Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#161

Post by FullyFunctional » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

Thanks for writing this and good for you to finally leave that wasteland. I learned an important lesson on my first job "Don't be suckered into being loyal to your company because, no matter what they say, they are loyal to share holders, not to you".

On a side note, I don't understand the fetish with Google; where does this reality distortion come from that they have the best engineers? At _every_ company I have worked for I have been told "we have the best engineers" :) (I've been in Silicon Valley for 17+ years and Google is not that exceptional).

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#162

Post by madeofpalk » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

eldavido wrote: post #91

To author: you lost the political game. I busted my ass at a startup for years and also lost the political game. So I'm speaking from experience here. You can either get all mad and worked up and pissed off about it, and waste years of your career (as I did) being pissed off, stubborn, and refusing to change. Or figure out how to play. I'd like to think there are places with better politics but I think it's pretty en…

Also it's amusing to consider that someone got fed up with the politics of a workplace to 'work for themselves' where they'll need to battle the politics of many different clients.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#163

Post by city41 » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:57 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #127

shados wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one of my previous teams, we did away with individual metrics because they "punished" team players. If an engineer spent most of a week helping another with their issue, it made them look bad in whatever tracker we used by almost every metric. I prefered sticking to trying to optimize whole team velocity and using 1 on 1s and peer reviews to track individual performance where it was needed (eg: compensation review…

relatedly, a friend of mine worked at a place where everyone was on "20% time = bug time". You were expected to spend ~ 20% of your time taking bugs from the bug tracker and fixing them. Bugs closed were part of a metric towards bonuses. People were taking one bug, breaking it in to 3 or 4, then closing all of those. "Add button for X" became * "add button on form" * "add CSS for button" * "update CSS for button" * "…

Reminds me of this classic Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#164

Post by runevault » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #29

> I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures, but there were no metrics that tracked developer time. For several jobs in a row, I've felt that helping others on a team is undervalued and under-recorded. I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while. The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist points…

Once a team is settled in this can be hard to measure. For me personally I was able to show mine by changing teams and helping drastically inflate overall team velocity, not just by the number of points I added, but how much more productive everyone else became. It is hard to do on an established team where you're already part of it, though, and that's a problem I don't know how to solve.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#165

Post by madeofpalk » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

ithinkinstereo wrote: post #126

eldavido wrote: post #91

To author: you lost the political game. I busted my ass at a startup for years and also lost the political game. So I'm speaking from experience here. You can either get all mad and worked up and pissed off about it, and waste years of your career (as I did) being pissed off, stubborn, and refusing to change. Or figure out how to play. I'd like to think there are places with better politics but I think it's pretty en…

Working for yourself really does mean working for yourself. Yes, you might have customers to answer to, but you can always tell them to fuck off if you want. You suffer the consequences and reap the rewards. Your actions, small or large, matter. Yes, working for a corporation is safer and more stable. In the grand scheme of things, this is the risk-adverse, safe thing to do. The OP may waste years of his life, or he…

Doesn't the same exist for a workplace though?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#166

Post by lrem » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

debt wrote: post #150

lrem wrote: post #49

I'm also a Googler. Upon joining I was also given the keys to an ancient data pipeline, due a redesign for at least five years at that time. The person handing me the keys left almost immediately. My task was also keeping the thing adrift and nursing it back to health, whatever it takes. I did get promoted for that. The metric I used was pretty much the amount of developer time that went into supporting it that was s…

Because you didn’t show graphs but showed testimonies form actual humans. Which I would assume, I don’t know for sure, that business people see graphs or hear grand ideas all day long and just really wanna know “yeah but is this actually improving anything for anyone?”

Nit: as described by OP, promotions in Google are decided by senior engineers. Your hypothesis still sounds valid.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#167

Post by gjvc » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #127

shados wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In one of my previous teams, we did away with individual metrics because they "punished" team players. If an engineer spent most of a week helping another with their issue, it made them look bad in whatever tracker we used by almost every metric. I prefered sticking to trying to optimize whole team velocity and using 1 on 1s and peer reviews to track individual performance where it was needed (eg: compensation review…

relatedly, a friend of mine worked at a place where everyone was on "20% time = bug time". You were expected to spend ~ 20% of your time taking bugs from the bug tracker and fixing them. Bugs closed were part of a metric towards bonuses. People were taking one bug, breaking it in to 3 or 4, then closing all of those. "Add button for X" became * "add button on form" * "add CSS for button" * "update CSS for button" * "…

In my naivety I've never heard nor thought about "what gets measured gets gamed". It's been my intuition for a while, but it explains much of what used to frustrate me -- I wish someone had told me this 15 years ago.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#168

Post by Jemmeh » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

legohead wrote: post #140

You don't try to get promoted in engineering. You do a kickass job, and those above you notice and promote you or at least give you a raise/bonus. Now that sounds naive, but the reason this works is because you are actually in power. You can easily find another job granting you more pay, especially with something like Google on your resume. In my 20+ years of software development I've never asked for or even pursued…

I'm glad that this has worked for you but it's not like that for everyone. Also it's very stupid in many ways that people constantly just have to jump ship to get a raise. I might really love my work, be learning a lot, work with great people, but I have to fight tooth and nail to get a raise -or- waste a bunch of my time constantly talking to new companies. And then my current company loses someone with a lot of domain knowledge too. I love programming. I really do wish I could just sit down and code. Companies are always talking about wringing out the last drops of productivity but they don't reward programmers for focusing on code, but instead the business side of things and constantly jumping ship.

I play the game like most people do, of course. But it's a stupid game.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#169

Post by NTDF9 » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

dep_b wrote: post #72

dahart wrote: post #29

> I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures, but there were no metrics that tracked developer time. For several jobs in a row, I've felt that helping others on a team is undervalued and under-recorded. I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while. The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist points…

I worked in a remote team once helping a company in Seattle (that perhaps had a bit of a jock culture problem). I could be stuck for days because following the README in a repo just wasn't enough to get the project to compile and run. Every standup I was telling "I'm completely blocked for the last two days because I cannot run the repo, so I cannot run any tests and at the moment I'm doing absolutely nothing.". To b…

This is endemic to our industry. The problem really is short-sighted management. They only value something that shows themselves in good light with their superiors.

Managers absolutely don't seem to care about actually building a team and cultivating a culture of success.

Engineering managers are way way worse than Soccer managers in this regard.

I would put this all on the hiring processes right from how we hire engineers and managers and what gets a promotion. But unfortunately, our industry would rather remain blind.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#170

Post by Eridrus » Wed, Feb 28, 2018, 4:59 PM UTC

phamilton wrote: post #64

Writing documentation and fixing bugs is in fact not the bar for a senior software engineer. I don't disagree with the promotion committee on that front. IIRC, Senior Software Engineer is a terminal level. You aren't expected to advance any more once you reach that level. Some do, but you can stay a Senior Engineer for the rest of your career and that's fine. So certainly "can fix bugs and write docs and tests" isn't…

The issue with this is that it leads to people choosing projects based on what they think is promotable and doing the bare minimum on anything else. Which is how you get code with no tests or documentation.

I think there needs to be some recognition for people who saw that there was a real need for some grunt work, and the business was suffering because of it, and went and did the work. The key part about this that I would consider "senior" is being able to look at everything that is going on and figure out what is actually critical.