I probably should have left [redacted]'s name out of it. He's a nice guy, but a bit cynical and rough on the edges, at least he was 15 years ago. He fit in well in New York, brutally honest, but actually generally nice.
Edit: I should point out that we were in Google NYC, as were the researchers. We had lunch with them some times. I remember the first name and face of the guy who submitted the slow code, but forget his family name and intentionally left his name out.
New Yorker to New Yorker adds a lot of context. Google's corporate culture is generally very Californian, but this happened all within the New York office between people who generally got along pretty well and knew each other decently.
In context, there was a heavy note of respect for someone's abilities and disappointment that they weren't performing at a top level. He wouldn't have been so harsh with someone who was new or was a weaker engineer, or someone who wasn't used to New York culture.
Yeah, that might have made it sound as if he's always like that. To his credit, he was one of those that had to be involved when things got desperate, e.g. the insane and massive data recovery to prevent the index from growing stale during a PCR that wasn't properly planned for (if you were around, you know what I'm talking about).
Yea, nice guy and solid engineer. He was actually my TA for a systems engineering class back in school. He was actually very helpful in solving other people's problems, but a bit blunt in encouraging people to reach their full potential.
> New Yorker to New Yorker adds a lot of context. Google's corporate culture is generally very Californian
As a lifelong Californian who moved to NY, this makes sense.
Though I don't know if it's a blanket excuse... There's a reason that my friends at Goldman would agree that Google's culture is better, and a lot of it has to do with the difference between CA and NY culture. I completely dismiss the claims that the difference is just about surface-level abrasiveness, instead of noticeable differences in how unkindly people treat each other. I regularly see strangers here treat each other in ways that I didn't see in 30+ years in California.
Ie, "he's from New York" isn't quite a rebuttal to "he's being an asshole at work". The work culture is more tolerant of assholes, but that barely makes it better.
I grew up in the upper Midwest, went to school outside Boston, and spent most of my adult life in New York and Hong Kong. I haven't spent much time in California, so maybe I'm placing too many of the cultural problems I saw at Google at the foot of Californian culture. I saw lots of pressure to "be Googly", which seemed to result in a lot of passive-aggression. That matches the stereotypes I've heard of LA and SF cultures.
New York and Hong Kong are both very impatient places that don't suffer fools lightly. They're both brutally honest places, but with strong shared identities. Both places have lots of people from elsewhere who are sympathetic to being new to the city.
The quintessential New York story is the woman pushing a stroller (buggy, for my overseas friends) out of a subway car. A man in a hurry is passing her, looks over his shoulder, they make eye contact and silently agree he should help. He grabs the front of the stroller, they carry it up the stairs, and he sets the stroller down at the top of the stairs. They give each other a nod, and he runs off. Never a word is spoken. On the other hand, if you stop in the middle of the sidewalk to read a map or talk on the phone in New York, don't be surprised if people bump into you, perhaps on purpose.
I just left Goldman after more than a decade. I actually really preferred the corporate culture to the Google culture, but most of my time was in Hong Kong. I even knew a couple of people who worked at Goldman, went to Google, and came back to Goldman. I don't doubt that there are some assholes there, particularly in trading, but my experience in both Strats and Technology was overwhelmingly positive. In my experience, abusive MDs didn't last long, but maybe I was very lucky. If you're having a tough time, I don't want to give out full names, but some pretty unique names: Laurent, Jia, Dunstan, and C.K. all really seem to care for their folks. The heads of SRE, One Delta Strats, and Flow Strats in Hong Kong also seem to be really great managers, but Grahaeme, Nick, and Alain are pretty common names.
At Google, a friend of mine managed a couple of small teams (on a shoestring budget, using mostly interns) and completed a couple of projects ahead of time, only to get them cancelled by middle management right before launch. One of the projects even had heavy buy-in from upper management, but he got essentially zero credit for either one because they were cancelled before launching. It was incredibly frustrating for him and he left. In my experience, Goldman runs projects much better, particularly using "Projito" internal contracts that list the value proposition, deliverables, timetable, and whose budget is paying for it.
Also, despite Goldman's reputation, I saw a lot less arrogance at Goldman than at Google. Goldman has a much more healthy respect for its competitors, though with good reason. I've also seen a few people transition from Google to Goldman and take a bit of time to adjust to the idea that Google's way of doing things is best in Goldman's operating environment. At Google, I got the sense that lots of people thought that Google was better than its competitors because they were smarter. At Goldman, I got the sense that lots of people felt they were better than their competitors because they had higher expectations of themselves.
Why am I not surprised that you are actually not a New Yorker, always the transplants that project their most negative sides onto the city culture as an excuse
Edit: I should point out that we were in Google NYC, as were the researchers. We had lunch with them some times. I remember the first name and face of the guy who submitted the slow code, but forget his family name and intentionally left his name out.
New Yorker to New Yorker adds a lot of context. Google's corporate culture is generally very Californian, but this happened all within the New York office between people who generally got along pretty well and knew each other decently.
In context, there was a heavy note of respect for someone's abilities and disappointment that they weren't performing at a top level. He wouldn't have been so harsh with someone who was new or was a weaker engineer, or someone who wasn't used to New York culture.