To all ex-googlers, what made you leave the company? I've heard the company is one of the best pay master, no other company beat the perks they offer and of course the pride of working for Google. Same question for current googlers if they are planning to leave.
You drank way too much Google koolaid from Blind.
Lol
Mythbuster: 1. The company does not have the best pay. Not for everyone. It has lower refreshers than FB and Apple. Google is like Comcast. Treats new employees better than old ones. 2. Have you tried the shit food in Sunnyvale? Everyone in the valley has better perks these days. 3. Pride of working at Google? Turns out you were worse than Uber since the beginning with harassments and bro culture but your PR department was better at covering up. I don’t look at googlers and assign high prestige. Long time googlers come across as coasters and not ambitious to me. But yeah it’s better than Amazon probably
We are actually hiring quite a few Googlers onto my team at Amazon. Turns out people will ditch free food and SJW culture for building great products.
Northman I’m sure way more people are dreaming to do other way around
I was in Google cloud and quit a couple of months ago. Work in most of the teams is not very interesting. New grads may have fun but they work on very narrow scope of projects. They would learn a lot more in companies like Facebook. For mid career engineers i.e level 4 and 5, unless you are in a high impact project, it is so hard to do work with meaningful impact that will get you promoted; especially 5 to 6. Once you are a level 6, most of your time is spent on navigating through a lot bullshit; which is increasing quite a bit at Google cloud (by bullshit I mean, dealing with incompetent eng managers, product management org where majority of the leadership is less than a year old).. To top it all, Google doesn't pay as much as everyone thinks it does. The median salary of a senior engineer (level 5) is in low 300s and for Staff it's low 400s.. while this is not bad, many decent companies in the bay area pay as well or more. I joined 4 years ago as a level 5. Got promoted to level 6 last year and it was quite a struggle. I don't even remember anything else I did in the last 4 years. So I quit a couple of months ago. I'm am chilling now..will start interviewing early next year.
Thanks for sharing the experience. I’m heading to Google (T5), and can relate how frustrating it could be if competent engineers don’t get exposed to T6 level projects for timely promo. BTW, did you refer to GCP/Cloud AI org? At FB it seems most get promo to E6 by 3-4 years’ tenure, and very unlike to stuck at E5. But E7+ seem challenging due to limited scope. And regarding the comp, I feel Google’s recent comp are much more compelling than used to be, specially for candidate with strong competitive offers. My T5 offer is ~430k excluding signon, whereas I heard in 2015-16 it was considered as solid T6 offer.
@Facebook, are you currently E5 or E6 at FB? And YOE? Trying to understand how the leveling between 2 companies work for external hires
There are many companies which will handily beat Google's total compensation, in-office perks and benefits. Google is merely (one of) the best among the large, well known tech companies. There are perks and benefits at elite fintech companies that are so expensive they wouldn't even be plausible for companies the size of Google.
Like which companies
Like the one in my nick, for starters. Likewise for DESCO, TGS, PDT, Edgestream, etc.
Higher TC at FB, slow promo process, lack of impact, lots of bureaucratic BS like Readability, attempts to save money on perks (food quality dropped dramatically, no to-go boxes beyond HQ anymore, etc).
@OP - Pride? I work for money. I don't feel any pride about the source of that money.
TC will be shit if you stick around for too long.
$$$, doubled my TC after leaving google
Perf, downlevel, politics, left-wing groupthink unstable environment where I never figured out how to really succeed (GCP). Perf was annoying because by the time you get feedback from it the next cycle is almost over and you are doing it all again. I was downleveled when I joined and tortured by the promotion bug until I realized it wasn't necessary. The politics you need to go through for perf isn't really mean spirited or anything like that it's just exhausting and I found it exhausting nodding to the left-wing group think/wokeness. Also my comp got a lot better leaving as did my level.
Tech Industry
Yesterday
1128
I haven’t done shit today!
India
Yesterday
285
Heard congress distributing wealth
Tech Industry
Yesterday
867
Should we leave Bay Area?
Tech Industry
Yesterday
3204
Avoid teams with only Chinese or Indians especially with a Chinese/Indian manager
Tech Industry
2d
42928
Worried that our top performer is an attrition risk. How do managers handle this?
It's literally the same reason as why people leave their company. They felt it was too slow and wanted a faster pace. They wanted more "impact" (lul). They wanted to make a difference.
Actually in my case it was because I got an offer that tripled my total compensation with a better team and culture. I think most peoples' reasons boil down to increasing their net worth or increasing their sphere of influence. Pursuing "impact" and "making a difference" naturally leads to the latter, if not also the former.
@RenTec: hard to believe a jump could add 200% more to TC relative to G’s top of the market comp. Mind to share level and TC you had at Google? And, where you headed to? I assume it’s a unicorn; how’s their TC breakdown? Congrats anyway for the right move!