11 ms·

I quit Google to work for myself (2018)

381 points by alexzeitler 2y ago

goalonetwo 2y ago
Ah, another one of those infamous 2018 blog posts on "why I quit Google". And those blog posts absolutely always start by telling you that the engineers at Google are the smartest in the world. Oh boy are those people indoctrinated.
- neilv 2y ago
  What sounded like the usual Google-internal-self-congratulatory-echo-chamber nonsense grated on me, too, but I kept reading, and was glad I did, because the article didn't go like the usual.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  They were in 2008. It's largely just people's mental models changing slowly, as well as selection bias of people who still believe Google has world-class engineering being overrepresented among people who still work at Google.
  - SamvitJ 2y ago
    What companies would you say have world-class engineering now (2024)?
    - nostrademons 2y ago
      2017-2022 I would've said the Ethereum foundation and various DeFi startups. If you look at what Ethereum accomplished with proof of stake, it's quite remarkable. The game theory alone for proof of stake is thorny as hell, and then they built a working secure implementation and upgraded a distributed network of unaffiliated organizations who all voluntarily run nodes, all without major hitches or anyone's funds being lost. That's huge, and more impressive than anything Google's done in the last 5 years. Since 2022, I would probably say the various LLM owners: OpenAI, Anthropic, Character.AI, etc. The complexity here isn't in the basic transformer architecture though (which was invented by Google in 2017), but in the data infrastructure that hoovered up all the data on the web to train it on, as well as the fine-tuning on various use-cases. Not surprisingly, good engineers follow the money: these have also been the lucrative industries in those time periods.
davidfiala 2y ago
> Your manager doesn’t promote you? > No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports. They don’t even get a vote. > Instead, promotion decisions come from small committees of upper-level software engineers and managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion. AIUI, nowadays in 2022+ the manager gets the only vote.
- antognini 2y ago
  It used to be that you would put together your promo packet, which was sent to the promo committee. These days it is your manager who puts together your promo packet. But it is still the promo committee (which doesn't include your manager) that decides whether or not you get promoted.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - goldfish3 2y ago
    Technically yes, but "promo committee" has also changed to be your immediate org instead of being independent. Which makes your promo more dependent on your manager's influence.
- gopher2000 2y ago
  Most large tech companies require the manager to write some sort of a promo packet to be reviewed by a relevant committee. But it's not a mystery and ultimately it falls on the manager to put together a strong packet that makes it clear why the candidate should be promoted. The promotion attempt itself is the manager's vote. Beyond that it comes down to how strongly they champion for the candidate's promotion. It's the only way to ensure some consistency between promotions, IMO.
- 1024core 2y ago
  What I found neat (when I heard about it) was that one could nominate yourself for promo, without your manager's assent. This is quite rare and a neat feature.
shoo 2y ago
the same author has also published an interesting series of "annual review" blog posts summarising his progress trying to get different software businesses off the ground -- including being quite open about the finances. If you're interested in boostrapping a software business, and haven't seen them, they're well worth reading: https://mtlynch.io/tags/annual-review/ https://mtlynch.io/tags/annual-review/ https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/ https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
- Etheryte 2y ago
  A good highlight of what quitting your job can look like: > Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable. We often hear about the successes, and it is easy to be loud with success, but it's important to keep in mind the ground truth: most companies fail. It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    It's an interesting reality check that in 2023, six years into his journey as a bootstrapped founder, Tiny Pilot made $225K in profit on ~$1M on revenue. For 2021 and 2022, it made roughly a $5K profit; the rest was all losses. He quit Google because he couldn't get a promotion presumably from L4 to L5, but $225K is less than what an L4 makes. This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      At one point Musk was within $100,000 of personal and business bankruptcy when Tesla ran short of funds.
belval 2y ago
I'll play devils advocate because it's more fun but this: > The pipeline didn’t record many metrics. The ones it did have made it look like things had gotten worse. My bug discoveries caused the overall bug count to increase. The pipeline’s failures increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies instead of silently passing along bad data. I understand why the author might think this is better, but all software have bugs and a lot of data is tainted by those bugs. Was fixing the pipeline an actual priority? Was it critical? If so, how were the downstream internal customers dealing with the new exceptions? Why were they not raising a ruckus about it? Why was the author allowed to move on to a different project if there were so many bugs in that pipeline deserving of a promotion? I have met more people in life that made a big deal out of ultimately unimportant details than the opposite. Internal pipelines usually have a lower bar and the downstream consumer may not even care about 75% of features that are just there and unused. Being a senior engineering is also knowing when to leave good enough alone. > My other work didn’t look so good on paper either. 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. Is that conclusion really wrong? It's a bit uncharitable for sure but that is indeed what happened not just how it appeared to have happened. If your project was such a low priority that dropping it for several months does not flash a red light in someone's dashboard, then I am sorry but that does not seem promotion worthy. The little comic also has good examples that things that imo are not "senior" work. Writing E2E tests for a product that is already shipped is worthwhile, but unless it's something very special it's not complex enough, does not require enough design to be considered "senior work". Again I don't know the guy, maybe he did get an unfair read on his body of work, but reading the entire blog I mostly get the vibes of "I worked 2 years at Google and then wanted to be a senior so I rushed my promo packet without a cornerstone project" and the committee refusing that is just the system working as intended.
- mtlynch 2y ago
  Hi, I'm "the guy." Thanks for reading! I largely agree with you. I didn't mean to argue that the work I was doing for the first two years merited a promotion. My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing what my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that I did the work well, and then later found out that it was all worthless for career advancement. I think there are competing interests at a large organization that make this difficult. On the one hand, you have grungy work that needs to get done but only requires the skill of a junior developer (e.g., fixing bugs, writing tests). On the other hand, everyone at Google wants to advance their career by doing senior or above work, so how do you incentivize anyone to do the grungy work if it essentially means a career pause? I don't know how to solve that problem at scale. I didn't and still don't harbor resentment toward Google or my managers for how promotions worked. I think it's difficult to align incentives for an organization with 100k people, and they chose a reasonable strategy. But I felt like the things I was good at didn't align well with career advancement at Google, so that was why I left.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mtlynch 2y ago
Author here. Cool to see this pop up again! Happy to answer any questions about this post.
- emmanueloga_ 2y ago
  I saw your post about selling TinyPilot, congratulations! FWIW I agree with all your points in your 2018 article, and I wish I had left Google sooner too. I was wondering if you could share if you are working on a new project? I saw your posts about fuzzing a PDF parser but there's no context if this is for a new project, or I missed it :-). Cheers! -- 1: https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/ https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
  - mtlynch 2y ago
    Thanks! No, the fuzz testing is just for fun and probably not anything serious, although it would be fun to find a fuzzing target that has a good bug bounty program. My wife and I just had our first child, so I'm mainly focusing on family time for now and slowly easing back into work over the next few months. My main priority is to finish the book I've been promising to write for the past four years.[0] [0] https://refactoringenglish.com/ https://refactoringenglish.com/
    - emmanueloga_ 2y ago
      Very cool, I just subscribed for updates!
    - buzzert 2y ago
      Love the book title!
- ushakov 2y ago
  Happy to have met you in Berlin at the merge :)
  - mtlynch 2y ago
    Hi Mish! Great meeting you as well and cool to run into you again here!
cdrini 2y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this. The breaking projects before completion is very annoying, but also the author seems like they were only there for a promotion? I mean a promotion is nice, but it was never really explained why that was such a dealbreaker. If the only thing keeping you at your job is the prospect of a better title, that's probably a bad sign. They then made a lifetime's worth of money at Google in four years, and then used that financial stability to do something high risk which most people can't afford to do. Regardless, I'm glad they've found work that resonates with them! Hopefully they can use that financial stability to build something useful and impactful :)
- strken 2y ago
  I would be very discouraged if the people who set tech strategy at my company were the ones who had passed me on the promo ladder by not writing any tests and refusing to go to interviews or help their team fix bugs.
- asdfman123 2y ago
  Will you work for me as a software engineer? I'll pay you $20 an hour, which is vastly more than nearly all of your ancestors throughout history have made. Why is it a dealbreaker? Don't you enjoy software engineering? My point is that human psychology doesn't work that way. You compete with people around you. If they're getting promoted while you're being left behind, you're not going to be very happy about it.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Actually, that varies from person to person. I've been fine not being promoted (less time doing the self-reporting monkey-dance leaves more time to work on projects), and I make enough to satisfy my material needs and desires. And at most startups, there's nowhere to be promoted to when you're a double-digit hire. There's just the work and the chance of a cash-out (or of changing the world, whatever gets you up in the morning). Very different from the BigCo rat race.
    - taneq 2y ago
asdfman123 2y ago
This is also why I'm thinking about leaving Google. I have little to sit through meetings, try to pawn necessary work off to others, and play the game while there's a hundred small tasks that my project desperately needs me to get done. I can jump ship and make $50-100k/yr more because the next place I work will actually value my experience, even though it's technically much more useful to Google.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  I did this. Google (at least, the chain of managers I had) didn't know how to manage people like me and I wish I'd realized it sooner. I make more money now doing more effective work faster at a smaller company with a focused project, not a 100,000-person everything company.
  - eplatzek 2y ago
    would you be willing to share how much more you made and what you had been making?
- throwaway_5753 2y ago
  Where will you go that will be a 50k-100k bump over google comp?
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    Lots of places, for two reasons 1) companies usually hire ex-Googlers up-level because they're perceived as being more valuable (Google titles tend to under-represent engineer capabilities; an L4 Googler is an SSE elsewhere). 2) Google was one of the FAANGs that fixed wages via unofficial non-competes. Their compensation ladders still reflect that.
    - sickblastoise 2y ago
      Dealing with some ex googlers at my current (non tech company) now, Jesus Christ they are culture killers at regular companies.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
misstercool 2y ago
Quote the author “To continue advancing my career, I’d need projects that were even larger in scope and involved collaboration with more partner teams. But that just meant the project could fail due to even more factors outside my control, wasting months or years of my life.” I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control Very true. You do at least have more control in a startup however (at least that’s how feels).
- mtlynch 2y ago
  Author here! >I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works! After six years of running bootstrapped businesses, I actually more strongly believe the opposite. It might be true at a high-growth VC-backed startup that you need many stars to align to succeed. In bootstrapped businesses, you basically just need one thing to succeed: product market fit. If you create a product that people want, you'll probably succeed even if you make a lot of other mistakes. With TinyPilot, I didn't know anything about hardware or selling a physical product at the beginning, so I did a million things wrong. But I landed on a product people were willing to pay for, and I found a good way of getting it in front of customers, so the company worked. I did some things right, but for the first year, I mostly felt like revenue was growing on its own and I was trying to keep up. You still need luck to find product market fit because lots of reasonable-sounding ideas end up flopping, but you really just need to get lucky once rather than wait for a whole set of things to get lucky at the same time.
  - misstercool 2y ago
    Well, to be honest, I have never heard any of many FAANG turned startup founder friends told me that the want to build a life style business from the beginning. Every one wants to build a vc-backed startup with a home run idea. Many of them ended up building life style business because the markets of their ideas were actually much smaller. If you do the math, climbing the corporate ladder at FAANG might have better ROI than running life style business. Of course, money is not the only consideration in life.
joshdavham 2y ago
The author also has an update for 6 years later: https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-6/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-6/
phyzix5761 2y ago
I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers. Think about it like this. A customer is the entity that exchanges money for something they value; like a good or service. That's usually your manager. Or in the case of OP the promotion committee. (Many times it's both your manager and the promotion committee). They are the ones who directly control your money (raise, bonus, promotion, etc). With that perspective in mind it makes sense to manage your career as a business where you're doing things to increase the rate at which you deliver value to the entity which can trade money for that value. Many of the setbacks you faced are very common when trying to run your own business. The customer changes their mind, the market shifts the goal posts, you realize you're focusing on the wrong things. Like a business you have to constantly change your strategy and adapt to the customer; not the other way around. Why? Because the customer can very easily get their goods or services from someone else if you can't deliver what they want.
- ljm 2y ago
  What you are describing is contracting, self-employment, consultancy, and those are orthogonal to having a career.
  - manmal 2y ago
    Why are you adding this distinction? Having done both, I can’t say I disagree with GP. Maybe I‘ve overlooked something.
    - lazide 2y ago
      They probably prefer to believe they don’t have to do those things.
- hinkley 2y ago
  And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy. But if you’re working for a boss, they can get in the way. It’s not enough that you do what the customer wants, you have to do it my way, even if that prevents the customer from getting what they want. And if the “customer” is buying the item for someone else, that indirection can result in failure as well. Which often happens when you make custom software for businesses. Their boss wants what he wants, and that’s not what his employees want.
robertclaus 2y ago
I know this article is about Google's culture and the author is a strong developer, but it reminds me of conversations with junior developers at other companies. I've worked with a lot of junior folks that think they should be a "senior" 2 years out of their undergrad CS courses. After all, fixing some tests independently fullfills the "leads complex projects" box on the leveling chart.
softwaredoug 2y ago
> Metrics or it didn’t happen Sadly the chosen metric can be subject to politics. You’ll find stakeholders have their pet metric, claim another stakeholders metric doesn’t measure what’s important, or a new, important person thinks all the metrics are garbage and need to be changed. I’ve had successful projects hit their metrics and those have also gotten caught up in politics.
misonic 2y ago
this is inspiring as people like me are also going this process, don't know what would happen next but also no regret
rnts08 2y ago
Congratulations, OP learned about "we expect loyalty and effort from you, but you won't get any from us", which is 99.5% of all companies out there. I hope OP does well on their own and don't have to work in this kind of disingenuous places in the future.
nikolayasdf123 2y ago
its kind of cool to see this guy getting his own product up. you go friend!
nikolayasdf123 2y ago
+1. unless you own sizeable equity. you are not (your employer's) company.
kachurovskiy 2y ago
By now the author missed on approx. 2 million dollars of income.
- bitfilped 2y ago
  There are more important things in life than money.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Said on a VC forum?
    - bitfilped 2y ago
      Yes, one would think if this community actually valued VC activities they would be praising the author for forging his own way and starting companies rather than tearing him down for choosing not to take the easy way and suckling on googles teets.
      - lazide 2y ago
        Huh? What does that have to do with my comment?
thdhhghgbhy 2y ago
It's easy to get cynical about the review process. But just, for crying out loud, put yourself in the organisation's shoes. Tech is full of BS, and full of bullshitters. With the size of this organisation they need some consistent metrics, however not great these are, to assess and gauge performance versus other employees. You can't have the decision to promote in your manager's hands exclusively, they don't have the visibility of the organisation. The author also sounds like he went 'off books' a bit helping out on things they were interested in, rather than what was on jira boards or whatever their sponsor cared about. You'll get punished for this in a lot of places, it's just how it is. Management need to see what you are doing.
- f1shy 2y ago
  Let me try a short reply: if the manager needs to see what somebody is doing, he hast to look at it. Not look KPIs and metrics. KPI and easy metrics are for lazy bad managers.
  - thdhhghgbhy 2y ago
    I already mentioned above, direct managers don't have organisational visibility and can't decide among the hundreds who should be promoted and who shouldn't. The promotion request needs to go some central forum with objective criteria. This is not to say your manager can't represent you vigorously to this forum.
corentin88 2y ago
That’s the guy who created TinyPilot. Since then he wrote yearly articles about it’s IndieHacker journey. Some of them have been shared on HN. Worth reading!
solatic 2y ago
The conclusion I took away from this piece is just how heartless it is to depend on a promotion committee. I know Google put them in place because they wanted an Engineering-driven culture where people could do great Engineering work and still be recognized, even if their manager didn't. But it sure doesn't sound like these promotion committees are recognizing great Engineering work, especially when that work falls under difficult-to-quantify cultural improvements. Life is better when you find counterparts (customers, leaders, etc.) who appreciate what you bring to the table and can demonstrate that appreciation via promotion decisions. Faceless committees relying on packets fundamentally, by design, cannot develop the relationship that allows for genuine appreciation to form. If you're in a company whose leadership doesn't appreciate you, then why are you forcing yourself to stay? Go find somewhere that does appreciate you. If Google doesn't learn that it's simply not possible to avoid the loss of good talent to bad management or process, then that's their loss. Take advantage of the good-enough performance reviews and take your time planning your exit. Life is too short to work in an organization that actively dissuades forming genuine, supportive, professional working relationships with colleagues.
- adonovan 2y ago
  Exactly. There are non-monetary rewards to doing good work: esprit de corps from a team of coworkers you like and respect, satisfaction and pride in your craft, positive responses from users, and so on. For many, promotion is like winning a pie-eating contest only to find that the prize is: more pies. It’s fine to recognize that your interests and your employer’s are only loosely aligned and to decline to play the game the way they want you to.
hugodan 2y ago
“I quit myself to work for Google” is the most common pattern but not as much spoken about. We can see the side effects of it in posts like these and countless others that come with forced contraptions as ways to justify having quit Google.
consf 2y ago
[dead]
DeathArrow 2y ago
If you are that good that Google wants to hire you, it means you don't need Google, you can do fine on your own or working somewhere else.
jonathan_landy 2y ago
When I worked as a post doc, I wasn’t paid much but I got a direct return on extra work: another paper etc. when I got my first job as a data scientist, I was paid much more but there was seemingly little response to extra work. It was distressing. But later I learned that making a good impression on people would pay off long term, through recommendations for new jobs etc.
manoDev 2y ago
Working with the promise of a future promotion is, effectively, giving credit to your employer. "In every country in which the capitalist mode of production reigns, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power before it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, as for example, the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist." - Karl Marx. Capital Volume One, Chapter Six: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power.
azangru 2y ago
It was a rather depressing read. Sad that an organization functions in a way that doesn't promote collaboration and creates all sorts of perverse incentives. Sad that employees get carelessly tossed from one project to another without any consideration for what they want for themselves. Sad that "being surrounded by the best engineers in the world, using the most advanced development tools in the world, and eating the free-est food in the world" (and probably being paid quite handsomely as well) is not enough for happiness, unless there is also promotion involved.
- coding123 2y ago
  We definitely do things wrong in this world.
grisBeik 2y ago
Screw promotion. I just want a job that provides intrinsic motivation (meaningful, inspiring work; Flow), and pays enough for me to make ends meet and to save reasonably. There are three problems: - many companies pay like crap, so if (God forbid) you want to save some money, a promotion is required (the only way to increase benefits is to get promoted); - meaningful work is a unicorn in its own right; - most annoyingly, a worker that is in their comfort zone and has been delivering consistently well in their role, will inevitably be forced to "grow" and "develop their career", or will be called a "straggler", at an American corporation. Consistent excellence at a certain level is not "stagnation", it may just as well be deliberate stability. Infinite growth (or at least, infinite perturbation), in the personal context, is an unfathomable mania of American corporations.
jart 2y ago
That TinyPilot is really cool. It deserves to take off. I'm surprised he's still bootstrapping at this point, because with a product like that, there's a lot more to gain than there is to lose by taking angel and VC money.
- mtlynch 2y ago
  Thanks, Justine! I'm a big fan of your work. I actually sold the company earlier this year.[0] I never looked into VC money primarily because I like the independence of being the sole owner, though I agree there would have been a lot of advantages. [0] https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/ https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
maslo0 2y ago
Funny enough, optimizing for promotion is not only a common strategy among individual contributors but is also encourage by mgmt. During my single year at Google I collaborated with a guy from a different team. His strategy was to do most of the meaningful (measureable) work on his own. Fair enough, I don't care. But he didn't predict that the project can be reassign. At that was exactly what happened. When I ask product manager why, he said that this is normal practice, credits should go to the product owning team. When discussed such situations with other googlers two separate views emerge: either you're new and you exploit the system as is or "It's not the same google any more". Funny fact that we still think about that old google when it comes to culture, work, ppl, etc.

381 points by alexzeitler 2y ago

Ah, another one of those infamous 2018 blog posts on "why I quit Google". And those blog posts absolutely always start by telling you that the engineers at Google are the smartest in the world. Oh boy are those people indoctrinated.

neilv 2y ago
What sounded like the usual Google-internal-self-congratulatory-echo-chamber nonsense grated on me, too, but I kept reading, and was glad I did, because the article didn't go like the usual.
nostrademons 2y ago
They were in 2008. It's largely just people's mental models changing slowly, as well as selection bias of people who still believe Google has world-class engineering being overrepresented among people who still work at Google.
- SamvitJ 2y ago
  What companies would you say have world-class engineering now (2024)?
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    2017-2022 I would've said the Ethereum foundation and various DeFi startups. If you look at what Ethereum accomplished with proof of stake, it's quite remarkable. The game theory alone for proof of stake is thorny as hell, and then they built a working secure implementation and upgraded a distributed network of unaffiliated organizations who all voluntarily run nodes, all without major hitches or anyone's funds being lost. That's huge, and more impressive than anything Google's done in the last 5 years. Since 2022, I would probably say the various LLM owners: OpenAI, Anthropic, Character.AI, etc. The complexity here isn't in the basic transformer architecture though (which was invented by Google in 2017), but in the data infrastructure that hoovered up all the data on the web to train it on, as well as the fine-tuning on various use-cases. Not surprisingly, good engineers follow the money: these have also been the lucrative industries in those time periods.

davidfiala 2y ago

> Your manager doesn’t promote you? > No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports. They don’t even get a vote. > Instead, promotion decisions come from small committees of upper-level software engineers and managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion. AIUI, nowadays in 2022+ the manager gets the only vote.

antognini 2y ago
It used to be that you would put together your promo packet, which was sent to the promo committee. These days it is your manager who puts together your promo packet. But it is still the promo committee (which doesn't include your manager) that decides whether or not you get promoted.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- goldfish3 2y ago
  Technically yes, but "promo committee" has also changed to be your immediate org instead of being independent. Which makes your promo more dependent on your manager's influence.
gopher2000 2y ago
Most large tech companies require the manager to write some sort of a promo packet to be reviewed by a relevant committee. But it's not a mystery and ultimately it falls on the manager to put together a strong packet that makes it clear why the candidate should be promoted. The promotion attempt itself is the manager's vote. Beyond that it comes down to how strongly they champion for the candidate's promotion. It's the only way to ensure some consistency between promotions, IMO.
1024core 2y ago
What I found neat (when I heard about it) was that one could nominate yourself for promo, without your manager's assent. This is quite rare and a neat feature.

shoo 2y ago

the same author has also published an interesting series of "annual review" blog posts summarising his progress trying to get different software businesses off the ground -- including being quite open about the finances. If you're interested in boostrapping a software business, and haven't seen them, they're well worth reading: https://mtlynch.io/tags/annual-review/ https://mtlynch.io/tags/annual-review/ https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/ https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/

Etheryte 2y ago
A good highlight of what quitting your job can look like: > Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable. We often hear about the successes, and it is easy to be loud with success, but it's important to keep in mind the ground truth: most companies fail. It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  It's an interesting reality check that in 2023, six years into his journey as a bootstrapped founder, Tiny Pilot made $225K in profit on ~$1M on revenue. For 2021 and 2022, it made roughly a $5K profit; the rest was all losses. He quit Google because he couldn't get a promotion presumably from L4 to L5, but $225K is less than what an L4 makes. This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    At one point Musk was within $100,000 of personal and business bankruptcy when Tesla ran short of funds.

belval 2y ago

I'll play devils advocate because it's more fun but this: > The pipeline didn’t record many metrics. The ones it did have made it look like things had gotten worse. My bug discoveries caused the overall bug count to increase. The pipeline’s failures increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies instead of silently passing along bad data. I understand why the author might think this is better, but all software have bugs and a lot of data is tainted by those bugs. Was fixing the pipeline an actual priority? Was it critical? If so, how were the downstream internal customers dealing with the new exceptions? Why were they not raising a ruckus about it? Why was the author allowed to move on to a different project if there were so many bugs in that pipeline deserving of a promotion? I have met more people in life that made a big deal out of ultimately unimportant details than the opposite. Internal pipelines usually have a lower bar and the downstream consumer may not even care about 75% of features that are just there and unused. Being a senior engineering is also knowing when to leave good enough alone. > My other work didn’t look so good on paper either. 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. Is that conclusion really wrong? It's a bit uncharitable for sure but that is indeed what happened not just how it appeared to have happened. If your project was such a low priority that dropping it for several months does not flash a red light in someone's dashboard, then I am sorry but that does not seem promotion worthy. The little comic also has good examples that things that imo are not "senior" work. Writing E2E tests for a product that is already shipped is worthwhile, but unless it's something very special it's not complex enough, does not require enough design to be considered "senior work". Again I don't know the guy, maybe he did get an unfair read on his body of work, but reading the entire blog I mostly get the vibes of "I worked 2 years at Google and then wanted to be a senior so I rushed my promo packet without a cornerstone project" and the committee refusing that is just the system working as intended.

mtlynch 2y ago
Hi, I'm "the guy." Thanks for reading! I largely agree with you. I didn't mean to argue that the work I was doing for the first two years merited a promotion. My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing what my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that I did the work well, and then later found out that it was all worthless for career advancement. I think there are competing interests at a large organization that make this difficult. On the one hand, you have grungy work that needs to get done but only requires the skill of a junior developer (e.g., fixing bugs, writing tests). On the other hand, everyone at Google wants to advance their career by doing senior or above work, so how do you incentivize anyone to do the grungy work if it essentially means a career pause? I don't know how to solve that problem at scale. I didn't and still don't harbor resentment toward Google or my managers for how promotions worked. I think it's difficult to align incentives for an organization with 100k people, and they chose a reasonable strategy. But I felt like the things I was good at didn't align well with career advancement at Google, so that was why I left.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mtlynch 2y ago

Author here. Cool to see this pop up again! Happy to answer any questions about this post.

emmanueloga_ 2y ago
I saw your post about selling TinyPilot, congratulations! FWIW I agree with all your points in your 2018 article, and I wish I had left Google sooner too. I was wondering if you could share if you are working on a new project? I saw your posts about fuzzing a PDF parser but there's no context if this is for a new project, or I missed it :-). Cheers! -- 1: https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/ https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
- mtlynch 2y ago
  Thanks! No, the fuzz testing is just for fun and probably not anything serious, although it would be fun to find a fuzzing target that has a good bug bounty program. My wife and I just had our first child, so I'm mainly focusing on family time for now and slowly easing back into work over the next few months. My main priority is to finish the book I've been promising to write for the past four years.[0] [0] https://refactoringenglish.com/ https://refactoringenglish.com/
  - emmanueloga_ 2y ago
    Very cool, I just subscribed for updates!
  - buzzert 2y ago
    Love the book title!
ushakov 2y ago
Happy to have met you in Berlin at the merge :)
- mtlynch 2y ago
  Hi Mish! Great meeting you as well and cool to run into you again here!

cdrini 2y ago

I'm not sure I agree with this. The breaking projects before completion is very annoying, but also the author seems like they were only there for a promotion? I mean a promotion is nice, but it was never really explained why that was such a dealbreaker. If the only thing keeping you at your job is the prospect of a better title, that's probably a bad sign. They then made a lifetime's worth of money at Google in four years, and then used that financial stability to do something high risk which most people can't afford to do. Regardless, I'm glad they've found work that resonates with them! Hopefully they can use that financial stability to build something useful and impactful :)

strken 2y ago
I would be very discouraged if the people who set tech strategy at my company were the ones who had passed me on the promo ladder by not writing any tests and refusing to go to interviews or help their team fix bugs.
asdfman123 2y ago
Will you work for me as a software engineer? I'll pay you $20 an hour, which is vastly more than nearly all of your ancestors throughout history have made. Why is it a dealbreaker? Don't you enjoy software engineering? My point is that human psychology doesn't work that way. You compete with people around you. If they're getting promoted while you're being left behind, you're not going to be very happy about it.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Actually, that varies from person to person. I've been fine not being promoted (less time doing the self-reporting monkey-dance leaves more time to work on projects), and I make enough to satisfy my material needs and desires. And at most startups, there's nowhere to be promoted to when you're a double-digit hire. There's just the work and the chance of a cash-out (or of changing the world, whatever gets you up in the morning). Very different from the BigCo rat race.
  - taneq 2y ago

asdfman123 2y ago

This is also why I'm thinking about leaving Google. I have little to sit through meetings, try to pawn necessary work off to others, and play the game while there's a hundred small tasks that my project desperately needs me to get done. I can jump ship and make $50-100k/yr more because the next place I work will actually value my experience, even though it's technically much more useful to Google.

shadowgovt 2y ago
I did this. Google (at least, the chain of managers I had) didn't know how to manage people like me and I wish I'd realized it sooner. I make more money now doing more effective work faster at a smaller company with a focused project, not a 100,000-person everything company.
- eplatzek 2y ago
  would you be willing to share how much more you made and what you had been making?
throwaway_5753 2y ago
Where will you go that will be a 50k-100k bump over google comp?
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Lots of places, for two reasons 1) companies usually hire ex-Googlers up-level because they're perceived as being more valuable (Google titles tend to under-represent engineer capabilities; an L4 Googler is an SSE elsewhere). 2) Google was one of the FAANGs that fixed wages via unofficial non-competes. Their compensation ladders still reflect that.
  - sickblastoise 2y ago
    Dealing with some ex googlers at my current (non tech company) now, Jesus Christ they are culture killers at regular companies.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

misstercool 2y ago

Quote the author “To continue advancing my career, I’d need projects that were even larger in scope and involved collaboration with more partner teams. But that just meant the project could fail due to even more factors outside my control, wasting months or years of my life.” I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!

joshdavham 2y ago
> the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control Very true. You do at least have more control in a startup however (at least that’s how feels).
mtlynch 2y ago
Author here! >I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works! After six years of running bootstrapped businesses, I actually more strongly believe the opposite. It might be true at a high-growth VC-backed startup that you need many stars to align to succeed. In bootstrapped businesses, you basically just need one thing to succeed: product market fit. If you create a product that people want, you'll probably succeed even if you make a lot of other mistakes. With TinyPilot, I didn't know anything about hardware or selling a physical product at the beginning, so I did a million things wrong. But I landed on a product people were willing to pay for, and I found a good way of getting it in front of customers, so the company worked. I did some things right, but for the first year, I mostly felt like revenue was growing on its own and I was trying to keep up. You still need luck to find product market fit because lots of reasonable-sounding ideas end up flopping, but you really just need to get lucky once rather than wait for a whole set of things to get lucky at the same time.
- misstercool 2y ago
  Well, to be honest, I have never heard any of many FAANG turned startup founder friends told me that the want to build a life style business from the beginning. Every one wants to build a vc-backed startup with a home run idea. Many of them ended up building life style business because the markets of their ideas were actually much smaller. If you do the math, climbing the corporate ladder at FAANG might have better ROI than running life style business. Of course, money is not the only consideration in life.

joshdavham 2y ago

The author also has an update for 6 years later: https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-6/ https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-6/

phyzix5761 2y ago

I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers. Think about it like this. A customer is the entity that exchanges money for something they value; like a good or service. That's usually your manager. Or in the case of OP the promotion committee. (Many times it's both your manager and the promotion committee). They are the ones who directly control your money (raise, bonus, promotion, etc). With that perspective in mind it makes sense to manage your career as a business where you're doing things to increase the rate at which you deliver value to the entity which can trade money for that value. Many of the setbacks you faced are very common when trying to run your own business. The customer changes their mind, the market shifts the goal posts, you realize you're focusing on the wrong things. Like a business you have to constantly change your strategy and adapt to the customer; not the other way around. Why? Because the customer can very easily get their goods or services from someone else if you can't deliver what they want.

ljm 2y ago
What you are describing is contracting, self-employment, consultancy, and those are orthogonal to having a career.
- manmal 2y ago
  Why are you adding this distinction? Having done both, I can’t say I disagree with GP. Maybe I‘ve overlooked something.
  - lazide 2y ago
    They probably prefer to believe they don’t have to do those things.
hinkley 2y ago
And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy. But if you’re working for a boss, they can get in the way. It’s not enough that you do what the customer wants, you have to do it my way, even if that prevents the customer from getting what they want. And if the “customer” is buying the item for someone else, that indirection can result in failure as well. Which often happens when you make custom software for businesses. Their boss wants what he wants, and that’s not what his employees want.

robertclaus 2y ago

I know this article is about Google's culture and the author is a strong developer, but it reminds me of conversations with junior developers at other companies. I've worked with a lot of junior folks that think they should be a "senior" 2 years out of their undergrad CS courses. After all, fixing some tests independently fullfills the "leads complex projects" box on the leveling chart.

softwaredoug 2y ago

> Metrics or it didn’t happen Sadly the chosen metric can be subject to politics. You’ll find stakeholders have their pet metric, claim another stakeholders metric doesn’t measure what’s important, or a new, important person thinks all the metrics are garbage and need to be changed. I’ve had successful projects hit their metrics and those have also gotten caught up in politics.

misonic 2y ago

this is inspiring as people like me are also going this process, don't know what would happen next but also no regret

rnts08 2y ago

Congratulations, OP learned about "we expect loyalty and effort from you, but you won't get any from us", which is 99.5% of all companies out there. I hope OP does well on their own and don't have to work in this kind of disingenuous places in the future.

nikolayasdf123 2y ago

its kind of cool to see this guy getting his own product up. you go friend!

nikolayasdf123 2y ago

+1. unless you own sizeable equity. you are not (your employer's) company.

kachurovskiy 2y ago

By now the author missed on approx. 2 million dollars of income.

bitfilped 2y ago
There are more important things in life than money.
- lazide 2y ago
  Said on a VC forum?
  - bitfilped 2y ago
    Yes, one would think if this community actually valued VC activities they would be praising the author for forging his own way and starting companies rather than tearing him down for choosing not to take the easy way and suckling on googles teets.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Huh? What does that have to do with my comment?

thdhhghgbhy 2y ago

It's easy to get cynical about the review process. But just, for crying out loud, put yourself in the organisation's shoes. Tech is full of BS, and full of bullshitters. With the size of this organisation they need some consistent metrics, however not great these are, to assess and gauge performance versus other employees. You can't have the decision to promote in your manager's hands exclusively, they don't have the visibility of the organisation. The author also sounds like he went 'off books' a bit helping out on things they were interested in, rather than what was on jira boards or whatever their sponsor cared about. You'll get punished for this in a lot of places, it's just how it is. Management need to see what you are doing.

f1shy 2y ago
Let me try a short reply: if the manager needs to see what somebody is doing, he hast to look at it. Not look KPIs and metrics. KPI and easy metrics are for lazy bad managers.
- thdhhghgbhy 2y ago
  I already mentioned above, direct managers don't have organisational visibility and can't decide among the hundreds who should be promoted and who shouldn't. The promotion request needs to go some central forum with objective criteria. This is not to say your manager can't represent you vigorously to this forum.

corentin88 2y ago

That’s the guy who created TinyPilot. Since then he wrote yearly articles about it’s IndieHacker journey. Some of them have been shared on HN. Worth reading!

solatic 2y ago

The conclusion I took away from this piece is just how heartless it is to depend on a promotion committee. I know Google put them in place because they wanted an Engineering-driven culture where people could do great Engineering work and still be recognized, even if their manager didn't. But it sure doesn't sound like these promotion committees are recognizing great Engineering work, especially when that work falls under difficult-to-quantify cultural improvements. Life is better when you find counterparts (customers, leaders, etc.) who appreciate what you bring to the table and can demonstrate that appreciation via promotion decisions. Faceless committees relying on packets fundamentally, by design, cannot develop the relationship that allows for genuine appreciation to form. If you're in a company whose leadership doesn't appreciate you, then why are you forcing yourself to stay? Go find somewhere that does appreciate you. If Google doesn't learn that it's simply not possible to avoid the loss of good talent to bad management or process, then that's their loss. Take advantage of the good-enough performance reviews and take your time planning your exit. Life is too short to work in an organization that actively dissuades forming genuine, supportive, professional working relationships with colleagues.

adonovan 2y ago
Exactly. There are non-monetary rewards to doing good work: esprit de corps from a team of coworkers you like and respect, satisfaction and pride in your craft, positive responses from users, and so on. For many, promotion is like winning a pie-eating contest only to find that the prize is: more pies. It’s fine to recognize that your interests and your employer’s are only loosely aligned and to decline to play the game the way they want you to.

hugodan 2y ago

“I quit myself to work for Google” is the most common pattern but not as much spoken about. We can see the side effects of it in posts like these and countless others that come with forced contraptions as ways to justify having quit Google.

consf 2y ago

[dead]

DeathArrow 2y ago

If you are that good that Google wants to hire you, it means you don't need Google, you can do fine on your own or working somewhere else.

jonathan_landy 2y ago

When I worked as a post doc, I wasn’t paid much but I got a direct return on extra work: another paper etc. when I got my first job as a data scientist, I was paid much more but there was seemingly little response to extra work. It was distressing. But later I learned that making a good impression on people would pay off long term, through recommendations for new jobs etc.

manoDev 2y ago

Working with the promise of a future promotion is, effectively, giving credit to your employer. "In every country in which the capitalist mode of production reigns, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power before it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, as for example, the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist." - Karl Marx. Capital Volume One, Chapter Six: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power.

azangru 2y ago

It was a rather depressing read. Sad that an organization functions in a way that doesn't promote collaboration and creates all sorts of perverse incentives. Sad that employees get carelessly tossed from one project to another without any consideration for what they want for themselves. Sad that "being surrounded by the best engineers in the world, using the most advanced development tools in the world, and eating the free-est food in the world" (and probably being paid quite handsomely as well) is not enough for happiness, unless there is also promotion involved.

coding123 2y ago
We definitely do things wrong in this world.

grisBeik 2y ago

Screw promotion. I just want a job that provides intrinsic motivation (meaningful, inspiring work; Flow), and pays enough for me to make ends meet and to save reasonably. There are three problems: - many companies pay like crap, so if (God forbid) you want to save some money, a promotion is required (the only way to increase benefits is to get promoted); - meaningful work is a unicorn in its own right; - most annoyingly, a worker that is in their comfort zone and has been delivering consistently well in their role, will inevitably be forced to "grow" and "develop their career", or will be called a "straggler", at an American corporation. Consistent excellence at a certain level is not "stagnation", it may just as well be deliberate stability. Infinite growth (or at least, infinite perturbation), in the personal context, is an unfathomable mania of American corporations.

jart 2y ago

That TinyPilot is really cool. It deserves to take off. I'm surprised he's still bootstrapping at this point, because with a product like that, there's a lot more to gain than there is to lose by taking angel and VC money.

mtlynch 2y ago
Thanks, Justine! I'm a big fan of your work. I actually sold the company earlier this year.[0] I never looked into VC money primarily because I like the independence of being the sole owner, though I agree there would have been a lot of advantages. [0] https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/ https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/

maslo0 2y ago

Funny enough, optimizing for promotion is not only a common strategy among individual contributors but is also encourage by mgmt. During my single year at Google I collaborated with a guy from a different team. His strategy was to do most of the meaningful (measureable) work on his own. Fair enough, I don't care. But he didn't predict that the project can be reassign. At that was exactly what happened. When I ask product manager why, he said that this is normal practice, credits should go to the product owning team. When discussed such situations with other googlers two separate views emerge: either you're new and you exploit the system as is or "It's not the same google any more". Funny fact that we still think about that old google when it comes to culture, work, ppl, etc.