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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

mtlynch.io

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Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#331

Post by tomkarlo »

zhausjgzga wrote: post #192
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…

At my job, we use HeyTaco, a Slack bot. Every day you can give up to five tacos out by @mentioning somebody with a :taco: emoticon. If you answer a question or help somebody out, they will probably give you some tacos. The app keeps track of who gets the most tacos with leaderboards and the like. This has instilled a culture of helping others out on the team, by gamifying it and making it visible.

We use something like this in my org, and Google has "kudos", but I've found that the problem is their usage is highly variable even within a medium-sized or (we're roughly 1,000.) On some teams, the average employee will have hundreds of these kudos, whereas on others, the average might be 1 or 2.

This was highlighted to me recently when someone in Slack noted that one person had ~50X the kudos of everyone else and asked how that happens... and they said "just go hang around in team X's channel, they'll give you a 'taco' any time your answer a query."

Given Google's promo system (where a committee looks at candidates from very different teams) this then means they'd have to try to normalize the data for it to be useful.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#332

Post by ct520 »

MadBohr wrote: post #310
dep_b wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 to me sounds like a complete lack of self-ownership on your part. You literally sat blocked doing nothing for days, without reaching out to an individual to help with this? Instead you just spammed Slack saying you're blocked? While I agree that it would have been nice if somebody helped you, you are in control of your own destiny. If nobody is helping you, you need to personally escalate it and reach out until…

100 percent agree with your post.

Unfortunately most people I have met do not think like this.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#333

Post by josephjrobison »

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 academia, if you're a PhD student that writes the paper, you're the "first author", but anyone who helps you do research or process data or other contributions is a "second author".

I think that's a better system, because one person may have 2 first author publications and 3 second author publications. Another person may have just 1 first author publication but 12 second author publications. So you can weigh and evaluate each person based on their assistance and contributions to others.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#334

Post by emiliobumachar »

mistermann wrote: post #267
dep_b wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe it's not the initiative per se. Did you name the function silliness(), runPig(), or give any other blatant display of contempt? It's dripping from your comment.

(not saying it was necessarily about something real, just that it could be)

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#335

Post by smcl »

mtlynch wrote: post #312
smcl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early on in the article you describe the excitement your younger self had a the prospect of working with the "best engineers in the world". However further down you describe your difficulties with some products - undocumented code with no unit tests and silent failures which are hard-to-diagnose. Has your opinion changed about this at all? I am not sure how indicative these descriptions are to overall quality at Goog…

No, I found developer quality to be very high at Google throughout my time there. I think the lack of tests was more symptomatic of bad incentives that good developers were forced to follow. Developers were rewarded for flashy things they could show promo committees, and rigorous tests or well-written documentation. It was unusual to find code with no tests because a code reviewer will usually insist on at least some…

Interesting, thanks for the reply!

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#336

Post by Covzire »

ithinkinstereo wrote: post #275
matthewmacleod wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't really follow. As an independent worker, you answer to your clients. As an employee, you answer to your single client. It's basically the same deal.

It's not really the same. You have way more control as an independent operator. Yes, you have to answer to your customers, but only to the extent and to the degree you desire. It's not at all the "same" as working as an employee. My point is less applicable to freelancers with one/few customers and more directed towards operators that manage product/service oriented businesses with dozens/hundreds/thousands of custom…

The biggest draw with Self-Employment in my opinion is setting your own hours and working at your own pace.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#337

Post by mtlynch »

debt wrote: post #324
mtlynch wrote: post #2

Author here. Happy to answer any questions about the post or about my experience at Google.

I'm curious, do you feel it took you too long to ship the projects you were working on? Or do you feel you shipped them on time?

I don't think so. Although it's worth noting that Google isn't big on deadlines. They set quarterly goals, but on the teams I was on, they weren't taken very seriously because it was so common to be pre-empted by other tasks. But I never got any kind of feedback that my projects were shipping too late.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#338

Post by ma2rten »

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…

Google actually kind of has a partial solution for this. Your performance review is not just based on manager's assessment, but you also need to gather reviews from your peers.

However, you need to strike a balance between helping out peers and having impactful projects.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#339

Post by grasshopperpurp »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #242
freshfey wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene is an absolute must, regardless of the position.

I’d call it a must not, because then you’d be the type of person who takes life advice from books such as “The 48 Laws of Power.” It’s not a good look for most people, and not a good way to think about the world, IMO.

Would you say it's helpful to understand the way that certain people work/think, though? I haven't yet read it, and I've seen this criticism before.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#340

Post by CodeMage »

dceddia wrote: post #278
rdtsc wrote: post #103

> Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the organization. That is the true test. You are supposed to pretend only to buy into it but never really believe it. Understanding that things function on two levels is critical. One level is the superficial "we are a family, community, we are not evil, making the world better". But that's the trap to catch all the naive people and extract extra work h…

There is an excellent book I read recently called Developer Hegemony [0] which goes into depth on your first point. It calls the naive folks "optimists" -- unfailingly devoting themselves to the company ideal. It discusses two other factions, the pragmatists (come in, do work, get paid, go home) and the opportunists (take every opportunity to rise to the top). I recommend checking it out, and the author's blog too [1…

Sounds like a "nicer" rehash of the Gervais Principle. I haven't read Developer Hegemony, but from the looks of the author's blog, I would recommend "cutting out the middleman" and going straight to the source material: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
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