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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)

#111

Post by raincole »

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.

> Why is it a dealbreaker?

Because they can find a job that pays way more than $20 an hour. That's it.

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

#113

Post by [deleted] »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #64

I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers. Think about it like this. A customer is the entity that exchanges money for something they value; like a good or service. That's usually your manager. Or in the case of OP the promotion committee. (Many times it's both your manager and…

[deleted]

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

#116

Post by antupis »

WWLink wrote: post #107
hinkley wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy. But if you’re working for a boss, they can get in the way. It’s not enough that you do what the customer wants, you have to do it my way, even if that prevents the custome…

> And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy. This is exactly we end up with MS Products like Teams and Windows Phone 7/8 lol. A lot of MS stuff is built to sell to the companies not the employees.

And it is working generally very well if you compare GCP and Azure. DX is much better at GCP but Azure does stuff that companies care much better and is 2x bigger.

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

#118

Post by thdhhghgbhy »

It's easy to get cynical about the review process. But just, for crying out loud, put yourself in the organisation's shoes. Tech is full of BS, and full of bullshitters. With the size of this organisation they need some consistent metrics, however not great these are, to assess and gauge performance versus other employees. You can't have the decision to promote in your manager's hands exclusively, they don't have the visibility of the organisation. The author also sounds like he went 'off books' a bit helping out on things they were interested in, rather than what was on jira boards or whatever their sponsor cared about. You'll get punished for this in a lot of places, it's just how it is. Management need to see what you are doing.

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

#119

Post by avereveard »

sangnoir wrote: post #110
nostrademons wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America I know it's topical, but I really don't think the working class on America is pissed because they are struggling to increase their annual income from $350,000 to $500,000 at their Big Tech job. That's an elites-problem; or whatever you choose to call anyone in the top 5% earning bracket.

Side of the same coin. Salaryman earning millions are still salaryman. You're bounded to the whims of the employer, and can lose it all from the ups and down of the personal relationships that surround you. The American dream is not the rich employee, is moving out to that relationship and build something you own.

Building something that is bounded to the marked at large and can weather the individual change of whims is increasingly harder as megacorp are capturing more and more value in every corner of the market.

The entire mechanism that elevated the working class to entrepreneurship is broken and the effects do include a working class increasingly repressed, at ever income bracket.

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

#120

Post by f1shy »

thdhhghgbhy wrote: post #118

It's easy to get cynical about the review process. But just, for crying out loud, put yourself in the organisation's shoes. Tech is full of BS, and full of bullshitters. With the size of this organisation they need some consistent metrics, however not great these are, to assess and gauge performance versus other employees. You can't have the decision to promote in your manager's hands exclusively, they don't have the…

Let me try a short reply: if the manager needs to see what somebody is doing, he hast to look at it. Not look KPIs and metrics. KPI and easy metrics are for lazy bad managers.
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