Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

What makes so sure? Have you started your own thing? Glad to hear about your story/lessons learned.

If all features were equal, like widget production, we'd definitely be able to prove or disprove the productivity boost, but I haven't ever worked in a context where this is the case. There's no guarantee that feature implementation time will go down, maybe it did just not go up as much as it would otherwise, maybe people manage to make more useful features in the future, or at least not as much less useful as they would have been (we would expect utility/feature to go down as a system matures)

When I worked in a two-person team it was easier, of course, the time I spent on improving the code base I soon got back when I had to implement new functionality on a short deadline, this reflected well on me in performance reviews. The problem in a larger team is that it might be someone else who is able to implement a feature quickly due to my improvements.

My guess is that we should be lucky that there are guys like the OP who naively spend time on "low impact" code improvements even though they might not reap the rewards. Without them we would only have people doing the bare minimum to implement new features with a big ball of spaghetti as a result, where projects are abandoned just because no one is willing to maintain them any more. (does this sound like some company we know?)

I guess what I'm describing is that we might end up with a prisoners dilemma situation, where optimising for short term measurability represents defection.

At most of the companies I've worked, if a VP or senior exec likes you they make it known to the committee or a key person on it.

This just comes from my personal experience working at large companies. It's also true of just getting something done: usually the most efficient way is contacting a VP (or relevant executive) who can move things. I've wasted years of my life trying to wade through bureaucracy.

> Remember we're talking about promoting an engineer to a higher level engineer, not into management.

You don't need to be in management for your people skills to matter. If you're a senior engineer / team lead / whatever, you're seen as authority, an expert, someone consulted for wisdom. If you're hostile or rude it reflects badly on the company, hence these committees look at your people skills.

> it seems at least possible that soft skills are not considered.

I can't speak for Google explicitly but I can say your soft skills are always considered. Always. They consider them when they hire you and most places absolutely place a premium on them when promoting.

It's one of the reasons the requirements for promotions are so ill-defined everywhere. It's not just a concrete list of achievements, it's how your coworkers and manager view your personality.

> but ended up being pathologically and myopically

Yep -- politics. That's unfortunately how it works. You can assume it was an aberrant anomaly, in my experience politics rules the roost when promotions are being doled out.

> The senior executive's ear OP needed wasn't one on the promo committee

The senior executive wouldn't be on the committee, he or she would put in a good word for you.

Look, you don't have to take my word for it. If you know any senior HR people at your company or other companies, ask them how promotions are handled. It won't be uniform but I'm guessing politics, reputation and soft skills are most of the time (unfortunately) going to outweigh programming metrics.

/my two cents

My conclusion is that starting a small indie business is less risky than aspiring to be the next Zuck.

First, it's harder to fail, because there are fewer forces pushing you to make risky decisions. For example, you can start doing contract work, take on clients, and use them to support you while you build your indie business. Hell, you can keep working at your full-time job if you want to and build your business on the side. Those are bedrocks of income that can last you more or less indefinitely. Often, your employer ends up being your business' first customer. Additionally, you don't have an investors telling you to quit your job and use their capital to scale up your business' costs beyond the level that your revenue can support, which is one of the primary reasons that funded businesses go under.

Second, the business opportunities are simply more plentiful. The bigger you get, the fiercer competition gets. The more money you aim to make, the fewer paths there are to get there. If you want to find your first 10 customers, you can go out and talk to 50 or 100 or 200 people yourself. Every marketing channel is your oyster. None of your competitors feel threatened. The niches you can fill are endless. If you want to go from 1M to 10M customers, however, you need an exceptionally clever strategy, brilliant insights, a lot more resources, and a much higher degree of luck.

It's difficult to actually measure success rates without agreeing on the answer to this question: What counts as someone trying to start a business?

With small indie projects/companies, I'd wager there are a lot more people starting who aren't really serious and never take more than a couple of sincere steps. They might lower your perception of the success rate, especially compared to VC-funded companies if your denominator there only includes those who've actually raised a round. More people fail tryouts for the high school basketball teams than tryouts for the NBA. People filter themselves.

But I assure you that, if you're committed to the task, your chances of succeeding with an indie business are much, much higher than 0.1%.