711–720 of 783 posts
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The customers still dictate your work. If you don't build the features they want, you won't have a business. Essentially you're still working for them.
Yes, sure, you're working for them; but it's still better (IMHO) to have clients than bosses. A boss is someone that uses you to look good to his own boss, but doesn't really care about what you do. A client, most of the time, actually needs what you produce.
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…
> Second, you're a lot better off working at a good company -- MUCH better off Working at Google ruined my mental health. Granted, it hasn't been great to begin with, but being in SRE made my absolutely miserable. Every night, coming intellectually wasted and couldn't even work on my own project because of draconian IP clauses in my contract. Quit half a year ago, went (back) into freelancing and I couldn't be happie…
Is this standard Google policy?
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I can give some insight from my own experience. In my current position, there are a large number of "things" that I've had to figure out, either by reverse engineering, reading code, or intuition. So I get constantly bombarded with helping others get unstuck. Well, when it comes time for a project meeting, those on the meeting are far removed from the other groups that I constantly have to help out. And it sounds lik…
Capability and responsibility become conflated very easily. You start off as the superhero who can fix problems, but that gradually creates dependency. 1st year 'Thanks for your help finding that error that was holding us up.' 2nd year 'We are all finished now. Just sent it over to you for debugging.' 3rd year 'Hey we are all waiting on you to fix. Big deadline for big customer.' CC: management 4th year Management: '…
Management publishes a Medium article "We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made."
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> Second, you're a lot better off working at a good company -- MUCH better off Working at Google ruined my mental health. Granted, it hasn't been great to begin with, but being in SRE made my absolutely miserable. Every night, coming intellectually wasted and couldn't even work on my own project because of draconian IP clauses in my contract. Quit half a year ago, went (back) into freelancing and I couldn't be happie…
> draconian IP clauses in my contract. Is this standard Google policy?
Which is okay if you work on one personal project at a time, but breaks down if you hop from project to project with friends. Waste of everyone's time.
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> draconian IP clauses in my contract. Is this standard Google policy?
Yes. All intellectual property you work on, including in your spare time at home on your laptop, belongs to Google and you have to go through a reassignment procedure where they declare they're not interested in your work. Which is okay if you work on one personal project at a time, but breaks down if you hop from project to project with friends. Waste of everyone's time.
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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
Sounds like you were in a gnarly situation and did well to get out. You are what you do, and those types of places can have a long-term corrupting influence on your professional habits and instincts.
The observation that “all companies have politics” is about as useful as the observation that both Venezuela and Denmark have imperfect governments. These statements are correct only in the narrowest sense.
Those pointing out that you never work for “yourself” are also technically correct. If you own a business, you have a responsibility toward your customers. The good news is that it’s possible to find a niche in which you actually like your customers and enjoy doing right by them. Running your own company also gives you the opportunity to optimize for what you think is important, both personally and professionally.
Best of luck.
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The reason is pretty clear, the worked remotely and so had no means to physically reach out but instead had to wait for people to reply on mail.
OP said slack. DM is as simple as doing "/msg @joe.blow I'm blocked, can you please help me?". If no response, go to @joe.blow's colleagues. If still no response, go to their boss. If still no response, go to their bosses's boss. Repeat until you run out of people to escalate to, at which point you find another job.
My other thought was to file blocking bug/defect issues on the relevant software because obviously if it can't build in the first place it's certainly not passing QA.
Some of this may get to the level of passive-aggressive or aggressive-aggressive bridge burning.
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Everywhere I have worked, if I had gone to my manager's manager without his explicit instruction to do so, would have led to my manager spending 100% of his time trying to get me fired because I would not be a wild card in terms of messaging to his boss. Undoubtedly there are places where this is not the case, but in any workplace where politics have taken over skipping the hiearchy leads to nothing but political war…
Sounds like your bosses have been a little micromanagey. Talking to more senior managers have been great ways for me to gain valuable perspectives on their goals and ask questions about how to achieve them. They should also be interested in a more unfiltered view from talking to the rank and file.
After 15 years of doing this my theory on corporate promotions is simple: you need an executive sponsor. VPs don't know who you are by default, they have too many reports. And if you're assigned unsexy work like keeping the trains running, well the better you do your job ironically the more you become like wallpaper. I'm not saying you have to be a kissa*, although that does work at a remarkable number of companies,…
> The OP complains about not having enough metrics in his assignments but do committees promote people based on stone-cold, anonymous metrics? The answer, from what I gather, is yes. The hiring / promotion committees are essentially an anonymous collection of fellow engineers, perhaps a step higher than you, but somewhat random in composition. As such, there is no reliable way to grease hands or build meaningful rela…
You only need that person's recommendation, not that of 15 random fellow engineers.
Besides, your data 'proving' your value likely has no context or comparable benchmarks, after 30 seconds of numbers it's straight to your soft skills.
But yes, agree with your second point that it's up to the manager to protect his projects or champion his employees.