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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

mtlynch.io

401–410 of 783 posts

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#401

As someone who will be entering the industry, I loved your perspective on your job at Google. Also, having read Cal Newport's "So good that they can't ignore you", I couldn't help but notice the hunger for independence in good software developers. Would you recommend newcomers to join smaller unstable( more independence) companies or bigger, more stable( Top 4) companies(lesser independence)?

The existence of a BigCo is stable, but a job there isn't always. Between up-or-out, re-orgs, RIFs, defrags - you just might find yourself effectively reapplying for your own job on a yearly basis.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a manager of some kind were to notice the Slack messages and ping someone specific to help, that would be a perfect example of the kind of management that is so sorely lacking at so many companies. Many employees are too burned, or proud, to even put out an SOS... so a cry for help is actually a gift to management. If only it were someone’s job to think for a few minutes each day about each employee and notice if…

Why not both? I cringed when I read OP's comment where he spammed "I'm completely blocked" in the chat without asking for specifics. What a complete lack of individual ownership. Even the best manager can't help somebody who is unwilling to help themselves. Source: am a manager.

> Even the best manager can't help somebody who is unwilling to help themselves.

I just want to point out that that is a lot of assumption based on the limited (probably paraphrased) context we have here.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#404
post #198
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. Yeah, right. People who hold the current power will never let you do it. For one simple reason. No one likes to be promoting their next boss. In fact in most companies merely talking about 'biggest problems plaguing an organization' can get you fired. No likes to be told that the curren…

Yeah. Right!

Organizations that wish to be successful are designed so that you can't promote your next boss. Engineers and management are different things. Engineers can be promoted and do impactful work and identify problems and get promoted some more, without ever threatening to become anyone's boss.

Then, your engineers can be rated based on how well they solve engineering problems, and management can be rated based on how well they manage human capital and allocate between the various engineering problems that need to be solved. Certainly there's some politicking based on prioritization, but that's not a bad thing. You don't want to accidently solve problems that no one really needs solved, its a waste of time.

Sure shitty organizations exist. That doesn't mean organizations are always shitty.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#405
It has been so long since I quit my last day job (2005), that I can't really remember what it was like or what made me quit.

But I can tell you this. I would not have been this productive if I'd stayed on at my cushy software developer job. I've had way more fun too.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#406
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope; the benefit of being a good team player is that it helps you build relationships. Those relationships often turn into opportunities down the line. But it’s hard to drive that behavior at an individual level without creating some conflicts of interest. This is why I generally dislike measuring individuals against specific metrics. I try to set individualized metrics for all of my direct reports — for example, if…

> the benefit of being a good team player is that it helps you build relationships. Those relationships often turn into opportunities down the line. Most of the time other people leave or move to other teams. Being a decent human being is not about getting practical advantages - otherwise sociopaths would be the most helpful people around. Instead, many large corporations want to instill a culture of competitiveness…

>Being a decent human being is not about getting practical advantages - otherwise sociopaths would be the most helpful people around.

Sociopaths are exploiting the macro-level heuristics we've developed as a species to come to an immediate, reasonably-likely evaluation of safety, tending individuals toward trust, and danger, tending individuals toward defensive action. It takes knowledge and experience to differentiate between a good read based on sincere action and a bad read based on intentionally-deceptive action.

Sociopaths often will appear like the most helpful people around, and sometimes may actually be the most helpful people around, for the duration of the time that they need you to be on their good side. Then they'll dispose of you ruthlessly. If you don't pick up on the signals ahead of time, you don't find out until you've been backstabbed. If the sociopath is skilled, they ensure that you can't "come back from the grave" and cause problems for them.

It's not that corporations don't like cooperation in principle. From a high level, in fact, many corporations are actively and honestly trying to cultivate it. It's just that our systems keep the exploits too open to the relatively-rare maladjusted power player (normal people will sometimes flirt with the same tactics to avenge personal grudges, etc). This forces everyone into a defensive position, if it doesn't force them out of the game entirely.

Once an organ grows to exceed the direct influence of a very small handful of truly good and wise leaders (the more palatable tech word may be "visionaries"), it will inevitably mandate this weird perceptual bastardization.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#408
So, I don't think Google described what senior engineer means to him. Senior engineer means first that you a practitioner and can execute on software projects, but second it means you can influence others. From his own description, I would not be in favor of promotion as there was no evidence of influence. Instead of writing E2E tests, he could of influenced others to write E2E tests and the metric would be the number of diffs where he got people to write E2E tests.

It requires beyond stellar technical work to overlook the influencing aspect.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#409
post #374

Is it just me, or do stories like this make it increasingly clear that working at large companies like Google, Amazon, etc are a mistake? Getting on a company that becomes Google/Amazon/etc (or more likely doesn't but that's life) is one thing, getting sucked into the corporate dystopia described in that blog post is quite another. I guess I'll continue to work at smallish start-ups because the idea of being swallowe…

It really depends. Smallish companies cannot afford to pay nearly as well as the big ones. Sometimes a few years of dystopian hellish work is worth the money. For example, if you then use said saved money to start your own venture with no need for Other People's Money.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#410
post #182

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…

As a junior engineer, what the best way to learn about and master the political game? I feel like it all goes way over my head. Does anyone have any recommended reading?

Twenty years ago I worked as a contractor for a political operator inside an advanced tech part of IBM. He had plenty of technical chops, but more importantly he was a very good politician. We joked about us someday writing a book entitled "Rock Soup: The Art of Political Engineering". He told the rock soup story often, but it is more commonly known as the Stone Soup story. Study it carefully, as it describes some fundamental principles in an organization. When you are first starting out, you have ideas and energy but few resources. You must know how to paint a glowing picture of the future to those with necessary budget. Think of those people with budget as your internal VCs, except their risk tolerance is much less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

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