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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)

#71

Post by misstercool »

mtlynch wrote: post #53
misstercool wrote: post #49

Quote 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 t…

Well, to be honest, I have never heard any of many FAANG turned startup founder friends told me that the want to build a life style business from the beginning. Every one wants to build a vc-backed startup with a home run idea. Many of them ended up building life style business because the markets of their ideas were actually much smaller.

If you do the math, climbing the corporate ladder at FAANG might have better ROI than running life style business. Of course, money is not the only consideration in life.

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

#72

Post by pkaye »

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…

There is no guarantee of success. There is a lot of luck involved.

Look at Robert Pera who founded Ubiquiti Networks. He was working on an idea his bosses ignored on he own during nights and weekend and then founded his company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera

Jensen Huang said when they started Nvidia at one point they were thirty days from going out of business.

Also compare the TinyPilot (at $399) to the open source JetKVM ($69) which is supposed to come out soon.

https://jetkvm.com/

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

#73

Post by joshuamorton »

rockemsockem wrote: post #50
nvarsj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fairly sure Google has/had a cliff for engineers to reach senior by a certain time frame. That puts immense pressure to get promoted, or you get laid off.

It's no longer senior, it's only L4 (new hires are usually L3). Also I never knew the time length for the cliff, but I think it was really, really long.

It also wasn't, as far as I know, every strictly enforced. There were folks when I joined (which was when the L5 requirement still existed, but it was in its way out) who had been L4 for like a decade.

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

#74

Post by goalonetwo »

sickblastoise wrote: post #61
shadowgovt wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of places, for two reasons 1) companies usually hire ex-Googlers up-level because they're perceived as being more valuable (Google titles tend to under-represent engineer capabilities; an L4 Googler is an SSE elsewhere). 2) Google was one of the FAANGs that fixed wages via unofficial non-competes. Their compensation ladders still reflect that.

Dealing with some ex googlers at my current (non tech company) now, Jesus Christ they are culture killers at regular companies.

exactly this. Working with a couple ex-google and ex-facebook. Without failing every meeting we hear at least once "At Google/Facebook we used to ..." for something that is completely not applicable here.

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

#76

Post by cdrini »

asdfman123 wrote: post #28
cdrini wrote: post #18

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…

Will you work for me as a software engineer? I'll pay you $20 an hour, which is vastly more than nearly all of your ancestors throughout history have made. Why is it a dealbreaker? Don't you enjoy software engineering? My point is that human psychology doesn't work that way. You compete with people around you. If they're getting promoted while you're being left behind, you're not going to be very happy about it.

It's less about comparing to your ancestors, more your peers in other industries. If you're getting payed say $40/h, that's muuuuch more than most other jobs, and can give you a comfortable living for quite a while.

I agree human psychology is part of it and can help explain someone's mentality, but I don't think human psychology can fully justify someone's behaviour, since humans aren't automatons beholden to their psychology.

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

#77

Post by skirmish »

rockemsockem wrote: post #39
shadowgovt wrote: post #29

Earlier 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.

> For reference almost all SWE hires start at L3.

Straight out of school, yes. With a few years of outside experience and an advanced degree, it is easy to join at L5. Which I think is ideal, no promotion headaches, just focus on interesting work (L6 already starts to be management heavy, so not that attractive).

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

#78

Post by cdrini »

mtnGoat wrote: post #63
sickblastoise wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with some ex googlers at my current (non tech company) now, Jesus Christ they are culture killers at regular companies.

I know at my last job I closed any resumes that had Google on them. They generally didn’t do well at startups in my opinion, the scope and responsibilities are too broad and there is no where to hide. And the ones I did hire tended to want to make everything look the way it did at Google.

That seems a little much; Google has had such a huge number of software employees, that it seems unwise to draw assumptions about everyone based on what I imagine has been a much smaller sample size than the total that you've personally worked with.

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

#79

Post by SamvitJ »

r0ze-at-hn wrote: post #31
cdrini wrote: post #18

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…

> author seems like they were only there for a promotion It is more the other way around. Internally google taught/teaches engineers that their only goal is promotion. All parts of this used to be very very public. There are whole presentations, decks, docs, and more. What level you are and what level the person you are talking to ~mattered~. The goal isn't to be a good engineer, to make good products, or anything li…

This is just not true, sorry, even now. Google is one of the tech companies known for deemphasizing level visibility and titles. Case in point: almost three years in, and I don't know the levels of many of my colleagues. Though sometimes one can guess.

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

#80

Post by alarge »

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.

No, your manager doesn't decide your promotion. The difference between before and now is that before, your manager was expected to make the case for your promotion. Now, the manager is expected not to be an advocate, but to provide their balanced input (ready now, ready soon, not yet ready).

The promotion still goes to a promo committee - although now they try to locate it close enough to your org that they have heard of you, and can have a high-context reviewer (not your manager) at the table.

The carryover from the previous system (and the thing that these sorts of posts seem to miss) is that every level has explicit expectations about the sort of activities that a person at that level can be trusted to independently conduct. A decision on promotion is a decision on whether or not a person has adequately demonstrated that they can do the work of the next level. It isn't some sort of award for doing their current job well. When someone languishes for a long time at a level, it is usually because they aren't demonstrating those next-level signals.

The system can feel unfair - like a team that lacks adequate opportunities for someone to demonstrate next-level signals, or the insistence that work doesn't count until its production impact can be assessed (which may take years for some projects). But it is rarely as capricious as may sound.

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