Departing Googler: Perks are nice, but I was bored and not getting rich
An anonymous software engineer who says he used to work on AdWords, Google's lucrative if straightforward ad-selling system, has written a blog post explaining why he's leaving the search giant. Unfortunately, his tenure at Google did not include a tutorial on the use of the "Return" key, and most of his post is one long paragraph reaching 1,422 words. Here's the 100-word version on why he split for a social-networking startup.
There are the perks: health benefits, free food, on-campus gyms, a beach volleyball field, the tech talks. Disneyland for three days. There's Google Search, Gmail, Google Reader, or Calendar. I felt proud to work at the company that built these. Every engineer gets either two 24" or one 30" monitor, as well as a company laptop. Then there's the community. In general, Googlers are a great bunch, and smart. But I am more a startup person than a big-company person. At a startup, every individual has a impact. As a recent Google employee, I would have never gotten rich there, even if the stock had doubled or tripled in price. Other Google-specific problems: it is unlikely to work in an area that one is passionate about. Another scale-related problem: Due to the size of the code base, it takes a long time to actually become productive at Google, which can be frustrating at times.
