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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

mtlynch.io

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Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#651

Post by rdtsc »

jadbox wrote: post #438
rdtsc wrote: post #103

> Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the organization. That is the true test. You are supposed to pretend only to buy into it but never really believe it. Understanding that things function on two levels is critical. One level is the superficial "we are a family, community, we are not evil, making the world better". But that's the trap to catch all the naive people and extract extra work h…

Slavoj owes much of the theory to Hegel (which Stavoj is a follower of). This video is a very light intro to Hegel by Rick Roderick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MsNyR-epBM

You're right. Absolutely. He sort of re-digested it for the popular culture, mixed it with perverse jokes and side notes.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#652

Post by DontGiveTwoFlux »

lovich wrote: post #612
bowmessage wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 war…

Sounds like your bosses have been a little micromanagey. Talking to more senior managers have been great ways for me to gain valuable perspectives on their goals and ask questions about how to achieve them. They should also be interested in a more unfiltered view from talking to the rank and file.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#653

Post by branchless »

neuronsguy wrote: post #519
HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just clicking on your profile I see you work in London. From what I can tell most programmers don't get paid 'ludicrous amounts' there. Though maybe you have a rare role, or maybe you just have a very low threshold for what you consider ludicrous.

You are correct about the tech industry here (low salaries relative to US) but developers working in finance in London make comparable money to Bay Area tech firms. People routinely get paid £100k straight out of university to write code in London, just not in the tech scene. Total comp in the financial sector with 5 years experience is commonly £200k. Which is not 'ludicrous' but more than you might imagine from see…

Not true.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#654

Post by wolco »

eikenberry wrote: post #647
wolco wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did that once and then rewrote the repo. Everything was fine for months on our team until another team merged their exact copy with new changes that broke what I was doing. Everyone senior left my team and it looked like I was doing nothing for 4 months. Communication should come first and the manager needs to step up.

I agree that communications is important and was the primary thing wrong here. It was more that even on top of that, they just sat there doing nothing vs. at least trying to be productive and figure it out for themselves. And didn't you have backups of that repo?

Sure I have backups. The other group took a copy of the repo and changed it over a three month period and never checked back in. The versions were very different and merging my copy in was difficult and required a rethinking and rewrite.. in the end it became three separate components. All of this happened during a management change so the timing wasn't perfect.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#655

Post by nilkn »

martinraag wrote: post #546
greggarious wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

It worked out for me long-term. It really depends on a lot of factors. In my case:

* I didn't actively seek out employment elsewhere. A place I'd interviewed at and turned down in the past contacted me again after they'd finished a large fundraising round. They had a new office, and I was curious just to see how they'd progressed. The whole thing happened fast and they ended up offering me a 50% raise.

* I preferred my current workplace in basically every way except for money.

* I had a great relationship with my boss, who also held a lot of power in the company.

* I wasn't really "just another" developer at the company but was doing some pretty important work.

They matched the offer (exceeded it, really), I took the counteroffer and stayed, and two years later I've been promoted two levels and given multiple further raises and bonuses.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#656

Post by bps4484 »

antoinevg wrote: post #646
bps4484 wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Manager here] I don't really see what the political game is here that he lost. What I think he failed to do was show impact in a clear a visible way. Don't get me wrong, there is salesmanship required here in terms of clearly demonstrating your value, but it's not like Google was giving the promo to some other guys who always went out to dinner with his boss and sucked up to him, or the guy the boss went to college…

As an engineer my job is to engineer. As a manager it's your job to figure out what my impact is. If you make it my job to show what my impact is I (and everyone else you are responsible for) will simply spend my time coming up with ever more creative ways of doing this instead of engineering. But hey, maybe I'm being silly and your company has no problems finding competent engineers, all your projects ship on time a…

First, just to make sure we are on the same page, are you in agreement that this wasn't politics, but perhaps a disagreement in the roles and responsibilities of a manager and an engineer and what an engineer is expected to do at google? I just want to make sure we're on the same page on that, which was the crux of my point.

But as to your point, on the roles and responsibilities of managers and engineers, I mostly agree with your comment about the role of a manager, which as I said before should be responsible for working with the engineer both to show their impact, but also making sure they're actually doing impactful work.

I disagree that if it's your job as an engineer to show what your impact is that you'll come up with creative ways of doing this. You can try to come up with creative ways of showing impact, and maybe a promotion panel will agree with you, but maybe they won't and you'll be left without recognition (I've seen this happen before).

To your last comment about competent engineers, I don't know what company you work at, but at mine, shipping projects on time, and under budget, especially when they are large in scope and involve complex technologies or large teams that you've led, and especially when those projects have impact on the company's bottom line, those project are considered major impact and and those engineers are amply rewarded.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#657

Post by YZF »

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…

Where I work we are big on peer review. So in theory helping others should have value. It's still not perfect. For example, a junior may not be able to asses the value of your help, or anything else for that matter. People will still tend to rank their friends higher. While your boss doesn't rank you whether he promotes your work to others has a big influence on how they view you.

In a previous company we had a better mix of peer reviews and input from technical leads (that were not your bosses). This was by far the best system I've seen to date for a company of that size.

In small companies there is typically good visibility into what everyone is doing. If you have good management then things tend to work very well. If you have bad management it can be worse than large companies.

One thing I've come to learn is that this sort of stuff, call it culture, has to be a priority for the company's leadership, they have to keep inspecting it and fixing it. They need to talk to people and understand their concerns. Otherwise it always drifts the wrong way. The Google system from what I read here sounds terrible.

EDIT: Having people try to optimize to play the system, just like the article describes, is inevitable so you must ensure the incentives are aligned. Make sure you find ways to look at the stuff that really matters and make sure you're not antagonizing your employees with your review system.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#658

Post by jimbokun »

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.

This person probably DID ask more specific questions. They were just describing the gist if the interaction. Not a literal copy paste of the exact messages.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#659

Post by FullyFunctional »

ironjunkie wrote: post #599
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 Bl…

I want to add that I do think google has a _culture_ that allows great people more visibility. You don't see [as] many blogs by say Apple engineers :)

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#660

Post by daddosi »

dep_b wrote: post #72
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…

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…

But it was! It was excluding you! Your lack of performance made everyone else look more productive.
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