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I quit Google to work for myself (2018)

mtlynch.io

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Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)

#11

Post by nostrademons »

Etheryte wrote: post #8
shoo wrote: post #5

the 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…

It's an interesting reality check that in 2023, six years into his journey as a bootstrapped founder, Tiny Pilot made $225K in profit on ~$1M on revenue. For 2021 and 2022, it made roughly a $5K profit; the rest was all losses. He quit Google because he couldn't get a promotion presumably from L4 to L5, but $225K is less than what an L4 makes.

This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.

Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)

#12

Post by rvnx »

Etheryte wrote: post #8
shoo wrote: post #5

the 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…

(Not saying it for this person, as I don't know), but there is a case also where you can be a very average performer, just hiding in a large corporation (or retiring, as some people even say), then you will be very well paid, and highly considered. Then once you leave to create your own projects or join a small start-up, reality hits.

Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)

#13

Post by nostrademons »

goalonetwo wrote: post #2

Ah, 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.

They were in 2008. It's largely just people's mental models changing slowly, as well as selection bias of people who still believe Google has world-class engineering being overrepresented among people who still work at Google.

Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)

#15

Post by rvnx »

nostrademons wrote: post #11
Etheryte wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's an interesting reality check that in 2023, six years into his journey as a bootstrapped founder, Tiny Pilot made $225K in profit on ~$1M on revenue. For 2021 and 2022, it made roughly a $5K profit; the rest was all losses. He quit Google because he couldn't get a promotion presumably from L4 to L5, but $225K is less than what an L4 makes. This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in A…

A big factor for early employees (not N. 1 or 2, but the first XXXX) is purely being lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stroke-of-...

This was 2007. Now worth 15 times more.

The Chef as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers

paid 26M USD in 2009. Now worth 15 times more.

So half a billion USD for this.

(same for Nvidia or OpenAI employees just riding the wave)

Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)

#16

Post by emmanueloga_ »

mtlynch wrote: post #14

Author here. Cool to see this pop up again! Happy to answer any questions about this post.

I saw your post about selling TinyPilot, congratulations! FWIW I agree with all your points in your 2018 article, and I wish I had left Google sooner too.

I was wondering if you could share if you are working on a new project? I saw your posts about fuzzing a PDF parser but there's no context if this is for a new project, or I missed it :-).

Cheers!

--

1: https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/

Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)

#18

Post by cdrini »

I'm not sure I agree with this. The breaking projects before completion is very annoying, but also the author seems like they were only there for a promotion? I mean a promotion is nice, but it was never really explained why that was such a dealbreaker. If the only thing keeping you at your job is the prospect of a better title, that's probably a bad sign. They then made a lifetime's worth of money at Google in four years, and then used that financial stability to do something high risk which most people can't afford to do. Regardless, I'm glad they've found work that resonates with them! Hopefully they can use that financial stability to build something useful and impactful :)

Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)

#19

Post by 1024core »

davidfiala wrote: post #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. AIUI, nowadays in 2022+ the manager gets the only vote.

What I found neat (when I heard about it) was that one could nominate yourself for promo, without your manager's assent. This is quite rare and a neat feature.

Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)

#20

Post by mtlynch »

belval wrote: post #9

I'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 ha…

Hi, I'm "the guy." Thanks for reading!

I largely agree with you.

I didn't mean to argue that the work I was doing for the first two years merited a promotion.

My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing what my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that I did the work well, and then later found out that it was all worthless for career advancement.

I think there are competing interests at a large organization that make this difficult. On the one hand, you have grungy work that needs to get done but only requires the skill of a junior developer (e.g., fixing bugs, writing tests). On the other hand, everyone at Google wants to advance their career by doing senior or above work, so how do you incentivize anyone to do the grungy work if it essentially means a career pause? I don't know how to solve that problem at scale.

I didn't and still don't harbor resentment toward Google or my managers for how promotions worked. I think it's difficult to align incentives for an organization with 100k people, and they chose a reasonable strategy. But I felt like the things I was good at didn't align well with career advancement at Google, so that was why I left.

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