361–370 of 449 posts
Ex-Netflix here. I was a senior dev at Microsoft and Netflix (8 years of professional experience) and decided to switch to freelance for a variety of reasons. Eventually that turned into starting a company that provides a home for ex-FAANG (etc) devs that want to switch to freelancing. Facet Development is a freelancer network made up exclusively of ex-FAANG engineers. Facet does the work of finding freelancing jobs/…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's oversimplifying it a bit. I minored in Economics so I'd like to believe I have a decent understanding of it. The problem isn't that Google just says, "Hi, donate time to us, your corporate overlords, in exchange for nothing." Instead, they make a very reasonable argument of, "You should help your teammates and colleagues." Imagine that you're on a team with a junior developer. Their feedback is basical…
"You should help your teammates and colleagues." is not, by itself, an argument. It's a moral precept. "You should help your teammates and colleagues produce more value for the company because we hired you to produce value for the company" is an argument. Now if the company's employee evaluation process doesn't recognize the second-order value you produced here then that's the company's problem, not yours.
I think I personally skewed too far into trying to do unmeasurable things, but I feel like it would be miserable to live on the other extreme where you only do things that are measurable and benefit your career.
Where does that thinking end? If I don't feel like finding a garbage can, should I just throw my trash on the ground as long as nobody sees me? After all, it's the city's fault that they haven't set up incentives to prevent me from littering.
I served at Google as an SRE for 2+yrs. I burnt out and ragequit. Now I'm an SRE at a startup. I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true.
If a company doubles in size every 2 years, then mathematically, you cannot have a median tenure of more than 2 years.
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This is spot-on, and it's also true in organizations without stack ranking. It's actually not a cynical way to view your job. If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? I've consistently seen that successful engineers focus on work that has an impact, and they are good at making it known. The first part is obviously good, but a lot of enginee…
> If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? If what you are doing isn't making an impact, why is it being assigned to you in the first place? Or, to put that another way: a worker is hired to do things. Their comparative advantage is in doing ; time they spend in any other role than doing is labor that would have been better allocated/delega…
The real problem for organizations is choosing what to optimize for, and how short sighted they can afford to be to survive. Someone below mentioned that the military in a war time environment is probably something that people who subscribe to this kind of thought would think is the ideal work place. The thing is if you look at these organizations in times of crisis, they may optimize for the quickest way to win the war, when it really should be to ensure long standing peace.
You won’t see a lot of ex-Apple people posting here because of the deeply-ingrained conditioning to never talk publicly about anything that goes on there, even after you leave. I’ll say I liked the company in general. The rank and file engineers were smart and nice to work with, a real pleasure. But people were meaner and egos were huger the higher up the org chart they were, and I had to interact regularly (daily) w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is spot-on, and it's also true in organizations without stack ranking. It's actually not a cynical way to view your job. If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? I've consistently seen that successful engineers focus on work that has an impact, and they are good at making it known. The first part is obviously good, but a lot of enginee…
> If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? If what you are doing isn't making an impact, why is it being assigned to you in the first place? Or, to put that another way: a worker is hired to do things. Their comparative advantage is in doing ; time they spend in any other role than doing is labor that would have been better allocated/delega…
There are a different set of disadvantages to this system, but I just wanted to point out that in Google’s case, management doesn’t assign anything, so an engineer working on something unimpactful is not seen as a management failure but a choice made by that engineer. It’s fine to do and you can keep your job forever doing work you believe in even if it’s not overtly “impactful,” but if you want to get promoted, it’s up to you to align yourself with the higher-level priorities.
Edit: That’s not to say Google never wastes highly-paid employees’ time (like your admin example), but the core difference is Google employees aren’t just hired to “do.” They’re also expected to spend a lot of time thinking, prioritizing, and organizing themselves, so that’s not wasted time.
I joined a startup after, stayed for many years, they went public, I took some time off, worked at some other startups, and now I’m back at a FAANG. This time, though, I know what to do - and what I want out of working here - so I’m looking forward to a wholly different experience.
I’ll likely throw my hat back into the startup ring in a few years but who knows?
I will say this, I look back fondly on my time at Apple.
Ex Netflix. Joined a promising startup with 1 - Great mission 2 - Impressive engineering culture 3 - Super boring name: Farmers Business Network FBN is the only reason I haven't moved away from the Bay Area. We're hiring too, if anybody wants to shoot me an email I'll forward it along. tan@farmersbusinessnetwork.com
Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ( https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ ). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue…
> bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage Thanks for sharing your experience Michael in that blog post. Can I read that "$200k paid in case" as in all paid off without loans even from family/friends? If so, $200k seems like a high saving amount considering average American household are in credit card debts. In other words, Google job did pay really well…
Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ( https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ ). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue…
Great article about the promotion process and the employee dynamic at Google. It very accurately summarises much of why I quit there so quickly after coming in via an acquisition. That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money. I was very lucky to have a friend who taught me that very early (not about Google specifically, the same applies to any company). Wo…