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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

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Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#171

Post by derekp7 »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #120
dep_b wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

What makes my stomach turn is the interpersonal aspect. How can all your teammates see you fail through no fault of your own for days and pretend they don't notice. Unfortunately in my experience, that's not a rare occurrence.

I can give some insight from my own experience. In my current position, there are a large number of "things" that I've had to figure out, either by reverse engineering, reading code, or intuition. So I get constantly bombarded with helping others get unstuck. Well, when it comes time for a project meeting, those on the meeting are far removed from the other groups that I constantly have to help out. And it sounds like I'm just giving excuses of why my work isn't done.

So if there is a micro-crunch coming up (i.e., I need to have an SOP drafted, tested, etc by this afternoon), the entire morning I tend to blow off other peoples issues. Until I can get a chance to come up for air.

But that makes me feel bad, so what I end up doing instead is I go home at the end of the day and work till past midnight just to get caught up on what I couldn't do in the daytime. For any outside-the-box work I tend to pull 20-30 hours stints over the weekend. After 25 years of this, and as I need more sleep since I'm getting older, I can be a bit snippy when someone breaks me out of my concentration because they can't figure out something, and they have a down customer that needs service "right now".

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#172

Post by notyourday »

This is an perfect illustration that a company gets exactly what it rewards and it measures. Initially it works out just fine because the field for the company is wide open so regardless of what it measures and it rewards the results look good enough.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#173

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

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.

My experience is that oftentimes people at Google-style companies play not even a zero-sum game, but more like a negative-sum game (if there is such a thing). If you're helping someone out, people will take that as an opportunity to take advantage of you.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#174

Post by stephencanon »

dahart wrote: post #77
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 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 assis…

My experience coaching a college sports team for a few years is that even very good players are often pretty bad at assessing the contributions of their teammates. They tend to significantly over-weight the contributions of players who have a similar style of play to themselves, and underweight the contributions of players who play other positions (or play the same position differently).

They especially undervalue actions that happen "away from the play" (the software-engineering equivalent might be something like rewarding a teammate who steps in to help you fix an critical block-ship bug, missing the person who had the foresight to write a test case two years ago that prevents a bug from occurring in the first place).

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#175

Post by tonyedgecombe »

madeofpalk wrote: post #162
eldavido wrote: post #91

To author: you lost the political game. I busted my ass at a startup for years and also lost the political game. So I'm speaking from experience here. You can either get all mad and worked up and pissed off about it, and waste years of your career (as I did) being pissed off, stubborn, and refusing to change. Or figure out how to play. I'd like to think there are places with better politics but I think it's pretty en…

Also it's amusing to consider that someone got fed up with the politics of a workplace to 'work for themselves' where they'll need to battle the politics of many different clients.

It worked for me, mainly because I'm intolerant of the corporate bullshit, if I don't like a client then they will be fired.

The thing that had the biggest impact on my quality of life since I left the corporate world is the ability to say no.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#176

Post by bethling »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #99
Quarrelsome wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I just meant, if they have an endless flow of "pretty darn good" employees, they have no particular need to try to retain any given one. Other companies may have to search hard to find excellent software engineers, but Google does not.

It's still really important. There's a cost to training and getting an engineer to understand the problems and scale that Google faces (some might come in with that, but many do not). There's also domain/google specific knowledge that's expensive to replace as well.

Yes, if someone leaves after 4 years, it's possible to hire someone else of the same ability level, but you're going to spend time and effort to make them as effective as the person who just left.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#177

Post by googlethrow »

michaelgreen wrote: post #137
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…

The first thing that comes to mind is peer reviews. Although it's not inherently quantitative data and doesn't remove any of the bias/politics/etc. it can be a good indicator of who others feel are helping them. However as the writer of the article pointed out often times you can't see when other people are improving your ability to do work whether that's through writing more documentation, improving some internal in…

Googler here: The google performance and promotion process does, in fact, rely on reviews from your peers. The process happens once every 6 months, every other being non-mandatory.

Although your peers saying you were helpful is not enough, you need to demonstrate impact (and other attributes depending on your level).

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#178

Post by muthuraj57 »

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 our team, we have our custom implementation of a web app like https://bonus.ly . The idea is, every member would be given a certain points(we call it jems) at the start of the month. He/she can give those points to other members who help them with the reason specified and it will be posted on a slack channel through slackbot.

Using this, everyone can know what other people is working and who is helping who like that. For every month at a team meeting, people who got more points will be appreciated in front of the whole team. The total points is calculated using a formula such that a member who just start giving/receiving more points per jem than other so that new comers will be appreciated more.

It works really well and at performance review, managers will consider this stats. Also the performance review contains two peers (chosen by us), and all kind of managers who we are reporting.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#179

Post by Vinnl »

dep_b wrote: post #72
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 b…

On the one hand it is indeed disappointing that nobody would help you with this. On the other hand, there's a more pro-active role you could have played yourself in this as well. "When everybody is responsible, nobody is" - what often helps is specifically asking people, by name, to sit down with you for a bit and help you get through it.

In fact, there are many social group situations in which asking specific people is far more effective than asking questions "to the group".

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#180

Post by wan23 »

lbrandy wrote: post #108
otterley wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"terminal level", in the sense being used by the OP, doesn't mean "end of the IC track". It means a level that you can be at "forever". Often times the junior engineering levels have some expectations around eventually being promoted (ie, "up or out").

IIRC, at Google the levels below Senior Engineer require progress toward a higher level as a job requirement. So that even if you're performing well at that level, if you aren't showing progress it gets counted against you in perf increasingly until eventually you are at risk of being pushed out.
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