I Quit Google to Work for Myself (2018)
mtlynch.io
mtlynch.io
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]
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?
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 ;)
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.
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.
I found practice interviews on interviewing.io very useful
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”.
Talk about hitting a wall.
Having experienced both, I'd say it's still infinitely better than this being a negotiation with your direct manager.
Figuring out the dynamics of a committee is harder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are some people who need to be shown their way off the bus.
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.
Here's the authoritative guide for Google specifically: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/08/tips-for-noogler-engineers..... It should serve you well at other, similar companies, with only minor tweaks.
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!
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241
(I understand it's not considered a dupe by HN; just sharing for history's sake.)
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.
> 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).
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
Calling an employer/employee relationship slavery after a Googler complains he wasn’t promoted fast enough is peak self-importance.
Especially when they use phrases like "back breaking work".
It mainly indicates a severe lack of perspective.
Mercy.
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 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".
And that keeps companies, even the bad ones, from getting away with dehumanizing its workforce.
""" 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.
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.
The word you're looking for is rape.
If working a cushy tech job is slavery then what would be working at a sand mine in cameroon called ?
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.
I suggest some travel in your near future.
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?
Working is not slavery, you work for money to do what you want.
You have a bad boss, can happen. Change jobs and it's done
>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]
[0] https://www.businessinsider.fr/us/slavoj-zizek-says-your-off...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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)
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.
Note also that this incorporates transaction costs inside the "benefit" or "cost". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem for more info.
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.
'course, the pig still gets eaten in the end.
By complaining about the "shortage" they encourage new entrants into the field and convince existing talent to accept lower wages.
It's purely marketing, IMO.
That seems like lousy marketing. If I'm told that something is constantly in a shortage my first thought isn't exactly to sell it for less.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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’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).
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.
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.
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 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?
https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/
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.
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.
There's a bit more to the site than it might seem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19057745
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.
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.
1) The hardest tech possible. I want to test my intellectual limits, which was not possible in the corp world.
2) The most hyped areas, today those are AI/Kubernetes.
If you have a unique solution, then it should not be a problem to get early adopters.
Moreover, after leaving my corporate job, I began:
1) Working 17 hours days, 7 days a week.
2) 100% software dev.
To sum up, if you leave the corp, you must increase your focus.
Many of these are more likely to occur when working at a big Corp, so working by yourself can help you avoid this.
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).
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.
The other option is to raise money, but then you switch from a developer to manager.
Can I ask what you’re building? It is very hard to be productive that long, hence the question
“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.)
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.
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
Yup
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.
The most important thing in that comment is - for the first two years, the site made no money. Then one of their quizzes went viral.
Maybe this person gave up too soon? The keto site looks good and is useful, maybe if it sticks with it, it might make decent profit?
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.
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. : )
That's harsh.