TechCrunch: "Why Google Employees Quit"

Last week, TechCrunch re-posted snippets from an email list for former googlers. This article was set up to make an obvious conclusion: Google is not the fairy tale land of employment.

Wait, wait, you mean not everyone loves their job at Google? Shocking! A logical person might point out that what one person loves another person hates and thus, it is physically impossible to have a large company where everyone loves their job.

That being said, allow me to make a few points:
1) Former Googlers are not representative of Googlers.
Imagine if you set up a group for ex-New Yorkers, and then asked why they left New York. You’ll probably get an usual number of negative complaints. That doesn’t mean that most people hate New York.

Likewise, TechCrunch didn’t ask Googlers whether or not they liked their jobs – they took a thread from a list of former googlers. That is, people who didn’t love Google enough to stay, for whatever reason. So, you’re already starting with a list of people whose feelings towards the company skew usually negative.

2) The Email Thread is not representative of Former Googlers
People love complaining, particularly those who feel that they have been wronged in some way. If you start an email thread with the question “Why’d you leave Google,” you’re opening the floodgates for those who hated Google. People like me, who genuinely enjoyed their experience at Google, will stay silent. People like complaining more than praising.

3) TechCrunch was unethical in releasing the (first) names of the posters.
Though TechCrunch hid the last names of the posters, they released the first names. If your name is Bob or Mike, your secret might be safe. But, what if your name is “Gayle”, or one of the many ethnic or unusual names? Then they might as well have released your full name. Releasing people’s names added nothing to the article, but embarrassed – or potentially hurt the careers of – the posters.

4) Almost everyone at Google does like their job.
When I left Google, people were surprised. Everyone (or virtually everyone) likes it there. No one came to me and said “yeah, I want to leave too. I hate it here!” I did have several people admit to me that they were thinking about leaving as well. But, in every one of those cases, they said that they liked it, but wanted to go to a smaller company or to a different role.

5) Why I liked Google (and why I left)
I had a great team. I liked our project. I liked my manager. I was working on cool, interesting stuff.

Google is, in my opinion, the best place to be an engineer. Engineers are given more authority than I’ve seen at any other company. If you want to work on something new, there’s lots of other projects that you can easily switch to. You can work on your own personal pet project 20% of time. How many other companies let you do that?

For my 20% project, I got to teach two courses at University of Washington. It was an enormous time investment, but I loved teaching. I’ve kept in touch with many of my former students, and it’s amazing to see them to become fantastic engineers at Google, Microsoft and Amazon. I really appreciate both Google and UW giving me that opportunity.

Despite Google being a great place to be engineer, I realized that I didn’t want to be an engineer anymore. Ironically, the fact that I was so happy with everything about my job at Google made it the decision easier. After all, if everything was right about the job (team, manager, project) and you’re still not excited, the issue is probably the job itself.

Though I liked coding and considered myself fairly good at it, I wanted learn a little more about business: sales, marketing, product design, finance, accounting, etc. Google is a great place, but it’s not the place to learn those skills. I felt I could only get that education at a start-up, so I left.

Google App Engine – Caching and Downtimes (Rant)

Google App Engine:

“We will be taking memcache offline tomorrow morning from 9-10am PST (GMT-8) for routine maintenance. Calls to the memcache API will *not* throw exceptions but will instead return false for set() calls and None for get() calls (just like any other cache miss.) Your app should continue serving normally during this period, and
we’ll keep you updated on our progress.”

Google writes this as though it’s “no biggie – we’re just disabling caching for an hour – your app will operate as normal”.

If you’ve used App Engine, you know how ridiculous that is. You can’t operate an App Engine site without lots and lots of caching.

App Engine takes your generous daily quota and divides it up into tiny little minute or second long quotas. Their logic is something like this:

1. You can eat 2000 calories in one day.
   Hurray! That’s a lot of food!
2. It’s good to pace yourself and not eat it all at once.
   Absolutely. You wouldn’t want to pig out on breakfast and not be able to eat anything else all day.
3. Therefore, we will only let you eat 1.4 calories per minute.
   Well, f*ck. Pass me two thirds of a tic tac?
   

CareerCup gets about 10,000 page views per day – not the smallest site, but hardly the biggest. CareerCup cannot operate without heavy caching. By taking down caching, they took down my site for an hour. Not cool.

Now, Google could have mitigated this by removing the absurdly small quotas temporarily. CareerCup would have run slowly, but at least it would have run. Instead, though, users get punished for expensive-ish queries, with no chance to avoid it. Not cool.

This brings me to my next point:
Google, if you’re going to take down people’s sites, can you pick a better time than 9am – 10am? Try, perhaps, 2am – 3am? I know you don’t want to come into work at 2am. I know it’s not really Google culture to tell a team that they have to be at work and away from their families 2am. But you have to. You have real users operating real businesses, many of which are a whole lot bigger than CareerCup. We depend on you to keep our websites up.

Google: Don’t act like taking down memcache doesn’t disable our sites. And don’t disable our sites at 9am when you could’ve done this 2am.

A Googly Peek into Racism

Racism is rampant. Maybe this election has made people less racist, maybe it hasn’t. At the very least, I hope that it has made people realize that, yes, racism is still very much alive. As a quick illustration, check out the top 10 Google search suggestions for Obama: 30% are race-related issues: “birth certificate”, “muslim” and “antichrist”.

The most frustrating part is that people don’t even see the racism and sexism. A Google coworker who had a “Hillary Nutcracker” displayed in his office window – he probably didn’t think about how that’s dripping with sexism. Nor did the Republican friend who asked online for one good thing that “Barack HUSSEIN Obama” has ever done. Nor does the other friend who asserts that Colin Powell only endorsed Barack Obama because he’s black.

We don’t see these things because we see them all too often. We’ve become immune to it. It’s time that we wake up and call these things out for the racist, sexist acts that they are.

In Honor of the VP Debates…

Brought to you by Google’s 2001 search index, a quick comparison to show just how new to the scene Sarah Palin is:

John McCain: 158,000 hits in 2001
Joe Biden: 3,240 hits in 2001
Barack Obama: 671 hits in 2001
Sarah Palin: 0 hits in 2001.

Despite being mayor of a small town, the internet had not even heard of her in 2001. I’m not sure if that says more about Palin or Google…

Cuil – The Next “Google Killer”?

With the recent press about Cuil, the latest “Google-Killer Search Engine”, it seems that we’ve forgotten the lessons from the late 90s. Cuil’s claim to fame appears to be:

• It was founded by Ex-Googlers
• They claim to have a larger web-page index than Google

The first point is somewhat interesting, but not exactly a path to success. As for the second point, I’d like to say: (1) How do you know that? (2) What does that mean? (3) So?

How Do You Know That?

Google doesn’t release the size of its index.

What Does That Mean?

How did they count the size of Google’s index? If two urls have identical content, are those the same page? What if the content is merely very similar? Suppose the only difference is that Google isn’t indexing the duplicate pages (or, say, the spammy pages), does it matter that Cuil’s index is bigger?

So?

Bigger isn’t better. I thought we’d learned that back in the late 90s. For most queries, it doesn’t matter if the search engine returns 30 results or 1000. You’ generally don’t go past the 3rd page. What really matters is the ranking of the pages. If the page you wanted is on the 15th page, it might as well not be there at all.

How Cuil Actually Stacks Up:

Interface:

• Pros: Slick and pretty. The content drill down is nice – although it doesn’t always display relevant things. I also like having the page numbers locked at the bottom so that I don’t have to scroll.
• Cons: Ranking of results is unclear. There’s 3 columns and the rows don’t line up with each other. When I’m trying to actually find a good page, I’m not sure where to read.

Speed, Reliability, Performance

• Pros: Speedy
• Cons: Searches frequently fail. I got “no results” when I tried searching for “Google Talk”. I tried the same search a second time and it worked.

Search Result Quality

• Selection Criteria for Sample Queries: All queries were selected from my Google Web History, and were queries in which I was attempting to answer a question.
• Query #1 (an error I am getting with Google App Engine): error 403 cpu quota exceeded
• Cuil: No Results
• Yahoo: #1 Result is Google App Engine article about it
• Google: #1 Result is a Google Group question about this. #3 (or #5) is the Google App Engine article
  Winner: with Google as a close second.
  Answer: Common Error. Try using python’s profiling.
• Query #2: send pdf to kindle
• Cuil: Show articles mentioning that you can do this, but not telling me how.
• Yahoo: #1 Result is a discussion about it.
• Google: #1 Result is a link to Amazon explaining how to do this.
  Winner: Google
  Answer: Your Kindle has an email address that you email the pdf to.
• Query #3: 99 luftballoons translation
• Cuil: #1 Result is a translation
• Yahoo: #1 Result is someone asking for a translation
• Google: #1 Result is a translation
  Winner: Cuil & Google (tie).
  Answer: It’s about war. And red balloons.
• Query #4: “imagine no religion” billboard seattle
• Cuil: No results
• Yahoo: #1 Result is blog post mentioning it. #2 Result is press release about it.
• Google: #1 Result is press release about it. #2 Result is blog post mentioning it.
  Winner: Google, with Yahoo as a close second
  Answer: This billboard was put up by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
• Query #5: percent female math majors in US
• Cuil: No results
• Yahoo: #1 is a seemingly-relevant but dead link. #2 also seems relevant, but not a direct answer. #3 is about carbon monoxide levels at death. Hmm…
• Google: #1 is related article that contains an answer to the question. #2 is a very relevant study, and the summary (which is as far as I read) indirectly answers the question. #3 is about a particular school’s gender ratio.
  Winner: Google.
  Answer: 48% of math majors in the US are female.
• Bonus Query: cuil
• Cuil: Nothing even remotely related to the search engine.
• Yahoo: #1 result is the search engine.
• Google: #1 result is the search engine.
  Winner: Google and Yahoo. Poor Cuil…
  Answer: Google and Yahoo both know what Cuil is (as well as what each other). Cuil, sadly, does not.

Conclusions

While Cuil may claim to have a larger search index, the number of “no result” searches certainly suggest lesser web coverage. The flashy interface is mostly just that – flashy. It’s pretty, but the three column layout leave your eyes wandering all over the page unsure of which result is meant to be the most relevant. A more cynical person might even suggest that the three column layout helps mask the fact that Cuil may not know an appropriate ranking.

If you want to get real traction as yet-another-search-engine, you’d better attack a different market from Google (or Baidu in China, or Yahoo in Japan, etc) or you’d better be substantially better than Google. Just being better isn’t good enough, and Cuil has a long way to go even on that end.

Why I left Google

Yes, folks, it’s true. April 11th, almost three years after my first day as a Googler (or “Noogler”), was my last day. Did I hate it? Did something go horribly wrong? Did the company completely change? No no, nothing like that.

I loved Google. It’s a fantastic company, particularly for engineers. You’re driving the products, it’s growing quickly, and you get to solve challenging problems all the time. I learned a ton and I’m really glad I had that experience.

But, with three years at Google and four internships between Microsoft and Apple, the experience I’m missing is a startup.

With that said, let me answer some questions:

Q: So, now that you’re not there, you can tell me what you were working on, right?

No, silly, that’s not how NDAs work! I’ll let you know when it ships though.

Q: Well, what are you doing now?

At this very moment? Sitting in a hotel room in Buenos Aires. I’ll be in Buenos Aires for the next three months, learning Spanish, drinking wine, eating good food, and playing around with some startup ideas. I’ll be back in Seattle on August 1 and I’ll eventually join a startup.

Got suggestions about what to do in Buenos Aires? Let me know!

Q: What startup will you be joining?

I’m not sure. Since I wanted to travel for a few months, I really had to do that first and then look once I get back to Seattle.

But… if you have suggestions, here’s what I’m looking for:

• Project management / business role at a small company, or development for a startup
• Seattle based (or allow me to work remotely). I like Seattle and I’m not planning on leaving anytime soon.
• Ideally consumer or mobile apps, but I’m open to other ideas.

Coming soon — Fun stories from Google: Pink Princess and the Annoyatron .

April Fools Day

I’m embarrassed to admit that I almost fell for Gmail custom time. I thought “oh, that’s sort of sketchy”… and then I quickly remembered it’s April Fools day. Nice try, guys .

I think this is my favorite testimonial:

“I used to be an honest person; but now I don’t have to be. It’s just so much easier this way. I’ve gained a lot of productivity by not having to think about doing the ‘right’ thing.”

Todd J., Investment Banker

Note the investment banker part. Tee hee

Form Happy – Happy Forms!

I’ve gone a little bit form happy today. Google Docs just announced today the introduction of forms in Google Spreadsheets. Oh, happy day…

Prior to this, I had a simple little form app that I wrote. It wasn’t great, but it kind-of-sort-of did the trick. There were two versions that I used for Seattle Anti-Freeze:
1) Public Access – anyone can add or remove rows. All updates get emailed to me.
2) View-Only Access – only admins can add or remove rows. Anyone can view the data.

For the “add yourself to the invite list” form, I used #1. This was mostly ok – I just had to be diligent about monitoring the list. I got a lot of comments about why there isn’t more security on my forms, but it really wasn’t a problem. Sure, I could lock stuff down with a password – but why? There’s a balance between security and the user interface – more security is not always a good thing (although it would have been nice if a certain someone stopped adding Barney Stinson to my lists…).

For the guest list, I used #2. It let anyone view it but not edit it. Technically Google Spreadsheets could do this before, it was just a little more work to add rows (since you have to be logged in to gmail). Easy adding and removing, but there was no ability to edit the contents of a row. One day I fully meant to get around to implementing this, but now… meh.

Hellooooo forms. Beautiful. Perfect. I’ve got a little bit form happy today by replacing my old forms with new Google Spreadsheets form. I’ve got a new invite list form, an idea submission form, and a form to track the guest list for parties. Excellent.

And, you can monitor any changes to the docs via iGoogle. Wheeeee! This makes me a happy person.

Google Seattle/Kirkland Tech Talks

Google Seattle/Kirkland is running its tech talk series with speaking from inside and outside of Google. Here’s the lineup:

Register at http://www.google.com/events/seattle_techtalk

Contact seattle-events@google.com with questions.

Linking for Dollars

[UPDATE: I emailed Linking for Dollars and they have now updated their code to include the rel="nofollow" attribute. They now fall within the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Nice work!]

Much like I nod my head to the inventor of Pet rocks, I would nod to whoever came up with Facebook gifts. If you can get people to pay $15 (adjusted for inflation) for a rock, or $1 to send an icon (eg, “gift”) with a message, I say “bravo!” The sillier the idea, the more impressed I am when someone monetizes it. Really – I’m impressed with their brilliance in marketing.

In a similar fashion, I say “bravo” to Empowering Youth’s Linking for Dollars* initiative. Empowering Youth* is, presumably, trying to raise its pagerank (or if not pagerank specifically, they’re trying to market their company). Instead of paying people to link to them, which breaks Google Webmaster Guidelines, they’ll donate $1 to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for each person that links to them. It doesn’t seem quite so unethical if the money is going to a charity, does it?

Empowering Youth, Inc, is sponsoring an effort to raise funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Last year, “Linking for Dollars” raised $500! You can help. Empowering Youth will pay one dollar to St. Jude, just for posting this announcement. Details are here

However, all the reasons that search engines don’t like paid links are in play here (read Matt Cutt’s post about this). The basic idea is this: if I see John hanging out with Daniel, I will assume that John likes something about Daniel. Maybe he thinks Daniel is interesting, or smart, or funny, etc – I don’t know what it means, but it probably means something positive about Daniel. If Daniel pays John to hang out with him, well, it doesn’t really mean much, does it? Paid links are the same way, regardless of where the money goes.

Now, in all honesty, I don’t think Linking for Dollars / Empowering Youth knows about any of this fancy search engine optimizer stuff. They may have never heard of paid links, and they probably don’t know that it’s “illegal.” They probably said “hey, we want to get the name out about our company – and wouldn’t it be great if we could do this in a charitable way?” They came up with a great way of doing this – but it just may be one that’ll get their site dropped. Yikes!

So, bravo to Linking for Dollars. I applaud your creativity and your ability to align reader’s charitable inclinations (and likely your own) with marketing your company. Frankly, I think charities would be more effective if they could better align people’s “selfish” motivations with their own donation goals. But, you’re still breaking the rules of the game – or at least the Google Webmaster Guidelines – by paying for links. Tsk tsk.

* Any links to Linking for Dollars and Empowering Youth use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. I won’t play in this pagerank game .