Title is a lot like salary--hoping for a significant improvement within a company is a fool's errand. The way to get "promoted" is to switch jobs.
I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
141–150 of 177 posts
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#142Author here! Cool to see this pop up on HN again. I was wondering why I was getting so many Twitter notifications all of a sudden.
As a quick update, I continue to be happy with my decision to leave Google. I enjoy working for myself, even though I haven't made much money at it yet. I'm ending 2019 with ~$7k in revenue, which isn't much, but it's a bump from the $2.2k I made in 2018. My savings are still far higher than my annual cost of living, so I'm not in any danger of running out of money in the next few years.
I'll be posting another year-end summary to my blog on Feb. 1, 2020. I also write monthly retrospectives[1] about my work and weekly updates on What Got Done.[2]
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#143It appears it isn't going terribly well so far: https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/ But, he doesn't seem discouraged. I'm guessing whatever equity he had means he has a fair amount of time to figure it out.
Author here! I'd say it's not going profitably, but I enjoy my lifestyle a lot.
Yeah, I'm not discouraged by progress so far. My expectations were that there would be several duds before I found a business that earns money. I've done a great job with part one of the plan (failed businesses), so the profitability part should happen any day now. : )
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#144"In my head, the promotion committee was this omniscient and fair entity."
I think this is the pure, gullible heart at the center of the word naivety. It's strange for me to read it and believe that anyone would ever write this without a strong side dish of sarcasm, and especially about Google. Google, the evil advertisement agency, Google the clobberer of GMail accounts, Google the banner of Android developers. How can anyone reach adulthood and still believe in these kinds of fairy tails?
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it is just slavery If working a cushy tech job is slavery then what would be working at a sand mine in cameroon called ?
Much of the workforce 1. cannot take a couple of days off, without informing their boss much in advance 2. cannot work on something in their off time, on their own computers without employer claiming ownership of it (I am talking specifically about software here) 3. cannot take a unpaid month off, to travel or just rest, for example without losing their jobs 4. have no hope of receiving pension, decent medical benefi…
You're extremely misinformed on what constitutes actual slavery (especially plantation 18th/19th century slavery), up to the point of being disrespectful of their descendants (not forgetting the victims of current forms of slavery).
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#146It appears it isn't going terribly well so far: https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/ But, he doesn't seem discouraged. I'm guessing whatever equity he had means he has a fair amount of time to figure it out.
It isn’t going well yet from a financial perspective, but he writes this: “People have asked me if I’m still happy with my decision to quit and start my own company. The answer is definitely yes. As someone who has always valued independence, I love being a solo developer. It makes a world of difference to wake up whenever I want and make my own choices about how to spend my entire day. This is how I want to live the…
Thanks for reading!
> From a life-satisfaction perspective, it sounds like it’s going extremely well! (And that’s WAY more important, at least to me.)
Yes, definitely. I haven't found a profitable project yet, but I definitely feel a greater sense of satisfaction with my life overall. I really treasure the feeling of waking up every morning and working on exactly what I want to work on.
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like you're underestimating how terrible Google's stack ranking system. It basically exploits you into doing more work than you should with the prospect of making more money, only to smack you back down and ask you to do 6 more month of back breaking work. More than you were hired to, mind you.
Without sounding judgy, this is something that I joke with my fellow Gen-x'rs and Boomers with. Millenials expect prepayment for what they're about to do, in hopes they can actually do it. I was raised in a generation that you had to prove you could in fact, do the work. I appreciate and enjoy their confidence, and don't much care for what you might call "being entitled", though I can see this will become a protected…
This reflects more on our generation’s distrust of the systems that we work in than any kind of entitlement or misplaced confidence. As well as our general economic adversity/anxiety, debt, lack of future prospects, exploitation, etc.
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#148It appears it isn't going terribly well so far: https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/ But, he doesn't seem discouraged. I'm guessing whatever equity he had means he has a fair amount of time to figure it out.
I don't want to be too harsh on this guy. He should be proud he pushed out 5 projects and he seems really really passionate about Keto. The fact he made even one dollar is impressive, it is always hardest at the start. But some of the things he did make my head explode. He spent more than his total revenue ever on...testing software? He paid hundreds of dollars for every project on logos? He paid a developer thousand…
Thanks for reading!
A lot of the feedback I got after my one-year update was that I was overspending. I mostly disagree, though with acknowledgement that my businesses don't earn much money, so I don't have much of a leg to stand on in defying conventional wisdom.
The key disconnect is that people seem to be arguing that I should strive for profitability at all times, whereas my goal was to minimize the time to find high revenue. Once I find something that gains traction, I don't expect it to be that difficult to reduce costs. If take on more work myself in the name of lower costs, I might make a small profit sooner, but it would probably be longer until I find something that earns large profits.
There's obviously a limit. I can't afford to hire a whole team of developers just to speed up my projects. But $1-2k here and there to save me a week or two of work annually still feels reasonable to me.
>He paid a developer thousands of dollars to develop a blog? Half his projects are free wordpress/(insert popular website builder) templates.
There's a bit more to the site than it might seem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057745
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet in one short article the OP perfectly summed up who google sucks at making long term software that continues to work. People often say that google rewards for new projects and ideas vs maintaining the old, I didn’t really understand what that meant until he explained it here. Doing good work is meaningless, the only that matters is what some faceless committee thinks. What’s odd is that the committee doesn’t…
Except that this is one view. The committees were changed a few years ago to no longer be "faceless" for most engineers. Now committees are made up of managers who work fairly near you in the org chart. I work in an org that is explicitly tasked with a huge amount of maintenance and refactoring work. Our promo rates have historically been higher than other orgs. There is a very widespread belief that things like code…
Does Google follow the practice of setting annual goals? At IBM where I worked for many years, we had to create something called a PBC (Personal Business Commitment). The idea was that you would be judged on how well you did with respect to those stated goals.
Re: I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that this is one view. The committees were changed a few years ago to no longer be "faceless" for most engineers. Now committees are made up of managers who work fairly near you in the org chart. I work in an org that is explicitly tasked with a huge amount of maintenance and refactoring work. Our promo rates have historically been higher than other orgs. There is a very widespread belief that things like code…
Does Google follow the practice of setting annual goals? At IBM where I worked for many years, we had to create something called a PBC (Personal Business Commitment). The idea was that you would be judged on how well you did with respect to those stated goals.
They do set annual goals starting at the team level and then moving up. But, as far as I have seen at the line manager and middle manager level, people are not judged directly on their progress on these goals. At higher levels this probably changes, but I don't really have a good sense of how directors and vps are evaluated.