Something I try to do whenever I read articles like this: Whenever you see the name of the giant corporation that the author worked at, replace it with "my team". Google has over 100,000 employees, so there's no real "here's what it's like to work at Google". At that scale, there is too much variance for any simple neat summary (though there are certainly trends and commonalities).
I've met people who worked at Amazon who described it as a hellscape of misery and others who felt it was incredibly rewarding. There's been times when I worked at EA when I loved my job and times when I hated it.
A single data point is useful, but it's only a single data point. I'm glad the author found a better job that fits what they're looking for. That's all any of us really want in our careers.
I was at amazon for over 10 years. The burn out hellscape culture, often where you’re managed by some H1B manager who’s afraid of themselves getting fired (and having to leave the US) if they don’t meet their forced attrition quotas: it’s real. I spoke with those managers and heard it directly from them.
Yeah there are teams coasting by. Of course, there are engineers working 60 hours a week who will tell you about their excellent work life balance. Some of it is relative.
I respectfully disagree. There is a "What it's like to work at Google."
Google has a culture. Large companies have a way of operating. I don't think any of OP's comments are at all off-base for Google. A lot of what OP wrote is fundamental to any organization with tens of thousands of people.
And you know something? That's fine. I know people who are very happy there, and I know people who are miserable there. There are times in my life when /I/ would have been very happy in that sort of place, and there are times in my life when /I/ would have been completely miserable there.
A lot of that comes down to personality, and a lot of that is situational.
For example, I want a very different employer if I don't have kids and can throw my life into work than when I'm dealing with a difficult family situation. I've been in both situations.
I would be completely miserable at Google _right now_. It might have been a dream job out-of-college, and it might be a great job again in just a few years.
That's true, but blog posts written solely by people who left are unlikely to capture it well. There is an implicit selection bias in play. People tend to write most about transitions, but if you want to know what it's like to work somewhere, the people you really want to ask are those right in the middle of it, because that's where you spend the most time.
While I agree with this sentiment, I wouldn't be so quick to completely dismiss pervading company cultures.
I think a better suggestion would be to say that when you read articles like this you should ask if the author has the right perspective to know what the truly common elements of a company's culture are or if they're extrapolating from a single data point.
Plus, people seek different values from their work, and even those values also change over time. So, yeah, what really matters is the number of data points.
Still, Google is obviously not the hacker-driven company it used to be 10 years ago. Almost all data points suggest that Google lacks internal vision and leadership (likely outside of a few key areas). This sounds like a typical multi-national corpo w/ a lot of money to burn.
If there is a company that is a hellscape for 30% of its employees, and works just fine for most of the rest, then I would describe that company of having a hellscape culture. The existence of positive experiences doesn't change the fact that a lot of these bad experiences, at Amazon, at Google, are directly due to corporate policies, incentives, and the decisions of upper management.
Same for Microsoft. In spite of the top-management-spirit teams were totally different in their stress levels, WLB and daily routines.
The same actually implies to those small "Used By X company" when you evaluate products, I have seen those claiming to be used by Microsoft while knowing it was just a short term evaluation that ended with nothing but MS is still paying for a licence.
Something I try to do whenever I read articles like this: Whenever you see the name of the giant corporation that the author worked at, replace it with "my team". Google has over 100,000 employees, so there's no real "here's what it's like to work at Google". At that scale, there is too much variance for any simple neat summary (though there are certainly trends and commonalities).
I've met people who worked at Amazon who described it as a hellscape of misery and others who felt it was incredibly rewarding. There's been times when I worked at EA when I loved my job and times when I hated it.
A single data point is useful, but it's only a single data point. I'm glad the author found a better job that fits what they're looking for. That's all any of us really want in our careers.