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

Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

mtlynch.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 783 posts

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#261

Post by gvb »

jrockway wrote: post #231

> It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present. This was the beginning of the end for me. I don't care about the gift at all; if I wanted something I would have already bought it. But it was the idea that an easy way to cut costs was the solution to everything. Ignore the fact that there are three separate teams working on literally every problem at Google. No, what's really costing them money is buying…

FWIW, he was a Software Engineer aspiring to be a Senior Software Engineer.

The promotion committee noted that in the past six months, I clearly demonstrated senior-level work. These were, uncoincidentally, the months when I was optimizing for promotion.

But they felt that six months wasn’t a long enough track record, so… better luck next time.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#262

Post by phamilton »

jpm_sd wrote: post #218
tehlike wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Four years' worth of GSUs oughta be enough for anybody." No. Not even close. There's a reason it's called golden handcuffs. It all depends on where you are in life. If you have a mortgage, it won't be enough depending on the house you have. If you don't have a house, you will have a lot of FOMO. Big time. It's all about pscyhology - you need exactly 0$ if you are dedicated and don't have dependencies. Ok, let's say…

I thought "oughta be enough for anybody" was an obvious "640KB" joke, but maybe I'm just old. Anyway, it certainly is enough money to appropriately cushion an attempt at freelancing. And the best thing to do after leaving a job at Google is to move somewhere cheaper!

> "640KB"

"$640K in GSU over 4 years ought o be enough for anybody"

That's actually the ballpark for a senior engineer.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#263

Post by nickjj »

ultrasounder wrote: post #251
nickjj wrote: post #63

Good luck with your new programming adventures. Just based on reading your article I would say your mindset is in the right spot to be successful on your own. I've been freelancing as a developer for the last 20 years and have turned down interviews from Google / etc. in the past. It's a fun ride. > Optimizing for promotion This is one of many reasons why I'll never work a "regular" job.

Hi Nick just popped in to say Thank You for your SAAS Flask course. I am slowly working through it along with the updated Flask Mega Tutorial

Hi, no problem.

Thanks so much for signing up to that course.

If you have any questions you know where to reach me!

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#264

Post by g9yuayon »

This article may as well be used to describe my employer or many other companies that have more people than the quantity of work. My suggestion: join a company that figures out how to manage visibility, such as Netflix. Or join a company that does not need to manage visibility, such as a fast-growing startup.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#265

Post by phamilton »

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…

> The metric

I think you answered your question. You had a metric that was tied to value for the business.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#266

Post by fancyfacebook »

tehlike wrote: post #45
jpm_sd wrote: post #7

Because you made enough money that it was an affordable risk? Yes, perf is garbage and management is chaos, but let's be honest with ourselves. Four years' worth of GSUs oughta be enough for anybody. "Devoted employee" followed by "expert at gaming the perf system" followed by "project cancelled and adrift" is, sadly, the normal progression for a Googler, from what I've seen.

"Four years' worth of GSUs oughta be enough for anybody." No. Not even close. There's a reason it's called golden handcuffs. It all depends on where you are in life. If you have a mortgage, it won't be enough depending on the house you have. If you don't have a house, you will have a lot of FOMO. Big time. It's all about pscyhology - you need exactly 0$ if you are dedicated and don't have dependencies. Ok, let's say…

Yes that's how money works, if you start spending lots of it then you won't have it.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#267

Post by mistermann »

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…

> 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.".

This happened to me once a few years ago, once I finally figured it out I put all this silliness into one single bootstrapping function you could call to get the pig of an application to run, and asked the lead dev to add it to the core library. Later that day I got called into my manager's office as apparently my behavior was disruptive and problematic.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#268

Post by NTDF9 »

phamilton wrote: post #211
whack wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Writing documentation and fixing bugs is in fact not the bar for a senior software engineer. The bar for a senior engineer should be identifying the biggest problems plaguing an organization, and successfully tackling them. In some cases, the biggest problem is building and launching something shiny and impressive. In other cases, the biggest problem is fixing bugs. Refactoring complex/unstable systems to make them…

> The bar for a senior engineer should be identifying the biggest problems plaguing an organization, and successfully tackling them. You're missing the crucial step of advocating for these problems to be solved. Until you know this is actually something important to the organization, you're just scratching your own itch. In OPs example, did it really matter that the data was occasionally bad? Quite often analytics ex…

>> In OPs example, did it really matter that the data was occasionally bad?

Ok. Let some apps choke to death. Once it dies, you'll have your response to "Did it really matter"

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#269

Post by throwaway84742 »

Pretty much why I left as well. Wasted years on improving existing stuff rather than building new stuff. Google doesn’t value improvements, even very significant and quantifiable ones, except if you’re improving CTR or relevance. Promotion-wise working on a hot new project which will flame out in a few years is 10x better for you to “demonstrate impact”. Quality be damned. If you launch new shit, you get a lot more brownie points. Googlers, don’t be stupid the way I was. If you’re looking to get promoted, get on a hot new project and steadfastly maneuver away from any and all work that doesn’t look worthwhile in your promo packet. This sucks for Google in the grand scheme of things. But the alternative will suck for you, and your first priority should be you, in spite of what anyone says. Anything else just leads to suckage and unhappiness.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#270

Post by tankenmate »

Djvacto wrote: post #87
tankenmate wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are going to hand out points for people to vote with, may I suggest quadratic voting.[0] [0] http://ericposner.com/quadratic-voting/

So, would you mind helping me see if I understand quadratic voting correctly? Let's say there are 4 voters: A, B, C, D, voting on policies 1-10. Everyone gets a certain number of votes (say one per policy, so 10 total). Voter A only really cares about policy 5 & 7. So they want to buy votes for these 2. They can give up their votes in, say, policies 1-4 to get 2 more votes for policy 5, and can also give up votes 6,…

That's basically it. So say you had 10 people on your team, each person gets 9 votes. Say someone wanted to give only one person all their votes, the recipient would accrue 3 votes (sqrt(9)=3). Or they could give 2 people 4 votes each which would accrue as 2 votes (sqrt(4)=2) each for those two people and then you'd have one left for someone else. Then you tally up all the accrued votes (not votes spent) for all the people and then you'd be able to rank people according to how helpful they are (but this ranking wouldn't be transferable outside your team; you can't use it to compare them with the helpfulness of people on other teams).
Post reply on HN