Maybe it has something to do with the way you say it. Maybe you meant to say, "I had a shitty experience at Google", but you accidentally typed, "most of the work is shitty legacy maintenance". Maybe you meant to say that you were not satisfied to start out with the other Nooglers in intro jobs and prove yourself by working your way up, but instead you said that most people start out in shitty jobs and never escape.

What I've observed is that most people at Google are working on shitty legacy maintenance.

I was in New York, which is generally considered to be slightly above other satellites on the project-allocation heap but far below Mountain View, because that's where all the players are. Most people I knew were on uninspiring work, although there were exceptions, but you generally had to be Senior SWE or higher before you were even considered eligible for the good projects (and even some people at Sr. got shafted).

Google has a palpable "Real Googler Line". Above it, you're free to transfer and work as you wish. If you want to change teams, just decide to do it. Hell, Steve Yegge quit his project in public. Below it, you have manager-as-SPOF and one-assigned-project... banking without the upside. When I was there, the RGL was moving upward to somewhere between Senior and Staff.

I don't know why you have a chip on your shoulder against me. I never did anything to you.

You are maligning my company.

You could not figure out how things worked at Google, and expected people to start following the new guy who had only been there a few months and hadn't actually accomplished anything yet, and when people didn't drop the 100,000 engineering years of accumulated wisdom to listen to you, you started believing that it must be the system that was broken and not you.

And that was fine; you can believe whatever you need to believe. But when you start spreading this delusion outside of Google, you are hurting Google.

Most nooglers get a legacy job to start out. When you prove yourself, and people like your ideas, you will be asked to join other projects. You were only there for a very short time. In order for you to transfer to another project, that project has to want you. Without any accomplishments...

And you quickly developed a reputation as the new guy who was publicly lecturing everyone about how things should be. You told them that their languages of choice were all crap, when they were the ones actually getting work done. Despite how talented you think you are, can you see how that might be a turn-off for any team thinking of taking you in?

All these things you claim are you projecting: 1) Most work is shitty legacy maintenance. (You didn't like your first assignment.) 2) Google doesn't listen to reason. (Google does not give carte blanche to nooglers.) 3) There is no way out of a shitty first job. (You couldn't hack your first assignment.) 4) There is a glass ceiling. (You were alienating people.)

When you present your paranoid beliefs as objective facts, people who don't know any better might believe them. That is why I have a problem with what you post.

You, sir, are deeply wrong.

You are maligning my company.

YOUR company? You're telling me you get your pick of the best projects, and that you have at least one of triumvirate on speed dial any time you want to hash out an idea? You think those SVPs and VPs and managers-of-managers-of-managers you're putting yourself out there to defend give a shit about you? Ha!

But when you start spreading this delusion outside of Google, you are hurting Google.

Google is chock-full of high-ranking people making bad decisions. They are hurting Google. I want Google to succeed. It had a great run and a really great culture... for a while. It would be good for the world if it went back to such a state.

Without any accomplishments...

Google's problem is that there are a lot of influential but underqualified people who think that if you didn't do it At Google, it doesn't count; you didn't do it at all, and you don't know what you're talking about. Now that is the epitome of corporate arrogance. And it led to some absolutely stupid product decisions, which I won't name but they're relevant to this discussion.

You told them that their languages of choice were all crap

Google's limited language white-list (C++ and Java only, with Python deprecated in production) is a bad decision. C and C++ are the right tool for the job in some cases. I like Go, but I haven't done much with it. My problem is more with the short white-list and the bad justification for it than with the languages themselves. (Although there is no justification for Java over Scala in 2012.)

I disliked C++ then more than I do now. The quality of C++ code I fell into was pretty bad (object-oriented spaghetti) but that kind of code can be written in any language, and so can good code.

You couldn't hack your first assignment.

Wrong. I didn't get into what happened or why I left, but it wasn't a performance issue. My manager was unethical and lied to me and it caused a lot of hardship. Among other things, he promised a 3.4 rating to prevent me from seeking transfer (I agreed to stay on his project in exchange for a decent number) and then gave me something lower (making transfer impossible). If he had been a decent person and kept his word, I'd have stayed on the project for 18 months and things would have been fine. But I lost all faith in him after he openly lied to me in order to keep me on his project. (He also bait-and-switched me into joining his project, promising work on the new system but putting me on the old one. I gave him the benefit of the doubt on that one. Priorities shift unpredictably and it's often not the manager's fault. Lying about the Perf number was unforgivable.)

There is a glass ceiling.

I never made that claim.

That is why I have a problem with what you post.

I doubt that's all of it.

Will you two please just stop this?

Why? I find both perspectives very informative.

Please don't let your personal relationships spoil an informative (if sometimes heated) discussion. That kind of kills the "hacker" spirit.

Please don't misinterpret anything Michael Church says as being informative. The man is crazy. Like, paranoid schizophrenia crazy. He was banned from Wikipedia not just for vandalism, but for trying to blackmail wikipedia admins by threatening more vandalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mike_Church). He will, of course, claim that this was all a conspiracy against him by the Wikipedia admins, just like he claims that Google management was out to get him. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Isomorphic/Minions_of_the_....

At Google, Michael Church is infamous. Practically everyone has heard of him. He is known primarily for having posted many insane rants to a company-wide mailing list. These threads literally consisted of Michael Church writing a wall-of-text rants followed by leagues of coworkers replying to say, in effect, "For the love of God would you shut up already?". He had few, if any, defenders, yet he pretty much ignored everyone and would keep posting unapologetic follow-ups. He would say the same things internally that he now says externally. He is the best proof there ever was that Google employees can say anything they want and not get fired.

To this day, Michael Church is still a popular meme. As in, literally, we have a meme template that is a church with an M on it, and we (his former peers) use it to mock him. He is that crazy.

He's supposed to be the crazy one, and yet you're still arguing on this 4 day old thread everyone else has forgotten about? Will you please just let it go?

I was hired at Google at nearly the same time as a certain famous ex-Googler. Both of us were given difficult intro jobs with legacy systems, the sort of projects that chew up engineers and spit them out. It's a chance to prove your mettle.

One of us attacked the problem head on, taking on tasks that would normally be "below" us. In the end, the bad project taught him what he needed to know about Google engineering. He replaced the legacy system with modern infrastructure, which brought him public recognition from the senior VPs, new opportunities to work on interesting projects, and nomination for promotion.

The other one of us decided that he was too good for his job. He very publicly whined about how it was below him and how the only way to get ahead at Google is to start out in one of the interesting jobs. Rather than work his way up through a meritocracy, he expected to be instantly recognized for his natural genius. He got poor performance ratings from his peers and manager, and eventually rage-quit after about six months.

It was the classic Goofus and Gallant story.

That's radically inaccurate but I don't have the time to set you right.

As the author of more centithreads than God himself, you don't have time to reply to a comment on the Internet?

I'm kind of impressed with your restraint, actually.

Of course you don't. You are too busy writing the shiny new stuff.

I am an engineer at Google. No, we don't read through patents to figure out how to do something. We are not idiots. If I wanted to implement a pinch/zoom system, I would just do it. It's not rocket science. In fact, I believe I did do it, before I worked at Google. I was writing code for an iPhone app on a version of IOS that did not have the gesture recognizers available in the public API. It's not that hard to recognize two points moving away from each other.