I am considering switching to Google from Amazon. I'm in a pretty good place at Amazon, but the hours worked can get brutal. What is the median workday like at Google? Are there periods of crunch? I should add that I'm on the upper end of L5.
Google is famous for its work-life balance. A lot of people I know work less than 40 hours a week. Google is ultra difficult to get into but once you’re in, you are completely coddled. It’s especially noticeable when you have already worked for a bunch of other larger tech companies like myself. Yesterday, the day before Thanksgiving, the SLU BRN building was pretty much empty after lunch. I was giving a tour to an Amazon friend from across the street. The only people around were one team playing board games in the library room and a few other people hanging out in the massage chairs. My friend left around 2pm because he had to get back to work. I went home early. Teams that don’t have SRE have on-call but there’s a limit to how many rotations you can be on. If you do more, you get paid overtime pay. Some people opt to do more because they want the overtime pay. But even then, you have to get approvals to go beyond the limit.
Sounds so peaceful and full of life. Can't wait to get into Google
I've heard Salesforce also has very good WLB
TC?
Ever watch Attack on Titan? Working at Google is like being a member of the Military Police that protects the king in the innermost gates. Only the top trainees of each training camp become MP but they are the laziest ones who never have to fight off the titans. Well, my friends and I joke that working at Google is like being an MP and working everywhere else is like being a member of the Survey Corps. The Survey Corps are the scouts that have to explore outside the walls and get killed off by the titans.
If you want wlb don’t join Cloud.
I’m on Cloud. From what I’ve seen, it’s been great. Maybe there are a couple teams that aren’t all that great? The office is always almost empty after about 4:30pm. The Seattle SLU campus yesterday was empty after lunch. Maybe it’s different for the Bay area? Also, have you worked at other larger tech companies? In comparison, I haven’t seen anything remotely close to Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, or Amazon level of long hours.
I am in Seattle. If you visit our block at 7:00 you’d find half of the team working. CLs are sent on weekends and midnights. Can’t tell you the exact team obviously
Best WLB job I’ve had, and yet I get more work done in the time I work because there isn’t a bunch of distracting bullshit going on constantly. YMMV based on your team.
Yeah, all our meetings default to 30min max. We get a lot done in our meetings. Every other company I’ve been at, it would have required a 1-2 hour meeting.
It is one of the few companies which is really serious about work life balance. Except few bad apples, managers overwhelmingly support work life balance. Cloud is one area which is full of people from outside and has a slightly different culture. Although , at the moment, it is just a perception. In reality things are not that bad - the difference being Cloud is the only team which has real deliverables and teams are held accountable for what they do or not do.
Been there >10y. Work life balance is strongly encouraged from the top. On occasion I've found myself working off-hours, because (1) I was on-call, or (2) the work I was doing was so interesting that I wanted to do it outside of regular hours. Crunches are rare but can happen too. But most of all it depends on the team. On my team of 10, we all work normal hours except the one straight from school who seems to have no desire for a life outside of work.
Do they allow you to WFH and at weird hours?
They allow you to do whatever you want, a majority of the time. Management is pretty flexible. Come perf time, you get to grade your manager and they want to ensure you score them well. Of course, you also have to provide artifacts that you’ve been doing your job but what’s odd is that you’re not rewarded for “delivering features on-time.” No one gets promoted for meeting some deadline. Everywhere else I’ve been, that’s a huge deal. Not really at Google. Artifacts: pull requests and design docs. Interesting thing is that in perf, everyone will skim your design docs. Senior ICs will skim through your pull requests on code quality and difficulty. Managers will look at your code stats to check you aren’t completely slacking off and in other cases, overdoing it. Sometimes, the stats point to hey, this person is working too hard. We don’t do that here. Hahaha