I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
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I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
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Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#2Ah, another one of those infamous 2018 blog posts on "why I quit Google".
And those blog posts absolutely always start by telling you that the engineers at Google are the smartest in the world. Oh boy are those people indoctrinated.
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#3 > Your manager doesn’t promote you?
> No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports.
They don’t even get a vote.
> Instead, promotion decisions come from small committees of upper-level software engineers and managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion.
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#4Ah, another one of those infamous 2018 blog posts on "why I quit Google". And those blog posts absolutely always start by telling you that the engineers at Google are the smartest in the world. Oh boy are those people indoctrinated.
What sounded like the usual Google-internal-self-congratulatory-echo-chamber nonsense grated on me, too, but I kept reading, and was glad I did, because the article didn't go like the usual.
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#5the same author has also published an interesting series of "annual review" blog posts summarising his progress trying to get different software businesses off the ground -- including being quite open about the finances. If you're interested in boostrapping a software business, and haven't seen them, they're well worth reading:
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#6> Your manager doesn’t promote you? > No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports. They don’t even get a vote. > Instead, promotion decisions come from small committees of upper-level software engineers and managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion. AIUI, nowadays in 2022+ the manager gets the only vote.
It used to be that you would put together your promo packet, which was sent to the promo committee. These days it is your manager who puts together your promo packet. But it is still the promo committee (which doesn't include your manager) that decides whether or not you get promoted.
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#7> Your manager doesn’t promote you? > No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports. They don’t even get a vote. > Instead, promotion decisions come from small committees of upper-level software engineers and managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion. AIUI, nowadays in 2022+ the manager gets the only vote.
Most large tech companies require the manager to write some sort of a promo packet to be reviewed by a relevant committee. But it's not a mystery and ultimately it falls on the manager to put together a strong packet that makes it clear why the candidate should be promoted. The promotion attempt itself is the manager's vote. Beyond that it comes down to how strongly they champion for the candidate's promotion. It's the only way to ensure some consistency between promotions, IMO.
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#8the same author has also published an interesting series of "annual review" blog posts summarising his progress trying to get different software businesses off the ground -- including being quite open about the finances. If you're interested in boostrapping a software business, and haven't seen them, they're well worth reading: https://mtlynch.io/tags/annual-review/ https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
A good highlight of what quitting your job can look like:
> Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable.
We often hear about the successes, and it is easy to be loud with success, but it's important to keep in mind the ground truth: most companies fail.
It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#9I'll play devils advocate because it's more fun but this:
> The pipeline didn’t record many metrics. The ones it did have made it look like things had gotten worse. My bug discoveries caused the overall bug count to increase. The pipeline’s failures increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies instead of silently passing along bad data.
I understand why the author might think this is better, but all software have bugs and a lot of data is tainted by those bugs. Was fixing the pipeline an actual priority? Was it critical? If so, how were the downstream internal customers dealing with the new exceptions? Why were they not raising a ruckus about it? Why was the author allowed to move on to a different project if there were so many bugs in that pipeline deserving of a promotion?
I have met more people in life that made a big deal out of ultimately unimportant details than the opposite. Internal pipelines usually have a lower bar and the downstream consumer may not even care about 75% of features that are just there and unused. Being a senior engineering is also knowing when to leave good enough alone.
> My other work didn’t look so good on paper either. On several occasions, I put my projects on hold for weeks or even months at a time to help a teammate whose launch was at risk. It was the right decision for the team, but it looked unimpressive in a promo packet. To the promotion committee, my teammate’s project was the big, important work that demanded coordination from multiple developers. If they hornswoggled me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities. I was just the mindless peon whose work was so irrelevant that it could be pre-empted at a moment’s notice.
Is that conclusion really wrong? It's a bit uncharitable for sure but that is indeed what happened not just how it appeared to have happened. If your project was such a low priority that dropping it for several months does not flash a red light in someone's dashboard, then I am sorry but that does not seem promotion worthy.
The little comic also has good examples that things that imo are not "senior" work. Writing E2E tests for a product that is already shipped is worthwhile, but unless it's something very special it's not complex enough, does not require enough design to be considered "senior work".
Again I don't know the guy, maybe he did get an unfair read on his body of work, but reading the entire blog I mostly get the vibes of "I worked 2 years at Google and then wanted to be a senior so I rushed my promo packet without a cornerstone project" and the committee refusing that is just the system working as intended.
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#10[deleted]