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

731–740 of 783 posts

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#731

Post by dilyevsky »

VHRanger wrote: post #592
eqdw wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that middle managers were useless shits who wasted my time and got in the way of work. I imagined that the flat organizational model made more sense: since this is what my day to day life is, anyway, at least we get rid of idiots who get paid more than me. Then I worked in a place where I had actually good middle management. They were smart and capable. They supported our team and helped us succeed.…

The problem is that management is basically an art and no one knows how to create consistently good managers. Because it's the epitomy of soft, unmeasurable, skills. So when people get frustrated with shitty management, they turn to whatever other idea,. If people read and __actually implemented__ the stuff in Peopleware (or any other classic SWE management book that's highly regarded) we'd all be better off. But ins…

> If people read and __actually implemented__ the stuff in Peopleware

Lol, I feel like that's too much to ask. I'd be happy with management that actually read Brooks instead of just pretending like they did.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#732

Post by dilyevsky »

devposter wrote: post #634
guelo wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is it's very difficult to interview your management chain before you take the job.

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.

Not at Google.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#733

Post by q3k »

cloverich wrote: post #715
q3k wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. All intellectual property you work on, including in your spare time at home on your laptop, belongs to Google and you have to go through a reassignment procedure where they declare they're not interested in your work. Which is okay if you work on one personal project at a time, but breaks down if you hop from project to project with friends. Waste of everyone's time.

Genuinely curious how enforceable it is, and how often it is enforced. That is, if you jump from project to project with your friends, on your own time and equipment, is there a legal case that despite whatever you signed its null? Similarly, how often does Google go after people like this?

I'd rather not end up in court against Google lawyers. Or generally have to work around agreements that I sign.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#734

Post by ordinaryperson »

jldugger wrote: post #721
ordinaryperson wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't befriend everybody, true, which is why you should identify one senior executive you think can help and market yourself to him or her (again, I wish it didn't work this way, but it seems to). You only need that person's recommendation, not that of 15 random fellow engineers. Besides, your data 'proving' your value likely has no context or comparable benchmarks, after 30 seconds of numbers it's straight to yo…

Anywhere else, yea, but at Google specifically, not an option. Executives don't override the committee, except maybe Larry and Sergey. And if your advice is 'be friends with the CEO', I'm sure that'll scale right up. The good news is that, based on reports from Googlers here, it sounds like the system is changing for the lower promotion tiers.

How did 'a senior executive' become the CEO? Obviously absurd and clearly not what I wrote.

It's not about 'overriding' the committee, it's about having a champion on the inside.

You seem to believe there's no human element to this process. It's all number crunching -- like they're picking stocks with a good P/E ratio.

But the higher up you go the more your people skills are valued and none of that will show up in data. Guarantee you nebulous categories like 'personality' and 'fit' are bandied about frequently in these discussions.

If promotions were strictly numerical as you seem to believe then they'd be more meritocratic, but I believe the OP's point was he felt the process was unfair.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#735

Post by hi41 »

eldavido wrote: post #91

To author: you lost the political game. I busted my ass at a startup for years and also lost the political game. So I'm speaking from experience here. You can either get all mad and worked up and pissed off about it, and waste years of your career (as I did) being pissed off, stubborn, and refusing to change. Or figure out how to play. I'd like to think there are places with better politics but I think it's pretty en…

>You can either get all mad and worked up and pissed off about it, and waste years of your career (as I did) being pissed off, stubborn, and refusing to change

I can relate to this. I became bitter and angry when I did not get promoted several times and was told that the company expects "more". I became a person I am not proud of.

My question is how does one extricate onself from such a bad place?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#736

Post by r00fus »

tomkarlo wrote: post #331
zhausjgzga wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my job, we use HeyTaco, a Slack bot. Every day you can give up to five tacos out by @mentioning somebody with a :taco: emoticon. If you answer a question or help somebody out, they will probably give you some tacos. The app keeps track of who gets the most tacos with leaderboards and the like. This has instilled a culture of helping others out on the team, by gamifying it and making it visible.

We use something like this in my org, and Google has "kudos", but I've found that the problem is their usage is highly variable even within a medium-sized or (we're roughly 1,000.) On some teams, the average employee will have hundreds of these kudos, whereas on others, the average might be 1 or 2. This was highlighted to me recently when someone in Slack noted that one person had ~50X the kudos of everyone else and…

Could this be combined with a group-level kudos/tacos metric?

Even if it is - don't be that manager of the group with the least group kudos/tacos?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#737

Post by mgkimsal »

HappyThrowaway wrote: post #685
mgkimsal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I was afraid to rock the boat though

This is really at the heart of why most people don't speak up (or speak up more loudly) - fear. Fear of losing the job, income, etc. There are no easy answers to this, short of having - if not FU money - a comfortable cushion to see you through a year or two between income streams.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#738

Post by s73v3r_ »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #694
s73v3r_ wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game of Thrones?

Where most character seem to end up dead.

But, not the ones who know how to play politics. Tyrion is still very much alive, whereas Ned Stark, who was a very righteous man, who thought himself above politics, is dead.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#739

Post by bps4484 »

Aeolun wrote: post #680
bps4484 wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everyo…

> 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.'.

You can't? Especially if you have documentation of the bugs that were previously happening, this is very solid evidence. Another one I've seen, "This would cause a weekly page a 2 am, and half the time ended up being an all day problem that needed to be put out. This no longer happens and is worth $X of engineering time."

I would agree though that second example "built a feature that saved $60000" is a stronger statement because it's so much more quantifiable to the businesses bottom line.

To go back to my original point though, we all (not just managers, but the entire team) should constantly be pushing to get ourselves to objective measure. The more subjective measures are used ("I refactored this code which is now easier to read") the more you allow the bad politics I outlined earlier where a boss and his buddy team up to get raises. It's very toxic and should be avoided at all costs.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#740

Post by mistermann »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #334
mistermann wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.". This happened to me once a few years ago, once I finally figured it out I put all this silliness into one single bootstrapping function you could call to get the pig of an application to run, and asked the lead dev to add it to the core…

Maybe it's not the initiative per se. Did you name the function silliness(), runPig(), or give any other blatant display of contempt? It's dripping from your comment. (not saying it was necessarily about something real, just that it could be)

Nope, any contempt would have only been after the other developer displayed his contempt for productive use of shareholders money. I always find it funny how so many people seem to think that is a matter of opinion rather than a matter of fact.
Post reply on HN