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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

#531

Post by jonex »

jakelarkin wrote: post #328
googlethrow wrote: post #191

Google is changing the promotion process such that managers have much more power (for all promotions up to level 5 == senior swe). Previously it used to be, as Michael says, very much in the hands of the committee members who never heard about you or even your team. Now the committee will be composed of your manager and some other two managers from a related team. The committee will not see your own promotion rationa…

my co is moving from managers to anon committee, because it gives managers too much unchecked power to favor/punish. the wheel goes round.

I would trust my manager to not abuse that power. If he would start using it, I'd first try to change team or, if not possible, just change employer. Hopefully, for the sake of the organisation, people quitting would reflect badly on the manager over time.

The point being, it's much easier for me to manage the relationship with my manager than with some anonymous committee that doesn't even know me. The manager is already important enough that I would not keep him if he seemed more interested in personal agendas than his subordinates.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#532

Post by s73v3r_ »

jehlakj wrote: post #424
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…

Any resources on upping my political game before I start at a company?

Game of Thrones?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#533

Post by deathanatos »

bowmessage wrote: post #376
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…

"when meeting my skip-manager (your managers manager) for the first time during my exit interview" This is a huge issue... You should have more actively met with them.

I've been in corporations where this is not always possible. (Mostly, politically speaking, though IIRC at one job my grandboss was not located in my building/city.)

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#535

Post by s73v3r_ »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #442
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…

From the company's perspective it's always a game of getting maximum effort/value for minimum price. From the employee's perspective it's the exact opposite: maximum price for minimum effort/value. If they can dangle that carrot in front of you and get you to give 110% at your current pay scale for 1-2 more years then why the hell wouldn't they do it? And how many people grind away on that treadmill after having that…

"If they can dangle that carrot in front of you and get you to give 110% at your current pay scale for 1-2 more years then why the hell wouldn't they do it?"

Cause that's a shitty thing to do. And, as shown, it leads to people leaving.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#536

Post by dennis_jeeves »

smsm42 wrote: post #396
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…

> Or figure out how to play. There's a third way. Don't go to Google. There are literally thousands of smaller places you can work for/in/with, some of them do pretty cool things. There'd be politics too, probably, but not as much as in Google, and you could control your destiny to a more significant degree. Small(er) companies - if you pick right - tend to have significantly better environment in that regard (not pe…

>There are literally thousands of smaller places you can work for/in/with, some of them do pretty cool things.

List them. Especially the ones where you do not need to sudy for several algorithmic puzzles.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#538

Post by HumanDrivenDev »

neuronsguy wrote: post #519
HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just clicking on your profile I see you work in London. From what I can tell most programmers don't get paid 'ludicrous amounts' there. Though maybe you have a rare role, or maybe you just have a very low threshold for what you consider ludicrous.

You are correct about the tech industry here (low salaries relative to US) but developers working in finance in London make comparable money to Bay Area tech firms. People routinely get paid £100k straight out of university to write code in London, just not in the tech scene. Total comp in the financial sector with 5 years experience is commonly £200k. Which is not 'ludicrous' but more than you might imagine from see…

Damn, I've made some bad decisions in this career!

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#539

Post by weixiyen »

kaoD wrote: post #206
somberi wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am manager who has a few levels under me (Total team of about 100 people). I find it difficult to buy into your experience, and hear me out. I am arguing in your favor. If you are assisting, and this includes providing support for someone else's code, or doing "invisible" tasks (setting up a redis cluster or writing end-to-end tests), this often finds its way into one email group or another. In fact I remember the…

That reads an awful lot like you're optimizing for people good at leaving email trails, i.e. at office politics. There's only one way to actually measure someone's output, and it's working close to the team and witnessing their actual productivity. Getting involved. 1-on-1s. Of course the farther removed from this process the more politics come into play.

^ this. Weekly or bi-weekly 1:1s + read the check-ins. Check-ins don't lie. If you are not reading check-ins as an engineering manager, then you are going to be heavily affected by politics.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#540

Post by wufufufu »

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…

What's a jock culture problem? Where everyone talks about sports and it's alienating?
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