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

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#281

Post by phamilton » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 6:04 PM UTC

NTDF9 wrote: post #268

phamilton wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bar for a senior engineer should be identifying the biggest problems plaguing an organization, and successfully tackling them. You're missing the crucial step of advocating for these problems to be solved. Until you know this is actually something important to the organization, you're just scratching your own itch. In OPs example, did it really matter that the data was occasionally bad? Quite often analytics ex…

>> In OPs example, did it really matter that the data was occasionally bad? Ok. Let some apps choke to death. Once it dies, you'll have your response to "Did it really matter"

Yep. I'm not kidding.

I worked on one such app. It was lost in the cross fire, I was asked to try to fix a bug. I came back and said this wasn't a bug, it was a badly built system. If they wanted me to work on it, I'd need a few sprints dedicated to it. They passed. A month or two later, it was impacting some crucial flows. We revisited it and funded it. I AB tested the rewrite against the original and saw a statistically significant improvement in user behavior. We retired the original, I presented my findings to our product team. They agreed it was impactful.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#282

Post by cableshaft » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 6:04 PM UTC

martinraag wrote: post #105

The article really resonated with me, as it's eerily similar to my own experience at Microsoft a couple of years back. Constant reorgs, resulting in projects being cancelled, resulting in lack of motivation, as months of your hard work are thrown out due to unclear decisions by the management. I too was hoping for a senior level promotion. The last project I worked on, I was the only non-senior level developer in a t…

> What I found most off putting, was when meeting my skip-manager (your managers manager) for the first time during my exit interview, all doors for a senior level promotion were suddenly open, to incentivise me to stay. Doesn't feel great when negotiations with your employer are comparable to those had with your cable provider.

Wow, that's one hell of a way to look at things. Thanks for that perspective.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#283

Post by dgreensp » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 6:04 PM UTC

Vinnl wrote: post #179

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…

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…

If a manager of some kind were to notice the Slack messages and ping someone specific to help, that would be a perfect example of the kind of management that is so sorely lacking at so many companies. Many employees are too burned, or proud, to even put out an SOS... so a cry for help is actually a gift to management. If only it were someone’s job to think for a few minutes each day about each employee and notice if there is some small action that would help them.

Nah, let’s just alternate between micromanaging and being totally absent; fret about lack of productivity or lack of progress; maybe institute a daily stand-up.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#284

Post by eeZah7Ux » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #81

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…

> the benefit of being a good team player is that it helps you build relationships. Those relationships often turn into opportunities down the line.

Most of the time other people leave or move to other teams.

Being a decent human being is not about getting practical advantages - otherwise sociopaths would be the most helpful people around.

Instead, many large corporations want to instill a culture of competitiveness and often cynicism because competing is what they do.

Cooperation, lasting relationship between employees, mutual help, solidarity are increasingly scary words for many companies.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#285

Post by matte_black » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

amdavidson wrote: post #258

hackbinary wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the Toyota's idea of Kanban supposed to alleviate this? As in if there is some problem with the production line, anyone can push the stop button, and everyone assists?

Just to clarify your point, I believe you are referring to andon[0], the system of alerting people to an issue, rather than kanban[1], a system for inventory management. In a manner of speaking he did pull the andon cord by speaking up in his team meetings and alerting people in Slack, but the cord means nothing if there is not a culture supporting the alert. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andon_(manufacturing) 1:…

No, the equivalent would be as soon as he raises the issue, no one can type even one more line of code, not even a character, and their editor would be completely blocked.

That’s what these companies need. The entire business comes to a screeching halt.

And if they really needed more motivation, production servers could be shut down if the issue was not resolved in 24 hours. That will really hold their feet to the fire.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#286

Post by mostlyskeptical » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 6:07 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #175

madeofpalk wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for this

A thread full of people talking about how bad working for yourself is had me questioning my upcoming decision to quit and try to do something for myself, and what you said is the biggest reason why I want to. I love hard work, but I don't love pointless work. I already do some low pay contracting on the side, but it's with a couple of small companies that trust me 100% so they never tell me "no". Don't get me wrong, they will question the hell out of my decisions and I've changed quite a few in response to the questions, but at the end of the day they trust me to do what's best for them.

I already have the house paid off, have no other debt, and have low 7 figures in reasonably liquid investments. Working for myself has been a dream of mine as long as I can remember. I don't need much money, just enough to get by.

Anyway sorry for the rambling. Just wanted to say thank you, you made me feel better about going into work today. Maybe I'll make today the last?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#287

Post by cletus » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 6:07 PM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #254

cletus wrote: post #183

Speaking as a >6 year veteran (Xoogler) some of this rings true. Still a couple of points: > No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports. They don’t even get a vote. This isn't quite true. It's true that the promo committee doesn't include your manager and it's that committee's vote that determines your promotion BUT your manager does get to say whether or not they support your promotion. Anecdotally, c…

> committees expect to see manager support so if a potential promotee has it, it doesn't mean a lot Having been on a promotion committee a number of times, I have to say that manager feedback is generally pretty useless at face-value. A good manager will make sure the right peers write reviews and that the candidate didn't forget anything important. But the candidate can smooth over all of this themselves; my committ…

From the article:

> If I just kept going, I’d soon be promoted to the next level, Senior Software Engineer.

That's (being promoted to) T5.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#288

Post by notjustanymike » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 6:07 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…

We use bonusly. As a proof-of-concept, I imagine it'd tackle some of your requirements. Bonusly points are tied to real world rewards, so there's incentive to use it.

People who had a lot of "assists" at our company regularly brought in 1000+ points a month, which then translated in $100+ in amazon gift cards or steam points.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#289

Post by mountainofdeath » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

I used to work at {OTHER_BIGCO} and felt the same. It was so bad at one point, I could basically toss a coin if I was going to work on something different that week. It was at point I realized there was no chance the promised promotion would come (well that and the lack of senior devs to observe) that I decided to move on.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#290

Post by fsa_adf_fsa_09 » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

> I proudly and lovingly nursed the pipeline back to health. I fixed dozens of bugs and wrote automated tests to make sure they wouldn’t reappear. I deleted thousands of lines of code that were either dead or could be replaced by modern libraries. I documented the pipeline as I learned it so that the institutional knowledge was available to my teammates instead of siloed in my head.

> The problem, as I discovered at promotion time, was that none of this was quantifiable. I couldn’t prove that anything I did had a positive impact on Google.

I briefly took a part time job in college. It was at a mall, walking distance from school. It was a mid-range clothing brand that I can no longer remember the name of.

Ostensibly, it was a sales position. I'm pretty sure the word sales was in the title. Anyone who has ever walked into a store like that knows there is very little sales (as in salespeople exhibiting selling skills to make sales) occurring. It's 99% "can I help you?" followed by "just looking".

After a couple weeks my manager took me aside and said my sales numbers were bad. It wasn't a threat -- they were having a hard enough time keeping staffed -- but she pointed it out to me.

So, under no pressure to actually change those numbers, I decided to do it anyway. I figured out that if you stand at the cash register and the customer didn't explicit tell you who helped them, you could claim the sale for yourself.

A couple weeks later my numbers were through the roof! My manager congratulated me.

I don't think it's uncharitable to say that my story would equip anyone to navigate 95% of the corporate world.

There's a lot of FUD in this thread about working independently. So one more data point: I've known a number of people over the years that everyone here would know (by title if not by name). What do they have in common? They all struck out independently at some point in their careers.

It's not either / or. Going independent early can be a great way to sidestep a lot of the ladder-climbing sillyness you'll have to do. It will also, if you're doing it right, make you a lot better at your job.