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Comment by thethethethe | Hacker News Reader

> It's supposed to be management's responsibility to pick projects that will be successful

If you just do what management tells you at Google you will never be promoted past L4. You need to come up with new ideas and projects to sell to management. The key is to align your project ideas with what management says they want.

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sounds really exhausting... if that's the constant expectation and you're actually good at it, why work for Google at all and not fundraise for yourself? cuz you're doing all the same legwork but your ideas go to the man.

If you can make 600k a year, a few years in a row (let's say three). How does 1.8M in hand stack up against starting your own business, with maybe a bigger potential number, but a lower statistical chance of making it there.

600k gross is 340k net in California if you are married.

Hopefully your spouse is earning a similar amount too!

Quite a lot of L9s did start companies, which were then acquired by Google. Others are working on things that already require a large amount of capital or influence, or just otherwise want to keep working on projects rather than administration.

It's not "really exhausting", it's just doing your job?? Personally I enjoy more coming up with my own stuff and fighting to launch it than just following orders (my favorite career accomplishments are making .app and .dev happen).

good for you, i can't imagine myself being under the gun to come up with a new funded project every year (or however often), would rather just work on some real product with revenue even if it's not very original

Based on this comment it seems like you have a highly distorted view of what it's actually like. You're arguing against a strawman.

It's not like that at all. Possibly it's like that for a high level PM, but for a SWE, it's more about putting yourself on the right project. You certainly don't have to constantly be coming up with new products on your own.

Also like, projects can last more than a year. There's something finishing up now that started work in like 2019 and planning in idk, 2016. And I know people who have gotten multiple promotions over growing their contributions to that particular endeavor.

I think it is exciting actually. Google a bit of a mess internally so there are lots of problems to solve. Everyone knows that these problems exist but people either aren't brave enough to defy management spend to the time to solve the problems or don't know how to promote their proposals to whom

If you are happy being handed pre-scoped work, you can just stay at L4, which many people do.

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