by refulgentis | 2026-02-07 21:20:11+00:00
One of my first hard lessons at G was all the little sayings mean whatever you want them to mean. You can end up really confused in conversation with someone who uses a saying to justify something you feel is the opposite of the saying.

i.e. “trying to go for promotion” <==> “cozy vibes and self-interested comfort”...promo-hunting is the opposite of cozy vibes, i.e. rest and vest. My first week at G, someone took me aside privately for was advising _not_ to be promo-seeking and that being a ladder climber was a recipe for unhappiness. Why? More or less because it was a crapshoot and also wasn't based on achievement as much as perception, and there's a certain type of person who is very good at managing perception. They are not a good person. And they were right on that.

“Ill and cancelled projects” <==> “luck surface area”...I'm about 90% sure I know exactly what project the poster was talking about. To be honest more straightforward than I was in my initial reply, "increasing luck surface area" is one the most fucking insane reframings of "working cross purposes on the flavor of the day." It's not like Sergey's showing up and saying "I know we must do $X" and then everyone in 6 step-leader chain in the 3 orgs affected hears that immediately, is immediately on board, and shepherds it to a conclusion.

People are people.

75% of what Sergey says is gonna be out of context bullshit because he lacks the familiarity and deep understanding you get from grappling with a problem over time.

80% of your management chain will quietly ignore what he said because they understand this, and understand that you're supposed to be polite to the higher up dilletantes, but continue working as planned.

That's not to say this is great or doesn't have it's own downsides.

Something big at Google I did ended up extremely fucked up because my local org's engineering team was super focused on making Project $Y a big deal, even though VPs and directors across 3 orgs were begging for us to do work on finishing up Project $X, and I had that work done 3 years earlier.

But, all it took was A) me being an engineer B) middle engineering management in my org not giving a shit, because middle management was newly promoted during COVID, and in that bucket of 80% of overachievers who are playing personality games. (c.f. Ian Hickson's leaving Google essay and how decision making evolved to be based on "how do I benefit"). And engineering leads in that org were super excited about project $Y, so everything else be damned, they were going to do project $Y and anyone thinking about project $X was causing trouble.

You'd think I'd just go to the VPs then, right? But I decided not to and leave. Because even if I did and they backed me up, the fact I was telling anyone at all that Project $X wasn't gonna happen this year either* got me slapped with a troublemaker label, de facto demoted, and a bad performance review. Doubling down on that and asking for an audience with VP(s) involved to correct this would lead, at best, to a narrow short term win, while the bullying would continue until I left, and they had already curtailed my ability to leave by giving me a bad performance review based on vague "not a team player" stuff.

If you're into sports / NFL at all, this is the lesson that Jim Schwartz never learned, and why he'll never be a head coach. You need to be perceived as a team player who won't create any problems to be invited into the backroom, or in my case, be allowed to have strong opinions on what decisions are made in the backroom.