If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be an engineer at Google during the early to late 2000s, here you go.
Now even though Google is fundamentally a spyware advertising company (some 80% of its revenue is advertising; the proportion was even higher back then), we Engineers were kept carefully away from that reality, as much as meat eaters are kept away from videos of the meat industry: don’t think about it, just enjoy your steak. If you think about it it will stop being enjoyable, so we just churned along, pretending to work for an engineering company rather than for a giant machine with the sole goal of manipulating people into buying cruft. The ads and business teams were on different floors, and we never talked to them.
↫ Elilla
Even back then, Google knew full well that what they were doing and working towards was deeply problematic and ethically dubious, at best, and reading about how young, impressionable Google engineers at the time figured that out by themselves is kind of heartbreaking. In those days, Google tried really hard to cultivate an image of being different than Apple or Microsoft, a place where employees were treated better and had more freedom, working for a company trying to make the web a better place.
Of course, none of that was actually true, but for a short while back then, a lot of people fell for it – yes, including you, even if you now say you didn’t – and reading about the experiences from people on the inside at the time, it was never actually true.
I remember falling for it, hook, line and sinker. In retrospect, it was obvious but I was too immersed in their outward appearence to bother looking deeper.
> Of course, none of that was actually true, but for a short while back then, a lot of people fell for it – yes, including you, even if you now say you didn’t – and reading about the experiences from people on the inside at the time, it was never actually true.
That is not true.
I specifically remember telling everybody the “don’t be evil” crap was not true. Even if it was for a moment, it would change whenever the company wanted to.
So many people bought into their crap. So many.
When they removed the “motto” was one of those days I was sad I was right 🙁
PROTIP: Don’t work for a “cool” company, you’ll be overworked and underpaid just for the bragging rights of working for a household name (and maybe for the bragging rights of working on some cool stuff).
Instead, work for a “boring” company that deals in financial transactions or accounts receivables for the medical waste industry or similar. Those companies have trouble finding good employees (since every graduate wants to work for the Googles and the Metas) so they have to pay above market rate. Your job is not your hobby, it’s a thing you are paid to do so you can then clock out and do your hobbies.
Of course, if you can land a job at Mountain View or some other crème de la crème position paying 250K per year or so, there is an argument for working for Google. But not as a grunt.
kurkosdr,
I’m going to be a contrarian here. Don’t spend your career working for small local companies, you’ll be overworked and underpaid… At least try to start your career working for a big company where you’ll get paid triple the amount and maybe some cool projects worthy of your degree under your belt. You’ll tire of the bureaucracy and may even get laid off, but at least you’ll have a bankable brand on your resume, which will pay for itself with more opportunities than working for small unknown companies.
Above all, make a lot of inside connections if you can, that opens up a lot more doors than studying books. It’s very easy to become pigeonholed, where you keep landing jobs that reflect earlier jobs, rather than the jobs you aspire to do. It’s one of my regrets in this field.
Should have been more clear on that, work for a reasonably large but “boring” company.
How about, work for small local companies that pay well servicing large corporate clients. That’s what I do. I love working for MSPs that have their act together and service large corporates. Internal politics at large organisations are frustratingly toxic. The smaller orgs give their staff more flexibility/freedom. But I’m specialised as a UC/networking/security engineer. Your experience will vary especially if you’re in desktop support. Google sucks, Apple sucks, Microsoft sucks but web based online email is addictive like crack. No one wants to run a local email server anymore. It’s too much hastle.
Darkmage,
I guess if you can find it. The closest I’ve had to that was subcontracting a few levels down from a military contractor.. I learned how much they were paying at the top and by the time it reached those of us doing hands on work it was a tiny fraction of what the military contractor was being paid for our work. It was eye opening. I think it’s better to be a middle man than the one doing the work. In any case though I was bound by non-complete clause so I didn’t have a right to get out from under the middle men. Although as I understand it non-compete clauses are prohibited in some states like california. I would guess that workers without non-competes have more leverage in these kinds of situations.
I do run email servers. While I agree there is some hassle associated with it, the bigger issue is that there’s not much market demand left for small independent providers. That evaporated as everything’s been outsourced to microsoft or google. Walking in the door it’s pretty much a safe bet.
Edit: “non-complete clause”…hahaha!
“Sorry boss, I’d love to do it, but I’m bound by a non-complete clause!”
kurkosdr,
Google pays $250k to those with about 5 years of experience (or with a Master’s degree and a few years experience, or a PhD out of school).
People tend to really under estimate how much upwards mobility is possible in a large company, especially younger ones. (Meta pays more, Amazon slightly less, OpenAI significantly more).
The issue is, Google used to be an engineering led company. Many decisions were brought from the “bottom up”. Projects like GMail, AdSense, Cardboard (VR), Google Talk and many others have started as individual or small team efforts. Basically it was like startup with all the upsides, and none of the downsides, along with massive financial incentives (many early employees became really rich).
Today? Not so much, unfortunately short term profits took over, along with foreign company culture eroded the native one. Too many managers, directors, and VPs were hired from competitors, which were frankly doing worse than Google. (If they were really good, why couldn’t they compete with Google in where they came from)?
I would recommend reading up on Boeing purchase of McDonnell Douglas as the seminal cautionary tale of death of innovation.
It’s strange to keep writing apologies for Google, given they laid me off, but there are obviously two sides to the story.
I met so many fantastic people at Google. Each was idealistic, including the managers, even if I didn’t always understand or agree with some leadership decisions. Many of those managers were people like you and me, like the author of the article, who came from open source or greatly appreciated it. I so often ran across people whom I greatly admired, open source contributors, people from Bell Labs, Mozilla, Sun.
The problem is, you can’t escape politics inside a company. No matter what decisions you make, you’ll upset someone. Companies need to protect themselves in certain situations, so they can’t always make or stand by certain statements publicly. I saw a lot of resentment toward leadership, and I realized how difficult it is for them to deal with that, I really didn’t envy them. I understood some of the frustration, but much of it felt exaggerated, many felt completely free to complain about trivial things.
Sure, Google’s money came from ads. I never saw the privacy problem with that. They used minimal anonymized information for targeting, but fiercely defended against leaking any personally identifiable information, to such a degree that it often slowed down projects (on the security side, I greatly admired how seriously user security was valued/protected, and the security teams, how proactive they were, the incidents they prevented, how they defended journalists, many stories I’m unable to share). It’s difficult for me to imagine a better revenue model, allowing them to provide so much for free. In return, the volume of open-source output will probably remain difficult to match. They developed open video codecs that had a real chance of rivaling proprietary ones, something I feared might never happen.
Google significantly contributed to the positive perception and embrace of open source in the corporate world.
There were many things I disagreed with at Google, but for me, it will remain somewhat of a utopia, even if in the end it drifted from what it had been. It’s disheartening to see how it’s perceived today, but I think history will judge it with nuance. For those of us who were there, we’ll know what it meant while it lasted.
cheemosabe,
I appreciate your perspective, really. But an aspect that bugs me with these tech companies vowing to protect user privacy is the hypocrisy of their positions. Yeah they’ll try to protect customer information from getting into the hands of other tech companies, but at the same time they’re totally guilty of vacuuming up our information for themselves. For example I am extremely critical of Google buying up private consumer credit card purchase information (highly unethical but technically legal in the US) and tracking android locations without the permission or knowledge of users…
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/mm4vrr/google_illegally_tracking_android_users_according/
https://www.courthousenews.com/google-to-pay-62-million-for-tracking-users-without-consent/
Even if they protect this information from getting into the hands of others, it’s not redeeming when google themselves have violated user privacy to their own ends. I don’t mean to point the finger just at google here, apple and microsoft are more than open to being privacy creeps as well when it suites them. As advocates for user privacy, we should not be condoning the acquisition of private user data just because they don’t share it with others….that’s not ok. Companies that do this while continuing to engineer products and services to hoard user data are not good faith stewards of user privacy.
That’s a fair point, but it does overlook detrimental effects of google’s ad empire displacing other ad sponsored services around the world. A lot of these were professional journalists who lost their jobs because google took their ad revenue away. It’s logical to say “survival of the fittest” yadda yadda yadda, but nevertheless those “free” services came at a significant cost for humanity. For better or worse, the google services and jobs we have were effectively born out of their win over quality news sources and journalism, which we’ve lost. The point being, it wasn’t all “pros”, there are “cons” as well.
I appreciate your view. To whatever the extent that google culture may have been more positive when it was younger & smaller, wall-street interests have a tendency to wreck everything to increase shareholder value.
I took a look at the filing for the tracking lawsuit. It seems some location data was also linked to “Web & App activity” which was stored separately and that could also be turned off, it’s just that this behaviour wasn’t obvious. I’m not sure if there was bad intent or not.
Yes, I find credit history pretty freaky in general. I don’t know how Google used that, I’ll have to take a look.
cheemosabe,
Yeah, companies can say whatever they want. and “intention” is nearly impossible to pin down.
In the version of android I was using at the time there was an option to opt out of google location tracking, you had to explicitly opt out every single time you enabled the GPS. This was infuriating and yet if you failed to opt out even once, it would not prompt you again. IMHO it was an antipattern designed to frustrate/trick users
However I think the reason google actually got in trouble is because they collected location tracking of users who had opted out anyway.
cheemosabe,
I would say the Google of 10 years ago was a real special place which will probably never be replicated anywhere else at all.
The Google of today is probably still very good. However it is very difficult not to recognize the deterioration. Becoming large came with growing pains, and unfortunately the company could not successfully navigate all of them.
Especially later on when internal feedback was devalued and started being completely falling on deaf ears. (Do they still have the “geist”?)
Agreed. I think there was a zeitgeist in the year before I left (mid 2023).
If it was dystopian then imagine now that they produce glorified autocomplete “AI” slob.