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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

#481

Post by eqdw »

rsp1984 wrote: post #445

I'm glad you put in the work to write down your experiences, and I'm glad that HN is rewarding this. Promotion at Google is a process filled with selfishness and dishonesty and I think hackers need to know about this. The promotion committees are a joke. They typically have no idea about your product, your team, your quality of contribution and whether what you're telling them in the promo package is true or a lie. T…

I used to believe that middle managers were useless shits who wasted my time and got in the way of work. I imagined that the flat organizational model made more sense: since this is what my day to day life is, anyway, at least we get rid of idiots who get paid more than me.

Then I worked in a place where I had actually good middle management. They were smart and capable. They supported our team and helped us succeed. They shielded us from most of the political BS. They advocated for us to other elements of the business. They invested, both time and money, in our professional development.

To make it concrete: in a company where the other engineering teams (five or six of them) were consistently experiencing churn, having morale problems, and shipping buggy code six months late, our team had zero turnover, a shrinking bug backlog, and consistently delivered things _ahead_ of schedule.

I'm 100% on board with the good old proven management model now. You just need to have an actually good manager.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#482

Post by latj »

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've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while."

Sounds like a super fun place to work. ;)

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#483

Post by stevenh »

Teams are spontaneously disbanded and their projects are moved to other countries because it prevents people who share the same allegiance or ideology that runs counter to Google's from conspiring to hide "accidental" exploitable bugs in the code which could later be used to damage the company. The project gets audited by the next team's fresh eyes and if an exploit is found then it is patched and can be traced back to the moles who can then be monitored or fired. Rinse and repeat until launch.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#484

Post by q3k »

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…

> Second, you're a lot better off working at a good company -- MUCH better off

Working at Google ruined my mental health. Granted, it hasn't been great to begin with, but being in SRE made my absolutely miserable. Every night, coming intellectually wasted and couldn't even work on my own project because of draconian IP clauses in my contract.

Quit half a year ago, went (back) into freelancing and I couldn't be happier. Don't care about the money or prestige anymore.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#485

Post by phamilton »

sssilver wrote: post #455
phamilton wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem is dishonesty. I've never worked for a company that would at least admit "our primary focus is selling rather than software quality". I know it should be implied, but when work is advertised as "looking for ninja pro engineers dedicated to their craft to help build top notch software", no wonder people get misaligned on values.

Have you ever worked for a company that was faced with running out of money? Things get real pretty quick when you hear you only have X months of runway.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#486

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

Politics is everywhere. Misaligned incentives are everywhere.

The best you can do is find a place where those with the power to promote also have skin in the game. Usually that means working directly for an owner, or being an owner yourself.

Politics dominates when those who do the promotion do not suffer the consequences of losing good people or promoting bad people.

All organizations become shit after they grow to 10,000+ people. It’s not possible for politics to be kept out at that scale. Google may be worse than many other places because its steady profits allow it to keep many useless individuals on the rolls, who would be fired elsewhere.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#487

Post by sangnoir »

I always knew Google incentivizes the launch of "new" products, but the breadth and depth of the extent wasn't apparent. I now understand why Google Talk has so many short-lived reincarnations. On the flipside, this also disincentivizes maintenance/up-keep of old products - Reader never had a chance.

It ironic that Google's share class/structure relieves its C-level management from short-term/quarter-by-quarter thinking, but at the same time it pressures the rank-and-file to have short horizons.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#488

Post by klenwell »

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…

If the standup was part of a scrumesque process, this is a case where a scrum master could have really come to the rescue.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#489

Post by [deleted] »

inetknght wrote: post #226
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…

That's neither healthy nor sustainable. You're the one that sees a problem; you absolutely need to make your boss aware of that situation and that the company needs to arrange for better utilization of man-hours. If management doesn't fix that to be healthy, consider moving to a healthier position.

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