<story><title>Google Calculating Which Employees Are About to Quit</title><url>http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-05-19-n33.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makecheck</author><text>&lt;i&gt;...the algorithm helps Google “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave”...&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sounds like the department of pre-crime. :)&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s fascinating: enough Google employees want to leave, that Google is studying their behavior.  Clearly, even amazing perks, challenging work and brilliant colleagues will wear thin on a person?  Or maybe it&apos;s not that there&apos;s anything wrong with Google per se, but that people are regularly trying to branch out and start their own companies, etc. and no amount of pampering will change those ambitions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jrockway</author><text>I don&apos;t think Google is what it used to be anymore.  I know people that work there, and they say that the perks are gradually being rolled back.  (Instead of dinner, there is left-over pizza from lunch if you stay late; that sort of thing.)  The insurance has never been as good as places like Microsoft (or even universities that run their own healthcare plan).  The fun projects don&apos;t make much money, so most of the people there are working on boring things.  It seems like their standards are slipping too; I worked at DoubleClick before the aquisition, and Google held onto some of the worst developers I have ever met.  (One guy started crying when my boss and I tried to explain database transactions to him.  He works on a database-driven web app for Google.)&lt;p&gt;Anyway, the honeymoon is over, and Google is just an average place with a pretty logo and a popular search engine and email service.  It has all the corporate stupidity that any other big company has.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Calculating Which Employees Are About to Quit</title><url>http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-05-19-n33.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>makecheck</author><text>&lt;i&gt;...the algorithm helps Google “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave”...&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sounds like the department of pre-crime. :)&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s fascinating: enough Google employees want to leave, that Google is studying their behavior.  Clearly, even amazing perks, challenging work and brilliant colleagues will wear thin on a person?  Or maybe it&apos;s not that there&apos;s anything wrong with Google per se, but that people are regularly trying to branch out and start their own companies, etc. and no amount of pampering will change those ambitions.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>iigs</author><text>&lt;i&gt;challenging work and brilliant colleagues&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Word on the street is that there&apos;s some fun work to do but there&apos;s a lot of vanilla corporate grinding on the Adwords interface and reporting infrastructure, and that Google hires a lot of people into those roles before they can branch out into other jobs.&lt;p&gt;Also everyone I&apos;ve personally spoken to about job interviews (i.e. not read about on the internet) was pained by the pomposity/egos of the people that were doing the interviews. In my opinion there&apos;s a lot more to be said for someone that is humble and gets their work done with the occasional intellectual surprise than someone who can school you any day on the One True I/O Monad and takes every opportunity to do so.&lt;p&gt;Of course, it&apos;s also possible that it&apos;s absolutely perfect and the people that I talked to had sour grapes because they never got offers. I don&apos;t know. :)</text></comment>