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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

mtlynch.io

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Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#71

Post by aecorredor »

dahart wrote: post #29

> I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures, but there were no metrics that tracked developer time. For several jobs in a row, I've felt that helping others on a team is undervalued and under-recorded. I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while. The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist points…

At my company we use something called bonusly. You get 30 bonusly per month to give out to your teammates, and each bonusly is worth $1. You can buy basically anything with the bonusly you receive (amazon gift cards = anything). On top of being able to buy stuff, it also keeps metrics on which teammates help the most. The only downside is that you must give out all your bonusly at the end of the month (if not it's wasted money), so sometimes you start giving it out without really taking into consideration which teammate has helped you the most.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#72

Post by dep_b »

dahart wrote: post #29

> I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures, but there were no metrics that tracked developer time. For several jobs in a row, I've felt that helping others on a team is undervalued and under-recorded. I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while. The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist points…

I worked in a remote team once helping a company in Seattle (that perhaps had a bit of a jock culture problem). I could be stuck for days because following the README in a repo just wasn't enough to get the project to compile and run. Every standup I was telling "I'm completely blocked for the last two days because I cannot run the repo, so I cannot run any tests and at the moment I'm doing absolutely nothing.". To be sure to repeat a message like that every four hours in channels like Slack.

Managers read it, my teammates in Seattle read it. Nobody ever helped us (because you know pair programming is so much more efficient if you can have two programmers blocked when you could just have one staring out of the window and typing "help" to invisible people). If at all I would be unblocked after a few days usually the problems was some kind of unguessable piece of configuration that should have been part of the README and/or code, a problem completely unsolvable without knowing what to do. Only then I could continue doing a minor change like updating a CSS file for the next Safari or IE quirk, usually just 5 minutes of work.

Apparently helping remote teammates to get unstuck in their work just wasn't an interesting performance metric.

Until this day I still can't believe that everybody was just throwing tens of thousands of dollars of work out the window because helping stuck teammates wasn't counting towards some kind of bonus.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#73

Post by mtlynch »

totalZero wrote: post #36

> If I ever made a mistake at Google that cost the company $10 million, I would suffer no consequences. I’d be asked to write a post-mortem, and everyone would celebrate the learning opportunity. For most of these founders, a $10 million mistake would mean the end of their business and several lifetimes of debt. This is not as insightful as it seems....risk tolerance should be a function of percentages, not square nu…

I think that's true, and obviously there are a lot more situations at Google than a small company where you're even in a position to lose $10m.

But not all costs are proportional to company size. I could screw up a command on my AWS account and rack up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars cloud costs. I could make that mistake at a $1M/yr business or a $500/yr business.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#74

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

jpm_sd wrote: post #7

Because you made enough money that it was an affordable risk? Yes, perf is garbage and management is chaos, but let's be honest with ourselves. Four years' worth of GSUs oughta be enough for anybody. "Devoted employee" followed by "expert at gaming the perf system" followed by "project cancelled and adrift" is, sadly, the normal progression for a Googler, from what I've seen.

How is four years of GSUs enough? Four years is in the low six digits. Being financially secure in the Bay Area requires an order of magnitude more than that.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#75

Post by somberi »

dahart wrote: post #29

> I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures, but there were no metrics that tracked developer time. For several jobs in a row, I've felt that helping others on a team is undervalued and under-recorded. I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while. The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist points…

I am manager who has a few levels under me (Total team of about 100 people). I find it difficult to buy into your experience, and hear me out. I am arguing in your favor.

If you are assisting, and this includes providing support for someone else's code, or doing "invisible" tasks (setting up a redis cluster or writing end-to-end tests), this often finds its way into one email group or another. In fact I remember the names of the "helpers" as you put it by the virtue of their emails and to that end I value them, just as much if not more, for keeping us shipshape.

IMHO, you should find these emails, and I am sure they exist already, and use it as your metric.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” I say show me email chains, and I will show a hero.

Of course I am not stating the obvious fact - which is that your manager, if he or she is worth their salt, should totally value the role "helping" plays in making good software.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#76

Post by [deleted] »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #59

Frankly there are far more toxic and awful large companies to work for. I think with the perf/promo process being what it is Google was intentionally trying to avoid the really bad nepotistic and political parts of some other large (or not large) corps. But they introduced other problems, which the article writer alludes to. For myself, the bullshit with perf and the awful corporate culture stuff became apparent with…

[deleted]

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#77

Post by dahart »

stephencanon wrote: post #51
dahart wrote: post #29

> I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures, but there were no metrics that tracked developer time. For several jobs in a row, I've felt that helping others on a team is undervalued and under-recorded. I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while. The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist points…

I've never tried it, but I suspect you'll run into the same issue that sports does, where "assists" don't accurately reflect the people who are making things happen on the court. We miss the perimeter shooter who positions themselves just so to pull two defenders out of position, but give credit to the point guard who makes the now-easy pass for the "assist". It's entirely possible for the person most responsible for…

This is what I worry about, and what I hope to avoid by asking who's tried it. I am hoping that my analogy is more imperfect than that. ;) Requiring people to hand out an assist quota to anyone that helps them, I hope, might be closer to each player rewarding assists to anyone else who passes them the ball. Since it's all players giving assists for any reason to each other, and not a single ref only handing out assists for the shot, perhaps that will allow for a fuzzier definition of success and a system that is harder to game?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#78

Post by Isamu »

shados wrote: post #54
dahart wrote: post #29

> I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures, but there were no metrics that tracked developer time. For several jobs in a row, I've felt that helping others on a team is undervalued and under-recorded. I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while. The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist points…

In one of my previous teams, we did away with individual metrics because they "punished" team players. If an engineer spent most of a week helping another with their issue, it made them look bad in whatever tracker we used by almost every metric. I prefered sticking to trying to optimize whole team velocity and using 1 on 1s and peer reviews to track individual performance where it was needed (eg: compensation review…

Yeah we don't do metrics, we gather short appraisals from a list of people that you provide, that you worked with throughout the year. You are encouraged to provide names of people that are outside of your group. So if you helped some other team, this is the way you cash in on that.

Helping other teams succeed is a cultural thing and your organization has to encourage it with its practices and procedures.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#79

Post by xoogler_456 »

> I submitted my first promo packet, and the results were what I feared: the promotion committee said that I hadn’t proven I could handle technical complexity, and they couldn’t see the impact I had on Google.

Ha! I think the promotion committees have a rubber stamp with that justification. It's so vague and unactionable, yet they tell _everyone_ that on their first go round.

The second time around, you get to point their feedback and say "Last time you told me to do X, Y, and Z. I did X, Y, and Z. Shit or get off the pot."

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#80

Post by otterley »

phamilton wrote: post #64

Writing documentation and fixing bugs is in fact not the bar for a senior software engineer. I don't disagree with the promotion committee on that front. IIRC, Senior Software Engineer is a terminal level. You aren't expected to advance any more once you reach that level. Some do, but you can stay a Senior Engineer for the rest of your career and that's fine. So certainly "can fix bugs and write docs and tests" isn't…

At many organizations, Senior Engineer is not the end of the IC track, not even close. For example:

... > Senior Engr. > Staff Engr. > Sr. Staff Engr. > Principal Engr. > Sr. Principal Engr. > Distinguished Engr.

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