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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

mtlynch.io

301–310 of 783 posts

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#301
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the author said it in the article: Optimize for promotion. Work from day 1 to game the metrics. If it helps your metrics, do it, if it doesn't approach with caution. If you start that from day 1 you'd be 2 years ahead of the author. Honestly, it sounds like a really shitty way to live. I personally prefer doing great work and having faith that it will work out. It has, a lot slower than that, but I'm proud of…

There's another position that's similar but less gross, which is to have some humility about what you think is important vs. what work your manager/manager's manager think is important. Try to work on what they think is important not (just) because of a cynical desire to game the system and get ahead, but because they have probably more experience and (often a lot more) context than you do. Of course, this only works…

That's definitely true too. There's a lot of developers who spend way more time beautifying code than they actually do driving the business. While sometimes great code leads to great business results, that's not a law of nature. The inverse and converse can certainly be true too.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#302
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

That's basically it. So say you had 10 people on your team, each person gets 9 votes. Say someone wanted to give only one person all their votes, the recipient would accrue 3 votes (sqrt(9)=3). Or they could give 2 people 4 votes each which would accrue as 2 votes (sqrt(4)=2) each for those two people and then you'd have one left for someone else. Then you tally up all the accrued votes (not votes spent) for all the…

I was about to ask what happens to the 1 leftover vote, since it's not enough to give to anyone.

I now recall that sqrt(1) = 1. I did not recall that 2 minutes ago.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#303
post #299
post #103

> Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the organization. That is the true test. You are supposed to pretend only to buy into it but never really believe it. Understanding that things function on two levels is critical. One level is the superficial "we are a family, community, we are not evil, making the world better". But that's the trap to catch all the naive people and extract extra work h…

> One level is the superficial "we are a family, community, we are not evil, making the world better". But that's the trap to catch all the naive people and extract extra work hours from them Wow, your answer also precisely describes right-wing politics. Some naive leftists talk publicly about some of these meta rules and get hated.

No, it doesn’t. It describes politics.

Assigning caricatures to the “other side” like a football rivalry also describes politics. People have opinions. Sometimes these opinions align with a broader group. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes opinions evolve, and if you respect “the other side,” yours might, or theirs might.

Extrapolating to pejorative classifications of the left or right as a group is precisely what’s wrong with politics because it caters to competitive human nature, and the attitude that the other side must be defeated, bipartisanship (remember that?) be damned. There is no middle or consensus in a knife fight. This is applicable not only to national-level politics, as you've turned the discussion, but also to corporate politics, the subject of the thread.

“Politics is broken. Because of the {left,right}.” is a self defeating approach, and it amazes me how many otherwise intelligent people fall for it. Sadly, we might be too far gone to fix this, and what I would consider a reasonable opinion, like mine, seems every day to be more and more in the minority.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#304

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…

You can absolutely work for yourself. Google has customers too. If you work for Google, there is you, Google, and customers. If you work for you, there is you, you, and customers. You could metaphorically think of your customers as hiring and firing you, sure, in which case you have potentially millions of “bosses” and you can decide which ones you want to try to appeal to.

Running a start-up can be a pretty good gig, too.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#305
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/

...why?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#306
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why not both? I cringed when I read OP's comment where he spammed "I'm completely blocked" in the chat without asking for specifics. What a complete lack of individual ownership. Even the best manager can't help somebody who is unwilling to help themselves.

Source: am a manager.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#307
post #195
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is gamed too. You just don't include the names of people you have wronged: the bugs you have left for others to fix, the undocumented code, the projects you were supposed to complete but got reassigned so that you could work on something with higher promotion possibilities, the delays you cause in other people's work, etc...

This is exactly what I've seen happen in my experience and have often wondered about alternatives. Bridgewater, for example, uses a system that allows for feedback from anybody at any time [0], but I suspect that presents new issues like negative reviews from rival employees. Additionally, a lack of context could result in negative feedback for decisions that actually help the business (e.g. passing on requests to help colleagues with relatively low-value items in favor of focusing on higher priorities).

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/bridgewater-employees-rate-pe...

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

It is also easy to get irked when people are seemingly unwilling to do any digging or reverse engineering on their own and go straight to asking for help. Allowing someone to search for an answer for several hours may seem like a waste of their time, but it also could allow them to learn how to figure out a problem on their own. Of course their is a fine line between being a jerk and not helping someone because you w…

Yes. Unfortunately, by the time you start to think people are asking for fishing lessons just to get lunch, it can become difficult to recognize a true student.

I started out as the eager mentor, even when it was among my peers in university. But somewhere in my ~25 years of R&D, I started to notice how coworkers would become dependent. They would ask for help on types of things that I knew I had figured out myself, even when I was a novice. They develop the plea for help as a first reflex to avoid any learning tangential to what they consider the task at hand.

So, I found myself swearing under my breath and refusing to be their search engine or man-page. Depending on my mood that day, I might tell them I have no time and they should google it themselves, or I might pretend I don't know the answer either. Sometimes I relished the time to sarcastically school them on the mundane deductions it would take to answer their question from the very screen full of error messages they pasted at me. But, I already knew they would miss or ignore the hint, and be back again next time they stumbled.

Sadly, I think this cultivated impatience leaked out into my attempts to mentor a very junior staff member we had a couple years ago. I could no longer really distinguish "too lazy to try" and "drowning". They found a new job after a year or so, and it was probably wise for them. I am still trying to visualize how I can do better the next time we try to onboard somebody far junior to our current team...

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion that "a junior engineer and a manager who is at least partially paying attention can get that done" is a horseshit excuse that could be applied to 99% of what any given developer does. Moreover, developers find themselves having to write tests and fix bugs because the priorities of upper management didn't allow it or foster it for the last developer.

> developers find themselves having to write tests and fix bugs because the priorities of upper management didn't allow it Well there's your problem. If fixing those bugs isn't aligned with the priorities of upper management then you are either working on unimportant bugs or your org is screwed. You going rogue certainly isn't the solution. I see this a lot. Developers place their priorities and biases over actual bu…

Then upper management needs to be forthright in their priorities. Have you ever worked somewhere that didn't tell their developers something like "we expect clean code and quality software"? I don't think I've heard of somewhere that owned up to the fact that their primary interest was to pump out software despite a lack of code maintainability. I'm sure that the teams that produce hot garbage for Oracle tell themselves that they care about code quality.

In that case, developers are expected to read between the lines, which is quite an antipattern in doing business with any company. If you're essentially being lied to, the deal can only get worse from there.

Developers having a level of autonomy to address problems is what you consider "going rogue"? I guess it looks that way if I squint, but if developers can't decide on their own to address problems, that's not somewhere anyone should want to work. I wouldn't even want to be the slavedriver who sees their developers who are solving legitimate problems as escaping the plantation. A good manager should, rather than see this behavior as rogue, try to work it in to the existing process. A healthy development cycle should allow developers to allot a level of time or effort to address issues, and even junior developers can know better what needs to be addressed than someone who hardly touches the code.

You're right, going rogue isn't the solution; it's a sign that leaving the organization may be the solution.

There is a balance between the developer's priorities and that of the business. A business that doesn't care about a developer's judgment is totally myopic and self-deluded into thinking that it knows best about the nuanced facets of its operation. Concurrently, developers have been paid to do a job, and if they divert too much from what that job is, that can be doing wrong to the hand that's feeding them. Yet, if they are being set up to fail by the company(e.g. insufficient time allotted to maintenance), they are faced with the choice to "go rogue" in an attempt to save themselves and perhaps the company if they can see a rude awakening up ahead. As much as you may see this as transgression, this kind of situation is ultimately set up by the employer and they are solely responsible. We're not talking about employees doing their own side projects on the company time; they may literally be trying to save the company from itself.

Employees are going to going to exert some form of autonomy even when it's not granted to them. Those who are in positions of power can choose to harness that initiative instead of viewing it as a threat.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#310
post #72
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…

This to me sounds like a complete lack of self-ownership on your part. You literally sat blocked doing nothing for days, without reaching out to an individual to help with this? Instead you just spammed Slack saying you're blocked?

While I agree that it would have been nice if somebody helped you, you are in control of your own destiny. If nobody is helping you, you need to personally escalate it and reach out until you get the job done. If somebody did this on my team, the first question I would ask them was why the hell they let themselves sit blocked for days.

...and of course my team would have been more proactive on helping you because one of our core values is help your co-worker, but that is besides the point here.

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