Yep, the primary distorting effect at a place like Google is the seemingly infinite source of revenue from something which is in large-part fully automated. The ad revenues are a crazy firehose.
Yes it takes a large crew of SREs and SWEs to keep that firehose fully primed, but nothing close to the labour force that Google employs.
When I joined Google at the end of 2011 there was something like 20,000 full time employees. At that point it was already clearly a company that had already transitioned from a disruptor of the industry to a maintainer of the status quo. e.g. they clearly bought the ad-tech company I was an employee at just to make us shut up and go away.
The conservative review and permissions structures in place there that the writer is complaining about are in place to avoid fucking up the firehose. And they're legit important. One of the most intimidating times I had working in my career was on the Ad Exchange release rotation, where I had production access for the deployment of binaries to thousands of machines in many datacentres that produced millions out transactions per second and were responsible for buckets and buckets of revenue. Please Don't Fuck Up was like an airplane banner circling around in my skull the whole time.
Any innovations that happen at Google happen because there are very smart keen people there, and Google is constantly seeking out alternate $$-firehoses. But it's never happened and I doubt it ever will. It's not a culture accustomed to being hungry enough to work aggressively to hunt $$.
This reminds me a lot of AT&T and Xerox in their prime: they both had a firehose of seemingly-infinite revenue (phone calls and photocopies), and used some of that money to hire a bunch of really smart people and have them work on research projects, which the company then completely mismanaged and wasted.
Even a hefty FAANG salary is still ~1% of what you can make once you 'escape' and carve out your own software legacy.
Ironically many capable, intelligent and driven people end up joining Google, et al. thinking it's the place for them ...not realizing it's where you go to (mentally) retire.
>Even a hefty FAANG salary is still ~1% of what you can make once you 'escape' and carve out your own software legacy.
Huh? How do you figure? No one makes ridiculous amounts of money just writing software unless they're incredibly lucky. This sounds like typical American thinking: "if you just work hard, you'll be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs!" Bullshit. For every guy like them, there's thousands of people who spent countless hours and sacrificing their best years working on stuff that went nowhere; they would have been better off working at a FAANG.
Every offer I've ever received from a series A or seed stage startup has had compensation and equity potentials that -- even when imagining a successful exit via IPO or acquire -- totalled (when amortized over a 5 year period) to 2/3rds or 1/2 of what I was getting at Google. There is literally no financial reason to go to an early stage startup as an employee vs going to a FAANG. The founders and VCs don't give enough equity for it to even be close to a "lottery ticket."
As for forming my own startup means a) having an idea that VCs want to fund b) having connections to said VCs c) foregoing income while in the prototyping phase.
I have a family to feed.
I ended up leaving my Google job simply out of job satisfaction. Finances, nope. Makes no sense.
You're thinking of a particular type of startup here. Most startups don't involve VCs, for instance.
But you're right, there is a period where the founder makes little to nothing from the startup. You need to be able to weather that. And, if you're betting on the startup making you an instant millionaire, you're betting on the wrong horse. I mean, it can happen, but it's not the most likely result. The most likely result is that it will fail, and you'll have to try again with a different startup.
The difference between successful founders and unsuccessful ones is the unsuccessful ones gave up. The successful ones almost always have a string of failures before the one that succeeded.
That said, starting your own company can be much more profitable in the long run than working for someone else. And more fulfilling.
Yes it takes a large crew of SREs and SWEs to keep that firehose fully primed, but nothing close to the labour force that Google employs.
When I joined Google at the end of 2011 there was something like 20,000 full time employees. At that point it was already clearly a company that had already transitioned from a disruptor of the industry to a maintainer of the status quo. e.g. they clearly bought the ad-tech company I was an employee at just to make us shut up and go away.
The conservative review and permissions structures in place there that the writer is complaining about are in place to avoid fucking up the firehose. And they're legit important. One of the most intimidating times I had working in my career was on the Ad Exchange release rotation, where I had production access for the deployment of binaries to thousands of machines in many datacentres that produced millions out transactions per second and were responsible for buckets and buckets of revenue. Please Don't Fuck Up was like an airplane banner circling around in my skull the whole time.
Any innovations that happen at Google happen because there are very smart keen people there, and Google is constantly seeking out alternate $$-firehoses. But it's never happened and I doubt it ever will. It's not a culture accustomed to being hungry enough to work aggressively to hunt $$.
Politics is eating everything there.