I keep hearing a lot about amazing work life balance from (almost all) google employees. The TC is amazing too. How on earth is it possible? I don’t think any other company in FAANG or any company can manage to give both good pay and good WLB. Any insights? #tech #google #wlb #tc
IMO, Apple SWE has better pay in the long run and better WLB than Google. - Better pay due to refreshers and stock growth. - Better WLB due to once a year perf review Apple HWE is terrible with WLB though from what I heard.
Based on personal experience, for WLB Salesforce = Apple SWE >= Google > Apple HWE.
Wait, really? You are saying Apple SWE wlb is better than google? I am hearing this for the first time
Yeah different teams in Apple have more difference than other companies, there are good team with amazing WLB.
just go check out google ads org or GCP. it varies by team in any company
Good WLB is a meme for Google kind of... I knew a guy who had maybe a total of like 30 PRs in 2 years and was cruising, the thing is he was mid 30s and still L4... It’s good WLB in the sense you can put in 30 hours and not get PIP’d but your compensation is gonna be like someone -5 YOE who did actual work.
After certain point tc doesn't matter much tho especially as an L4 at google
Sorry, what does PR stand for?
Focus on robust systems to improve quality of work that end up paying dividends in the long run = better WLB
lack of accountability
poor work satisfaction is the 3rd piece you give up in this Cap theorem. they don't deliver much.. spend so much time in consensus building.
Have to say though, recent half year WFH situation gives WLB another look, I know a lot of the peeps on the business side pull in long hours including myself, to keep that revenue stable.
Which organisation in Google?
Depends on individuals. I’ve seen someone on my team still working at 3AM. I’ve also seen someone clock out at 5pm. Hard to give the one correct answer for a company this size
Agreed with above. WLB is hard to quantify. Some people have a poor WLB because they can't/won't say NO to taking on more work out of fear. Some people have a poor WLB because they fear delegating and leading a team and risking making themselves obsolete that they take the work all on themselves and then complain about it.... WLB is different between groups and people and so I think one needs to try and understand where people are coming from when they either b*tch or brag about WLB.
You made it seem like clocking out at 5 is not common
A lot of reasons 1) Ads revenue is pretty stable so there is no rush to get a market fit hence engineers dont have to work super had 2) This is an infinite recursion, but since wlb is good a lot of emphasis is on code quality, which leads to it being very easy to write new code withouth it breaking as our testing is super good. Strong code review systems A lot of folks hate part 2, so much enphasis on code quality leads to more time for code to be accepted, however once upon a time Search and Ads codebase was so bad that folks had to spend a lot of time just dealing with fires when there was a directive to increase our testing and code quality which has lead to life being much eaiser in that aspect
Can confirm about point 2.
I have never seen our server go down in the last 2.5 years. Being on call is like taking a vacation