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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)

#231

Post by rswail »

safety1st wrote: post #196
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.

Maybe not when you put it that way, but small businesses used to be a larger share of the economy and a more viable "rags to riches" path than they are today. The system is undoubtedly rigged to favor large businesses - most people understand that intuitively but the anti-trust cases the government is currently prosecuting and in many cases winning are hard evidence of how the US really punted on protecting the small…

Given who was supporting the MAGA candidate, we can expect that these anti-trust cases will disappear as of January 20, 2025.

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

#232

Post by rswail »

amrocha wrote: post #223
ratmeadow wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yall are missing the point and reading what you want to read. I am quite aware of the perspective. There are people on the streets in my city because the median income is $70k and the median house is $1.5M. They are thoroughly screwed by the system. My point is not to garner sympathy for the top earners. My point is that almost all of us are earning far below what we should when you look at the grand scheme of things…

I think I see what you’re saying, and I agree with you that the wealth inequality between the ultra rich and everyone else is the real challenge. The tech worker with a Google salary is a lot closer to a homeless man on the street than he is to the true 1% in the US, and that’s a real problem.

The top 1% are closer to a homeless person on the street than they are to the top 0.1%.

The wealth inequality in the US is the underlying fracture in the social compact that is driving the populist politics that are at play.

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

#233

Post by SideQuark »

chickenzzzzu wrote: post #230
SideQuark wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small businesses are no less viable than ever. Read some historical BLS and SBA stats, SUSB at Census.gov, or pretty much any proper place that tracks historical businesses data. There’s literally tens of millions of small businesses, over 10% of the US working population is first gen millionaires. Just because not everyone is Warren Buffet or the tech echo chamber here only looks at app style businesses doesn’t mean…

Hold on, you are conflating two things. How many first gen millionaires got there through their own small business, compared to big corp RSUs?

The avg wealth of a small business owner is 3x a non business owner. Look up avg wealth by age and you do the math.

10% of Americans don’t get big corp RSUs. As I said HN lives in a weird tech echo chamber.

As I said, spend some time reading. I pointed out some good places to dig into this.

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

#234

Post by dooglius »

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…

Very few of the subjects I studied in high school reach the bar of being useful to 5-10% of the students

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

#235

Post by mathteddybear »

azemetre wrote: post #38
r0ze-at-hn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How long would you say Google has been like this? Around the time when they realized they had an unstoppable monopoly? IPO? Early years? Always?

In my humble experience some time between 2006-8 and 2013. Unless they hid it that well from us interns.

It's not the only thing that changed. Good thing, my manager joined Google back in these older years, so, for instance, he could say to me that I was "expected to rise to L5" in such a way that I knew it wasn't enforced in our org.

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

#236

Post by nostrademons »

SamvitJ wrote: post #198
nostrademons wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were in 2008. It's largely just people's mental models changing slowly, as well as selection bias of people who still believe Google has world-class engineering being overrepresented among people who still work at Google.

What companies would you say have world-class engineering now (2024)?

2017-2022 I would've said the Ethereum foundation and various DeFi startups. If you look at what Ethereum accomplished with proof of stake, it's quite remarkable. The game theory alone for proof of stake is thorny as hell, and then they built a working secure implementation and upgraded a distributed network of unaffiliated organizations who all voluntarily run nodes, all without major hitches or anyone's funds being lost. That's huge, and more impressive than anything Google's done in the last 5 years.

Since 2022, I would probably say the various LLM owners: OpenAI, Anthropic, Character.AI, etc. The complexity here isn't in the basic transformer architecture though (which was invented by Google in 2017), but in the data infrastructure that hoovered up all the data on the web to train it on, as well as the fine-tuning on various use-cases.

Not surprisingly, good engineers follow the money: these have also been the lucrative industries in those time periods.

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

#237

Post by mtlynch »

jart wrote: post #220

That TinyPilot is really cool. It deserves to take off. I'm surprised he's still bootstrapping at this point, because with a product like that, there's a lot more to gain than there is to lose by taking angel and VC money.

Thanks, Justine! I'm a big fan of your work.

I actually sold the company earlier this year.[0] I never looked into VC money primarily because I like the independence of being the sole owner, though I agree there would have been a lot of advantages.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/

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

#238

Post by bitfilped »

lazide wrote: post #136
bitfilped wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more important things in life than money.

Said on a VC forum?

Yes, one would think if this community actually valued VC activities they would be praising the author for forging his own way and starting companies rather than tearing him down for choosing not to take the easy way and suckling on googles teets.

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

#239

Post by lazide »

bitfilped wrote: post #238
lazide wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said on a VC forum?

Yes, one would think if this community actually valued VC activities they would be praising the author for forging his own way and starting companies rather than tearing him down for choosing not to take the easy way and suckling on googles teets.

Huh? What does that have to do with my comment?

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

#240

Post by immibis »

jebarker wrote: post #164
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.

> 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

Aligning those incentives is not your job, but your manager's. If they want you to do that job they should pay you for that job. Don't work for free.
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