The author also has an update for 6 years later: https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-6/
I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
51–60 of 250 posts
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#52Quote the author “To continue advancing my career, I’d need projects that were even larger in scope and involved collaboration with more partner teams. But that just meant the project could fail due to even more factors outside my control, wasting months or years of my life.” I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control…
> the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control
Very true. You do at least have more control in a startup however (at least that’s how feels).
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#53Quote the author “To continue advancing my career, I’d need projects that were even larger in scope and involved collaboration with more partner teams. But that just meant the project could fail due to even more factors outside my control, wasting months or years of my life.” I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control…
Author here!
>I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
After six years of running bootstrapped businesses, I actually more strongly believe the opposite.
It might be true at a high-growth VC-backed startup that you need many stars to align to succeed.
In bootstrapped businesses, you basically just need one thing to succeed: product market fit. If you create a product that people want, you'll probably succeed even if you make a lot of other mistakes.
With TinyPilot, I didn't know anything about hardware or selling a physical product at the beginning, so I did a million things wrong. But I landed on a product people were willing to pay for, and I found a good way of getting it in front of customers, so the company worked. I did some things right, but for the first year, I mostly felt like revenue was growing on its own and I was trying to keep up.
You still need luck to find product market fit because lots of reasonable-sounding ideas end up flopping, but you really just need to get lucky once rather than wait for a whole set of things to get lucky at the same time.
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#54Author here. Cool to see this pop up again! Happy to answer any questions about this post.
I've been following your story for the past several years since you wrote this post and it helped me understand the realities of indie hacking and startups more than most articles, so thanks for writing in public and documenting your journey, I'm sure I'm not the only one you helped. By the way, whenever I see your username, I always seem to read it as Mount Lynch, haha.
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#55This is also why I'm thinking about leaving Google. I have little to sit through meetings, try to pawn necessary work off to others, and play the game while there's a hundred small tasks that my project desperately needs me to get done. I can jump ship and make $50-100k/yr more because the next place I work will actually value my experience, even though it's technically much more useful to Google.
Where will you go that will be a 50k-100k bump over google comp?
Google would be a $50-100k bump over Google if they promoted me to the level commensurate with my experience
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a little more than that. At the level this engineer was at, they are expected to seek and attain promotion. Sitting at a level below staff becomes a negative and can lead to you being put on a PIP because you aren't meeting the declared expectations when you aren't being promoted. Google eventually removed that language because they learned that in a 100,000-person company, there's simply not enough room in the…
It was senior (L5) that you were expected to reach, not staff. It was revised down to L4. For reference almost all SWE hires start at L3.
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Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all. The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period, and going up levels involves a largely arbitrary process that is disconnected from your actual work performance seems pretty problematic to me. Seems like it'd…
No, it really isn't. The amount of time is very long, I don't even actually know what it was, and I personally am not aware of anyone this happened to and have never heard of anyone this happened to. In the past you were expected to hit L5, 2 promotions from hire, and now the expectation is L4, so only 1. An L5 engineer at Google is someone who is expected to be able to handle any medium-large difficulty task with so…
> The amount of time is very long
It is now, it used to be a lot shorter. "Up or out" has effectively been sacrificed to cost savings, which is perhaps a good thing in some ways.
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
Thanks! No, the fuzz testing is just for fun and probably not anything serious, although it would be fun to find a fuzzing target that has a good bug bounty program. My wife and I just had our first child, so I'm mainly focusing on family time for now and slowly easing back into work over the next few months. My main priority is to finish the book I've been promising to write for the past four years.[0] [0] https://r…
Very cool, I just subscribed for updates!
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it really isn't. The amount of time is very long, I don't even actually know what it was, and I personally am not aware of anyone this happened to and have never heard of anyone this happened to. In the past you were expected to hit L5, 2 promotions from hire, and now the expectation is L4, so only 1. An L5 engineer at Google is someone who is expected to be able to handle any medium-large difficulty task with so…
> The amount of time is very long It is now, it used to be a lot shorter. "Up or out" has effectively been sacrificed to cost savings, which is perhaps a good thing in some ways.
What did it used to be?
Re: I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
#60Earlier 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…
(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.
Ain't this the truth. So many mediocre people hide in a giant company, learn how to hit their kpis and think they're crushing it, but get smacked in the face by reality when they leave.
My experience at a small company is that I always feel mediocre :)