12 ms·

I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)

200 points by luu 7y ago

ainar-g 7y ago
> Wait a second. I was in a business relationship with Google. > It may sound strange that it took me two and a half years to realize it, but Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the organization. To make us feel that we’re not just employees, but that we are Google. > That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money. People, and especially young people, should think about this more. It's called “labour market”, not “labour community”. A company as a whole is a faceless, consciousness-less creature that will eat you alive if that increases the right metrics. And it's definitely not a loving parent-figure that some of the HR people want you to think it is. Also, this needs a (2018).
- elfexec 7y ago
  > It's called “labour market”, not “labour community” It's also called human resources, not human community or human family. You are a resource just like a monitor or a stapler on the desk. A resource that the company uses for the benefit of the shareholders.
  - doublement 7y ago
    Being a useful resource doesn't have to be miserable though, especially if your role is more akin to a chainsaw or rocket engine than a stapler.
    - saalweachter 7y ago
      A farmer will put the animals' comfort and health and safety ahead of their own. They'll work long hours through heat waves and winter storms, get up in the middle of the night to check that everything is all right, spend every waking and sleeping moment worrying about the livestock, individually and collectively. 'course, the pig still gets eaten in the end.
      - im3w1l 7y ago
        You need to watch more PETA undercover videos.
    - bluntfang 7y ago
      there are thousands of chainsaws and rocket engines ready to take your place.
      - izacus 7y ago
        Really? So why does everyone complain about engineering shortage?
        Afton 7y ago
        There are ~basically~ no employee shortages, only employee shortages at a given pay rate.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        wccrawford 7y ago
        Because what they're really saying is that they don't want to pay more money. By complaining about the "shortage" they encourage new entrants into the field and convince existing talent to accept lower wages. It's purely marketing, IMO.
        noonespecial 7y ago
        >convince existing talent to accept lower wages. That seems like lousy marketing. If I'm told that something is constantly in a shortage my first thought isn't exactly to sell it for less.
        wccrawford 7y ago
        Eh, you're right. I'm obviously not thinking clearly this morning.
        ALittleLight 7y ago
        To justify the H1B and similar quotas so they can import more foreign born labor so they can pay labor less.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    Indeed; "human" is an adjective in that phrase.
- forgotmypw 7y ago
  Sadly, this trap is designed quite well, while warnings about it are not designed nearly as well, and many fall into it for n years.
  - Frost1x 7y ago
    I'm always surprised at how people fall in this trap. Businesses are inherently not there for your interest (income/livelihood), they exist to capture money/resources. They hire people to be the human face to make it appear otherwise (HR) and market (propoganda) to workers in similar ways products/services are marketed to consumers. If there's a position, businesses expect it contributes to their profit. If the position pays $200k/yr, you can rest assured in the long run, they expect your work (or at least an average of your team, branch, etc. over that time) to produce at least what you're being paid in value. That's optimistically speaking but realistically speaking, more value must be produced than your total compensation (you're always worth more than you're being paid or compensated if a business is doing its job well). That's labor in general across the board ("skilled" or "unskilled"). The catch is when businesses overestimate a worker's value... that's when we plebeian workers are actually pulling money/value from the relationship--we're getting back more than we contribute in. For some reason, culturally, this scenario for the laborer to pull more value than a business is taboo and seen as laziness, fraud, theft, etc. but it's somehow not taboo when the direction of the relationship changes: for a business to make money off its workers.
    - noonespecial 7y ago
      Its not always zero sum. In the best case, a group of workers that could make 1x each on their own, combine and are able to make 1.5x each together, and get paid around 1.2x each. The additional .3x is the corporate "profit" and is distributed in any number of ways depending on how the company is set up. Its still a rational decision for all of the employees to work there.
      - Frost1x 7y ago
        Not sure I believe emergentism. While it may be difficult to quantify, I don't find the "whole greater than the sum of its parts," just the perception of the sum being greater than its parts or the reality hiding in the complexity from us mere mortals. Without emergent properties (your work + my work < our work), it really is a zero sum game. To me, you may be able to manipulate perception of value in this fashion but that's where it ends (which to be fair, is often enough).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tuesday20 7y ago
  My dad had just one job all his life, for 33 years. While he didn’t become rich, he did enjoy relative peace of mind, pension etc. Of course everything is relative, but there was a time where companies had a little bit of concern to their employees, however small it was. Those days are gone. These days, companies don’t even pretend. A very small percentage of people are going to do well, for the vast majority it is just slavery, plain and simple
  - trentnix 7y ago
    Nonsense. Everywhere I’ve been employed cared about my wellbeing and when I was an employer, I cared about the wellbeing of my staff. Calling an employer/employee relationship slavery after a Googler complains he wasn’t promoted fast enough is peak self-importance.
    - vms20591 7y ago
      Yeah, they might pay for your insurance, give you free food, but that's it. The ultimate motive is to make profit, by getting every bit of work from you. You can sugarcoat it however you want, but to an employer, you are just a liability, not an asset, even when the "current" they call you as one. Because, the "next" they might not. The terms "employer", "they" are relative. As in the previous comment, "A company as a whole is a faceless, consciousness-less creature".
      - trentnix 7y ago
        No, a company just a collection of people with a common goal. And when you don’t like one company, you have incredible mobility to find another. In a job market as good as the one in the US at the moment, that mobility is irrespective of skill level. And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce.
        lotsofpulp 7y ago
        There are vast swaths of the US that are in economic decline, and they most certainly do not allow for mobility irrespective of skill level. They don't even have sufficient economic activity to support a Walmart.
- war1025 7y ago
  What always gets me about these statements is that, yes you're in a business relationship with the company, but that relationship is obviously highly profitable to you. What's the point of giving up that income just to "stick it to the man"?
  - wccrawford 7y ago
    IMO, knowing that it's a business relationship and not a community is important to getting your proper compensation and keeping your mental health. It's not about "sticking it to the man" at all, but getting your appropriate compensation. IMO, too many people see their company as a family, but the company does treat them that way and knows the mistake that the employees are making. I think it leads a lot of people to burnout by giving their all to the company while they just receive an average paycheck in return. Instead of putting that effort into their job, they could be enriching their own lives instead.
  - rb808 7y ago
    There is only one thing worse than being exploited by the capitalist corporations and that's being unemployed and not being exploited by anyone.
- scotty79 7y ago
  I was always aware that there's no relationship. That I'm just selling my life for money. Every moment that I'm not doing the thing that I want to be doing at that moment should better be worth it. Employer can pay with money or with entertainment. Roleplaying as a "part of family" or "valued employee" can be worth something but never forget it's a game played for your entertainment to balance lower pay. When it's no longer worth for the players, game ends and everybody goes home to barely ever meet again. Pick employers that offer best sum of pay and entertainment at the lowest cost to your life.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  >Arguably the most pervasive element enabling exploitative office culture is the postmodern trickery of the contemporary working environment. Slavoj Žižek argues that modern employment tactics create the illusion that our employer is our friend. This fabrication empowers the employer while denying the employed the right to vocalize and protest dissatisfaction of their working conditions. “You’re not going to stick around and help out? I thought we were a team? I thought we were friends?” >Žižek suggests that the environment of the workplace has been twisted, using architectural devices, to manipulate employees. Kitchens, ‘break-out spaces’, lounges, free food, free coffee – he postulates that this is a postmodern sleight of hand designed to manipulate and disarm staff. By fabricating the illusion of employer as friend, the employed is denied the opportunity to protest, argue, fight, be adversarial and demand more of their working conditions. These informal spaces are political spaces of control, surveillance and manipulation.[0] [0] https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/slavoj-zizek-says-your-office-ping-pong-table-is-oppressing-you-2012-5 https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/slavoj-zizek-says-your-off...
  - buboard 7y ago
    There is nothing particularly insightful in that quote. Employee/employer relationship is like any other transactional relationship: exchanging some freedom for money. Other forms, e.g. freelancing, consulting are different, but pay less for the same amount of work
    - claudiawerner 7y ago
      The quote remarks on the changing of the relationship, a point which is insightful. Several authors (from Zizek to Frederic Lordon) have noticed the dynamics of the relationship changing from pure unashamed totalitarianism in the workplace to the idea that the boss is your friend. The nature of the employee/employer transactional relationship has changed both in theory (management techniques) and practice (direction, micro-management) since the time of the old critiques of domination in the workplace. The employee/employer relation, it is argued, has not become more equitably transactional, but rather the old pre-Fordist techniques have been hidden and obscured - arguably more perniciously. It is, if nothing else, an indication that critics of capital need to reformulate the conception of the employer/employee relationship. Nitzan & Bichler and Vrousalis take two divergent approaches to exaplaining the special nature of the employee/employer relationship as situated in modern life.
merricksb 7y ago
Discussion at the time of publication, nearly 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241 (I understand it's not considered a dupe by HN; just sharing for history's sake.)
tyingq 7y ago
It appears it isn't going terribly well so far: https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/ https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/ But, he doesn't seem discouraged. I'm guessing whatever equity he had means he has a fair amount of time to figure it out.
- streetcat1 7y ago
  The issue that I see is that he turned from software developer into content creator/blogger If you plan to give up a corporate job, you should go all-in on software projects, since your main advantage is that you can devote 100% for focused development.
  - rozenmd 7y ago
    How is anyone going to find your software if you don't write about it?
    - streetcat1 7y ago
      It depends on your software. Here are my rules: 1) The hardest tech possible. I want to test my intellectual limits, which was not possible in the corp world. 2) The most hyped areas, today those are AI/Kubernetes. If you have a unique solution, then it should not be a problem to get early adopters. Moreover, after leaving my corporate job, I began: 1) Working 17 hours days, 7 days a week. 2) 100% software dev. To sum up, if you leave the corp, you must increase your focus.
      - ayende 7y ago
        Welcome to burnout, then. That is not sustainable, and you can't create a profitable solution in a time frame that this amount of work would pay off without horrible (personal) costs.
        seieste 7y ago
benjaminwootton 7y ago
The idea of working to please an anonymous promotion committee is quite depressing. Why do this “pick me” dance when it’s completely within your control to get the job you want within a few weeks? By far the path of least resistance is simply to get a job and the promotion elsewhere. Or do something entrepreneurial like this guy and completely tie your skills and abilities to the rewards. As a talented engineer at Google the last thing I would ever consider to improve my lot is spending years playing this game.
- amznthrowaway5 7y ago
  Yeah, if you keep your leetcode skills sharp and study to game the "design" interviews, you can get a job at a competing company instead of playing the depressing political game. As a bonus you'll make significantly more than internal promos.
  - usaar333 7y ago
    Maybe up to senior levels (say T5). At some point, it becomes difficult to even keep your level, much less advance it. All said, I likewise would find it difficult as OP to work at a large company where local incentives can be so misaligned to the company's. Hence, the advantage of working at start-ups.
    - tome 7y ago
      T5? On what scale is that? And where does it compare on https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Apple,Amazon,Google,Facebook,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Apple,Amazon,Google,Facebook...
      - amznthrowaway5 7y ago
        L5 (Senior SWE) at Google, the position Michael was trying to get in the blog post.
  - programmertote 7y ago
joeblau 7y ago
The promo process story hits home with me. I was trying to get promoted a few years back at my company. Over the previous 4 years, I built out a lot of systems, fixed critical bugs in our software stack, stayed late during crunch mode ensuring on time shipping, and volunteered to debug issues upstream issues impacting our software. Our team was customer facing so back-end bugs always surfaced in our product. I was a customer focused developer and fixer. That being said, every time promo time rolled around, I had nothing to show for it. You needed metrics and some plan of how you were going to show your manager you were performing at the next level or it didn't count. The software that I worked on over a crunch week that made the news papers, doesn't count. My managers would put me on project that didn't lead to any favorable trajectory for promotions. Every project they ever suggested, which I took up is now deprecated or severely paired back to the point where it doesn't matter outside of my personal development. Now, I'm 4 years in and starting from zero in terms of building my foundation for working on a project that is valuable enough to the company to reach a higher role. I'm still willing to do the hard work, spend the occasional late nights, get lost in my passion of working on customer solutions, and try to have an impact. My question now is whether it makes sense to build for my company or build for myself?
- zrail 7y ago
  Sounds like you needed a brag doc. You are the only one that can remember everything you did, so write it down and hand it to your manager so they can remember too. https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/ https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/
  - simlan 7y ago
    Interesting I do exactly that to keep track and have something in hand on a rainy day where the motivation tanked. I usually keep it analog though because a ruby piece of paper that fills over time is more tangible than a doc. But i guess that is personal preference ;)
  - joeblau 7y ago
    This is a great idea, thanks for sharing.
heyflyguy 7y ago
Now granted, I never worked at Google, but I've worked for several F500 companies through the years. I made a promise that I'll never work for one ever again because this corporate structure and bloat tend to engineer promotions and reward through things that do not actually benefit the company. His work, which was useful to the company essentially got reworked into something that impressed the "promotion committee". I think this is the notion that should terrify all founders, to not let the original culture turn into endless committees and stifled work products. I guess Google can endure this only due to the sheer cash it generates, and no i do not think that their promotion structure supports that.
- Tade0 7y ago
  My take is that it's a product of their situation: Google has thousands of highly talented people on board who probably have some expectations regarding professional growth, so in order to keep them they produce it. Does this mean that we have an overabundance of talent? I don't think so. I guess Google simply has enough money to keep its competitors at bay by hoarding talent. And they appear not to be alone in this as the anti-poaching agreement scandal showed.
- rb808 7y ago
  If you're at a corporation you should figure out which game you're playing. Are you there to "benefit the company" or get "promoted and rewarded"? Make a decision but they are different paths leading different directions.
  - vonseel 7y ago
    Those are equally terrifying statements to what the user above said.
    - m0zg 7y ago
      Those statements aren't "terrifying" in the least once you consider that your relationship with the employer is a _business_ relationship. If the employer didn't want career games, they wouldn't reward them. As simple as that. If your company's official party line diverges from its reward structure, the best thing you can do for yourself is to follow the reward structure and ignore the exhortations to be doing things the company obviously doesn't give a shit about (as measured in dollars, the only reliable measure). Fundamentally your only rational goal in the situation is to maximize your expected return over the duration of your employment. At Google or FB you maximize it by launching stuff that looks good in a promo packet (with metrics and numbers, too; if you can't measure something it's worthless at promo time), and never, ever working on anything "legacy" related. Those are, at a basic level, the rules of the game. Your _rational_ choices are: play the game well, or play some other variant of the game somewhere else. Not playing the game is not an option. Playing the game poorly is irrational. Here's the authoritative guide for Google specifically: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/08/tips-for-noogler-engineers.html http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/08/tips-for-noogler-engineers..... It should serve you well at other, similar companies, with only minor tweaks.
KKKKkkkk1 7y ago
My manager assured me that my promotion was close. He felt that I was already capable of senior-level work. I just needed the right project to prove it to the promotion committee. Who hasn't been there before. I've had my manager tell me I have a "bright future" in my team, a couple of weeks before it was dissolved.
- BossingAround 7y ago
  Same here. I was doing an amazing work and my manager really feared me leaving the team. He'd do anything to keep me there. 2 months fast forward, the team has been canceled, and 20 people were searching for a new position.
coffeefirst 7y ago
The "metrics or it didn't happen" meme, which really means ignoring all the observable facts that aren't numbers, is very real. It's also a virus that enables smart people to make dumb decisions, and it's starting to spread outside the valley.
kelvin0 7y ago
In the end where do you get your rocket fuel? It's either a) External validation from factors out of your control, or ... b) Internal self-motivation which you have 100% linked to your own volition. Waiting for some unicorn to land in your lap with a golden certificate of promotion might be a little difficult to attain. Attacking interesting problems and helping others with your talents might be more meaningful.
acvny 7y ago
I wrongly thought google only hires smart people...
acvny 7y ago
Another victim of the 4 hour work week scam
domador 7y ago
Do the members of this dystopian-sounding promotion committee at Google actively develop software themselves (when they're not promoting or failing to promote people)? Is this a case where those who can't develop software judge those who can? Or am I reading too much into one ex-Googler's account of their own experience?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rkagerer 7y ago
Google was great 15 years ago. Lately, most of what I observe from its products and read about the company lends the impression they've fallen victim to their size and are just another dumb, beurocratic corporation whose best innovations come from acquisitions of smaller startups (Maps, Android, Nest, etc). Good on the author for leaving and seeking a place where he's free to truly innovate.
downerending 7y ago
Title is a lot like salary--hoping for a significant improvement within a company is a fool's errand. The way to get "promoted" is to switch jobs.
- amznthrowaway5 7y ago
  Salary is the important part, some companies will give out the title but not the corresponding salary. It's especially bad at places like Amazon, where you will often be given deferred and reduced compensation below the bottom of the next band. It really makes no sense to chase promotion unless you are going for L7+ https://www.teamblind.com/article/How-refreshers%E2%80%9D-work-at-Amazon-pVJmPiL4 https://www.teamblind.com/article/How-refreshers%E2%80%9D-wo...
mtlynch 7y ago
Author here! Cool to see this pop up on HN again. I was wondering why I was getting so many Twitter notifications all of a sudden. As a quick update, I continue to be happy with my decision to leave Google. I enjoy working for myself, even though I haven't made much money at it yet. I'm ending 2019 with ~$7k in revenue, which isn't much, but it's a bump from the $2.2k I made in 2018. My savings are still far higher than my annual cost of living, so I'm not in any danger of running out of money in the next few years. I'll be posting another year-end summary to my blog on Feb. 1, 2020. I also write monthly retrospectives[1] about my work and weekly updates on What Got Done.[2] [1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives [2] https://whatgotdone.com/michael https://whatgotdone.com/michael
- alpineidyll3 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this! Labor markets would be a nightmare without people who can reason through their own incentives like you :).
craftinator 7y ago
"In my head, the promotion committee was this omniscient and fair entity." I think this is the pure, gullible heart at the center of the word naivety. It's strange for me to read it and believe that anyone would ever write this without a strong side dish of sarcasm, and especially about Google. Google, the evil advertisement agency, Google the clobberer of GMail accounts, Google the banner of Android developers. How can anyone reach adulthood and still believe in these kinds of fairy tails?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
cosmodisk 7y ago
I work for a small company and have a fairly high level of freedom when it comes to making decisions on which projects to work on.This year I worked on projects I deemed most beneficial to the busines. At the end of the year I did receive an absolute zero on top of my base salary.So in 2020 I will only work on projects that will mostly benefit me personally but not necessarily the company.
mathewsanders 7y ago
I get the point of being able to measure success by something quantifiable, but the emphasis on individuals needing to prove the impact they’ve made strikes me as an odd setup. I’ve never worked at a FAANG but currently at a F100 in fintech, and as the product manager for our team, part of my role is to make sure our team is doing work that has quantifiable value. But for ICs on the team they’re not penalized if I make the wrong decisions and lead the team down a negative path (however part of my role in being successful is making our team goals transparent to all the team so they can help course correct if my thinking is way off).
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  The process has changed since Lynch left (actually it changed ~the week he left Google). For promotions up to L5, the decision is made by people within your org, who should have context on whether you were working on the right things or not. By L6+ (even as an IC), part of your job is to make decisions that are good for the organization, so having to justify them is not unreasonable.
- war1025 7y ago
  Reading this comment and thinking back to my memory of the article from reading it earlier today and when it has been posted in the past, I wonder if the "failed promotion" wasn't so much a matter of "not working on a shiny new project" as not making sure metrics were in place to document how the improvements to the service he was maintaining made it so it could handle more load. At some point on the ladder it's no longer enough to do good work, you need to show your work and why it matters to the company.
nojvek 7y ago
Google is worth almost a trillion dollars. Their ads shit golden billions of dollars. They have more than a 100k employees. Google is a big corp with big corp politics and they can get their cream crop of engineers, use them, abuse them and know that the next batch is waiting in line. It's kind of same with MSFT, AMZN and the others. If you really value your skills and have the confidence that you can go it alone (or at a smaller company) and make the same-ish, go do that instead. It is really hard to beat Google's FU compensation but if the smart engineers at Google banded together to do their own thing, they'd have a bigger return than adding to Larry and Sergey's billions.
nojvek 7y ago
Kudos to you. I wish you the best on the IndieHacker journey and pray that you end up making more than you would at Google, have better fulfillment in life and create more value for everyone else. We really need more people working on harder problems that create a better future for everyone rather than figuring out how to spam more clickbait ads to people. Google is great but it seems they’re quite astray of their mission of organizing the world’s knowledge and making it universally accessible. We have a long way to go to truly achieve this.

200 points by luu 7y ago

> Wait a second. I was in a business relationship with Google. > It may sound strange that it took me two and a half years to realize it, but Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the organization. To make us feel that we’re not just employees, but that we are Google. > That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money. People, and especially young people, should think about this more. It's called “labour market”, not “labour community”. A company as a whole is a faceless, consciousness-less creature that will eat you alive if that increases the right metrics. And it's definitely not a loving parent-figure that some of the HR people want you to think it is. Also, this needs a (2018).

elfexec 7y ago
> It's called “labour market”, not “labour community” It's also called human resources, not human community or human family. You are a resource just like a monitor or a stapler on the desk. A resource that the company uses for the benefit of the shareholders.
- doublement 7y ago
  Being a useful resource doesn't have to be miserable though, especially if your role is more akin to a chainsaw or rocket engine than a stapler.
  - saalweachter 7y ago
    A farmer will put the animals' comfort and health and safety ahead of their own. They'll work long hours through heat waves and winter storms, get up in the middle of the night to check that everything is all right, spend every waking and sleeping moment worrying about the livestock, individually and collectively. 'course, the pig still gets eaten in the end.
    - im3w1l 7y ago
      You need to watch more PETA undercover videos.
  - bluntfang 7y ago
    there are thousands of chainsaws and rocket engines ready to take your place.
    - izacus 7y ago
      Really? So why does everyone complain about engineering shortage?
      - Afton 7y ago
        There are ~basically~ no employee shortages, only employee shortages at a given pay rate.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - wccrawford 7y ago
        Because what they're really saying is that they don't want to pay more money. By complaining about the "shortage" they encourage new entrants into the field and convince existing talent to accept lower wages. It's purely marketing, IMO.
        noonespecial 7y ago
        >convince existing talent to accept lower wages. That seems like lousy marketing. If I'm told that something is constantly in a shortage my first thought isn't exactly to sell it for less.
        wccrawford 7y ago
        Eh, you're right. I'm obviously not thinking clearly this morning.
      - ALittleLight 7y ago
        To justify the H1B and similar quotas so they can import more foreign born labor so they can pay labor less.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  Indeed; "human" is an adjective in that phrase.
forgotmypw 7y ago
Sadly, this trap is designed quite well, while warnings about it are not designed nearly as well, and many fall into it for n years.
- Frost1x 7y ago
  I'm always surprised at how people fall in this trap. Businesses are inherently not there for your interest (income/livelihood), they exist to capture money/resources. They hire people to be the human face to make it appear otherwise (HR) and market (propoganda) to workers in similar ways products/services are marketed to consumers. If there's a position, businesses expect it contributes to their profit. If the position pays $200k/yr, you can rest assured in the long run, they expect your work (or at least an average of your team, branch, etc. over that time) to produce at least what you're being paid in value. That's optimistically speaking but realistically speaking, more value must be produced than your total compensation (you're always worth more than you're being paid or compensated if a business is doing its job well). That's labor in general across the board ("skilled" or "unskilled"). The catch is when businesses overestimate a worker's value... that's when we plebeian workers are actually pulling money/value from the relationship--we're getting back more than we contribute in. For some reason, culturally, this scenario for the laborer to pull more value than a business is taboo and seen as laziness, fraud, theft, etc. but it's somehow not taboo when the direction of the relationship changes: for a business to make money off its workers.
  - noonespecial 7y ago
    Its not always zero sum. In the best case, a group of workers that could make 1x each on their own, combine and are able to make 1.5x each together, and get paid around 1.2x each. The additional .3x is the corporate "profit" and is distributed in any number of ways depending on how the company is set up. Its still a rational decision for all of the employees to work there.
    - Frost1x 7y ago
      Not sure I believe emergentism. While it may be difficult to quantify, I don't find the "whole greater than the sum of its parts," just the perception of the sum being greater than its parts or the reality hiding in the complexity from us mere mortals. Without emergent properties (your work + my work < our work), it really is a zero sum game. To me, you may be able to manipulate perception of value in this fashion but that's where it ends (which to be fair, is often enough).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tuesday20 7y ago
My dad had just one job all his life, for 33 years. While he didn’t become rich, he did enjoy relative peace of mind, pension etc. Of course everything is relative, but there was a time where companies had a little bit of concern to their employees, however small it was. Those days are gone. These days, companies don’t even pretend. A very small percentage of people are going to do well, for the vast majority it is just slavery, plain and simple
- trentnix 7y ago
  Nonsense. Everywhere I’ve been employed cared about my wellbeing and when I was an employer, I cared about the wellbeing of my staff. Calling an employer/employee relationship slavery after a Googler complains he wasn’t promoted fast enough is peak self-importance.
  - vms20591 7y ago
    Yeah, they might pay for your insurance, give you free food, but that's it. The ultimate motive is to make profit, by getting every bit of work from you. You can sugarcoat it however you want, but to an employer, you are just a liability, not an asset, even when the "current" they call you as one. Because, the "next" they might not. The terms "employer", "they" are relative. As in the previous comment, "A company as a whole is a faceless, consciousness-less creature".
    - trentnix 7y ago
      No, a company just a collection of people with a common goal. And when you don’t like one company, you have incredible mobility to find another. In a job market as good as the one in the US at the moment, that mobility is irrespective of skill level. And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        There are vast swaths of the US that are in economic decline, and they most certainly do not allow for mobility irrespective of skill level. They don't even have sufficient economic activity to support a Walmart.
war1025 7y ago
What always gets me about these statements is that, yes you're in a business relationship with the company, but that relationship is obviously highly profitable to you. What's the point of giving up that income just to "stick it to the man"?
- wccrawford 7y ago
  IMO, knowing that it's a business relationship and not a community is important to getting your proper compensation and keeping your mental health. It's not about "sticking it to the man" at all, but getting your appropriate compensation. IMO, too many people see their company as a family, but the company does treat them that way and knows the mistake that the employees are making. I think it leads a lot of people to burnout by giving their all to the company while they just receive an average paycheck in return. Instead of putting that effort into their job, they could be enriching their own lives instead.
- rb808 7y ago
  There is only one thing worse than being exploited by the capitalist corporations and that's being unemployed and not being exploited by anyone.
scotty79 7y ago
I was always aware that there's no relationship. That I'm just selling my life for money. Every moment that I'm not doing the thing that I want to be doing at that moment should better be worth it. Employer can pay with money or with entertainment. Roleplaying as a "part of family" or "valued employee" can be worth something but never forget it's a game played for your entertainment to balance lower pay. When it's no longer worth for the players, game ends and everybody goes home to barely ever meet again. Pick employers that offer best sum of pay and entertainment at the lowest cost to your life.
claudiawerner 7y ago
>Arguably the most pervasive element enabling exploitative office culture is the postmodern trickery of the contemporary working environment. Slavoj Žižek argues that modern employment tactics create the illusion that our employer is our friend. This fabrication empowers the employer while denying the employed the right to vocalize and protest dissatisfaction of their working conditions. “You’re not going to stick around and help out? I thought we were a team? I thought we were friends?” >Žižek suggests that the environment of the workplace has been twisted, using architectural devices, to manipulate employees. Kitchens, ‘break-out spaces’, lounges, free food, free coffee – he postulates that this is a postmodern sleight of hand designed to manipulate and disarm staff. By fabricating the illusion of employer as friend, the employed is denied the opportunity to protest, argue, fight, be adversarial and demand more of their working conditions. These informal spaces are political spaces of control, surveillance and manipulation.[0] [0] https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/slavoj-zizek-says-your-office-ping-pong-table-is-oppressing-you-2012-5 https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/slavoj-zizek-says-your-off...
- buboard 7y ago
  There is nothing particularly insightful in that quote. Employee/employer relationship is like any other transactional relationship: exchanging some freedom for money. Other forms, e.g. freelancing, consulting are different, but pay less for the same amount of work
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    The quote remarks on the changing of the relationship, a point which is insightful. Several authors (from Zizek to Frederic Lordon) have noticed the dynamics of the relationship changing from pure unashamed totalitarianism in the workplace to the idea that the boss is your friend. The nature of the employee/employer transactional relationship has changed both in theory (management techniques) and practice (direction, micro-management) since the time of the old critiques of domination in the workplace. The employee/employer relation, it is argued, has not become more equitably transactional, but rather the old pre-Fordist techniques have been hidden and obscured - arguably more perniciously. It is, if nothing else, an indication that critics of capital need to reformulate the conception of the employer/employee relationship. Nitzan & Bichler and Vrousalis take two divergent approaches to exaplaining the special nature of the employee/employer relationship as situated in modern life.

merricksb 7y ago

Discussion at the time of publication, nearly 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241 (I understand it's not considered a dupe by HN; just sharing for history's sake.)

tyingq 7y ago

It appears it isn't going terribly well so far: https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/ https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/ But, he doesn't seem discouraged. I'm guessing whatever equity he had means he has a fair amount of time to figure it out.

streetcat1 7y ago
The issue that I see is that he turned from software developer into content creator/blogger If you plan to give up a corporate job, you should go all-in on software projects, since your main advantage is that you can devote 100% for focused development.
- rozenmd 7y ago
  How is anyone going to find your software if you don't write about it?
  - streetcat1 7y ago
    It depends on your software. Here are my rules: 1) The hardest tech possible. I want to test my intellectual limits, which was not possible in the corp world. 2) The most hyped areas, today those are AI/Kubernetes. If you have a unique solution, then it should not be a problem to get early adopters. Moreover, after leaving my corporate job, I began: 1) Working 17 hours days, 7 days a week. 2) 100% software dev. To sum up, if you leave the corp, you must increase your focus.
    - ayende 7y ago
      Welcome to burnout, then. That is not sustainable, and you can't create a profitable solution in a time frame that this amount of work would pay off without horrible (personal) costs.
      - seieste 7y ago

benjaminwootton 7y ago

The idea of working to please an anonymous promotion committee is quite depressing. Why do this “pick me” dance when it’s completely within your control to get the job you want within a few weeks? By far the path of least resistance is simply to get a job and the promotion elsewhere. Or do something entrepreneurial like this guy and completely tie your skills and abilities to the rewards. As a talented engineer at Google the last thing I would ever consider to improve my lot is spending years playing this game.

amznthrowaway5 7y ago
Yeah, if you keep your leetcode skills sharp and study to game the "design" interviews, you can get a job at a competing company instead of playing the depressing political game. As a bonus you'll make significantly more than internal promos.
- usaar333 7y ago
  Maybe up to senior levels (say T5). At some point, it becomes difficult to even keep your level, much less advance it. All said, I likewise would find it difficult as OP to work at a large company where local incentives can be so misaligned to the company's. Hence, the advantage of working at start-ups.
  - tome 7y ago
    T5? On what scale is that? And where does it compare on https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Apple,Amazon,Google,Facebook,Microsoft&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Apple,Amazon,Google,Facebook...
    - amznthrowaway5 7y ago
      L5 (Senior SWE) at Google, the position Michael was trying to get in the blog post.
- programmertote 7y ago

joeblau 7y ago

The promo process story hits home with me. I was trying to get promoted a few years back at my company. Over the previous 4 years, I built out a lot of systems, fixed critical bugs in our software stack, stayed late during crunch mode ensuring on time shipping, and volunteered to debug issues upstream issues impacting our software. Our team was customer facing so back-end bugs always surfaced in our product. I was a customer focused developer and fixer. That being said, every time promo time rolled around, I had nothing to show for it. You needed metrics and some plan of how you were going to show your manager you were performing at the next level or it didn't count. The software that I worked on over a crunch week that made the news papers, doesn't count. My managers would put me on project that didn't lead to any favorable trajectory for promotions. Every project they ever suggested, which I took up is now deprecated or severely paired back to the point where it doesn't matter outside of my personal development. Now, I'm 4 years in and starting from zero in terms of building my foundation for working on a project that is valuable enough to the company to reach a higher role. I'm still willing to do the hard work, spend the occasional late nights, get lost in my passion of working on customer solutions, and try to have an impact. My question now is whether it makes sense to build for my company or build for myself?

zrail 7y ago
Sounds like you needed a brag doc. You are the only one that can remember everything you did, so write it down and hand it to your manager so they can remember too. https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/ https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/
- simlan 7y ago
  Interesting I do exactly that to keep track and have something in hand on a rainy day where the motivation tanked. I usually keep it analog though because a ruby piece of paper that fills over time is more tangible than a doc. But i guess that is personal preference ;)
- joeblau 7y ago
  This is a great idea, thanks for sharing.

heyflyguy 7y ago

Now granted, I never worked at Google, but I've worked for several F500 companies through the years. I made a promise that I'll never work for one ever again because this corporate structure and bloat tend to engineer promotions and reward through things that do not actually benefit the company. His work, which was useful to the company essentially got reworked into something that impressed the "promotion committee". I think this is the notion that should terrify all founders, to not let the original culture turn into endless committees and stifled work products. I guess Google can endure this only due to the sheer cash it generates, and no i do not think that their promotion structure supports that.

Tade0 7y ago
My take is that it's a product of their situation: Google has thousands of highly talented people on board who probably have some expectations regarding professional growth, so in order to keep them they produce it. Does this mean that we have an overabundance of talent? I don't think so. I guess Google simply has enough money to keep its competitors at bay by hoarding talent. And they appear not to be alone in this as the anti-poaching agreement scandal showed.
rb808 7y ago
If you're at a corporation you should figure out which game you're playing. Are you there to "benefit the company" or get "promoted and rewarded"? Make a decision but they are different paths leading different directions.
- vonseel 7y ago
  Those are equally terrifying statements to what the user above said.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    Those statements aren't "terrifying" in the least once you consider that your relationship with the employer is a _business_ relationship. If the employer didn't want career games, they wouldn't reward them. As simple as that. If your company's official party line diverges from its reward structure, the best thing you can do for yourself is to follow the reward structure and ignore the exhortations to be doing things the company obviously doesn't give a shit about (as measured in dollars, the only reliable measure). Fundamentally your only rational goal in the situation is to maximize your expected return over the duration of your employment. At Google or FB you maximize it by launching stuff that looks good in a promo packet (with metrics and numbers, too; if you can't measure something it's worthless at promo time), and never, ever working on anything "legacy" related. Those are, at a basic level, the rules of the game. Your _rational_ choices are: play the game well, or play some other variant of the game somewhere else. Not playing the game is not an option. Playing the game poorly is irrational. Here's the authoritative guide for Google specifically: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/08/tips-for-noogler-engineers.html http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/08/tips-for-noogler-engineers..... It should serve you well at other, similar companies, with only minor tweaks.

KKKKkkkk1 7y ago

My manager assured me that my promotion was close. He felt that I was already capable of senior-level work. I just needed the right project to prove it to the promotion committee. Who hasn't been there before. I've had my manager tell me I have a "bright future" in my team, a couple of weeks before it was dissolved.

BossingAround 7y ago
Same here. I was doing an amazing work and my manager really feared me leaving the team. He'd do anything to keep me there. 2 months fast forward, the team has been canceled, and 20 people were searching for a new position.

coffeefirst 7y ago

The "metrics or it didn't happen" meme, which really means ignoring all the observable facts that aren't numbers, is very real. It's also a virus that enables smart people to make dumb decisions, and it's starting to spread outside the valley.

kelvin0 7y ago

In the end where do you get your rocket fuel? It's either a) External validation from factors out of your control, or ... b) Internal self-motivation which you have 100% linked to your own volition. Waiting for some unicorn to land in your lap with a golden certificate of promotion might be a little difficult to attain. Attacking interesting problems and helping others with your talents might be more meaningful.

acvny 7y ago

I wrongly thought google only hires smart people...

acvny 7y ago

Another victim of the 4 hour work week scam

domador 7y ago

Do the members of this dystopian-sounding promotion committee at Google actively develop software themselves (when they're not promoting or failing to promote people)? Is this a case where those who can't develop software judge those who can? Or am I reading too much into one ex-Googler's account of their own experience?

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rkagerer 7y ago

Google was great 15 years ago. Lately, most of what I observe from its products and read about the company lends the impression they've fallen victim to their size and are just another dumb, beurocratic corporation whose best innovations come from acquisitions of smaller startups (Maps, Android, Nest, etc). Good on the author for leaving and seeking a place where he's free to truly innovate.

downerending 7y ago

Title is a lot like salary--hoping for a significant improvement within a company is a fool's errand. The way to get "promoted" is to switch jobs.

amznthrowaway5 7y ago
Salary is the important part, some companies will give out the title but not the corresponding salary. It's especially bad at places like Amazon, where you will often be given deferred and reduced compensation below the bottom of the next band. It really makes no sense to chase promotion unless you are going for L7+ https://www.teamblind.com/article/How-refreshers%E2%80%9D-work-at-Amazon-pVJmPiL4 https://www.teamblind.com/article/How-refreshers%E2%80%9D-wo...

mtlynch 7y ago

Author here! Cool to see this pop up on HN again. I was wondering why I was getting so many Twitter notifications all of a sudden. As a quick update, I continue to be happy with my decision to leave Google. I enjoy working for myself, even though I haven't made much money at it yet. I'm ending 2019 with ~$7k in revenue, which isn't much, but it's a bump from the $2.2k I made in 2018. My savings are still far higher than my annual cost of living, so I'm not in any danger of running out of money in the next few years. I'll be posting another year-end summary to my blog on Feb. 1, 2020. I also write monthly retrospectives[1] about my work and weekly updates on What Got Done.[2] [1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives [2] https://whatgotdone.com/michael https://whatgotdone.com/michael

alpineidyll3 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this! Labor markets would be a nightmare without people who can reason through their own incentives like you :).

craftinator 7y ago

"In my head, the promotion committee was this omniscient and fair entity." I think this is the pure, gullible heart at the center of the word naivety. It's strange for me to read it and believe that anyone would ever write this without a strong side dish of sarcasm, and especially about Google. Google, the evil advertisement agency, Google the clobberer of GMail accounts, Google the banner of Android developers. How can anyone reach adulthood and still believe in these kinds of fairy tails?

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cosmodisk 7y ago

I work for a small company and have a fairly high level of freedom when it comes to making decisions on which projects to work on.This year I worked on projects I deemed most beneficial to the busines. At the end of the year I did receive an absolute zero on top of my base salary.So in 2020 I will only work on projects that will mostly benefit me personally but not necessarily the company.

mathewsanders 7y ago

I get the point of being able to measure success by something quantifiable, but the emphasis on individuals needing to prove the impact they’ve made strikes me as an odd setup. I’ve never worked at a FAANG but currently at a F100 in fintech, and as the product manager for our team, part of my role is to make sure our team is doing work that has quantifiable value. But for ICs on the team they’re not penalized if I make the wrong decisions and lead the team down a negative path (however part of my role in being successful is making our team goals transparent to all the team so they can help course correct if my thinking is way off).

joshuamorton 7y ago
The process has changed since Lynch left (actually it changed ~the week he left Google). For promotions up to L5, the decision is made by people within your org, who should have context on whether you were working on the right things or not. By L6+ (even as an IC), part of your job is to make decisions that are good for the organization, so having to justify them is not unreasonable.
war1025 7y ago
Reading this comment and thinking back to my memory of the article from reading it earlier today and when it has been posted in the past, I wonder if the "failed promotion" wasn't so much a matter of "not working on a shiny new project" as not making sure metrics were in place to document how the improvements to the service he was maintaining made it so it could handle more load. At some point on the ladder it's no longer enough to do good work, you need to show your work and why it matters to the company.

nojvek 7y ago

Google is worth almost a trillion dollars. Their ads shit golden billions of dollars. They have more than a 100k employees. Google is a big corp with big corp politics and they can get their cream crop of engineers, use them, abuse them and know that the next batch is waiting in line. It's kind of same with MSFT, AMZN and the others. If you really value your skills and have the confidence that you can go it alone (or at a smaller company) and make the same-ish, go do that instead. It is really hard to beat Google's FU compensation but if the smart engineers at Google banded together to do their own thing, they'd have a bigger return than adding to Larry and Sergey's billions.

nojvek 7y ago

Kudos to you. I wish you the best on the IndieHacker journey and pray that you end up making more than you would at Google, have better fulfillment in life and create more value for everyone else. We really need more people working on harder problems that create a better future for everyone rather than figuring out how to spam more clickbait ads to people. Google is great but it seems they’re quite astray of their mission of organizing the world’s knowledge and making it universally accessible. We have a long way to go to truly achieve this.