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Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process (https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ https://mtlynch.io/wh

• DecayingOrganic 8y ago
  It's a good idea to improve your web developer skills, but I think the problem lies within your entrepreneur skills. I'd highly recommend the book Disciplined Entrepreneurship to you. It consists of 24 steps that is focused on product conceptualization, which I think you'll pretty much appreciate it.
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation! I'll check it out.
  • mrlinx 8y ago
    Could you share why you think that's a problem in his approach/method?
    • ReverseCold 8y ago
      Both of the things he mentioned didn't really solve problems. The storage thing is already solved, people have no reason to switch from AWS. As he mentioned his product was worse, so even if it was just for the sake of competition...
    • DecayingOrganic 8y ago
      Once you have identified an idea or technology as the basis for your innovation-driven business. Your first goal is to assess the needs of potential customers, focusing on a target customer with the goal of achieving product–market fit—a product that matches what customers in a specific market are interested in buying, which unfortunately he failed accomplishing this step as the customers did not want to buy his product. The single necessary and sufficient condition for a business is a paying customer. The day someone pays you money for your product or service, you have a business, and not a day before. You cannot define a business as a product, because if nobody buys your product, you simply do not have a business. The marketplace is the final arbiter of success. Now, just because you have a paying customer does not mean you have a good business. In order to have a good, sustainable business, you will need to gain enough customers paying enough money within a relatively short period of time so you do not run out of capital, but instead, become profitable. And as a startup, you have few resources, so every action you take must be hyper-efficient. Therefore, you will not start by building a product or hiring developers or recruiting salespeople. Instead, you will take a customer-driven approach by finding an unmet need and building your business around it.
      • fermienrico 8y ago
        Entrepreneurship is a lot more complicated. Each startup’s failure is unique and has various mix of challenges. Suggesting a book for someone who has failed running a startup right away is naive and glib. Also, the OP didn’t put too many details of why his startup failed. Asserting that they have poor entrepreneurial skills - how do you know if it wasn't circumstantial?
        • DecayingOrganic 8y ago
          People usually say that entrepreneurship should not be disciplined, but chaotic and unpredictable—and it is. But that is precisely why a framework to attack problems in a systematic manner is extremely valuable. You already have enough risk with factors that are beyond your control, so the framework provided by disciplined entrepreneurship helps you succeed by reducing your risk in factors that you can have control over.
    • rburhum 8y ago
      The first time I built a business, I made the same mistake as the OP: "Then, it struck me: what if ingredient parsing was the business? If this was a problem for me, then surely other developers struggled with it as well. Hopefully, some of them made money and would give some of said money to me if I solved their problem. Thus, the idea was born for Zestful, my ingredient-parsing service." Before starting to write a single line of code, you need to do market research and understand the opportunity size. Building a business takes several years of personal investment and you are betting a lot of potential missed opportunity on the "ingredient business" market. This is a common mistake that, again, I have made myself, too.
      • was_boring 8y ago
        Zestful sounds like a feature of Edamam (https://developer.edamam.com/ https://developer.edamam.com/). I think the market is not in parsing, but extracting nutrition information.
        • mtlynch 8y ago
          Yeah, Edamam probably does something similar to what I was doing. The project kind of came out of me needing ingredient parsing for a different product and existing solutions being a poor match. Edamam requires you to display their logo in your app if you use their API[0], which I found inappropriately intrusive. There's a similar service called Spoonacular, but they don't allow you to store results for more than an hour[1], which is crazy. I wanted to build a search index that let users search by ingredient, so it made no sense for me to reprocess my entire corpus of data every hourly. But they succeeded and I didn't, so maybe the weird API terms are what they need to survive. [0]: https://developer.edamam.com/about/terms https://developer.edamam.com/about/terms [1]: https://market.mashape.com/spoonacular/recipe-food-nutrition https://market.mashape.com/spoonacular/recipe-food-nutrition
      • ashelmire 8y ago
        This is a great argument for entering into an existing market, rather than trying to find a new one.
• toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Congratulations on buying your freedom and having the ability to work on projects that interest you.
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    Thanks! I much prefer this to having a job. I hope I can find a way to make it work forever.
• corpMaverick 8y ago
  How do you pay for your living expenses ? Do you work remotely ?
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    I had pretty substantial amount of savings when I quit. I expect my annual expenses for the next few years to be $15-20k, so I can either pay that with returns from my investments or drawing down from my savings. It's not enough to live the rest of my life on, especially if I want to start a family, but I'm set for the next few years.
    • rdlecler1 8y ago
      What about healthcare?
      • mtlynch 8y ago
        Private health insurance is $3k/yr here, so it's part of the $15-20k/yr.
        • lg 8y ago
          with spending like that if a decent chunk comes from savings rather than income, you probably qualify for MassHealth.
          • mtlynch 8y ago
            Possibly! I don't think I'd qualify until 2020 because my 2018 income is over the limit because of my earnings at Google in the beginning of the year. My understanding is that it's based on the previous year's income, so I'd have to earn nothing in 2019. I'm not sure if I'd apply in any case. I feel like it's questionable ethically to take public assistance when I could earn a high income if I chose to work for an employer.
            • 8y ago
• sjg007 8y ago
  Do you feel disconnected in Western Mass? I am not sure how remote you are but I live in a remote area now but work remotely and feel it. Hell, even in the Bay area I was remote-is since the commute was isolating. All I can say about the culture there is that you have to job hop to develop relationships that may lead to future opportunities. *Btw your cartoon on your blog is good. If that's your original creation you might consider developing it out.
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    I don't, but I've only been here 7 weeks so far, so it's too early to tell. I'm pretty solitary, so I'm hoping the disconnectedness works out okay. I wish I could draw those cartoons. I work with a freelance cartoonist named Loraine Yow (https://www.lolo-ology.com/ https://www.lolo-ology.com/). I wrote a blog post about how the process works: https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/ https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/
    • sjg007 8y ago
      Well you two might have something! Kind of like a new take on dilbert, phd comics, or something.
  • xkcd-sucks 8y ago
    Western Mass is awesome. The environment's beautiful, housing can be cheap, and drinking water is some of the best in the country. People are generally less rules-oriented and clique-oriented than in the Boston area. The art and music scenes are much better. The "progressive activism" community is thriving, but you can also hunt with a rifle on private property. Food is cheap and there are tons of thriving local farms. If you're constipated you can roll through Springfield and get shot at just like you can in East Cambridge or Mattapan, but outside of that it's quite safe and people are super helpful. You basically get the extremes of everything in Boston at a much lower price. Possible downsides are long, snowy winters, and far fewer jobs.
    • quickthrower2 8y ago
• mindfulplay 8y ago
  I recommend reading The E-Myth book. It's super insightful I learnt a lot from it and thinking outside the technician box...
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation! I've heard great things about it, so it's definitely on my list.
• lemming 8y ago
  Great article about the promotion process and the employee dynamic at Google. It very accurately summarises much of why I quit there so quickly after coming in via an acquisition. That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money. I was very lucky to have a friend who taught me that very early (not about Google specifically, the same applies to any company). Working as a contractor just cemented it - I was sitting next to people earning half as much as I was or less, just because I was a contractor and they were an employee. Once you can see this, it's amazing when employees get sucked into killing themselves working crazy hours because they identify so strongly with the company they work for. Companies go to great lengths to promote the idea that we're all one big family, of course, precisely because it allows them to exploit their workers more easily. Since leaving Google, I now make a software product I sell online. I have no boss, no employees and no investors. Occasionally I miss having coworkers, but mostly it's great. Freedom is really worth a lot of money, at least for me.
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    Thanks for reading! >Since leaving Google, I now make a software product I sell online. I have no boss, no employees and no investors. Occasionally I miss having coworkers, but mostly it's great. Freedom is really worth a lot of money, at least for me. Yeah, that's the thing I miss most. Not just the social interaction, but being around smart people. Within Google, it was so easy to learn because there were experts in every field imaginable. Outside, there's so much bad information floating around, so if I'm not knowledgeable in a particular area, it's hard for me to distinguish between good advice and cargo cult techniques.
    • hef19898 8y ago
      That is true, and the main thing I miss about Amazon. And the very steep learning curve, I probably learned more at Amazon than during my diploma and masters studies combined. Still, they have been a very good foundation.
  • LeifCarrotson 8y ago
    > I was sitting next to people earning half as much as I was or less, just because I was a contractor and they were an employee. Was this still true after all the taxes, insurance, and stability factors are considered, or was this just your hourly rate?
• ploggingdev 8y ago
  > Currently working on toy projects to sharpen my web development skills Could you talk about what those projects are about and what languages/frameworks you are using? What's next? Are you looking to start another business or taking some time to just learn and work on projects that you find interesting? Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading your blog posts and forum posts on IH. Good luck!
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    >Could you talk about what those projects are about and what languages/frameworks you are using? Sure, I'm working with Angular now. I might switch to Vue.js because I'm not crazy about Angular and I've heard very good things about Vue, but I'm also wondering if I'd like Angular more once I reached proficiency in it. >What's next? Are you looking to start another business or taking some time to just learn and work on projects that you find interesting? The project I want to get back to is a keto recipe search engine (https://ketohub.io/ https://ketohub.io/). I put it on hold for other projects, but I have more ideas for it and it's a good project for me to stretch my web development skills. I may also consider projects targeting customers in Western Mass that nobody else is really going after. When I tell people here I'm a developer, many tell me that the software they're forced to use at work is terrible and old but there's no replacement, so maybe I'll find one I can tackle. >Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading your blog posts and forum posts on IH. Good luck! Thanks!
    • rhymenoceros 8y ago
      > Sure, I'm working with Angular now. I might switch to Vue.js because I'm not crazy about Angular and I've heard very good things about Vue, but I'm also wondering if I'd like Angular more once I reached proficiency in it. I am probably preaching to the choir here, but if you are looking to sharpen your skills, it's almost always better to stick with a single tech and learn it really, really well. That doesn't mean it's harmful to step through some Vue tutorials to get a feel for how it is different, however, if you're not careful you can end up losing a ton of time learning about the JS framework du jour and not actually making progress on anything. Especially if you are not in any hurry to build something useful. Just about the only constant in JS frameworks is that any decision you make now on which one to use will probably be wrong in a year. That's not to say optimizing for development speed isn't a good thing, especially if you are looking to bang out POCs as quickly as possible to vet startup ideas. But if you're not careful this can devolve into "funtime with tech" that could be a major distraction which might not even look or feel like one. Speaking from experience :-)
• pjc50 8y ago
  It seems mad that something like "ingredient parsing" could ever be a business; on the other hand, a decade ago I was sharing a house with a PhD student who was trying to do effectively the same thing with chemistry papers to extract relevant formulae. Worked well for clearly defined things like "1,1,1-trichloroethane", less well for colloquial things like "formaldehyde" or, god help you, "lead". (Is a "lead researcher" the head of your team, a person researching the properties of the metal Pb, or a researcher made out of that heavy grey metal? This is practically an unsolved computational linguistics problem)
  • logfromblammo 8y ago
    Lead (/leed/) researcher - most senior of your research team. Plumbologist - a person researching lead (/led/). Plumbous researcher - researcher made primarily from lead (/led/). Probably an AI that deeply resents the materials-based engineering flaws in its processor core and robotic reality interface. Lead (/leed/) plumbologist - most senior of a research team investigating lead (/led/). Plumbous plumbologist - aforementioned AI, but dedicated to self-improvement. Lead (/leed/) plumbous plumbologist - most senior of a group of lead-constructed (/led/) AIs, investigating the mystery of why the human progenitors chose such a bad metal for building robots.
    • jkchu 8y ago
      Well that clears that confusion up :)
• technofiend 8y ago
  To quote your article: 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. 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. Don't take this as an ad-homimen attack because it's not. You fell into the same trap some other people do at stack ranked organizations. These systems create evolutionary pressure and the people who thrive are those who adapt to the ranking system as much as the job. Right, wrong or indifferent the ranking system is part of the job and in the same situation the people I see getting promoted would have dedicated significant time proving anything they did produced value or they wouldn't have done it. That's why (IMHO) it was so difficult to get anyone interested in changing our stack ranked system to anything else; because those who thrived under it were in charge of deciding whether and how to change and already knew how to succeed in the old one.
  • twblalock 8y ago
    This is spot-on, and it's also true in organizations without stack ranking. It's actually not a cynical way to view your job. If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? I've consistently seen that successful engineers focus on work that has an impact, and they are good at making it known. The first part is obviously good, but a lot of engineers disdain self-promotion. However, self-promotion is not a bad thing if you really are good at your job, because it opens up opportunities to have an even greater impact, which is good for you and for the company.
    • rizwan 8y ago
      > If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? The problem is that, at review time at Google, you have to be able to "quantify" the impact. Many types of impact are quantifiable (e.g. "Made server request scale from 100 query-per-second to 1,300 qps", "reduced code size by 30%", etc.). It's much harder to measure, say, the impact of a refactor where you made the code easier to reason about and more maintainable, so that future work can be done on it more easily. I witnessed the same thing at Google; I worked on a project that everyone joked only existed because the person who wrote it wanted promo, and the best way to get it was to design a very complex system, and convince others to adopt it. (He did get it, and promptly switched teams.) Some things have been made better, though. I've heard that going from L4 → L5 now involves much more influence from your manager, since they would know and, without quantifying something like a refactor, can speak to the positive impact you had in a project.
• jcims 8y ago
  Have you tried selling your recipe parser to retailers like Kroger. Many of them are firing up features to order online and they’ll have pickers pull your order together so you can grab it later.
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    I think there's a bit of a delta between where my service is and what they'd need. There would have to be logic to do fuzzy matching from the parsed ingredient to the items in their inventory that customers can purchase. There are competitors in this space that are already far ahead of me in terms of building shopping lists from ingredients, so it would be difficult to compete with them. My idea was to start with smaller developers who prefer my service's improved accuracy and more liberal licensing terms.
    • jcims 8y ago
      Interesting! I’d been noodling with this idea earlier this summer while chasing a lawnmower about the yard. The SKU match seems tricky. Guess I’m way late to the party haha.
• tmaly 8y ago
  Mike, I did not realize you moved. We should meet up one of these days. -Ty
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    Hey Tyson, yes definitely. I do plan to come back for IH NYC meetups on occasion.
    • i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
      Mike and Tyson. Mike Tyson.
• megaman8 8y ago
  It's a great article. But, I'm always surprised to see people are surprised by this: "That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money." And it's doubly surprising when highly educated/smart people don't understand this. I think there's something fundamentally flawed about our education system that isn't teaching or preparing people for the real world. I think every child should grow up with a basic understand of economics and how our economy works. here's some advice about doing an indie business: When you build your own software business: the rewards are not proportional to how much effort you put in. You may put relatively little and get a huge reward or may work day and night for years with 0 revenue.
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    I think that's oversimplifying it a bit. I minored in Economics so I'd like to believe I have a decent understanding of it. The problem isn't that Google just says, "Hi, donate time to us, your corporate overlords, in exchange for nothing." Instead, they make a very reasonable argument of, "You should help your teammates and colleagues." Imagine that you're on a team with a junior developer. Their feedback is basically worthless to promotion committees because they're low-level. If they say, "Hey, can you help me understand why my code is crashing?" the selfish answer is, "No, if I spent two hours helping you, the benefit I provide to you is not measurable or quantifiable and won't help my case for promotion." But it would also be kind of miserable for everyone if you constantly avoid helping your teammates and only do the absolute minimum required to avoid standing out as egregiously unhelpful.
    • negativez 8y ago
      "You should help your teammates and colleagues." is not, by itself, an argument. It's a moral precept. "You should help your teammates and colleagues produce more value for the company because we hired you to produce value for the company" is an argument. Now if the company's employee evaluation process doesn't recognize the second-order value you produced here then that's the company's problem, not yours.
      • 8y ago
• devy 8y ago
  > bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage Thanks for sharing your experience Michael in that blog post. Can I read that "$200k paid in case" as in all paid off without loans even from family/friends? If so, $200k seems like a high saving amount considering average American household are in credit card debts. In other words, Google job did pay really well with RSUs and bonuses so that you can save up to buy house in one shot?
  • tzakrajs 8y ago
    That is correct, this is fairly typical compensation for the OP's level.
  • hamstercat 8y ago
    Considering the salary offered by FAANG and other big tech companies, saving 200k$ is very doable. Yes some people are in credit card debts, and that proportion is higher than it should, but saving that amount of money is not unheard of. Most people just spend all they have (and a little more), which leads to not having that kind of savings. Doing so in just 4 years may be harder (again, depends on your spending), but if you have a little nest before then I don't see what's so strange about it.
    • p1esk 8y ago
      If his total comp was $300k, which is normal for a senior google dev, it's entirely possible to save $100k per year, even if the rent is $3.5k/mo.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  • scylla 8y ago
    There are literally hundreds of developers in FAANG companies putting down payments a lot more than 200k in the Bay Area. The median compensation including RSUs is over 400k. If you're in a critical org your RSUs can be an order of magnitude more than that.
• dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts You have no idea how much the people of Vermont appreciate this. Be sure to tell all your friends who want out of NY how great Western MA is. ;)
  • awojtasz 8y ago
    Ssshhhh don't let anyone in on the secret! This is from a native! :)
  • yazan94 8y ago
    Are there a lot of tech jobs in western Mass? I am working in NYC and really not feeling the whole big-city vibe.
• walshemj 8y ago
  Interesting how many slots where open for each promotion round /board (in Uk terminology) I have been in a similar situation at British telecom where the competition was even more intense. In systems engineering (where most but not all the engineers and developers sat) you would have 16-20 promotion slots from MPG2 to 4 every 15/16 months. Several hundred people would get through the paper sift to even get an interview - as my boss said get an interview the company was 100% sure that you where capable of performing at that level I had three successive boards and didn't get it. MPG2 was the entry level grade BT had a super flat structure. Some people where so desperate they would join payphones to get a promotion. More savvy ones joined the mobile side as they where known for having serious grade inflation
• EpicEng 8y ago
  >bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage Don't take this the wrong way, I'm sure you considered this, but... why put all that cash down when you almost certainly could have got a low interest mortgage and made more by putting that money in... well anything really?
  • joshschreuder 8y ago
    I've never had a mortgage so can't speak for OP, but I would imagine for some people the stresses of debt and recurring repayments outweigh having a bit of extra money from investing elsewhere.
    • EpicEng 8y ago
      It's not about the extra money, it's about the opportunity cost of not doing anything with all that cash. Mortgage rates are still relatively low, you could easily beat it with most any investment.
  • bdcravens 8y ago
    A mortgage (or the lack thereof) has a guaranteed rate of return. Any investment that would beat most mortgage rates doesn't.
    • EpicEng 8y ago
      Two years ago a CD would have beat it. Today it's not quite there, but there are very safe invenstments out there that will almost certainly beat a mortgage rate.
      • negativez 8y ago
        That would only be true for non-traditional loans (ARM etc). I don't believe you could have obtained a CD APR > 3% two years ago.
  • LargeWu 8y ago
• timClicks 8y ago
  Hey Michael - have been following your story for several months. Disappointed to hear that the recipe parsing idea didn't work out for you.
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    Thanks for reading! Yeah, it's a shame but I expected that I'd have lots of ideas that don't work out. I'm trying to maximize what I learn from them and minimize the amount of time it takes to find out if an idea is viable.
    • heyoni 8y ago
      I don’t follow your blog but I keep running into it, and it’s a really cool story. I hope you figure it out and keep documenting it because I’m trying to do the same and would love to maintain this level of autonomy. Unlike you though, I think I’m taking too long to execute rather than failing to monetize something.
• mark_l_watson 8y ago
  I want to do something with AI/ML and recipes also but monetizing a passion is not always possible. Have you seen the NYTs open source recipe ingredient parser? +1 for moving to a less expensive area and ‘buying back’ some of your own time. I did this a long time ago and have seldom regretted it.
  • mtlynch 8y ago
    >Have you seen the NYTs open source recipe ingredient parser? That's actually what I based mine on. I wrote a series of blog posts explaining how I did it: https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/ https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/
• voltagex_ 8y ago
  >"Will we be able to maintain this for the next 5 years?” to, “Can this last until I’m promoted?”" If that mentality is widespread, it explains so much about Google.
• ejanus 8y ago
  Which part of web are you learning?