YHK - yet another hacker news clone

18 points karakoram 1 hour ago 10 comments

What's the culture at Google like these days? For Core Teams Like Gmail, Search, Ads.

What's it like working in these traditionally critical departments now?

richard_chase 57 minutes ago | parent

We just let the LLMs rip and spend most of our time in the sleeping pods or the buffet. Six figures for days of relaxation. It truly is the good life.

ramesh31 44 minutes ago | parent

>"We just let the LLMs rip and spend most of our time in the sleeping pods or the buffet. Six figures for days of relaxation. It truly is the good life."

There was a sweet spot in mid-2025 where this was actually the case; Claude Code early adopters could complete sprint work in their sleep while the rest of the world (management) hadn't caught on yet.

Now it's just "oh, this should take you guys a day, right?"

rootsudo 10 minutes ago | parent

Tbf it still is the norm in many other companies but… shhhhh

londons_explore 44 minutes ago | parent

Kinda sad that LLM's let me build little projects that would take a week in an hour, yet Google still isn't releasing much new or different, or even fixing bugs faster.

Mr boss man needs to uncork Google's 'labs' culture.

furyofantares 34 minutes ago | parent

They simply aren't as useful for production stuff as they are for little projects.

They are useful! Just not the 1000x return you get on a tiny thing or the 100x return you get on a small thing.

smt88 21 minutes ago | parent

I completely disagree. If you do the architecture and review the work, they can do bulletproof production work.

I have them review each other’s work before I review it, and they also do security audits of the entire codebase on a regular schedule.

For frontend work especially, the productivity boost is insane. Claude built me a replacement for a complex UI that took a human developer 6 months to build poorly, and Claude did it in two hours.

furyofantares 4 minutes ago | parent

Production was probably the wrong word - I really mean size and complexity of the project.

A replacement for a complex UI that would take a human developer 6 months to do is indeed something I would consider a small project at this point.

dxf 42 minutes ago | parent

Ex-Googler here. I'm not sure there is one answer to your question.

The culture of your org is 100% dependent on where you are, and primarily flows from your Director. This is both good and bad.

The good: You can have islands of positive culture inside otherwise problematic organizations, provided the Director sets that positive culture and makes sure their managers and leaders help enforce it.

The bad: You can be one re-org away from that positive culture going away. That said, I experienced many higher-level re-orgs that people basically considered no-ops because our Director didn't change, and I know of orgs that have had good culture for over 10 years.

If you are considering a role in some part of Google (either as a new hire or an internal transfer), you should ask probing questions about the organization itself to try and understand its specific culture and how that culture is embraced by the people inside it.

argee 15 minutes ago | parent

> If you are considering a role in some part of Google (either as a new hire or an internal transfer), you should ask probing questions about the organization itself to try and understand its specific culture and how that culture is embraced by the people inside it.

A bit easier said than done, when there's a bad director no one is going to tell you in the interview. On the other hand they are unlikely to praise them either, so you can pay attention to the omission if your questions are specific enough.

elpocko 31 minutes ago | parent

You go there every day, and they give you money. It's not great but it's just a job after all. It's quite weird because they expect you to do something for at least 20 hours every week, sometimes even more. It's not easy to keep up.

They made me come in on a Wednesday last week, and I was like "Whaaat?", I'm not doing that for 250K/month, like are you kidding