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:
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.
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 :)
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
(mtlynch.io)381 points by alexzeitler 8 November 2024 | 231 comments
Comments
https://mtlynch.io/tags/annual-review/
https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
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.
Happy to answer any questions about this post.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.