
I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018) - luu
https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/
======
mtlynch
Author here! Cool to see this pop up on HN again. I was wondering why I was
getting so many Twitter notifications all of a sudden.

As a quick update, I continue to be happy with my decision to leave Google. I
enjoy working for myself, even though I haven't made much money at it yet. I'm
ending 2019 with ~$7k in revenue, which isn't much, but it's a bump from the
$2.2k I made in 2018. My savings are still far higher than my annual cost of
living, so I'm not in any danger of running out of money in the next few
years.

I'll be posting another year-end summary to my blog on Feb. 1, 2020. I also
write monthly retrospectives[1] about my work and weekly updates on What Got
Done.[2]

[1] [https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives](https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives)

[2] [https://whatgotdone.com/michael](https://whatgotdone.com/michael)

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

------
joeblau
The promo process story hits home with me. I was trying to get promoted a few
years back at my company. Over the previous 4 years, I built out a lot of
systems, fixed critical bugs in our software stack, stayed late during crunch
mode ensuring on time shipping, and volunteered to debug issues upstream
issues impacting our software. Our team was customer facing so back-end bugs
always surfaced in our product. I was a customer focused developer and fixer.

That being said, every time promo time rolled around, I had nothing to show
for it. You needed metrics and some plan of how you were going to show your
manager you were performing at the next level or it didn't count. The software
that I worked on over a crunch week that made the news papers, doesn't count.
My managers would put me on project that didn't lead to any favorable
trajectory for promotions. Every project they ever suggested, which I took up
is now deprecated or severely paired back to the point where it doesn't matter
outside of my personal development.

Now, I'm 4 years in and starting from zero in terms of building my foundation
for working on a project that is valuable enough to the company to reach a
higher role. I'm still willing to do the hard work, spend the occasional late
nights, get lost in my passion of working on customer solutions, and try to
have an impact. My question now is whether it makes sense to build for my
company or build for myself?

~~~
zrail
Sounds like you needed a brag doc. You are the only one that can remember
everything you did, so write it down and hand it to your manager so they can
remember too.

[https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/](https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/)

~~~
simlan
Interesting I do exactly that to keep track and have something in hand on a
rainy day where the motivation tanked.

I usually keep it analog though because a ruby piece of paper that fills over
time is more tangible than a doc. But i guess that is personal preference ;)

------
benjaminwootton
The idea of working to please an anonymous promotion committee is quite
depressing.

Why do this “pick me” dance when it’s completely within your control to get
the job you want within a few weeks?

By far the path of least resistance is simply to get a job and the promotion
elsewhere.

Or do something entrepreneurial like this guy and completely tie your skills
and abilities to the rewards.

As a talented engineer at Google the last thing I would ever consider to
improve my lot is spending years playing this game.

~~~
knorker
> The idea of working to please an anonymous promotion committee is quite
> depressing.

Having experienced both, I'd say it's still infinitely better than this being
a negotiation with your direct manager.

~~~
tyingq
I've had the opposite experience. With some exceptions, It's not that hard to
figure out how to win over one person. Even if they are a terrible manager,
you get a sense of what they consider important.

Figuring out the dynamics of a committee is harder.

~~~
izacus
This sounds like a feature, not a bug - it prevents extroverts who suck up to
a boss always stepping over introverts who do a better job.

~~~
vxNsr
And yet in one short article the OP perfectly summed up who google sucks at
making long term software that continues to work.

People often say that google rewards for new projects and ideas vs maintaining
the old, I didn’t really understand what that meant until he explained it
here. Doing good work is meaningless, the only that matters is what some
faceless committee thinks.

What’s odd is that the committee doesn’t look at code quality, maintainability
or longevity. They don’t care about documentation at all apparently because
it’s not a quantifiable metric. And yet if you asked any engineer they would
all say they’d rather work with documented code vs undocumented. It would ave
them time and allow them to fix things faster.

The fact that google is trying to turn everyone into a quantified machine is
making the whole org very sick.

~~~
izacus
Remember that you're reading an anectodal accounting of a single person who
got rejected while working in a single team. There might be bias there :)

~~~
Zach_the_Lizard
There is indeed bias, but working at a company with a similar committee
process, the committee process does indeed introduce its own series of biases
and failure modes.

For example, depending on how the committee is chosen and the size of the
company, you might still be known to the committee.

Popularity therefore still matters a great deal.

This isalso why my work inbox is chock full of weekly, biweekly, and monthly
updates to products and features that are completely irrelevant to me, my
team, or even my domain.

Complexity is hard to measure and somewhat subjective, but might be an
important metric for promotion.

With potentially less specific domain knowledge available to the committee,
something that seems easy might be extremely complex or vice versa.

Maybe you make something so easy and configuration driven engineers can
delegate to non-engineers.

Now your job looks easy, but it took months of research to come up with a
schema that can encode global tax rules (made up example) and only a few weeks
to move hardcoded logic to the configuration and a couple days to build a UI
on top.

Now engineers never touch tax rules ever again and deliver actual value in
other domains. Your team remains small, possibly even shrinking as a result of
your work.

But the Nth rewrite of $INTERNAL_LOGGING_FRAMEWORK has all kinds of sexy QPS,
memory consumption, process time, etc. metrics to sell.

Right or wrong, I can say from experience the rewrite tends to get the
promotion unless the tax guy writes a _really_ compelling story in just the
right way.

Humans are humans, be they managers or committee members.

------
heyflyguy
Now granted, I never worked at Google, but I've worked for several F500
companies through the years. I made a promise that I'll never work for one
ever again because this corporate structure and bloat tend to engineer
promotions and reward through things that do not actually benefit the company.

His work, which was useful to the company essentially got reworked into
something that impressed the "promotion committee". I think this is the notion
that should terrify all founders, to not let the original culture turn into
endless committees and stifled work products.

I guess Google can endure this only due to the sheer cash it generates, and no
i do not think that their promotion structure supports that.

~~~
rb808
If you're at a corporation you should figure out which game you're playing.
Are you there to "benefit the company" or get "promoted and rewarded"? Make a
decision but they are different paths leading different directions.

~~~
heyflyguy
I don't disagree with you, only as a business owner I'd be pretty upset if I
even knew that was going on amongst my new hires. If someone can't explain to
me our company vision after 90 days, as well as their role in delivering it -
I'm not saying they'll be fired but it's not a long term engagement between
us.

~~~
kbutler
Isn't that a management failure? If the most effective way to "get promoted
and rewarded" is substantially different from "benefit the company", then
management is not directing effectively.

~~~
heyflyguy
100% my point in fact.

------
merricksb
Discussion at the time of publication, nearly 2 years ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241)

(I understand it's not considered a dupe by HN; just sharing for history's
sake.)

------
KKKKkkkk1
_My manager assured me that my promotion was close. He felt that I was already
capable of senior-level work. I just needed the right project to prove it to
the promotion committee._

Who hasn't been there before. I've had my manager tell me I have a "bright
future" in my team, a couple of weeks before it was dissolved.

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

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

------
ainar-g
> Wait a second. _I_ was in a business relationship with Google.

> It may sound strange that it took me two and a half years to realize it, but
> Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the
> organization. To make us feel that we’re not just employees, but that we
> _are_ Google.

> That conversation made me realize that I’m _not_ Google. I provide a service
> to Google in exchange for money.

People, and especially young people, should think about this more. It's called
“labour _market_ ”, not “labour community”. A company as a whole is a
faceless, consciousness-less creature that will eat you alive if that
increases the right metrics. And it's definitely not a loving parent-figure
that some of the HR people want you to think it is.

Also, this needs a (2018).

~~~
tuesday20
My dad had just one job all his life, for 33 years. While he didn’t become
rich, he did enjoy _relative_ peace of mind, pension etc.

Of course everything is relative, but there was a time where companies had a
little bit of concern to their employees, however small it was.

Those days are gone. These days, companies don’t even pretend. A very small
percentage of people are going to do well, for the vast majority it is just
slavery, plain and simple

~~~
trentnix
Nonsense. Everywhere I’ve been employed cared about my wellbeing and when I
was an employer, I cared about the wellbeing of my staff.

Calling an employer/employee relationship _slavery_ after a Googler complains
he wasn’t promoted fast enough is peak self-importance.

~~~
gaggler
I feel like you're underestimating how terrible Google's stack ranking system.
It basically exploits you into doing more work than you should with the
prospect of making more money, only to smack you back down and ask you to do 6
more month of back breaking work. More than you were hired to, mind you.

~~~
heyflyguy
Without sounding judgy, this is something that I joke with my fellow Gen-x'rs
and Boomers with. Millenials expect prepayment for what they're about to do,
in hopes they can actually do it.

I was raised in a generation that you had to prove you could in fact, do the
work.

I appreciate and enjoy their confidence, and don't much care for what you
might call "being entitled", though I can see this will become a protected
phrase in the near future.

~~~
unlinked_dll
This reflects more on our generation’s distrust of the systems that we work in
than any kind of entitlement or misplaced confidence. As well as our general
economic adversity/anxiety, debt, lack of future prospects, exploitation, etc.

~~~
war1025
This comment amuses me because the same people seem to have a high level of
trust in the government as a general rule. Or at least in candidates on the
left who advocate for a government that is more involved in day-to-day life.

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

------
kelvin0
In the end where do you get your rocket fuel?

It's either

a) External validation from factors out of your control, or ...

b) Internal self-motivation which you have 100% linked to your own volition.

Waiting for some unicorn to land in your lap with a golden certificate of
promotion might be a little difficult to attain. Attacking interesting
problems and helping others with your talents might be more meaningful.

------
nojvek
Google is worth almost a trillion dollars. Their ads shit golden billions of
dollars. They have more than a 100k employees. Google is a big corp with big
corp politics and they can get their cream crop of engineers, use them, abuse
them and know that the next batch is waiting in line. It's kind of same with
MSFT, AMZN and the others.

If you really value your skills and have the confidence that you can go it
alone (or at a smaller company) and make the same-ish, go do that instead.

It is really hard to beat Google's FU compensation but if the smart engineers
at Google banded together to do their own thing, they'd have a bigger return
than adding to Larry and Sergey's billions.

------
mathewsanders
I get the point of being able to measure success by something quantifiable,
but the emphasis on _individuals_ needing to prove the impact they’ve made
strikes me as an odd setup.

I’ve never worked at a FAANG but currently at a F100 in fintech, and as the
product manager for our team, part of my role is to make sure our team is
doing work that has quantifiable value.

But for ICs on the team they’re not penalized if I make the wrong decisions
and lead the team down a negative path (however part of my role in being
successful is making our team goals transparent to all the team so they can
help course correct if my thinking is way off).

~~~
war1025
Reading this comment and thinking back to my memory of the article from
reading it earlier today and when it has been posted in the past, I wonder if
the "failed promotion" wasn't so much a matter of "not working on a shiny new
project" as not making sure metrics were in place to document how the
improvements to the service he was maintaining made it so it could handle more
load.

At some point on the ladder it's no longer enough to do good work, you need to
show your work and why it matters to the company.

------
nojvek
Kudos to you. I wish you the best on the IndieHacker journey and pray that you
end up making more than you would at Google, have better fulfillment in life
and create more value for everyone else.

We really need more people working on harder problems that create a better
future for everyone rather than figuring out how to spam more clickbait ads to
people.

Google is great but it seems they’re quite astray of their mission of
organizing the world’s knowledge and making it universally accessible. We have
a long way to go to truly achieve this.

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

------
craftinator
"In my head, the promotion committee was this omniscient and fair entity."

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

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

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

------
tyingq
It appears it isn't going terribly well so far:

[https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/](https://mtlynch.io/keep-
growing-never-profit/)

[https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/](https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-
year-1/)

But, he doesn't seem discouraged. I'm guessing whatever equity he had means he
has a fair amount of time to figure it out.

~~~
nlh
It isn’t going well yet from a financial perspective, but he writes this:

“People have asked me if I’m still happy with my decision to quit and start my
own company. The answer is definitely yes.

As someone who has always valued independence, I love being a solo developer.
It makes a world of difference to wake up whenever I want and make my own
choices about how to spend my entire day. This is how I want to live the rest
of my life.”

From a life-satisfaction perspective, it sounds like it’s going extremely
well! (And that’s WAY more important, at least to me.)

~~~
jka
As someone currently in a similar situation to the article author, I can
wholeheartedly agree that regaining your own agency and being able to
determine technology and product decisions is a huge relief and opens up
greatly enjoyable and satisfying opportunities for growth.

Developing a product takes a lot of time and effort, especially for a
small/solo team - and yes, by pure financial metrics it may seem like success
is a long distance away.

In much of the world it also takes a degree of good individual (or family)
fortune and savings to be able to embark on a journey like this, and I think
it's important to be aware of that privilege.

That's not a criticism, but something worth keeping in mind especially when
discussing and explaining these projects. Not everyone in society can make
this kind of leap (despite what those who tend to profit from inspiring and
leading bright young developers might tell us) due to the anxiety involved in
paying recurring bills. This is even more true in the U.S. with the additional
bundled decision complexity (HMO vs PPO, etc.) and financial cost of selecting
and paying for healthcare, versus taking the gamble that you'll be one of the
lucky members of society not to require medical care. Well-educated and well-
compensated folks such as the audience of HN are likely among the people most
able to take the risks required.

Anyway, despite the argument that this might not be an economically rewarding
project at the moment: value creation is a different, harder to measure
metric, and I'd argue the author is creating value for themselves and for
their community they're building tools for.

(Upvoted both parents of this reply, since I think this is a really important
and interesting trend and topic, regardless of any argument positions taken)

------
acvny
Another victim of the 4 hour work week scam

------
acvny
I wrongly thought google only hires smart people...

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

