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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

#581

Post by lambda_lover »

aecorredor wrote: post #71
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 company we use something called bonusly. You get 30 bonusly per month to give out to your teammates, and each bonusly is worth $1. You can buy basically anything with the bonusly you receive (amazon gift cards = anything). On top of being able to buy stuff, it also keeps metrics on which teammates help the most. The only downside is that you must give out all your bonusly at the end of the month (if not it's wa…

I can't imagine working at a company with this kind of system. Sounds a little too much like MeowMeowBeenz (http://community-sitcom.wikia.com/wiki/MeowMeowBeenz) from the TV show Community. ("MeowMeowBeenz™ takes everything subjective and unspoken about human interaction and reduces it to explicit, objective numbers.")

How do you feel bonusly avoids this potentially awkward gamification/popularity contest? I feel like most people I know would just give 30 bonusly to a random person on the last day of the month, but maybe your colleagues are a little more disciplined :)

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#582

Post by greedo »

sangnoir wrote: post #451
slezakattack wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is similar in emergency situations. When you need somebody to call 911, don't ever say "Somebody please call 911!". You have to look at someone, point at them, and tell them "I need you to call 911". Most people will either stand in shock or think that someone else is on it.

> Most people will either stand in shock or think that someone else is on it. The bystander effect is real, but I wouldn't expect to see it in organisations with explicit hierarchies. Can you imagine this happening in the armed forces? If this happens under your watch as a leader, you're not good at leading.

It occurs in explicit hierarchies all the time. Watch the opening scene in "Saving Private Ryan." Most of the troops are scared shitless, waiting for someone to tell them what the hell to do. And these were troops who had been trained for 3 years before hitting Normandy.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#583

Post by mostlyreal »

popcat wrote: post #182
eldavido wrote: post #91

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?

As a senior engineer, I'd recommend not thinking about a "political game" most of the time.

Focus on demonstrable, measurable impact for your company's customers in the area that your team focuses on. If you do that, then you'll find that you're aligned with your boss and your boss's boss pretty much all the time.

You can argue for what you believe when you have data to back you up. If not, respect the judgment of your superiors. Figure out what your management chain wants to accomplish and then find the best measurable way to accomplish it. If you don't know. Ask.

Remember that the game is a long game. Software Development is unusual because many people expect to be "senior" 3-5 years out of college. In other fields, that will barely get you out of an apprenticeship.

I think about it this way:

1. Not all effort is equally valuable.

2. Not all value is equally visible/measureable

3. Not all value is equally aligned with your team/company's priorities

Find what efforts produce the most value that can be measured, in alignment with your company's priorities.

Usually when engineers feel like they have to "play the political game", they fall into one of these traps:

1. They are doing work that isn't actually valuable (e.g. an unprompted huge refactoring)

2. They are doing valuable work that is hard to measure (e.g. adding tests to a codebase without a plan to demonstrate improved developer velocity and/or product quality)

3. They are doing valuable, measurable work towards the wrong goals (e.g. building product-wide localization support without the company intending to localize their content)

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#584

Post by swyea »

neuronsguy wrote: post #519
HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just clicking on your profile I see you work in London. From what I can tell most programmers don't get paid 'ludicrous amounts' there. Though maybe you have a rare role, or maybe you just have a very low threshold for what you consider ludicrous.

You are correct about the tech industry here (low salaries relative to US) but developers working in finance in London make comparable money to Bay Area tech firms. People routinely get paid £100k straight out of university to write code in London, just not in the tech scene. Total comp in the financial sector with 5 years experience is commonly £200k. Which is not 'ludicrous' but more than you might imagine from see…

That is so no true in my experience as someone working in finance in London. Can you name 1-2 companies paying 100k for graduates or 200k after 5 years?

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#585

Post by swyea »

beachy wrote: post #355
popcat wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Put yourself in your bosses shoes. Think about what they need to succeed, and do what you can to help them. Once you have experience as a manager you'll appreciate how great it is having a"can do" person like this on your team. This is a philosophy you can wear comfortably too, as it's not based on sucking up. If you have a decent boss, they'll make sure you share in the glory. If you haven't, you'll need to move on…

and that's what we call politics

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#586

Post by draw_down »

white-flame wrote: post #112
eldavido wrote: post #91

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…

> In the first place, nobody "works for themself". You might work for customers, or clients, or whatever, but not "yourself". Just to be pedantic, I'd say if you've got enough in savings to live without further work-based income & retire, then you are "working for yourself". You paid yourself via saving that money up to "work" on whatever you want. Even if it's just a tan & cirrhosis. :)

Yes, if you’re independently wealthy this doesn’t apply to you. Otherwise you’re in the same boat as everyone else. People who work for themselves have n bosses instead of one boss. You can prefer one or the other but it’s not really that different, I think.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#587

Post by draw_down »

komali2 wrote: post #523
eldavido wrote: post #91

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 Horowitz writes in "The Hard Thing About Hard Things," if there even is a political game at your company, someone up top has fucked up.

Nope. It’s every single company. Every one, believe it.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#588

Post by flukus »

eikenberry wrote: post #397
MadBohr wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And even if everyone completely ignored them when they direct messaged their teammates... why do nothing. Why not dig in and figure out how to get it to build and update the Readme? I don't understand why someone would just sit there and do nothing instead of trying to fix the problem.

It also appears to assume that someone could help them. There are plenty of times where knowledge of a project or component is simply lost, either the developers don't remember or are gone, it's one of the costs of employee turn over.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#589

Post by tintor »

phamilton wrote: post #64

Writing documentation and fixing bugs is in fact not the bar for a senior software engineer. I don't disagree with the promotion committee on that front. IIRC, Senior Software Engineer is a terminal level. You aren't expected to advance any more once you reach that level. Some do, but you can stay a Senior Engineer for the rest of your career and that's fine. So certainly "can fix bugs and write docs and tests" isn't…

"Writing documentation and fixing bugs is in fact not the bar for a senior software engineer."

That depends on difficulty and complexity of bugs you are fixing.

Re: Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

#590

Post by MrLeap »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #334
mistermann wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

This comment gave me a rather nice maturity flashback. Maybe I shouldn't have called that function "bobfuscate()"
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