Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

One previous company had a system where one can reward someone who assists you, in cash. It shows up on their w2, post tax and in performance reviews. The amount you can reward depends on your level.

That attitude is pretty illustrative of a larger problem. Maybe the work of bug fixing and maintenance of legacy systems is undervalued, which might explain why those systems get into such sorry shape to begin with at big companies like Google.

My main takeaway from this piece is that it's easy for the incentive structure at big tech companies to get all out of whack. The most useful, most necessary work is often times not the work that benefits the employee most. This is pretty basic management 101 where you want to incentivize good behaviors by aligning the company's interests with those of the employees. When that incentive alignment is working it eliminates the need for employees to choose between the company and themselves. Everyone wins.

When it isn't working you get stories like the author's — the individual becomes unhappy and leaves and the company loses a valuable employee.

> I was surrounded by the best engineers in the world, using the most advanced development tools in the world.

This one might be ironic, but am I the only one feeling really annoyed by the fact that every engineer working at Google feels like every other engineers at Google is "the best in the world" ? Beside the obvious arrogance, I cannot tell if it's a subtle brainwashing or a complete lack of critical thinking.

(not only for Google, I saw the same remarks from Facebook and a couple of the other big ones, but Google is by far the most prevalent)

Hey, Dhruv! Thanks!

Yes. You can't change people. Your actual job description is worth 20% or less of your workplace success; as long as you're doing enough to stave off disaster, you are pretty much fine.

There is a simple metric for workplace success: if most people are happier while you're around (including and especially anyone above you in the chain of command), you're winning; if not, you're not. This can probably be summarized as "popularity". A few things can overcome this, so you may want to be careful not to go 100% focused on it, but you will definitely prosper if you make it the focus of 95% of your work.

Developers who like to debate and don't take it personally when a colleague disagrees are at a distinct disadvantage here, despite simultaneously frequently being some of the best qualified coders, because they don't understand that they're rare, and that many other people take any form of non-ambiguous criticism of their ideas or work as a major offense: taking bread out of their kids' mouths, etc.

I have a theory that the more a person cares for niceties, appearances, and superficialities, the more it shows that they're incapable of operating at a level any deeper than that (that is, capacity and the presence of superficial tokens generally understood to mark capacity are inversely correlated; e.g. an expensive watch does not necessarily indicate power, wealth, or importance; compare Dunning-Kruger Effect). People who are capable of doing useful work seem to find these superficialities asinine and have difficulty hiding it, whereas people who aren't capable of useful work try as hard as possible to keep the focus on the surface level, because that's their only hope.

Since the surface level is immediately apparent and the importance of the subsurface may only become apparent after some experience, imposters can, and frequently do, find great success.