
Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself - mtlynch
https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/
======
dahart
> I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures,
> but there were no metrics that tracked developer time.

For several jobs in a row, I've felt that helping others on a team is
undervalued and under-recorded. I've been planning to implement the "assist"
metric, similar to basketball, on my own team for a while.

The idea would be something along the lines of everyone gets a set of assist
points they must distribute to people who help them the most.

While I don't love the idea of gamifying it, all the places I've ever worked
have had too strong of a reverse incentive towards individual achievement,
especially when it comes to promotion, and not nearly enough support for
teamwork in specific and measurable ways.

Anybody have experience with teamwork metrics like this, or others that worked
or didn't work?

~~~
dep_b
I worked in a remote team once helping a company in Seattle (that perhaps had
a bit of a jock culture problem). I could be stuck for days because following
the README in a repo just wasn't enough to get the project to compile and run.
Every standup I was telling "I'm completely blocked for the last two days
because I cannot run the repo, so I cannot run any tests and at the moment I'm
doing absolutely nothing.". To be sure to repeat a message like that every
four hours in channels like Slack.

Managers read it, my teammates in Seattle read it. Nobody ever helped us
(because you know pair programming is so much more efficient if you can have
two programmers blocked when you could just have one staring out of the window
and typing "help" to invisible people). If at all I would be unblocked after a
few days usually the problems was some kind of unguessable piece of
configuration that should have been part of the README and/or code, a problem
completely unsolvable without knowing what to do. Only then I could continue
doing a minor change like updating a CSS file for the next Safari or IE quirk,
usually just 5 minutes of work.

Apparently helping remote teammates to get unstuck in their work just wasn't
an interesting performance metric.

Until this day I still can't believe that everybody was just throwing tens of
thousands of dollars of work out the window because helping stuck teammates
wasn't counting towards some kind of bonus.

~~~
Vinnl
On the one hand it is indeed disappointing that nobody would help you with
this. On the other hand, there's a more pro-active role you could have played
yourself in this as well. "When everybody is responsible, nobody is" \- what
often helps is specifically asking people, by name, to sit down with you for a
bit and help you get through it.

In fact, there are many social group situations in which asking specific
people is far more effective than asking questions "to the group".

~~~
dgreensp
If a manager of some kind were to notice the Slack messages and ping someone
specific to help, that would be a perfect example of the kind of management
that is so sorely lacking at so many companies. Many employees are too burned,
or proud, to even put out an SOS... so a cry for help is actually a gift to
management. If only it were someone’s job to think for a few minutes each day
about each employee and notice if there is some small action that would help
them.

Nah, let’s just alternate between micromanaging and being totally absent; fret
about lack of productivity or lack of progress; maybe institute a daily stand-
up.

~~~
MadBohr
Why not both? I cringed when I read OP's comment where he spammed "I'm
completely blocked" in the chat without asking for specifics. What a complete
lack of individual ownership. Even the best manager can't help somebody who is
unwilling to help themselves.

Source: am a manager.

~~~
jey
One of your jobs as a manager is to debug these people issues, right? So when
you get a "bug report" like "I'm stuck", you should investigate the bug and
look for a solution, which might be something like "Hey Bob, Jim is having
trouble getting the Frobnicator running on his machine. Can you please give
him a hand with this later today? Thanks". (This assumes that Jim's SOS was
issued in the first half of the day; want to make sure the issue gets resolved
promptly while also not interrupting Bob's own productivity/flow.)

~~~
MadBohr
Yes that's true, which is why I said "why not both?" The manager should do
more, but so should the employee. Sitting there and saying "I'm blocked, woe
is me" is garbage compared to saying "I'm blocked. Can you please help me
Mr/Ms XYZ?"

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
> _What a complete lack of individual ownership. Even the best manager can 't
> help somebody who is unwilling to help themselves._

> _Source: am a manager._

> _I 'm blocked, woe is me" is garbage_

As a manager, are you prepared to put your real name to these comments?

~~~
mrep
> As a manager, are you prepared to put your real name to these comments?

This is an anonymous public forum with a massive audience and great content.
Let's keep it civil and not target individuals. Please don't try and start
witch hunts to ruin someone's career just because you do not agree with him.

------
eldavido
To author: you lost the political game.

I busted my ass at a startup for years and also lost the political game. So
I'm speaking from experience here.

You can either get all mad and worked up and pissed off about it, and waste
years of your career (as I did) being pissed off, stubborn, and refusing to
change. Or figure out how to play. I'd like to think there are places with
better politics but I think it's pretty endemic of large organizations. I'd
love to be proven wrong.

The thing is, "working for yourself" is so flawed in so many ways. In the
first place, nobody "works for themself". You might work for customers, or
clients, or whatever, but not "yourself". Second, you're a lot better off
working at a good company -- MUCH better off -- unless you have a pretty damn
concrete idea of what you're doing. In addition to the income, the big company
will provide better networking, more credibility for _anything_ you do
subsequently (whether a new job, fundraising, hiring--ANYTHING), it's an all-
around better gig.

I'm just trying to save you a lot of wasted years and time here. Take it or
leave it.

~~~
popcat
As a junior engineer, what the best way to learn about and master the
political game? I feel like it all goes way over my head. Does anyone have any
recommended reading?

~~~
alexc05
I think the author said it in the article: Optimize for promotion. Work from
day 1 to game the metrics. If it helps your metrics, do it, if it doesn't
approach with caution.

If you start that from day 1 you'd be 2 years ahead of the author.

Honestly, it sounds like a _really_ shitty way to live. I personally prefer
doing great work and having faith that it will work out.

It has, a lot slower than that, but I'm proud of the work I've done and enjoy
my work daily.

~~~
jcheng
There's another position that's similar but less gross, which is to have some
humility about what you think is important vs. what work your
manager/manager's manager think is important. Try to work on what they think
is important not (just) because of a cynical desire to game the system and get
ahead, but because they have probably more experience and (often a _lot_ more)
context than you do.

Of course, this only works if you have managers you feel like you can trust
and respect in the first place.

~~~
xkjkls
That's definitely true too. There's a lot of developers who spend way more
time beautifying code than they actually do driving the business. While
sometimes great code leads to great business results, that's not a law of
nature. The inverse and converse can certainly be true too.

~~~
tehlike
Spot on. Most organizations spend time on how to do thinks than actually doing
it. What i found out was to get some data as soon as possible, even if it has
large caveats. That is more important than getting it right, becaude you wont.

------
martinraag
The article really resonated with me, as it's eerily similar to my own
experience at Microsoft a couple of years back. Constant reorgs, resulting in
projects being cancelled, resulting in lack of motivation, as months of your
hard work are thrown out due to unclear decisions by the management.

I too was hoping for a senior level promotion. The last project I worked on, I
was the only non-senior level developer in a team of 5. I went out of my way
to ensure we released a well designed, built and tested system on time. At
times I felt like I was committing more to the project than any of my more
senior comrades. Come release time, I even saw one of the design decisions I
had insisted on save us from down-time. All of this I was sure would lead me
to the desired promotion.

Come performance review time, I was rated at the top performance tier, as I
had the past couple of years. Unfortunately however, I was informed not enough
time had passed since my last level increase, but I was sure to get it if I
kept it up for another 1-2 years.

It's hard to describe the feeling of defeat I felt at that point. I resigned
and left within the next few months. What I found most off putting, was when
meeting my skip-manager (your managers manager) for the first time during my
exit interview, all doors for a senior level promotion were suddenly open, to
incentivise me to stay. Doesn't feel great when negotiations with your
employer are comparable to those had with your cable provider.

~~~
cableshaft
> What I found most off putting, was when meeting my skip-manager (your
> managers manager) for the first time during my exit interview, all doors for
> a senior level promotion were suddenly open, to incentivise me to stay.
> Doesn't feel great when negotiations with your employer are comparable to
> those had with your cable provider.

Wow, that's one hell of a way to look at things. Thanks for that perspective.

~~~
colordrops
Both are businesses, and most successful businesses are sociopathic. That
includes game theory both with customers and internal resources. You are a
"human resource", not a friend.

~~~
overeater
This is where I think academia has got it right. When you do something, you
get full credit on it -- your name on the paper, your face on the book and
department website, you're the one giving the presentation, you're the one who
gets the benefits if it's commercialized (after the university takes its cut).
Loyalty also is valued (or a less negative word to use is being a team
player), as people write recommendation letters for each other and their
reputation is at stake when they do anything.

------
phamilton
Writing documentation and fixing bugs is in fact not the bar for a senior
software engineer. I don't disagree with the promotion committee on that
front.

IIRC, Senior Software Engineer is a terminal level. You aren't expected to
advance any more once you reach that level. Some do, but you can stay a Senior
Engineer for the rest of your career and that's fine.

So certainly "can fix bugs and write docs and tests" isn't sufficient for that
promotion. A junior engineer and a manager who is at least partially paying
attention can get that done.

I also don't really disagree with the evaluation that 6 months of Senior level
work isn't enough for a promotion, especially if nothing actually shipped.

I get that constant reorgs are frustrating. That alone is enough of a reason
to not work at Google or another BigCo. That's the real problem here.

~~~
otterley
At many organizations, Senior Engineer is not the end of the IC track, not
even close. For example:

... > Senior Engr. > Staff Engr. > Sr. Staff Engr. > Principal Engr. > Sr.
Principal Engr. > Distinguished Engr.

~~~
lbrandy
"terminal level", in the sense being used by the OP, doesn't mean "end of the
IC track". It means a level that you can be at "forever". Often times the
junior engineering levels have some expectations around eventually being
promoted (ie, "up or out").

~~~
wan23
IIRC, at Google the levels below Senior Engineer require progress toward a
higher level as a job requirement. So that even if you're performing well at
that level, if you aren't showing progress it gets counted against you in perf
increasingly until eventually you are at risk of being pushed out.

------
kristianc
This covers a lot of the same ground as Brendan Reid's "Stealing the Corner
Office"[1], which gives a playbook for helping stuff like this work in your
favour, rather than against you.

You fit the profile of what Reid calls the "Smart but Stationary Manager" \- a
guy who is a lot smarter than a lot of the people who do get promoted, but who
doesn't optimize for the right factors. Reid's point is that a lot of these
guys get habitually overlooked as they optimize for the success of the
company, rather than themselves, and assume they will be evaluated on their
work alone.

The idea that when you go to work, you are there first and foremost to work on
your own career development (rather than the goals of the company) crops up
again and again. Even in failing companies, you see people make spectactular
career gains.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stealing-Corner-Office-
Strategies-B...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stealing-Corner-Office-Strategies-
Business/dp/1601633203)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I guess my question is: Can you get job satisfaction from promotion-focused
work? I'm proud of what _I 've done_. When I make someone else's life easier,
that makes me feel good/satisfied with my work. I can't fathom satisfaction
from impressing a promotion committee and tacking on a bigger title.

~~~
mseebach
The general idea is that the things that would impress a promotion committee
are things that you have done, that are good for the company.

That, of course, is not the truth everywhere, but anecdotally it's a lot truer
than most people complaining about other people sucking up thinks it is.

~~~
gordon_freeman
How come fixing bugs to make data pipeline more robust and data more accurate
does not fall under "things that are good for the company"?

~~~
mseebach
The point is that it's on you to articulate the value of what you're doing.
Some activities are "batteries included" when it comes to metrics, but a great
many aren't.

If fixing bugs in the data pipeline is indeed valuable to the company, you can
explain to the promotion panel how (after all, you convinced yourself).

------
lrem
I'm also a Googler. Upon joining I was also given the keys to an ancient data
pipeline, due a redesign for at least five years at that time. The person
handing me the keys left almost immediately. My task was also keeping the
thing adrift and nursing it back to health, whatever it takes. I _did_ get
promoted for that. The metric I used was pretty much the amount of developer
time that went into supporting it that was saved by my damn ugly hacks. It was
collected by asking nicely for the affected folk to confirm their lives got
better.

I can't say why it worked only for one of us.

~~~
robbrit
Were you going from junior (L3) to intermediate (L4)? If you were, then the
task you described seems appropriate - you don't have to do much to go from L3
to L4.

The author of the blog post was going for senior (L5), which you can't get
just by maintaining code.

~~~
lrem
Right, that's probably the difference.

------
jpm_sd
<holds envelope to forehead> Because you made enough money that it was an
affordable risk?

Yes, perf is garbage and management is chaos, but let's be honest with
ourselves. Four years' worth of GSUs oughta be enough for anybody.

"Devoted employee" followed by "expert at gaming the perf system" followed by
"project cancelled and adrift" is, sadly, the normal progression for a
Googler, from what I've seen.

~~~
tehlike
"Four years' worth of GSUs oughta be enough for anybody."

No. Not even close. There's a reason it's called golden handcuffs. It all
depends on where you are in life. If you have a mortgage, it won't be enough
depending on the house you have. If you don't have a house, you will have a
lot of FOMO. Big time.

It's all about pscyhology - you need exactly 0$ if you are dedicated and don't
have dependencies. Ok, let's say just couple thousand for a room and food.

~~~
jpm_sd
I thought "oughta be enough for anybody" was an obvious "640KB" joke, but
maybe I'm just old. Anyway, it certainly is enough money to appropriately
cushion an attempt at freelancing.

And the best thing to do after leaving a job at Google is to move somewhere
cheaper!

~~~
phamilton
> "640KB"

"$640K in GSU over 4 years ought o be enough for anybody"

That's actually the ballpark for a senior engineer.

------
rsp1984
I'm glad you put in the work to write down your experiences, and I'm glad that
HN is rewarding this.

Promotion at Google is a process filled with selfishness and dishonesty and I
think hackers need to know about this. The promotion committees are a joke.
They typically have no idea about your product, your team, your quality of
contribution and whether what you're telling them in the promo package is true
or a lie.

The way promotion works at Google is actually a direct consequence of their
desire to "empower" the engineers and keep managers in a rather passive,
supervisory role. The assumption behind it (completely misguided IMO) is that
engineers will "figure it out" on their own and "handle things among
themselves" just fine.

The big problem with this is that it strongly incentivizes the kind of anti-
social behavior that's normally associated with Wall Street: dishonesty,
short-term thinking, greed, narcissism.

 _To the promotion committee, my teammate’s project was the big, important
work that demanded coordination from multiple developers. If they hornswoggled
me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities._

That's exactly right. Manipulating your coworkers to your own advantage is the
fastest route to promotion at Google. Lying about your contribution to things
would be the runner-up. This is simply because there's a lack of authorities
who could see, recognize and penalize such behavior.

I never understood why Google favored this over a good old proven management
model where your boss would handle things.

I know I may be the exception but I actually value having a boss who's got
things under control and looks after the team, as opposed to a lord-of-the-
flies type situation where the promotion goes to the biggest liars and
manipulators.

Source: I worked at Google as a SWE

~~~
eqdw
I used to believe that middle managers were useless shits who wasted my time
and got in the way of work. I imagined that the flat organizational model made
more sense: since this is what my day to day life is, anyway, at least we get
rid of idiots who get paid more than me.

Then I worked in a place where I had actually good middle management. They
were smart and capable. They supported our team and helped us succeed. They
shielded us from most of the political BS. They advocated for us to other
elements of the business. They invested, both time and money, in our
professional development.

To make it concrete: in a company where the other engineering teams (five or
six of them) were consistently experiencing churn, having morale problems, and
shipping buggy code six months late, our team had zero turnover, a shrinking
bug backlog, and consistently delivered things _ahead_ of schedule.

I'm 100% on board with the good old proven management model now. You just need
to have an actually good manager.

~~~
VHRanger
The problem is that management is basically an art and no one knows how to
create consistently good managers. Because it's the epitomy of soft,
unmeasurable, skills.

So when people get frustrated with shitty management, they turn to whatever
other idea,.

If people read and __actually implemented__ the stuff in Peopleware (or any
other classic SWE management book that's highly regarded) we'd all be better
off. But instead we're stuck in this equilibrium where we constantly chase
management trends (see: open offices which are consistently shown to be
nefarious for productivity).

~~~
dilyevsky
> If people read and __actually implemented__ the stuff in Peopleware

Lol, I feel like that's too much to ask. I'd be happy with management that
actually read Brooks instead of just pretending like they did.

------
ordinaryperson
After 15 years of doing this my theory on corporate promotions is simple: you
need an executive sponsor.

VPs don't know who you are by default, they have too many reports. And if
you're assigned unsexy work like keeping the trains running, well the better
you do your job ironically the more you become like wallpaper.

I'm not saying you have to be a kissa*, although that does work at a
remarkable number of companies, I'm saying you have to make yourself known to
a person with power. Otherwise you're just a name and easy to reject.

You want to believe in meritocracy but in my experience the correlation
between effectiveness and promotions is weak to nonexistent. If you want to
get promoted -- besides doing a good job (and sometimes not even then) -- the
reality is you probably have to market yourself upwards.

The OP complains about not having enough metrics in his assignments but do
committees promote people based on stone-cold, anonymous metrics? I'm guessing
a lot of it is how they 'feel' about someone.

But these days as a developer the sad reality is you probably need to switch
jobs every 3-5 years if you want to keep moving upwards, unless you're really
lucky.

~~~
jldugger
> The OP complains about not having enough metrics in his assignments but do
> committees promote people based on stone-cold, anonymous metrics?

The answer, from what I gather, is yes. The hiring / promotion committees are
essentially an anonymous collection of fellow engineers, perhaps a step higher
than you, but somewhat random in composition. As such, there is no reliable
way to grease hands or build meaningful relationships with the wide range of
people who might be on your committee.

The larger problem OP faces is simple: his senior engineer projects are not
being protected by his manager. And possibly sabotaged indirectly by
executives above. In that sense, he does need an executive sponsor, simply to
protect the project assignments he needs to build his stone cold anonymous
metrics case.

~~~
ordinaryperson
You can't befriend everybody, true, which is why you should identify one
senior executive you think can help and market yourself to him or her (again,
I wish it didn't work this way, but it seems to).

You only need that person's recommendation, not that of 15 random fellow
engineers.

Besides, your data 'proving' your value likely has no context or comparable
benchmarks, after 30 seconds of numbers it's straight to your soft skills.

But yes, agree with your second point that it's up to the manager to protect
his projects or champion his employees.

~~~
jldugger
Anywhere else, yea, but at Google specifically, not an option. Executives
don't override the committee, except maybe Larry and Sergey. And if your
advice is 'be friends with the CEO', I'm sure that'll scale right up.

The good news is that, based on reports from Googlers here, it sounds like the
system is changing for the lower promotion tiers.

~~~
ordinaryperson
How did 'a senior executive' become the CEO? Obviously absurd and clearly not
what I wrote.

It's not about 'overriding' the committee, it's about having a champion on the
inside.

You seem to believe there's no human element to this process. It's all number
crunching -- like they're picking stocks with a good P/E ratio.

But the higher up you go the more your people skills are valued and none of
that will show up in data. Guarantee you nebulous categories like
'personality' and 'fit' are bandied about frequently in these discussions.

If promotions were strictly numerical as you seem to believe then they'd be
more meritocratic, but I believe the OP's point was he felt the process was
unfair.

~~~
jldugger
I didn't say the committee was numerical, though their reputation is such.
OP's challenge is that Google's promotion committee isn't an executive panel,
or subject to appeals except from perhaps the highest executives. It's a
random panel of experts who you'll likely never have met, because the company
is 100k engineers, and working on your small corner of Maps or whatever makes
it unlikely you'll have ample opportunity to meet people from Security, or
Search or Adwords or Adsense or Golang or Youtube or Nest or any of the myriad
of other products besides yours from which the promotion panel is randomly
pulled. You're essentially suggesting that to go from say Software Development
Engineer 2 to Senior Software Development Engineer, you need to simply
schmooze a few thousand coworkers.

> But the higher up you go the more your people skills are valued and none of
> that will show up in data. Guarantee you nebulous categories like
> 'personality' and 'fit' are bandied about frequently in these discussions.

Remember we're talking about promoting an engineer to a higher level engineer,
not into management. I don't know panels discuss, but given the odds are that
nobody on the panel knows anything about you other than whats in the committee
packet, it seems at least possible that soft skills are not considered.

> If promotions were strictly numerical as you seem to believe then they'd be
> more meritocratic, but I believe the OP's point was he felt the process was
> unfair.

I'm not sure about that. My reading is that the OP left because the committee
was saw themselves as numerical, but ended up being pathologically and
myopically so. The metrics they see are the ones that can be calculated, often
easily. Getting dinged for finding more bugs than you fixed in legacy
software, when they mistake known bug counts for actual bug counts. Treating
unquantifiable results like unreleased software as invalid. Ignoring necessary
but difficult results to quantify like interviewing candidates, documenting
code, and writing test suites.

Such a pathology can't be solved by knowing the right people, especially not
when the system is designed to prevent this exact technique. The senior
executive's ear OP needed wasn't one on the promo committee, it was the one(s)
reassigning his team projects every quarter. Or barring that, one at another
company.

~~~
ordinaryperson
> Google's promotion committee isn't an executive panel, or subject to appeals
> except from perhaps the highest executives. It's a random panel of experts

At most of the companies I've worked, if a VP or senior exec likes you they
make it known to the committee or a key person on it.

This just comes from my personal experience working at large companies. It's
also true of just getting something done: usually the most efficient way is
contacting a VP (or relevant executive) who can move things. I've wasted years
of my life trying to wade through bureaucracy.

> Remember we're talking about promoting an engineer to a higher level
> engineer, not into management.

You don't need to be in management for your people skills to matter. If you're
a senior engineer / team lead / whatever, you're seen as authority, an expert,
someone consulted for wisdom. If you're hostile or rude it reflects badly on
the company, hence these committees look at your people skills.

> it seems at least possible that soft skills are not considered.

I can't speak for Google explicitly but I can say your soft skills are always
considered. Always. They consider them when they hire you and most places
absolutely place a premium on them when promoting.

It's one of the reasons the requirements for promotions are so ill-defined
everywhere. It's not just a concrete list of achievements, it's how your
coworkers and manager view your personality.

> but ended up being pathologically and myopically

Yep -- politics. That's unfortunately how it works. You can assume it was an
aberrant anomaly, in my experience politics rules the roost when promotions
are being doled out.

> The senior executive's ear OP needed wasn't one on the promo committee

The senior executive wouldn't be on the committee, he or she would put in a
good word for you.

Look, you don't have to take my word for it. If you know any senior HR people
at your company or other companies, ask them how promotions are handled. It
won't be uniform but I'm guessing politics, reputation and soft skills are
most of the time (unfortunately) going to outweigh programming metrics.

/my two cents

~~~
jldugger
> At most of the companies I've worked, if a VP or senior exec likes you they
> make it known to the committee or a key person on it.

Like, half of OP's blog post is about how Google specifically is not most of
the companies you've worked for. Your advice would be useful virtually
anywhere else, and were the subject anywhere else I would likely agree.
However, in this specific case, "Look kids, this is just how the business
world works" is poor advice and treats industry as homogeneous, despite your
statement to the contrary.

Google's insanely profitable market position allows them to be wronger for
longer on many things, ranging from server design to management practices.
There was a time in which Larry Page fired all project managers, and I've seen
no accounts saying 'This was a triumph -- huge success.' So if the rest of
society has converged on a solution where management should be in charge of
level promotions, this doesn't mean Google has adopted this (likely efficient)
method.

Which is the point of this article: a warning to those that would fill his
empty seat, that social norms, rules and processes are vastly different than
you expect, and may persist despite not working in anyone's favor.

~~~
ordinaryperson
It's certainly possible politics and soft skills don't play prominent roles in
promotions at Google -- I've never worked there.

But no matter how much of unicorn they are I'm guessing human nature still
applies. I think the OP will see that Google, despite its attempts at
meritocracy, is probably a lot like other places in that you have to market
yourself upwards, and probably to someone who can help.

------
woolvalley
This is why people change companies every two years. It's easier to get a
promotion by studying for interviews on leetcode than by spending the extra
time promo gaming in one's career.

"Facebook will give me a sr software engineer position after 5 hours of
interviews, here is that offer letter" is a very strong position. Market
dynamics are a lot faster than internal promo dynamics at bigco.

Once you reach sr although, you usually have to go through the promo game from
what I can see. Most companies do not hire staff engineers unless your already
staff engineer somewhere else at another bigco. This is why people tend to
become manager after this point, because you see its more effort to become a
staff engineer than it is to become a 'sr manager', which is about equivalent
to a staff engineer. People also become a manager for the learning experience.
Understanding 'the other side' can be quite enlightening.

~~~
ashelmire
So I just checked out leetcode... it's supposed to be for juniors or
undergrads, I assume? The hardest problems on there seem pretty trivial,
especially when compared to the problems on projecteuler.

~~~
toephu2
well you should have no problem getting into Google then

------
googlethrow
Google is changing the promotion process such that managers have much more
power (for all promotions up to level 5 == senior swe).

Previously it used to be, as Michael says, very much in the hands of the
committee members who never heard about you or even your team.

Now the committee will be composed of your manager and some other two managers
from a related team. The committee will not see your own promotion rationale
or your own description of your projects and achievements, rather it will be
the job of your manager to present these points and advocate on your behalf.
The committee (except for your manager) will also see only limited peer
feedback compared to before -- no free form text, only multiple choice
questions/answers.

If all three managers agree that you meet the bar, you get promoted.

~~~
jakelarkin
my co is moving from managers to anon committee, because it gives managers too
much unchecked power to favor/punish. the wheel goes round.

~~~
jonex
I would trust my manager to not abuse that power. If he would start using it,
I'd first try to change team or, if not possible, just change employer.
Hopefully, for the sake of the organisation, people quitting would reflect
badly on the manager over time.

The point being, it's much easier for me to manage the relationship with my
manager than with some anonymous committee that doesn't even know me. The
manager is already important enough that I would not keep him if he seemed
more interested in personal agendas than his subordinates.

------
Aqua
I can understand author’s motives very well.

I also started off in a corporation, it wasn’t google but it was a large
organization where politics played a major role in one’s carreer. I had a very
good friend, an architect who worked there for over 10 years, he was excellent
in corporate politics and taught me a whole lot about it. The bottom line is
that unless you have metrics to back up your claims (whatever they are), your
claims mean nothing. Unfortunately, corporate culture encourages this kind of
selfish attitude, where in order to get promoted you have to lick asses
heavily, and the rest is just a background noise, even your performance. If
you know the right people and if you have a good realtionship with them (also,
if you are ‘famous’ within the company), then you will almost certainly
succeed. This is how it works, almost everywhere, not just corporate
environments.

It may appear that the author recklessly quit Google without having another
job or even idea for a business, and I did the same thing, I had to leave,
because I simply couldn’t bear the fact that I was doing better (this,
obviously, is subjective) than people 2-3 levels above and my promotion was
put on hold just because there were corporate rules that forbid promoting
employees that have been already promoted once within 2 years time period.
When I informed my manager that I am leaving, he almost panicked, as he did
not see that coming and they heavily relied on my experience and skills. They
offered me a promotion and over 90% raise but I simply did not care anymore, I
could not work there any longer. I also quit without having another job on the
horizon. As a consequence my depression and insomnia almost disappeared, I am
less nervous and feel generally a lot better. Do not judge the author for
leaving Google, he did the right thing for himself, even though it exposes him
to a serious risk.

~~~
ryandrake
> They offered me a promotion and over 90% raise but I simply did not care
> anymore

What this should tell you is that they indeed could have easily promoted you
and given you a raise but deliberately chose not to because they bet you’d
work for below market. Only when they realized they were wrong did they
suddenly admit they could treat you fairly. You made the right decision
clearly.

------
blunte
You're describing knowledge work at many companies.

You've also recognized why upper management, particularly execs, are more
likely to be sociopaths (or at the very least, admittedly selfish).

And fortunately you've come to understand that being the boss/owner is the
best way to make your hard work actually pay you accordingly. The downside to
being your own boss is that your work ethic and motivation may drive you to
work every waking hour. This is bad, and I hope you learn balance.

I don't think there's a solution to the problems you described - at least not
a solution that includes staying in a company and working for someone else.
There are people who are happy to stay mid-level and just churn out work for
pay. Sometimes they play for the team, and sometimes they're a little selfish.
But most importantly, they are satisfied or complacent. Others, like you, are
neither.

Cheers and good luck!

~~~
dboreham
Happy to see this post because reading the thread I was poised to say much the
same thing.

I would add that people here may tend to have the kind of personality where
they naturally assume that : if you are helpful to other people they will be
helpful back; being helpful to other people is a rewarding thing in itself; if
you are a good person you should be rewarded.

If this sounds like you (anyone reading, not the parent) I feel it is
worthwhile pointing out that not all humans are like this. In fact most
aren't. Surprisingly (it took me many decades and about 20 psychology books
so...ymmv) it can be very difficult to realize this, if you have this sort of
trusting personality type. fwiw I'm talking about the subconscious parts of
the brain, so whatever you think you think, and whatever you hear other people
saying...that's not really relevant. We are all Chimpanzees throwing feces
inside.

~~~
hkmurakami
Could you recommend us some of the most impactful psychology books you read on
the subject?

------
rdtsc
> Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the
> organization.

That is the true test. You are supposed to pretend only to buy into it but
never really believe it. Understanding that things function on two levels is
critical. One level is the superficial "we are a family, community, we are not
evil, making the world better". But that's the trap to catch all the naive
people and extract extra work hours from them (possibly at the expense of
family or personal time).

There is a second level of unspoken rules - "it really is about business and
internal politics". You are supposed to discover and navigate a set of
unwritten rules. And these usually don't get spelled out for you, because they
are kind of ugly and often diametrically opposed the official rules from the
first level.

Slavoj Zizek likes to talk about this when he talks about institutional
ideology and how there are rules and meta rules. The meta rules dictate how
you relate to the official rules. Which ones you are supposed to break to get
ahead, for instance. The other side is that you are given permission to do
something but you are not really allowed to take advantage of that or you get
in trouble. For example the whole "take any vacation time you want, we don't
have fixed days". But you are expected to not really take more than a few or
you'll be laid off eventually.

Here is an excerpt where he talk a bit about that:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfO9gL28pAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfO9gL28pAs)
(warning, he likes to use gross jokes and you might find his style
unpalatable)

~~~
mtlynch
Thanks for sharing that. That describes feelings I had working there. I think
the idea of rules and meta-rules is a good way of explaining it.

~~~
neerkumar
The promotion process at google self-selects for a very important skill: you
are given a certain goal and you find the optimal way to achieve it,
regardless of whether you agree with it or not.

This is a crucial skill for middle managers. Their role is often making sure
their team executes on executive vision without questioning the vision
(imagine how messy things would become if each middle manager would start
questioning executive strategy and push back on projects).

At the end, Google process worked as they designed it for. People like you,
who don't like to just do what they are told to do, choose to move on. And
people who accept it get promoted and go on to become effective middle
managers from a Google executive standpoint.

------
DisruptiveDave
As I've progressed from job to job (and everything in between), I've learned
how important tracking your personal metrics are. I've trained my mind to
always record the before/after for any project I work on and keep a written,
screenshot'd record of the impact. Every single time. You should ALWAYS be
ready to answer the question (presented to you in a direct or indirect
manner), "Why should we continue paying you $X."

~~~
blfr
On this track, the question you want to have a good answer for is "Why should
we pay you way more than $X?"

------
mtlynch
Author here. Happy to answer any questions about the post or about my
experience at Google.

~~~
shatteredvisage
I'm going to be applying there soon, 4 years into my career. It'll involve a
loong move and big changes: what advice can you give someone who wants to
spend a couple years (or more?) with the big G?

Also, any chance of submitting a referral? :)

~~~
fredley
Author writes article ranting about decision-making by groups of people who
know nothing about them.

Commenter asks for referral from author who knows nothing about them.

~~~
mfoy_
Sounds like his head is already in the game!

------
fsa_adf_fsa_09
> I proudly and lovingly nursed the pipeline back to health. I fixed dozens of
> bugs and wrote automated tests to make sure they wouldn’t reappear. I
> deleted thousands of lines of code that were either dead or could be
> replaced by modern libraries. I documented the pipeline as I learned it so
> that the institutional knowledge was available to my teammates instead of
> siloed in my head.

> The problem, as I discovered at promotion time, was that none of this was
> quantifiable. I couldn’t prove that anything I did had a positive impact on
> Google.

I briefly took a part time job in college. It was at a mall, walking distance
from school. It was a mid-range clothing brand that I can no longer remember
the name of.

Ostensibly, it was a sales position. I'm pretty sure the word sales was in the
title. Anyone who has ever walked into a store like that knows there is very
little sales (as in salespeople exhibiting selling skills to make sales)
occurring. It's 99% "can I help you?" followed by "just looking".

After a couple weeks my manager took me aside and said my sales numbers were
bad. It wasn't a threat -- they were having a hard enough time keeping staffed
-- but she pointed it out to me.

So, under no pressure to actually change those numbers, I decided to do it
anyway. I figured out that if you stand at the cash register and the customer
didn't explicit tell you who helped them, you could claim the sale for
yourself.

A couple weeks later my numbers were through the roof! My manager
congratulated me.

I don't think it's uncharitable to say that my story would equip anyone to
navigate 95% of the corporate world.

There's a lot of FUD in this thread about working independently. So one more
data point: I've known a number of people over the years that everyone here
would know (by title if not by name). What do they have in common? They all
struck out independently at some point in their careers.

It's not either / or. Going independent early can be a great way to sidestep a
lot of the ladder-climbing sillyness you'll have to do. It will also, if
you're doing it right, make you a lot better at your job.

------
armitron
Google has one of the worst monocultures I've ever seen in my life with a
heavy emphasis on commoditization. It's a giant machine treating software
engineers as nothing more than easily replaceable cogs.

The perks and "easygoing" atmosphere play into this facade and are designed to
delay the process of discovery. If you are after [significant] material
benefits, by all means go work for Google but be prepared to be treated like a
commodity. Ideally you will go through the same process of discovery the
author did, faster, and will be able to adapt to extract the most out of the
situation.

If you think programming is an art and despise corporate processes that
constantly devalue it, then Google is one of the worst places you could be.

------
shepardrtc
I recognized your username from all your work in the Sia community. Thanks for
helping to make it better.

While reading your article, I got the distinct impression that Google set up
the system that way so they didn't have to give promotions. They get so many
applications from the best software engineers in the world that they don't
really have to work to retain people, and if they need a manager, there are
plenty of those applying, too. I would suspect that in order to be promoted,
you truly have to be exceptional and almost worthy of knighthood. The fact
that your manager, who has intimate knowledge of your abilities, has no input
into your advancement, and the fact that the metrics they look at are
naturally difficult to achieve due to project churn makes it appear that they
really don't want to promote anyone unless they have a very good reason.

~~~
mtlynch
I think that Google does _try_ to treat their employees fairly. I don't think
the promo process is the way it is because of greed.

That said, I do think that the system is biased in Google's favor. It's
designed much more strongly to filter out false positives (promote someone
underqualified) than false negatives (withhold a promotion from someone
qualified). As a result, it lets Google pay people at their lower-level title
even though they're doing higher-level work.

~~~
tfha
I can understand why they do it, having someone incompetent in an important
position is way more dangerous for the company than having someone competent
stuck in a lower position.

But it's still a risk to lose good employees, talent is very valuable.

------
ChuckMcM
Wow, that was _exactly_ the mechanic I observed when working there. The result
was pockets in the company where people worked on stuff that they didn't
understand and were not (yet?) clued in that nothing they did would get them
promoted and yet if they broke anything it would get them fired. Helping those
groups to change things for the better should have been a pretty impressive
thing, but my observation was that wasn't understood by the promotion
committee.

------
code4tee
A cacophony of management dissonance, bureaucratic internal processes, your
job being outsourced to India and then being asked to clean up the mess
created by said India team...

So basically Google is like any run of the mill tech department in a boring
corporate environment, but with free food and a side project on self driving
cars. Got it.

~~~
debt
"Google is like any run of the mill tech department in a boring corporate
environment, but with free food and a side project on self driving cars. Got
it."

This applies to nearly every single tech company in the Valley at this point.

------
iamcasen
I have had exactly the author's experience at prior jobs. Quite literally the
EXACT experience.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was put on a project that was doomed to
fail from day one. I was looking at it optimistically. It was a problematic
system, and I knew I could improve it dramatically.

What happened instead? My improvements brought to light a lot of horrible
stuff, and the new code was catching and alerting on previously hidden errors.
This lead people in high places to believe I was reckless and shipping
dangerously bad code, when it reality, it was not any worse off than before.

This led to my downfall. It was a sad lesson to learn, but office politics are
everywhere. It's so important to recognize when you're being backed into a
corner and given projects that are designed to fail.

------
bsvalley
When someone tells me "I'm a software engineer at XYZ", the first thing I ask
is - in what team are you in? If your role is to maintain internal web pages
or to build random tools for the marketing team then yeah... it doesn't have
any meaning. Sure, you still get the benefits of being an employee at XYZ, but
it's not super fulfilling. I'd say %30 of developers work on cool things in
these companies and the rest of the dev just fill in the blanks. I've worked
at a few of the Big-5 and that's what I've observed mostly.

An other thing is - don't get pay by the hour. If you want to maximize your
ROI you need to generate passive income there's no other secret. Your day is
limited to only a few hours.

------
zacherates
Completely anecdotal but I was talking to a Googler who had basically the
opposite experience and recommended working at Google because of the promotion
panel. The fact that their manager had no say in the process and that they
could put together their promotion packet on their own was a feature in their
mind, because their experience included their manager "forgetting" to put them
up for promotion repeatedly at other companies.

That being said, promotion processes do seem to be pretty screwed up in
general (personal experience with 3 different companies), and fail in various
ways. So it's worth keeping in mind that the "external promotion process"
(getting another job) is always available.

edit: grammar.

~~~
phamilton
I worked at Yahoo during a time of pseudo stack ranking (QPR). Managers had a
target for average rating, and most managers would identify a few people for
promotion and give everyone else "Meets Expectations" reviews so they could
give the promotion candidates "Exceeds Expectations".

Even worse, managers generally used the success of their reports as part of
their success criteria, so they we're always actively trying to promote people
because if they didn't then they weren't successful at their jobs. So managers
would help that one or two people get promoted, even if they we're generally
useless. And the other devs on the team would get ignored.

It was a unique time in my career, when I had a performance review rating of
"Exceeds Expectations" in a review that described my contributions as
"mediocre".

To be fair, my manager was actually pretty good and acknowledged the
disconnect is the review. I had been down leveled in an acquisition and was
doing a job 2 levels higher than my own, and he wanted to give me useful
feedback and knew nobody would actually read it but me.

------
cmrdporcupine
Frankly there are far more toxic and awful large companies to work for. I
think with the perf/promo process being what it is Google was intentionally
trying to avoid the really bad nepotistic and political parts of some other
large (or not large) corps. But they introduced other problems, which the
article writer alludes to.

For myself, the bullshit with perf and the awful corporate culture stuff
became apparent within 6 months of landing here at Google as a result of
acquisition. After working at a startup or small company (aka "get your shit
done and fix all the things or we'll go out of business!") and getting drafted
to work here (and ahem, eat the free food and take all the money they give
you...) it's very apparent.

But I've stayed and slogged it through, and just stopped caring and just keep
my head down and try to do the work I think is useful. Luckily Google has
stopped promulgating the line that one _has_ to get promoted to Level X after
Y years, or get ejected. There's a recognition now that people can just
contribute at a certain level and be good employees and not play the promo
game.

I know very few people who are believers in this culture internally. Anybody
who has been through promo is cynical about it. Which is I guess why there's
been some incremental changes to the process recently. We'll see how it shakes
out.

------
throwaway84742
Pretty much why I left as well. Wasted years on improving existing stuff
rather than building new stuff. Google doesn’t value improvements, even very
significant and quantifiable ones, except if you’re improving CTR or
relevance. Promotion-wise working on a hot new project which will flame out in
a few years is 10x better for you to “demonstrate impact”. Quality be damned.
If you launch new shit, you get a lot more brownie points. Googlers, don’t be
stupid the way I was. If you’re looking to get promoted, get on a hot new
project and steadfastly maneuver away from any and all work that doesn’t look
worthwhile in your promo packet. This sucks for Google in the grand scheme of
things. But the alternative will suck for you, and your first priority should
be you, in spite of what anyone says. Anything else just leads to suckage and
unhappiness.

------
xtrapolate
As a business person, you're going to have to sell yourself/your services to
other people. Perhaps that's not too different from pitching yourself to an
"anonymous promotions committee"?

Interesting and insightful read. Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your
future endeavours!

~~~
mtlynch
>As a business person, you're going to have to sell yourself/your services to
other people. Perhaps that's not too different from pitching yourself to an
"anonymous promotions committee"?

That's fair.

I've wondered about that myself. Will I just end up resenting "the customer"
the same way I resented "the committee?"

My hope is no because I feel like with a customer, I can learn more from
failures. If I launch a product and it doesn't sell, I can try a totally new
product or adjust it somehow and see how that affects things. I can talk to
customers and get their feedback. With the promo committee it felt very opaque
and my opportunities for feedback were so rare. Plus I felt like if I got
better, I'm just getting better at working the perf system which is probably
only useful within Google or other Google-like companies. If I get better at
selling to customers, that should be useful in a much broader way.

>Interesting and insightful read. Thanks for sharing, and good luck with your
future endeavours!

Thanks for reading!

~~~
benp84
I prefer pitching to customers because they really do get more value out of
your product if you better communicate what it does and how it helps them.
With committees it sounds more like playing a zero-sum game.

------
nickjj
Good luck with your new programming adventures. Just based on reading your
article I would say your mindset is in the right spot to be successful on your
own.

I've been freelancing as a developer for the last 20 years and have turned
down interviews from Google / etc. in the past. It's a fun ride.

> Optimizing for promotion

This is one of many reasons why I'll never work a "regular" job.

~~~
ultrasounder
Hi Nick just popped in to say Thank You for your SAAS Flask course. I am
slowly working through it along with the updated Flask Mega Tutorial

~~~
nickjj
Hi, no problem.

Thanks so much for signing up to that course.

If you have any questions you know where to reach me!

------
heavenlyblue
Article’s gist: I an young and idealistic and I went working for Google
thinking they’re from another planet. That’s not true.

~~~
oblio
My first full time job was as IT support for financial auditing/IT auditor. I
didn't stay there long, but I learned this quickly: get a paper trail going
ASAP. You never know when you'll need it, either to toot your own horn or to
fight back, especially against bullshit :)

------
dkroy
This question may be an odd one, but how did you create the little cartoons in
your blog post? I feel like they really improved my experience as a reader,
and if I were to create content in the future I wouldn't mind knowing if there
was an easy way to include something similar for someone with little to no
artistic skill.

Edit: Found my answer in this blog post of yours [https://mtlynch.io/how-to-
hire-a-cartoonist/](https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/)

~~~
spraak
At the end of the article:

> Illustrations by Loraine Yow

which links to [https://www.linkedin.com/in/lolo-
ology/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lolo-ology/)

I wondered if anyone would have not read to the end of the article and, like
we both did, assume that the author had created the cartoons.

------
agounaris
Thats not just google mate, every large company is like this. We join thinking
that our engineering will make a difference but it does not work like this. If
you want to climb the ladder either join high, or grow through a smaller
company.

------
gniv
Nice writeup! You should definitely keep writing.

Regarding what to optimize for promotion: I would say it's choosing the right
manager (and peers, to a lesser extent).

I know somebody who has struggled to get promoted for multiple cycles (funnily
enough, in the same large group you were in). Then he decided to move, and the
new manager went out of her way to get him promoted, and he got it relatively
quickly.

I've seen this scenario happen a lot in the last few years.

~~~
groby_b
Yup. If you don't have a manager who works their ass off to help your career,
you don't have a good manager. You recognize them by the fact that they
usually talk _a lot_ about what management means, and what it should do, and
aren't afraid to change that opinion if they learn something new.

------
FullyFunctional
Thanks for writing this and good for you to finally leave that wasteland. I
learned an important lesson on my first job "Don't be suckered into being
loyal to your company because, no matter what they say, they are loyal to
share holders, not to you".

On a side note, I don't understand the fetish with Google; where does this
reality distortion come from that they have the best engineers? At _every_
company I have worked for I have been told "we have the best engineers" :)
(I've been in Silicon Valley for 17+ years and Google is not that
exceptional).

~~~
ironjunkie
It's part of a subtle marketing machine. It starts with the interview process

Did you realize that Google is the single company in which people are
_actually_ bragging about interviewing there? (even if the outcome was
negative)

They also select a specific type of engineers that are influenceable enough to
be convinced that everyone at Google are the absolute best. Those same
engineers are then writing those type of Blog posts in which they pound the
message over and over about being the best. It's a win-win. Good for their own
ego, and good for the company as side marketing.

Now, I'm not saying that they are below average, but in the valley, I don't
think Google has any more talents than other companies that don't make such a
big deal about being _the best_

~~~
FullyFunctional
I want to add that I do think google has a _culture_ that allows great people
more visibility. You don't see [as] many blogs by say Apple engineers :)

~~~
ultrasounder
Thats coz, You sign a waiver as part of your "1 week intensive keeping secrets
bootcamp + orientation" that Thou shalt not blog about _anything_ while you
are employed at Apple. That means _anything_. Infact there is a very stringent
policy on what is acceptable and not kosher when it comes to posting on social
media. Thats why you dont see anything from Apple employees. Not that they
didnt buy in to the Steve Jobs Think Different, Your work is so much more
important than yourself Koolaid. Its just that posting anything without
approvals can be a career limiting move. Source- Have a couple of friends
working on Hardware side and one working Frameworks test group.

------
KKKKkkkk1
_On several occasions, I put my projects on hold for weeks or even months at a
time to help a teammate whose launch was at risk. It was the right decision
for the team, but it looked unimpressive in a promo packet. To the promotion
committee, my teammate’s project was the big, important work that demanded
coordination from multiple developers. If they hornswoggled me into helping
them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities. I was just the
mindless peon whose work was so irrelevant that it could be pre-empted at a
moment’s notice._

My experience is that oftentimes people at Google-style companies play not
even a zero-sum game, but more like a negative-sum game (if there is such a
thing). If you're helping someone out, people will take that as an opportunity
to take advantage of you.

~~~
googlethrow
This sounds harsh. In cases you are a significant contributor to a launch it
should be signifiend in the "launch entry" (there's an internal tracking tool
for all launches).

You then of course need to sell your contribution:

    
    
      - It was nothing less than ciritical for the success of the project
      - It required deep technical knowledge
      - It required communication with other teams
      - It required mastery of several technologies, etc.
    

The teammate in question should hepefully support these claims.

------
eastbayjake
Sidebar: This was really great writing for a software engineer! It's a skill a
lot of highly-technical people lack but can have great impact when you combine
storytelling with technical expertise. I saw one of the author's plans was to
write more and find ways to monetize it -- I wish him luck and gave him a
Twitter follow to keep up.

------
totalZero
> If I ever made a mistake at Google that cost the company $10 million, I
> would suffer no consequences. I’d be asked to write a post-mortem, and
> everyone would celebrate the learning opportunity. For most of these
> founders, a $10 million mistake would mean the end of their business and
> several lifetimes of debt.

This is not as insightful as it seems....risk tolerance should be a function
of percentages, not square numbers.

~~~
mtlynch
I think that's true, and obviously there are a lot more situations at Google
than a small company where you're even in a position to lose $10m.

But not all costs are proportional to company size. I could screw up a command
on my AWS account and rack up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars cloud
costs. I could make that mistake at a $1M/yr business or a $500/yr business.

------
the_arun
If you %s/google/<your-current-company>/g , the story wouldn't change. It
depends on the way you showcase your work to your management and peers is the
secret of the success. But for some it is against idealism and "do good"
nature. This same story happened to me but in another enterprise. The solution
that worked for me is to find a Manager who knows your talent and gives you
freedom and he does the marketing for your work knowing your strength. But it
is uncommon to find a good manager that fits above qualities.

~~~
ospider
Totally agree, a good manager should do all the bragging so that "you" could
really do the things that benefits yourself and the company.

------
legohead
You don't _try_ to get promoted in engineering. You do a kickass job, and
those above you notice and promote you or at least give you a raise/bonus.

Now that sounds naive, but the reason this works is because you are actually
in power. You can easily find another job granting you more pay, especially
with something like Google on your resume.

In my 20+ years of software development I've never asked for or even pursued a
promotion. If the job wasn't taking care of me, I went elsewhere with a nice
20% raise.

~~~
Jemmeh
I'm glad that this has worked for you but it's not like that for everyone.
Also it's very stupid in many ways that people constantly just have to jump
ship to get a raise. I might really love my work, be learning a lot, work with
great people, but I have to fight tooth and nail to get a raise -or- waste a
bunch of my time constantly talking to new companies. And then my current
company loses someone with a lot of domain knowledge too. I love programming.
I really do wish I could just sit down and code. Companies are always talking
about wringing out the last drops of productivity but they don't reward
programmers for focusing on code, but instead the business side of things and
constantly jumping ship.

I play the game like most people do, of course. But it's a stupid game.

------
Anirudh25
As someone who will be entering the industry, I loved your perspective on your
job at Google. Also, having read Cal Newport's "So good that they can't ignore
you", I couldn't help but notice the hunger for independence in good software
developers. Would you recommend newcomers to join smaller unstable( more
independence) companies or bigger, more stable( Top 4) companies(lesser
independence)?

~~~
Retric
I highly recommend optimizing for salary for the first 4 years.

~10k/year * ~40 years of compound interest is significant. Most young people
have debt and getting rid of that fast opens up a lot more options and
flexibility.

On top of that company's that pay more have more incentive to maximize your
value. On the other hand if you make little then they have incentive to burn
you out and replace you ASAP.

~~~
Anirudh25
I agree with you

------
chapill
Google doesn't use something like SonarQube I guess. That's full of metrics
like "fixed x bugs, improved code quality y%, reduced SQALE technical debt to
z."

I can't say I blame author for leaving Google. So called "senior" devs who
crank out garbage and then foist maintenance on lower level devs aren't people
I want to work with either. They're going to keep you down as mid-level
janitor until you get the stats to back your story up. Static code analysis
can paint that picture quite nicely for management. Sadly, that didn't seem
like an option at Google.

If enough janitors leave, the whole place will stink soon. I think the author
was wise to stand up for himself. Other Googlers who feel that way should join
him.

------
ultrasounder
Wow!. Really inspiring write-up. Thanks for sharing. No. You are not an idiot.
When you find time, please pick-up "Anything You want" by Derek Sivers.
Essentially, You don't need a business idea. You just make something that
"helps" people however vague that might sound. GOod luck with your venture and
Indie Hackers is Great and Channing Allen has built a Great community around
it with an awesome podcast to boot!. Who knows you could even be back at
Google after "successfully" bootstrapping your startup for a few years.

~~~
mtlynch
Thanks for reading! I've heard a few people recommend Derek Sivers, so I'll
add him to my list.

------
ironjunkie
> I was surrounded by the best engineers in the world, using the most advanced
> development tools in the world.

This one might be ironic, but am I the only one feeling really annoyed by the
fact that every engineer working at Google feels like every other engineers at
Google is "the best in the world" ? Beside the obvious arrogance, I cannot
tell if it's a subtle brainwashing or a complete lack of critical thinking.

(not only for Google, I saw the same remarks from Facebook and a couple of the
other big ones, but Google is by far the most prevalent)

~~~
riazrizvi
Google, Facebook, Palantir, Microsoft - it's a narrative that those
organizations spend dollars to support because it helps them in recruitment
and in b2b consulting. It is similar in investment banking and management
consulting. The employees lap it up, and learn to talk-the-talk. Each of these
tech companies are cash cows with huge locked-in revenue streams that do not
depend so much on innovation for survival. IMO Amazon and Apple seem to be
organized around accountability and sink or swim projects which create a
different walk-the-walk culture, similar to start ups. Though I'm just an
outsider looking in.

~~~
ironjunkie
My feeling also. The whole "At Google everyone is THE smartest in the world":
This is marketing "talk-the-talk".

It's crazy once you realize how easy it is to make the employees repeat the
ego-flattering "talk-the-talk" without them realizing they are part of a huge
marketing machine.

------
sangnoir
I always knew Google incentivizes the launch of "new" products, but the
breadth and depth of the extent wasn't apparent. I now understand why Google
Talk has so many short-lived reincarnations. On the flipside, this also
disincentivizes maintenance/up-keep of old products - Reader never had a
chance.

It ironic that Google's share class/structure relieves its C-level management
from short-term/quarter-by-quarter thinking, but at the same time it pressures
the rank-and-file to have short horizons.

------
sharemywin
That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to
Google in exchange for money.

------
xoogler_456
> I submitted my first promo packet, and the results were what I feared: the
> promotion committee said that I hadn’t proven I could handle technical
> complexity, and they couldn’t see the impact I had on Google.

Ha! I think the promotion committees have a rubber stamp with that
justification. It's so vague and unactionable, yet they tell _everyone_ that
on their first go round.

The second time around, you get to point their feedback and say "Last time you
told me to do X, Y, and Z. I did X, Y, and Z. Shit or get off the pot."

~~~
mtlynch
Yeah, exactly. I only found out after I did my first promo attempt that the
committee is expected to grant the promotion if you've fixed the gap the last
committee identified. I wish I'd known about that earlier so I could have
gotten my gaps defined explicitly.

------
newobj
With 11 years of experience, maintaining a legacy system and writing docs does
NOT sound like sr. level promo material to me. At <Equivalent BigCo>, sr.
level promo was tantamount to rearchitecting an existing product, leading a
team in multiple-person-years development effort.

I appreciate the message around difficulty in quantifying impact, but just
putting this into practical perspective, I think OP's manager may have failed
to manage his expectations around what constitutes promo material.

~~~
abvdasker
That attitude is pretty illustrative of a larger problem. Maybe the work of
bug fixing and maintenance of legacy systems is undervalued, which might
explain why those systems get into such sorry shape to begin with at big
companies like Google.

My main takeaway from this piece is that it's easy for the incentive structure
at big tech companies to get all out of whack. The most useful, most necessary
work is often times not the work that benefits the employee most. This is
pretty basic management 101 where you want to incentivize good behaviors by
aligning the company's interests with those of the employees. When that
incentive alignment is working it eliminates the need for employees to choose
between the company and themselves. Everyone wins.

When it isn't working you get stories like the author's — the individual
becomes unhappy and leaves and the company loses a valuable employee.

~~~
newobj
Not disagreeing just saying it sounds like his expectations were mis-managed.

Whole story seems like a CF frankly and representative of the reasons why I've
never even considered interviewing at Google.

------
jasonmaydie
> Wait a second. I was in a business relationship with Google.

Didn't take me long to realize that most company events and get-togethers and
volunteering and other assorted non business activities are bullshit and a
complete waste of time.

Like he said.. "it's a business relationship"

------
6a68
I dunno, it seems like the learning process of putting together a series of
unsuccessful promo packages might be the exact training you need to become
"senior".

If the (good) work you did wasn't reflected in the metrics, then you need to
figure out how to change the metrics, or change what you work on.

There's nothing inherently scummy or "political" about influencing the
collective direction: identify problems, come up with good ideas for solutions
and how to measure (partial) success, and talk it over with your team and
manager around the time goals are being set. People are biased, distracted,
and fallible, but generally recognize good ideas when they are communicated
clearly.

If you're not good at documenting your successes, reflect on what is and isn't
getting documented, and find ways to set yourself up for success the next
time. Talk to people who've gotten the promotion you want, and figure out what
you've missed.

Learning to independently identify problems, devise solutions, measure
success, document success, and advocate for your ideas and yourself are
essential skills for the human organizational / business part of writing code
for a living. This is true whether you work on your own, at a startup, or at a
bigco like Google.

Good luck! :-)

------
kamaal
This might work for a company with no competition and railway cars full of
advertising money coming their way regardless of their actions.

In other places these things end up as a massive disaster and end up creating
a culture of sabotage. There is a lot of backroom dealing that goes in these
'anonymous' committees. People who sit there aren't individual evaluators like
in a public exam. They are generally people who come from teams around you.
And they try to optimize and sabotage based on what is good for them. For
example, a well deserving candidate's promotion can be turned down for a total
irrelevant reason, while some political lackey could get promoted by adding
all sort of cooked up recommendations to their 'promotion packet'. Most of the
times all this is done so secretly that when promotions are announced the come
across as a shock to most people. Of course people see through this all the
time, and cubicles full of employee always talk of 2 + 3 not adding up to 5 in
these cases.

Another huge scam in these things is the 'important work' bogey. You could
have contributed way more code, fixed a lot more bugs and added a lot more
value, but your promotion can be denied on the grounds of not doing 'important
work'. What the definition of 'important work' is nobody knows, as its largely
defined by work done by the guy getting promoted, no matter what work that is.

There are more things to this. For example, salary negotiations play another
toxic game here. In most companies budgets are fixed. So a manager is likely
to reward his lunch buddy far more than other people in the team. Eventually
over 3 - 4 years you realize some of your team mates are now making way more
disproportionate money compared to their peers and the work. This spills into
all sorts of other opportunities.

The best thing I heard was from one manager, who told, if your manager isn't
telling your for sure a few months in advance that you are getting promoted,
you most likely aren't.

In most companies its already decided who gets promoted, they just have to do
these 'promotion packet' and 'anonymous committee' rituals to cook up
documentation to justify it, to protect themselves from law suits later.

All of this called 'negotiation' by those who benefit from these schemes. In
reality it is getting financial and other favors in return for proximity and
servitude to power.

------
iampliny
Hi, Indie Hacker here who also has some experience with politicized corporate
environments. I’d like to encourage you to ignore some of the bad advice in
this thread.

Sounds like you were in a gnarly situation and did well to get out. You are
what you do, and those types of places can have a long-term corrupting
influence on your professional habits and instincts.

The observation that “all companies have politics” is about as useful as the
observation that both Venezuela and Denmark have imperfect governments. These
statements are correct only in the narrowest sense.

Those pointing out that you never work for “yourself” are also technically
correct. If you own a business, you have a responsibility toward your
customers. The good news is that it’s possible to find a niche in which you
actually _like_ your customers and _enjoy_ doing right by them. Running your
own company also gives you the opportunity to optimize for what you think is
important, both personally and professionally.

Best of luck.

~~~
mtlynch
Thanks for reading and for your advice!

I like your analogy about Venezuela and Denmark. : )

I do think they have a point. Throughout this process I've continually tried
to consciously avoid a "grass is always greener" mentality and recognize that
starting my own company will have difficult challenges as well. So I
appreciate the feedback from both sides.

That said, Indie Hackers is filled with stories of people who left corporate
jobs and found greater satisfaction in their own companies, so I think it
varies by person and requires some luck. I'd like to see what happens
regardless.

------
eric_b
The more I hear about the inner workings of Google, the less impressed I am.
It seems their vaunted hiring process has let in folks who specialize more at
internal politicking than getting things done. It doesn't take too many of
those kind of people to ruin a culture, and cause a company to stagnate or go
backwards.

~~~
GVIrish
I don't know that it is so much that the Google hiring process has selected
for adept internal politicians as it is that Google hasn't paid as much
attention to human factors as it should.

A lot of Google's philosophy is about automating things a person normal would
use their judgment on and just choosing not to perform some human-centric
functions at all (e.g. customer support).

It's hard to get internal culture right in the best of circumstances. When you
treat like an algorithm and you don't get that algorithm right, it encourages
all sorts of maladaptive behavior, politicking, etc.

To be fair Google's promotion board is not as flawed as say, Microsoft's old
stack ranking system. But it does set up incentives in such a way that to
advance people may optimize their work in a way that doesn't benefit the
company.

------
vitomd
If you like this kind of post, there are many: Why I quit x:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22why%20I%20Quit%22&sort=byPo...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22why%20I%20Quit%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

~~~
skoocda
And dozens of "I left google" :
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22I%20left%20google%22&sort=b...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22I%20left%20google%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

------
SonicSoul
this is a highly enjoyable read, and i am glad i found your pet project since
I am trying keto diet myself :)

however i can't say that i agree with your main thesis. It's pretty wild if
you think about it that someone would work at Google with all those perks yet
focus on such petty negatives. No x-mas gift? join the 90% of all other
companies. No "Senior" title before 3 years? This is not at all unusual. At
least your company had a framework for promoting employees and they were
willing to give you a chance every 6 months (even if its not a perfect
evaluation, it's a system that may get improved over time). Nope no sympathy
here but i do hope working on your own gives you more happiness! I did find
your project details helpful and inspirational

------
typetehcodez
A good rant and first foray into politics for the OP, I would imagine. C'est
La vie. IMHO, the next step for OP is to learn how to play the game and add
"finding a paying customer" to that list of what's next. Google "persuasion
reading list".

~~~
wahnfrieden
Sounds interesting, but is there a less politically-charged reading list along
these lines with less Trump / Trump boosterism?

------
walshemj
Strange that you don't personally go before a board to present which was my
experience at a Large tech company in the uk - relying only on written
"packets" would seem to discriminate for neurotypicals.

Btw anyone know what the number of promotion slots a year for the eligible
population is in google?

When I worked in Systems engineering division (67k FTE) in BT there where 18
or so mpg2-> mpg4 every 18 months (if we were lucky) approx. 600 would pass
the paper shift to get on the short list.

I was told by my boss that getting on the short list meant they thought you
where capable of doing the job group finance wouldn't approve of small in
crease in pay quanta - I knew some people so desperate they took a transfer to
payphones to get a promotion.

------
notyourday
This is an perfect illustration that a company gets exactly what it rewards
and it measures. Initially it works out just fine because the field for the
company is wide open so regardless of what it measures and it rewards the
results look good enough.

------
ericmcer
I thought google was supposed to be an industry leader in assessing and
managing human assets. This whole thing boils down to making a simple problem
complex.

The simple solution is that direct superiors and co-workers are the best
resources for determining viability. The junior engineer he trained is better
informed than the entire promotion committee with their metrics packet. Maybe
it works sometimes but for all the millions(billions?) Google has invested
into dissecting how teams and human resources work, this is a case where they
totally failed and a very basic solution would have worked.

~~~
dgacmu
Not really - the counterpoint to that is that giving supervisors too much
direct power is also an invitation for bias, blindspots, or abuse of power.
You also don't want to slip into stack ranking (witness how demoralizing it
was at Microsoft), which is easy if you don't have a way of getting globally
calibrated.

------
acd
You provide a service write code for the company so that the company makes
good profits in exchange you get a salary.

Nobody cares if you work hard over time unless your projects are late.

Lessons learnt spend time with your loved ones.

------
erichmond
There's so many comments, I'm sure this will get lost. But just so you
understand what the grass looks like on the other side.

At Google you got paid a great salary, had great 401k and perks to work on
projects that most likely go nowhere.

Working for yourself you're sacrifcing all those perks, to work on projects
that will most likely go nowhere.

That said, definitely do it. It will teach you a ton in the process, everyone
should go out on their own, mostly to realize how hard it can be.

New perspectives are invaluable, so I applaud your decision and wish you all
the luck in the world!

~~~
mtlynch
Thanks! Yeah, I recognize that's definitely a possible outcome. Perhaps it's
statistically the most likely outcome. But I agree with you that it's worth
doing if for nothing else to see what it's like. At worst, I go back to being
an employee again somewhere.

------
nashashmi
Hate to be the guy who says matter of fact things so matter of factly, but the
author just stated that when he was programming he was happy and when he was
calculating how to exceed at the game, he almost got promoted, but wasn't
happy.

When he was only focusing on the metrics, he was ignoring everything else.
That is unethical. That is calculated. That is unreal. That is the yellow
brick road to unhappiness and a horrible career.

The main problem was the constant reorg. He couldn't get a project done with
completion.

------
i_am_nomad
All they need to do is add employee ranking to fulfill their destiny and
finally become Microsoft.

------
johnrob
The best thing an employer can do for an employee is assign explicit value to
that employee’s work. Otherwise, the burden lies on the employee regardless of
the fact that a manager may declare solid performance. If the value of your
work isn’t clear, you will suffer in the long run via missed promotions and
potential layoffs.

Sadly, if your project’s value is not well understood, you need to get off of
it.

------
justaguyhere
This is exactly how many many many people feel, with one difference - most
people don't even get the chance to pick up good skills, tech or otherwise.
They are stuck doing the same thing for months and years. Add to it visa,
family complications and the situation gets worse.

At least he learned a lot, has Google on his resume, I'm genuinely happy for
him.

I hope he really makes it! More indie hackers the better.

------
heipei
A little OT, but I wonder what recruiters / interviewers think of people who
took time off to bootstrap their own business but ultimately went back to
applying for a regular job. Having the option to go back to working for a big
corporation is a good safety net, so it would be an important factor if taking
a year off would drastically reduce the likelihood of being hired again.

------
jnet
The google promotion process sounds about as horrendous as their hiring
process.

------
Quarrelsome
This is why its healthier to always run with the premise that you're leaving
at some point and its the employer's responsibility to keep you there and give
you interesting and rewarding work. If you're asking them to promote you then
its the wrong way round, they should be asking on you about whether you're
staying there. That's how the market is today.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I doubt Google cares if the majority of it's people stay or not. Beyond the
rock star employees who they absolutely know they need/depend on, they have an
unending pipe of software engineers who want to put Google on their resume, in
part due to the value of having the resume item and in part due to all of the
perks.

Assuming the free food and massages will keep a lot of talent there, why would
they bother incentivizing the average individual employee with interesting
work and promotions? If you leave, they'll replace you, likely without
shedding a tear.

~~~
Quarrelsome
afaik their "average individual employee" is actually pretty damn good. Anyway
that's the point, if they don't care then you shouldn't remain there trying to
impress them, especially if that doesn't align with your life goals.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Sure, I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I just meant, if they have an
endless flow of "pretty darn good" employees, they have no particular need to
try to retain any given one.

Other companies may have to search hard to find excellent software engineers,
but Google does not.

~~~
bethling
It's still really important. There's a cost to training and getting an
engineer to understand the problems and scale that Google faces (some might
come in with that, but many do not). There's also domain/google specific
knowledge that's expensive to replace as well.

Yes, if someone leaves after 4 years, it's possible to hire someone else of
the same ability level, but you're going to spend time and effort to make them
as effective as the person who just left.

------
Ruphin
Reading through this comment section I get the feeling a lot of folks here are
rather confused about what it is they really want. On one hand they care about
producing quality work, and value doing meaningful work like helping others or
solving problems nobody else wants to touch, and on the other hand they expect
to receive this senior title in recognition of their efforts and get
disillusioned when they fail to do so.

There's so much resentment in this thread about colleagues who have titles,
when they aren't producing superior work. You're clearly judging your peers
(and by extension yourself) based on quality of work, so why care about the
title? If you can write good code, or design great APIs, or build excellent
tests or clean up outdated codebases, I don't care if your title is Emperor of
the Universe or Junior Intern, you're welcome on my team any time and I'll be
glad to have you on board and build awesome products with me.

If you want to get that title, then by all means go play the title game like
the author. Focus on metrics, forget about producing meaningful work, and
you'll be on the fast lane to become one of those people that you resent right
now.

Anyone remember those "unprofessional" titles like "Chief Executive Ninja" and
whatnot that were so popular in the startup scene a while ago? These people
were simply signaling that they didn't really care about titles and cared
about other things instead, like building product, or adding value in some
form. I used to work at a startup where everyone could pick their own title;
so anyone could be a senior engineer if they wanted to. Ofcourse it didn't
matter if they did, because nobody was judged by their title, but by their
work. If that's what you want, then go and find a place like that; they exist!

Kudos to the author for figuring out what he wants.

~~~
dlwdlw
I think because tech is well off compared to other industries, tech workers
delay a certain type of adulthood maturity. This isn't functioning in society
maturity but the maturity of finding and knowing your place.

To the young everyone has high hopes for you mostly because they want that
energy and drive. At a certain point however you aren't valued based in your
individual technical contribution but your ability to support existing
narrative structures.

The shock from people feeding you your own narrative heroes journey to
expecting you to kiss ass and support existing stories is specific to tech
because of the relatively new and parallel "journeyman engineer" career path
that tops out around 300k. The remaining paths are the thought-leader/genius
path and the traditional corporate man.

------
GiorgioG
My takeway from reading that this article is that being a software developer
at Google is a shit-show - just like everywhere else ;)

------
adultSwim
If you had a union, you could have a say in how promotions are handled.

This is how the whole industry works. They will be more than happy to keep you
low, doing useful work relatively cheaply, indefinitely.

On the other hand, cry me a river. There are a million and a half families,
including 3 million children, in the US living on less than $2/person/day.

------
letientai299
> You’re in a business relationship with Google. If you’re disappointed that
> Google isn’t “romancing” you with gifts like you do for your wife, you have
> a misguided notion of the relationship.

This line is the best summary how most companies treat their employees,
despite whatever the company promote about internal community, team building,
etc...

------
g9yuayon
This article may as well be used to describe my employer or many other
companies that have more people than the quantity of work. My suggestion: join
a company that figures out how to manage visibility, such as Netflix. Or join
a company that does not need to manage visibility, such as a fast-growing
startup.

------
jrockway
> It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present.

This was the beginning of the end for me. I don't care about the gift at all;
if I wanted something I would have already bought it. But it was the idea that
an easy way to cut costs was the solution to everything. Ignore the fact that
there are three separate teams working on literally every problem at Google.
No, what's really costing them money is buying everyone a phone every year.
(Which, BTW, you can just order from TechStop. You don't own it, of course,
but what value does a phone have in two years anyway? The cost of buying it is
the same to Google whether or not you keep it forever or for the duration of
the contract. But ordering the phone from TechStop doesn't buy much goodwill,
like maybe getting a free phone and giving it to your family does.)

> The pipeline’s failures increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies
> instead of silently passing along bad data.

Anyway, I kind of heavily disagree with the promotion/performance review
complaints. I was on a promotion committee a number of times at Google, and my
committees always loved stuff like increasing reliability, adding metrics, and
doing the "dirty work" to keep things running smoothly. This, if true, is the
pinnacle of what's valued as solid engineering work.

The thing is, I was reviewing people a level below me (that would be the
L3->L4 committee -- like the author, I was a senior software engineer), and
that's the kind of work I expect at that level. To get from Senior to Staff
(L5->L6), you expect this kind of thinking but across multiple teams. It is
not as simple as sweet-talking people into doing stuff for you (which is what
a lot of people think leadership is), it's more of facilitating productivity
in your area of expertise. So if your general area of work has a lot of
problems with flaky pipelines -- you need to get the metrics in there, you
need to teach other people how to use the metrics to direct their development
goals, you need to make the changes easy to test... basically, you need to
make the less-experienced of your teammates able to operate in your specific
area as efficiently as you. Because then those people can go out and get the
dirty work done (getting promoted in the process), and you can bring your
bigger-picture analysis and implementation skills to a new problem.

Something I saw while on committees was people that were performing the
responsibilities of their level on the "ladder" spectacularly. That does not
necessarily mean that they are doing anything at the level that they're
requesting promotion to. A new level is a new job, not just doing your current
job really well. (For that, you just get a pay increase, not a title change.)
I really think that's what was going on with the author; he was performing
Senior-level work really well. That does not make you a Staff engineer.
Additionally, there is no particular demand that you ever become a Staff
engineer. I think my W2 for the last year I worked at Google was something
like $270,000 as a Senior engineer. That is good money. So the question is, do
you need more, so you're mad that you're not getting promoted... or do you
just want something because there are levels and you want to be the highest?

Certainly, by working for yourself you can avoid all of this. You can always
tell yourself that you're the best person in the world and nobody is going to
disagree with you. I always saw the ladder as a way of suggesting what sort of
classes of problems to work on to work more efficiently and effectively, and
by working in that direction you were growing as an engineer.

~~~
gvb
FWIW, he was a Software Engineer aspiring to be a Senior Software Engineer.

 _The promotion committee noted that in the past six months, I clearly
demonstrated senior-level work. These were, uncoincidentally, the months when
I was optimizing for promotion._

 _But they felt that six months wasn’t a long enough track record, so… better
luck next time._

------
eruci
It has been so long since I quit my last day job (2005), that I can't really
remember what it was like or what made me quit.

But I can tell you this. I would not have been this productive if I'd stayed
on at my cushy software developer job. I've had way more fun too.

------
jonbarker
Noticed your new project is a keto recipe webapp - this will have to compete
with some good ones: [https://ketodietapp.com/](https://ketodietapp.com/), and
[https://www.ruled.me/keto-recipes/](https://www.ruled.me/keto-recipes/) .
Fascinated by how ruled.me in particular seems to have won the 'indexed by
google' game for 'keto recipes.' Also fascinated by how much ruled.me might be
making with adsense. Also generally fascinated by special interest communities
and how to monetize them, any content around strategy here would be greatly
appreciated!

------
bitL
Whenever I sense politics is more important to promotion that great job, I am
leaving. I went into this field idealistic, driven for creating technology
that can change lives for the better, and way too often artificial red tape is
put everywhere by clueless or outright evil managers in order to drive their
agenda and increase their chances for promotions and more $ into their
pockets. It's literally negation of every single value I stand for and often
have no choice but to leave and work on my own projects. Even the best
companies like author mentioned aren't immune to human nature and have many
blind spots.

------
TheMagicHorsey
Politics is everywhere. Misaligned incentives are everywhere.

The best you can do is find a place where those with the power to promote also
have skin in the game. Usually that means working directly for an owner, or
being an owner yourself.

Politics dominates when those who do the promotion do not suffer the
consequences of losing good people or promoting bad people.

All organizations become shit after they grow to 10,000+ people. It’s not
possible for politics to be kept out at that scale. Google may be worse than
many other places because its steady profits allow it to keep many useless
individuals on the rolls, who would be fired elsewhere.

------
hotpxl
This guy spent 2 years realizing that "it's a business relationship". I worked
at another smaller bay area company and I only spent 2 months to realize that.
Google is already much better.

------
ests_eu
Thank you for sharing this. Your story actually made me think about myself -
whether I am actually doing something because I believe it's best for company
goals, or I am doing something because I want my work to be visible and viewed
as valuable.

I work in a very small team, where promotions don't exist, but I am more aware
now, that I often try to work on taks which are more easily recognizable as
"wow you did something cool", instead of focusing on quality of code and work.
And that's just because I fear to seen as a slacker.

------
ernsheong
I've been there, done that (quit another MNC, not Google).

Unfortunately in the real world, hardly anyone wants your new product, and
people are so accustomed to polished products that work on every platform,
that one person can hardly deliver something pay-worthy nowadays. Not to
mention it's so difficult to land on an idea that people really want, and that
idea itself is something doable by one or two persons at most (bootstrap
model)

After 6 months of hardly any income, had to eat humble pie and get back to
employment (for now).

Good luck.

------
luord
Google always was one of the few companies I wished to join. That feeling has
decreased over the years, and now this article might have killed it
completely.

I'm happy with what I'm doing anyway.

------
allsystemsgo
Well, Google is a big company. Politics are a thing. A lot of younger hires
don't know how to navigate that kind of environment. I had a lot of trouble in
that area. I joined a smaller firm and things improved dramatically. As the
smaller firm grew, I grew into understanding and learning how to navigate
politics gradually.

You find this in every single industry. I used to work in public accounting
and it was just like this. Google isn't special in this regard.

To author: good luck! If your startup takes off, let us know!

------
OOPMan
Is it just me, or do stories like this make it increasingly clear that working
at large companies like Google, Amazon, etc are a mistake?

Getting on a company that becomes Google/Amazon/etc (or more likely doesn't
but that's life) is one thing, getting sucked into the corporate dystopia
described in that blog post is quite another.

I guess I'll continue to work at smallish start-ups because the idea of being
swallowed by a programmer black-hole doesn't appeal :-)

~~~
dmitrygr
It really depends. Smallish companies cannot afford to pay nearly as well as
the big ones. Sometimes a few years of dystopian hellish work is worth the
money. For example, if you then use said saved money to start your own venture
with no need for Other People's Money.

------
vinceguidry
There is no reason anymore for the ambitious to work for the man. They will
forever be trying to think of a _lord-serf_ relationship as a _mercantile_
one. Aided by earnest attempts by the company to help them delude themselves
into thinking so.

If you want control over your economic destiny, you need to be in business for
yourself. There is no middle ground between being a serf and being a merchant.
At least not in our profession.

------
dlwdlw
Once Quality is defined it no longer is Quality. Instead it opens the way for
gatekeepers to stand guard around their moat and claim Quality eventually
corrupting the original definition.

To try and hold onto that which cannot be held onto is the path of good
intentions that leads to hell. It is the temporary victory of bean counters
while the human spirit nurses it's wounds.

------
cletus
Speaking as a >6 year veteran (Xoogler) some of this rings true. Still a
couple of points:

> No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports. They don’t even
> get a vote.

This isn't quite true. It's true that the promo committee doesn't include your
manager and it's that committee's vote that determines your promotion BUT your
manager does get to say whether or not they support your promotion.

Anecdotally, committees expect to see manager support so if a potential
promotee has it, it doesn't mean a lot unless there is a lot of specific
information that the manager can provide to support the promotion (ideally
peer feedback should do this anyway). It tends to be an issue if your manager
doesn't support your promotion however. And this happens. It also happens that
people get promoted without manager support.

Personally I never understood how this situation arose. I operate under the
principle that there should never be "negative surprise". So if your manager
doesn't support your promotion (which, hopefully, is solely because it's the
manager's informed belief that it won't pass committee) then the report should
already know this before they decide to submit for promotion. If they don't,
that's a giant manager fail.

If the report goes up anyway, if I were a manager there's absolutely nothing
to be gained from not supporting the promotion.

Moving on to the other points:

> Metrics or it didn’t happen

There's a lot of truth to it but not in the way the guy intends I think. He
goes on to say that there were no metrics for what he was doing.

Well that's the first problem. You should create them. And it sounds like this
guy was looking to a T4 to T5 promotion. There's a certain amount of
independence and proactiveness required for T5+ so not creating the metrics to
measure his successes by is an issue.

The manager again bears some responsibility for this. One of the primary jobs
of a SWE manager (IMHO) is coaching their reports for situations like this and
building their careers.

A better way to say this is that impact matters. Working on a bunch of small,
unrelated things is not impact. Promotion isn't a matter of doing a lot of
work or being helpfully necessarily. By T5+ it's an issue of having impact
across your project and to your wider team.

Also, it's worth noting that often people do have to go up for the same promo
twice. The natural instinct for committees is not to promote and they'll give
you feedback as to why. So then 6 months down the track you submit an updated
packet that includes all the ways you've addressed the previous committee's
feedback. That's really common.

As for the holiday gift, yeah I was there for that. All I was say is that it
was bad optics, particularly in light of say, how much money was handed out to
Levandowski. The argument was that it was too expensive to adminster across so
many different countries. This may be true but it feels like penny-pinching
and cost-cutting. And as they say, as soon as they take away the free drinks
it's time to pack your bags. The issue isn't the free drinks, it's what it
signals.

Project cancellation! Been there twice. It's highly demotivating.

~~~
jrockway
> committees expect to see manager support so if a potential promotee has it,
> it doesn't mean a lot

Having been on a promotion committee a number of times, I have to say that
manager feedback is generally pretty useless at face-value. A good manager
will make sure the right peers write reviews and that the candidate didn't
forget anything important. But the candidate can smooth over all of this
themselves; my committee promoted someone who's manager feedback read
something like "TODO: write this". That reflects poorly on the manager, not
the candidate.

> looking to a T4 to T5 promotion

I think he was looking for T5 to T6 actually.

> Project cancellation! Been there twice. It's highly demotivating.

RIP us.

~~~
cletus
From the article:

> If I just kept going, I’d soon be promoted to the next level, Senior
> Software Engineer.

That's (being promoted to) T5.

~~~
mtlynch
Correct, I was looking to be promoted to T5.

------
joeevans1000
Heck yeah! It's great to read this. Large companies will bleed you dry and not
remember your name. It's better to be the survivor of a failed startup than a
star at a huge company. Better than being the survivor of a failed startup is
the owner of a successful one. You'll never know that last one if you don't
try.

------
mountainofdeath
I used to work at {OTHER_BIGCO} and felt the same. It was so bad at one point,
I could basically toss a coin if I was going to work on something different
that week. It was at point I realized there was no chance the promised
promotion would come (well that and the lack of senior devs to observe) that I
decided to move on.

------
mostafab
He can try Startcrowd platform, it is a side-project platform designed with
Googlers in mind: [https://hackernoon.com/no-kaggle-is-unsuitable-to-study-
ai-m...](https://hackernoon.com/no-kaggle-is-unsuitable-to-study-ai-ml-a-
reply-to-ben-hamner-27283878cede)

------
komali2
>So if Google and I have a business relationship that exists to serve each
side’s interests, why was I spending time on all these tasks that served
Google’s interests instead of my own? If the promotion committee doesn’t
reward bugfixing or team support work, why was I doing that?

That's where the culture failed.

------
_nickwhite
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22quit%20google%22&sort=byPop...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22quit%20google%22&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Serious question, why is Quitting Google such a big deal?

~~~
Adamantcheese
Because it's touted as the company to get a job at and leaving it means
something is wrong with you and you need to write up a blog post justifying
why you left teh best position ever!!!!1!

------
enlightenedfool
"I was in a business relationship with Google". The point that most employees
especially in the US forget. It's strictly business for the company. Whatever
incentives they offer is for the company's well being. Feelings like "proud to
work for xxx company" is stupid.

------
thrownaway954
one take away I found: ship early ship often

For all the projects I've done over the years, I didn't "wait til the end" to
ship something. Get a feature done and ship it out. If you wait until "it's
finished" it will never be and you risk both losing interest and losing
clients.

------
mehrdada
I think Paul Graham's old "Hiring is Obsolete" post sets the right framework
for thinking about this, why it happens, and the arbitrage opportunity that is
present.

[http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html](http://paulgraham.com/hiring.html)

------
throthro
Short answer: OP can afford that.

------
real-hacker
Working for a big company is stable but fragile (you can lose the job, or
become a special cog that cannot fit into any other machine).

Working for yourself is risky at the very beginning, but anti-fragile, given
you know what you are doing.

------
pfedigan
This is exactly why I am going to start my own company in my own name and
start being a contractor with my 'employers'. Why be a slave when we only have
a limited amount of years on this planet?

------
danschumann
Where is the metric for being a team player? Patrick Lenceoni's book, 'The
Ideal Team Player' defines the 3 main traits of a team player: Humble, Hungry,
and People-Smart.

------
stanislavb
Good luck, mate! Really, I believe you've taken the right decision. Even if
you fail, that will be much better than continuing the environment you've
described!

------
toephu2
On average does anyone know how many GSU's Google is offering these days for a
Senior (L5) engineer?

(either new Senior hire, or joined Google within the past 2 years)

------
mathgladiator
So, I don't think Google described what senior engineer means to him. Senior
engineer means first that you a practitioner and can execute on software
projects, but second it means you can influence others. From his own
description, I would not be in favor of promotion as there was no evidence of
influence. Instead of writing E2E tests, he could of influenced others to
write E2E tests and the metric would be the number of diffs where he got
people to write E2E tests.

It requires beyond stellar technical work to overlook the influencing aspect.

------
adultSwim
"Nothing to show for it"... except the bank to go work for yourself and years
of extremely valuable experience

------
eafkuor
Man, the more I read these comments, the luckier I feel about working for
Atlassian!

------
dhruvkar
Hey Michael, best of luck on your new adventure and hope you continue working
on ketohub! ;)

\- Dhruv

~~~
mtlynch
Hey, Dhruv! Thanks!

------
zulrah
haha, I have a guy like this in my job. He won't do ANYTHING that couldn't be
represented in a promotion document. Which is annoying but at the same time he
is always successful with his promotions

------
nathan_f77
This was an excellent post, and I loved the comics. But the situation sounds
like a real nightmare. I recently read a blog post about burnout [1], and
"lack of control" was one of the main factors.

The Indie Hackers community is awesome. I've been thinking about starting a
tech cooperative along those lines [1], where the members have full control of
their own projects and can work on whatever they want. The goal would be to
build some small SaaS products or mobile apps, and generate a bit of money.
The value of joining a cooperative is that we could try many different ideas
in parallel and share a fraction of the winning ideas, similar to a VC who
invests in a large number of startups. The other benefit is that we can build
a much closer community than Indie Hackers, because everyone has a stake in
the company. We'd be independent, but could still work together to help each
other succeed.

Anyway, if this sounds like something that appeals to you, feel free to fill
out this application form [2]. (I've heard from some really awesome people but
will keep the form up for a while.)

[1] [https://m.signalvnoise.com/avoiding-the-
trap-8df59e718f3e](https://m.signalvnoise.com/avoiding-the-trap-8df59e718f3e)

[2] [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnm-
SZxbcKuQ7PUU9ArRnlD1LiK...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1dnm-
SZxbcKuQ7PUU9ArRnlD1LiKe920sTOV_Y2FAmaY/viewform)

------
iamleppert
Working at big companies it is very important to choose which projects to work
on, and which to not work on. You should be asking your manager, product
manager, whoever, to explain in detail how your project is going to be
helping. Why is it even necessary? If it's a smaller part of a big system,
what is the bigger system doing, and is this project really going to help it
in some way? And in some way I mean some way that can be easily measured and
demonstrable. The business case must be crystal clear.

If it's new development, how do they know this feature or thing is going to
work, or is needed? What work has been done to verify these assumptions, and
what is the risk? If there is any data collected, user stories, or customer
interviews, ask to see that information. Ask to see any roadmaps or
presentations given to higher level managers. Ask to be included in any
product meetings or customer interviews. If they balk at any of this, it's a
red flag that they are unwilling to be open with their plans. In my
experience, this normally means they know their own plans are bullshit or they
simply don't exist. It's really amazing how many managers and senior level
people at these companies operate on bullshit. I've seen it so many times.

The purpose of all this is to insulate and protect yourself from the failure
of your own management. If a manager keeps cancelling your projects, ask why?
Personally after a manager has cancelled one of my projects more than once and
there isn't a good explanation why (i.e. something I myself wouldn't have seen
coming), I start to question and doubt his decision making ability, and I'm
less likely to want to work on his team or do his assigned work. I immediately
start looking at other options for how I can benefit the company. This is a
tricky situation in itself, however. I've had managers who have let me run
with my own ideas and have praised me for leading projects and working closely
with various areas of the business, and I've also been fired because my
manager couldn't stand the fact I wasn't willing to be his slave and work on
another of his (soon to be cancelled) projects.

In many tech companies who only care about end of the line results, it's
simply not enough to do a good job. You have to do a good job on something
that actually matters. When you're up for promotion, you're up against other
people who have done a good job at things that have mattered, and the
quantification being done is how much of these good things matter when
compared to one another.

It's really a shame in this case that it seems like the OP was really stuck
under very poor management who clearly didn't know what they were doing.

If Google holds it engineers to results, why doesn't it let them at least
decide what they get to work on? It seems they've forgotten the part that if
you're going to decouple someone's direct management influence, you need to
decouple that manager's ability to assign that person work or dictate what
projects he or she works on. Just goes to show even at a company like Google
they don't have everything figured out...

------
justherefortart
Sounds like the same shit management at most places I've worked. Not
surprising in the least though.

Everything to the sister company in India!

------
stevenh
Teams are spontaneously disbanded and their projects are moved to other
countries because it prevents people who share the same allegiance or ideology
that runs counter to Google's from conspiring to hide "accidental" exploitable
bugs in the code which could later be used to damage the company. The project
gets audited by the next team's fresh eyes and if an exploit is found then it
is patched and can be traced back to the moles who can then be monitored or
fired. Rinse and repeat until launch.

------
samrocksc
In this thread.....we b.itch & moan about office jobs.

