Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#591

Post by ohsnapman » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 12:59 AM UTC

aecorredor wrote: post #71

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…

At my company we use something called bonusly. You get 30 bonusly per month to give out to your teammates, and each bonusly is worth $1. You can buy basically anything with the bonusly you receive (amazon gift cards = anything). On top of being able to buy stuff, it also keeps metrics on which teammates help the most. The only downside is that you must give out all your bonusly at the end of the month (if not it's wa…

At Google there is a peer bonus benefit. You can peer bonus someone for doing something awesome. Each peer bonus is $150 before tax. You can list your peer bonuses on your promo packet. You can give as many of these out as you want ... within reason. Sometimes at Google they do something called a peer bomb, where many people will peer bonus a single person.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#592

Post by VHRanger » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:08 AM UTC

eqdw wrote: post #481

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.…

The problem is that management is basically an art and no one knows how to create consistently good managers. Because it's the epitomy of soft, unmeasurable, skills.

So when people get frustrated with shitty management, they turn to whatever other idea,.

If people read and __actually implemented__ the stuff in Peopleware (or any other classic SWE management book that's highly regarded) we'd all be better off. But instead we're stuck in this equilibrium where we constantly chase management trends (see: open offices which are consistently shown to be nefarious for productivity).

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#593

Post by lutorm » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:08 AM UTC

CodeMage wrote: post #373

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…

> 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 metric might be a good idea, but I think the real problem goes deeper than that. Take a step back and ask yourself a more fundamental question: should everyone who does good work be promoted? By definition, p…

By definition, promotions are limited

That's not really the case if the promotion ladder is a skills/experience based ladder and not a responsibility ladder. If being a "senior engineer" just means you have reached a certain level of proficiency, then there's no reason everyone can't be promoted to that level.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#594

Post by dep_b » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

MadBohr wrote: post #306

dgreensp wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a manager of some kind were to notice the Slack messages and ping someone specific to help, that would be a perfect example of the kind of management that is so sorely lacking at so many companies. Many employees are too burned, or proud, to even put out an SOS... so a cry for help is actually a gift to management. If only it were someone’s job to think for a few minutes each day about each employee and notice if…

Why not both? I cringed when I read OP's comment where he spammed "I'm completely blocked" in the chat without asking for specifics. What a complete lack of individual ownership. Even the best manager can't help somebody who is unwilling to help themselves. Source: am a manager.

I’m not repeating exact conversations, people or problems for obvious reasons.

You can bet I was a hell more specific about both the problem and who should help me.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#595

Post by ernsheong » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:21 AM UTC

popcat wrote: post #182

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…

As a junior engineer, what the best way to learn about and master the political game? I feel like it all goes way over my head. Does anyone have any recommended reading?

I don't buy all this. Do your best work. Be nice to others as much as humanly possible. Don't treat it as a game, you might end up losing and get disappointed. Don't get your hopes up too high. We can't control everything. Be thankful. And surprise, you might just get the promotion for being more of a human than a machine.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#596

Post by guelo » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

eqdw wrote: post #481

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.…

The problem is it's very difficult to interview your management chain before you take the job.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#597

Post by masterj » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:22 AM UTC

grantcox wrote: post #564

mtlynch wrote: post #2

Author here. Happy to answer any questions about the post or about my experience at Google.

Thanks for sharing this, I've not been (and never will be) a SV employee, so it's interesting to see such a different perspective. 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…

Promotions carry a corresponding salary bump that can be quite large. Check out http://levels.fyi/ (seems to be down right now) or the associated spreadsheet of salaries: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IclsJmHUMWjZCECMKi1I...

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#598

Post by ironjunkie » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:29 AM UTC

mtlynch wrote: post #312

smcl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early on in the article you describe the excitement your younger self had a the prospect of working with the "best engineers in the world". However further down you describe your difficulties with some products - undocumented code with no unit tests and silent failures which are hard-to-diagnose. Has your opinion changed about this at all? I am not sure how indicative these descriptions are to overall quality at Goog…

No, I found developer quality to be very high at Google throughout my time there. I think the lack of tests was more symptomatic of bad incentives that good developers were forced to follow. Developers were rewarded for flashy things they could show promo committees, and rigorous tests or well-written documentation. It was unusual to find code with no tests because a code reviewer will usually insist on at least some…

Did you really believe you were working with the best developers in the world though? Did you not realize this was all part of a marketing machine to make you feel good?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#599

Post by ironjunkie » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:35 AM UTC

FullyFunctional wrote: post #161

Thanks for writing this and good for you to finally leave that wasteland. I learned an important lesson on my first job "Don't be suckered into being loyal to your company because, no matter what they say, they are loyal to share holders, not to you". On a side note, I don't understand the fetish with Google; where does this reality distortion come from that they have the best engineers? At _every_ company I have wor…

It's part of a subtle marketing machine. It starts with the interview process

Did you realize that Google is the single company in which people are actually bragging about interviewing there? (even if the outcome was negative)

They also select a specific type of engineers that are influenceable enough to be convinced that everyone at Google are the absolute best. Those same engineers are then writing those type of Blog posts in which they pound the message over and over about being the best. It's a win-win. Good for their own ego, and good for the company as side marketing.

Now, I'm not saying that they are below average, but in the valley, I don't think Google has any more talents than other companies that don't make such a big deal about being the best

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#600

Post by taneq » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 1:42 AM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #127

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…

relatedly, a friend of mine worked at a place where everyone was on "20% time = bug time". You were expected to spend ~ 20% of your time taking bugs from the bug tracker and fixing them. Bugs closed were part of a metric towards bonuses. People were taking one bug, breaking it in to 3 or 4, then closing all of those. "Add button for X" became * "add button on form" * "add CSS for button" * "update CSS for button" * "…

It sounds like you need a 'reasonable person' clause - when considering bonuses, each metric gets looked at by a randomly selected group of peers and they can jointly decide if someone's gaming the system.

To take a narrower view, it sounds like that place needed to assign weights to the different bugs, so that the big scary bug was worth 20x (or whatever) of the trivial 'tweak the CSS' bugs.