I left Google voluntarily but, since you asked, I did blow the whistle on unethical management practices, and I was chagrined when absolutely nothing changed. That wasn't why I left. I left because I wanted to do functional programming and that wasn't going to happen where I was. I don't mind using C++ but I'd rather it not be my full-time job.
For my part, I don't like the creeping laxity of ethics that I've seen in technology startups (including Google) for the past few years. I really think that some of the slimiest actors are coming into our industry because they think engineers are easier to take advantage of (since we just want to code and a lot of us put our heads in the sand about office nastiness).
I'm glad that programmer salaries are finally starting to converge to what we're worth, but a lot of the worst elements are coming into VC-istan because of the money that's in it.
Have you ever worked in the finance industry? Those guys will kill their own family if it will get them a $5K raise.
I worked in the california mortgage industry before going to college. These guys would convince families living paycheck to paycheck to buy/refinance REALLY expensive homes. If they were on a 30 year fixed, we get them on an option-arm. If they are on an option-arm, we get them on a 30-year fixed.
This is all typical finance stuff. But here comes the kicker--they would actually outright LIE about interest rates and had a few shady notaries to back them. They would say you have a 1% interest rate (for 30 years) when it was really a 5 year option-arm and screw people. The worst part is, CA has some sort of law that protects mortgage lenders from unhappy customers after 5 years time (exactly when the 1% interest rate would fly to the market rate). Needless to say, several people left the company when we found out. Some folks reported them to the BBB--I don't know what happened to those scumbags though. I really hope people like that stay out of science.
> I don't know what happened to those scumbags though.
Unlike the S&L crisis, exactly none of them got indicted and all of them got bailed out, except Bernie Madoff whose schemes were totally orthogonal to the financial crisis.
Not that your point of people taking an "at all costs" approach to career advancement is missed, but I'm not sure about your analogy re: the finance industry. He's an engineer, not someone trying to close deals on mortgages or equity loans, none of that is his domain.
I work in finance software (specifically regulatory compliance) and it's arguably one of the most supportive and communicative industries to be on the engineering side of.
Until you start having to deal with compliance regulations, then it becomes a chore.
I was in a group doing arbitrage. I can't say anything first-hand about mortgages.
Real-estate people (not including architects) are scummy. All of them. It's the filthiest business around. Real-estate finance people are bound to be scummy. I agree.
I wasn't saying, "There are no slimeballs in finance". I just think that, from a boots on the ground perspective, there isn't much difference between Wall Street and the hottest startups of VC-istan.
Ah, you left before it became apparent that Google is a company going into decline. Personally, I stopped even considering working there when I heard about Search-Plus-Your-World, and when I saw a Google+ video advertisement, I knew the company had ceased to be anything of intellectual interest. It had a good run, though.
You know, I sit around here and occasionally run into classic Michael Church writing, which I feel like I dig pretty well. But the clearly provable missteps into blatant lies, such as this failed startup comment, just need to stop. Your honesty and your truth, Michael, are more important than your thoughts. Please stick with that.
I downvoted most of the top comments on this subthread. This has nothing to do with the topic of this article or this discussion, nor is this even relevant to most people here. Please hash out your pissing contest / interpersonal grudges elsewhere.
When I left, an excellent programmer and a personal friend of mine had to crack his 401(k) because the company didn't have the money to cover what taxes he owed on the small amount it had paid him in 2010.
Perhaps it's still on life support and E is still funding H's lifestyle, but I'll stand by "failed for nontechnical reasons".
I can't believe that HN is blatantly calling you liar. I can't believe you're calmly responding to it.
Guys, whether or not someone might or might not be lying about their own personal life is strictly their business, and not yours -- and certainly not a public matter!
Nobody is calling him a liar, they are just pointing out that his story may not be as factual as he portrays it to be. If he's choosing to air his dirty laundry in public, it's expected that people are going to comment on it. Those without inside information may not know what is true and what is not true. Those with inside information may feel that it's inappropriate to disclose the exact details which may discredit the argument. This makes the process very difficult. There's really no way anyone can say "everything michaelochurch says is wrong".
Those without inside information may not know what is true and what is not true.
Then email him.
There's really no way anyone can say "everything michaelochurch says is wrong".
It's incredibly creepy that HN is fact-checking a personal anecdote about a nameless company; an anecdote which he clearly wanted to share with us in order to simply chill with us and be happy with us. He wasn't even hurting anyone or saying anything about anyone. You all chose to dig for no reason at all.
Let me put it another way. His original story did not whistleblow anything. It was just a story without a particular purpose. It doesn't matter why he wrote it, nor does it matter whether it was true. He wrote it in order to feel happy. HN went out of its way to check whether it could ruin that happiness, for no reason whatsoever.
The same people come out of the woodwork anytime michaelochurch says anything about Google, and sometimes even when he doesn't say anything about Google. It is getting a little tiresome.
As someone with no stake in either condemning or defending Google, I'll just say that while I admire Google as a company, and have many friends who work there, this kind of reflexive attacking of anyone who criticizes Google's internal heirarchy, or thinks some of its decisions were wrong etc, and constant defense and glorification of everything it does, is grating. And people talk about Apple fanboys.
It doesn't matter if everything m_o_c says is exactly true or not. It doesn't matter if what went down when he was at Google is entirely his fault. Just give it a rest already.
His stories are just so far removed from reality we can't help it. It's like a programming language debate where someone says "Perl has no OO" and complaining that "Perl programmers come out of the woodwork to correct me every time I say that." Well yeah. It's the Internet. That's what we do.
More seriously, this affects my ability to hire people I want to work with. When I have to start by explaining away random falsehoods about Google, that wastes time I could have spent talking about projects or programming or something. You only get one first impression. It's better if the first impression is reality instead of a contrived fantasy world.
Also, I take exception with the statement that I'm "coming out of the woodwork" to post. I am in the top 10 highest reputation users here. I'm already out of the woodwork :)
I suspect what really affects your ability to hire people you want to work with is your posts on HN and what they convey about you (vs michealochurch's posts and what they convey about him).
Right now (and please take this as constructive feed back, because that is the intention) in your posts here you come across as someone who has totally drunk the Google koolaid and can see no wrong in anything Google does, and attacks anyone who says anything negative about Google or any of its products, with a special grudge against michaelochurch.[1]
I am not sure that helps you hire the right kind of people. But hey, you know better.
[1] please note: I am not saying you are a fanatic. just saying you come across as someone who sees Google as some kind of Immaculate Workplace, that can never do wrong. Just feedback. I could be totally wrong.
Noted. It is hard to dislike Google when you previously worked for Bank of America. Like I imply in another comment, one's previous experiences can easily taint one's future experiences.
Even with a little bias, I I really think I get it mostly right. Here's another perspective:
Steve writes: ``One day I started getting jealous of this digital piano that people were playing every day. So I sent a nice email to someone in facilities asking if there was any chance we might be able to get a guitar. She said it sounded like a good idea and she promised to look into it.
A month went by, and I started to get a little sad, because I thought they were just not interested. But I sent her a little email and asked if there was any update. Just hoping, you know, against hope.
She told me: "Oh yeah, I'm sorry -- I forgot to tell you. We talked it over with the directors, and we all decided the best thing to do was to build a music studio."
So now we have Soundgarden over in Building A. It has two rooms: one with soundproofing and two electric guitars and a bass and a keyboard and a drum set and a jam hub and amps and all kinds of other crap that I can't identify except to say that it's really popular. The other room has a ukulele and some sort of musical drum and a jazz guitar and some other classical instruments.''
My experience is the same. Any opportunity that Google has to spend a lot of money on me, they take. And yup, that makes me pretty darn happy, especially coming from Bank of America!
Steve Yegge says Google is a cool place to work. Peter Norvig thinks it is a great place to work. m_o_c thinks differently. All good.
If Yegge starts stalking m_o_c on HN that gives a different impression to neutral onlookers, even when the underlying facts haven't changed. That was my only point.
And yes, as someone who has worked at "Bank of America" type companies, I get exactly what you are trying to say. Good for you.
If Yegge starts stalking m_o_c on HN that gives a different impression to neutral onlookers. That was my only point.
His post is the top-rated comment on the top-rated article. Yes, I read HN and reply to comments frequently. While we await some form of therapy for this obvious mental defect, we will just have to accept the more-than-occasional comment from me :)
But to be fair, I didn't go out of my way to look for michaelochurch, and, in fact, I was just defending someone else who was being blasted for being critical of Michael. If Google was brought up and nobody corrected Michael, I wasn't going to. Like you say, it's been covered again and again and it is probably not worth rehashing. Oh well.
I have run into other comments from Michael, and I treat them at face value:
Ultimately, I don't think I'm a crazy person. Bring up programming, we'll talk about programming. Bring up Google, we'll talk about Google :)
(Oh, and one more things: I do complain about Google on HN. I think Wallet being blocked on Verizon is dumb. I think the lack of the Android trackball is dumb. I think the whole fake-open-source process around Android is dumb. But seeing as how we live in an imperfect world, I'm willing to live with this. As time improves, things will get better.)
It is disappointing that you cannot see m_o_c's attention-seeking flamebaiting for what it is.
It's a shame you're happy to allow him to say whatever he likes about a company (and I'm not talking about Google) yet you're unhappy when people calmly correct him; even though you don't know the company, or who works there, or what the situation is, and the people correcting him do know the company, and the people working there, and what the situation is.
A huge chunk of this thread is taken up with pointless responses to m_o_c's comments. He flamebaits Google; Googlers cannot respond fully because stuff is still private; a bunch of people who don't know the truth either side pile on; useful discussion is pushed further down the page.
> If Yegge starts stalking m_o_c on HN
When m_o_c's comment is the first in thread on the first thread on HN there's no stalking needed. m_o_c is deliberately choosing to push the buttons of Googlers knowing that they'll really want to respond (and I'm grateful to them for showing some restraint).
I don't think we can blame Michael for writing comments that are upvoted to the top of the thread. I generally try to share my personal experiences as they relate to threads, and if the community as a whole finds them worth upvoting then so be it.
Perhaps you'd like a technical solution to your problem, in which case you can petition PG for a backend solution or you can whip up a quick browser extension to hide comment trees or to ignore Michael.
Steve Yegge says Google is a cool place to work. Peter Norvig thinks it is a great place to work. m_o_c thinks differently. All good.
Also, there's a "blind man and the elephant" thing going on. Google is a huge company. I'm sure Google is a great place to work-- for Peter Norvig. If you're already great, the rewards and environment are fantastic; if you're good and trying to become great, it's a bit sclerotic, because there are 10,000 other people who've been there longer than you and who also want to become great, and most of the work Google thinks it needs to have done won't help you improve or advance.
Google is not some horrible company. It's actually quite good, even if poorly managed. The quality of engineers is very high, and the perks are fantastic. It's just not the best place if you're in your mid-20s, still somewhat green, and want to become great. It takes too much time, and too much irrelevant people-pleasing work, to advance.
I suspect you would feel differently if you had an internal view of the things he said. I am, you might say, the least fanatical of all googlers, and am quite pessimistic about the company in a lot of ways. Even with that I feel a twinge of lol every time I see an m_o_c post on anything having to do with ethics, employers, and what not. What he "blew the whistle" on had nothing to do with ethical management by any sane person's definition. I am highly inclined to doubt his new foray into workplace controversy as well, considering how quickly it has followed on the heels of the last.
Personally, I'm happy to call him a liar, although I typically refrain because I can't really provide any evidence of it externally.
sure, I am not saying m_o_c is right, or ethical, or sane or anything. I don't know the man from Adam.
I am just some random hacker half the world away. All I am saying is, as an outsider who knows nothing about what is really going down, when I see a pack of people piling on to someone for saying something which seems like no big deal to me (large companies with tens of thousands of employees have a few unethical managers/political bs happening here and there duh), you give him more credibility than he might otherwise get.
It's very clear that he had a different experience working at the company that you did. Leave it at that and let it go.
The way people pile on him every time he sticks up his head does far more harm to Google than it does good.
If he's "wrong", then he's wrong. You would hope than anyone capable of working for Google would be capable of sorting through conflicting evidence on their own. Trust them and leave them to it.
M-o-C may or may not be posting stuff that people in the know can parse as a lie. But you, my friend, are saying stuff that anyone with the "scroll up" skill can see is a lie.
Saying an unnamed thing failed for the vague "non-technical reason" is enough for one person to, indeed, really, call him a liar and another person to feel strongly enough about situation to blatantly-lie-about-the-liar-calling-situation...
Yeah Wow, he must have really gotten under some group's collective skin...
"... If he's choosing to air his dirty laundry in public, it's expected that people are going to comment on it. ..."
These comments on this topic are disturbing.
Google is a public company. It's first priority is to shareholders. Google is also hierarchical despite what anyone claims. So it's more than likely that employees like @michaelochurch claim, are minced up in the bureaucracy. Start here, "Why Google Employees Quit" (2009) ~ http://techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-quit/
I read your link. It just doesn't seem like the same Google that I'm working at. I guess you need to have a certain personality to work at Google; if you don't have it, it won't work for you.
There are a lot of people that I encounter who have never worked anywhere but Google. I feel sorry for them because one day some tiny thing is going to annoy them (oh noes, only two types of M&Ms in the microkitchens!), and then they'll leave. Only then will they realize how fucking miserable the rest of the world is.
Another problem is that people want to work for Google so badly that they accept crap offers, at least people writing to TechCrunch to complain, anyway.
(Also, FWIW, of all the offers I had for jobs in NYC, Google gave me the most money, not to mention benefits, bonus, and stock. And my other offer was an investment bank's on the core software architecture team.)
It just doesn't seem like the same Google that I'm working at. I guess you need to have a certain personality to work at Google; if you don't have it, it won't work for you.
As I said in another comment, I think this is a "blind man and the elephant" situation.
Your rank, age, and political success (measured in Perf) determine the type of Google you get. If you're Peter Norvig, Google is an awesome place to work. I can imagine few better jobs than Director of Research at Google.
If you're already great, Google is a fine place to work. If you're good and trying to become great, it's not. It's stifling, frustrating, and slow. At least, that's what I saw, but I was only there for 6 months and had already run afoul of multiple seriously unethical people (people who should have been fired). Google's a huge place. I far from got a sense of "the whole thing", but what I saw on the cultural front (7/20 all-hands) was certainly not encouraging.
I feel sorry for them because one day some tiny thing is going to annoy them (oh noes, only two types of M&Ms in the microkitchens!), and then they'll leave.
Yeah, see: I don't care about that stuff either way. The perks are nice, I guess, but I go to work for the work, not for the Xbox.
Google has perks down. Providing interesting work for even half the talent it takes in is an "area for development".
Another problem is that people want to work for Google so badly that they accept crap offers, at least people writing to TechCrunch to complain, anyway.
Actually, I think it goes the other way. Google pays very well, so people look at the numbers and expect more of the job than what they're actually going to get.
I'm not sure it's possible for a single company to provide advancement opportunities for most of its ambitious mid-level contributors. Mathematically speaking it makes at least as much sense to play the wider job market looking for a succession of "perfect fit" jobs for yourself every few years rather than sticking with Google and continually trying to win a shot at a series of slightly more prestigious positions.
Obviously if you were part owner of the business things would change considerably, but not everyone has the risk tolerance for that - it helps to be single with cash in the bank.
Except he wasn't lying about his own personal life, he was accused of lying about previous employers, places that employ others who may have an interest in not seeing their companies' names dragged through mud.
For my part, I don't like the creeping laxity of ethics that I've seen in technology startups (including Google) for the past few years. I really think that some of the slimiest actors are coming into our industry because they think engineers are easier to take advantage of (since we just want to code and a lot of us put our heads in the sand about office nastiness).
I'm glad that programmer salaries are finally starting to converge to what we're worth, but a lot of the worst elements are coming into VC-istan because of the money that's in it.