> In 2020, the pandemic destroyed bucket #3 for most people. We were no different. Friends from back home in Canada couldn’t visit us. Even meeting up with local friends became hard. In January 2021 I tore my achilles tendon playing pick-up basketball. There goes bucket #2.
> Only then did I realize bucket #1 had been running low for a while.
I'm somewhat puzzled. If the author is struggling to socialize with friends (bucket #3) and struggling to pay attention to physical health (bucket #2) then why does he think that this is going to help improve work-life balance:
> I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now.
I can empathize with the desire to get caught up in a high-energy startup (it's fun!) but this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Filling your days with extra work can fill the "bucket #1" (career) but it seems like a nail in the coffin for the author's problems with bucket #2 (physical health) and bucket #3 (social life).
Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.
+1 I'm finding this post a bit confusing as well. TBH, Google seems to be an ideal place to have work-life balance. Things move slowly and everyone expects that projects never get delivered on time (as the author points out). People generally are not expected to work outside of working hours and definitely not on weekends.
I believe a better title for the blog post could be "Why I left Google: unsatisfying work" and seems more inline with what the author experienced.
The subtlety is that its not about projects not being delivered on time, its about them never being delivered (either cancelled or scoped down until no one has to actually do anything).
In an environment like this the incentive is to become a bottleneck for a lot of projects (so you get at least some that get delivered) and then a) do nothing on most to outwait the inevitable cancellation b) do the minimum possible work on the remainder, but make it seem as complex as possible.
Even with low hours of work this becomes a very stressful environment as if you are trying to get something done, you have to be constantly convincing people you are depending on that the project is worthy of category b). While doing the exact thing to the people depending on you. Turnover makes this hard also as a small percentage of coworkers are very valuable to you (you can trust them to prioritize your project).
From my experience this stress stretches into your out of work time, making the WLB worse even with a reasonable amount of "in office" hours.
Usually its the extremes that are having the same effects.
Atm I am in a super demanding job, requiring me to overwork, make decisions on the spot, work on problems etc.
On my free time while I want to sit down and watch some TV, go for running, enjoy a nice dinner or whatever... I FEEL EMPTY!
I am fixated with my work... its not healthy and its creating low motivation for me. It feels like work has taken away all pleasures in life for me. It is not HEALTHY at all (I am currently seeing professionals about it)
Generally anything in moderation is key...
P.S. I do overwork myself for someone else to enjoy the fruits of my labour... sad story.
sounds like the beginnings of either burnout, depression or both. I'm in a job that's not quite demanding enough at the moment and it caused me to fall into a depression. It's good to catch it in time to do something about it.
I mean nothing beats the feeling of delivering real value by building or fixing things. Its a great feeling! Often after having fixed something after working on it for hours, I will want to do even more for a while because of that “high”.
I work for a another big company and this sounds exactly like my job. Currently trying to get out and writing applications since it becomes unbearable for me.
going through this now with my first L5 scope project.. not enjoying it. too many parties involved and i have to somehow convince them all to do work for me. meanwhile i keep getting bombarded with questions that mean nothing to my immediate scope of work, which is slowly pushing me behind schedule.
good news is that my project is unlikely to get canned. we're in too deep already. learned early not to pick useless feature projects and cleanup work. if your manager isn't excited about what you're doing, its gonna get the ax.
The first project I worked on at Google was a system for consumers to send money to each other. My team made a mobile app before I joined, but it "wasn't part of the product vision" for that to be in the Google Wallet app. (So I guess we'll flush hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of code down the toilet!) Our PM looked around for teams willing to use our service, and found the Gmail team very receptive. A few engineers integrated it in about a week and we launched that "send money" button on Gmail at Google I/O. Could never get over how Gmail had "send money" but Google Wallet didn't. (They eventually changed their mind, of course.)
I'll never forget the launch. I was sick, and sitting on the floor of a war room live-coding a script to give every attendee $1. Python, had tests, and it persisted its state to SQLite so that we could Control-C it if our service got too slow. It didn't get too slow; we did a lot of load testing and capacity problems and the launch was very smooth. Most fun I've ever had while sick. (10-year-older jrockway wouldn't go to work while sick, though.)
>Our PM looked around for teams willing to use our service, and found the Gmail team very receptive. A few engineers integrated it in about a week and we launched that "send money" button on Gmail at Google I/O. Could never get over how Gmail had "send money" but Google Wallet didn't. (They eventually changed their mind, of course.)
Thanks for the insight on why Google makes so many braindead decisions. It's so frustrating I'm ready to abandon them entirely.
Haha, I'm still afraid to update GPay because I think they ruined it with their social or coupons or whatever the heck they did to it. All I want is to pay for stuff.
When I moved to the US I foolishly tried telling people to pay me, or I tried to pay them with GPay or GWallet or whatever it was, and they were like no? Everyone just uses Venmo now. Missed opportunity.
This is weird - I use it here in the UK and don't recognise this description at all. Social? Coupons? I just tap my phone to pay for stuff. It's the equivalent of Apple Pay, except that everyone's heard of Apple Pay and shops just conflate the two.
Europe (incl. the UK) doesn't need these social payment apps because we have free instant bank transfers between personal accounts. In the US if you want to send your friend money electronically then you need a 3rd party app.
Its two different products. Google pay especially in India is a mobile wallet with coupons and rewards. Ironically, the card payment app is now called Google Wallet.
> learned early not to pick useless feature projects and cleanup work.
And that's why things slowly rot away. Cleanup should be a priority, otherwise it eventually slows down new feature work.
In fact, a project should not be declared finished until its inevitable follow-up cleanup tasks have been completed as well. Just like a party weekend is not finished until you have cleaned up the mess after. Somebody is going to have to do it, and if it's not you right after you're done with your deliverables, then somebody else will have to do it. Possibly yourself further down the road when you actually want to do something else more exciting. Just like doing the dishes. Nobody wants to start preparing a big meal by having to do the dishes from the week prior.
Yep, technical debt and atrophy.
If not paying-down that debt, it becomes like compound interest from a loan shark.
If not applying maintenance, atrophy sets in and things get worse and worse.
Ya.. I get it, but I don't have the energy to try to convince people to be excited for a project that I'm barely excited for. Nothing I ever do here is exciting. Thought maybe working on app with over a billion users would be exciting, but all we ever do is steal features from other apps.
> all we ever do is steal features from other apps.
Strategically, this is called being a Fast Follower. One of GOOG's problems is that it acts in the market as a fast follower, but tells itself internally that its an groundbreaking innovator. Your reaction (which was also my reaction),
> Nothing I ever do here is exciting. Thought maybe working on app with over a billion users would be exciting...
is a form of corporate-wide cognitive dissonance between GOOG's propaganda and reality.
The subtlety is that its not about projects not being delivered on time, its about them never being delivered (either cancelled or scoped down until no one has to actually do anything).
I can appreciate this feeling, because I've been living it for awhile. If I can borrow the original author's metaphor, as my career bucket sprung a leak, my other buckets were filled, and I've been just fine with that. As others have pointed out in this discussion, this is really all about perspective. If the career bucket is really important, then you will tend to that (but, again, here's where the metaphor falls apart, at least for the author -- he noticed his other buckets also leaking, but he focused on the career bucket [which, of course, is fine if it works for him]).
Yes, the constantly changing landscape of my work can be a mental strain at times, but, for me, it's the devil I know. I've invested 15+ years with my employer, and I know the domain well. I don't want my other buckets to lose water in an effort to fill my career bucket, at least right now.
I can only speak for myself but I personally find jobs like that to be very stressful. Every review period a coin flip. Periodic severe swings in work output expectations because the thing you thought wasn’t important is now on some executives quarterly goals. Etc. Spending 40 hours a week doing effectively nothing but pushing a rock up a hill can be exhausting. This is a phenomenon that exists outside of my single anecdote: http://www.garlikov.com/philosophy/Sisyphus.html.
Having clear and achievable targets (that are achieved!) and consistent expectations is much preferable.
The current popular understanding of work life balance (or lack thereof) is almost always about work consuming an unhealthy/unbalanced amount of time, often leaving little time for life. Job satisfaction and work life balance are often linked, but distinct.
I think the thing others are pointing out is that regardless of what he clarifies in the post itself, the title does not match the content.
The issue is that when you don't feel like you're achieving things at work, it's stressful.
At the end of a day when you worked on some task for a solid 8 hours, it's easy to unwind - work is done, work was accomplished, you know what you're doing the next day.
At the end of a day when you spent the whole day trying to find out what you should be doing, didn't find anything and will resume that the next day...you can't unwind. Were you doing the right thing? Maybe there was someone else you should've contacted? What if you don't find it tomorrow? Is the organization broken? Should you try to fix it? (No) - there's a lot that you can't help but think about it.
I actually don't think the title is confusing. It makes perfect sense. I wrote elsewhere on this thread that the author basically chose to tilt the balance towards work because the other side, life, wasn't working out.
Having time provides a natural level of satisfaction. All of this discussion, but it feels like a natural “both” is the best way of describing the why behind this post.
Google's culture is built to replace your out of work time with time on Google campuses and ensuring your friends are other Googlers. Work-life balance for Google is just living at Google.
Add that everything you say probably means your work life is also unsatisfying... I mean, nothing makes me happier about my work than when I get something done.
People say this all the time about Google and it simply doesn't reflect the reality I've seen working here.
Yes, there are cafes and they serve dinner. There is a gym and a game room and other perks. And you know what? At dinner time, there's only a handful of people eating and the rest of the office is a ghost town.
I'm sure that some people do end up with their life revolving around Google. That's probably particularly true for people who got hired right out of college and moved for work. But most people I know seem to have very balanced work and personal lives.
I think people love the idea of a narrative that everything that appears nice about working at Google is actually secretly sinister and is making Googlers miserable but, like, maybe it's just a good job, you know? Maybe they offer all the perks because competition for software engineers is high and it helps attract talent.
Obviously, there's many valid criticisms of Google, as there are with most companies their size. But it's not a supervillain fortress full of trapped minions or something. It's just a huge corporation that found ways to make a lot of money per employee thanks to the magic of software and data. In industries where the marginal cost is zero and competition is still high, this is what you should expect to see.
I worked at Google for a few years.
I have the best Google food memories from "The Root". I remember the day they served the most delicious duck I've ever had, and the day all the food was Klingon themed. The food was a nice perk, but I really miss the gym. A few coworkers and I had a standing appointment with a trainer. A coworker also ran a weekly yoga session. It was also easy to bike to work. It all worked because of the on-site showers.
I left to give a smaller startup a shot. I've been there 6 years, and the project continues to keep me engaged and fulfilled. They wrote meals into my employment contract, which I thought was pretty funny. They've followed through with it, although it's not as nice as having dozens of themed cafeterias. I've struggled to consistently hit the gym the last few years because of the relative inconvenience. It's my own lack of self-discipline, though, rather than any pressure from work.
I don't know your situation but I find discipline to be not very helpful as an explanatory variable: it's not something you can meaningfully change. What you can change is the overall environment, such that it's easier to do the thing: have an appointment with a trainer (or set some other time, even before/after work on particular days helps), attach a meaningful goal (weight loss, strength standards), etc.
Work-wise, I have pretty much unlimited schedule flexibility. I have a lot of seniority, and people needlessly fear me for my reputation. My immediate manager is someone younger than me that I helped hire, and he's in the gym probably 4x a week. I went in with him a couple weeks ago and he absolutely wrecked my shoulders in a good way. The problem is that his gym is half an hour away. I can't fix that without moving, and I own a house and have a family. My local gym is a joke, and isn't staffed. I bought an exercise bike a couple years ago, and have maybe ridden it once a month on average. I've owned free weights for years, but the last time I touched them was four months ago when I crushed my fingernail bad enough to go to urgent care. I wasn't even working out, I was moving them back into storage...
I think I am justified it blaming myself for lack of self-discipline. I lost about 8lb since November by calorie counting, due to having elevated liver enzymes. I've gained about half of it back since my enzymes went back to normal though, because it lost its relative importance. My best guess it was due to a medication rather than my weight, and I changed medication. I have a serious and rare medical condition, and the medication I'm taking is probably going to give me cancer in a few decades, so if I'm going to motivate myself to do something it's playing with my daughter or a hobby. If I obsessively worked out, maybe I wouldn't even have the medical condition, but that doesn't seem to be something I'm capable of right now.
10 years ago I got really depressed at work and started working out 3x a week with Herbalife "health coaches". I ached and was hungry all the time and it was great. I was 40lb lighter than I am now, and could do 100 pull-ups. I know I'm still physically capable of doing that, yet it also seems impossible. Laying on the couch reading hacker news seems more important most of the time.
You have lots of seniority, implies a good income thus likely a larger dwelling.
You have free weights at home.
> I think I am justified it blaming myself for lack of self-discipline.
The harsh side of me agrees with this. You have all of the material resources to set up a really cool training setup.
The empathetic/caring side of me disagrees. "Self-discipline" is certainly a thing, but you are also dealing with a medical condition and maybe your body shouldn't be working out in the way that your rational mind thinks it should, plus you want to be a good father to your daughter. Plus, your regular workouts seemed to always have a social component.
Your sub/unconscious needs will dominate whatever "self-discipline" you try to consciously apply.
That's the diagnosis. If correct, the prescription I offer is:
Find a way to do "workouts" which involve your daughter.
I started taking my son to the gym when he was 8, he was doing freeweights. He'd help me count reps. When it was his turn to lift, I stressed 1) low weight high reps (like sets of 30), 2) technique, 3) stop before exhaustion. Kid is eight, skeleton is not built for weight-bearing, so cannot stress it with heavy things.
"workouts" could also be walks, preferably in the park/in nature with your daugher. If you want to make it really physical for you while still keeping your daughter's pace, buy a goruck backpack and put 20lbs in it, then 30, then 40. You don't have to walk fast to exercise when carrying a heavy ruck. Your daughter stops to smell a flower? So do you, bend over to sniff the flower--- while wearing a 40lb ruck. You'll get your workout, all while exploring the world at a child's pace.
I exercise about 4x/week, and work remotely. If I owned a home + some barbells, I would space out my schedule to take 2-hour lunches, and get a workout over the lunch break. This would give me enough time to do meaningful exercise, clean myself up, and microwave my prepped lunch for when I sat down again.
I also expect 90% of people to find that whole idea strange or unreasonable.
Fitness comes down to finding some physical activity that you enjoy, or can comfortably perform multiple times per week. I like big, 'chunky' barbell work, such as deadlifts and overhead presses, but used to solely do cardio. Some people like rock climbing, or hiking, or biking. So long as it's a physical activity, it's likely able to be counted as some kind of fitness or exercise.
If you only have the energy for fitness/exercise 1x or 2x a week, then that's all you need to start with. It won't do very much, but is a great starting point for building a stronger habit without overloading yourself.
You don't need to answer these to me, but if you end up going forward with fitness, you'll probably have to answer them for yourself:
What kind of physical activities do you enjoy? Do you have any fitness goals? Are there any weird aches or pains you have that might be lessened with regular exercise? How many sessions are you willing to commit to in a week? Are you willing to follow a healthier diet?
Maybe they offer all the perks because competition for software engineers is high and it helps attract talent.
How does offering perks that people don't actually use attract people? Surely people clever enough to work at Google would see that those things aren't really perks.
Works the same as every apartment building with a rooftop deck and a shared lounge that almost no one ever uses. People see it and because it looks like a resort they move in but almost never use them.
I look at the perks a role offers and ignore any that don't apply to me, and I'm nowhere near clever enough to work for Google. I'm just a bit surprised that people who work at Google wouldn't do the same.
And that culture was blown out of the water when everything shut down and you were sitting at home all day.
That said, while I think "offices with every perk you can think of" is definitely a part of Google culture, the "living at the office" stereotype really only applies to younger folks. Once you have a family, living in a van in the Google parking lot and showering at the gym doesn't really work.
I worked there with an intern who happened to be in his 40's. He was previously a professional athlete, and decided to get into engineering. He owned a gorgeous ranch in Montana, with his own baseball diamond, outdoor bed, and enough land that the neighboring farmer leased it for planting.
He was living in a crappy studio apartment in the bay area. He decided to try and save money by buying an RV and live in one of the known Google shanty towns in an unused office parking lot. We all teased him that he would never find a girlfriend without real plumbing. He lived there for about 6 months, until security politely asked him to leave because the company wanted to start using the parking lot.
>"He decided to try and save money by buying an RV and live in one of the known Google shanty towns in an unused office parking lot. We all teased him that he would never find a girlfriend without real plumbing"
This whole passage had me in stitches. I'm glad I asked. I may never heard the phrase "known Google shanty towns" again but I will probably never forget it. Cheers.
When I interviewed in pre-pandemic Mountain View, there was a section of the parking lot with around 6 RVs parked next to each other. I couldn't believe my eyes.
Maybe they did it long enough to save up money for a house.
Complete nonsense. I can’t even reach most of my coworkers by chat after hours. Everyone in my office is gone before 6. This may be true for international workers or recent grads who don’t have families or friends local, but in my experience this stereotype of Googlers living on campus is mostly apocryphal and from the dot-com and 00s eta. I heard the same thing about Netscape, people working 100 hour weeks, sleeping under their desks.
The Google of 2022 has over 150k employees, the culture is way different than say, 2007. The average age of the employees these days is older.
Maybe in Mountain View, but even then: it was never that many people who stayed after hours (I worked there for years, then transferred to SF, where even fewer people stayed/stay late).
I remember a friend showing me around the FB Campus and there was a gym, a barber shop, a Mexican restaurant with bar and I think a drop off laundry place and dentist. I know it was meant to impress but I was horrified by the subtext of all that i.e that it was really just required because people spent so much time there.
I would love to have a gym, barber, dentist and laundry all in the one place.
Commuting to those places really isn't time well-spent for me, so the faster I can get in and out, the better.
Restaurants and bars is getting a bit iffy, because that's an inherently social activity and I think you need wider horizons than a hundred fellow Metamates.
I had a similar experience - when I felt like things were moving too slow and I didn't deliver a lot I was much more stressed out. My manager and team was satisfied with my output but I couldn't shake the anxiety that I wasn't doing enough!
Ironically for me I went the opposite direction, now working at a large tech company I have more than enough work to fill my plate. I am no longer worried about not doing enough:D
They would have an ideal work-life balance IF they enabled full remote work.
Their hybrid you-have-to-come-to-the-office approach basically means that you still need to live in an area near to the office, which basically means no real benefits from remote setting.
Don't think author is replacing unhappy personal life with workaholism. He's saying that when you have low energy in some parts of your life, it drains into other parts.
Now that he enjoys his work more, he's finding that he also has more energy for gym / social situations etc.
I had the same experience in big tech. Lack of work progress made me depressed and bled into other parts of my life.
Startups have their own issues, but at least there's more momentum on most days. Important to go with well-funded ones in this environment though, preferably by the top VCs: https://topstartups.io/
Think you missed the point. Burn out can come from working in a sclerotic organisation where you fail to achieve your goals (despite doing fine professionally and financially and going home at 4pm). This became obvious to the author when other aspects of life were diminished. It also seems procrustean to assume everyone should conform to your notion of work life balance. Working hard on a problem of perceived importance may be exactly what someone wants from life.
I mean sure, the author is in a somewhat luxurious position. But then, why does anyone leave Google if not for some version of this.
Ultimately people like to have some ownership in direction of projects and products.
Many times that is taken from you on larger teams.
It is odd that HBS and value extractors (business/finance/project/marketing) have taken so much power from value creators (creatives/developers/product people) in terms of the power balance, most people know that makes bad products and was really the basis of capitalism starting, ownership of direction.
> In his landmark 1776 work The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith showed that a clever division of labor could make a commercial enterprise vastly more productive than if each worker took personal charge of constructing a finished product. [1]
The project managers and finance want to make the product now, from a value extraction viewpoint over a value creation one. It ultimately leads many value creators to go do their own thing.
No matter how hard they try to remove the creative element of product creation, it is actually a key input to successful projects.
Products are like creative works, they should be built with depth, deep dives and aim to be a fun experience and friend of the user.
Bottom up processes can create great products with polish and love, they are value creation processes.
Top down processes and deadlines create shallow features and products, they are value extraction processes.
The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors.
What is bottom up vs top down process? It isn't mentioned in your link.
> The best value creation process is just an iterative/incremental cycle, with lots of power in the court of the value creators over the value extractors.
This is consistent with the development process I've used with my game/app (nebulous) for the last 7 years. I learned very early on that players responded directly (as in told me via reviews and emails) and overwhelmingly positively to frequent substantiative updates. Early on it pushed me to find my absolute limit: ~2 weeks of < 4 hours of sleep each night, on a ~28 hour day schedule.
I kept bureaucracy, overhead, and expenses to a minimum and have been fortunate enough to reap the rewards over an extended period of time. My focus has always been on maximizing user experience first, revenue second.
More power/product decisions from the bottom or the developers/creatives/value creators than the top down project managers/finance/value extractors.
Yes, making your own projects is almost a requirement or having side projects when work in on a big team on your day job or other projects. Everyone needs a creative outlet and programming, no matter how hard they try to remove it, is a creative process.
While revenue/value extraction is important long term, it is much easier to sell when love/value creation is present. You can't market and extract value from value that isn't there. You can't rush a quality game mechanic that makes all aspect of your game fun.
Creativity doesn't always fit a 8-6 tightly wound agile process focused on just revenue, you need some open mode or play with that closed mode. It is why indies and artists or writers perform better when they can control their own destiny more. With less oversight directing you to short chance important parts or prototypes, there is more play and open mode which always leads to a better refined product especially where "fun" is part of the product.
Thank you for teaching me two new words and their expressions. English not a first language for me so it is nice to encounter new expressions, which actually isn't that often. Thanks
"The work life balance " is extremely confusing or misleading. He absolutely will get more work life balance at Google than at a startup. What he meant is that he got more excited because he could make more impact despite sacrificing work life balance. It is the opposite of what he claims. People should seriously stop redefining words to make themselves sound smart. And chances are he is gonna get pretty much nothing from the startup equity than from Google. (it is a bet with odds against him , statistically speaking)
I think it's because it's because his buckets are not around time management, but energy management.
And it works both ways. If you are drained by your job, you get home exhausted and want to just lay on the couch. If you are energized by your job, you get home excited. You feel like you can take on the world and then might be up to go to dinner with friends instead of drained and depressed and want to stay home and eat ice cream to console yourself (my personal go to).
The same goes in the other directions. If you are healthy, you will have more energy for other things. If you are unhealthy, your body will drag you down, it will be harder to do other things. Think of having a broken leg or a lot of pain. You just don't feel well and will bring that feeling into other parts of life.
Energy management isn't a zero sum game.
However, I think you do point out something else. Throwing yourself into work because you want to avoid dealing with issues in your other buckets is not an energy gain. But there is a key difference between working more to avoid painful things and reigniting a spark of joy in your work.
Because being miserable for 8 hours a day at work will leave you drained and depressed for the other 16. That makes socializing hard.
Being exited and happy for 9 hours a day at work abd coming home with a sense of accomplishment can actually give you energy to do more for the othe 15 hours.
Yes, but you have to be very careful about the slippery slope here and how you measure things. I personally find that I sleep about the same regardless of how miserable I am at work, which means I get no quality change from roughly eight hours a day. My commute doesn't change in quality either and four many people that commute is 1 hour each way. Some people will find some other numbers that are important to subtract here. In the extreme, you'll find that an extra hour a day of work but reducing the misery of your work can result in 1 good hour of free time instead of 2 mediocre hours of free time. For most people things aren't quite that extreme but it's certainly not anything resembling 15 vs 16.
Think the same. In my case, though it is "Being excited and happy for 4-5 hours a day at work". More than that and my brain is just too tired to enjoy the rest of the day. My schedule is 40h/week, though, but I'm still productive doing half of that.
Exactly my thoughts. It is, in fact, darkly funny that this post is titled around "work-life balance", because the author is basically saying "My life stuff wasn't working out so I tilted the scales towards work."
I completely understand finding it unsatisfying to work in a situation where you're not making any progress. It's something that I think is the worst thing about my current role, and the lack of progress contributes to burnout in its own way. But working weekends and nights regularly is another, faster way to burnout, especially for someone who has a family.
The author states it wasn't actually work-life balance that was making him happy and tired. Rather, he discovered:
> By mid-2021 I was tired all the time. I know I wasn’t alone, because it was an ongoing meme inside Google2. It’s only now that I realize what was wrong: I missed the satisfaction of building things and finishing projects.
This is the classic justification that leads people to self-defeating workaholism: The idea that you can fill the voids in your life by just working harder.
The false dichotomy is the idea that the alternative to Google is to work more hours + evenings + weekends at a startup. He's replacing one problem with another, but this new problem feels fresh and new and like turning over a new leaf. At least for now.
I get what he’s saying though. There can be great joy and a positive feeling of “losing yourself” in your work when you actually get to create. I think his role and and the internal bureaucracy prevented him from using that creative energy.
I don’t think it makes you a workaholic to observe that a shit work environment drains your energy and burns you out, whereas a good one can leave you feeling energized.
They weren’t saying that they needed to work harder at Google to be happy, they were saying they needed to move somewhere else where they could get job satisfaction from completing projects.
I mean, I'm the same way. I look back at my life and the times I didn't create things of value seem so meaningless. I don't want to go back to creating meaningless things. Even if I'm working harder, I'm enjoying what I'm doing.
> Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.
This has been the key pitch since Intel at least, perhaps even Fairchild.
They did explain why they had lost job satisfaction, big companies all over the place are struggling to hold on to people as they restructure and fail to deliver due to the pandemic's impact. The morale and human cost of this organizational faltering is driving people out.
Because buckets #2 and #3 are low, people are having a harder time accepting a bad hand in bucket #1. If you have a good life outside of work you can push through bad work environments for a while.
Some people genuinely believe in their work. Jonas Salk worked hard because he believed his work mattered. This guy works hard at Replit because he believes his work matters. My family friend with Down Syndrome works hard at his menial job because he believes his work matters. If people didn’t work hard to accomplish hard things we would still be living in mud huts with 50% infant mortality.
I think they meant that once they realized their work was unsatisfying they wanted to change it. The “working late and on weekends” was a way of showing their new excitement for the role.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But I do agree the conclusion for leaving being work life balance seems incorrect.
I never though I would agree with PragmaticPulp ;) , I also have seen this pattern before, as someone who works at Google (SDE) and worked at Amazon previously, and also worked at unknown small/medium size companies, most team WLB at Google is pretty pretty good, you set your own rhythm of work and goals.At Amazon in the other hand is quite different, you will get PIPed for sure if your team is sweaty and you go on a normal pace, but at Google you have to be really awful to get fired. Startups use the "mission" and "family" non-sense to hustle people to work hard, while most of the times are the founders(and the VCs) the only ones that benefit.
This is overly cynical post by otherwise great comments from you, PragmaticPulp.
I personally find working harder is the only way I can survive. Being unproductive is depressing because it brings lackluster mediocre life/rewards with it. With life that is less rewarding and dull, my mental health suffers. Spiraling downwards. It has happened twice.
On the other hand, I never get burned out no matter hours or effort. Building stuff is too much fun. Building stuff with super cool people is even more fun.
Early Googler's were the happiest bunch when it was in a startup stage.
So, I can relate with the author more than your cynical take on this.
Something I try to do whenever I read articles like this: Whenever you see the name of the giant corporation that the author worked at, replace it with "my team". Google has over 100,000 employees, so there's no real "here's what it's like to work at Google". At that scale, there is too much variance for any simple neat summary (though there are certainly trends and commonalities).
I've met people who worked at Amazon who described it as a hellscape of misery and others who felt it was incredibly rewarding. There's been times when I worked at EA when I loved my job and times when I hated it.
A single data point is useful, but it's only a single data point. I'm glad the author found a better job that fits what they're looking for. That's all any of us really want in our careers.
I was at amazon for over 10 years. The burn out hellscape culture, often where you’re managed by some H1B manager who’s afraid of themselves getting fired (and having to leave the US) if they don’t meet their forced attrition quotas: it’s real. I spoke with those managers and heard it directly from them.
Yeah there are teams coasting by. Of course, there are engineers working 60 hours a week who will tell you about their excellent work life balance. Some of it is relative.
I respectfully disagree. There is a "What it's like to work at Google."
Google has a culture. Large companies have a way of operating. I don't think any of OP's comments are at all off-base for Google. A lot of what OP wrote is fundamental to any organization with tens of thousands of people.
And you know something? That's fine. I know people who are very happy there, and I know people who are miserable there. There are times in my life when /I/ would have been very happy in that sort of place, and there are times in my life when /I/ would have been completely miserable there.
A lot of that comes down to personality, and a lot of that is situational.
For example, I want a very different employer if I don't have kids and can throw my life into work than when I'm dealing with a difficult family situation. I've been in both situations.
I would be completely miserable at Google _right now_. It might have been a dream job out-of-college, and it might be a great job again in just a few years.
That's true, but blog posts written solely by people who left are unlikely to capture it well. There is an implicit selection bias in play. People tend to write most about transitions, but if you want to know what it's like to work somewhere, the people you really want to ask are those right in the middle of it, because that's where you spend the most time.
While I agree with this sentiment, I wouldn't be so quick to completely dismiss pervading company cultures.
I think a better suggestion would be to say that when you read articles like this you should ask if the author has the right perspective to know what the truly common elements of a company's culture are or if they're extrapolating from a single data point.
Plus, people seek different values from their work, and even those values also change over time. So, yeah, what really matters is the number of data points.
Still, Google is obviously not the hacker-driven company it used to be 10 years ago. Almost all data points suggest that Google lacks internal vision and leadership (likely outside of a few key areas). This sounds like a typical multi-national corpo w/ a lot of money to burn.
If there is a company that is a hellscape for 30% of its employees, and works just fine for most of the rest, then I would describe that company of having a hellscape culture. The existence of positive experiences doesn't change the fact that a lot of these bad experiences, at Amazon, at Google, are directly due to corporate policies, incentives, and the decisions of upper management.
Same for Microsoft. In spite of the top-management-spirit teams were totally different in their stress levels, WLB and daily routines.
The same actually implies to those small "Used By X company" when you evaluate products, I have seen those claiming to be used by Microsoft while knowing it was just a short term evaluation that ended with nothing but MS is still paying for a licence.
I am noticing a (darkish?) pattern in these recurring “I transitioned jobs” reports. Worryingly, they represent many of the words I imagine myself writing if I were again a blogger.
It’s basically the honeymoon/wanderlust cycle. Person gets job. It is a dream job. It is described as a dream job because of reasons a1, b1, and c1. Delta t passes. Things have changed. Because of reasons x1, y1, and z1, job is no longer a good dream job. It’s now a bad dream/nightmare job. Person has awakened now, and for reasons, a2, b2, and c2 is living a new dream. Blink, flinch, repeat.
The nagging suspicion is that while things change, they don’t so much actually. They shift around. What does change is how we come to see things. At one point, we convince ourselves things are awesome. Later we believe it’s not. Which is the real truth we ought to accept? It’s like trying to measure the one way speed of light. You can’t, just the sum of the round trip.
So do we make the assumption that somewhere in the middle of this good-to-bad cycle is the reality? Or suspect it was always that bad, we were just able to initially gaslight ourselves? Or perhaps that it was and still is good, we’ve just let the negatives creep in and take over?
Some would philosophize that all happiness is an illusion. Or a choice. Or whatever.
But what frustrates me about this (having been through this cycle 3-4 times now), is that it is not a universal life experience. I have relationships with family, friends, and various institutions that grow stronger and stronger over time. They do NOT loop like work relationships do. Is there something inherit in work relationships that makes this loop inevitable? Do all experience it, or only a certain mindset of persons? Are there cases where this loop is broken, but they just rare enough, you don’t hear about them? Should I despair or hope?
The question “what is my ideal job?” doesn’t always have to have the same answer. We learn. We react. We have new experiences, which become routine, then we seek novelty again. Or, convince ourselves that it’s a really good deal and stick around.
Relationships are different though. I see work as primarily transactional, whereas personal relationships work best when they aren’t. In a friendship it’s common for both people to grow in the same direction, while a company is inflexible and doesn’t respond to your individual growth so it’s more likely that you’ll “grow apart.”
I think the difference is that work is typically much more stressful and difficult than relationships with friends and family.
I suspect that exposure to constant stress at work causes us to have negative feelings over time (burnout), and the easiest way to reset the emotional clock is to get a different job working on something else.
But some people appear to be highly resistant to burnout, and I’m not sure why. I’d definitely like to learn more about it, though.
I've had 3 "dream jobs." I only regret joining one of them and it basically followed the pattern you describe, and I think I just narrowly avoided entering into this cycle in my most recent job search. In the last year, I had multiple opportunities to continue the cycle and switch jobs to another local maxima, but I think I broke the cycle, but mostly by refusing to keep playing the game.
I had weekly conversations with my friend who ended up hearing about all of my job complaints and this friend was able to see how my feelings about work changed over time. At times this friend was ready to hit me over the head because of how repetitive my complaints were.
Every time I interviewed and got a job offer, I would convince myself that I wanted to switch companies because company Y was offering me more money and responsibilities than company X and I thought company Y would give me growth opportunities beyond what I would have at company X. I would rationalize the decision in a lot of ways and would be thorough in comparing the pros and cons of switching to company Y.
And then I would talk to my friend. And my friend would say "okay, so company Y is offering you more money than company X. What do you want to do?" And I would say something like "I'm not 100% sure if I will be happy at company Y, but they're offering me more money and the company / team / product is cool. If I'm not happy in 1-2 years I can use that money to start my own company and be in a better position."
It didn't seem like I wanted to work at company Y that badly if my answer to "what do you want to do" isn't "work at company Y!" I justified my decision to change jobs by finding the things I didn't like at company X and contrasted them with the things I liked at company Y.
Leaving company X needs to be a separate decision from joining company Y in order to make the best decision. In the past I always considered them as the same decision. Even when I was interviewing at lots of companies which should have given me more choice, it always came down to making decisions about company Y based on company X instead of being about what I wanted to do for the long-term.
I talked to a bunch of other friends and family about switching to company Y and everyone else except this one friend went along with whatever I said. Some people lightly questioned what I said but only to see that I had an answer for their questions, but the human mind can rationalize basically anything and I had already fooled myself into thinking I wanted to switch jobs when I was just unhappy with company X.
I fooled everyone except my one friend, because my friend realized that my decision-making process was fundamentally flawed. That gave my friend the confidence to push-back on what I said. Having a contrary perspective gave me the space to reconsider my decisions.
I quit my job at company X and am currently trying to start my own company since that's what I wanted to do all along.
Everyone is welcome to point out the contradictions in this article and talk about the silliness of walking away from the comfort of FAANG workload and compensation while talking about "work life balance",... that's your right, and you're probably correct in one interpretation...
But Google is terrible for our industry. On the whole. And for many people who are trying to get satisfaction out of their work.
For innovation generally, and a terrible employer for people like TFA writer (and myself). The more people who quit to go to startups or smaller companies, the better, because it will ultimately accelerate technology and innovation.
This is precisely why compensation at Google is what it is: to capture a chunk of talent and cordon it off from the potential of creating value elsewhere... to keep the revenue firehose running there but most importantly to make sure none of that revenue firehose ever diverts elsewhere.
All the talk of "innovation" there amounts to: we want your intellectual property, yes, but if we can't get it or it's not worth much, we mostly want you to not create intellectual property elsewhere (or for yourself). And we'll pay absolutely handsomely to make sure that nothing you ever think of or write contributes to the success of anybody else.
That's how a behemoth like Google survives.
I'm surely not the most amazing engineer in the world, but at Google I was a mediocre one. Not technically, mind you, but organizationally: I was terrible at playing the game, writing the design docs and getting the comments, presenting my work to other people, snatching "impactful" projects before others could take them... and showing it all off to perform the promo dance. I sucked at that, and that is primarily what success at Google is about...I failed at it... Except they didn't care, that was all fine, there was plenty of space to just plod along... because they don't need you to succeed. Just not succeed somewhere else.
But before Google I aggressively contributed to the success of some of the companies I was at, including ones competing with Google. Once I was at Google, I was no longer doing that. And, actually, it became clear to me... that was my actual value to Google...
You can tell the author is mostly worn out not from long hours or challenging technical work, but from fighting against the overwhelming inertia that faces building/shipping anything. It’s exhausting.
Curious if you worked with smaller companies since your time at Google and how does you experience compare?
My personal experience says most mid-sized startups don't do any better on most fronts either. Contrast the process you described "writing the design docs and getting the comments, presenting my work to other people" to "the SVP engineering feels we should do X by Friday even though it isn't urgent to business" and the former doesn't sound as bad. In fact, you have way more agency in former.
The promo game sucks, no doubt. But there are games at play in companies of all sizes. Promo games in some, authority games in others.
Not since, not yet. And for sure I can imagine things going like you say. There's always drama. Small company drama can be even worse sometimes. So far in my search I've been trying to target companies under 100 people, aiming for more a more lead / principal type role. But we'll see how it nets out. I have a few months left of, uh, RSU runway.
> This is precisely why compensation at Google is what it is: to capture a chunk of talent and cordon it off from the potential of creating value elsewhere...
I recall reading a thread on some facebook group where the OP was freshly hired at an (undisclosed) Large Company with amazing compensation only to do... well, nothing in particular for there weeks at the time of writing.
Commenters tried to make sense of it and figured that either no one is in control of the budget or he's essentially "parked" for a project that's supposed to launch at the start of the next quarter.
But perhaps the said company was large enough to engage in such practices.
> Enough equity that if I’m right about what Replit can become, I’ll come out ahead of staying at Google.
How often is that viable?
For me, I work at a FAANG like company and I kind of hate it. I'm doing work that touches 1-2 billion people but it's just not fun. For me, WFH sucks. My best times were in small companies with small teams where people had to work together to do stuff where as my FAANG job you just pull off of piece of the never ending list of work to do and do it.
I do feel the golden handcuffs though. I need the money to retire. I'd give it up for a job I was sure I'd like, for one that I think has a reasonably okay chance to succeed, and for one where if it succeeds I feel like I got a reasonable %.
To try to be clearer on those last points. I wouldn't need to replicate my FAANG like compensation. I just need to believe that when the company does well I don't feel that all I did was make the boss rich (which can be the case in small companies)
But, I no longer know what kind of job I'd be happy at.
> Enough equity that if I’m right about what Replit can become, I’ll come out ahead of staying at Google.
This is why it is so hard to financially justify working for a startup. To cover the risk requires large outsized gains. And financially the 15 percentage points drop in salary could easily be say a 50% drop in disposable income.
Yet the pleasure is worth the price.
And the above ignores any longer hours (I personally struggle to value my time or satisfaction, in either dollars or opportunity costs).
I think it's also important to take into account the diminishing marginal utility of money. It's one thing to leave a FAANG job making 300k a year to work at a non-profit for 50k a year. But going to a startup making 150-200k a year can be a great trade if it genuinely brings more satisfaction. After all it's not like your family is going to starve making only 4x the median salary in the US. If you also get a lottery ticket in the form of startup equity then great, but it could still make total sense to make the move even if you assume (probably correctly) that your equity will be approximately worthless.
$200K/yr and a family of 3 like the author, assuming he takes advantage of public school and lives relatively frugally, you can afford a 4-bedroom house in a not-bad part of the Bay Area in 10 years in the best case. And you need your salary to keep up with the real estate market. So yeah, it definitely depends! Hope your wife works, too…
The median income in San Francisco is ~70K per year, so even just looking at SF this is more than double the median. The median household income is ~120k per year in SF. No idea what the author's family situation is but assuming their spouse works then the household income is probably 3-4x the median income of SF households. Everybody's financial situation is different and you certainly have to take that into account, but my only point is that if you are looking at a job change that involves a pay cut but to a level where you can still be financially secure then it makes total sense to evaluate it based on other factors like job satisfaction.
His main point is that he feels like he's making more progress and being more productive at ReplIt than at Google, which leads to higher satisfaction. He considers satisfaction more important than just pure hours / compensation.
I'm inclined to agree. Working uphill in a complexity jungle (organization or technical) can drain the soul.
working at a lower-paying job (and doing more hours) is a poor way to satisfy the upper end of the Maslow pyramid of needs (ala, self actualization).
The most important metric is consistent and passive income from wealth. Once you have "enough" of such passive income, you can spend your time on self actualization.
Most people don't reach the level of passive income required for their chosen lifestyle quality, and so cannot expend time for self actualization. So instead, they double up their career and make that the mode for self actualization (after all, two birds one stone and all that). But i do believe that it mostly does not work, unless the job is somehow a 1:1 mapping to that particular person's method of self actualization. Unfortunately, a lot of people kid themselves and pretend that it does match.
If you find your work to be meaningful, then working more hours at a job where you can spend most of your time actually getting work done can be a great way to satisfy the upper end of Maslow's hierarchy.
Many things worth doing can't be accomplished without a team, sometimes a large team. It can be impossible to do this solely on passive income (unless you're a billionaire or something).
> The most important metric is consistent and passive income from wealth.
This is an opinion with which reasonable people can disagree.
You write as though it’s impossible to hold a job you don’t love and at the same time work toward self-actualization. This is clearly not true for all definitions of self-actualization that I’m familiar with.
the number of people actually able to obtain a job for which they would also self-actualize with if given unlimited money, is so small as to be a statistical anomaly.
Sure, part of the job being satisfying can be that you actually need the money so doing it means you provide for your family. While still craving that the job be intrinsically satisfying.
As a thought experiment, can you imagine hunting being more satisfying to a person than eating a farmed cow? Maybe it satisfies some innate desire to hunt? Maybe they like they challenge?
Now could you imagine that same hunting being far more satisfying if they are hungry, or if their family needs the food, than if they already have access to infinite food?
Similar for job satisfaction. Many people might be most fulfilled when doing something challenging where generating work product directly translates to meeting material survival needs.
> Many people might be most fulfilled when doing something challenging [as a job]
i challenge the notion that this can apply to many people. It applies to _some_ people - arguably, a very small number, compared to the number of jobs.
The activities that many people self-actualize on are likely to be non-essential and require capital to perform. Activities such as sports, arts, music, literature, etc. Very few people would self-actualize on being a carpet cleaner, flipping burgers, or being accountant.
Spending your time constantly fighting other members of your own company to protect your team is exhausting. Work-life balance usually has a much bigger factor than just "time spent working" and it's the result and morale that goes with it. If you are working overtime but you're getting results it's often very rewarding and doesn't lead to burnout.
He clearly was working on projects at google that were exhausting for his scope of mind, the specific hours were less relevant than the fact that he was spending 30-40 hours a week could be "wasted" hours, even if he's now doing 60 hours a week, they're all more gratifying.
Couldn't have put it better. I worked remotely at Google and I worked remotely at a startup. I worked 1/8 the hours at Google and was paid 3x the amount of money. Don't get me wrong, the work was boring as shit compared to the startup, but I had the coveted "4 hour workweek" Tim Ferriss became famous for. It was like being retired. In fact, it was better, because I still had my youth.
I could sympathize with OP if this "loss of productivity" meant sitting in a physical office twiddling your thumbs, but Covid changed the game. I cooked during meetings. I sat in the sauna, did yoga, played videogames, or hung out with my friends when I was blocked. When I was waiting for blaze to build/run my code, or was waiting for presubmit checks to pass (shit took forever), I would switch tabs in iTerm and would work on my side project. I never touched my corp laptop after I figured out how to VNC/SSH in from my personal computer.
If it weren't for mandatory RTO I would still be at Google and I probably would be for the rest of my career, or till my side hustle was bringing in serious cash. We'll see how remote Facebook compares. If it's at all similar to remote Google, I am never going back to being an employee at a startup. In a post-covid world, having a "meaningful" corporate job is for suckers. It's all about minimizing hours and maximizing pay.
Agreed, author seems deluded and kool-aid enduced. I'm all for change when it makes sense to you. Sticking with a company you're not charged up for often feels like torture, but any semblance of what they said in the article and "work-life balance" feels way off the mark.
I like this post a lot and respect the jump. However... Replit? I needed a browser IDE for some work about ~4 years ago and used their product briefly before switching to Cloud9 (now owned by Amazon). Nowadays, GitHub has Codespaces which is really slick. I don't see Replit as a company that is going places. I'd guess that Cloud9 was acquired by Amazon for 50 million? Maybe I'm missing something.
I agree, like it or hate it, Github is where code lives. They own the platform developers flock to. That is a very big advantage. If the product is even remotely comparable Replit is in for a rough time.
Also for bigger orgs, if there is already a contract with Microsoft, Codespaces will be the likely choice over any alternatives.
> Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water. One for career, a second for physical health, and a third for social and family life.
click
I've heard about this concept often but this time reading it, I think I finally found out why it's not working for me..
Where's the fourth bucket? Where's the me bucket?
Maybe not everyone is like that, but, even though I enjoy, and find meaning in both career, exercise and family+friends, it all drains me, it exhausts me, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally, and the only time I can recharge is during long unstructured stretches of time alone without external responsibilities.
Do people not generally need the fourth bucket or what?
I totally agree with you! For me some time alone with myself not spent working is essential for my psychological well being! Luckily enough I always manage to get a daily dose of me time!
Totally agreed! Unstructured downtime is crucial. For many people you might also add a fifth bucket for their spiritual life (or maybe that overlaps enough with what you're describing).
>I hadn’t been coding regularly for about 5 years. But thankfully their interviews were practical. I spent evenings and weekends refreshing my skills enough to pass.
Can we agree how screwed up our joke interview culture is when a Google engineer with 10 years experience has to brush up interview skills? Come on.
Wait, they left Google for work life balance, to work more hours at a startup. Whaat?
I think I get what they're saying though - they were fundamentally unhappy with their ability to make an individual impact at Giant Corp. Well, that's pretty normal and probably a reason for a lot of people's unhappiness at big companies.
A startup can help satiate that need, or even a small company.
Arguably a healthier approach is to detach one's self identity and satisfaction from work, and get that from non-work things. Easier said than done though. Inevitably this person is going to burn out hard when the start up they go to fails expectations.
> Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water.
I'm not agree with this. I think physical health should absolutely be the number one priority.
Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health.
That said, I would not put my health on any kind of trading table, it's the only thing that I actually own, and I can't afford to dis-own it.
Also, I don't think it's a "three buckets problem", someone probably invented it so they can talk about such thing safely in front of their boss.
You work to improve your life, and you need a good life so you can and know how to improve the life of the others (through the product you helped making). It is hard for someone to generate good results if they're living in miserable condition. A good boss should know this.
> Let me just put it coldly here: career can be re-established, friend can be re-found, losing family is a painful struggle but it's not impossible to start from scratch. But physical health, once you lose it, you'll likely lose everything else too. The same thing is also true for mental health.
You may want to consider rating mental health higher than physical health. They are correlated, but if in doubt and/or if you need to choose, mental health is the one.
And that's where the social/family component comes in. And the work component. Both contribute to mental health. Just as physical health does. But if work and family/friends "buckets" suck, then no matter how tip-top shape you get physically, mental health will suffer.
Therefore, it makes sense to not place the physical health bucket over the other two. All has to contribute to mental health.
Strange, could’ve switched teams and had 1 and 2 without the hassle. Given what’s happening with the markets I doubt the equity will end up turning up much.
I worked at Google for about six months. Met some amazing folks and saw some amazing stuff, but the intro to Beverly Hillbillies kept intruding into my thoughts. Search felt like the bubbling crude that fueled everything, it was interesting.
>"Met some amazing folks and saw some amazing stuff, but the intro to Beverly Hillbillies kept intruding into my thoughts."
I thought this was laugh out loud funny. I was in need of a good laugh so thanks for that.
I'm curious though did you just walk away because it wasn't for you or something else? Isn't just getting in there a colossal months-long interview affair?
It was an experiment to see if we could relocate the family out west. It truly was a dream job, i got to work with some true phenoms and trailblazers in my industry and had many options to grow despite being much older than the average Googler.
Family circumstances just changed and it wasn’t going to work out. It was a heartbreaker but i was glad to have done it.
For that role i think i did ten interviews. The previous attempt was 14 and i didn’t get an offer. Its a bit shorter loop for xooglers and in the past six years I’ve had two other offers but there was always a confounding factor. One was comp, I’m not SWE and in every case i did or would have taken a pay cut.
>"Its a bit shorter loop for xooglers and in the past six years I’ve had two other offers but there was always a confounding factor. One was comp, I’m not SWE and in every case i did or would have taken a pay cut."
Interesting you've had two other offers from Google since leaving? Why would they require a pay cut? If you don't mind my asking what's your area if not SWE? Are you on the AI or research side?
Who else read this and found that the issue had nothing to do with work-life balance, but with Google now being a “bullshit job” company? see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
While the idea that "bullshit jobs" are common may itself be bullshit [1], one can imagine that at companies like Google whose major task is preserving their current market position rather than innovating to enter new markets, and who allegedly employ smart engineers simply to prevent their competitors from employing smart engineers, there is a higher than usual level of bullshitness.
[1] From Wikipedia: Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful."[14] The study also found that while there was some correlation between occupation and feelings of uselessness, they did not correspond neatly with Graeber's analysis; bullshit "taskmasters" and "goons" such as hedge-fund managers or lobbyists were vastly satisfied with their work, while essential workers like refuse collectors and cleaners often felt their jobs were useless.
I wonder if this article would be the same if the author wasn’t making google money for 10 years. Having all that money let’s you quit to a 40 person startup and be guilt free.
I don’t need to add much more commentary than the original post already has, but this is hardly considered an apology in my eyes:
> While I still think that the totality of the design decisions was a clear a privileged copy, I don't think it warranted my reaction. I'm sorry for that, and I give you permission to publish Riju.
Like thanks for giving me permission to publish MY weekend project that you have 0 say over what I do with, and blame the project as being a copy over “design decisions”. Meaning, a square box with the name of the language overlaying it?
Instead of owning his mistake as he should he basically claims “I have to remember I’m not the struggling kid from Jordan anymore” to avoid taking responsibility and shifts the blame to this ex-intern anyways.
But he still apologized, and the project was reinstated. The issue is resolved. You can continue to be mad about it, or you can forgive and forget. If it were me, I would want to move on and not carry around a little package of resentment. I've got enough to carry as is...
He basically says "I still think you stole from me and I'm only saying sorry and letting you publish your project because of the backlash".
You think he would have apologized if the guy's post didn't get massive amounts of attention on HN?
If you're making a sincere apology you don't try to cover your ass ("While I still think that the totality of the design decisions was a clear a privileged copy") at the same time.
So he's an asshole. So what? What useful purpose in there in demanding he grovel sufficiently and seem sincere? The only point to asking for a "better" apology is to enjoy watching him squirm, the gratification in the fall of someone we dislike, the capitulation of an enemy. What actually mattered was a lawsuit and a project being published. Both of those things were real and impactful, and both were resolved completely. Focusing any more on the apology is Twitterverse schoolyard bullshit nonsense.
There will always be assholes in life, and they're not going to stop being assholes. But they do sometimes control billion dollar companies, and we sometimes need to work with those billion dollar companies. Getting a real impactful change in the world is much more important than the satisfaction of the fall of an ego.
It's a shame that that incident seems to dog them around on HN so much. I don't like what the CEO did in that case either, but I don't think their entire company should sink due to that one incident
> but middle managers are clever enough to word OKRs in a way that makes them all think they’re getting what they want.
I chuckled at this one. Middle managers gonna middle manage.
I know a lot of this behavior is simply due to the position in which they are where senior managers and execs wont take no for an answer. But you have to make tough choices: If you don’t believe deep down that you can deliver, push back hard rather than playing games.
> This sounds simple, but expenses for a family of three with a house in the Bay Area are no joke. It wound up being ~85% of my Google salary.
I live in the Bay area, but under exotic conditions. I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college. Am I don't the math wrong?
It's not entirely clear, but I suspect the author is referring to their base salary at Google. The fact that Replit, a startup, provided a salary capable of covering his expenses (which were equal to 85% of his salary) is another clue that he's not included RSUs in the calculation.
> I would like to stay but when I do the math on the cost of staying, the numbers seem crazy to me. Like $500,000 annual to stay in this area, married with 2 kids in college.
Bay Area is definitely livable on far below $500K.
The "2 kids in college" makes your math impossible to guess because that could be anywhere from a minor footnote to the entirety of your budget if you're trying to pay full sticker price tuition in real-time with no prior savings (which almost nobody does, but it would make the math look terrifying). That's not really a feature of the Bay Area, though, because you'd carry that college line item on your personal budget wherever you moved.
House (or medium/large condo): bought in last 3 years $1.5mm usd
Mortgage (20% down): $105,000/year
Property taxes: $17,000/year
Maintenance: between $3600-11,000/year (including capital things like AC, roof, flooring, repainting interior, foundation amortized)
Total: $133,000/year
Family:
Grocery: $20,000/yr
Daycare 2 kids: $48,000/yr (yes daycare is $2000/mo in SF... to START)
Transportation: $8,000/yr (car payment + insurance + gas)
Annual one week "really nice" vacation: $10,000 (4 round trip tickets, 2 hotel rooms, food, transport, entertainment etc)
Misc costs: $10,000
Total: $96,000
Comes out to about $230k/year in raw expenses. These are pretty accurate for 2021 San Francisco 40 minutes walking distance from FiDi. Of course there's no way you'd qualify for an $8500/mo mortgage on that salary (19k/mo) so instead you'd have to settle for a 2 bedroom condo ($960,000? maybe? can you squeeze 2 adults and 2 kids into 1050 sq feet? long term?) for the four of you, sharing one car.
You might be able to pull this off on $300,000 with substantial help from family if they are local, but after taxes etc you will be struggling to save 1% of your income and not really building/maintaining an emergency fund or building savings for other projects/hobbies.
Seems kind of disingenuous to include the down payment as a cost considering, in principle, it's a transfer of one kind of wealth to another. Otherwise, your expenses line up well with my own family's expenses in the Bay Area.
The real killer is that if the house needs work - and it will, because the housing stock here is very old and wasn't exactly well built to begin with - the cost of the work in the bay area is 1.5x at least most other areas of the country.
If you put minimal effort into controlling costs this actually makes sense. But for a real-life example, my family of 3 (one kid) has expenses of about <1/3rd of that, childcare included.
That's a pretty real-life example. Are you an owner in that area that bought in the last three years? How long were you wait-listed on daycare? How close to fidi are you? If you're willing to cart your kid all the way to the sunset every day you can find cheaper daycare, or if you're renting your costs are going to be way lower.
California makes it more difficult in that the salary required for a home pushes you past thresholds for financial aid. You might be what’s known as “house poor” but the university sees the house as an asset that counts towards a high net worth. There are even some prestigious private universities offering “no tuition for families making less than $150k (or thereabouts)”.
Correct about not including RSUs in that footnote. Since I've always budgeted to live off salary and not bonus/RSUs, they weren't part of that particular calculation.
Obviously my W2 will look very different in 2022, since RSUs essentially get treated as cash grants and startup options are illiquid.
The math depends largely on what sort of housing situation you are assuming. As you probably know. $1.5-$1.8MM is a small (1200-1500 sq ft.) 3bd/2bth ranch house in a San Jose suburb with mediocre schools and strip mall culture. (e.g., https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1995-Majestic-Way-San-Jos...)
It goes up from there. Townhouses are getting close to $1.5MM now in the same area. I haven't followed prices in SF recently, but they are no better I assume. I think you'd be priced out of a small house on the peninsula at $500k/year.
If you're paying for college times 2, I don't know, $500k sounds kind of minimal with 7-10k a month mortgage if you want any sort of ability to save a meaningful amount of money.
Keep in mind you'll be paying $30k+ a year in property taxes every single year for the privilege of that house.
If you're trying to recreate the mid-west lifestyle of a 3-bedroom, 2,500 sq ft house with a big yard, new cars, in an excellent school district, then yeah, it's going to be expensive as hell.
This, if your lifestyle is completely inelastic you're gonna have a bad time. Even with double the pay you're not going to come close to the midwest in terms of house-size (without living in a really bad area/with a huge commute). If you are OK with not living in as large of a place, but having more money for physical goods (e.g. nice groceries/restaurants, gadgets and devices) and stuff that is mostly location-agnostic (vacations, investments) you might be substantially better off.
You definitely don't need $500k to rent a 3bed apartment in the South Bay. I think market rate is probably around $5.5k/mo? Call it an even $6k to include parking and utilities. Should be comfortably affordable on $200k with breathing room ($200k for a married couple with claimable dependents being roughly $146k after tax, $72k going to housing, $74k post-tax for whatever else), though not sure about kids' tuition.
Right now is a terrible time to buy a home in the South Bay (rising interest rates + RTO) so don't take all-in home ownership costs at face value.
How long have the people doing it now on far far far less been doing it for? eg if they bought a house 10 years ago, their expenses are less. Could they do it now on the same amount?
I have no reference for the bay area living expenses, but it isn't correct to say that just because something was once doable that it still is.
All my wife's family bought houses here in the 80s. They would not be able to remotely afford to live here if they had to pay for housing at today's market rates. I think there is probably a lot of this in the Bay.
You're almost certainly doing the math wrong unless you are doing a comparison like "I live in a 3k square foot house with top schools and a 10m commute and need the exact same in the bay area".
I recently left a company of 1000 employees for one with 20 and my experience has been similar: working more but paradoxically have more energy for the other two buckets.
My colleagues have a greater sense of urgency and are more biased toward action . I do believe the saying (paraphrased) “you are a reflection of the people you spend the most time with”, and I think that’s how the energy and action I get in my work life “trickles” into my social life and fitness goals.
Hey Scott, I really liked your post! I, too, rely on the 3-bucket evaluation: career, health, family / friends.
Oddly, I also really enjoy repls in general. Repl.it has always been a big way for me to learn quickly and to explore programming language edge-cases, and even think about code-reviews (when trying a simpler code I may want to comment on). I'm interested in Replit, as I've never heard of it before.
I think some comments here are responding to the fact that OP uses work life balance in an odd way.
What I believe is being discussed is something different. It is having meaningful work.
For many people, life just isn’t fulfilling without productive achievement. And for many, career is the space where productive achievement is pursued.
Think about how a single 30 minute video meeting can drain all your energy for the entire day. This can be so much worse than long hours or stressful deadlines.
When people talk about work life balance, they tend to talk about x hours doing A, B, C.
But, even if cliche, the quality of these activities is what determines the level of satisfaction, of fulfillment.
You can spend 4 hours a day with your spouse but if your relationship is terrible and you bicker the whole time, is this good work/life balance?
It won’t feel like it.
I applaud OP for seeing on some level how precious each year of this limited life is, and making a self-aware choice about how to spend some of them.
> I decided the best fix would be to work somewhere so small that this entire class of problems couldn’t exist.
You found the secret. Small companies rock, no amount of clout or equity can buy you the sanity and clear conscious of not having to deal with the Organizational Mire.
This puzzled me: "Projects need multi-team cooperation to succeed, so you have to do a lot of work up front to get everybody pulling together. But it makes projects fragile."
The suggestion is that teams are atomic, that projects are scoped larger than what teams can do, and the bag-of-teams for a given project is volatile - because teams are seeking the highest reward projects. What's missing for me is an organizational cadence where projects pitch, teams shop, and then all commit for some period of time and then evaluate in phase.
Maybe that approach is too static. It is interesting to think about teams independently managing their committments as bandit experiments inside the org.
This kinda just reads like a post hoc rationalization for a career decision. 'Leaving Google' is supposed to mean something momentous, but it isn't. It's a career decision, like many of us make at least several times through out life.
First point - even if, so what? The value of the article is in the thoughts, regardless of motivation.
Second point - maybe 5 years and hundreds of "leaving Google" posts ago. And the author doesn't seem to try to make it bigger than it is. TFA is exactly that - an explanation of a career decisions which HN found good/resonating.
This was a confusing piece of writing. The opening paragraph states:
>"I left because I needed to fix my work-life balance."
The summary paragraph then states:
>"I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. But what I do makes a difference that I can see. Progress feels 10x faster."
It doesn't appear that they fixed their work-life balance at all. It does sound like they may have fixed their work-satisfaction balance however but that wasn't the stated reason for leaving.
I am an Engineering Manager at a FAANG company and I would hate to see my team work on evenings and weekends and think their work-life balance is good that way. If an IC on my team would do this, I would be concerned about them burning out as well.
It also makes me think that my philosophy about work is probably not compatible with working in a startup. Normalizing excessive working hours is something I don't see myself doing any time soon.
> I would hate to see my team work on evenings and weekends
I've worked at startups and Google. The glacial pace of the latter can mean working late feels necessary to get anything done. And even tiny changes can take forever so the feeling of having accomplished something of value is infrequent at best. Maybe it gets better at higher levels, though the internal memes don't give me much hope.
Some people are suited to big corps while others prefer start-ups. Nothing wrong with a little diversity.
>> Getting things done at Google can be hard. Projects need multi-team cooperation to succeed, so you have to do a lot of work up front to get everybody pulling together. But it makes projects fragile. When any of those teams changes direction, or even just over-stated their original commitment, the project slows down or fails3.
This sounds to me like "Why I left the paramilitary death-squads: No retirement benefits"
Ok, that is taking it to the extreme, for sure, but Google has been, for a long while now, an evil behemoth. It tries to funnel an increasing chunk of people's activities on the Internet, using that to help commercial companies sell you products and services you probably don't need (already questionable manipulation), and moreover - collecting huge amounts of personal and inter-personal information for the US and other governments to spy on you, and gradually also to more carefully filter and control what information you get access to.
> Google was incredibly good to me. I had some incredible teammates and role models. My family’s financial situation is forever changed. I got promoted fairly steadily and was set up well to keep advancing.
>
> So why was I unhappy?
Apparently, not because of what Google does to most people. Which is not "incredibly good". Don't go work there.
Good. I think working for big corporations is death for talented people. Unless you have some boss that lets you work out your own vision without having to deal with other people or company procedures. But that's unlikely.
I've recently come to the personal realisation that Bucket #1 is only for people with unused capacity in, or a total lack of, Buckets #2 (physical health) and #3 (social and family) - I'd actually create a Bucket #4 specific to family.
I don't need a lot of social; my bucket is probably a bit smaller than most peoples. I have very few close friends but still too many to catch up with as often as I'd like.
I've had some back issues and so physical health has had an increased priority recently-ish because, as I've been told by my ever-loving, ever-suffering wife, I'm not as happy a person to be around if I'm not regularly playing sport.
So, I'm both playing sport as well as increasing core, back, and general physical strength in order to be able to continue to play sport for as long as I freakin' well can. Physical health, done right, is a massive consumer of time and headspace.
I have two kids that I love spending time with, interacting with, and developing into rational, well-balanced humans (hopefully, if there is such a thing). This is also a massive consumer of time and both mental and physical effort.
I've been to a couple of funerals recently, and the shit that people remember, the things that touches and changes the lives of those you love and choose to spend time with, is a million miles away from "work" or "career".
My bucket #1 gets the spill-off from the other buckets, enough that the bucket doesn't go dry.
Note: I'm aware the above is entirely my personal experience, and there are people I know who LOVE their careers and are happy to sacrifice other buckets for it. My wife is a teacher, and wholly committed to educating kids and she gets legitimate life affirmation from seeing past students go on to be successful - and I have great respect for this. I work in IT, it's fucking BS that means nothing and just funds the other buckets. The two roles I've left in my "career" were for work/life balance reasons, and I took a pay cut both times. And don't regret either decision, other than both should have been done earlier.
I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. But what I do makes a difference that I can see. Progress feels 10x faster
Might feel more satisfaction but the work life balance is still missing and eventually will come back to make him write "Why I left Repl.it"
Eastern traditions have solved this a long time back. You have to break the cycle.
"Balance" can mean "all things equal" but when talking about work-life balance I think it means that your work and non-work time combine to produce optimal satisfaction. For some people, if they derive a large amount of satisfaction from their work, that may mean that a more demanding job provides better "balance" in their life.
I don't think he's referring to work-life balance in the standard way. His work-life balance issue wasn't because of too much work, it was because it was uninspiring somehow. He compensated heavily with 'life' as per his water bucket analogy. He played basketball and he hung out with friends, but when that was taken away, he clearly saw that he disliked his work and over relied on 'life'. So he eased the stress caused by work by finding something more inspiring. He may have found a better balance with work he actually likes.
As for the Eastern traditions I think you're implying, the solution is simple, but not easy. Clearly there aren't many Buddhas roaming around in continuous states of bliss, and it isn't for a lack of trying. Having said that, the insight he gained when he was stripped of his 'life' balancing activities is precisely the sort of realizations people can make on their path through some of these traditions.
I think this is probably approximately true, at least if everyone involved is ok with it (I hope the author's family is), but it's a bit weird to describe it as fulfilling work-life balance which isn't usually used in a way that's neutral about how they should be balanced (ie. even if all of the above is true, it would still usually be described as a "bad balance").
Some colleagues of mine worked at Google, and their reports do not reflect well on the management style there. People are pitted against each other and forced to downrate one vs. the other in periodic reviews, using a graphical tool built for the purpose (seriously).
> Only then did I realize bucket #1 had been running low for a while.
I'm somewhat puzzled. If the author is struggling to socialize with friends (bucket #3) and struggling to pay attention to physical health (bucket #2) then why does he think that this is going to help improve work-life balance:
> I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now.
I can empathize with the desire to get caught up in a high-energy startup (it's fun!) but this whole blog post reads like someone trying to replace an increasingly disappointing personal life with excessive workaholism. Filling your days with extra work can fill the "bucket #1" (career) but it seems like a nail in the coffin for the author's problems with bucket #2 (physical health) and bucket #3 (social life).
Posts like this are a dream come true for investors and startup founders. "Lacking satisfaction in your life? Come work harder for less money at someone else's startup!" I suspect this blog post is going to become a staple on VC Twitter and in startup recruiting pitches for the next few years.