Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I quit Google to work for myself (2018)

mtlynch.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 250 posts

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

#181

Post by amrocha »

avereveard wrote: post #119
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.

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…

No they’re not. A “salaryman” earning millions has financial independence in 5 years maximum if they so choose.

Most people are forced to work or starve. These are not the same.

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

#182

Post by azangru »

It was a rather depressing read. Sad that an organization functions in a way that doesn't promote collaboration and creates all sorts of perverse incentives. Sad that employees get carelessly tossed from one project to another without any consideration for what they want for themselves. Sad that "being surrounded by the best engineers in the world, using the most advanced development tools in the world, and eating the free-est food in the world" (and probably being paid quite handsomely as well) is not enough for happiness, unless there is also promotion involved.

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

#183

Post by coding123 »

azangru wrote: post #182

It was a rather depressing read. Sad that an organization functions in a way that doesn't promote collaboration and creates all sorts of perverse incentives. Sad that employees get carelessly tossed from one project to another without any consideration for what they want for themselves. Sad that "being surrounded by the best engineers in the world, using the most advanced development tools in the world, and eating th…

We definitely do things wrong in this world.

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

#184

Post by dfee »

ryandrake wrote: post #177
godzillabrennus wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You and I have a fundamentally different view about how to optimize education. Your view is probably great to cover the base case of people “checking out” of their children’s education, but my individualized view doesn’t care about the 90% but the child in front of me.

I’d also posit that this approach to education reduces overall attainment by dulling the edge of what the margin is capable of.

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

#185

Post by julianeon »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #157
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…

> the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers This is definitely the case in many/most companies, but it's also a sign of a dysfunctional and declining internal company culture, and a bad pattern that will lead to decline in quality of product and deteriorating internal team dynamics. It's better to seek out employers where this inevitable…

Above a certain company size however I think what he’s describing is not avoidable. In a less than 0.5k person company you’ve very close to the company. In a > 10k person company there’s no way: there’s a lot of layers to the company and often can’t “touch” the customer as an employee. The nature of the job is mediating how the layers interact: you can’t reduce that complexity out of it.

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

#186

Post by aix1 »

jeffbee wrote: post #176
aix1 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That's wildly incompatible with my experience there in the previous decade

Yes, there have been some very signficant changes over the last few years. Promos are decided in-org. Managers play a much more important role. There are promo quotas along with associated pressures (felt more acutely in some orgs compared to others).

But, putting that asides, a manager who doesn't have any idea of what or how their reports are doing is clearly failing at their job under any of those systems.

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

#187

Post by laweijfmvo »

throwaway215234 wrote: post #144
throwaway_5753 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where will you go that will be a 50k-100k bump over google comp?

Google comp is known to be low. Top candidates with in-demand skills can easily ask for 2x TC of google and get a stream of offers pouring in.

ask where?

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

#188

Post by dmazzoni »

jebarker wrote: post #172
rockemsockem wrote: post #47

Earlier 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…

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

Yes. There are far fewer people at each higher level.

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

#189

Post by sgerenser »

Simon_ORourke wrote: post #128
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 nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income. Precisely this, and while I completely support the original author in their quest to find their own bootstrapped business, I keep wondering what the "what if" would have looked like had they stayed earning the big bu…

You don’t really have to wonder, Google (really all big tech) stocks mooned since 2018, so he’d likely be far wealthier.

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

#190

Post by mattlondon »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #108
cdrini wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point, but I don't believe it scales at the same rate -- meaning I believe the salaries are much higher than the living costs. Eg average us salary is probably somewhere around 60k. Let's say single bedroom apartment not in SF is maybe like 1.5k/mo, that leaves like 42k left over. Google salary I would guess is closer to 150k (low end probably); SF single bedroom is probably closer to 4k/mo, that leaves…

Internally most larger tech companies index their salary bands based on the CoL of the employee. The downturn over the last couple years has had many companies move reqs from high CoL areas to low CoL areas to save money.

IME of Big Cos, it is never cost of living that is taken into account, but what "the competition" in the local market are paying, and then some percentile of that.

Who "the competition" are specifically is 99.9% of the time entirely black-box, as is the percentile that the company is targeting. So they claim it is open and transparent ("we benchmark against local employers in tech") but the actual details are hidden - are the other employers they are using FAANG or someone else? Are they targeting 50% or 95%? Etc etc ("oh that is confidential sorry")

This is how you end up with situations like London, which is obscenely expensive cost of living, yet gets lower salaries than SF and Zurich which in my experience are a bit cheaper than London for day to day costs (e.g. transport, food etc).

London is a physically & metaphorically huge cultural World Capital and attracts loads of people from across the world so there is more competition for tech/high-skilled roles because so many people move to London after they graduate, and stay for good. So salaries are lower but everything else is more expensive due to population density and resulting demand. No one wants to live in Zurich so there are less people competing for each job, so salaries need to be higher to attract and retain staff in such a dull and boring place that people naturally and understandably plan to leave after a few years.

Post reply on HN