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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)

#161

Post by [deleted] »

DeathArrow wrote: post #153
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…

>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. Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion. Students should be teached these things in universities so they don't waste years from their lives after they graduate.

[deleted]

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

DeathArrow wrote: post #153
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…

>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. Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion. Students should be teached these things in universities so they don't waste years from their lives after they graduate.

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by [deleted] »

rvnx wrote: post #15
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…

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 jus…

[deleted]

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

#164

Post by jebarker »

DeathArrow wrote: post #153
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…

>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. Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion. Students should be teached these things in universities so they don't waste years from their lives after they graduate.

> maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion

Until the actual business you work for goes down the pan because everyone is optimizing for promotion

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

#165

Post by godzillabrennus »

epolanski wrote: post #156
DeathArrow wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion. Students should be teached these things in universities so they don't waste years from their lives after they graduate.

I find it super sad that we should teach kids how to climb corporate ladders rather than taking control of their life, starting businesses, making the world a better place or chasing a career of fulfilment rather than maximizing money return.

Agreed. Every kid their senior year of high school should be forming an LLC, starting a company around their idea, learning the basic skills to operate one, if they want to graduate.

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

#166

Post by naveen99 »

noduerme wrote: post #155
DeathArrow wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion. Students should be teached these things in universities so they don't waste years from their lives after they graduate.

Optimizing for promotion is a terrible solution to life's problems. Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases. Whether the a corporate hierarchy is your "customer" or you deal with actual end-consumers, the goal is to minimize your workload while maximizing your paycheck, and a promotion in a corporate setting simply does not do that anywhere short of the C-suite…

Ideally promotions are for people who can handle increased responsibility with ease.

Think of lifting more weight every week when you begin a strength training program. You get promoted until you plateau.

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

#167

Post by elegantlie »

ratmeadow wrote: post #132
sangnoir wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't know about America, but keep in mind that having an income which is a large number doesn't necessarily mean you have tonnes of wealth (in most general sense of the word), due to cost of living. In my country, you could be in the top 5% of earners and still not be automatically set or life or anything like that, because tax and housing is so bloody expensive it's ridiculous. Even on $200k+ you're still stuck a…

I worked in big tech in one of the coastal cities. Most of my coworkers, although great people, were delusional in terms of money. I was getting paid between 200k to 400k during my tenure, and after working there a few years, I was set for life.

Reality check: even in "high cost of living areas", typical salaries are around 50k. Most of my coworkers came from wealthy families and perceived buying condos in Chelsea as middle class activities. I don't think they saw themselves as rich. And to be fair, many probably didn't actually save that much money, because they had such expensive lifestyles.

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

#168

Post by jonathan_landy »

When I worked as a post doc, I wasn’t paid much but I got a direct return on extra work: another paper etc. when I got my first job as a data scientist, I was paid much more but there was seemingly little response to extra work. It was distressing. But later I learned that making a good impression on people would pay off long term, through recommendations for new jobs etc.

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

#169

Post by mtlynch »

steelframe wrote: post #69
mtlynch wrote: post #14

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

Forgive me if I seem presumptuous in my advice here. You've done things in your career that I can only dream of doing. What I can say is that I've somehow managed to survive a quarter-century in a string of Big Tech companies without dropping out (yet). It sounds like you may have been looking at the currents and picking the one that seemed best one to swim in. I found there's often -- but not always -- another optio…

Context for others: steelframe and I were teammates at Microsoft in the late 2000s.[0]

Hey steelframe! Good to see you here again!

This is good advice and something I wish I'd recognized earlier at Google. For the first few years there, I was under a manager who had 20+ direct reports, so he probably didn't have time to think of the best projects for me.

I probably would have been better off figuring out my own high-impact project rather than focusing on fighting short-term fires that kept popping up for my team.

In certain ways, I solved this with the founder route because I get to skip the "earning the right to create my own destiny" phase, but in other ways, there's inescapable grunge work like legal compliance, taxes, vendor issues, etc.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011696

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

#170

Post by theptip »

cromagnum wrote: post #87
WalterBright wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot harder to found a business successfully than most people imagine.

Incorrect. In fact YC’s (i.e. the website you’re on) whole thesis is that it’s a lot easier to found a business successfully than most people imagine. Yeah, they’ve drifted from their roots a little but I think it’s been proved out. The irony is killing me.

How many have you founded? Important data point for such an opinion.
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