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Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

• dhruvkar 9y ago
  Hey Michael, best of luck on your new adventure and hope you continue working on ketohub! ;) - Dhruv
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    Hey, Dhruv! Thanks!
• vitomd 9y ago
  If you like this kind of post, there are many: Why I quit x: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22why%20I%20Quit%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22why%20I%20Quit%22&sort=byPo...
  • skoocda 9y ago
    And dozens of "I left google" : https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22I%20left%20google%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22I%20left%20google%22&sort=b...
• mtlynch 9y ago
  Author here. Happy to answer any questions about the post or about my experience at Google.
  • shatteredvisage 9y ago
    I'm going to be applying there soon, 4 years into my career. It'll involve a loong move and big changes: what advice can you give someone who wants to spend a couple years (or more?) with the big G? Also, any chance of submitting a referral? :)
    • fredley 9y ago
      Author writes article ranting about decision-making by groups of people who know nothing about them. Commenter asks for referral from author who knows nothing about them.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • mfoy_ 9y ago
        Sounds like his head is already in the game!
    • mtlynch 9y ago
      I recommend applying for a promotion early, even if you don't think you're actually ready. It's valuable just to go through the experience end-to-end. My other suggestion would be to learn from my mistake and be realistic about your relationship with the company. It's filled with a lot of great people and they build a sense of community, but at the end of the day it's a business relationship, so you should decide what you want out of it and work towards getting that.
    • dmitrygr 9y ago
      * Negotiate the title hard! very hard! Harder than you ever have. It is much easier to get a higher level at hiring than ever after. * Do NOT buy any line of the form "It is our policy to hire people with $YEARS of experience / $DEGREE degree / $OTHER_PROPERTY at level $LEVEL only"! It is all lies!
    • 111_1_111 9y ago
      How could he possibly refer you if he's never met you and doesn't even work for them any more?
  • totalZero 9y ago
    Nice. Do you think large companies would benefit from a different scheme that rewards employees who "think like an owner"? (pardon the oft-used phrase)
    • mtlynch 9y ago
      Yeah, but in fairness to Google, it's not an easy problem to solve. Of course from my perspective, I want them to care about things like bugfixing or supporting my teammates. But then you have to put controls on that so that people can't just never really do anything except bugfixing or riding their teammates' coattails. I think the right direction is weighing manager feedback more heavily so that if a team member is doing things that benefit the whole team, the promo committee can accept the manager's word that the person had an impact even if they can't quantify it with metrics.
      • professor_plum 9y ago
        Unfortunately this begs the question a bit. How does one hire good managers? I mean good as in both competent and not jerks.
    • burlesona 9y ago
      At risk of stating the obvious, not all the medium/large tech companies work as described in this article. At Atlassian, for example, the direct managers are the ones who make promotion recommendations, it’s very much driven by your contributions on your team, whether accompanied by shiny metrics or not.
      • totalZero 9y ago
        True, but conversely, many large companies outside of tech have a very similar disconnect between the reward system and the actual work that benefits the firm. I saw this when I was working at a bank. Even in a profit-transparent business, politics and optics played a larger role than raw performance and team support.
      • groby_b 9y ago
  • southphillyman 9y ago
    Is your experience common for rank and file Googlers or specific to your role/department? Lots of unrecognized maintenance work, constant project changes, lack of transparency between employees and management. Sounds like an undesirable situation, are these issues that are so widespread there that transferring to another project isn't a likely solution?
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • mtlynch 9y ago
      Yeah, I think my frustration with the promotion process is pretty widespread. People recognize that the promotion process is flawed, but they also recognize that it's hard to fix. And Google is aware and working to fix it, but making changes to something so important in a 70k+ employee organization is slow. From other comments, it sounds like in the last month, they've gotten rid of committees for promotion decisions up to the level of Senior Software Engineer, so it does sound like they're moving in the right direction. I suspect in practice, there will be thorny incentives there as well, but I'm hopeful for them.
  • autokad 9y ago
    nice article although its sad you couldn't get recognized for the value you were adding. I am not good at wording things, but here goes: I didn't see you call it out directly, but I also find employees are discriminated by project. if you are not working on a valued project, any value you provide to the company will be shrank by how unimportant they feel the project is.
    • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      The author did indicate a project involving machine learning likely being a better path to promotion.
      • gvb 9y ago
        Except, if I got the sequence right, it turned into "bait and switch:" Priorities shifted. Management traded my project away to our sister team in India. In exchange, that team gave us one of their projects. It was an undocumented system, built on deprecated infrastructure, but it was nevertheless a critical component in production. I was assigned to untangle it from our sister team’s code and migrate it to a new framework, all while keeping it running in production and hitting its performance metrics.
    • mtlynch 9y ago
      Thanks for reading. I agree that choice of project has a large effect. Projects that involve collaboration with a lot of partner teams increase your chance of promotion because the more people your work impacts positively, the better your set of peer recommendations when it comes time for promotion. It's much harder to "sell" a project whose effects are only directly visible a few people, even if it's valuable work.
  • smcl 9y ago
    Early on in the article you describe the excitement your younger self had a the prospect of working with the "best engineers in the world". However further down you describe your difficulties with some products - undocumented code with no unit tests and silent failures which are hard-to-diagnose. Has your opinion changed about this at all? I am not sure how indicative these descriptions are to overall quality at Google ... but if they are indicative I'd be furious at the situation as a Google employee, where my (otherwise very smart) fellow Googlers are delivering what sounds like very poor products.
    • josefresco 9y ago
      I too was also intrigued by the statement "best engineers in the world" and then subsequently reading that Google engineers suffer from the same BS as any average software company.
    • mtlynch 9y ago
      No, I found developer quality to be very high at Google throughout my time there. I think the lack of tests was more symptomatic of bad incentives that good developers were forced to follow. Developers were rewarded for flashy things they could show promo committees, and rigorous tests or well-written documentation. It was unusual to find code with no tests because a code reviewer will usually insist on at least some tests. But it was common to see complicated behavior with just a single test associated. Or a complicated interaction between components with no end-to-end tests. There's not really a strict cultural expectation for documentation, so it's very easy to find code that's either not documented, documented inaccurately, or documented unhelpfully.
      • smcl 9y ago
        Interesting, thanks for the reply!
      • ironjunkie 9y ago
        Did you really believe you were working with the best developers in the world though? Did you not realize this was all part of a marketing machine to make you feel good?
  • ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
    I love your Keto Hub idea! https://ketohub.io/ https://ketohub.io/ I'm especially looking at the Keto Queso recipe. If you wanted to monetize that by instantly adding those ingredients + plus low carb chips into an Amazon shopping list, I would be buying through your affiliate link immediately. Edit: I removed my comment about profiting off of others content being a 'very google' thing to do. OP does a great job linking directly to the recipe source.
    • mtlynch 9y ago
      Oh, thanks! Yeah, for most of the blogs I link to, I'm in communication with them and they react really positively to the site. I want to have a symbiotic relationship with them as much as possible.
  • chubot 9y ago
    (former Google engineer here) No questions, but it was a good read. I'm sad to hear that the gaming of the promo system is still such a large concern. Unfortunately that was also the case way back in 2005, through 2010, and until I left. What's new to me is the shuffling of projects back and forth to India. That's not something that seemed to be an issue when I was there, and it's sad to hear this new concern for keeping engineering talent.
    • mtlynch 9y ago
      Thanks for reading. Sorry to hear you had the same experience. What's your experience been post-Google?
      • chubot 9y ago
        I've been working on open source software for the last couple years (links in my profile). The funny thing is that after more than one promo disappointment, I just started working on open source projects at work. I did that seriously for the last 6-7 years of my 11 year tenure (maybe 30-60% time instead of 20% time). That ended up improving my skills a lot, and I never got the sense of my work being thrown away (which would have led to me leaving much earlier). Like you, I always had a lot of respect from my coworkers and manager, and they never questioned what I was doing. I was always maintaining some legacy system that everybody knew was important but nobody wanted to touch (or knew how to touch). I did eventually get promoted, but somewhat to my chagrin it was for a committee-friendly project -- C++ that handles a lot of qps. In contrast, I think all the developer tools I wrote in Python had a lot more impact on the company. I got a lot more positive feedback on those (just not from the right people apparently, as non-engineer or junior engineer feedback isn't counted that strongly, as it was explained to me). I guess my view was that the promo committees cared more about technical difficulty than impact on the company, which leads to the obvious situation where people invent difficult work to do. In my mind, it's not a coincidence that most Google products are now slow and full of bugs -- at least the ones that make it past the all-too-common "just barely launched" state. I never worked on front end code, but I noticed that front end engineers also get the shaft. The products show it. ----- I was disappointed in certain things at Google, and there was a certain amount of "believing your own PR", but overall it was fantastic for me. Otherwise I wouldn't have stayed for so long. I don't have any illusion that other companies are better. They might not have these problems, but they have other problems that Google doesn't. (I know plenty of people who stayed at Google for 5 or more years, then went to another company and left that company after a year.) I think you might feel the same way, since your choice was to start something on your own rather than take a job at a similar company. Employees just hold Google to a very high standard, which is both fair and good for the company!
  • debt 9y ago
    I'm curious, do you feel it took you too long to ship the projects you were working on? Or do you feel you shipped them on time?
    • mtlynch 9y ago
      I don't think so. Although it's worth noting that Google isn't big on deadlines. They set quarterly goals, but on the teams I was on, they weren't taken very seriously because it was so common to be pre-empted by other tasks. But I never got any kind of feedback that my projects were shipping too late.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • eqdw 9y ago
    Are you familiar with the writing of Patrick Mackenzie? patio11 on hackernews, kalzumeus.org. His career trajectory has been similar to your story, in that he was a line engineer who went independent. The think that makes patrick great, though, is that he took the time to write up all his lessons in a blog that is essentially a how-to guide for engineers who want to make the move from "I just write code" to "I am a sucessful self-employed software consultant. If you haven't come across him before, I strongly suggest you check it out
    • ridiculous_fish 9y ago
      Thanks for the tip. FYI the address looks to be kalzumeus.com instead of kalzumeus.org
    • mtlynch 9y ago
      Yeah, I actually discovered Patrick McKenzie through Indie Hackers. He was one of the early podcast guests: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/013-patrick-mckenzie-of-appointment-reminder https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/013-patrick-mckenzie-of... I am very much influenced by his story. I agree that he does a great job documenting what he learned.
  • grantcox 9y ago
    Thanks for sharing this, I've not been (and never will be) a SV employee, so it's interesting to see such a different perspective. The big question that I didn't quite get from the post, is why did promotion matter so much to you? Everything seemed to hinge on that, but you didn't quite explain why it was so important, other than "what a great title - people would be so impressed". It sounds like when you were happy with your title, you were happy with your work - you "lovingly" fixed the old pipeline, wrote documentation, helped colleagues etc. Were there particular benefits to being promoted that would have increased your daily happiness?
    • masterj 9y ago
      Promotions carry a corresponding salary bump that can be quite large. Check out http://levels.fyi/ http://levels.fyi/ (seems to be down right now) or the associated spreadsheet of salaries: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IclsJmHUMWjZCECMKi1IS4w_6To5oMUtksPShuk1nuc/edit#gid=1145296357 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IclsJmHUMWjZCECMKi1I...
    • mtlynch 9y ago
      Thanks for reading! It was mostly just the status. I think having the title of Senior Software Engineer has a lot of value in itself because it brings better job offers and more credibility if I go off on my own. Also, people tended to be assigned more interesting projects the higher their level. I'd enjoy the extra compensation, but that wasn't as strong a factor.
  • deyan 9y ago
    You are a good writer and I enjoyed reading the article. I agree with many of the other points written here such as politics being omnipresent in the corporate world. I am writing to add one point I did not see mentioned elsewhere: You are making an implicit assumption that working on a "smaller" idea (like the ones mentioned in Indie Hackers) is somehow less risky than aspiring to be the next Zuck. Empirically, this seems to be false. I have worked for ~15 years on startups. I have many friends, who are also entrepreneurs. I have observations on all sorts of efforts - from small side projects to large VC-backed bets to bootstrapped businesses. My takeaway is that technology startups are characterized by a tremendous amount of risk and require a lot of hard work - regardless of the type of venture. I encourage you to talk to founders (in person, not reading PR-oriented websites like Indie Hackers) and verify that for yourself. If I had to make up numbers to illustrate this notion, I'd say that making a $1B/year business might be 0.001% likely, while making a $1M/year business might be 0.1% likely - but for all practical purposes, both are incredibly challenging to pull off. If that's the case, might as well aim as high as possible and justify the risk involved. Turns out the one thing that really matters is having a strong idea, which is forgiving to the many mistakes entrepreneurs inevitably make. In that regard, I wish you luck and hope you end up with a strong concept sooner rather than later.
    • csallen 9y ago
      I'm not the author of the article, but I did create Indie Hackers, I've talked to many hundreds of smaller indie founders, and I also went through YC where I met many hundreds of moonshot founders (and was one myself), so I have some perspective here as well. My conclusion is that starting a small indie business is less risky than aspiring to be the next Zuck. First, it's harder to fail, because there are fewer forces pushing you to make risky decisions. For example, you can start doing contract work, take on clients, and use them to support you while you build your indie business. Hell, you can keep working at your full-time job if you want to and build your business on the side. Those are bedrocks of income that can last you more or less indefinitely. Often, your employer ends up being your business' first customer. Additionally, you don't have an investors telling you to quit your job and use their capital to scale up your business' costs beyond the level that your revenue can support, which is one of the primary reasons that funded businesses go under. Second, the business opportunities are simply more plentiful. The bigger you get, the fiercer competition gets. The more money you aim to make, the fewer paths there are to get there. If you want to find your first 10 customers, you can go out and talk to 50 or 100 or 200 people yourself. Every marketing channel is your oyster. None of your competitors feel threatened. The niches you can fill are endless. If you want to go from 1M to 10M customers, however, you need an exceptionally clever strategy, brilliant insights, a lot more resources, and a much higher degree of luck. It's difficult to actually measure success rates without agreeing on the answer to this question: What counts as someone trying to start a business? With small indie projects/companies, I'd wager there are a lot more people starting who aren't really serious and never take more than a couple of sincere steps. They might lower your perception of the success rate, especially compared to VC-funded companies if your denominator there only includes those who've actually raised a round. More people fail tryouts for the high school basketball teams than tryouts for the NBA. People filter themselves. But I assure you that, if you're committed to the task, your chances of succeeding with an indie business are much, much higher than 0.1%.
• Anirudh25 9y ago
  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)?
  • kochthesecond 9y ago
    I started 4 years ago and want to recommend starting somewhere with a good program for new hires and preferably some kind of follow up program after starting.
  • gorbachev 9y ago
    Join a company that has great mentors. If you already know what you love, then additionally pick a company that's great at that. If you don't, then pick a company where you get a chance to be exposed to a wide variety of different things. If you aren't getting that in the company you pick, quit and pick another one.
    • madamelic 9y ago
      >Join a company that has great mentors. Why? I have had people say this to me before but I think it is silly advice for where I am at. No one has really explained what a mentor is supposed to do in regards to a software engineer who is mid-level. When I think "mentor", I think "hand-holding". I don't need hand-holding. I just need to be on a team with peers who push each other. Is that mentoring? What does "mentoring" look like when someone grows beyond a junior role?
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    >Would you recommend newcomers to join smaller unstable( more independence) companies or bigger, more stable( Top 4) companies(lesser independence)? I recommend new developers start at large, successful companies where software is a first-class citizen (e.g. Microsoft, Google, Facebook). My first full-time job ever was a developer at Microsoft, and I'm really thankful for that job. I felt like within a large company, it was much easier to learn effective development practices and why they're important. At successful companies, good practices have a good way of percolating through, whereas at smaller companies, it's easier to fall into "cargo culting" of just doing things because that's how everyone else is doing them. I think you can see this in things like the Google Python Style Guide (https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html). It only allows imports at the package or module level, even though most examples online do star imports or imports of particular functions. But when you build large systems that way, it creates ambiguity when you read the code because if you see a function call, it's hard to identify where it came from. There are a lot of things like that where the rule seems arbitrary, but in a large company, you can get context about why it helps you maintain your code and helps others understand it.
• kristianc 9y ago
  This covers a lot of the same ground as Brendan Reid's "Stealing the Corner Office"[1], which gives a playbook for helping stuff like this work in your favour, rather than against you. You fit the profile of what Reid calls the "Smart but Stationary Manager" - a guy who is a lot smarter than a lot of the people who do get promoted, but who doesn't optimize for the right factors. Reid's point is that a lot of these guys get habitually overlooked as they optimize for the success of the company, rather than themselves, and assume they will be evaluated on their work alone. The idea that when you go to work, you are there first and foremost to work on your own career development (rather than the goals of the company) crops up again and again. Even in failing companies, you see people make spectactular career gains. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stealing-Corner-Office-Strategies-Business/dp/1601633203 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stealing-Corner-Office-Strategies-B...
  • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I guess my question is: Can you get job satisfaction from promotion-focused work? I'm proud of what I've done. When I make someone else's life easier, that makes me feel good/satisfied with my work. I can't fathom satisfaction from impressing a promotion committee and tacking on a bigger title.
    • jimmy1 9y ago
      I don't give a shit about titles I just want to be paid appropriate to the value I create, and unfortunately in most companies, the best way to get a big salary bump is to get an upwards title change.
      • rhacker 9y ago
        I remember one company I told them flat out - I'm going remote. Love it or leave it. They let me do it, but told me because - state has a lower salary in general, you may see some kind of 5% pay decrease at some point. A month after I left to become a remote employee by boss called and said my salary raised 20K. No title change, just plain old doing what I wanted to do.
    • 9y ago
• jpm_sd 9y ago
  <holds envelope to forehead> Because you made enough money that it was an affordable risk? Yes, perf is garbage and management is chaos, but let's be honest with ourselves. Four years' worth of GSUs oughta be enough for anybody. "Devoted employee" followed by "expert at gaming the perf system" followed by "project cancelled and adrift" is, sadly, the normal progression for a Googler, from what I've seen.
  • smcl 9y ago
    What is a "GSU"?
    • cmrdporcupine 9y ago
      Google Stock Unit
    • jpm_sd 9y ago
      Google Stock Unit, internal term for RSU
      • Nicksil 9y ago
        I'm guessing RSU stands for Restructured Scientific Umbilical?
        • joshuamorton 9y ago
          Restricted stock unit. Stock compensation in the form of actual shares (not options) that vest over some time period.
          • Nicksil 9y ago
            I was way off. Thanks a lot for the clarification!
            • tclancy 9y ago
• DisruptiveDave 9y ago
  As I've progressed from job to job (and everything in between), I've learned how important tracking your personal metrics are. I've trained my mind to always record the before/after for any project I work on and keep a written, screenshot'd record of the impact. Every single time. You should ALWAYS be ready to answer the question (presented to you in a direct or indirect manner), "Why should we continue paying you $X."
  • blfr 9y ago
    On this track, the question you want to have a good answer for is "Why should we pay you way more than $X?"
• heavenlyblue 9y ago
  Article’s gist: I an young and idealistic and I went working for Google thinking they’re from another planet. That’s not true.
  • oblio 9y ago
    My first full time job was as IT support for financial auditing/IT auditor. I didn't stay there long, but I learned this quickly: get a paper trail going ASAP. You never know when you'll need it, either to toot your own horn or to fight back, especially against bullshit :)
• rsbartram 9y ago
  Many people are quitting their high profile jobs to join the freelance community. Fiverr has a movement called #doersacrosstheglobe and it's coming to Los Angeles to host 2 separate events. https://latechnews.org/doersacrosstheglobe-los-angeles/ https://latechnews.org/doersacrosstheglobe-los-angeles/
• dahart 9y ago
  > 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 they must distribute to people who help them the most. While I don't love the idea of gamifying it, all the places I've ever worked have had too strong of a reverse incentive towards individual achievement, especially when it comes to promotion, and not nearly enough support for teamwork in specific and measurable ways. Anybody have experience with teamwork metrics like this, or others that worked or didn't work?
  • xexers 9y ago
    > I've been planning to implement the "assist" metric, Anyone from Shopify here? If I recall correctly, this was tried at shopify and has since been removed due to people gaming the system for their friends.
  • AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist points they must distribute to people who help them the most. There is a really great idea in there somewhere - create incentives for helping others - but I'm struggling to come up with a good way to implement it that doesn't just water everything down. The closest I can think of is how repo commits can be counted/graphed per user. Works easily for code jockeying, but less so for softer talents like pair programming.
    • sharemywin 9y ago
      What most companies do is give bullshit senior level promotions that way they can get 5 good years out of someone before they get the same realization it took him to get to in 2 years.
    • bluetwo 9y ago
      Lloyd Shapley already figured out a "fair" way to do this, called the Shapley value. Basically it's a thought experiment in which all team members of a project (or group, etc) estimate the impact when losing various members of the team (whose work presumably is done by other team members or contracts) on the final cost. Run some math on the data and you have a group estimation of the relative contribution of all members. I have a theory that the reason more managers don't use this available tool is that it would probably rate management contribution on the lower end...
• xtrapolate 9y ago
  As a business person, you're going to have to sell yourself/your services to other people. Perhaps that's not too different from pitching yourself to an "anonymous promotions committee"? Interesting and insightful read. Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your future endeavours!
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    >As a business person, you're going to have to sell yourself/your services to other people. Perhaps that's not too different from pitching yourself to an "anonymous promotions committee"? That's fair. I've wondered about that myself. Will I just end up resenting "the customer" the same way I resented "the committee?" My hope is no because I feel like with a customer, I can learn more from failures. If I launch a product and it doesn't sell, I can try a totally new product or adjust it somehow and see how that affects things. I can talk to customers and get their feedback. With the promo committee it felt very opaque and my opportunities for feedback were so rare. Plus I felt like if I got better, I'm just getting better at working the perf system which is probably only useful within Google or other Google-like companies. If I get better at selling to customers, that should be useful in a much broader way. >Interesting and insightful read. Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your future endeavours! Thanks for reading!
    • benp84 9y ago
      I prefer pitching to customers because they really do get more value out of your product if you better communicate what it does and how it helps them. With committees it sounds more like playing a zero-sum game.
  • chubot 9y ago
    I would argue it's different, because customers are harsh but rational, while promotion committees are more capricious than harsh. Customers have "skin in the game". They spend their own money, not somebody else's, and they presumably use what they bought. Promotion committees have little skin in the game. They meet for an hour and make decisions, and they don't see any consequences of those decisions. They're following rules they didn't make that are supposed to lead to a good result, but they may not in practice. If the results are bad, they don't really get any feedback until years later. Maybe this blog post will be taken as feedback. Unfortunately this story sounds pretty familiar to me (having worked at Google).
• totalZero 9y ago
  > If I ever made a mistake at Google that cost the company $10 million, I would suffer no consequences. I’d be asked to write a post-mortem, and everyone would celebrate the learning opportunity. For most of these founders, a $10 million mistake would mean the end of their business and several lifetimes of debt. This is not as insightful as it seems....risk tolerance should be a function of percentages, not square numbers.
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    I think that's true, and obviously there are a lot more situations at Google than a small company where you're even in a position to lose $10m. But not all costs are proportional to company size. I could screw up a command on my AWS account and rack up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars cloud costs. I could make that mistake at a $1M/yr business or a $500/yr business.
  • arbie 9y ago
    > This is not as insightful as it seems....risk tolerance should be a function of percentages, not square numbers. Percentages are hard to calculate in large companies. Is it a multiple of the engineer's salary? A percentage of the team's budget? The org? The company?
• Quarrelsome 9y ago
  This is why its healthier to always run with the premise that you're leaving at some point and its the employer's responsibility to keep you there and give you interesting and rewarding work. If you're asking them to promote you then its the wrong way round, they should be asking on you about whether you're staying there. That's how the market is today.
  • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I doubt Google cares if the majority of it's people stay or not. Beyond the rock star employees who they absolutely know they need/depend on, they have an unending pipe of software engineers who want to put Google on their resume, in part due to the value of having the resume item and in part due to all of the perks. Assuming the free food and massages will keep a lot of talent there, why would they bother incentivizing the average individual employee with interesting work and promotions? If you leave, they'll replace you, likely without shedding a tear.
    • Quarrelsome 9y ago
      afaik their "average individual employee" is actually pretty damn good. Anyway that's the point, if they don't care then you shouldn't remain there trying to impress them, especially if that doesn't align with your life goals.
      • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        Sure, I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I just meant, if they have an endless flow of "pretty darn good" employees, they have no particular need to try to retain any given one. Other companies may have to search hard to find excellent software engineers, but Google does not.
        • bethling 9y ago
          It's still really important. There's a cost to training and getting an engineer to understand the problems and scale that Google faces (some might come in with that, but many do not). There's also domain/google specific knowledge that's expensive to replace as well. Yes, if someone leaves after 4 years, it's possible to hire someone else of the same ability level, but you're going to spend time and effort to make them as effective as the person who just left.
• sharemywin 9y ago
  That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money.
• shepardrtc 9y ago
  I recognized your username from all your work in the Sia community. Thanks for helping to make it better. While reading your article, I got the distinct impression that Google set up the system that way so they didn't have to give promotions. They get so many applications from the best software engineers in the world that they don't really have to work to retain people, and if they need a manager, there are plenty of those applying, too. I would suspect that in order to be promoted, you truly have to be exceptional and almost worthy of knighthood. The fact that your manager, who has intimate knowledge of your abilities, has no input into your advancement, and the fact that the metrics they look at are naturally difficult to achieve due to project churn makes it appear that they really don't want to promote anyone unless they have a very good reason.
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    I think that Google does try to treat their employees fairly. I don't think the promo process is the way it is because of greed. That said, I do think that the system is biased in Google's favor. It's designed much more strongly to filter out false positives (promote someone underqualified) than false negatives (withhold a promotion from someone qualified). As a result, it lets Google pay people at their lower-level title even though they're doing higher-level work.
    • tfha 9y ago
      I can understand why they do it, having someone incompetent in an important position is way more dangerous for the company than having someone competent stuck in a lower position. But it's still a risk to lose good employees, talent is very valuable.
• danschumann 9y ago
  Where is the metric for being a team player? Patrick Lenceoni's book, 'The Ideal Team Player' defines the 3 main traits of a team player: Humble, Hungry, and People-Smart.
• lrem 9y ago
  I'm also a Googler. Upon joining I was also given the keys to an ancient data pipeline, due a redesign for at least five years at that time. The person handing me the keys left almost immediately. My task was also keeping the thing adrift and nursing it back to health, whatever it takes. I did get promoted for that. The metric I used was pretty much the amount of developer time that went into supporting it that was saved by my damn ugly hacks. It was collected by asking nicely for the affected folk to confirm their lives got better. I can't say why it worked only for one of us.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • bethling 9y ago
    To be fair, a lot of that can depend on your manager. Your manager (should) have a better perspective on what resonates with the committees, help you gather/frame the data, and polish the package. Google managers might not be the ones doing the promotion, but a good one can help you get there
  • debt 9y ago
    Because you didn’t show graphs but showed testimonies form actual humans. Which I would assume, I don’t know for sure, that business people see graphs or hear grand ideas all day long and just really wanna know “yeah but is this actually improving anything for anyone?”
    • lrem 9y ago
      Nit: as described by OP, promotions in Google are decided by senior engineers. Your hypothesis still sounds valid.
  • robbrit 9y ago
    Were you going from junior (L3) to intermediate (L4)? If you were, then the task you described seems appropriate - you don't have to do much to go from L3 to L4. The author of the blog post was going for senior (L5), which you can't get just by maintaining code.
• cmrdporcupine 9y ago
  Frankly there are far more toxic and awful large companies to work for. I think with the perf/promo process being what it is Google was intentionally trying to avoid the really bad nepotistic and political parts of some other large (or not large) corps. But they introduced other problems, which the article writer alludes to. For myself, the bullshit with perf and the awful corporate culture stuff became apparent within 6 months of landing here at Google as a result of acquisition. After working at a startup or small company (aka "get your shit done and fix all the things or we'll go out of business!") and getting drafted to work here (and ahem, eat the free food and take all the money they give you...) it's very apparent. But I've stayed and slogged it through, and just stopped caring and just keep my head down and try to do the work I think is useful. Luckily Google has stopped promulgating the line that one _has_ to get promoted to Level X after Y years, or get ejected. There's a recognition now that people can just contribute at a certain level and be good employees and not play the promo game. I know very few people who are believers in this culture internally. Anybody who has been through promo is cynical about it. Which is I guess why there's been some incremental changes to the process recently. We'll see how it shakes out.
  • deleted 9y ago
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• nickjj 9y ago
  Good luck with your new programming adventures. Just based on reading your article I would say your mindset is in the right spot to be successful on your own. I've been freelancing as a developer for the last 20 years and have turned down interviews from Google / etc. in the past. It's a fun ride. > Optimizing for promotion This is one of many reasons why I'll never work a "regular" job.
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    Thanks! And thank you for reading.
  • ultrasounder 9y ago
    Hi Nick just popped in to say Thank You for your SAAS Flask course. I am slowly working through it along with the updated Flask Mega Tutorial
    • nickjj 9y ago
      Hi, no problem. Thanks so much for signing up to that course. If you have any questions you know where to reach me!
• phamilton 9y ago
  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 sufficient for that promotion. A junior engineer and a manager who is at least partially paying attention can get that done. I also don't really disagree with the evaluation that 6 months of Senior level work isn't enough for a promotion, especially if nothing actually shipped. I get that constant reorgs are frustrating. That alone is enough of a reason to not work at Google or another BigCo. That's the real problem here.
  • otterley 9y ago
    At many organizations, Senior Engineer is not the end of the IC track, not even close. For example: ... > Senior Engr. > Staff Engr. > Sr. Staff Engr. > Principal Engr. > Sr. Principal Engr. > Distinguished Engr.
    • nuggien 9y ago
      I think google itself follows that same path of promotion, ending in a fellow position after distinguished engineer? I wonder how many people at google have the fellow title.
    • joshuamorton 9y ago
      Terminal level and Max mean different things here. Indeed you can become a senior fellow at Google, but you aren't expected to. You are however expected to hit senior at some point in your career. There's no requirement to grow further, so the bar for senior is high.
    • lbrandy 9y ago
      "terminal level", in the sense being used by the OP, doesn't mean "end of the IC track". It means a level that you can be at "forever". Often times the junior engineering levels have some expectations around eventually being promoted (ie, "up or out").
• johnrob 9y ago
  The best thing an employer can do for an employee is assign explicit value to that employee’s work. Otherwise, the burden lies on the employee regardless of the fact that a manager may declare solid performance. If the value of your work isn’t clear, you will suffer in the long run via missed promotions and potential layoffs. Sadly, if your project’s value is not well understood, you need to get off of it.
• xoogler_456 9y ago
  > I submitted my first promo packet, and the results were what I feared: the promotion committee said that I hadn’t proven I could handle technical complexity, and they couldn’t see the impact I had on Google. Ha! I think the promotion committees have a rubber stamp with that justification. It's so vague and unactionable, yet they tell _everyone_ that on their first go round. The second time around, you get to point their feedback and say "Last time you told me to do X, Y, and Z. I did X, Y, and Z. Shit or get off the pot."
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    Yeah, exactly. I only found out after I did my first promo attempt that the committee is expected to grant the promotion if you've fixed the gap the last committee identified. I wish I'd known about that earlier so I could have gotten my gaps defined explicitly.
• code4tee 9y ago
  A cacophony of management dissonance, bureaucratic internal processes, your job being outsourced to India and then being asked to clean up the mess created by said India team... So basically Google is like any run of the mill tech department in a boring corporate environment, but with free food and a side project on self driving cars. Got it.
  • debt 9y ago
    "Google is like any run of the mill tech department in a boring corporate environment, but with free food and a side project on self driving cars. Got it." This applies to nearly every single tech company in the Valley at this point.
• gniv 9y ago
  Nice writeup! You should definitely keep writing. Regarding what to optimize for promotion: I would say it's choosing the right manager (and peers, to a lesser extent). I know somebody who has struggled to get promoted for multiple cycles (funnily enough, in the same large group you were in). Then he decided to move, and the new manager went out of her way to get him promoted, and he got it relatively quickly. I've seen this scenario happen a lot in the last few years.
  • groby_b 9y ago
    Yup. If you don't have a manager who works their ass off to help your career, you don't have a good manager. You recognize them by the fact that they usually talk a lot about what management means, and what it should do, and aren't afraid to change that opinion if they learn something new.
• jonbarker 9y ago
  Noticed your new project is a keto recipe webapp - this will have to compete with some good ones: https://ketodietapp.com/ https://ketodietapp.com/, and https://www.ruled.me/keto-recipes/ https://www.ruled.me/keto-recipes/ . Fascinated by how ruled.me in particular seems to have won the 'indexed by google' game for 'keto recipes.' Also fascinated by how much ruled.me might be making with adsense. Also generally fascinated by special interest communities and how to monetize them, any content around strategy here would be greatly appreciated!
• blunte 9y ago
  You're describing knowledge work at many companies. You've also recognized why upper management, particularly execs, are more likely to be sociopaths (or at the very least, admittedly selfish). And fortunately you've come to understand that being the boss/owner is the best way to make your hard work actually pay you accordingly. The downside to being your own boss is that your work ethic and motivation may drive you to work every waking hour. This is bad, and I hope you learn balance. I don't think there's a solution to the problems you described - at least not a solution that includes staying in a company and working for someone else. There are people who are happy to stay mid-level and just churn out work for pay. Sometimes they play for the team, and sometimes they're a little selfish. But most importantly, they are satisfied or complacent. Others, like you, are neither. Cheers and good luck!
  • dboreham 9y ago
    Happy to see this post because reading the thread I was poised to say much the same thing. I would add that people here may tend to have the kind of personality where they naturally assume that : if you are helpful to other people they will be helpful back; being helpful to other people is a rewarding thing in itself; if you are a good person you should be rewarded. If this sounds like you (anyone reading, not the parent) I feel it is worthwhile pointing out that not all humans are like this. In fact most aren't. Surprisingly (it took me many decades and about 20 psychology books so...ymmv) it can be very difficult to realize this, if you have this sort of trusting personality type. fwiw I'm talking about the subconscious parts of the brain, so whatever you think you think, and whatever you hear other people saying...that's not really relevant. We are all Chimpanzees throwing feces inside.
    • hkmurakami 9y ago
      Could you recommend us some of the most impactful psychology books you read on the subject?
• eldavido 9y ago
  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 endemic of large organizations. I'd love to be proven wrong. The thing is, "working for yourself" is so flawed in so many ways. In the first place, nobody "works for themself". You might work for customers, or clients, or whatever, but not "yourself". Second, you're a lot better off working at a good company -- MUCH better off -- unless you have a pretty damn concrete idea of what you're doing. In addition to the income, the big company will provide better networking, more credibility for anything you do subsequently (whether a new job, fundraising, hiring--ANYTHING), it's an all-around better gig. I'm just trying to save you a lot of wasted years and time here. Take it or leave it.
  • debt 9y ago
    “unless you have a pretty damn concrete idea of what you're doing.” This. But to take it further, you better be ready to hustle your ass off. Because you need to bring money in which means meeting new clients 24/7/365. Good luck. It’s an impossible amount of work to do alone so hopefully you have a good network.
    • antonkm 9y ago
      I don't know if I agree. I work directly with clients together with another dev and I do most sales. It's not 24/7/365. I sell, network and meet new contacts maybe about 35-50% of my week during intense sale periods. I work 35 hour weeks. All year through I have about 4h per week in sales activities. The "trick" is being socially skilled and interested in others, to get them to trust you with jobs that are large enough so you don't have to be constant lookout for new assignments. (I do not mean to imply that you lack social skills). I have a small client pond (50-75 contacts on first name basis) where I'm becoming the big dev fish and people have started sending referrals my way nowadays. Your point about going it alone is valid - I chose to partner up because of the crazy amounts of context switching solo operations require.
• justherefortart 9y ago
  Sounds like the same shit management at most places I've worked. Not surprising in the least though. Everything to the sister company in India!
• rdtsc 9y ago
  > Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the organization. That is the true test. You are supposed to pretend only to buy into it but never really believe it. Understanding that things function on two levels is critical. One level is the superficial "we are a family, community, we are not evil, making the world better". But that's the trap to catch all the naive people and extract extra work hours from them (possibly at the expense of family or personal time). There is a second level of unspoken rules - "it really is about business and internal politics". You are supposed to discover and navigate a set of unwritten rules. And these usually don't get spelled out for you, because they are kind of ugly and often diametrically opposed the official rules from the first level. Slavoj Zizek likes to talk about this when he talks about institutional ideology and how there are rules and meta rules. The meta rules dictate how you relate to the official rules. Which ones you are supposed to break to get ahead, for instance. The other side is that you are given permission to do something but you are not really allowed to take advantage of that or you get in trouble. For example the whole "take any vacation time you want, we don't have fixed days". But you are expected to not really take more than a few or you'll be laid off eventually. Here is an excerpt where he talk a bit about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfO9gL28pAs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfO9gL28pAs (warning, he likes to use gross jokes and you might find his style unpalatable)
  • ianmcgowan 9y ago
    Sounds like the Gervais theory of management: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-ii-posturetalk-powertalk-babytalk-and-gametalk/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...
  • albertgoeswoof 9y ago
    This is absolutely correct. These rules are also specifically there to self-select only those capable of understanding and navigating the meta rules, as only people with the capacity will be able to run a company like google at a senior level. If you think a promotion committee is tough to handle, wait till you hit a real board of directors with millions of dollars at stake, shareholders, regulators, colleagues fighting for your role and a million other competing pressures.
  • 9y ago
• agounaris 9y ago
  Thats not just google mate, every large company is like this. We join thinking that our engineering will make a difference but it does not work like this. If you want to climb the ladder either join high, or grow through a smaller company.
• martinraag 9y ago
  The article really resonated with me, as it's eerily similar to my own experience at Microsoft a couple of years back. Constant reorgs, resulting in projects being cancelled, resulting in lack of motivation, as months of your hard work are thrown out due to unclear decisions by the management. I too was hoping for a senior level promotion. The last project I worked on, I was the only non-senior level developer in a team of 5. I went out of my way to ensure we released a well designed, built and tested system on time. At times I felt like I was committing more to the project than any of my more senior comrades. Come release time, I even saw one of the design decisions I had insisted on save us from down-time. All of this I was sure would lead me to the desired promotion. Come performance review time, I was rated at the top performance tier, as I had the past couple of years. Unfortunately however, I was informed not enough time had passed since my last level increase, but I was sure to get it if I kept it up for another 1-2 years. It's hard to describe the feeling of defeat I felt at that point. I resigned and left within the next few months. What I found most off putting, was when meeting my skip-manager (your managers manager) for the first time during my exit interview, all doors for a senior level promotion were suddenly open, to incentivise me to stay. Doesn't feel great when negotiations with your employer are comparable to those had with your cable provider.
  • cableshaft 9y ago
    > What I found most off putting, was when meeting my skip-manager (your managers manager) for the first time during my exit interview, all doors for a senior level promotion were suddenly open, to incentivise me to stay. Doesn't feel great when negotiations with your employer are comparable to those had with your cable provider. Wow, that's one hell of a way to look at things. Thanks for that perspective.
    • colordrops 9y ago
      Both are businesses, and most successful businesses are sociopathic. That includes game theory both with customers and internal resources. You are a "human resource", not a friend.
      • 9y ago
• heipei 9y ago
  A little OT, but I wonder what recruiters / interviewers think of people who took time off to bootstrap their own business but ultimately went back to applying for a regular job. Having the option to go back to working for a big corporation is a good safety net, so it would be an important factor if taking a year off would drastically reduce the likelihood of being hired again.
• bsvalley 9y ago
  When someone tells me "I'm a software engineer at XYZ", the first thing I ask is - in what team are you in? If your role is to maintain internal web pages or to build random tools for the marketing team then yeah... it doesn't have any meaning. Sure, you still get the benefits of being an employee at XYZ, but it's not super fulfilling. I'd say %30 of developers work on cool things in these companies and the rest of the dev just fill in the blanks. I've worked at a few of the Big-5 and that's what I've observed mostly. An other thing is - don't get pay by the hour. If you want to maximize your ROI you need to generate passive income there's no other secret. Your day is limited to only a few hours.
• ChuckMcM 9y ago
  Wow, that was exactly the mechanic I observed when working there. The result was pockets in the company where people worked on stuff that they didn't understand and were not (yet?) clued in that nothing they did would get them promoted and yet if they broke anything it would get them fired. Helping those groups to change things for the better should have been a pretty impressive thing, but my observation was that wasn't understood by the promotion committee.
• the_arun 9y ago
  If you %s/google/<your-current-company>/g , the story wouldn't change. It depends on the way you showcase your work to your management and peers is the secret of the success. But for some it is against idealism and "do good" nature. This same story happened to me but in another enterprise. The solution that worked for me is to find a Manager who knows your talent and gives you freedom and he does the marketing for your work knowing your strength. But it is uncommon to find a good manager that fits above qualities.
  • ospider 9y ago
    Totally agree, a good manager should do all the bragging so that "you" could really do the things that benefits yourself and the company.
• justaguyhere 9y ago
  This is exactly how many many many people feel, with one difference - most people don't even get the chance to pick up good skills, tech or otherwise. They are stuck doing the same thing for months and years. Add to it visa, family complications and the situation gets worse. At least he learned a lot, has Google on his resume, I'm genuinely happy for him. I hope he really makes it! More indie hackers the better.
• legohead 9y ago
  You don't try to get promoted in engineering. You do a kickass job, and those above you notice and promote you or at least give you a raise/bonus. Now that sounds naive, but the reason this works is because you are actually in power. You can easily find another job granting you more pay, especially with something like Google on your resume. In my 20+ years of software development I've never asked for or even pursued a promotion. If the job wasn't taking care of me, I went elsewhere with a nice 20% raise.
  • Jemmeh 9y ago
    I'm glad that this has worked for you but it's not like that for everyone. Also it's very stupid in many ways that people constantly just have to jump ship to get a raise. I might really love my work, be learning a lot, work with great people, but I have to fight tooth and nail to get a raise -or- waste a bunch of my time constantly talking to new companies. And then my current company loses someone with a lot of domain knowledge too. I love programming. I really do wish I could just sit down and code. Companies are always talking about wringing out the last drops of productivity but they don't reward programmers for focusing on code, but instead the business side of things and constantly jumping ship. I play the game like most people do, of course. But it's a stupid game.
  • toephu2 9y ago
    Obviously you have never worked at any BigCo in the Valley.
• kamaal 9y ago
  This might work for a company with no competition and railway cars full of advertising money coming their way regardless of their actions. In other places these things end up as a massive disaster and end up creating a culture of sabotage. There is a lot of backroom dealing that goes in these 'anonymous' committees. People who sit there aren't individual evaluators like in a public exam. They are generally people who come from teams around you. And they try to optimize and sabotage based on what is good for them. For example, a well deserving candidate's promotion can be turned down for a total irrelevant reason, while some political lackey could get promoted by adding all sort of cooked up recommendations to their 'promotion packet'. Most of the times all this is done so secretly that when promotions are announced the come across as a shock to most people. Of course people see through this all the time, and cubicles full of employee always talk of 2 + 3 not adding up to 5 in these cases. Another huge scam in these things is the 'important work' bogey. You could have contributed way more code, fixed a lot more bugs and added a lot more value, but your promotion can be denied on the grounds of not doing 'important work'. What the definition of 'important work' is nobody knows, as its largely defined by work done by the guy getting promoted, no matter what work that is. There are more things to this. For example, salary negotiations play another toxic game here. In most companies budgets are fixed. So a manager is likely to reward his lunch buddy far more than other people in the team. Eventually over 3 - 4 years you realize some of your team mates are now making way more disproportionate money compared to their peers and the work. This spills into all sorts of other opportunities. The best thing I heard was from one manager, who told, if your manager isn't telling your for sure a few months in advance that you are getting promoted, you most likely aren't. In most companies its already decided who gets promoted, they just have to do these 'promotion packet' and 'anonymous committee' rituals to cook up documentation to justify it, to protect themselves from law suits later. All of this called 'negotiation' by those who benefit from these schemes. In reality it is getting financial and other favors in return for proximity and servitude to power.
• FullyFunctional 9y ago
  Thanks for writing this and good for you to finally leave that wasteland. I learned an important lesson on my first job "Don't be suckered into being loyal to your company because, no matter what they say, they are loyal to share holders, not to you". On a side note, I don't understand the fetish with Google; where does this reality distortion come from that they have the best engineers? At _every_ company I have worked for I have been told "we have the best engineers" :) (I've been in Silicon Valley for 17+ years and Google is not that exceptional).
  • ironjunkie 9y ago
    It's part of a subtle marketing machine. It starts with the interview process Did you realize that Google is the single company in which people are actually bragging about interviewing there? (even if the outcome was negative) They also select a specific type of engineers that are influenceable enough to be convinced that everyone at Google are the absolute best. Those same engineers are then writing those type of Blog posts in which they pound the message over and over about being the best. It's a win-win. Good for their own ego, and good for the company as side marketing. Now, I'm not saying that they are below average, but in the valley, I don't think Google has any more talents than other companies that don't make such a big deal about being the best
    • FullyFunctional 9y ago
      I want to add that I do think google has a _culture_ that allows great people more visibility. You don't see [as] many blogs by say Apple engineers :)
      • ultrasounder 9y ago
        Thats coz, You sign a waiver as part of your "1 week intensive keeping secrets bootcamp + orientation" that Thou shalt not blog about anything while you are employed at Apple. That means anything. Infact there is a very stringent policy on what is acceptable and not kosher when it comes to posting on social media. Thats why you dont see anything from Apple employees. Not that they didnt buy in to the Steve Jobs Think Different, Your work is so much more important than yourself Koolaid. Its just that posting anything without approvals can be a career limiting move. Source- Have a couple of friends working on Hardware side and one working Frameworks test group.
• notyourday 9y ago
  This is an perfect illustration that a company gets exactly what it rewards and it measures. Initially it works out just fine because the field for the company is wide open so regardless of what it measures and it rewards the results look good enough.
• KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
  On several occasions, I put my projects on hold for weeks or even months at a time to help a teammate whose launch was at risk. It was the right decision for the team, but it looked unimpressive in a promo packet. To the promotion committee, my teammate’s project was the big, important work that demanded coordination from multiple developers. If they hornswoggled me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities. I was just the mindless peon whose work was so irrelevant that it could be pre-empted at a moment’s notice. My experience is that oftentimes people at Google-style companies play not even a zero-sum game, but more like a negative-sum game (if there is such a thing). If you're helping someone out, people will take that as an opportunity to take advantage of you.
  • googlethrow 9y ago
    This sounds harsh. In cases you are a significant contributor to a launch it should be signifiend in the "launch entry" (there's an internal tracking tool for all launches). You then of course need to sell your contribution: - It was nothing less than ciritical for the success of the project - It required deep technical knowledge - It required communication with other teams - It required mastery of several technologies, etc. The teammate in question should hepefully support these claims.
• cletus 9y ago
  Speaking as a >6 year veteran (Xoogler) some of this rings true. Still a couple of points: > No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports. They don’t even get a vote. This isn't quite true. It's true that the promo committee doesn't include your manager and it's that committee's vote that determines your promotion BUT your manager does get to say whether or not they support your promotion. Anecdotally, committees expect to see manager support so if a potential promotee has it, it doesn't mean a lot unless there is a lot of specific information that the manager can provide to support the promotion (ideally peer feedback should do this anyway). It tends to be an issue if your manager doesn't support your promotion however. And this happens. It also happens that people get promoted without manager support. Personally I never understood how this situation arose. I operate under the principle that there should never be "negative surprise". So if your manager doesn't support your promotion (which, hopefully, is solely because it's the manager's informed belief that it won't pass committee) then the report should already know this before they decide to submit for promotion. If they don't, that's a giant manager fail. If the report goes up anyway, if I were a manager there's absolutely nothing to be gained from not supporting the promotion. Moving on to the other points: > Metrics or it didn’t happen There's a lot of truth to it but not in the way the guy intends I think. He goes on to say that there were no metrics for what he was doing. Well that's the first problem. You should create them. And it sounds like this guy was looking to a T4 to T5 promotion. There's a certain amount of independence and proactiveness required for T5+ so not creating the metrics to measure his successes by is an issue. The manager again bears some responsibility for this. One of the primary jobs of a SWE manager (IMHO) is coaching their reports for situations like this and building their careers. A better way to say this is that impact matters. Working on a bunch of small, unrelated things is not impact. Promotion isn't a matter of doing a lot of work or being helpfully necessarily. By T5+ it's an issue of having impact across your project and to your wider team. Also, it's worth noting that often people do have to go up for the same promo twice. The natural instinct for committees is not to promote and they'll give you feedback as to why. So then 6 months down the track you submit an updated packet that includes all the ways you've addressed the previous committee's feedback. That's really common. As for the holiday gift, yeah I was there for that. All I was say is that it was bad optics, particularly in light of say, how much money was handed out to Levandowski. The argument was that it was too expensive to adminster across so many different countries. This may be true but it feels like penny-pinching and cost-cutting. And as they say, as soon as they take away the free drinks it's time to pack your bags. The issue isn't the free drinks, it's what it signals. Project cancellation! Been there twice. It's highly demotivating.
• armitron 9y ago
  Google has one of the worst monocultures I've ever seen in my life with a heavy emphasis on commoditization. It's a giant machine treating software engineers as nothing more than easily replaceable cogs. The perks and "easygoing" atmosphere play into this facade and are designed to delay the process of discovery. If you are after [significant] material benefits, by all means go work for Google but be prepared to be treated like a commodity. Ideally you will go through the same process of discovery the author did, faster, and will be able to adapt to extract the most out of the situation. If you think programming is an art and despise corporate processes that constantly devalue it, then Google is one of the worst places you could be.
• googlethrow 9y ago
  Google is changing the promotion process such that managers have much more power (for all promotions up to level 5 == senior swe). Previously it used to be, as Michael says, very much in the hands of the committee members who never heard about you or even your team. Now the committee will be composed of your manager and some other two managers from a related team. The committee will not see your own promotion rationale or your own description of your projects and achievements, rather it will be the job of your manager to present these points and advocate on your behalf. The committee (except for your manager) will also see only limited peer feedback compared to before -- no free form text, only multiple choice questions/answers. If all three managers agree that you meet the bar, you get promoted.
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    Interesting changes! That sounds like the right direction. I'll be interested to hear how it plays out.
  • jakelarkin 9y ago
    my co is moving from managers to anon committee, because it gives managers too much unchecked power to favor/punish. the wheel goes round.
    • jonex 9y ago
      I would trust my manager to not abuse that power. If he would start using it, I'd first try to change team or, if not possible, just change employer. Hopefully, for the sake of the organisation, people quitting would reflect badly on the manager over time. The point being, it's much easier for me to manage the relationship with my manager than with some anonymous committee that doesn't even know me. The manager is already important enough that I would not keep him if he seemed more interested in personal agendas than his subordinates.
  • newfoundglory 9y ago
    Interesting - what’s the justification for doing that?
  • 9y ago
• vinceguidry 9y ago
  There is no reason anymore for the ambitious to work for the man. They will forever be trying to think of a lord-serf relationship as a mercantile one. Aided by earnest attempts by the company to help them delude themselves into thinking so. If you want control over your economic destiny, you need to be in business for yourself. There is no middle ground between being a serf and being a merchant. At least not in our profession.
• mostafab 9y ago
  He can try Startcrowd platform, it is a side-project platform designed with Googlers in mind: https://hackernoon.com/no-kaggle-is-unsuitable-to-study-ai-ml-a-reply-to-ben-hamner-27283878cede https://hackernoon.com/no-kaggle-is-unsuitable-to-study-ai-m...
• i_am_nomad 9y ago
  All they need to do is add employee ranking to fulfill their destiny and finally become Microsoft.
• samrocksc 9y ago
  In this thread.....we b.itch & moan about office jobs.
• chapill 9y ago
  Google doesn't use something like SonarQube I guess. That's full of metrics like "fixed x bugs, improved code quality y%, reduced SQALE technical debt to z." I can't say I blame author for leaving Google. So called "senior" devs who crank out garbage and then foist maintenance on lower level devs aren't people I want to work with either. They're going to keep you down as mid-level janitor until you get the stats to back your story up. Static code analysis can paint that picture quite nicely for management. Sadly, that didn't seem like an option at Google. If enough janitors leave, the whole place will stink soon. I think the author was wise to stand up for himself. Other Googlers who feel that way should join him.
• typetehcodez 9y ago
  A good rant and first foray into politics for the OP, I would imagine. C'est La vie. IMHO, the next step for OP is to learn how to play the game and add "finding a paying customer" to that list of what's next. Google "persuasion reading list".
  • wahnfrieden 9y ago
    Sounds interesting, but is there a less politically-charged reading list along these lines with less Trump / Trump boosterism?
• jasonmaydie 9y ago
  > Wait a second. I was in a business relationship with Google. Didn't take me long to realize that most company events and get-togethers and volunteering and other assorted non business activities are bullshit and a complete waste of time. Like he said.. "it's a business relationship"
• woolvalley 9y ago
  This is why people change companies every two years. It's easier to get a promotion by studying for interviews on leetcode than by spending the extra time promo gaming in one's career. "Facebook will give me a sr software engineer position after 5 hours of interviews, here is that offer letter" is a very strong position. Market dynamics are a lot faster than internal promo dynamics at bigco. Once you reach sr although, you usually have to go through the promo game from what I can see. Most companies do not hire staff engineers unless your already staff engineer somewhere else at another bigco. This is why people tend to become manager after this point, because you see its more effort to become a staff engineer than it is to become a 'sr manager', which is about equivalent to a staff engineer. People also become a manager for the learning experience. Understanding 'the other side' can be quite enlightening.
  • ryandrake 9y ago
    This has been true everywhere I’ve worked in tech. It is far, far easier and a straighter path to “level up” to a different company than to get promoted internally. Without a single exception, and even in the depths of two tech hiring downturns.
  • ashelmire 9y ago
    So I just checked out leetcode... it's supposed to be for juniors or undergrads, I assume? The hardest problems on there seem pretty trivial, especially when compared to the problems on projecteuler.
    • toephu2 9y ago
      well you should have no problem getting into Google then
• ultrasounder 9y ago
  Wow!. Really inspiring write-up. Thanks for sharing. No. You are not an idiot. When you find time, please pick-up "Anything You want" by Derek Sivers. Essentially, You don't need a business idea. You just make something that "helps" people however vague that might sound. GOod luck with your venture and Indie Hackers is Great and Channing Allen has built a Great community around it with an awesome podcast to boot!. Who knows you could even be back at Google after "successfully" bootstrapping your startup for a few years.
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    Thanks for reading! I've heard a few people recommend Derek Sivers, so I'll add him to my list.
• zacherates 9y ago
  Completely anecdotal but I was talking to a Googler who had basically the opposite experience and recommended working at Google because of the promotion panel. The fact that their manager had no say in the process and that they could put together their promotion packet on their own was a feature in their mind, because their experience included their manager "forgetting" to put them up for promotion repeatedly at other companies. That being said, promotion processes do seem to be pretty screwed up in general (personal experience with 3 different companies), and fail in various ways. So it's worth keeping in mind that the "external promotion process" (getting another job) is always available. edit: grammar.
  • phamilton 9y ago
    I worked at Yahoo during a time of pseudo stack ranking (QPR). Managers had a target for average rating, and most managers would identify a few people for promotion and give everyone else "Meets Expectations" reviews so they could give the promotion candidates "Exceeds Expectations". Even worse, managers generally used the success of their reports as part of their success criteria, so they we're always actively trying to promote people because if they didn't then they weren't successful at their jobs. So managers would help that one or two people get promoted, even if they we're generally useless. And the other devs on the team would get ignored. It was a unique time in my career, when I had a performance review rating of "Exceeds Expectations" in a review that described my contributions as "mediocre". To be fair, my manager was actually pretty good and acknowledged the disconnect is the review. I had been down leveled in an acquisition and was doing a job 2 levels higher than my own, and he wanted to give me useful feedback and knew nobody would actually read it but me.
  • deleted 9y ago
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• allsystemsgo 9y ago
  Well, Google is a big company. Politics are a thing. A lot of younger hires don't know how to navigate that kind of environment. I had a lot of trouble in that area. I joined a smaller firm and things improved dramatically. As the smaller firm grew, I grew into understanding and learning how to navigate politics gradually. You find this in every single industry. I used to work in public accounting and it was just like this. Google isn't special in this regard. To author: good luck! If your startup takes off, let us know!
• jrockway 9y ago
  > It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present. This was the beginning of the end for me. I don't care about the gift at all; if I wanted something I would have already bought it. But it was the idea that an easy way to cut costs was the solution to everything. Ignore the fact that there are three separate teams working on literally every problem at Google. No, what's really costing them money is buying everyone a phone every year. (Which, BTW, you can just order from TechStop. You don't own it, of course, but what value does a phone have in two years anyway? The cost of buying it is the same to Google whether or not you keep it forever or for the duration of the contract. But ordering the phone from TechStop doesn't buy much goodwill, like maybe getting a free phone and giving it to your family does.) > The pipeline’s failures increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies instead of silently passing along bad data. Anyway, I kind of heavily disagree with the promotion/performance review complaints. I was on a promotion committee a number of times at Google, and my committees always loved stuff like increasing reliability, adding metrics, and doing the "dirty work" to keep things running smoothly. This, if true, is the pinnacle of what's valued as solid engineering work. The thing is, I was reviewing people a level below me (that would be the L3->L4 committee -- like the author, I was a senior software engineer), and that's the kind of work I expect at that level. To get from Senior to Staff (L5->L6), you expect this kind of thinking but across multiple teams. It is not as simple as sweet-talking people into doing stuff for you (which is what a lot of people think leadership is), it's more of facilitating productivity in your area of expertise. So if your general area of work has a lot of problems with flaky pipelines -- you need to get the metrics in there, you need to teach other people how to use the metrics to direct their development goals, you need to make the changes easy to test... basically, you need to make the less-experienced of your teammates able to operate in your specific area as efficiently as you. Because then those people can go out and get the dirty work done (getting promoted in the process), and you can bring your bigger-picture analysis and implementation skills to a new problem. Something I saw while on committees was people that were performing the responsibilities of their level on the "ladder" spectacularly. That does not necessarily mean that they are doing anything at the level that they're requesting promotion to. A new level is a new job, not just doing your current job really well. (For that, you just get a pay increase, not a title change.) I really think that's what was going on with the author; he was performing Senior-level work really well. That does not make you a Staff engineer. Additionally, there is no particular demand that you ever become a Staff engineer. I think my W2 for the last year I worked at Google was something like $270,000 as a Senior engineer. That is good money. So the question is, do you need more, so you're mad that you're not getting promoted... or do you just want something because there are levels and you want to be the highest? Certainly, by working for yourself you can avoid all of this. You can always tell yourself that you're the best person in the world and nobody is going to disagree with you. I always saw the ladder as a way of suggesting what sort of classes of problems to work on to work more efficiently and effectively, and by working in that direction you were growing as an engineer.
• deleted 9y ago
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• g9yuayon 9y ago
  This article may as well be used to describe my employer or many other companies that have more people than the quantity of work. My suggestion: join a company that figures out how to manage visibility, such as Netflix. Or join a company that does not need to manage visibility, such as a fast-growing startup.
• throwaway84742 9y ago
  Pretty much why I left as well. Wasted years on improving existing stuff rather than building new stuff. Google doesn’t value improvements, even very significant and quantifiable ones, except if you’re improving CTR or relevance. Promotion-wise working on a hot new project which will flame out in a few years is 10x better for you to “demonstrate impact”. Quality be damned. If you launch new shit, you get a lot more brownie points. Googlers, don’t be stupid the way I was. If you’re looking to get promoted, get on a hot new project and steadfastly maneuver away from any and all work that doesn’t look worthwhile in your promo packet. This sucks for Google in the grand scheme of things. But the alternative will suck for you, and your first priority should be you, in spite of what anyone says. Anything else just leads to suckage and unhappiness.
• thrownaway954 9y ago
  one take away I found: ship early ship often For all the projects I've done over the years, I didn't "wait til the end" to ship something. Get a feature done and ship it out. If you wait until "it's finished" it will never be and you risk both losing interest and losing clients.
• deleted 9y ago
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• ordinaryperson 9y ago
  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, I'm saying you have to make yourself known to a person with power. Otherwise you're just a name and easy to reject. You want to believe in meritocracy but in my experience the correlation between effectiveness and promotions is weak to nonexistent. If you want to get promoted -- besides doing a good job (and sometimes not even then) -- the reality is you probably have to market yourself upwards. The OP complains about not having enough metrics in his assignments but do committees promote people based on stone-cold, anonymous metrics? I'm guessing a lot of it is how they 'feel' about someone. But these days as a developer the sad reality is you probably need to switch jobs every 3-5 years if you want to keep moving upwards, unless you're really lucky.
  • greedo 9y ago
    I've heard this referred to as having a 'rabbi' who can help you navigate the political seas of a company.
  • eqdw 9y ago
    At first glance I didn't realize that "kissa" was a censored curse word, and I thought that "kissa" was a new slang for "kiss-a*" So I'd like to propose a new slang term, "kissa"...
  • jldugger 9y ago
    > 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 relationships with the wide range of people who might be on your committee. The larger problem OP faces is simple: his senior engineer projects are not being protected by his manager. And possibly sabotaged indirectly by executives above. In that sense, he does need an executive sponsor, simply to protect the project assignments he needs to build his stone cold anonymous metrics case.
• mountainofdeath 9y ago
  I used to work at {OTHER_BIGCO} and felt the same. It was so bad at one point, I could basically toss a coin if I was going to work on something different that week. It was at point I realized there was no chance the promised promotion would come (well that and the lack of senior devs to observe) that I decided to move on.
• fsa_adf_fsa_09 9y ago
  > I proudly and lovingly nursed the pipeline back to health. I fixed dozens of bugs and wrote automated tests to make sure they wouldn’t reappear. I deleted thousands of lines of code that were either dead or could be replaced by modern libraries. I documented the pipeline as I learned it so that the institutional knowledge was available to my teammates instead of siloed in my head. > The problem, as I discovered at promotion time, was that none of this was quantifiable. I couldn’t prove that anything I did had a positive impact on Google. I briefly took a part time job in college. It was at a mall, walking distance from school. It was a mid-range clothing brand that I can no longer remember the name of. Ostensibly, it was a sales position. I'm pretty sure the word sales was in the title. Anyone who has ever walked into a store like that knows there is very little sales (as in salespeople exhibiting selling skills to make sales) occurring. It's 99% "can I help you?" followed by "just looking". After a couple weeks my manager took me aside and said my sales numbers were bad. It wasn't a threat -- they were having a hard enough time keeping staffed -- but she pointed it out to me. So, under no pressure to actually change those numbers, I decided to do it anyway. I figured out that if you stand at the cash register and the customer didn't explicit tell you who helped them, you could claim the sale for yourself. A couple weeks later my numbers were through the roof! My manager congratulated me. I don't think it's uncharitable to say that my story would equip anyone to navigate 95% of the corporate world. There's a lot of FUD in this thread about working independently. So one more data point: I've known a number of people over the years that everyone here would know (by title if not by name). What do they have in common? They all struck out independently at some point in their careers. It's not either / or. Going independent early can be a great way to sidestep a lot of the ladder-climbing sillyness you'll have to do. It will also, if you're doing it right, make you a lot better at your job.
• nathan_f77 9y ago
  This was an excellent post, and I loved the comics. But the situation sounds like a real nightmare. I recently read a blog post about burnout [1], and "lack of control" was one of the main factors. The Indie Hackers community is awesome. I've been thinking about starting a tech cooperative along those lines [1], where the members have full control of their own projects and can work on whatever they want. The goal would be to build some small SaaS products or mobile apps, and generate a bit of money. The value of joining a cooperative is that we could try many different ideas in parallel and share a fraction of the winning ideas, similar to a VC who invests in a large number of startups. The other benefit is that we can build a much closer community than Indie Hackers, because everyone has a stake in the company. We'd be independent, but could still work together to help each other succeed. Anyway, if this sounds like something that appeals to you, feel free to fill out this application form [2]. (I've heard from some really awesome people but will keep the form up for a while.) [1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/avoiding-the-trap-8df59e718f3e https://m.signalvnoise.com/avoiding-the-trap-8df59e718f3e [2] https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnm-SZxbcKuQ7PUU9ArRnlD1LiKe920sTOV_Y2FAmaY/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnm-SZxbcKuQ7PUU9ArRnlD1LiK...
• ericmcer 9y ago
  I thought google was supposed to be an industry leader in assessing and managing human assets. This whole thing boils down to making a simple problem complex. The simple solution is that direct superiors and co-workers are the best resources for determining viability. The junior engineer he trained is better informed than the entire promotion committee with their metrics packet. Maybe it works sometimes but for all the millions(billions?) Google has invested into dissecting how teams and human resources work, this is a case where they totally failed and a very basic solution would have worked.
  • nieksand 9y ago
    Under this system, how do you keep a semblance of uniformity in promotion standards in a large organization? Sounds like this would lead to "easy" teams for getting promoted in while others with higher standards lag. End result would be grade inflation where titles becomes even less meaningful.
  • dgacmu 9y ago
    Not really - the counterpoint to that is that giving supervisors too much direct power is also an invitation for bias, blindspots, or abuse of power. You also don't want to slip into stack ranking (witness how demoralizing it was at Microsoft), which is easy if you don't have a way of getting globally calibrated.
• enlightenedfool 9y ago
  "I was in a business relationship with Google". The point that most employees especially in the US forget. It's strictly business for the company. Whatever incentives they offer is for the company's well being. Feelings like "proud to work for xxx company" is stupid.
• newobj 9y ago
  With 11 years of experience, maintaining a legacy system and writing docs does NOT sound like sr. level promo material to me. At <Equivalent BigCo>, sr. level promo was tantamount to rearchitecting an existing product, leading a team in multiple-person-years development effort. I appreciate the message around difficulty in quantifying impact, but just putting this into practical perspective, I think OP's manager may have failed to manage his expectations around what constitutes promo material.
  • abvdasker 9y ago
    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.
    • newobj 9y ago
      Not disagreeing just saying it sounds like his expectations were mis-managed. Whole story seems like a CF frankly and representative of the reasons why I've never even considered interviewing at Google.
• Aqua 9y ago
  I can understand author’s motives very well. I also started off in a corporation, it wasn’t google but it was a large organization where politics played a major role in one’s carreer. I had a very good friend, an architect who worked there for over 10 years, he was excellent in corporate politics and taught me a whole lot about it. The bottom line is that unless you have metrics to back up your claims (whatever they are), your claims mean nothing. Unfortunately, corporate culture encourages this kind of selfish attitude, where in order to get promoted you have to lick asses heavily, and the rest is just a background noise, even your performance. If you know the right people and if you have a good realtionship with them (also, if you are ‘famous’ within the company), then you will almost certainly succeed. This is how it works, almost everywhere, not just corporate environments. It may appear that the author recklessly quit Google without having another job or even idea for a business, and I did the same thing, I had to leave, because I simply couldn’t bear the fact that I was doing better (this, obviously, is subjective) than people 2-3 levels above and my promotion was put on hold just because there were corporate rules that forbid promoting employees that have been already promoted once within 2 years time period. When I informed my manager that I am leaving, he almost panicked, as he did not see that coming and they heavily relied on my experience and skills. They offered me a promotion and over 90% raise but I simply did not care anymore, I could not work there any longer. I also quit without having another job on the horizon. As a consequence my depression and insomnia almost disappeared, I am less nervous and feel generally a lot better. Do not judge the author for leaving Google, he did the right thing for himself, even though it exposes him to a serious risk.
  • ryandrake 9y ago
    > They offered me a promotion and over 90% raise but I simply did not care anymore What this should tell you is that they indeed could have easily promoted you and given you a raise but deliberately chose not to because they bet you’d work for below market. Only when they realized they were wrong did they suddenly admit they could treat you fairly. You made the right decision clearly.
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    Thanks for reading and for sharing your story. That's very encouraging to hear.
• eastbayjake 9y ago
  Sidebar: This was really great writing for a software engineer! It's a skill a lot of highly-technical people lack but can have great impact when you combine storytelling with technical expertise. I saw one of the author's plans was to write more and find ways to monetize it -- I wish him luck and gave him a Twitter follow to keep up.
• ironjunkie 9y ago
  > 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)
  • riazrizvi 9y ago
    Google, Facebook, Palantir, Microsoft - it's a narrative that those organizations spend dollars to support because it helps them in recruitment and in b2b consulting. It is similar in investment banking and management consulting. The employees lap it up, and learn to talk-the-talk. Each of these tech companies are cash cows with huge locked-in revenue streams that do not depend so much on innovation for survival. IMO Amazon and Apple seem to be organized around accountability and sink or swim projects which create a different walk-the-walk culture, similar to start ups. Though I'm just an outsider looking in.
    • ironjunkie 9y ago
      My feeling also. The whole "At Google everyone is THE smartest in the world": This is marketing "talk-the-talk". It's crazy once you realize how easy it is to make the employees repeat the ego-flattering "talk-the-talk" without them realizing they are part of a huge marketing machine.
• eric_b 9y ago
  The more I hear about the inner workings of Google, the less impressed I am. It seems their vaunted hiring process has let in folks who specialize more at internal politicking than getting things done. It doesn't take too many of those kind of people to ruin a culture, and cause a company to stagnate or go backwards.
  • GVIrish 9y ago
    I don't know that it is so much that the Google hiring process has selected for adept internal politicians as it is that Google hasn't paid as much attention to human factors as it should. A lot of Google's philosophy is about automating things a person normal would use their judgment on and just choosing not to perform some human-centric functions at all (e.g. customer support). It's hard to get internal culture right in the best of circumstances. When you treat like an algorithm and you don't get that algorithm right, it encourages all sorts of maladaptive behavior, politicking, etc. To be fair Google's promotion board is not as flawed as say, Microsoft's old stack ranking system. But it does set up incentives in such a way that to advance people may optimize their work in a way that doesn't benefit the company.
• jnet 9y ago
  The google promotion process sounds about as horrendous as their hiring process.
• OOPMan 9y ago
  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 swallowed by a programmer black-hole doesn't appeal :-)
  • dmitrygr 9y ago
    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.
• walshemj 9y ago
  Strange that you don't personally go before a board to present which was my experience at a Large tech company in the uk - relying only on written "packets" would seem to discriminate for neurotypicals. Btw anyone know what the number of promotion slots a year for the eligible population is in google? When I worked in Systems engineering division (67k FTE) in BT there where 18 or so mpg2-> mpg4 every 18 months (if we were lucky) approx. 600 would pass the paper shift to get on the short list. I was told by my boss that getting on the short list meant they thought you where capable of doing the job group finance wouldn't approve of small in crease in pay quanta - I knew some people so desperate they took a transfer to payphones to get a promotion.
• hotpxl 9y ago
  This guy spent 2 years realizing that "it's a business relationship". I worked at another smaller bay area company and I only spent 2 months to realize that. Google is already much better.
• eruci 9y ago
  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.
• ataturk 9y ago
  Well I'm glad you got Google's dick out of your mouth. Don't worry, just about every young developer gets played in the first job.
• mathgladiator 9y ago
  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.
• GiorgioG 9y ago
  My takeway from reading that this article is that being a software developer at Google is a shit-show - just like everywhere else ;)
• pfedigan 9y ago
  This is exactly why I am going to start my own company in my own name and start being a contractor with my 'employers'. Why be a slave when we only have a limited amount of years on this planet?
• erichmond 9y ago
  There's so many comments, I'm sure this will get lost. But just so you understand what the grass looks like on the other side. At Google you got paid a great salary, had great 401k and perks to work on projects that most likely go nowhere. Working for yourself you're sacrifcing all those perks, to work on projects that will most likely go nowhere. That said, definitely do it. It will teach you a ton in the process, everyone should go out on their own, mostly to realize how hard it can be. New perspectives are invaluable, so I applaud your decision and wish you all the luck in the world!
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    Thanks! Yeah, I recognize that's definitely a possible outcome. Perhaps it's statistically the most likely outcome. But I agree with you that it's worth doing if for nothing else to see what it's like. At worst, I go back to being an employee again somewhere.
• dkroy 9y ago
  This question may be an odd one, but how did you create the little cartoons in your blog post? I feel like they really improved my experience as a reader, and if I were to create content in the future I wouldn't mind knowing if there was an easy way to include something similar for someone with little to no artistic skill. Edit: Found my answer in this blog post of yours https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/ https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/
  • spraak 9y ago
    At the end of the article: > Illustrations by Loraine Yow which links to https://www.linkedin.com/in/lolo-ology/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/lolo-ology/ I wondered if anyone would have not read to the end of the article and, like we both did, assume that the author had created the cartoons.
• rsp1984 9y ago
  I'm glad you put in the work to write down your experiences, and I'm glad that HN is rewarding this. Promotion at Google is a process filled with selfishness and dishonesty and I think hackers need to know about this. The promotion committees are a joke. They typically have no idea about your product, your team, your quality of contribution and whether what you're telling them in the promo package is true or a lie. The way promotion works at Google is actually a direct consequence of their desire to "empower" the engineers and keep managers in a rather passive, supervisory role. The assumption behind it (completely misguided IMO) is that engineers will "figure it out" on their own and "handle things among themselves" just fine. The big problem with this is that it strongly incentivizes the kind of anti-social behavior that's normally associated with Wall Street: dishonesty, short-term thinking, greed, narcissism. To the promotion committee, my teammate’s project was the big, important work that demanded coordination from multiple developers. If they hornswoggled me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities. That's exactly right. Manipulating your coworkers to your own advantage is the fastest route to promotion at Google. Lying about your contribution to things would be the runner-up. This is simply because there's a lack of authorities who could see, recognize and penalize such behavior. I never understood why Google favored this over a good old proven management model where your boss would handle things. I know I may be the exception but I actually value having a boss who's got things under control and looks after the team, as opposed to a lord-of-the-flies type situation where the promotion goes to the biggest liars and manipulators. Source: I worked at Google as a SWE
  • eqdw 9y ago
    I used to believe that middle managers were useless shits who wasted my time and got in the way of work. I imagined that the flat organizational model made more sense: since this is what my day to day life is, anyway, at least we get rid of idiots who get paid more than me. Then I worked in a place where I had actually good middle management. They were smart and capable. They supported our team and helped us succeed. They shielded us from most of the political BS. They advocated for us to other elements of the business. They invested, both time and money, in our professional development. To make it concrete: in a company where the other engineering teams (five or six of them) were consistently experiencing churn, having morale problems, and shipping buggy code six months late, our team had zero turnover, a shrinking bug backlog, and consistently delivered things _ahead_ of schedule. I'm 100% on board with the good old proven management model now. You just need to have an actually good manager.
• bitL 9y ago
  Whenever I sense politics is more important to promotion that great job, I am leaving. I went into this field idealistic, driven for creating technology that can change lives for the better, and way too often artificial red tape is put everywhere by clueless or outright evil managers in order to drive their agenda and increase their chances for promotions and more $ into their pockets. It's literally negation of every single value I stand for and often have no choice but to leave and work on my own projects. Even the best companies like author mentioned aren't immune to human nature and have many blind spots.
• eafkuor 9y ago
  Man, the more I read these comments, the luckier I feel about working for Atlassian!
• SonicSoul 9y ago
  this is a highly enjoyable read, and i am glad i found your pet project since I am trying keto diet myself :) however i can't say that i agree with your main thesis. It's pretty wild if you think about it that someone would work at Google with all those perks yet focus on such petty negatives. No x-mas gift? join the 90% of all other companies. No "Senior" title before 3 years? This is not at all unusual. At least your company had a framework for promoting employees and they were willing to give you a chance every 6 months (even if its not a perfect evaluation, it's a system that may get improved over time). Nope no sympathy here but i do hope working on your own gives you more happiness! I did find your project details helpful and inspirational
• iamcasen 9y ago
  I have had exactly the author's experience at prior jobs. Quite literally the EXACT experience. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was put on a project that was doomed to fail from day one. I was looking at it optimistically. It was a problematic system, and I knew I could improve it dramatically. What happened instead? My improvements brought to light a lot of horrible stuff, and the new code was catching and alerting on previously hidden errors. This lead people in high places to believe I was reckless and shipping dangerously bad code, when it reality, it was not any worse off than before. This led to my downfall. It was a sad lesson to learn, but office politics are everywhere. It's so important to recognize when you're being backed into a corner and given projects that are designed to fail.
• stevenh 9y ago
  Teams are spontaneously disbanded and their projects are moved to other countries because it prevents people who share the same allegiance or ideology that runs counter to Google's from conspiring to hide "accidental" exploitable bugs in the code which could later be used to damage the company. The project gets audited by the next team's fresh eyes and if an exploit is found then it is patched and can be traced back to the moles who can then be monitored or fired. Rinse and repeat until launch.
• TheMagicHorsey 9y ago
  Politics is everywhere. Misaligned incentives are everywhere. The best you can do is find a place where those with the power to promote also have skin in the game. Usually that means working directly for an owner, or being an owner yourself. Politics dominates when those who do the promotion do not suffer the consequences of losing good people or promoting bad people. All organizations become shit after they grow to 10,000+ people. It’s not possible for politics to be kept out at that scale. Google may be worse than many other places because its steady profits allow it to keep many useless individuals on the rolls, who would be fired elsewhere.
• sangnoir 9y ago
  I always knew Google incentivizes the launch of "new" products, but the breadth and depth of the extent wasn't apparent. I now understand why Google Talk has so many short-lived reincarnations. On the flipside, this also disincentivizes maintenance/up-keep of old products - Reader never had a chance. It ironic that Google's share class/structure relieves its C-level management from short-term/quarter-by-quarter thinking, but at the same time it pressures the rank-and-file to have short horizons.
• mehrdada 9y ago
  I think Paul Graham's old "Hiring is Obsolete" post sets the right framework for thinking about this, why it happens, and the arbitrage opportunity that is present. http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html
• toephu2 9y ago
  On average does anyone know how many GSU's Google is offering these days for a Senior (L5) engineer? (either new Senior hire, or joined Google within the past 2 years)
• acd 9y ago
  You provide a service write code for the company so that the company makes good profits in exchange you get a salary. Nobody cares if you work hard over time unless your projects are late. Lessons learnt spend time with your loved ones.
• komali2 9y ago
  >So if Google and I have a business relationship that exists to serve each side’s interests, why was I spending time on all these tasks that served Google’s interests instead of my own? If the promotion committee doesn’t reward bugfixing or team support work, why was I doing that? That's where the culture failed.
• _nickwhite 9y ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22quit%20google%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22quit%20google%22&sort=byPop... Serious question, why is Quitting Google such a big deal?
  • Adamantcheese 9y ago
    Because it's touted as the company to get a job at and leaving it means something is wrong with you and you need to write up a blog post justifying why you left teh best position ever!!!!1!
• throthro 9y ago
  Short answer: OP can afford that.
• luord 9y ago
  Google always was one of the few companies I wished to join. That feeling has decreased over the years, and now this article might have killed it completely. I'm happy with what I'm doing anyway.
• joeevans1000 9y ago
  Heck yeah! It's great to read this. Large companies will bleed you dry and not remember your name. It's better to be the survivor of a failed startup than a star at a huge company. Better than being the survivor of a failed startup is the owner of a successful one. You'll never know that last one if you don't try.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• 6a68 9y ago
  I dunno, it seems like the learning process of putting together a series of unsuccessful promo packages might be the exact training you need to become "senior". If the (good) work you did wasn't reflected in the metrics, then you need to figure out how to change the metrics, or change what you work on. There's nothing inherently scummy or "political" about influencing the collective direction: identify problems, come up with good ideas for solutions and how to measure (partial) success, and talk it over with your team and manager around the time goals are being set. People are biased, distracted, and fallible, but generally recognize good ideas when they are communicated clearly. If you're not good at documenting your successes, reflect on what is and isn't getting documented, and find ways to set yourself up for success the next time. Talk to people who've gotten the promotion you want, and figure out what you've missed. Learning to independently identify problems, devise solutions, measure success, document success, and advocate for your ideas and yourself are essential skills for the human organizational / business part of writing code for a living. This is true whether you work on your own, at a startup, or at a bigco like Google. Good luck! :-)
• letientai299 9y ago
  > You’re in a business relationship with Google. If you’re disappointed that Google isn’t “romancing” you with gifts like you do for your wife, you have a misguided notion of the relationship. This line is the best summary how most companies treat their employees, despite whatever the company promote about internal community, team building, etc...
• dlwdlw 9y ago
  Once Quality is defined it no longer is Quality. Instead it opens the way for gatekeepers to stand guard around their moat and claim Quality eventually corrupting the original definition. To try and hold onto that which cannot be held onto is the path of good intentions that leads to hell. It is the temporary victory of bean counters while the human spirit nurses it's wounds.
• iamleppert 9y ago
  Working at big companies it is very important to choose which projects to work on, and which to not work on. You should be asking your manager, product manager, whoever, to explain in detail how your project is going to be helping. Why is it even necessary? If it's a smaller part of a big system, what is the bigger system doing, and is this project really going to help it in some way? And in some way I mean some way that can be easily measured and demonstrable. The business case must be crystal clear. If it's new development, how do they know this feature or thing is going to work, or is needed? What work has been done to verify these assumptions, and what is the risk? If there is any data collected, user stories, or customer interviews, ask to see that information. Ask to see any roadmaps or presentations given to higher level managers. Ask to be included in any product meetings or customer interviews. If they balk at any of this, it's a red flag that they are unwilling to be open with their plans. In my experience, this normally means they know their own plans are bullshit or they simply don't exist. It's really amazing how many managers and senior level people at these companies operate on bullshit. I've seen it so many times. The purpose of all this is to insulate and protect yourself from the failure of your own management. If a manager keeps cancelling your projects, ask why? Personally after a manager has cancelled one of my projects more than once and there isn't a good explanation why (i.e. something I myself wouldn't have seen coming), I start to question and doubt his decision making ability, and I'm less likely to want to work on his team or do his assigned work. I immediately start looking at other options for how I can benefit the company. This is a tricky situation in itself, however. I've had managers who have let me run with my own ideas and have praised me for leading projects and working closely with various areas of the business, and I've also been fired because my manager couldn't stand the fact I wasn't willing to be his slave and work on another of his (soon to be cancelled) projects. In many tech companies who only care about end of the line results, it's simply not enough to do a good job. You have to do a good job on something that actually matters. When you're up for promotion, you're up against other people who have done a good job at things that have mattered, and the quantification being done is how much of these good things matter when compared to one another. It's really a shame in this case that it seems like the OP was really stuck under very poor management who clearly didn't know what they were doing. If Google holds it engineers to results, why doesn't it let them at least decide what they get to work on? It seems they've forgotten the part that if you're going to decouple someone's direct management influence, you need to decouple that manager's ability to assign that person work or dictate what projects he or she works on. Just goes to show even at a company like Google they don't have everything figured out...
• nashashmi 9y ago
  Hate to be the guy who says matter of fact things so matter of factly, but the author just stated that when he was programming he was happy and when he was calculating how to exceed at the game, he almost got promoted, but wasn't happy. When he was only focusing on the metrics, he was ignoring everything else. That is unethical. That is calculated. That is unreal. That is the yellow brick road to unhappiness and a horrible career. The main problem was the constant reorg. He couldn't get a project done with completion.
• stanislavb 9y ago
  Good luck, mate! Really, I believe you've taken the right decision. Even if you fail, that will be much better than continuing the environment you've described!
• Ruphin 9y ago
  Reading through this comment section I get the feeling a lot of folks here are rather confused about what it is they really want. On one hand they care about producing quality work, and value doing meaningful work like helping others or solving problems nobody else wants to touch, and on the other hand they expect to receive this senior title in recognition of their efforts and get disillusioned when they fail to do so. There's so much resentment in this thread about colleagues who have titles, when they aren't producing superior work. You're clearly judging your peers (and by extension yourself) based on quality of work, so why care about the title? If you can write good code, or design great APIs, or build excellent tests or clean up outdated codebases, I don't care if your title is Emperor of the Universe or Junior Intern, you're welcome on my team any time and I'll be glad to have you on board and build awesome products with me. If you want to get that title, then by all means go play the title game like the author. Focus on metrics, forget about producing meaningful work, and you'll be on the fast lane to become one of those people that you resent right now. Anyone remember those "unprofessional" titles like "Chief Executive Ninja" and whatnot that were so popular in the startup scene a while ago? These people were simply signaling that they didn't really care about titles and cared about other things instead, like building product, or adding value in some form. I used to work at a startup where everyone could pick their own title; so anyone could be a senior engineer if they wanted to. Ofcourse it didn't matter if they did, because nobody was judged by their title, but by their work. If that's what you want, then go and find a place like that; they exist! Kudos to the author for figuring out what he wants.
  • dlwdlw 9y ago
    I think because tech is well off compared to other industries, tech workers delay a certain type of adulthood maturity. This isn't functioning in society maturity but the maturity of finding and knowing your place. To the young everyone has high hopes for you mostly because they want that energy and drive. At a certain point however you aren't valued based in your individual technical contribution but your ability to support existing narrative structures. The shock from people feeding you your own narrative heroes journey to expecting you to kiss ass and support existing stories is specific to tech because of the relatively new and parallel "journeyman engineer" career path that tops out around 300k. The remaining paths are the thought-leader/genius path and the traditional corporate man.
• iampliny 9y ago
  Hi, Indie Hacker here who also has some experience with politicized corporate environments. I’d like to encourage you to ignore some of the bad advice in this thread. 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.
  • mtlynch 9y ago
    Thanks for reading and for your advice! I like your analogy about Venezuela and Denmark. : ) I do think they have a point. Throughout this process I've continually tried to consciously avoid a "grass is always greener" mentality and recognize that starting my own company will have difficult challenges as well. So I appreciate the feedback from both sides. That said, Indie Hackers is filled with stories of people who left corporate jobs and found greater satisfaction in their own companies, so I think it varies by person and requires some luck. I'd like to see what happens regardless.
• zulrah 9y ago
  haha, I have a guy like this in my job. He won't do ANYTHING that couldn't be represented in a promotion document. Which is annoying but at the same time he is always successful with his promotions
• real-hacker 9y ago
  Working for a big company is stable but fragile (you can lose the job, or become a special cog that cannot fit into any other machine). Working for yourself is risky at the very beginning, but anti-fragile, given you know what you are doing.
• ests_eu 9y ago
  Thank you for sharing this. Your story actually made me think about myself - whether I am actually doing something because I believe it's best for company goals, or I am doing something because I want my work to be visible and viewed as valuable. I work in a very small team, where promotions don't exist, but I am more aware now, that I often try to work on taks which are more easily recognizable as "wow you did something cool", instead of focusing on quality of code and work. And that's just because I fear to seen as a slacker.
• ernsheong 9y ago
  I've been there, done that (quit another MNC, not Google). Unfortunately in the real world, hardly anyone wants your new product, and people are so accustomed to polished products that work on every platform, that one person can hardly deliver something pay-worthy nowadays. Not to mention it's so difficult to land on an idea that people really want, and that idea itself is something doable by one or two persons at most (bootstrap model) After 6 months of hardly any income, had to eat humble pie and get back to employment (for now). Good luck.
• adultSwim 9y ago
  If you had a union, you could have a say in how promotions are handled. This is how the whole industry works. They will be more than happy to keep you low, doing useful work relatively cheaply, indefinitely. On the other hand, cry me a river. There are a million and a half families, including 3 million children, in the US living on less than $2/person/day.
• adultSwim 9y ago
  "Nothing to show for it"... except the bank to go work for yourself and years of extremely valuable experience