Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#81

Post by exelius » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:12 PM UTC

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…

Nope; the benefit of being a good team player is that it helps you build relationships. Those relationships often turn into opportunities down the line. But it’s hard to drive that behavior at an individual level without creating some conflicts of interest.

This is why I generally dislike measuring individuals against specific metrics. I try to set individualized metrics for all of my direct reports — for example, if I had a developer who keeps checking in code without valid tests, code coverage might be a metric I track with him just to help him understand how he’s doing against his personal goal. Even within the same job description there is often room for a significant variation in technical and interpersonal skills, and you need a team with a good mix of both to be successful. A one-size-fits-all approach to individual metrics just leads to a team of people with the exact same skill set.

I think the way you measure teamwork is at the team level by having a consisitent set of team-level metrics the entire team is judged against. This means individual personality and career path variations don’t matter as much. I’m talking things like say, number of broken builds, velocity improvements, production issue counts, etc. These should be business outcomes that the product folks care about. If you make it the team’s responsibility, you’ll find teamwork happens more naturally.

This approach to performance management is in direct opposition to stack ranking, and a big part of why I refuse to work for a company that forces its managers to stack rank within teams. The question of “what makes a good employee great?” is so difficult to answer that if you have multiple high performers, it’s effectively arbitrary. It also tends to punish people who are maybe less technically brilliant, but have strong interpersonal skills (after all, how else does a mediocre programmer make it through a CS degree?) Those interpersonal skills often lead to better technical discussions and avoidance of miscommunication between technical folks.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#82

Post by code4tee » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:14 PM UTC

A cacophony of management dissonance, bureaucratic internal processes, your job being outsourced to India and then being asked to clean up the mess created by said India team...

So basically Google is like any run of the mill tech department in a boring corporate environment, but with free food and a side project on self driving cars. Got it.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#83

Post by Quarrelsome » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:14 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #60

Quarrelsome wrote: post #40

This is why its healthier to always run with the premise that you're leaving at some point and its the employer's responsibility to keep you there and give you interesting and rewarding work. If you're asking them to promote you then its the wrong way round, they should be asking on you about whether you're staying there. That's how the market is today.

I doubt Google cares if the majority of it's people stay or not. Beyond the rock star employees who they absolutely know they need/depend on, they have an unending pipe of software engineers who want to put Google on their resume, in part due to the value of having the resume item and in part due to all of the perks. Assuming the free food and massages will keep a lot of talent there, why would they bother incentiviz…

afaik their "average individual employee" is actually pretty damn good. Anyway that's the point, if they don't care then you shouldn't remain there trying to impress them, especially if that doesn't align with your life goals.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#84

Post by decwakeboarder » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #19

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess my question is: Can you get job satisfaction from promotion-focused work? I'm proud of what I've done . When I make someone else's life easier, that makes me feel good/satisfied with my work. I can't fathom satisfaction from impressing a promotion committee and tacking on a bigger title.

The general idea is that the things that would impress a promotion committee are things that you have done, that are good for the company. That, of course, is not the truth everywhere, but anecdotally it's a lot truer than most people complaining about other people sucking up thinks it is.

The problem is in measurability of a change. If I improve a developer or analyst workflow that makes 100 people 1% more successful, that's likely both more beneficial and also harder to measure than a change that makes 5 people 10% more successful.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#85

Post by GVIrish » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

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…

> 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".

The NBA has an advanced metric for that called gravity. As you could imagine Steph Curry's gravity is through the roof.

Another related metric is +/- for when a player is on the floor. That one is more nebulous and error prone but it is meant to describe a player's impact on the floor outside of things like assists, points, rebounds, etc.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#86

Post by gniv » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

Nice writeup! You should definitely keep writing.

Regarding what to optimize for promotion: I would say it's choosing the right manager (and peers, to a lesser extent).

I know somebody who has struggled to get promoted for multiple cycles (funnily enough, in the same large group you were in). Then he decided to move, and the new manager went out of her way to get him promoted, and he got it relatively quickly.

I've seen this scenario happen a lot in the last few years.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#87

Post by Djvacto » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

tankenmate wrote: post #69

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…

If you are going to hand out points for people to vote with, may I suggest quadratic voting.[0] [0] http://ericposner.com/quadratic-voting/

So, would you mind helping me see if I understand quadratic voting correctly?

Let's say there are 4 voters: A, B, C, D, voting on policies 1-10. Everyone gets a certain number of votes (say one per policy, so 10 total).

Voter A only really cares about policy 5 & 7. So they want to buy votes for these 2. They can give up their votes in, say, policies 1-4 to get 2 more votes for policy 5, and can also give up votes 6, 8-10 to get 2 more votes for policy 7. So they put 8 votes into the "common pool" in order to ensure that, in addition to their vote for 5 & 7, each policy also gets 2 extra votes?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#88

Post by jonbarker » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

Noticed your new project is a keto recipe webapp - this will have to compete with some good ones: https://ketodietapp.com/, and https://www.ruled.me/keto-recipes/ . Fascinated by how ruled.me in particular seems to have won the 'indexed by google' game for 'keto recipes.' Also fascinated by how much ruled.me might be making with adsense. Also generally fascinated by special interest communities and how to monetize them, any content around strategy here would be greatly appreciated!

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#89

Post by oblio » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

durgiston wrote: post #57

stephencanon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 +/- and its variants are for. Especially useful for sports like hockey where scoring is rare. Of course, in a work environment this is even harder to try and measure, if for no other reason than that people are almost never 'off the court' and if they are there are many confounding factors.

Scoring in hocker is rare? Scoring in football^Wsoccer is even rarer :)

That's why they have a million statistics, these days. Goals, assists, distance covered, top speed, region of the pitch most used, etc.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#90

Post by blunte » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:18 PM UTC

You're describing knowledge work at many companies.

You've also recognized why upper management, particularly execs, are more likely to be sociopaths (or at the very least, admittedly selfish).

And fortunately you've come to understand that being the boss/owner is the best way to make your hard work actually pay you accordingly. The downside to being your own boss is that your work ethic and motivation may drive you to work every waking hour. This is bad, and I hope you learn balance.

I don't think there's a solution to the problems you described - at least not a solution that includes staying in a company and working for someone else. There are people who are happy to stay mid-level and just churn out work for pay. Sometimes they play for the team, and sometimes they're a little selfish. But most importantly, they are satisfied or complacent. Others, like you, are neither.

Cheers and good luck!