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]
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?
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.
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 ;)
My advice is talk to your manager about how disappointed you are. If you need metrics and a plan - work with him on how to get that, I'm sure they'll be happy to help. Alternatively it could be that you are doing great work but your manager didn't notice - so you should be telling him what you're up to. It could be that your manager isn't wise enough to realize how valuable you are so you should let others try to do the heavy lifting and fail. It could be that there you're just working too hard so you should be going home earlier and work on spending time learning the skills for your next job.
Another challenge along the previous 4 years was leadership turnover. In the last 4 years, I've had 4 managers. No one every really lasted more than a year. My most recent manager quit to start a stealth startup around the time I switched teams. He's a great person and a great manager, but he's on to bigger and better things. I've only been on my new team for a few months and my new team is great, but I think you final sentence is really where my sentiment is right now.
Yeah, if you keep your leetcode skills sharp and study to game the "design" interviews, you can get a job at a competing company instead of playing the depressing political game. As a bonus you'll make significantly more than internal promos.
Maybe up to senior levels (say T5). At some point, it becomes difficult to even keep your level, much less advance it.
All said, I likewise would find it difficult as OP to work at a large company where local incentives can be so misaligned to the company's. Hence, the advantage of working at start-ups.
There's a twist to this. Once you reach the "senior" level, you don't have to "play the game" anymore. You're pretty well compensated, the requirements to get to the next level are stratospheric, so you could just stay a T5 forever. Although it'll gnaw on you that your former engineering peers who have switched to management seem to have a much easier time going up the ladder, even though they suck mightily as managers, and it's not clear to anyone (including themselves) what they actually do.
As a senior engineer at a big tech co, can agree with this. I switched teams recently and the new manager asked me what my career plans were and said “oh you think the packet you made to get a senior level is big, a staff eng needs like X number of pages and they are only N number of engs in the company”.
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.
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.
The committees were changed a few years ago to no longer be "faceless" for most engineers. Now committees are made up of managers who work fairly near you in the org chart.
I work in an org that is explicitly tasked with a huge amount of maintenance and refactoring work. Our promo rates have historically been higher than other orgs. There is a very widespread belief that things like code quality don't matter at all for promos but it doesn't bear out in the numbers.
Does Google follow the practice of setting annual goals? At IBM where I worked for many years, we had to create something called a PBC (Personal Business Commitment). The idea was that you would be judged on how well you did with respect to those stated goals.
They do set annual goals starting at the team level and then moving up. But, as far as I have seen at the line manager and middle manager level, people are not judged directly on their progress on these goals. At higher levels this probably changes, but I don't really have a good sense of how directors and vps are evaluated.
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.
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.
My take is that it's a product of their situation: Google has thousands of highly talented people on board who probably have some expectations regarding professional growth, so in order to keep them they produce it.
Does this mean that we have an overabundance of talent? I don't think so. I guess Google simply has enough money to keep its competitors at bay by hoarding talent.
And they appear not to be alone in this as the anti-poaching agreement scandal showed.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
As a business owner, that would be your failure, not the new hire's. This seems like a highly US-centric point of view.
In reality, either you give you new hire resources to learn these things, i.e. give enough time on the clock to dedicate to this, as well as materials to learn from, or the person will not know these things.
You're right, but I specifically mentioned corporations as that is where its less obvious what is right for the company and more likely to make it hard to get promoted or recognized.
Those statements aren't "terrifying" in the least once you consider that your relationship with the employer is a _business_ relationship. If the employer didn't want career games, they wouldn't reward them. As simple as that. If your company's official party line diverges from its reward structure, the best thing you can do for yourself is to follow the reward structure and ignore the exhortations to be doing things the company obviously doesn't give a shit about (as measured in dollars, the only reliable measure).
Fundamentally your only rational goal in the situation is to maximize your expected return over the duration of your employment. At Google or FB you maximize it by launching stuff that looks good in a promo packet (with metrics and numbers, too; if you can't measure something it's worthless at promo time), and never, ever working on anything "legacy" related.
Those are, at a basic level, the rules of the game. Your _rational_ choices are: play the game well, or play some other variant of the game somewhere else. Not playing the game is not an option. Playing the game poorly is irrational.
I will have to take a look at that link. Interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing.
I don’t think the game is limited to the tech industry. What scares me is it seems pretty much all office jobs eventually turn into corporate politics / bs. On one hand, I can see how the politicking and playing the game seems to be in the best interest of the company - look! We’re getting stuff done and it looks awesome! OTOH, I worry that less obvious ideas (and good people) are neglected and like you said, The Game promotes the wrong behavior.
I guess if you get to that top “Fellow” developer level at a comfortable place maybe you don’t have to worry bout it anymore. Or maybe it becomes more important than ever... I hope not!
On one hand, I can see how the politicking and playing the game seems to be in the best interest of the company - look! We’re getting stuff done and it looks awesome!
Often, behind the smoke and mirrors, not much is actually done. And then you may end up with a disastrous product launch like Google Stadia. Unfortunately most projects don't have similarly useful public evaluations to show how poorly they are actually delivering. Those who would put in the time to develop a good product wouldn't be promoted.
One thing I was going to add but didn't makes it less terrifying. Often people what people think is benefiting the company isnt. eg being a hero working long hours is great in the very short term, but a better solution is managing a more sustainable process that consistently delivers.
My general feeling regarding any company is work closest to the source of revenue. This way, your performance will be attached to what drives the business performance.
The corollary to this is working in the area that the company appreciates the most. So, for Apple, it might be design, for Google, software engineering, for Salesforce, being on the sales side.
Don't know how it is now, but this would be a bad idea at Google specifically when Larry was in charge. Back then you'd need to work on something he cared about to have the best career trajectory. To give an example: Larry never particularly seemed to care about Cloud, Ads or Technical Infrastructure (TI). He did seem to care a lot about Google+, at least until it became obvious that it's not going anywhere, Android, and "moonshot" projects like Waymo (nee Chauffeur).
I don't consider myself above say a mediocre programmer, but some of the atrocities called "code" that I saw at the Fortune 500 companies, I swore them off and have been working as a consultant for startups since. I have to change up companies every year or two or I become anxious and bored.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
This statement is worded to lead a reader to believe you’ve never actually experienced “back breaking work”. It reads as incredibly privileged and insulated
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.
You’re not wrong, but we have those expectations because we often have to go deep into educational debt to get the job in the first place. The costs always get passed along.
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.
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.
Yeah, they might pay for your insurance, give you free food, but that's it. The ultimate motive is to make profit, by getting every bit of work from you.
You can sugarcoat it however you want, but to an employer, you are just a liability, not an asset, even when the "current" they call you as one. Because, the "next" they might not. The terms "employer", "they" are relative. As in the previous comment, "A company as a whole is a faceless, consciousness-less creature".
No, a company just a collection of people with a common goal. And when you don’t like one company, you have incredible mobility to find another. In a job market as good as the one in the US at the moment, that mobility is irrespective of skill level.
And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce.
"""
No, a company just a collection of people with a common goal
"""
yes, which is to make profit and keep shareholders & investors happy. Companies like Facebook might have started with a simple goal of connecting family & friends. But, now its an entirely different beast, making money by selling you and with way too many security holes that it hopes it can fix.
"""
And when you don’t like one company, you have incredible mobility to find another.
"""
You are joining another one that has the same common goal.
"""
And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce.
"""
Please tell that to the Amazon's warehouse workers who had to piss in a bottle, because they don't want a slippage in their quota.
There are vast swaths of the US that are in economic decline, and they most certainly do not allow for mobility irrespective of skill level. They don't even have sufficient economic activity to support a Walmart.
I have a hard time imaging the people are willingly sacrificing theirs and their kids' futures for no reason. It's hard to up and move somewhere without adequate savings, a family or friends network. What kind of landlord is going to rent to someone with no job? Will someone in that situation be able to get a job that even allows them to save up for a home purchase in an economically burgeoning area? Or will they always be treading water?
people have always had that mobility though; there's nothing special about the current US job market. want to become the king in a feudal society? just raise an army and take over
I'd like to agree with you, because the narrative that employees corral and motivate their employers is an attractive one, and to be encouraged.
Within tech specifically: I do think it's true that software employers shift and change their rhetoric and/or practices to meet the (sometimes entitled) demands of developers.
But some of the issues silicon valley tech firms are relentlessly unwilling to move on are ones around unionization and collective bargaining.
If employees are truly creating the market, and it's the companies that have to work to attract and retain them, then why are employers so fearful of anything except individual bargaining?
For people who are all of: confident, socially mobile (few family/social ties to bind them) and physically in good health you are probably absolutely correct. But I would wager that setting those expectations across entire populations doesn't scale.
I hate these flippant comparisons of unhealthy workplaces to slavery. People are paid and can go home to their families at night. Nobody is being whipped or sold or forced to have sex. Comparing a Google software developer to a slave is nonsense and undermines the horrors that real slaves went/go through.
1. cannot take a couple of days off, without informing their boss much in advance
2. cannot work on something in their off time, on their own computers without employer claiming ownership of it (I am talking specifically about software here)
3. cannot take a unpaid month off, to travel or just rest, for example without losing their jobs
4. have no hope of receiving pension, decent medical benefits etc
5. have no good way of progressing in their career, without having to play bullshit office politics
6. have no concept of maternal, paternal leave, beyond the token few days which is a joke
and so on...
Yes, it is slavery. Compared to Cameroon, this is much better, cushier, comfortable slavery, but it is still slavery, aka wage slavery. We have been brainwashed so much about work, being a good citizen etc etc, that most of us can't even recognize that we give away the best years of our lives in return for a car, a small house and some money - and this is just the lucky ones, most of us don't get even that.
Both are slavery, just different forms of it. Yes, one of them is much better than the other, but they are both slavery.
Google offers unpaid time off, 12 weeks of maternal and paternal leave (more if you are a birth parent), is generally on the more flexible side of IP rights for a US company, provides decent medical benefits, and has a promo system through committees explicitly to minimize the amount of politicking one needs to do.
You're extremely misinformed on what constitutes actual slavery (especially plantation 18th/19th century slavery), up to the point of being disrespectful of their descendants (not forgetting the victims of current forms of slavery).
It is just that your dad had different expectations.
Had your dad expected to be promoted every 2 years like this guy, after 33 years he would have been CEO of the company.
It is real that a lot of people today expect to get promoted fast for only doing their job.
Ask your dad what would he think if his job had all the perks that Google and FB give, including relative salary. You will see that it will sound like heaven for him. Why not just stay working there?
>Arguably the most pervasive element enabling exploitative office culture is the postmodern trickery of the contemporary working environment. Slavoj Žižek argues that modern employment tactics create the illusion that our employer is our friend. This fabrication empowers the employer while denying the employed the right to vocalize and protest dissatisfaction of their working conditions. “You’re not going to stick around and help out? I thought we were a team? I thought we were friends?”
>Žižek suggests that the environment of the workplace has been twisted, using architectural devices, to manipulate employees. Kitchens, ‘break-out spaces’, lounges, free food, free coffee – he postulates that this is a postmodern sleight of hand designed to manipulate and disarm staff. By fabricating the illusion of employer as friend, the employed is denied the opportunity to protest, argue, fight, be adversarial and demand more of their working conditions. These informal spaces are political spaces of control, surveillance and manipulation.[0]
There is nothing particularly insightful in that quote. Employee/employer relationship is like any other transactional relationship: exchanging some freedom for money. Other forms, e.g. freelancing, consulting are different, but pay less for the same amount of work
The quote remarks on the changing of the relationship, a point which is insightful. Several authors (from Zizek to Frederic Lordon) have noticed the dynamics of the relationship changing from pure unashamed totalitarianism in the workplace to the idea that the boss is your friend. The nature of the employee/employer transactional relationship has changed both in theory (management techniques) and practice (direction, micro-management) since the time of the old critiques of domination in the workplace. The employee/employer relation, it is argued, has not become more equitably transactional, but rather the old pre-Fordist techniques have been hidden and obscured - arguably more perniciously.
It is, if nothing else, an indication that critics of capital need to reformulate the conception of the employer/employee relationship. Nitzan & Bichler and Vrousalis take two divergent approaches to exaplaining the special nature of the employee/employer relationship as situated in modern life.
I was always aware that there's no relationship. That I'm just selling my life for money. Every moment that I'm not doing the thing that I want to be doing at that moment should better be worth it.
Employer can pay with money or with entertainment. Roleplaying as a "part of family" or "valued employee" can be worth something but never forget it's a game played for your entertainment to balance lower pay. When it's no longer worth for the players, game ends and everybody goes home to barely ever meet again.
Pick employers that offer best sum of pay and entertainment at the lowest cost to your life.
What always gets me about these statements is that, yes you're in a business relationship with the company, but that relationship is obviously highly profitable to you. What's the point of giving up that income just to "stick it to the man"?
IMO, knowing that it's a business relationship and not a community is important to getting your proper compensation and keeping your mental health. It's not about "sticking it to the man" at all, but getting your appropriate compensation.
IMO, too many people see their company as a family, but the company does treat them that way and knows the mistake that the employees are making.
I think it leads a lot of people to burnout by giving their all to the company while they just receive an average paycheck in return. Instead of putting that effort into their job, they could be enriching their own lives instead.
I'm always surprised at how people fall in this trap. Businesses are inherently not there for your interest (income/livelihood), they exist to capture money/resources. They hire people to be the human face to make it appear otherwise (HR) and market (propoganda) to workers in similar ways products/services are marketed to consumers.
If there's a position, businesses expect it contributes to their profit. If the position pays $200k/yr, you can rest assured in the long run, they expect your work (or at least an average of your team, branch, etc. over that time) to produce at least what you're being paid in value. That's optimistically speaking but realistically speaking, more value must be produced than your total compensation (you're always worth more than you're being paid or compensated if a business is doing its job well). That's labor in general across the board ("skilled" or "unskilled").
The catch is when businesses overestimate a worker's value... that's when we plebeian workers are actually pulling money/value from the relationship--we're getting back more than we contribute in.
For some reason, culturally, this scenario for the laborer to pull more value than a business is taboo and seen as laziness, fraud, theft, etc. but it's somehow not taboo when the direction of the relationship changes: for a business to make money off its workers.
If you're not better off working for a company than you would be if you left the company, then leave. If you can get a better offer elsewhere, or working on your own, then go.
In a voluntary exchange, both parties are better off than they would be otherwise - they both are both "getting back more than [they] contribute in."
If I buy an apple for a dollar, it means I consider the apple to be worth more than a dollar. At the same time, the seller values the dollar more than the apple. Both parties are better off by making the exchange.
Employment is the same: the employer considers the labor performed to be worth more than the compensation (or they wouldn't employ the person), and the employee considers the compensation to be worth more than the labor (or they leave).
If you're not leaving, then why not? Maybe you value the predictability/security of a regular paycheck (though that can end at any time). Maybe you don't know how to capture the value of your time working on your own (you can learn). Or maybe the resources/connections/structure of the company allows your labor to produce more value than you could alone, so your labor is more valuable for the company than it would be elsewhere (an expert on self-driving cars may not be able to add much value to a pharmacy, but can add a lot of value to waymo/uber/tesla).
Its not always zero sum. In the best case, a group of workers that could make 1x each on their own, combine and are able to make 1.5x each together, and get paid around 1.2x each.
The additional .3x is the corporate "profit" and is distributed in any number of ways depending on how the company is set up. Its still a rational decision for all of the employees to work there.
Not sure I believe emergentism. While it may be difficult to quantify, I don't find the "whole greater than the sum of its parts," just the perception of the sum being greater than its parts or the reality hiding in the complexity from us mere mortals.
Without emergent properties (your work + my work < our work), it really is a zero sum game. To me, you may be able to manipulate perception of value in this fashion but that's where it ends (which to be fair, is often enough).
No, differential preferences make free exchange a positive sum game (economic surplus/gains from trade). Emergent properties can magnify the value, but are not necessary.
The apple farmer sells apples because (he considers) the money is worth more than the apples. Consumers buy apples because (they consider) the apples are worth more than the money.
My perceived benefit - my compensation to you > 0 (I win = consumer surplus)
My compensation to you - your perceived cost > 0 (You win = producer surplus)
If either one of those is not true, no voluntary exchange takes place. In compelled exchange, only the first needs to be true. This takes various forms, including taxation, robbery, and slavery.
Note that those two equations are from two individual perspectives - I determine my benefit, you determine your cost. If you simplify to "benefit > your cost" and compel the exchange, you get a dystopia - compulsion "for the benefit of all/others/king/etc.", without realizing the full costs to those compelled to sacrifice. Voluntary exchange is required to allow each individual to determine their own benefits and costs.
It would be interesting to try worker co-ops for software... It is a woefully underexplored space. I expect three is /some/ emergent value (eg, I don't really do ux worth a damn...), and a worker co-op could get there without needing to get huge.
> It's called “labour market”, not “labour community”
It's also called human resources, not human community or human family. You are a resource just like a monitor or a stapler on the desk. A resource that the company uses for the benefit of the shareholders.
A farmer will put the animals' comfort and health and safety ahead of their own. They'll work long hours through heat waves and winter storms, get up in the middle of the night to check that everything is all right, spend every waking and sleeping moment worrying about the livestock, individually and collectively.
Sorry, you're right, I should rethink my argument. Billion dollar businesses aren't made on chainsaws and rocket engines. They're mostly made in conference rooms by salespeople with capitol. So, identifying as a chainsaw or rocket engine is basically just an admitting that you're a tool willing to work for less than what the salespeople think what your labor is worth.
You aren't going to change the world as an IC. If you're really a 10x engineer, maybe put that 9x difference back into learning how to market yourself or a product, if you really want to make a difference.
You're not working for "less than what someone thinks your worth", you're working for a price set by the market and an assessment of what level of quality your work is.
A developer gets paid before the salespeople have anything to sell. It's up to the company and its salespeople to try to not lose money on their deal with their R&D people. Considering the context of the article (Google engineer) and how much people in that market get paid, making money after you pay them is a tall order. Most businesses fail.
>You're not working for "less than what someone thinks your worth", you're working for a price set by the market and an assessment of what level of quality your work is.
So what about that 1x engineer who negotiated for 50k more than you, even though your output is better than his. Your company isn't jumping to give you a raise. Is that just "the market"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The process has changed since Lynch left (actually it changed ~the week he left Google). For promotions up to L5, the decision is made by people within your org, who should have context on whether you were working on the right things or not.
By L6+ (even as an IC), part of your job is to make decisions that are good for the organization, so having to justify them is not unreasonable.
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.
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.
"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?
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...
I don't want to be too harsh on this guy. He should be proud he pushed out 5 projects and he seems really really passionate about Keto. The fact he made even one dollar is impressive, it is always hardest at the start.
But some of the things he did make my head explode. He spent more than his total revenue ever on...testing software? He paid hundreds of dollars for every project on logos? He paid a developer thousands of dollars to develop a blog? Half his projects are free wordpress/(insert popular website builder) templates. He managed to burn 6k a month on rent/food while doing this? Even in New York that is kinda ridiculous, I did 2k a month in Brooklyn with my startup.
That said, the amount of traffic his blog gets is amazing. I think his biggest achievement was that. Hopefully he can direct that traffic towards future projects.
A lot of the feedback I got after my one-year update was that I was overspending. I mostly disagree, though with acknowledgement that my businesses don't earn much money, so I don't have much of a leg to stand on in defying conventional wisdom.
The key disconnect is that people seem to be arguing that I should strive for profitability at all times, whereas my goal was to minimize the time to find high revenue. Once I find something that gains traction, I don't expect it to be that difficult to reduce costs. If take on more work myself in the name of lower costs, I might make a small profit sooner, but it would probably be longer until I find something that earns large profits.
There's obviously a limit. I can't afford to hire a whole team of developers just to speed up my projects. But $1-2k here and there to save me a week or two of work annually still feels reasonable to me.
>He paid a developer thousands of dollars to develop a blog? Half his projects are free wordpress/(insert popular website builder) templates.
That’s impressive, but I feel like you are avoiding the main criticism in that link. Testing doesn’t matter at your stage. Imagine if you spent a bunch of time perfecting the human resource procedures for your websites, it’s too early to think about that. Maybe that is hard to internalize since it was your job for so long
>Testing doesn’t matter at your stage. Imagine if you spent a bunch of time perfecting the human resource procedures for your websites, it’s too early to think about that. Maybe that is hard to internalize since it was your job for so long
Ah, I see what you're saying. I respectfully disagree.
For me, testing earns back time invested very quickly, often before I even commit a changelist. I would write more tests if I were working for a large company or I was maintaining a mature product, but I don't buy the idea that zero is universally the correct number of tests for any early-stage product.
My E2E tests and CI routinely prevent me from breaking major functionality in my websites and APIs. It seems like a no-brainer to spend an extra 20% of my up-front development time writing automated tests to catch those instead of discovering the breaks after the fact, patching it, then testing all the functionality manually.
The issue that I see is that he turned from software developer into content creator/blogger
If you plan to give up a corporate job, you should go all-in on software projects, since your main advantage is that you can devote 100% for focused development.
Welcome to burnout, then.
That is not sustainable, and you can't create a profitable solution in a time frame that this amount of work would pay off without horrible (personal) costs.
In my experience, burnout seems to be a result of poor sleep, poor nutrition, lack of autonomy, lack of recognition, etc. This is especially true if working harder won't lead to greater rewards, like if you have a fixed salary or if your compensation is fairly independent from your actual work.
Many of these are more likely to occur when working at a big Corp, so working by yourself can help you avoid this.
I hope other people new to marketing themselves don't read this. Choosing "most hyped" market segments isn't good advice. You want to be a supplier in a market segment that has high demand and low supply. "Most hyped" in most cases means that the segment has high demand, but also high supply. "Most hyped" is where you find everyone who's following the big obvious trends. It's better advice to position self where there is demand, but too little supply. If talking about tech, it's often tech that's trending in the client circles, but somewhat obscure in the contractor circles. This implies that where the bulk of contractors are isn't interesting, unless you have something that makes their offers obsolete.
Right, I always advocate startups to compete with google/amazon. You cannot create hype as a startup, you must ride an existing wave (at least for hard tech).
However, you must start dev before the area is hyped and hit the market at the right time.
Also, you must target areas where the big players cannot and will not compete (for example, multi cloud, edge , privacy).
17 sounds a bit hardcore, maybe you are very young:) I'm currently doing the exact same route, but at about maybe 14. For those who doubt, please don't until you try it. I have no idea why, but I can actually put 14 into my own project and I feel completely great. I work maybe 6 days a week like this, get up in the morning and just code until I crash. I'm about a year into it now and I honestly don't feel any burnout at all, if anything I'm becoming more energized and excited as my project nears a production quality and launch nears. You can work much harder and longer for yourself than you can for a check, I swear it's true. I was pretty burned after a standard 40-hour at my last job, I work twice as hard now and I feel great. Weird but true.
When you are working for yourself, there is a "no man land" period, where you are trying to switch the economics from selling your time, to selling the product. So you want to work as hard as possible.
I’ve experienced the same, though not 14 hours consistently. Are there any steps you take to avoid burnout? Also, are you coding all day? Or writing content etc?
Yes, I'm coding all day, but I'm very nice to myself and only do it if I feel up for it. I just naturally have 14 hours in me because it's my own business, which was the really surprising thing after seeing how 40 elsewhere made me feel. I think starting this without the skills to fully pull it off was really key. The learning I've had to do along the way has been really rewarding and has really broadened me out as a tech professional, so there has been this constant positive development in myself as I progress, which keeps me getting up ready to try hard again. No job I've ever had motivated me like this. One other thing I think is key is proper goals. I'm not shooting for a "startup", I want a small business. I want to put something out that actually solves a problem, does it well, and make an honest living off it. I don't think I will ever sell my company for 100 million, but I do think I can make a living and offer myself a nicer working life than I've experienced in the corporate world. That is motivation enough for me.
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.)
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)
> From a life-satisfaction perspective, it sounds like it’s going extremely well! (And that’s WAY more important, at least to me.)
Yes, definitely. I haven't found a profitable project yet, but I definitely feel a greater sense of satisfaction with my life overall. I really treasure the feeling of waking up every morning and working on exactly what I want to work on.
Indeed, if you can achieve financial independence before striking out on your own, you will be able to do it with less stress. There is a lot of available information about the FIRE movement (Financial Independence Retire Early) that worth reading for younger software developers who want to work independently.
Thanks for posting those, they're really insightful
I think the whole premise of relying solely on Amazon Affiliate links might be the weakest link of the chain
> I received applications from over 30 writers, did paid trials with about 10 of them, and never managed to bring costs below $46 per article. There certainly are writers who work for $15 per article, but they churned out barely-intelligible garbage
Honestly that sounds like something he coulda explored better while keeping his job and quitting after it was successful. If someone else is going to do your job then why not wait till you find the right person. He may wanna try paying more per article honestly. Any serious writer would charge way more.
I know people who went this route but they waited till they had a good thing going. They also freelance to make up for any additional income necessary.
It's a pretty narrow niche. Assuming a 5% cut from Amazon, he's making 10 to 50 cents for every conversion.
Each article is costing him $50 or so.
So that article has to convert 200 times before it breaks even. Assuming 1% conversion, which is very optimistic, you would need 20,000 visitors to that page.
Ignoring the costs, 200k visits a month would turn $500. 2M would turn 5k.
It's pretty easy to see this isn't going to pay the bills. He didn't seem to do the math.
Author here! I'd say it's not going profitably, but I enjoy my lifestyle a lot.
Yeah, I'm not discouraged by progress so far. My expectations were that there would be several duds before I found a business that earns money. I've done a great job with part one of the plan (failed businesses), so the profitability part should happen any day now. : )
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?
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
[2] https://whatgotdone.com/michael