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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

#361

Post by kolpa »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #323
MadBohr wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could you please give an example of a message with more ownership? Keep in mind that he didn't know at the time that he was missing some undocumented configuration step.

Bad: "I need help with this."

Good: "Hi, Sumitra. Can you help me with this or recommend someone who can?"

Good: "Hi, $MANAGER. Can you help me with this or recommend someone who can?"

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#362

Post by eric_b »

The more I hear about the inner workings of Google, the less impressed I am. It seems their vaunted hiring process has let in folks who specialize more at internal politicking than getting things done. It doesn't take too many of those kind of people to ruin a culture, and cause a company to stagnate or go backwards.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#363

Post by kolpa »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #348
MadBohr wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The reason is pretty clear, the worked remotely and so had no means to physically reach out but instead had to wait for people to reply on mail.

Direct message doesn't require physical contact.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#364

Post by mlazos »

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 work at Microsoft, and I know around promo time in addition to people on your team, managers ask for feedback from people not on your team that you’ve interacted with as well so that can be used in conjunction with whatever projects work you’ve completed.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#365

Post by cryptbe »

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…

At Google you can ask your coworkers to write feedback that would be included in your promo package. I wonder why the author didn't ask the developers that they helped to write a few sentences explaining how much time they'd saved thanks to the author's help. The hiring committee wouldn't ask for any metric if there were already a few people testifying that "I saved XX hours".

Disclaimer: I work at Google.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#366

Post by tclancy »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #253
ithinkinstereo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working for yourself really does mean working for yourself. Yes, you might have customers to answer to, but you can always tell them to fuck off if you want. You suffer the consequences and reap the rewards. Your actions, small or large, matter. Yes, working for a corporation is safer and more stable. In the grand scheme of things, this is the risk-adverse, safe thing to do. The OP may waste years of his life, or he…

That doesn't really follow. As an independent worker, you answer to your clients. As an employee, you answer to your single client. It's basically the same deal.

It's not quite true: places of employment that are ok with you firing a client, while they exist, are rare. When I was an independent contractor, I was loath to fire a client because they can be hard to find, but knowing I could and doing so was a good feeling. I don't know if the positive of that offset the mental stress of generating clients, but it was one of the positives. So was the freedom to work when you want. I now work remotely full-time for a company with an incredibly flexible attitude toward getting your work done, but I still feel guilty for running errands on "company time". The flip side to that is when I worked for myself, all time was potentially company time.

So it's all fit & personality.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#367

Post by marssaxman »

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…

I have generally chosen to deal with this problem by refusing to acknowledge the existence of bonuses or promotions. It is harder for a warped incentive structure to warp your behavior if you refuse to be motivated by its prizes.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#368

Post by MadBohr »

jey wrote: post #325
MadBohr wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of your jobs as a manager is to debug these people issues, right? So when you get a "bug report" like "I'm stuck", you should investigate the bug and look for a solution, which might be something like "Hey Bob, Jim is having trouble getting the Frobnicator running on his machine. Can you please give him a hand with this later today? Thanks". (This assumes that Jim's SOS was issued in the first half of the day; wa…

Yes that's true, which is why I said "why not both?" The manager should do more, but so should the employee. Sitting there and saying "I'm blocked, woe is me" is garbage compared to saying "I'm blocked. Can you please help me Mr/Ms XYZ?"

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#369

Post by NTDF9 »

cookiecaper wrote: post #243
NTDF9 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is endemic to our industry. The problem really is short-sighted management. They only value something that shows themselves in good light with their superiors. Managers absolutely don't seem to care about actually building a team and cultivating a culture of success. Engineering managers are way way worse than Soccer managers in this regard. I would put this all on the hiring processes right from how we hire eng…

I don't think it's specific to our industry. I think it's specific to the corporate system we have, and that it correlates with the sense of ownership and freedom that we give people. When it's "every man for himself", you're going to see that optimization toward individual metrics and protection of personal reputation, even if it means that a colleague's reputation is deprived. When you have a recognized long-term l…

Is the short-term thinking a cause or an effect?

I think short-term thinking by superiors causes short-term behavior by reports.

If the management pays fairly, with fair raises, fair balance, fair acknowledgement of all kinds of work and not just the flashy stuff, most reports would focus on the right things, do their jobs well and not look to switch jobs all the time.

But if the management is always trying to escape giving promotions/raises, does not acknowledge the underlying effort to get something to production, only thinks about their own empires (basically short-term selfish thinking) it will cause a disproportionately high number of reports to behave the same aka look out for their selfish interests.

I am absolutely certain that top companies look to retain good players (top != stock price or market cap).

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