[HN Gopher] I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
___________________________________________________________________
I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
Author : alexzeitler
Score : 330 points
Date : 2024-11-08 20:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mtlynch.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mtlynch.io)
| goalonetwo wrote:
| Ah, another one of those infamous 2018 blog posts on "why I quit
| Google".
|
| And those blog posts absolutely always start by telling you that
| the engineers at Google are the smartest in the world. Oh boy are
| those people indoctrinated.
| neilv wrote:
| What sounded like the usual Google-internal-self-
| congratulatory-echo-chamber nonsense grated on me, too, but I
| kept reading, and was glad I did, because the article didn't go
| like the usual.
| nostrademons wrote:
| They were in 2008. It's largely just people's mental models
| changing slowly, as well as selection bias of people who
| _still_ believe Google has world-class engineering being
| overrepresented among people who still work at Google.
| SamvitJ wrote:
| What companies would you say have world-class engineering now
| (2024)?
| davidfiala wrote:
| > Your manager doesn't promote you? > No, managers at
| Google can't promote their direct reports. They don't even
| get a vote. > Instead, promotion decisions come from small
| committees of upper-level software engineers and managers who
| have never heard of you until the day they decide on your
| promotion.
|
| AIUI, nowadays in 2022+ the manager gets the only vote.
| antognini wrote:
| It used to be that you would put together your promo packet,
| which was sent to the promo committee. These days it is your
| manager who puts together your promo packet. But it is still
| the promo committee (which doesn't include your manager) that
| decides whether or not you get promoted.
| goldfish3 wrote:
| Technically yes, but "promo committee" has also changed to be
| your immediate org instead of being independent. Which makes
| your promo more dependent on your manager's influence.
| gopher2000 wrote:
| Most large tech companies require the manager to write some
| sort of a promo packet to be reviewed by a relevant committee.
| But it's not a mystery and ultimately it falls on the manager
| to put together a strong packet that makes it clear why the
| candidate should be promoted. The promotion attempt itself is
| the manager's vote. Beyond that it comes down to how strongly
| they champion for the candidate's promotion. It's the only way
| to ensure some consistency between promotions, IMO.
| 1024core wrote:
| What I found neat (when I heard about it) was that one could
| nominate yourself for promo, without your manager's assent.
| This is quite rare and a neat feature.
| aix1 wrote:
| In theory, yes. In practice, it would take some pretty
| extraordinary circumstances for one to get promoted without
| their manager's support.
|
| For starters, even if it is the candidate themselves who
| self-nominate, it is still the manager who writes the promo
| readiness assessment that forms the main body of the packet.
| It is also the manager's job to solicit peer feedback and
| represent it to the committee.
|
| One could imagine a scenario where the manager's opinion
| diverges sharply from the assessment of the session lead and
| other senior folks sitting on the committee (who decide
| collectively) but again, those would be some pretty
| exceptional circumstances...
|
| Layered on top of this are promo quotas, which already mean
| that some folks who do tick all the boxes aren't getting
| promoted as soon as they would be otherwise (or at all). That
| is to say that there are lots of headwinds even if the
| manager _is_ supportive, let alone when they aren 't.
| jeffbee wrote:
| At all levels?
|
| I know it changes every year so I don't let my own personal
| experience color my perception of Google 2024, but some years
| when I was there my manager barely even knew where my desk was.
| My promo packets for L5 and L6 were judged by peer committees
| and I am not sure they even saw my manager evaluations. When I
| sat on an L5 promo committee we did not weigh manager
| assessments. This made sense at that time because of how hands-
| off managers were in the realm of the reasons a person could
| get promoted to L5.
| aix1 wrote:
| These days it's the manager who writes the next-level
| assessment (NLA) and it's the NLA that forms the main body of
| the packet that the promo committee looks at. They're also
| the one soliciting and summarizing peer feedback etc.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That's wildly incompatible with my experience there in the
| previous decade. I hope the current managers are up to the
| job! Most of my managers didn't have even the slightest
| inkling of how to evaluate what I was doing on the job. One
| of them was mainly occupied with running the "mindfulness"
| office.
| aix1 wrote:
| > That's wildly incompatible with my experience there in
| the previous decade
|
| Yes, there have been some very signficant changes over
| the last few years. Promos are decided in-org. Managers
| play a much more important role. There are promo quotas
| along with associated pressures (felt more acutely in
| some orgs compared to others).
|
| But, putting that asides, a manager who doesn't have any
| idea of what or how their reports are doing is clearly
| failing at their job under _any_ of those systems.
| alarge wrote:
| No, your manager doesn't decide your promotion. The difference
| between before and now is that before, your manager was
| expected to make the case for your promotion. Now, the manager
| is expected _not_ to be an advocate, but to provide their
| balanced input (ready now, ready soon, not yet ready).
|
| The promotion still goes to a promo committee - although now
| they try to locate it close enough to your org that they _have_
| heard of you, and can have a high-context reviewer (not your
| manager) at the table.
|
| The carryover from the previous system (and the thing that
| these sorts of posts seem to miss) is that every level has
| explicit expectations about the sort of activities that a
| person at that level can be trusted to independently conduct. A
| decision on promotion is a decision on whether or not a person
| has adequately demonstrated that they can do the work of the
| next level. It isn't some sort of award for doing their current
| job well. When someone languishes for a long time at a level,
| it is usually because they aren't demonstrating those next-
| level signals.
|
| The system can feel unfair - like a team that lacks adequate
| opportunities for someone to demonstrate next-level signals, or
| the insistence that work doesn't count until its production
| impact can be assessed (which may take years for some
| projects). But it is rarely as capricious as may sound.
| indigoabstract wrote:
| Will Google turn into a university next?
|
| Because this sounds to me a bit like how things work in
| academia. I think the push there is to publish, but the
| essence is that, for every decision, committees rule.
| ahoka wrote:
| Google works like academia because that's all the founders
| knew.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I mean, it's always seemed pretty academic to me, due to
| the founders.
| shoo wrote:
| the same author has also published an interesting series of
| "annual review" blog posts summarising his progress trying to get
| different software businesses off the ground -- including being
| quite open about the finances. If you're interested in
| boostrapping a software business, and haven't seen them, they're
| well worth reading:
|
| https://mtlynch.io/tags/annual-review/
|
| https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
| Etheryte wrote:
| A good highlight of what quitting your job can look like:
|
| > Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to
| create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few
| years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a
| few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were
| profitable.
|
| We often hear about the successes, and it is easy to be loud
| with success, but it's important to keep in mind the ground
| truth: most companies fail.
|
| It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did
| manage to find something that made money, but realistically
| most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without
| generating income.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's an interesting reality check that in 2023, six years
| into his journey as a bootstrapped founder, Tiny Pilot made
| $225K in profit on ~$1M on revenue. For 2021 and 2022, it
| made roughly a $5K profit; the rest was all losses. He quit
| Google because he couldn't get a promotion presumably from L4
| to L5, but $225K is less than what an L4 makes.
|
| This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is
| pissed off in America, because looking at this experience,
| the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass
| of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock
| grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they
| give you more.
| rvnx wrote:
| A big factor for early employees (not N. 1 or 2, but the
| first XXXX) is purely being lucky to be in the right place
| at the right time.
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stroke-
| of-...
|
| This was 2007. Now worth 15 times more.
|
| The Chef as well:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers
|
| paid 26M USD in 2009. Now worth 15 times more.
|
| So half a billion USD for this.
|
| (same for Nvidia or OpenAI employees just riding the wave)
| away271828 wrote:
| I did "reasonably" well for a couple decades and then I
| did, if not spectacularly, well for a decade+ that
| certainly set me up for retirement. And I might have even
| retired earlier absent COVIVD. Not spectacular sums but
| certainly reasonable amounts given owning a house and
| modest travel sums.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| You really shouldn't quit Google if your plan is to get
| rich. You should quit if you don't care too much about
| money and want more interesting work than being a cog in a
| lucrative machine.
| matwood wrote:
| Yeah. Google or any of the big techs are the lowest risk
| paths to economic stability and independence. Anyone with
| the ability to work on one should absolutely take it.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Those who have the ability to take such a path often have
| other paths available to them that they can take with
| more risk-because the low risk path is _always_ available
| to them as a fallback.
| fullshark wrote:
| Same as it ever was. The company man is hardly a new
| phenomenon.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > This might also be a microcosm of why the working class
| is pissed off in America, because looking at this
| experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow
| smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give
| you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of
| others so that they give you more.
|
| That has always been the case. If anything, software
| development opened up a brand new avenue for people to get
| rich other than stuffy "elite" colleges that feed into
| NYC/Chicago/Boston into finance/law/medicine.
| pkaye wrote:
| There is no guarantee of success. There is a lot of luck
| involved.
|
| Look at Robert Pera who founded Ubiquiti Networks. He was
| working on an idea his bosses ignored on he own during
| nights and weekend and then founded his company.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera
|
| Jensen Huang said when they started Nvidia at one point
| they were thirty days from going out of business.
|
| Also compare the TinyPilot (at $399) to the open source
| JetKVM ($69) which is supposed to come out soon.
|
| https://jetkvm.com/
| WalterBright wrote:
| At one point Musk was within $100,000 of personal and
| business bankruptcy when Tesla ran short of funds.
| ouddv wrote:
| I would bet a substantial sum that Tesla was insolvent
| early in the m3. They suddenly were firing people all
| over the place and not paying many vendors, and paying
| others quite late. Additionally, the finance pros kept
| quitting right then....
|
| I think it went bk, but Musk bet that he could hype up
| the stock enough to raise cash in the next offering and
| then pretend it never happened...
| WalterBright wrote:
| If you're that interested, read the Musk biography I
| linked to in this thread. It's a good read.
| oblio wrote:
| Based on which source? Musk?
| WalterBright wrote:
| The biography "Elon Musk" by Vance.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Billionaire-SpaceX-
| Shaping/...
| I_AM_A_SMURF wrote:
| > This might also be a microcosm of why the working class
| is pissed off in America, because looking at this
| experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow
| smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give
| you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of
| others so that they give you more.
|
| I mean getting a job as a SWE at Google is hardly a good
| strategy if you don't enjoy writing software. But yes once
| you're there is very hard to justify doing anything else,
| there's a reason why they call them "golden handcuffs".
| sangnoir wrote:
| > This might also be a microcosm of why the working class
| is pissed off in America
|
| I know it's topical, but I _really_ don 't think the
| working class on America is pissed because they are
| struggling to increase their annual income from $350,000 to
| $500,000 at their Big Tech job. That's an elites-problem;
| or whatever you choose to call anyone in the top 5% earning
| bracket.
| avereveard wrote:
| Side of the same coin. Salaryman earning millions are
| still salaryman. You're bounded to the whims of the
| employer, and can lose it all from the ups and down of
| the personal relationships that surround you. The
| American dream is not the rich employee, is moving out to
| that relationship and build something you own.
|
| Building something that is bounded to the marked at large
| and can weather the individual change of whims is
| increasingly harder as megacorp are capturing more and
| more value in every corner of the market.
|
| The entire mechanism that elevated the working class to
| entrepreneurship is broken and the effects do include a
| working class increasingly repressed, at ever income
| bracket.
| amrocha wrote:
| No they're not. A "salaryman" earning millions has
| financial independence in 5 years maximum if they so
| choose.
|
| Most people are forced to work or starve. These are not
| the same.
| avereveard wrote:
| > has financial independence
|
| well yeah the dream is not the salaryman lifestile, but
| the financial independence, thanks for agreeing with me
| amrocha wrote:
| The "salaryman lifestyle" necessitates low wages. It's a
| "lifestyle" because you can't quit it. You make barely
| enough money to sustain your family, so that you're
| forced to keep working against your will.
|
| If you're making millions of dollars, you're not a
| salaryman. You're making a choice to sell your labor, but
| you can always quit and the impact to your livelihood
| will be minimal.
| mcdeltat wrote:
| I don't know about America, but keep in mind that having
| an income which is a large number doesn't necessarily
| mean you have tonnes of wealth (in most general sense of
| the word), due to cost of living. In my country, you
| could be in the top 5% of earners and still not be
| automatically set or life or anything like that, because
| tax and housing is so bloody expensive it's ridiculous.
| Even on $200k+ you're still stuck at that job for a
| decade or more to afford a low-to-mid tier
| house/apartment, unless you have generational wealth. No,
| you won't be homeless, which is a lot to be thankful for,
| but you're still pretty locked in to being a wage minion.
| In my country, I reckon the top 5% earning is more like
| where the average should be, in order for the average
| person to have a decent life.
| saagarjha wrote:
| That depends on how you live your life. Most of the
| people who are making even the top 1% of the salaries in
| the US are probably not set for life. They could be if
| they quit immediately and moved to Vietnam maybe, but
| otherwise their cash is probably locked up in a house or
| spent on things like their car or school for their kids.
| elegantlie wrote:
| I worked in big tech in one of the coastal cities. Most
| of my coworkers, although great people, were delusional
| in terms of money. I was getting paid between 200k to
| 400k during my tenure, and after working there a few
| years, I was set for life.
|
| Reality check: even in "high cost of living areas",
| typical salaries are around 50k. Most of my coworkers
| came from wealthy families and perceived buying condos in
| Chelsea as middle class activities. I don't think they
| saw themselves as rich. And to be fair, many probably
| didn't actually save that much money, because they had
| such expensive lifestyles.
| amrocha wrote:
| Being "stuck" at a job for a decade, living a life with
| zero financial worries, does not compare to the average
| worker who has to work for 40+ years, cannot afford to
| purchase property, and has to rely on social security in
| old age when they can't work anymore.
|
| Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly
| lack of perspective.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's not the dollar values so much as the incentive
| structure.
|
| I think most Americans have a core value of "work hard,
| get compensated for your work". There's a basic value of
| _fairness_ and meritocracy, that you can take steps to
| control your destiny and will be rewarded proportionally.
|
| When you've been at Google for a few years these days,
| you realize that this isn't really true. Nobody knows or
| cares how good a programmer you are. Nobody really cares
| how hard you work either. Your ability to get promoted is
| basically dependent upon _how well your manager knows how
| to work the system_ and then _whether you listen to your
| manager_. I 'm an eng manager there; I am relatively good
| at working the system, having gotten my reports 4
| promotions in the last 2 years. My tech lead does all the
| actual work, because he actually cares about product
| quality, knows the code well, mentors the team
| effectively, and is a nice guy to work with. My job is
| just to get him promoted (which I've done, twice) and
| ensure that he doesn't leave. The last promotion packet
| hinged on work that took him maybe a couple months to do,
| but that I managed to spin into a big complex project,
| because it was stuff that folks at the Director/VP level
| cared about deeply but had no idea how to do. All the
| rest of the two years, the time spent fixing bugs and
| improving code health and mentoring the team and
| delivering small usability improvements, was basically
| ignored (don't tell him or the rest of the team!) because
| it fell below the radar screens of the decision-makers
| who hold the purse strings.
|
| When it comes to the working class, I suspect that most
| of them would _like_ to be able to take pride in their
| work and be rewarded for it. To make money because they
| did a particularly clean plumbing job, and not because
| they paid off Yelp to increase their rating to 4.5 stars
| or happened to run the right Google AdWords. But that 's
| not the world we live in, salesmanship and paying the
| right taxes to the right overlords matters more than
| actually doing the job well, and people are pissed about
| it.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Eye opener I expected but still a bit jarring to have
| confirmed. Am both sad and glad I'll never work in a
| place like that.
| safety1st wrote:
| Maybe not when you put it that way, but small businesses
| used to be a larger share of the economy and a more
| viable "rags to riches" path than they are today. The
| system is undoubtedly rigged to favor large businesses -
| most people understand that intuitively but the anti-
| trust cases the government is currently prosecuting and
| in many cases winning are hard evidence of how the US
| really punted on protecting the small businesses from the
| big ones over the last few decades. You aren't going to
| find many people in the working class who disagree with
| the idea that big corporations should be cut down to size
| and we should have an economic system that's friendlier
| to people who want to be their own boss.
| shostack wrote:
| Your attempt to sow a divide among people by labeling
| them the derogatory "elites" in line with GOP talking
| points isn't helpful here.
|
| If you want to ground this conversation in facts, here's
| a few for you to chew on:
|
| 1. Someone earning $500k/year TC still has far more in
| common with someone earning $80k or even $50k when you
| compare them against people with hundreds of millions or
| billions of dollars who control capital.
|
| 2. Someone earning $500k in a vhcol area like the Bay
| Area still likely cannot afford what historically was
| considered a "nice" home in a "nice" neighborhood without
| years of saving up when those homes cost $3M+.
|
| 3. Someone earning that may not necessarily be wealthy
| and be largely dependent on their ability to continue
| receiving a paycheck compared to those with true wealth
| who can take loans against like billionaires.
|
| The reality is, someone earning that much is likely
| financially comfortable where a major disaster likely
| won't bankrupt them, and can likely afford reasonable
| housing for a family, and retire one day. That is more
| than most of America for sure right now and that sucks,
| but it absolutely does not make them "elite" and it
| speaks volumes of the efficacy of the GOP propaganda
| machine that you and so many others think that.
|
| That _used_ to simply be "the American dream."
| j7ake wrote:
| If they graduated from Ivy or Stanford or Berkeley, they
| are elite even if they are unemployed after graduating.
| 500ktc wrote:
| With all due respect, you're disconnected from reality.
|
| - Earning 500k TC for 15 years equals financial
| independence and retiring at age 45 if you're careful
| (even if you lived in a HCOL)
|
| - Earning 50k means working until you're 65 with a
| meanger 401k and spend the rest of your life depending on
| social security
|
| Just because high earners aren't billionaires doesn't
| mean they can relate in any way to someone earning 50k or
| even 80k, that is absurd.
| whack wrote:
| > This might also be a microcosm of why the working class
| is pissed off in America, because looking at this
| experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow
| smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give
| you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of
| others so that they give you more.
|
| Here's an alternate take. A competitive free market has
| squeezed corporate profits so much, that most would-be-
| capitalists would be better off joining the working class
| instead. Consider the alternative where anyone who doesn't
| have the financial means to build their own company, is
| relegated to a sub-par quality of life.
| Narhem wrote:
| Very rarely is working for yourself/contract type work
| going to make more money than being a hired employee.
|
| Someone quoting likely means they were hired edged out by
| employees who were sucking the corporate companies dick.
|
| But you need context, for instance due to the nature of
| Google employees pushing other employees out is likely due
| to external organization.
|
| At this point either I'm going to be a part for the rest of
| my life or I'm going to shoot people.
| rvnx wrote:
| (Not saying it for this person, as I don't know), but there
| is a case also where you can be a very average performer,
| just hiding in a large corporation (or retiring, as some
| people even say), then you will be very well paid, and highly
| considered. Then once you leave to create your own projects
| or join a small start-up, reality hits.
| rozap wrote:
| Ain't this the truth. So many mediocre people hide in a
| giant company, learn how to hit their kpis and think
| they're crushing it, but get smacked in the face by reality
| when they leave.
|
| My experience at a small company is that I always feel
| mediocre :)
| disqard wrote:
| I assure you that Imposter Syndrome is a daily reality
| even for Senior Engineers at Google.
| I_AM_A_SMURF wrote:
| I thought once I reached Staff at Google it would go
| away. It in fact made it even worse now that I have a
| whole slate of incredible peers to compare myself to.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The internal culture at Google outright fosters it.
| Everything from the interview process on.
|
| My mental health is 5x better since leaving.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's a _lot_ harder to found a business successfully than
| most people imagine.
| cromagnum wrote:
| Incorrect. In fact YC's (i.e. the website you're on) whole
| thesis is that it's a lot _easier_ to found a business
| successfully than most people imagine. Yeah, they've
| drifted from their roots a little but I think it's been
| proved out.
|
| The irony is killing me.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 80% of businesses fail within 5 years.
| cromagnum wrote:
| Well, less than 1% of lifeforms are born as humans but
| that doesn't seem to scare people into not having babies.
| snicky wrote:
| Interesting, but I don't get it. Are you saying people
| aren't scared of having babies even though they can
| randomly give birth to an ant or an elephant?
| Swizec wrote:
| It's incredibly easy to found/start a business.
|
| It's incredibly hard to build that beginning into a
| profitable money machine.
| theptip wrote:
| How many have you founded? Important data point for such
| an opinion.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| > It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he
| did manage to find something that made money, but
| realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep
| at it without generating income.
|
| Precisely this, and while I completely support the original
| author in their quest to find their own bootstrapped
| business, I keep wondering what the "what if" would have
| looked like had they stayed earning the big bucks in Google.
| sgerenser wrote:
| You don't really have to wonder, Google (really all big
| tech) stocks mooned since 2018, so he'd likely be far
| wealthier.
| yard2010 wrote:
| I love the part of the story in which a guy in a windbreaker
| knocks on his door on Sunday morning and tells him that he has
| to come with him since a sprinkler popped in his office.
|
| I know really few people that can write such relatable and
| honest content like this guy. I've been stalking him for years
| now. Great inspiration source
| belval wrote:
| I'll play devils advocate because it's more fun but this:
|
| > The pipeline didn't record many metrics. The ones it did have
| made it look like things had gotten worse. My bug discoveries
| caused the overall bug count to increase. The pipeline's failures
| increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies instead of
| silently passing along bad data.
|
| I understand why the author might think this is better, but all
| software have bugs and a lot of data is tainted by those bugs.
| Was fixing the pipeline an actual priority? Was it critical? If
| so, how were the downstream internal customers dealing with the
| new exceptions? Why were they not raising a ruckus about it? Why
| was the author allowed to move on to a different project if there
| were so many bugs in that pipeline deserving of a promotion?
|
| I have met more people in life that made a big deal out of
| ultimately unimportant details than the opposite. Internal
| pipelines usually have a lower bar and the downstream consumer
| may not even care about 75% of features that are just there and
| unused. Being a senior engineering is also knowing when to leave
| good enough alone.
|
| > My other work didn't look so good on paper either. On several
| occasions, I put my projects on hold for weeks or even months at
| a time to help a teammate whose launch was at risk. It was the
| right decision for the team, but it looked unimpressive in a
| promo packet. To the promotion committee, my teammate's project
| was the big, important work that demanded coordination from
| multiple developers. If they hornswoggled me into helping them,
| it's evidence of their strong leadership qualities. I was just
| the mindless peon whose work was so irrelevant that it could be
| pre-empted at a moment's notice.
|
| Is that conclusion really wrong? It's a bit uncharitable for sure
| but that is indeed what happened not just how it appeared to have
| happened. If your project was such a low priority that dropping
| it for several months does not flash a red light in someone's
| dashboard, then I am sorry but that does not seem promotion
| worthy.
|
| The little comic also has good examples that things that imo are
| not "senior" work. Writing E2E tests for a product that is
| already shipped is worthwhile, but unless it's something very
| special it's not complex enough, does not require enough design
| to be considered "senior work".
|
| Again I don't know the guy, maybe he did get an unfair read on
| his body of work, but reading the entire blog I mostly get the
| vibes of "I worked 2 years at Google and then wanted to be a
| senior so I rushed my promo packet without a cornerstone project"
| and the committee refusing that is just the system working as
| intended.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Hi, I'm "the guy." Thanks for reading!
|
| I largely agree with you.
|
| I didn't mean to argue that the work I was doing for the first
| two years merited a promotion.
|
| My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing what
| my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that I did
| the work well, and then later found out that it was all
| worthless for career advancement.
|
| I think there are competing interests at a large organization
| that make this difficult. On the one hand, you have grungy work
| that needs to get done but only requires the skill of a junior
| developer (e.g., fixing bugs, writing tests). On the other
| hand, everyone at Google wants to advance their career by doing
| senior or above work, so how do you incentivize anyone to do
| the grungy work if it essentially means a career pause? I don't
| know how to solve that problem at scale.
|
| I didn't and still don't harbor resentment toward Google or my
| managers for how promotions worked. I think it's difficult to
| align incentives for an organization with 100k people, and they
| chose a reasonable strategy. But I felt like the things I was
| good at didn't align well with career advancement at Google, so
| that was why I left.
| skulk wrote:
| > My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing
| what my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that
| I did the work well, and then later found out that it was all
| worthless for career advancement.
|
| oh wow. Reading this made me realize why (in the context of a
| big tech career) it's such a good idea to have a mentor whose
| reasonably far away from your team. They could have probably
| pointed this out to you early.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Yeah, I found a mentor at the beginning of year 4, and they
| were very helpful. There were a lot of things happening on
| my team that I didn't understand, and my mentor was able to
| recognize them as political patterns that were somewhat
| common.
|
| I realize I maybe came across as naive thinking that I
| could get promoted without thinking much about career
| strategy or politics, but that's how the first few years of
| my career had worked out.
|
| After undergrad, I worked for Microsoft for three years,
| and I got promoted twice without ever thinking about
| career. I just did the projects my team needed, and did a
| good job. Same thing when I worked for NCC group: promoted
| after a year and was on track for more.
|
| One of the big differences in other companies was that they
| gave me opportunities to demonstrate aptitude in my day to
| day work rather than needing to see me launch something big
| and shiny. I invested a lot into peer reviews and building
| repeatable processes, so managers at those companies were
| able to see that impact my team even if it would be hard to
| prove measurable results to an external promo committee.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Author here. Cool to see this pop up again!
|
| Happy to answer any questions about this post.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| I saw your post about selling TinyPilot, congratulations! FWIW
| I agree with all your points in your 2018 article, and I wish I
| had left Google sooner too.
|
| I was wondering if you could share if you are working on a new
| project? I saw your posts about fuzzing a PDF parser but
| there's no context if this is for a new project, or I missed it
| :-).
|
| Cheers!
|
| --
|
| 1: https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
| mtlynch wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| No, the fuzz testing is just for fun and probably not
| anything serious, although it would be fun to find a fuzzing
| target that has a good bug bounty program.
|
| My wife and I just had our first child, so I'm mainly
| focusing on family time for now and slowly easing back into
| work over the next few months. My main priority is to finish
| the book I've been promising to write for the past four
| years.[0]
|
| [0] https://refactoringenglish.com/
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| Very cool, I just subscribed for updates!
| buzzert wrote:
| Love the book title!
| ushakov wrote:
| Happy to have met you in Berlin at the merge :)
| mtlynch wrote:
| Hi Mish! Great meeting you as well and cool to run into you
| again here!
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I've been following your story for the past several years since
| you wrote this post and it helped me understand the realities
| of indie hacking and startups more than most articles, so
| thanks for writing in public and documenting your journey, I'm
| sure I'm not the only one you helped. By the way, whenever I
| see your username, I always seem to read it as Mount Lynch,
| haha.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Haha, maybe if one of my companies does _really_ well, I 'll
| be able to buy a mountain and name it after me.
|
| Thanks so much! That's really nice to hear.
| steelframe wrote:
| Forgive me if I seem presumptuous in my advice here. You've
| done things in your career that I can only dream of doing. What
| I can say is that I've somehow managed to survive a quarter-
| century in a string of Big Tech companies without dropping out
| (yet).
|
| It sounds like you may have been looking at the currents and
| picking the one that seemed best one to swim in. I found
| there's often -- but not always -- another option: build a dam.
| In other words, change it up. Alter the landscape. Seek to
| change the business in a way that nobody's been willing/able to
| do before. Looking back at my career I found I was happiest and
| most successful when I was able to tell my boss what I was
| doing vs. waiting for my boss to tell me to do something
| interesting/impactful/etc.
|
| When that option doesn't seem to be presenting itself, it's
| probably time to move on. But I've found it's often worth
| giving it a try first.
|
| A couple of times I needed to earn the right to create my own
| destiny by pushing through some grunge work, but once I
| established a degree of trust with my management chain, that
| was capital I could "cash in on" by proposing something big,
| new, and interesting. It never ceases to amaze me to see how
| boldness often gets rewarded. I just saw a co-worker of mine
| draw blood from a stone (funding-wise) by proposing something
| ambitious and controversial last week. Suddenly they're a TL of
| a new team this week. They've built a reputation for "just
| getting it done," so management has confidence in their ability
| to execute and drive results.
|
| Whenever I'm starting to feel stuck in a rut, that's when I
| open a blank document and start hammering out a design for
| something new. I'm not even thinking about promotion when I do
| that. But somehow, somewhere down the road, either a promotion
| or a bigger opportunity with another company has always come of
| it.
| cromagnum wrote:
| Can you explain how this doesn't amount to saying "You seem
| like you're brave. There's another option: be a coward."
|
| You don't seem to be proposing an alternative strategy with
| equivalent risk/reward dynamics, rather, it seems like what
| amounts to anathema to entrepreneurship.
| skulk wrote:
| some people would rather be well paid, secure cowards than
| scrappy risk-taking heroes.
| cromagnum wrote:
| But GP is specifically talking to someone who isn't in
| that bucket?
| mtlynch wrote:
| Context for others: steelframe and I were teammates at
| Microsoft in the late 2000s.[0]
|
| Hey steelframe! Good to see you here again!
|
| This is good advice and something I wish I'd recognized
| earlier at Google. For the first few years there, I was under
| a manager who had 20+ direct reports, so he probably didn't
| have time to think of the best projects for me.
|
| I probably would have been better off figuring out my own
| high-impact project rather than focusing on fighting short-
| term fires that kept popping up for my team.
|
| In certain ways, I solved this with the founder route because
| I get to skip the "earning the right to create my own
| destiny" phase, but in other ways, there's inescapable grunge
| work like legal compliance, taxes, vendor issues, etc.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011696
| AureliusMA wrote:
| Nice to see you on HN :-) Too bad we couldn't reach a deal on
| your Keto site, but hopefully the new owner takes care of it
| well. Can't wait to see what you will do next! Cheers!
| sjs7007 wrote:
| I don't have anything useful to add but just want to say, like
| many others have said, I really appreciate the way you have
| continued to document your journey from start to today and not
| shied away from sharing details. Thank you for that!
| dom96 wrote:
| How old were you when you decided to quit Google? How much
| savings did you have at that point?
| cdrini wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree with this. The breaking projects before
| completion is very annoying, but also the author seems like they
| were only there for a promotion? I mean a promotion is nice, but
| it was never really explained why that was such a dealbreaker. If
| the only thing keeping you at your job is the prospect of a
| better title, that's probably a bad sign. They then made a
| lifetime's worth of money at Google in four years, and then used
| that financial stability to do something high risk which most
| people can't afford to do. Regardless, I'm glad they've found
| work that resonates with them! Hopefully they can use that
| financial stability to build something useful and impactful :)
| strken wrote:
| I would be very discouraged if the people who set tech strategy
| at my company were the ones who had passed me on the promo
| ladder by not writing any tests and refusing to go to
| interviews or help their team fix bugs.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Will you work for me as a software engineer? I'll pay you $20
| an hour, which is vastly more than nearly all of your ancestors
| throughout history have made. Why is it a dealbreaker? Don't
| you enjoy software engineering?
|
| My point is that human psychology doesn't work that way. You
| compete with people around you. If they're getting promoted
| while you're being left behind, you're not going to be very
| happy about it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Actually, that varies from person to person. I've been fine
| not being promoted (less time doing the self-reporting
| monkey-dance leaves more time to work on projects), and I
| make enough to satisfy my material needs and desires. And at
| most startups, there's nowhere to be promoted _to_ when you
| 're a double-digit hire. There's just the work and the chance
| of a cash-out (or of changing the world, whatever gets you up
| in the morning).
|
| Very different from the BigCo rat race.
| taneq wrote:
| > And at most startups, there's nowhere to be promoted to
| when you're a double-digit hire.
|
| This is something I'd assumed every engineer-type person
| faces sooner or later. Unless you're in a massive corp with
| hundreds of engineers, there's only maybe two or three
| tiers of engineering roles. That's two promotions, ever,
| unless you want to be promoted out of engineering and into
| management. So if you want to stay technical, instead of
| chasing higher status job titles, you have to chase higher
| status projects.
| cdrini wrote:
| It's less about comparing to your ancestors, more your peers
| in other industries. If you're getting payed say $40/h,
| that's muuuuch more than most other jobs, and can give you a
| comfortable living for quite a while.
|
| I agree human psychology is part of it and can help explain
| someone's mentality, but I don't think human psychology can
| fully justify someone's behaviour, since humans aren't
| automatons beholden to their psychology.
| klipt wrote:
| Not if you live in a very high cost of living area. Which
| is where the biggest Google offices are.
| cdrini wrote:
| That's a good point, but I don't believe it scales at the
| same rate -- meaning I believe the salaries are much
| higher than the living costs.
|
| Eg average us salary is probably somewhere around 60k.
| Let's say single bedroom apartment not in SF is maybe
| like 1.5k/mo, that leaves like 42k left over.
|
| Google salary I would guess is closer to 150k (low end
| probably); SF single bedroom is probably closer to 4k/mo,
| that leaves 102k. Big difference, and note the ratio here
| isn't as important as the absolute value. You live a very
| different life with 102k than with 42k.
|
| And also note wealth doesn't really increase linearly
| with how much money you have, it tends to be more than
| linear, because people with lots of money are more
| comfortable investing large chunks of it, which further
| increases their wealth.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Internally most larger tech companies index their salary
| bands based on the CoL of the employee. The downturn over
| the last couple years has had many companies move reqs
| from high CoL areas to low CoL areas to save money.
| mattlondon wrote:
| IME of Big Cos, it is _never_ cost of living that is
| taken into account, but what "the competition" in the
| local market are paying, and then some percentile of
| that.
|
| Who "the competition" are specifically is 99.9% of the
| time entirely black-box, as is the percentile that the
| company is targeting. So they claim it is open and
| transparent ("we benchmark against local employers in
| tech") but the actual details are hidden - are the other
| employers they are using FAANG or someone else? Are they
| targeting 50% or 95%? Etc etc ("oh that is confidential
| sorry")
|
| This is how you end up with situations like London, which
| is obscenely expensive cost of living, yet gets lower
| salaries than SF and Zurich which in my experience are a
| bit cheaper than London for day to day costs (e.g.
| transport, food etc).
|
| London is a physically & metaphorically huge cultural
| World Capital and attracts loads of people from across
| the world so there is more competition for tech/high-
| skilled roles because so many people move to London after
| they graduate, and stay for good. So salaries are lower
| but everything else is more expensive due to population
| density and resulting demand. No one wants to live in
| Zurich so there are less people competing for each job,
| so salaries need to be higher to attract and retain staff
| in such a dull and boring place that people naturally and
| understandably plan to leave after a few years.
| raincole wrote:
| > Why is it a dealbreaker?
|
| Because they can find a job that pays way more than $20 an
| hour. That's it.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| Agree and not only that, Google attracts a certain type of
| person that I feel like is more competitive and slightly
| obsessed with self image (senior role titles for example)
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's a little more than that. At the level this engineer was
| at, they are expected to seek and attain promotion. Sitting at
| a level below staff becomes a negative and can lead to you
| being put on a PIP because you aren't meeting the declared
| expectations when you aren't being promoted.
|
| Google eventually removed that language because they learned
| that in a 100,000-person company, there's simply not enough
| room in the pyramid and they'll lose the people who are doing
| the keeping-the-lights-on work who don't self-promote. They
| didn't know that yet in 2018 if memory serves.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| It was senior (L5) that you were expected to reach, not
| staff. It was revised down to L4. For reference almost all
| SWE hires start at L3.
| skirmish wrote:
| > For reference almost all SWE hires start at L3.
|
| Straight out of school, yes. With a few years of outside
| experience and an advanced degree, it is easy to join at
| L5. Which I think is ideal, no promotion headaches, just
| focus on interesting work (L6 already starts to be
| management heavy, so not that attractive).
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Yes, good point I should have clarified that.
| klipt wrote:
| Yes switching jobs is often a path to "sideways
| promotion". You have to interview well, but that's
| something that's learnable - and more under your control
| in a way, than getting good promotable projects at your
| current employer.
| r0ze-at-hn wrote:
| > author seems like they were only there for a promotion
|
| It is more the other way around. Internally google
| taught/teaches engineers that their only goal is promotion. All
| parts of this used to be very very public. There are whole
| presentations, decks, docs, and more. What level you are and
| what level the person you are talking to ~mattered~. The goal
| isn't to be a good engineer, to make good products, or anything
| liek that, but to ONLY do what a nameless committee might want
| to make that magical number go higher. So while they might not
| have joined Google for that reason eventually they learned what
| was wanted. There is a whole generation of software engineers
| that learned this lesson unfortunately.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| This is not true. Google is so large that I'm definitely
| willing to believe that there are parts where people are like
| this, but I found that people generally did not care about my
| level and while there are many docs/slides about how to get
| promoted it was largely oriented towards helping people
| advocate effectively for themselves and was not "thou shall
| be promoted".
|
| There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can
| reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount
| of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can
| reach a certain level within a certain (very generous)
| amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at
| all.
|
| The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in
| a certain time period, and going up levels involves a
| largely arbitrary process that is disconnected from your
| actual work performance seems pretty problematic to me.
| Seems like it'd be hard to focus on actually doing useful
| work in such an environment.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| No, it really isn't.
|
| The amount of time is very long, I don't even actually
| know what it was, and I personally am not aware of anyone
| this happened to and have never heard of anyone this
| happened to. In the past you were expected to hit L5, 2
| promotions from hire, and now the expectation is L4, so
| only 1.
|
| An L5 engineer at Google is someone who is expected to be
| able to handle any medium-large difficulty task with some
| amount of cross-team coordination and get it done without
| much oversight. IMO every software engineer should be
| able to get to that point in their career eventually
| otherwise it indicates a pretty big problem.
| spwa4 wrote:
| > The amount of time is very long
|
| It is now, it used to be a lot shorter. "Up or out" has
| effectively been sacrificed to cost savings, which is
| perhaps a good thing in some ways.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| What did it used to be?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| When I started in 2011 I was told "up or out" of L4 by 4
| years.
|
| That was dropped around 2015 or 2016.
|
| I stayed for 10 years at L4 then left on my own. I had no
| interest in the perf game and never attempted promotion.
| L4 money was good enough.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I don't think it was a case of it "happening to" people,
| as in HR took them out back and put a bullet in their
| head... just social pressure. Internal elitism, perf
| comments, slowly chipping away at you, maybe even toss
| you on a PIP. Until you throw up your hands and leave.
| After all, other employers would be more than happy to
| have you.
|
| But yes, it was officially dropped. I stayed as L4 for 10
| years. But when I transferred teams I occasionally got
| ... attitude.
|
| Thing is, if you go from L4->L5 (or L5->L6) based on
| performance you're expected to stay or improve on that
| performance once you're at L5, and if you don't, you'll
| get up with Needs Improvement, and there's no going back
| to L4.
| jebarker wrote:
| What happens once you hit L5? You just need to perform
| satisfactorily each year?
| dmazzoni wrote:
| Yes. There are far fewer people at each higher level.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| There's different kinds of customers for different kinds
| of bureaucracies though.
|
| However, it looks like the people working at L4 for
| Google are being handled no differently by HR than
| assembly-line workers at other top Wall Street companies.
| Better pay for more people than most of the old guard,
| but why can't they do this part of it with some
| ingenuity.
|
| >The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level
| in a certain time period
|
| At least factory workers know this is not going to happen
| from the get-go. This is even more non-congruous for the
| kind of HR involved. Probably why factory workers have as
| much of their productivity leveraged as they do. Most of
| those companies are so far from bonanzaville, if they
| didn't do it right, they would have failed a long time
| ago.
|
| You would think Google was built from a different
| foundation well enough to avoid this, or would have been
| able to migrate further away from useless bureaucracy
| than some of the hundred-year-old companies. It's almost
| like they didn't know any better.
|
| Well, when you do the math it seems like for quite some
| time that everything truly worthwhile going on at Google
| has been, to a very large extent, the conserved portion
| of the output of people who never got promoted.
|
| Financially, if you were going to invest in _people_ ,
| that would make them the better investment than those who
| did get promoted :\
|
| It might be difficult to put some exact numbers on it,
| but you could probably tell how high-performance the
| unsung heroes are, by whether or not Google is making any
| money or not any more, and how much.
|
| Now what about the people who could never get hired at
| Google or places like that to begin with?
|
| If you could invest in somebody like that, woo hoo the
| sky's the limit !
|
| You'd be raking in the bucks way more on a hard-working
| non-corporate scrapper than Google makes from a highly
| credentialed true genius who is the least bit decent at
| corporate climbing :)
| tdeck wrote:
| I will second what the parent poster says, people
| definitely cared about levels in the teams I was on
| (2016-2021). Sometimes people would talk about other
| engineers using only their level. E.g. "some L3 keeps
| sending me these crappy CLs" or my manager introducing new
| teammates by saying "we have a new L5 joining the team".
| This seemed normal to a lot of people at Google, but since
| I have worked at other places where someone's level almost
| never comes up in any conversation I always found it a
| little concerning.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| So like I said, I definitely believe that it happened,
| but I didn't see it and I have a hard time believing it
| was the norm. I was there 2016-2022. Also the "some L3
| keeps sending me these crappy CLs" person sounds like a
| bit of a dick.
| azemetre wrote:
| How long would you say Google has been like this? Around the
| time when they realized they had an unstoppable monopoly?
| IPO? Early years? Always?
| SamvitJ wrote:
| This is just not true, sorry, even now. Google is one of the
| tech companies known for deemphasizing level visibility and
| titles. Case in point: almost three years in, and I don't
| know the levels of many of my colleagues. Though sometimes
| one can guess.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Fairly sure Google has/had a cliff for engineers to reach
| senior by a certain time frame. That puts immense pressure to
| get promoted, or you get laid off.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| It's no longer senior, it's only L4 (new hires are usually
| L3). Also I never knew the time length for the cliff, but I
| think it was really, really long.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| It also wasn't, as far as I know, every strictly enforced.
| There were folks when I joined (which was when the L5
| requirement still existed, but it was in its way out) who
| had been L4 for like a decade.
| aix1 wrote:
| Right, while there was a "growth" expectation for L4s
| written into the SWE job ladder, there were no fixed
| timelines. Enforcement varied from org to org: at least
| one of my previous orgs periodically conducted talent
| reviews, specifically looking at cases like long-tenured
| L4s to decide whether to intervene.
|
| That was before the layoffs started. One of my by then
| ex-reports, who was a very talented and knowledgeable but
| not at all career-focused long-time L4s got laid off in
| one of the rounds. :(
| izacus wrote:
| Not just Google - I haven't seen many companies which would
| tolerate people being stuck on junior level for many years.
| They'd be slowly managed out (unless the company is
| government or really big).
| herval wrote:
| > the author seems like they were only there for a promotion?
|
| Based on Blind and personal experience, the vast majority of
| people in big tech are literally doing that. It's probably the
| most used carrot used by management in those companies too, so
| hard to blame them
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > they were only there for a promotion?
|
| My experience: initially, I learned a lot of new things, I was
| excited to work for a big famous company. But eventually, it
| started to be less fun and more stressful. There's an endless
| push for impact or to improve some questionable metrics, while
| technical debt is building up. Also there's always uncertainty
| about reorgs and layoffs. Lots of anxiety related to the next
| evaluation cycle.
|
| After a few years, I can say money is probably my main driver.
| Although, I don't want to get promoted because I certainly
| don't want more stress. I want to stay in this company as long
| as possible because I will be very hard to earn more money
| elsewhere.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > the author seems like they were only there for a promotion?
|
| Well, yes obviously? People get jobs to get money, and a
| promotion gives you more money.
|
| The ones not aiming for a promotion are the strange ones, not
| the ones who are.
| aix1 wrote:
| I'd say that's a rather narrow way to look at it.
|
| I know more than a handful of folks who are very happy with
| their level of responsibility and comp, and don't want higher
| expectations and more stress even if it would bring in
| significantly more cash. I personally think that's a pretty
| healthy way to look at it. Not everything in life is about
| money.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| This is also why I'm thinking about leaving Google. I have little
| to sit through meetings, try to pawn necessary work off to
| others, and play the game while there's a hundred small tasks
| that my project desperately needs me to get done.
|
| I can jump ship and make $50-100k/yr more because the next place
| I work will actually value my experience, even though it's
| technically much more useful to Google.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I did this. Google (at least, the chain of managers I had)
| didn't know how to manage people like me and I wish I'd
| realized it sooner.
|
| I make more money now doing more effective work faster at a
| smaller company with a focused project, not a 100,000-person
| everything company.
| throwaway_5753 wrote:
| Where will you go that will be a 50k-100k bump over google
| comp?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Lots of places, for two reasons
|
| 1) companies usually hire ex-Googlers up-level because
| they're perceived as being more valuable (Google titles tend
| to under-represent engineer capabilities; an L4 Googler is an
| SSE elsewhere).
|
| 2) Google was one of the FAANGs that fixed wages via
| unofficial non-competes. Their compensation ladders still
| reflect that.
| sickblastoise wrote:
| Dealing with some ex googlers at my current (non tech
| company) now, Jesus Christ they are culture killers at
| regular companies.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| I know at my last job I closed any resumes that had
| Google on them. They generally didn't do well at startups
| in my opinion, the scope and responsibilities are too
| broad and there is no where to hide. And the ones I did
| hire tended to want to make everything look the way it
| did at Google.
| cdrini wrote:
| That seems a little much; Google has had such a huge
| number of software employees, that it seems unwise to
| draw assumptions about everyone based on what I imagine
| has been a much smaller sample size than the total that
| you've personally worked with.
| goalonetwo wrote:
| exactly this. Working with a couple ex-google and ex-
| facebook. Without failing every meeting we hear at least
| once "At Google/Facebook we used to ..." for something
| that is completely not applicable here.
| arghnoname wrote:
| I work at one of the big companies and some people do
| that even here. People just talk about their experience
| or other systems that they know. It always feels
| conservative to me, as often it's said to suggest
| emulating what some other group or company did to solve
| an often superficially similar problem, but with entirely
| different constraints. I think some people with certain
| kinds of thought patterns just pattern match and try to
| apply past experience a bit too broadly.
| shitlord wrote:
| Google doesn't exactly pay top of market.
| throwaway_5753 wrote:
| who does these days?
| throwaway215234 wrote:
| Lots of high-paying companies, if you work on hard
| engineering problems. Probably not many for CRUD or
| frontend.
| izacus wrote:
| Let's hear some examples :)
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Google would be a $50-100k bump over Google if they promoted
| me to the level commensurate with my experience
| throwaway215234 wrote:
| Google comp is known to be low. Top candidates with in-demand
| skills can easily ask for 2x TC of google and get a stream of
| offers pouring in.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| ask where?
| runeblaze wrote:
| Smaller companies need to outbid Google for talent,
| especially if they carry less stability. I imagine there are
| quite many who went like: leaves Google for great cash
| package at smaller company/start up -> smaller company goes
| belly up -> go back to FAANG
| misstercool wrote:
| Quote the author "To continue advancing my career, I'd need
| projects that were even larger in scope and involved
| collaboration with more partner teams. But that just meant the
| project could fail due to even more factors outside my control,
| wasting months or years of my life."
|
| I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that
| the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of
| your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You
| learned how the world works!
| joshdavham wrote:
| > the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out
| of your control
|
| Very true. You do at least have more control in a startup
| however (at least that's how feels).
| mtlynch wrote:
| Author here!
|
| > _I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit
| that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that
| out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life.
| You learned how the world works!_
|
| After six years of running bootstrapped businesses, I actually
| more strongly believe the opposite.
|
| It might be true at a high-growth VC-backed startup that you
| need many stars to align to succeed.
|
| In bootstrapped businesses, you basically just need one thing
| to succeed: product market fit. If you create a product that
| people want, you'll probably succeed even if you make a lot of
| other mistakes.
|
| With TinyPilot, I didn't know anything about hardware or
| selling a physical product at the beginning, so I did a million
| things wrong. But I landed on a product people were willing to
| pay for, and I found a good way of getting it in front of
| customers, so the company worked. I did some things right, but
| for the first year, I mostly felt like revenue was growing on
| its own and I was trying to keep up.
|
| You still need luck to find product market fit because lots of
| reasonable-sounding ideas end up flopping, but you really just
| need to get lucky once rather than wait for a whole set of
| things to get lucky at the same time.
| misstercool wrote:
| Well, to be honest, I have never heard any of many FAANG
| turned startup founder friends told me that the want to build
| a life style business from the beginning. Every one wants to
| build a vc-backed startup with a home run idea. Many of them
| ended up building life style business because the markets of
| their ideas were actually much smaller.
|
| If you do the math, climbing the corporate ladder at FAANG
| might have better ROI than running life style business. Of
| course, money is not the only consideration in life.
| mtlynch wrote:
| Yeah, I agree financial ROI is definitely higher in a
| FAANG, especially the last five years.
|
| I'm still glad that I left when I did, as I value autonomy
| a lot, so being able to choose what to do every day is
| worth a lot to me.
| joshdavham wrote:
| The author also has an update for 6 years later:
| https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-6/
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the
| customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your
| raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers.
|
| Think about it like this. A customer is the entity that exchanges
| money for something they value; like a good or service. That's
| usually your manager. Or in the case of OP the promotion
| committee. (Many times it's both your manager and the promotion
| committee). They are the ones who directly control your money
| (raise, bonus, promotion, etc).
|
| With that perspective in mind it makes sense to manage your
| career as a business where you're doing things to increase the
| rate at which you deliver value to the entity which can trade
| money for that value.
|
| Many of the setbacks you faced are very common when trying to run
| your own business. The customer changes their mind, the market
| shifts the goal posts, you realize you're focusing on the wrong
| things. Like a business you have to constantly change your
| strategy and adapt to the customer; not the other way around.
| Why? Because the customer can very easily get their goods or
| services from someone else if you can't deliver what they want.
| ljm wrote:
| What you are describing is contracting, self-employment,
| consultancy, and those are orthogonal to having a career.
| manmal wrote:
| Why are you adding this distinction? Having done both, I
| can't say I disagree with GP. Maybe I've overlooked
| something.
| lazide wrote:
| They probably prefer to _believe_ they don't have to do
| those things.
| hinkley wrote:
| And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and
| DevEx are so much more difficult. If you're a person making a
| piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be
| different and you can get to the end and they are still
| unhappy.
|
| But if you're working for a boss, they can get in the way. It's
| not enough that you do what the customer wants, you have to do
| it my way, even if that prevents the customer from getting what
| they want.
|
| And if the "customer" is buying the item for someone else, that
| indirection can result in failure as well. Which often happens
| when you make custom software for businesses. Their boss wants
| what he wants, and that's not what his employees want.
| WWLink wrote:
| > And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX
| and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you're a person
| making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs
| can be different and you can get to the end and they are
| still unhappy.
|
| This is exactly we end up with MS Products like Teams and
| Windows Phone 7/8 lol. A lot of MS stuff is built to sell to
| the companies not the employees.
| antupis wrote:
| And it is working generally very well if you compare GCP
| and Azure. DX is much better at GCP but Azure does stuff
| that companies care much better and is 2x bigger.
| hinkley wrote:
| MS offers bundle deals to managers who eat that up like a
| 1980's TV wife bragging about how she "saved" the family
| $300 by buying $1000 of shit they didn't need.
|
| It's been their schtick practically from the beginning.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > the most important lesson of any career: The person/people
| who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real
| customers.
|
| Such is a "career" in a large hierarchy, where actual
| acquaintance with people hardly exists and is replaced by
| "process".
|
| In short, your _real customers_ are not even people anymore,
| they are a _process_.
|
| Having enthusiasm for pursuing great ideas that help _people_
| is the sweet spot in both career and society.
|
| From the Fine Article:
|
| "Of course my fate should be in the hands of a mysterious
| committee who's never met me. They wouldn't be tainted by any
| sort of favoritism or politics. They'd see past all that and
| recognize me for my high-quality code and shrewd engineering
| decisions."
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Sounds like hell.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >I think you learned the most important lesson of any career:
| the customer is not your customer. The person/people who
| control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real
| customers.
|
| Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing
| for promotion. Students should be teached these things in
| universities so they don't waste years from their lives after
| they graduate.
| noduerme wrote:
| Optimizing for promotion is a terrible solution to life's
| problems. Promotions often, if not always, come with much
| larger workloads for only marginal pay increases.
|
| Whether the a corporate hierarchy is your "customer" or you
| deal with actual end-consumers, the goal is to _minimize_
| your workload while _maximizing_ your paycheck, and a
| promotion in a corporate setting simply does not do that
| anywhere short of the C-suite.
|
| So what should one optimize for, if not promotion? _Being the
| indispensable guru in your domain_. People get promoted and
| people get laid off. No one has as much power as the person
| you cannot, must not, ever fire. In such a situation, the
| optimal strategy is to terrify one 's superiors who don't
| understand the domain, and _refuse_ promotion (but do accept
| a raise).
|
| See that webmonkey in the corner next to the rain pipe,
| making double what the manager makes? If they fired him the
| whole company would be screwed because he's the only one who
| has a complete picture of XYZ client's network
| infrastructure.
| naveen99 wrote:
| Ideally promotions are for people who can handle increased
| responsibility with ease.
|
| Think of lifting more weight every week when you begin a
| strength training program. You get promoted until you
| plateau.
| esprehn wrote:
| > Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger
| workloads for only marginal pay increases.
|
| While this might be true in other industries, in big tech
| companies like TFA is talking about SWE promotions come
| with rather large increases in pay.
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&trac
| k...
|
| The author was trying to go from L4 to L5. Promotions are
| also backwards facing, which means at the point you get
| promoted you're already doing the larger workload.
| epolanski wrote:
| I find it super sad that we should teach kids how to climb
| corporate ladders rather than taking control of their life,
| starting businesses, making the world a better place or
| chasing a career of fulfilment rather than maximizing money
| return.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Agreed. Every kid their senior year of high school should
| be forming an LLC, starting a company around their idea,
| learning the basic skills to operate one, if they want to
| graduate.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I sometimes can't even detect sarcasm on HN anymore. What
| 16-18 year old kid (or their parents) has the capital and
| time to start and run their own business? Even when
| they're adults, they likely will not have access to
| business ownership. Depending on the source you use,
| somewhere between 5 and 10% of Americans own their own
| business. I'm not saying basic business skills aren't
| valuable--they are, but the vast, vast majority of people
| will work for someone else throughout their careers.
| Shouldn't we be optimizing education for the 90% case?
| dfee wrote:
| You and I have a fundamentally different view about how
| to optimize education. Your view is probably great to
| cover the base case of people "checking out" of their
| children's education, but my individualized view doesn't
| care about the 90% but the child in front of me.
|
| I'd also posit that this approach to education reduces
| overall attainment by dulling the edge of what the margin
| is capable of.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I don't know if this is sarcasm or not but:
|
| You could make it work if this "everyone forms an LLC in
| school" initiative comes with "everyone gets a chunk of
| cash to invest into this business". I assume the time
| would come from restructuring curriculums so that half of
| your senior year is spent on this project. Maybe add
| another year onto high school instead that is the
| Business Year.
|
| This would also require a massive increase in the amount
| of money going into schools so it's pretty much a non-
| starter in the US.
|
| As to "optimizing for the 90%", I feel like there's
| probably a lot of interesting differences in a world
| where every high school graduate has been in a boss'
| shoes. Possibly bosses would be able to get away with a
| lot less shady shit. This probably doesn't help the
| chances of setting it up either.
| epolanski wrote:
| I would legit support a law that gives every 18 years old
| 50k to decide what to do in their life. And to adjust it
| with life.
|
| As a society we would be making a better long term
| investment in the economy.
|
| And give them good education, but most importantly
| examples we can.
| jebarker wrote:
| > maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for
| promotion
|
| Until the actual business you work for goes down the pan
| because everyone is optimizing for promotion
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I did not care for the performance review practices at Apple
| (and it is probably similar in every other big corporation).
|
| We'll give you a 1 to 3 rating in three categories (it's been
| a while, something like: "Expertise", "Innovation",
| "Teamwork"). A "1" means you did not meet expectations, a "2"
| means you met expectations and a "3" means you exceeded
| expectations.
|
| If we give you a "1" in anything, you should probably start
| to look for a job elsewhere.
|
| We can't give you a "3" in two of the categories above
| however. Well, we can but then we have to go up the
| management chain -- perhaps even to the director -- because
| giving someone a "3" in more than one category means we have
| to raise your "grade". And moving up a grade is a Big Deal.
| We can only have so many top-tier engineers.
|
| Oh, and regardless of what your manager thinks of you, all
| managers have to report to _their_ manager for what we call a
| "leveling session". Here your manager needs to defend their
| choices when compensating their direct reports in front of
| all the other managers and of course their boss as well.
|
| Something in particular we're looking to make sure of is that
| your manager rewards _some_ of their direct-reports with
| bonuses, a raise, etc. but "punishes" others. Egalitarianism
| is frowned upon.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| > the customer is not your customer. The person/people who
| control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real
| customers
|
| This is definitely the case in many/most companies, but it's
| also a sign of a dysfunctional and declining internal company
| culture, and a bad pattern that will lead to decline in quality
| of product and deteriorating internal team dynamics.
|
| It's better to seek out employers where this inevitable trend
| is explicitly countered, or hasn't developed yet.
|
| We all feel better when we're producing good quality and get
| recognition for it.
| julianeon wrote:
| Above a certain company size however I think what he's
| describing is not avoidable. In a less than 0.5k person
| company you've very close to the company. In a > 10k person
| company there's no way: there's a lot of layers to the
| company and often can't "touch" the customer as an employee.
| The nature of the job is mediating how the layers interact:
| you can't reduce that complexity out of it.
| robertclaus wrote:
| I know this article is about Google's culture and the author is a
| strong developer, but it reminds me of conversations with junior
| developers at other companies. I've worked with a lot of junior
| folks that think they should be a "senior" 2 years out of their
| undergrad CS courses. After all, fixing some tests independently
| fullfills the "leads complex projects" box on the leveling chart.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| > Metrics or it didn't happen
|
| Sadly the chosen metric can be subject to politics. You'll find
| stakeholders have their pet metric, claim another stakeholders
| metric doesn't measure what's important, or a new, important
| person thinks all the metrics are garbage and need to be changed.
|
| I've had successful projects hit their metrics and those have
| also gotten caught up in politics.
| misonic wrote:
| this is inspiring as people like me are also going this process,
| don't know what would happen next but also no regret
| rnts08 wrote:
| Congratulations, OP learned about "we expect loyalty and effort
| from you, but you won't get any from us", which is 99.5% of all
| companies out there. I hope OP does well on their own and don't
| have to work in this kind of disingenuous places in the future.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| its kind of cool to see this guy getting his own product up. you
| go friend!
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| +1. unless you own sizeable equity. you are not (your employer's)
| company.
| kachurovskiy wrote:
| By now the author missed on approx. 2 million dollars of income.
| bitfilped wrote:
| There are more important things in life than money.
| lazide wrote:
| Said on a VC forum?
| thdhhghgbhy wrote:
| It's easy to get cynical about the review process. But just, for
| crying out loud, put yourself in the organisation's shoes. Tech
| is full of BS, and full of bullshitters. With the size of this
| organisation they need some consistent metrics, however not great
| these are, to assess and gauge performance versus other
| employees. You can't have the decision to promote in your
| manager's hands exclusively, they don't have the visibility of
| the organisation. The author also sounds like he went 'off books'
| a bit helping out on things they were interested in, rather than
| what was on jira boards or whatever their sponsor cared about.
| You'll get punished for this in a lot of places, it's just how it
| is. Management need to see what you are doing.
| f1shy wrote:
| Let me try a short reply: if the manager needs to _see_ what
| somebody is doing, he hast to _look_ at it. Not look KPIs and
| metrics. KPI and easy metrics are for lazy bad managers.
| thdhhghgbhy wrote:
| I already mentioned above, direct managers don't have
| organisational visibility and can't decide among the hundreds
| who should be promoted and who shouldn't. The promotion
| request needs to go some central forum with objective
| criteria. This is not to say your manager can't represent you
| vigorously to this forum.
| corentin88 wrote:
| That's the guy who created TinyPilot. Since then he wrote yearly
| articles about it's IndieHacker journey. Some of them have been
| shared on HN. Worth reading!
| solatic wrote:
| The conclusion I took away from this piece is just how heartless
| it is to depend on a promotion committee. I know Google put them
| in place because they wanted an Engineering-driven culture where
| people could do great Engineering work and still be recognized,
| even if their manager didn't. But it sure doesn't sound like
| these promotion committees are recognizing great Engineering
| work, especially when that work falls under difficult-to-quantify
| cultural improvements.
|
| Life is better when you find counterparts (customers, leaders,
| etc.) who appreciate what you bring to the table and can
| demonstrate that appreciation via promotion decisions. Faceless
| committees relying on packets fundamentally, by design, cannot
| develop the relationship that allows for genuine appreciation to
| form. If you're in a company whose leadership doesn't appreciate
| you, then why are you forcing yourself to stay? Go find somewhere
| that does appreciate you. If Google doesn't learn that it's
| simply not possible to avoid the loss of good talent to bad
| management or process, then that's their loss. Take advantage of
| the good-enough performance reviews and take your time planning
| your exit. Life is too short to work in an organization that
| actively dissuades forming genuine, supportive, professional
| working relationships with colleagues.
| adonovan wrote:
| Exactly. There are non-monetary rewards to doing good work:
| esprit de corps from a team of coworkers you like and respect,
| satisfaction and pride in your craft, positive responses from
| users, and so on.
|
| For many, promotion is like winning a pie-eating contest only
| to find that the prize is: more pies. It's fine to recognize
| that your interests and your employer's are only loosely
| aligned and to decline to play the game the way they want you
| to.
| hugodan wrote:
| "I quit myself to work for Google" is the most common pattern but
| not as much spoken about. We can see the side effects of it in
| posts like these and countless others that come with forced
| contraptions as ways to justify having quit Google.
| consf wrote:
| Loyalty to a company doesn't always translate to a long-term
| payoff
| DeathArrow wrote:
| If you are that good that Google wants to hire you, it means you
| don't need Google, you can do fine on your own or working
| somewhere else.
| jonathan_landy wrote:
| When I worked as a post doc, I wasn't paid much but I got a
| direct return on extra work: another paper etc. when I got my
| first job as a data scientist, I was paid much more but there was
| seemingly little response to extra work. It was distressing. But
| later I learned that making a good impression on people would pay
| off long term, through recommendations for new jobs etc.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| Working with the promise of a future promotion is, effectively,
| giving credit to your employer.
|
| "In every country in which the capitalist mode of production
| reigns, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power before it
| has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, as for
| example, the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the use-
| value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the
| labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives
| payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the
| capitalist."
|
| - Karl Marx. Capital Volume One, Chapter Six: The Buying and
| Selling of Labour-Power.
| azangru wrote:
| It was a rather depressing read. Sad that an organization
| functions in a way that doesn't promote collaboration and creates
| all sorts of perverse incentives. Sad that employees get
| carelessly tossed from one project to another without any
| consideration for what they want for themselves. Sad that "being
| surrounded by the best engineers in the world, using the most
| advanced development tools in the world, and eating the free-est
| food in the world" (and probably being paid quite handsomely as
| well) is not enough for happiness, unless there is also promotion
| involved.
| coding123 wrote:
| We definitely do things wrong in this world.
| grisBeik wrote:
| Screw promotion. I just want a job that provides _intrinsic_
| motivation (meaningful, inspiring work; Flow), and pays _enough_
| for me to make ends meet and to save reasonably.
|
| There are three problems:
|
| - many companies pay like crap, so if (God forbid) you want to
| save some money, a promotion is _required_ (the only way to
| increase benefits is to get promoted);
|
| - _meaningful_ work is a unicorn in its own right;
|
| - most annoyingly, a worker that is in their comfort zone and has
| been delivering consistently well in their role, will
| _inevitably_ be forced to "grow" and "develop their career", or
| will be called a "straggler", at an American corporation.
|
| Consistent excellence at a certain level is not "stagnation", it
| may just as well be deliberate _stability_. Infinite growth (or
| at least, infinite perturbation), in the personal context, is an
| unfathomable _mania_ of American corporations.
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