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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

#671

Post by Ruphin »

Reading through this comment section I get the feeling a lot of folks here are rather confused about what it is they really want. On one hand they care about producing quality work, and value doing meaningful work like helping others or solving problems nobody else wants to touch, and on the other hand they expect to receive this senior title in recognition of their efforts and get disillusioned when they fail to do so.

There's so much resentment in this thread about colleagues who have titles, when they aren't producing superior work. You're clearly judging your peers (and by extension yourself) based on quality of work, so why care about the title? If you can write good code, or design great APIs, or build excellent tests or clean up outdated codebases, I don't care if your title is Emperor of the Universe or Junior Intern, you're welcome on my team any time and I'll be glad to have you on board and build awesome products with me.

If you want to get that title, then by all means go play the title game like the author. Focus on metrics, forget about producing meaningful work, and you'll be on the fast lane to become one of those people that you resent right now.

Anyone remember those "unprofessional" titles like "Chief Executive Ninja" and whatnot that were so popular in the startup scene a while ago? These people were simply signaling that they didn't really care about titles and cared about other things instead, like building product, or adding value in some form. I used to work at a startup where everyone could pick their own title; so anyone could be a senior engineer if they wanted to. Ofcourse it didn't matter if they did, because nobody was judged by their title, but by their work. If that's what you want, then go and find a place like that; they exist!

Kudos to the author for figuring out what he wants.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#672

Post by ospider »

the_arun wrote: post #130

If you %s/google/ /g , the story wouldn't change. It depends on the way you showcase your work to your management and peers is the secret of the success. But for some it is against idealism and "do good" nature. This same story happened to me but in another enterprise. The solution that worked for me is to find a Manager who knows your talent and gives you freedom and he does the marketing for your work knowing your…

Totally agree, a good manager should do all the bragging so that "you" could really do the things that benefits yourself and the company.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#673

Post by ehsankia »

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 never understood why Google favored this over a good old proven management model where your boss would handle things.

But then you're back to the initial problem they're trying to solve, which is that some person will get a manager who's way too friendly and promotes too many people, while some other poor soul gets stuck with a harsher manager than never promotes anyone. In short, it's hard to enforce consistency across a company that large.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#674

Post by Anirudh25 »

Retric wrote: post #25
Anirudh25 wrote: post #3

As someone who will be entering the industry, I loved your perspective on your job at Google. Also, having read Cal Newport's "So good that they can't ignore you", I couldn't help but notice the hunger for independence in good software developers. Would you recommend newcomers to join smaller unstable( more independence) companies or bigger, more stable( Top 4) companies(lesser independence)?

I highly recommend optimizing for salary for the first 4 years. ~10k/year * ~40 years of compound interest is significant. Most young people have debt and getting rid of that fast opens up a lot more options and flexibility. On top of that company's that pay more have more incentive to maximize your value. On the other hand if you make little then they have incentive to burn you out and replace you ASAP.

I agree with you

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#675

Post by Anirudh25 »

mtlynch wrote: post #22
Anirudh25 wrote: post #3

As someone who will be entering the industry, I loved your perspective on your job at Google. Also, having read Cal Newport's "So good that they can't ignore you", I couldn't help but notice the hunger for independence in good software developers. Would you recommend newcomers to join smaller unstable( more independence) companies or bigger, more stable( Top 4) companies(lesser independence)?

>Would you recommend newcomers to join smaller unstable( more independence) companies or bigger, more stable( Top 4) companies(lesser independence)? I recommend new developers start at large, successful companies where software is a first-class citizen (e.g. Microsoft, Google, Facebook). My first full-time job ever was a developer at Microsoft, and I'm really thankful for that job. I felt like within a large company,…

Thanks for the advice. This will be helpful to a lot of my friends who will be starting in the industry.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#676

Post by Anirudh25 »

stevenwoo wrote: post #255
Anirudh25 wrote: post #3

As someone who will be entering the industry, I loved your perspective on your job at Google. Also, having read Cal Newport's "So good that they can't ignore you", I couldn't help but notice the hunger for independence in good software developers. Would you recommend newcomers to join smaller unstable( more independence) companies or bigger, more stable( Top 4) companies(lesser independence)?

If you are still in college I would recommend joining your university's co-op program and try to work for companies that have gotten decent reviews from former co-op students. Almost everything this guy learned except the exact details of the process, could be learned while you are still in college so you can make an informed decision on your first real job and probably have the opportunity to continue with whichever…

Thank you but I am not in America. In India, we don't have the co-op program.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#677

Post by some_account »

MadBohr wrote: post #368
jey wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of your jobs as a manager is to debug these people issues, right? So when you get a "bug report" like "I'm stuck", you should investigate the bug and look for a solution, which might be something like "Hey Bob, Jim is having trouble getting the Frobnicator running on his machine. Can you please give him a hand with this later today? Thanks". (This assumes that Jim's SOS was issued in the first half of the day; wa…

Yes that's true, which is why I said "why not both?" The manager should do more, but so should the employee. Sitting there and saying "I'm blocked, woe is me" is garbage compared to saying "I'm blocked. Can you please help me Mr/Ms XYZ?"

The way you talk makes me think you don't like people very much, which is really bad in a manager.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#678

Post by Anirudh25 »

taormina wrote: post #524
Anirudh25 wrote: post #3

As someone who will be entering the industry, I loved your perspective on your job at Google. Also, having read Cal Newport's "So good that they can't ignore you", I couldn't help but notice the hunger for independence in good software developers. Would you recommend newcomers to join smaller unstable( more independence) companies or bigger, more stable( Top 4) companies(lesser independence)?

Personally, I would recommend a smaller unstable company. At the time, I didn't recognize it as being such (but certainly not Top 4), and I wouldn't have possibly learned as much and as quickly in a less dysfunctional organization. To be fair, that's also why I eventually ended up leaving, but responsibility and opportunity can be very available in understaffed and unstable companies. Definitely find some good mentor…

A smaller company will certainly give me more independence but it will be difficult later when I want to transition to a bigger company. How can we identify good mentors?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#679

Post by dzamo_norton »

mratzloff wrote: post #643
epicureanideal wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your specification of a "correct way to report a problem" is company specific, or your personal preference, or the way that you think an ideal problem report would be stated. We're humans. Unless there's been a training day or a Readme file explaining HOW to report a bug, I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect this protocol to work: "I'm blocked!" "Why?" "{reason}" If nobody ACKs the "I'm blocked" messag…

"I'm blocked because on compile I get such-and-such error message and I don't know how to fix it. Who is the right person to ask about this?" I just cut your protocol complexity by half. ;-)

Same complexity, just less chatty.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#680

Post by Aeolun »

bps4484 wrote: post #656
antoinevg wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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

Wasn't the point of the article that the Grunt work that has to be done and makes things better for everyone in the future isn't rewarded at all? That work may have an impact on the bottom line of the company, but be spread out over years of maintenance and prevented (potentially disastrous) bugs. However, as the author states, it's almost impossible to quantify that.

You cannot tell your selection committee 'I refactored code and that'll save us probably 100 bugs in the next year, times 2 hours per bug, at $300 per man hour, a $60000 savings.'.

Whereas it's easy to tell them 'I built a new feature x, in the past 10 weeks it's been running it's improved sales by 3%, leading to increased profits over the next year of $60000'.

Both 'earned' the company the exact same amount of money, but the first one is much more speculative.

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