I quit Google to work for myself (2018)
mtlynch.io
mtlynch.io
> Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable.
We often hear about the successes, and it is easy to be loud with success, but it's important to keep in mind the ground truth: most companies fail.
It's nice to see that for this author, three years in he did manage to find something that made money, but realistically most people don't have that much runway to keep at it without generating income.
This might also be a microcosm of why the working class is pissed off in America, because looking at this experience, the optimal strategy for revenue is to blow smoke up the ass of a wealthy corporation until they give you a fat stock grant, then claim credit for the work of others so that they give you more.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/stroke-of-...
This was 2007. Now worth 15 times more.
The Chef as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Ayers
paid 26M USD in 2009. Now worth 15 times more.
So half a billion USD for this.
(same for Nvidia or OpenAI employees just riding the wave)
That has always been the case. If anything, software development opened up a brand new avenue for people to get rich other than stuffy “elite” colleges that feed into NYC/Chicago/Boston into finance/law/medicine.
Look at Robert Pera who founded Ubiquiti Networks. He was working on an idea his bosses ignored on he own during nights and weekend and then founded his company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera
Jensen Huang said when they started Nvidia at one point they were thirty days from going out of business.
Also compare the TinyPilot (at $399) to the open source JetKVM ($69) which is supposed to come out soon.
I think it went bk, but Musk bet that he could hype up the stock enough to raise cash in the next offering and then pretend it never happened...
https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-Billionaire-SpaceX-Shaping/...
I mean getting a job as a SWE at Google is hardly a good strategy if you don't enjoy writing software. But yes once you're there is very hard to justify doing anything else, there's a reason why they call them "golden handcuffs".
I know it's topical, but I really don't think the working class on America is pissed because they are struggling to increase their annual income from $350,000 to $500,000 at their Big Tech job. That's an elites-problem; or whatever you choose to call anyone in the top 5% earning bracket.
Building something that is bounded to the marked at large and can weather the individual change of whims is increasingly harder as megacorp are capturing more and more value in every corner of the market.
The entire mechanism that elevated the working class to entrepreneurship is broken and the effects do include a working class increasingly repressed, at ever income bracket.
Most people are forced to work or starve. These are not the same.
well yeah the dream is not the salaryman lifestile, but the financial independence, thanks for agreeing with me
If you’re making millions of dollars, you’re not a salaryman. You’re making a choice to sell your labor, but you can always quit and the impact to your livelihood will be minimal.
Obviously you won't be set for life at any income level if you spend money as quickly as you earn it - hedonic treadmill and all - but there is an income level sufficient to meet all of ones needs, and the rest can be saved and invested.
Rule of thumb is: if you can barely afford the lifestyle you have with an income, you probably can't maintain the same lifestyle without an income.
Reality check: even in "high cost of living areas", typical salaries are around 50k. Most of my coworkers came from wealthy families and perceived buying condos in Chelsea as middle class activities. I don't think they saw themselves as rich. And to be fair, many probably didn't actually save that much money, because they had such expensive lifestyles.
Out of curiosity, what are the tax rates and housing prices where you are?
In my area, the maths would work something like this. Let's say $400k income (extremely high for my city). After tax, more like $200k. Rent might be $30k, plus other costs, let's be generous and say $40k total. That comes out around $160k savings per year. Lets say you work there for 5 years (which IMO is a long time at the start of your career), that's $800k. Median house is $1.5M. You could probably buy a substandard apartment and be back to 0 savings. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it better than what everyone else is getting? Absolutely. But I don't think it's exactly "set for life" given you've achieved pretty bare minimum...
What I've also found is there's a correlation between people in tech who don't seem to care about money, and having already started from wealth. Oh, how are you saving so much money? Right, you live in your parents' second house... How did you afford that apartment? Oh, your parents paid for half of it... (For added effect, add in a rich partner too.) Etc etc. Strip away generational/systematic wealth and even at the top of the layperson ladder, you're barely getting anywhere.
I think this might be the root of the difference in perspective. Very few people can be set for life maintaining a lifestyle only just afforded by their income. You may have to move to a cheaper neighborhood or less costly metroplex, and perhaps not buy a new car as frequently. But you won't have to work a day again
Claiming these are anywhere comparable is an incredibly lack of perspective.
The parent was talking about their country, not the USA.
The wealth inequality in the US is the underlying fracture in the social compact that is driving the populist politics that are at play.
Even at $200k, only NYC/SF are so expensive that cost of living changes are meaningful.
I think most Americans have a core value of "work hard, get compensated for your work". There's a basic value of fairness and meritocracy, that you can take steps to control your destiny and will be rewarded proportionally.
When you've been at Google for a few years these days, you realize that this isn't really true. Nobody knows or cares how good a programmer you are. Nobody really cares how hard you work either. Your ability to get promoted is basically dependent upon how well your manager knows how to work the system and then whether you listen to your manager. I'm an eng manager there; I am relatively good at working the system, having gotten my reports 4 promotions in the last 2 years. My tech lead does all the actual work, because he actually cares about product quality, knows the code well, mentors the team effectively, and is a nice guy to work with. My job is just to get him promoted (which I've done, twice) and ensure that he doesn't leave. The last promotion packet hinged on work that took him maybe a couple months to do, but that I managed to spin into a big complex project, because it was stuff that folks at the Director/VP level cared about deeply but had no idea how to do. All the rest of the two years, the time spent fixing bugs and improving code health and mentoring the team and delivering small usability improvements, was basically ignored (don't tell him or the rest of the team!) because it fell below the radar screens of the decision-makers who hold the purse strings.
When it comes to the working class, I suspect that most of them would like to be able to take pride in their work and be rewarded for it. To make money because they did a particularly clean plumbing job, and not because they paid off Yelp to increase their rating to 4.5 stars or happened to run the right Google AdWords. But that's not the world we live in, salesmanship and paying the right taxes to the right overlords matters more than actually doing the job well, and people are pissed about it.
not great
>and then whether you listen to your manager.
I mean that's part of the job, no?
I'm sure the system isn't perfect, but I was a wee programmer back in the day when it was way more common for MBA types to be managing programmers, the idea that solid technical skills might get you promoted to the compensation of what a director might make was almost unheared of.
G's sytem of promo isn't perfect, it emphasizes the wrong things, but it's forward progress in the long run.
There’s literally tens of millions of small businesses, over 10% of the US working population is first gen millionaires.
Just because not everyone is Warren Buffet or the tech echo chamber here only looks at app style businesses doesn’t mean millions of people are not succeeding.
10% of Americans don’t get big corp RSUs. As I said HN lives in a weird tech echo chamber.
As I said, spend some time reading. I pointed out some good places to dig into this.
If you want to ground this conversation in facts, here's a few for you to chew on:
1. Someone earning $500k/year TC still has far more in common with someone earning $80k or even $50k when you compare them against people with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars who control capital.
2. Someone earning $500k in a vhcol area like the Bay Area still likely cannot afford what historically was considered a "nice" home in a "nice" neighborhood without years of saving up when those homes cost $3M+.
3. Someone earning that may not necessarily be wealthy and be largely dependent on their ability to continue receiving a paycheck compared to those with true wealth who can take loans against like billionaires.
The reality is, someone earning that much is likely financially comfortable where a major disaster likely won't bankrupt them, and can likely afford reasonable housing for a family, and retire one day. That is more than most of America for sure right now and that sucks, but it absolutely does not make them "elite" and it speaks volumes of the efficacy of the GOP propaganda machine that you and so many others think that.
That used to simply be "the American dream."
- Earning 500k TC for 15 years equals financial independence and retiring at age 45 if you're careful (even if you lived in a HCOL)
- Earning 50k means working until you're 65 with a meanger 401k and spend the rest of your life depending on social security
Just because high earners aren't billionaires doesn't mean they can relate in any way to someone earning 50k or even 80k, that is absurd.
People are living on half that, if not less. $3,000/month? $2,000? Saying that $500k doesn't go very far just because they have to have the $3,000,000+ house isn't likely to garner much sympathy.
Oh no, it's going to take a couple of years to save up for the down payment on a $3 million house. How about not making enough to be able to save for a down payment on any house in the prime parts of the Bay Area!
$500k/yr is enough to buy a lot of luxuries that are denied to those making $50k/yr, and it's stupid to try and deny it.
But that's simple jealousy. Some software person at Google writing ad software isn't the one that moved manufacturing jobs out of America, nor do they have the power to bring them back. They can't vote on a tarrifs or fund a stimulus in Congress to help American workers. They don't set public policy at all. The best they can do at stealing from the government is to cheat a bit on their taxes, or be a NIMBY after they've bought that house.
> which is low since that 500k isn't cash comp and you wait for long term capital gains to kick in
Stock that a company gives you as compensation is treated as ordinary income at the time it vests, based on the value when it vests. If your total comp is $250k salary + $1M in stock over four years, and the stock value stays flat, your taxes are the same as if you got $500k in salary each year (a bit worse, actually, because of the first year vesting all at once making your income $250k and then $750k); if it doubles the day after your grant and stays flat after that, your taxes are the same as if you got $750k in salary each year. Long-term capital gains only apply to increases in stock value after it vests - not any different than if you sold your company stock immediately and bought another stock.
There are more exotic situations where they aren't, and also there are ESPPs (employee stock purchase program) which are also different though that's not a grant, but I don't want to rathole on stock option grant stuff here.
Here's an alternate take. A competitive free market has squeezed corporate profits so much, that most would-be-capitalists would be better off joining the working class instead. Consider the alternative where anyone who doesn't have the financial means to build their own company, is relegated to a sub-par quality of life.
My experience at a small company is that I always feel mediocre :)
My mental health is 5x better since leaving.
The irony is killing me.
It’s incredibly hard to build that beginning into a profitable money machine.
Precisely this, and while I completely support the original author in their quest to find their own bootstrapped business, I keep wondering what the "what if" would have looked like had they stayed earning the big bucks in Google.
I know really few people that can write such relatable and honest content like this guy. I've been stalking him for years now. Great inspiration source
Think about it like this. A customer is the entity that exchanges money for something they value; like a good or service. That's usually your manager. Or in the case of OP the promotion committee. (Many times it's both your manager and the promotion committee). They are the ones who directly control your money (raise, bonus, promotion, etc).
With that perspective in mind it makes sense to manage your career as a business where you're doing things to increase the rate at which you deliver value to the entity which can trade money for that value.
Many of the setbacks you faced are very common when trying to run your own business. The customer changes their mind, the market shifts the goal posts, you realize you're focusing on the wrong things. Like a business you have to constantly change your strategy and adapt to the customer; not the other way around. Why? Because the customer can very easily get their goods or services from someone else if you can't deliver what they want.
But if you’re working for a boss, they can get in the way. It’s not enough that you do what the customer wants, you have to do it my way, even if that prevents the customer from getting what they want.
And if the “customer” is buying the item for someone else, that indirection can result in failure as well. Which often happens when you make custom software for businesses. Their boss wants what he wants, and that’s not what his employees want.
This is exactly we end up with MS Products like Teams and Windows Phone 7/8 lol. A lot of MS stuff is built to sell to the companies not the employees.
It’s been their schtick practically from the beginning.
Such is a "career" in a large hierarchy, where actual acquaintance with people hardly exists and is replaced by "process".
In short, your real customers are not even people anymore, they are a process.
Having enthusiasm for pursuing great ideas that help people is the sweet spot in both career and society.
From the Fine Article:
"Of course my fate should be in the hands of a mysterious committee who’s never met me. They wouldn’t be tainted by any sort of favoritism or politics. They’d see past all that and recognize me for my high-quality code and shrewd engineering decisions."
Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion. Students should be teached these things in universities so they don't waste years from their lives after they graduate.
Whether the a corporate hierarchy is your "customer" or you deal with actual end-consumers, the goal is to minimize your workload while maximizing your paycheck, and a promotion in a corporate setting simply does not do that anywhere short of the C-suite.
So what should one optimize for, if not promotion? Being the indispensable guru in your domain. People get promoted and people get laid off. No one has as much power as the person you cannot, must not, ever fire. In such a situation, the optimal strategy is to terrify one's superiors who don't understand the domain, and refuse promotion (but do accept a raise).
See that webmonkey in the corner next to the rain pipe, making double what the manager makes? If they fired him the whole company would be screwed because he's the only one who has a complete picture of XYZ client's network infrastructure.
Think of lifting more weight every week when you begin a strength training program. You get promoted until you plateau.
While this might be true in other industries, in big tech companies like TFA is talking about SWE promotions come with rather large increases in pay.
https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track...
The author was trying to go from L4 to L5. Promotions are also backwards facing, which means at the point you get promoted you're already doing the larger workload.
I’d also posit that this approach to education reduces overall attainment by dulling the edge of what the margin is capable of.
You could make it work if this "everyone forms an LLC in school" initiative comes with "everyone gets a chunk of cash to invest into this business". I assume the time would come from restructuring curriculums so that half of your senior year is spent on this project. Maybe add another year onto high school instead that is the Business Year.
This would also require a massive increase in the amount of money going into schools so it's pretty much a non-starter in the US.
As to "optimizing for the 90%", I feel like there's probably a lot of interesting differences in a world where every high school graduate has been in a boss' shoes. Possibly bosses would be able to get away with a lot less shady shit. This probably doesn't help the chances of setting it up either.
As a society we would be making a better long term investment in the economy.
And give them good education, but most importantly examples we can.
Until the actual business you work for goes down the pan because everyone is optimizing for promotion
We'll give you a 1 to 3 rating in three categories (it's been a while, something like: "Expertise", "Innovation", "Teamwork"). A "1" means you did not meet expectations, a "2" means you met expectations and a "3" means you exceeded expectations.
If we give you a "1" in anything, you should probably start to look for a job elsewhere.
We can't give you a "3" in two of the categories above however. Well, we can but then we have to go up the management chain — perhaps even to the director — because giving someone a "3" in more than one category means we have to raise your "grade". And moving up a grade is a Big Deal. We can only have so many top-tier engineers.
Oh, and regardless of what your manager thinks of you, all managers have to report to their manager for what we call a "leveling session". Here your manager needs to defend their choices when compensating their direct reports in front of all the other managers and of course their boss as well.
Something in particular we're looking to make sure of is that your manager rewards some of their direct-reports with bonuses, a raise, etc. but "punishes" others. Egalitarianism is frowned upon.
This is definitely the case in many/most companies, but it's also a sign of a dysfunctional and declining internal company culture, and a bad pattern that will lead to decline in quality of product and deteriorating internal team dynamics.
It's better to seek out employers where this inevitable trend is explicitly countered, or hasn't developed yet.
We all feel better when we're producing good quality and get recognition for it.
My point is that human psychology doesn't work that way. You compete with people around you. If they're getting promoted while you're being left behind, you're not going to be very happy about it.
Very different from the BigCo rat race.
This is something I'd assumed every engineer-type person faces sooner or later. Unless you're in a massive corp with hundreds of engineers, there's only maybe two or three tiers of engineering roles. That's two promotions, ever, unless you want to be promoted out of engineering and into management. So if you want to stay technical, instead of chasing higher status job titles, you have to chase higher status projects.
I agree human psychology is part of it and can help explain someone's mentality, but I don't think human psychology can fully justify someone's behaviour, since humans aren't automatons beholden to their psychology.
Eg average us salary is probably somewhere around 60k. Let's say single bedroom apartment not in SF is maybe like 1.5k/mo, that leaves like 42k left over.
Google salary I would guess is closer to 150k (low end probably); SF single bedroom is probably closer to 4k/mo, that leaves 102k. Big difference, and note the ratio here isn't as important as the absolute value. You live a very different life with 102k than with 42k.
And also note wealth doesn't really increase linearly with how much money you have, it tends to be more than linear, because people with lots of money are more comfortable investing large chunks of it, which further increases their wealth.
Who "the competition" are specifically is 99.9% of the time entirely black-box, as is the percentile that the company is targeting. So they claim it is open and transparent ("we benchmark against local employers in tech") but the actual details are hidden - are the other employers they are using FAANG or someone else? Are they targeting 50% or 95%? Etc etc ("oh that is confidential sorry")
This is how you end up with situations like London, which is obscenely expensive cost of living, yet gets lower salaries than SF and Zurich which in my experience are a bit cheaper than London for day to day costs (e.g. transport, food etc).
London is a physically & metaphorically huge cultural World Capital and attracts loads of people from across the world so there is more competition for tech/high-skilled roles because so many people move to London after they graduate, and stay for good. So salaries are lower but everything else is more expensive due to population density and resulting demand. No one wants to live in Zurich so there are less people competing for each job, so salaries need to be higher to attract and retain staff in such a dull and boring place that people naturally and understandably plan to leave after a few years.
Because they can find a job that pays way more than $20 an hour. That's it.
Google eventually removed that language because they learned that in a 100,000-person company, there's simply not enough room in the pyramid and they'll lose the people who are doing the keeping-the-lights-on work who don't self-promote. They didn't know that yet in 2018 if memory serves.
Straight out of school, yes. With a few years of outside experience and an advanced degree, it is easy to join at L5. Which I think is ideal, no promotion headaches, just focus on interesting work (L6 already starts to be management heavy, so not that attractive).
It is more the other way around. Internally google taught/teaches engineers that their only goal is promotion. All parts of this used to be very very public. There are whole presentations, decks, docs, and more. What level you are and what level the person you are talking to ~mattered~. The goal isn't to be a good engineer, to make good products, or anything liek that, but to ONLY do what a nameless committee might want to make that magical number go higher. So while they might not have joined Google for that reason eventually they learned what was wanted. There is a whole generation of software engineers that learned this lesson unfortunately.
There was/is the expectation that eventually everyone can reach a certain level within a certain (very generous) amount of time, but I don't see that as the same thing at all.
The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period, and going up levels involves a largely arbitrary process that is disconnected from your actual work performance seems pretty problematic to me. Seems like it'd be hard to focus on actually doing useful work in such an environment.
The amount of time is very long, I don't even actually know what it was, and I personally am not aware of anyone this happened to and have never heard of anyone this happened to. In the past you were expected to hit L5, 2 promotions from hire, and now the expectation is L4, so only 1.
An L5 engineer at Google is someone who is expected to be able to handle any medium-large difficulty task with some amount of cross-team coordination and get it done without much oversight. IMO every software engineer should be able to get to that point in their career eventually otherwise it indicates a pretty big problem.
It is now, it used to be a lot shorter. "Up or out" has effectively been sacrificed to cost savings, which is perhaps a good thing in some ways.
That was dropped around 2015 or 2016.
I stayed for 10 years at L4 then left on my own. I had no interest in the perf game and never attempted promotion. L4 money was good enough.
But yes, it was officially dropped. I stayed as L4 for 10 years. But when I transferred teams I occasionally got ... attitude.
Thing is, if you go from L4->L5 (or L5->L6) based on performance you're expected to stay or improve on that performance once you're at L5, and if you don't, you'll get up with Needs Improvement, and there's no going back to L4.
However, it looks like the people working at L4 for Google are being handled no differently by HR than assembly-line workers at other top Wall Street companies. Better pay for more people than most of the old guard, but why can't they do this part of it with some ingenuity.
>The fact that you are expected to reach a certain level in a certain time period
At least factory workers know this is not going to happen from the get-go. This is even more non-congruous for the kind of HR involved. Probably why factory workers have as much of their productivity leveraged as they do. Most of those companies are so far from bonanzaville, if they didn't do it right, they would have failed a long time ago.
You would think Google was built from a different foundation well enough to avoid this, or would have been able to migrate further away from useless bureaucracy than some of the hundred-year-old companies. It's almost like they didn't know any better.
Well, when you do the math it seems like for quite some time that everything truly worthwhile going on at Google has been, to a very large extent, the conserved portion of the output of people who never got promoted.
Financially, if you were going to invest in people, that would make them the better investment than those who did get promoted :\
It might be difficult to put some exact numbers on it, but you could probably tell how high-performance the unsung heroes are, by whether or not Google is making any money or not any more, and how much.
Now what about the people who could never get hired at Google or places like that to begin with?
If you could invest in somebody like that, woo hoo the sky's the limit !
You'd be raking in the bucks way more on a hard-working non-corporate scrapper than Google makes from a highly credentialed true genius who is the least bit decent at corporate climbing :)
It's not the only thing that changed. Good thing, my manager joined Google back in these older years, so, for instance, he could say to me that I was "expected to rise to L5" in such a way that I knew it wasn't enforced in our org.
That was before the layoffs started. One of my by then ex-reports, who was a very talented and knowledgeable but not at all career-focused long-time L4s got laid off in one of the rounds. :(
Based on Blind and personal experience, the vast majority of people in big tech are literally doing that. It’s probably the most used carrot used by management in those companies too, so hard to blame them
My experience: initially, I learned a lot of new things, I was excited to work for a big famous company. But eventually, it started to be less fun and more stressful. There's an endless push for impact or to improve some questionable metrics, while technical debt is building up. Also there's always uncertainty about reorgs and layoffs. Lots of anxiety related to the next evaluation cycle.
After a few years, I can say money is probably my main driver. Although, I don't want to get promoted because I certainly don't want more stress. I want to stay in this company as long as possible because I will be very hard to earn more money elsewhere.
Well, yes obviously? People get jobs to get money, and a promotion gives you more money.
The ones not aiming for a promotion are the strange ones, not the ones who are.
I know more than a handful of folks who are very happy with their level of responsibility and comp, and don't want higher expectations and more stress even if it would bring in significantly more cash. I personally think that's a pretty healthy way to look at it. Not everything in life is about money.
Happy to answer any questions about this post.
I was wondering if you could share if you are working on a new project? I saw your posts about fuzzing a PDF parser but there's no context if this is for a new project, or I missed it :-).
Cheers!
--
No, the fuzz testing is just for fun and probably not anything serious, although it would be fun to find a fuzzing target that has a good bug bounty program.
My wife and I just had our first child, so I'm mainly focusing on family time for now and slowly easing back into work over the next few months. My main priority is to finish the book I've been promising to write for the past four years.[0]
Thanks so much! That's really nice to hear.
It sounds like you may have been looking at the currents and picking the one that seemed best one to swim in. I found there's often -- but not always -- another option: build a dam. In other words, change it up. Alter the landscape. Seek to change the business in a way that nobody's been willing/able to do before. Looking back at my career I found I was happiest and most successful when I was able to tell my boss what I was doing vs. waiting for my boss to tell me to do something interesting/impactful/etc.
When that option doesn't seem to be presenting itself, it's probably time to move on. But I've found it's often worth giving it a try first.
A couple of times I needed to earn the right to create my own destiny by pushing through some grunge work, but once I established a degree of trust with my management chain, that was capital I could "cash in on" by proposing something big, new, and interesting. It never ceases to amaze me to see how boldness often gets rewarded. I just saw a co-worker of mine draw blood from a stone (funding-wise) by proposing something ambitious and controversial last week. Suddenly they're a TL of a new team this week. They've built a reputation for "just getting it done," so management has confidence in their ability to execute and drive results.
Whenever I'm starting to feel stuck in a rut, that's when I open a blank document and start hammering out a design for something new. I'm not even thinking about promotion when I do that. But somehow, somewhere down the road, either a promotion or a bigger opportunity with another company has always come of it.
You don’t seem to be proposing an alternative strategy with equivalent risk/reward dynamics, rather, it seems like what amounts to anathema to entrepreneurship.
Hey steelframe! Good to see you here again!
This is good advice and something I wish I'd recognized earlier at Google. For the first few years there, I was under a manager who had 20+ direct reports, so he probably didn't have time to think of the best projects for me.
I probably would have been better off figuring out my own high-impact project rather than focusing on fighting short-term fires that kept popping up for my team.
In certain ways, I solved this with the founder route because I get to skip the "earning the right to create my own destiny" phase, but in other ways, there's inescapable grunge work like legal compliance, taxes, vendor issues, etc.
I don't want to say my exact net worth at the time, but I earmarked $400k to last me five years of trying to make it on my own.
$400k was kind of extreme because I assumed I'd maintain the lifestyle I had at Google, including my $4.2k/mo apartment in downtown Manhattan. I ended up moving to Western Massachusetts, where my burn rate was significantly lower and could have been even lower if I rented an apartment instead of buying a house.
Life is better when you find counterparts (customers, leaders, etc.) who appreciate what you bring to the table and can demonstrate that appreciation via promotion decisions. Faceless committees relying on packets fundamentally, by design, cannot develop the relationship that allows for genuine appreciation to form. If you're in a company whose leadership doesn't appreciate you, then why are you forcing yourself to stay? Go find somewhere that does appreciate you. If Google doesn't learn that it's simply not possible to avoid the loss of good talent to bad management or process, then that's their loss. Take advantage of the good-enough performance reviews and take your time planning your exit. Life is too short to work in an organization that actively dissuades forming genuine, supportive, professional working relationships with colleagues.
For many, promotion is like winning a pie-eating contest only to find that the prize is: more pies. It’s fine to recognize that your interests and your employer’s are only loosely aligned and to decline to play the game the way they want you to.
There are three problems:
- many companies pay like crap, so if (God forbid) you want to save some money, a promotion is required (the only way to increase benefits is to get promoted);
- meaningful work is a unicorn in its own right;
- most annoyingly, a worker that is in their comfort zone and has been delivering consistently well in their role, will inevitably be forced to "grow" and "develop their career", or will be called a "straggler", at an American corporation.
Consistent excellence at a certain level is not "stagnation", it may just as well be deliberate stability. Infinite growth (or at least, infinite perturbation), in the personal context, is an unfathomable mania of American corporations.
I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
Very true. You do at least have more control in a startup however (at least that’s how feels).
>I am sure if he looks back and reflects again, he will admit that the success of a startup relay on 100+ other factors that out of your control. It is never a wasting time in your life. You learned how the world works!
After six years of running bootstrapped businesses, I actually more strongly believe the opposite.
It might be true at a high-growth VC-backed startup that you need many stars to align to succeed.
In bootstrapped businesses, you basically just need one thing to succeed: product market fit. If you create a product that people want, you'll probably succeed even if you make a lot of other mistakes.
With TinyPilot, I didn't know anything about hardware or selling a physical product at the beginning, so I did a million things wrong. But I landed on a product people were willing to pay for, and I found a good way of getting it in front of customers, so the company worked. I did some things right, but for the first year, I mostly felt like revenue was growing on its own and I was trying to keep up.
You still need luck to find product market fit because lots of reasonable-sounding ideas end up flopping, but you really just need to get lucky once rather than wait for a whole set of things to get lucky at the same time.
If you do the math, climbing the corporate ladder at FAANG might have better ROI than running life style business. Of course, money is not the only consideration in life.
I'm still glad that I left when I did, as I value autonomy a lot, so being able to choose what to do every day is worth a lot to me.
And those blog posts absolutely always start by telling you that the engineers at Google are the smartest in the world. Oh boy are those people indoctrinated.
Since 2022, I would probably say the various LLM owners: OpenAI, Anthropic, Character.AI, etc. The complexity here isn't in the basic transformer architecture though (which was invented by Google in 2017), but in the data infrastructure that hoovered up all the data on the web to train it on, as well as the fine-tuning on various use-cases.
Not surprisingly, good engineers follow the money: these have also been the lucrative industries in those time periods.
I can jump ship and make $50-100k/yr more because the next place I work will actually value my experience, even though it's technically much more useful to Google.
I make more money now doing more effective work faster at a smaller company with a focused project, not a 100,000-person everything company.
1) companies usually hire ex-Googlers up-level because they're perceived as being more valuable (Google titles tend to under-represent engineer capabilities; an L4 Googler is an SSE elsewhere).
2) Google was one of the FAANGs that fixed wages via unofficial non-competes. Their compensation ladders still reflect that.
> Your manager doesn’t promote you?
> No, managers at Google can’t promote their direct reports.
They don’t even get a vote.
> Instead, promotion decisions come from small committees of upper-level software engineers and managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion.
For starters, even if it is the candidate themselves who self-nominate, it is still the manager who writes the promo readiness assessment that forms the main body of the packet. It is also the manager's job to solicit peer feedback and represent it to the committee.
One could imagine a scenario where the manager's opinion diverges sharply from the assessment of the session lead and other senior folks sitting on the committee (who decide collectively) but again, those would be some pretty exceptional circumstances...
Layered on top of this are promo quotas, which already mean that some folks who do tick all the boxes aren't getting promoted as soon as they would be otherwise (or at all). That is to say that there are lots of headwinds even if the manager is supportive, let alone when they aren't.
I know it changes every year so I don't let my own personal experience color my perception of Google 2024, but some years when I was there my manager barely even knew where my desk was. My promo packets for L5 and L6 were judged by peer committees and I am not sure they even saw my manager evaluations. When I sat on an L5 promo committee we did not weigh manager assessments. This made sense at that time because of how hands-off managers were in the realm of the reasons a person could get promoted to L5.
Yes, there have been some very signficant changes over the last few years. Promos are decided in-org. Managers play a much more important role. There are promo quotas along with associated pressures (felt more acutely in some orgs compared to others).
But, putting that asides, a manager who doesn't have any idea of what or how their reports are doing is clearly failing at their job under any of those systems.
The promotion still goes to a promo committee - although now they try to locate it close enough to your org that they have heard of you, and can have a high-context reviewer (not your manager) at the table.
The carryover from the previous system (and the thing that these sorts of posts seem to miss) is that every level has explicit expectations about the sort of activities that a person at that level can be trusted to independently conduct. A decision on promotion is a decision on whether or not a person has adequately demonstrated that they can do the work of the next level. It isn't some sort of award for doing their current job well. When someone languishes for a long time at a level, it is usually because they aren't demonstrating those next-level signals.
The system can feel unfair - like a team that lacks adequate opportunities for someone to demonstrate next-level signals, or the insistence that work doesn't count until its production impact can be assessed (which may take years for some projects). But it is rarely as capricious as may sound.
Because this sounds to me a bit like how things work in academia. I think the push there is to publish, but the essence is that, for every decision, committees rule.
Sadly the chosen metric can be subject to politics. You’ll find stakeholders have their pet metric, claim another stakeholders metric doesn’t measure what’s important, or a new, important person thinks all the metrics are garbage and need to be changed.
I’ve had successful projects hit their metrics and those have also gotten caught up in politics.
> The pipeline didn’t record many metrics. The ones it did have made it look like things had gotten worse. My bug discoveries caused the overall bug count to increase. The pipeline’s failures increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies instead of silently passing along bad data.
I understand why the author might think this is better, but all software have bugs and a lot of data is tainted by those bugs. Was fixing the pipeline an actual priority? Was it critical? If so, how were the downstream internal customers dealing with the new exceptions? Why were they not raising a ruckus about it? Why was the author allowed to move on to a different project if there were so many bugs in that pipeline deserving of a promotion?
I have met more people in life that made a big deal out of ultimately unimportant details than the opposite. Internal pipelines usually have a lower bar and the downstream consumer may not even care about 75% of features that are just there and unused. Being a senior engineering is also knowing when to leave good enough alone.
> My other work didn’t look so good on paper either. On several occasions, I put my projects on hold for weeks or even months at a time to help a teammate whose launch was at risk. It was the right decision for the team, but it looked unimpressive in a promo packet. To the promotion committee, my teammate’s project was the big, important work that demanded coordination from multiple developers. If they hornswoggled me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities. I was just the mindless peon whose work was so irrelevant that it could be pre-empted at a moment’s notice.
Is that conclusion really wrong? It's a bit uncharitable for sure but that is indeed what happened not just how it appeared to have happened. If your project was such a low priority that dropping it for several months does not flash a red light in someone's dashboard, then I am sorry but that does not seem promotion worthy.
The little comic also has good examples that things that imo are not "senior" work. Writing E2E tests for a product that is already shipped is worthwhile, but unless it's something very special it's not complex enough, does not require enough design to be considered "senior work".
Again I don't know the guy, maybe he did get an unfair read on his body of work, but reading the entire blog I mostly get the vibes of "I worked 2 years at Google and then wanted to be a senior so I rushed my promo packet without a cornerstone project" and the committee refusing that is just the system working as intended.
I largely agree with you.
I didn't mean to argue that the work I was doing for the first two years merited a promotion.
My point was more that I felt frustrated that I was doing what my manager and team asked of me, told consistently that I did the work well, and then later found out that it was all worthless for career advancement.
I think there are competing interests at a large organization that make this difficult. On the one hand, you have grungy work that needs to get done but only requires the skill of a junior developer (e.g., fixing bugs, writing tests). On the other hand, everyone at Google wants to advance their career by doing senior or above work, so how do you incentivize anyone to do the grungy work if it essentially means a career pause? I don't know how to solve that problem at scale.
I didn't and still don't harbor resentment toward Google or my managers for how promotions worked. I think it's difficult to align incentives for an organization with 100k people, and they chose a reasonable strategy. But I felt like the things I was good at didn't align well with career advancement at Google, so that was why I left.
oh wow. Reading this made me realize why (in the context of a big tech career) it's such a good idea to have a mentor whose reasonably far away from your team. They could have probably pointed this out to you early.
I realize I maybe came across as naive thinking that I could get promoted without thinking much about career strategy or politics, but that's how the first few years of my career had worked out.
After undergrad, I worked for Microsoft for three years, and I got promoted twice without ever thinking about career. I just did the projects my team needed, and did a good job. Same thing when I worked for NCC group: promoted after a year and was on track for more.
One of the big differences in other companies was that they gave me opportunities to demonstrate aptitude in my day to day work rather than needing to see me launch something big and shiny. I invested a lot into peer reviews and building repeatable processes, so managers at those companies were able to see that impact my team even if it would be hard to prove measurable results to an external promo committee.
I actually sold the company earlier this year.[0] I never looked into VC money primarily because I like the independence of being the sole owner, though I agree there would have been a lot of advantages.
"In every country in which the capitalist mode of production reigns, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power before it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, as for example, the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the use-value of the labour-power is advanced to the capitalist: the labourer allows the buyer to consume it before he receives payment of the price; he everywhere gives credit to the capitalist."
- Karl Marx. Capital Volume One, Chapter Six: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power.