Unfortunately, yes. If I hadn't, I might be retired.

You should be commended for being principled and sticking with what you believe. Thanks for your candor.

Imustaskforhelp 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But you left because you were feeling like google was going in gutter and wanted to make an ethical choice perhaps on what you felt was right.

Honestly I believe that google might be one of the few winners from the AI industry perhaps because they own the whole stack top to bottom with their TPU's but I would still stray away from their stock because their P/E ratio might be insanely high or something

Their p/e ratio has almost doubled in just a year which isn't a good sign https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/googl/alphabet/pe-...

So like, we might be viewing the peaks of the bubble and you might still hold the stocks and might continue holding it but who knows what happens after the stock depreciates value due to AI Bubble-like properties and then you might regret as why you didn't sell it but if you do and google's stock rises, you might still regret.

I feel as if grass is always greener but not sure about your situation but if you ask me, you made the best out of the situation with the parameters you had and logically as such I wouldn't consider it "unfortunately" but I get what you mean.

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cmrdporcupine 9 hours ago | parent [-]

That's one of the reasons I left. It also became intolerable to work there because it had gotten so massive. When I started there was an engineering staff of about 18,000 and when I left it was well over 100,000 and climbing constantly. It was a weird place to work.

But with remote work it also became possible to get paid decently around here without working there. Prior I was bound to local area employers of which Google was the only really good one.

I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.

After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though. People who worked there in the decade prior to me had a much better place to work.

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Imustaskforhelp 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Interesting, so if I understand you properly, you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google.

I am super curious as I don't get to chat with people who have worked at google as so much so pardon me but I got so many questions for you haha

> It was a weird place to work

What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it?

> I never loved Google, I came there through acquisition and it was that job with its bags of money and free food and kinda interesting open internal culture, or nothing because they exterminated my prior employer and and made me move cities.

For context, can you please talk more about it :p

> After 2016 or so the place just started to go downhill faster and faster though

What were the reasons that made them go downhill in your opinion and in what ways?

Naturally I feel like as organizations move and have too many people, maybe things can become intolerable to work but I have heard it be described as it depends where and in which project you are and also how hard it can be to leave a bad team or join a team with like minded people which perhaps can be hard if the institution gets micro-managed at every level due to just its sheer size of employees perhaps?

	▲	cmrdporcupine 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> you would prefer working remote nowadays with google but that option didn't exist when you left google. Not at all. I actually prefer in-office. And left when Google was mostly remote. But remote opened up possibilities to work places other than Google for me. None of them have paid as well as Google, but have given more agency and creativity. Though they've had their own frustrations. > What was the weirdness according to you, can you elaborate more about it? I had a 10-15 year career before going there. Much of what is accepted as "orthodoxy" at Google rubbed me the wrong way. It is in large part a product of having an infinite money tree. It's not an agile place. Deadlines don't matter. Everything is paid for by ads. And as time goes on it became less of an engineering driven place and more of a product manager driven place with classical big-company turf wars and shipping the org chart all over the place. I'd love to get paid Google money again, and get the free food and the creature comforts, etc. But that Google doesn't exist anymore. And they wouldn't take my back anyways :-)