Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

mtlynch.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 783 posts

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#611

Post by taneq »

Infernal wrote: post #605
taneq wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start by actually talking to your management instead of just trying to be a rock star. "Hey, I'm spending a lot of time doing Team X's job and it's impacting on my assigned work, if you want me to keep doing this then put me in charge of Team X, otherwise let's all sit down together and clarify who is responsible for what."

So I'm asking this not to move the goalposts, but because it's the situation I'm in - what do if your manager is too weak/distracted/uncaring to actually act on this information and/or the projects in wait state on you are not actually within your manager's sphere of influence?

Hmm, tough one. The default answer is "follow it up the chain" - if your boss isn't doing the right thing, talk to their boss, and so on. Another approach is to talk to the manager of the team who's leaning on you, and let them know (if they don't already) how much they're depending on you and that you should really be in that team. This can cause drama with your immediate boss (they're seen as 'poaching' you) but if said boss doesn't care then this might not be a problem.

Of course, by the time you have upper management yelling at you because "several teams are waiting on you", the response becomes "why have you allowed several teams to become completely dependent on one overworked person?"

The other, more drastic solution (as someone else said) is simply to move jobs. This can be the only way to fix the issue if the entire management structure is corrupted and you don't think it's fixable from within. You could even just leave, start a consultancy company, and let the second team know that you're available for hire when they need you.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#612

Post by lovich »

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.

Everywhere I have worked, if I had gone to my manager's manager without his explicit instruction to do so, would have led to my manager spending 100% of his time trying to get me fired because I would not be a wild card in terms of messaging to his boss.

Undoubtedly there are places where this is not the case, but in any workplace where politics have taken over skipping the hiearchy leads to nothing but political warfare

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#613

Post by derekp7 »

joncrane wrote: post #522
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…

>After 25 years of this What has your career trajectory been like over the past 25 years?

I'd best describe myself as a "computer person". Other than the first few years when I first started at around 15, my job has been Unix Systems Administrator / Engineer, but I've always thrown a lot of programming at my job too. Not just systems automation programming, but various utilities, apps, etc.

For example, back in 89 (I was 18 - 19 then) the company I was at had a need to access multiple screens at the same time in their green-screen (serial terminal) application. So I wrote a multi-session terminal emulator. Ended up being a lot like what GNU screen is today (not sure if screen existed then, this was pre-internet days for me).

Other times I'd write up software distribution systems, monitoring systems, etc. Or work on creating things like a custom interpreted language, just because an app developer at my company needed that. Or write hand-coded postscript, because someone's app needed that.

In my current company, I'm still a Linux systems engineer / Lead, but I've been on-loan to our app development team to help with C-based libraries that they need (this code is a couple decades old, and they don't have any C hackers that can work on it). This is software that interfaces with medical testing equipment, so it feels like I'm making some difference.

Lately I've been brushing up on my web development skills, becoming buzzword-compliant, and putting together web apps both for internal use, and related to maintaining our product.

I guess I should have went into full time development years ago, but I was always worried that I'd get shoved into boring business applications instead of working on really interesting stuff. So I've stayed in the Unix/Linux ops role, found out that a lot of what I've been doing is now called DevOps, and doing open source work on the side.

As for the trajectory, I haven't changed jobs that often. I've had a couple of dud-type jobs where I lasted 1 - 3 years (they didn't want someone who could do "extra" stuff, because that "made the rest of the team look lazy" as I was told in a performance review once). But when I start at a good place I try to make a good first impression, then a better second impression, and try to work and support as many people as I can (while doing my best to make them look good, but making sure I get recognized too). Helps to have a number of people that "have my back".

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#614

Post by tehlike »

xkjkls wrote: post #301
jcheng wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another position that's similar but less gross, which is to have some humility about what you think is important vs. what work your manager/manager's manager think is important. Try to work on what they think is important not (just) because of a cynical desire to game the system and get ahead, but because they have probably more experience and (often a lot more) context than you do. Of course, this only works…

That's definitely true too. There's a lot of developers who spend way more time beautifying code than they actually do driving the business. While sometimes great code leads to great business results, that's not a law of nature. The inverse and converse can certainly be true too.

Spot on. Most organizations spend time on how to do thinks than actually doing it. What i found out was to get some data as soon as possible, even if it has large caveats. That is more important than getting it right, becaude you wont.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#615

Post by mtlynch »

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…

Thanks for reading!

It was mostly just the status. I think having the title of Senior Software Engineer has a lot of value in itself because it brings better job offers and more credibility if I go off on my own.

Also, people tended to be assigned more interesting projects the higher their level.

I'd enjoy the extra compensation, but that wasn't as strong a factor.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#616

Post by letientai299 »

> You’re in a business relationship with Google. If you’re disappointed that Google isn’t “romancing” you with gifts like you do for your wife, you have a misguided notion of the relationship.

This line is the best summary how most companies treat their employees, despite whatever the company promote about internal community, team building, etc...

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#617

Post by nissimk »

Vinnl wrote: post #179
dep_b wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the one hand it is indeed disappointing that nobody would help you with this. On the other hand, there's a more pro-active role you could have played yourself in this as well. "When everybody is responsible, nobody is" - what often helps is specifically asking people, by name, to sit down with you for a bit and help you get through it. In fact, there are many social group situations in which asking specific people…

It's good you pointed this out because many people don't know. I took a first aid class and they taught us in an emergency situation, never say "somebody call 911!" Because everybody will think someone else will do it. Point to a specific person and say "you, call 911!"

It's the same thing.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#618

Post by lovich »

kamaal wrote: post #198
whack wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing documentation and fixing bugs is in fact not the bar for a senior software engineer. The bar for a senior engineer should be identifying the biggest problems plaguing an organization, and successfully tackling them. In some cases, the biggest problem is building and launching something shiny and impressive. In other cases, the biggest problem is fixing bugs. Refactoring complex/unstable systems to make them…

>>The bar for a senior engineer should be identifying the biggest problems plaguing an organization, and successfully tackling them. Yeah, right. People who hold the current power will never let you do it. For one simple reason. No one likes to be promoting their next boss. In fact in most companies merely talking about 'biggest problems plaguing an organization' can get you fired. No likes to be told that the curren…

God yes.

At my current position I have been hired to help rewrite an application and I was literally taken aside and talked to for saying, verbatim, that "the application was built for business needs that no longer exist, and we need to update it for our current requirements", because it upset people by implying that the code they wrote 5 years ago was no longer perfect.

It seems like any organization that grows beyond 2 layers of management turns into an organization that spends the majority of it's time posturing rather than attempting to get anything done

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#619

Post by cdelsolar »

smsm42 wrote: post #608
dennis_jeeves wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last time I was interviewed by phone at Amazon, I was asked to write a binary tree to a file. Time given: 30 minutes. Does that count as a puzzle? Did lot's on exercises on binary trees before but was not prepared for that question.

Nah, that sounds pretty simple - you just need to know how to walk a binary tree (basic knowledge) and how to write a string to a file (even more basic knowledge) - provided binary tree stores strings (and with right serializer, everything stores strings). Unless I am missing something. Don't think this qualifies as a puzzle. Puzzle would be something that requires non-trivial knowledge or exceptional insight to solv…

OK then do it on the phone with the interviewer looking at you as you're typing and your brain has suddenly blanked. I've been coding since I was 9 years old, have a massive (relatively) side project with a couple hundred users, have shipped multiple projects in multiple jobs, and I know what a binary tree is and how to traverse one, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to do it under those conditions. I absolutely hate interview questions where they make you code on the spot. Just look at my Github, I swear I wrote that code.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#620

Post by kajecounterhack »

lhorie wrote: post #119
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…

In a previous company, there was a feature in the intranet to give kudos to other people. Everyone in the company could see a kudo as a post in the global intranet "chat" sidebar (not really chat, more like a communal facebook wall of sorts that would bump posts to the top any time anyone commented on them) You could give as many kudos as you wanted, and it had zero impact on performance appraisal/raises, but it sure…

Google has both the kudos system as well as a peer bonus system. People don't use it enough across the company imo.
Post reply on HN