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

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#681

Post by sig_ » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 7:25 AM UTC

CodeMage wrote: post #340

dceddia wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an excellent book I read recently called Developer Hegemony [0] which goes into depth on your first point. It calls the naive folks "optimists" -- unfailingly devoting themselves to the company ideal. It discusses two other factions, the pragmatists (come in, do work, get paid, go home) and the opportunists (take every opportunity to rise to the top). I recommend checking it out, and the author's blog too [1…

Sounds like a "nicer" rehash of the Gervais Principle. I haven't read Developer Hegemony, but from the looks of the author's blog, I would recommend "cutting out the middleman" and going straight to the source material: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Not at all. Gervais Principle is a joke, though some serious research may have been done around it. It's about organizational dynamics.

https://www.daedtech.com/ blog is (by quick reading of two posts) career advice for software developers. Very thoughtful, very well written and explicit, with analogies, anecdotes, and opinionated advice.

Whether that advice is any good, I'm the wrong person to judge; I still work as a wage slave (: basically he's telling everyone to go out as independent consultant and solve customers' problems instead of being "an entry in someone else’s Gantt chart. If you can’t autonomously deliver value with your expertise, then you’re specializing in the wrong thing."

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#682

Post by kamaal » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 7:34 AM UTC

tytso wrote: post #638

smsm42 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or figure out how to play. There's a third way. Don't go to Google. There are literally thousands of smaller places you can work for/in/with, some of them do pretty cool things. There'd be politics too, probably, but not as much as in Google, and you could control your destiny to a more significant degree. Small(er) companies - if you pick right - tend to have significantly better environment in that regard (not pe…

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 changin…

>>Politics is just what people call interpersonal dynamics when they don't like a particular setup.

No. Politics is when 1 among the 3 people, wants more than his share using all means possible.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#683

Post by dlwdlw » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 7:41 AM UTC

Ruphin wrote: post #671

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…

I think because tech is well off compared to other industries, tech workers delay a certain type of adulthood maturity. This isn't functioning in society maturity but the maturity of finding and knowing your place.

To the young everyone has high hopes for you mostly because they want that energy and drive. At a certain point however you aren't valued based in your individual technical contribution but your ability to support existing narrative structures.

The shock from people feeding you your own narrative heroes journey to expecting you to kiss ass and support existing stories is specific to tech because of the relatively new and parallel "journeyman engineer" career path that tops out around 300k. The remaining paths are the thought-leader/genius path and the traditional corporate man.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#684

Post by confounded » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 8:04 AM UTC

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…

I’m extremely skeptical of your estimates; they’re considerably higher than I’ve heard of in London.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#685

Post by HappyThrowaway » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 8:29 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" * "…

Ah yes, bug counting. There is an even worse variant: when the manager only looks at the number of open bugs/issues, rather than what has been closed, or code that was checked in, etc. I had the misfortunate to work under such circumstances.

I was supposed to complete an existing project. Only problem was, new bugs kept getting added by the tester, and were then assigned to me by the project manager, so the number of issues kept growing. I would fix them (or existing ones) during the week, but at the next conference call it would still look like I was not making progress, because the total number of open issues did not shrink much.

This led to weekly inquiries of "when will it be done", and pointing out that it was essentially a moving target, due to circumstances beyond my control, did not help much. Eventually I did catch up, but the damage was done. Apparently this manager now thought of me as somebody who wasn't very productive. They moved me to another, completely unfamiliar project, where I got essentially no help from others, then decided that I was not productive enough and let me go.

In retrospect, being asked continuously when the project would be done, was an indication that I was the only one being blamed for its delay. I was afraid to rock the boat though, and quietly assumed that surely this manager was taking all the factors into account (especially since I did point them out a few times). As it turned out, they were not, and I will not make this mistake again, should a similar situation come up in a future job.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#686

Post by SiempreViernes » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 8:34 AM UTC

kolpa wrote: post #363

SiempreViernes wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is pretty clear, the worked remotely and so had no means to physically reach out but instead had to wait for people to reply on mail.

Direct message doesn't require physical contact.

When I mentioned mail, I meant email which is exactly as easy to ignore as a DM.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#687

Post by groundCode » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 8:37 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.

Nitpick s/he said s/he couldn’t run the repo. If someone posted that in our slack someone would jump in and ask what errors s/he was getting. Once we found a solution we would get the docs updated, usually by the person who found the problem since they have the most context.

People ask for help in different ways based on personality, skill set and experience. It’s more important to meet them where they are than sit back and smugly suggest they lack individual ownership.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#688

Post by ManlyBread » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 10:19 AM UTC

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.

Having my blockers completely ignored for a significant amount of time was a major factor in deciding to find a new job. There are only so many times you can beg for libraries, source code, permissions and other essential tools before coming to a conclusion that maybe somewhere else there is a place where you don't have to deal with this bullshit.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#689

Post by FatalBaboon » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 10:21 AM UTC

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?

Unless something is keeping you there, just find a new job, here are some reasons:

- If you reach this situation, you're more competent than the rest of the group. Nobody to learn from, time to go.

- "Management" is a big machine, with its own insider culture and politics. It does not change overnight, do you want to wait 6 months minimum for things to get better?

- Changing job is good for just about everything: career, money, knowledge... as long as you don't do it too often.

- Meta-bonus: getting into a job with better peers means tighter work-friends. It's not fun to be around people overdesigning object-oriented projects when you understand functionnal programming and low-level debugging.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#690

Post by rsp1984 » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 10:22 AM UTC

ehsankia wrote: post #673

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…

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.

There's always the route of complaining to your boss' boss. But I guess then Google would actually have to start to give a s#!t about their managers actually performing proper managing tasks. I can imagine though that VPs and their C-level would consider such mundane affairs to be far below Google's aspirations...