The Myth of the Genius Programmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ

The Art of Organizational Manipulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTCuYzAw31Y

I rewatch these every few years, or before an interview. Puts me back in the right headspace.

If you're reading this Ben, thank you.

It starts with some general points one could summarize as defining a "good culture" and how that should pay off for both employer and employees, but then later tramples all over it by excusing or outright endorsing the exact type of political behaviour that was criticized at the beginning: upward perception, the favour economy, finding influential friends, connectors, not burning bridges, and facetime.

edit: The mentioned plan B (leaving) is really the only option for what they call a "hostile corporation". I don't agree with many of the plan A "learning to play the game" recommendations. This just changes you for the worse.

You can't change the nature of reality, but you can choose to play the game in the service of good moral outcomes, or in servive of selfish greed.

> Google is the opposite: it's like a giant grad-school. Half the programmers have PhD's, and everyone treats the place like a giant research playground [...] Every once in a while, a manager skims over the bubbling activity, looking for products to "reap" from the creative harvest. The programmers completely drive the company, it's really amazing. I kept waiting for people to walk up to me and ask me if I had declared my major yet. They not only encourage personal experimentation and innovation, they demand it. Every programmer is required to spend 20% of their time working on random personal projects. If you get overloaded by a crisis, then that 20% personal time accrues anyway. Nearly every Google technology you know (maps, earth, gmail) started out as somebody's 20% project, I think.

Even if this was only half-true back then, there's very little you could do to convince me that it's true at all now. This culture and the public perception of it has been squandered.

[1]: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2005-09-25-FirstWee...

It really did just feel like grad school with better funding. For me it lasted until around 2014 (wow, 10 years ago) when a director stole my ideas and bad-mouthed me to a bunch of senior folks. I hung on a bit longer (working for a close friend of the author of this FAQ on 3d printing and making stuff) and then a couple stints with ML hardware, before I finally concluded that the company was well on its way to enhittifying everything it did.

Sundar is sort of the complete opposite of this. He wants a large pool of completely anonymous programmers and a small number of directors who know how to turn those programmers into growth products, but those directors don't have a clue. For example, with gChat, one day the head of chat told TGIF that chat was changing, that japanese teen girls were the primary target, and they wanted emojis. He didn't even get that there was this enormous number of professional workers using gmail/gchat/gcal/gdocs and that by fucking up the product, he lost their trust.

Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.

I get that they've made a ton of money, but it also seems like they really wanted to spend their lives making awesome stuff and doing things like scanning books and making them free. And it feels a bit like the market forces took Google away from them. They put Sundar and a bunch of other McKinsey alums in charge. And McKinsey is, from what I can tell, basically the opposite of grad school.

Whenever I did see Larry or Sergei make an appearance they always looked a little dead inside and like they were just going through the motions.

And from what I can tell, the original sin was taking VC funding. Once they took VC funding, they had limited actual control over what happened to their company. So while they talked in 2004 about not wanting to be a conventional company, and while they warned in 1998 that ad-driven search engines were biased against their users, they still had limited ability to be unconventional in any way that was unattractive to investors. And that includes, in a sense, just being too different. A large company will eventually need to be run by professional management, and professional managers need a thing that looks and drives like a conventional company.

For what it's worth, I don't think it's wrong or bad, but just the way corporations work.

The DoubleClick acquisition wasn't a merger, and had no impact on anything as far as I could tell. It was really acquired for the market share not the people and iirc every DoubleClick employee was reinterviewed, maybe half didn't make it!

I doubt McKinsey had much to do with it either.

IMO the problem was more that the culture of endless hiring disconnected from need eventually caught up with it. I think once Page finally became CEO he may have decided he didn't like it much, especially as with ever greater numbers of restless/bored employees the flow of negative feedback / hate mail got bigger and bigger. People like Pichai are often appointed as CEOs when founders move on, because they will stick to the founders vision and won't make any big changes. Ballmer and Tim Cook are similar, I think, except that Cook seems to have done a better job of keeping things on the original path than the other two did. Typically under such CEOs revenues and profits increase a lot, but there are few bold initiatives or risks taken. It's easy for drift to set in.

I think this one sentence describes everything, companies are all about the people at the top. Its these people that set the culture, pace and overall direction of the company.

If the founders tune out and outsource the very soul of the company to general managers, who can keep lights on rather too well. Well thats what you get. The lights will be on, it will be life as usual and gradual erosion of that very soul that was the company.

You can't blame Larry and Sergei either. There are better things to enjoy when you have billions in the bank and one life to spend it.

It pains me to think this won’t be happening anymore because really, you can’t sic your brightness engineers on detecting ad blockers _and_ casually make scientific breakthroughs. Something happened to google and the we’ll be writing about for decades to come but if there’s one thing I’m certain it’s that they are done trying to make the world a better place.

What Isomorphic, the spinoff, learned pretty quickly is that protein structure prediction is not, has never been, and is unlikely to be, the most critical blocking step in developing new drugs. That won't stop pharma from investing biobucks (virtual dollars that are gated by milestones) in them. Right now pharma is terrified because their pipelines are drying up, their blockbusters are going generic, and the recent rates of new discoveries leading to new candidates (target diseases/bio pathways) are dropping, even as they invest more and more into automation and machine learning.

(By the way Mike- I always did wish you had been able to run your "math problems" on exacycle, as a way of monetizing idle cores)

> That won't stop pharma from investing biobucks (virtual dollars that are gated by milestones) in them.

I didn't quite follow this, could you maybe elaborate? What is a virtual dollar in this context? Do you mean they make promises of future payments if certain goals are achieved, but the dollars never become real because the goals aren't achievable?

Re: math problems. I remember looking at Exacycle and wondering about that :) but concluded it would have been self defeating, as it'd just have resulted in Google dominating the network and that'd have been seen as an attack.

What I’m saying is, I don’t think there’s another one project like it in the pipeline…not from the company that’s focusing its resources and talents on throttling browsers with adblockers.

I realize that this is an oversimplification and these changes take decades to become fully realized but you have to admit, it’s a bizarre thing to focus on from the company that literally solved protein folding.

These geniuses were advancing humankind and at some point and now they’re doing “this”.

As for more projects in the pipeline, well, see the sibling post by dekhn. It's hard to know what's important to work on if you aren't actually on the front lines. DeepMind did AlphaFold because it saw a way to apply its general AI research to biotech, not because it's a biotech firm.

It's news to me that Sundar had anything to do with gdrive, gmaps, and gmail, except that he was head of Apps for a while, long after those products had completely established themselves.

It's hard enough to be motivated to work on things in a Big Company. It's even harder when you have to consciously play a game to advertise and promote your success and work -- spending almost as much time doing that as actually doing work. ... and then have others come along and take credit for your work, etc.

Success in academia comes to those who pick the right people to work with, pick the right things to work on at the right time and say the right things at the right times to the right people, all to push yourself ahead of others guised under veils and veneers of goodness. Truth, morality and the quest for knowledge be damned.

"Picking" is more than what the word suggests. It involves shutting others out, stealing ideas and actual work, propagandizing, giving out freebies but keeping the kickbacks hidden, buttering people for favors, building and fostering inner circles etc. All this is the politics.

No surprise that the ones who are left and thrive are self driven narcissists and ruthless cold blooded creatures painted in playful colors.

Google is the equivalent of the Ivy league. Hopeless, clueless and on a path to irrelevance fostered by a thousand leeches.

Some argue, the world is better because of what Google produced and hence entitled to such inner workings. Same argument as the Ivy's. That's missing the forest for the trees. The real loss isn't what Google or the Ivys have become, but the opportunity loss comparing to what they could have been, with all their resources, had they not gone down this path. This isn't the only possible outcome in this game.

What is even the real question? How should we do politics?

Do you have a proposal to repair this? It seems any organizational effort is going to end up in a similar situation, because the people who desire to be at the top are the people willing to do the things required to get there, and that leaves little room for people who just want to pursue 'truth, morality and the quest for knowledge'.

It seems to me that the only solution to resolving this problem is to either (a) rely on a benevolent, genius, moral autocrat; (b) completely purge the leadership regularly; or (c) delegate authority to some future un-corruptible intelligence.

What does this mean? Yes, I understand the English, but I mean deeper: What are you trying to say? And, why does it matter?

Who cares about "losing the trust of the users". What matters is that 99% of "professional workers" don't have a choice what mail/chat/calendar/word processor they use. Their IT department decided for them. And, if they do have a choice, what do they use instead?

> Oh well. Sundar is why we can't have nice things.

Most of Google is now mature products. Run it like a business -- maximize profits. It seems logical to me.

That's true until is isn't. Complacency's impact is subtle, but no company is actually invincible forever.

It is logical if all you want is to extract maximum short-term value from what was already built. To me, the logical conclusion of this path is irrelevance in the long term.

The only two real big success products to come from Google that are still around are Search and Gmail. Maybe you can count Scholar but it’s really just a type of search.

Workspace was assembled from various acquisitions, YouTube they bought, Cloud is just a Jack Ma-esque “copy whatever Bezos is doing” initiative.

Most home grown Google products have either failed or been killed in the cradle. G+, Stadia, etc etc

20% was always a myth.

The theory that google hasn’t birthed any original products just doesnt hold any water

Chet Haase wrote a book on those years, and while it is clear that Google gave them rocket fuel to meet their ambitions, their company culture was wildly different from the rest of Google. Shipping code on Android would not have passed muster for anyone at mainline Google; the process and standards were utterly alien from one another.

There is no way Android happens without the acquisition.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110205190729/http://www.busine...

Can we really say that Danger could have accomplished the same thing? I was in the carrier industry at that time and Danger was just another handset company.

Those are kinda important parts. Like, to the point that if they'd homegrown "GVideos" I bet it would have failed.

> Chrome.

Which was a WebKit wrapper - explicitly just the browser chrome.

The YouTube product which is their creator economy that exists today didn't back then. In fact, I'm pretty sure original team would've run out of money soon.

> Which was a WebKit wrapper - explicitly just the browser chrome.

And Docker is "a wrapper" around Linux Cgroups. So? It was a unique product with instant market fit - "fast browser without the UI clutter and with sandbox'ed tabs".

I'm trying to picture a white board with someone drawing up a plan how to destroy everything and take over.

Woah, video replies, we have to remove those. Threaded conversations under videos? Lets make them into an unbearable mess and make it as hard as possible for anyone to have a conversation. We can put it under history! ha-ha good one! Wait, we could suck everyone into a vacuum and have them all watch the same videos? ~ Excellent idea!

Creative company indeed

Then it was run under Google from 2006 to 2023.

Does anyone remember what 2005 looked like at all?

But people really like the narrative that Google couldn’t make a YouTube

Googles main successful product was amazing infrastructure. Lots of real innovation. It enabled massive scale of everything else, including acquisitions. YouTube was about to hit the wall when they got acquired.

But the people “leading” the place are trash.

It was already the case, at that point, that 20% really just meant doing more of what Google was already doing.

But maybe I just didn't know the right people or have the right connections or status.

2005 was still very open

It will collapse under its own weight if Google stops spending billions of dollars on it every year.

500k-700k is a little more realistic. 1500 employees across all domains (engineering, marketing, product management, customer service, etc) isn’t a huge number

Disclaimer: I’ve never worked at Google and have no insider information.

The fact that basically all of the big companies (Microsoft, Google, Apple) use Webkit or Chromium shows that it's very difficult to build and maintain one successfully IMO. I think that Mozilla are essentially the only ones developing something that's somewhat competitive, not to mention that most smaller companies (e.g. Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Island etc.) all use Chromium.

I'm not saying that it's easy to succeed with a product even after you've bought it, or started it from a fork (see less successful Chromium/Webkit forks). I'm just saying that it was not something built from the ground-up in Google. For example, v8 was and really changed a lot of things in the JavaScript world including Node, Deno etc.

The graphics libraries are definitely more custom... Although in total fairness they're not entirely ground-up Apple either; Quartz was based on Display PostScript, which was acquired from NeXT, and which NeXT built in collaboration with Adobe based on Adobe's earlier work on PostScript. It's obviously true Apple's done a lot of work since then (e.g. Metal), but in that case, so has Google since forking Webkit.

I think you missed the point, there's two forks in the history of Blink (Chromium). Yes, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but WebKit is a fork of KHTML. So it's not like it originated at Apple either, it originated at KDE.

1. The V8 JavaScript engine, which blew away everything else. 2. The sandboxed, multiprocess, threading model.

Those were the two things emphasized in the original Chrome "comic" at launch, if I recall:

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

Firefox only declared it completed electrolysis in 2018, nearly a decade after this comic.

This is technically true, but Maps before Google was nothing like what you see now. Most of the innovation happened at Google. Earth hasn't changed that much, but it's not really the killer app that Maps is.

Chrome. Photos. Hadoop. Kubernetes. Brain. Spanner. T in GPT (Transformers). And lots more. Google's real contribution was internet scale systems and how to run them reliably.

Part of Google's perceived aura (IMHO) when they started was that they seemed to be like the nebulous group of pre-Web Internet-savvy techies. Which were a smart group, tending towards altruistic and egalitarian, and wanting to bring Internet goodness to people, and onboard people into Internet culture. What seemed like one sign of this was times that you'd see old-school techies outside of Google treating Google like stewards rather than exploiters. And when they said "Don't Be Evil", I thought I knew exactly what they meant.

Well, the dotcom gold rush happened, huge masses of people rushed in looking for what it was about, huge money rushed in and soon tried to landgrab and then exploit those masses rather than onboard them, Doubleclick acquired Google :), techie job interviews started looking like rituals to induct affluent young new grads into their rightful upper-middle career paths, unethical behaviors became so commonplace that people can't even see them, and academia was infected a bit. Which I think means...

...If another Google happened, would we even recognize it? From where could it draw its culture that's not pretty completely overtaken by big money and all that attracts and builds?

Maybe the next Google can't be in the space of computing/communications/information at all, because big money and and coattail-riders would be all over that too quickly.

Maybe it would instead arise from people that really love to study insects. And they have a cooperative community around that, and have been trying to explain the importance of insects to the world for years, but not many care. Then it turns out that insects are the key to averting an imminent Earth extinction-level event. So the bug nuts get huge infusions of cash, and can work on all the problems they've wanted to.

And it'll be at least a few years before people with no interest in insects, other than chasing money, can really take over and start perverting the field, set up gatekeeping to pass people like them, while excluding the actual people who created and loved the field and saved the world, etc.

Personally, I have always disliked bugs, and will never be a candidate for Bügle.

Join the ant revolution!

- Small, relatively young company.

- Absolutely gargantuan amounts of revenue

You can't run a company this way unless you have a very large money firehose.

The last time this happened was early-Facebook. I don't think there has been a single company since then that fit the description - which IMO is fine, the celestial alignment of factors is pretty rare.

Companies nowadays have kind of the opposite problem: lots of hiring, but not enough revenue to show for it. Some tried to build a similar culture on VC funding but imploded once the cash ran out. You really need an intensely profitable product to make this formula work.

It's still possible for a one-off startup here and there to maybe get into this boat, but at this point the big tech players are there to slurp up the real money makers early and often and assimilate them into the borg.

If this sort of environment were what I wanted to work in, I'd probably look at specialized teams/niches inside of big corps. Surely very difficult to find, but they do exist.

So Google has really only been doing obvious ideas. Like Pixel phones, Pixel buds, getting into cloud too late.

clearly you're incorrect, since Google was (famously!) exactly like this before the ads firehose of cash started.

~ ex-Googler : 2011 to 2018

[Disclaimer: I work at Google.]

Another example: Linux developers thinking that managing patches by email is the best approach ever, because Linux is dominant.

maps and earth were both acquisitions

"The Billion Dollar Code" is a Netflix series about the lawsuit of Google trouncing the little guys. [0] is a brief bit from its creator about the impetus for the show. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty good. In the [0], they compare it to The Social Network being from the Zucks point of view, aka the winner. This story is told from the view of the losing side.

[0] https://variety.com/2021/streaming/global/netflix-the-billio...!

> Lau explained that he gave individuals from Art+Com copies of the SRI TerraVision “source code, walked them through it, and talked to them about it.” Id. at 1050–51

https://cafc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/opinions-order...

1. speculation, without identifying it as speculation

2. hyperbolic words

3. absence of any contraindications to their thesis

Someone decided to handle this situation that way, so one has a perfect right to be angry at them, and generalize that as "being angry at Google".

The author takes it with philosophy and pragmatism, that's admirable and I'm certainly not one to tell them how they should feel. But other factors indicate that his situation was also prone for that positiveness (feeling like a relief because of golden handcuffs, long tenure in a stock-distributing tech company + director level meaning that there's likely no concerns regarding money, side career already underway, maybe a relief to have some change).

Others might not be in the same situation, and are now jobless in in slow economy, with tenuous savings, rent or mortgage coming up. They might feel outright furious for a layoff that they have neither control on, nor were a reason for, and that shows no face to take responsibility - and they're completely entitled to feel that way, if that helps them cope. I'd say it makes sense to me, and don't feel bad for being angry if that's how you feel.

People who climb their way to Director usually don't tilt at windmills and shake their fists at clouds.

This is actually not a productive way to cope and it’s good advice to tell people not to cope this way.

It all comes and it all goes. Let it come. Let it go.

I mean, yes. And it'll make Mr Angry feel worse, make the people around him feel worse, and make the world worse. So the recommendation is don't do that. If someone is going to do something productive after being sacked, learning to do it out of a place of love is a skill well worth picking up. Makes the world better and all that.

I also prefer—on a personal level—to set anger aside. But anger is probably one of the strongest forces driving individuals to "make the world better".

Are you thinking of an instance? Anger typically locks in the status-quo by causing people to fight each other. Greed on the other hand has pushed us from farming monkeys into modern society with a material existence that was hitherto unthinkably comfortable. Harnessing greed created and powers the modern engine of wealth creation. And greed works best when people are thoughtful, patient, kind and calm.

Typically anger just makes people do things that are hasty and stupid. I'm not thinking of situations where I've seen it get much done. It isn't an emotion that can power long term, strategic plans - or at least not good ones. Tends to burn out or be destructive.

You way of saying it is nicer, granted.

It really doesn't look like a slow economy!

See https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth

This is very different than say, if an L3 engineer got hit with a layoff a year after joining.

Heck in any major city in the US, your average CRUD enterprise dev is probably making twice as much as the local median household income and should have savings

A number of reasons, yes.

For an individual, HUD puts the "low income" threshold at $70k and "very low income" at 44k.

Because "getting rid of senior people" is exactly what that is.

This is quite sweet in its stereotypical techie approach to life - your friends and family are asking questions about your situation because they care about and want to bond with you, not because they particularly care about the actual information you're conveying :-)

I know it can be good, but sometimes the questions can legitimately get in the way of connection and spending quality time, and not everyone wants to have the hard conversation while being in the hotseat (especially not over, and over, and over again. I am transgender, for example, and while having 1 mildly hostile family member would be a somewhat-problem, most of my extended family only wants to talk about that thing, and that one thing, with me, to the point where it effectively creates a wall. That at least is my experience of the issue, it's not quite the same, but I've definitely experienced the "questions dynamic" within other, much-more-mild scenarios, and generally, IMPE, I really dislike it unless I'm actively getting something interesting out of it, which I'm oftentimes not! It can be very much isolating, as far as my personal experience goes.)

So, not really a terrible solution, I think!

Unfortunately, with where my past is, a whole lot of my family too has the idea that I'm living a distorted life, and that this needs to be corrected (almost as a first priority thing). There's almost an Animal-Farm-istic "All sins are equal, but some sins are more equal than others" kind of thing going on there, if you catch what I mean.

Intellectually, I think many of them can understand how this is not really the most rational thing given the on-paper beliefs, but emotionally, it's a very different story, and the emotions seem to win out on that front.

Answering the basics isn't too terrible for me, though it definitely can be a problem if it's the only focus (and if the conversation inevitably keeps looping around to that singular topic. I am a freaking human being, darnmnitall!!)

Like, sure, sometimes it is good bonding, and sometimes it's not, it's very much context dependent.

If having the emotional security of not being in the hotseat answering questions from family members is necessary for an amount of emotional security on the OP's part, then I would consider that to be a good strategy. It might not be what you would do in that scenario, which is okay, as you and OP are different and might have different methods of addressing and meeting your respective emotional needs.

Who are these commenter's that demand for him not to post an FAQ? Why can't he just post an FAQ and they are like "oh yeah thank you very much!" and everyone is happy? Why does he have to feel bad for his FAQ and instead answer the same uncomfortable questions over and over even though he's fine but nobody believes him?

Why do these normies demand that the world adjusts to them?

    WHAT IS A NORMIE?

    Normie is a slang for a “normal person,” especially someone seen to have conventional, mainstream tastes, interests, viewpoints, etc. It is intended as an insult but often used ironically.
    Normie is also sometimes used by specific in-groups to refer and distinguish themselves from specific out-groups.

If you don't want to bond and spend 30 minutes getting cared about, just say "I'm fine, I just don't want to talk about it right now". Maybe follow with "And you, how are you?", but that's optional.

Again, they probably don't particularly care about the actual information.

You haven't met my family. They just want gossip.

That's what social networks and email is for, not broadcasting it to the wider world, see, you're on Hacker News, me you, them and everyone in general.

No, you did not imply that. You outright stated it.

You have decided to visit another persons homepage. Remember that word?

To what end they use their little corner of the internet is up to them, and them alone. They did not link it here. They did not invite you. And you certainly do not get to coral them into your little "social media" silos to provide you with "content" in the form and place you deem appropriate.

What links you click on is your own responsibility. As is recognizing that you are not the navel of the world, and not everything you encounter is targeted is you.

You are exhibiting a _grating_ amount of "main character syndrome", as the kids call it these days.

Jesus fucking Christ on a pogostick, I really should know better. But every once in a blue moon I feel like pissing in the wind.

I think it is news in same sense that they got hired for jobs that paid hundreds of thousand dollars. Maybe a those truck drivers making 50K/ year really want to know about SV's best and the brightest. After all once truck divers, warehouse workers, paralegals etc finish their PhD in machine learning they will be working right along with valley folks.

Most have enough savings to be able to start up something interesting, fun, and that delivers a lot more societal value than their current Google role.

Junior redundancies are more problematic, particularly in the current job market.

Amen :_(

But also a Director is probably pulling >$1,000,000 / yr (the golden handcuffs).

My friends who are still at g seemed pretty miserable in 2023. I haven't heard from them this month though, didn't realize another layoff round hit. It's absolutely off my wishlist of companies nowadays.

He didn't mention coming to the office as a complaint of his so I don't think it is one.

- 80% get average grade. 2% get worst, 6-8% get between worst and average. That covers 90% of the distribution.

- The below-average grade is a death sentence to your career there.

- The rest, people recently found out, is half-eaten by people who get promoted.

- There's now _precious_ little incentive to put in an effort in a culture that was already known for it's rest-and-vest-ness.

- The quotas are enforced 3-4 levels up from bottom, and managers are expected to warn anyone who might get below average. In practice, that means 15-20% of people are being told they might get a scarlet letter.

- There is ~nowhere to transfer internally since late 2021. 100 applicants for every open role.

- The internal orgs all love to do whatever the opposite of "yes, and" is. And each were told to Focus™, so that leads to people having an easy excuse to turning down _any_ request. It's much more efficient to shit all over the other org and not do the work and tell your director it's their fault than it is to enable bottom-up action.

- The simplification of performance reviews also meant it shifted from being 80% peer feedback and 20% management to 95% management. And Google, like anywhere, is full of people at their worst, and their best. It's lead to a, frankly, gob-smacking amount of chicanery that I thought I left behind at immature companies. Even your average gossip-y early startup is better, because there's a certain sense of reality, instead of ad dollars that magically convert to paychecks.

- Constant, ever-beating drum of firings. There was the huge one last year, and then the sizable one recently in a couple orgs, but it's been near-constant.

- The firings are absurdly post-modern sterile. You wake up, locked out of your laptop, locked out of the office, and have an email in your personal inbox telling you they're cutting your team.

- They have to "cut teams" instead of do layoffs because of the legal / cost ramifications of just doing layoffs to drive up profits. But that opens up some of that chicanery I mentioned: have it on good authority from 2 sources that the political movers who came into the Assistant org. for Bard would ship people onto "classic" Assistant teams just to fire them.

It's really hard to explain concisely, but basically, I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone come close to that place unless they're sub 100K in savings. Nothing makes sense, nothing is real, everyone knows it, and you have a bunch of the world's smartest people optimizing for how to do the least without being the least. A lot of that involves saying no and telling everyone it's someone else's fault, and like any hierarchical organization.........

I had a committee interview there maybe 8 years ago and already that was such an impersonal feeling that I really disliked my experience and didn't continue, not that they'd have hired me in the end.

I had 2 referrals for the team I wanted to join and I thought I'd be interviewing with that teams members who knew me from various foss projects or at least knew of the projects. When I heard it was by committee my anxiety went through the roof.

I hope things improve for everyone.

There's the not-quite-randomly-selected people who interview you, and write feedback. Then there's the completely separate set of people on the hiring committee who make a decision reading the feedback and other stuff (referrals, resume, etc). The latter group doesn't talk to the former group though, just the written feedback.

If it doesn't.. I think I would absolutely hate that.

I don't interview people I know personally or refer or know from projects but I absolutely want 2-3 from my team to be speak to them and us do the technical tests.

But I'm an SRE and not a SWE and there are a lot fewer operation/platform people compared to the 6-10 dev teams of 6-12 people doing various languages one sre team supports so there are usually plenty of SWE specific people to bring on committees. My team is 6 who support 80 SWEs so there are just a lot fewer proficient IAC writers on staff.

In addition, the process adds some steps to keep a single person's irrational biases from propagating: formal rubrics, rating broken down into components each of which requires written justification, and the group of people making the decision to hire or not hire are explicitly ones who never see or hear the candidate and are deciding based on interviewers' written reports.

Maybe? What if the pool is being influenced with whatever is trendy at the time?

I would take my bias of working with a former colleague for years over what the current societal pressures are enforcing. Some may call it nepotism, I'd call it risk management.

They are amazing engineers and we've all grown together over the last decade and we know what each of us is great and at where they'd be fantastic in a company. They're SWEs and I'm an SRE so we actually aren't on the same team or anything but they know they can bring me on as a Staff/Princ SRE and we'll get things done well cross-team far beyond what most companies of disparate eng/teams gets done.

These are people super passionate about the technology. We give presentations/talks on various projects, etc. I know their skills are up to date and growing constantly. Finding someone passionate is difficult. Maybe not at google but in normal-not-faang world it is.

The hard part wasn't the money at all. The hard part was that I had let the company culture become a major part of my self identity. It sounds like the author didn't let that happen to him. Kudos. I wish I hadn't.

1. The 4% number comes from the Trinity study, which found that 95% of the time you have >$0 after 30 years. If you're >30 years from death now, a more appropriate benchmark might be 3% or possibly 3.5%.

2. $100k/yr post tax is more than $100k/yr pretax, even if it's mostly long term capital gains and dividend taxes.

3. Health insurance $$$.

So the number for you is probably a little higher maybe $5m to switch to 3% and add an additional $50k for tax and health insurance costs.

But yea the general point stands. Someone working as a director probably pulling >$1m/yr, with a long tenure, almost definitely has way over that amount. (I wouldn't be surprised if it was $20m+)

Unfortunately, That is so certainly not the reality I live in right now.