Working at Microsoft vs Google

Jun.30, 2008 in Google

Sergey Solyanik, left Google to re-join Microsoft as Dev Manager.

I think I am the first person in the Seattle/Kirkland area to do so, so this merits an explanation.

writes Sergey in his blog post. He explains why he chose to move back to MS and below are some notable points from it:

Plusses for Google:

Peer-based review model where one’s performance is determined largely based on peer comments, and much less so based on the observations of the manager.
Wide employee participation in corporate governance. i.e., A lot of internal aspects of Google are ruled by committees of employees who are passionate about an issue, and are willing to allocate some of their time to have this issue resolved.
Doing many things by committee.
Free food.

Negatives for Google:

Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful – search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc). All of them are free, and it’s anyone’s guess how many people would actually pay, say $5 per month to use Gmail. For me, this really does make the project less interesting if people are not willing to pay for it.

WTD Author’s comment: I think Sergey got it wrong because the underlying business model of Google is not to just produce eye candy stuff just for the coolness factor of it, but to build a platform (a platform so huge that even MS can’t complete with it) for a profitable advertising network – to connect advertisers and publishers.
Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" – web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people – and the infrastructure required to support them.
The culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much.
It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it’s a different 10% every week – the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.
The Google Manager is a very interesting phenomenon. On one hand, they usually have a LOT of people from different businesses reporting to them, and are perennially very busy. On the other hand, in my year at Google, I could not figure out what was it they were doing. The better manager that I had collected feedback from my peers and gave it to me.

He concludes by writing:

Am I sorry that I spent this year at Google? Not at all! It gave me a different perspective. It gave me new ideas. It cleared my mind. It gave me a much needed change of pace after the death march of the Windows Home Server release. I enjoyed the company of quite a few really good people from whom I learned a lot…