"I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve met who left Google because it was limiting their career, even when they were deeply comfortable working there."
This is why they pay so high. It's a trap. That, and the apparent "status" of working there (which has mostly worn off now)
You've expressed my frustration with what I experienced there exactly. But I do wish I could have that pay back...
Also re: "agile" I came into "agile" 20ish years ago in the form of eXtreme Programming, and it looked nothing like the cargo cult that is SCRUM or its imitations today. It was, in the end, a set of precepts to put creative power into the hands of developers and let them just get things done without management getting in the way of how -- but in exchange the customer is given the ability to say what things get done and (to some degree) when. Developers do their own estimates. "You ain't gonna need it". No big "upfront design". Refactoring and testing, architecture and design built in as a constant overhead as just standard best practices, not stories or tasks in themselves. Planning meetings are coworkers hashing things out in a room, and "stories" are sticky notes on a whiteboard expressed in minimal, non-technical terms. Standups are literally people in a circle giving a very brief update, in case anybody else is interested, not a ritual to prove you're attending work today, or to show off.
In this system, design is an emergent property of a creative group of experts working together. It doesn't preclude design documents, and it still involves architecture discussions. But it doesn't require an explicit PRD/design-doc process.
How I'd like to work in a shop like that again. I can tell you Google was the polar opposite. Everything took forever.
Yes, I left just before (1 year) the bloodletting began. There was already a whiff that GSU refreshes weren't going to be as generous and perf was going to be tougher.
This is why they pay so high. It's a trap. That, and the apparent "status" of working there (which has mostly worn off now)
You've expressed my frustration with what I experienced there exactly. But I do wish I could have that pay back...
Also re: "agile" I came into "agile" 20ish years ago in the form of eXtreme Programming, and it looked nothing like the cargo cult that is SCRUM or its imitations today. It was, in the end, a set of precepts to put creative power into the hands of developers and let them just get things done without management getting in the way of how -- but in exchange the customer is given the ability to say what things get done and (to some degree) when. Developers do their own estimates. "You ain't gonna need it". No big "upfront design". Refactoring and testing, architecture and design built in as a constant overhead as just standard best practices, not stories or tasks in themselves. Planning meetings are coworkers hashing things out in a room, and "stories" are sticky notes on a whiteboard expressed in minimal, non-technical terms. Standups are literally people in a circle giving a very brief update, in case anybody else is interested, not a ritual to prove you're attending work today, or to show off.
In this system, design is an emergent property of a creative group of experts working together. It doesn't preclude design documents, and it still involves architecture discussions. But it doesn't require an explicit PRD/design-doc process.
How I'd like to work in a shop like that again. I can tell you Google was the polar opposite. Everything took forever.