Heh, it was a small startup. And then there was a $x0 million seed round and suddenly we became a much larger startup. When we hired a bunch of business/management-type people who had all worked together at another organization they imported their broken culture. (We were able to hire all of them because their previous organization had had a significant layoff... and for the record I had nothing to do with their hiring, they all just kinda showed up one day)
Same. I quit Google to go work at a 4 person company. I love that we’re just able to get stuff done. Hard to get GPUs? Walk down to Central Computers in SOMA and buy L40S cards and build a workstation for everyone to share.
I’m not very financially motivated. I’m already making more than 90+% of the US. I just can not fathom the level of greed I saw hiding behind people’s eyes at Google as they try to build empires. I’m in Silicon Valley to learn about and work with computers. I get to work a chill number of hours while still learning every day. If you could get a lot of employees like that you’d have a huge market advantage.
I'd rather die than become that. And there were plenty of Googlers there just chilling making good money. It's the mid level managers that were making around 500k eyeing up the 1MM comp packages that were the problem.
5 or 6 most days. I’m of course happy to do more in sprints when duty calls. Working at 100% is fun - as an exercise. Like training with weights on. Maybe your site gets DDOS’d. Maybe your database has a critical issue. As long as you’ve done some prep these are recoverable issues. And solving big problems tells you and your boss that you’re important.
But honestly most of the time I’m able to take my best thinking hours of the day, put those into the job, and get 90% of the output with much less than 90% of the time. The worst thing you can to is try to fill the time and create a bunch of tech debt. Artificial time scarcity keeps things lean.
> I just can not fathom the level of greed I saw hiding behind people’s eyes at Google as they try to build empires.
That’s very well written. Poetic even.
> I’m in Silicon Valley to learn about and work with computers.
The industry used to be more like that. Never entirely, of course - Microsoft made a bunch of people millionaires in the 80s and 90s, turned some heads. A few others did too.
Even in the early 2000s almost none of the MBA types were going to the Bay Area after graduating.
But things changed. It basically had to. There were too many companies making too much money - and making their employees too wealthy - for people to ignore it. Zero interest rates added fuel to the fire and everyone who could jumped on it. Late stage capitalism, everyone gotta get theirs. And here we are.
The most frustrating part of working in the tech industry for me is that when it was smaller, it was a given that you would work with people who loved the tech. Now the industry is filled with people who are "in tech" but have no real interest in the technology itself, and in many cases aren't even slightly technical. They're just doing it for the money and because everyone told them it was a good field to go into.
There's so many of these people that it's really hard to avoid working with some of them. I consider myself extremely lucky because I started a business and when these people show up, I can choose not to promote them, or straight up fire them, or find some other way to show them the door. But the broader ecosystem we're in is something I have no control over, and it has clearly changed, so that it's not just filled with people who don't know or care about the tech, it's run by them (and in the long term it shows as the tech degrades).
You might be missing the dot com boom in your analysis. MBA types flocked to the tech sector looking for those IPOs, a trend that I suspect has only grown stronger since.
There are tradeoffs, but I'll never go back to big organizations.