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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

#411

Post by bambax »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #273
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…

"In the first place, nobody "works for themself". You might work for customers, or clients, or whatever, but not "yourself"." nail on the head... so many people don't get this simple fact that if you DO NOT have clients, you DO NOT have a business. You can't ever "pay yourself", some outside entity have to pay you for your product.

Not true!

If you're doing b2b, yes admittedly you work for clients, yet a client is still very different from a boss (he can't order you around or give you "performance evaluations", etc.)

BUT if you're doing b2c and selling something to many anonymous customers you don't interact with, you're truly working for yourself; that thing can be a piece of software, an object, a novel, etc.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#412

Post by rzzzt »

johngalt wrote: post #387
derekp7 wrote: post #171

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…

Capability and responsibility become conflated very easily. You start off as the superhero who can fix problems, but that gradually creates dependency. 1st year 'Thanks for your help finding that error that was holding us up.' 2nd year 'We are all finished now. Just sent it over to you for debugging.' 3rd year 'Hey we are all waiting on you to fix. Big deadline for big customer.' CC: management 4th year Management: '…

So... how does one break the cycle?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#413

Post by lkrubner »

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…

One easy way to track this is tell every employee that each month they get 3 upvotes and 3 downvotes. The votes are anonymous. (If you have less than 20 employees, then maybe just 1 upvote and 1 downvote.) They vote for their co-workers.

You'll see patterns in the upvotes and downvotes. The upvotes might signal "This person helped me a lot." The downvotes can catch interpersonal problems that might otherwise be hidden from you. For instance, someone on your team might be guilty of sexual harassment, but they are clever about hiding it from you. Your only clue will be that, say for instance, all the women keep downvoting that person.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#414

Post by bdhess »

geofft wrote: post #256
bdhess wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really undebuggable. Process Explorer shows registry calls, and IIRC even marks them in red when the key is missing. Again not arguing that this is efficient, just that doing nothing is less efficient.

I generally assume that when someone says "blocked" they're not literally staring out the window, they're just not operating with anywhere close to the efficiency they should be. Also it's not clear to me that learning how to use Process Explorer + using it, when that's not your job, is actually meaningfully more efficient than staring out the window all day.

I don’t understand your comment. Whose job should it be, then, to learn and use debugging tools?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#415

Post by shados »

Isamu wrote: post #78
shados wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one of my previous teams, we did away with individual metrics because they "punished" team players. If an engineer spent most of a week helping another with their issue, it made them look bad in whatever tracker we used by almost every metric. I prefered sticking to trying to optimize whole team velocity and using 1 on 1s and peer reviews to track individual performance where it was needed (eg: compensation review…

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.

The issue then is the other side of the story: you end up with popularity contests. Someone with a silver tongue will always win in peer review-based processes. No solution's perfect.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#416

Post by greedo »

redux13 wrote: post #67
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 company that I work for employs a system of peer review - where at the end of the year your teammates write reviews for you and your appraisal is based on that. It seems to work pretty well our case and definitely aligns the incentives of the employees with having an impact on the people around them.

That's assuming that your peers aren't willing to sabotage you to get ahead...

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#417

Post by cmrdporcupine »

phamilton wrote: post #64

Writing documentation and fixing bugs is in fact not the bar for a senior software engineer. I don't disagree with the promotion committee on that front. IIRC, Senior Software Engineer is a terminal level. You aren't expected to advance any more once you reach that level. Some do, but you can stay a Senior Engineer for the rest of your career and that's fine. So certainly "can fix bugs and write docs and tests" isn't…

I think you are mostly correct. But the problem with Google's promo/perf process is that there has until very recently been the expectation that all employees eventually get to Level 5 (Senior Software Engineer). When I started it was outrightly stated that if you didn't get to this level within 5 years, you would probably end up getting, ehh... scrutinized.

They have since backpedaled on that, and now it's not an expectation. But you can imagine what kind of frustration this can lead to if you're continually passed up for promo to that level.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#418

Post by mkirklions »

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 dont work on software, but shouldnt there be deliverables that matter?

Track management only.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#420

Post by 0x445442 »

bthrn wrote: post #381
thrownaway954 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In the first place, nobody "works for themself". You might work for customers, or clients, or whatever, but not "yourself"." nail on the head... so many people don't get this simple fact that if you DO NOT have clients, you DO NOT have a business. You can't ever "pay yourself", some outside entity have to pay you for your product.

I know people who have quit full time jobs to write algo trading software for themselves to use -- the market pays them but I wouldn't call it a customer.

Interesting you went here. I've thought for a long time that trading your own money in the markets is the closest (urban) thing to leaving the cave in the morning, killing your food and dragging it back. The thought is appealing to me on so many levels.
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