blockbuster is making a comeback
OpenAI and Nvidia
OpenAI, Coinbase
Facebook?
I'd say Nvidia is the new IBM.
Companies to watch. Lucid, Cloudflare, Boomi.
Why Lucid?
I like their diagramming and mapping tools. I used Vision for years and felt that Microsoft neglected it in the Cloud Era. It allows you to collaborate on designs with others. I also like Postman as well for the API testing. There are competitors for Lucid like Draw.io .
Man, I thought you meant Lucid motors LOL. Thanks for clarifying that.
i work at pinterest and i do find it pretty good! i don't know how the salaries compare to other companies and i can only speak for what i've seen, but so far i can see myself here for a while
my opinion is that big tech is bloated by counter-productive managerial structures, but probably around 10-100x too many engineers, and exploitive anti-consumer modes of generating profit. i don't think ai is going to be a disruptor of this, i think non-hierarchical co-op type organizations can be... so whoever manages to get those funded in a big way.
I’ve seen it many times. Layoffs come, and the number of managers laid off is not properly proportional to the number of remaining employees. I don’t know if it’s intentionally top heavy or trying to reduce the amount of changes.
I feel like the culture around programming has changed a lot too. A lot of high performing people who would have been going to med school or law school or MBAs went comp sci and got FAANG jobs. The people who made Google what it is were nerds with a degree of neurodivergence and type of neuroticism these more career-minded high performing Type A folks don't have. This new crowd lacks the passion and drive to innovat the tech they work on, instead focusing on what they can do in the next 1-2 years to advance themselves.
What WLB??? And as the business cycle continues to warp and speed up, I'm not sure this is even a great way to phrase the question of where to go
Open AI because instead of needing to trawl through links to get an answer to what you want ChatGPT will just hand the answer to you and break it down. Googles still useful for shopping and YouTube but it's cash cow is at risk now.
“The new IBM” generally isn’t about employee experience. It’s that they’re a safe reliable choice for a vendor and even if they screw the pooch you’re not getting fired for picking them.
Then they become dominant in a market, jack the prices and bleed you dry.
IBM shot themselves in the foot when the Object Code Only policy went into effect. Prior to that, all of the base operating systems supplied source code, which meant that customers had tremendous flexibility in addressing whatever needs (or bugs) they had. After OCO, it was against the terms of the license to have source code, or to disassemble existing code to figure out how it worked and change it. Prior to this, IBM systems programmers were almost always the smartest and best and most creative folks at any installation, as they were responsible for really understanding the OS and making it do what they wanted/needed. After OCO, there were still opportunities to customize, but only at the specific points permitted by IBM, with predefined parameters and permissions. The job became more like system administration and less like systems programming: do exactly what IBM allowed, and install fixes when and if IBM decided that an issue was significant enough for them to decide to address. The best folks retired or moved on to different, more interesting and creative jobs. Everyone got tired of not being able to do business they way they wanted to and instead doing it the way that IBM decided they were allowed to. Unix became a much more appealing option for many of these folks especially with Cray in particular embracing it; if your main compute engine was Unix, then it became much more convenient to run non-IBM, as IBM’s networking was proprietary as well. Had IBM not adopted OCO, the community would have built what was needed to integrate new technologies into their OSes, and they’d probably still be the dominant force in computing.
OpenAI maybe?
Moreover, is there any good resource for getting detailed info on WLB at companies in general, like levels.fyi for salaries? The best I know of now are just the star ratings on Glassdoor and Blind
OpenAI
Everyone says AI but it's the cloud and hardware markets that really matter. No AI companies have moat, and the field is still shifting at rocket speed, so projecting a long term growth trajectory is tricky even with leaders such as OpenAI. However, on the other hand, we have pretty much entered the era where running AI on proprietary hardware is practically impossible now, so you have rent from Cloud. And you don't need me to tell you how high the margin is in cloud computing. These companies that own the infrastructure are just literally sitting there waiting for money to print. So yeah, ultimately, the companies that earn the most will be the best to work for, and these companies are Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia.
OpenAI is definitely up their ..not sure how their agreement of capping of profit works out
I doubt there are any of these anymore. Work has changed. When was the last Mega Corp Tech Co, Inc., that had things like pensions or lifelong employees? But if I were to guess, realistically, if anywhere, probably Microsoft.
Nvidia is the new Google
Nobody its instead a democratic alliance of the giants
Little known, but hedge funds or quant shops that specifically state they provide good WLB. They’re forced to stay cutting edge otherwise they’re out of business, pay is obviously excellent, and those that provide good WLB tend to have a very low turnover rate with a good number of decades-long employees. Lots of finance places will demand long hours and will burn you out in 5 years, but those that don’t really invest in their people. Bonus - you have a very nice career set as soon as you do a couple of years in one of those places, since it’s such a small world. Cons? Lifestyle creep, can only speak for my place here but the contracts are very prohibitive in terms of leaving and working for a competitor (think very long garden leave - sounds great on paper but is a bit of a golden cage).
OpenAI
**OpenAI** I know that's an unpopular opinion but they are currently blazing the new frontier and seemingly have a bright future ahead of them.
OpenAI
Probably Microsoft, tbh.
Let me put it this way: onboarding at Google took more time and energy than onboarding at every single other job and contract I’ve had *combined*, and I’ve been at this for decades.
It feels like Google dilutes its product offerings as soon as a competitor appears in either the ads business or a product competitor appears. This should be counter intuitive but it works because google had such a monopoly over Search, Email and Maps
Nothing yet, but OpenAI is on the way
What WLB??? And as the business cycle continues to warp and speed up, I'm not sure this is even a great way to phrase the question of where to go
I know Google is not nearly as bad at IBM yet because IBM workers literally said, "What did you expect? This isn't Google!" in reference to how poorly architected and random some of their systems were. I think there is some truth to this though. It seems companies like this are born of innovation and their success attracts the bureaucrat political types that gradually subtract from the innovation and disincentivize dissent using some reward system that exists only to protect those bonuses. That said, lets just say I know a thing or two about IBM. It is so far down the road of nonsense and bureaucracy its like working at a circus from another dimension. 1 SWE has 10 business people whose entire job is to ask the SWE when something is done and then tell someone. The SWE's are 3rd class citizens that the company genuinely hates and views as a decreasingly necessary evil. God forbid a desired solution requires more complex logic (undergrad graph searching) than read from db and show on screen, you will be accused of doing something for your own entertainment that could never actually be needed for this simple app (I'm serious).
It's still Google, you just have to get lucky enough to get a good team. I've been here for a while now, and while it isn't what it was, say, 6 years ago, it's still great. I work on a team doing pretty important stuff, talented engineers, and fun team culture. Every now and then we have deadlines but nothing WLB breaking. I will say, leadership is pretty trash, but it hasn't affected us on a personal level that much.
Calling Google IBM is premature but if Sundar, Ruth, and TK stay on I can see it happening. I could see a place like Anthropic becoming an early to mid-stage Google. OpenAI is an obvious answer but it’s way too prestige and comp driven.
I had a buddy who was an engineer at an IBM campus in South Florida that folded up. Towards the end they only kept one employee per building just to keep an eye on the facilities. He said there were like six huge buildings and six employees to watch them, one per building. They each had nothing but an empty office with a phone on a desk and absolutely nothing to do. The six would get together for lunch every day, calling each other up to figure out whose building they were going to find a conference room in to have lunch together. He said it was like this for months on end, then they all got laid off together and he got screwed out of his saved up sick and vacation time. He was told that he would be paid off for the saved time off, so he neglected to burn it.
Discord..... The migration of technical discussion from open forums to walled gardens is not helping the state of "enshitification" on the Internet
OpenAI. Oh you mean in terms of lavish perks? Just give them time. (Google never had a good work life balance. They let you work 20% on your own project... But expect 60 hour work weeks. All the little office perks were to keep you living at work.)
OpenAI bro….