The problem is that it can hurt your career, especially if you've never worked anywhere else. (random guess: somewhere between 15% and 30% of the workforce falls in that category)
You can learn the wrong lessons: you learn how to go up for promotion rather than build things that work for users.
In the last 10 years it's become extremely common at Google do work that is simply thrown away (because of issues above your pay grade). You could work at Google for 5 years and nothing you worked on ever sees the light of day. That is a problem.
You don't learn what works when your work gets thrown away. You can still get promoted anyway. So why do the work? Just pretend you did it. (It's usually not as black-and-white as that; employees are usually well intentioned but then are surprised when the work that was hyped up by management gets suddenly thrown away.)
I'd say that if you want to have a good career as an engineer, you should focus exclusively on building things from 22 to 26 (or whatever your first 4 years are). If you miss a year or 2 of that because of corporate politics, then you missed a lot of learning, and you may be unqualified for future jobs.
There is legitimately a lot to learn about writing software on the job -- IMO it's more than the equivalent of another 4 year CS degree.
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This is probably the best description of it that I've read (after working there myself for over a decade and seeing the change in values):
I heard someone describe grad school as "17th grade" for some people with the wrong attitude. Google might be "21st grade" for others. That is, you're following metrics set up by an organization -- getting "graded" -- rather than building things for "the world".
The way some Google employees speak about "the world" highlights that disconnect. (e.g. the wearables thing on the front page yesterday was mocked)
To be fair, this is how things work at most jobs. If you work at a big bank or insurance company, you don't really care about "customers" either -- they are too far away from you. You care about what your boss thinks and his or her boss. This is sort of the "default" configuration of society.
Yes, well, I agree with all those criticisms. It's been 9 years of frustration for me, here at Google. But that's not what my comment was about. I took issue with his griping that he couldn't hire and fire and drive a meat grinder. To me that's an entirely other kind of dysfunction...
Perf at Google is broken. But I think it's endemic to large companies, probably. I only worked at smaller ones before. I worked for some that were meat grinders, and others that were better.
You can learn the wrong lessons: you learn how to go up for promotion rather than build things that work for users.
In the last 10 years it's become extremely common at Google do work that is simply thrown away (because of issues above your pay grade). You could work at Google for 5 years and nothing you worked on ever sees the light of day. That is a problem.
You don't learn what works when your work gets thrown away. You can still get promoted anyway. So why do the work? Just pretend you did it. (It's usually not as black-and-white as that; employees are usually well intentioned but then are surprised when the work that was hyped up by management gets suddenly thrown away.)
I'd say that if you want to have a good career as an engineer, you should focus exclusively on building things from 22 to 26 (or whatever your first 4 years are). If you miss a year or 2 of that because of corporate politics, then you missed a lot of learning, and you may be unqualified for future jobs.
There is legitimately a lot to learn about writing software on the job -- IMO it's more than the equivalent of another 4 year CS degree.
----
This is probably the best description of it that I've read (after working there myself for over a decade and seeing the change in values):
https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241
I heard someone describe grad school as "17th grade" for some people with the wrong attitude. Google might be "21st grade" for others. That is, you're following metrics set up by an organization -- getting "graded" -- rather than building things for "the world".
The way some Google employees speak about "the world" highlights that disconnect. (e.g. the wearables thing on the front page yesterday was mocked)
To be fair, this is how things work at most jobs. If you work at a big bank or insurance company, you don't really care about "customers" either -- they are too far away from you. You care about what your boss thinks and his or her boss. This is sort of the "default" configuration of society.