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.

----

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.

Yup. The Google promo article [1] from today is good on the background for why these things happen. How can you show technical impact on a chat product that scales from 20 million to 80 million users? (numbers made up) Sure, there are challenges, but they're very easy to look at and dismiss as not that hard. If you launch a new chat app it's very clear something happened.

I'd also add that it's a often a lot easier to build and launch something like this with Google infrastructure than it is to get a new feature suggestion taken seriously by someone two levels up and an org over.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241

Seems like discussing burnout and disillusionment with tech is a perennial HN favorite. I've bookmarked a lot of great threads and comments on this topic. Some of my favorites:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22862570

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21645117

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241

Going to bookmark this one too :)