(Note, I'm new here, let me know if there's anything I can do better when writing textposts)
Edit: It seems like maybe my particular role isn't that interesting. Which orgs within google are good to work for?
If management won't let you understand enough of the business to do so, I sympathize, I've been there. But if you're allowed to understand the business and are expecting someone else to come up with the innovation, you just need to get your shit together and be an engineer.
If you like the business but don't like what you're doing, can that change soon? If this is the deciding factor, why not phrase it that way to whoever can make that decision? Nothing to lose ...
If you just want to leave the company in general, than isn't your answer "yes?"
For example, I was once offered the opportunity to work on low-latency software that identifies users as they move between websites (fingerprinting in ad tech speak). There are tons of cool CS problem around this, but in the end I turned it down.
Now I do ostensibly 'boring' CRUD work for a large eCommerce marketplace company. But it's an honest business model that benefits both sides of that market and I feel happier than I would have been in ad tech.
But it never hurts to interview.
Some resented being moved interstate or overseas, and sought a path home to where they like to be.
Some say they are burned out and burnt by scale problems but mainly I think it's loss of autonomy at root. Being told to do things you don't believe in is hard.
Only one left in some sense fully vested, and he's a bit bored by the outside world. I don't think google is a 'chocolate factory' but be warned after initial enthusiasm wears off, you need to retain some sense of core role in any job, and few may be as accommodating as Google is said to be.
I'd look internally first.
1. Pushing code and being unaware of the build system that does anything else.
2. Unable to comprehend that there can be teams/companies where some products are written and maintained by one person, and does not have any practical code reviewing. (This is not a good thing, but it is not difficult to imagine how that can be).
3. (and lately), people explaining things that come off to me as SWE/SRE friction, as opposed to the typical google SRE hiring/book propaganda.
I'll add anything I can think of, but obviously it's one persons opinion.
General career advice has been discussed a lot here, but it really depends on your personality and motivation. (E.g. do you want a stable job, can you tolerate a stable job for a long time, are you looking to get into management, can you pull off company hopping every 2 years, are you a SWE and do you have a math background & drive to branch into data science, are you planning to launch a startup and what skills are you still missing to do that, etc)
I was extremely happy at Google for many years. I liked my coworkers, I liked my work, I liked my manager. I did get burned out from time to time, but usually there was something interesting to keep me going through the rough patches, and my team, coworkers, and managers were all very supportive of what I needed to do to stay productive and happy (which in a lot of cases was "sleep for 2 days and maybe wake up to have a meeting that would be inconvenient to move"). It was quite wonderful. I had no trouble getting promoted, got "strongly exceeds" performance reviews, and had a lot of fun. Good times.
All good things must come to an end eventually, however. I came into work one day and my project was cancelled (and not like "wind it down over the next 6 months", but literally "might as well delete the CLs you're working on") and I hastily transferred to another interesting-sounding team that, in retrospect, I kind of got the hard-sell to join.
As it turned out, I didn't really care for the other team that I transferred to, and thought to myself "everyone else on my old team got 6 months to sit at home and research other projects to transfer to, so I'll just look for another project." I did not get that option. I was basically told "you just transferred, so you can't leave." And then told, "you really aren't getting enough work done on your own hours, I want you to be here at 9am so I can make sure you're working." That went as well as you'd imagine. A bunch of people advised me "you're depressed, you should take 3 months off and get some antidepressants". I talked with my doctor and did that. In the end, it had no effect. The third-party company that handles paid leave denied my claim, so it was unpaid leave. I decided to take a vacation right at the end of my leave... which the vacation system decided was invalid and silently discarded. When I was on vacation without cell phone service, Google started calling my parents (I'm 32 BTW) looking for me. It was quite a production when I finally got cell phone service back. 3 months of de-stressing, instantly erased.
I got back and started working on a new project under the supervision of my existing manager. He decided that, based on git commit timestamps, I wasn't programming quickly enough. (I got that from another very new manager once, and it was also an App Engine project. I'm not sure if that says more about me or App Engine, but I digress.) To be brutally honest, I'm kind of offended that he didn't consider me to be capable of forging timestamps on git commits. I thought about it, honestly, but in the end decided that experienced managers knows that some things are easy and some things are hard. But in the end, I thought honesty was the best policy.
I was pretty stressed out at this point because my manager and I clearly didn't get along, and the project I wanted to work on didn't have official headcount so I couldn't really get out of a bad situation. At that point I wrote up some email to the relevant concerned parties and realized "I do not want to read the response to this email", so I didn't. Some time passed and someone from HR called me saying "you know if you are gone for 3 days, you're voluntarily resigning, right?" I said, "yup." And that was the end of my experience working for Google. I still have my laptop and badge. They still have a box of my stuff (including my beloved Realforce 87UB keyboard!) Oh well.
My point is, there are other places to work. Google is a huge company and some people are happy and some people aren't. If you're unhappy, maybe you can find happiness elsewhere. I'll tell you one thing, though... antidepressants won't make you happy about a job you don't like.
That's awfully generic advice, but to do better you'll need to get an advisor who can get to know you.
GXJam prolly wasn't designed for that purpose in mind, but that's how I use it :)
I have been at Google about 12 years now and had a three year stint in Payments until somewhat recently. Out of all of the organizations, projects, and products I worked on (6 projects, 12 managers, 5 offices, 2 continents), Payments is the least Google-feeling of them all with the worst management and politics (frankly it was fucked). The rest of Google was a dream in comparison. Had I known Payments was in bad shape, I might not have joined it originally.
Before leaving, try somewhere else. I recently founded my own team elsewhere build software for distributed system infrastructure, and I cannot tell you how fun it is. The joy is still at Google, but Payments is a blackhole. I can't believe the rest of the leadership tolerates that hostile black sheep of an org.
Google is largely what you make of it.
