The departures come at a time when Google is in transition, its becoming "old." Having worked there between the time it exited its giddily irresponsible teen years to the start of its midlife crisis, I recognized the symptoms. What was humorous to me was that I lived through that the first time at Sun (at Sun 10 years) from Sun just going public to the point where they were struggling with their identity. And for much of that time Eric Schmidt was either my boss, or my boss' boss. 'one hop' in the food chain as it were. At Google I mentioned to Eric that we'd been in this movie before :-) He pointed out the numbers were a lot bigger in the picture on this go round. From what I hear from friends who have left after I did, the movie is playing out the same way.
The last group I was in at Sun was the Java group that later was the core of JavaSoft. It had been populated with low employee number 'refugees' as one of them put it. A number of folks certainly had enough money to not work if they chose to. But an interesting thing happens.
When you suddenly have enough money in the bank so that you can quit when ever you want, you lose your fear of losing your job and trying to find another. And not having that fear to hold you back, can be tremendously empowering.
This was one of the messages in the movie Office Space which is sometimes expressed as 'Work like you don't need to work.'
The change is both subtle and dramatic. People stand up for things they value rather than things they think they should support. They sometimes stop everything they are doing to spend a couple of months to help a promising new employee get their bearings and become effective. They push back on schedule fantasies with hard nosed realities, they tell upper management when things are borked or when they are making bad calls. When you don't care if you get fired, as long as your a reasonably principled person, you can become immensely more effective.
And you learn is that it isn't that you don't like work, its that you don't like bogus things that get in your way at work. Nearly every single person I know who has 'retired' it really meant they stopped reporting to someone else and instead invested their time and energy into things they were passionate about and could make a big impact on. Sure pretty much everyone takes some time off to just breathe and think three related thoughts in succession, but once decompressed from the demands of that large organization, they engage in their vision with diligence and passion. Because of that I am not at all surprised when people who became financially independent at a company continue to work there for many more years. How they work changes, and sometimes what they work on changes, but making things happen is a powerful drug.
As for the median thing, my experience is that people I've interviewed have short stints with longer stints in the middle, so they go job A -> B -> C then at job D they find someone or something to keep their attention and work there for a longer time 5, 6, 10 years then move on. My cycle time seems to be 5 to 10 years but its really an individual thing.
"People stand up for things they value rather than things they think they should support."
This is an awesome reply. Not because the views on Google but how reaching financial independence changes the outlook on work. It something I can closely relate. As I have gotten closer to FI, I am more likely to do things that I value even if they ruffle the feathers than just go along with things that I dont value personally but still need to do as part of doing the job.
This reply was so timely for me as just yesterday I told my boss that I quit go find somebody else because I was being asked something that diverged from my value system. Being customer-centric, I value customer satisfaction very high and I am not fond of the hurdles being erected to achieve that goal.
Great response. For the "retired" who stayed on, what sort of impact did their newfound attitudes have on things? Did they play a part in any of the major new products or improvements that came later?
Generally the impact I've observed was folks getting more stuff done. I attributed that to them not worrying about pissing someone off if they stepped on their toes, but it may have been that they just had only one thing to focus on.
To be balanced I've also seen them leave, basically to put to the powers that be a set of facts or demands that need to be true, only to have those same powers tell them it wasn't going to happen. Then they left. I try to pay a lot of attention to those sorts of events because depending on whose reasoning I find more credible it can inform my own thoughts about staying or leaving.
I always find this kind of speculation through determinism a little silly (under the covers all it's really saying is "x is the new y").
Yes, many companies fall into similar patterns as they get older, but many don't. Most of the giant corporations we talk about on HN are fairly unique, don't have exact analogues, and, complex systems being what they are... Meanwhile, people also leave jobs because they took them when they were 25 and now they want to try their hand at Khan Academy (or Yahoo for some reason).
I think you are absolutely right to suspicious of such narratives. They are always a product of both the observer's bias and the systemic bias of the environment in which they operate. I didn't immigrate here, which changes how I experience the place, and as someone who tends to work for 5 to 10 years at a place the half dozen places I have direct experience at are a small fraction of the total number of companies.
The effect I've observed is that Silicon Valley has such mobility (which is to say between jobs) and such commonality between business structure, that the larger companies get, the less pronounced their differences become. I attribute that to the challenge of assimilating folks into the company culture that is too far off the valley 'mainstream.' It also provides a tremendous amount of cross fertilization where people say "Oh at my old company we used to do X" and if its a better thing than what the locals do it has a good chance of being adopted. So management techniques, office layouts, and programming methodologies have a sort of viral nature to them as well. This seems to homogenize the way companies evolve than you might expect.
This is gold. Not so much for the comments on Google, as for the comments on what being fearless does to you. But I've also experienced that you need to couple being fearless with having some superior or even unique skills to maximise satisfaction.
"When you suddenly have enough money in the bank so that you can quit when ever you want, you lose your fear of losing your job and trying to find another. And not having that fear to hold you back, can be tremendously empowering."
My take on this is that (if you are a good engineer) you can just choose to be fearless anyway and trust you'll get a job whenever you want one. Life is too short to skulk around in fear of what some random middle manager thinks about you. This doesn't mean that you should go around rubbing people the wrong way (you shouldn't) or that you shouldn't be trying to make your FU money (you should).
But I've seen many many talented devs twist themselves in knots, trying to please their managers' unreasonable demands, and otherwise live a life of cringing fear or quiet desperation, just out of fear of being fired/demoted/whatever. This is particularly true in India, where hierarchical power structures are more pronounced than in the USA. and losing a job has more of a social cost.
"Nearly every single person I know who has 'retired' it really meant they stopped reporting to someone else and instead invested their time and energy into things they were passionate about and could make a big impact on."
Gold. I am only semi-"retired" (I have money in the bank, I don't really have FU money. Any day now ;)) and I am nowhere as talented as Google's top 20 employees, but this is true ime.
I was always fairly "fearless", so didn't have to work on that bit. But I did have to consciously choose never to work on uninteresting/boring things or with boring/uninteresting people.
(I am aware that most people in the world don't have that choice - all the more reason that people who do have such a choice should probably exercise it)
After being ground down after a decade of working on outsourced enterprise software -and it did take some grinding, some of us are good at deceiving ourselves - I decided I would never ever work on meaningless (to me) things again or with uninteresting people.
It paid off in spades for me. I now work on interesting machine learning projects, and have more interesting work offered to me than I can complete in a lifetime. I work much harder than in my salaried 'coding body' days, but the work is challenging and feeds my soul.
"making things happen is a powerful drug."
A very very addictive one, and you don't really need to be part of a large organization to partake of it. There are many people working quietly in many areas on very ambitious projects, with little fanfare - there is a large world outside the valley (and outside software). Perhaps the drug is too addictive, but that is the subject of a different post.
The last group I was in at Sun was the Java group that later was the core of JavaSoft. It had been populated with low employee number 'refugees' as one of them put it. A number of folks certainly had enough money to not work if they chose to. But an interesting thing happens.
When you suddenly have enough money in the bank so that you can quit when ever you want, you lose your fear of losing your job and trying to find another. And not having that fear to hold you back, can be tremendously empowering.
This was one of the messages in the movie Office Space which is sometimes expressed as 'Work like you don't need to work.'
The change is both subtle and dramatic. People stand up for things they value rather than things they think they should support. They sometimes stop everything they are doing to spend a couple of months to help a promising new employee get their bearings and become effective. They push back on schedule fantasies with hard nosed realities, they tell upper management when things are borked or when they are making bad calls. When you don't care if you get fired, as long as your a reasonably principled person, you can become immensely more effective.
And you learn is that it isn't that you don't like work, its that you don't like bogus things that get in your way at work. Nearly every single person I know who has 'retired' it really meant they stopped reporting to someone else and instead invested their time and energy into things they were passionate about and could make a big impact on. Sure pretty much everyone takes some time off to just breathe and think three related thoughts in succession, but once decompressed from the demands of that large organization, they engage in their vision with diligence and passion. Because of that I am not at all surprised when people who became financially independent at a company continue to work there for many more years. How they work changes, and sometimes what they work on changes, but making things happen is a powerful drug.
As for the median thing, my experience is that people I've interviewed have short stints with longer stints in the middle, so they go job A -> B -> C then at job D they find someone or something to keep their attention and work there for a longer time 5, 6, 10 years then move on. My cycle time seems to be 5 to 10 years but its really an individual thing.