Valleywag
An anonymous software engineer who says he used to work on AdWords, Google's lucrative if straightforward ad-selling system, has written a blog post explaining why he's leaving the search giant. Unfortunately, his tenure at Google did not include a tutorial on the use of the "Return" key, and most of his post is one long paragraph reaching 1,422 words. Here's the 100-word version on why he split for a social-networking startup.
There are the perks: health benefits, free food, on-campus gyms, a beach volleyball field, the tech talks. Disneyland for three days. There's Google Search, Gmail, Google Reader, or Calendar. I felt proud to work at the company that built these. Every engineer gets either two 24" or one 30" monitor, as well as a company laptop. Then there's the community. In general, Googlers are a great bunch, and smart. But I am more a startup person than a big-company person. At a startup, every individual has a impact. As a recent Google employee, I would have never gotten rich there, even if the stock had doubled or tripled in price. Other Google-specific problems: it is unlikely to work in an area that one is passionate about. Another scale-related problem: Due to the size of the code base, it takes a long time to actually become productive at Google, which can be frustrating at times.(Photo by Pathfinder Linden)
Comments
Reducing the 100-word version down to a 12 word epitome:
"As a recent Google employee, I would have never gotten rich there"
I think this blog entry probably points out the problems at Google (and a LOT of tech companies) more clearly than any other. This person, while obviously skilled and talented, should never have been hired in the first place. If his priority is to make a big impact and work on projects that are personally interesting, then the preliminary interviews should have eliminated him as a candidate. Think of all the money Google wasted training him and then multiply that by all the people like him at Google and you have a huge money drain.
@jackparsons: I have a friend who chose Google over pre-IPO VMWare. Oops.
@Nicholas Carlson: We've been over this; Googlers (and Persai code monkeys) are better than you at technical things, but you could beat them in a write-off (hah! April 15--get it?) any day. Just be careful when you criticize engineers' less than eloquent writing. Do you really want Paul Boutin to nail you on your next math mistake?
he joins goog when its at a 400+ a share and still expects to get rich?
i thought google didn't hire retards.
Reducing the 12-word version down to a 5 word epitome:
"Recent Google employee, not rich"
greedy mf
looks like google is becoming the new yahoo... they even have the same beach volley fields!
@sample032: VMWare people weren't getting rich off the IPO, the EMC ones were.
@DanLar75: Two word version: "Google sucks"
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