Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

Never thought about it that way but it is probably the reason I like to understajpnd the rules before breaking them.

Why do you think it should be difficult?

I almost always interview my immediate management chain (immediate manager and boss of my immediate manager) before taking a job.

> I can't say for sure but your mention of 'CSS' makes me guess this is a web application, in which case you should be able to read the source code and figure out how to build it.

Not necessarily. In my case, we have a web application where it eventually turned out that the variable was read from an environment variable. On a server where I didn't have access.

There are politics no matter where you are. Whenever two or three are gathered together, there is politics. Politics is just what people call interpersonal dynamics when they don't like a particular setup. The bottom line is that people all have their set of goals, and if you are lucky, your goals, their goals, and the goals of the company are well aligned. If they aren't the question is can you find a way of changing the situation so that they are better aligned?

This applies to being a leader in a volunteer organization, or being a leader in an open source project --- or being a leader in a corporate environment. In my experience the last is often actually easier and simpler than the first two!

As far as your goals are concerned, you should be clear to yourself what they are. For me, it wasn't primarily about the money. Sure, I'm at Google now, and I'm enjoying the compensation --- but I spent nine years at MIT before I moved on to VA Linux Systems (and doubled my salary, before equity --- most of which ended up being worthless).

If you know what your goals and desires are, the next trick is to understand what others' goals and desires are, and trying to help them achieve their goals while also making yours a reality. This is true whether you are working for yourself, or working at a big company. (And at a big company, sometimes it's a matter of finding the right team. Don't assume that just because you had a lousy time on one team that the characteristics of your situation are universal across the entire company.)

Working at big companies it is very important to choose which projects to work on, and which to not work on. You should be asking your manager, product manager, whoever, to explain in detail how your project is going to be helping. Why is it even necessary? If it's a smaller part of a big system, what is the bigger system doing, and is this project really going to help it in some way? And in some way I mean some way that can be easily measured and demonstrable. The business case must be crystal clear.

If it's new development, how do they know this feature or thing is going to work, or is needed? What work has been done to verify these assumptions, and what is the risk? If there is any data collected, user stories, or customer interviews, ask to see that information. Ask to see any roadmaps or presentations given to higher level managers. Ask to be included in any product meetings or customer interviews. If they balk at any of this, it's a red flag that they are unwilling to be open with their plans. In my experience, this normally means they know their own plans are bullshit or they simply don't exist. It's really amazing how many managers and senior level people at these companies operate on bullshit. I've seen it so many times.

The purpose of all this is to insulate and protect yourself from the failure of your own management. If a manager keeps cancelling your projects, ask why? Personally after a manager has cancelled one of my projects more than once and there isn't a good explanation why (i.e. something I myself wouldn't have seen coming), I start to question and doubt his decision making ability, and I'm less likely to want to work on his team or do his assigned work. I immediately start looking at other options for how I can benefit the company. This is a tricky situation in itself, however. I've had managers who have let me run with my own ideas and have praised me for leading projects and working closely with various areas of the business, and I've also been fired because my manager couldn't stand the fact I wasn't willing to be his slave and work on another of his (soon to be cancelled) projects.

In many tech companies who only care about end of the line results, it's simply not enough to do a good job. You have to do a good job on something that actually matters. When you're up for promotion, you're up against other people who have done a good job at things that have mattered, and the quantification being done is how much of these good things matter when compared to one another.

It's really a shame in this case that it seems like the OP was really stuck under very poor management who clearly didn't know what they were doing.

If Google holds it engineers to results, why doesn't it let them at least decide what they get to work on? It seems they've forgotten the part that if you're going to decouple someone's direct management influence, you need to decouple that manager's ability to assign that person work or dictate what projects he or she works on. Just goes to show even at a company like Google they don't have everything figured out...