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.
This is not true, Google is no longer capable of changing anything internally, it's like a government in that respect, it can make a new process/program (that might on the surface make some things look better) but underneath the old system is still there.
Well they can launch new semi-independent initiatives under the Alphabet umbrella. They just need to use that to create a web search engine. Something sorely lacking in their current portfolio.
TLDR: Its basically an efficient market in some countries, most people have kidnap insurance even though they dont know it (as their employer isnt allowed to diclose this insurance), the insurers know the criminals going rate, and can cut off their entire business if they break the "rules"
"Google announced that 20 percent of its workforce would be able to work from home permanently"
Google gets a lot of PR cred for this but its not the case at all.
They "estimated" that 20% of workers would be remote at their management chains discretion. Ie pretty much the same policy they've always had (you can be remote if you get permission, but you'll be the odd one out).
3 days in is just a trick, if you need to commute the majority of the week why not commute the other two days (vs moving somewhere further out with a better WFH setup).
The main benefit for amazon's tools is once you've been there a while you know how they work, and all the complexity and bugs have been stripped out of them. And because they force engineers to go oncall everyone has a pretty good idea of how to fix things.
When you have SRE's spending all day creating the next new thing (generally after deprecating the previous one with no replacement), you end up in a situation where you forget how to say, rollback a bad deployment. Or scale a fleet.
The problem with fancy infrastructure as code, containers and logging services is when they break you have no idea how to get out of trouble. SSH and grep almost always work, as does symlinking a directory.
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.