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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

#541

Post by weixiyen »

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'd be politics too, probably, but not as much as in Google

WAT.jpg

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#542

Post by jjoonathan »

rzzzt wrote: post #412
johngalt wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For managers: better metrics or fewer metrics.

For programmers: jump ship. A well-executed handoff process will not only maintain goodwill but remind others of your value.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#543

Post by treis »

cookiecaper wrote: post #188
wehadfun wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea if a developer helps someone there is no guarantee that there will be an email chain generated as proof. If you truly believe this in all due respect you are out of touch with reality. People still walk up and ask for help. Maybe not in remote teams but in the office all the time. Supposedly making these type of interactions possible is the whole point of open offices

Yes, people who have been around the block come to the same realization that the author does re: filing bugs. Any type of written communication or record that is not either undeniably necessary or unambiguously favorable must be avoided. I've had the experience several times where extensive, detailed emails would always meet the same reply: "Thanks. Let's talk about it in the morning." These people are wise to the ga…

Meeting notes are your best friend. If someone pulls the let's talk about it in person, send an email afterwards summing up the conversation.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#544

Post by brokenmachine »

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: '…

This is absolutely true, and enlightening to see stated so succinctly.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#545

Post by pyrale »

MadBohr wrote: post #382
BowBun wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A new repo, likely a new employee on a new project. I have to disagree with your statement since you don't know the context at all. If all they're given is a repo with inadequate instructions, there's not much more you can do than keep asking for general help. Comment sounds like typical 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps', meant to put down new talent, ignoring that complex, modern dev environments have many parts…

> 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. That is not asking for help. Asking for help would be "Can somebody please help me? ... rest of message here...". Even better is asking an individual (or individuals) directly.

"I'm blocked" is the strongest type of distress signal in terms of workflow. If you don't investigate that, what else would you investigate ?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#546

Post by martinraag »

greggarious wrote: post #475
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…

>What I found most off putting, was when meeting my skip-manager (your managers manager) for the first time during my exit interview, all doors for a senior level promotion were suddenly open, to incentivise me to stay. Did you meet anyone who had taken that option? I thought it was commonly viewed a bad idea to take a counter offer, since most companies will lay you off or never promote you again due to perceived di…

I know of someone (not in the same company) who was offered a one time large cash bonus to stay for at least 12 more months. He took the offer. Unfortunately I don't know where that has lead to in his relationship with the employer.

I too would be interested in knowing if that has actually worked out for anyone long term.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#547

Post by pyrale »

kolpa wrote: post #361
emiliobumachar wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

Bystander effect in a situation that is not critical is a good sign that your company culture is fucked up. That's also on management.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#548

Post by brokenmachine »

bdhess wrote: post #414
geofft wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the point was that it's silly for someone who's meant to be on a team to spend possibly days trying to debug something as silly as that, instead of someone on the team just spending the few minutes to help them and give them the registry key they need.

It's not time efficient for everyone to work separately down to reverse-engineering the machine code to work out what's missing every time.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#549

Post by smsm42 »

dennis_jeeves wrote: post #536
smsm42 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't think anybody does puzzles anymore. It's like 2000s thing. Are there still puzzle interview places left?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#550

Post by Adamantcheese »

_nickwhite wrote: post #534

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22quit%20google%22&sort=byPop... Serious question, why is Quitting Google such a big deal?

Because it's touted as the company to get a job at and leaving it means something is wrong with you and you need to write up a blog post justifying why you left teh best position ever!!!!1!
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