I quit Google to work for myself (2018) • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by mtlynch » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #54

mtlynch wrote: post #14

Author 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.

Haha, maybe if one of my companies does really well, I'll be able to buy a mountain and name it after me.

Thanks so much! That's really nice to hear.

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

#172

Post by jebarker » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 2:47 PM UTC

rockemsockem wrote: post #47

nicoburns wrote: post #41

Earlier 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…

What happens once you hit L5? You just need to perform satisfactorily each year?

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

#173

Post by mtlynch » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 2:49 PM UTC

misstercool wrote: post #71

mtlynch wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 R…

Yeah, I agree financial ROI is definitely higher in a FAANG, especially the last five years.

I'm still glad that I left when I did, as I value autonomy a lot, so being able to choose what to do every day is worth a lot to me.

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

#174

Post by manoDev » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 2:57 PM UTC

Working with the promise of a future promotion is, effectively, giving credit to your employer.

"In every country in which the capitalist mode of production reigns, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power before it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, as for example, the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist."

- Karl Marx. Capital Volume One, Chapter Six: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power.

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

#175

Post by mtlynch » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 3:14 PM UTC

skulk wrote: post #90

mtlynch wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lar…

> 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. oh wow. Reading this made me realize why (in the context of a big tech career) it's such a good idea to have a mentor whose reasonably far away from your team. They could have probably pointed this out t…

Yeah, I found a mentor at the beginning of year 4, and they were very helpful. There were a lot of things happening on my team that I didn't understand, and my mentor was able to recognize them as political patterns that were somewhat common.

I realize I maybe came across as naive thinking that I could get promoted without thinking much about career strategy or politics, but that's how the first few years of my career had worked out.

After undergrad, I worked for Microsoft for three years, and I got promoted twice without ever thinking about career. I just did the projects my team needed, and did a good job. Same thing when I worked for NCC group: promoted after a year and was on track for more.

One of the big differences in other companies was that they gave me opportunities to demonstrate aptitude in my day to day work rather than needing to see me launch something big and shiny. I invested a lot into peer reviews and building repeatable processes, so managers at those companies were able to see that impact my team even if it would be hard to prove measurable results to an external promo committee.

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

#176

Post by jeffbee » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 3:22 PM UTC

aix1 wrote: post #147

jeffbee wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At all levels? I know it changes every year so I don't let my own personal experience color my perception of Google 2024, but some years when I was there my manager barely even knew where my desk was. My promo packets for L5 and L6 were judged by peer committees and I am not sure they even saw my manager evaluations. When I sat on an L5 promo committee we did not weigh manager assessments. This made sense at that tim…

These days it's the manager who writes the next-level assessment (NLA) and it's the NLA that forms the main body of the packet that the promo committee looks at. They're also the one soliciting and summarizing peer feedback etc.

That's wildly incompatible with my experience there in the previous decade. I hope the current managers are up to the job! Most of my managers didn't have even the slightest inkling of how to evaluate what I was doing on the job. One of them was mainly occupied with running the "mindfulness" office.

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

#177

Post by ryandrake » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 3:23 PM UTC

godzillabrennus wrote: post #165

epolanski wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I sometimes can't even detect sarcasm on HN anymore. What 16-18 year old kid (or their parents) has the capital and time to start and run their own business? Even when they're adults, they likely will not have access to business ownership. Depending on the source you use, somewhere between 5 and 10% of Americans own their own business. I'm not saying basic business skills aren't valuable--they are, but the vast, vast majority of people will work for someone else throughout their careers. Shouldn't we be optimizing education for the 90% case?

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

#178

Post by esprehn » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 3:28 PM UTC

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…

> Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases.

While this might be true in other industries, in big tech companies like TFA is talking about SWE promotions come with rather large increases in pay.

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track...

The author was trying to go from L4 to L5. Promotions are also backwards facing, which means at the point you get promoted you're already doing the larger workload.

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

#179

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 3:29 PM UTC

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.

It's not the dollar values so much as the incentive structure.

I think most Americans have a core value of "work hard, get compensated for your work". There's a basic value of fairness and meritocracy, that you can take steps to control your destiny and will be rewarded proportionally.

When you've been at Google for a few years these days, you realize that this isn't really true. Nobody knows or cares how good a programmer you are. Nobody really cares how hard you work either. Your ability to get promoted is basically dependent upon how well your manager knows how to work the system and then whether you listen to your manager. I'm an eng manager there; I am relatively good at working the system, having gotten my reports 4 promotions in the last 2 years. My tech lead does all the actual work, because he actually cares about product quality, knows the code well, mentors the team effectively, and is a nice guy to work with. My job is just to get him promoted (which I've done, twice) and ensure that he doesn't leave. The last promotion packet hinged on work that took him maybe a couple months to do, but that I managed to spin into a big complex project, because it was stuff that folks at the Director/VP level cared about deeply but had no idea how to do. All the rest of the two years, the time spent fixing bugs and improving code health and mentoring the team and delivering small usability improvements, was basically ignored (don't tell him or the rest of the team!) because it fell below the radar screens of the decision-makers who hold the purse strings.

When it comes to the working class, I suspect that most of them would like to be able to take pride in their work and be rewarded for it. To make money because they did a particularly clean plumbing job, and not because they paid off Yelp to increase their rating to 4.5 stars or happened to run the right Google AdWords. But that's not the world we live in, salesmanship and paying the right taxes to the right overlords matters more than actually doing the job well, and people are pissed about it.

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

#180

Post by amrocha » Sat, Nov 09, 2024, 3:34 PM UTC

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…

Being “stuck” at a job for a decade, living a life with zero financial worries, does not compare to the average worker who has to work for 40+ years, cannot afford to purchase property, and has to rely on social security in old age when they can’t work anymore.

Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly lack of perspective.