I work in big tech. Not Google. This is one of the best blog posts I have read about big tech. I agree with most things. The most important one is the wrong optimization for promotion. People would happily push something complicated and unnecessary to production just because it can help them to get promoted later on (by showing fake impact). The other thing I strongly agree with is working on things that don't add value to users but rather to follow company guidelines. But it's hard to avoid this one. Finally, moving very slowly due to complex systems and so many teams that need to get involved in making change. In the end most employees end up exactly as described in the post - staying because of the amazing salary and benefits, contributing less and less as time goes by.
Regarding firing people. From my experience it's doable but takes a long time. That's why offloading an employee to another team is usually easier.
With all that being said, I still think for most people who work for someone else, big tech is better than startups once you're experienced. If you don't work for yourself than optimizing for money is a reasonable thing to do.
> The most important one is the wrong optimization for promotion.
As a CEO, it is literally his job to ensure that promotions are aligned with company goals. At Google, VPs have final say on every single promotion. If there were people who were getting promoted under his command for stupid reasons, he was literally the person who could stop it.
> That's why offloading an employee to another team is usually easier.
At one point I noticed that our team kept getting these incompetent engineers transferred from other parts of the company. At first I was puzzled, especially because my director was completely unphased by this. Then I realized he kept asking a lot of questions in our 1-1s about how X is doing, what X could do to improve, etc. And finally after a few months X would be gone. I think this guy got a reputation as a "cleaner" so our team would get the garbage to get taken out. I always wondered if/what kind of special favors he got in exchange for doing this from his peers...
> The other thing I strongly agree with is working on things that don't add value to users but rather to follow company guidelines.
At face value, what you're agreeing with makes sense, and I'm a strong believer in questioning / re-affirming the "why" before taking on big projects.
But while the premise seems correct, his one example does not. FTA:
> we have an extremely long project that consumed many of our best engineers to align our data retention policies and tools to Google. I am not saying this is not important BUT this had zero value to our users.
This is a short sighted take, and ignores some of the reasons that such initiatives are often necessary (and I'd even argue...valuable). Two off the top of my head:
- Alignment with data retention policies = meet my expectations as a user about how Waze handles my data. I realize I'm in the minority by caring about this.
- Integration with standard tooling = easier for existing teams to contribute/maintain, less overhead managing disparate tooling, eventual gains in feature velocity which do equate to customer value.
So yeah, question the rationale for doing something, but look past your own immediate goals when evaluating the value of this kind of initiative.
I agree the specific example he used is not a great one. I think you nailed it. It seems his main problem was spending a lot of time and resources on a problem that most likely wouldn't exist in Waze the startup. It's not the kind of problems he wants to spend time on, which is valid.
In this particular example he even acknowledged that it was important. But it's not always the case and then I can understand the frustration. As you said "question the rationale for doing something".
Regarding firing people. From my experience it's doable but takes a long time. That's why offloading an employee to another team is usually easier.
With all that being said, I still think for most people who work for someone else, big tech is better than startups once you're experienced. If you don't work for yourself than optimizing for money is a reasonable thing to do.