561–570 of 783 posts
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As Horowitz writes in "The Hard Thing About Hard Things," if there even is a political game at your company, someone up top has fucked up.
And if you think there's no political games in your company then you're very naive. Your either not seeing it (which is bad for you) or its being hidden from you (which is also bad).
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The message you're responding to is literaly saying that you need to play the politics game in small startups as well. Perhaps even more so since you don't have clearly defined process of goals that lead to promotions and pay raises.
> Perhaps even more so Wasn't my experience. Of course, YMMV. > since you don't have clearly defined process of goals that lead to promotions and pay raises. Looks like Google does have defined process. Did it help the OP? Doesn't seem so. Defined processes are good if they're defined with your goals in mind. If they are defined explicitly to prevent you from reaching your goals, they'd be only an impediment, and one…
Author here. Happy to answer any questions about the post or about my experience at Google.
Are you familiar with the writing of Patrick Mackenzie? patio11 on hackernews, kalzumeus.org. His career trajectory has been similar to your story, in that he was a line engineer who went independent. The think that makes patrick great, though, is that he took the time to write up all his lessons in a blog that is essentially a how-to guide for engineers who want to make the move from "I just write code" to "I am a s…
Author here. Happy to answer any questions about the post or about my experience at Google.
The big question that I didn't quite get from the post, is why did promotion matter so much to you? Everything seemed to hinge on that, but you didn't quite explain why it was so important, other than "what a great title - people would be so impressed". It sounds like when you were happy with your title, you were happy with your work - you "lovingly" fixed the old pipeline, wrote documentation, helped colleagues etc. Were there particular benefits to being promoted that would have increased your daily happiness?
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>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?
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…
Well, the goal of a promotion is to both enable the employee to get more responsibilities and the company to get more out of the employee. If you're already putting in as much as the senior folk without being one the company has no upside in offering a promotion with the exception of employee retention/reducing employee turnover, so it is fitting that they'd offer it when you are about to leave.
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> 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.". This happened to me once a few years ago, once I finally figured it out I put all this silliness into one single bootstrapping function you could call to get the pig of an application to run, and asked the lead dev to add it to the core…
Maybe it's not the initiative per se. Did you name the function silliness(), runPig(), or give any other blatant display of contempt? It's dripping from your comment. (not saying it was necessarily about something real, just that it could be)
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I guess my question is: Can you get job satisfaction from promotion-focused work? I'm proud of what I've done . When I make someone else's life easier, that makes me feel good/satisfied with my work. I can't fathom satisfaction from impressing a promotion committee and tacking on a bigger title.
The general idea is that the things that would impress a promotion committee are things that you have done, that are good for the company. That, of course, is not the truth everywhere, but anecdotally it's a lot truer than most people complaining about other people sucking up thinks it is.
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I'd add another component: The people usually tasked with figuring these things out are new to the team. There can be all kinds of politics and interpersonal baggage with helping the new person with old configuration/ compilation/ deployment stuff. Often, it'll take one of the legacy leads to step in and clean things up. By then, everyone's annoyed at the new person, and the failure of this effort will get saddled on…
"Non-technical reasons" is the way to stifle growth. I completely agree. If only there was a way for employees to rate their Manager instead of the other way.
Then again, I've been very selective in where I work. People like to bash the "culture" stereotype, but it's definitely something I consider when I'm looking for a job... you know, how people are expected to interact with other people, not whether there are ball pits and the like.
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You're forgetting that you could also track secondhand assist as well. I can't speak for programming but in soccer this is well-known. It's just very hard to Value just like an employer would in terms of having that person on board for morale. Fortunately the better people get it and understand that that person should be value even if they weren't directly involved in making the change but they were definitely a part…
A person’s projected morale is very under-appreciated. I don’t know if I’m at the point in my career that I boost morale just by being on the team, but I do know there are people who, if they left my company, would have an impact on my morale even though I never ask them for help or work directly with them. Just something about knowing a person is an amazing and knowledgeable resource and he’s choosing to work here o…
Moving on is a fact of life, more so now that ever. My parents both worked for the same company over 35-40 years before they retired; I don't think I can imagine that'll be even close to the norm for many in the workforce now (especially software / other tech).