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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

#201

Post by diet_mtn_dew »

gjvc wrote: post #167
mgkimsal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

relatedly, a friend of mine worked at a place where everyone was on "20% time = bug time". You were expected to spend ~ 20% of your time taking bugs from the bug tracker and fixing them. Bugs closed were part of a metric towards bonuses. People were taking one bug, breaking it in to 3 or 4, then closing all of those. "Add button for X" became * "add button on form" * "add CSS for button" * "update CSS for button" * "…

In my naivety I've never heard nor thought about "what gets measured gets gamed". It's been my intuition for a while, but it explains much of what used to frustrate me -- I wish someone had told me this 15 years ago.

It's called Goodhart's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#203

Post by chapill »

Google doesn't use something like SonarQube I guess. That's full of metrics like "fixed x bugs, improved code quality y%, reduced SQALE technical debt to z."

I can't say I blame author for leaving Google. So called "senior" devs who crank out garbage and then foist maintenance on lower level devs aren't people I want to work with either. They're going to keep you down as mid-level janitor until you get the stats to back your story up. Static code analysis can paint that picture quite nicely for management. Sadly, that didn't seem like an option at Google.

If enough janitors leave, the whole place will stink soon. I think the author was wise to stand up for himself. Other Googlers who feel that way should join him.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#204

Post by chubot »

xtrapolate wrote: post #35

As a business person, you're going to have to sell yourself/your services to other people. Perhaps that's not too different from pitching yourself to an "anonymous promotions committee"? Interesting and insightful read. Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your future endeavours!

I would argue it's different, because customers are harsh but rational, while promotion committees are more capricious than harsh.

Customers have "skin in the game". They spend their own money, not somebody else's, and they presumably use what they bought.

Promotion committees have little skin in the game. They meet for an hour and make decisions, and they don't see any consequences of those decisions. They're following rules they didn't make that are supposed to lead to a good result, but they may not in practice.

If the results are bad, they don't really get any feedback until years later. Maybe this blog post will be taken as feedback. Unfortunately this story sounds pretty familiar to me (having worked at Google).

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#206

Post by kaoD »

somberi wrote: post #75
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…

That reads an awful lot like you're optimizing for people good at leaving email trails, i.e. at office politics.

There's only one way to actually measure someone's output, and it's working close to the team and witnessing their actual productivity. Getting involved. 1-on-1s.

Of course the farther removed from this process the more politics come into play.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#207

Post by winstonewert »

Djvacto wrote: post #87
tankenmate wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

In QV, you buy votes with money. You can buy as money votes as you want, but you have the pay v*v for it, where v is the number of votes.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#208

Post by mseebach »

decwakeboarder wrote: post #84
mseebach wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the bit where the GGP's "optimising for the right factors", or something adjacent to it comes in. Many things can't be objectively measured, and upon realising that, many techies give up. But there is subjective truth, which for sure is a lesser truth than the objective sort, but truth none the less. How did you come to believe that you've made 100 people 1% more successful? If you can convince yourself that you've done good, important work, you can probably convince other people too -- but you have to do it, they're not going to convince themselves. Collect the evidence, such as it is, and articulate your case.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#209

Post by fahayekwasright »

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…

They were waiting for you to solve your own problems just like they did. Your job at that point was to make the README better.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#210

Post by groby_b »

gniv wrote: post #86

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 s…

Yup. If you don't have a manager who works their ass off to help your career, you don't have a good manager. You recognize them by the fact that they usually talk a lot about what management means, and what it should do, and aren't afraid to change that opinion if they learn something new.
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