Hasnain says:

This leaves me with a lot of mixed feelings. It's a blogpost by the founder of Waze on his experience at google and why they left N years later.

I was first nodding along with agreement as a bunch of things matched my experience at a bigco (for better or worse). But then some of the later sections around work-life balance, compensation, and transparency/directness left me with a bad taste in my mouth - in some cases I'd expect the author here to have more control over the things they are complaining about; and in others... well, I don't think 'd enjoy working with them.

"If I had to summarize it, I would say that the signal to noise ratio is what wore me down. We start companies to build products that serve people, not to sit in meetings with lawyers. You need to be able to answer the "what have I done for our users today" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech. I guess that's just not me. As the tech regulation / anti trust heats up - the noise will continue to get louder than the signal. The innovation challenges at Corp-Tech will only get worse as the risk tolerance will go down. Soon, Lawyers > Builders and the builders will need to go elsewhere to start new companies."

Posted on 2021-02-18T06:01:13+0000