As someone who works in IT (or on the fringes of it, at least), a job at Google is seen as the Holy Grail of positions: if it’s not going to be a job for life, it’ll at least set you up for it—after all, who wouldn’t want to hire Google alumni, right? And the benefits? Let’s not even start.
But is the reality a bit more, well, real?
According to this Google Group thread set up by the company’s HR department to discover why ex-employees left, the answer is a resounding Yes: their gripes are the same as those of any other employee in a sizeable organisation.
Those of us who failed to thrive at Google are faced with some pretty serious questions about ourselves. […] Google is supposed to be some kind of Nirvana, so if you can’t be happy there how will you ever be happy? It’s supposed to be the ultimate font of technical resources, so if you can’t be productive there how will you ever be productive?
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2 responses to “Quiting Google”
Anyone who’s read Microserfs could see that Google was turning into Microsoft. It was ever going to be so.
I would, however take issue with this:
Google actually celebrates its hiring process, as if
its ruthless inefficiency and interminable duration were a sure proof
of thoroughness, a badge of honor. Perhaps it is thorough.
Hmmm. Now ‘scuse me if this sounds a little unfair, but I’d say that advertising your recruitment drive on a single billboard on Route 101 in Silicon Valley is actually a rather exclusive and parochial approach to hiring.
Ken Auletta’s “Searching for Trouble” in this week’s New Yorker kind of touches on this. Auletta mentions how Brinn and Page are getting a bit distressed over their employees growing sense of self-entitlement in regards to the growth of google and the problem of “don’t do evil.”.
Now, I don’t know anyone who worked there, but it seems the above quote is pretty telling. Probably on the whole, a majority of people are going to be dissatisfied with where they work, regardless of what what they do. We’re all just kind of self-entitled a-holes like that, I guess.